Bumble Bee

Buzzy buzz buzz

The idea for this bee popped into my head as I was dozing off one day, so quickly had to semi wake up again and make some quick notes/sketches so I didn’t forget it.

The body is a sphereized cube (add a cube, sub-divide, apply) and then stretched a little using proportional editing, a further subdivision was then added.

A couple of vertex groups were then created for the strip pattern, which then had hair particle systems added to them with ‘hair dynamics’ enabled, a wind force field was added and then set to run for a couple of seconds to push back the hair/fur of the bee.

The eyes were made from a small ico-sphere, with a selection of its faces extruded. 

The luminescent version was created mainly as an experiment to pass the hair info node through a colour ramp, which was then fed into an emission and diffuse nodes to control the colour and was also used to control the mix of those nodes so that the end of the hair would glow, but the base of the hair would not.

 Quoth the raven nevermore

Pretty sure if the raven has a name it is ‘Nevermore’ however if you leave nevermore off, then it sounds like the raven’s name is ‘Quoth’ so made pictures with both options.
I wanted to make the raven look happy rather than sinister, like he's at a social event (raven school reunion or some such) and is enjoying himself.

The body is a simple multires sculpt, except for the feathers around the neck and tops of the legs, these are individual modified curves.

To design the raven I took multiple images of ravens, imported them into pixelmator and then drew over them to get outlines for a front and side view that could be used in blender as reference images.

Going on an adventure

Kitty cat in a box plane chasing down those pigeons.

Initial sculpt of my cat, who considerately modelled for me by sitting on my desk (and my keyboard, and in front of my monitor)

Retopology of the sculpt

some variations of facial expressions

Some variations of cat colouring

Sloth

The true mother of invention

Contrary to the common expression about necessity if you think about it most inventions are not for things that are needed but are instead to make our lives easier, I mean I doubt a fitness fanatic invented the remote control.

This is the second creature that I’ve formed using the sculpt tools instead of just vertex modelling, the overall body I’m happy with but I think the face could have been better, this one is actually the second attempt at modelling it. I think at some point I’ll either re-visit the idea of a sloth or some other type of furry creature and try to create something with a bit more character.

The hair(s) are probably the bit that took the longest to reach a point where I was happy with it, I knew I wanted a thick look to it (at least for the body) but there was alot of back and forth tweaking the base and tip thickness, especially for around the face. The node setup for the hair also went over a fair few iterations, the final version made use of the hair info node and mixing two hair bsdf nodes (mixing transmission and  reflection setups).