I've been a blender user for a long time now, but have never been a serious user. In other words, I don't use all of the blender knowledge I've accumulated very often. The main reason being is because of a major setback I have. It's modeling. I can model basic items and some intermediate things, but not too well. This has held me back for years and I'm tired of it.
I want to be able to model well, especially complex things like humans, organics, etc. Please, if someone can help me learn how to model well, so I can create better games and animations, I feel I would be able to finally use all the things I've learned over the years!!! Thank you in advance...
Sadly, the only way past that is continued practice…
To get going, find something like the Joan of Arc tutorial, or Building a Better Human tutorial, and follow it. Your first attempts will look pathetic (probably) but the more you work with it the better you get.
For example, when creating my very first head, this is what I came up with about halfway through (sorry, don’t have anything older):
(Looks fairly masculine, doesn’t she? Also, edgeloops are in need of help, and there’s a few triangles in bad spots…)
When doing organic stuff, you need to plan a little bit about where you put ‘edge loops’, or rings of vertices. For example, around the mouth, around the neck, etc. Search for TorQ’s face tutorial for some excellent advice for modelling a face ready for animation.
When doing organic stuff, you’ll want to use the ‘subsurf’ button. This takes your mesh and converts it to a bezier surface – which means things look a bit differently. To control the curve, place vertices at or near the lowest part of the valleys and the highest part of the hills. Very few, if any, are needed in-between.
When subsurfacing, if you need a sharp edge, you’ll need at least two lines next to each other. Here’s a cube with a hole in it to visualize:
hmm… I can’t think of anything else right now, but if you start and post with wires in the WIP forum you’ll get a great deal of help.
It may be that modelling is not your strong point. This is not uncommon. Some are modellers. Some are texturers and lighters, and some are animators. A few can do all astonishingly well (like the Orange team), but I think that has more to do with years of practice than anything else.
I hope this helps. Don’t give up. The only way to improve is to jump right in. And don’t be perfectionist about it. Have you seen womball’s fish? It’s definitely not a realistic fish. But I had a chance to play around with him and he’s one of the cutest, most expressive characters I’ve seen in a while.
