Hello again! So, I randomly got a burst of inspiration to recreate this random little penguin dude from Mario and Luigi Brothership because I just loved how he was just a blob with a beak and eyes. Here he is, fully rendered:
And here’s the reference picture I used:
Now, I know it looks simple, but I actually spent several hours on it. The modeling was easy enough, didn’t have any issues there, but oh boy, the TEXTURING. I spent several hours fiddling with texturing the body because I couldn’t figure out why the stencil mask wasn’t working. Turns out that masks in texture paint mode are invisible in material preview, but not in solid view, which I had no idea until I stumbled across it by mere chance after being frustrated for multiple hours and trying to look up a fix.
Then, I set up a simple lighting setup with 2 area lights (a blue and yellow light) and a snowy HDRI with a fresnel setup for a rim light on him, and then I called it a day… until I returned to it the day after to fiddle around with shader nodes for another several hours to give Bambino a more saturated shadow through gradient nodes:
So yes, he may be a simple blob with a beak and eyes, but man, it was way harder to make him than I thought it would. I’m happy with how he turned out, though! Oh, and just for fun, I did this quick little spin animation for him because one of my friends requested it:
So yeah, that was the first character I ever made from start to finish in Blender. I’ve modeled more complex things, but they’re still WIPs. Hope you like him!