Character Render

I’ve been practicing, off and on, with main character modeling/designing for my Graphic Novel In The Year 2525 which involved the use of Blender to model and render a base image in Cycles so I can paint over corrections; I also used Freestyle as a guide for inking lines, however many of the finer lines in the image is unaltered Freestyle.

I used Blender 2.8 to finish the modeling, and used cloth sim on the uniform.

Since I am new at this part of working in 2D, I accidentally set Blender to render in 8k and worked on this image at that resolution, but in the end it was a happy accident as it left me with a very high quality output.

I had bought my first ever screen tablet a couple of weeks ago and watched tutorials on how to draw, ink, and stroke lines, and came up with the final image below in combination with Blender.

Full 1080 output:

4k output (cropped to head only):

4k Full output

8k output (cropped to head only):

Base model in Blender:

You can view all my older renders here from many years ago: 2525: Irene Jameson

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Beautiful style and character design! Love your work!

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This is really nice work. I like the final result, nice job.

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Great character. The style is very nice. I would never have guessed she was a 3D asset.

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Wow it’s so enjoyable to look at!
the small and big shifts in color really works well here. A job well done!
You almost think it’s ALL vector graphics magic!

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BRAVO! I like it very much. I like elastic look of leg muscles, and the softness of the boots. Beautiful face. Great art!

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great work…!!!
so the original result had no outlins !!!
i would say youv reached the goal … though its really hard to trace and do outlines for every shot you render !!!

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Thanks!

I used Freestyle to render lines as guides to ink over. It was very useful as a “sketch” render. The output of that is so high, that when scaled down the lines virtually disappear, so I never posted them.

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I featured you on BlenderNation, have a great weekend :slight_smile:

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You’re #featured! :+1:

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Thank you so much. I appreciate that!

I love it to death! :heart: It’s UFO Barbie™!

That said…wouldn’t it have been way easier to, uh, y’know…just draw her? This method just seems a little “over-engineered”.

But again, I love it! Nice work! :+1:

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Thanks!

You’re right, it would be easier and also faster to just draw, but I’m not an artist, and I have no skills with drawing. But I know Blender well enough for character modeling. At this time, it’s the best I can do until I end up learning to draw on my own.

Fair enough!

Well, keep that up then! I say if you hadn’t revealed your process in creating this image you’d have fooled at least half the people seeing it! :v::love_you_gesture:

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She’s hot! :heart_eyes:

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OMG! I remember you from ages ago when you were posting updates on your character. You’ve honestly grown so much as an artist! I remember seeing your first attempts and constant revisions and they encouraged me to keeping trying to learn character design. This is AMAZEBALLS!!

~ Para :heart:

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This is what I’ve been looking for. My passion is to create a graphic novels using Blender as a tool.

What drawing program did you use to do the linework? I use mypaint.

I’m still getting the basics of Blender down. I’m focusing on sculpting now.

Did you follow a tutorial that teaches the workflow that creates this result or did you discover the workflow yourself? I’d really like to know how to produce this effect.

Since you just started to inking you make want to check this guy out. He has been inking for a very long time, made money as pro in comic books and actually wrote a couple books on how to do it. https://www.deviantart.com/sky-boy

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Very hot like an atomic bomb.

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Thank you.

I’ve worked on this for several years, though in the last few years I’ve only had about 1 hour a week to work in Blender. 2019 finally became the year I’m getting some results. Hopefully my next one will be much better as I bring with me both the good and bad I’ve learned with the constant trial and error.

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I used Photoshop for the line work, of course inking over the Freestyle lines rendered by Blender. Without Freestyle I’d never guess where to ink as I haven’t yet developed an “artistic” view for visualizing where lines should go.

I did some minor sculpting on the sleeves which created the contours I needed to create shadows and highlights where I was able to draw lines along the edges to create the illusion of “wrinkles”.

I figured out my own workflow by years of trial and error, and it’s nothing special. I just modeled the character and uniform, then I pose her, then I apply modifiers in a new file, and then I sculpt fixes and enhancements for the camera view. The materials, I just mix a Toon BSDF and Diffuse to create a soft but toonish look. The lights are simple Sun lamps, with two at the back creating rim lighting. And that’s really it. The overall vibrancy of the image was enhanced in Photoshop with filters.

I learned most of what I did from watching random YouTube tutorials over the years, and then on forums like this, and random FB groups as well as working with people who know more than me – but mostly videos on learning to model, and understanding how to use the modifiers and shaders.

Thanks for commenting! :slight_smile:

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