Reply To: Where should I start?

[Harris Clook]

was it this video? I watched his ’24 version which is how I found CGC myself!

Again, I’ll stress the value in how important it is to work on other things inbetween tutorials. You’ll probably see people saying this a lot through your journey, but going straight from tutorial to tutorial without flexing what you learn is a much harder way to progress.

If characters and mechs are what you want to do, then perhaps you can start small. After learning hard surface modelling (and even sculpting) skills, you could make smaller things like pieces of armour, or a component on a mech like a battery for example. Then when you’ve learnt a bit of materials, shaders, and texturing, you could make various metal materials with their own colours, scratches, dings, and dents. Or you could make cloth materials for characters. IE, go small to start with before you go way too large and attempt to set off to create a complete mech kitted out with all the whizzes and bangs.

I say all this as if it was what I did. It absolutely wasn’t. I started by rushing through too many courses without taking time to put anything into practice and later felt like I had forgotten a lot of what I had learnt. Everyone learns differently, but if you can, try to not do what I did! Wayne mentions in one of his courses that finding the right balance for you is important – there understandably is such a thing as learning too fast

Using references is a valuable way to stay on track while working too – without them you may find your imagination runs too wild and you eventually get bogged down. While I was working on Noodlehead, I opened up Cyberpunk 2077 and took a load of screenshots of vehicles (like this for example), pasted them into Pureref and used them to help create particular parts. Here’s the whole reference board if you’re interested.

Also save everything! Even just to look back on and see how far you’ve come! And post as much as you’d like here on the community page if you need critique and advice!