Coco the Gumball Machine

Meet Coco Coco is a gumball machine. She started as a character for my traditional animation class, and I liked her enough to bring her into 3D afterwards.

Coco model sheet — coloured design, three-quarter turnaround, silhouettes and expression studies — The original model sheet: design, turnaround, silhouettes, and expressions.

She started in 2D

Drawing her by hand is where I figured out the design. When you're drawing every single frame you end up knowing her shapes really well, so most of that got worked out here first.

Coco rough pose sketches — Rough pose exploration.

2D animation

Building her in 3D

In 2D you can cheat her shapes on every frame, but a 3D model has to hold up from every angle, so a lot of what worked on paper had to change. She was also the first character I ever rigged, so I was learning how a rig works and building hers at the same time.

Responsible for: all aspects
Modelling, rigging, animation: Maya
Texturing: Substance Painter, Photoshop

The thing I didn't want to lose was the hand drawn feeling, so I spent a while trying to figure out the texture for Coco. Her shading falls off in halftone dots instead of a smooth gradient and the hatching is drawn on, so she still reads flat and printed even though she's lit in 3D.

Close up of Coco's body showing halftone dot shading and drawn hatching — Halftone shading and drawn hatching on her body.

Close up of Coco's ears showing the same halftone falloff — The same falloff on her ears.

Her eyes were the part that nearly finished me. They sit inside a glass dome and had to keep their shape while she moves, so I used a lattice to hold them there. Getting the lattice and the eye rig to agree with each other took longer than everything else put together, and they broke in some pretty funny ways before they behaved.

Not what was supposed to happen.

Figuring out how she moves

Before touching the real shot I put her through walk, jump and turn exercises to work out how she carries herself. She has no arms and her head is a big glass dome, so the acting has to come from timing and weight instead of gestures.

Walk, jump and turn.

Inside the final shot

This is the shot at the top of the page running in the Maya viewport, before any of the rendering.

The final shot in the viewport.

The effects are 2D elements I drew, then brought into Maya as an image sequence on a texture. This one is the charge up right before she explodes.