Curse Pixar.

I spent last night rewatching The Incredibles (and hunting for easter eggs on the DVDs; they're present in nearly every menu on Disc 2, and even a couple of places on Disc 1). I did absolutely nothing I had planned to do, thanks to that.

Anyway, despite the fact that I already have one of the characters for my animation project almost completely finished (she's about halfway through the rigging phase), I now want to scrap her and totally redesign everyone. Not too terrible a loss, since she's the only one I'd modeled so far, and I hadn't managed to come up with a good design for two of the other three protagonists yet — but I hate the design process, since my drawing skills aren't quite up to where I need them to be.

A point they make over and over again in the special features is that realistic CG humans don't quite look right, as we all see humans every day, and we know what to expect. If the modelers and animators don't do everything perfectly, the viewers can tell — even if they don't consciously know what's missing — and it becomes a distraction. On the character I've modeled already, the face is a bit stylized — the eyes are extremely large — but the body is way too realistic (I based it on one of Akira Gomi's photograph sets). Rigging her has been a headache, because I've been trying to make her move realistically, too. Perhaps I can save myself a lot of trouble by making them more cartoon-like.

Which is a totally different set of problems, because I can model pretty well from photographs, but from drawings? Well, my drawings? Ack.

On the other hand, I can quit obsessing about making the hair move like real human hair; if the characters are stylized, the hair can be too. I've rendered at least a hundred test animations in the past couple of weeks, trying to get the hair "right". If I go with more cartoonish characters, I can settle for "good enough" hair.

As a side note, one of the troubles I'd had with my model was her eyes. Because they were so large, I had to rotate the eyes outward a little so she didn't look cross-eyed. But when I did that, the eyes' specular highlights didn't look right, because they were occurring in different places relative to the iris. But I discovered that the Incredibles character Mirage, with eyes about the same relative size, was also a little cross-eyed, but it wasn't really noticeable until I was actually looking for it.