The Panda/Zebra - Part 1

I thought the panda would be the most difficult stamp to do but I was very wrong. The panda was quite easy apart from the features on the panda's face. I used many techniques which I learnt in tutorials and practiced on other stamps.

I used the picture I drew below to create the basic shape of the panda. I put this as a material on a plane and shaped a sphere around the shape of the template. I looked up many images on the Internet to get a good idea of the rough shape of the panda's head and looked into ways i could make it look more realistic.















I created the main shape of the panda first without it's eyes or ears. This was very difficult as I did not know exactly what a pandas face looked like except for in images I had seen on the Internet. I Made eye sockets where I knew the black eye patches would be placed and I pulled out the nose. I also flattened the width of the head because a pandas head is not perfectly round. I used 'edit poly' modifier for this and the 'soft selection' tool. I also used 'TurboSmooth' modifier which enabled the head to have a smooth head shape. Another tool which helped me during this was the 'symmetry' tool. This allowed me to cut the head in half to make it equal on both sides and make sure that anything that I changed on one side of the head, would naturally change on the other side to make it symmetrical.














I rendered the image at this point to see what that head shape would look like after a render. The image below shows how it looked.

















I then wanted to make the features of the face to make it look more realistic as the render above looked kind of creepy and blank and I was unsure about the shape of the head and how it would actually turn out. I then wanted to make the eye patches so I used a sphere and reshaped it using the 'edit poly' modifier. It was very difficult to do this as I was simply just going by an image and what I thought it might look like. I then used the 'symmetry' tool to make an identical eye patch on the other side of the panda's head. The ears were created in a similar way as the eyes and were very difficult to place on the panda's head because it was unsure of their exact position.














This is the panda at this stage. I rendered the image to see what it would look like. It has been suggested that from a distance it looks slightly like Jack from the film, The Nightmare Before Christmas. I was not happy with this comment for obvious reasons so I knew i had to fix the eyes somehow to make it look different.