Ongoing Character Design & Modelling for LA English-French School: Riordan Rockets. Character: Fusée

This is the starting point: their extant low-res. clip-art created character.

And this is my initial version (truly first-pass) who I've named "Fusée" (French for Rocket, bien sûr) - here you can see Fusée's rigging.

Quickie render of Fusée

Quickie render of Fusée with cel-edges and toon shader, fire colour-shifted to match the original concept

Quickie render of Fusée with cel-edges and toon shader, face close-up

Quickie render of Fusée with cel-edges and toon shader, fire colour-shifted to match the original concept

Cel-edged, cartooney, and very close to the original concept, but now easily re-purposable for many uses!

My suggested next design steps - lose the legs, make the fins the legs (I re-rigged, of course) and make the fire the correct blue...

And this is a quickie example of Fusée being used as intended to create an in-house logo for the Astronomy / Telescopy area of an after-school science fair event.

And here is the Volunteer Proposal I sent to the school's Principal. She has kindly given me permission to post this - she is now thinking (and I agree) of opening a design competition amongst students and parents for a mascot and / or logo.

Volunteer Proposal:
As a 3D Generalist and digital illustrator, I noticed the extant hand-painted version of the Riordan Rocket Mascot with some interest; I though perhaps I could contribute as a parent volunteer in an area squarely within my professional sphere.
To that end I propose I take the low-res copy of that mascot image / logo I’ve found online, and use this as the base for a modeling / character-building exercise to enable Riordan’s Rockets mascot to be easily repositioned for a range of use-cases and placements.
Objectives:
A well modeled, low-poly sub-division surface model, with thoughtful polygon and edge flows to allow for easy animation / deformations, fully-rigged for animation using industry-standard methodologies which can translate between 3D DCC tools with ease.
Well developed PBR (Physically-based Renderer) materials to allow for clean stylized but photo real renders when appropriate
Well-developed Toon materials / cel-edge materials for a highly-stylized cartoon or technical illustration rendering style when appropriate.
Output from any proprietary formats into common 3D DCC exchange formats, prioritizing completeness and fidelity of conversion - FBX, USD et al. Methodology / tool pipe:
I will use Foundry / Luxology’s Modo as my primary toolset, and once I’ve reached final quality and export into FBX and USD, I shall test and qualify these outputs using Blender and Unity, as well as a few highly-specific 3D CADD tools I commonly use (F3D 2.2.1, FreeCAD, ParaView, CAD Assistant, MeshLab, MeshMixer, Wings3D et al) to be sure of ready and correct parsing in a range of downstream tools.
I’ve taken a brief first-pass crack with the Mascot images available online, and this is the current rough state of development, given faithfully replicating the current mascot’s style and basic forms (note: I did do a little work on the eyes to convey more warmth and humor) as an initial starting-point.
I’ve given this little character a temporary name in my setup file of “Fusée” - which is of course Rocket in French. In these grey background images, you can see the rigging controls I’ve set up for this mesh so it can be posed, or later even animated if that’s desired. Note: I have not, at this point, set up any kind of detailed facial rig for expressions or eye movements - merely tied eyes and mouth to head and body level controller.
There are some screengrabs from my 3D window in Modo, showing real-time approximations of the final rendered quality of the PBR materiality I’ve assigned to Fusée’s various surfaces. The Toon shader and cel-edge line work only shows up at final render (see upper right of this sheet for examples). These PBR materials, though largely photorealistic, are still stylized and simplified - this is intentional.
Original Source Document:
Further Development Ideas:
1) If I were looking at this little character and thinking about how to develop it to have the best overall applicability to a range of future use-cases, I would strongly consider losing the two yellow humaniform legs, and making the fins the legs... one can either go for a three-legged locomotion, or visually emphasize the two “front” of the three, allowing the “rear” fin to imply tail-like motions in the cases where tripartite motion is too complex or otherwise unhelpful. This could allow for some wonderful “squoosh, twist and squish” animations - landing, taking off, turning and /or running jumping - anticipation of action, reaction, and so on - this could also allow for some lovely throwback illustrations reminiscent of The Muppet Show’s “Pigs in Space” or the original source material of the 1930’s Buck Rodgers serials with Fusée in a horizontal alignment flying through the void. This approach to Fusées legs also gives Fusée a better silhouette for instant gestalt recognition as a rocket.
2) I developed his rocket flare in a realistic manner; without the Toon shader over-ride, it’s an energetic blue which is a fair depiction of an alcohol-fueled rocket (think Wehrner Von Braun, Tsien Hsue-shen, Robert Goddard) firing in our atmosphere, or of a Hall Effect thruster firing in vacuum. I toon-ified it to match the source illustration: were it me, I’d consider at the least swapping to the fiery blues (to act as an accent against the yellows & reds) and to convey a feeling of greater energy and power.

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