Abstract
Anime characters often take the shape of deformed vehicles. However, it is often difficult for a director to convey his/her vision of character deformation to the designers through textual documents − which is the standard format by which they communicate. A communication gap forms where the designer cannot fully understand what the director has in mind, which subsequently leads to inefficiency and time loss during the design process. Our aim is to improve design efficiency for deformed vehicle characters. In this study, the vehicle we focused on was airplanes. We measured and compared the size and proportion of the different parts of airplanes and existing airplane-based characters. We summarized the data gathered into a deformation template, which we implemented into 3Ds max along with a simple deformation simulation system. As a result, we were able to perform deformation based on the deformation template in a semi-automatic matter. A questionnaire based evaluation showed that our system is indeed effective in designing characters.
