Evolution of the Characters

I wanted to show the evolution of our main characters from a quick doodle to the final 3D model they became.

Here is that quick doodle on the left.  I drew it to show Wallace the idea for the characters and the short.


On the right is a much better sketch that Michael did for us to flesh out the design a bit more. 
This is where I started with the modeling in Maya.

 This one is the first finished model I came up with.  His eyes were large and he had a nose like in the drawing. 

The first decision to deviate from the original drawing was the elimination of the nose.  Wallace and I both liked him better without one.  It makes his face less human and cuter as well I think.

The next major change we made was to his eyes.  As I said in a previous post I saw a commercial with characters with tiny little eyes and they looked really cute.  I didn't go as far with this character but making the eyes smaller really made a difference we liked.  I also tapered the limbs, a great suggestion Wallace had made.  This is the model I passed on to Wallace to take into Zbrush.

Along with tweaking the features of the face, one of the best details Wallace made to the characters was the folds he added to the top and bottom like a real piece of dynamite.  Even though we didn't want to make them look realistic, these details really help sell that they are sticks of dynamite and not just cylinders.  As you can see his feet are still very generic and I thought we might keep them that way (kinda like the M&M characters).  But Wallace surprised me and created these amazing shoes for them.

Below are a few views of the shoes.  They really stand out and definitely add character to these guys.  Click on the photos and check out the details he put in them.  Really great stuff! The difference in color is also one of the ways we differentiated the two so viewers can more easily tell them apart.

More on that below.

We needed to create differences other than the shoes.  A lot of that became textural.  Wallace made Boom dirtier.  He is missing a tooth and has freckles. His body is also slightly paler.  Even with all these subtle changes we wanted something a bit more drastic.





Wallace had the idea of giving one of them glasses.  Here is Boom wearing the glasses but after discussing it we both decided that Bang looked better in them.

So after two weeks of hard work in Zbrush, Wallace finished these great characters.  Like I said in the previous post, we definitely spent a lot longer on the characters than we had planned but in the end it was definitely worth it.  Here is the final Bang and Boom.