JUSTIN SADO
Technical Artist & Engineer
BARBIE BAPHOMET
Character Modeling | Rigging & Animation | Procedural Geometry | Cloth & Hair Simulation | Procedural & Manual Texturing
.png)
Fig 1: Le Baphomet but Barbie
Barbie Baphomet began as a fleeting mental image, inspired by the contemporary hype around Greta Gerwig's Barbie movie, but with Barbie's signature pretty, pink, and/or pastel aesthetics worn by an icon of occult mysticism.
In light of Le Baphomet's symbolic meaning, this thematic contradiction fits like a glove; as an emblem of nonbinary syntheses, opposites resonating, the oxymoron incarnate -- who's to say Le Baphomet shouldn't be in pink? Why not do away with the esoteric facade, and give it all a pretty manicure?
The end-result's at once visually stunning, conceptually commanding, and unfathomably queer.
Breakdown
Made entirely in Blender, Barbie Baphomet's design includes a combination of hand-sculpted assets and procedural elements; the coat was simulated using Blender's built-in cloth physics, with its fluffy bits and connective chains generated via custom-made geometry node groups (Fig 3).
Barbie Baphomet's horns were also generated procedurally, largely consisting of a Bezier curve with a square profile whose scale tapers to a point with the curve's length; random variations in scale and along the curve's tangent then produced a wavy texture (Fig 4).
Fig 3: Procedural hair system demo
Fig 2: Workflow compilation (music by Ada Toydemir, IG @simulacrum_._)
By prioritizing procedural approaches wherever possible, much of Barbie Baphomet's design remained open to adjustment throughout the entire workflow; if I decided the horns were a bit too wavy, for example, a tweak to their parameters sufficed -- rather than re-sculpting the geometry from scratch, which would've been immensely tedious.
What's more, the custom-made node group for Barbie Baphomet's fluffier bits enabled greater control than reliance on Blender's built-in hair system would've, and, to the relief of my midrange laptop, yielded much more performant results.
It was also very fun.