Modeling a jack-o-lantern / pumpkin fit for animation?

Support Modeling
1

Hey guys, I’m trying to make a jack o lantern that would be fit for animating, but I’m finding it surprisingly difficult.

I can make the pumpkin itself well enough (excuse the lack of a stem):



but I can’t figure out how to carve a face into the pumpkin such that:

  1. It looks good subsurfed
  2. It retains the low poly edit mesh for easy animation

I’ve done some searching and tried quite a few methods. I have trouble making the face look how I want it on the low poly mesh (not enough control in low poly?) by using booleans or retopo to stitch in a face, then adding subsurf. Making the mesh higher poly makes it much more difficult to clean the boolean or stitch in a retopo, and still doesn’t look that great.

Applying the pumpkin’s subsurf and using the cookie cutter script produces pretty good results for still images, but it’s not practical to animate with such a high poly mesh is it?

I’m just not really sure the best way to approach this. Any help would be greatly appreciated… :slight_smile:

2

I have made a couple jack-o-lanterns. For the best one, I used the retopo tool. I had no problems animating them, but of course, any time you put an irregular cut-out or protrusion on a regular surface, it’s going to add a few polys. just try to cut back where you can, without sacrificing good topology.

3

Tis the season.

Attachments

jack-o-lantern.blend (177 KB)