Bertie Bassett is a mascot for the Bassett's brand of Liquorice Allsorts. He is a man made of liquorice, his body parts all being Allsorts in various colours. Bertie, a jovial, smiling character in a top hat, is somewhat of an anthropomorphic spokesman used to market it to consumers.
We were engaged to update and develop the Bertie Basset character for the Bassett's rebrand in 2012.
Each liquorice allsort sweet was photographed and then scanned and manipulated in photoshop to give high-resolution textures and reference for modelling. Each sweet was individually modelled and the corresponding textures and materials applied. The feet and the top hat rim were created using mograph and binding the small spheres to a hidden cylinder object. The sweets were arranged to create Bertie in a 'T' pose stance (feet together arms out perpendicular to side) so that he could be rigged.
Rigging allows for bones to be placed within the model that bind and distort the mesh to help pose Bertie in the correct position. Elements like the hands had additional controls to allow for bending the fingers, posing his hands and holding objects.
Elements such as the legs, head, body and arms were rendered out separately to allow the packaging designer more freedom to move and make subtle positional changes. In addition each render was layered in a multi pass 16bit render to help colour correcting and to aid in adding or removing highlights/shadows etc.
All elements were created in Cinema 4D R12 by myself except for the eyes and mouth which were composited on later in photoshop.