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Spooky Blender Pumpkin

A bright orange jack o' lantern with a glowing yellow inside, floating in front of a blurry brick wall background.

The pumpkin I made in Blender to celebrate Halloween 2021. Also includes some progress snapshots.

A bright orange jack o' lantern with a glowing yellow inside, floating in front of a blurry brick wall background.
The fruit of my labor. ha ha because pumpkin is a fruit.

I’ve learned to do a little with Blender in the past, but it’s easy to forget. (The other side is that being an infrequent user it’s always different from previous times I’ve used it.) I decided to make a jack o’ lantern for Halloween. Happy Halloween!

I’m reasonably happy with how it turned out. I enjoy sculpting in Blender, even if I don’t do it very much. Trying to learn all the really hardcore model stuff like maps and textures is too much for what I generally want to do with it, which is one-off blends every now and again. For my book I did the main image in Blender, and I like how that turned out, but for the other thing I published I stuck to Inkscape and GIMP.

I also looked into better image formats, since PNG is getting long in the tooth. I recompressed all the images in this post to webp, and they cut the total size from over 20MiB to under 0.4MiB. Nice! (It helps that the draft images all have gray backgrounds. The final image above is over half of the sum of the image sizes.) I tried again with AVIF, which is supposed to be the new hotness, but the files were slightly larger. Not sure if that’s because of settings, because I tried to convert webp→avif (rather than from the original PNGs), or just the luck of the draw. I stuck with webp.


Work in progress pictures follow.

A grayscale spherish shape with a stem sticking up. Has rough vertical lines suggesting vague shape of a pumpkin.
The initial sculpt off of the regular old Blender UV Sphere. Mostly used the clay strips here.
A slightly lumpy and pumpkin-like gray blob with a stem.
Not much progress, but some. Added initial creases using the…crease tool! Lumpified some of the lobes? of the pumpkin.
A slightly lumpy pumpkin-like gray blob with the top cut off and floating above.
I cut the top off it. I think I just drew a seam using edit mode and divided the object with that. And then used a modifier to thicken the two parts up.
An orange pumpkin-shaped object, with its top floating above. The top has a pumpkin-colored stem.
Added basic materials, which at that point meant colors. I did add a flesh color on the inside and under the cap (not shown). Hadn’t colored the stem yet.
A close-up of a pumpkin with a ghoulish black face floating in front of it. The bottom of the separated top of the pumpkin floats above at top.
Modified the color of the skin material a bit, and I drew a face in Inkscape that I imported to be used to carve the pumpkin.
A carved jack o' lantern with interior yellow light. The top floats above it, with brown stem.
Really starting to look like a jack o’ lantern now. This carving was actually a misstep as I went back to an earlier version to improve some of the details. I made a mess! Should have just kept this one.
Carved jack o' lantern, glowing yellow inside, with its top slightly askew.
This is close to the final version, though I made some changes to the materials and added a backdrop afterwards.

Have a merry Halloween! May your costume be rad and your candy sweet!

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