The 3D Cartoon Blog

I’m obviously still in the newbie mode of learning Autodesk Maya, and my preferred genre of modeling is simply cartoons. I’m not really into making realistic or next generation characters just yet, as I feel they are beyond my grasp. Cartoons however feel more accessible and with this, I’m on the look out for various techniques with regards to their composition.

Eyes for me are the most obvious thing I notice about a Cartoon Character, and I’ve spent a great deal of time this week simply exploring / looking around at various techniques to creating eyes within 3D Cartoon models.

Here is my notes so far:

The Classic.

I’m sure there is a more descriptive name for this style of approach to cartoon eyes, but I’ve simply called it the "classic". The reason being is that for me, being the newbie, they are somewhat the easiest approach to eyelid creation. As all you need to do is wrap the eyeball (sphere) around 2x half spheres and animate by rotating the bottom  / left where needed.

The Dots.

This style for me seems to be the cheapest of all, but yet can be extremely effective in some of the 3D render’s I’ve seen. It’s simply a case of inserting 1x black sphere on top of the head, and there you have it, eyes. The upside is you’re not having to worry about to much in terms of blinking and socket movement and yet the downside is I think you have to spend more time thinking about how your character will convey emotion when animating (ie eyebrows will play a more strategic role than ever etc).

The Classic with attitude.

Although at first glance this style looks exactly like the "The Classic", the difference here is that there appears to be more detail than just 2x Spheres cut in half. In that the lower tear ducts appear to have had more work done to them. This for me looks like the secondary evolution to the Classic when learning and likely to be my next technique to practice.

The Disney Way.

I’ve dubbed this the "Disney Way" as I’ve really only seen Disney use this technique the most, in that I noticed it this morning when watching Mickey’s Playhouse how Mickey always seemed to blink using the top eyelid only. The bottom was rarely ever seen or used.

This technique is something that I’m aiming to do the most, as well it seems more natural for cartoon characters. The hard part for me at the time of writing, is that I’m not even sure on how to begin to create such a thing as it appears more complex than I thought.

Below is an example of the Eye opening and closing. Notice how the top goes down and that’s it.

Brilliant!

The Goldfish.

I think this is the cheapest and easiest way for newbies like myself to start out, as well all you need to do is inject an eyeball into a models head, ensure the outer edges fit nicely and call it a day. Pretty much like a goldfish in many ways only without the eyelids.

The Alien Look.

I usually see this look on either alien characters or robots, but its essentially the same technique as "The Goldfish" but has less human appeal to it (ie all one color etc).

The Painted On

This style is typically found within toy like characters. In that the eyes themselves don’t really have 3D composition and instead are typically textured onto the surface. I first saw this style being used in the PIXAR movie cars, where apparently the eyes where simply part of the texture (can’t confirm for 100% sure obviously). I see this as being only really effective for stills, as I’m thinking to animate them it would be surely be a pain in the butt to rig?

Conclusion.

There are obviously many ways to approach eyes in 3D Cartoon models, I’m a big fan of all of the above. The thing that I honestly have a hard time understanding is the various ways in which you can animate the above in a way that conveys emotion.

The ones with eyelids and eyebrows seem to more obvious when it comes to animation, whilst the ones that don’t have these seem to rely more on everything around the face to convey emotion.

An example comes to mind with the "The Dots" style, at first look my immediate thought was "oh they have to rely on eyebrows to convey the emotion" but I do recall seeing a cartoon where the block dots would squash down or grow / shrink in size to represent movement. Subtle but I found effective!

My thoughts going forward is I need to practice using the all of the above, see what fits with what character and figure out a rhythm or style to use. My preference is to use "The Disney" approach as that to me seems to be the mainstream norm and yet part of me wants to play around for a while using "The Dots". The reason being is I think I need to spend time animating some models first in order to get to know limitations and strengths around the above techniques and then apply the right fit where the context suites later on.

It’s been a fun study though and the above models are brilliant designs made by others I’ve randomly come across in my study (I had a list of URL’s names of the above, but lost them so I do apologize for not crediting them)