#pombun

[ID: Edited picture of all three Wind and Wave starter pokemon made to look like characters from "The Scum Villain's Self Saving System". Left to right, Browt the grass bird is Shang Qinghua, with scrolls, a bun in a blue ribbon, and holding a calligraphy brush. Pombun the fire dog is Bingpup with a black and gray color scheme, a red design on his forehead, and pink cheeks. Gecqua the water gecko is Shen Qingqiu with a paler blue body, green eyes, green hanfu, a folded fan, and a System screen behind him./ID]

Modelling

This was the part I was most nervous to do, as most of this project hinges on how well I model the character. I was not familiar with character modelling at all (my only experience being this topic and some Blender experimentation), so it was a bit of a learning curve when creating this mesh.

I used a combination of techniques but mainly the box modelling technique for most of the limbs and body. I specifically used polygon modelling with soft selection to get the shape I liked for the head. I also used the boolean tool to create sockets for the eyes to sit in, inside the head. This created a strange problem as the mesh didn't appear in the rendering window or in the unshaded polygon view. I managed to get the mesh to appear in the window, by deleting the history of the new polysurface the boolean created, from the original derivative polygon. However, I am unable for it to appear like the other polygons in Maya (I don't know what I did but it shows up when rendering and that's all that matters hah).

I also used the multi-cut tool to create the mouth shape as well as created several repeating ovals in different orientations as the 'hairs' of the pompoms.

UV Shell Editing and Texturing

With the character modelled, I created textures according to the prompt given by the generator. So I pulled colours and textures from the prompt to create the textures of the body, eyes, claws, horn and pompoms in Photoshop. This was quite difficult as the configurations of the UV shells were strange looking and had several areas concentrated in one circular area. I found creating consistent patterns difficult as the shell would wrap around the polygon in odd ways, but through lots of trial and error (and reloading the mesh in Maya several times), I managed to create patterns that wrapped properly on the polygons.

(I turned off the shells when I imported these to Maya but left them on here as a reference to how strange the shell looked for certain polygons). I eventually textured the more convoluted UV shells (legs and ears) with just Lamberts in Maya. I also thought it would be better to use the lights within Maya as opposed to the HDRIs as I felt the style of realistic lighting and textures would not have the visual aesthetic I wanted.

Here are some final images of what the fully textured and lit model looked like. I felt the model came out quite charming with its big eyes and soft face. From here I will be able to rig and animate the mesh.