I am a high school student designing my own game. I want to learn more about 3D design, so I am going to design my own 3D character. I want my character to be a simple round bodied character with legs and claws. We have a semester to complete this project. My questions are:
Do you think this is an achievable goal?
How do I get started with modeling and designing using Blender?
Thanks
Could start with realizing that design and modeling are different things with different goals.
Design the character first and then focus on modeling and other production stages. It’s the design stage that makes or breaks a believable character. Every aspect in the character contributes to that, its silhouette, size, proportions, posture, clothing, colors, accessories, anatomy, movement eventually, etc. helps to make a character look and feel like something that fits in its environment/world, even if you don’t show the environment. A story helps figuring out what the character is like and what it needs.
Make multiple versions to choose/combine from while developing the character. One version might give too much pressure to make it right, but multiple versions allows you to put the ideas down and then step back and look at them.
Those things you can do without opening Blender, but you could use Blender too if that helps. Just don’t expect to be designing a character by following a modeling tutorial, and if you know you’re designing, don’t make it a modeling challenge. Use simplest and fastest way you can think of to put the ideas down, anything, as long its legal. Refining can happen later.
When you’re modeling you need to turn a design into a usable 3D model, making decisions about the forms, structure, different workflows on how you make the structure so it fulfils the requirements from the end use and other stages in the pipeline. But first thing is to know and actually see what you’re modeling. If you can’t see it, you should be designing and/or looking for a reference.
Even if it’s simple, you can still make things hard by trying to model something you’re not looking at. For example, a coffee mug is a simple everyday object but it’s still possible to screw it up in modeling http://3dxtras.com/content.php?page=3dmodels_detail&prodid=6539
