Monday, September 15, 2014

Capt.' Ironside: A Voyage Across the Seven Seas of Character Design


The Ballad of Captain Ironside


(Or, Character Animation 101)


By Drew McCall


This is Captain J. Mortimer Ironside...


This character is one that I drew on paper, scanned into photoshop, and animated in After Effects. This was a very time consuming process, which took a lot of patience while both animating and editing the original drawing. The original drawing, by the way, looked like this:


I chose this sea captain mainly because I liked the idea of having sea captain named 'Ol' Ironside'.


After assigning layers to each of the body parts and adding some texture and color to it, it ended up looking like the character you see above. I wasn't done yet, though. I still had to animate it.
It took a while to create the background ship and sea, and I had to use the perspective tool to get the floor to look right. In the end I was very happy with the way it looked. I animated the legs and added a slight movement to the body to make the walk cycle seem a little more natural. I added a built in rain effect and... Presto! I was done. I liked this project, it took a lot of time and patience but the end result was really worth it.




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