Wednesday, September 11, 2013

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.

11 comments:

  1. Fantastic new styles! I like it!

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  2. Wow, just seeing the variations is amazing. I really like that sort of stuff.
    I'm curious. What was the expected turnaround on these designs once you had reference. Was it a day or a week for character? Or did it depend on the character?

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  3. Cool! Thanks for posting these. It's fascinating to get such a thorough behind-the-scenes peek at the process.

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  4. I really do love the style that you guys came up with for the characters, it's really fun and solid looking. I've tried to do an "Infinty Look" version of Han Solo and Chewbaca recently because of the stuff I see posted on here lol.

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  5. those are so good!

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  6. Wow! These went through quite some iterations.

    I noticed you like to use kind of an ivory/bread dough color scheme when doing a monochromatic study. Is there any particular reason why you use that color over say, gray or something like that? Do you have your swatches set up so you can find those colors easily?



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  7. Estavio: Thanks!

    Kim: More that that, because the point at which things transferred from concept to modeling was a gray area---we were often doing new concept up until the toy model was sent off to the factory.

    Cedric: You're welcome, thanks for the comment.

    Craig: I saw an Indiana Jones and Han Solo someone did on Deviantart also. It's fun to see fan art.

    Thanks Abe!

    Nasan: At first I did grays when trying to figure out the geometry, but I found that I could put color right on top of the ivory ones with a multiply layer, so I stuck with that most often. I just picked/mixed the colors freehand every time, no swatches.

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  8. Love the back story on this awesome project. Still, its missing a little something: some BANCROFT. (okay, not that little, I'm kinda big actually.)

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  9. Love seeing these style explorations, and what led to the final design!

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  10. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    Sam... I always like a lot of your work...
    BUT these are AMAZING

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  11. Tom: Haha, we could all use a little more Bancroft.

    Thanks Emerson, Vinicius!

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