Behind The Scenes: Martian Animation (Patreon)

Time for another character design. I don't primarily create characters, but ever since I was creating environments and dioramas, some of them were just screaming for some life. So I set myself to create a different styles of 3d people to fit my designs.

At first, I established a low poly aesthetics, so I can easily plug them into any low poly diorama. Then I spent some time refining my cartooning skills and ultimately creating a distinct cartoon style and even releases detailed course episode on female 3d cartoon.

But when it came to some marketing style designs, I was missing a character style.

Visit the full Pinboard here

I kinda had a vision on how the character should look like. Something more geometric, very stylized, almost like emoji. I fired up the Pinterest and searched for some characters like that.

I didn't find exactly what I wanted, but there were pieces I saw I can stick together. But since this was the first time, I needed some proof, so I broke my workflow and started Blender. I quickly prototyped the character head using quadsphere and played with the mouth geometry and shape, nose position and eyes style and placement.

What looked like pretty easy thing to do, turned out to be quite a journey. I needed several iterations, until I could confidently say, that the head design will work.

After that, it was time for some scene brainstorming and sketch. I had the concept of the astronaut strutting around on the planet surface for a long time, so I tried to sketch in some idea.

I looked up some Martian imagery and liked the rock formations, so I used those to frame the composition. I wanted to go for a perspective camera, so I opted for a really stylized shot, camera low to the ground with small focal number. That's why I sketched in a really large foot in the front.

I liked the comp, but it was missing something and I though it might look cool for the astronaut to have a dog. With a helmet on. In the middle of the process I remembered a stylized version of the Curiosity rover I made a while back and it was already looking like a cute robot companion.

What if I stylized it more, reduced the wheels to four and give it a bit of dog-like personality? And the rest was like a waterslide. It just came together and all it needed was some funk uplifting beat. Have a listen on my YT process video :)

You can watch the process video on Youtube