I created the Guavaroo character back in 2006 as a means to promote character design and animation at the company i'm currently working at. We had t-shirts printed up (7 colours no less!) and I thought it would make a great vinyl character, so I began the steps to see this realized in a physical 3d form.
First, I built and rigged the character in Maya. I then sent an .obj file to
3d Art to Part and received a relatively inexpensive and nicely detailed - though rough - prototype.
The prototype model then went thru another stage of refinement, with a new mold made, a wax version cast and then smoothed out by the talented toy sculptor
Peter Kelley. A revised mold was created from this cleaned up sculpt (individual pieces now segmented with pin and registered plugs and sockets) and three versions cast in polyurethane.
As evident in this 3d-render, the refined sculpt matches the CG geometry pretty closely.
After this great amount of progress, the project hit the back burner and has been sitting in limbo for the past year 1/2. I'm now in the process of resurrecting it. I'll be painting up two of the copies (keeping one clean for future mold-making) and seeing if we can't move on to the next stage of getting these roto-cast in vinyl.
Inner ear infections are NOT fun. This is the third time as an adult that I've had vertigo, and this spell had me out of commission for 4 consecutive days.
