A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post talking about a new version of our third and fourth sequences That included a cute little houseplant friend that Aldo plays with, who also becomes injured in the destruction. the team really liked that idea, so we've added it to the film. In order to make the shots reality, we need a character design in a model and a rig as soon as possible. This week I worked on some designs for plant friend based on some common house plants.
The first version that we liked was just having plant friend be kind of a generic flower. You can see some sketches that I came up with below.
After feeling pretty confident about this idea, we realized that having plant friend just be a flower might be misleading because in the final sequence of our film we have some flowers dying from burp gas poisoning. well the intention is that these Flowers are different from plant friend, having them basically look the same would be kind of a continuity issue , so we decided to go back to the drawing board and design plant friend to look like a different type of houseplant. You can see the designs from this pass below:
The final design we came up with was based on a Monstera deliciosa plant. We like the big leaves, and the fact that the separations in the leaf structure lends itself well to being rigged as fingers. I think it strikes a good balance of being more anthropomorphic enough to be understood, but still being a real plant that you would find in someone’s home.