I am currently working on one of the two remaining 3D models. It is related to a mixtape titled “Days Before Rodeo”, a project released before “Rodeo” album, which was quickly rated as one of the best contemporary hip-hop mixtapes of all time. A famous signature of Travis Scott is a burning cactus – it is related to his record label Cactus Jack, also used as an element of Travis’ collaborations with Nike on the shoes. I decided to make it an element of one of the compositions.

On the page which I use as a point of reference very often – TurboSquid. One of the cactus models seemed to be a great material for a guideline:

I did not need points of reference from a few perspectives, as the shape of cactus is a rather flexible 3D model, so one overall overview was fine. The structure of it is based on the loft tool with a variety of thicknesses, angles and positions of the subdivisions (circles). The amount of vertices was not good enough, so using the loop cut tool I added some necessary detail. The next stage was selecting every second loop and scaling it up, to achieve the natural “rows” that cactus has. In some cases when the rows were uneven, I had to simply move the whole selection around with the selection tool. At first I was making every arm separately from scratch, but I quickly noticed that a much quicker way would be simply copying them and moving the circles inside, so they have uneven shapes. I was also thinking of adding the spikes with either a cloner or hair tool, but the overall aesthetic of other models wouldn’t match too much detail in this one. I finished by placing it in the studio box and rendering out with sample material to see how it presents itself before adding a texture in Substance Painter.