3D CHARACTER ARTIST
GARRETT KITCHENMASTER
Poodle Character
Original concept by: Dandy
Inspired by Zootopia's distinctive art direction, I created a poodle character based on the artist Dandy’s concept. My goal was to capture Disney’s signature balance of realism and stylization.
This project allowed me to apply techniques I’ve learned through various courses at Gnomon, including Character Sculpture 1 & 2, Maya Modules, Character Modeling & Sculpting, Stylized Character Creation, and Demo Reel.
I began the process by researching artists and studios who have used animal characters within their films. I used these reference images to better understand how to execute the overall concept.
Blocking out the character’s proportions and sculpting finer details in ZBrush, focusing on shape language while maintaining anatomical believability. I then retopologized the mesh in Maya to create clean topology.
Texturing was done in Substance Painter, where I developed layered materials to enhance depth and stylization that would be applied to both the model and fur.
Although the original concept did not contain clothing, I wanted to add clothes to better embody the character's personality.
While figuring out what clothes to give to the character, I worked on keeping the overall aesthetic that Dandy had originally created.
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The clothing I chose was closely related to the character's original fur placement. The colors I chose were selected to better represent the excitable and bubbly expression that the character has.
Both the pants and the jacket were created from scratch, in Marvelous Designer.
Finally, I crafted the full fur groom in Maya’s XGen, where I carefully balanced artistic flair with natural movement to complement the character’s design, once again, taking real-world and stylized aesthetics into consideration.
