The Process and Challenges

For this project I worked with Klarekoek to bring one of their existing 2D characters into 3D. The job was to model, rig and animate a character that already had an established design, so unlike with Pablo I was not making creative decisions freely. Everything had to match what already existed. The proportions, the personality, the look. It all had to carry over.

That turned out to be harder than designing something from scratch. With Pablo if something looked off I could just decide it was a style choice and move on. Here there was always a reference to check against and a lot of the time what I had made was not quite right even if I could not immediately say why.

The rigging took up most of my time. The character had a specific personality and I needed the rig to actually support that, especially in the face. I rebuilt parts of it more than once because even when it worked technically it did not feel right in motion. The eyes would settle too fast or a gesture would have no anticipation and read as stiff. Those are small things but they add up and they are the difference between something that looks like the character and something that actually feels like them.

What I Learned

Posing and creating the character to be 3D printed was difficult. I started by creating the character normally and then rebuild it for printing, using the first one I made as a sort of base.

The main thing I took from this is that the requirements of a medium shape every decision you make, and if you do not think about the medium early enough you end up doing the work twice. Which is what happened here. The first model was not wasted because it gave me something to work from, but going back and rebuilding it taught me more about 3D printing than I would have learned if I had planned it correctly from the start.