I’ll share with you my process for making my entry on the bcon challenge
Thumbnail:
Blender 2.74 splash screen:
Made by Manu Jarvinen with Blender, Gimp in Linux (Xubuntu). The original drawn concept is by: Miisa Lopperi.
Day 1:
I started by doing a low poly model of the cat, it was pretty awful but it helped me to understand the general structure of the cat
After getting the general structure I sculpted the facial features trying to do it as similar as possible to the splash screen
I used the Retopoflow addon to remesh the cat trying to get the lowest polygon number possible, here’s a comparison on the meshes
I also did strategic cuts on the topology for keeping the face features without having to subdivide the model
Remeshing the model also allowed me to have a better uv map and work faster on the textures
For the eyes I reused an old model and I baked the Iris into eyeball. After finishing the textures I began to work with the hair particles, I did 3 layers of furr, 1 for the small furr, 1 for the log furr and a third one for the whiskers
Layer1:
Layer2:
Layer 3:
Render:
At this point I still wasn’t sure about the general concept of the scene so I took a rest.
Day 2:
While falling asleep I started thinking on the scene and I recorded some audios on general ideas for the scene.
Basically I started by expanding the splash screen with someone taking the rope that appears on the image the general idea was having a girl trying to catch a bunch of cats with a cane
So i started by doing the girl. At this point I was very delayed so I reused the face of the cat by changing the mouth and ears topology to make the girl
Then I sculpted the face and the body
After that I did some variations of the cat by changing the texture colors
Then I thought that having all the cats just looking at the fish would be boring so I did a couple objects for the cats to make them interact with them
After rigging the characters I started to pose them on the scene
At this point the scene was almost ready, I baked some textures and since sketchfab can’t work with hair particles I converted them to instances and extruded them to give some volume.
All was ready but there was a problem, my fbx was of almost 200 MB!
The free accounts of Sketchfab just let you upload files of 50 MB so I has to figure out how to reduce the file size.
I started by eliminating the hair strands that weren’t too visible but it wasn’t enough so I selected all the hair instances an I used random select feature and CTRL+L to select some hairs and remove them. I repeated this 3 times with all the cats and I finally got a 46 MB file. Since I still had a bit of space I added some light particles to give it a nice effect
Finally I uploaded my model to sketchfab and I added some post proccesing to the 3d viewer. Im prety happy on how it turned out!
Give it a look by yourself !
My sketchfab model