Help with Designing character model in Blender....

Hello, I am Having trouble finding tutorials for Blender on how to make a Character with this form, It took me about 3 hours to find a perfect reference for a character I want, and I have tried following the Poly Pattern in blender but nothing is working, I cant get the Legs correctly shaped, or the arms....

If someone knows how to work with this type form please help!
the tutorial i got this Reference from was a tutorial based on 3dsmax, I tried it on there and idky i just cant get the form right.

 

The type of form does not matter, you must learn to use your tool properly

http://cgi.tutsplus.com/tutorials/c...game-character-using-blender-part-1--cg-16132

 

Yup, the tool has to be learned. My advice is the same as vidi's, follow some tutorials, especially ones that do something similar.

The way I would likely do this model is box modelling combined with subsurf modelling. Create a box, put a subsurf on it, position the top where the arms meet the shoulder(either top or bottom), and put the bottom where the hip becomes the legs. You would also want to divide it in half and put on a mirror modifier so you can just do one side. Then create edge loops where you need them and position things in line with the reference images from both front and side.

Honestly, I have much more trouble trying to find/create good references than to actually create a model once I get a good reference.

 

Blender is no amateur-grade modeling tool that you can just open up and use after seeing a tutorial or two, you know? It's right up there with proprietary solutions and requires a certain (read: 'long') time to get accustomed to. The learning curve of such highly specialized tools tends to be as steep as a brick wall and Blender is no exception to this.

So as the two previous posters, I highly recommend you to learn to use Blender first.
However, I'd like to warn you:
Online tutorials aren't the best way to go about it, as tend to be faaaaaaaaaar too superficial. Blender has a million-billion features and tutorials that go "click this, then this, then this and finally this" don't do them justice. You'll learn "how to do exactly X", but nothing about the underlying processes. As a result you'll have trouble with using Blender efficiently for any task that is similar to "X" but not quite the same.
You need to understand what exactly the tools do in order to be able to decide which ones to use for what job.

I started really learning Blender recently with a book. And let me tell you this:
You can clearly tell the difference between an online tutorial that is - at best - as mediocre as the modeler who created it and a complete book written by a Blender Foundation Certified Trainer.
Unfortunately, the book is only available in German. So if you don't happen to speak it, you're out of luck. Although there might be some English equivalent I don't know about.

 

I found a PDF for Blender in English, but i get distracted when something takes a long time to be explained >.>
I Used to use 3dsmax for simple mod making in Skyrim, mainly cuz i had issues installing Blender back then but Now i use blender and Like it a lot more than most programs (Besides the center-point thing with the Left click, hard getting used to right clicking and not left clicking)

I tried the Box and Create edge loops idea and I cant get all the poly lines properly lined up with the Reference poly lines without the mesh some how becoming deformed....

So far I'm having no problem creating landscapes and Models (low poly style) but for some reason Character bodies have always been hard to make v.v

 

thank you for you're Replies btw

 

Then I have some bad news for you: 3d modeling (and game development as a whole) are no instant-gratification type of activities. You'll spend months, even years, working countless hours before producing anything worthwhile.

You need to make a decision:
You either say "I really want to do 3d modeling and/or game-development!", man up, sit down and take your time to learn and understand how Blender works. This means not even thinking about your character/game and taking a few steps back. In a month or two, you should be able to create your character fairly easily with the added bonus of being much more efficient while doing so.

Alternatively you come to the conclusion that 3d-modeling/game-development isn't something you want bad enough to justify spending countless hours on learning.
If that's the case, please do yourself and everyone here on the forums a favor and stop wasting your own and our time. The forums are there to help you creating something, NOT to create it for you. If you don't want to put in the effort and learn your tools, nothing good will ever come out of it.

Character design isn't easy for a couple reasons. For one, creating organic shapes is harder than creating simple, primitive shapes. Creating a face is harder than creating a house, as the latter is just a couple of blocks. For another, you need to be very careful about the topology of your mesh or it will become virtually impossible to animate. Lastly, you'll want a very, very low polycount for videogames. This makes the first point hard to achieve.

 

Alright thank you
It's probably gonna take me a lot of time, mainly due to the fact i'm a Kinetic Learner and not so much an Auditory one (Easier to learn by watching and doing).
But I appreciate the Advice, I have been told I need to Teach myself to be more patient and to just sit down before and I'm working on it (Glad someone could Remind me about that).

Been wanting to take a look in that PDF again

I completely agree on the Organic shapes, but there is one thing.... The Vampire I created while watching a tutorial for Sculptris on How to sculpt the Human face on Youtube, the First time around it came out Hideous and Deformed (Albeit i stayed up from 12 to 3 am working on it) I decided to trash it and go to bed, I woke up that morning and instantly got to work on the Vampire Face, it only took me 1 hour and 30 mins to complete it on my second try (without having to watch the tutorial again).
The Taurus head took me about 3 hours in total but is probably my best work and I kinda relied on some basic info from my dad about wrinkles and the such, each tooth I molded down to a fine point along with maulers and gums.

Is this usually normal? Or did creativity just purely take over and not skill from watching the tutorial?
I tried adding a Taurus body onto the head, but the body just would not come out right, is that also normal for faces to be easier?

I'm also going to take a look at Vidi' tutorial it looked really good.

and sorry if I'm wasting your time v.v...

 

Maybe it's also talent, you know?
Those two heads are looking quite good.

The reason why I don't recommend online-tutorials is that they tend to start off with doing things. "Let's create something!!!" They offer little to no background information, so you end up pressing buttons not knowing what they actually do.
This ended up becoming a huge problem for me.
My first attempt at learning Blender was using online tutorials, Google and a lot of time. It worked...kind of. It worked in the same way as if I would have written a book with my left hand (I'm right handed). I was working very slow, inefficient and the results weren't optimal.

Here's one example:
If you unwrap your model and assign a texture, you do so by choosing it from a dropdown list. At one point I wanted to remove a texture I have since replaced by another, so I selected the texture, then clicked the "X" on the right end of the list and thought everything was good.
However, when I wanted to assign the new one again, I saw that he texture I have 'deleted' was still in the list. I repeated the process and it still wouldn't work.
I used Google and found out that the solution to my perceived problem is very simple:
Select the texture, then hold shift, click on the "X", save, then restart Blender.
I thought that they were joking, but no, it actually worked.
At the time I thought that this must have been the mad UI design that Blender supposedly has. The thing so many people cried about on the Internet.

The book I'm currently reading explained what "datablocks" are, how Blender uses them and what all those buttons (including the "X") actually do to them. And guess what?
Suddenly everything makes an insane amount of sense! What I thought was insanity, was actually a very, very useful system of Blender. I just didn't understand it.

The thing is:
Not a single tutorial I've followed has explained datablocks like this. It was all just clicking buttons, but no explanation as to what those buttons actually did.

Furthermore, it served to illustrate something:
Blender is not intuitive. It's a pro-tool. Pro-tools don't need to be intuitive. Those tools are build around the needs of professionals, who spend months/years learning and working with those tools. They are designed in a way that allows those people to work as efficient as possible, not that it's easy to understand for newbies. It's just not a priority.
As such, there is tons and tons of things where Blender doesn't do what you'd expect it to do. The left-/right-click thing isn't the only one. Believe me.



Also, if you still feel determined to learn Blender, you're not wasting anyone's time. It's just that the Unity forums are full of people who want to make games without doing any work. As a programmer, I've lost count of how many threads in the scripting board were essentially: "I can't program, have no intention to learn it, but need »X«. Somebody, do it for me plox."

 

Lol I can't script at all, But I want to learn, Just saving that For when i go to school .
Everything else i can probably learn from the PDF, Google and here.
oh by the way the PDF is called "Blender: From Noob to Pro", Is that the book you have?
I appreciate your time, is there a friends button?

 

David Ward has some great stylized character modeling tutorials for Blender. Check them out. One I really like is this one - a Tim Burton style character. He's a very good teacher, easy to listen to, doesn't go too fast, etc.

 

Ill check him out and see what hes got, thanks

 

A little shorter than the previous replies but more to the point of your problem... Have you learned about the snapping modes in blender? I often find it easiest to turn on surface snapping and start with a plane, then extrude edges to retopo. Do big pieces to get the basic shape and your topology lines flowing the direction you want them to, then use edge loops to refine where necessary. The nice thing is then you just grab edges or vertices or faces and move a tiny bit when will resnap so you can keep refining and snapping and relatively quickly (in terms or modeling anyway) get good model topology suitable for use with xnormal to bake maps from your original model onto.

 

Yes i know how to to use snapand edge looping, in a previous comment i atated that i tried with edglooping and i dont feel like snapping would really help lol, i dont really need it much for this, i problem mainly is angling the lines well, but Vidi game me a pretty good tutorial and imma try it out sometime.
Thanks though from reminding me about snapping, i actually need to use it for a different project.

 

Daniel Kreuter Has one of the better tut's I have seen. If you are looking to focus on stylized from line art characters. And for the most part he will call out the rule or convention that he is breaking as he does so.

This persons channel will cover most of your rigging needs as well. A word of advice from someone who is freshly a year into learning to model. Sit down for a week or three, Don't get attached to anything you do, And just use the bleep out of the tools to your hearts Content and have fun. Do allot of models quickly. Don't worry about quality, Don't worry about keeping them. This is to Learn a few tools and learn them well.

Spoiler: Tools to learn

I nset
E xtrude
Smooth Vertex. Assign this one a hotkey with the right click menu, Use a number
Vertex Slide ( Ctrl V )
Merge ((Alt M ))
Insert Edge Loop ( (Ctrl R)
These can take care of most of your vertex pushing needs. Do up some box modeling with a subsurf of 2 or 3 and just make stuff happen for a week or two.

And for bonus points, Looks up how to draw 101 tuts on Deviant Art and pin it. Most of what you see there will transfer.

 

Yeah!
David Ward is da BOSS!!

 

Bonus Tip!!!

Look up the little program Alchemy. It is meant to bring out some "creativity" of sorts. I mentioned above that I suck at actually getting the concepts I need to model, though I can generally model what I want once I do. Well, I'm currently working on a top-down space shooter that plays similar to asteroids, and I'm making my aliens using Alchemy and Blender. Alchemy is great to get some sort of squiggles down, which can be shaped as filled in or not, and it has many little tools and effectors to get different things. So I'm using it for the top-down view of the aliens, and using Blender to actually model them. Of course, I have to figure out where it makes sense to create more height since I'm only using a top-down view, but I like it so far.

So for learning purposes, just make some weird stuff in Alchemy, and turn it into models. It will force you to do something different, and likely try different methods of modelling. In my aliens, I'm mostly using box modelling with sub-surfs since aliens in this style are generally organic and curvy so it fits.

 

Huh, is alchemy an app for android? It sounds familiar but there are so many apps with the name alchemy lol... im gonna check out david ward soon, its one of those rainy days where its good to cuddle up in bed and just listen to an audio book or start watching tutorials.

 

The Alchemy I'm talking about is for Windows/Mac/Linux and can be found here.

 

Ok, thanks

 

Well, I was able to do it finally with the Tutorial Vidi put up
and thanks everyone for the Advice and information