Reply To: Looking for Guidance on Creating Realistic Environments for My Cartoon Series

Regardless of what you want to eventually do, if you’re new to Blender, CORE is always a great place to start. Beyond CORE, specificially for doing a city, I’d suggest Kent Trammell’s CUBICITY, and the follow up course by Mike Hodgetts B-CITY. Kent’s is a more straight forward modelling approach, but Mike’s takes a similar concept but using geo nodes. While the latter isn’t strictly necessary, it probably could help to generate different looking cities, or parts of cities, pretty quickly. Also, Jonathan Lampel’s ASSEMBLE course is a great geo nodes primer and also is around a project that would fit in a city landscape.

If you want to get into characters for your comics, Lucas Falcao’s BASEMESH is a great place to start, and Wayne Dixon’s RIG, SHAPE, and the new EYES course can take what you learn from his CORE course and teach you what you need to know to rig so you can bring characters to life.

And if you’re really wanting to do comics, check out Paul Caggeggi’s DRAW and PANELS courses. The first is a primer on Grease Pencil and the other is about using Grease Pencil to draw Comics (and grease pencil can be combined with 3D models to make a comic look). Also, he has a CONCEPT and TURNAROUND course on using Grease Pencil to design your characters (and the ideas could be used to design pretty much anything you could think of if you really wanted to).

There’s not a lot here (as of now) about doing 3D for 2D cel shading, but there’s lots of other things that could be used, depending on what the look/style you’re going for is.  Hopefully, this will at least give you a place to start  I know I mentioned a lot… You don’t necessarily have to go through it all (or at least certainly not all at once) but I was trying to be thorough on the ones I thought, based on what you were asking, would be most in line. There’s lots of other stuff on CG Cookie as well that might not seem like it relates on the surface, but could spark ideas or ways of doing something that you might not otherwise considered, so while these would be a good starting point, by no means is it exhaustive of everything that might possibly help.