Modeling Tutorial for Game Character

Support Modeling
1

I’m looking for a tutorial (or set of tutorials) with extensive coverage of the development of a video game character asset (models, textures, joints, rigging, weight painting, etc).

I’m been scouring Youtube for a while now, and learning has been extremely slow for the most part (I have learned about concepts like weight painting, polygon count, topology, bump mapping, x/y/z axes). However, many of the tutorials I’ve found either explain very little or don’t indicate what hotkeys are being used concurrently.

Does anyone know of any specific tutorials that are easy to learn from for a complete beginner to 3d modeling software? I’ve used things like photoshop before but 3d modeling feels like a completely new ballgame. Earlier I found this tuhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfAYtY4KsF4 but it requires a paid membership, something I don’t have access to. The character looks great, and it covers a wide variety of topics. Are there any free alternatives to it, or set of tutorials that can substitute for something like it?

I don’t mind if they are tutorials for other programs as well (Maya, 3dsmax, Lightwave) but I just need something that is easy to begin with and covers a wide scope of topics for 3d models used in video games. Thanks in advance.

2

currently the standard way is like this: make your character using high poly modeling techniques, and as many seperate meshes as you want. use the sculpt tools liberally. when you have done that, use the retopo tools ( surface snapping ) to construct a low poly mesh over the high poly one. UV unwrap the low poly mesh and add a blank image to the UV coordinates. now use the baking functions to bake the normals of the high poly one onto the UV coordinates of the low poly one. now, once you have added the resulting normals map as a texture, your low poly mesh should resemble the high poly one when lit. so the things you need to study are: modeling, both high and low poly, sculpting, UV unwrapping, and normals baking. from there you will get into texture painting, rigging, and animating. You should be able to find docs on all of these things using google.