Hey folks!

We've got a request from the National University of Singapore Games Lab with a survey on how great character designers work their magic. So, if you are an experienced character artist or designer, give them a little helping hand, won't you?

NUS Games Lab Character Design Survey

PROJECT GOALS

National University of Singapore Games Lab is starting work on an interesting area that studies character design from many angles: art, psychology and computer science. We would like to study how artists create complex characters starting with simple shapes like triangle, rectangle and circle. Our ultimate goal is to make entry-level character design accessible to everybody, especially for young parents and kids.

We need to conduct surveys on two groups: artists and end-users, in order to study what is effective in character design. E.g. If the artist designs an evil character, does the audience really find the character scary or bad? Once we put surveyed data through computer algorithms, we can come out with effective tools that allow creation of complex characters from simple shapes. No more 1000 slider GUIs. Just some high level choices on role/behavior/anatomy of character and tweakable simple shapes.

YOUR EXPERT OPINION

We need your help in accessing experienced artists’ opinion for our expert category. To start our research, we need to validate a set of 2D human character cartoon shapes. We have put up a very simple survey at http://ashraf.comp.nus.edu.sg/research/characterDesign/survey1.html that should take less than a minute to complete (just 10 multiple choice questions).

We are hoping to gather a response group of at least 30-40 experienced artists.

1. Reply to gashraf@nus.edu.sg with the subject line: “Character Survey: Artist”. I promise that the surveys will take very little time to finish, and sent out very infrequently.
2. Complete the survey at http://ashraf.comp.nus.edu.sg/research/characterDesign/survey1.html
3. Forward this mail to experienced artists you know firsthand. We do not want this group to be a random crowd.

Pls. help us start this project by clicking on the survey link, and giving us your feedback. All inputs are anonymous, and all email addresses (for future survey mailers) will be kept strictly confidential.

Thank you very much for your help.

Golam Ashraf, Ph.D.

Lecturer (Animation, Games & Interactive Media), NUS School of Computing

Principal Investigator (Procedural Content), US Games Lab, IDM Institute

(off)+65-6516-7348::(addr) Blk. AS6-5-11, Law Link, SoC, NUS, S(117590)

http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~ashraf/

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