Design
For this project I want to design a cute character, so I used chibi’s body shape (2 heads).
Original sketch Final result
Color palette
For the colorof this character, I want to keep saturation and value(brightness) at lower level. I choose purple pink and yellow, which give peaceful, tender and innocent feelings.
Modelling and Texturing
Since I couldn’t find suitable resources (most of the body proportions were incorrect), I referred to the three views in 2D to model the character.
The lighting effects under default setting looks horrible, it need to be set the light used and shadows to observe the desired result. Also, depth map shadows should be enabled to see the shadows.
I unwraped UV for face and painted it in Sai2(digital painting software).
Rigging and skinning
I used Mixamo to rig the character so that I can use the animation from mixamo directly. However, the imported character should be cleaned and without strange shapes. Because my character is too small, the result was not as expected, I need to paint it again to fix bugs in Maya.
When skinning is completed, it is best to export it for future use, or save in another script to copy from.
Blendshape and face animation
I used blendshape here to make face animation, it also can be applied in game engine.
When making eye animation, I grouped(ctrl+G) eyes, eyelashes and face to create blend shape.
When making mouth animation, I grouped face,teeth and tongue to create blend shapes.
They can be moved out of the group (or moved into another group)after finishing current morph deformation.
However, the base mesh(group and its hierarchy) is fixed for each blend shape.
When creating blendshape, I set to world because local will ignore transformation, I need translation infomation here so I keep it.
The blend shape target can be rebuild so the mesh could be created in case we need it again.
The deformation order should be pre-deformation (before skinning),because it is has binded skin.
I drawed some images with alpha channel to create 2D appearances here.
It is better to separate two meshes with the same number of vertices (eyelashes) when making blend shapes, because it will exchange the their targets sometimes.
In order to animate eyes, I rigged a bone to control both eyes, the joint should be on the intersection of their vertical bisectors so that the eyes can rotate in the correct region. I also limited the translation here.