I tried a cartoonish character design. This charater have interesting facial expressions which providing more space for character performances.
this brings some challenges, the most difficult is the facial binding, cartoon character expression changes need to be made with blendshape, I use faciel finished character facial binding. Then used auto rig pro to do the body binding and finally merged the two controllers together
Design sketch
But first the character design, I drew some very cute drafts in the early stages, and tried out a lot of different ideas here, such as designing the protagonist as an ancient person in Chinese dress, here are a couple of sets of ancient Chinese dresses for her, or a more stylised look with pea-eyes, and also thinking about the head-to-body ratio, and hoping that the protagonist would have both the innocent inquisitive traits of a child, but also be full of courage, and exploring a semi-realistic character I’m exploring a semi-realistic style for the character.
In terms of expressions, I referred to the exaggerated expressions of recent cel shading animations, which bring challenging for the later modelling and expression binding.This raises a number of questions： The character’s shadow outline and colour need to be achieved in which way? How to make the character expression move flexibly? How to make the material of three rendering? How to bind the skeleton? How to make the 3RT character move more naturally?
Modelling：
Start by modelling the head, extruding from a flat surface to the general shape of the skull. However, stylised character modelling requires a few details to be considered to make the result better, here are the tips:
Nose：To make such a small nose you need to use the sculpting mode and pull it out with the smallest brush possible
Mouth：The lips of a character with such a small mouth are easy to mould through, especially when viewed from the side (the character has a large angle of dip from the middle of the person to the chin. Still use edit mode to make the mouth, and then use embossing to paste the lips for better effect.
Eyeballs: inwardly recessed round pieces were used here. I tried that the eyeballs of the spheres would be incongruous on the character, although that would be easy on the bindings (as with traditional character bindings), though less visually pleasing. So ended up making flaky eyes, with the depressions appearing to be deep eyes. Here brings a new problem: how to bind irregular eyeballs？
Eyelashes: The eyelashes of a character cartoon are made up of upper and lower eyelashes, and each part is made up of three three-dimensional pieces. Adjusting the eyelash model so that it perfectly covers the character’s eye socket from all angles of observation has encountered some problems here: how to bind irregular eyelashes? How to change their nature during expression changes? How to bind them to the character’s eyelids?
Teeth Material：The character’s mouth is small and his teeth are in a position where they are difficult to be affected by light. I started out with a triple-touch material, which almost always showed the colour of the dark side (it looked like a slice with no light or dark), so I ended up using blender’s material to adjust a realistic material for the teeth