Scarecrow Explained

I had a few people asking me about my scarecrow character so I figured I would make a post about him. Scarecrow in the books was always the one with the brains who could figure things out. He also briefly ruled the Land of Oz until Ozma took over. He’s afraid of fire, and water makes him soggy.

In my animation he’s going to be more of a trickster. He’s smart, but also a little tricky and devious. He’s going to be fairly clumsy and all over the place. Expect lots of bent backward joints. Hopefully I’ll get a render fairly soon with some good poses. Right now they are all fairly generic. I’ve modeled him with a fairly realistic face. I’ve had a few people comment on it, that they think his face should be more like a sack. I’ll disagree because I want him to be a Scarecrow, but also one that is very much alive. It’s almost as if his face has been magically transformed into a real person with straw-stuffed innards.

Here is a render of where he is at right now.

He’s not posed at all there keep in mind, just a generic one that let me see him while I worked on the texture.

I built him in Lightwave, and based him off of several sketches and drawings that I’ve done. I really based him off of this digital illustration here. I didn’t do an orthogonal drawing of him laid out. I have other sketches hidden away in a bunch of notebooks that I was using for various details.

This is a doodle I had done while working on TikTok. It was closer to the feel I wanted by he looks really evil and angry.

In my design of scarecrow I had to be careful to balance what we already know of him, the expectations, and how I remembered him and the way that I wanted him portrayed. It’s clear that my idea of how he should behave and act in The Trio of Oz is quite different from the Scarecrow in the 1932 movie. I also didn’t want him to be straight out of the books.

Here are a few glimpses of various incarnation around of our hero.

And finally here is some technical CG information. Here are the wires to my model, basically how the surfaces are put together.

And finally here is an image of the rig. Essentially a character rig is what would be the skeletons of a figure. I can define how everything moves, and click and drag the bones around.