From the unusual and sometimes downright bizarre creative mind of yours truly, springs a most unlikely superhero. Influenced by a recent obsession with blender video tutorials, my odd little guy seems to have sprung from and be the result of several totally unrelated videos that I have watched over the last few months.
I didn’t set out to make a character, because quite honestly I’m not really good at character modeling.
“Jack” started innocently enough as just a pumpkin that I modeled Halloween night. But silly me, I was so enamored with my happy little pumpkins, I just kept opening the blend file and playing with them.
Before I knew it, I had modeled a face on one of them and not just your typical jack o’ lantern face either. I had actually managed to give him a funny little face.
Well obviously, now I needed to model a body. You can’t have a bodiless head floating about. Well, okay, yes you can, but my creative muse insisted that “Jack” needed a body, so he got one.
And since I had recently finished watching the “Johnny Blender” tutorials, he kind of ended up with a superhero type body. Although I obviously altered proportions and body shape a little, well okay, a lot. Most superheros don’t have little pot bellies or arms that are twice as long as their legs.
Then just to drive myself more than mildly nuts, although I started him in 2.49, I continued and finished him up 2.50 alpha 0 and successive test builds.
Nothing like an actual project to make you learn a new version of a program, so consequently, finishing Jack took far longer than it should have, due to me stumbling around looking for features and tools that I knew should be there, but couldn’t quite find.
I’m not overly known for logical thinking, so previous versions of Blender with their “here and there” placement of tools actually made perfect sense to me and 2.50 leaves me looking and trying to guess where things are. But 2.50 grows on you very quickly, so my next project should go much faster. Well until I get to the texturing stage, I seemed to have the most trouble remembering their new locations.
Now what was I talking about, oh yeah, here are the front, side and back views of my little superhero, “Jack”. There are still some things that I’d like to tweak and fix, (the topology around his nose comes to mind), but he is finished for now. I’m thinking he needs a rig, and David Ward just released some videos on a rig that looked easy enough for me to not only build but actually use.
And I will get right on that, just as soon as I start and complete a Valentine’s day project. Which I can’t discuss here yet, on the off chance that my husband actually reads my blog.
Yeah, not overly likely, but I’m not taking any chances. 
