Creating Custom Characters in Forza Motorsport

CREATING A CHARACTER USING CUTOUTS.

Firstly here is the starting image that I am going to use as a rough guide, mainly for the posture and so I have a guide for positioning the shapes. My version will not be exact by any means due to the contours of the car, the limitations of the editor and the limitations of my own skill! The main problem I have here is with the size of the surface area that I have to work with and the level of zoom the editor allows. Clicking in the right thumb-stick will give you 3 levels of zoom.

My first layer is one large Black rectangle that will act as the background and eventually be her clothing once I start cutting out shapes with other shapes. So to begin with we break down the general shape of the source image using circles of varying shapes and sizes- elongating them where necessary to create the individual body parts. You should end up with something looking like this here.

Now at this point you could simply use these circles and make the character from them but you would need to fill in the blanks somehow which may or may not take more layers than what I eventually ended up using. This demonstration is simply to show one of many possible techniques you can use. With the method I’m about to use, all you need to do is cut out the shapes to form the body from what is already there so to speak.

Next we then start adding a little more definition to the overall body shape by pasting in shapes that match the background colour of the vehicle. In this case I have changed it from black to blue, as blue is easier to work with, especially if you are going to be using black colours on your character

You can clearly see that by adding an elongated blue circle and an arc I am beginning to define the characters hips and her dress. I also added an elongated white arc behind the existing layers (for the legs) to create the thigh in the background. Other shapes for the leg in the fore ground will eventually overlap the part of the arc that does not need to be shown. Finally I added a small blue triangle under her arm, but I’ll come back to that in a moment.

Next you can clearly see that by using a mixture of blue rounded edged rectangles and arcs I have defined the shape of the head/hair and the arms a little more.

Next I focused on the legs and have used white elongated triangles, rounded edged rectangles a few circles for the feet and lower parts of the legs. I then used some black coloured arcs to add a little definition to the shape or her legs. The black matched the background colour so they can’t be seen until they overlap the legs. This has given her more realistically shaped legs

Next I have decided to add some gradient effects to the legs and chest area. I used a black gradient which is applied under the blue background but over the body. Any overlapping gradient edges (the bits you don’t want visible) are masked by the black background (her clothing) or covered by the blue. This gives her legs a nice tone which makes the colours less flat looking. I also added a very fine curved line across the thigh in the fore ground to define this leg better.

Next I now changed the entire body colour to a more realistic tone rather than the dull grey/white that was created using the gradients. I have also added a few curved lines to accentuate the cleavage. You can see part of the arm (her left arm) poking over into the chest area so this will have to be moved a little at some point. I also added a rounded edged blue rectangle to shape her shoulder (her right).

Next I have added some facial features. Now at this point it would be very difficult maybe even impossible to get the same level of detail as seen in the source picture. This is due to the fact that the size of the space to work with is very small indeed and also the level of zoom is not varied enough for you to get close enough to be more precise. She looks rough and in need of a few more touch ups.

If you notice I also added some blue curves underneath the leg in the foreground to give a little more shape to that leg. I also added 2 Blue triangles under her arm (her left arm) and joined the other arm together using more circles (her right arm).

Next with the last remaining layers I added some minor adjustments to the face, leg and arms. Although if you look closely you can see that she has a black spot on her forehead. Her eyes also look too wide open. I also added her ponytail that masked an erroneous black line that appeared under her arm previously. I also fixed her shoulder that had the blue hole in it previously and added another gradient to her arm (her left arm). The garter and dagger were added as my own interpretation of the character! Previously I added a small blue triangle to accentuate her breasts but here I removed it because I felt it looked better without.

Lastly I added a couple of arcs to the eyes just to make them appear less wide open. Then I am now in the process of changing the car colour to white from blue.

You can begin to see the cut out shapes more easily as I change the colour of each one.

The final finished product which although could have done with a few more layers to finish the job and some background image. It does the job for a basic character. From this:

To this:

Posted By: Robert Cram

Date: 2005-06-07