Hello everyone, I hope you’re all well. I have a question about learning character sculpting. I started using Blender earlier this year, around January. Like many beginners, I began with the popular donut tutorial and watched several YouTube tutorials, learning some cool stuff along the way. However, what really caught my interest was character creation, so I started watching character modeling videos. Everything was going well until they introduced sculpt mode, which seemed daunting at first. I decided to try it out and even bought a tablet for this purpose—it’s been fun and I enjoy it.
However, my challenge now is that when I sculpt characters, they don’t quite look right. I attempted to learn drawing to create my own references, but I found it time-consuming and felt like I was neglecting Blender. Now I’m at a loss. I don’t know where to start with learning how to sculpt properly. When I search on YouTube, I mostly find videos of people sculpting random characters or their favorite ones, with advice to practice every day. While this is helpful, I feel stuck and unsure of the best approach. Should I just start sculpting random heads, or is there a more structured way to improve? I would really appreciate your advice on how to proceed from here.
I think you need to pick a category first, say NPR, Photo-realistic, monsters, robots, etc. Reference images are important and a quick way to get some inspiration. Search for your category with a search something like this…
character design <YOUR CATEGORY HERE> character references
You can set your search to Images or Videos… I would Stay Away from 3d characters that are already created and stick to 2d character designs unless it is a tutorial or perhaps a time-lapse ( but I find time-lapse has never helped me, as most of the information is lost)…then you would be able to work from your own sketches as you progress and gain experience.
Pick one you like and try sculpting it as best you can, then if you need some specific help you can find something that explains how to fix the problem, here or perhaps on YouTube… Don’t spend a week on it in the beginning, you are just learning the tools and what workflow is best for you, at this point. Save the ones that resemble your concept, so you can finalize them later on… Practice, practice, and then practice some more! Set a time for sketching… Take a look at @joseph 's portfolio… and get some ideas on NPR work…
