Boot Hat

Here's Some of my more recent stuff.

This character, for obvious reasons, is named Boot Hat. (Mostly because he hasn't needed a better name yet.)  At the time I was doing workshops at high schools around the maritimes and needed a character to work with.

The tough part was the character had to be interesting enough to capture the attention of an impossible, inattentive group of high school students; but simple enough to model in an hour. That is, of course, impossible; but I came pretty close.

I started with this sketch, which I cleaned up in photoshop.

I modelled the whole character, saving incrementally after completing each major step or section. I cleaned up the files a little, and did the workshop like a cooking show. I would start in an empty scene, and block the character out as a cube. When I had shown enough of one step, I would open up the completed version from the list. This allowed me to jump ahead to a later point of the class was rowdy and inattentive, or jump to a part that was either more interesting or more informative, depending on the attitude of the class.

Eventually I got the hang of it, and when I found the time I polished the character up a bit, and can be seen here.

The story behind this guy, inasmuch as it exists, is that he`s a three-foot-tall warrior armed with elements from human society. He started one insomniac night when I realized, as you only can at 3 AM, what a fantastic hat a boot would make for a tiny little person. Note his pants; a pair of boxer shorts, his tunic; a torn basketball jersey, and his sword; half a pair of hedge shears (Thanks to my co-worker Dave Rigley for helping me come up with that.)

I am putting the finishing touches on a rig for him, which I`ll have a post about next week. At the moment I`m home for the weekend and have no access to my software, or any computers that can run it. Stay tuned for more interesting renders.

-alex