Let’s talk about the Carnaval ornament competition! I’ll try to share my process and inspiration a bit. The blog is perhaps a bit late considering carnaval happened two weeks ago… but now that I started this blog, I decided to give type it out after the fact. I’ll discuss the entries I created for the carnaval ornaments competition. Spoiler alert: none of them made it into the game unfortunately, but a lot of other awesome designs did make it in – so I’m happy about that. And hopefully this also proves that I don’t just win because people put in a popularity vote for me. Extra motivation to up my game for next competition. Let’s review the ones I made:
Carioca Cat
This one was inspired by the jaguar, an animal that has always impressed me, and of which you can find the largest population in Brazil. If I had more time to model I would’ve made his mouth open up and show some teeth, but on the other hand this needs to be a festive ornament so this might be better haha.
To tell a bit more about the process: I started with modeling the animal of course. I have different UV bakes for it here below. I started with yellow, moved to green (why? I don’t know either!), and came back to yellow. There used to be a Brazilian flag on his back and on the side of the building, but that ended up being against the competition rules so I had to remove that.
I wanted feathers on there to get that carnaval feel, but due to the low poly design became more like leaves, and I actually liked that! On the roof a flower emerged and instead of the chimney that become the origin of the ornament.
I knew that I needed some music to make the design more like a party. I added some simple low poly trumpets to the front. But still… Something was missing. And that is where the silhouettes of women playing trumpets came into play. The colours are supposed to resemble party lights and a bunch of neighbours having a party!
Although this design is not available in game (yet), I’m very happy with the end result myself.
Cavaquinho Carnaval
This design I made for my dear friend TheTempest, who is living in Brazil, so I am glad he liked the design. Music was the inspiration (cavaquinho is a small four stringed guitar), and even inside the instruments there are ladies dancing. It is a flat roofed small townhouse, with four stages on top of it (which ended up looking a bit like a cake haha).
It did not make it in game, but I am determined to put this one into production for next years carnaval.
Capybara Carnaval
This one is made for CaFe MogadoR, mainly because he always posts capybara gifs (inspired by PaulM). There is one resembling the capybara gif on the balcony.
Did you know that capybaras are native to Brazil? They can get a lot larger than I thought they could grow: up to 1.3m (4.3 feet) and weigh up to 79kg (174 pounds)!
Bananananana
The description of this ornament is: “This carnaval is BANANAS! A potassium filled party!”. This one I made very last minute, especially for my friend Humansim.
I’m not sure if it is the building style, the colours, the mask, or the partying bananas on the porch, but it feels very New Orleans to me instead of Brazil. Maybe this will come in game for Mardi Gras instead?
Overall I learned a lot of new Blender techniques, I learned a lot about Brazilian carnaval, I saw a lot of new players trying out design challenges and some wonderful models won this challenge and are available in game now. This article was made in hindsight, but for the next challenge I will try to keep a bit more track of my progress along the way, so I can you show the creative process that goes into the stuff I make. Thanks for reading, and leave a reply if you liked this blog!
To view all of my ornaments, including a link to watch them up close in a 3D environment, you can go here:
To read more about this competition held by Upland for Carnaval 2023, and to see the winners of this competition click here: