BLENDER| SUBSTANCE PAINTER
MODEL FIGURES WITH PERSONALITY USING BLENDER
Discover how to create a stylized character with Blender and Substance Painter
In this tutorial you’ll learn how to create a cool stylized character. We will cover everything you need to know to produce a professional-looking image for your portfolio in Blender - modelling, sculpting, texturing, rigging, hair particles, lighting and rendering.
The concept art of the character, Milo, was done by the artist Rodrigo Wolff for a 3ds Max course by the Brazilian Mascoteria School. You should check them out because they have fantastic work. I decided to use their cool concept art and make a proof of concept to convince myself that Blender is a good replacement for my beloved Softimage (yes, I’m that old school!).
Bear in mind that this is quite a big project if you’ve never modelled a character like this before, so take your time. There is no deadline here. For me, this process took five full weeks of work that were spaced out along my free time, but for some people it could take less time and for others it could take more. This is not a race. All that matters is the final result.
FOLLOW THE VIDEO
bit.ly/3DWorld-gameart
01 INITIAL BLOCKING
Import the concept art as image references (using the Add menu on the top of the viewport). Create several UV spheres and use them to block out the main proportions of the character using only the scale, rotate and move tools, and sometimes, if needed, move the vertices around in Edit Mode. You can also use other geometric objects like cylinders for the neck and torso. This stage is very important, because if the proportions are not done correctly the model will look strange later on.
DOWNLOAD YOUR RESOURCES
For all the assets you need go to bit.ly/3DWorld-gameart
02 MERGE THE MESHES
At this point the scene must have a lot of objects lying around on the outliner. You can start joining them together. Join them in six groups: head, hair, torso, arms, hands and legs. Use Ctrl+J or go to the Object menu>Join. Apply all transforms (Ctrl+A) - this will help brush deformation while sculpting.
AUTHOR
Diana David
Diana is a 2D/3D generalist, specialized in animation, character design and storyboards. Her work can be seen all over the world on TV series, TV ads, animation shorts and games. dianadavid.net
03 REMESH
Although the objects are joined together you may notice that they are still independent from each other, because the geometry hasn’t changed. For a change like that to happen we need to remesh it. Go to Sculpt Mode and on the right side of the screen on the Active tool settings, look for the Remesh tab.