Augmented Reality character creation: sweet case with AR that was chosen by Adobe illustrator on Behance

Last March the international IT company Live Animations launched “TIMI”, an augmented reality application for a series of confectionery products. The company has developed a creative concept, a story about the adventures of the character and 20 series of AR-cartoons, 3 minutes each. In less than six months, the product has achieved impressive results − 250,000 downloads. The marketing campaign with AR has significantly increased the number of repeat sales and raised the popularity of the brand in its segment.

Timi’s case has been approved by Adobe illustrator on Behance, the most trusted worldwide designer community. One of the key success factors is the characters, their appearance, realistic emotions, and movements. The Live Animations’ design team shared their experience and some tips on how to create AR characters.

Looks awesome

Beautiful expressive eyes, a cute nose, and mouth, lively emotions, all these things form the first impression of the character and build an emotional connection with the viewer. Then you might start considering features of the clothes and how they match with the personality to the character.

Pay attention to the smallest details, references, because children simply adore “Easter Eggs”.

For example, our Beaver has large eyebrows, that help to read his emotions easily. Beaver also has an ultra-high-tech suit and a cool rocket, so it’s easy to understand, that he a space traveler.

Arti is an artist boy. He has a dreamy look, a kind smile, and his entire look shows that he is fond of drawing. Kids can imagine the story about this character, build their own relationships with Arti and the brand accordingly.

The appearance should give viewers some clues about what kind of a character is in front of them.

You can do a quick test. Show your character to one of your friends and ask to tell the story about your sketch. Is he good or evil, what he does, where he lives and so one.

It is also important to remember that this is a 3D character, so shapes are voluminous, therefore, the character should be interesting to look at from different angles. On the one hand, this literally gives more space for creativity, on the other hand, it requires more work to perform, while paying attention to numerous details.

How to create a character: concept, script, modeling, editing

Creating a perfect character is not enough, you also need customer’s approval. Usually, it takes a lot of time to coordinate the concept and scenarios.

We had 2 screenwriters and they wrote 2 types of script concepts. The first one was a customer vision — supposedly there had to be animations without the common storyline and relationships between characters.

We’ve offered a full story instead, with many characters, protagonists, antagonists, and unbelievably interesting plot. The customer wanted the first option, but we insisted on the second one. Our team decided to make audio boards for both ideas to conduct a test among kids and get their feedback. It was a rather time-consuming process, however, it was the entire project’s success at stake.

I found a freelance storyboard artist, and he quickly drew 2 storyboards. Then I found and organized an audio track recording with a brief description for each episode’s character and we recorded professionally the soundtrack to the pictures from the storyboard.

After the child survey proved that we were right in our vision of the project, we began writing separate episodes, scripts, and at the same time drawing concepts for one common story.

We began to create a separate universe with the general story line. All scripts are connected by the common idea “sweetness is joy”. Sweets give children energy, strength, feed their brain and help children to focus on the right thoughts and ideas accordingly. In the future, this allows the little user to become fully involved in the game, that is actually the goal we were trying to reach.

One of the most difficult things was to make 3D models in the same style.

The team had several modelers, and everyone had their own vision, but with the help of art-leads, we did it great. It is important to have a person in the team who supervises the overall creation of characters so that we don’t get completely different characters from various universes in the end.

The biggest challenges were in Timi’s modeling itself since this is the company’s brand, and its image was on all packages.

When we began modelling, it was difficult to transform the 2D character into a 3D model. Another issue was that the target audience consisted of the children of primary school age. The character on the package, however, is a plump little tot of 4–5 years old and children from the target audience cannot compare themselves with him, that is unacceptable in this situation. We needed to make Timi look similar as in the brand image, but twice as old.

Another interesting stage was the voicing of cartoons. First, we gave the voice to the main characters, then the team made animations, voice-overed them and interactivity of the application, and featured it with AR. It is very time-consuming, which you also need to keep in mind when creating characters.

5 tips how to develop a great character:

1. In characters’ creation face is what matters the most.
2. Pay attention to small details. This will give the character special features and personalization.
3. Try to test your ideas before developing.
4. It’s better to create one storyline.
5. Don’t forget about sounds’ stage.

Composed by Elena, Lead 3D Generalist, Live Animations