Research

Year 3 Research

Creating my character

The first step I took when creating my character was to explore the world that Riot games created. Looking at a map on http://leagueoflegends.wikia.com/wiki/Runeterra . I then looked into which characters came from where. I did this to distinguish what areas are made up of good characters and which are bad. Here is what I found:

Area:	Randomly selected champion:	Type:	Image thumbnail:
Demacia	Lux	Good
Noxus	Swain	Bad
Piltover	Caitlyn	Good
Zaun	Blitzcrank	Bad
Frej'lord	Ash	Good
Bandle city	Poppy	Both
Ionia	Shen	Both
Bilgewater	Miss Fortune	Both
Shadow Isles	Thresh	Bad
The Void	Malzahar	Bad
'Angles'	Kayle/Morgana	Both
'Outlying Yordles'	Fizz	Neutral
'Battlefield Born'	Skarner	Neutral
Solar	Leona	Good

There were a couple of characters whose origin was either not on the map or not stated, for example: champion Brand is from Lokfar (which is not on the map) and champion Ahri is not stated. Because of this it meant that if needed, I could either not say where my champion is from or make up my own location. While doing this research I also noticed some areas had quite clear themes, which will help me when I design my character.

These themes are:

Area:	Themes:
Demacia	Blue/yellow/gold colours/ shiny looking
Piltover	Traditional steampunk
Noxus	Dark colours/ poison/ blood
Zaun	Biochemistry/ green / poison
Frej'lord	Ice/ nordic/ barbarian
Ionia	Chinese/ martial arts/ balance

I decided to chose Demacia as it has a clear enough theme to be able to recognise a champion from Demacia. I feel it allows a lot of flexibility with the design of the character. Having chosen the area I now have a clearer idea of what my characters design could be like and her history.

Within the game League of Legends, there are 3 lanes that a 5 vs 5 game is played on. Traditionally only certain types of characters are played in each lane. Along side the lanes is the additional and optional role of the jungler. The types of character are:

Lane:	Type:
Top Lane (1 player)	Attack Damage (AD): Assassin Brawlers Ability Power (AP): Assassin Crowd control Health: Tank High sustain
Mid Lane (1 player)	Ability Power/ Mage: Assassin/ Burst Area of effect (AOE) High mobility
Bottom Lane (2 players)	Attack Damage (AD): Range Damage per second (Dps) Poke/ Siege Support: Healing Shields Crowd Control (stuns, grabs, etc.) Harassment Buffs (extra stats for themselves and/or other players)
Jungler (1 player)	Sustain Buffs Ability Power Assassin Crowd control Health Tank Attack Damage (AD): Brawler Assassin

So, as you can see, within each lane there are main types and within those there are subcategories. There is an extra subcategory called High mobility and it can fall under all categories. In top lane, (assuming there is a jungler on the team) there is one player, in the middle lane there is one player and in bottom lane lane there is two players. The jungler will be moving between all lanes.

It was important for me to look into this as I need to understand the role my own character will play on the team. I have chosen to make a tank type character, which could be played in the top lane or as a jungler. More specifically, I have chosen to make a high mobility tank. I made this decision as they are becoming more popular as season 3 draws to an end and I predict will be the focus of tank and jungle players in season 4 (sometime around January 2014). Part of the reason for their sudden popularity is the change in type of character in the Mid Lane, assassins are more common, which are fast characters, so in order to counter these assassin types, a high-mobility jungler is required.

The plus sides to this type of character are:

• ability to reposition
• ability to escape bad situations
• enables strong ganks for junglers
• good for gap closing and engaging on team fights

There are also a few negative points to this type of tank:

• sacrifice of damage, they focus on defence
• Sacrifice on health, they tend to be given lower health to start with
• Higher skill cap, these champions tend to be hard to play and newer players wouldn't handle them well.

Champions such as 'Jarvan IV' and 'Zac' are examples of this type of tank and having the above positive and negative points. There are some exceptions which are 'Garen' and 'Singed'. They are easier to play however their utilities are lower, thus high level players tend to avoid them.

A tanks basic mechanics are crowd control, gap closing, shield, percentage shred, zoning and terrain altering. I will need to keep these in mind when creating my own characters profile.

Which leads me onto creating my character profile. 

Material Comparisons 

 In the book Creating lifelike Figures in polymer clay by Katherine Dewey, she explains the difference in certain makes of polymer clay and which is better for what task. I am sticking to Newplast polymer clay for the majority of my maquettes as they don't dry out for a very long time, however I am going to explore super sculpty clay and fimo clay, as for the action pose i am wanting to try firing it so I can paint it and add extra detail. 

As part of my research I have looked at a few places to compare prices of the same clay, having now decided which clay to get. I have looked at online shops as well as shops close to where I live, comparing not only the price but whether for the price waiting potentially a day to a few weeks is worth any potential savings:
(PP = Postage and Packaging)

Newplast 500g ￡3
56g fimo ￡2.43 - Jarred's

Newplast 500g ￡3.99
56g fimo ￡2.26 - ￡3.10 - Amazon

Newplast 500g ￡2.99 + ￡2.95 PP = £5.94
56g fimo ￡2.29 +￡2.95 PP = £5.24   - hobbycraft

Newplast 500g ￡2.28 + ￡7.95 = £10.23
56g fimo  - N/A www.bristolfineart.co.uk

Newplast 500g ￡2.10 + ￡2.99 PP = £5.09
56g fimo ￡2.50 + ￡2.99 PP = £5.49 www.londongraphics.co.uk

Newplast 500g ￡1.50 + ￡2.49 PP = £3.99
56g fimo N/A - mbfg.co.uk

Jarred's  is a shop in Middlesbrough, as I'm studying at Teesside this means getting my clay there would cut out any delivery charges, their prices are overall cheaper, the only one cheaper was mbfg.com, however they have a delivery charge and they don't supply the fimo clay. Not relying on a delivery means less potential for delays in getting the clay, the only delay there could be is if the shop runs out of stock, however having had a chat to the people their, they re-stock regularly and the longest I could wait is till mid week the following week. this wouldn't be much different from waiting for a delivery, however it would still work out cheaper and therefore still benefit for me to buy my clay this way.

Character Design Research

I looked at four books, The legend of Korra, Book one:Air, the art of the animated series, The art of Rise of the Guardians, The art of The secret world of Arrietty and the art of Howl's Moving Castle. I wanted to see if in these book it is clear exactly why the design phase happens and if it is in fact important to the pipeline.

Rise of the Guardians

The first book I looked at was the Rise of the Guardians. DreamWorks seems to use the process of creating several concepts, each from a different artist, for each character. They then see which one captures them the most, which sums up the character and just has the right feel. As the story was based off an original book, they already had the backgrounds of the characters established, therefore the themes and colours were pretty set too. This can still change through out the character creating process, for example the character of Bunny was going to be a scientific to himself type of character. However once they started the voice acting, they decided to change it to be more in keeping with the actor. They have a system where by they work on the basis of '75% believability and 25% fantasy'. This helps to keep their characters believable while still being creative with the design. Having already decided to do something similar myself, this is a good guideline for me to work from.

They had a lovely flow chart of their process, I'm going to re-create it simply and only up to the modelling stage, just to give an idea of how much goes on before the models are even started, but it also, to me anyway, shows the importance of the design stage at least in their work flow.

Pipeline:

The Legend of Korra, Book One: Air

Their drawing process was interesting. They have 2 or 3 artists who do all their concept work. For the characters they seem to have a pretty clear idea of what they want before going into the design stage, the information given to the artists is quite detailed. So the physique of the characters seems to be the same and never really altered. However face shapes, hair styles, clothing styles, they all go through the process of being changed to suite the characters personality but also region. Once the design is selected expression sheets are done to establish the characters personality further. These would help the animators no end, especially for 2d animation, as the expressions must say consistent to the character. They mentioned that this process not only helps the strengthen the characters but it also helps the story, they alter the storyline as they create each episode, sometimes growing more attached to certain characters so altering their part or after considering how a character would react to a certain situation the storyline takes a slightly different turn. Another part of the processes they go through is the concept artists designs a load of faces and they pick out which ones suite what characters, again establishing early on how a character shroud look. For smaller characters who aren't such a focus they recycle them, change the outfit to fit the scene. As they aren't looked at too closely and only feature for a few seconds, it saves them the hassle of designing constantly new characters that aren't going to have much attention paid to them.

An interesting feature of the book was explaining how they make the vehicles. They use CG. One of the concept artists makes detailed plans of the vehicles but as this would take a lot of time for a 2d animation artist to draw and to keep consistent, they make them as 3d models, rendering them out to look like cartoons.

The Secret World of Arrietty and Howl's Moving Castle

As these were both produced by the same company they follow the same process with only really one difference so I thought I'd talk about them together.

Studio Ghibli like DreamWorks tends to use existing stories for their story lines. Arrietty is their version of the borrowers. So the themes and colours were already set. They have a couple of concept artists who work on designing the characters. They design many faces as well before picking who suites which character. Once they have a rough idea of the characters they start to storyboard, the character concept process however continues to develop until the director is fully happy with the design. The colours of the characters are changed as they environment designs are established to suite the environments. The design of the character heavily affects the design of the environment, but equally so does the environment affect the character. So throughout the process each is changing the other. Once each is set, character sheets are drawn, storyboards worked on and refined and the animation process begins.

This process happens in Howl's Moving Castle, the difference being the use of CG in this film. Howls' castle is entirely CG, the parts of the castle were drawn out and coloured in keeping with the animation, then cleverly made into a model that meant they could move each bit of the castle without having to re-draw it all and paint it all over and over.

After reading through all this I can firmly say that the design process is very important. It is the foundations of the animation, it means consistency can be kept, it means the characters are just right, they suite their personalities and their voices. The character sheets and emotion sheets help the animators to keep the personalities of the characters. The set designs create the feel of the film so getting the colours and designs right are extremely important.