At the start of this assignment I decided to design my cute character of cuddly toys and teddy bears I own because I love the cute and fluffy feel a cuddly toy/ teddy bear has, I originally thought this would be fairly easy to model and create even though the fur might’ve been a bit difficult. I started by taking some reference photos of my teddy’s and also looked up some additional references online. Then I got to work on designing some concept ideas.
It struck me that the majority of cute toys have 2 things that stand out the most, shiny eyes and holding a heart. So I decided I would try to incorporate these key details into my project as well.
Here is me blocking out the bear’s body using the curved cube; we had been shown as a plugin to blender from the stylised bear video we were shown in class.
Once I got the body’s rough shape created, I combined and remeshed the different parts of the body together and then used the smooth tool to give it a seamless finish. I used the elastic distortion tool to create a more pudgy and cuddly look to the bear.
I started with adding the loops around the mouth of the bear like how we had been shown in class trying to make sure there were no triangles that would ruin the retopoly of the character. I really started to struggle making accurate polygons and left myself with a puzzle to figure out how to piece it all together correctly, this wasn’t the case at times as when I checked the loops they wouldn’t connect the whole way around the head leaving some areas with more or less polygons than what I had intended.
But I kept going at it tackling all looping problems head on. Some vertices I created in the process didn’t fully snap together so I had to create some additional ngons to fix the problem and stop it from creating triangles. Once I had the loops all finished I checked to make sure everything was connected and looped properly before moving to painting and texturing. I decided to export the model back into blender to start painting and add the fluffy fur texture to my character.
Here is the final model rendered in Blender.
Conclusion:
I am really impressed with the finished teddy bear model and especially impressed by the fact that this is my first ever organically sculpted character using blender model, I would have liked to include a bit more detail such as adding a names to the heart or shown the teddy bears seams through its fur but I feel that I still met the specifics of the brief in creating a super cute character. I think this assignment, as stressful as it was, was the best part of the whole semester for me because it was really fun and I’d really like to get into character modelling and use it for video games and TV shows. Contact was a bit of an issue but given covid is still in effect that’s nothing we have any control over so we just have to deal with it and move on, it would have helped learning and remembering the software much faster along with fixing problems that we didn’t know how to overcome on our own. I am really excited to continue making more 3D characters and I think I’ll start looking into the creation of other 3D objects like food and everyday items, and maybe I can then start to make my own games and animations with them.