Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2009/06/13/blender-sculpt-mode-is-easy-and-super-cool/

This Blender 3D tutorial has really helped me with my latest problem. The problem was that no matter what I did the body of the 3D cat mesh that I’ve been working on refused to look like anything other than a piece of hexagonal metal. I desperately needed to smooth it but I didn’t know how. I checked out this amazingly simple tutorial and, although it doesn’t seem to be written by a native English speaker, it sure helped me with my Blender problem.

The mesh is still far from done however; the ears look more like they belong on a Gremlin, the fur is very similar looking to that of a sock puppet which has been lost behind the sofa for a couple of years rather than a sleek cat with plenty of time for personal grooming, and it has the blank dead eyes of a killer robot. I’m experimenting with the fur at the moment based on a little jpeg I knocked together in Photoshop in about ten seconds flat. The next step is probably to do another less shaggy looking jpeg to be used as the texture image for UV mapping onto the mesh.

When the cat is seen at the size it will be in the finished animation this is all less important – as you can see in the image above the major problem was the hexagonal metal robot look, and that’s solved now – but when it comes to a close up there is a lot of work to be done on this little 3D creature. I am happy with the way the 2D elements and 3D elements I have been planning are going together in the animation though, I think in the end it’s going to look good.