Emelia - a production diary

onMouseOver="flipB2(onB2)" onMouseOut="flipB2(offB2)"> INTRO

KIDS

(float mouse over images to see wireframes)

From left to right we have Jimmy, Leroy, and Claire. Not shown here are Miriam, April, and McCarthy. As you can see their hair styles vary significantly. You can read more about how I made all these in the "tricks" section in the top menu bar. Currently they have a skin shader I was messing around with, but I have decided in the final version to instead give them a peach colored felt material for skin. Having realistic skin on cartoon characters is a real problem. The issue isn't so much getting it to look real, but rather that when you do it just looks freaky to have a cartoon head wrapped in human flesh. If you are going to caricaturize the body, you need to caricaturize the skin too just like a traditional artist would.

So instead of a scientific approach to shader writing, a painterly approach is needed that epitomizes reality rather then mimicking it. I don’t mean here writing a shader that looks like oil paints or water color, but approaching shader writing with the mind of a painter instead of with the mind of a scientist. Ok, enough ranting :)

One of the initial challenges with the modeling of the kids was matching their design to Emila's. As you can see on the image to the left here the original designs looked like they came from different worlds! So I moved each design closer to the other until I found a happy balance between the two where Emelia still looks freaky and the kids look cute.

I am jack's complete
lack of fashion sense

The next part of designing the kids involved a trip the children's department of my local department store where I took reference photos of the horridly wonderful clothing that people make little kids wear, a sampling of which you can see here on the right. Apparently the same person who designed Tyler Durden's wardrobe in Fight Club has a day job making children's clothing.

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