A little late in the game… I wasn’t sure if I wanted to participate since I rarely have time for side projects. Here’s the character I’ll be making:
She’s the little girl from My Neighbor Totoro. I should have the dvd somewhere so I’ll be posting more images soon.
EDIT: Forgot to mention, the company that made the character is Ghibli Studios. And the character is from My Neighbor Totoro
Thanks Lord McGoat! Here’s an update:
I’m sculpting the basic front/side shape for now. I’ll start on the topology once I get a nice looking shape. at this point the side doesn’t really match the front :shrug:
Another update soon hopefully.
Great choice! This should be a lot of fun! I love her expressiveness in the movie. When she sees one of Totoro’s little helpers for the first time, that “gotta have”-look is to-die-for! lol
Very nice start on the sculpt! Yeah, its tricky to get the look down. You just have to study as many different references as possible to get a real good feel for the character and then try to translate that into a good compromise for the 3D model. All that is anything but easy, I know! For Akane, I literally took hundreds of screengrabs in all possible angles. Anybody who thinks bringing a stylized 2D character into 3D with the established look intact is unsophisticated child's play, should try it for a change. ;)
A sculpt such as this is anything but plain, so my advice is to keep that in mind while sculpting. Even the smallest subtleties in the silhouette and contour go a long way here and should be worked in as much as possible. Even if they wont be visible in some angles, they can make all the difference in other ones. Also you should frequently check and adjust the mesh in Max, since ZB's perspective is not 100% accurate, to say the least, and can be very frustrating when you want to render outside of ZB.
I'll be watching this with great interest for sure!
Kanpai!:thumbsup:Thanks for the epic feedback TheRazorsEdge. You seem to point out a lot of the problems I’m going through with this one. 
Without a doubt, the most painful part to get right is the cheek area. I’m still feeling like something’s off around the mouth and the cheeks.
Up#2:
A few more tweaking and then I should start the retopo. Any feedback would be great at this point.
I think what you have looks great!
You are really capturing her character well. Looking forward to more updates.
Cheers!
yeah! very nice work.
think you got her down pretty well, aswell. she’s really cute.
maybe you should open/stretch the mouth a tad more, to make a more neutral base for those quite extreme expressions. dunno, just a thought. i have never tried to do anime in 3d, myself. so i’m not sure how to go about it.
anywho… looking forward for your next update.
btw. it’s a great movie.
-r
Thanks everyone!
Better late than never, I guess. Had some time this weekend so I decided to texture and render her in MR. It doesn’t seem likely that I’ll meet the deadline, so I’m taking my sweet time 
And I’m definitely not going to be able to rig/animate her in time, so I’m renderig each expression separately…
Thanks RageOfAges!
Two more. The second one is rage. First one is pleased, but I’m still not sure about that. It could also be “enjoyment”. What do you think?
d8D, my pal, even if you don’t meet the deadline, you’ve won my heart 
Well, I don’t know if that counts… Brilliant.
I find the first one to look more like enjoyment, rather than pleased. Your rage is good, has all the right components, but on this character it strikes me more as sadness, as in she’s throwing a temper tantrum and crying because she didn’t get a cookie. Like I said, though, It still fits rage very well, only it makes a really cool sad too.
-Rage
Awww. What a great translation into 3d, very nice work.
“Pleased” looks more like pleased than “enjoyment” to me, because of the eyebrows, so I’d leave that. It’s like she’s seen something that’s pleased her rather than she’s in the process of enjoying something.
My only crit would be the eyes, it’s a little wierd how you have the green iris then the fuzzy black border around it. To my mind it makes it a little less “eyelike”, because it’s kind of in the middle ground between the cartoony reference (all black) and reality (fuzzy dark border). Meh, tiny little crit really. It’s really a very beautiful result all in all.
