BLENDER 2.9 AND ABOVE
WORK WITH BASIC POLYGON TOOLS IN BLENDER
There are certainly a wide range of modelling tools available in Blender, but a great place to start is with honing your good old-fashioned polygonal modelling skills
I t can be a real challenge for someone new to modelling to know where to even begin. Do you start with sculpting, then retopologise your model? Do you begin with Boolean tools like Hard Ops or Box Cutter and use cutting tools to make your models look amazing? Or do you perhaps poly model them in a way that’s been very common since the industry began?
This tutorial will help you start your journey by exploring a very basic polygon workflow. If you grasp all these basics, you can move onto the more challenging topics listed above. You can then begin to combine the different types of modelling and start to expand your skills in new and exciting ways.
We will start here by making a little robot with a core body, four legs and a single eye. It’s going to be suitable to take into a game pipeline and at the end we can look at it in a 3D painting program like Substance Painter from Adobe.
If you learn some of these basic techniques, you can create assets for games, TV and film and even for 3D printing, and it may help you move to those higherlevel workflows as you further develop your skills.
AUTHOR
Glen Southern Glen runs SouthernGFX, a small Cheshire-based studio specialising in character and creature design. He has been using and training ZBrush in the UK for over 15 years.
southerngfx.co.uk
01
START WITH PRIMITIVES
Blender is a very complex program now and you'll have to get to grips with the basics before you can get stuck into the more complex stuff. There are many ways to create models and a wide range of techniques to use, but let’s focus on a very basic polygonal robot model. As always let’s start with a primitive shape. Press Shift+A to add objects and then choose Cylinder. If you want to move it around use G and then X, Y or Z to move it along an axis. Blender is all about the shortcuts!
02
THE VIEWS
You can switch your perspective to an orthographic view, or even a quad view. To access this, go to View>Area>Toggle Quad View. It's really handy to be able to see the perspective view and also get a fix on the side and front as needed. It helps as things get more complex, and if you switch to wireframe later the side views really help for selecting components.