Creating appealing characters is one of the most satisfying, but also, undoubtedly, one of the hardest things you can do in 3D.
In this course I share my full process for designing, modelling, and animating characters in a way which is easy to follow, even for complete beginners.
Ever since I started to learn 3D animation, over 25 years ago, I wanted to create my own appealing, stylised, characters.
The problem was, I struggled to find useful resources or information which would teach me the skills that I needed.
Having invested many years of study into learning how to design and create my own characters, I’m now sharing my experience in this course.
Through many years of practice, I have come to understand how the application of a few simple principles can transform the quality of a character design.
In this chapter I will share those principles with you and cover the basics of how I go about designing animal characters for illustration or 3D animation.
Once we’ve discussed things in theory, I will then demonstrate how to apply this knowledge whilst designing a number of unique tropical fish characters.
Character Modelling for animation can be time consuming and take many years to master. By starting out with simple characters, you can quickly learn the essential modelling skills which will provide a foundation for all your future projects.
During this chapter I share my approach to modelling, texturing, shading and lighting a character based on one of the designs created in Chapter 01. We will then also go on to place this character into a simple underwater environment.
In this chapter, I first demonstrate how to build a 3D character rig in Blender. This rig contains all the controls which are essential to be able to successfully animate your character.
Once the rig is complete, we will go on to analyse how a fish swims, using that information to help create a simple looping animation cycle.
Finally, I will show you how to make use of that cycle as an element within a longer animation which will truly bring your character to life.
3D sculpting offers a fast and intuitive way to translate a character design into 3d either for use within an animation or as a standalone illustration.
In this chapter, I’ll be covering everything you need to know as a beginner taking your first steps in 3D sculpting.
You’ll then be ready to put your new skills to use as we sculpt a cute seahorse character based upon my provided design.
In this final chapter of the course, we’ll be putting everything together to create a 3D character illustration of a Hawksbill sea turtle hatchling heading out to sea.
Working from the provided design, we’ll start by building a base mesh before gradually sculpting details and refining our character with a constant eye on creating an appealing end result.
We’ll then build a simple environment, before moving on to shade our character with Blender’s procedural shaders, and set up our lighting.
Finally, we’ll bring the whole image together within Blender’s compositor, where we’ll colour balance the image and add some final effects to create a polished end result.
This is just a small selection of the projects submitted by students of this course.
This work illustrates how students are not only able to replicate the characters from the course but they are able to use their new skills to design and create original characters of their own.
By the end of this course, you'll have covered:
This course is designed for both beginners and those who already have some experience with Blender and are ready to take their work to the next level.
Whilst no character creation experience is necessary, a familiarity of Blender’s interface would be very helpful.
If you are not already familiar with Blender then I would highly recommend that you start out with my Blender Essentials for Animators course, which will teach you everything you need to know.
For the design demonstrations in this course, I’ll be drawing digitally in Adobe Photoshop but this is not required and you're free to follow along using any traditional or digital medium that you choose.
The latest version of Blender can be downloaded for free from: blender.org
Hi, I'm John!
Before building Into Animation I worked as an animator and animation director in children's television for over 15 years.
I love animation and my goal is to give you the best start possible in this exciting and rewarding craft.