Original subtitles

When working on a 3D character design, there are basically two ways you can approach this.

And one of them is basically sculpting.

So let me show you real quick what I mean.

In Blender, you have the sculpting mode or any other 3D software that supports sculpting.

And you have all these tools that you can use to basically shape and mold some objects,

just as you would in the real world when sculpting with clay and stuff like that.

So this is one of the techniques. It's like a more artistic approach.

At the same time, you have more freedom there to create something and to shape it into whatever you like.

And the other way would be to create the character just by modeling the topology manually,

vertex by vertex, edge by edge, loop by loop.

And that's the way this character is built.

So let me show you real quick what I mean by that.

If we inspect this a little bit closer, you can see that this is a very simple topology.

And this is basically just extruded, cut, and moved around to create the topology I want.

There is no sculpting involved.

And we start with a really basic low poly shape.

And we are refining more and more until we get something like this.

So this is one of the approaches you can use.

And sometimes you can use like hybrid techniques where, let me show you here,

when sometimes you create a low poly character manually, you model everything,

and then you apply something called multi-res modifier.

And you sculpt these little details like wrinkles and some deformation and stuff like that.

So there are definitely hybrid ways how to approach this.

But most of the time you either sculpt your character or model your character.

And my approach to character building, since I really wanted to create the characters

that I can use in my 3D illustrations without committing fully into studying the anatomy too much

and drawing the characters, drawing faces, and getting the proportions right,

I really wanted some cartoon characters.

So I used all the sources I mentioned in the beginning of the video

and came up with the way how I build my mesh for the character to quickly create something like this.

And with that said, I create always something called the character archetype.

And you can see similarities with these three characters here.

And basically they are made from the same base.

So first was a shaman character, but then I took it a little bit further

and created the spaceman character and the miner here.

And basically the body is the same.

I just added some more features and used some of these hybrid techniques

to sculpt in a little bit of the details.

But they really share a common mesh.

And this way you can create like two, three, four archetypes of characters

and derive all other characters from that.

So that's very useful.

And I do this all the time.

So this is the way I approach my character building

because I really wanted a quick way how I can enhance my designs with character

without going too much into the sculpting and stuff like that.

So the goal for this episode is to give you these tools

so you can have nice characters in your designs as well.

And we'll start with the shaman character right away.