Danny - Rigged Character (free download)

Danny is a character I’ve been working on over on instagram over the past couple months. She’s rigged with a slightly customized rigify rig, and made in blender from sculpt to final renders. :slight_smile:

Rendered in cycles, with Blender 3.2!

She’s free to download on Gumroad. :slight_smile: Link here!!!

And if you like this project, consider liking it on artstation. :slight_smile:

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/mzbE99

Or follow me on Instagram here:

Cheers, thanks for taking a look!

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couple extras <3

Here’s a bunch of various WIP renders I posted on instagram

and here’s a render of the very first initial sketch sculpt, along with the first vizdev pass at her:

If you have any questions about how she was made let me know! happy to answer :slight_smile:

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so nice, I really love it, thank you so much for sharing this, Im beginner I have an upcoming project that has a character and needs some rigging to make it look like you, I really love animations and making life characters, I want to ask how did you perpare the face for rigging and give it some expressions? because im really struggling with it :heart:

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Nice! You gave her some great expressions there.

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Prepare the face for rigging? So on the rigging side, the new rigify face rig really helps a lot, since it’s so easy to build the rig and see if it works, adjust the metarig, and then rebuild it. Very fast to iterate!

I also would super recommend looking up what other people have done for face rigs, both stuff you can get for blender (the Jane rig is super good, just got it recently and I’m currently trying to understand it) and also watching what pros do for rigs in maya, just on youtube or something. Just seeing how they function helps you understand how the face works and how the rig should move. :slight_smile:

On the modeling side, I super recommend exporting a screen grab or a render from blender and take it into photoshop or gimp or whatever and painting over it, either with liquidify or just straight drawing. This is like my secret weapon haha, I do this multiple times whenever I’m working on a project… it’s so much easier to think about good face shapes in the 2D plane vs 3D imo.

I wish I had an example for Danny, but I can’t find one unfortunately. I’ll keep looking, but here’s an example from another character I was working on a while ago:

Far left here is a screengrab from blender viewport, middle is liquidify and painting in photoshop, and the right is a blender viewport again after adjusting the model to match the photoshop image. I often will add a camera into the scene just to do these paintovers and compare easily. This just realllly helps nail down something that is appealing and looks good from every angle, and nailing those initial good shapes is really important to getting it to look good in expressions and stuff.

also always referencing other artists, I look at a lot of disney storyboard artists when I’m working on expressions, just to reference super clear face shapes. :slight_smile:

Hope that kinda answers your question?

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cheers, thank you! <3

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Thank you so much you helped me a lot, and I downloaded the file just to see how things are working and putting it into consideration for my new character. :heart:

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Congrats, the character is amazing!
I don’t want to criticize your work, but just one tip. Take care about the fingers position. To make sure they will be always spread and not one behind others.
I don’t if I made my self clear. But that is it.
Cheers!

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Now that I’ve downloaded the character, I must say you did a FANTASTIC job on the clothes and shoes. I’ll be referencing those shoes when I get around to modeling a pair of sneakers.

I’m not a huge fan of rigify* so I haven’t messed with the rig much, but getting to inspect the modeling and shders up close is pretty awesome

* I just don’t find rigify intuitive, it is not a reflection of your skill or implementation, which from your renders and animations looks quite solid.

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I featured you on BlenderNation, have a great weekend!

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You’re on the #featured row! :+1:

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I really like the strength and youth that comes through in this character. Modeling and your animation in the chair is super! It looks like she’d be into some really cool adventures. Great work with this!

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I like her ! Gonna have to meet up with her sometime :grin:

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Hi!, yes thanks your proposition I wish learn how did you make it. Best regards and compliments ! Artsantana

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Admittedly this is only one small part of a long and complicated process to make and rig a full character, but they do have a tutorial on how they model hair with curves on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2XjdzzWCqI

For a more complete tutorial series on modeling toon characters, you can try either of Dikko’s tutorial series (he also has a rigging one, but it’s not based on a customized version of Rigify like this one), this series by Tomcat, (which I personally don’t love the style of, but have seen people get good results from when doing their own style)

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