Miscellaneous

Onion Thing

Bio:

Onion Thing, The Talented and Beloved Onion Thing III, or simply 3D Onion is a secondary sona and mascot I created in 2022 to represent my endeavors into Blender and 3D artwork.

Origins & Inspirations

The design for Onion Thing came to me in a dream sometime October 2022, and seeing it come to fruition was my biggest motivation for seriously jumping into 3D. Her first model was quick and dirty, but it helped me get down enough of the fundamentals that I came back to Blender again and again until I finished her 2023 model - a real beauty.

What made Onion Thing's design so appealing to me was specifically the context she was created for. In that dream she served as a mascot and sona for a 6th gen 3D game, appearing before it started to ramble off about it. Ever since then, she's been a beacon for my dreams of someday making 3D video games that pay homage to that era which haunts my earliest creative memories. As of 2023 there's a huge explosion of nostalgia for 5th gen games (as there was one for 4th gen/16-bit ones a decade earlier...), but I, in my completely unbiased wisdom, believe that 3D graphics peaked sometime in the early early 2000s. Ok, ok, maybe not LITERALLY with those early Dreamcast and PS2 games, but I think that generation of 3D games had the perfect blend of fidelity and limitations to breed some really unique art direction not possible before and not often explored since.

This is why you will see a liberal dose of Y2K inspiration in her design. Her mask is meant to represent a sort of manic cartoon mascot vibe you could find in Crash Bandicoot, and I went back to Onion's roots and combined that cartooniness with the stylization of African folk art of hyenas. Her clothing is meant to be my platonic ideal of a cool, simplified Y2K mall goth, but I have plans for giving her different themed outfits based on the projects she's meant to be the host for.

Her human half is one of my favorite aspects. The random neurons firing in my brain really went off with the idea of a sona who is effectively a chick wearing her own fursona head. I think it captures me very well in that aspect, as I switch between humans and furs often nowadays. In my most barest element, I am a silly broad who puts on a hyena mask to talk about things.