The Producers started with the basic concept of the characters because they already existed in the game, but they wanted to bring them to life and give them a look consistent with the advanced animation they were creating.
The Characters were first created as simple pencil sketches, then specific colors and costumes were incorporated into more advanced illustrations. The colors and costumes are very important, because the producers wanted to stay consistent with the game. The producers were very conscious of how the characters specific designs would play with certain backgrounds. Certain characters were also modified to accommodate the advanced techniques used in capturing the character movements (for more on this, see Motion Capture Section). All of this was taken into account before the final decisions were made.
The characters were also given three basic expressions to convey emotion in different situations. Remember this is computer generated animation, there are no actors so the producers had to rely on computer animators to give the characters their personalities.
Once the specific colors and characteristics were established, it's time to build the characters in there three dimensional form, in the computer. A wire-frame, much like a skeleton, is created first, and then skin, color and texture are added one layer at a time, to create the realistic 3D characters.
Some characters were also created with cel animation, and placed in three dimensional environments. The cel animated characters were then given a computer generated drop shadow - incorporating them better into the CG sets. The producers called this
2 1/2 D or cel integration. It gave the producers the freedom to move through backgrounds in a dynamic way. The trick is to incorporate these characters (that have not been created 3-dimensionally) into 3D backgrounds. This gives the animation a 3D look.
