The following post details my designing and modelling processes involving my characters and props!

INITIAL MODELS & CONCEPTS:

We started to discuss character designs and how to allocate, mostly from discussions and meet ups we had prior to this. We were focusing mostly on using “prey” animals with a soft design.

Based off this l consensus I began researching general toy plushie designs and art styles to implement into my models. Some members of my group modelled a few of their designs where I modelled 2 as there were a lot of design to pick between. We were given the choice to model a “main toy”, being the frog, and an additional toy design. Doing this allowed us to vote which frog design we liked best as a group to move forward with while still having a character to animate.

Own photographs on the general design I wanted to go for. General design elements that was agreed on was simplistic/round:

Here are a few designs I looked art from other artists. This gave me a idea to reflect how I wanted my toys to look and posted these into the group chat to inform my group.

“A little bear”, I adore the little details added to the bear to make it feel like a stuff animal (the texture and patch). Makes it feel authentic/well loved. There’s a clear distinction between the glossy eyes vs the matte texture of the “fur”. Basic design elements- soft features, big eyes//pupils, big head (very child like in it’s proportions).

https://guzz.artstation.com/projects/veP1D

“Big cat and girl” by Lori Tsao is a small 3D model series. Simplistic design with soft pastel colours/lighting. I adore the characterisation, the solid circular forms reminds me of “Pop mart” toys, which carry similar design elements. It takes a illustrative approach, the facial features appearing to be drawn on rather than modelled. The matte character model vs the clothes gives it a toy-like design, putting a semi-realistic fabric over contrasts against the model itself while not making it jarring.

https://dribbble.com/shots/12516652-Big-cat-and-girl

Shibe dog, unknown artist. Pinterest is good but most of the time I can’t link back to the original poster, but had to include this model 🙁 I think it’s adorable, and because of the squish to the cheek it makes it feel like a plush. I want to try and do something similar to my toy, using squash and stretch when it reacts or makes contact to surfaces so it doesn’t appear stiff.

Adrián San Vicente “Art Toys”. Similar to design elements featured above, round simple designed animals with a glossy finish. Uses semi-realistic fabric again to pick apart materials. I like the soft glossy sheen of the model, makes it appear to be a solid surface material like plastic/rubber.

https://www.instagram.com/adrian_sanvicente/?hl=en

Researched toys from online, considering similar colour schemes and designs:

I then began to do a few character sketches based on the research I had done. I took materials and details into consideration, ensuring to give the toys aspects to differentiate them from real animals. As the setting is an arcade machine I wanted to ensure the designs belonged in that environment. I designed a money frog character and a few animals from Andrea’s toy list. Also kept in mind my desire to squash and stretch a character, so design elements would have needed to be kept in mind to design around that.

Mused the idea of a themed arcade machine, having all the elements revolve around the frog. I felt proud of the design, however it didn’t fit the arcade retro theme we were going for and would’ve stuck out like a sore thumb. Despite this it was nice to explore the concept, since we were originally talking about the machine being themed around the animals. It also would have limited us on what toys to include/other designs that could’ve been included.

Looking over the designs I created I liked the fish and the frog the most, so I began 3D modelling these characters. I blocked out the frog by adding spheres and having the shapes mirrored to the other side using the mirror modifier, then applied. I used a bezier curve to form the mouth and the string around the body, using the mirror modifier for both and joining the vertices by using the “merge at centre” shortcut. I had to draw the shapes and alter them using proportional editing to ensure it was as close to the model as possible. The money note was relatively tricky to achieve as I used a flat plane, used the cutting tool to divide it into sections and made it form around the frog using proportional editing. I added a solidify modifier and then applied to hide any empty space between the frog and the note. I edited the colours around the mouth and the stomach as a placeholder for when I wanted to texture these areas later, using the knife tool to cut the shape and selecting those inner faces to assign a new material. One thing I could’ve done with this model was selecting the edges of the top/bottom circles and deleting edges to turn any triangles to quads, as the model was made up mostly of circles. I believe I did this at a later stage of the model. For the flies wings I added circles and used the fill shortcut. We mostly wanted the models we created to be hard surface to have more time for animating our shots, and it gave less opportunity to encounter issues.

Frog:

The process of the fish was very similar, using sphere’s to form the main features and proportional editing to get the acquired form I wanted. I liked the sense of gravity and “weight” to the Shibe model, so I attempted to have the same effect be present in the fish model where the shape drooped downward. I also wanted the tail to come to a point, so I transformed the back of the sphere inward to get the desire shape. I liked the googly eyes from my concept art and used spheres, scaling and repositioning them so they fit the shape of the body. I then selected faces and assigned different colours to get different colour variance down.

Finished fish model!

Ellen then set up a voting system once everyone posted their frog designs. The votes went towards my frog design, which I was really flattered by. Despite choosing my frog design, as mentioned earlier, everyone still had different animal designs they posted prior so everyone had a animal they could still rig and animate down the line. I adored everyone’s designs (they’re adorable, are you kidding me?!???) and it was nice to see everyone’s take on the same character!

TEXTURING THE TOY:

Since we were going to use my frog for the main character I wanted to try and texture him to have a better visual appeal, and I lowkey thought the angular colour application to the mouth/stomach was an eyesore. I also wanted to have a similar pale colour scheme to fit my researched models, that way if our arcade had crazy lighting it would bounce nicely off the model.

I had to first design on colours and patterns to apply to the frog. I drew up a few drafts on what to include in the frogs design!

I liked the far right designs the best, the rest of the designs made the frog look sinister. I changed around the colours a bit during the substance painting phase so it contrasted against the note.

I also had to consider the design of the money note, whether I wanted it to look like real money and what currency. In the end I settled for a design that fit the model, frog money. You wouldn’t be able to see the currency amount because of the fly, but this was the fly settles nicely on top of the note without the design looking too busy.

Substance:

As I’ve had my designs ready I UV mapped my frog! I thought this process was a LOT easier compared to my Hotel Transylvania character and I was able to keep vertices even throughout the design, so I was able to clean up the UV map before pulling it into substance.

Before:

After organization:

I had also realized that Andrea wanted the toys to be rubber, as we previously talked about how the toys communicated through squeaking. I had originally thought we were making them plushies with squeaker centre but it didn’t make sense for a claw machine. I redid my UV mapping after adding a air seal plug to the toy to tie into everyone else’s design. Looking back I wish I bevelled the plug so it wasn’t as sharp, it looks like a metal clip attached to rubber which I’m not so crazy about now.

Another thing I noticed was when we were doing the face shape key workshop it was better to model the character with an open mouth. I went back to my design and cute the basic shake with a knife tool, extruded inward and bevelled to get an appearance of a mouth. I had to play around with hiding the upper lip so it could accurately merge with it’s shape. I added a small sphere into the mouth, transformed it and shaded smooth to take on the appearance of a tongue. I should have UV mapped around the mouth too as it was hard to paint inside later on.

Before painting my frog in substance I looked up a few videos on art style to see different techniques. I didn’t end up using the techniques in the videos as I didn’t want my frog to appear too different from the other toys, however it was a cool insight on what you can achieve through the substance program! I had also posted these videos into the group chat for my team to review/if there’s any artistic liberties they wanted to take.

Video’s looked over (including some that my team posted that peaked my interest 😀 Some of these were really cool to me because I wasn’t aware you could paint using blender itself. Although the techniques and results really appealed to me I was more familiar with using substance, so I stuck with what I knew.)

A massive pain was that I was painting the frog in texture sets rather than one whole mesh, which made it a pain to insert into blender later on. One small blessing was it was easier to paint and isolate certain areas. I tried my best to paint the details on the note (I wasn’t sure if I could import my frog note design directly into substance, and even then the process sounded confusing to me when looking up tutorials online.) I wanted to ensure the green values were different so it didn’t blend in with the frog model. I found the black to be too harsh again the pastel colours so I change it to a light brown to compliment the design. I used a height brush to indent the back, surrounding the plug to have it appear as if the toy was really made from rubber. I gave my frog a glossy finish to mimic the material.

Material to mimic:

Toy textures:

I then baked my normals and found that there was multiple textures for the different texture sets :’) I started to panic, however I found that I just needed to include the maps that made an impact to the actual frog. This meant pulling the textures into the respected materials in blenders shading nodes. I found that the material would apply all over, however I brought my file to class and Alec helped me pull the textures to the right areas. I added the respected nodes to translate the textures from substance to blender.

Finished frog model, with textures! If anything I made him appear too glossy, almost like glass. I didn’t end up inserting the brown colour shift to the black areas to fit in with the other characters. One regret I have painting this character was not ensuring the back of the note was painted. Some angles you can see the grey behind the note, but at this stage it was too late to go back and re-texture it. Thankfully it can’t be seen in the animation, however I have to be more vigilant with that aspect in the future. Overall I’m happy with how the design came out! The colour scheme compliments well and the design isn’t too busy.

Texture issue resolved:

When everyone was posting their animation progress I noticed that in Aaron’s clip the frog had very obvious texture issues. I began to panic as Aaron already made so much progress and I didn’t want him to have to start over, so I frantically started trying to find a solution. (The same texture issue was happening to Ellen’s bird, and I didn’t want anyone’s hard work to go to waste 🙁 )

Safe to say I was really relieved. It was a simple fix and the issue was resolved by messing around with the shaders until I found the problem.

ENVIROMENT DESIGNS:

When my frog was finally ready I wanted to help add to our environment. Andrea and Ellen were adding their models to flesh out the room, experimenting with different layouts (see below, taken from the discord.)

I believe this was how we presented the room during one of the presentations. I wanted to try and work out a few designs/props that could potentially be added. An arcade usually if full with clutter, so we all eventually modelled props that added character to our environment.

Thinking about the layout of the room. The first design was my 3D previs layout, and thought of ways that the child could move around using the space.

Then I briefly did designs based of the screenshots that were sent into the discord. I looked into different themed arcades and what could be added to give it an authentic look. Below my references and sketches on layout/potential props we could add based off of my research.

I added this to one of our presentation slides. We eventually moved on to create posters for the backwall from the prop sketches to fill the space.

More machines, thought of using the light from the machines to illuminate a darker enviroment:

As everyone was adding in their props I wanted to see if I could add to the environment, as I felt like I didn’t have enough involvement outside of the sketches I was producing. I had asked to help with the environmental lighting and took a screenshot of scene at the time and put a colour dodge overlay over areas that could be enhanced. I showed this to our group and they really liked the idea (plus more prop designs. I’m gutted I didn’t model the Kirby bin but Ellen and Aaron were modelling bins, so I stuck to smaller props.)

Neon Light:

The first prop I created for the environment was small neon signs. I was in class and drew up a few shapes, looking to use the concept of this tutorial but using a transparent image instead:

Mike came along and told me to use a bezier curve to trace over the shapes and increase the thickness, which was a faaaar more straightforward method. It made the process faster and once done he showed me how to increase the emission and how to show the effect in Blender. He then did it for our environment which brought everything together. Ellen used a similar technique for her sour batch sign, and was also able to add this to the strips on the ceiling.

Example of how this came out in blender vs in the scene:

Arcade machines:

Looking at the arcade machines I was curious to see if we could alter them to look like they were switched on. I took a look at the below video and posted it in the discord chat to discuss this with my team.

I attempted to follow along but realised that it would probably be difficult passing these files around to my teammates so I asked Alec later to see how we could make the machines light up, which proved to be a easier method.

I wanted to include a small Easter egg that had our credits on one of the machines. I brought a old school sonic game into procreate and used a pixel text generator to add our names. I didn’t know who should be placed where, so for fun we played a few games and tallied everything up at the end to who gets top score. (I didn’t care where I placed, as long as I beat Ellen lol). With the help of Alec we uploaded the image through emission and showed us how to make the image emit light. This was used for the pacman and ticket machine too.

I had shown Ellen how to “project from view”, having the machine be front on and automatically form the shape of the UV. We then uploaded the image and changed the framing so the image fit the screen.

Machines:

Game boy:

I followed this tutorial to make a Game Boy. I wanted to include a retro gaming console to reflect the aesthetic we were trying to replicate. Used the same method for the game boy as we did the arcade machine to look like a game was being played on the console. I’m happy I came across this tutorial, it showed me how to UV project from a viewpoint and create stencils through modifiers. These techniques proved useful in other areas of the project.

Stools: