Halloween Cat Final

Halloween challenge submission! 

Total tris: 21,436 
Texture resolution: 4K 

Workflow: I sketched out a concept for a little character inspired by vintage Halloween cat decorations. I had a lot of big ideas for animation, but not the chops to pull it off, so I simplified and then simplified some more. I used Wayne's ball rig video to create a rig that controls the pumpkin, the cat head, and the ears like three connected balls (because everything is a bouncing ball anyways) and then got about halfway through animating it and realized it was like 5 minutes till midnight, so it is what it is.

For the textures, I followed the workflow from Relic ( and they ate my soul in the process. Are you wondering why my pumpkin is shiny? Me too ) except that I modeled the low poly version first and then spent an inordinate amount of time trying to reverse engineer a high poly version for the baking. Lesson learned.

I used Instamat for the textures, though there are a couple little details like the pompom on the hat that fell through the cracks and didn't make it to the texture maps. 

For the cat's face, I intended to create several expressions to animate or at least flip through, but I ran out of time. I painted the texture for the eyes and mouth in Photoshop.

I got a late start (just real life getting in the way) and chewed on this till literally the last minute. There’s a lot that didn’t measure up to the vision I had and it’s got problems, but it did turn out pretty cute.

Bonus image: my (real) Halloween pumpkins