In this second semester of the 3D Literacy course our assignment was to make a “cute character”, it didn’t matter what it was, human, animal, robot, and even scary or imposing characters, as long as they were made to look cute.
And so began my next project .
Research:
During the first 4 or 5 weeks of the class I was exploring some sketches of potential cute characters to make, and brainstorming everyday about what to pursue. I managed to narrow it down to 3 choices, an alien monster pet, a shota monster boy, and a joke creature being a literal catfish. Ultimately I opted to make the catfish, spoiler alert, and continued exploring that.
Below are some sketches of mine
I began my sketching along with a pinterest board that explored the characters. Initially it had the spider boy and catfish since I decided to drop the alien pet.
link to it below
Development:
The process of making the final desings was short enough. I initially tried to go for a more cartoony or silly look to it, but after listening to the class where Henry was telling us to take into consideration real-world anatomy of creatures and people when designing out cute characters. He also reminded us that character shapes and silhouette also matter. So taking all that into consideration I went back on my designs and took a more anatiomically sound approach. In my miond the combination of a cat and a fish would be an otter for some reason, so I began looking at otter anatomy on top of cat and fish anatomy.
Another thing that Henry mentioned that I took into account was that it would help us a lot if we marked our designs with section sthat could be made with primitive shapes. I tried to draw some on the sheet and while not obvious they are there and I did use them when I began modelling in Blender.
After showing it on Discord I was advized make the model with less primitives so I deleted a couple of the extra ones on the neck and abdomenal areas. I was also informed on how to include pictures in Blender to keep my ref sheets constantly at hand.
After that I continued to develop the model over the weeks.
Although I had some “hiccups along the way”…
But I fixed it and moved on.
Once finished with the modelling I began working on the Retopology. I probably could’ve finished it a lot sooner but I had been stwitching between the 3D homework and the animated Narratives homework and spent more time on the later one. So It took me longer than I should have.
Retopology was the hardest part of the whole assignment for me , not because it was particularly difficult or hard to understand, but rather because I continually made mistakes when making the quads and spend a lot of time finding errors, fixing them, making more quads, fiding mistakes, fixing them, making more quads, and so on and so forth.
Even After I thought I finished fixing the quads, I found more of them in Blender when I was posing the character.
After that came some other issues but it all mostly subsided. Thanks to Henry the issues I missed were fixed and I was able to finally be done with the retopology. 
However before I went into Blender to pose the model, I worked on the textures for the catfish on Substance Painter. I lowkey hate substance, more so because I’m still getting used to it and because it takes a long time to make the textures and skins. Henry was very firm about the pipleine being, modeling, retopology, texturing, and then posing.
I was a bit worried after fixing the REtoplology and UVs of the model that I would have to completely redo the textures from scatch, at times I just needed to make some minor adjustments, but in the later on fixes it would take orever to redo. But fortunately I figured out that the textures are stilluseable on the most recent model of the catfish.
I also decided to include a tank with a lid in the scene as the background… or rather foreground. In retrospect that may not have been the BEST way to go about it but I wanted to make a box/tank that the catfish came out of that showed in some small way what its story was. so yeah… that’s the reason for the tank.
And then I finally got to upload the model into Sketchfab. I still feel I might have done something wrong somwhere between the posing and uploadin gthe file to Sketchfab, but I’ll find out later I suppose.
Results:
The model is finalized and available for viewing in Sketchfab at the link below.
https://skfb.ly/ouozq
Reflection:
Thinking back on this year, on the assignment, my performance, my results, and everything inbetween that happened… I do think I could’ve have done better, but this is the best I could do, and I an happy with it.I do wish I had balanced out working on the 3D assignment as much as I did with working on the Animated Narratives assignment as there are a few things that were a bit rushed, especially to the end. It didn;t help much that I had no prior experience with Blender, but I do like it and hope to continue improving and learning how to use it as time goes on..