Posing

I have just decided on three poses that I will present Cornelius in for the "turntable" animation; one of which I will print out in the 3D Printing stage.  I decided to focus on presenting a hippie-type character, but I still needed to emphasise the observant and laid back, middle aged character that was stated in the brief.  Here are the three poses that I decided on and I shall talk through each of them.

 This is Cornelius in the lotus pose.  This is my favorite of the three poses and is loosely based on the CG pose of Dylan that I referred to in this post, as well as various images I found of people meditating in the lotus pose across the internet.  I was originally going to do him squatting, but I decided to cross his legs in the way that many people sitting in the lotus pose do.  I think that this will be the pose that I will print out in the 3d printing stage.

 In this pose, I wanted to convey one of the key characteristics of Cornelius; he is an observer.  He is a sensible and civilised occupant in comparison to his counterparts in the London Zoo advertisement, and therefore, he provides a commentary on the people who visit the zoo each day.  I based this pose on real gorillas, in the way that they can bend over and put both their hand and feet evenly on the ground and keep their back straight.

For the third pose, I was unsure what to do with Cornelius at first; I had already done a sitting pose and a crouching pose, so I decided to present him in a standing pose.  I was initially going to do something with Cornelius putting his arms in the air and leaning back, but I decided that it would make the character look too over the top, so I decided to produce a "peace" gesture.  I used several videos and images of hippies in various poses to come up with this one; I tried to make the pose as loose as possible.

I now need to put these three models and possibly also Cornelius in the default "crucifix" pose into a turntable animation in Maya, which involves the character in each key pose rotating on the Y axis so he can be viewed at various angles.

I'm pretty excited about the next stage as this involves printing out a physical 3D model of Cornelius and it will be great to actually get to touch something that I designed and created in Maya.