CG?

At this point in the project I had already decided on what type of animation style I was going to use. The style I had chosen on was CGI or 3D animation. The reason I wanted to go with this particular type of animation was mostly because I had a knack for it.  I was very much like a duck takes to water, as some would say although, not to say that I didn’t consider other types of animation as possibilities.

There was definitely hand draw animation, or as some people call it traditional animation. There was also Flash animation, which had become very popular in the last couple of years. Also, there was stop-motion that is very popular with Tim Burton animated films, and many others. The problem was that none of the other types of animation seemed right to me. Looking back on it now, it would of been a lot easier if I had drawn the whole animation out.  But I wouldn’t hear of it, this had to be CG. I wouldn’t have it any other way, and even up to this point I have not regretted it, not one bit.

I started work on the main character, the fairy. There were several things I wanted to do with this fairy. The first was to attach the wings to the body of the fairy. In most films the fairy’s wings are not really attached, it is more like someone just glued them on to her back. I wanted to give my fairy wings that looked as if they were growing out of her body. That there are really apart of her and not just something that was put on at the last moment.

The Second was to give her hair.  On a lot of CG characters, they don’t really have hair on their heads; it’s more like they’re wearing a helmet that is made to look like it. The reason why someone would make hair like that is mostly because, it uses up a lot of memory and takes longer to render. There are also all these other little problems with hair that I can go into but I’ll save that for another time and post. But knowing all this I still want to put hair on this character and I was going to.

The Third thing I want to give this character is a loincloth. I thought this would be a good idea, because it would give this character an outdoor look as well as tell the viewer that she is part of nature and, nature plays a big part in her life. Now unlike hair this was not that big of a deal as it was with the hair. It just meant I was giving an object a cloth attribute. For those of you who are lost and don’t understand what I’m talking about, is making an object in the computer behave like a peace of fabric. The only problem with “cloth” is what I would have to keep in mind when designing the character, namely the parts that I wanted to have the cloth attribute on. I will talk more on this in another post as well.

These were the three big things I want to do in this project at this time, others would come and be added but at this time this is what I was focused on. I started work on a muck fairy as you may call it. I wanted to improve on my current fairy design and make her look more realistic. This would mean that I was going to have to redesign her, but I was going to do that any way since all I really had at the time was the first fairy character design and a comic drawing I did. The CG fairy I was making at this time was not going to be the fairy I would use, she was more of a test run to solve at list one of the problems I had.  I worked on her for the rest of the semester both modeling and rigging the character. Eventually making a short 9 second animation that I called “Fairy Fly” Which you can view below.

Thanks to this I was able to work out how to build my fairy, and what I need to do to make the way I was envisioned it. As well as some new idea that made me wanted to explore this character.