I want to be a character designer for Pixar someday. I don’t have any experience actually designing a character for a storyline, but I draw animals all the time. I was just wondering what you guys thought was harder. Designing a character from scratch (like a monster) with practically no limits, but not much to start with (besides it cant look too much like a human or animal) or a animal or object common to everyday life (like a fish, lamp, or bug) Leave your post!
I think it’s a personal preference, it’d depend on how imaginative you are visually. I’d say starting from scratch, because you’d have to make sure that the characters are designed intelligently. It’d be so easy to go overboard, or not do well enough, and there are so many ways you could mess it up. On the other hand, if you’re good at putting characters together, it’d be really easy to make amazing characters, but you’d have to be conscious about making things look too similar to other characters, considering you’d probably have a good knowledge of so many
From the perspective of an artist, I can say that it’s more difficult to design a character around a KNOWN, familiar something-a human, a real animal, etc.-than it is to design something completely from scratch. In the latter, when the audience sees your work onscreen, they have nothing to really compare it to, so they can’t say, “well, they got the eyes all wrong”, or “the head’s too big”, etc. They really have no references. This is ESPECIALLY true when working in CGI, due to what’s called “the uncanny valley”, that difficulty in accurately rendering human skin and other features in this media. When watching Monsters, Inc., for example, I was highly impressed with how detailed the characters’ features seemed, the subtle movement of Sulley’s fur, the depth of emotion in Randall’s emerald eyes, but when The Incredibles came out, I was a bit disappointed at first by the designs of the characters, who seemed so much more “cartoonish” to me than the ones in Monsters, Inc.. The eyes seemed “flatter”, the features exaggerated to impossible proportions, in sharp contrast to the background effects, like the explosions or the water. I then realized that with human characters, I had a lot more to draw on for actual comparison, so that would have made the animators’ job on that movie a lot tougher than the ones working with monster or robot characters, where you have more freedom to experiment with designs.
Both are great arguments. This is why I couldn’t decide on one or the other. Of course, with CGI monsters work better because of the difficulty of human skin, but on paper it’s a tough choice. Fur is really hard on paper.
I go back and forth between the two. Starting from scratch can be difficult just because you have no boundaries, but that can also be a plus; total freedom. I went with starting with an object though. You really have to make sure you make it believable enough, but not too realistic. Like pitbulllady mentioned, you don’t want to get into the uncanny valley situation. I think finding that balance would be more difficult than creating a character from scratch.
Although I’m not, in my own opinion a very good drawer at all, I find starting from scratch to be ever so hard… But making some freaky renditions of an everyday object is relatively easy for me
