The Boys

I decided to use three characters as protagonist figures for my animation. For design purposes they are named: Bub, Legs & Float.

Bub

Bub was designed with the intention of being unique. He is the only character with both arms and legs, and so is easily distinguishable.
In addition to having four limbs, Bub is also not a traditional sphere. He was created using a sphere, but modified using soft selection and simple skewing of polygons to create his unique shape. 

Bub's arms, legs and feet are cylinders which have been modified using the manual realignment of both vertices and polygons. The glowing wires used as shoulder tendons are 2D lines, which have been modified with the 'noise modifier', and finally converted to an edible mesh, so that the material could be added to a 3D model to achieve the full effect. 

Bub's hands are composed of boxes and spheres. A box was used to form the basis of the hand, then a smoothing modifier was applied. His fingers are spheres which have been heavily skewed, almost into tube shapes. This allowed for pointed fingertips that were seamless. 

The final version of Bub is shown above, rigged to a biped.

Legs
The design of legs was intended for the composition of a trio of protagonists which compliment each other. His legs were originally designed to contain springs (right) that allowed him to elevate himself up where others could not access, or extend to such a length that only he could reach. I decided that such an inclusion would be more trouble than it was worth, and scrapped the idea due to time constraints.

With the inclusion of a running scene, and after many (failed) attempts at creating a walk cycle for this character; I decided that an alternate form would be the most appropriate to create a walking or running scene including this character.  

This alternate form featured spheres serving as sockets for the legs to be attached (similar to Bub's leg design) which allowed for 360° rotation. Because of this added dimension, Legs is able to transform from a lower, more stationary form, to an agile and athletic form. I did not have time fiddle around with the transition process, and so worked it in to my animation without the actual process being shown. Springs coiled several thousand times each are used as ligaments to connect Legs' thighs to his lower legs. This allows for evidence of realism as it provides support to Legs as he runs, and generally looks cool.

Float

Float is easily recognisable as 'the one who floats'. In the early stages of design, Float was intended to be one of two characters (the other being Bub) who could speak, and was going to be a female. Float's design is very straightforward: a sphere as a body and a tube and a cylinder for the ring.

At first I wanted to have the ring transform into Float's body. Plates on his exterior would shift open allowing for the ring to collapse into him. Again, I was constrained by time and had to settle with a simple vanish inside the body.

This was achieved by creating two identical rings, applying an 'edit poly' modifier to both, selecting all the polygons of one and shrinking them to a size which would fit inside Float. I then applied a Morpher modifier to the original, and made the second state to be the shrunk version. Once this was completed I rigged the sequence to a slider for ease of access, and animated it as was needed. 

These characters are all coloured white, this is used to create the atmosphere of a faction or light vs dark, even good vs evil. The next character is named 'Igor', a name I felt was appropriate for the caliber of this character. 

Igor

For all intentions, the Igor model was designed to be a bad guy. I had planned to incorporate an inhibitor which caused the Igors to turn from white to black and obey some higher power. That idea was too complex, and scrapped. 

Igor's body was made similar to Bub's, but with more emphasis on the top. I wanted Igor to look like a big, hulky grunt with a lot of intimidation but not much actual ability. This explains the simplicity of his design.

His arms are cylinders connected to spheres, his hands are the most complex aspect of his design. Igor's hand actually forms the basis of Bub's hand, without the smooth modifier. I created each finger individually using a combination of boxes and a pre-designed piece from the 'damper' model in 3DS Max to make the knuckles. Initially I had the fingers rigged an IK constraint each and managed to get them working independently of one another, that became a problem when I worked with the hand as a whole. The whole hand was grouped together in several fixed positions and used for animation.