I’m working on modeling a reindeer. I’m starting my holiday project early so I can abandon it mid December instead of on Christmas Eve.

Modeling animals in Blender isn’t something that I’ve done a lot of. I typically create a pointless poorly lit scene or something for my twitch channel. Conveniently they have sharp lines and rely on either particle systems or camera movement for animation. Working on something organic that will need to be rigged is bit daunting.

To start my reindeer I used metaballs to get an organic look before converting it to a mesh and then editing it to look more reindeer-like. For the antlers I used a curve path and applied a bezier circle to the bevel (using ctrl+s to achieve the points on the tips). The particle system for the fur was tedious. Despite the fact I used vertex groups for where I wanted the fur the be it still continued to appear elsewhere. I ended up solving the issue by deleting a portion of the mesh and starting over but it really shouldn’t have been showing up there. Goodbye original hooves!

Overall I’m happy with the result. She looks like a cute needle felted critter. The legs are a bit awkward and the hooves/collar/saddle mesh and material need work but she isn’t too bad for a first attempt. The largest obstacle in this project will be the armature and rigging.