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I believe that art is a journey. It is an endless exploration; a continuous foray into new territory, techniques, and ideas. It is about discovering and conveying the truth of both our outer and inner worlds.

Every project I work on is built upon what has come before. They draw upon all my previous experience. But, in addition, they always cover new ground. Every project stretches a little further than my comfort zone - sometimes much further. This stretch is an important opportunity to learn and grow. Like almost all my projects, “Just What I Needed” began as an interest in exploring something new. At my job I usually work on various visualizations that require realistic portrayals of people, machinery, and environments. There is often little room for the strange or exotic. This has naturally led to an interest in making something wild and fun for a change.

The gremlin in my image is the crystallization of that interest. He began as a desire to create a full CG cartoon character. I am not going to lie; this was a daunting task for me. Because there are only two people, including myself, on the 3D graphics team at my job, we necessarily must work on every aspect of the pipeline. However, this generalization leads to a distinct lack of specialization. While I have modeled, textured, rigged, animated, rendered and composited scenes, I rarely spend any great amount of time on any one aspect of the pipeline. This was a problem, because I really wanted my character to look good.

I began by looking through tons of references. I knew I wanted some kind of gremlin like character, but I had no idea what I wanted specifically. I finally found wonderful inspiration for the design of my gremlin’s head when I saw a concept sketch of a dragon named “Ziggy” by Bobby Chiu

I also used several images of the evil gremlin Stripe, from the Gremlins movie, in order to get a sense of the general shape of my model’s head. The first method I learned for modeling heads was from a tutorial by Dave “The Hobbit Guy” Komorowski . It worked great for me the first time I tried it and has continued to be my favorite approach. I admit that it was an interesting change to apply this method to my gremlin, though, as I only had a decent front view to work from and Dave’s approach begins with a side view. But that’s all part of the journey.

I started by roughing in the model before I began to add the more intricate details such as the inner mouth, eyelids, and wrinkles around the eyes and throat. I try to only add detail as I need it in order to keep the geo as light as possible. I also use Maya for most of my work and I take advantage of the incredibly powerful smooth preview option and constantly switch between the rough and smoothed views of my model to see how it is coming along.

When I started, I didn’t have a clear idea of what I wanted the body to look like. I expected that once I had the head looking decent I would have a good feel for the body as well. To help me feel this out I did several test renders of the finished model of the head in order to get a sense of the full character.

Having mostly finished the head, I realized I now had a good idea of what I wanted. Because he was a cartoon character, and had a huge grin, I settled on a disproportionately small body with big hands and feet as well as a tail. I decided that simple finger and toe structures, complete with stubby claws, would best compliment his teeth and horns. I didn’t have any reference when I began modeling the body, just a relatively vague idea of relationships among his limbs and a desire for the shape to fit his head.

For modeling his body I started with a simple cube and began to add detail where I needed it. I am not usually overly concerned about the flow of edges or eliminating triangles at this point, but instead try to concentrate on blocking in the overall shape and getting it to fit the idea in my head. One thing I do try to keep in mind as I work is anatomy. Given the fairly detailed structure of the gremlin’s head I knew it was important that I make the body match.