Sculpting our Blender Anime Character | Making my first Anime Week #01

This week on making an anime. Let's start our concept frame using a 3D pipeline in Blender. I always begin projects with a moodboard, a collage of references and inspirations that you can look back on. The bigger the image, the bigger the inspiration. Or reference. using this, sketch out the idea you want to create. I was very rough to save time, but the better the concept art, the easier and better the final result will be. I knew I wanted a character flying through the sky in some dynamic pose

with a weapon. Now that we've jotted down what we want to create, let's build the model. On a side note, I was totally new to blender. So if you're a green like me, you can go to the blender website and watch the basic videos to get up to speed. This is something I always do with new software. I also changed my UI and some of my shortcuts to match Maya, which is what I'm most comfortable with. Every link from this video will be shared in the description below. I would always suggest new artists

to go through the full character pipeline building a base mesh, sculpting, retopology, creating UV’s and face sets. But if you've gone through all that and you want to save a touch of time, go ahead and start with the human base meshes very kindly provided by the team at Blender. Navigate to this link, download the files and sets up your asset browser tab. I got some ideas from these guys who were a huge help. Getting the asset manager set up will be a very big thing when we get into full produ

ction. Alrighty. Let's sculpt starting with the stylized base mesh. Hide the eyes and flatten out this area. A full Eye RIG would be overkill for our end result, which would be 2D. I started with the jawline by making it very sharp. Using the pinch and scrape tools, create sharp lines on the model where you know you want your line art. If you have references that have character toys. Study those models. It will help you understand your sculpt in 3D space and where to place features. Make sure to

work in ORTHOGRAPHIC so you're not working with lens distortion in mind. Using the grab tool. Adjust the model to your design and references and before you know it, boom, we have a face. Now use the pose tool to start blocking out the character per your concept frame. Don't be afraid to break proportions and get a little out there. Use the grab tool to fix some of these areas where we've lost volume. Let's pause here and finalize our layout Scene. Layout, is where we lock our general framing le

ns choice and animation blocking. I changed the lens to a 25 millimeter to get a more stretched perspective, which is what looked ok me at this point. Now we can go ahead with the sculpt, with the camera and scene in mind, meaning you're not spending time in areas you'll never see. Use references as you go and where you need I needed references specifically for the feet and hips. For muscles, I use about three or four tools with the multires modifier uncheck sculpt base mesh. Start by outlining

your muscle shape or crease with the draw sharp tool. Hold control to draw extruding lines. Try to find forms and use the scrape tool to flatten out areas to get a more angular silhouette and some variation on the surface. Use the grab and inflate tools to build and preserve a volume. Think about the silhouette and does it feel solid? Then use the pinch tool to sharpen your lines. The crease tool with a smaller brush size to push down the crease. Then the inflate tool on either side of the creas

e to make it look like the muscle is folding on top of the crease. Finally, smoothing out areas around the crease and at the pinching ends so that the muscle feels more integrated. I just repeat this all over the body. You can change the MetCap shader from time to time to see your model in a different light, helping you identify and fix problem areas. If you're working with the multi resolution modifier and you see this artifact, use the apply base button to fix the issue, which tends to do the

trick for me. Let's give him some color for fun. Although be careful not to get carried away. 3D lighting can often mislead you in the final 2D product, but it's still good to see. We're using a noise texture into a mixed color with a dark and light skin tone, for some soft patchy skin. Then we mix on top, another higher frequency patchy skin to get some skin color with variation. It looks strong now, but when we plug this into the principle, BSDF and add a little pink subsurface, it will soften

this effect. Great. Nothing too complicated as this is only for previs. And before you know it, voila. We have a very naked character. Next week, let's tackle the clothes, props, sword and shoes. As always, if you'd like to follow us on our journey of making our own anime, Hit the like, subscribe and alert buttons, even comment! Feel free to follow us on our other socials and I'll see you next time. Thank you for watching.