Script

Below is a script sent to us a while ago by Paul Shurey. We will need to consult it in the next week or so to help us plan out and time our animation sequences, as well as record dialogue. The script needs to be developed to fit our demo's narrative...


This bear is bare.
He hasn’t any hair
Who will take care
Of this lost little bear?
And since he’s so bare
He’s quite unaware
Of what kind of bear
Is this fur free Bare Bear.
(map animation)
"So Bare Bear is going on a journey around the world, to try and discover what kind of bear he really is.
Is he a Polar (Arctic) or a Brown Bear (Russia), a Sloth Bear (India) or a Panda (China)? A Sun Bear (Indonesia) or a Spectacled Bear (South America), a Black Bear (North America) or a Koala (Australia)?
By seeing the different bears in their natural habitats, and observing their behaviour and eating habits, Bare Bear hopes to unravel the mystery of his identity, to find his true home and to be re-united with his family."


(fur suit changing sequence)
"And on his travels Bare Bear will acquire a collection of bear suits allowing him to become any kind of bear he wants to be!"

Little Big Planet

Thought I'd whack a few images up here to display where our inspiration derived from for bare bears knitted suit, as we originally were planning on using fur.




Love the simplistic design and the quality of the fabric and wool textures used. If we can achieve anything like this I will be happy.

Bare Bear Model & Texture Tests

Today was a very productive day as we finally got maya work underway as a team. I had the simple task of modelling bare bear and so began by referencing the final concept designs for him. For previous character models I have always scanned in front, back, side drawings to use as image planes however for bare bear it was unnessasary because of his simple geomtric design.

It took me pretty much a day to model the entire character clothed and naked. The clothed version was simply a case of duplicating the naked head and creating a pouch like opening for his face to peep through. I then scaled it and only inserted the visable faces of the naked head within the hollowed out hat (saving on polygon count). I also modelled a beautiful zip to emphasise the fact he's in an all in one suit. Plus I can get some awesome secondary animation on it when the time comes.

The body was a very simple cone shaped mesh, curved with the back straightened. I also sculpted in a seem line for the stiching running down the centre of the bear, as he is after all being stylized as a toy. We all agreed the legs and arms did not need to be physically attached to the body as they would look more stitched on and floppy hanging from a point. It won't affect the rig at all.

Huge debates occured over the shape of the legs and arms, stumps, paws, cones, sausages, thumbs, no thumbs, mits etc!!! We should have established these fine details before modelling really but I soldiered through the stress and went with what I thought looked best; a mitten shaped palm with a thumb (for when he picks up objects during animation), and a wool stuffed arm in a cone like shape. Legs were also debated but I insisted stumps would look crap and there would be no nice heel role for animation. I therefore included rounded feet, again which looked like fabric stuffed with wool.

The nose and eyes were simple spheres shaped slightly to look like black beads/buttons. The mouth has yet to be modelled as it was looking noticeably like a moustache when attempted. #

I then called upon Alecs help to run a few texture tests to see whether the model was working, plus lambert default depresses me. We worked together with a few fabric textures we had found earlier in the week to recreate a wooly suit and cotton face. We only played around with the clothed bare bear for today. Below is the progress, which I am fairly happy with.... for tests!!



For the above render the same fabric texture and bump was applied to both suit and face (colour changed in PS). Hmmm it's ok. Lacks depth and cosyness. Bit of a cheat to use the same file twice but hey it looked suprisingly good. The suit needed more of a noticably different texture I felt, more of a knitted look. The two textures used can be seen below.





For this next render the cotton texture was left on the face as we felt that worked as his bare skin. However the suit was given a dense wool texture an bump very similar to that of the sack boy characters in little big planet...



As you can see from the render above, it was a slight improvement and highlighted the difference betweeen his bare skin and suit more, in terms of materials. It definately still needs work, but he's already looking alot more snug! Below is the texture which is actually a photo of a wicker basket found on a texture website, but works perfectly for woven wool.



Tommorow I need to sort out the mouth, zip seem and tweak the textures alot more to match the lighting in the environments we will be using. I want to experiment in achieving a higher quality look to the model, as I feel it looks slightly like an in game character at present.

Old Storyboard

Above is a storyboard I have been meaning to post up for quite some time. It was the one I produced over easter for the meeting with Paul in week 1. I had no idea of what bare bear looked like or how we were going to go about getting bare bear to each destination during the break so the whole thing was done in a very simplistic loose style. I had however seen the illusrations from the childrens book prototype and so I knew the bear was at the time just a bog standard old school design. I made this primarily to show the client how the transition could be made from country to country using a map sequence/transition depending on where bare bear was travelling to next. I also sketched out rough background designs for china, the arctic, Austraillia (now scrapped) and the woods (now changed to the dump) as I knew those were the teams favoured locations for the demo. I was very unsure of how the bear would arrive in each location at the time so to save time I simply skecthed him being dropped from the sky in each establishing shot, not very creative I know!
As the meeting with the client never took place unfortunately it was never used but it definately helped us to develop our ideas and get a narrative structure to our demo. Hopefully I can show Paul this old storyboard in our next meeting as evidence of how we have made progress.

Character Development

Over the weekend I was assigned the task of developing the initial character design produced by myself and Philly B. The others are all busy developing environment background designs. I tried to play around with the few concepts we liked from our original brainstorm session however I always seemed to develop back to the favourite first design! Below is a selection of my concepts showing my thought process and favoured styles...



Here I sketched various possible shapes for the torso and arms for my favoured design.



Above is a range of head sketches I produced in an attempt to develop the design me and phil agreed on (top left). Unfortunately I hit dead ends with most and again favoured the first!



Of my many head variations one look I stubled upon was the addition of an almost hoody style hat. After I drew it I realised it was very similar to Kenny from South Parks design. I scrapped the nose and mouth as I liked the idea of the hood being draw string pulled so tight it only revelaed the big puppy dog eyes. I liked the cutness of the design, however it wasn't bare bear for me, and would lack expression when it came to animation.



These 4 were a selection of my favourite designs and I felt were all unqiue in that they were totally different in size and shape. Top left is a square shaped bear which i felt would have been cool to incorporate the head in the body as one big square with limbs protruding. Bottom left is a fat grizzy bear design which I think would have worked well as an extra character, say a bear that bare bear met on his travels, but not for the main character. On the right and slightly larger is the favoured design again however I developed the head into more of a rugby ball shape, and curved the whole thing out if that makes sense?! I really liked this design as you instantly feel sorry for the character due to his weak stance and limp limbs. The middle design was me trying to throw together a combination of the square design and the rugby ball headed one. Didn't work as his face annoys me rather than persuades me to feel sorry for him! Jared agreed the rugby ball shaped design was the winner so far.

Photoshop Concept Art

I spent today creating a professional poster print of out final bare bear design in Photoshop. I spoke to Mike Smith who suggested I take my concept work to the next level in order to advance myself as a character designer. I have always tended to work in coloured pencil during concept stages as it is my natural medium and I find it easy to knock out loose designs on paper. However I have always faced the problem of how to colour my designs professionally when I finalise one. So far my best efforts have been with magic markers, although even they are hard to achieve block colour with. I have always wanted to be good at photoshop colouring and so decided to give it another stab as past attempts have failed miserably.

Mike showed me some work by an established 3rd year artist named Tony Trimmer who I instantly admired for his PS artwork. I love how he uses the software to colour his characters. He doesn't use block colour or gradients, nor does he work in the over done manga black outlined style. He colours using textures and photos mixed with sharp jagged shadows. http://www.tonytrimmer.com/

Alec showed me the basic tools and techniques needed to get started after I had scanned in my drawing and set it as an outline layer. I learnt various tools such as ...add inner and outer glow, emboss, add to selection, decrease selection, blending layers, and many many more. From then on I worked alone and managed to produce a piece which I am really really proud of. I tried to emulate tony trimmers style but encorporate my own personality and techniques to my drawing. It is my favourite piece of concept work to date and portrays Bare Bear in all his glory!

A first attempt at colouring a character in PS

Today I showed the guys the character development work I knocked up over the weekend and we all agreed on a final design, which ended up being a slight variation on the first one we drew! We decided a full colour concept of the design was required. So today I drew a quick sketch of BB, scanned it in and began selecting areas of the drawing using the polygon lasoo and applying block colour. I added block shadows in a darker tone and played around with a few filters which only made things worse so I left it! Unfortunately I had to leave it there due to work. Its very simple and not great, but I plan to achieve much better tommorow now I've familiarised myself with the tools and refreshed my PS knowledge. I am planning on producing a full size proffesional quality print of Bare Bear at college tommorow.

Studio AKA and Wool

Today Myself, Alec, and Phil sat around a computer and tried to make wool. Sounds boing but it was eventful and fun. Alot of mum jokes were said and time flew by. We are striving to achieve a similar look to that of AKA's awesome wool textures in their short film "Lost & Found".



As well as this me and Phil have always been a fan of AKA's character designs and simplistic stylized environments. Most of their characters either have long legs & small bodys or are really small and with eyes wide apart or glowing. One to watch......

Character concepts begin...

Project Schedule

Easter Delight

So yeah. Erm going to update this later and write stuff. But a few visuals of the quick bear model I made over easter. Oh and some fur tests, innit.