My beloved Honey, a cat with a ginger back and white belly, sits on the carpet with her head and left paw sticking through an empty picture frame.

A beautiful picture

This is a tribute to my beautiful Honey, who tragically passed away in 2023. She was and is the light of my life, the sweetest cat ever, my baby. I’ll never stop missing her, but I count myself lucky to have known her at all, because the love I have for her can never die.

The model is based on one of the best photographs we have of Honey, when she decided that she wanted to be involved in the process of framing pictures and inserted herself into the situation with her typical delicate curiosity.

The original photo of Honey sticking her head through the empty picture frame.

Model breakdown

WIPs

My process for modelling was to draw outlines with connected vertices in the X and Y projections, then start filling in faces between them until we get a rough cat shape. It took some trial and error, but I am actually really happy with how it turned out!

The head I modelled with the mirror modifier to get it symmetrical, then applied it before working on the body.

WIP: low poly cat's head. It is missing eyes and is untextured.

I needed a few passes to get the head proportions correct.

WIP: low poly cat. It is untextured and the proportions are slightly different to the finished model.

I painted the textures using a combination of Krita and Blender’s built-in texture painter. This is actually the first time that I’ve used the blender painting tools, and I have to say, they are really good for putting down blocks of colour before taking the texture into a proper art program for refinement. Usually I have loads of grief trying to line things up at the edges of UV islands, but this approach trivialises that problem.

WIP: low poly cat with some rough texture work.

Though some of the light and shadow is manually painted on, I also baked an Ambient Occlusion map in Blender to make self-shadowing a bit easier. If you have an AO texture that ramps between white and black, you can set it as a “multiply” layer in your art program and get instant shadows over your albedo texture.

WIP: low poly cat with more detailed textures.

Alternate view

This model is only intended to be seen from the front, so I put less effort into the back. Still, I tried to aim for accuracy if not precision because what’s the point of working in 3D if you only ever look at one side of something?

This probably sounds boastful, but I cannot get over how accurate I’ve made the back of Honey’s head. That might sound like an odd thing to single out, but I am very familiar with this view because she liked to sit on my lap facing away from me. Her head was a perfect place to plant kisses.

Also, check out that lush rug! It’s generated using Blender’s hair particle system, which was something I’d never touched before today!

A rear view of Honey's model.

Wireframe

The model of Honey has 310 vertices, 84 of which are her eyes.

Wireframe of Honey's model. Because it is very low poly, there's a lot of negative space. Most detail is centred on the head.

Credits

With thanks to Keith333, whose carpet textures I used for the environment.

Carpet texture - Red: I recoloured this to brown for use as the carpet.
Fabric - Green carpet: I recoloured this to grey for the rug.