03 October 2017

Teddy - new 3D cartoon character


Teddy will be added to the science series I occasionally animate for Doctor Christopher Labos at "The Body of Evidence" podcast. He will join the doctor character and a slew of others I've made but haven't put in projects yet. The shorts are only about 1 ½ - 2 minutes long but have quite a bit of movement in them. While Teddy is a bit different from the rest, being a toy bear and fuzzy we are hoping he will fit right in and become the doctor's main companion in the coming animations. The series started out using limited 2D animations of illustrations but we never seemed able to get artists to stay long enough to get more than one short done with them... if even that! So last time out I decided to use my 3d skills, and make a cast of characters I could reuse and animate in a limited but consistent way.

Technically speaking, he is better modelled than most of my earlier efforts at cartoon characters and done from scratch. This images him is his neutral pose as he isn't rigged for movement yet. My next personal film with Mike Luce involves a very cartoon-y character so I am hoping this is a sign that it will go even better as it will be much, much more complicated to pull off.

UPDATE:
ready to start animating!

4 comments:

T' said...

Cool that you're pushing things for those little medical shorts. I hope everyone likes it! As for the cartoony thing, however this 3D stuff works, you're going to want something you can distort and move really quickly. Would 2D be better?

Behemoth media said...

Better? hard to say. If I was capable of doing 2D animation I would definitely do some tests. As it is I can't draw a single cartoon character... other than the Diptards, so I can't imagine I'll be doing 24 images a second of cartoon drawings anytime soon!

T' said...

Ever thought of animating the Diptards? They'd make nice, easy models and all you'd have to animate is the mouths. Sure, there are copyright problems, sort of but it might be fun!

Behemoth media said...

I have animated them for a silly thing I did for my cousin. I also have a way to switch their face textures out so they could have 2d facial expressions on a 3D model. It used or be online but I deleted it and it's too big for an email... plus it's just silly and not very good!