After a short break, we have been given our newest assignment, sculpt a cute character using blender, the character needed to be Under 40000 Polygons and would need to be designed and sculpted by us, so I began by making a large mood board filled with things that I found cute, a random assortment of images from online of characters and Ideas I could take inspiration from.
Once I had a mood board sorted, I began by taking the images into Illustrator and began sculpting out several character Ideas, one of my initial ideas for the project was a robot or mechanical character, but when I asked about the possibility, my tutors suggested that I try to make something more organic, I did try developing a Robot but ended up scrapping it.
Unfortunately, cute designs are a weakness of mine, and it’s something that I myself struggle with, as I don’t follow things that are overtly cute, I prefer something with a bit of substance to it, which Is where the robot Idea came from, and I could design something I appreciated the design of and then “Chibi” it, however, I felt as though this wouldn’t fit the brief 100 percent and decided to pick between the two characters, and ended up going with the cat idea, and gingerly naming him “lockdown Louis” A cat who’s had to go back to work after being stuck at home for ages, which explains the miserable expression and hunched physique.
So I eventually took it into blender and began my sculpt, the previous week we had begun experimenting with MetaBalls, a plugin that allows you to sculpt out a character and get a basic skeleton down, which we could then add on top of, so I mapped out the basic shape of my character, including the feet and head.
After I eventually made the arms and then using the Dyntopo option in the sculpting menu, I began to simplify the model down so that It would look less blocky, I then began to polish it off with the smooth tool and began work in the sleeves, attempting to give them a cuffed look which I would add to later, Using the inflate tool to create the base and then draw and scrape tool to carve out the insides.
