11/02/13 - Poses

Today we were given a rigged humanoid/cartoony model and introduced to the concept of creating 'poses' for a character model.

We were initially left to familiarise ourselves with manipulating the model, which demonstrates good practice by having helpers attached to all of its bones.

We started off by creating a 'shy' pose, which you can see below.

This pose was created by making the character seem smaller. The forward tilted head creates a very timid appearance.

Next we created a 'confident' pose for our characters:

The wide stance and generally larger appearance creates the impression of someone with plenty of confidence.

After being talked through the creation of the above two poses we were let loose and given the task of creating as many different poses as we could for the duration of the lesson, you can see all of them below, enjoy!

Laughter:

I think this pose would be helped if we had some means of manipulating the eyes, the blank expression means that the meaning of this pose could be lost on many people.

Cowering:

This was originally supposed to be scared, but the term scared can be showed in a number of ways i think. This example hear shows fear of an outside force in my opinion, like something harassing the character or an imminent impact of some kind. Again the ability to manipulate the face would help this pose greatly.

Ascension:

This was the last pose i made during the session, not the most serious of poses but i believe it conveys the holy nature of the characters state. Also, in case you were wondering, yes, i did use photoshop to create this image!

I greatly enjoyed this session, the pre-made model we were given was a joy to use and really demonstrates, through proper rigging and constraints (such as not letting the elbow be rotated in a non-realistic way) the kind of standards that would be expected from a professional model rig. Something i have definitely taken from using this model however is that facial expressions can in some cases be integral to portraying a certain emotion or character state.

I also understood from this session that posing is not solely restricted to character models. A pose animation could be useful for a treasure chests open and close states, or for more complex yet not humanoid models that have several different animations.