this little animated scene took ridiculously long to finish, starting in 2017, and continuously tinkered with, mostly through 2020 and 2021

so i'm rolling back through old screenshots and notes, trying to remember how the process went.

initially this started as a combination of this sketch I'd had lying around from an old design assignment, and an experimental eye rig I'd been figuring out in 2017 that i figured would be really suitable for a cat.

the weird thing to get used to with 3D modelling, is it's always gonna be ugly for a while at the start of the process.



you can see what a huge difference, from blocking out the base shapes, compared to a few days later after all the fucking around and box modelling more detailed forms.

i find it's always worth spending an uncomfortable amount of time ensuring proportions and shapes are correct before detailing it up (much like thumbnailing in 2D art before drawing details).

as I continued fiddling around with building a rig, I realised I could probably actually make something out of it. 2018 was an exciting year for me artistically, I was so used to kinda just making assets for the sake of learning or practice, but I was starting to get confident enough to move ahead and make something small but finished and presentable.

so i went ahead trying to figure out what to do with the whole scene. i vaguely knew i wanted him hanging over a body of water, so roughly posed him on a greyboxed jetty.

anyone here who's an animator can agree w me that it's absolutely hell trying to pose characters when there's any background music on.


and then was greyboxing the scene out, trying to work out the framing and where the camera should be locked to.


one of the things i like most about making assets for 3D games is the challenge of making an asset look good from every angle the camera will be seeing it from. really time consuming, but real satisfying to have a fully self-contained little character.

but having a locked off view like this does mean i can really "design to the camera" and tweak it best for that angle.

you can see the cat's head is clearly not designed to be seen at a different angle.

it was a couple of years before i returned to this project again after this point, and by then i had a clearer idea of what i wanted the scene to look like : a lit interior casting warm light, rain outside, fish swimming around, and a windowsill that's hanging low over water.

with a lot of doodling back and forth between posing greybox objects in the scene, playblasting and painting over it, i finally settled on this composition.

and completely scrapped the neck fluff as you can see,

after roughly scratching out some "temporary" textures, i tried painting over at a higher res for a crisper texture, but it just didn't ever look as good as the scrappily done one at 512px size.

idk what possessed me at this point to also try and replicate the "jpeging" upscaled look, wanting the look of a 512px image at a 2k resolution, so spent a couple of days just stuffing around making photoshop actions.

came up with nothing really interesting and ended up just keeping the original small scrappy texture file in the end.