Introduction

Namaki means sweetie; in my country we use the expression when we see a cute baby girl or boy. For the past five years, since I started learning how to draw perfect circles with a pen, I've had the idea of designing what you see now – this is just the beginning. Back then, I wasn't too serious about it because I didn't have any drawing skills; I was more into 3D than 2D. Whenever my hands were off 3D I would draw two circles close to each other, put two dots on the bottom of the circles (try it and you'll see a funny face) and from there I had myself part of a character's facial expression; little by little I was able to draw the head and the other parts (I still draw these characters in this way whenever I can and I collect the drawings in a folder). I decided to model one of these characters for a challenge.

Sketching & Painting

I should highlight from the start for beginners, that if you have something in mind that you want to create then first of all: draw. Drawing is basically thinking out loud! I started by drawing the character; however, at the time I could only draw circles (Fig.01). I then painted it using different colour variations until I reached the best theme.

Modelling

I basically modelled the character, starting with polygon primitive objects such as a cube, sphere and cylinder
(Fig.02).

Texturing, Lighting & Rendereing

I continued by making the UVs and adding a basic texture to the model (Fig.03). I mostly did the final texturing according to my lighting and rendering, meaning that after adding the basic colours and texture to the model, I prepared my lighting and rendering, and then made the final textures according to the lighting setup.


For the scene I used three area lights (Fig.04) and an ambient colour for the environment. I connected mia_physicalsky1 to the Environment Shader of the camera (Fig.05).