Creating a Cartoon Character in Cineversity Brand ID: Creating Octopus Facial Features

Photo of EJ Hassenfratz

Instructor EJ Hassenfratz

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  • Duration: 06:20
  • Views: 5395
  • Made with Release: 18
  • Works with Release: 18 and greater

In this video we used simple primitive geometry, a Sweep, and a Loft Object to create basic facial features for our octopus characters.

In this video we used a few Spheres, a Symmetry Object, and a Sweep & Loft Object to create basic facial features for our octopus characters.

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Transcript

In this video, we're going to go ahead and add some facial features to our octopus character utilizing some simple geometry and a few generator objects. So let's first start out by creating the eyeballs, and for the eyeballs, I'm just going to use a simple sphere. And we'll just bring down the radius of this sphere, go to our Floor-up View and just position this. And remember our octopus kind of has a big bulgy cartoon eyeballs. I always love huge eyeballs on my characters, so we're going to give this guy some huge eye eyeballs as well. And what I'm going to do is, just to see how this is going to look when I have two eyeballs is, just go ahead and create a symmetry object. Drag that sphere into our symmetry, and you can see that now that mirrors the eyeball, and now I can mess around with just one of these spheres and see how this is going to look on both sides when I actually create another eyeball. So what I'm going to do is just kind of rotate this sphere and just squash it in the Z, like this, and just move this into position. Kind of rotate this as well, and just kind of make it a flatter, more stylized eyeball. And I think that's looking pretty good. What we're going to do next is just rename this like the white part of the eyeball. And then I'm just going to click "Cmd," click and drag, and make this a child of the white eyeball, so it actually shows up in the symmetry object, and move it forward, scale it down, and move this forward a little bit more, scale this down, maybe move this to the left, and name this the "Pupil." So you can see now we have the white part of the eyeball and the pupil. And again, I can go in here and maybe just rotate this a little bit forward. You're going to notice a little bit of jugging is going on here because of the low polygon count in our object, or low amount of segments. And I can up this, just smooth everything out here and get nice smooth geometry. And again, just tweak this overall once so it doesn't look cross-side or anything. We don't want that. But I think this is looking pretty good for a start for the eyes, so I'll just rename this "Eye Symmetry" for now, and we'll just leave the symmetry object in there. So next, we're going to ahead and create a mouth. So I'm going to go into my "Front View," grab my pen to zoom in here and just create a little happy cartoony mouth and have it kind of open, have it a gap a little bit. And the nice thing about the pen tool is I can go in here without using any shortcut keys or anything, you just kind of tweak the spline to however I want it to get it to the point where I'm happy with it. And I say that's looking pretty good. So I'll just leave that as that is right now. And let's just rename this "Lip Spline" because this will actually be the lips of my character. And I'm just going to move this forward so we can actually see this in front of our object here, in front of our octopus' face. So that's looking pretty good. I like the positioning, I like the scale of the mouth spline. So what I'm going to do now is create some geometry with this by utilizing a sweep object. And for a sweep object to act upon a spline, I need to create or define a profile spline. Now it'll just be a circle, so I'll drag and drop this underneath the sweep. And you can see that's really, really big, so I'll just scale this down here and zoom in here and maybe a value of two. Looks pretty good. I think that's looking nice. And again just reposition this. So you'll see that, you know, if I look through this, this is just...you can see through the mouth. And what I want to eventually do is add a different texture to the inside of the mouth so I don't want to actually see the head as this mouth is open. So what I'm going to do is create more geometry based on this initial spline that we created for the lips to create the nice back part or the open part of the mouth. So what I'm going to do is utilize the same spline, create an instance of it. And what an instance is, if I just move this off to the side, is a reference of that initial spline, you can see that. Because I have the lip spline selected, it automatically set this up as the reference object for the instance, and if I make any changes to this lip spline. So if I go into Point Mode and just move the points up or down, that's going to mirror exactly what we're doing because, again, it's an instance, anything we change to the initial spline will be passed along to the instance. So this is really handy when you want to build something based off of an initial object like our spline here. So I'm just going to undo that so our spline, our instance spline is right back into its position where I made it, so right in the same position as our initial spline. And I'm going to create some more geometry using this instance by using a loft object. And what a loft object is going to do is kind of create some geometry using that spline. And if I move this forward, you can see that basically created just a flat plain based on that geometry, lofted polygons along our spline here. So this is perfect because now I can go ahead and put a material on there and you won't be able to see through the actual mouth part through to the head. So there we go. We got our eyeballs with just some spheres, our lips using a sweep object, and then the inside of the mouth using a loft object. And again, because we're using that instance object, we can go into our initial spline point, make him look like he's really, really surprised and that other instance spline that's being lofted will move and update along with it. So really, really cool being able to use that instance there. So in the next video, we're going to ahead and add some colors to our character by applying some plastic-toy looking materials.
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