Week 9 – Sculpting characters

This week, I have started more in-depth plan work towards my model progression. Here, I have included a mood board in which I have gathered a variety of visuals to help me brainstorm further what subject I may choose to indicate the topic of ‘cuteness’. This visual brainstorm has helped me to narrow down my options for my final assignment.

Analysing cute characters through shapes…

As part of my research, I decided to gather a handful of characters that I thought are cute and to understand further what makes a character appear visually cute, I decided to roughly sketch their form based on the shapes they resemble. All of these seemed to be roundly shaped, and have organic linework and have simple but bright colour schemes. The main features that are noticed first include the head, eyes and stubby, small legs and feet. From this, I will keep in mind of these traits in order to put this knowledge to use towards my final model for this assignment.

Concepts so far…

Inspired by the mood board above, I have created a handful of creature concepts below and with these concepts, I attempted to use a range of animals to test if I could make them cute by applying previous research outcomes. The first one is of a frog, in which I tried to make cute by giving him facial features such as a big head, big eyes, fluffy hair and also through clothing in which he is wearing a cute pair of dungarees. It was rather difficult to achieve cute features in this concept piece which in comparison, was a lot easier in the other concepts. This is due to how the other ones are more stereotypically cute with lots of fur and big eyes- particularly in reference to the candy floss cat and fire goat designs.

Texture experimentation in Blender

With our week’s lesson, we were taught how to apply textures to our Blender tools and I decided to experiment with a variation of alphas to see what types of effects I could get using a basic UV Sphere as a base. These tests turned out really well and have given me a wider sense of knowledge and more options with my model. Although I don’t think I will use this method of application, this task has been a huge benefit for future considerations. Not only was this activity really beneficial to learn about, but it was also extremely fun to experiment with these various alpha textures. Below are some examples of my outcomes and also the alphas that I used!

The texture alphas in which I used (These were found on google!!)

Settling on a final decision…

Although I really like all of my designs equally, I felt as though the goat design has more interesting features and would ultimately be more enticing as a model compared to the others, which lack motive and personally I prefer this design as it is something I would definitely enjoy making. For my final model, I will be using this mood board further as a means of reference. Doing this would make my model more anatomically accurate and believable, ensuring that the audience is aware of what they’re viewing.

Goat mood board!!