Creating a Timeline

Here I'll be breaking each stage of my project down to create a timeline.

Creating Character Art As Reference Material For Modelling

For this I've decided on one week as I'm planning to have a fairly basic superhero style character inspired by The Flash. I'll most likely use a base image the internet to use as guidelines as I'm not that confident in my 2D art skills so I feel like this will benefit me by doing it this way.

To help me do this I found a set of youtube tutorials created by Mr. H to help me make sure the features on the front and side images line up properly.

Modelling and Texturing Using Character Art As Reference

Since I want to keep my model simple as I would like to be marked on the quality of my topology, the rigging and the animation I have no plans to make my character overly complicated so when it comes to modelling I think I will need around three weeks to create my character to make sure I get all of the topology correct as well as have a nice clean model ready for rigging. I will be using 3DS Max to create and texture the model.

After taking a peek at a previous student's blog, I saw that he took around that time to create a similar character I feel like that is the most appropriate source of information to go off of as he was a student in the same shoes as I am right now. The reason I have chosen to do this is because I have no idea how much experience people on the internet have, people who create similar characters as I'm planning to create.

So with this information I've made the decision to take 3 weeks to model and texture my character.

I'll also be texturing my model which shouldn't take too long as my character will feature a very basic colour scheme of a pinkish beige for his face as well as red and yellow which should take me around a week if I do it correctly.

To help me with this I'll be using a combination of texts from booksand articles which I will create and annotated bibliography for in my proposal.

Rigging My Model

I will be using 3DS Max to rig my model as well as modelling and texturing it, I'll be using a biped skeleton to rig my model as my character is a humanoid then I will skin everything apart from the head which I will skin after the face has been rigged. Theoretically I should only need a week for this but I'm leaving myself some extra time in case I encounter some issues which need fixing.

As for the face, I plan to use morph targets also in 3DS Max, which is easier to do if the head is separate but once I'm done with the facial morphing I'll skill the head back onto the biped rig.

I think this overall process will take me around two weeks to rig my character using the biped skeleton then another week for a facial morph as I plan to have quite a few target morphs so I can have many different expressions. Three weeks total so I can make sure the rig is optimized and won't cause any problems for when I'm animating. Even if rigging doesn't take all that long, I will need some of this time just in case my topology is not correct or if there are some errors that only get revealed to me during the rigging process.

I'll be using information sources to help me which I will put in my annotated bibliopgraphy.

Animating my character!

As for animating my character I plan to create and optimize ten looping animations which are as follows: Walking, Running, Standing, Punching, Kicking and a Jump. I plan to use one week for each of these animations. But before I animate I need references, which I will spend a week doing before I begin my animating.

This will leave me six weeks which I plan to use to create a start and stop walking and running animation, with this I can have my character go from standing idle, to walking or running and then stop, reverting back to the standing animation. I'll take one week to create the start and stop walking animation and then another week to create the start and stop running animation, leaving me with four weeks.


With one of the remaining four weeks I'll be tidying up any of the animations or fixing any problems then I will use one of the the remaining three weeks to create a video showcase for my animations, showing off the animations and how they link and transition together. Then with my remaining time I'll also look into importing my character and animations into Unity and assign my character controls so my character will be able to run around and attack and such. To do this I'll be using a collection of tutorials as scripting and using Unity isn't my strong point.