Work in progress - isn’t this exquisitely beautiful? No? Well, it wasn’t my fave toy at the age of four, just something I remember from then. For my “Toys I Had” series.
Mesh started as a cube, extruded out to a couple dozen. Arms and legs are three boxes each, bent around and tapered. Subsurf modifier to make it all round and soft. Got a nice made-of-cloth shape by pinching the legs and arms vertices where they join the main body. Took a screen capture of a front view to use as a guide to draw the face and clothes in Inkscape. Tweaked that a little in gimp then slapped it on as a texture. Particle system for red yarn hair.
Further work needed: make the red yarn more yarny looking. (Challenge for everyone: use the word “yarny” at least once a day in public.) And then it needs to look more like a ragdoll with yarn hair. I’m not sure how to accomplish that without an actual item to look at. Make it look more like it’s made of cloth - hints of fine detail fibers with a normal map or something, and some small-scale bunching/pinchiness along where a seam should be - easy, just needs butt-in-chair time to do it. Plaid instead of stripes, maybe. The back is devoid of any artwork. Add stains, scuff, hints of lint and crud. It’s a baby’s toy that spends most of its time on the floor, and so should look about as clean as one. Of course, a more interesting background and better lighting.
How do other 3D artists add crud and lint? Generally, I’ve seen little online material, or in books even, on how to make something dirty, cruddy, dusty, scruffy, etc. beyond the obvious method of adding stuff to an image used as a texture map. Some crud, like wads of dusts, pet hairs, don’t lay flat on the surface. Are there ways quicker than actually modeling these as objects? Stuff to experiment on…
This was fun to make, and fairly quick except for the hair. This was the first time I tried the particle system since the 2.4x series. For now I’m using 2.61 which runs great for real projects.
If I didn’t have better looking projects to work on, I’d spend even more time on this to rig and animate it.
