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California Institute of the Arts

Character Design for Video Games

California Institute of the Arts via Coursera

Overview

In this course you will explore concepts and approaches involved in creating successful character designs that can be applied to video games. Following a first week delving into some foundational concepts for successful character design, each of the remaining three weeks are structured as a master class where you will observe three professional character designers at work in the studio: Andy Ristaino (Adventure Time), Jacky Ke Jiang (Journey), and Robertryan Cory (SpongeBob SquarePants). Each designer will take on two different design challenges on the fly and address the various issues in designing characters for games, such as movement, expression, and technical limitations. At the end of each week you will have an opportunity to try out some of the concepts from that week's lesson on characters of your own design.

This is a fun and engaging class especially useful for students interested in animation in film and TV as well as games, and is suitable for students of any drawing ability.

Taught by

Fran Krause

Reviews

4.5 rating, based on 6 Class Central reviews

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    Rates

    Rates completed this course, spending 2 hours a week on it and found the course difficulty to be medium.

    This course is different from the others in the series in that it is presented as a series of Masterclasses with professional character designers dispensing nuggets of character design wisdom while they work through a design brief provided by Fran. There are some great insights here into the mechanics and principles of designing characters followed up with the assignments getting you to put these theories to practice.
  • Fábio Medeiros completed this course.

  • Roman Gorislavski

    Roman Gorislavski completed this course.

  • Taniyah M Englett

    Taniyah M Englett completed this course.

  • Na'imah Muhammad completed this course.

  • Bart Frank completed this course.

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