Anime Character Modeling - Complete workflow

Hello everyone,

the video-tutorial presented in this thread covers the detailed workflow of modeling a stylized style character from character-sheet to finished model.

This video is an introduction and overview to what we will create in this series:

The first of twenty-four parts has been published today and can be viewed here:

The other parts will be uploaded one a day starting from now with a length between 10 and 20 minutes each.

This thread has the second purpose to give you space to post your WIPs and to get feedback on it.
I hope you like the series, thank you for watching!

-Daniel Kreuter

Here is my current attempt so far…


Must admit that I am looking forward to this series a lot - going from scratch to a full anime figure will be fun.

Looks great @ads!

So I’ll be posting the new videos here whenever they are released so that others can see at which point progress was made.

I’ll be subscribing to your channel later today… Are you going to rig the character also?

Hi Daniel,

This is a good go for the blender community and anime in general.

Everyone who likes these tutorials join the Google+ " 3D anime" forum.

Here is my part 2…



For me personally, 10"-15" video length is perfect. It gives me a nice evening task to go through - not too long, just right.

Safetyman, this tutorial is only modeling but I plan to create followup tutorials abut for example rigging since everyone will have a character model available to try it on out and to follow along.

My progress from day 1:
http://oi60.tinypic.com/2hgd3jt.jpg
My progress day 2:


I need help on character modeling so Im hoping to learn a lot from this series, thanks for posting it!

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5:

A very well done series so far. I like your guide line technique for shaping the head. Here is my anime girl through Part 3.



You’ll notice I’m not quite following the reference (bridge of nose) and will probably make more adjustments as we go along. I’m planning on rigging and animating her when done, so I’ll have to model the inside of the mouth at some point. I may just append some teeth from another project, adjust the size and build the inside of the mouth to fit.

@orinoco : Awesome! Looks really good and I’m glad you’re trying to improve it by varying parts.

For everyone else, Part 6:

I am falling behind. I wasn’t satisfied with the topology of the face, so I pulled up my reference drawings, kept the parts I was happy with (the eyes, the end of the nose, the lips and the jaw line, and retopoed the rest.


I’m still not completely happy with this, mainly the blue cheek area and the spot behind the nostril where the naso-labila folds end at the nose, but I think they will do for now. I find coloring in the loops and areas helps me sort out the topology.

1 Like

I see. I also struggle a lot with topology. It’s not easy.

Part 7:

Hello everyone.
First of all let me introduce myself, I’m new to this community, I’m 27 and I’m from Barcelona and I’ve been using Blender for the past three weeks. I didn’t know anything about 3d modelling really, but for me it was like discovering an awesome new world. I’ve been silently browsing these forums and it helped me learning a lot.
Obviously I started from the basics, making cups, jars, etc, learning the basic tools, then I moved into creating simple characters and animating them.
Then I began trying something more advanced and my first “anime head” looked really weird, then all of the sudden Mr. Lasla started these awesome tutorials and not only I’ve been learning a lot of techniques, but concepts like topology, so thank you and keep up your work Mr. Lasla.

This is my current model, it’s pretty noobish and I know most of you would find design flaws at first glance, I’m quite aware of them myself so… Nevertheless I’m happy with it and I’m constantly correcting things, I’ll redo the ears since are very… raw? I must also say I’m not trying to copy everything Lasla’s doing but extrapolating what I see into what I want to make, my model is intenteded to be male.


Anyways. I’ll keep working, Blender has become my free time consumer these past weeks

You’re very welcome @TresErre !
I must say I’m impressed with how well you work already after such a short amount of time. You wouldn’t want to see my first models of faces after more then one year of experience. Keep up the good work :slight_smile:

As for some feedback. Indeed you might have to look a bit into topology but don’t worry about it too much. This is already very good. It took me years to get to this. Anyways… you might want to read some articles about it and have a look at the knife tool in Blender which will help you a lot at fixing topology errors.

Other than that a pretty model!

Here is my current progress (just finished pt5) - adding some simple ears. I found it a little tricky creating the ears, but it was good fun :slight_smile:

Attachments


Part 5 progress:


@Mr.Lasla, you wondered about other complete character modeling tutorials. The old classic is Joan of Arc, written many years ago for 3DSMax in French, and translated into English and Maya, but not into the Blender of the time.

It was written as a beginner tutorial, but, at the time, 3DSMax and Maya both had N-gons, which the author used frequently in modeling, later repairing the topology with other 3DSMax specific tools. As Blender hadn’t yet implemented N-gons, the tutorial was difficult for Blender novices to follow. Some BlenderArtists did make the model, but as far as I know, no one actually produced a Blender specific translation.

Cool tutorial. Thanks you for make it !! :smiley:

Part 1 Finished :wink: