Story Zoobi Rigging Animation Tools Used Resources Used View video

COSC 3P98 - Zoobi Zoom

The idea for our main character, Zoobi Zoom, came when we were coming up with a mascot for one of our extra-curricular projects. We were originally going to use a robot for our animation but because of this mascot we came up with we decided Zoobi would be perfect to use instead.

Zoobi started as a simple sketch when we first came up with the mascot, and then for this animation project I decided to model him myself based on the original drawings. It was my first time ever modeling a 3D character so not only did I have to spend a lot of time familiarizing myself with the Blender program but I also went through many tutorials.

The technique I used was box-modeling after coming across a very useful box-modeling tutorial of a teddy bear, which had a similar sort of shape I wanted for Zoobi. When I first began I used a mirror tool so that I would only have to focus on one side him. Unfortunately I found that it would leave a strange crease down the middle. In particular I could not get the head to be oval shaped. Instead I began again and focused on creating the entire body and I figured I could then add the head afterwards by reshaping a sphere into an oval and then connecting it to the body. In the end attaching the head was problematic and we decided it was easier to just leave it separate from the body but put it close enough that it would hide the fact.

If time had permitted I would have liked to have started modeling Zoobi all over again because along the way I learned a fair amount about using Blender that would have helped me in the beginning. I would have liked to have tried starting with modeling his head and then extruding from that the rest of his body. Nonetheless I am pleased with how Zoobi turned out.

Then it came time to dress Zoobi up. I decided the best way to do that was to learn how to UV map. When it came to unwrapping the body I did so in the easiest way I could think of since the body isn't one simple shape. I cut the arms and legs at the points where I wanted the suit black and easily unwrapped them. I didn't concern myself with unwrapping the rest of his body nicely since it would also be one solid colour. Then i just had to export it, colour the image in Photoshop and then UV mapped the coloured image back onto Zoobi for the completed version.