I started out with a simple sphere and went ahead and modified it into a bomb like shape.

After that I went ahead and created the wick using three cylinders.

Then I created the feet. They both started out as spheres.

The eyes.

At this point I realized something didn't look quite right so I went online to look at more references. I added the small plate to the top of the bob-omb's head.

I added a floor and the wind up key to the back of the bob-omb. The key took several tries before I was satisfied with it.

I added some simple color and maps.

After that I spent a few hours playing with lighting and raytracing settings. I modified the previous maps to give off reflections and I rendered it out. After that I noticed that the reflections on the eyes made the bob-omb look cross-eyed, so I got rid of those.

I would say that the hardest part was modeling the elements that didn't resemble any basic shapes. I found myself going back and redoing those elements a few times. The most time consuming part (other than the modeling itself) was to work out the lighting.

I really enjoyed this project. It has been many years since I did any modeling and it felt good to get back into it. I was surprised at how much I'd forgotten, and maybe even more surprised at the things I remembered.

Peter Certik, 2013