Rationale

Creating my now finalized character, Dottie, and animation her was a challenging process. I have stayed true to the initial concept of Dottie throughout, whilst making small changes here and there. 

The initial concept of Dottie was inspired by the cartoon series, “Little Audrey”. Little Audrey was a cheeky and mischievous little girl who spent most of her time with her maid and her dog. With Dottie, I’ve tried making a modern version of the 1960’s cartoon show. Visually, I wanted Dottie to be a Disney-style character. This meant changing the features to round eyes, with a round face and a pointed chin to emphasize her cheeky/mischievous nature. I wanted her to have very expressive eyebrows, and to do this I chose to make them very dark and thick, (as opposed to her blonde hair). I dressed her in pink, using magenta, a bright pink for excitement.pink can also connote confidence and assertiveness, but also warmth and affection. The color also seems very girls and childish , helping to make her cute. 

Peer critique sessions aided the development of Dottie. For Instance, I changed the eye color to brown up until I had feedback saying that she was cuter and looked more innocent when she had blue eyes. However, for some features, I had to go with my own judgment. The color of the dress was another point that some people would have liked to be changed. Despite this, I had too many reasons to keep the dress pink as I thought it suited my animation better. I experienced with a polka dot dress but it wasn’t practical when animating, so the bright pink dress remained. The peer critique was helpful none the less as it gave me lots of ideas to experience with.

I started the modeling process with her bow (Her Prop). It was quite difficult making the shape from squares, but it turned out fine. I created it large and scaled it down when putting it on her head. The dress was a problem initially I wasn’t sure wether to extrude the skirt from her legs or to make an entirely new mesh. I stuck with the later as my brilliant lecturer advised. Creating a whole new mesh would also be easier to animate when the time came. I experimented with the possibility of making her more realistic by creating thinner limbs but once again went back to the rounder and cuter initial idea as it was more true to who I wanted Dottie to be. Her torso had to be shortened to create this effect. 

I did a lot of experimenting with xGen and nHair which was actually a great learning process. However, due to time constraints and lack of experience, I had to revert to the original “solid” hair for the final product. I'm a little bit proud know that I know how to use xGne and nHair.

As I now had some experience with xGen, nConstraints, and nCloth I decided to make her dress an nCloth object. It was difficult, but I had envisaged her with a dress that flowed and bounced with her movements. _-_ through a lot of hard work, the desired design was achieved. 

When it came to her walk cycle, I designed her with a skippy-ish walk to show her personality. In the concept of the story, she is always being told off by her nanny for her cheeky pranks and games, so I decided to animate her with a chirpy walk that develops into her being annoyed when her nanny calls her name. This would then end with a cheeky smirk as she knows what she has done. The bright lighting in the walk cycle is due to the fact that she lives in a massive mansion with lots of large windows. Therefore Dottie is flooded with a lot of light and in most modern houses the lights are blue and not yellow. 

In conclusion, it was a challenging process with both highlights and lowlights, but all in all was very enjoyable there were quite a few tweaks and changes made due to practicality and feedback. At the end of the day the final product has stayed true to the original concept. I am quite pleased with the outcome.