Blender Character Modeling A companion book to the Blender Character Creation Series on Youtube

Transcription

1 Blender Character Modeling A companion book to the Blender Character Creation Series on Youtube Darrin Lile Blender Foundation Certified Trainer 2017, Darrin Lile. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or distributed without the written consent of the author.

2 Preface This book grew out of the unexpected interest in my Youtube series, Blender Character Creation. I initially intended for the series of thirty-five videos to be for the students in my classroom who were interested in creating characters in Blender. But many more people than originally intended have found the videos on Youtube, and have found them useful. This has been wonderful to see. But with more viewers, has come more questions, and I m not always able to answer them. So I have created this book to go into a bit more detail and provide some introductory information for those just beginning with Blender. It has been amazing to witness the interest in these videos, and in creating characters with Blender in general. I hope this book will help you create the characters you have in your head and bring them to life in Blender! Thanks! Darrin 2

3 Table of Contents Blender Character Modeling 1 Preface 2 Table of Contents Installing Blender The Blender Interface Working with Objects The 3D Cursor Pivot Points and Origins Essential Modeling Tools Mouse Button Selection Manipulator Short Cut Keys Color Scheme Emulating Number Pad Keys Essential Shortcut Keys Creating the Loop Mask Modeling the Head Modeling the Torso and Arms Modeling the Hips and Legs Modeling the Hand Modeling the Mouth Modeling the Teeth Connecting the Mouth and Modeling Ears Modeling the Eyes Modeling the Clothes and Accessories 65 Conclusion 71 3

4 Introduction to Blender Blender began as an in-house 3D graphics program in the 1990s and has grown into an incredibly powerful 3D animation and visual effects suite of tools. But perhaps the most astounding aspect of Blender is that it s free. It provides artists all over the world with amazing opportunities to create their visions at a very low cost of entry. Granted, you need a computer, and a fairly powerful one at that. But an artist anywhere in the world can download Blender and begin creating their dreams. Having said that, I will be the first to admit that there is a bit of a learning curve to using Blender. It is not an easy program to learn, and definitely not an easy one to master. It takes time and practice to learn and internalize Blender s workflow and logic. But I think, given the right guidance, anyone can quickly get up to speed and start creating with Blender. 1.1 Installing Blender The first thing you need is, of course, Blender. If you haven t downloaded the program yet, go to and click on the Download button on the main page for the latest version. This will take you to the Download screen where you can download the appropriate flavor of Blender for your particular operating system. Note the system requirements while you are there. You should have at least 8 GBs of RAM in your computer and have a reasonably good graphics card, with at least 1GB of memory. These specs will help with the speed at which Blender can render the models and images on your screen. 4

5 In addition, you may want to invest in a pen and tablet for your computer as well. I use a Wacom Intuos tablet for sculpting and texture painting. This is extremely helpful and provides a lot of control when doing detailed work. Using the mouse in these situations can be very frustrating. In addition, Blender uses many shortcut keys on the keyboard number pad. I use a laptop that does not have a number pad, so I have purchased a separate Bluetooth number pad. I pull this out whenever I use Blender. I highly recommend it. If this isn t an option for you, I ll talk about how to emulate number pad keys later. Once you have downloaded Blender, follow the instructions on the website to install the program. For most operating systems all that is required is a simple double-click of the downloaded file to install Blender. 1.2 The Blender Interface When you first open Blender it is a fairly sparse initial interface, as 3D animation programs go. There is a lot hidden here and we will not be able to go over every single detail in this book. But here are the essentials of what you need to know to get started. NAVIGATION To move around in Blender s 3D View, the main thing you need to know is that the Middle Mouse Button rules. Hold down the Middle Mouse Button (MMB) and move the mouse and you will tumble around in the 3D world. To pan the camera back and forth, hold down the Shift key and click and drag the MMB. To zoom in and out, hold down the Control key and click and drag the MMB. You can also turn the scroll wheel on the mouse to zoom in and out. So in a nutshell, here s what you need to know about navigating the 3D viewport: Middle Mouse Button (MMB) = Tumble Shift + MMB = Pan 5

6 Ctrl + MMB = Zoom Mouse Scroll Wheel = Zoom SELECTION The selection of objects in Blender is one of those things that can turn people off right from the start. But please stay with me and know that there is a certain logic to it. To select an object in Blender you use the Right Mouse Button. That s right, unlike every other program on earth, you select things with the right mouse button. So hover your cursor over an object in the 3D view and click the right mouse button. An orange outline appears around the object letting you know that it has been selected. If you try to select an object with the Left Mouse Button, you ll find that, instead of selecting the object, the action just moves a little red circle around the screen (we ll talk about that in a bit). It s a little odd, but once you get into the groove of Blender s way of doing things, it actually works out pretty well. Try and be open-minded about it here at the start but, if if just isn t working for you, we will soon talk about how you can switch to using the Left Mouse Button for selection. If you want to select more than one item at a time, hold the Shift button down on the keyboard while you click. Now when you right-click another item it will add it to the existing selection. To deselect an item from the selected objects just hold Shift and RMB click it again. Now that you have a few objects selected, what if you just want to deselect everything? Well, you can not just click out in empty space. That would move that red circle thing around again. No, to deselect everything just press the A key on the keyboard. And if you hit the A key again it will now select every visible object in the scene. The A key toggles the selection of all objects. Here s a quick run-down of the selection options we ve discussed so far: RMB = select an object in 3D view Shift + RMB = add to or remove an object from the existing selection 6

7 A key = toggles selection and de-selection of all objects visible in the 3D view TOOLS AND PROPERTIES There are many panels and windows to work with in Blender. But two of the most important are the Tool Shelf and the Properties Panel. These allow us to create and modify objects in the scene. The Tool Shelf is usually already visible on the left side of the Blender interface. It can be toggled on and off with the T key on the keyboard. The Tool Shelf holds some handy tabs for categories like Tools, Create, Relations, Animation, and Physics. The Tools and Create tabs will probably be what you use most as you re learning Blender. On the right side of the 3D viewport is where you will find the Properties Panel. It is often hidden from view when you first open Blender, but you can toggle its visibility on and off with the N key. The Properties Panel allows you to view and adjust the properties of the objects in your scene. For example, select the Cube and at the top of the Properties Panel you should now be able to see the fields for its Location in the scene. If you haven t moved the cube, the X, Y, and Z fields will read Below this are the Rotation, Scale, and Dimensions fields. As we move and alter our objects, we ll be able to see these fields update. You can also enter numeric values directly into these fields to transform the object. And if you re feeling fancy, you can even type in an equation, like in the Location Z, and Blender will update the scene accordingly, moving the object up 5 units. If you scroll down the Properties Panels there are 7

8 quite a few other sections available. You can change the focal length of the camera in the Lens field of the View section. And you can also change the name of the selected object in the Item section. SCREEN LAYOUTS There are of course many other windows in the Blender user interface besides the Tool Shelf and Properties Panel. And they are all remarkably configurable. In fact, each window you see in the Blender interface can be changed, resized, or simply removed altogether. If you hover your cursor over the border of any two windows, you can click and drag to resize those windows. If you Right-click on one of these borders you get an Area Options menu that allows you to choose between Split Area and Join Area. Use these to split an existing window or combine two into one. layout to go back to. However, any changes you make at this point will be applied directly to the Default screen layout. The Screen Layout menu is at the top of the interface. My suggestion is to create a new screen layout before you begin rearranging the screen. That way you always have the Default To create a new screen layout you can click on the plus icon next to the screen layout pull-down menu. Give your new screen layout a new name and then you can make any changes to this new screen layout that you would like. If you expand the pull-down menu you can find the Default layout still there for you to go back to. By the way You can press Ctrl + rightor left-arrow to scroll quickly through all the different screen layouts. There are other screen layouts listed here. This menu gives you several options for configuring the interface based on specific yet common tasks for which artists use Blender. There are Screen Layouts for Animation, Compositing, Motion Tracking, and Video Editing. Try one and see what you think. Going 8

9 through each of these and examining the different windows in each layout provides insight into how people use the Editor panels as well as how easy it is to configure Blender s interface. For example, the top right window when you first open Blender is an Editor window called the Outliner. The Outliner displays a list of the objects in the current scene and allows you to adjust their visibility, select-ability, and render-ability. But this is just one Editor type that could be displayed in this window. If you click on the button in the top left of the panel window you will get a list of all the possible Editors that are available. Several of them are already shown in the default layout, like the Properties panel, the Timeline, and the 3D view. But as you can see, there are many more. EDITOR WINDOWS Each of Blender s Screen Layouts is made up of multiple Editor Windows. You can access a list of Editor Types by clicking on the pull-down menu button in the corner of any window. The list is rather long and many of these you may not use for some time, if ever, depending on your needs. You can change any window to any Editor type. So we could change the Outliner to the Node Editor, or the Dope Sheet, and then back again. But remember, any change you make is applied to the screen layout your using at the time. 1.3 Working with Objects Objects are the building blocks of any 3D model. You can see the base primitive objects that are available by clicking on the Create tab in the Tools Shelf on the left. From here you can create Meshes, Curves, Lamps, and other objects such as Cameras, Armatures, and Text objects. 9

10 Let s try this. If you haven t already, select the cube in the center of the grid with the Right mouse Button (RMB) and press X to delete it. You will then have to confirm the action by clicking Delete from the menu. Now click the UV Sphere button in the Create Tab. This will create a new object at the location of the 3D Cursor (that little red circle thingy again. I promise we ll talk about that soon). Notice that a new collection of fields and buttons appears at the bottom of the Tool Shelf on the left. These are settings that only appear when you first create an object. They allow you to adjust the object before beginning to edit it. If you were to move or alter the object in any way, these settings would disappear and would no longer be available. They are only here during the initial setup of the object in the scene. If you change the Segments field to something like 6 and the Rings to 8, you can see how this effects the shape and look of the sphere. TRANSFORMING OBJECTS Now that you ve created an object, you might as well move it around a bit. You re choices are to Translate, Rotate, or Scale the object. And you can do this in a couple of different ways. First let s look at the Transformation Manipulators. You can select which manipulator you would like to use at the bottom of the 3D View. Selecting the Translate Manipulator superimposes the translate gizmo over the selected object, and by left-mouse-button (LMB) clicking and dragging one of these arrows you can move the object within 3D space. If you click on the Rotate button, you will see a new type of circular gizmo superimposed on the selected object. Clicking and dragging on one of these rings allows you to rotate the object. Lastly, if you click on the Scale button, you stretch and squash your object by clicking and dragging on any of the lines with the small boxes at the end. 10

11 Notice that the colors of each gizmo correspond to the colors of the axis in the bottom left of the 3D view. These are the axes of the 3D world inside Blender. The blue axis is the Z axis which represents up and down. The red axis is the X axis, which represents side to side, or left to right, directions in 3D space. And the green axis is the Y axis, which represents the forward and backward axis in Blender. There are of course shortcut keys for Translate, Rotate, and Scale. For Translate, you can press the G key (think g for grab) and move the mouse. This moves the object freely in 3D space. When you have placed the object where you would like, click the Left Mouse Button to confirm the action. Likewise, you can press the R key to Rotate, and the S key to Scale. When you press one of these keys and move the mouse, however, you don t have a great deal of control over how the object is adjusted. The object tends to move, rotate, or scale in multiple axes at once. You can select a particular axis in which the action should take place by adding an extra key-press after the shortcut key. For example, let s say that we d like to move that sphere in the X axis only. You can press the G key for move and then the X key on the keyboard. Now when you move the mouse the object will be constrained to only moving in the X axis. This works for rotation and scale as well. And you can you can get even more fancy with this trick. Say you wanted to move a sphere up five grid units. You could press G for move, the Z key for the Z axis, and then press 5. Your sphere moves up 5 units. Now just click the mouse or press Enter to confirm the action. This works with rotation, but the number you enter is the number of degrees to be rotated. So you could press R, then Y, and then type 45. Your object rotates 45 degrees around the Y axis. You can also indicate which axis you do not want to be effected by the action. For example, if you By the way Most other 3D programs use the Z axis to represent the forward and backward axis, and the Y axis for up and down. This really isn t an issue until you begin importing Blender objects into other 3D animation packages. 11

12 had a cylinder and you wanted to scale it in the X and Y axes, but not in the Z (so it got fatter but not taller) here s what you could do. Select the cylinder and press S for Scale, then press Shift + Z to tell Blender that you do not want the Z axis effected, and then move the mouse. Now the cylinder scales only on its X and Y axes, increasing its width without increasing its height. Here are the shortcut key combinations we ve just discussed: G key: Translate (or Move) R key: Rotate S key: Scale G, R, or S and then X, Y, or Z to constrain the action to an axis G, R, or S, and then X, Y, or Z, and then the number of units to be effected G, R, or S and then Shift + X, Y, or Z to choose the axis that will not be effected by the action 1.4 The 3D Cursor OK, I ve put off talking about the 3D Cursor long enough. This is one of those very Blender things that you just don t find in too many other animation programs. In fact, I ve never seen anything like it. But surprisingly enough, once you get used to it, that little red circle thingy comes in pretty handy. The 3D Cursor allows you to snap things to a particular point in 3D space. You can place the cursor somewhere and then snap an object to it, or a vertex, or a pivot point; anything really. As you have no doubt already discovered, you can click the left mouse button anywhere in the scene and the 3D Cursor will move to that point. You can also use the Snap Menu to move it around. Press Shift + S to bring up the Snap Menu, and here you can choose among several ways of moving the 3D Cursor. You can snap the Cursor to 12

13 the current selection, to the center of the grid, to the nearest grid unit, or to the active object. Which you choose depends on what you would like to do. Let s say you had two objects in your scene and you wanted to place a Point Light exactly in the center between them. You could select the two objects, press Shift + S to bring up the Snap Menu, and choose the Cursor to Selected option. This would place the 3D Cursor in the center of the selected objects. Now you could go to the Create Tab on the Tool Shelf and click the Point Light button. New objects are created at the position of the 3D Cursor so the light would be created in between the two lights. Another great way to use the 3D Cursor is for moving the pivot point of an object. By doing this you can change the point at which an object rotates or scales. Instead of an object rotating at its center point, like a seesaw, it could rotate at one end, like a lever. But to discuss this further, we first need to talk about Edit Mode. EDIT MODE So far we have been working in what is called Object Mode. Down at the bottom of the 3D view, there is a menu and it is usually set to Object Mode when you first open a scene. This is the Object Interaction menu. If you click on this you can see many other interaction modes. Switch to Edit Mode here, or you can toggle in and out of Edit Mode by simply pressing the Tab key. In Edit Mode you have access to the basic components that make up an object: vertices, edges, and faces. A vertex is just a point in space. It has location, but no size. An edge is the connection of two vertices: a line. And a face is defined by at least three connected edges. You can switch between these three basic components by choosing the appropriate button at the bottom of the 3D View: Vertex Select, Edge Select, or Face Select. You can also switch between the Select Modes by pressing Ctrl + Tab. This brings up the Mesh Select Mode menu. 13

14 It is in Edit Mode that the majority of modeling is done. Adjusting a 3D model in Object Mode allows you to control its scale and proportion, but it is in Edit Mode that the details are created. 1.5 Pivot Points and Origins We took a brief detour away from the 3D Cursor to discuss Edit Mode, but now we need to revisit the topic to look at the concepts of Pivot Points and Origins in Blender. In many 3D animation programs, the pivot point of an object is the same as its origin. The model naturally scales from and rotates at its origin, and you are given tools to move that origin to wherever you would like. But the origin and the pivot point of an object are always treated as the same thing, inextricably intertwined. Blender however, does this a bit differently. Every object has an origin, and yes we can rotate the object around its origin any time we like. But we can also rotate an object around the location of the 3D Cursor, apart from the origin. This allows us to do some pretty tricky stuff once you get used to the idea. So let s examine a scenario in which this might be useful. Let s say we have a door that needs to rotate at its hinges. For animation purposes we would move the origin of the object in line with the hinges. Now the door object will rotate at its hinges. But what if, when setting up our scene, we needed to scale the door up from the ground to make it a little bigger? We could move the origin to the base of the door, scale it, and then move the origin back to where it was. But a more efficient way would be to move the 3D Cursor to the base of the door, and then tell Blender to temporarily scale from the position of the 3D Cursor. How would we do this? As discussed earlier, pressing Shift + S will bring up the Snap Menu. This allows us to snap the cursor to whatever is selected. So we could select a vertex at the base of the door, press Shift + S, and then choose Cursor to Selected. This moves the 3D Cursor to the proper 14

15 place, but now we need to tell Blender to use this as the point from which we will scale the door. We use the Pivot Point menu at the bottom of the 3D View to do this. The default setting is Median Point. This usually coincides with the origin of the object. But if we select 3D Cursor from this menu, Blender will use the location of the 3D Cursor as the pivot point when we scale the door. When finished we can switch back to Median Point. We can also use the 3D Cursor to move the origin of an object. On the Tool Shelf, under the Tools tab, you will find a pull-down menu titled Set Origin. When you fly the menu out you have several options for moving the origin of the selected object. One of them, of course, is Origin to 3D Cursor. Treating the pivot point and the origin as separate entities allows us a great deal of freedom when working with objects in Blender. 1.6 Essential Modeling Tools There are many modeling tools in Blender, and the list seems to grow with every version update. But there are two essential modeling tools that you should know from the beginning. You can create an amazing array of object with just these two tools. And for both of these, you need to have the object in Edit Mode. EXTRUDE The Extrude Tool is one of the most fundamental tools in 3D modeling. It is essential for adding new geometry to a model. You can find the Extrude button on the Tool Shelf (T key) under the Create tab. The shortcut for this is the E key. Let s give it a try. Add a Cube into your scene. Go into Edit Mode by pressing the Tab key, and then 15

16 press Ctrl + Tab to bring up the Mesh Select Mode menu. Choose Face from this menu. Now select a face and press the E key. When you move the mouse Blender will extrude the face along a perpendicular line, creating new faces. You can select multiple faces and extrude them as well. For just about anything you create, you we will be using the Extrude Tool quite a bit. But you can also extrude edges. Select an edge and extrude it out. You ll see that it pulls a single plane out from the edge. LOOP CUT AND SLIDE Loop Cut is an essential tool with which we can add edges to our 3D models. It too has a button on the Create tab of the Tool Shelf, but its shortcut key is Ctrl + R. After you press Ctrl + R you will need to hover your mouse cursor over an edge of the object. You ll see a kind of ghost image of the edge loop that will be created. Move the cursor to other edges of the object and the ghost loop will hop from one place to another, giving you an indication of where the actual edge will be placed. Once you find the right location, click the Left Mouse Button (LMB) to drop a temporary edge onto your object. You can now slide that edge back and forth with the mouse. When you have placed the edge exactly where you want, click the LMB again to confirm the action. The shortcut keys for the essential modeling tools we have discussed are: Extrude: E key Loop Cut and Slide: Ctrl + R MODIFIERS There are several modifiers that you should know about at the beginning of your Blender journey. They can be found in the Properties Window, on the right side of the screen, when you click on the button with a wrench on it. The ones that we will be discussing are the Subdivision Surface and the Mirror modifiers. There are many more, as you can see in the Modifier pulldown menu. But these two will serve you well as you get up to speed quickly in Blender. 16

17 model by clicking the Apply button. The Subdivision Surface modifier allows you to smooth the polygons of a model by virtually and interactively subdividing the mesh. You can increase or decrease the amount of smoothing within the settings of the modifier. With each increase in subdivisions, the model increases in smoothness. Ultimately you can apply the smoothing permanently to the To add the Subdivision Surface modifier to an object simply select it from the Add Modifier pull-down menu. Increasing the value in the View field will increase the number of polygons you see in the 3D View. You can set a different value for how you the object looks in the final render using the Render field. There are two types of subdivision algorithms that you can use to subdivide the object with this modifier. One is Catmull-Clark, which will smooth the object, rounding out the edges. The other is Simple. Clicking the Simple button will allow you to add polygons to the object without rounding off the corners. The button with the Eye icon on it will toggle the effect off and on in the 3D view window. When using any of the modifiers, keep in mind that the changes they make to the object are just a preview. The changes are not applied directly to the object until you press the Apply button. The modifier will then disappear from the modifiers list and the changes will be applied permanently. But very often you do not have to apply the changes if you are using your model solely in Blender. A model can often be rendered and even animated with modifiers added but not applied. 17

18 The Mirror modifier is an excellent tool for models like characters and vehicles, anything that is symmetrical across a center axis. With this modifier you will be able to model just one side of a character and the changes will mirror automatically to the other side. It is usually best to use the Mirror modifier on an object that is in the center of the grid. I tend to model my objects in the center of the grid and then, when finished, move them to the proper location in the scene. To use the Mirror modifier, delete one half of your object in Edit Mode and then apply the modifier. You can select to mirror along the X, Y, or Z axes. The Merge option is on by default, and should be left on if you want the two sides to become one object when you apply the modifier. I generally enable the Clipping function as well. This will allow you to drag points that should be on the center line and snap them together. This helps avoid seams down the center of your object. Keep in mind that this modifier mirrors around the origin of the object. So you may need to use the 3D cursor to move the origin to the proper location. If you are getting undesired results from the Mirror modifier, sometimes a change in the position of the origin can help. Like any other modifier, you can click the Apply button to make your changes permanent. For the Mirror modifier, I recommend applying the changes before moving on to other parts of the modeling process, like rigging a character or texturing. Strange results can occur if you leave this modifier in the list while using other tools. Ultimately, you can add as many modifiers to an object as you like, but be mindful of the Evaluation Order of the modifier stack. Blender evaluates and applies the modifiers in the stack from top to bottom. Depending on the modifiers that are used, the order in the stack can affect the results that you get. Having a Mirror modifier above a Solidify modifier, above a Subdivision 18

19 Surface modifier, can give very different results than Subdivision Surface, Solidify, then Mirror. You can move individual modifiers up and down in the stack (with arrow buttons in the top right of the modifier) and sometimes this just has to be tested to see what the results will be with different stack orders. LAYERS An important part of any project, 3D or otherwise, is organization. And Blender s layers help you stay organized as you create your scene. The layers are found at the bottom of the 3D view. You can select an individual layer by clicking on one of the boxes, or multiple layers by Shift + clicking several. You can also move selected objects from one layer to another. Just press the M key on the keyboard and the Move to Layer window comes up. You can then select one or many layers to move the object to. PERSONALIZING BLENDER There are a few ways of personalizing Blender that might help you work more efficiently. One is changing the selection of objects from the right to the left mouse button. Another is creating shortcut keys for the manipulator tools. You can change the color scheme of the interface. And you can emulate number pad keys on a laptop. Let s take a look at each of these. 1.7 Mouse Button Selection Selecting objects with the right mouse button may not be everyone s cup of tea. I ve been using Blender for years and it still feels odd to me at times. So if you would like to change to using the left mouse button, no one will hold it against you. Here s how Go to the File menu at the top of the screen and then choose User Preferences. The Blender User Preferences window will open. Now click on the Input button at the top of the window. On the left side you will find a 19

20 Select With: section with buttons for Left and Right. Click the Left button. When finished be sure to also click the Save User Settings button at the bottom of the window. Now when you close the window you should be able to select objects in Blender with the left mouse button. For most people this will probably feel a lot more intuitive. 1.8 Manipulator Short Cut Keys I started in 3D animation long ago with programs like Lightwave and 3ds Max. Because of this I got used to having short cut keys to switch between the Move, Rotate, and Scale manipulators. I still like the intuitive nature of grabbing a manipulator and transforming the object in a particular axis. And even though I love Blender, I want the ability to switch between manipulators without having to click on a button each time. So here is how I have set up my Blender preferences so that I have short cut keys for each of the manipulators. We ll once again need to go into the User Preferences window from the File menu. And click the Input button at the top of the window. In the center there is a long list of items. The seventh one down is 3D View. Twirl down the little triangle next to 3D View, and then twirl down the triangle for 3D View (Global). Now you will need to scroll all the way down the list until you see the Add New button. Click this button and a new item called none will be added to the list. Open this up and enter the follow information. In the field that says none enter: view3d.enable_manipulator 20

21 I use the Ctrl + Alt + Left Arrow to choose the Move manipulator, the Ctrl + Alt + Down Arrow for the Rotate manipulator, and for the Scale manipulator I use Ctrl + Alt + Right Arrow. These are what work for me. You can choose anything you would like, but be careful not to create short cut key combinations that are already being used for something else in Blender. Here is what my preferences look like for the manipulators: 21

22 1.9 Color Scheme You can also change the appearance of the Blender user interface to suit your personal preferences. Go back into the User Preferences window and click on the Themes button at the top. On the left is a pull down menu with various color themes for the interface. One word of caution, before you begin trying out these various themes make a Default preset so you can get back to the current theme easily. Just click on the + button next to the Preset menu and name the new preset Default. Now you can always get back to the way Blender was at install without having to use the Load Factory Settings option in the File menu. In addition to the Preset menu, Blender gives you the option of modifying just about every detail of the interface. I have never felt comfortable delving into each little setting in this window. Just knowing that I have the power to do so has been enough for me Emulating Number Pad Keys If you are using a laptop that does not have a number pad, you can change Blender s preferences to use the standard 1 through 0 keys at the top of the keyboard. Access the User Preferences window from the File Menu and click the Input button at the top of the window. Place a check mark in the box by Emulate Numpad. Now click the Save User Preferences button at the bottom of the screen Essential Shortcut Keys There are a lot of short cut keys to remember in Blender. No one can remember them all. But here are a few that I think are essential to know early in the learning process. G R Move Rotate 22

23 S Scale Z Wireframe Shading A Select All/Deselect toggle X Delete T Tool Shelf N Properties Panel M Move to Layer Tab Edit Mode/Object Mode toggle Shift + S Snap Menu Space Search Ctrl+Alt+Q Quad View toggle C Circle Select B Border Select Shift + D Duplicate Numpad 1 Front View Numpad 3 Right View Numpad 7 Top View Numpad 5 Orthographic/Perspective Views Edit Mode: E Ctrl + R W Ctrl + V Ctrl + E Ctrl + F Extrude Loop Cut and Slide Specials menu Vertices Menu Edges Menu Faces Menu 23

24 Character Modeling Now that we ve covered some of the essential tools and concepts of Blender, we can begin putting it all together to model our character. The drawings that I use for this project can be found on my website. Just go to and download the following files: steampunk-kid-front.png steampunk-kid-side.png handdrawing.jpg 2.1 Creating the Loop Mask I've split the drawing of the character up into individual images, one for the front view and one for the side view. I ll bring these images into Blender by pressing the N key and opening the Properties panel on the right. I can scroll down to the Background Images section and click on Add Image. I'll begin with the front view. I want this image to be for only the Front View camera so I'll choose Front from the menu. I ll click on the Open button and browse to the front image of the character on my hard drive. Now if I press the 1 key on the number pad I go to the Front View, and a press of the 5 key will take me into Orthographic View. Once you are in Orthographic View you should see the image there now. I'll choose a new image by clicking on the Add Image button again. And for this one I ll choose the Side View from the Axis menu. I want this one to be only visible in the Right Orthographic camera. So I ll press the 3 key on 24

25 the number pad, and then the 5 key to go to Orthographic View. I should see my side view image now. And then if I press the 1 key on the number pad again I should see my Front view. To be able to see these both at the same time, let s create a new Screen Layout. I ll click the plus key next to the word Default at the top of the screen to create a new screen layout. I ll call this Character Modeling. Now I ll make this screen layout have two windows, the Front View on the left and the Right View on the right. I click in the upper right-hand corner of the 3D View and drag to the left to create a new view window. On the left side I ll press the 1 key and the 5 key to go to Front Orthographic, and there is the front image of my character. On the right view I will press the 3 key and press the 5 key to make sure I m in Orthographic view there as well. I d like to move this guy up so his feet are on the ground plane. So I ll adjust the Y Axis Offset in the Background Images section for the Front View. I will bring him up to 5 units in the Y. And I can go over to the Right View and bring him up 5 units there as well. Now his feet are on the ground plane. I also want the images to not be quite so bright. I can adjust this with 25

26 the Opacity setting in the Background Images section. I ll take this down to.25. And I ll do the same over with the Side View. Now my custom Screen Layout is ready for character modeling. For this particular modeling process, I usually begin in the Front View. So I ll hover the mouse over the Front View and press Ctrl + Up Arrow to make the view full screen. This isn t necessary, but it makes it easier for me to work during this part of the process. You can toggle out of full screen by pressing Ctrl + Up Arrow again. I ll begin by creating a single polygon Plane. Make sure your 3D Cursor is in the middle of the grid by pressing Shift + S and selecting Cursor to Center. Now Click on the Create tab on the left side of the screen, and then click the Plane button at the top of the list. The plane will need to be rotated 90 degrees around the X axis. One way to do this is to press the R key and then immediately press the X key, and then type 90. This is telling Blender to rotate the plane around the X axis 90 degrees. Be sure and press the Enter key to confirm the transformation. This single polygon needs to be split in half now. To do this, press the Tab key to go into Edit Mode, and then press Ctrl + R. This will enable the Loop Cut & Slide tool. Hover the mouse cursor over a horizontal edge of the plane and click twice without moving the mouse. You could also press Enter twice. This will insert an edge vertically right down the center of the plane. Now that the plane has been subdivided into two halves, we don't really need the left half of it. So let s delete it. While still in Edit Mode, press Ctrl + Tab and choose Face. Simply select the face on your left and press the X key. Choose Faces from the Delete menu. Now we just have a measly half of a polygon. And from this we will build our entire character. 26

27 Press the Tab key to go back to Object Mode. Now we need to move this into place between the upper lip and nose of our character. To do this I ll press the G key and then press the Z key. When I move the mouse, the plane will move solely in the Z axis. Move the plane up to the character s face. So I have the plane positioned between the nose and the mouth, and what I want to do is mirror it so that whatever I do on one side of the character s face is mirrored over to the other side. This is why we deleted one side, so we could mirror it back over. To do this I just need to select the plane in Object Mode and go over to the Properties window on the right side of the Blender interface. Here I ll click on the Modifiers Button (with the wrench icon). Now I ll click the Add Modifier menu and select Mirror. I ll want to choose Clipping in the Mirror panel. And I ll make sure all four buttons at the top of the Mirror pane are activated. This will display the results of the modifier in Edit Mode. So now when I go into Edit Mode by pressing the Tab key and, for example, go to Vertex Mode, I can select a vertex and move it around and now it mirrors what I do on each side. This allows me to concentrate on modeling just one side of the character, and the other side follows along. I will begin extruding edges out around the mouth, the nose, and around the eyes, keeping in mind good edge flow so that when it's animated it deforms in a realistic manner. What I ll be doing is trying to create an edge flow so that mirrors the structure of the muscles of the human face. If I do that, then when it deforms during animation, it will do so in a more realistic and believable way. So that's why I'm concentrating on the edge flow right up front. To begin, I ll select the vertical edge on the right and press the E key to Extrude. And I ll just move the new edge out a bit. I ll keep extruding edges all the way around the mouth. Then I ll go to Vertex Mode and do a little 27

28 adjusting to get the structure correct. Once I have the first edge loop around the mouth, I want to extrude the edge up in the center for the nose. For this particular edge I ll do something a little different. I can bring the point on the right down a bit, creating a kind of new edge with an extra vertex in it. I can then extrude this edge with the extra vertex up for the tip of the nose. Now I'm just going to select the edge in the center and extrude it up to the bridge of the nose. And the next extrusion I ll take all the way up near the top of the brow. So now we can work on the eyes. I ll select the edge near the eyes and extrude it out to the side a bit. Then I ll adjust it a bit so that I can begin extruding out from the top and bottom edges of this polygon. What I want to do is extrude out of the top and put three edges, or three subdivisions, along the top of the of the eye. I ll press E for extrude and just begin coming up across the top of the eye. And I ll do the same for the bottom of the eye. At the outside of the eye, I can select the two edges and press the F key to make a face. This closes up the loop around the eyes. 28

29 So now you can see that we have a twodimensional loop mask taking shape. Let s go ahead and select the edge around the mouth and bring it out. I can extrude the whole edge loop and scale it out a bit. I then need to connect the points near the nose using Alt + M and choose Merge at Center. I can also begin selecting anywhere there are four points and pressing the F key to create faces. I will extrude the edge around the mouth one more time and scale out some. And now you should be seeing that nice design for the edge loops around the mouth and also around the eyes. This is the basis of the edge loop flow for the character s face. The great thing about this is you could just save it now and use this for pretty much any character. Let's continue by extruding the edge around the mouth once again. And then we can begin connecting the outside mouth loop to the bottom of the eyes. And finally one more extrusion from the side of the head, near the cheeks, down around the chin and we ll finish up the loop mask. So now we re to the point where we can begin pulling this out into three dimensions. What I'm going to do is begin with this centerline of vertices and 29

30 just select a point in the front view. And then I ll pull it out to its proper place in the side view. I will hit the Z key to go to wire frame. And then move down the character, selecting points and moving it out to match the the reference image. Once I've got that center line done, I'll move one row over and begin on the next vertical row of vertices. I'm going to start moving the points forward that go around the eyes and bring forward the side of the head as well. It's kind of hard to know exactly where the points should be, but that's okay. You don't need to put them precisely where they re supposed to go. You just need to get them generally in place, so that when you take a look at it in three dimensions, you can begin to see you where to pull the points. At this point we should take a look at it in our Default View. We now have the basic loop mask. From this point, we need to look at it carefully from all angles. When we adjust vertices, we should move them forward and back in the Y axis, to get it to look more like our character 2.2 Modeling the Head Now we can work on finishing up the character s head. But first let s work on pulling some points to get a better shape to the loop mask. You can see that when I pulled the points out, I got this very angular shape to the face and that's not what we want. So I'll begin to pull some points out, trying to round out the shape of the face. 30

31 This can be relatively tedious work, but it needs to be done to get nice curves to the face, especially since this is a cartoony character. What I ll do is just pull points forward and back in the Y-axis right now to try and get that curvature of the face a little smoother. Then once I get the curvature correct, I'll begin moving points in the in the X-axis as well. Now since this is a cartoony, younger character, I should work on bringing the cheeks forward some to portray that kind of baby fat look. And to get a better sense of how I'm doing, I will add a Subdivision Surfaces modifier to this as well. So I will click on the Modifiers button in the Properties windows and add a Subdivision Surface modifier. In this panel I'll choose Optimal Display, and I ll increase the View to 2. I ll also click the button with a triangle on it to turn on Apply the Modifier in Edit Mode. This will allow me to see how the curvature of the modifier is working on the model. I think I ll need to do a little more pulling of vertices at this stage, to flesh out the cheeks and nose area a little. Once I get that done I can begin pulling points in the X-axis as well. Be sure and check your front and side views at this point. For my project, I need to move the vertices of the nose and lips forward just a bit to match my drawings. Once you get the loop mask adjusted to match your reference, I think we're ready to begin working on the rest of the head. As we move forward, we'll be pulling points and modifying the structure of the model constantly. What we need to do is select the edges on the top of the brows, extrude them, and begin moving them up and over the head. Even though there are clothes and a helmet, I will begin to model the character as if there are none, modeling the base character. And then I'll add clothes and the helmet on top of that. 31

32 For this part of the process I'll turn off the subdivision modifier (button with the eye), so I can see the model un-smoothed. I ll select the edges at the top of the brow and begin extruding them up and over the head. As I go, I'm going to be widening the distance between the vertices, and scaling the edges to make them a little more flat. At the top of the head, I will begin rotating the edges just a bit so they conform to the shape of the skull. Once I get to the back of the head I'll begin thinking about how to connect the back portion to the front, or the character s face. Each edge I extrude at the back of the head needs to have a corresponding edge at the front. We will need to connect the front and the back and we will need matching edges to do that. The edge that I've extruded at the base of the skull is a little wide when looked at from the front view. To scale this edge in the X-axis I ll need to move the pivot point to the center of the edge. So I ll select the center point and press Shift + S and choose Cursor to Selected from the Snap menu. This will move the 3D Cursor to this point. Now if I 32

33 use the Pivot Point menu to change the pivot point to the 3-D cursor, the scaling will happen from that center vertex. So I ll scale that edge in to match the width of the head from the front view. Now I m going to work on connecting the edges of the face to the back of the head. I can select the edges at the side of the face and extrude them toward the back of the head. I may need to adjust them in the front view so they match the reference image. And I also need to Merge the points with Alt + M, connecting the cheek and temple of the character. Be sure and adjust your vertices and edges as you go so that they are well spaced and make sense. If there are misplaced vertices and edges, continuing to extrude from them will only compound the problem and make it harder to fix later. Take the time to adjust each point before making the next extrusion. I ve lined up the edges from the back of the head to match the front. We can extrude these forward and connect them up at the side of the head using the Merge tool (Alt + M). Once all the points have been merged, I ll go back to the Default View and see how It's looking. My model seems a little thin from the front view. l think it needs to widen out and curve out a little more on the side of the head. Also keep in mind that the Default Camera s focal length of 35mm can be a little distorting. So what I sometimes do is go to the Properties Panel (press the N key). And I ll scroll to the View section, and the Lens field. Instead of the default setting of 35mm, I ll change that to 50mm. I ve found that 50mm seems to work little better at this stage in the process. I will use the Proportional Editing Tool that s at the bottom of the 3D View. When you re in Edit Mode you get several options for this tool. I ll 33

34 choose Enable right now. If you have multiple parts to your object and you just need to adjust one, choose Connected. That will only effect the piece that your cursor is hovering over. I just have one part to my object so Enable is fine. If I click on one of the vertices I d like to move and press the G key, I can see the influence range of the Proportional Editing Tool. If I scroll the Mouse Wheel I can adjust this influence. I ll move points around to adjust the width of the characters head. So now it's looking pretty good, but there are still some issues that need to be fixed. Most can be taken care of fairly easily with some judicious point pulling. Did I just say that? Judicious point pulling? Really? I ll do some adjusting of the character to get the shape of the head the way I want it, and in the next section we will start working on the neck and torso. 2.3 Modeling the Torso and Arms After a bit of point-pulling, I ve been able to get the face of the character to be a little more smooth, rounded, and cartoony. But I think we're ready to go ahead and work on the neck now. So I will switch over to my character modeling Screen Layout. There are a couple ways we could go do this, but I think what I will do is select the entire edge at the base of the head, Extrude it down, and scale in for the neck. So I ll hit the E key to extrude, and I ll pull this ring of edges down and move it in on the sides just a little, as well as scale in some. I can also scale the edges in the Z-axis to flatten them a bit. 34

35 Getting these edges to the proper place is really just a matter of carefully scaling and rotating. I ll rotate the edge loop so it is more horizontal, and I ll scale in so the ring matches the neck in the reference drawing. And I'll just do a little adjusting of there vertices here to try and reduce the amount of stretching that's happening around the neck. Ultimately I'll probably insert some edge loops into the face, but right now I m trying to keep the character as simple as possible so that when I make a change, it effects a greater part of the model. The more vertices you have, the less each one effects the overall shape of the object. I ll give the neck two more extrusions. And then once I get down to the shoulders I'm going to go ahead and extrude again, pulling down a bit and scaling it out it is well. Now that we re at the base of the neck, you may want to go around the to the back of the model and adjust vertices to make sure that they are spaced evenly. It s good to have the polygons of a character model as uniform and as neat as possible. When vertices are jammed together is can sometimes effect how the mesh deforms when rigged and animated. Let s go back to the Character Modeling Screen Layout where we can see the front and side views. And let s begin working on extruding the body down. Even though this character has clothes, I ll want to go ahead and model the body underneath the clothes first, and then put the clothes on top of that. I ll select the edge loop at the bottom of the neck and extrude. I ll scale out a bit, and down some. And I will Alt + Select edge loops and adjust them so they fit the character reference before moving on to the next extrusion. 35

36 Once again, I can scale these edges in the Z axis to flatten them out a bit. Each edge should be getting a little flatter, so by the time we get to the waist, the edge loop should be parallel to the ground plane. At this point it s a good idea to go back into the Default screen layout and look at the model in Perspective view. You should check your edges and make sure that all the edges flow smoothly across the model. I'm just going to adjust a few of the vertices to make sure that everything is uniform and flowing evenly. Because if you have something that's a little off, as you continue to extrude it can just compound the problem. So from time to time you should go in and make a few adjustments. For the arms, I will use four of the faces on the side of the torso, delete them, and then extrude the edge loop out to the side. You can see in the image that the shoulders for the model aren t as high as they are in the drawing. We shouldn t be too concerned about that right now. We ll be able to adjust the shoulders more accurately once the arms are in place. So after I delete the faces where the arms will be, I l adjust the vertices to make sure that the arm hole is a smoothly shaped oval and matches the drawing fairly accurately. Once that is done, we can start extruding the arm 36

37 out. I ll begin with the oval shape, and then as we extrude out toward the wrist, I ll begin to shape it to be more of a circle. So I ll just select that edge loop and hit E to extrude. I ll pull that extrusion out just a little bit and scale that in. I also want to flatten it by scaling it in the X axis just a little. And then I ll extrude again and scale in again. As I m doing this, I m not exactly matching the the reference image, and that's okay. This is just a guide, it's not set in stone. I'll extrude again, and this time I'm going to begin on the elbow edges. For every joint you have in a character, you need at least three edges: one edge for the center of the bend, and the other two edges on either side to help hold the shape when the joint is bent. As you extrude toward the hand, remember that our wrists are usually flatter than the rest of our arm. You may need to flatten the wrist in the Z axis a bit. Once you get the arms extruded out to the wrists, switch back to the Default view to look at the model in perspective. You should tumble all around the model and begin fixing problem areas now. The arms may be flat from a particular angle, or the volume of the shoulders may need to be increase. Take some time to get this part of the model correct now before you move on. Spending a little time on this now can save you some grief later in the process. 37

38 2.4 Modeling the Hips and Legs At this point we have the beginnings of the arms and the torso. Let s begin on the character s hips now. I will press the Tab key to go into Edit mode, then Ctrl + Tab select Edges from the menu. Now I ll select the bottom edge, at the waist, and extrude down until I get to the top of the legs. Then I will select edges at the front and back and extrude those down underneath the pelvis. It will almost be like a diaper for the character. So first I ll extrude down twice to where the leg-holes of the character would be. And then the trick is to select corresponding edges at the front and back of the character. I ll select four edges at the front and four at the back, and these are the ones I ll extrude down to make the diaper. Extruding these edges down, I ll scale in a bit in the Y and X axes, so they begin to narrow from the front and come together from the side. Now we need to connect the vertices underneath the pelvis together. I ll select two corresponding points and press Alt + M to bring up the Merge menu. And I ll select At Center so they merge together evenly and connect in the middle. Once those points are connected, we will need to do some serious point pulling to get the leg openings to be more rounded. If we began extruding the leg without doing this, it would not be the nice, round, cartoony leg that we want. And it would be very difficult to get that shape after we have extruded the edges to create the leg. So we should 38

39 work on getting the shape correct now, so we don t compound the problem and create more work for ourselves in the future. With the leg openings adjusted the way we want them, let s begin extruding the legs down. I ll select the edge loop and extrude, and pull down just a little bit. And then I ll flatten it up some by scaling in the Z axis. The selected edge may then need to be rotated and moved back up into place near the hips. Scaling in the Z axis was just to get all of the points more in line with each other. I will extrude the edge loop again and bring it down a bit, scale it out, and move and rotate it into place. So now there are three edges at the top of the leg pretty close together. Another extrusion brings us down to the top of the knees. We ll probably need to scale again in the Z axis to flatten it out. And this edge should be the first one in the leg that is parallel to the ground plane. Remember that we need three edges for any joint, so this edge at the top of the knee is the first. We need to extrude again to get the edge at the center of the knee. This is where the actual bend of the knee will occur. Be sure to take some time here to scale the other edge loops to get the shape that you want for the legs. We ll do another extrusion for the calf, and this may need to be scaled out some. And then we can extrude again down for the ankle. 39

40 It s worth mentioning again that we have three edges at the knee and three edges where the leg meets the pelvis. These will be important when we get to the rigging and skinning stage. You will need an edge placed at the point where the limb will bend. And you will need the edges on each side of the bend so you can control how much the mesh deforms. So now we have the basis of our character. We have the head, the torso, the arms, and the legs. There is, of course, more work that needs to be done to pull the points around and get them to imply anatomical structures, like the shoulder blades, the knees, and elbows. But so far it's looking pretty good. In the next section we will start working on the hand. 2.5 Modeling the Hand The first thing I m going to do before starting on the hand is to bring in a reference image. It s just one that I drew and it isn t very detailed. But I try and use reference images for anything more complicated than a box. It s hard to get the scale and proportions right when I m thinking about edges, and extruding, and merging points, etc. I need to establish the proportions with a drawing first. So let s open the Properties panel by pressing the N key. And then scroll down to the Background Images section. Click on the Add Images button, and then on the Open button. Browse to the handdrawing.jpg file and click Open Image. Click the All Views menu and select Top view. Now, in the Top View (7 key), if you press the 5 key on the number pad to go to Orthographic view, you should see the image. It s very large so we ll need to shrink it down and put it in place at the end of the character s arm. I ll click in the Size field and drag to reduce the size of the hand image. And then I ll click and drag in the X field to move the hand over to the 40

41 character s left arm. I ll need to adjust the Y axis a bit as well. This process will allow me to move the image and scale it until it s where the hand should be on the character. Once that is in place, I will begin by creating a cylinder. I ll go to the Create tab and click the Cylinder button. When I create the cylinder, a settings panel opens at the bottom of the Tools panel on the bottom-left of the screen. Here I can adjust the number of sides that the cylinder will have. The cylinder is created with 32 sides by default. The fingers of our character certainly don t need that many sides. So in the Vertices field I ll change the value from 32 to 8. I ll scroll down in this same window and change the Cap Fill from Ngon to Nothing. This will make sure that the cylinder has no top or bottom, so it is essentially a pipe. I will now move the cylinder up to where the middle finger would be. I ll need to rotate it 90 degrees and scale it to size. In my Character Modeling screen layout I have changed the Side view to the Top view. So I can see the Front and Top views together. I ll move the cylinder into place for the middle finger, according to the reference image. Now I can add two edge loops, one for each of the joints of the finger. I ll press Ctrl + R and place them at the joints. We will also need to close the tip of the finger. To do that I ll select the two edges on the top of the finger and the two edges at the bottom. I can then press the E key to extrude and scale these edges in the Z axis. This will bring the newly extruded edges toward each other, bringing them together so they just almost meet. Now I ll want to merge these vertices together. I ll select two corresponding vertices, press Alt + M, and then from the Merge menu I ll choose At 41

42 Center. I will need to do this for the other vertices as well. Once that is done, I can merge the points on the left and right to the sides of the opening to completely close off the hole. In my reference drawings, I have my character wearing gloves, but I m going to model the hands as if you might see them without the gloves as well. So I ll need to create fingernails. I will insert an edge loop where I think the cuticle would be. And then I ll go to Face mode and select the two faces on the top of the finger, nearest the tip. I will press Ctrl + E to extrude and then I ll immediately press the S key to scale the faces in just a bit, making them slightly smaller. At this point I ll go back to the Move manipulator and push the faces down into the finger. So now we have a square hole that we ve pushed into the finger. Now I ll extrude the faces again, pull them up above the top of the finger slightly, and scale back out again, making them a bit bigger. Now you might think that this looks odd, and I d agree with you. But if we now add a Subdivision Surface modifier you ll see where I m going with this. Go to the Properties Window on the right side of the screen, and click the button with the wrench on it. With the finger selected, click the Add Modifier pull-out menu and select Subdivision Surface. In the Subdivision Surface panel, I can increase the View to 2 and put a checkmark next to Optimal Display. In addition, I should press the T key on the keyboard to open up the Tools Shelf. And under the Tools tab, in the 42

43 Shading section, I will click on the Smooth button. This will allow me to view the finger so the polygons aren t so faceted, or blocky. So now we have something that is beginning to look more like a finger. As I ve mentioned, we usually need at least three edges at each of the character s joints. This will allow us, in the skinning stage, to adjust the amount of weight around the bend, to get believable deformations. So I will insert edge loops on either side of the existing edges of the finger. And then I will select the center edge of each joint, those existing edges, and scale them out slightly. This will hint at the bony part of the knuckles. Now I will move these edges up so they are level with the bottom of the finger. And then, selecting the two edges at the bottom of each joint, I will move those up slightly to hint at the crease of the joint, along the pads of the finger. Now that we ve created one finger, we can use this same object for all the others. But before I begin duplicating, I d like to move the pivot point of the object to the base of the finger. This will make it easier to rotate and scale the new fingers. I will select one of the vertices at the base of the finger and press Shift + S to bring up the Snap menu. From this I will select Cursor to Selected. This will move the cursor to that vertex. Once that is done, I can go to the Tools Panel (press the T key) and from the Set Origin pull-out menu I ll select Origin to 3D Cursor. With the origin of the object at the base of the finger, I will be able to move, scale, and rotate from that point. This will make getting the other fingers in their proper place much easier. So with the finger in Object mode, I can 43

44 duplicate the object by pressing Shift + D and begin creating and placing the other fingers. Now we should begin thinking about how to connect the fingers together and how to extrude the hand back to connect with the wrist. Currently, each one of the fingers is a separate object. We need to combine them all into one object. So I will select all of the fingers and press Ctrl + J to join them together into one object. Now that they re all one object, we can begin linking them together. I will merge the two vertices between each finger. To do this I ll select two vertices and then press Alt + M. This will bring up the Merge menu. From the menu I ll choose At Center. This will move the two points together and merge them into one. Now I can select the continuous edge all the way around the finger to extrude back for the hand. One word of caution, be sure to deselect the vertical edges between the fingers. You don t want those to be part of the extrusion. This would create faces inside the hand and you will have to go back and delete them later if you don t make sure and deselect the vertical edges between the fingers. It may not be a problem for your model, but I just wanted to mention it now. With the edge around the fingers selected, I will begin extruding back toward the wrist. We will need to keep an eye on the model from all different angles, the perspective and orthographic views, to ensure proper scale and proportion of the hand. As we begin extruding the hand back, we will come upon a common issue that is difficult to avoid. There is almost always a difference between the number of edges at the wrist and the number of edges around the hand. 44

45 And it doesn t really matter if you extrude the hand out of the wrist toward the fingers, or extrude the fingers back toward the wrist like we are doing. There is usually a difference between the two. So we need to be mindful of this as we move toward the wrist. There are currently 26 edges around the hand in my model, but only 8 around the wrist. That s a big difference to make up in only a few extrusions, but we can do it by planning ahead and carefully using the merge tool. Each time we extrude we should collapse some points with the merge tool to reduce the number of edges around the hand. So I ll begin with the top of the hand and collapse the three points that extend from the web of the fingers. I can select all three vertices, press Alt + M, and choose At Center. I ll do this for the three vertices that extend from between the index and middle finger, the middle and ring finger, and the ring finger and the pinky. Now when I select the edge around the hand I only have 20 edges. I ll extrude that edge one toward the wrist and find some other points I can collapse. Now on the palm of the hand, I ll merge points using the merge tool, as shown in the 45

46 image. Doing this I can get the edge count down to 16. And then I ll extrude again. I will continue with this process until I get the number of edges down to 8 to match the wrist. The trick is to do a little at a time, so you don t create a lot of triangles all in one extrusion. In addition, I don t want to create excessive extrusions in the hand just to get the edge count down to eight. It s kind of a balancing act, and may take a couple of tries to get it the way you want it. When you finally reach the wrist, with the same number of edges around the wrist and hand, you will need to combine the two objects into one so they can be connected together. To do that, I ll select both the hand and the arm and then press Ctrl + J. This will join the two objects into one. When you join the hand and body together you will loose the Mirror modifier you had on the character. All you need to do is add another Mirror modifier and the newly connected hand will be mirrored over as well. Now I can begin merging corresponding points together to connect the hand to the wrist. You may need to do a little bit of point pulling to get the vertices to line up with each other. And once everything is connected you may also need to add an edge loop or two at the wrist. Remember that you usually need at least three edges at any joint to get proper deformation when rigging the character. So as you can see I ve added a couple of edge loops to make sure that the wrist will deform properly. To connect the thumb I ll need to delete four faces from the hand so I ll have a hole that has eight edges around it. As you may recall, the fingers and thumb were made from a cylinder with eight sides. So with a hole that has eight sides, I ll be able to connect the thumb and the hand the way we connected the hand and wrist. 46

47 I ll select four faces on the hand, where the thumb should go, and delete them by pressing X and then selecting Faces from the Delete Menu. Now we can select all the edges around the end of the thumb (Alt + mouse click) and then also select the edge around the hole in the hand (Shift + Alt + mouse click). With these edges selected, I will press Ctrl + E to bring up the Edges Menu. From this I ll select Bridges Edge Loops. This will connect the two edges so the thumb is now part of the hand. In addition, I ll add an edge loop through the new faces to allow me to adjust the width of that part of the hand. Now I just need to adjust the spacing of the edges on the thumb. I will use another option in the Edges menu: the Edge Slide tool. With this you can select an edge loop and slide it along the mesh. This is very helpful with an object like the thumb since it is at an angle and not aligned to the World axes. There are also a few too many edges along my thumb, so I ll delete an edge by selecting it and pressing X, and then choosing Dissolve Edges from the menu. To finish off the hand I will need to do some more pointpulling to get it to the shape that I want. I would like it to have a smooth, rounded, cartoon feel like the rest of the character. So once I finish that, I ll be ready to move on and begin working on the mouth of the character. 2.6 Modeling the Mouth Now is a good time to begin working on the inside of the mouth. The way I usually do this is to begin with the edge around the character s lips. I ll select this edge loop and extrude back into the head, creating the gums, 47

48 tongue, and throat. I call this portion of the character the mouth sack. Not a pleasant name for it, I know, but I haven t yet come up with anything better. To work on the mouth I ll switch back to my Character Modeling screen layout so I can see the side and front views at the same time. I ll begin by selecting the edge loop around the lips and press the E key to extrude. I ll scale it in the X and Z axes just a little. Then I ll extrude again and pull back a bit. I can also scale up now to make the edge loop a little bigger. This will begin the inside of the lips, moving toward the gums. At this stage I could also begin flattening the edge loop in the Y axis. As I create more extrusions and move back toward the throat, I ll flatten the edges slightly each time, making them more vertical from the side view. In addition, I ll begin pulling some points to make the mouth sack more rounded from the front view. Once again, it s good to adjust vertices as we go so we don t compound problems with the shape of the object. It will be more difficult to fix problems later. As I continue extruding the mouth sack back into the head, I ll keep an eye on both the front and side views. I m going through the same process for each edge as before: extrude, pull back, scale, and adjust points. As I get to the neck, I ll begin 48

49 rotating the edge loop around the Y axis, turning down the throat of the character. This will ensure that if he opens his mouth wide, there will still be geometry visible inside. To create the tongue we will need to select faces at the bottom of the inner mouth and extrude up and forward. We will be scaling and adjusting points along the way. I ll select four faces at the bottom of the mouth sack and press E to extrude. I ll pull the faces up a bit and also flatten them some by scaling in the Z axis. And maybe even scale in a bit in the X axis. With the next extrusion I ll move the faces forward and rotate them forward. This will begin to point the faces toward the front of the face, where the teeth will be. One more extrusion and I can bring the tongue forward to its full length. I will scale in a bit to create the tip of the tongue. At this point you may need to go back and select the individual edge loops of the tongue to scale and place them the way you would like. Rarely do I get something shaped the way I want it on the first pass of extruding. There is always more work to do to get the proper scale and proportions. The last thing I need to do in terms of the mouth here is to go back and check the lips of the character. They usually end up being horribly skinny after extruding back into the mouth. So I ll select the edge on the inside of 49

50 the lip and move it back slightly, and I ll select the edge loop on the outside of the lips and move it forward. I m just trying to get a little thickness to the lips, making them more believable. Lastly, it looks as the tongue on my character is sitting a little too high in the mouth. So I can select the faces at the front of the tongue and then press Ctrl + Up Arrow to expand the selection. I ll then move the faces down toward the bottom of the mouth. And that should take care of the the mouth and the tongue for our character. The next thing we can work on is the teeth. We ll do that in the next section. 2.7 Modeling the Teeth Now that we have finished with the inside of the mouth and the tongue, we can begin working on the teeth. The teeth are really just cubes, that we will shape and place into the gums of the character. Many cartoon characters have simple half-cylinders for teeth, a single object for the top teeth and another object for the bottom teeth. But for this character we are going to create individual teeth. To do that we will need to create gums for the teeth to go into. And to create gums we really need to be able to access the mouth sack more easily. It s kind of difficult to get in and around the mouth right now. So maybe we should split the inner mouth apart from the head so we have unobstructed access to it. What I ll do is go to face mode and select the row of faces at the back of the throat. If I press Alt and click on an edge between two faces, Blender will select the entire loop of faces. Pressing Ctrl + Numpad Plus Key 50

51 will expand the selection one face loop at a time. I ll need to expand the selection up to just behind the lips of the character. With the inner mouth selected, I d like to separate it out into its own object, apart from the rest of the character. So I ll press the P key to bring up the Separate menu, and I ll choose to separate based on the Selection. Now our selection is a completely separate object. We should be able to go into Object mode and select just that object. In fact, it might even be a good idea to go into the Outliner and rename the new object Inner Mouth. To isolate the inner mouth object, I ll make sure it s selected and press Shift + H (Alt + H to make visible again) to hide everything else that is not selected. Now we can access the mouth more easily. To create the gums I will first select the faces on the top of the mouth that will define the upper gums. This is usually a U-shaped pattern. Yours may look different than mine, depending on the polygon structure of your model. I ll then select a similar pattern of faces on the bottom of the mouth. We will use these faces to extrude the gums inward into the inner mouth. Now if I go to the side view by pressing the 3 key on the numpad, and press Z for wireframe, I can see what is happening as I extrude. With the faces selected I ll press the E key to extrude, and then I ll immediately switch to the scale manipulator. Now as I scale in the Z axis, the faces will move toward each other and begin to flatten out. I ll try and get them as close as I can without actually touching each other. If they touch it will be very hard to select one row or the other. The reason why I m 51

52 doing this is to flatten the gums. I will need to bring them back again, apart from each other, soon. So just try to get them fairly close together. The next step is to just select the top, and move it back up into place. And then just select the bottom faces and move them down into place. Now we have the gums, ready for the teeth to be placed in them. But there s a problem, just like we couldn t see the inner mouth, we now can t see the gums inside the mouth. We need a way of accessing them so we can position the teeth. So what I need to do is just delete the front row of faces on the inner mouth. This is the part that was connected to the back of the lips. And you may be thinking: if you delete that row of faces how are you going to connect the inner mouth back to the head? Well, what I ll ultimately do is just combine the two objects into one, and then Bridge the two edges back together. It s actually going to be easier than you might think. So once I delete the faces you can see that we have access to the gums and will be able to insert the teeth into them much more easily. In addition, you can adjust the vertices of the gums now, if needed. The first tooth I d like to make is the front incisor, the large tooth in the middle, on the top. 52

53 I ll go to the Tools panel on the left (press T), and in the Create tab I ll just create a Cube. I will scale it in the X and Y axes so it is a little narrower and shallower. And then I ll tab into Edit mode and insert an edge loop horizontally in the middle of the object (Ctrl + R). Now I ll add a Subdivision Surface modifier to the object. And in the Modifier panel I ll turn on Optimal Display, increase the View to 2, and click the button with a triangle on it to Adjust Edit Cage to Modifier Result. Once that is done we can just begin to see the shape of the tooth. I can then select the vertices at the top of tooth and scale them in a bit, and the bottom vertices and make them a little wider. I ll also select the edge loop in the center and move that forward in the Y axis. Once I have the shape that I like I ll go back to the Tools panel, under the Tools tab, and press the Smooth button in the Shading section. Now we can move the tooth into place. I ll begin with the upper left side of the teeth. We will just create one side and then mirror the teeth over to the right side. With the first tooth in place, I can use it to duplicate and create the next one. This is also an incisor and is the same shape, but its usually just a little smaller than the first. I ll duplicate and scale it down and put it in place. I ll also rotate it a bit around the Z axis to begin the curved line going back to the molars. 53

54 The next tooth is a canine, and it is a little more pointed that the others. But I can still duplicate the smaller incisor and use that for the canine. I ll just select the bottom face of the canine and scale it in to get the point. And it too will need to be positioned and rotated along the gums. If desired you could make the canine a little taller and narrower than the incisor. But this really depends on the kind of character you re working on. When placing the teeth it may help to switch between Global and Local orientation. You can move, rotate, and scale along the Global axes of the scene, which is the default, or you can use the axis of the selected object. You can find the Orientation menu at the bottom of the 3D View, or you can also press Alt + Space bar to bring up the menu. When trying to place something precisely, this can speed up the process. The next tooth we should work on is the premolar. For this I ll begin with a new object, and once again it s just going to be a cube. But this time we ll need a few more edge loops. I ll need vertical edge loops along the front and side of the cube, and I ll create a horizontal one as well. And then let s add a Subdivision Surface modifier, with the same settings as the last. I ll also go to the Tools tab on the left again and click the Smooth button. I ll then go into Vertex mode and pull vertices on the top of the cube to resemble the points and crevice of a molar. I m not looking to get every little bump and detail of a realistic tooth here. I just want to hint at the shape and keep the design fairly cartoony. Once we get this new tooth in place along the gums, we can just duplicate it to create the 54

55 other molars. I ve even scaled them so they are slightly different sizes. And now all we really need to do is just mirror our existing objects to create the rest of the character s teeth. To do that I ll combine, or join, all of the teeth into one object. I ll select them all and then press Ctrl + J to run the Join tool. Now I need to make sure that the origin of this new object is in the center of the grid, because the Mirror modifier will mirror the object around its origin. So I ll press Shift + S to bring up the Snap menu and I ll choose Cursor to Center. And then in the Tools tab, I ll click the Set Origin pull-out menu and choose Origin to 3D Cursor. Now the origin of the teeth object is in the proper place for us to mirror. There s one last thing that we should check before we try to mirror an object. And that is to see if there is any rotation on our object. If there is, we will need to apply the rotation to set the values back to zero. So let s open up the Properties panel by pressing the N key. And let s scroll up to the top of this panel and take a look at the Rotation fields. You can see that there are values in the Rotation fields other than zero. We need these to be zero to ensure that the Mirror modifier behaves the way we want. To zero these out, I can press Ctrl + A to bring up the Apply Transform menu, and I ll select Rotation. Now those fields have only zeroes in them, and that s what we want. I ll select the teeth object, go to the Modifiers panel, and select a Mirror modifier, and now the teeth are mirrored along the X axis for the other side of the mouth. 55

56 We will need to do this again along the Z axis to create the bottom teeth. But first we need to apply the modifier. I ll go back to the Modifiers panel and use the Up button in the Mirror Modifier to move it up in the modifier stack. I m doing this because the order of the modifiers can have different effects on the object. If I applied the Mirror modifier at the bottom of the stack I would get a different result than at the top of the stack. Once the Mirror modifier is at the top, I ll press the Apply button and both sides of the teeth will become one object. I might as well go into the Outliner, double-click on the object and rename it as well. I ll call it teethtop. But this time we won t need the origin of the object at the center of the grid. In fact, we will need it up near our top row of teeth. So I ll go back to the Set Origin pull-out menu in the Tools tab, and choose Origin to Geometry. And then in the Properties panel (N) I can move the 3D cursor down just a bit in the Z axis. This will ensure that when I mirror the teeth they won t be right on top of each other. How much you should move the 3D Cursor down will depend on the size of your objects. But just used the arrows in the Z field to move the Cursor down so it s slightly below the top teeth. I ll now select the teeth, add a Mirror modifier, and I ll move the Mirror modifier to the top of the stack again. It may not look like anything has happened, but if we enable the Z axis and turn off the X axis, we can see the bottom teeth mirrored along the Z. Once I click the Apply button, the top and bottom teeth will be all one object. But I d like for the bottom teeth to be a separate object from the top, so I will go into Edit mode and select them by hovering over each tooth and 56

57 pressing the L key. And then I ll press the P key to bring up the Separate menu and choose Selection. Now the bottom teeth are all one separate object. Once again I ll go into the Outliner and rename this new object teethbottom. And then I ll set the origin to the center of the objects by clicking the Set Origin pull-out menu and selecting Origin to Geometry. Now it will be easier to pull the bottom teeth back a bit and place them in the bottom gums. The bottom teeth should be a little different from the top teeth of course. The front incisors are usually smaller than the upper ones, and you may have to reposition a few to get them to look right. I ll select the front incisors in Edit mode with the L key again and scale them down slightly. In addition, the bottom teeth are usually set back from the front, unless you have a character with a particularly pronounced under-bite. And of course there are a lot of reference images on Google that can help with placing the teeth. 2.8 Connecting the Mouth and Modeling Ears Now that we ve finished with the interior of the mouth, we should go ahead and connect it back up to the rest of the head. As I mentioned earlier, what I will do is just bridge the mouth and the lips. But first we need to join the two object into one. So I will press Alt + H to unhide the rest of the character (I had selected the mouth and pressed Shift + H to hide the body some time ago). In the Outliner I ve named my objects. I ll select the Character object, and then Shift + click the mouth object. And then I ll press Ctrl + J to join them into one object. And I ll rename this object character. Now if we move into the inside of the character s head we can see the edges that we need to bridge together. Let s go into Edit mode and select the corresponding edges along the gums and the inside of the lips. I ll press 57

58 Alt and click an edge along the gums to select the entire edge loop. And then I ll press Shift + Alt and click the edge loop along the lips. With those two edge loops selected, I ll press Ctrl + E to bring up the Edges menu. From the menu I ll click Bridge Edge Loops. Now we have a loop of faces connecting the inner mouth and the character s head. Once you do this, take a look at the position of the teeth. It s always difficult for me to get the teeth up close enough to the back of the lips. I ve seen so many 3D characters with the teeth too far back from the lips. In reality, our teeth are right up against the back of our lips. So get them as close as you can. When you pull the teeth forward they may move out of the gums slightly. So you may need to adjust the vertices of the gums to mold them around the teeth. While we re here working on the head, this might be a good time to create some ears for our character. This particular character doesn t have ears that you can see. The helmet covers the ears completely. But it might be helpful to go through the process of creating some cartoony ears. Generally speaking the ears line up with the bottom of the nose and also with the top of the eyes. But this is a cartoon character so we have a bit more leeway to put them where we want. I ll begin by selecting two faces where the ear should go. And all I m going to do is extrude out several times and pull some points to get a very simple cartoon ear. 58

59 I ll press E to extrude and I ll pull straight out just a little and move the new faces back and up a bit. Then I will extrude two more times, pulling out and positioning the faces each time. At the last extrusion I ll scale the faces down to make the curvature of the ear. I can select the single vertex in the middle and pull it in to hint at the interior of the ear. In addition, I will adjust vertices all over the ear to get the shape I want. I ll then select the four faces at the front of the ear and press E to extrude. I ll press S to go straight to the Scale tool, and scale the faces in as well as pull them back into the ear a bit. Of course, you ll want to take some time and pull points to get it shaped more to your liking. But this is all I m looking for, just some simple cartoony ears. 2.9 Modeling the Eyes We ve got one more part to work on before we complete the base character, and that s the eyes. To begin let s create a sphere. I ll go over to the Create tab on the Tools panel (T) and click the UV Sphere button. In the Add UV Sphere panel that appears at the bottom of the Tools panel, I ll adjust how many Segments and Rings the sphere has. I ll enter 16 in the Segments field and 24 in the Rings field. This will give me the number of edges I need for the pupil and the iris of the eye. In addition, I ll add a Subdivision Surface modifier to it. In the Subdivision Surface modifier I ll increase the View field to 2, turn on Optimal Display, and click on the 59

60 button with a triangle on it to enable the Adjust edit cage to modifier result feature. Also, I ll go to the Tools tab in the Tools panel and click the Smooth button. This will make the sphere smoother. I also want to rotate the sphere 90 degrees in the X axis. This will point the top pole of the sphere in the same direction as the character. We ll use the circular pattern of the edges at the pole to create the iris and pupil. I ll just open the Properties panel with the N key and type 90 into the X field under Rotation. We should also move the eyeball to it s own display layer. With the sphere selected, I ll press the M key to bring up the Move to Layer window. I ll click on the second layer to move it there. Our eyes are made up of two basic parts. One is the inner part with the iris and pupil. The other is the outer eye, which is the cornea. The outer eye is transparent and reflective, and the inner eye has the color of the iris and the white of the eye. So we really need two objects to do this correctly. But first I will go to the Outliner and rename the sphere to eyeinner. And then I ll just press Shift + D to duplicate it, and immediately press the Enter key. This ensures that the duplicate remains in the exact same position as the original. I ll rename the duplicate in the Outliner as well. I ll call it eyeouter. Also in the Outliner, I ll click on the eyeball icon to turn off its visibility in the 3D view. I just want to make sure that I don t accidentally select or alter it right now. Going back to the original eyeinner object, I ll tab into Edit mode. To create the iris, I need to insert edge loops on either side of the third edge from the pole. So I ll press Ctrl + R and insert one edge loop outside this edge, and one inside it. 60

61 The reason I m doing this is to have edges to hold the shape when the iris is flattened. To flatten the iris I will need to move the pivot point to the center of that original third edge loop. I ll Alt + Click the edge to select the loop and then press Shift + S to bring up the Snap menu. I ll then choose Cursor to Selected. Now let s make sure that the pivot point is at the cursor. I can click the Pivot Point pull-out menu at the bottom of the 3D View and choose 3D Cursor. I ll select the vertex in the center of the pole and press Ctrl + Numpad Plus key to expand the selection. I ll expand the selection to include the original edge, around which we added the other two edge loops. I ll go to the Right Orthographic camera. I can press the 3 key on the numpad to do that, or go to the View menu and choose Right in the Cameras section. I ll also press Z to see the eye in wireframe. Now when I go to the Scale tool and scale in the Y axis the selected points will flatten, forming the iris of the eye. The next task is to create the pupil of the eye. I need to select the collection of triangle faces at the front of the eye so I ll press the C key to enable Circle Select mode. And I ll just click and drag to select the faces. 61

62 Since I have a Subdivision Surface modifier applied to the eye, if I extrude the pupil in, the edges will collapse and be too curved or smoothed. So what I can do is extrude twice. I ll press the E key once, click the mouse, and then press the E key again. Now I ll begin pulling the faces back into the eye, and even extrude a couple more times as I push back. When I ve pushed back far enough into the eye, I ll need to extrude twice again to get a sharp edge to the back of the pupil. I should change the pivot point back to Median Point in the Pivot Point pull-out menu so when I scale in the last extrusion, the scaling is centered at those faces. If you recall, when we originally created the sphere, we used 16 Segments. This means that there are 16 edges going into the pole of the sphere, inside the pupil. Having so many edges meeting in one place can cause visible pulling and wrinkling around that center point. To alleviate some of this we can remove every other edge to create eight four-sided polygons (quads), instead of 16 threesided polygons (tris). I ll select every other edge within that center circle of tris and press the X key to bring up the Delete menu. I ll then choose Dissolve Edges to remove those edges, leaving quads behind. 62

63 That takes care of the inner eye. Let s now turn our attention to the outer eye. I ll turn off the visibility of the inner eye in the Outliner, and make the outer eye visible. The outer eye needs to be just a little bit bigger than the inner part. So I ll scale it up a tiny amount. I ll press the N key to open up the Properties panel, and in the Scale fields for X, Y, and Z I ll enter This will ensure that we won t see any overlap with the inner eye. For the cornea, we need to do pretty much the same thing that we did with the inner eye, except instead of flattening the front of the sphere, we need to bulge it out. Once again we need to insert edge loops on either side of the third edge from the center. And then we need to make sure the 3D Cursor is in the center of that third edge loop. I ll press Alt + Click to select the whole edge loop, and then press Shift + S and choose Cursor to Selected. Then we should change the Pivot Point to the 3D Cursor, select all of the points at the front of the eye, and scale in the Y axis so the selection bulges out. The outer eye on the finished character will be transparent and reflective. So we will be able to see the color of the iris through the cornea. But the outer eye will also reflect the light in the scene. So it will help add a glint or sparkle to our character s eyes. Lastly, I will delete every other edge in the circle of tris at the front of the eye, just like we did with the pupil. It s very important here because the reflectivity of the material will really highlight any pulling or wrinkling that might occur. At this point we can work on putting the eye into the head of the character. To make our lives easier we should probably join the two parts of the eye into one object, before we start moving and scaling. So I ll select both objects in the Outliner and press Ctrl + J. And I ll rename the new object in the Outliner to Eye.L. 63

64 Now I can start moving the into place. I ll Shift + Click the first layer so I can see both the character and the eye. And I ll move it up into the head. Placing an eye in a character s head like this can be kind of tricky. Not only do you have to consider the size of the eye, but also the placement. In addition, you will most likely need to do a good deal of adjusting to the vertices around the eye to get a snug fit for the eyeball. For this character I will need to move some of the points around the eye forward in the Y axis, and others back, so they mold around the eye. I ll also insert an edge loop to help hold the eye lid area in place. No matter how much pointpulling and adjusting you do, often times there are still small opening between the lids and the eyeball. But we don t want the viewer to be able to accidentally see into the head through one of these cracks. What we can do is extrude the center edge loop back into the head, intersecting slightly with the eyeball, to form a kind of suction cup. There s one more thing we need to do before we are done with the eyes: we need to mirror the eyeball over to the other side. To do this, we need to set the center of the eyeball object to the center of the grid. I ll first make sure that the 3D Cursor is at the center by pressing Shift + S and choosing Cursor to Center. Then I ll go over to the Tools tab in the 64

65 Tools panel (T), and in the Set Origin pull-out menu I ll select Origin to 3D Cursor. Now I just need to go over to the Modifiers panel, add a Mirror Modifier, and the eyeball will be mirrored over to the right side of the character. I should apply the modifier, but before I do I ll move the Mirror modifier up to the top of the stack in the Modifiers panel. This will ensure that the Mirror operation happens before the smoothing of the Subdivision Surfaces modifier. I ll then press the Apply button in the Mirror Modifier. Now the two eyeballs are all one object. I ll rename this object eyes in the Outliner. At a later stage we will need to split these apart so they can be independently controlled by the character rig, but for now I think it s fine to keep them as one object. Well, that just about does it for the base geometry of the character model. There is always more point-pulling and adjust that we can do. But in the next section we ll take a look at how to create the clothes and accessories for the character Modeling the Clothes and Accessories In this chapter let s work on creating the clothes and accessories of the character. We will go over how to create the character s helmet, his shirt and vest, his pants, and his shoes. From this you ll see the general process of creating clothes and will be able to apply the techniques to creating clothes of your own design for your characters. To create the helmet, I first need to get rid of the ears. The ears would stick out of the helmet if I were to leave them as they are. So I ll select the faces of the ears, press the X key, and in the Delete Menu I ll choose Faces. 65

66 Now we just need to fill that hole where the ears were. One way to do that is to press Alt and select the edge loop around the hole. Now I ll press the F key to fill that with a face. The problem with this is that it did not extend the edge through the middle of the hole. And therefore we have a six-sided polygon. This won t do, especially since we are using the Subdivision Surface modifier. We need to mainly use four-sided polygon, and sometimes three-sided. But we should try and avoid ngons, or polygons with five or more sides. To fix this we can cut an edge through the face with the Knife Tool. I ll press the K key to enable the Knife Tool and click on each vertex on either side of the hole, and then press Enter. You can see the Knife Tool cursor change when you re hovering directly over a vertex. Now we ve filled the hole and reestablished an edge through the middle of the face. To create the character s helmet, I ll use the geometry of the head and duplicate it. So I ll press the C key to activate Circle Select, and I ll select the faces of the head that most correspond to the helmet in the reference drawing. I ll then press Shift + D to duplicate those faces. In the Tools tab I ll click the on the Shrink/Fatten button to expand the new faces out away from the head. This will be the base geometry of the helmet. But before I work on it any further, I should separate it out as its own object. To do that I just need to press the P key to bring up the Separate Menu. From this menu I ll choose Selection. To keep things tidy I should now rename that object in the Outliner. I ll call it helmet. So now it s a 66

67 matter of reshaping and pulling points so it looks like the helmet in our reference image. Once the helmet object is the proper shape I can add some thickness to it. It s much easier to mold and work with an object like this when it has no thickness. So I always try and get it the proper shape before adding thickness. I ll use the Solidify Modifier to do this. I ll go over to the Modifiers panel and in the Add Modifier pull-out menu I ll select Solidify. In the Solidify Modifier panel I can click and drag the Thickness field to increase or decrease the thickness of the object. When it s the way I want it, I can click the Apply button to apply the modifier. But with the Mirror and Subdivision Surface modifiers above the Solidify in the modifier stack, some strange things happen. So before I press Apply on the Solidify panel, I ll press the Apply button in the Mirror modifier. Then I will press Apply in the Solidify panel. When I do, I loose some of the thickness I had. This is because the Subdivision Surface modifier is still in place. All I need to do is add a few edge loops along the edge of the helmet. So I ll press Ctrl + R and hover over the lip of the helmet. I ll scroll the mouse wheel a bit to add another edge loop, and then I ll click the left mouse button twice. Now we have a few edge loops that will keep that part of the helmet fairly sharp, even though there is a Subdivision Surface modifier in place. There is one other thing to consider for our helmet. When we get to the UV mapping stage, trying to UV map the inside of the helmet will be a struggle. UV mapping something like this with thickness is always rather tedious. And to make matters worse, we won t even see the inside of 67

68 the helmet since it will be on the character s head. There s no need to go through all that hassle for something that isn t even going to be seen. So what I d like to do is delete the faces on the inside of the helmet that won t be seen and that don t contribute to the shape of the object. I ll go to Face mode and press C to activate the Circle Select Tool. Now I ll just click and drag to select the faces that I d like to delete, press the X key and choose Faces from the Delete menu. Now this object will be much easier to UV map and won t contribute extra polygons to the scene. As a reminder, be sure to get the object exactly the way you want it before using and applying the Solidify modifier. Having that extra geometry really makes it difficult to shape and alter the object. To create the shirt I ll go through much the same process. I ll go into Face mode and select the faces that would be the shirt. I ll press Shift + D to duplicate those faces, use the Shrink/Fatten Tool to expand it off of the body. Then I ll press the P key to bring up the Separate Menu and choose Selection. Now that it is a separate object, I ll rename it in the Outliner. I d also like to split the shirt down the front so that one side can overlap over the other, creating the placket for the buttons. First, I ll Apply the Mirror modifier that is still on the shirt object by tabbing back to Object Mode and pressing the Apply button in the Mirror panel. I ll then select the edges down the front of the shirt and press Ctrl + E to bring up the 68

69 Edges Menu. In this menu I ll select Edge Split. Now I can move one side of the edges underneath the other to make it look like a button-down shirt. Once the shirt is the way I like it, I ll go through the same process as above to create thickness using the Solidify Modifier. In addition, I will delete the faces on the inside of the shirt to reduce the poly-count and to make my life easier during the UV mapping stage. For the pants of the character, I don t actually have to create a new object, like I did for the helmet and shirt. Since we don t see the legs of the character, I can use the actual geometry of the legs as the pants. I won t even bother duplicating the legs and splitting it out to another object. I ll just use the legs themselves, selecting edges and scaling them in and out to create the the wrinkles of the pants. I ll select the edge loop at the waist and use the Edge Split Tool again to break the legs apart from the torso. For the sole of the boots, I ll create a cube, scale it so it is the proper thickness, insert an edge loop down the middle, and simply extrude it back toward the heel. At the heel, I ll lift the faces up, and then extrude down to the ground. And then I ll insert edge loops horizontally along the top and bottom to hold the sharpness of the edges when I add a Subdivision Surface modifier. Now, the shoe laces of the boots are an interesting trick. To create one of the laces I ll go to the Create tab in the Tools Panel and click the Path button. This will create a path, and if I tab into Edit mode I can see the individual points that make up the path. I can adjust these points to get the shape I m looking for. To extend the path, I can select one of the end 69

70 points, press E and extrude a new segment from the end of the path. This gives you a lot of control over the shape and length of your path. Once I have the shape, I ll tab back into Object mode and go over to the Paths panel in the Properties window on the right. In this panel I ll click and drag on the Depth field to add some geometry to the path. But this only produces half the lace. I ll need to go to the Fill section and select Full from the pull-out menu. This will now produce a full tube that s beginning to look like shoe laces. But it s still very blocky. To make it more rounded, I ll go back down to the Bevel section and increase the Resolution a bit. 70