Getting started in 3D modeling?

I am a aspiring game design enthusiast and i would love to know where to start off in learning to make 3D models in blender i can really use some good youtube tutorial series and maybe some books as well anything to get me started.

 

I'm a coder, kind of going through the same thing. It seems like all of the 3d modeling tutorials are like "See how to make this super awesome alien!", but very few cater to actual beginners who don't know the first thing about modeling.

However, I've been going through the tutorials on blender.org, and have found them to actually be pretty good. The first set go over the interface, and culminate in modeling a submarine using a reference image. I learned quite a bit from that series.

Lately, I've also been watching a lot of speed modeling videos to get the general idea of a modeler's thought process. Its been rather enlightening.

 

I hope its as enlightening as reading code, But i will check out the blender tutorials thank you. One other thing do the tutorials go over the very basics like meshes,shaders,textures?

 

Hi. I just started learning Blender as well.
I would recommend checking out http://blenderartists.org/forum/index.php
They have introductory tutorials on the site, and a forum for Blender artists.

 

Surprisingly it kind of is. Tonight I was watching a video by pigart and I was surprised at how many of the concepts parallel coding. Its interesting to watch them build out their objects in large ambiguous blocks to get the basic shape, then start molding it into a more detailed shape. My problem was always that I was trying to get tons of detail right from the start.

I thought it was funny because it seems so simple in retrospect. When I code I don't code the most complex stuff first, I start by stubbing out code, filling in the broad concepts and adding detail later.

I don't know if I'll ever be a decent artist, but I'm trying my best to understand the thought process behind it. I think looking at art and figuring out how to do it is probably the same as a programmer looking at code to figure out how someone did something. That's my main reasoning behind watching the speed model videos anyway.

 

Check out CGCookie's Blender tutorials. I started there and can't say enough good things about their videos. A lot of their advance modeling videos require a subscription but there should be plenty of beginner ones to get your feet wet.

 

Do you happen to speak German, OP?

 

Actually, I don't think you need to be much artistic to be a good modeler.
Sure it helps, but helps, but more artistic people tend to lean towards organic modeling,
while technical people tend to lean towards hard surface modeling.
And, usually, there is a lot more need/work for environment and assets than there is for characters.

Might be a bit oldschool, but I would like to point out this tutorial,
which might been one of the better ones I've seen, http://www.3dtotal.com/ffa/tutorials/max/joanofarc/joanmenu.asp
Because it covers a lot of very useful basics when working with polygons.
Though, this was the era before zbrush and the likes, so some things have been modernized.

 

I'm mainly a coder but I've got some 3d modeling experience as well so that I can build most of my own assets with the assistance of a texture library, I'm no artist but I can get by. I can't tell you anything specific for Blender because I learned on Maya and Max but in general I would look into a concept called box modeling.

Here's a moderate length description
http://www.jjonaitis.com/tuto/tuto2.htm

In general with box modeling you start with a cube and then you use extrude, scale, move, and edge loops to add more and more detail to the object. Usually when you box model if the object is meant to be symmetrical you will want to cut the box in half so that it's cut along the x or z axis (x is better so that z can point forward, otherwise you may have to rotate your model 90 degrees). Once the entire model is done you simply duplicate it along the x axis (-1, 0, 0).

Here's an example of a small ship I made for a 2.5d game, I made it exactly as I described above.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/lzgg96f84jejipu/piranha3.png?dl=0

(edit): Here's a shot of the same model selected inside of Maya so you can get an idea as to the shape of the various polygons to see where to extrude/scale/loop.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ujxwevqpgppdfwt/pirahnamodel.png?dl=0

With extrude, scale, and edge loops you can do virtually anything. If you have very complex geometry however you may want to draw profile curves and revolve/loft them. This is good for objects that are cylindrical like pipes, wires, or a lamp or maybe chair legs that have some level of detail in them (though you can also do this with extrude/scale). If you're making a character you'll want to build it in a t-pose and extrude to points where you want to put the joints when you animate, you can add new details later with edge loops.

The most important thing with modeling is to not worry about putting too many details in, you'll get much better performance if you can make general shapes with well done textures and bump maps to add your detail. This is some advice that I should take myself but like I said above I'm not an artist so I rely on premade textures rather than custom solutions (though I can modify those in photoshop a little bit). As a result I pay a price in my polygon counts.

If you do need a complex shape in many cases booleans are the best way to do it. My good examples of this are on a computer I don't have access to at the moment but a while back I was messing with making some Magic mana symbol dice to 3d print. Here's an example of one of the faces

https://www.dropbox.com/s/0zwf3qvqmbarv35/die4.png?dl=0

I did that by importing the artwork to a plane that used it as a texture, tracing some profile curves over the artwork, and then extruding the curves. From there I took my now extruded model, placed it going through the plane of my die face, and using boolean/difference.

This can be a good technique to do something like etch a complex piece of artwork into a model, but going back to my texture advice above you may be better off just using a displacement map here depending on where your bottlenecks are.

 

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