Frog, 2025

Process Writeup

I started this project with the goal of recreating this painting of a frog, but in 3D. I aimed to utilize modern NPR modeling techniques and custom shaders within Unity.

The reference I followed is [Name] by [Name], linked here.

I started in Blender with a high poly sculpture of the Frog, applying temporary vertex colors to make sure my proportions were correct.

When moving onto retopology, I decided to keep my model pieces separate. This would aid rigging and shading down the line.

I UV’d and blocked the color shapes out on a custom texture, to let the Frog come to life.

I wanted to get the Frog inside Unity as quickly as possible, to begin experimenting with the shaders. I created a basic NPR toon-shader with shadows and specular highlights, but unlike standard toon-shaders I wanted to have precise control over the color of the lit area. I did this by only applying additive color to the shadows and specular highlights, allowing me finer control to capture the colors of the original piece. This also follows the traditional workflow of many 2D digital painters.

I then began building a custom sub-shader to control when and where the speckles on the frog would appear. This came in the form of a custom specular map to emulate the roughness of the frog’s skin.

Moving onto the eye, I implemented a custom shader to darken the rim of the Frog’s sclera.

I wanted to emulate how I would animate, in 2D, the light playing across the rim of the Frog’s iris. This came in the form of a modified specular map.

images needed: frog sculpt, frog retopo wireframe, frog UV, frog base map color, frog specular color,