Infinity Evolution

Our early efforts toward finding the style of Infinity met with some interesting results. We didn't know how we were going to unify such diverse properties and I think our first attempts were pushing unification to the detriment of character. Keep in mind that there were tons of sketches being done by other artists also, this represents only a small part of the total effort in this search.

I included our final version at the end of the lineup, then the original Mr. Incredible on the right for comparison. The final version is a combination of artwork done between Jason Kim, Jon Diesta, myself, and lots of support from the rest of the team. 

I thought I'd include this here---we had the idea early on to animate the faces on the maps  (with animated brow as well) rather than a full facial rig, to get them to feel more toy-like. I liked the effect but we ultimately scrapped it. I painted these expressions over the in-game model to see how far we could without the jaw moving and such.

Sully went through a similar transformation. We didn't know at this point that we were doing Monsters University, so our figures reflected the older versions of the characters. The Sully on the bottom next to Jon's sketch is an amalgam of Ben Simonsen, Jon Diesta, and myself just like the Mr. Incredible above.

Once we had reference from the new Monsters Film, we were able to zero in on the characters fairly quickly. Jon Diesta did the sketches for Sully and I painted over them. I drew and painted Mike here. I included some of the 3d support we did as well: we often sketched over the models to solve more specific problems such as fur.