Ox Character Design

I started by doing some sketches of Oxes in order to get an understanding of the physicality of an Ox.

They have a very distinctive horn shape which very gradually curves down, along with a very flat and hunched back.  The hunched back can really be exaggerated; particularly as the character will be carrying a Cat and Rat.

I initially had the idea of portraying the Ox as a cool, calm character who is happy to compromise.  In the bottom image, I experimented with the easy going facial expressions and the sense of understanding that the character would convey.

 However, as the character development went on, he become less of a "cool" character and more of a simpleton with a vacant expression.  This is mainly because the Ox is essentially not a very bright character for letting the Cat and Rat travel with him in the first place, and the Rat eventually outsmarts and deceives the Ox at the last moment.

In the next two drawings, I drew the character with a more vacant expression.  This may seem static and lifeless but that is almost the whole point of the drawing.

I also started to make his back more rigid and taller to exaggerate the appearance of the character, and so that it would be suitable for carrying the Cat and Rat.

In this next drawing, I tried to consider how this character should look when submerged in water.  This is fairly fundamental as the character will be in the water for a whole scene.  I would need to make sure that the character's head was high enough in relation to his back so that it would still be above the level of the water.  It was also suggested to me by team members that his nose and mouth should be further out of the water.

I was not fully satisfied with the look of the Ox at this point so I decided to go back into the facial expressions and push it further.  As you will see in the next two images, I started playing with exaggerating the size of the eyes and snout.  I was working at making the character look more warped and detached from reality.

 However, when I showed these to Lily, the director, she asked for a more cute design.  I interpreted this as being a character that wasn't particularly sharp but that you could still sympathise with; particularly when he is deceived by the Rat.  Making this character cute and appealing would be fairly challenging so I decided to look for reference.  Eventually, I decided to look at the more rubber dose animation of the 1920s and 1930s, particularly the VERY early Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies.

A lot of the earlier Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies used to have quite cute and appealing animals that would be exploited or manipulated in various ways, like in the cartoon below.

After studying this animation, I decided to apply this style of character design to the Ox.  I made his eyes and snout more like that of a rubber dose cartoon character from that era and I think it works well; he has a very vacant and not particularly bright facial expression, but his face is a lot more versatile.  He can have a blank expression, but he can also look shocked or disappointed if need be.

Another touch that I have added to this character design is that his horns now simply droop down either side and only curl at the very end.  Rather than being a sharp, powerful character with quite sharp, assertive horns; he is a dopey pushover and I thought drooping horns would reflect this.  I have retained the quite exaggerated, hunched back that I was working on in earlier designs.

I think I have settled on this concept, so I have done another variation of this character design with the Ox standing at another angle.

I also started doodling facial expressions for this Ox design and I think that this is going to be a really good design for expressing a wide range of facial expressions.  He will mostly have quite blank and almost dumb expressions, but I'm not afraid to really push them out and I have some very exaggerated smiling expressions and sad expressions.

Creative changes + More character design work

First of all, I would like to announce that we have made the creative decision to change the Buffalo to an Ox.  The reason for this is after doing a bit more research into the Chinese Zodiac; the second animal of the zodiac is in fact an Ox, contrary to Ed Young's telling of the Great Race.  I also learnt that it is only in the Vietnamese version of the Zodiac in which the Water buffalo is the second animal.

Furthermore, after comparing images of the Buffalo and Ox, I have decided that the Ox has more potential for interesting character design.

An Ox

A buffalo

An Ox's body proportions are far more exaggerated, compared to a buffalo.  It has a massive back, that would be good for the cat and rat to sit on and their horns that droop downwards could be used to add appeal to the character.

As I have volunteered to do the character design for the Ox, here are some more images that I am using as reference for the Ox character.

Sketches for the design of the Ox character are to follow.

Fingers and right arm.

The hands would not be as laborious to rig as the female model that came with the tutorial, primarily because I only had two big fingers and a thumb to rig.

This stage was just a matter of fitting the joints in the fingers and thumb, and then aligning them correctly in the top, front and side views.

Once that was done, I now had to parent these fingers to the wrist to make the hand.  In order to emphasise the grip in the fist, I decided to add an extra joint, called the leftHandPalm, which is marked by the pivot here.  This should hopefully make the range of movement in this hand greater.

As for the right arm, I could have mirrored the joints of the left arm, but I think that this may have caused problems when it came to binding the skin, as demonstrated a few posts back.

I decided to build the right arm from scratch and to try and make resemble the left arm joints as closely as possible.  I think this would also be good practice as I could get the hang of building arms, complete with IK/FK handles and controls.

Building the arms for the alien

This is an area where I tend to fall short when I'm rigging, so when it came to putting the joints in the arms, as well of the relevant controls, I would have to follow the relevant part of the Digital-Tutors tutorial to the letter.

 I initially started with three joints for the shoulder elbow, but I remembered to put another in the forearm, as I would need to set the IK handle here and then extend the effector to the wrist.  This is because the IK would only need to affect up to the forearm, as the wrist would have its own controls; however, at the same time, all the controls would need to be at the wrist in order to make it easier for the animator to operate.

Of course, I will now need to make sure that these joints are inside the arm and also positioned in a way that it wil bend accurately.  In this video, I found that the joint was actually outside the arm, so I just repositioned the joints, similarly to how I did the leg.  See this video.

Another important part was to make sure that the local joint rotations were all in order and that they were all straight.  I did this by hitting Fn and F8 to check the rotations of the joints.  As you see below, all of the joints in the forearm are straight as they are all aligned with the X, Y and Z axis perfectly.

 The fingers, on the other hand, were a little out of line and had to be rotated slightly so that they could be as in line as possible.

 Checking the local rotations was something that I got the hang of fairly quickly, the next stage was to insert an IK handle to create that bend.  The bending point would have to be in the elbow, but the wrist would have to be free to move by itself.  Therefore the effector could only affect from the shoulder to the forearm.

How I did this was by clicking the starting point at the shoulder and then clicking the forearm to insert the handle.  Even though this handle was not going to impact on the wrist, it would need to be located at the wrist; as all of the controls for this arm would need to be based there.

In this video, you will see me relocating the effector to the wrist, using the Hypergraph.

Now, I can use the IK handle to move and bend the arm.  It is an IKRP so this means I can rotate the arm in several directions.

 Before moving on to the next stage, I needed to create some controllers that I would constrain a little later.  This wrist control, which will be used for moving the arm in IK mode was made simply by importing another cube and reshaping.

 I needed a shoulder control to move the shoulder up and down, so I just created this S curve using the same method I used for the Pole Vectors in the leg.

Neck Control for alien

This stage was actually a bit further on, but I felt confident enough to do it straight away.  I created a NURBS curve control for the neck.  I then placed an IK handle in the neck so it could move independently of the back.  In order to make the head rotate, I contained both the skull and head base joint to the neck control with an Orient constraint.  Here is a video of this in action.

Twist

The chest control was prepared for translating the upper back in any direction, but it was not yet capable of creating a twist in the back.  In order to do this, I used the connection editor to create a connection between one of the attributes of the chest control and the twist attribute of the IK Spline Handle that I created early on.

I loaded the chest control as the output and the IK spline handle as the input.  In order to create the connection, I selected Rotate Y from the chest control list, as this was the most appropriate attribute for influencing the twist, as the twist of the spine moves on the Y axis.  I selected twist from the list of attributes of the IK spline handle.

 Now, when I adjust the Rotate Y attribute of the chest control, the spine twists around naturally.

Controls for the joints

Just as I did for the legs, I needed to create some controls for the clusters and joints in the upper body so that the animator would not need fiddle with them to animate.

Rather than create a control out of curves from scratch, I decided to import on that I made earlier.

It was simply a linear NURBS cube, which is ideal for creating controls as it does not render.  I snapped the cube to the chest joint and then scaled it out.

I then moved the vertices so that the control fit around his chest more comfortably.

The hip control, which needed to be produced next, was created simply by duplicating the chest control, snapping it to the root and then reshaping it with the vertices and of course, never forgetting, freezing the transformations.

Next were the abs control and hip sway, the latter of which would sit within the hip control.  These were both created from NURBS circles.  The Hip sway was shaped simply by going into Vertex Mode, selecting every other vertice and scaling in.

 The arrow, which would control the position of the upper back, was created using the CV Curve tool which was set to linear mode, to give it a rigid look.

Finally, I constrained all these controls to the relevant clusters using a Point orient.  The root joint was constrained to the Hip control using a Parent constraint, as I wanted it to stay in its own place, but still follow the Hip control if need be.  This is a video to illustrate me constraining all the relevant joints and clusters and then testing the controls.  I created a layer called DO_NOT_TOUCH, for anything that I do not want the animators to mess with.

I then parented all of the controls to the Hip control, meaning that if I dragged the Hip control around, the rest of the upper body follows.