I spent 9-ish months modeling this quirked-up cat boy 🥀

I forgot what exactly caused this (either following someone who was experimenting with 3D? Or watching a video essay on 3D Youtubers). But in 2025 I decided to sit down and teach myself how make 3D character models. Nix was started in June of 2025... then worked on sporadically & finished in March 2026...

On one hand, I feel I should be easy on myself. This is a hobby project I did to teach myself how to use Blender and didn't have a deadline. I'm still new to 3D. Plus 2025 (especially the back half of the year) was rough for me, so a lot of projects ended up in a similar state. But 9 months for a single model is a terrible turn-around time.

I want to recap on working on him & some of issues I ran into (motivational or otherwise) as a 'project post-mortem'

June 2025 - Starting off

Nix was started after I finished a model of ALT from Pop'n music. The modeling part itself took a few days since I was already gaining a grasp on low-poly box modeling at this point.

The most difficult part for me here iirc was making his hands, which I followed a tutorial for (3D low-poly hand tutorial by Baú Maker) and figuring out how I wanted to model his clothes.

I paused after this point for a few reasons;

• The next part was UV unwrapping and texturing. I hate texturing. More on that later.
• I was doing Artfight that year & wanted to save my energy for drawing attacks, especially since I use it to refresh my art examples.
• Late July-Early August had some upsetting events relating to art & hobbies
• I was preparing for a solo trip in August
• I picked up a sewing project for a small doll of Nix, which I have a post about (Nat's Nuigurumi Arc - Part 1)

September 2025 - The UV mines

After wrapping up the Nix doll, I went back to this model

Like I said earlier, Texturing is my least favorite part of 3D modeling. UV-unwrapping can be tedious, but at least I'm working entirely in Blender here. I still haven't found a workflow I liked for texturing.

Blender's built in texturing tools are limited, so I do my texture work in Krita. This means jumping between two programs with different control schemes with no instant feedback, as well as having to drag out my large, uncooperative drawing monitor (TL:DR; it has issues staying on & is clunky to get setup). And on top of that issues with the UVs and Model may crop up that I then have to go back and fix. Not fun.

After several passes I ended up taking a break from this again until January. iirc this break was a mix of being annoyed with unwrapping, as well as picking up another sewing project.

Also I don't know where to put this but at one point Nix was going to have a toon shader, but I removed it for now since I couldn't get it working with his face & didn't like how it behaved in the rendered view.

January 2026 - New OS, same Nix

Here you can see part of the scrapped toon shader.

The rest of 2025 was spent on sewing projects, and I also swapped to Linux in December & had to do re-setup all my programs. Blender was one of the last ones.

This pass was Rigging. I don't have much to say on making the skeleton outside of I gave him an FK/IK switch for his legs. More options for posing & all. Weight painting was tedious & there's still clipping issues with some poses. But at least unlike texturing I got to do it entirely in Blender

March 2026 - 2D face rig

I picked him back up this month since I want to cull off some unfinished projects. The final part was making a face rig. For this I used 2D textures on floating planes (think: Miis). This way it's easier to expand on or swap out parts as needed, and I can keep the main mesh low-poly

I used Poole's 2D eye rig tutorial for the eyes & brows, and used what I learned to build the mouth (no automatic lip-syncing, but given I'm likely just posing him for photos it's not necessary right now)

As of right now, he has 4 eye shapes, 3 irises, 5 eyebrows, and 31 mouth shapes. + everything but the base eye shapes are moveable. Tons of expressions to work with.

The good thing is it's pretty easy to add on more as needed. Just add more images to the image sequence.

On why this took 9 months...

...Yeah even for a beginner this is way too long for one model.

My ALT model took around one month give or take some dips? And I made several other models between them.

I think this loops back to ADHD. I talked about it in my post about reading (Trying to like Reading again). But as a TL:DR it results in a lot of hobby stuff being 'fixate on it for 5 days straight and then not touch it again for 3+ months' whether I want it to or not.

While there were other models I made between starting and finishing Nix, These kinds of motivational dips have been devastating for my personal projects, leading towards an overwhelming amount of unfinished things that may or may not get worked on again. I'm trying my best to cull off older projects as I can, but it's hard to resist the allure of a shiny new idea. So for now I'll try to limit new things to stuff I can do really quickly.

Really, this has been an uphill battle for years & poor mental health hasn't helped much. This decade, especially after graduating college has been difficult & I feel like focus issues & motivational dips have had gotten worse as a result. There's been a lot of demoralizing things in terms of art (to the point I pulled out of pursuing art as a career), and constant anxiety spikes results in a ton of moments where I'm too anxious to work.

9 months for one character is not a good turn around, even for personal art. If every personal project has massive gaps like the ones I had here I'll probably have... idk 10 3d models like him in my life time? That downtime didn't contribute to quality, so most of it (except the July-August break) felt like wasted time.

Plus from an educational standpoint, I ended up forgetting a lot during that period & if it wasn't for my notes I probably would've been completely lost when picking the project back up again. I guess some level of forgetting is natural, but having it happen multiple times within the same project gets annoying.

Mental health, I don't know what I can do right now (most of the things causing it to decline are far out of my control...) But I think right now I'll at least work on resisting taking on larger projects until I finish existing ones.

Future Tweaks?

Back to the model, I'm considering him done since the main rigging & texture is there & ready to use. But I might add these later if I feel like it

• Fix jacket clipping issues - tidy-ness & better posing. Reducing them was a struggle, but I'd like to find ways to avoid it at all in the future if I do end up using him for stuff
• Other outfits - ex; Original design, Arkadia, Canonballers, AUs
• Tidier Rig controls - making them neat isn't too necessary since he's likely only gonna be used by me, but it'd make it easier to tell which does what, as well as easier to grab controls as needed
• Toon shader - was scrapped due to not liking how it behaved on his model, but if I find a method I like It'd be cool to try again
• Making a template out of the face rig - Mainly to make rigging future models faster. Will be helpful for when motivational dips strike again

And now what?

idk lmao

Like I said earlier, I mostly made him to teach myself character modeling & rigging. So I don't have any ideas outside of maybe posing him for a quick screenshot.

I do want to continue experimenting with 3D, maybe make models for Siren and Eiri so I can pose all 3 of them in scenes, or start tackling my OCs. But again, don't want to take on too many larger projects right now.

I don't know how to end this so I guess I'll end with some more proper renders of Nix.