Blender 3D: Deep Dive Into Modeling

1. Intro: Hi, I'm Remington. I'm an animator in Silicon Valley and I also run SouthernShotty 3D where I teach people how to use Blender 3D to produce animation and artwork. Today we're going to be diving into modeling with Blender. These skills are necessary for anyone looking to pursue a 3D career. You'll learn Blender's modeling tools, what it means to have good topology, and tricks to speed up your workflow. This course assumes you're familiar with Blender and we'll move at a brisk pace. If this is your first time, I recommend checking out your first day in Blender course, which covers the basics of opening Blender for the first time. In other beginner classes, I explained how to model your first character, how to animate characters, and how to bring your illustrations to life. This course will enable you to model your own artwork. But for this class, we'll be going through a simplified version of this character. We will cover all the techniques used to make the final product and we'll cover texturing him in a follow-up course. Let's get started. 2. Project Overview: I've included a project file with my sketch already loaded in place in the foreground. Feel free to use your own character sketch. I want to clarify before you start, this course is not intended to be a step-by-step process on how to make this particular character. Rather, my goal is to teach you the techniques needed to make your own artwork. There'll be timelapse sections in the course, where I'll explain techniques and fast-forward through the process to the next technique. This is to keep the course at a reasonable length and to focus on the fundamentals of modeling. However, you want to make this character step-by-step, I've included a link to a full 4 1/2 hour recording of me modeling this character and texturing with keyboard shortcuts turned on. I've also included a trace layer on the project file. This is my model with the wireframe turned on and opacity turned down, so you can follow along by trying to copy and trace my model if you would like to learn that way. 3. Types of Modeling: There are different ways to approach modeling and they all have their advantages and disadvantages. Let's take a look at the most common types of modeling. The subdivision modeling is the process of modeling with a low poly object with the intent of using a modifier to add detail. It's a destructive modeling process, meaning we won't be able to go backwards without an undo or save file. This is the easiest form of modeling for beginners and independent creators, and this is how we'll be modeling our character today. Another option is sculpting your object. You start with a base mesh and continually add detail until you have a final product. This is great for getting organic models with lots of details. However, the dynamic topology results in port topology and requires a slow, tedious process of retopologizing. Hard surface modeling is best reserved for things such as products, robots, cars, and other models with a hard surface. Usually, these types of models use a lot of modifiers to keep things procedural with a focus on Boolean modifiers and Bevel modifiers. Next, let's take a look at topology. 4. Learning Topology: Topology refers to the distribution of vertices and edges that make up the face as seen on your object. The direction these pieces come together forms your topology flow. Having a good flow is good for texturing and animation. Our character today will have some simple topology, so let's look at a more advanced example. Here we have a humanoid model. I've gone ahead and marked some important areas red, to illustrate my point. When modeling your artwork, especially with characters, it's important to keep your edge flow in mind. The flow is primarily controlled by edge loops and poles. An edge loop is a continuous ring on your model. You can select a loop by Alt, clicking and Blender. There are exceptions, but you should pretty much always be aiming to have quad-based faces, meaning they only have four edges. This will keep your edge loops flowing. However, it's worth noting most game engines use triangles where you can convert quads to triangles easily with the triangulate modifier. A poll is when five vertices connect to one point. You'll notice that the flow stops in some areas here. That's because there was a poll here. Polls are great ways to redirect topology. This makes it easier to adjust pieces of the model, anime, and subdivide these models. Polls are best used around defining features such as the eyes, mouth, ears, shoulders, or legs. You'll notice it's usually when an appendage or feature is attached to the body. For this course, all you need to do is try and use quads and keep consistent edge loops per major feature. I've linked to a good website in the description below, if you'd like to learn more about topology. 5. The Modeling Tools: I'm going to very quickly run you through some of the most useful blender modeling tools, modifiers, and add-ons. This is intended to be a speedy overview to start, don't worry, we'll return to these as we model our character and learn more and how to use them. First topic Modeling Tools, let's take a look at some of the basic tools in Edit mode. Extrude allows us to extrude based on our selection. By default, it will face a normal direction of our face. However, you can constrain it to an axis as well by pressing X, Y, or Z. Useful for adding holes or appendages to your object. The Loop Cut tool adds loop star model by default. It centers the loop with one cut, but you can use the mouse wheel to add more cuts. Useful for adding extra topology to your models. The Knife tool lets you cut a shape into an object. It can snap to angles, vertices and more. Be careful, this can mangle your topology, but it's useful for complex shapes and cutting out close. Look at the bottom of our list of options and shortcuts here. Inset will inset the selection into itself along the surface. If you hold down Control, you can use this Extrude as an Inset as well. Helpful for adding topology to large faces. Modifiers can be added in the modifier panel are not permanent until you click "Apply". Think of them like modeling effects with the subsurface modifier which subdivides each face based on the input number here. Keep the view port numbers low if your computer is lagging, and save the more complex topology for rendering. The Bevel modifier adds bevel to your objects, those little round corners on the edge here. You can add bevels based on angles or selections and you can up the segments to give them more topology. The Mirror modifier will mirror your object across a specified access. The Shrink Wrap modifier will allow you to wrap objects onto another surface. Solidify modifier will add thickness to your geometry. Here's some helpful modeling add-ons. They should be enabled under Edit, Preference, Add-ons. As it'll make your modeling process faster, we'll be utilizing several in this course versus a Loop Tools add-on. This adds buttons to help us shape our selected edge loops. We will be using this to create a circular shape based on our selection. Extra Objects adds mesh objects. We'll be using this to add a round cube easily. Extra Curves, adds extra curve shapes and saves you time without having to create basic shapes. We'll use this for our backpack straps and arms. That covers everything we'll be using in this course. Let's dive in and begin modeling. 6. Building the Body and Head: Please note that I have custom keyboard shortcuts turned on the preferences here, I've turned on the Tab for Pie Menu and Space-bar for Search. If you'd like to match me, I've also turned on the Wireframe and the overlay to make it easier for you to follow along. You can view my keyboard inputs and the bottom right, if you find that useful. I will also put text on the screen whenever I am time-lapse it. Here we are in our starter project file here, what I'm going do is hit "Shift A" and I'm going to add a round cube. I'll just run a cube down here, I'm going to come up here to operate a Preset, set this to quadro sphere, we don't need that much topology because we're going to be using a subdivision surface. I'm going to go and roll this down to about four. Great. Now what I'm going to do is move this up here to this interval character's head, and then I'm going to "Scale" this in so that it's about the size of what the head might be there, and we're going to work on adjusting that in a minute. Now I want to add topology here, so what I'm going to do is do a subdivision modifier, so I'm going to "Hit" Control 2, and what that's going to do is add a subdivision modifier with a viewport level of two. You can adjust that if it's getting laggy for you. What I'm going to do is "Hit" Shade Smooth here. We also have the optimal display here, which will show the original wireframe so you can decide which way you want that to look; I prefer to keep it on. Then I'm also going to turn this off in Edit Mode because I don't want to be able to see the subdivision in the Edit Mode otherwise, it might screw with some of my settings. Now what I want to do is take one side and mirror it, so we're going to switch here into Wireframe mode. Then, we're going to Box Select everything here and delete the vertices. Now you'll notice that we only have half the sphere, so we're going to add a mirror modifier. We'll go ahead and add that mirror modifier there. You can see we get a little pinch there and that's because the modifier order does matter, so we're going to move that up above the subdivision and you'll see that now, that looks correct. What it's doing is mirroring with our origin point over the x-axis, so as long as we have that origin point center and keep our vertices in line here, this mirror modifier will allow us to work on one side. You just want to be careful when you're modeling like this because you might screw up your topology if you're not careful. It's usually best to work with it off and go from there. Up here we have proportional editing, so we can turn that on and off with the shortcut of O and change the type of emotion that it has here too sharp and smooth, I like to leave mine on Smooth, and let's go ahead in Wireframe mode and grab some of these vertices here. What you'll see is that when I "Hit G" to grab and remove that, you'll see that I get this little circle around. If I scroll up and down on my mouse wheel, you'll see that I'm affecting more of the points. This is really great when we're trying to do some broad level positioning on our characters. What I'm going to do is go ahead and "Grab" that there and you can see that molds with the face there, and same thing here with on the bottom, I'm going to go ahead and "Drag" these by proportional editing on, scales see if flattened that out a bit, move that up a little bit on the z-axis, and you can see we're getting a pretty good face shape right there. Now let's go ahead and "Tap" back out to object mode, and we can see that we have a pretty good head shape already. But when we go to the side, we see here that it looks a bit like a melon. What we could do is we can keep moving around with the proportional editing but another thing that's nice and easy to do is that if we switch here into Sculpt Mode, we can go ahead and we can use the Grab Brush right here, and you'll see that you get this yellow brush that rotates based on where you are, and if you "Hit F" you can change the size of that brush. I like to use this a lot too. What I like to use this for is just grabbing pieces of the head and moving things around. I'm just going to go ahead and play, and mold this head into the shape of a head here. It's like being a stylized character anatomy, still matters for creating the character back of the head tend to be more of a sphere. The sides of the head flatter and more of a circular shape, and the face and the jaw line is almost like a rectangle attached to the back of that. The brow and the mouth poke out frontwards when looking at the cheeks from the front, you'll notice that they poke out to the sides of it. I'm planning on painting my eyes. If you want to model your own eyes, I recommend creating eye sockets by extruding faces inwards to your model, then softening up the edge and making a bit more circular. Some of these basic proportions will go a long way in creating a believable character, and by the end of this course, you should have all the tools and skills you need to implement these yourself. Great, I'm glad this happened in the sculpting process, my model broke and you see that it no longer is mirroring, and that's because these vertices are no longer on the center. If we come here and to Wireframe mode, I'm going to select everything in the center and we want to snap those to the axis here, so we're going to switch up here to 3D cursor, and we want to make sure 3D cursor's here at the center, if it's not "Hit Shift C" and that'll re-center it to the center of the origin there. Then, now we're going to scale to that cursor, so if we press S, X,0, that will scale everything to zero, on the x-axis with the cursor, which since it's here, will snap us right there. I'm going to switch this back to median point, which is the median selection of everything you have, we "Tab" back out here into object mode. We can see that that's fixed. That's a quick way to keep re-snapping those in there if you're a mirror modifier ever breaks. Next up, let's add another round cube here, and we're going to make this into the nose. If we just go to mesh round cube, we should get this here. I'm just going to go ahead, scale this up here, scale that down, and we'll see our outline selection there. I'll switch into Wireframe view here, and I'm just going to go ahead and scale that down a bit on the z-axis and scale that out on the x-axis. Move that back up on the Z, and you can see here that we have a nose. We're going to go ahead and "Tab" out here, in Wireframe mode, we're going to select everything on this side, we're going to delete the vertices there. Let's "Tab" back out to Object mode here, and then I'm going to switch to my side view here and just move this out here. If you want, you can flatten that back-end, so I'm going to go ahead and turn on Proportional Editing, maybe scale that in on the Y a bit, and you'll see that if I do that there, it flattens the whole nose which what we're looking for, let's go ahead and scale this in on the Y as well. We're getting more of a bulbous nose there. Now what we can do is if we take this nose here, and then when you grab this head and we "Hit" Control J, that will join, and you'll notice that it adds the subdivision and the [inaudible] to it automatically, but it won't keep the shade smooth, so you need to "Right-Click" Shade Smooth, and with that, we have a nose for our character. Next up, let's look at adding some ears. Now, we're going to add a cylinder. Let's go ahead "Shift F, A" cylinder, and then what I want to do is scale this down on the z-axis. I'm going to go ahead and scale that down. But first I want to remove the vertices, we don't want that much. Let's go ahead and, and just divide this by two, you can do math in here, so if I "Click" here and "Hit Division" by two, it will reduce it by half, so let's go ahead and scale this down on the z-axis there by hitting S and Z, we're going to "Rotate 90 degrees" on the x-axis, so I just hit R 90x. You can see those down here. As a reminder, we're going to go ahead and move this up here, and then we're going to "Scale" our ear down until we get it in a general shape there. Now what we want to do is add some geometry so that we can work with this ear. What I'm going to do is go ahead and "Tab" into Edit mode here, and this is we're going to use the inset, so we're going to switch to Face Selection mode up here. We're going to grab this front face and this back face here. Then we're going to inset that in and that's going to give us an edge loop there. Now what we're going to do is "Press" X and delete Faces. Now, we're going to switch back to edge selection mode here, we're going to Alt click this edge loop, and then we're going to hit Spacebar to search and do grid fill, and that's going to give us a bit of geometry there. Now, what we're going to do is come back here, do the same thing, grid fill, and that'll give us some geometry there too. Now, what we can do is we'll tap back on an object mode. We'll hit Control 2, and we'll see that we have a little bit of an ear shape there. Now, what I'm going to do is tap in edit mode and just use the proportional editing and the sculpt mode until I get a shape of an ear that I want. While modeling the ears, it's important to note that the ears poking on the back and have a bit in the end and in the center there's also this lip around the edge of the inner ear, just using proportional editing and the Grab Brush to move things around until I get them in the shape I like, and then I actually went ahead and use the inflate brush in the sculpt mode, which just allows you to inflate with a spherical motion, and that makes for that great upper ear arc that I'm looking for there. Now, that I have that in shape, what I'm going to do is join that into the head again, so we'll take this object and then click this one, hit Control J, which will join them, right-click "Shade Smooth" and now we have some ears on our character. Now, we could do some fancy bridge looping and things like that to attach this into the model. I personally with my style, like to keep my ears and things like that, almost dreading out of things like it's a toy, so I prefer that style. However, we will be diving into how to bridge edge loops later with the hand and the arm. But for now, let's move on to the body, so I'm not doing anything new here, just the same process of adding a cube and the modifiers and shaping it, so I'm just going to speak over to this. The body is almost shaped like a teardrop. You want the chest to be a bit flatter with the button, the stomach poking out a little bit, and our backs have a natural arc that goes inward above our glutes. Our character's head is so big we don't need to worry about a neck or shoulders in this particular scene. But the shoulder square off at the top of the chest and you should extrude faces in between the shoulders to build the neck if needed. In this case, I'm going to move the body a bit back on the y-axis because I want to make sure that the head has enough room for a chin to over-set the front of our body here. Next up, we're going to do is add some hair to our character. I also want to point out that you should keep your scene organized. Up here, I've gone ahead and double-click these and you can name these, so name this body and head to keep those organized. Next up what I'm going to do is click here and then I'm going to create this button up here that gives a new sub-selection, and we're going to call this one hair and make sure we have that selected as we go to Shift A, we're going to add a round cube. I'm going to set the arc down to something really low, like two because we're going to be using these for the hair, and we don't want to have so much geometry up here that would begin to lag our scene. Now, what we're going to use is the snapping method. First of all, I'm going to scale this down to a really tiny size, maybe about the size of what appears to be one of those curls. Then what I'm going to do is hit Control A and apply rotation and scale, and that's going to apply the scale. Now, what we're going to do is use snapping, so I'm going to move this out here above our object here. We're going to turn on the snapping button right here. But first of all, let's just go ahead, change a couple of settings up here to make this a bit more friendly. We're going to come up here, we're going to click "Face". We're going to turn on snap with center, align rotation to target, and make sure move is on. Now, when we grab this and move around our object, you'll see that it's rotating to match the normal, so that's great. Now, what we're going to do is come over here to where it's called Roundcube, and we're going to call this hair dot 000 and this just means that every time we duplicate it will go hair dot 001, 2, 3, 4, and keep it a bit more organized. Now, let's take a look at where we want the hair to appear on our character. I'm going to type in edit mode to make this a bit easier. Now, I have Face Select on and pressing circles so that I can use the circle select. I'm going to go ahead and start grabbing the faces just to illustrate where the hair will naturally reside. You see here that it usually comes down in the back, up around the ears, and then up here around the brow, so that's about where I'm going to keep the concentration of the hair. Now, also I'm going to do is just continually hit Shift duplicate, and move this hair around until we have a bit of volume. As you can see here, I'm just duplicating moving around the edge of where I want to contain the hair and then going in and filling it in. Then after that I'm going to start duplicating and tossing smooth spheres up, building up volume. You want to make sure you avoid images, walls of hair and you'll see that I'm trying to naturally move things out so they slope into one another and keeping some of the hair puffed up more in the front where I think he might have combed it over, even if it is more of a curly-haired character. But towards the end here as I'm going through and adjusting things, I'll actually turn off snapping and just use the Move Gizmo and move things around. Make sure you're looking at in the top view, side view, front view, and working from all angles, and that'll make it a bit easier. Now, we're going to randomize this a bit so it doesn't look so uniform and fakes. What we're going to do is since we have anything that was sub-collection here we're going to right-click this, hit "Select Objects", that's going to select everything and hit Spacebar search for randomize and transform. We're going to click that here, and we're going to do scale even because we want everything scale evenly. Then what we can do is start just tweaking this here, and we'll add just a little bit there, I'm going to do maybe 1.1, maybe 1.25, and 1.25. That's introducing just a bit of randomness and size there, and we could do the same thing with emotion if we do 0.1. You see that's maybe a little too much, so it's 2.05, 0.025, and 0.05. You can see that it's given our hair just a bit of randomness so it doesn't appear so uniform and fake. You can play with the random seed here until you get one that you like. But I'm great with that for now, so I'm just going to click off to the side here to deselect everything. I'm going to join all these into one object, so I'm going to right-click the hair, hit "Select Objects", and then I'm going to hit Control J and it'll join into whatever the Act 1 was, in this case it was hair zero at the last selected one. Then I'm going to press Control 2 to subdivide that and hit "Shade Smooth", and you can see now that we have some hair for our character. Great, at this point, you'll be able to rotate around and see that you have some bald spots. The way to fix that is to tap in here into edit mode. Then you're going to de-select everything, in my case by pressing A. Then if you hold L over an object, it will select that object, and then you can turn on your snapping again and just duplicate and resume to fill in those bald spots. Great. Now, if you'll notice down here at our face counted stickiness from 6,000 faces to 50,000 faces because there's so many hair particles here. This may slow down your viewport, so what you can do is either disable the subdivision in the viewport with this little button here or you can disable all the hair in the viewport at all. I'm going to do that for the remainder of this course to keep my viewport moving quickly. I'm going to go ahead here and move this hair object into the model folder and get rid of the sub-selection, and now that we have all of our hair in one container. 7. Building the Arms: Let's take a look at our curve tools. Curve tools are procedural and operate differently than meshes. We can create a curve then use custom bevels, geometry, or other curves to determine the shape that appears alongside the shape of the curve. There are a lot easier to work with when creating curve tube-like models. We are going to model our arms using the curves, and we'll convert them to mesh so that we can edit them like a traditional model. What we are going to do here is add a curve so hit Shift A, go to Curve, and then we are just going to do a basic Bezier curve. Now it looks like a flat line here, but if we rotate that by 90 degrees on the X by hitting R 90X, you'll see that gives us a curve there. What we are going to do is take this curve, maybe move this up here. I'm going to make sure my snapping is turned off there. I'm going to tab into edit mode here, and then you can see here that we have these Bezier curves, so we can rotate those, and we can grab the handles and move those, and we can subdivide these if we want to add more mesh. But for now, we are just going to go ahead and use these two points. I'm going to grab one point here and put it there. Now because this is a 2D object, it could be a bit difficult to judge in the view, so make sure you are switching from your side view, and your front view a lot. I'm going to want the start of my arm to be right around there, and then we're going to do is come into the top view here. I'm going to grab this arm piece here, and I'm going to bring this around to the front, and this can be difficult to wrestle for your first time, don't worry, it can be confusing, so just come here, and you want to pay attention to the order of these arrows right here. We can see they are spinning up that way and around. What we are going to do is go ahead rotate this front piece around, and you can see now that we are getting the arrows coming around this direction, so it feels more like our arm, so we are going to grab that center point there, of this front-most point here, and we're going to bring that down here to around our wrist. You can see there how we're getting that shape already. Let's go ahead grab this back piece here and will come into the front view on those, maybe rotate that a bit. I'm going to bring that up here where the start of the arm is. Now another important thing is we can scale this. If we go ahead and scale that in to see how that's bringing in those handles and the size of the curve giving us a less drastic ease into that motion. Right there you can see we're getting a much more natural-looking arm. Again, let's grab this front point here, I'm going to switch into the side view here. Then I'm just going to bring this back closer into the body. With that, you can see we have the shape of an arm. Now what we're going to do is add some geometry to that arm. I'm going to tab back out to object mode here, come under here in the curve menu. Then what I'm going to do is turn down geometry here, and we're going to add a bit of geometry. Here we have the bevel and what we're going to do is leave it on round and then we're going to turn up the depth right here. You can see that that's actually giving us a tube. Let's go ahead and turn that tube up just a bit there until we get a thick little arm and that's what we're looking for there there. What you can do now is go in and just continually adjust that curve until you get it to snap into position on your body. Great, so I'm happy with the positioning there, but you'll notice that this looks pretty low resolution, now we can add a subdivision, but another thing we can do is actually change the render resolution up here. If you see here, we can go ahead and add and remove resolution there. Feel free to add until you feel that you have a comfortable curve. I'm going to leave mine around 14. I feel like that looks pretty great for a starting point. I'm just going to go ahead and rotate this a bit here. Now let's go ahead and add a hand. Then we're going to actually bridge loop these two together. First, let's come back out to object mode here, we're going to click over here. Now in here, in object mode, what we're going to do is go ahead and add a round cube. I'm going to hit Shift A, add a round cube, you know the drill. We're going to switch here to QuadSphere. Then I'm going to reduce my arcs to something around about four. Now what I'm going to do is scale this down and then place this over where I want the hand. I'm going to rotate that a bit so it matches the angle of the arm there. Then I'm going to switch in the side view here and bring this out to the front here. Now we're not going to do anything special here, but we are just going to use some proportional editing to shape this to fit our hand. You'll notice here that with my geometry here if I I into the front view, I've lined up this side of the face here. You can see how there's a bit of an edge flow there so that these corners match there and these corners match there on the bottom of the wrist, that's intentional. We'll go through why in a second. Next up, let's add a little bit of a thumb. What we're going to do is tap in the edit mode here on our object. We're going to switch to Face Select and we just need a simple little thumb, so I'm just going to grab these two faces here, snap into the front view, maybe grab this front face too. We'll grab these four right here. Then I'm going to press E to extrude. Then I'm going to bring that up a little bit and then I'm just going to scale that in. Then I'm going to switch here into the wireframe mode, grab everything there and move that back. That'll just give us a little bump for the thumb. If I go ahead and add a subdivision, you can see that we have a tiny bump for the thumb. I'm just going to go through the sculpt to shaped that and give that a bit more definition. Great. Now we are going to attach this hand to our arm and this is where things get a little tricky. First of all, we are going to take our arm here and we are going to press H, and that's going to hide the arm. Now what we are going to do, is switch to the side view of our hand here. I'm just using Numpad 3 to switch over to a side view. Then you'll see here we have this natural face setting. What I'm going to do is grab this tab into edit mode. I'm going to turn off my subdivision view for now. I'm going to switch to edge view here. Then I want to select all of these vertices right here. I'm going to Alt-click, hold Shift, click there, grab that, click there, grab that, click there, grab that, click there, grab that. Now we have that edge loops selected. If you remember, we had enabled the loop tools, to come up here to edit on our side menu here, we'll see that we have looped tools up here. Let's twirl that down. When we click these shapes, it's actually going to do a couple of different things that will shape that into whatever you click. We are going to click circle and you see that gets us a circle shape. We are going to scale that in a bit, there. You can see that now we are getting more of a wrist shape. Now we are going to hit the face key up here, de-select everything we have there. I'm going to press C to use circle select. Then I'm just going to grab these faces right here, and we are going to delete those faces. Now we have a hole that we can attach to our arm. But first, we need to count how many faces we have around the edge here. I have 16 faces here, and if you've been following along, that's how many you should have too. Now we are going to press Alt-H, which will unhide everything in object mode, and that will bring that back. Then we need to count how many we have around here in our arm. Let's go ahead and hide our arm here. You can see here on mine that if you've counted around, I have 12. But what we can do is actually add resolution in the curve menu. If you click over in the curve menu, go to round, down here, we have a resolution. Up here, there is a U, that's the resolution for our arm as we saw before. But down here the resolution, will determine how much resolution we have on the roundness here. If I go ahead and bump that up to about five or six, that should also give me 16 faces there. Now if I press Alt-H, to reveal my hand, we should be able to bridge these two loops. What we are going to do now is grab this arm, press spacebar, search for Convert to mesh, and then this will now be a mesh. You'll see our curve options disappeared and if we tab in it now operates like normal mesh. What we are going to do is in our front view here, we are going to tab into edit mode, and we are going to use the edge mode up here and grab these little faces here. We are going to try and scale these down to match the size of the wrist. We are going to go ahead and grab that, match the size of the wrists. I'm going to move this back here. Now what we are going to do is tap back into object mode. We are going to grab the hand and we are going to grab the arm, we are going to hit Control J, it's a part of the same object now, we are going to tab back into edit mode. You'll see that our edges here are still selected. Then we are going to Shift, Alt, click this side, and we now have both of these selected. If we hit spacebar and search bridge edge loops, it will now bridge those edge loops and connect those together. Now, all we need to do now is Shift, select these and just shape them and move around until we get a bit more of a natural shape. I'm going to take a moment to do that, just by Alt, Shift, clicking, and then scaling in and out. You can see it doesn't take that much work just by Alt, Shift, clicking each edge loop, scaling it in and out, so I get a natural taper down to the wrist. If you want, you can even rotate these a tiny bit to get more of a natural edge flow. Great. Now let's tap back out into object mode here, we are going to hit Control 2. We'll see that we have a nice little cartoony arm. Now, if you want, I would recommend going in and continuing to just mess with proportional editing until you get what you want, so you can get a more natural shaping arm. What I'm going to do is maybe bring out this wrist portion here and maybe bring in the arm a little bit closer to the body. Let's talk a bit about the shape of the arm. Now, in this case, we are doing more of a stylized look, but when we are doing a hand, you are going to want a [inaudible] top of the hand, and when our knuckles are grabbed like this, coming in at a slope. Of course, you taper into the wrist and then come back out to the forearm. If you were doing a realistic proportion arm, you would taper back in at the elbow and then the bicep would be one of the widest points of the upper arm, moving up into the rounded shoulder. However, in this case, we are just doing a little tube arms, but those are just some tips if you want to give your character a bit more realism in their proportions. Lastly, we are just going to grab this arm, grab the body, hit Control J, and that will join in and give us our arms on both sides there and we are ready to move on to the legs. 8. Building the Legs: Next up, we have the legs, which are going to be incredibly simple. We're going to go ahead, hit "Shift A" here, I'm going to add a cylinder. I'm going to divide this by 2 to give us less geometry. Then what we're going to do is scale that down to about the size of the legs there. Now, what we're going to do is press forward slash, and what that will do, will move us into an isolated view of the selected objects. Run a tab in the Edit Mode here. We're going to switch to face select mode up here, we're going to grab that bottom face and up face. I'm going to press "X", delete faces. Now what we're going to press one to snap back in to our front view there and forward slash again to bring us back out. Now with wireframe mode on, we'll go ahead and switch to the vertices mode. We'll grab these vertices here. We're going to scale those up a bit. I'm going to make sure my proportional editing is turned off. Then we're just going to move this up with the G key so that it sits inside of our body there. Then we'll grab this, scale this down a bit and then move that down and we have the shape of our leg. Now, we could press "Control 2", here, and you'll see that that gives us some subdivisions there. We'll go ahead and hit "Shade Smooth". That should be all we need for our leg. I'm going to actually go ahead and add a bit of extra geometry. We hit "Control R", here. It will open up our loop cut, and then we can scroll up until we get some square faces. Now, you don't need to do that if you want to save on geometry, that's an easy place to save. We'll add a round cube. I'm going to go ahead and add a round cube there. I have my arc set to four. I'm going to go ahead tab into Edit Mode here and switch to wireframe mode. I'm going to grab everything here on the bottom, I'm going to delete those bottom vertices, switch back out to object mode. Now I'm going to scale this down and I'm going to move this over to the foot. You'll see that that matches the foot shape already. Then what I'm going to do is switch into side view mode here. I'm going to bring this forward. Then I'm going to tab into Edit Mode here. I'm still on wireframe mode. I'm going to select these back faces here. With those faces selected, I'm going to press "E" to extrude. You see now it wants to extrude on the normals up this way. That's not what I want. What I'm going to do is press "Y", that'll allow me to extrude on the Y, which is that green axis there. We're going to pull that back there. Then what we're going to do is rotate down to the bottom. You'll see that that extrude created a bunch of faces. I'm going to turn off my reference image for a moment to make this a bit easier to see, switch to solid view. We're going to switch to face select up here, C key, and we're just going to grab all these faces on the bottom there. Then we're going to press "X" to delete those faces. Now we have the shape of our foot. Just tab back out into object mode here, we're going to press "Control 2", and you'll see that we have the shape of a shoe starting. What we're going to do is add a bit more geometry. I'm going to turn off subdivision in our view there, I'm going to hit "Control R" to insert some loop cuts here. That'll give us some structure to our foot. Now what we can do is in edge select mode, we can "Alt Shift" click this one here. I'm going to use proportional editing up here. I'm going to scale by pressing "X" and then "X", and then we're going to move that out so that we get the shape of a shoe around our foot there. Let's tab back on onto object mode and see what that looks like with our subdivision on. Next up, what we're going to do is tab into Edit Mode here. I'm going to leave subdivision on because I want to see what it's doing. I'm going to use an edge select mode and "Alt Shift" click down here, press "F", that's going to add a face because this is an ngon, meaning it's not a quad, it has multiple points going on it. You can see that it's screwing up the geometry on the bottom. We're going to fix that by pressing "I" and insetting and bringing that way in there. Now what we're going to do is press "X" to delete that face. We're going to "Alt" click select that, and we're going to hit "Space bar," to search for grid fill, and we're going to do that. Now when we switch back out to object mode, that'll look a lot better. It's still not perfect, but it is better than what we had before. I'm going to show you one more thing that we can do to make this a bit more flatter on the foot. We're going to tab into Edit Mode here. We're going to hit "Control R", and we're going to add what's called a support edge loop, and we'll add that around the bottom here. You'll see that that snaps our foot to the ground more, and we've dragged that down. We can see that that's holding our subdivision into place to give us a flatter foot. At this point, we're just going to go through and tweak the shape of the foot. It does look like peanuts from the top. The heel and the toes tend to be a bit more spread out than the inner foot. Since it's a stylized character, I made this more extreme. Also raised the tip of the boot around the shoes to make room for the toes. I lowered the shoe around the heel to further exaggerate this idea and to make more rooms for socks later. Great. Now what we're going to do is we're going to grab our shoe and our legs, and our body, and then we're going to hit "Control J", and that will mirror everything over. I'm going to right-click hit "Shade Smooth", and now we're ready to begin adding clothes and accessories. 9. Adding Clothes: Closer, actually pretty easy to add with the solidify modifier. Let me show you how we're going to do that. We're going to grab the body here and we're going to hit Shift D to duplicate that body. We're going to come up here. We're going to hide the original body in the viewport and I'm going to take a look at my reference image. I know I want to add some sleeves and then maybe a line for the pants and down here as well. Let's go ahead and turn that reference image back off. Then we're going to do is grab body here and name this cloths. Then I'm going to tap into edit mode. We're going to press L over the shoe here. We're just going to go ahead and delete that shoe because we're not going to add cloths to that. We're going to be adding cloths to part of the arm and then we're going to add cloths to part of the body. Let's think about where we want those lines to appear. I want to add a sleeve right around here. I'm going to switch up here to edge select mode, going to Alt Shift, click that. Now I'm going to press V. What that's going to do is separate these into to pieces. If I double-tap a to deselect everything and press L over this arm here you'll see that now that's its own piece. Let's press X and delete those faces. Now we have what could be the start of sleeve there. Same thing with the body. Let's go ahead and maybe select this edge loop here is the pant line. We're going to press V. Then we'll do the same thing, select this piece and delete this piece up here. Now we have the starter where our pants could be. I'm going to go ahead and select that edge loop. I'm going to scale on the z-axis by pressing S and Z, flattening that out a bit and grabbing G and then Z to move that up a bit. That will give us more of a pant shape. Now we have our clothing object. Let's go ahead and turn our body back on so we can see how that's intersecting. Obviously this doesn't look like cloths yet. We're going to fix that with the solidify modifier. First of all, it's come up here. Let's add modifier under Generate, you'll see solidify, let's add solidify. You'll see that if I forward slash in on this object, it's adding thickness here. Up here you can see I'm actually getting some artifacts from this geometry that's intersecting. I'm just going to tab in the edit mode here. Then I'm going to make sure I'm on edge select mode, Alt Shift, click this edge, and then if you hit Control Plus, that'll select the next edge loop. If you hit X delete vertices, that'll get rid of that. That's hidden inside of the head so we don't need that anyways. Now what we can do is add some thickness over here of the solidify modifier. Let's go ahead and do 0.1. You'll see that that gives us some pretty thick cloths. Since we're doing a stylized, cartoony look, that'll be great. We're going to go ahead and move this up under subdivision. You'll see that that really starts to shrink things down and give it a rounded look, which can be great, but maybe if we don't want it that extreme. We'll, solidifier has an option for that. We come under here. Under edge data, we can choose our crease. You see that if we do that crease, it will tighten that crease when it's being subdivided. Let's go ahead add 0.5 to the inner, add 0.5 to the outer. You'll see that now we have some cartoony looking around cloths. Let's switch back out to object mode here. Press forward slash, and we'll see that we can see our cloths, but they're still inside our character. That's because by offset, it's offsetting negative 1, meaning it's offsetting inside of itself. If we put this all the way out to a positive one, you'll see they'll be all the way outside of our character. After that, feel free to just move ahead and maybe adjust some vertices to get the pants to fit like you want. I'll play with the thickness, maybe the offset and I'm going to mess around with my shoes and bring down that inner shoe so that I can see my socks more. With that, we're ready to move on to creating accessories. 10. Adding a Backpack: Next up, let's look at a quick way we can do the backpack. We're again going to use a curve. This time we're going to bevel with a shape. It says shift A and we're going to go ahead and add a curve here. I'm going to add a Bezier curve. I'm going to forward slash the focus in on that. Then what we're going to do is hit "Shift A" add curve. Then we're going to come down here and look at the different options that we have. We're going to select a rectangle here, and then what we're going to do with that rectangle is in the top view here, I'm going to hit "S" and scale that down on the y to give us a thin rectangle there. Now what we're going to do is take this curve and move this off to the side. It's out of our way because we're using that as a shape. I'm going to go ahead and grab this Bezier curve here, and I'm going to come to the "Curve options". I'm going to choose object as our bevel shape, and then we're going to grab this rectangle. You'll see here that it is way too big, so what we're going to do is come over here to our rectangle and scale that down until we have a reasonable shape. With this, we now have a strap shape. Probably want to up the U resolution, and then we can proceed to place this in place on our character. Before you do that, I recommend adding another point and a simple way to do that is we tab into edit mode here. I'm actually in top view right now. I'm going to press R 45. I'm going to give us a straight line there by doing that with this left one selected. Now what I'm going to do is select both of these, and then I'm going to right-click and hit "Subdivide." What that'll do is add one in the middle here, which will give us more room to play with. The strap actually took me quite a bit of time to get in place on the character. It can be difficult to wrangle something like this in the 3D view. Here's a couple of tips. One, I recommend placing your points where they need to be first. The top point up by the head, the bottom point down by above the glutes, and then the middle point out to the side of the body. Then after that, don't forget that you can scale and rotate these in the 3D view. I like to scale it down so that the easing isn't so extreme and that when I rotate the motions aren't so big. Then I also found it incredibly helpful to use the gizmos in this section, which are those little tools on the left. You can see here that with the rotate tool, I can click and drag until I can get the right orientation. But like I said, I'd start with the start and endpoints and move from there. Make sure you're moving around the view quite a bit. It takes a bit to wrestle in the place and there's not many tips I can offer here besides that, just take some experience and learning how to wrangle them. Don't worry though, it gets easier, and just stick to it. It may be frustrating at first, but I'm sure you'll get it. Now that I have the strap in place, I'm actually going to go ahead and convert this to a mesh by hitting "Spacebar search", convert to mesh. Then I'm going to go ahead and join this into the body and you'll see that that duplicates it and applies our effects there. Now I'm going to go ahead and add the backpack, I'm going to turn back on that reference image, and I'm going to start with a round sphere again and work that into place. The actual backpack is a simple process. I'm going to go ahead and fast forward through that. The only unique thing I really did here is that I selected the top half of the quad sphere and extruded that upwards and then added some geometry for both loop cuts. But that's not really that new of a technique. Let's take a look at how we did the pocket. This is actually a fun process. What we're going to do is hit "Shift A" and we're going to add a plane. We're going to grab this with a little move, move this over here, I'm going to go to the top view to give you a better view. We're going to tab into edit mode here. With this selected, we're going to right-click hit "Subdivide", I don't know, I'm going to choose something around, let's say eight subdivisions just to give us some geometry. I'm going to tap back out to object mode. I'm going to go back into front mode here, I'm going to hit R 90. What that's going to do is rotate that 90 degrees and we're going to move that up here close to our backpack. I'm going to switch to the side view here and move this over here, and I'm going to press "S" to scale that into about the size of the pocket that I want. I'm going to hit "Control-A.'' I'm going to apply the rotation and scale. Now what we're going to do is add this pocket to this backpack. Now if you are watching on my time-lapse, you'll notice that my backpack was joined into my head so that it can do the mirror and subdivision. You'll notice that when I click it, it is named head, and that is why. Here's the plane object here. We're going to add a modifier. We have a couple of modifiers we're going to add. First, we're going to add a shrinkwrap modifier. That's under here, under generate, and we have shrink-wrap. Now this will let us shrinkwrap this to the nearest surface points. We're going to take this, we're going to select our object here, which is the backpack, but also called head, and then you'll see that it just shrinks to the surface. Now we have wrapped methods up here and we're going to go ahead and do tangent normal project. That'll give us a bit smoother of a projection there. Now what we can do is we can go ahead and we can add a solidify modifier, will change this out to one, and that gives us our little pocket. Now I'm going to up my thickness a bit until I get something I'm happy with, and then what I'm going to do is come here into the modifiers and add a subdivision to give that a round look. I'm pretty happy with that pocket. Now if you want, you can tap into edit mode and you can actually grab these vertices and adjust that until you get something that you're happy with. But I'm going to leave mine there for now. What we can do now to put this on the other side is add again another modifier. We're going to add a modifier and we're going to add a mirror, and you'll notice that it mirrors over there. That's because this is where our origin object is. With this selected, we're going to hit "Control A" and then we're going to apply the location. What that's going to do is apply the origin point down here to the 3D cursor, which will mirror it on both sides so we can right-click, hit "Shade Smooth." Now we have pockets on both sides. If you want, you can add another plane, add some details there, or you could go ahead and add a plane and project a pocket on top. For now, let's move on to how to do accessories. 11. Making the Accessories: What we want to do is add some buttons. I'm going to add some buttons to the pockets. Then I had a bunch of little badges all over his backpack here. Then I also had some buttons for the clothes. Quick way to add buttons is to do Shift A and we're going to add a cylinder. I'm going to leave this down to something maybe as small as eight eight these are going to be small. I'm going to move this over here. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to tab into edit mode here. I'm going to hit Control R and click. That's going to give us a center point there. Going to switch into wireframe mode. I'm going to grab these bottom vertices and vertex select mode, press X delete vertices. If I took back out the object mode, you'll see here that we have no bottom there. We're going to do is we're going to add a bevel modifier, which right now is going to add a bevel on all of these and that's not what we want to do. What we're going do is up this angle until that disappears. I'm going to set mine to around 60 and that will only apply a bubble edge there. I'm going to add two edge loops there. That gives us a little button we can use with an origin point here. What I'm going to do now is scale this down to about this size of a buttons to really tiny little button there. Then I'm going to apply rotation and scale because that will affect the bevel size there. Then what we can do is adjust that bevel amount until we get a size that we're happier with. I'm just going to fast forward through this because this is just repetitive. This is the same thing we did there. I'm going to set my snap selection to the volume and then I'm just going to move it all around the backpack to place little badges everywhere. Then I'll scale it down and create some little pocket buttons and maybe some little clothing buttons. Feel free to add as few or as much as you would like. Great, so I've placed the buttons where I want. Let's look at how I quickly made those glasses. I'm going to go ahead and turn on my reference image here. What I'm going to do is not use any new techniques, but just show how we can use some of the techniques we did creatively to make things quickly. We're going to go Shift A, add a cube here. I'm going to switch into wireframe mode so I can see what I'm doing. I'm going to move this up over the glasses here. I'm going to scale this down until they match the side there. I'm going to tab into edit mode, grab everything here. I'm going to scale this up and down on the Z till it matches there. I'm going to switch in the side view here and just make this about the length of the glass. I'm going to turn off proportional editing and snap for now. I'm going to scale this N on the Y by pressing, S, Y and scaling that in. Then I'm just going to bring that forward on the Y, in front of the face right there. This is where you can get creative with your modeling. I'm going to switch over to the face selection mode here. I'm going to de-select everything. I'm going to grab these two right there and wireframe them. Now what I'm going to do is press, I to inset and then I'm going to delete those faces. See, now I have a border here. If I go ahead and press 2 there and select that one and that one, I can bridge edge loops just like I did with the hands. I'm going to type space-bar search bridge, edge loops. You'll see that that gives us some geometry in the middle there. If it's slipped into solid view, you can see that. See here that I'm interacting with the nose. I'm just going to go ahead maybe bump the glasses up a little bit higher. Then the image is. Now what I'm going to do, I'll add some edge loops. What we want to do is create a little bridge right there. We're going to go ahead click there, add an edge loop with Control R, drag that up. Click there, add an edge loop with R. You'll notice that these edge loops are slanted. What we're going to do, switch into vertex mode, switch over to wireframe. I'm going to grab these two press, S, Z, 0. That's going to flatten that out on the z-axis. We'll do that on the top there as well. What we can do is in wireframe mode, grab these two here. We're going to go ahead press Extrude and then just move that straight out until it is the center there. Then we want to make sure that snap to the center. I can go ahead and do that whole 3D cursor process again just to make sure those are snapped into the center for when we mirror this. Now I'm going to switch back to medium point here. Now we want to add a section here to go over the ear. We'll just do that same exact thing and extrude back and then move over there. I'm going to fast forward now, but as I'm going to do is add edge loops here on the side and extrude these vertices and keep extruding them and rotating them until they're around the ear. Now we can apply mirror modifier and it should mirror across and then we have our full glasses. Now I'm not trying to show you these glasses so that I show you exactly how to make glasses step-by-step. What I'm trying to show you what this is, how we're taking the techniques we've done with loops and extruding and all these other options and how we're able to use these to problem-solve and do our own models. The point in this course is not to step-by-step show you how to make this character, it is to give you the tools you need so that you can model what you want from scratch. 12. Cleaning up the Model: Great, so at this point hopefully you have your model. Now, you can go ahead and I recommend keep tweaking things, adjusting the look of everything and maybe adding any accessories, packets or anything like that that you want. But once you're ready and feel that your model is done, what I recommend doing is actually going up here, we're going to turn off our reference image once we have everything in place here. What we're actually going to do is apply everything. Now I recommend saving before you do this because this is destructive, so you won't be able to go back and change this. We're going to do Save As, and then we could do an incremental save. If we click this little plus button here, it'll add a number so that we can make a new save file quickly that way. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to select everything and then I'm going to press Space bar and search for convert to mesh, and what that's going to do is go ahead and apply all of our modifiers. Then what we can do is, again, select everything and one item, I'm going to hit Control J to join everything in there. I'm going to turn my hair back on and keep that object separate so they can turn that on and off, and I'm going to name my body here, I'm just going to name this backpack kid. Now we have everything in here. As you can see, some of the geometry here is dense, maybe more dense than it needs to be. What you can do is do one quick pass now and you can start adjusting things. For example, I'll probably adjust this nose so that it doesn't intersect with the glasses. But you'll notice that the nose has a ton of topology that it probably doesn't need. This is the boring part, but what you can do now is you can go through and start deleting edge loops. If you look at my final example on the project files, you'll notice that I deleted edge loops, but let me show you how to quickly do that. If we tap here into edit mode and we switched the edge here, we can select edge loops by Alt Shift selecting that we have been, and then we can hit "Dissolve Edges". Then we can go ahead and we can go through all of these and start dissolving edges that we don't think we need to hold the structure things. For example, I could go ahead and do that on this nose here. I'm just going to fast forward through that process. I wish I could give you a step-by-step process on how to do this. Unfortunately, this is something that comes with experience, so I'm going to give you some advice based on my experience. I'm going to fast forward through this and I'm not going to show the entire character because it's an incredibly tedious process, but don't forget, I have a model included in here that you can trace, and I also have my project files if you'd like to look at my topology and what I landed on for my final character. Now what you want to do is you want to go through and delete as many edge loops as you can while maintaining the shape of your model. This make it easier to texture, quicker to render and easier to animate if that's ever something you want to explore in the future. But don't forget the lessons that we learned early on about topology. We want a good even quad flow. What that means is that we want most of our quads and faces to be uniform in size and squares. Of course, the sizes of the squares will vary per object. The squares on the ears may be much smaller than the squares on the face, look per object and per area, we want to keep those faces about the same size. You could delete every edge loop on a leg, but you would end up with long rectangles and you don't really want that. How I recommend starting about it is starting at the densest areas first, usually I start at the center line and I move out and delete every other edge loop outside of that center line. Then if I maintain the shape of my object, then what I do is I go through and I do that again. Once I start to lose the shape of my object by dissolving that way, I start going through and getting rid of single edge loops. Really it's just a process of dissolving the edge loops and then control undoing, if you find out that it's ruining the shape of your character. Now, I wish I could give you more advice in that, but this is just going to come with experience in seeing how many edge loop you can get rid of to keep the shape of your character. I promise you that as you do it a couple times over a couple of projects and a couple of characters or objects, it will get much easier with experience. Just stick to it. It's a tedious process, but in the long run, it'll make your life easier when you move on to the next steps of 3D. 13. Outro: Thank you so much for watching. I always love seeing what you make from these courses, so please make sure to upload your project to Skillshare. Also, comment below what future courses you'd like to see. I'm working on a follow-up course for this character where we will learn how to texture this character and that'll be releasing in October 2021. Please stay tuned, and again, thank you for watching.