"Vanity"
was born as the central project in a character modeling course. The structure
of the project was to pick one of the Seven Deadly Sins, and to design
a character based around it. The first modern image I associated with
Vanity was that of the fashion model, to me a patently artificial person.
Hence Vanity's exaggerated form and hollow skull/back, to give the impression
that the creature is injection-molded. Some historical research showed
that, in the Medieval teaching system of the Sins, there is an animal
and a color associated with each, in this case violet and the horse. This
gave the sickly plastic color and the hoofed feet, which echo contemporary
high-heels and add to the original fashion-model parody. Vanity's face
was animated entirely using blendshapes (some of which can be seen in
the gallery) and was designed for optimized sneering. |