I have chosen to analyse and show you the process of all my characters thought this entire blog, in this particular posts i have chosen to show you how i created the character 'kirby'. however i won't be showing you with the images step by step i will be explaining textually due to on my recent blog 'Mario character' i have shown you all the basic principles and needs to creating the basic shapes of any character such as his shape and sizes, in this blog i will be explaining how i created the colours of kirby and how i materialised him using the materials i have on photoshop. the character kirby was an idea from the original game, i saw this as an opportunity to use him as an "original selling point" due to his retro format and likeliness towards old school gamers, kirby was originally used to capture the eyes of the younger generation ages between five and 12 because of the shear adorableness and friendliness his image has. creating this character was quite easy because of his basic shape, because of kirby shape and size i started creating him with a the primitive shape "circle" this was to be his body, i had to resize his whole body because the default shape that cinema 4d provided was too large also kirby's shape isn't perfectly circular it has shaped like a sphere so the middle of the circle is slightly squeezed.
Next i will be showing you how i created the material for kirby character:
After making the image into a layer it was time to get ride of kirby undated face. because on cinema 4d the material has to be flat i cannot just get kirby face from google still attached to his body because all i want is his face and not an image of his arms and legs. first i sleeted the magic pen tool on the tab on the left hand side, this tool selects different colour pixels in the image and lists them as a group, i would suggest using this tool on basic coloured characters like kirby because his primary colour all over is pink and the tool selects the pixels quite well. when the tool is selected it tries to select certain pixels but not all of them, however on a mac if you hold down the common button and hold the shift key a little plus symbol will appear and if you click more of the image the tool will select the bits it missed out. when the pixels are selected you have to click the backspace button or the (delete) button to clear the pixels off your screen. after i deleted the the unwanted shapes and colours off the screen i was left with the mouth and eyes but it was left on a black background so i selected the paint bucket tool and coloured the background layer in.
When the material was created i saved it as a jpeg, this works well with cinema 4d because if i would have used the photoshop format it would of tried to save the layers individually onto cinema 4d. Once the format was correctly selected and the image was on cinema 4d simply dragged the material over to my kirby and it had placed it onto my body.
Once my characters body was finished i could start on the feet and his fins, creating his feet i simply created another primitive shape using again the sphere but in the tool bar when the shape is first created it provides you will a range of shapes to pick from, once the shape had been i used the face selector and selected the bottom of the shape then deleted them, this created half a circle. I scrolled up to the top of the page and hovered over tools and selected the "gap filler" when this tool was selected if you hover over something with a missing face it highlights orange and if you click it it fills in the missing page. when the basic shape was created i dragged the title of the shape into a higher nervb which made the whole object smooth around the edges, I dragged the red material in onto the object then duplicated the object by holding down "command, 'C' " then holding down "command, V " to create a pair of feet. when creating the fins on kirby the same rules and principles applied i followed the same step by steps but in this case instead of deleting certain faces i just resized the image to make the base of the shape narrow to give it a fin affect.
