Applied Animation: Look Test

Now that I have the majority of our textures, I was able to get on with the look tests to see how we could use the textures for both the characters and the environments and experiment with how these textures work together. But first I had to create a digital version of Katy's characters. Whilst drawing out the characters, I realised that the wolf character was lacking something that I couldn't quite put my hand on and I felt that the character still appeared quite feline. I decided to experiment with changing the line work a little and making it look more 'furry'. Once I'd done this I also decided to change the eyes, as I felt like they looked too human and made the character look less frightening than what we wanted. After I'd made these changes I showed Katy and she was happy with the final result and said that she felt that the character had a lot more appeal now that I had made some adjustments. I also suggested that we change the Boar a little to make him more appealing by making his ears slightly larger and possibly changing the eyes. However, we haven't made any definitive decisions about this character yet so, for now, I worked with my sketch simply to test how it would look in the environment. I then did a character line up to determine size and to see how the characters worked together.

Character Line Up

Whilst I feel that the Wolf works with the Robin, I feel that the Boar is too realistic and makes the Robin appear more cartoon-y than the other characters. Katy also agreed and will work on refining the Boar character a little more. From here I began to add textures to the characters. 

Boar Textures

Wolf Textures

Original Wolf Texture

Robin Textures

Looking over the different tests I did for the Boar I prefer the two lighter colours to the brighter one (2nd in) and the original (4th), simply because I feel that they will stand out more against the background and the facial expressions will also be clearer to see. I also think that that they are just generally more appealing. After showing them to Katy she also agreed that the lighter ones might work better, however, she also liked the brighter coloured one too (2nd one in). However, I don't agree with this choice and believe that it would blend in too much with the backdrop. 

Reflecting upon the Wolf textures, I personally prefer the textures with the darker shade on top and the lighter on the bottom even thought the latter makes the facial features more noticeable. This may change once the character is placed in the environment however, so I am still going to test the different textures except for the first test, as the colours are too vivid and bright. At this moment I am leaning towards the original texture because I really like the colours and the way that they blend. I also like the appeal that the darker face gives to the character and I believe that it creates a sense of mystery and helps to imply that this character is dangerous.

In terms of the Robin character, I wanted to create colours that didn't match the Boar's or Wolf's but that also seemed quite natural. This proved a little harder than expected because the base colour was brown, just like the Boar's. After altering the textures I relaised that I much preferred the lighter colors I had created, which was the opposite of how I felt when Katy had done a lighter colour in her digital tests. However, seeing the textures in a lighter shade has changed my mind. I feel that the lighter shades give the character a lot more appeal and I am definitely drawn more towards the lighter tones characters. I also feel that the lighter tones will work better alongside both characters and the environments.

To test all of these ideas I placed the characters into the environments with all of the textures. 

I experimented with adjusting the levels of the ground only, as I originally felt that the trees were a nice colour as they were. I gradually increased the darker slider whilst very slightly decreasing the lighter one to make the colours appear darker. I much prefer the darker shades to the ground because it highlights the textures more than the lighter and original textures. The trees also appear to blend in better with the darker textures. In terms of character texture, the lighter shades work quite well against the lighter trees and darker ground. However, the original texture (4th along) also seems to stand out against this background. I still don't feel that the brighter Boar works, as I feel that it contains too much contrast and doesn't fit into the environment very well. 

I also tested how the darker floor and the boars would work against darker trees. Personally, I prefer the far trees in the darker tone, as it adds more depth to the environment. However, I'm not sure I like the darker foreground trees, as they draw attention away from the characters. However, I am going to discuss these thoughts with Katy first before I do any more tests to see how she feels about what I have done. 

As before I experimented with all of the textures together. The original texture was too pale and didn't show much of the texture so I immediately changed the levels of texture to make it darker. I also adjusted the levels of the tree textures to make them darker too, as we were thinking of placing this character in a darker setting. 

So I focused on making the texture appear darker and I also focused on making the colours the little brighter, as this is what we found when doing our research. Looking at the three tests I did, the first and the last stand out to me the most simply because I feel that they work really well with the all of the textures of the characters and the trees. However, the rock does seem to blend in with the ground a lot, so I will have to look at playing around with the levels of the rock texture to help it stand out a little better. Having said this however, I really like the deeper green in the second texture and think that it helps to make the characters texture stand out more, however it may also be too overpowering and draw attention away from the character. 

With the darker ground textures, I wanted to experiment with how these, and the characters, looked with the paler trees. I feel that the lighter foreground trees work really well with the characters and don't draw as much attention away from the characters as the darker foreground trees. I also really like some of the paler background trees, but I also like the darker ones too. I'm having trouble deciding, I know. In terms of the ground however, I think I prefer the slightly paler texture when used with the paler foreground trees because they blend together better than the darker ground texture. I also feel that the original character texture works better with the lighter trees, but we can't make any decisions on this yet because we don't have a sky or fog texture yet. 

Overall, I feel that I have explored the textures well enough and have come to the conclusion that the textures work well together if the background textures aren't too overwhelming to give the focus to the characters. Having paler foreground textures and darker background textures seems to help to create depth within the environment, however, I feel that I should experiment with adding different shades of the two textures to help create more depth. I also feel that I should experiment with them in After Effects to see how adding depth through 3D layers works. 

I also need to add in a sky texture for both environments and experiment with different methods for the fog in the wolf environment. During our next progress meeting, I will show Katy what I have done with the environments and see what she thinks about them and take my experimentation from there. I also didn't get around to placing the Robin into any of the environments yet and will need to do this before our next progress meeting.