Create

Character sheet

A character drawn from several angles, in separate images, so that it stays the same from one image to the next and from one shot to the next.

Character sheet

A character whose face changes with every image is not a character. For a series, a campaign, a film, it has to stay itself. The character sheet is what holds it together: the standard of illustration and animation, taken up in the Axiris studio.

What a sheet contains

Several views of the same character: front, profile, three-quarter, back. Expressions. The costume and its details. What studios call a character sheet.

At Axiris, it follows two rules learned by measuring.

One image, one body. A sheet where four views are pasted side by side is, for a model, an image with four characters. As soon as a setting opens up, it places them back inside it: silhouettes standing in an empty sky. The same views given as separate images produce none. The sheet therefore arrives cut up, one view per image.

Nothing but the subject. A title, a logo, a label on the sheet are text, and the text of a reference prints into the render. The production sheet is made for a human; the reference sheet is cropped down to the figures alone before it is used.

How it is used

In the image. The Box page takes up to nine references. In creation, a reference guides: the hairstyle, the clothes, the colours carry over. In editing inside a box, the person from the reference is kept: the face, the hair, the coat, the gesture, and the scene stays intact outside the area. You name the reference in the text of the box, and only that box changes.

In video. Each shot takes up to nine references. A nine-shot film was rendered from a single sheet, each shot generated on its own, with nothing passed from one shot to the next: the hair, the eyes, the markings on the costume are there on all nine. This is judged by eye; a resemblance measurement does not exist yet, and we do not present this result as a figure.

With a pose. The sheet says who the character is; the Pose Director says how it stands. The two combine: the person from the sheet takes the chosen pose, and keeps their face, their outfit, their rendering.

Building the sheet

The sheet is produced at the source as separate images, rather than as a board to cut up afterwards. The Axiris tool to build it and keep it to hand: Character Sheet Director.

For the method in general: Workflow with visual references. For what comes next: Video, shot by shot.