Kenny: The Skater Kid

The first character of my graduation reel from the Art Institute of Vancouver. Initial inspiration was from graffitti/pop-art/vector style art and the EA video game Skate. The character started out as a roller blader, based on a piece of vector art I saw that really struck a chord with me. It was of a cel-shaded rollerblader sitting with his head down leaning against an invisible wall with his arms on his knees. There was something about the mood, the illustration style that made me want to create something similar.

The first model wasn't anything I was proud of. The character was still a rollerblader at that point and something about him felt very static, along with the realistic proportions. A friend from school pointed out that the only cartoony aspect of the piece was the round looking boot of the blade, and the rest of the character failed to capture anything interesting personality. I showed the model to another friend, who commented on the modeling and the overall character. The jist of the feedback I got was "It's alright, nothing impressive."

I don't know what came over me, but I decided that with an extra semester left, I was going to remodel the character from scratch, this time using 100% my own material. So the head templates were drawn up in one night and the body another night, and finally I was ready to start modeling him. I had the concept down solid in my head by the time I started modeling this new version of the skater kid, what we see here. And everything flowed so quickly - I knew exactly what I wanted, I could see him in my head, and I just started modeling away and didn't stop.

The most time consuming aspect about working on this character was probably the texturing. At first, I wanted to go with a completely toon shaded look complete with black outlines. Then I changed my mind and wanted to keep the outlines with the realistic textures. Only problem is when I created the toon outline, the polycount went through the roof. So at the end of it all, I settled with realistic textures on a somewhat cartoony proportioned body.