Karma Chameleon

I have yet to post drawings of them here, but I have two robotic reptillian characters, named Wassat and Rensis. The former doesn't really resemble a particular species and the latter is based on a cobra, and I randomly decided to throw another character into the mix, this time a chameleon.



She doesn't have a name yet and this is just an early look for her, so no doubt she'll look completely different within a week or so knowing me. I'm most likely going to make her design a little less complicated. A friend of mine pointed out that the patterns on her shoulder plates made it look as though there was a tiny city inside of her, which was not the intention, but that's kind of a cool idea. Not sure if I want to use it or not, though.

Oddly enough, I got the inspiration for her whilst driving behind a Ford Ka and seeing the rearlights.

Rowf!

This is Zombie, one of my oldest characters. As his name and appearance suggests, he is an undead, dog-like lizard... thing. Looking at that description, it seems odd that he's as adorable as he is. He's actually changed quite a lot over the years. This is how he used to look, way back in 2005:



I'm not quite sure how he changed so dramatically, but I seem to have a habit of constantly tweaking things about my characters, sometimes without even realising it.

Robot Rock

Here are a couple of concept designs I came up with for my future robot sculpture. We were allowed to do pretty much whatever we wanted within reason, although my tutor suggested working with silhouettes and offered a box full of pieces of card cut into different shapes. I took a handful and dumped them on to the desk so they'd make some sort of silhouette and drew a few of them, then came up with designs based on them.



This was the first one. Obviously this would require far too much clay for me to be able to sculpt it, so I abandoned that idea, though I'm rather fond of it.



The second one. I really don't know what I was going for with this one and just kinda got silly with it halfway through because there was no way I was going to be able to sculpt that. It looks like some sort of demon chicken robot or something.



The third one, and the one I eventually ended up deciding on. The look on the far right is the one I'm going to be sculpting, which will be nice and easy to do as the little guy's so skinny.

More Concepts and Early Animations - Oliver

After coming up with Samantha's initial design, I decided she needed a buddy of some sort, and got to work doodling up various dinosaurs. The one that seemed to be the most popular (and that was my personal favourite as well) was the Stegosaurus, and he went on to become Oliver (they grow up so fast).



A couple more doodles later and I'd settled on a look for him, and a personality as well. I decided to muck about with his spines a little, and made it so they moved back when he was scared.



This was his first rig, though it suffered a lot of the same problems as Samantha's original one. His legs where also only made up of two parts, which made making them move rather tricky, as seen in his first test animation.

Lineless Ruse

I enjoy doing lineless pieces as they're fairly quick and easy to make, so I did one of one of my favourite characters of mine, Ruse (he isn't usually this short, though). I'm quite pleased with how this turned out, considering it started off as a silly little doodle in my sketchbook. This was the first time I'd added a texture to a lineless piece of mine, and I think it goes with the style well.

Samantha - Early Animations

This was the first ever test I did with Samantha's old rig. It's nothing too special as I was mostly getting adjusted to the software, but having never done this sort of thing before, I liked the results anyway.



It was after I tried to do a walk cycle that I decided that redoing her rig would be a good idea, as the gap problem mentioned in my previous post made this fairly tricky to do.



This was the first test I did with her new rig, which was much more expressive than her old one. This one had three interchangeable heads, could blink, move her pupils, show either the back or palm of her hands, and move her claws (though this isn't shown in this particular test). I was also happier with this one aesthetically, as it was much less flat than before.



Though this was mostly me having fun with the camera (obviously the movements will be less... elaborate in the final piece), this is a good example of how much more expressive Samantha's new rig was.

Some Concepts - Samantha

These were the first drawings I did of Samantha. As you can see she doesn't look a whole lot different to how she does now. Ordinarily I go through a fair amount of concept designs before I settle on something I like, but with Sammy it just came almost instantly (although that might be partly because I based her on an existing character of mine). My tutor suggested changing her feet as they looked a little too much like hooves, and also to perhaps modify her hands a little so they could show a little bit more emotiveness.



After tweaking her look accordingly, this was her first rig. However, it was fairly limited in that her pupils were permanently fixed in the same place and she couldn't blink, and the way I'd made her parts meant that if she bent her legs a certain way, there would be a triangle-shaped gap.