Hey everyone, today I'm going to show you how I made this in Blender. Like always, let's get started with the mesh. First, delete the default cube with X and then Shift A to create a cube. Add a subdivision modifier with Ctrl 1. and increase the increment and apply the modifier.
Now tab into edit mode. Scale the sphere into an oval shape. To make the bottom wider than the top, press 1 to go to the front view.
Change to wireframe mode and turn on proportional editing. You can scroll up or down to change the radius. Now select several surfaces at the bottom, making sure that you are set to individual origin and press E. To extrude out the legs, I added another subdivision modifier. In object mode, right-click to Shade Smooth.
Create another cube for the ears. Keep it separate from the main body since we won't be adding any physics to it. Subdivide it, and in edit mode, scale it into shape with S.
and move it into shape with G. Press Shift D to duplicate the other ear. Now we can parent this ear to the body. Select the body and tab into edit mode.
Select one or three points where the ear is, then select the ear in the side panel. Press Ctrl P to parent. Now do the same for the other ear. Now the ear is attached to those three points.
Shift A to create another cube for the tail, again subdividing it. Then extrude the tail out in edit mode, and press Ctrl R to create some loop cuts. Now move it into shape and scale out the tip a little to make it puffy. Right click to Shade Smooth.
Later, when animating, I also decided to add some more lumpy features to the tail, where I selected a section of the tail and extruded it out. Adjust it some more to achieve a better effect. You won't see this change until in later clips.
And then we parent the tail to the body. Again, select the body and tab into edit mode, and select one point this time. Then select the tail. Press Ctrl P to parent. Create a cube, scale it down, and then scale it up on the z-axis.
Go into edit mode, bevel it with Command B, and scale the end down a little. Duplicate the chopstick. Now let's create a plane for the ground.
Move the cat above the plane a little. Let's add collision in physics for the ground and the chopsticks. Then add the cloth physics for the body. Let's adjust the setting a little bit so it doesn't collapse. This is a final setting I had.
I decreased the speed multiplier, increased the mass, decreased tension and compression under damping. Turned on pressure with pressure increased to 3 and fluid density to 0.5. The pressure is used to keep the cloth from collapsing on itself.
Feel free to play around with these settings. Now let's pick this blob up. Go into edit mode and select the surfaces that will be grabbed. Go to data under the vertex group, create a new group, and name it pin.
Now hit Assign. You can also select the edge surfaces, lower the weight a little, and assign it. This way, when we pick it up, the bend will be more gradual.
Click Select to select all assigned surfaces. Then press Ctrl-H to create a hook. Make sure that the hook modifier is at the very top.
Also make sure that the subdivision is below the cloth modifier, as we don't want to overly subdivide the mesh. Then going back to Physics, under Shape, choose the Vertex Group, just made. Now if we press space to play the animation the mesh will follow the hook around. Press I to key in this location in the timeline. Move to a different frame and move the location of the empty.
You might see something like this happen if you press play, I have no idea why. But to fix this, make sure you're starting the animation from the zeros frame. If that doesn't work, select the body, tab into edit mode, and tab back to object mode. Now we might as well animate the chopsticks too. I'm also moving the keyframes for the hook forward a little to let the body settle on the ground before picking it up.
I'm using auto keyframing here to make this easier. This way every time anything is moved, a keyframe will be made. Now to make this drop, we need to unpin the vertex group during animation. Going back to Edit Mode and a new Vertex group, name it Unpin with no weights assigned. Now let's add a Vertex Weight Mix modifier.
Select Pin for A, then select Unpin for B. Change Vertex Set to All. Now by changing the Mix mode from Add to Replace, we can switch from Pin and Unpin.
You can click this little circle thing to key in the frame. Change from Add to Replace and key in another frame. Also make sure that this modifier is above the Cloth modifier. Now moving on to animating the ears and tail. Let's bake the cloth animation so there's no weird jittery stuff every time changing a frame.
Make sure the animal add-on is turned on in preference. Select the tail and go into edit mode. Press N to bring up the side panel.
You should see animal there under animation. Check location and press insert key. Now all the locations of the selected points will be saved relative to the object's origin.
Now just pull the tail into different shapes and save their locations in the timeline. And then I added a sweeping motion by rotating the entire tail from left to right. Later, I duplicated this motion and then added a little motion to the hook like this. By the way, I also increased the length of the animation here and also in physics under cache.
Note that you have to delete the bake first. Now just do the same for the ear by moving it around and inserting a key. Change the viewport and create a sun. In Output, under Shadow, increase Cube and Cascade size to get a more crisp shadow.
Change from the Timeline to the Shader Editor. Create a new material, Shift-A to create the Shader to RGB node, and a Color Ramp, set to Constant. Change the color of the Color Ramp, Select the other parts of the mesh, shift select the body last, and press ctrl L to link all materials. For the chopsticks, I copied the material already made and changed the color to black. Add the material to the other one by selecting the material under the drop-down.
I added a glass-like material to the ground by creating a new material, decreasing the alpha and setting blend and shadow to alpha blender and alpha hashed. And then I'm going to add some more details with texture painting. Don't worry, it's very easy. Instead of the conventional texture painting, I'm going to paint one material onto another. Select the ear and copy the material.
Then select the node we just made and duplicate it with Shift D. Create a Mix Shader node and plug the two material outputs into Shader. Change the color of the bottom material. This will be the material that gets painted on.
Place the cursor on the left corner until a little plus sign appears. Then click and drag to bring up another panel. Change that panel to UV Editor.
Tab into Edit Mode. Select everything with A and press U to Smart UV Project. Now change to Texture Paint. At the top, click on the Texture slot and add a new texture.
Set the color to black. Then click OK. This creates a new node to the material we made earlier.
Move this node to connect this to the Mix shader. Now just start painting. You can adjust the strength and radius of the brush, or press F to adjust the radius.
To use the Erase tool, hold down Control. I also changed the viewport for clearer visuals. Now just do the same for the other ear, by first unwrapping its UV, and then I added the same material to it, although the colors are flipped.
it still kind of works. Moving on to the background, change from object to world, create a light path and another background. Connect everything with a mix shader. The first background controls the shadow and the second one controls the color. Shift A to create a grease pencil and select Collection Line Art.
This adds a collection grease pencil layer, and material automatically. You can adjust the radius of the strokes. Add a camera in the scene and move it to view with Ctrl-Alt-Numpad-0, or go to the camera with Numpad-0.
Make sure to change the edge type by unchecking Crease and Intersection, and changing Contour to Individual Silhouette. Notice that the outline looks a little broken when we are not in camera view, so we can press N and under View Lock select Camera to View to always align the camera with the current view. Let's go back to the timeline. In Data, we can add new layers to the grease pencil object. There's the layer made by default, which is the black outline.
We can create a new layer for drawing the face features and uncheck the Use Light. In Material, You can see the default black color made by default. We can use that for drawing or create a brand new one like I'm doing. Go into draw mode. I'll be starting with drawing on the surface.
Change the top from origin to surface and change the offset to 0.01. Before we can start drawing, there are a few optional settings. Under the brush setting, you can adjust how much you want the brush to be simplified. This will lead to cleaner drawings.
Under post-processing, The change simplifies to 0.05. Then turn on stabilize stroke and change the radius to 10. Set the radius to the same as the outline. I also unchecked the use pressure of the pen. Now let's start drawing.
Let's start with the eyes. I am just randomly drawing an eye as a placeholder for now since I'll later be animating it to something else. You can also tab into edit to change up anything you don't like. Then for the whiskers, change from surface to 3D cursor and place the cursor into the face. You can turn on use pressure to get this effect or create straighter whiskers without it.
Of course we can't forget the mouth. Also make sure to check in front since during animation the grease pencil can disappear behind the mesh. Then I tabbed into Edit mode and selected everything with A. After that, press P to separate them. You can also remove the modifier for this grease pencil object.
Now select each part and separate them again with P in Edit mode. Then parent them to each part of the face like we did to the tail and ears. Select the body and tab into Edit mode.
Select the grease pencil and parent it to three points with Ctrl-P. Now they are following the body when we are playing the animation. Now we animate the eyes.
There are two ways that I'll be showing you guys. The first is the good old drawing frame by frame. Luckily we don't have to do that many since everything is already moving on its own. Let's select one of the eyes and go into draw mode. Make sure to turn on auto keyframing.
You can also enable onion skin at the top. This will make the last and next keyframe visible. Note that this only works in the solid viewport shading.
Now just move to a different frame on the timeline and Start drawing. The drawing will be automatically stored. The other method is interpolation. where you change the shape of the grease pencil in a different frame and generate the transition frames in between.
In edit mode, I selected the oval and moved it down a little. This generated a new keyframe in the timeline. Now to create the transition, select the grease pencil and make sure to be in between the two keyframes.
At the top, under grease pencil, select interpolate sequence or just press command shift E. This will create a new grease pencil position at every frame. Now I just worked on the rest of the animation. I changed the viewport to continue drawing the animation scene by scene. For the last part, I used interpolation after moving the grease pencil around with proportional editing turned on since this needed a smoother transition.
After that, just repeat these steps for the other eye. And that's pretty much it to this tutorial. I hope you found it helpful. If so, please leave a like and hit that subscribe button. See you next time!
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