Meet Mat- Chatter Telephone

Final Renders

Having made him look yellowed and aged, here are the final renders of the creepy little guy! Really enjoyed playing around with the features in Substance as I reminisced on being at my grandma's house looking at the inspiration dead in the eyes. I MAY make a second entry if I find the time as this has been a lot of fun

Bonus Renders

Base colour

Today I added the base colour to my displaced model, with the help of some of the existing masks I'd created. Small changes were also made to some displacement areas to correct unnoticed errors and newfound difficulties (I gave him eyelids because he was too cursed without them). From here I will go on to add yellowing/ sun bleached areas to the model to make it look aged. Also dirt and properly refining the look of the materials into the areas of base colour.

Rotary Dial Stickers

It was also today that I added the stickers to the rotary dial area. To do this I quickly made the colour sheet in Photoshop, bringing it in as a base colour, alongside the numbers which I also created in Photoshop and then imported as base colour onto the model. Doing this in this way saved me time and allowed me to get a greater deal of accuracy in an important part of the model. I then created the alpha for the text

Head Logos

As there are two historical brand logos on the chatter phone toy, I wanted to include these on my Mat too! I decided to place them on the back of the head, out of the way, like real toy branding would be. I created the alphas for the logos using images of the 1931-1956 and the 1957-1962 logo that I found online and cleaned up in Photoshop before layering them into place on Mat

Face Sticker and Stars

Then I went and added the face sticker, starting off with a basic alpha of the red lips and then layering onto it with brushes on the cheek area. This too was placed onto a white background with height to make it look like a sticker pasted onto plastic. 

As  the toy has star stickers, I also added these across the body

Displacement Planning

I wanted to start off by masking areas for displacement. I haven't really used the displacement tools in Substance Painter prior to this, so a lot of time was spent playing around with the functions until I got the result I wanted from it. For the body seams and the hands and feet I simply masked the polygons of the mesh in that area. For the rotary dial I made my own alpha in Photoshop and brought it in to Substance. For the remaining features I used the various free alphas built in to Substance Painter, occasionally using blur filters so the height would be more gradual.

Having finished with the displacement. I will now move on to blocking out base colour :)

Concept Board

Cursed idea but fun to play with. I'm turning the little guy into the iconic Fisher Price "Chatter Telephone" toy. Cute but unsettling, inspired by a nightmare I had when I was sleeping over at grandma's house as a kid amongst all the old toys from the 60s and 70s she never threw away. He's a little weird but so am I so lets see how he works out