Modeling a flat character?

[null-]

hey guys~
what's the best way to model a character with very little depth?

dizzy.

[bismark]

Use a plane with an image map of your character and transparency channel for the outline......just kidding..

[actarus]

Just kidding?
Thats actually a good way to do it,
except dont just use one plane,
just build your character in 2dimensions,
Depending on the style, you could use textures for the shape of it, or control that with the geometry.
Either way it works,

Hrmm, i think this is really just COMMON SENSE,
you want a flat character.... build it.... flat!!

-Tomi A.D.
Tomi@tad3d.com
http://www.tad3d.comhttp://www.tad3d.com

[popsickle]

As long as we're on the topic of flat charactors, How do you think they did the scene in "prince of Egipt" where the hyrogliphics came alive? That scene rules! loki

[waboflex]

There was a talk on that very sequence in Prince of Egypt at Siggraph last year. Most of it (as far as I can remember) involved BIG animated maps painted by hand, which were used as textures on the CG walls, with all sorts of multi pass rendering tricks to give the embossed on stone look. Tricky bit seemed to be creating textures to fit the camera tracking, since it's up and down and round corners, and pretty much one continuous sequence. Much of the work was in the traditional animators creating the textures, not so much CG in there. Still a great sequence though.

[hibedy-dibedy]

You can also map an image of your character onto a plane and then, using the split poly tool, trace it out. Start out with a square map and a square plane. If you project a planar with the smart fit switch on then it wont distort your image. Start cutting (edit polygons>split polygon tool) on an edge of your plane and drop points around the outline of your character. Remember that you have to start and stop on an existing edge of your plane. When your done, hit enter and you'll notice that your UV's are all messed up. To fix this you'll have to reproject your map onto the plane.