Character Sheets

by Brian Immel

This tutorial covers the basic aspects of how to create character sheet, how to prepare it in Photoshop and set it up for use of character modeling in Maya.

This tutorial assumes that the reader has a basic understanding of character designing (drawing), Photoshop, scanning, creating and assigning textures in Maya and creating and using layers in Maya.

What is a Character Sheet	Views	Where to start?	Color and Ink
Scan, Photoshop, and Save!	Separating the Views	Bring the CS into Maya

What is a Character Sheet

• A character sheet is a 2D visual representation of a character that will be modeled in 3D.
• Use drawing paper that will fit into your scanner. If you have a nice digital camera and the means to shoot flatwork, then you are encouraged to work bigger.

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Views

Character Stance should be in a ‘T’ pose. This pose is defined as the arms straight out, head looking straight ahead, and legs in their normal position. Don’t draw the legs spread out that makes an upside down V shape.

1. Front Feet straight ahead, no angles Palms of the hand facing forward

2. Side Its not 100% necessary to draw the arms in the side view as it may interfere with the portions of the character’s upper body region. If you must draw the arms and hands in this view, use a different color pencil or use dotted lines instead.

3. Back So often the backsides of characters are forgotten. Since this character is meant to be seen from all angles, its best to think about this side of the character as well.

4. Three-quarter Not totally necessary but helps the artist think about the character in 3D on paper before getting to the modeling stages.

5. Other Details of various items to be considered for modeling Hands Face/Head Top view

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Where to start?

1. Start with the front view. Draw the character in the center of the page on the far left or right side.
Tip: If the character is symmetrical, there is no need to draw both left and right side. Just draw half the character.

2. Once you have the front view done, use a ruler and a blue pencil to mark height indicators across the entire page. Use these lines to ensure the height and portions of the character are the same from the front to the side to the back views.

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Color and Ink

1. After you have sketched out the character in all views, you should go back and ink the outline or at least make them clean.

2. Next, you should color the character. We have several options as to how we can color the CS. We can do it the old fashion way (using pencils, markers, watercolor, canyons, etc.) or use your favorite image manipulation software like Photoshop.

Note: If you use Photoshop, layer everything! Layer your original scan, body color, highlights, shaders, areas of detail, dirt maps, and so on. The idea with layers is that you can easily make changes later on to a particular layer or feature of the surface.

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Scan, Photoshop, and Save!

1. Open up Photoshop, or your favorite image manipulation software, and scan the character sheet in.

2. Scan the CS using at least 72dpi. I usually scan around 150dpi but that depends on how much detail you have on your CS.

3. Once scanned, you should perform a few minor clean ups:

• Rotate the image so that the height lines are perfectly horizontal across the image.
• Crop the unnecessary areas.
• Adjust control levels to if necessary.
• Use the Erase Tool to clean up any unsightly marks or unimportant details.

4. If you opt to color your CS in Photoshop, make a new layer and color on as many layers as you like, just not on the original scanned layer. If anything, you should lock the original layer to protect it from any ‘accidents’.

5. Finally, save the file. I usually save two versions: one PSD format and the other in Targa format. Maya 5 and below cannot read a PSD format but it can read the lossless format of Targa. First, just save the file as a PSD format (example: Batman_CS.psd). Second, flatten your layers. Next, go to File > Save As. Type in the name of the file (example: Batman_CS.tga) and select Targa from the format area. By saving a version as a PSD format, we can go back and manipulate the layers, colors and any other notation we may need to revise in the future.

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Separating the Views

Next we should split up the CS into three separate files (front, side, and back).

1. Flatten your layers if you haven’t done so already. 2. Marquee select the area around the front view. 3. Make a copy (Ctrl + c).

4. Make a new file. Photoshop will automatically know what size to make it according to the dimensions of the image we just copied into the clipboard. Give this file the name of CharacterName_CS_Front.

5. Hit paste (Ctrl + v).

6. Flatten these layers and Save As a Targa format with 24 bits (not 32 bits, that will add an unnecessary alpha channel).

7. Go back to the originating file and more the marquee selection so that it fits over the next view. Use the deselection option for the Marquee tool to get rid of anything that we don’t want to include in the side view. We want to use the same size (height anyway) selection so that these images will match up pretty well in Maya later on.

8. Repeat steps 3 - 6 to make the side view only this time name the file accordingly.

9. Repeat this process again for the final view.

• Don’t close Photoshop just yet. We need to get the final image’s dimensions. Go to Image > Image size. In the top section listed as Pixel Dimensions, you will see both Width and Height. Make notes of these dimensions. We will need this info in the next step.

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Bring the CS into Maya

1. Open Maya.

2. Create a NURBS plane. Name the plane CS_Reference01.

3. Right-click and hold on the NURBS plane. Go to Materials > Assign New Material > Lambert. This will create a new Lambert shader named Lambert2. You should never assign textures to Lambert1 unless you want every piece of geometry you create have assigned textures.

4. Click on the checker box at the end of Color for this new shader.

5. Select File from the Create Render Node window listed under 2D Textures.

6. In the Attribute Editor, in the Image Name section, click on the folder icon and browse for the Targe file of the front view of our CS. Now we have assigned our external texture to this surface that will use as a reference for modeling in 3D.

7. Rotate this surface so that it sits upright and facing forward. If you cannot see the texture, hit 6 on the keyboard to enable textured view. At this point, you may notice that the CS image may look squashed or stretched. That’s perfectly okay. Maya’s just doing what it has been told to do. Select the NURBS surface and open up the Channel Box. In the Scale X attribute, type in the Width value from Photoshop but at a 1/100 of its original value. Example: Width = 520 pixels, Scale X = 5.20. If we don’t scale back the size of these dimensions when we bring the images into Maya, the image planes will be huge! Finally, In Scale Z attribute, type in the Height value divided by 100 to finish out scaling the image planes to their proper size.

8. Next we are going to save some time by duplicating the original reference surface. Select the CS_Reference01 surface and duplicate it.

9. Rotate the surface so that it sits 90 degrees (Rotate Y 90 or -90 depending) from the front view.

10. Assign a new Lambert to it. Connect this new shader to the side view targa file.

11. Collect the dimension info from Photoshop and apply those portions to CS_Reference02.

12. Now we will create the back view plane. Select the CS_Reference01 surface and duplicate it. Offset it by a hair on Translate Z (-0.005 should work).

13. Assign CS_Reference03 a new Lambert shader and connect it to the Targa file for the back view.

14. Collect the dimension info from Photoshop and apply those portions to CS_Reference03.

15. Next we should align these surfaces so the images fit well together. Move the planes by grabbing the Move Tool handles, not the center, and tweak their positions until the height lines match up. At this point, it will become apparent if we did get our drawing portions right or not. Sometimes the belly, feet or head sizes don’t match from front to side views. At this point, you can either tweak the CVs to make them fit better or just your artistic license to make judgment calls on how and what to model according to those image planes.

Happy Modeling!