Create Your First 3D Cat Character With Blender 3D

1. Welcome: Hello, my name is Zacavalcot and I am a treaty artist. In this class, you'll learn how to model and render your very Alka character using blender. Whether you're just starting out or already know a bit about treaty modeling, this class is here to make blender easy for you. We'll go over the basics and give you the tools to make a super cute character. You'll learn how to use lighting and rendering to make your character look awesome in a lively scene. Come with me and let's explore the amazing world of Three D art together. 2. Importing the References: Hello and welcome to this first class. First, we delete these three objects. And I take my reference image and I put in here in blender, I'm going to align it with the Y axis. I'm going to push it a bit back on the Y that I go to the front view with the Numpad one. And I align the belly or the feet with the ground. That's good for the position of this card. I rename it with M. I create a new layer that I call for reference. I do the same with the side drawing. I put it in blender. I align it with the X axis. I'm going to center it and push it back on the X axis. They're going to model our model inside these two cards. And they're going to be used as a reference. You can use your own reference or you can follow with the drawer I put on the resources page. We just a bit back these two cards, so we have a bit more space. I rename this card side and I put it on the layer. We're good to start our modeling. 3. Creating the Body: Okay, let's create the body shape. The bigger shape of the character. I will untique the selectable option here, so we cannot select the reference anymore. With M, I create a new layer that I name cat. We can create a cube here. It will be the shape we're going to use to the body. I will add subdivision surface modifier. Okay. And I will apply this modifier so we can have a liquid on the, on the modeling. I raise it a bit here and we're going to start to, to move the vertices. We shifted Z. We can see through the object and select the points that are behind the geometry. Otherwise we're going to select only the points in front of the geometry. I had another subdivision surface modifier so we can see the final result. So as you are going to see, I switch every time between the shaded view and the x ray view with shift Z. By the way, I'm going to put all the hot keys I'm using in this class, I, putting them on a Word file on the resources page. You can check the hot keys in here. I'm using a lot, the G key to move the vertice. I'm using shift Z to see through the geometry. When you want to move something in Blender, you can press then the axis, we're moving your geometry vertice edge faces or the whole object I can press and X, so I can move the vertisly on the X axis. And Z to divert only on the X and Y to move the verts Y Xs. As you can see, the front face is still not there. So I'm going to delete all the vertice from the left side and apply a mirror modifier that I'm going to put before the subdivision surface. Otherwise they're going to have issues on the middle shift the Z. I select all the vertices and I push them to the side to cover all the drawing area. With control R, I create a edge loop in here to have more T verte all the middle. I'm going to shape the face, looking to the front view all the time. I switch between shaded and x ray mode, it's just a matter of trying to match the reference. If I move this T to try to find a rounded shape, this cute character is always nice to have rounded shapes. In here, I press and Z to move only on the Z Xs. If you want to do the opposite, you can press shift Z. You can move on, on the X and Y axis. We're going to do that, shift Z. Move this vertices here. You can work with your own model, your own drawing, or use this one if you want. You can change it a bit. No, there's no problem here. I'm going to round the back of the cat in the front. Here I press shift the Z. I can move this vertis only on the x and y axis. I think we have a nice shape to start, and we can move to the next lesson. 4. Modeling the Tail: Okay, now we're going to model the tail. We'll start with a cube. Also, I'm going to put it here more or less where our tails in the drawing we are. I rotate the tail and put it here. Okay, shift Z. I select all the vertex, those that are behind the geometry. I try to align two verts here in the base of the tailing to use DDsion surface modifier. When I pressfZ, I lost all the volume I had. I started to do to create some edge loops. With control R, I can begin to match the contours of the tail. I create a nod, another edge loop here, also with control R. Okay, let's move this for this here too. You can find tune this as much as you want. And do something different too. If you can post on the project page to be a pleasure, to look at your project and give you some feedback. If you do a character of your own, it's really welcome. It's really nice to have different characters and different projects. I think I would just delete these two faces here to be simple to the subdivision surface to work so we can better attach the detail to the body. Create another edge loop here, always with control R. It's square now, but we're going to give it around shape shift to see the transparency, I selected the edges, then I press shift Z again. To come back to the shaded mode, the, I'll try to make this inner curve here but I can on the drawing. Okay, look nice in the side view. At least we are going to check also on the front view. It's a treaty model. Sometimes it works on one view but not on the other view. I raised the division to two. In the front of view, we have something that work at all. I hide my body, I rename the object tail. I do like with the body. I am going to delete the vertices and add a mirror modifier so we can work on only one side. Always remember to put the mirror modifier before the subdivision surface. Okay. I take all the vertices and push them to the side. Okay. Now the work is to try to round the cheer tube. Get round shapes. Right now it's really square. So I'm going to push this vertice bit with and X. I can push them to the middle of the S. It's already looking better. We can do the tip of the tail also with a different color to be easier to create two different materials. Let's move on to the next lesson. You can keep fine tuning your tail if you want. 5. Back Paws: Okay, let's keep going with the same techniques. We're going to create the pole. You see that we are only creating one pole and the other ones will be a copy of this first one. I already create my modifiers, the mirror and the subdivision surface in edit mode tab To change from object to edit mode, I move in x my object so the mirror will follow. On the other side I will roughly place the back left back pole in here. I'm going to use the drawing as a reference more or less in here. The front view it or less here. To okay, tonight start, I'm going to apply this subdivision surface, but I have to go to object mode, otherwise I can't apply the modifier. And I create a new subdivision surface just after the mirror modifier. Now we have a more geometry to work. I will delete these phases. It's easier to attach the pole to the body, the same thing we did on the tail shift Z. To see the transparency, I select all these vertices. I'm going to push the pole in here. Then the, I moved them inside the cat body. It's already looking nice. Maybe I'm not going to make the poll as big as in the reference. Yeah, it's cute like that. And x to move only on the x axis. And you can move on all the axis at the same time she to see the transparent select these two verts and move them. I'm going to move up the verts here to scale them down. So I will flat bit this shape in the bottom of the depo. I move the verts inside the body. Again, I have to balance with the verts, keep them at the middle distance between the other edge. Loops start to look nice. Try to balance a bit the position of the verts. We have a soft shape around the shape, or nice, I push back a bit the vertices to flat more the tip of the poll modifier. I put it in two. Now I can view everything together. Still have some vertices here appearing. So I move them into the body I forgot to modifier to. Okay, let's move to the next lesson. 6. The Pads: Okay, now that we have the poll, let's create the poll pad in here. I'm going to use the UV sphere. I right away create a mirror modifier with tab. I go to edit mode G X. To move away from the center of the geometry, I scale only on the Z. Xis, Z scale. On the Xs we have a small object here. Right click shades. I will add a subdivision surface modifier. I have to replace the ped at the right spot. I'll move the poll here to match the drawing. You can always keep Finny tuning forever, her models. But at some time we'll have to finish the work. Okay, I will match the scale of the pad in here. I will position with the side drawing too. As you can see, it's not exactly the same size. So I did this drawing just for the class. It's not really my, my strongest skill, sorry for that. But it's enough to try to match some drawing you can do yourself or you can find on the Internet. The goal is to understand the shapes and try to reproduce them in tread. Something that we do all the time to create models. You can do something by your head without reference, but it's always better to have a reference and photographs, videos, drawings. And if you have model sheets like this one with a side view and a front view, it's always better to use them to match the, match the reference. Even if at the end you change the module and do something different or completely different, you can do that. But starting from starting point, it's always a good idea. Here I just create a copy of the first one. With shift D, I can duplicate the object inside edit mode. I'm still on the same object, but we have the copies of the geometry. We shift these so we don't have to create new objects. It's better like that. If you press L, you can select one sub object entirely L to move. All the hot keys are going to be on the file, in the resources page so we can use them to your work. We have one less spot to create now. It's just a matter of tuning the placement and how much they go inside the Po geometry. You can do as you want. You can change the views to better rotate and better move the pads. They are matching the geometry. A good idea also always is to do some work and come back in the next day to see the result and see if you still like what you did. Sorry, it's excellent. It's better than stay hours in finny tuning something. Sometimes you take a break, you sleep, and next day you come back and to see I like this or I don't like, it's not exactly what I want. So I'm going to rework this part of the model. One good night of sleep. It's really nice to change your perspective and come in the next day and see if you really want to keep this road or change something. Anyway, you can keep fine tuning. And see you on the next lesson. 7. Front Paws: Okay, let's do the front poles now. I'm going to hide the tail and body for the moment, so I'm going to delete the modifiers on the back poles to, it's not looking nice right now. What I'm going to do, I had a new mirror moodifier and subdivision surface. Okay. With shift D, I copy the back pole, I rename the object front poles. I go to the edit board, I select all the geometry, I rotate on the z axis. That's it. It was really easy to do the front poles, just a copy from the back points. 8. Modeling the Ears: Okay, let's model the years. Let's start with cube again. Let's add the mirror modifier. Likely starting to get that we do always the same thing to these objects. Simple modeling, we can use the same techniques and really efficient in the edit mode. I place my geometry where I like the years to be. I use the front reference drawing to place them, Okay, this is already looking like ears. I will delete this face here, the bottom one, so it's easier to make the ears go inside the body. Now I am moving these two faces so the ears is not as big on the y axis, Frank. I right click and shoes shade smooth so I can see be shape you hide the other objects so it's easier to work. All the ears, well, let's move some verdict. See, I select the vertice behind the geometry. I keep saying the same thing, but you've got the 0.0 and I'm going to match this inside part of the years. Then we're going to create the outside. We will need to have a separation on the geometry here to create different materials. It's easier since we're not going to do complex stuff in the text side just using simple shaders. Having a separation with the modeling, it's better with control R. I create edge loops, have more control on the geometry. I keep moving the diverts trying to match my drawing. In the side drawing, I can see that the ear is not in the right spot. We're going to move. Then I can rotate also the year. Okay, thank you. Should work like that. Now I select these exterior faces in edit mode. Sorry I lost the selection. Select them again. We're going to extrude along normals. Each phase will extrude along its normal outward on phase. We can create this exterior part of the years. I did a double ext, to have the separation I talked about earlier. We have this cylindrical shape outside the first part we did. 9. The Eyes: Okay, let's create the ice. The ice is really easy to, this is a Y model, so we're going to add the fake reflections. We start with this year like we did with the bed balls. Like always, we are going to use the subdivision surface modifier. Yeah, I did a mirror. Maybe I will delete this modifier later. Let's see. Okay, so in here, in a separate part of the scene, I created the eyes and the fake reflections. Okay, so the big sphere will be black. We're going to have a bit of physical reflection. The small spheres are the fake specular spots that we have on the kai ice. This is how I do it. I make a copy of them inside the object, I am inside the eyes and I have three geometries inside the mirror. Will take these three objects and copy them. We have this small reflection smaller than the water on the two small spheres will be white and the sphere will be black. You can do as you want. You can tune this directly, Sam. Okay, now let's place it on the character. I rotate the object on the x axis, R x and 90 degrees on the, on the amped. So you can rotate an object with an angle. You see the mirror. It's inverted. So it's not okay. I'll do it by hand later on, so don't worry. You can do it on your side. You just have to copy and rotate the right eye. This one I will not use the mirror modifier. The object is inside the body. I have to place it here. I go to the side. The eye can switch the views to try to find the right position and the rotation of the eye inside the edit bode, I select this big sphere and I created another one. This is the big white part of, of the eye. I place it here. I select all and I rotate all the elements together. It's easier than one by one. With all, I select only these three elements and I will push them back to be on the surface of the white sphere. Okay, I rotate, rotate them again. You can switch reviews to try to find the best position to rotate your object that I am doing. Okay, I think it's nice you can tune on your side, maybe find tune it a bit on my side, but this is the basic and it's already working. Nice. We can move to the next lesson. 10. Creating the Nose: As you can see, it places the right eye between lessons. So now we can create the nose. We are going to use the same technique, a cube. I'm going to place it here to move it up. Then to skate it down, I'm going to move it in the y axis with Y, then scale it with Y, Z to move it down. I think with time you are going to know the hot keys by heart. If you use Blender every day, you can forget them. With control R, I create an edge loop in the center and I delete the verses so I can use the mirror modifier. I will also add a subdivision surface modifier with two subdivision right clip shades loose. As you can see we do every time the same thing she to select these two vertices and I'll move them to the center of the object. I move the two vertices to the center. Right now it's a bit like a triangle. I'm going to make an edge loop in here with control R. Then I can round a bit this shape. Okay? I'm not going to match exactly the facial features. I'm going to do it a bit different. I will push it back on the Y axis and rotate on the X axis. 11. The Mouth: Okay, let's model the mouth. So this is not the first time I model this character. And the mouth, I can't understand why. But it's really something that I'm struggle every time to do it right. Let's see if I can do it the right way on the first time In the other Cai characters I did with the same kind of mouth, it's always the same thing I'm always to create is smooth mouth that interacts nicely with the nose, like the two of them are trying to occupy the same place in the space. Let's see, let's do as we always do. Let's create a mirror modifier. Let's go to the edit mode and we move it to the right. Let's add a subdivision surface modifier. Okay, let's start to placing it in the right spot. Tat a bit on the x axis, shades move. We're going to add another subdivision level. Okay, This part is easier, but now we have to fine tune the shape. It's the hard part. To me, maybe you can come up with some solutions or different moths. Free to post your project to be really nice to see different things on the project page. I'm going to use this point as much as I can before doing creating edge loops. It's always easier to work with less points then adding detail to the geometry. When we can't do anymore, I will create an edge loop with control R in here. Right now the mouth is really square. Can be, if you want to do something like that, can be nice. Will move this center point here. Now I'm going to find these two ones where we have the transition with the nose. Okay? I have to push them inside the body, so we can see the nose passes above the mouth, that's the goal. We have to see the nose entirely. The mouth can be a bit hidden by the nose. Okay, now we have to round shapes. Okay, starting to look nice. I will probably a bit between lessons. You can do the same on your side, or if you're doing something different, go your model too. And we see each other in the next lesson. 12. Mustaches: Okay, let's do the moustache. So I will do them differently than what I did on the first time, but the technique, it's always the same. I start with the cube, maybe rotate them differently, try to find a different shape or something a bit different than the first model I did. I add a mirror subdivision surface modifier, two levels. Right click shades. Moose, let's go to Front View Edit mode, so I can push the mode shape in a. Here I rotate the mustache, the first word. I scale it down on z axis. And Z to scale an object only on the Z axis, then rotating like this. Now Y to scale it on the Y axis, I placed them near to the body and we are going to find you layer. Okay, trying to find the right spot. Let's go back to the mouth. I think it's a bit too small. I'm going to make make the mouth bigger. Okay. Now I had to work all these to verts. Has to go inside it and inside the body. So we can see the nose can do a different nose too. You can work. Okay. The first most I think I would put it here. I maybe bend it a bit. I had another loop at the middle and bend it, t like this. Select this vert, trying to find the right, the right shape here. As you can see, I'm not following anymore, the drawing for the facial features. You can follow the reference or trying to create above the reference. Feel free to express yourself to let your imagination do the job. Yeah, I think this first mustache is starting to look nice. With A, I can select all the vertices and shift D to duplicate them, so I create a second moustache. I'm going to press and Y to the, move it back on the Y axis so we can touch the body with L. I can select this whole mustache and G, Y to move it back. L to select all in this winner, I'm going to rotate it a tiny bit. I don't know, I break a bit. This band. I didn't hear. I'm going to keep this like that. Yeah, it's working nice. We'll see you in the next lesson. 13. The Eyebrows: Okay, this part of our model, it's the eyebrows. Like always, we start with a cube, scale it down S Y to scale it on the Y Xs and scale up on the X Xs. Just find it turning a bit to have a starting shape that's working already. Nice. Let's add our two favorite modifiers, mirror and subdivision, with two level two of subdivision. Let's go to edit mode and place the eyebrows. The eyebrows, it all depends on the mode you want for your picture and for your character. I will do them a bit like that to be surprised or sad. I think it's funny like that. You can do the opposite. The central vertex are going down and the exterior vertex going up. You have a cat that's not happy like you want. You can see reference on the Internet for official expressions. I'm going to keep them like in the first one I modeled. You have the same challenge here to make them touch the eye, but you can put them behind or above the eye like you want. I can try different things I think, but it is really not a difficult object to model. It's like a cylindrical shape. I have only 12 verts, so it's really easy to do. Yeah, thank you. Almost there, K, it's working nice Y. I move in the Y axis, the eyebrows, I can make them ticker with pushing this upper. 14. Lighting the Cat: Okay, let's start My favorite part. As I am a compositing supervisor, I always love to fine tune the final image. Once the product is modeled, the best part is to create the lighting and the image. Let's create a plane here with the background. It's really not a big deal. We can do other things if you want. You can create a scene behind your character. You can put your character in a scene that already exists. I extrude this edge, I will move it up with and Z. I create this shape. I will apply a bevel modifier. I use a lot of segments. Also the amount of the devil, We could already use it like that, but a subdivision surface so it'll be easier to attract the attention on the background. Don't want to see the background should be there. It's not render above a black background, the eye on the background. I create a camera camera object with zero on the num. I can see through the camera. This menu view, I selected the camera to view. If I move the viewport, now I'm moving my camera. I will center my camera in the scene. I wanted to be really at the center of the scene. Okay, let's create a second window. If you go here, we can create a second three D viewport. And I want to deselect camera to view so I can come back to perspective. And I want to select my camera and move it in this left viewport, I can move my camera as it is an object. First I want to play of the focal length. The longer the focal length, the more flat the object will be, like it was a toy or a small object. I like to use the 80 on this renders. Then I rotate a bit my camera, now you have to move a bit to the viewpoint, the background. Why scale it? You don't want to see the black behind the background. We can keep working on the left viewport and the right one will use to see the final result. I take the camera off the layer and the plane also, maybe it's a right time to rename the objects. It's always a good idea to stay organized. This is the nose, this is the mouse. It is the mustache. Sorry if I spelled something wrong. English is not my, my first language. I try my best, but it's always difficult to talk and think at the same time. Here you have the menu. All the menu is hidden. So if you can scroll the mouse so you can see these options, this is V and this is cycles to render the image. There are two render engines in Blender. By default, we have V selected. We're going to go to Cyo, have a nice GPU, can use GPU Compute. We will click on Noise for the final render. Are going to put in 60 seconds, but it all depends on your PC, on your machine. The more the samples, the less noise we're going to have the noise thresholds to clean the noise. The less this value, the more blender we'll compute to clean the noise. Let's start creating our lights. I will create a sun it to be the main light right now. This is the result of this lighting. I do first the lighting, then I created the materials, and then I adjust the lights so the lights can work with the materials I create. But first, I create the lights with standard material like this one. If I already have nice lighting with this gray shader, it's better to not lose the focus on the lighting. If you do materials and lighting at the same time for this kind of referenda, it's nice to work like that. It's very, it's a nice way to tank, to work on each parameter of the light. Now, I'm going to create the secondary lights. I use area lights. The shadows are not as sharp as the sun. I'm going to take the two lights and create a new shader. Pressing M on the keyboard. I will name new layer lights, have the Sun. This one will be the top light, the area lights. The bigger they are, the soften the shadows are. This one I think I it will be 5 meters. The shadows are really soft. I have the top of the character is bright so we can detach more from the background. I'll change the colors on the lights. Right now you can do on your ands and create something creative. But it all depends on your materials. If you want to create a mood with more of sunset of Surrise, you can use more pink or orange tint on your lights. Maybe the few lights like this one light. In creating the feel, we don't have two strong shadows on the opposite side of the sun. I forgot to deactivate the camera to view here. Very important to deactivate. Otherwise, we're going to move the camera. You have the lights that are appearing here. I can just deactivate the two icons, We see only the result of the renders. We are doing a final render. We can see each light separate. This is the field, this is the Sun, and this is the top light. This is really a classic set up for light. You have the key light, the light and all to create the edges to have brighter edge so we can detach the character from the background. In movies you see you always have a character, especially on the hair. The character is really from every detail behind the, I'm moving the back light far away from the character so we can, it's impacted the character but not as much. The BG flight, I will do the same thing. Flight. It really has to be soft just to not have stronger song shadows on the character. This is the sun, the sun, the main one. The key, the main or key light should be the stronger light in the scene. I can play with the angle of the sun. The angle is for having softer shadows. For now, I'm using for the strength. Maybe a bit too large. We will find tune all these lights once we have the materials, but for now I'll keep them like this. And top light on your. Yeah. Okay, I think we can go onto the materials. 15. The Materials: Okay, let's do the materials of this cat. You can really get created here. You can do whatever you want. You can use the reference from the Internet. You can use the color pallets. They are easy to find on the web. I'm going to do something similar to what I did on the first, the one you see on the cover of this class. Just changing the L, I will start creating the white eyes material, desaturate the color, and adding one to the value. So it's really 100% white. I can choose the material here, I don't need to create a different, a copy of the material, can use the same material on several objects. I will select only the elements of the object. I misspelled the white here, okay. I will create black material here with a bit of reflections, okay? Black. And I'll change the roughness. The roughness, the lower the value, the more the sharp the reflections. I'll do the same for the right eye. You can see I put back the wire frame if I select only the black part. And I will create a new material here and I will assign the black, I come back to it more and I assign the black material on the eye. The eyes are nice, I'm doing this material really simple so you can follow along, but you can add texture, something you want other features to the material. The background will do it green to change. It will be a material. So not a lot of reflections. If I go down the roughness, we have reflections. If I go up, the reflections are really softened. So we don't see them, that's what I'm going to do. I raise them a lot. The body, the body will be like a pink up, pale pink at not reflect this render. I don't use a lot of reflections. So I raise up the roughness, we are going to use it for the poses. And the tail in here, the tail I just select here, the pink material. Same thing for, the same thing for the polls. Just don't, don't forget the back paws. Okay, that's fine. China bit, the lateria. Now let's create a violet material for the facial features. They all have the same material except for the mouth. The mouth. I want it to be a bit more lighter than the rest. This would be a dark violet. With reflection this time I want to have some specular on these elements. They are very cylindrical it a bit of reflection here works nice for the mustache, the eyebrows and the nose. Okay, let's do the same for the pulse. For the Ped pulse, let's activate the viewport again. Let's go to edit mode. Let's select only the Ped pulse, add the material, and assign the violet material here, Okay, it's a mirror and so did it work on the right pole? Let's do the same thing on the back pole. You can use the left side view part to select the pulse. I'm struggling to select the pad. I'll just select the, the pose and invert the selection with control Y, I can select my head pulse and do the same. Create a new slot at the violet material and assign, assign it to the pose so it's already looking nice. The green and the pink violet are two complimentary colors. You can say in the comments if you want me to work on a class to talk about colors, something that I really love, and we can use a lot of new tools to make the work easier. Nowadays, you can create color palettes from images. You can create our own color palettes. You have a lot of tools to create beautiful color color palettes. Here the main colors are the green and the pink that are complementary colors. The cat, it's really detaching from the background. As I said, the mouth, I didn't on a lighter violet or a darker pink. 16. Fine Tuning the Render: Okay, welcome to the last class in here. I'm just going to find a bit the render, assign the violet material to the ears and to the tail will create a new one. Because as this is the skin of the cat, I want it to be met. And not to have the specular reflection. I want this part to be met. Let me just select the right faces. Okay, I had to deactivate the subdilision to select the right faces. Let's come back to the material, create a new slot. Then I will create a new material. Violet met. This will, will be a dark violet. But without reflection, I will change a bit. The heel. Come here to the violet side. I can turn on the subdivision surface, I have to select more faces, otherwise it's a bit strange. Now I can come back to the edit mode and press control to select the adjacent surfaces and assign this new material for the. Let's do the same for the tail. We did the right edge loop here, so it'll be easy to select only the, the tip of the tail. Create a new lot, assign the violet mat, and assign the material to the selected faces. Okay, the materials are all created and assigned to the right objects. We can go back to your object mode and fine tune a bit. The render, you can do whatever you want with this render. I raise the sun strength, we could use the subsurface scattering. Let me comment if you want me to go deeper on the shading part of blender. We can do nice stuff with this character. I can take another character and we can work only on the shader. Can only to talk about the colors and the shaders, maybe a bit of textures, the comments. This is something that you, you want in here. I can go to color management and work a bit on the contrast of the image if you want to use the image without past passing by another software like Photoshop or compositing software like Nuke. After Effect Fusion, you can do it. Your render straight from Blender. Just raise the contrast, Here you have, the image will pop more. That's it. Let's move to the conclusion. 17. Conclusion: Thank you for finishing this blender class. You now have the skills to create your own cute treaty character. Please leave a review and share a project. It means the world to me. And don't forget, keep learning and having fun with blender. Bye bye.