This week we were introduced to our second assignment ‘Organic Modelling’. The assignment prompt is to create a ‘Cute’ character in Blender, with the rules to stay within 40000 polygons and must have no fur, hair, or feathers (sculpted hair/fur is allowed). I’m personally really excited for this assignment and had quite a few ideas right off the bat. We also got to see some of the pervious first years work as examples, which I really enjoyed and hyped me up how I’m going to be able to create my own character too.
I have no previous experience with Blender or any other 3D organic sculpting software, so this assignment is going be a learning curve for me. I really liked how my first 3D Literacy assignment turned out, the inspiration coming from traditional Chinese aesthetics, that’d I’d really like to continue into this project. I started thinking about my own ideas and reference I could use for my character. Here are some inspo that I collected:
The 2 main ideas I liked were Chinese lion dance creatures and ‘Bao’ (Chinese steamed buns) or dim sum (I loved the Pixar short, so I looked at so concepts/screenshots from it). I thought that although the bao/dim sum were really cute, there would only be so much I could do and that the lion dog costumes were a stronger option. There’s a lot of mythology behind lion dances and the performers do a really good job of personifying them and making them seem alive. In some parts of the dance, they’re very dog like, sticking their butts up and overall carry that puppy energy. Since there’s so much character to these creatures I think if I combined the features of the lion costume and Chinese Lion Dogs (also known as shíshī; 石獅) to create like a hybrid creature, that should hopefully be cute and playful.
We also had an introduction to using blender. Like I said previously, I have no experience using any 3D modelling software, asides from Maya, which I only started this semester also. So today was my first time trying it out. I thought it was fun and ended up making a good alien with a large asset in the back.
