This character is simple because of the hands and lack of feet. There are no individual fingers except for the thumb, and there are also no feet.

Despite this character taking a darker look, the actual design is pretty simple. The character is made of stubs for arms, legs, and even a big stub for a head. The eyes are simple too.

Sometimes, a character with exaggerated features can be simplified. The nose on this character wont have too much detail, and by giving the character two legs and two arms it could be a very simple character.

Like the previous picture, this character is simplified and has over exaggerated features. There is no body with this character, but one could easily be provided.

This character has a bit of detail put into the outfit, but by just keeping regular shapes, this could be very simple.

Making a simplified character is demonstrated through all of the above pictures. Some have bodies, some have only heads. But these pictures of sculptures can all be used for various parts of a body. For example, I could use the chubby body of the last character with the simplified face of the third character. They can all come together with different combinations in order to make one simple character for Blender.

For my character, I'd like to make one that resembles a human, but make it very simple. I think it'll be fun to create this character and make it my own.

Today, I uploaded my Blender animation of the walk, run, and jump cycle:

In this animation, I think that I did the textures pretty well, and I'm also really happy with the animation for the jump. It looks smooth, which it didn't the first time I did it.

However, there are some issues. I didn't realize that throughout the animation, the water in the background sinks out of sight. Some of the camera angles are off or aren't doing the motions I intended, but went with because they still look alright. The movements of the walking and running could have been a bit smoother. Also, when the character begins walking, he doesn't actually move for the first step.

Other than that, for my first animation with something resembling a human, I think I did a pretty good job.

In animation class, we made a hand animation using hand stills. We learned how to model the hand in different poses to create a sentence with sign language. My hand reads, "Dylan is awesome". Here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiPTlb6M69Y

I think I did well with the actual model of the hand, but there were some vertices that looked wrong. Also, the thumb needed to be a little bit longer in order to not look quite as awkward during the animation. The difference could hardly be told between the letters "s", "n" and "a". There is also the issue with the camera. I hadn't realized that the camera was panning during the animation, which is a rookie mistake. But I'm new to animation.

Overall, I think the skills we learned for this project were helpful and definitely fun.