It has been almost a year now since I started designing characters and costume changes in Flash. There was a four month period in the Fall where there was no work and I went back to compositing cartoons with After Effects CS3 (a very cool new version of an already awesome program). Two weeks ago, I started designing characters in Flash again.

A few weeks before I started, I had a dream about how I could revolutionize the way I do what we call “character builds”. It’s similar in 3D to Rigging a character model. The problem I see with how I am asked to design characters in 2D is that next to no consideration is made for re-use. Now I am not talking about re-using the entire character in a later episode. No I mean re-using there various body parts. And let’s not stop at the obvious things like eyes, mouths and hands. I mean go all out and include everything right down to the toes.

Often I am asked to take an existing character and put them in a costume that has them going from wearing pants to shorts, from a long-sleeved shirt to a T-shirt, from wearing shoes to sandals or bare feet. Now they way that I have been doing it up until now (and my colleagues have been doing it as well), is drawing only what the concept drawing shows.

In my dream I had designed each character body type in the nude (minus the details not relavent for a kids’ cartoon), then designed a layer of summer clothing (tank-top/T-shirt, swimming trunks/underwear, bare feet). The next layer would be their heavier clothing (long-sleeved shirt or jacket, pants, shoes/boots). Even if the initial concept for a character only had them in summer attire, I would still design their heavier set of clothes, always anticipating that need for them in the future.

I dubbed this dream design the”dressing dummy”. At the very least, each main character would have their own unique design. Now when it comes to the secondary characters, well, that’s where it gets very interesting.

Instead of designing the myriad of secondary characters, a task that can overwhelm most design teams that have head to work on productions 12 or more episodes in less than 6 to 8 months, approach the whole things from the perspective of a toy maker designing parts for a Mr. Potatoe Head doll. Working with the registration points within Flash’s symbols and orientating parts such as limbs so that transformations along the x and y axis happen along and perpendicular to the bounding box of the symbol, you can place most designs within so that they are easily interchangeable.

Since vector graphics are fairly cheap (in regards to file size), all parts and variations can be embedded in a single character file. Essentially creating a digital “extra” (if I may use a Hollywood movie-making term). Using free or cheap extensions like AnimSlider from Animonger.com, the Thumbnail Plugin from Trickorscript.com, or writing your own, you can easily flip through the various designed parts embedded within a symbol for each body part.

I am not suggesting using any new great and powerful technology, just changing the approach to character design for large productions. For me, I wouldn’t even have a design job if it weren’t for Flash. It has brought jobs back to North America from over-seas studios, if only for the short-term, so that designers and animators can ply their trades once again. Why not be diligent and constantly seek out ways to streamline the process so that we keep the work here at home?