Sadé Collins

💥"Toon Tank" 💥

Last year, I discovered the works of game artist Kirill Rua for the mobile game: The Bombard Game.

I was so enamoured by the art style that, naturally, I just HAD to try my hand at recreating my own rendition of an animated toon-style tank.

While the original art and animations were made with Spine2D, my tank is all 3D with the exception of the background elements which are 2D.

I also wanted to further grow my budding rigging skills with Maya so for this experiment, I also thought it would be cool to create colour variants of my tank that I can switch between on my rig.

Although you can’t really see it here or in my final animations, in my rig for the tank, there is a controller that will allow you to toggle between the different colours so all variants of the tank share the same animations regardless of the colour shift.

Overall, hope you all enjoy!

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Tools Used: Valence3D (Ipad) | Maya 2024 | Adobe Substance 3D Painter | Marmoset Toolbag| Photoshop 2018 | Clip Studio Paint Pro | ToonSquid (Ipad) | Lumafusion (Ipad)

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♦ SQUIGGLY ICONIMATIONS ♦

Sleeping Mimic | Awakened Mimic Reward Vault | HammerTime | BoomBoom | Toon Tele | Toasty | Cartoon Cannon

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🪙“Awakened Mimic”🪙

IT’S ALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLIVE!!!!!! Alas, the Mimic has revealed its true form!!!

... Now ... I'm not an animator of any kind.

BUT last year I had a vision. A vision of me creating a simple treasure mimic inspired by a cool illustration I found by another fantastic artist. Beyond that, I also wanted my Mimic to come alive. I wanted it to get up, move and roar with fury! I imagined this Mimic as a video game character. Some kind of enemy the player would encounter on their journey in an RPG type of setting. With that thought in mind, I wanted to ALSO create a set of different sequences embodying how I would've imagined this mimic moving within a game. Just for fun.

I had all that in mind without having the slightest clue how I was going to accomplish it because like I said, I’m no animator.

HOWEVER; I AM a STUBBORN, OVERLY CURIOUS and CREATIVELY DETERMINED little squiggle with a couple of skills under my belt. And with those said skills, along with a couple more I gained during this pet project of mine, I made this!

Is it perfect? No. Are there things I could’ve done better if I knew more about 3D rigging and animation as a whole? Of course.

Do I care about that right now? Nope. Why? Because I woke up one day and decided I WANT TO MAKE A TREASURE CHEST MIMIC THAT ACTUALLY MOVES and just DID IT!

It took me some time to get it done but DAGNABBIT! I DID IT! Be proud of me please XD

Overall, I am SOOO HAPPY to see my lil guy finally up and moving and I hope you guys like him.

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🪙 Sleeping Mimic

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Tools Used: Valence3D (Ipad) | Maya 2024 | Adobe Substance 3D Painter | Marmoset Toolbag| Photoshop 2018 | ToonSquid (Ipad) | Lumafusion (Ipad)

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♦ SQUIGGLY ICONIMATIONS ♦ Reward Vault | HammerTime | BoomBoom | Toon Tele | Toasty | Cartoon Cannon

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🪙 "Sleeping Mimic" 🪙

Howdy hey folks!

I know, I know! It been DONKEY YEARS since I last made a post to Tumblr. This squiggle meister became a very busy bee last year August which caused me to fall off of personal projects for some months.

But thankfully, as we’ve entered the new year, I’m aiming to hop back on the bandwagon.

This is a little project I started last year. You could say it’s inspired loosely by artist @imcertly Poser chest design. I had actually done my own 3D rendition of Certy’s design, if you guys recall (it’s on my page if you need a refresher). At first, I had planned to animate my Poser model but later opted to create my own treasure chest mimic under the same inspiration.

What you’re looking at here is Part One. A simple chest that hides not a treasure but monstrous secret within itself.

But fear not curious souls; the mimic will reveal its true form in time.

One of my creative goals for 2026 is to continue my exploration of 3D rigging and animation in Maya from a 2D/3D digital media perspective. I don’t consider myself an animator or even a rigger for that matter, but I find myself becoming more comfortable with the process and I’ve been enjoying learning the process and developing my own methods of doing things.

So even if I take my sweet time getting there, I hope you guys will still join me on ongoing creative journey as I take the plunge into a new territory. I may fall off the Insta/Tumblr wagon from time to time (especially as my overall relationship with social media is shifting as well); rest assure, this squiggle meister is ALWAYS cooking up something.

Stay tuned for the Awakened Mimic coming soon-ISH!

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Tools Used: Valence3D (Ipad) | Maya 2024 | Adobe Substance 3D Painter | Marmoset Toolbag| Photoshop 2018

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♦ SQUIGGLY ICONIMATIONS ♦ Reward Vault | HammerTime | BoomBoom | Toon Tele | Toasty | Cartoon Cannon

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💣"Cartoon Cannon" 💣

I had originally made with cartoon cannon model as a companion to my last shared model - the Toasty toaster. While the Toasty toaster was made entirely in Maya, this cannon was made mostly on my Ipad with my favourite go-to modeling app - Valence3D. The only exception was the wick which I did in Maya with the Curve Tool and Sweep Mesh.

Also made another simple animation using this cannon of mine using Maya (3D animation) and ToonSquid (compiling and 2D animation)

Enjoy!

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Tools Used: Valence3D (Ipad) | Maya 2024 | Adobe Substance 3D Painter | Artstudio Pro (Ipad) | ToonSquid (Ipad)

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♦ SQUIGGLY ICONIMATIONS ♦ Reward Vault | HammerTime | BoomBoom | Toon Tele | Toasty | Cartoon Cannon

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🍞"Toasty" 🍞

Back to your regularly scheduled squigglemations, brought to you by yours truly!

I had originally canned this one before but decided to bring it back finish it. Just another example of me getting the hand of working my Ipad into my process by using Toonsquid to composite my 3D animations from Maya.

Yeah that’s right, you heard me correctly.

Did I mention that this animation is 98% 3D?

The only thing 2D in this is the little heart animation and the background. But the rest - the toaster and the toasts were made with Maya and textured in Substance Painter.

Enjoy!

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Tools Used: Maya 2024 | Adobe Substance 3D Painter | Artstudio Pro (Ipad) | ToonSquid (Ipad)

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♦ SQUIGGLY ICONIMATIONS ♦ Reward Vault | HammerTime | BoomBoom | Toon Tele | Toasty

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📺"Toon Tele" 📺

This is little retro style stylized toon television I made with Valence3D to test a new app - CozyBlanket.

I’m still working on my PC to Ipad workflow setup. So far, the only Ipad-only apps that I’ve managed to successfully fit into my process are Valence3D, Nomad Sculpt and ToonSquid.

I’m still playing around with CozyBlanket getting a feel for the app. I had originally bought the Lite version of Cozy but recently upgraded to the full Standard Version, unlocking more features including the ability to import low poly models from Valence for UVs. Although Cozy is best known for its retopology tools, as someone who is primarily a 3D modeller, I mostly use it for UVs. As far UV unwrapping and editing goes, I would say Cozy does the job. Personally, I think its unwrapping capabilities could use further improvement because when stacked up against Maya, it definitely feels like comparing apples to oranges. That’s not saying that Cozy does a poor job, though. I think if you’re on the go and you have a model that you wish to UV unwrap, I think Cozy is great for taking a first pass at UVs that you can then export to PC for finalization. It has just the right amount of tools for cutting seams, unwrapping your models and even laying them out - both automatically and manually. So on that front, I think its great. Obviously this more boils down to personal preference. Every artist needs are different and since I’m mainly discussing my own experience with the app, the way I’m using Cozy is as another companion app to my main go-to which is Maya. I’m using Cozy as a first pass at UVs on the Ipad before bringing it to PC to Maya for the final. Similar to Valence, Cozy works well with Maya (and pretty much any 3D app that can import OBJ).

I could talk more in depth about my thoughts on working with Cozy so far.

For now, I’ll just simply stick a pin in that review and continue to get use to working with it, the same way I’ve been doing with Valence. I got some projects backlogged that I’m excited to work on and share once they’re done so look out for those coming soon-ish.

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Tools Used: Maya 2024 | Adobe Substance 3D Painter | Artstudio Pro (Ipad) | ToonSquid (Ipad)

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♦ SQUIGGLY ICONIMATIONS ♦

Reward Vault | HammerTime | BoomBoom | Toon Tele | Toasty

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💎"Reward Pot" 💎

This is a companion piece to my Reward Vault. Meet its “younger sibling” --- Reward Pot.

Similar to the Reward Vault, the model was designed with Valence3D. Textured with Substance Painter. Rigged, animated and rendered with Autodesk Maya.

However, for this project, I tested a different approach to how I’ve been compiling and polishing up these squiggly iconimations I’ve been doing for fun. This rounds, I hopped over to my Ipad and worked with ToonSquid (and a bit of Artstudio Pro).

The main takeaway from this experiment for me was just how powerful ToonSquid for the Ipad was. I’ve lightly dabbled and played around with TS before.

I liked how straightforward and effortless ToonSquid was to learn. No time spent pulling teeth and hunting down tutorials just to get the basics. I was able to get the gist of ToonSquid’s very simple UI and figure out how to use it to suit my needs within a short minutes of poking around with the app. These are the types of apps that I tend to gravitate towards for my use.

I don’t care how powerful your app is or how many grand-spanking cool features you claim it has. If your app is too convoluted/confusing to use  and/or makes the learning experience too much of a chore; made worse by lack of resources to help you understand the sheer BASICS of using the app, then it’s not going to be a fun time.

Thankfully this was bit not my experience with ToonSquid. It was already a pretty neat app from the jump and the recent 2.0 update with even more insanely useful features just made it even better.

This was my first time really pushing it to see if I can use ToonSquid in my work and for what it’s worth, the short answer is yes.

I had fun putting together the Maya animations for  in TS and adding all the little effects you see in between. And I’m looking forward to testing it again for future projects.

Similar to Valence, ToonSquid has given me another incentive to fit it into my workflow and I’m looking forward to using it again going forward.

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Tools Used: Valence3D (Ipad) | Maya 2024 | Adobe Substance 3D Painter | Artstudio Pro (Ipad) | ToonSquid (Ipad)

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♦ SQUIGGLY ICONIMATIONS ♦ Reward Vault | HammerTime | BoomBoom

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🧨"BOOMBOOM!" 🧨

Like I said before, this was a test run for something I hope to do in the long run.

For this, I wanted to play around with some mixed media techniques - mixing 3D art and animation with 2D animation to produce 2D animated art. I’ve only done it once before and I’ve been meaning to try it again. Still on the learning path with my 3D animation while my 2D animation skills are a quite rusty. Thankfully there are lots of animated VFX sprites sheets on the web that can be used for reference and I’m not afraid to admit that I definitely made use of one of them to help with the 2D explosion animation.

Overall, this is the start of something I hope to keep going and learning from. That being said, I’ve decided to turn these little experimental personal projects into a sort of mini series that I can share on my social media. The working title for them is “Squiggly Iconimations”.

There’s no overarching theme to these icon animations. I was heavily inspired by the cool animations you see of props in 2D or 3D style mobile games.

I’ve seen a couple examples of them while browsing Pinterest for inspirations and always wanted to challenge myself to try and make some of my own, purely for the sake of learning something new and fun.

I’ve definitely missed dedicating time to experiment with pushing my art and current skills so it’s nice to get back on track with that.

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Tools Used: Valence3D (Ipad) | Maya 2024 | Adobe Substance 3D Painter | Marmoset Toolbag 4 | Photoshop CC 2019 ———————————————————————————————————

♦ SQUIGGLY ICONIMATIONS ♦ Reward Vault | HammerTime | Reward Pot

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🔨"HammerTime!" 🔨

Stop! Hammer Time!

Another one to add to my growing collection of 2D style game art and animations but made with 3D. Making 3D look 2D is my jam and this is great way of learning and continue to polish my 3D animation skills.

Sorry if this is starting to get a little repetitive of me.

But, what can I say? I’m having a lot of fun doing these and overall enjoying the experimental creative process.

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Tools Used: Valence3D (Ipad) | Maya 2024 | Adobe Substance 3D Painter | Marmoset Toolbag 4 | Photoshop CC 2019 ———————————————————————————————————

♦ SQUIGGLY ICONIMATIONS ♦ Reward Vault | BoomBoom! | Reward Pot

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🪙"Reward Vault" 🪙

 IT’S ALIVE!

Three animations. 1 rig.

This is a Reward Vault I created using Valence3D app (on Ipad) and Substance Painter. From there, I created a simple rig and produced 3 animation sequences, all done in Maya.

This was part of a personal study on creating 2D game art and animations using 3D. This was also a way to practice learning how to rig and animate in Maya. Nothing complex. Not really aiming for “production level quality”. Just something simple to get the job done for me.

I grabbed a couple of game art animations from 2D games I found on Pinterest to use as inspiration and desired to create something with that kind of vibe/aesthetic.

While I’m still very much a novice to this side of the process, I’ll admit that I am very proud of what I accomplished from this exercise. Compared to my first rig and animation attempt with the Candy Chest, this is certainly a step up and learned a lot, especially on the animation side of things that I’m hoping to carry forward to other experimental projects.

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Tools Used: Valence3D (Ipad) | Maya 2024 | Adobe Substance 3D Painter | Marmoset Toolbag 4 | Photoshop CC 2019 ———————————————————————————————————

♦ SQUIGGLY ICONIMATIONS ♦ HammerTime | BoomBoom! | Reward Pot

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"Pony Tales - Legendary and Epic Pony Patterns Set"

Here are the pony patterns that I made for Pony Tales: My Magic Horse - the newest mobile game title brought to you by the creative masterminds over at Foxie Ventures.

For this project, I was only responsible for textures based on my own designs. Another golden opportunity to further hone my 3D hand-painting skills in Substance Painter.

Overall, I had a lot of fun working on this project and it was pretty amazing seeing everything come together in the final product. Not just for my own contributions but my fellow colleagues as well.

Everyone did a fantastic job bringing this game together and for what it’s worth, I hope that long time fans of Foxie’s games enjoy their newest work!

"Horse Riding Tales - Reward Treasure Chests Set"

Got the opportunity to test my hand-painting skills in a recent update to Horse Riding Tales by Foxie Ventures. Designed a set of four new reward treasure chests and one of them is even featured in the game right now.

Not sure about the remaining three. Nonetheless, overall, I had a lot of fun working on this project. It was great to come up with the designs for the chest and of course, I enjoyed the texturing portion of the project the most.

Really helped me to hone my painting skills in Substance Painter and cement it as my go-to software for hand-painted textures.

Special shoutout to Mike Nixon, Art Manager and Oliver Kiel, Creative Director over at Foxie for their tremendous feedback throughout this project.

The end product of a practice paint I did recently in Substance Painter. I used a free wooden sign asset provided by @nhanceschool and @shabik3d from their free hand-painting tutorial guide.

As stated, this was done purely for practice so that I can get the hand of painting in Substance Painter.

I know SP isn’t particularly the “go-to” for 3D hand-painting. That’s usually either 3DCoat and/or even Photoshop. However SP is my main 3D texturing software.

I use regularly in my professional work and I have painted in the program before with pretty decent results and wanted to give it a try again since it’s been a while since I’ve done it (well…at least not for work and it’s actually using SP to hand-paint for work that inspired me to try painting in it again).

Hand-painted is a style of 3D texturing that I really, really love and want to make my own as a stylized 3D artist. I’m now determined to make Substance my main software to achieve that look since as you can see, it’s definitely capable.

Hoping to test this out some more moving forward.

"2D LIGHTING IN 3D ART ♻️ JUNKSCAPS"

This is another test I did while working on my last mixed media project. Recently, I’ve been experimenting more with Marmoset Toolbag in order to achieve my mix of 2D and 3D art. I tested it out on an asset from a previous project: Junkscraps.

Still one of my personal favourite projects til this date since it best captures the graphical/illustrative style I want to go with for my 3D art.

I learned that you can export your animations (i.e turntable, camera, etc) from Marmoset as an image sequence for compositing in other programs. Not only that, I also learned that I can render out render passes from Marmoset as an image sequence.

For this test, I rendered out a Base Colour/Albedo, Shadow and Highlight Pass of my turntable animation and compiled everything in Photoshop. It took some further experimentation to get the correct blending modes but this is the end results I got.

I’m very, very happy with how this turned out because, if you didn’t know any better, this could easily pass for 2D art when in actuality, it’s all 3D.

I hope to do more projects where I can incorporate what I learnt from this test but will see how things go.

Mech West - Carry Mech

Back in early 2022, I got the chance to work on the upcoming new 3D animated series created by my 3D alma mater - Animschool. For this project, I create two of the mechs featured in the series. This is the second mech design I got to work on. It's called the Carry Mech.

Similar to the Carrier Mech, I used my modeling skills to bring this cute little helper mech to life under the guidance and supervision of the Mech Modeling Lead, Tatiana Petrova and our Modeling Supervisor, Nina Tarasova, with additional input from Dave Gallagher, the series creator.

I was only responsible for the modeling portion of this mech creation. For this mech in particular, the additional produce assets such as, some of the fruits, vegetables and pastries, featured with it were downloaded from Quixel.

All props to the rest of the team who took this mech after me and realized it even further via textures, rigging and of course, animation. Ya'll did a phenomenal job! It was so cool seeing this guy in the final project which is out NOW on Youtube. You can watch it now right HERE.

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MechWest is a 3D-animated action-adventure TV series for all ages created by AnimSchool Studios. The show takes place in an alternate Old West where robots called “mechs” are household helpers and four distinct nations inspired by real-life desert cultures collide—and their mechs. 

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To find additional information on Mechwest you can go HERE.

There is also hopes from the studio to continue the series via crowd-funding, starting with the next episode through Kickstarter.

You can also check out the series KICKSTARTER CAMPAIGN to help support the show and fund future episodes:

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♦ MECHWEST MECHS ♦ Carrier Mech | Carry Mech

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Mech West - Carrier Mech

Happy that I can finally share this. Back in early 2022, I had the honour of working on an upcoming new 3D animated series created by my 3D alma mater - Animschool. For this project, I used my modeling skills to create two of the mechs featured in the series. This one is called the Carrier Mech.

Under the guidance and supervision of the Mech Modeling Lead, Tatiana Petrova and our Modeling Supervisor, Nina Tarasova, I helped bring this little mech to life. I was only responsible for the modeling portion though. Also special thanks to Dave Gallagher, the series creator, for his input throughout my time during the production process.

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MechWest is a 3D-animated action-adventure TV series for all ages created by AnimSchool Studios. The show takes place in an alternate Old West where robots called “mechs” are household helpers and four distinct nations inspired by real-life desert cultures collide—and their mechs. 

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The first episode is officially out NOW on Youtube. You can watch it now right HERE.

To find additional information on Mechwest you can go HERE.

There is also hopes from the studio to continue the series via crowd-funding, starting with the next episode through Kickstarter.

You can also check out the series KICKSTARTER CAMPAIGN to help support the show and fund future episodes:

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