3D Artist Gives Blender's Default Cube Some Love and Makes It Pretty

Ah, Blender's default cube – is there a mesh more iconic than that? Throughout the years, we've seen Digital Artists shattering it into tiny fragments, slicing it clean with a katana, aging it into an 80-year-old man's face, melting it in a pan, and even eating it – anything to wipe the scene of the annoying hexahedron. One artist, however, has recently shown the default cube some love and given it a "glow-up," transforming it into a quirky, funny-looking character.

Continuing their series of 3D characters with a trippy art style, the artist in question, known online as The Gonk, used a combination of Blender and Substance 3D Painter to transform the cube into a face that looks both blessed and cursed at the same time.

To create the outlines, the author duplicated the base model, extruded it, and inverted the Normals of the extruded mesh, and then assigned it a color with high Roughness during the texturing stage. Speaking of texturing, The Gonk painted the face layer by layer, much like a traditional painting – starting with the base color, then building up variations and using a Paint brush alpha to enhance the style.

The same art style was previously featured in The Gonk's earlier character models, which you can check out by visiting the artist's Instagram page.

Back in 2024, 3D Animator and Blender enthusiast known as Blue_Is_Anice_Number also paid tribute to the default cube, imagining the process of creating the mesh as an assembly line with a "Portable Cube Converter", which requires the sacrifice of one Suzanne, a.k.a. Blender monkey, to produce one cube. 

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