This is a course for anyone curious about the workflow of a Blender artist and who wants to watch the steps involved from start to finish of creating a character.
You should note that this course isn’t suited for absolute beginners expecting to learn what every bell and whistle of Blender does. Instead you should consider taking it if you’d like to see the pipeline process of this experienced Blender artist as he chooses what he wants to create though to the final product after modelling, lighting and rendering.
That being said, I still found it nice to go through as a person with some basic Blender knowledge already, wanting to see how someone with much more knowledge of it creates something really cool.
What’s in this Course?
The instructor will explain the initial process of gathering drawings online for inspiration. The point is that once you have an idea of a character you want to draw, you should have a look at other drawings or photos to make sure you get the proportions right and don’t miss any important features that should be included.
For this course he decided on a cartoony-looking monkey character in a space suit floating with various space-themed items around him.
Using references he sketches a mini version of what’s in his head, and when he’s happy with it he sketches a bigger, better drawing to upload and prepare for use in Blender.
In Blender you will be shown the whole process start to finish of blocking out the model with smaller shapes for each part, adding finer details, then applying materials for colour and tweaking the rendering settings.
You’ll notice that during some videos he is moving quite fast. So if you want to follow alongside copying every single step you will have to pause and go back repeatedly; it’s a lot but it’s not impossible. He does explain everything he’s doing and the fact that he moves so fast kind of proves how more experienced Blender artists are able to finish projects in a short time, which is encouraging for anyone just starting out in this area.
The instructor experiments with different types of lighting and camera settings before rendering the character out as an image and then goes a step further explaining some things he likes to do in Photoshop such as colour correction to perfect the final result.
Who is This Course For?
This course is really suited for anyone who is already a little familiar with the software and wants to see what steps an artist goes through to finish a project ready for sharing.
Summary
To sum up, you should consider this course if you’re interested in watching a Blender artist create a cool character in three and a half hours of video, explaining the steps along the way to give you some insight of the character-creating process.
The course is available here.