Original subtitles

Hey everyone, I welcome you to this

Shaman character illustration episode. What you see on the screen is the final result of the episode

This is what we are aiming for here

Let me just disable the overlays so we can have a look at this a little bit better

This is the Eevee preview. Of course, we can now look at the rendered preview with some denoising active

So yeah, this is the character we are going for

but first before we jump into this and

Let me maybe rotate this a little bit so you have a better look at the scene

Now before we jump into this and I know you're eager to start modeling right away, but there are some things

I really want to go over

But I will make it quick. These are just some of the side notes that I think you need to know

Before jumping into character creation

So without further ado, let's get to it and then we'll get to the modeling

first thing you need to decide before you start modeling any character is whether you want to create something from an

Existing concept or you want to make your own character concept?

I really recommend working from existing concept and

Not jumping into own character design and your own character creation right away

because that will create a whole new subset of problems that might

Influence your outcome and you might feel discouraged in the end when you don't like the result

so first of all, I would have you rather focusing on the modeling and

Creating a 3d representation of some existing concept then creating a new one from scratch

But if you feel like it if you feel up to the challenge

Of course, you can do that and I want to show you some tips to do that as well

But first, let me talk about the character concept first

This shaman character is not my character concept. I looked

Over the creative networks a lot till I found something. I really wanted to model

So let me switch to our station real quick. And this is the work by Geordie Willaworth

He's an amazing 2d artist and character designer

Illustrator and I found this work of his he has a lot of character illustrations here with this like

shaman characters and

Mystical and native characters and stuff like that. We can scroll through it real quick a little bit

So as you can see beautiful designs, and I really loved this one here

a little bit a little bit chunky character

Really stylized cartoony, so I've decided I will give it a go and create a design from that

But before I went into this I reached out to Geordie and

Asked the permission to do this. So and this is what I really recommend to do if you see some concept

I really recommend to respect the author and reach out to him ask for permission

Most of the times they will have no problem and if they're not like 3d artist and their

Whole work is based on creating a 2d character

Designs that's basically what they are doing

They're creating the concepts that others can take and either translate to some illustration or a movie or something like that

So the artist shouldn't have much problem with you

Approaching him for the concept and you will feel much better when you are working with permission and

You know that when you share your work then on the social media channels and on the creative networks

that there will be no like backlash from the other and

important thing to when sharing on a social media or creative network

Some work that's derived from a character concept of some other artist

Give a full credit

Mention it in the description in the visible place that this is based on someone else's work

It will not like make you any lesser artist or something

you're just acknowledging that this is someone else's idea and

the benefit of doing this actually is

most of the time the artist if they like your

Interpretation of their artwork and their concept they will share this as well to their audience

So not only you are working with their permission

Sometimes you might even get a little bit more attention from their audience if you do a good job

interpreting their artwork, so

Definitely look up something you like and don't forget to ask for permission. That's very important if for some reason

You can't find anything you like out there

and

You have really strong idea about the character you want to create you might want to create your own concept and again

I really encourage you to find something if that's your like first 3d character work from existing concept

But if there's no other way and you really need to create your own concept

I would like to show you like a few tips that can help you create a sketch and the sketch doesn't have to be like

Artistic quality like you see here on the screen. It just have to drive

Drive you in the right direction and you need to have a good proportion and stuff like that

So the character looks good in the 3d, but before you actually start developing your character

You might want to figure out like what's the realism or the stylization of the character if it's cartoony or not

And recently I came across an amazing video from the blender conference, let me show you here real quick and

The name of the video is illusion of animation. It's by Hjalti Hjalmarsson

amazing animator at the blender Institute and

he shared this on the blender conference in 2018 and

Basically, I think he called this

Stylization triangle or something like that

Don't get confused that this video is about animation because this applies beautifully to illustration as well

And here you can see there's a triangle which has these corners like reality

abstract and stylized so and this is a beautiful idea that stylization and

cartooning isn't like a

One-dimensional

Thing but there's a third dimension to it. So as you can see here, there is a full realistic face

basically a photo and

Stylization basically means simplifying all the way to something like an emoji

So when you're stylizing something you are taking things away, you're taking away details

You're taking away features until on the far right side only the essence is left

So the face is represented by a circle two dots for nice and stuff like that

So you can see that this is a human face, but it has no features. It doesn't tell you who it is

It's not recognizable. And then you have this abstract line when you can start like

emphasizing some of the features you can stretch

Stretch the face or something like that all the way to create something something really abstract like you can see

Representing a face with just some geometry

But it's a beautiful way to show how you can maybe create a cartoon that's stylized in some way

And then when you move it up a little bit you create like a large head or something

You create a more abstract representation of the character and that's more

of a cartooning thing

So I think this is a beautiful concept

You can find the link in the description by all means go watch this video

I think it's really amazing and then when you have this figured out like what is the character I want to create

How realistic or stylized you want it to be how cartoony if you're more on the cartoony side of things

I really recommend the drawing book

By Christopher Hart. I'm sure you're familiar

with this name he is

One of the most known

Cartooning artist and cartooning teachers out there. He has a lot of great YouTube videos. I personally have this book and

It teaches you how you can basically take some character concept some character idea

what tricks you can use with the proportions and

What you can emphasize what you can diminish on the character to match the age of the character

To match the personality of the character and this is very useful to study and not only for this kind of cartoony drawings

But for your 3d work as well

so I really recommend checking this out and the third important thing you need to do when

Learning the character design is to have a at least a little bit knowledge of anatomy

so there's this great book anatomy for sculptors and

This is made specifically with sculptors and digital artists in mind

So if you click through a little bit, you can see how it will show you

How you can learn the muscles the bones?

the skeleton and

Apply this in your art when developing your characters how the topology should look how the wireframe

Should look for certain parts of the body. So this is really essential when doing the character model and

This is just on the side

No

You don't have to like run right now and buy this book

You can go through this course and then later when you're deciding to make your own character

You can look into these stories and it will definitely

Make things much better. So let's go back to this character concept right now

The shaman concept by Jordi we will take this into the third dimension together right now