Making The Gumball Machine Character "Arthur"

For the gumball machine character, I decided to put the original drawing of Benson side by side to the design that I think suits the gumball machine. 

The gumball machine was widely used in the olden times, so I think adding the top hat and the black colour scheme works really well on the gumball machine. Additionally the use of the handlebar mustache can also be used as the handle used on the gumball machine that people use to accept the coin payment.

The other design of the gumball machine, I went for more of a different approach, adding a parka jacket and a different coloured base. I like the colour of purple on the gumball machine as it isn't a colour that would usually be used on a gumball machine. I quite like the green parka jacket contrasting with the purple.

For the design of Arthur, I started out with a cylinder that I scaled at the bottom to make it wider at the bottom. I also added an interface part on the body so that i can get an idea of what I want the body will look like. I also added a dispenser, where the gumballs come out of. i did this by adding a square and scaling in another square to make a nice border. I then added a sphere and a rectangle to finish off the design of the body.

I then added the thin legs by extruding a cylinder and stretching out a sphere.

At this stage i got a sphere and made it to the right head size for the character, then i added thin arms like the legs as it keeps in theme with Benson's design.

To add the see through glass head, i had to look online to find how to make the design see through. I used a transparent bdf on a mix shader to make the head transparent and also added an rgb to make the head a light blue colour.

Here is a rendered design of the character Arthur. For the head on this design I used an index of refraction so it would create a more lifelike approach to the glass head, creating stretches' to the reflections. This works really well for my character and am very happy with the result. 

Another thing I added was, I went onto substance painter and added a texture to the character to make the paint work better than a flat colour on the first design. Again, this makes the character more lifelike in appearance.

I played around with the different textures to add on my character to see which texture would work the best. I found this setup was the one that worked the best on the body of Arthur. The Musgrave texture gives the appearance of the body having texture, in this instance paint texture. The bumps give extra texture to the body aswell 

I am experimenting which design the gumballs will fit it the best for the character. I have decided to choose with the round design as it is more in theme with the design and has a better appearance than the floating triangles.

For his eyebrows and mouth, I used a Beizer curve to shape them, this helped a lot because it was very easy to create the right curve for the features.

In addition I got 2 spheres and put them as eyes in the right position. The nose i got a square and shaped it onto a triangle and beveled the corners. I also retextured the nose to a shiny texture to give a different texture to the body, also keeping the right theme as the character design. I then shade smoothed to make the nose have a rounded design.

I changed the middle part of the body to a square and a rectangle to mimic as the handle that accepts the coins for a gumball.

Today I added a HDRI to change the lighting in the workspace so that the lighting would be more accurate to that I recorded for the interaction that I am going to have with my character.

I then decided to redo the balls inside Arthurs head as I thought the balls I made before using an array didn't work very well for what I was going for, a realistic approach.

My teacher shared with me a physics tutorial on YouTube which I followed to help me use the physics engine on blender. I used rigid bodies and set the container, in this case the glass head, and set the head as passive.

For the gumballs, I added an active rigid body so that the balls were animated to fall and stack onto the bottom of the glass head. I really liked how this had turned out because it had a much better aesthetic than the array I did before and look more like gumballs.

Some problems I ran into was the glass head. I was rendering the shaders on CPU but when I switched the shader to GPU the glass didn't render properly, coming up black. I had to find a solution to this so I looked up on YouTube for a different way to make a glass texture and I used this:

After adding the HDRI the lighting came up loads better but the glass came up clouded and not see through, which I didn't want for the glass. I went into the scene mode and went to film section and ticked both transparent and transparent glass as it made the glass have the translucent properties that I wanted it to have.

I added bones to my character to make the process of animating my character easier to do. I went into setting and preferences and added the rigify option to make rigging Arthur easier.

I added a bone structure for Arthur so that I can now move different parts of his body around which is crucial for the animation of my character.

My characters head wasn't moving around properly, giving a distorted, pulled effect which I didn't want so I highlighted my pose and then the head and went into weight mode. I then coloured the head all red so that the weighting is right. Weighting is how much a mesh will move due to a bone, and the head was only fully weighted on the top. There was also weighting on the collar bone so had to change the weighting too.

Now my character is fully rigged up for animation so I will go and edit my footage on Premier Pro.

I have changed the hands on my character so they are more lifelike and in theme with the cartoon genre. I did this by modelling a square and then subdividing it. I then selected the parts where the fingers would be and used ctrl f and selected extrude individual faces. After that I used a subdivide modifier to smooth out the fingers.

I modelled out the hat by getting a plane and modeling in the top extruded part and the bridge of the hat through different loop cuts. I then extruded the middle part of the hat to get the right shape. After I moved the corner points on the bridge of the hat to give it the distinct folded at the sides appearance. After I got the right shape for the hat, I used the solidify modifier to get the thickness of the hat.

Here is a beautified render of Arthur.

When trying to fix some of the parenting to the character Arthur, I ran into some problems as when I moved his arm, that in turn, effected the gumballs in his head so I had to un parent the gumballs. I parented them in the first place because when I thought I moved Arthurs head, I wanted the gumballs to move too, but that didn't work as it just distorted and stretched the gumballs out instead of moving and keeping their original shape. I used alt p and cleared the parent.

Once I had fully rigged up my character, I then decide to import in my footage so I can start animating my character into his environment. 

I started out with a basic walk animation, to do this i used the aid of an image reference to help me map out the different limbs to make the characters walk as convincing as possible.

I then used lots of keyframes to do the different movements of the walk, including moving the arms and legs.

I also imported the video that Was going to be my base background that I recorded around my friend, Dan Hancock's house. I shot all of my takes close as I could to the shot list's description. When I finished getting all of my shots to my liking, I cut them down to make them flow well into each other. Once I had cut all of the shots then I imported the video.

I used this compositing setup to display my footage for the movie so that I could add in my character into the video.

My character Arthur wasn't rendering into the the video with the current setup I had to change it to incorporate rendered layers so that my character would show up. Also I turned up my Fac so that the character was fully visible, with no Fac I couldn't see the character at all.