A low-poly model of Lilac that I made! I’m trying to make a little 3D valentines day art of him and Amor :)
I spent so long trying to convert my little turntable animation to a gif… it’s not even a very good gif. It’s the best I could do :')
To be honest, I wasn’t fully confident in my ability to make a finished character model like this, so I decided to start by making Lilac first and seeing how it went… Amor has 5 legs, so the idea of modelling him is a little scarier.
I wanted to model, texture, and rig a character all the way through. I count this as a success! I think it came out really cute. I think I will try to make an Amor model too!
I started by making a blockout with a mix of box modelling and sculpting (oooh!!). Then I used BSurfaces to retopologise it into a single lower-poly mesh. I UV-unwrapped it as best as I could, and started texturing, working in and out of the Blender texture editor and Clip Studio Paint.
Texture-painting him was probably one of the most satisfying parts! Especially after The Great Struggle that was retopologising his hair… It’s really nice to feel that my 2D skills are able to feed into and contribute to my 3D skills.
I contemplated trying out a cel-shaded look, but in the end I decided I liked the smooth/soft shading of my good friend Principled BSDF. At some point I tried to add a normal map, but it made the material look weird so I ended up scrapping it.
The front and side view I sketched to reference while modelling!
Concepts for a couple pose & silly valentines cards.