Introduction

Hi, my name is Adrien Castel and I'm a 3D generalist at a studio based near Bordeaux in France. I made this illustration for my girlfriend. She's the kind of girl who makes you want to become someone better so that's why the idea was that she makes my fly!

References

As reference I used a little character I'd designed for an art toy, whose name is Buddy. As you can see in Fig.01, he's a simple shaped character with a round head. Thanks to that I've been able to turn him into several different characters, simply by changing colors and adding a few details (now the game is working out who's who!) For this particular illustration I wanted him to have better proportions – as you can see, the head is slightly smaller than in the reference.

Modeling

As the character was really simple, modeling the basic shape was not a very time-consuming. You can see in Fig.02 that I used a basic rig with biped to make the posing. Rigging was slower than modeling but I had to add some details to make it look better (Fig.03). I used the Array tool for zipper and the Loft tool for the scarf.




To sculpt the hair (Fig.04), I used the Loft tool again. I really like this tool because it's easy to use and great for organic modeling.


As you can see in Fig.05, I used the same technique to sculpt the clouds: one spline for the direction and three shapes to make the creamy look. I also played with the scale deformation to make it look better.