A memory from my childhood came to mind when my friends and I used to climb the berry trees in my neighborhood. Their sweet, colorful berries would appear every spring, red and white, but I preferred the red ones because they were sweeter. One of us would focus on collecting the berries, another would eat them on the spot without even washing them, and one wasn’t interested in anything except climbing to the highest point of the tree then struggling to get back down. That memory became the core idea behind three hamsters with those same personalities.
Gathering the references
I felt nostalgic then excited about the idea so i started gathering the references of the colors, the composition and textures.
Sketches
When I had a faint visual in my mind, I did a quick thumbnail sketch with ink and watercolor to lay the foundation for the piece.
Then I took that and developed it further digitally in Procreate.
After finishing the concept, here we are in the 3D viewport, trying to make my 3D piece look as close as possible to the original concept. I won’t lie I was intimidated, but I decided to focus on each step without overthinking the next ones.
Modeling
So here is the modeling. I tried to match the poses from my sketch, but I made a mistake that affected the rigging later on.
Texturing
I used the Voronoi texture combined with noise and tweaked it to create large patches, similar to how watercolor behaved in the concept.
I ran into a problem with a heavy viewport when using the Line Art modifier, so I had to search for an alternative way to create the outlines . I found a method that was a bit tricky with geometry nodes, but it gave me a lighter viewport and variation in line thickness as if it were drawn by hand with pressure.
Then adding the details with the Grease Pencil
Rigging
This is where I faced a problem I hadn’t placed the characters in a T pose or centered them on the grid. I tried several times to rig the characters using automatic weights, but it didn’t work. I couldn’t even manually weight paint the rig. After many attempts, I decided to learn how to animate using shape keys for the first time, and I’m really glad I did.
Composing
Added some real-time paper texture to the viewport, and I found a way to do it that gave really good results. Here’s how i did it using Blender’s Compositor.
Final Results
Roles
Character design, Modeling, Shading, Lighting and Character Animation
Software
3D Blender