this post is an update on the God’s Eye project. we’re starting to work on building out the characters in Moho.
in the process of developing our automated solutions, we start with the manual process. this is the only way to truly know what is required to complete a task, but the reality is we have no choice in most cases. the automation solution doesn’t exist, so we need to perform these operations manually, then capture the steps, dependencies, etc. only then can we understand the task enough to even determine the automation feasibility, but i digress as i’m headed into a tangent. the task we are manually performing is the creation of our characters for animation projects. we’re using Moho for a number of reasons, not important to this post, but the gist is we need to know how to build and animate our characters.
vectorizing the characters is the first step, which means redrawing the characters using shapes like rectangles, circles and such, then reshaping and sculpting them to the desired shape. these shapes have optionally have fills (the color of the shape) and strokes (the outlines of the shape).
the process allows us to have shapes we can move and reshape over time to create animation. it’s very similar to flash animation for those old enough to remember or heard about it. instead of paint and ink we have shapes, which we change from frame to frame.
starting with the character heads made the most sense. here we have Pecan, which i actually started after Waya, but i learned from the first pass at Waya and improved my workflow and structuring of the art.
after making some progress (and learning from failures) along the way of building the version zero of Pecan, including rigging ( giving character a skeleton and muscles for movement ), i wanted to take a crack at Kenjal and instead of jumping to the rigging focusing on angles to support a character turn around.
this process has been really rewarding both on personal and professional level, as we continue to push forward with our projects and building the studio. this is just the beginning.
