11. April 2026
Character Development, How Do You Design A Character?
Bella Woodfield 11th April 2026
The Runner Rabbit character came about from teaching myself Blender, using the multitude of YouTube video's out there in the ether. The very first incarnations came from scanning in a woodworking plan I'd found in an old book from a charity shop. I used this as a base in Blender to create the shapes for each section. I drew a version and scanned that in to use as a reference in Blender.
I wanted the rabbit to be "constructable", so I added rods to hold the legs and ears in place. A little animation of the construction can be seen here. Around that time (Easter 2025) I also experimented with the Adobe Neo AI animation tool- I think you can see why I didn't pursue using AI if you look at this video. For me personally, AI does not produce what's in my head; rather, it uses what it already knows, and I found the whole process frustrating and clunky. Experimenting with my "Girl and the Moon" book character left me feeling the same. When I experimented with AI animation with that character, it just kept producing Studio Ghibli-type looks or very brash photographic styles, which were disappointing to say the least. So after a few annoying attempts, I decided 3D animation was the best pathway for me, and continued learning Blender. AI is not a route I want to pursue.
Messing about with different ways to build the model led me to discover a very simple way of modelling the Rabbit, a process I have refined over the creation of the other animals: Delilah Bird, Buzz Bee, Stasher Squirrel, Luma Firefly and Fantastic Mr Frog. The rendering takes very little time, and being a fairly impatient person, this is important.
Colouring Runner was all done using the Blender Shader, and I drew his eyes on using the greasepaint function in Blender. There are some great tutorials like this one that show you the basics of using Greasepaint.
My foray into AI showed me that actually, the human glitches when animating in 3D are what give the character life, and the roughness of the animation is easier for humans to take in visually. AI produces very smooth, slick animation.. way too perfect for my liking. It's the mistakes I made in creating and animating the characters that actually make the characters lifelike.
From this point, Runner Rabbit seemed to have been given life, and from this small creation, the idea of making more animals and have them inhabit Woodfield Way was born.
In early March 2026, I decided to redesign Runner Rabbit. By then, I had developed a way to create the other animals in Blender, and things like Runner's eyes were created completely differently from the other animals. The other animals have eyes that can be pushed into place if it were a toy. The eyes can be animated more easily than with the Greasepaint ones. The initial redesign had him with a slightly pointed nose, but I decided to round this down to create a cuter version.
The new version meant that I needed to go back into all the scenes and replace him, but as I had placed the characters into their own collections in Blender, what seemed a bit of a daunting task, ended up being quite stress-free, and also allowed me to tidy up my filing system.
Runner Rabbit's Easter message 2026 can be seen here
The Runner rabbit cork toy version concept can be seen here