Art Spotlight: Grog the Adventurer

Animation Student Kai Müri describes how he used Blender and Substance Painter to adapt a draw-this-in-your-style challenge entry into 3D.

Kai writes:

I am always looking for new sources of inspiration and challenges to learn and improve my skills. Last month on Instagram I came across the “draw-this-in-your-style-challenge” from the incredibly talented t.m.wilson. A submitted artwork for this challenge immediately caught my interest. eugenedrawingfreaks drew this cool frog character. I love the pose and the cartoony style of the artwork and I found it a challenge to translate the 2D design into the third dimension. Except for the texturing part in Substance Painter, I used Blender for practically everything in this project. Blender’s realtime render engine EEVEE came especially in handy because it allowed me to work fast and not worry about long render times. Speaking of saving time, I gave myself two Saturdays of time to get this project done from start to finish. On the first day, I planned to do the modeling and UV work and one week later the texturing and lighting. With the time limit, I wanted to challenge myself to get a project done quickly without getting lost in detailing work. The goal was that after those two days I would have a decent rendered image, a turntable, and a model that I could upload to Sketchfab.