Out of Shape 5: The Cat’s Getting A-head

After sending a print of my Oh No pink blob guy to the creator of WebComicName, I was thrilled to hear that Alex was just as excited about the result as I was. “I LOVE IT SO MUCH! Such a cute booty!!!!!” was Alex’s feedback, and I decided instantly that the Oh No cat was going to be my next project. I approached this process the same way I had with the blob guy: create the rough form in Blender, solidify with MeshMixer, and do the major finishing in Sculptris.

As with the first model, I followed along with the tutorial Andrew had authored for SyFy Wire, guiding me enough so that I managed the whole process myself. The one hiccup I did encounter, however, was when I tried to export my Blender model, the cat’s head wasn’t coming along for the ride. The ears were there but something weird was happening to its head, which, as it turned out, was a result of the normals being inverted.

I was much more confident in modeling this time as I became more comfortable with the use of the S scaling and getting the overall hang of which keys and mouse buttons do what. The one regret I encountered during my sculpting of my cat shape was realizing that I should have used cylinders for the cat’s tail instead of rectangles. Using the former would have saved me the whole hassle of needing to round out the edges of this dude’s tail. Which… man. Was not fun. Also, in hindsight (or, about two hours into the project), it seemed really dumb that I’d initially chosen to go with cubes, but it was too late to turn around by then.

Having realized that the sculpting process takes some patience, I did as much as I could to the model on the first pass, and decided to revisit my little buddy again another day with fresh eyes. As eager as I was to simply call him (her?) completed, I wanted to deliver another awesome model to Alex — and a cat with a lumpy tail wasn’t going to cut it (ugh, seriously regretting not using cylinders). I still had to ask Andrew to use ZBrush to add the color and let me put the face on, but I did observe the process more carefully than I had last time. Perhaps I’ll be able to do it completely myself for the next one! In preparing the cat for color, Andrew overlaid the image with my model and LOOK AT HOW ACCURATE IT IS!

I may have found that my 3D modeling niche is blobby figures. Speaking of which, what’s the next Oh No character I should tackle? I suppose there’s always the option of adding accessories to the OG blob guy (for situations like this) but there’s also a menagerie of other options (literally). In the meantime, you’ll find me eagerly awaiting for my latest order from Shapeways: