‘Tis a lesson you should heed:
Try, try, try again.
If at first you don’t succeed,
Try, try, try again.
William Edward Hickson
3D modeling is far from the easiest thing to do. From acquiring enough (with enough often ranging from 50 to 100) usable photos of mascots to dealing with modeling mishaps, creating the best models of our mascots has certainly been a journey. But as great digital humanists do, we powered through these difficulties and tried again and again to achieve the best results. Thus, we present here a compilation of our favorite “failures” that brought smiles to our faces amidst the struggles we faced to create.
1. Carleton’s Own Headless Horseman
The Headless Health Promotion Cow
Strangely, whenever we finished the “build mesh” step for the cow model, the top half would go missing. We suspected that this was due to the different lightings in our initial set of cow photos.
2. The Journey to Creating Schiller
Problem: Schiller is MIA
When first setting out to create a 3D model of Schiller, we stumbled upon a crucial problem. Where exactly was Schiller? At first, we didn’t have Schiller on hand and could only use several sparse photos of the bust found online, so we searched for a program that could take one photo and turn it into a 3D model. This search proved to be rather futile though in that the sole website (smoothie 3D) that was said to have this capability appears to be defunct now with a pop-up asking for donations of euros blocking any of the site’s functions. So we ended up trying out Blender with the FaceBuilder add-on.
