I’d like to model a character based on the attached logo and then rig it for animation.
I am a beginner in Blender and my only experience is based on some tutorials.
Can anyone suggest me how to model it?
Shall I model the whole body and paint in black all the curved parts? Or shall I model them separately?
I gave more than a try, but I cannot find an easy way to model the boots, the suit and so on, with all the curves in those.
If the advice is on modelling the whole body and painting the boots and the suit, how do you advice to do it?
It depends on what you want to do with your character.
Do you want the white parts in the image to be invisible? Or do you want his body to appear white?
If you want the former, I would just model the clothes. If you want the ladder, you have to model his body as well.
As far as how to get the curves… that just takes practice. Use propertional falloff (with the “O” key) to help get smooth falloffs, you can use the “smooth” button. Nurbs are good for curvy shapes like that. I personally don’t use them because you have less control, but that’s a personal preference.
I tried both the proportional falloff and the nurbs (and bezier) curve.
While with the curves it seems I can make the shape (with a lot of efforts), I won’t have any three-dimensional figure with it.
On the other hand, the proportional falloff seems to give a very dirty mesh and it is very difficult to hand - lots of carved areas and crossing vertices.
You will have some serious issues modelling this figure, (apart from the copyright issues!) because some of the white areas are white because they are meant to be white objects, ( the trousers etc) and some are white because they are dark but reflecting light. This means that those parts must be modelled black, but be the right shape to reflect light in that exact way. Not impossible, but it requires a lot of skill to predict where a hilight will be on a model when creating the shape. Another issue is that if you intend to keep the character facing exactly the same direction, you will be ok, but if it turns around, the inside of the jacket must be correctly masked by the white of the waistcoat etc. In other words you need to model everything, even the bits you can’t see, in order for the parts you can see to retain any sensible shapes when the character moves.
The upside is that because it is so stylised, you only need a very simple mesh with a good broadly correct outline, and little detail.
I would model each section separately, starting with the boot-soles, and extruding upwards to complete the boots, then start a new mesh for the legs and body, another for the jacket body, one for the stick, one for the hat, and one for each arm. Keep textured turned on even when modelling, so you can see the shading as you work.
Also, you can’t model the mesh as is if you want to animate it, you will need to put it into a default pose that is easy to rig. ( Unless all you need is a single movement)
