Ray — 3D modeling specification
Authoritative spec from founder, 2026-04-29, used to drive Blender modeling iterations. Preserve verbatim; iterate against this rather than against earlier ad-hoc descriptions.
Overall silhouette
Small, chubby astronaut/mascot figure. Roughly 1 part head to 1.5 parts body. Squat and toy-like, almost like a vinyl collectible.
Head (helmet sphere)
A perfect sphere, slightly larger than expected — about 45% of total height.
The front has a large circular visor (a flatter sphere or inset disc) that takes up most of the face. The visor should be glossy and slightly recessed into the helmet — geometry-level recess, not just a shader patch.
Antenna
Two parts:
- A thin cylindrical stem rising from the top of the helmet
- Capped with a small sphere (ball finial)
The stem tilts very slightly forward. Not perfectly vertical.
Torso/body (the blob)
Tricky part — not a typical body. Think of it as a melted, rounded blob shape, wider at the bottom than the top. Use a metaball setup OR a subdivided cube sculpted into a pear/droplet form.
The bottom flares outward into soft, drippy lobes rather than legs — almost like a viscous liquid frozen mid-pour.
Reject: ice-cream-scoop, fortune-cookie, cone, sphere. The body is droplet-shape with drippy bottom-flare.
Legs/base lobes
Two rounded foot-like protrusions at the bottom, fused into the body. They look more like drips than feet — no ankles, no separation, just bulbous extensions that grow out of the body’s bottom.
Arms
Stubby, short arms emerging from the upper sides of the body.
The visible (left) arm ends in a simple spherical hand/mitten — no fingers, just a ball. The arms have no elbows; they’re soft tapered tubes.
Each arm + hand is a single tapered-tube-with-ball-end, NOT separate floating teardrops at the side.
Surface details / posing
The character is posed at a three-quarter back/side view (seeing it from behind-left). Plan topology accordingly, OR model symmetrically and pose later.
Texturing
Colorful patches (yellow, pink, red, blue, black) read as a painted surface rather than separate materials.
Bake them into a single color map applied to the whole mesh. Single texture, not multi-material assignment.
Modeling iteration history (Blender via MCP)
- v1-v4: blocking-out spike, sphere primitives, no character read. Discarded.
- v5: visor breakthrough — shader-patch visor on sphere head, but body was wrong cone shape.
- v6: rigged with 7-bone armature, chevron body, hands as separate floating teardrops. Body still cone, hands wrong orientation.
- v7: bigger visor + fortune-cookie attempt, head disconnected from body (rigging bug, fixed).
- v8: hands repositioned at body sides, fortune-cookie body. Founder feedback: “ice cream scoop, needs to be fortune cookie” → body shape rejected.
- v9 (in progress): rebuilt against this spec. Larger head (~45% total height), droplet/pear body with drippy lobes, geometry-recessed visor, tilted antenna, stubby tapered arms with sphere-mittens, three-quarter back-left camera.
Related
- ../../../01-projects/newsletter/index — Sanity Check uses Ray as recurring visual
- ../../../01-projects/squarely-puzzles/index — Squarely surfaces also use Ray
- ../../../../.claude/skills/blender-character/SKILL.md — modeling pipeline for chibi characters