Introduction

Hi all. In the article below I will briefly describe the steps used to create "This Little Pinkie…”

The idea was to practise cartoon character modelling. Rather than design my own character I wanted to take a popular cartoon character and recreate it in 3D. I have always loved the Warner Bros. cartoons, and in particular the episodes featuring Tweety Pie and Sylvester the Cat.

Research

I searched the net for some pictures and info on the pair. What I found was that Tweety had changed quite a bit from when he was originally drawn by creator Bob Clampett to how he was drawn in the 80's. I decided to keep him closer to the compact design of the original. Sylvester didn't really change much apart from originally having a black nose.

Modelling

For this project I used Maya 6.0, but the same techniques can be applied to other 3D applications. Before I started modelling, I roughly drew front and side views of each character to be used as image planes and act as a guide for the modelling process.

For almost all of my modelling I use the poly-poly method. For a character I typically start with a single polygon face, and extrude the edges to form to the basic shape of the eye.


From there I continue to extrude the edge loops and move the vertices to give me the desired shape, and edge flow. I only model using quads as it gives you a nice clean mesh and results in a more predictable surface when subdividing.