Four Body Types of Character Design - The Whale.

Whale, as the most intelligent mammal on earth, their brain is 10 times bigger and more complicated than human. I want to encounter one of them on my scuba diving trip, to dance with this the most mysterious wonder in ocean. As one of our capstone project characters, it seems its body type is easier than human characters to make; but to catch it's epic personality and its beauty, it's the hardest among of all.  

Rough Sketches:

1) Body Type 1_ The Giant Blue Whale.

    A- Base body shape.

  B - More body detail design. Add more bubbles on his rough skin, also his baleen.

 C - This is my favorite one so far among all my whale designs. Since we are planning to make this whale flying in the sky as part of the surreal theme, I reduced his skin bubble, change the eye shape into a tighter form, and add the rough design of the island growing on his back. This whale is a flowing island itself. :) 

 D - Scars. Added a few scars. Strong whales fight.

2) Body Type 2_ The Medium long Right Whale.

A - Base body shape. The hardest part to make this type of whale is his big opened mouth by his super giant long teeth!!

B - Add some rough horny skin texture. I image his skin is harder than rocks and it's a big tank!

C - Again, strong whales fight. Scars are a must.

D - A flying whale with a island on the back is always my first choice when a surreal image comes to mind.

3) Body Type 3_ The Medium Fin Whale.

A - Base body shape.

B - Rough skin texture.

C - Skin bubbles with scars.

D - Of course, we have to have an island on his powerful back to make it flow and move both in ocean and sky.

4) Body Type 4_ The Short Fat Humpbacked Whale. 

A - Base body shape.

B - With his baleen.

C - With curl skin texture. Short fat Humpbacked whale usually gives me an impression of being very friendly.

D - Finally, his also gonna carry an island.

First set of mood board for our capstone game - Photography Guru.

1) Art style - Exaggeration.

Josh's beautiful drawing, love the color combination, and the style is very surreal!

2) Photorealism.

Chunzi's drawing. I'm so excited about that giant whale!

3) Outlandish.

Chunzi's drawing.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/137795944@N05/albums

Part 2 - Final Zbrush Pose and Maya Pose:

Maya Pose - Although building the skeleton and skin weighing really takes a lot of efforts and time, overall I feel this is a better method to pose the character because there are so much more control with the skeleton structure system built in. It also brings in the animation functions too which is a plus.

ZBrush Pose - this method is a lot easier, but it's not functioning as good as Maya skeleton system is.

Here's the documentation of how I did this character's pose in Maya and the TPose in Zbrush.

Part 1_Skeleton and Pose.

1) Built the skeleton:
                                                                   Perspective view:

Front View

Back View

Side View

                                     

2) Pose Ready to wrap:

First try pose, but didn't realize that I didn't set the "key Selected" on each movement. So it turned out that frame 1 and frame 20 were all the same. Eventually I realize that I need to set the "Key Selected" *each time* when I select the target joints to make the pose. So re-did that twice until got to the right result.

Second try pose, this time I got the "Key Selected" right. So when I move the frame from 1 to 20, it started to move smoothly! Then I pulled out the original model, now they are all set to be wrapped and transfer the pose.