How I Made Aurora on Blender

 

For the longest time, I’ve always wanted to make my own characters to animate with. The following isn’t so much a thorough tutorial but rather a guide on how I got from point “A” to point “B” by watching various tutorials on YouTube. What you’ll need is:

 

-Blender (A free open-source 3D software you can download on their website)

-An adequate knowledge of how to draw and anatomy. (if not, there are artists you can commission online to help you if you want to make something more original, or you can practice with a pre-established character. Regardless, keep it simple. Still, knowing anatomy will help you for the 3D sculpting portion)

- Digital Illustration Program: (Be it Photoshop, PaintTool Sai, Clip Studio Paint, or Gimp)

 

Before starting it’s always good to have a tangible idea of what or who you want to create in Blender. At first, I created a rough draft mostly outline the shape and proportions of the body before adding the details. It is important to have a finished drawing, so you know what you are going to do after, but I learned this the hard way which led to a few setbacks on pondering/creating of the fly before the final result.

 

(For those wondering, the number on the bottom right was for helping me gauge how many meters I wanted the model to be which is closest to actual height in feet. Knowing the size of your model helps to prevent scaling issues when appending it into a scene. And yes she's quite a tall lady :)  )

 

(The Final Draft)

 

Once I had a character reference sheet, it was then time to start learning blender, and there’s no better start than with Andrew Price (AKA Blender Guru)’s Doughnut Tutorial. I had already done the earliest version of the it before version 2.8 came out, but as of recently, Blender Guru came out with a tutorial for Blender’s 3.0 Update, so if you’re starting out, definitely start with 3.0.

Blender Guru’s tutorials are an essential start, because he’s not just telling you how to make a doughnut but rather using the doughnut as a teaching point to help you understand Blender’s interface and tools, while also teaching a bit of art theory.

 

 

This next step is optional, but after finishing the Doughnut Tutorial, I wanted to get a better idea on how to Sculpt, and the best resource for tips is Yan Sculpts. There are plenty of free tips to learn from him, but for more in-depth tutorials, you will have to buy them on his Gumroad. I’ve only bought his course during the 2.8 update, but he has recently added a new package for 2.9. While his tutorials are helpful, the ones I took in his 2.7 / 2.8 package did require looking up tools as well as figuring out where certain prompts are located due to the changed interface from 2.7 and 2.8. Regardless of the differences, this course helped me to understand both Sculpting and UV editing.

But the reason why I say this is optional is because the next YouTube Channel I’m about to mention also covers Sculpting and UV textures but is more focused on creating a character for animations rather than sculptures. So, If you want to focus on character creation for animation, you can skip on to Dikko’s Channel.

 

Dikko’s videos are THE videos for anyone who want to create a character rig for animation. They cover everything from character design, modeling, texturing, rigging, and weight painting. I highly recommend his channel after the Blender Guru Doughnut Series, because they are moderately intermediate in skill level, so it’s good to have an understanding of Blender before proceeding.

 

 (My Progress while following Dikko's videos)

 

 

After I modeled and textured my character, I was working in a bit of a personal deadline, so I skipped Dikko’s rigging tutorials and jumped on to CGDive’s Rigify Tutorial. For those who don’t know, Rigify is a Blender add on that does a lot of the leg work for creating a bone rig. It creates an armature for you and all you have to do is match it up with your character model then generate a rig. You can even add specialized Rigify Limbs to the current armature. It also has a face rig which is good, but not as flexible as a custom face rig from what I heard, but it works fine for me.

 

I’d still like to revisit Dikko’s tutorial so I can compare methods, so it’s ultimately up to you which direction you wish to go when it comes to rigging. But if you decided to go with CGDive’s Rigify route, I highly recommend you at least refer to this video by Dikko where he demonstrates an amazing add-on called Voxel Heat Diffuse Skinning that will save you a lot of time on Weight Painting. Trust me… Weight Painting is a challenge (and a hassle) no matter how you build a rig. So, it’s always wise to take any tools or advantages you can get to make the process less painful.

 

Afterwards I started playing and posing the model to see how it bends and if there were any awkward topology. When it comes to bending the joints, they’re definitely not going to be perfect in the first go. Thankfully there are videos that can help you for those awkward joints by learning Shape Keys, which you can also used to make premade expressions.

 (Royal Skies is a great channel that covers many topics about Blender in bite sized videos)

(Markcom3D is another great channel with various videos about Blender)

So, after doing that, was I done? Yes, but no. Being that this is my first character rig, there were still things I needed to tweak, but that didn’t stop me from making videos. What I did while making the videos is basically take note of what seems off and fix them afterwards. I’m still fixing things time to time, but that’s part of the process of learning as well as the importance of Problem Solving.

 

Thank you for reading my blog and I hope it has given you a helpful road map on how to go about creating your own character. Also note, that Guides are not set in stone. If you found your own way that helps you, go for it! What matters is seeing your project through to the end.