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Minion collectibles designed in Blender

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Collectibles are an important marketing tool for supermarkets. In the Netherlands, one of the largest supermarket chains, the 'Plus', is currently giving away Minion models that you can stick on a pencil. They already invaded my house, and I was pleasantly surprised to hear that designer Metin Seven designed them in Blender! Let's hear his story.

Metin writes:

Some time ago I was approached by a toy / gift production company I design for every now and then. They asked me if I would be interested in 3D modeling for a project involving the famous Minions characters from the Despicable Me animations. That sounded like a fun project, so I took it on. The company also asked me to participate in the project management, and so I did too.

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The aim was the creation of a collection of toy designs related to a new movie centered around Despicable Me’s Minions, to be used for a Dutch supermarket chain promotion campaign (the Dutch Plus supermarkets). The toys needed to fit on the end of a pencil, like a huge eraser tip. To achieve this the hollow models had to include a narrow part that fits around a pencil, while the toy figure itself could be larger, surrounding the narrow part.

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I used the NURBS / solids tool MoI 3D for the modeling, because it has a very user-friendly workflow for hard surface modeling, and also offers industrial-standard unit accuracy.

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After the modeling was finished, I exported the models as Obj, and imported them in Blender, to use Cycles for the renderings. I mixed a diffuse BSDF and glossy BSDF with a Fresnel falloff node for realistic reflections, and mixed in a Translucent node for some Sub-Surface Scattering effect in the plastic material, because actual SSS took too long to render for the production speed requirements of this project.

The job was quite hectic, and I couldn’t manage it on my own, so we decided to attract two assistant 3D modelers to get the job done in time.

When the modeling was finished, the files and reference renderings were sent to the producer’s production division in China, where the preparation of the models for actual production was performed, and production started.

During the months that followed I had to keep the project a secret. First the movie was announced, and subsequently the Plus supermarket campaign started. As I’m a bit of a solitary who doesn’t watch television anymore and doesn’t read mainstream news anymore (predominantly design, tech and science news), I had missed that the campaign had already become a success. So when I posted on Facebook that I did a toy design job a while ago for Plus supermarkets involving the Minions, I was promptly buried under an avalanche of replies from parents whose children were already madly in love with the toy figures. And that’s the best reward a toy designer can get. :)

You’re invited to my portfolio site for an impression of my work.

All the best,

Metin Seven

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About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

1 Comment

  1. hahaha fantastic work!

    While you know NURBS look maybe also into Blender and Fusion 360.

    Fusion 360 can load the OBJ mesh turn into T-Splines (like subdivision surface just perfectly smooth) and T-Splines on the fly can be changed into NURBS.

    Meaning in Blender you can sculpt all the details fast with sub-d and in Fusion bring all the mesh data over and then add fillets and such to finish the design.

    Claas

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