Quest for Anime Character modeling!

Alright alright… It is time for me to do a WIP forum again.
Any of you who have been on the forums here for a while will have seen a user try and make an anime character in Blender before.

Some of you may have even tried it yourself… and realized… just how abysmally hard it is.

So this is not the first time i’ve done this, i don’t need to hear how you can’t translate 2d anime characters to 3d because much like Goku’s hair, it’s the same from both angles and what not.

With this forum i’m going to be posting alot of experiments on a bunch of aspects and what i’ll be working on. I feel like having a forum on it will help drive me to keep trying.

Before i begin, i’ll show you my result from last time. Which wasn’t too bad to be honest, but just isn’t what im looking for.



I honestly have like 50 pictures i could show from last time.

So i’ll start my new experimentations on the next post in this thread.

So i rewatched all of RWBY lately. And if you don’t know what that is, get on Netflix ASAP.
Rwby is a 3d animated Anime inspired web series created by Rooster Teeth (same producers as Red Vs Blue) and is made so well in so many ways. There’s still some funky animation issues, but for a 4 hour thing to watch (2 seasons) i can’t believe how amazing it is.
Sadly though the creator of this show has Died recently and most of the internet grieved alot over this… although the show will be continued by his animation team regardless.

Besides the point! If you’re trying to do Blender anime characters, you have no excuse. You have to watch RWBY…or atleast some of it…

With my current anime rigs, the eyes are created in the same way as the creating a chibi character CGCookie tutorial teaches.

Which are gigantic spheres squished inside the head with a lattice.
This method works, don’t get me wrong. it looks really cool.
However i don’t think this is the direction i want to take with the characters. They look too real and i’m a stickler for things being perfect, so i want to avoid things like that.

Here’s an example of the eyes i’m currently talking about.

Pretty recently, a youtube buddy of mine was so kind as to show me his method at making anime eyes in blender.
I need to go back and find out which one it was actually cause i really need to thank him as i didn’t expect it to be this incredible.

With a white eye shaped plane, you can use another plane with an eye pupil texture and shrink wrap it to the white eye plane. within the modified select “keep above surface” and set the offset of the pupil so it isn’t in the eye… and once you’ve done this the eye will never leave the space of the white area. and you can then add black planes over that to shape the eyelashes and what not.


So that is experimentation 1 that i’m really enjoying.
This also makes it easier to do some other anime like effects like the foggy eyes when a character is under a spell, or sparkly eyes, or even removing the eyes in general when they are really down and are staring at their feet.

overall this method allows for more cartoon/rule breaking like control over the eye portion of the face.

Downside to this is that you almost need to use shadeless textures or strange shadows are cast upon the head no matter how close you get it to the head. I hear there’s a way to make an object not cast a shadow, but i can’t get it to work… doesn’t matter though cause i wanna do toon/shadeless textures anyway.

My next step is to work on the head shape a bit and choose another body shape.
I really like the old body shape cause someone important to me drew it on paper for me, but sadly i feel like it’s a little too stubby/dwarf like. so i’m gonna try and look for some others with longer or slinkier proportions.

As far as the head goes, i’m looking into nendoroid style heads right now but i might make some adjustments on the nose.

Or i could even look into MMD style characters a little aswell.
I don’t know if you are aware, but there is a blender Add on to import MMD characters into your project, however the bones and controllers are pretty broken and moving it around is alot of guess work…

But c’mon… how can you not think this looks amazing? (sadly it’s triangulated)


It really is quite hard… I am working on a chibi model, thought it would be a fun and easy second project (I am a beginner) The modelling went super smooth, I got the hands down easier than I would’ve thought I could and without any reference. The body was easy. But then… Oh, the horror! The hair is impossible to model! And sculpting it is soo hard. It’s easy to create the front view, but then it’s hard to sculpt the next row of hair without modifying the front view (I want to create a spiky hair, so I just use snake hooks with dynamic topology) I am still looking for ways to sculpt all of the hair and not just the front and side views.

EDIT: Also, about your characters: the skin looks too pale IMO. You could try to drop the brightness a little and move to a more orange-ish colour.

Ah yes…
I know your struggle on the hair…
I’ve also been struggling with that since day one. i have found so many ways to make hair yet none of them quite feel right.
I even contacted a Japanese game company about one of their games (Closers dimensional conflict) and to my surprise they actually helped me out and showed me one of their hair models!
Even still i don’t know what to use xD

they didn’t want me disclosing their files (there was only 2) but from examining the files, what i learned from them was that that game in particular created hair using planes, but what really sold it was the texture they applied to these plains. I don’t know if you look it up, but there’s a girl with long hair that they showed me as example.

The hair and the textures seemed to be created in a specific order, this kind of taught me that there are 3 basic layers of hair. the top little fuzzy shorter bits, then underneath that is the most of the hair with bangs and what not, but then even a layer 3 under that that is closer to the neck and up the back of the head to about the mid range area.

i feel like i’m not explaining this well. anyway, after you have the planes set up, their texture was painted on hair kind of painted in the same bottom to top order to ensure it looks best.

overall i actually found i didn’t like this method.
my result came out about like…

I have found 2 neat methods as of recent though,
and they are actually halfway simple.


So this one i grabbed from a user making Eren Jaeger in Maya, and just applied the same method as best as possible to blender. It was slightly tedious, but that’s my result^

I created about 5 strands of hair using cirlces and just making a curved cone out of them. and placed them to look like a tuft of hair and took a render of them with a transparent background.
So… this was the result;


then i made a plane with about 2-3 segments with this texture applied onto it.

i created a basic wig like shape of generally how i wanted the hair to look and used the same hair color on it and started littering these planes all over it (in EDIT mode of course, in object mode you will lag up your system so bad)
as you lay these out and curve them into shape, remember that hair extends from the parting area of where you part it with a comb and it’s easier to figure out how it lays that way.

when i was done i duplicated it all and rotated it slightly just to make it even that much fuller.
And when you render it, any see through bits are covered up by the wig-ish object underneath.

And finally my newest found method i discovered from someone on Deviant Art, i’ve only got to test it once, but i think it could really use a texture on the original strand you create before duplicating the cone all over the place. This method is a bit High poly, but being that heads are always in view of the camera, i think it’s worth it.


going off the file name, it appears the Deviant artist user is named “MrSide” so credits to him on this one.

Believe it or not i still have practiced even more methods than that.
There is David ward’s tutorial on hair that made cylinders and the sculpt mode to make a greaser hair look but… really don’t bother unless you want greaser hair. it can’t be used in any other way in my opinion.

then there’s also particles which…ew…
(i still have a paid tutorial i wanna watch on it sometime though)

There is also just one more, which only applies to pony tails.
It’s bassically just using the skin modified to make long strands in the way you want, subsurf- them, and then duplicate them abut 2-3 times and squish them together to look like the desired hair.

Anyway, sorry for typing a book at ya!

That’s just kind of the summed up version of what i’ve learned about hair so far.

and i didn’t even touch on how to rig/simulate it! xD

Hmm… You could use the particle system instead of duplicating so much. You don’t have to use hairs in the particle system, you can use an object (i.e. you would use particle system to make the leaves of a tree, as duplicating would be too tedious and memory consuming, the same can be done with your hair tuft) Also, the Cycles hair is actually very good, but for when creating realistic characters. If you want to get an anime-looking hair (instead of, say, a “Brave” -Disney movie- kind of hair) then you can’t, however, use the hairs, as this way the hair would look too realistic when compared to the rest of the character.

You are correct! Infact when it comes to the particle system, using it with objects is the only area of the particle system i find myself really enjoying. You can even select different sections of the hair (Bangs, sides, back, top, by giving each respective area a vertex group and setting the density of the hair to be that group.

The only issue though is that you can’t bend and shape the planes afterwards. you can still comb the hair, but lining the hair up with the particles is a ton of fiddling around and then even after that you still cant change the shape of it. if you change the plane it applies to to every strand of hair. You can apply the particle system as an object yet for some reason still, each hair was linked with all the others when you tried to edit just one of them

So this was why i went in and just did it manually. It didn’t take super long really i was kind of surprised.

but here is the video in question, you can see what i mean by him combing the particle hair around 3:25

Edit: i really need to get around to trying to learn cycles at some point >-o
I’ve never used it at all :x it’s like relearning a whole nother program almost… but i suppose i have used nodes slightly in the past…with tutorials…

Can’t wait see your progress on this character :smiley:
I’m really interested in seeing how much you have grown since then so keep you head up high because I want to see you finish :slight_smile:

It seems you like that eye set up good thing I came with gifts!
My latest Version of the eye set up and My first version of the Mouth
Anime Eyes 5.zip (309 KB)
Anime Mouth 1.zip (287 KB)
Maybe one day I’ll compile this Into a face rig that would be able do every single anime expression possible.:cool:

Ziggy! :smiley:
I’m glad you found me cause ever sense youtube took out the messenger i…don’t… know how to contact people besides commenting on their videos O-o""

I never really got to say how much i appreciated you showing me the eye thing. I’ll admit at first i was kind of skeptical on it but once i actually looked at it further and figured out how it was done and it’s implications i found that simplistic rig to be really amazing. And often times amazing stuff isn’t shared like that, so really thank you!

Opens up the links*
Ohh i like the curve on your eye, you probably did that before but that somehow slipped my mind recently O-o i was beggining to think the face looked a little to flat because of it but that should help out some.

And this mouth…
Oh my… it looks kind of complicated to set up but this is pure genius. You wernt kidding when you said every anime face possible. This is spectacular. i was even just going back and looking at the videos of the closers dimensional conflict trailer and i was wondering if the mouths on them were physical or added on and with a rig like yours there, adding it to a face wouldn’t be all that hard… or if given enough attention, you could even position it on the side of the head on some camera shots to add to the unrealistic nature of 2d animated stuff like anime.
I almost wonder if it could use a large round darker pink circle for a tongue on the inside but honestly that isn’t even remotely necessary.

You’re amazing man! :smiley:

I don’t really have too much to show for my character so far at the moment. i’m just going around watching alot of stuff for reference and taking notes of things.
I’m making giant MSPaint pictures with a ton of images put together as a collage of my studies at the moment xD
I do hope to keep some sort of record/documentation of my findings aswell.

For shaping the eyes I put 2 lattice of one that conforms to the desired shape called Eye Shape and another called Eye Deform that follows the shape of Eye Shape Lattice On the new Eye you might have to unhide the Lattices to see them.



The Lattice has Shapekeys with default shape intact
In the Face Rig there will be Only one Lattice that control the shaping that way it’s simple and non-cumbersome I hate complexity.
There will still be Rigged Deform lattices though.
My Ideas for it to have it where all I have do set up is go add shrinkwrap modifier to lattice then apply to a shapekey then everything will be ready to go :D.

So i want to keep up with this thread really often but i apologize i worked all day today and tomorrow as well… so not much progress will be made till monday T^T

but in the time i’ve had i’m looking at alot of references, from other videos, projects, games and what not.
here’s just some notes i’ve made to my understanding of the shape of anime characters.


So i’ve noticed the eyebrow area actually sticks very far off the eye region… or i should say the eyebrows were more physical than i thought, being able to actually bend down over the eye.

In a few other places i’ve noticed how far back into the head compared to nose the eyes are as you can see in the middle image. there’s a great time lapse aswell on someone creating an anime head and they did this aswell.

this was probably really noticeable to others but for some reason it always slipped my mind that that tiny little nose could actually be so prominent.

again i’ll have more on monday or so ; -;

And then lastly with the full metal alchemist Ed picture, i always hurt and learn something from this image every time i look at it.

Welcome to Monday!

or the last bit of it i suppose… there was a surprise employee meeting at work today and i did try and spend my day off relaxing a bit aswell if you can forgive me >-o

anyway, here is a proof of concept on a few things although there is an important note i should make.
here’s the image first.


I’ll admit i didn’t give the head shape my 100%, but i think it came out alright.
Also the hair on it i snagged from another model and actually wasn’t meant for this shape but i think fit pretty well.

I did my first ever face texture which was just to darken under the nose and behind the eyes for ‘if’ the close it gives it a little indication of a curved eyelid.
then i was suppose to darken under the lip a little bit but honestly my texture got wiped 3 times in a row and i was rushing on the one that worked… i also tried to add some freckles but idk if you can even see them.

the ear of the head i left flat, i think for ears i’d li to go the route where some games have gone and just apply an image texture to the flat surface of the ear, although i do not have said image texture yet.

then most importantly, i forget so quickly how to use a lattice, so in my hate, i tried to connect the eyes to the face by giving it a shrinkwrap modifier.
i’ve learned very quickly that for flat plane eyes, do not ever do this. if the eyes have to move or blink in the slightest, it will destroy the look of your character. there is no way you will set up the flat plane eyes that will work with the headshape for eye movements. so definitely pay attention to ziggy’s method that uses the lattice… and i need to go back and learn how to use it…again… lol. it’s quick though i know.

lastly i know the edge didn’t show up on the mouth. i even gave the lip a sharp crease shader on it and that still didnt show up as an edge in the shadeless texture render.
i’d really rather not make a black ring on the mouth like i did for my last character to make this work so i’ll continue to experiment there aswell.

over i’m actually really excited about this head. :slight_smile:

Hey, try googling “kio miku blender” - it’s a rather professionally made Hatsune Miku model which contains many useful tricks you may use for reference, starting from general shapes and shading and ending with toon edges without freestyle and nodes, mesh hair physics etc.

Sorry it’s been ages since i’ve posted.
Alot of…life stuff happened in these past two months.

I’m trying to make get back into this though where i left off.

So far in a little bit of time i’ve managed to finish one of my least favorite things to model…Which is actually the inside of a character’s mouth. things get really jumbled up and complicated in there. I tried to make it easier on myself this time without having a real mouth cavity, but rather floating teeth and tongue inside of a dark red sphere like shape with a hole cut through it so when the mouth is open you’re seeing inside this red sphere and also the floating teeth and tongue. I feel though as if this saved me alot of time and strain making this, and will allow for a little bit more flexible options on the inside of the mouth in animation at times…i hope…


I’m actually even working on this today just after having a wisdom tooth pulled, so i feel like my descion making skills aren’t the greatest at the moment. Onto the body and the hands… which i also hate doing.
I basically wanna get done with the basic body shape. he’s going to be pretty slinky like so i just need to keep thinking he will look better once all the clothes are on. And i wanna try and rig it before i mae clothes because i’ve learned that weight paiting clothes to fit a already painted character is a nightmare

Okay okay okay…

=========HUGE TIP ALERT!!!============
So i spent over an entire day trying to get rigging on his shoulder to work. the shoulder always would dip and cut into the top of his collar bone.
I can’t believe it took me so long to realize what was wrong, so if you ever have this problem…
Apply or delete your Sub Surf Modifier. Weight paint can’t work on vertices that don’t exist yet.

================================

Okay so i’m moving onto some clothing.
I may be trying to do a general anime character to be used as a base for a variety of other characters, but i have a project that could use this now, so i’m going with that. I’m recreating a game character from an anime-esque MMO…
Anyway… here’s a little clip of his clothes.


Using that as a reference image, i have made a base model of the clothes. there is some modeled features, and some that i hope to texture in.


And so now… i venture into unexplored territory…
For me at least…

Now i have to sculpt the clothes to have creases in them… and i don’t have any experience with sculpting clothes,
and then on top of that i will need to turn that sculpt into a normal/bump map to use as a baked texture…i think is how it’s worded…
Basically apply the wrinkles in the clothes as a texture…

But i am so bad with texturing… but i really need to overcome this…
If anyone has any great tutorials on texturing! Please! may i see them? ^-^

Oh i’ll also need to texture the skin. i feel like that is a feature i always think is unnecessary, but looking at that in game model i notice alot of detail such as on the mouth and the neck that is textured that i could really like to take advantage of :slight_smile:

I will follow this thread. Making anime characters is something I’m also getting into. Here is a video of the best 3d anime I’ve ever seen. They show how it’s done too. But many things are over my head, but it may help you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhGjCzxJV3E&index=106&list=PLrBRnthhlsjQA6jewyc_mhLB8814KKEci

Thank you so much ShinMusashi for showing me that o:

I have only seen a little bit of it at the moment, but there’s a huge storm outside and no doubt is my internet going to go out. and i got the video pre buffered so i’ll be watching more of that real soon :stuck_out_tongue:

From the little intro segment, it reminds me alot of the cutscenes from the Sword art online Vita games or the .hack// Encore amv video.

Previously i had asked people about that and they told me that the Japanese have their own sort of software for that anime style of rendering. But i don’t know if that is true.

I’ve gotten to see some files from the game Closers dimensional conflict, and that one in particular was done with brilliant texturing. but you can see how that game has a slightly different look than the example you gave me right there.

Anyway i’m going to be watching the rest of that soon :stuck_out_tongue:

In the mean time…

Here is the progress i’ve made lately.

I’ve gone back and relearned how to texture bake. I found out that not using the sculpting feature in blender for months didn’t magically make me better at it. No surprise there of course :stuck_out_tongue:

And so with Poor sculpting, i made some normal maps… well it was a displacement map used as a normal map…
and then i’ve relearned how to do some texture painting to paint in the details of the clothes im trying to match.

I still need to make the boots, texture the gloves and Belts, give him hair that isn’t just stand in hair, and then texture his skin a little.




Wow ShinMusashi, That video is incredible. I can’t believe how much there is in there to learn from. I only wish i could hold on and retain this all at once. i’m defiantely going to have to be looking back at this video over and over.

The way it was shaded, The inner lines made from textures, the purposeful breaking the realism in the animation to break the 3d look of the motion flow.

I don’t know if there is a way to set up shaders in blender that works the same way as he described… (if a normal is less that 90 degrees facing away from the lightsource, it is lit up, or else it is not lit up.) I know there is a toon shader that can come really close to that though that i could probably tweak with and come up with a trick with it perhaps.

they were very transparent that they do not use normal maps… which is what i just learned to do.
But rather they had a higher poly count, and used the Uvs on the characters paint things. So say i wanted a dark spot on the jacket, i would UV that section of the jacket onto a specified color palette of a texture to do so i think…

Anyway… almost done watching but i really need to keep a hold of this video! xD

If you are working in BI, you can set a diffuse/specular color ramp and connect that to the result of the shader your using.
I put a link on your anime hero thread, but here it is again: http://blendernpr.org/downloads/
The toon shader for BI (among other most sexy things), is flexible enough to support hard or soft edges, although it doesn’t take into account the color of the lights, just the intensity.

I can’t say i’ve really ever downloaded add-ons for blender before, are those like, Material presets? or some sort of world material, or… Like, it looks amazing, :stuck_out_tongue: i’m just having trouble identifying the tool that it is :stuck_out_tongue:

In the meantime, i did a test render today :smiley:
The animation is terrible but it wasn’t suppose to be great.

The only thing he needs now is a face rig… and then… he has a cape and two 1H axes too he uses x:

Mainly, compositor nodes for the lines, and instructions on how to setup a material.