“Opossum Party” Low Poly Modeling Project

This project was a final project for a digital art and design class I took in Fall 2022. For the project, we were given complete creative freedom to choose whatever kind of project we wanted, and to plan it out and execute it accordingly. I had been been seeing a few different people showing up on my social media who exclusively modeled low poly animals, which really fascinated me and I personally also thought they were pretty adorable! As a result, I wanted to go ahead and try my hand at it. I had decided I would create a low poly scene with a few different animals within it that told some sort of short story.

I chose to go with a really fun prompt, modeling a small opossum celebrating his birthday with his parents by the local garbage can, complete with a small birthday cake with a candle. I modeled everything in the scene, and used basic Maya materials such as blinn and phong to color different parts of the scene. For the opossums, I used size to differentiate their ages. Of the two parent opossums, I chose to make one wider and heftier while making the other one smaller and thinner, to differentiate between the mom and the dad. For the ground and the walls, I used seamless concrete and brick textures accordingly. Finally, to complete the scene, I used an HDRI to add dim lighting to give the illusion of hanging out in a back alley at night.

My first step was looking into other artists’ interpretation of low poly models. It was actually pretty difficult to locate very many examples of low poly modeling, especially for animals, so I made sure to save as many examples as I could find that I felt might be helpful for myself later on. When researching, I decided that I wanted to model one of my favorite animals: opossums.

After researching, I sketched out the potential ideas and placements for my opossum scene. I had decided to create a scene with a smaller, seemingly younger opossum surrounded by two larger, seemingly older opossums. The smaller opossum would be centered and have a small slice of cake in front of him, to make it seem like they were all celebrating his birthday. I was also playing around with the idea of giving all the opossums small party hats, but I ended up scrapping that idea in the end.

The final step was to bring my ideas into Maya and model each of the characters, props, and then set up the final scene. In the end, I chose to use the smoothing tool with my opossum models rather than keeping them blocky, as I felt it made them look much cuter and more opossum-like.