Blender Character Creation Modelling

Welcome to this Blender Series on Character Creation There's quite a lot to be covered. We will be covering Modeling, Texturing, Rigging and finally little bit of Animation So in this first episode, we are of course  going to be starting with Modeling All Right, so first of all, I have created these two little simple reference images which you can download from the description. I am just going to drag them into our Blender file and can press 5 to make sure that we are in orthographic mode That toggles between perspective and orthographic. If you just press N to bring this Properties Panel and go into the background images section.

We can set an axis for each image. So for the front image, we just set that to front and for the side image, we can set that to right and by pressing 3 and 1 we can change views quite nicely We can press N and T to hide these two panels making sure that my 3D Character is centered which I can do by pressing <Shift>-C and then press <Shift>-A and Add a cube Enter into Edit mode by pressing <Tab> and Press ^R to bring up this little loop cut and by pressing Left-Click we can drag it around and by pressing Right-Click we can keep it in the center. Press Z to go to Wireframe mode Press B to go to Box Select Mode. These vertices over here, press X and delete half.

Don't forget to mirror these on the X-axis by going into the modifiers panel over here and just click mirror. Now enable clipping so that the central vertices can't be torn apart. At this stage, we put a nice little mirrored cube. Select everything by pressing A.

Move by pressing G and start moving these vertices to line up with the images. Select the Top vertices and press E to extrude it all the way up to the top of the shoulders and now we can add in another loop-cut by the base of the arms and from the side-view, may be round off the back a little bit and let us add one more loop-cut over here. Once again by Right-Clicking to keep it in the center and now if we <Alt>-<Right-Click> to select this loop over here and <Alt>-<Shift>-<Right-Click> to select this one Then we can press SY to Scale it on the Y Axis and Round it a little bit. Let us extrude this down to the groin area and just even things out a bit and drag this down maybe.

Just something like that. That's too much. Out of this Face over here, we can press <Ctrl>-<Tab> to choose whether we want vertex, face, or edge select mode. We use Face Select Mode to Extrude this down and we can position this in front and side view to sort of tip of the boots and I'm gonna press ^R and add a loop cut by the knee and may be another one up here.

See if I can't get rid of this strange pouch just like that. Front view, things are looking a little bit weird so put everything in the right place It's looking much better. Let's put one extra loop-cut down here. I can use Alt-S to Shrink in fashion fascinate slightly to round it out and I'm going to Alt-Right_Click to select this edge-slip over here and press <Ctrl>-E and going to edge-slide to slide along this to smooth things a little bit.

I'll do the same thing with this loop over here and with this one as well and probably this one too and also just going to face left node and select these two bottom faces and select <shift><Alt>S and then press 1 and enter to just use the 2 sphere command to just round it out a little That's looking better Let's go ahead and click the boots so I'm just going to scale out a tiny bit more, I'm going to press S Z and 0 to scale it to 0 Essentially get flat on the Z Axis and I'm going to press X and delete these faces. I'm going to edge mode Press <Ctrl>Tab to change the Selection Mode, or you can just find them down here if you prefer <Alt>-<Right-Click> to select this ring and press E to extrude, Right-Click to Cancel the Transform and press S. To Scale it tiny bit Just like that and I'll extrude it straight down. That looks good.

So we can select this front face here and we can hold <Ctrl><LeftClick> to just extrude it to the point that we were clicking at and this is a little bit uneven, so I am going to select all of this SZ0, do the same thing for both of these and we can just continue extruding this around this shape of the boot, to the heel, OK now at this point we want to join it back up to the the top of the boot here, so let's extrude it one more time. I'm going to vertex mode and we'll change our snapping from Increment to Vertex We can press one vertex with <Right>Click and press G to move it around. Then if we hold down <Ctrl> it will enable snapping We can see it just snapped to the closest vertex under the cursor So I just snap it to that vertex and just like that We just want to have these two vertices on top of each other seize into one. So select everything with A, say W and say remove doubles We can see the two joined together nicely now.

Alright, let's go ahead and fill this side end. I'm going to edge mode. We're going to press two edges and F to fill in a face. I'm just going to go round and do that That definitely needs some tweaking and I'm gonna do the upper side first.

Alright, let's see. OK. That's a bit of a strange shape. Probably going to need to go to Vertex Mode.

I'm just going to scale these two In a bit on the X-axis. Just something like that perhaps and may be I'll select the whole front part of the boot. By the way, with the Box Select, you can de-select, with the Middle-Mouse-Click Dragging It's pretty handy. I'm just going to scale this front part of the boot out a little bit on the X-axis Alright, let's work on the Arms.

I'm going to press 3 to go to side view and Let's see, I'm going to arrange these vertices in a sort of circle type shape Just with it the Arm is going to be extruded and I'll select this space and just extrude it out Can rotate it and Scale it and basically get sort of that and add an edge loop with ^R. For the elbow and also one up here so to get transition with the shoulders. We need to fix this up a little bit. Just something like that.

This is probably OK and we can also do the same thing we did with the legs. Just moved it a bit. ^E, Edge slide. Just move it like that.

OK. It's looking better. From Top View, I'm just going to go here and smooth this out. Alright, from side view, let's position this.

It is enough to line up exactly of course but just more or less. Just correct it from front view now. OK. So, that's more or less in line and good extrude out hand now Just do a very simple sort of machine hand since we don't want to worry too much about fingers at this stage.

So, let's extrude it out. May be scale it a bit on the Y axis and just do another one for the fingers. Something, a little bit thinner. Alright, just something like that and may be add one more loop cut over here.

Going to Face mode, and just select these four faces over here and press E. To extrude and just Right-Click and then press W to bring up this Specials Menu. Just press Smooth a bunch of times, just to give us a sort of area to extrude the thumb out. From Top View Extrude that and Extrude it once again.

Press <Shift><Alt>S and see if that helps us round it off Let's try and attach an edge to this chap. From side view, I'll just round the shoulders a little bit I'm going to the vertex mode to do this and now back in face mode, we can just select these two faces at the top and extrude them up and from side view, maybe press S Z and 0 to just flatten them and Loop-Cut over here. Play around a bit and try and get this looking good. We can may be just delete these over here and may be press Shift-Alt-S on this edge-loop.

Now undo that to have the desired effect We just wanted to get that a little bit rounder. Can do it manually I guess. Alright, so let's make a little head object. So I'm in Object mode now.

I'm going to add in a new Cube Object. Just strike it out to where head would be and scale it out a bit and you can just add a new modifier. Subdivision surface mode modifier will leave it at one and apply it and then we just add in one more and not apply that one so now if we select symbolic slit press O to enable what we call proportional editing which means we can grab this little circle of influence around and do this sort of thing and we can just quickly shape the head just something like this. It's a very simple head.

Probably it's just a blob. We don't need to worry too much about it. I'll just delete this half and add in a mirror modifier quickly and just shape things from the front as well. We won't enable clipping so this face already got torn apart but I'm going to fix that any moment.

Probably something like that is quite alright for the style of the character. So what I'm going to do is delete my mirror modifier. We need to apply the subsurface modifier and now with this object selected, I'm going to <Shift>-Right_Click to select my body and select ^J to merge them together and it is in Object mode, I'll select these vertices and press GX as alternative proportional editing I just do O again, move. GX and drag them together and you can see they are probably stuck.

Alright, we want to join the neck with the head, going to face mode, we just delete these faces where we'll be joining it and we'll select these edges here and see what happens when we press <Shift><Alt>S and just get it into slightly better shape by joining things up and now we can just select the two edges and press F to fill them in. We just go all around the neck and if anything needs smoothing out, it actually joined quite well I think. Just this one needs to be smoothed So it's looking a little bit fallen out with the hat, so, lets press <Shift>A to add a Circle and now you can press F6 and just change the amount of vertices down to 8 and now we just drag this circle up, scale it out a bit. In edit mode, may be we just put a loop little lower down than in the image.

I think, may be, sitting on it's head little bit heigh either. I'll extrude it up and we can just extrude it in, extrude it up again, so that quickly roughing up the basic shape and just add in some loops. May be, I'll round the top a little bit, do something like that and can just fill this in like that and let's see for this part in here let's just scale in, just about like this where the head starts and then extrude this up, just a little if he ever takes off his hat, we can see that it actually got an inside let us cut out one half of this and if we just select this object and <Shift><Left> the body, we can press <Ctrl>J to merge them together and let's now get the mirror modifier from the body and let's see I'm just going to get the select only the hat by hovering over one of it's vertices and pressing L. And then <Shift>H to hide everything but the hat and we can see that when we deleted the one half it also deleted this little interior face here, so I'm just going to press S to select in quickly Now press <Alt>H to unhide everything and he's looking much happier now, and, see, just add one more loop in there.

Now if we can just turn the ends up of the hat, give him a little bit of a style. I'm now going to make this a little bit thicker. We can make a little wider even. OK.

Cool. So he's looking very good and I'm going to look around. I think his arms are looking a little bit spindly I'm going to add in some extra edge loops here, given that tiny bit of a muscle and may be enough actually for the forearm as well and just thinking about when we are going to be rigging this. We could also add in some edge loops Just around the areas were we could bend, like the elbow and the knee also since it will just make the deformation a little bit easier to manage since this is such a low poly model and something like that is quite good.

Alright, so he is looking very nice. We'll just going to give him a little jacket Let's see. We're going to face mode and we can use C to just use this little creation tool. We can just move this around and just select to describe these two faces as well.

Alright, so this is sort of the are of the jacket. We can just press E to extrude and then press <RightClick> and then just press <Alt>S to just Scale it out a little bit. Just puff it out slightly. Ya, that looks nice and may be we can also just go into face mode and select these faces all around the bottom of this jacket and we can just extrude these down and may be press SZ and flash it around a little bit Just a little bit of a hang below the line of his shirt Ya, it's quite nice Got to bring it in slightly.

So what's missing, We still need to give him some cuffs Let's just add in a edge loop over here. Just <Alt><RightClick> to select this ring here, E <RightClick><Alt>S to fatten it a little bit and then we can just press <Alt>S again to bring that in slightly Ya. Worked out OK. Just get it manually straightened out somewhat.

OK. The last thing that needs to be done as far as the modeling is concerned is some hat. We just get the hat out over quickly. Select with L.

Press P and separate it by selection and we can just select H to hide that object and now we'll just select the top of the head and <Shift>D to duplicate. P to separate this by selection as well and now we can work on this little hand model we have here. Alright so let's see if we can extrude some hair around the back and just get this little bit more natural looking. Curve it a bit and something like that and get to follow his hairline slightly.

Ya alright, that's OK. I'm going to apply the mirror modifier. Just so that we can create some variation and I'm going to add a couple of edge loops to work with over here and I'm also going to hide the back part of the hair so that we can just focus on this front here and we can just make some spikes Just something simple like this I guess Alright press <Alt>H to unhide the rest and let's just scale this out a tiny bit and press E, <Alt>S to scale this in and I can press X and delete the interior faces and we can see this is all weird color. We selected all and press <Ctrl>N to recalculate the Normals Just tidy things up.

Just a little bit messy ... Something like that This back part is still looking a little bit strange Maybe add a Loop Cut in here So I just press <Alt>H to unhide everything Subtitles by Kinghuz Subtitles by Kinghuz The hat is not quite fitting the head. Now that it got some hair on it So I'm just going to press <Alt>S to flatten the hat a little bit Scale down the brim just slightly Alright so let's just have a little look around Ya He seems to have turned out pretty well and I think we'll call it quits for now. Hope we'll see you in the next video were we'll look at Texturing this guy and Ya Thanks for watching and I hope you've enjoyed Cheers.