Jack Watson

Bingsu. March 2025

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This was my first time working in Project Neo. I had worked in 3D before and found it to be quite frustrating, so I was looking forward to Adobe coming out with Project Neo as an alternative to traditional 3d apps. Overall I learned a lot with this project and feel like it was pretty easy and familiar to work with. I really like that Project Neo has options for different styles including an SVG export back to Illustrator. It was also a lot of fun to really explore character design and a really abstract character.

Final Art

Bingsu, final art, yellow dish with scoop of light green shaved ice with purple topping, wearing a yellow knitted hat and purple scarf. Facial expression on dish happy with red cheeks, string arms with gloves sit below the dish as arms. Melted ice water below character in a small puddle.

Sketches

I decided I wanted to do a food character, of course, and started out by sketching a variety of characters that started out more as animals, and gradually got more and more abstract. The first three are all bears basically, and the last two more traditional style bingsu. I ended up liking the last one I created the most. The 5th design I thought conveyed the idea of bingsu the best and gave me the most options for exploring expressions with the arms.

Bingsu original character sketches, Top to bottom, left to right, 1, bear bingsu sitting in a tiny glass. 2, bear bingsu laying down in a large glass with stripes. 3, bear bingsu, face and hands only, in a scalloped glass dish with orange slices for ears. 4, traditional round bingsu character with a cookie straw, sprinkles, sitting in a small dish. 5, the option chosen, traditional round bingsu in a round glass wearing a hat, scarf, and gloves.

The next step was to create expression sketches or studies from the original characters to test how they hold up and whether they convey different expressions well. honestly I think any of them could work but again, the last design ends up being the most expressive by design, while the others had different limitations.

Bingsu, sketches of all 4 characters, top row happy, bottom row sad, from left to right large bear, bear face, traditional bingsu with sprinkles, traditional bingsu with hat and scarf.

Turnaround

Since I knew this project was going to be 3D, either Blender or Project Neo, I needed to see the character from multiple sides to get an idea of volume and scale of all of the elements. I used guidelines to ensure the front and side elements all lined up for consistency. The scale is really just for fun here since this character doesn’t really live in the context of an environment or larger illustration where scale is important.

Bingsu, character turn around sketches for modeling. Left to right, final character choice, front view, side view, banana for scale.

Color

I wanted bright vibrant colors but also pastels with the design so I explored three pretty similar color palettes. I also made a more refined flat color vector of the character to create color test for each of the color palettes. Project Neo has the ability to import SVGs which meant I could create the more custom shapes I needed in Illustrator flat, and bring them in and extrude them in 3D.

Bingsu, final art vector assets. Color palette options top from left to right purple, pink teal, green. Second option yellow, red, light purple, dark purple. Third option green, yellow, red, light purple, dark purple. Bottom left bingsu character in full flat color vector. Bottom right, piece to export to Project Neo, melted puddle, facial expression, gloves, hat base, string.
Bingsu, color tests, dish with scoop of shaved ice with drizzled topping, wearing a knitted hat and scarf. Facial expression on dish happy with red cheeks, string arms with gloves sit below the dish as arms. Three different color palettes, primarily purple, primarily green, and primarily yellow.

Final Outputs

Project Neo has the ability to create different styles, and also export out videos of camera animations. This gives a really cool view of the full design of the character in 3D that you wouldn’t get with a static render.

Bingsu, turn around animation.

I also really enjoyed that I could take the exported vector SVG from Project Neo back into Illustrator. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the original vector of the character and the SVG imported from Project Neo. If I wanted to, I could then make further changes to the export in Illustrator and incorporate it into a larger design.

Bingsu, character color study next to the Project Neo svg export for comparision.
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