Year 3 Graphic Design & Animation: Final Project: Development

Continuing with the idea and development of designing collectable figures for fighting ice hockey fans, it was decided that the figures needed to be more realistic with a rounded human shape to help the NHL audience have a product that resembles more with the players.

Like the experiment with the figurines I created two characters for my final project. The quickest method I found was to create a human template that could be used for both players and then change sculpture of the faces to make them both unique from each other, this saved a lot more time compared to if i approached the project making two separate human models.

Cinema 4D has a clothing feature that generates cloth around any shape so creating a jersey shaped box around my characters upper body allowed it to morph around as a shirt. The method was also repeated for the shorts and socks too.

Hockey player's wear jerseys displaying their team logo and number on and to design my characters uniform I had to use a method called UV Mapping. This feature takes a 3D model and unwraps its surface in to a 2D texture, the flat texture can then be edited in photoshop for example and then rewrapped around the 3D model again.

After modelling my hockey players I had create rigs for both of them and this would allow me to move their limbs so I could have them in fighting poses. A rig in 3D modelling is seen as like a skeleton that supports the model, it's made up of different coloured lines and the colours represent different body parts like arms, legs and fingers. The rig lines up with the model and then when the rigs controls are used the rigs body parts move with the model so its possible to move the model realistically, for example if the model is a person you can move their arm in the manner a real person can move and rotate their arm.

I watched some real ice hockey fights from games in the NHL and took screenshots so I could capture the players positions when they were in fights. I used these photos as templates and inspiration for my positioning my own models.

After completing my models I had them both 3D printed for my final project. They were both printed in their default T-poses but I had the idea that I could print out my renders of the characters in their different fighting poses on A3 paper and then my physical model stood in the middle of them, so the image of the poses acted as shadows coming off of my model.