Saturday, September 12, 2009

Look at dog Teeth

In an effort to make the teeth/mouth section of this model go faster than the toes, I'm actually studying the subject a little first.
Real do teeth are scary, pointy things that remind us that dogs are decended from carniviorus wolves who figured out a good way to stop the deer/caribou/moose from running away: tear out the hamstring.
Looking at a few images from Bolt shows a specific choice: blunt the incisiors and other teeth so we don't scare the kids. Much like the Monsters Inc. characters tended to have large 'pointy' teeth, but in a rounded way. Also bolt's other teeth appear far more uniform and less pointy. The overall effect is more of a cross between human and dog, which helps Bolt look reasonable when talking human words.
So what am I gonna do? other than the feet I've tried to stay very close to realism so far. I still wonder if that is a good choice or not. Maybe I should have pushed more and scaled back later. I'm too used to doing lighting in the theatre, where we usually are going for a "realism that lifts slightly into theatricality" effect. Lessons learned: think more about and sketch more of your character. (Character design becomes more and more an interest to me...)

ANYway... It would be easier to model blocky teeth that have few gaps between them (like Bolts) rather than the strangely spaced out reality. Also it's just weird doing teeth with Polygon Smoothing involved, but I'm still hoping that'll save me in the end.

I guess I should keep sketching before trying... teeth are hard to draw too. Fine distinctions of shading have never been my strong point. The technique being the hard part. I guess start with a bigger image (I still do tiny thumbnails far more often, so I can work on the spacing of stuff and easily start over when I screw up. I should scan some of this stuff...)

Blah. It's a partly cloudy warm saturday. I should enjoy the out of doors a bit too.

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