Character design is perhaps a tricky foe to deal with. A great deal of creative thinking is required to create your animated character from scratch.
A considerable lot of the classic characters familiar from cartoons and movies look simple. However, a vast amount of effort and skill has made them compelling.
One of the vital skills that you need to acquire to create a mind-blowing animated video is animation character design. It is a challenging task to come up with compelling characters for your video. Thankfully, you have a lot of resources available to help you on your journey.
One can use an animated explainer video for both business and social causes. Check out one of our amazing explainer videos for Uber. It helped them increase their subscribers for Inter City rides and got 800k views in a week.
The skill to create an animated explainer video is an excellent asset for any business. One survey reported that 93% of companies who used explainer videos in their campaign were able to make customers understand better about their product/service.
Behind the creation of any animated cartoon character stands a thoroughly scrutinized concept, a great deal of discussion, study, and key decisions, so the ideas come to life in the best way possible. So, without wasting a minute more, let’s move on to the ultimate guide to creating the best animation character design.
Whether you are interested in 2D animation character design or 3D animation character design, you will find this article helpful. These are the steps you need to follow for designing animated characters:
Researching a project is necessary, whether you are creating a housing architecture or an animated character. Here are some questions that you need to ask:
You must have a clear answer to these questions before moving ahead. The answers to these questions will tell you how to move forward, and these answers will also decide the nature of the project. After noting down the answers to the questions, you should write down the types of characters that you want in the video.
You can move to the next steps with a firm understanding of your needs. You should now know the popular types of characters designed for the animation to decide what best serves your project.
The iconic animated characters are less fancier. These characters are usually faceless and blocky. With that said, these characters are also impressive. It can penetrate the minds and hearts of people, regardless of their class, gender, religion, and so on.
An iconic video is excellent for a corporate video that aims to inform complicated concepts to the audience. This type of video design communicates the information without any specific characters getting the limelight.
I’m talking about the type of characters we usually see in publications like “The New Yorker.” These characters are clean, realistic, and highly stylized. An editorial style character is useful if you aim to portray elegance and a sense of presence.
We commonly find pop-style characters in comic books and cartoons. These characters are expressive. These characters are for catching the limelight and dominating the screen. The audience feels the energy within them while watching them in action.
Check out our amazing comic book video.
If your brand is associated with fashion, entertainment, and humor, using these characters can be great for positioning your brand among your targeted audience.
Now that you know about the popular types of animated characters and how to select the best kind of character for you, you should start experimenting.
Use a pencil and paper or use software to sketch the attitudes and expressions of those characters. However, you must never be emotionally attached to those characters. You can also play with photos of your friends and try to create your character by turning the photo into a cartoon with BeFunky to have more ideas about the future character.
Use the characters you sketched and try to fit into the story. Get some feedback. If it does not match, get over it and start experimenting again. Even great designers go through trials and errors before creating a masterpiece. You must make sure that every character serves the motto of the video.
The study shows that more than 75% of users prefer sharing branded videos if they find it entertaining.
You’re dealing with the character in many phases of the story if you design characters for a video that exceeds 10 minutes. Draw your characters, portraying various emotions they must represent in different video stages. These images should breathe life into the video.
There is a chance that some characters may not fit in many video scenarios. If you find so, try adjusting, or you should consider opting for an alternative personality.
The final task in your hand is to animate your characters. You need to perform motion tests to approve your characters. You will be amazed to see how much you can learn by observing your animated characters’ movements. You can also give life to your characters using character animation After Effects tools.
Don’t miss to see this compelling 2D Character Animation Explainer Video for Remote Office by webdew.
Thankfully, there are plenty of great pieces of software in the market that can help you do 2D and 3D animation. You can see some tutorials and start using this software.
For 2D animation, here are some of the favourite tools that you can use for animating 2D characters:
Here are some decent pieces of software for 3D animation:
Take this guide as a blueprint for creating a fantastic animated character. It does not reveal every detail you need to design animated characters. However, I’ve shown you what kind of knowledge you should have to move to an advanced level of character design and animation.
I hope you have found valuable information in this article to clear up your confusion. Leave your thoughts below if you want to add more insights to this material.
Suppose you are really in a hurry for an animated explainer video. In that case, you can always outsource the project to a reliable agency webdew that can do the task for you.