Since I’ve always been a Muppet fan I decided to try and recreate Bunsen Honeydew’s hapless assistant Beaker from Muppet Labs where the future is being made today.
I started out with a relatively crude sculpt to get close to Beaker’s likeness based on a figurine I have in my office.
Then I tried to retopo him, and then I tried again and again because even though in theory Beaker has a very basic shape, making sure that all edges flow the way they work best was quite a lot of work.
For the hair I wanted to use Blender’s hair system instead of sculpting geometry, so I created sort of toupet to cover Beaker’s head. I used a couple of hair systems to help myself create a little more chaos in the hair.
Since Muppets are made of felt at first I tried using image textures to recreate the look, but I couldn’t wrap my head around UV unwrapping the head, so I went and searched for a more procedural solution.
For some reason using a Voronoi texture as a very slight bump map worked pretty well for the look I was after, so I stuck with that.
For the shirt I used a slightly modified checkered fabric from the Cycles Material Vault.
I started over on the lab coat about three or four times, since I couldn’t get the weird look you get from the way the original puppet is created. (basically a wide draped cloth that needs to cover up a puppeteer)
But eventually I ended up with this:
The expression and shape was immediately recognizable, but I felt (sorry) something was missing.
Going over the reference material I noticed that there is hardly any picture of Beaker where he isn’t showing at least one of his hands.
So I created sleeves and hands as seperate objects, that I positioned strategically to hide the fact that they’re seperate objects - in the same way the Muppets always try to hide the construction of their puppets. I used the pose brush in the sculpt tool to make the fingers feel slightly more natural.
Then I added a couple of light emitting planes to mimic the light I saw in my intended background and rendered the image in Cycles at 1500x2000 with 500 samples and the default denoising settings.
When the render was done, I composited the raw render inside of Black Magic Design’s Fusion, where I did some minor color correcting, light wrap and edge massaging to reach the final result you already saw at the top of this post.