I really enjoy watching football, and Arsenal matches most of all. I love seeing players work together to make one goal happen — the pass nobody expected, the run that started thirty seconds earlier.
And then the whistle goes, and I cannot sit still. Watching football makes me want to go outside and kick something. So: call a friend.
But wait. Who am I going to play with? I am shy, and making friends has never been the easy part.
So I made one
If there was nobody to call, I would build somebody. I started sketching a character. He had to be cute, because cute things are the best. His legs could not be too short, since we would be running and kicking. And he definitely needed long arms, for throw-ins and for blocking my shots.
I refined the sketch with an AI image service until the proportions stopped fighting each other, then took the final design into 3D.
Sculpting, and then fixing the sculpt
Blocking him out was fast and genuinely satisfying — until I turned on the wireframe and looked at the polygons. Less satisfying. So I did the unglamorous half myself: smoothing the surfaces with sculpting, then retopologising the whole thing by hand until the mesh deformed properly.
Then materials. I support Arsenal, so he wears an Arsenal shirt. That was never in question.
Playing with him
He has an enormous amount of energy and is genuinely bad at football. He cannot block a single shot. He has not scored once, and he is visibly annoyed about it.
He is still great. The point was never that he would be good. The point was that I stopped waiting for someone to be free.
To be continued.