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Building an Animation-Ready Character from the Ground Up

By Adrien-Luc Sanders, About.com

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From the stick sketch, add bulk using plain shapes. Visualize the body, and try to break it down into rectangles, triangles, cylinders, and circles. Try to think in three dimensions; for instance, my head isn’t just a circle with a triangle tacked on to it. It’s a curving sphere with a pyramid appended to the bottom, which means that I need to think about the dimensions that aren’t visible as well as the dimensions that are. The neck is a cylinder, set atop a pyramid for the slope down to the circles of the shoulders and then perched atop the tapering box of the chest.

Don’t get too detailed here; you’re not trying to capture accuracy. You just want to get a basic idea of bulk and form, captured in simple shapes. Look at it as building an old-style wooden marionette, before they’re carved in detail.

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