japhet.blend

May 20, 2026 (with renders on the 27–28th)
time taken: ~15.25 hours

A character design that has inexplicably stuck with me is Japhet OFFgame. Cat eats birb, birb puppets cat from within, birb bursts out of cat’s mouth pixel-horror-style in the buildup to the boss fight. It’s pretty cool!

Animation I made in 2017, inspired stylistically by the films of William Kentridge. Haven’t revisited the technique since, but I dig the visual effect.

Anyway, this was a great modeling challenge. Did a big complicated rig All By Myself™! He’s not T-posed by default but whatever!! Features a smidge of Grease Pencil for the eye & beak outlines, some crumb of scenery, and one of Blender’s default HDRIs for the lighting.

Model process shots: the original side view silhouette-sketch, a boxy mirrored wireframe, and a silhouetted shot of the upper body. — The more I model, the more I realize I don’t actually like sticking to a tightly-defined turnaround drawing. Stuff changes as I tweak vertices constantly.

My initial plan was for a #ffffff (all white) model, shadeless or cel-only, with physics on Valerie (the cat) to make him all limp. But I like shiny materials and, despite the tedium, to have full control over bone positioning. Main thing I learned with this model ended up being how bone groups and (some) constraints work. Did not use Rigify, but generated and poked around at its default models to get a better sense of how it actually works.

A T-pose of the model with all bones visible. — In this house we appreciate YouTube tutorial-maker Royal Skies, StackExchange randos, and a bunch of other pseudonymous heroes linked at the end of this page.

As a side note, the shading is only super shiny and reflective-looking like this with Blender’s Smooth shading turned all the way on. Compare the main render above to the auto-smoothed version:

Model process shots: the original side view silhouette-sketch, — Flatter, yet closer to my original concept.

The wing bones could be tweaked further for ease of use, but overall I’m happy with how this turned out! Have some resource linkspam…

resources used and other techy footnotes

YouTube: Inverse Kinematics in 2 Minutes. Uses Blender 2.8 but still entirely workable, give or take the UI (user interface, menus buttons etc.).
StackExchange: keeping IK feet flat. Now that’s an old UI!
YT: Rigging Eyes in 60 Seconds. Japhet’s eyes don’t move, but I used this for the head; it follows a single bone floating in front of the beak, carrot-on-a-stick style.
YT: animating a tail (short) + I poorly explain the damped track constraint. I considered using this for the wings, but ended up preferring Copy Rotation for more control.
YT: How to Join or Combine Armatures. TL;DR join it, then re-parent the child’s root bone(s) accordingly.
r/blenderHelp: unifying bone colors. ALT is key!
StackExchange: parenting Grease Pencil to an armature. Not mentioned: You also need to assign the Grease Pencil Layer to a specific bone through the Relations dropdown!
StackExchange: disabling Grease Pencil overlap. auuughhh
YT: Light Linking (Quick), used in the final render to highlight Japhet’s head and not Valerie.

…and a bird dab.

Japhet turnaround, still hitting that dab. — This pose was only made to look good as a static image, but I thought it’d make a funny turnaround. Millennial go spin.