Reply To: Making your own Models and Charaters.

[silentheart00]

How I learned to model was from box modeling, which I think is useful to get you thinking about how to use quads and geometry effectively.  It depends on where you want to go with it.  If you want to create game characters, it might be better to start with box modeling to get the basic shape with the best, most optimized mesh possible, then you can sculpt over that mesh some high frequency detail to bake out into maps later.  Or there’s more of a top down approach where you just sculpt up the character, then retopologize the mesh.  I think this approach makes less sense because you’re trying to break down a hi rez character into a low rez character where if you started with a low rez, the mesh is already optimized, saving some work later down the line.  But if you just want to sculpt characters and not worry about things like planning topology for deformations where the mesh is just going to showcase your sculpting abilities, then I wouldn’t worry about box modeling.  Again, depends on where you want to go.

I suggest started with box modeling because again, I think it will help you develop your feel and understanding of good topology flow and how to optimize your mesh for the best performance and look.  But I guess I’m kind of old school.  Sculpting definitely allows you to realize your vision in a more artistic and free way, where as box modeling is a little more planned out, kind of like solving a puzzle under some constraints sort of thing.

Intro to Blender is a good overall look at what Blender can do.

Modeling in Blender is the next step.  I haven’t gotten very far (at the retopo part right now) so I haven’t found anything that talks about box modeling.  The new course might go over that just based on what they said in the stream, but I can’t speak for that right now.

Here’s a tutorial I quickly found showing what box modeling is.  A few things I suggest is: 1. to not be dependent on the subsurf modifier as it can mask your bad topology.  So only use subsurf to check if your smoothed topology is following the turnaround then turn it off again.  2. Only add an edge loop if you absolutely have to!  This prevents you from adding too many loops at once, thus making things easier for yourself.  You won’t get bogged down in the details before you need to be dealing with details.  3.  Make sure the form is as round as possible before adding in another edge loop.  This saves you so much work down the line.  For example, for an arm, if you don’t round out the arm shape before adding an edge loop, you’ll have to then round out an extra edge loop.  If you have everything all set and ready to go, then add an edge loop, you will have little to nothing to do with creating that rounded shape.  Maybe you’ll have to scale it to fit, but most of the work is done.  4.  The guy in the video has his turnaround refs off the axes.  I suggest to keep everything (the box) at (0,0,0) so it’ll be much easier for you to work and avoid any funky behaviors of Blender.  You can line up your reference images to the axes, so it’s easy to set up.  There’s a really great playlist of videos from one of my former professors that talks about all of these things, but I’m pretty sure you have to be invited to view the videos.  I’ll look around and see if I can find anything of similar quality.

EDIT:  This is the video playlist from one of my former professors, it’s just unlisted.  It’s very Maya specific with all of Maya’s wonderful quirks, but once he gets into the actual modeling, the skills should be translatable.