Further Character Alterations

As we carried out our final preparations before animating we settled on how we were going to split the work load. Both of us decided that Emma would focus on animating the wolf, and I would focus on the boar. For the animating of the robin, we decided that it would probably be best to bit animate the robin in or own scenes, because this would help make he production process smoother as we wouldn't need to keep exchanging files over to one another and swapping to and from.  However we needed to make sure that our animation of the robin's lip syncing and body language are compatible. So we decided that it would be necessary for Emma to do an animation test and then pass that on to me, so that I could also produce a test which would enable us to double check that our animating doesn't look too different.

Emma did need to make a few changes to the face of the wold character in order to make it easier to animate the lip movements. This is something she consulted with me first in order to make sure I was happy with it's final design. To be honest I really liked the changes she made to it, because the alterations weren't too extreme and in some ways I actually think it worked better than my final design!

The alterations Emma made led to the boar looking slightly more realistic. This wasn't a problem at all, all it meant was that some slight changes needed to be made to the boar, just so that they didn't look completely different! The main changes on the boar just needed to be around the eyes, because at this point, he was the only character with eyebrows. 

We decided together that reducing the size of the eyes and giving him a ridge above his eyes similar to the one given to the wolf would give them a bit more of a connection. Also the ridges above the eyes could still be animated exactly the same as eyebrows would have been. 

Emma did suggest at one point that enlarging the ears on the boar could possibly enhance the character appeal. However after experimenting with this I decided that I really wasn't keen on this design alteration, I felt that the big ears made the character look too bat-like and a bit too threatening. So after some discussion we agreed that just altering the eyes would be necessary!

Another aspect that needed to be noted was that, in my original designs, all of the characters had sectioned off coloured tips to certain areas. For example the robins feathers/fingers and the top of her feathers on her head are all sectioned off. The same with the wolf's tail and ears. The same goes for the boar's ears and tusks. This is something we definitely needed to keep because this was one of the main features that connect all of these characters together.