The Reverend Kibbles
The Reverend Kibbles was born during a D&D campaign I ran. An old roommate and I came up with the idea for a televangelist character chaotic evil character. Tom, my roommate, decided to make him half rat, half bat, and half gnome. There is an insane amount of story behind The Reverend Kibbles, everything from his wings being burned by a mare goddess because he converted her son to his cause to him finding a culture of half gnome half horse wizards (the horse half, unfortunately, was on top causing a lot of balancing issues for them). His sword is the Rapier of Conversion which gives a small chance of converting anyone he hits with it to his cause. Anyways, the animation was made in my 3d Character Design class, we were asked to make a tin toy…I figured there was no one more suited to being immortalized into a tin toy than a televangelist gnome.
Method:
The concept pictures I found for this project were pretty varied, everything from bats and bones to pictures of the televangelist Benny Hinn (whom I based Kibbles face on loosely). From swords to hats. I had actually planned for his flame to be a spark generator with semi-transparent glass, but in the middle of making that I found a picture of a robot who shot flame…except the flame was just a two dimensional card sticking out from his hand. I really loved this so I scrubbed the flame I had been working on and modeled what’s currently there. The modeling was fairly varied, I used NURBS, Polygons, and Subdiv’s all for different things and for the first time really got into point by point touching up. The scarring on the side of his face started out as an error in Maya, but as I started fixing it I realized I like him having scars there a lot. So I took it back to the way it was and formed the problems into what the scars are now (it still took a lot of time to get the look I wanted, but I could tell from the garbled mess it started off being it would look good in the end). Finally, for the animation found videos of walking toys and emulated that. I tried to get it to look like he was just about to fall over with each step. The vibrations were fairly easy to do, but didn’t look right until I added more than average motion blur into it.
By the way, if you want The Reverend Kibbles on a shirt or a cutting board go here. I don’t make any money off of this. Also, let me know if you want a different phrase below him and I’ll do that also.