I’ve recently gotten back into Blender after a lonnnng time away (had to use 3ds Max all through college, so I’ve basically come back to an entirely-new program) and I’ve started to think about using Blender as an aid when I draw in 2D. Almost like a virtual version of those articulated wooden figures used for sketching out poses. Something I could arrange, then screenshot and move into a drawing program to draw my characters on top of.
Is that a good thing to do, though? I know that relying too heavily on tracing makes it hard to actually learn how the human body looks and moves, and I don’t want to cut corners only for it to mess me up later down the line. My problem is that, while I can draw a decent human, it often ends up taking me a very long time because I’m constantly fiddling with and second-guessing my anatomy and perspective, or just can’t get things to look quite the way I envision them. Obviously references help with this, but I can’t always find a photo of the exact pose I’m trying to do, so being able to create my own poses would be great.
I’m also wondering if anyone knows where I could get decent, rigged male and female models for a good price (or better, free). They don’t need to be overly detailed, although if I could find one that lets me adjust proportions somehow to create more varied characters, obviously I would be willing to pay extra for that. I’m looking through sites like turbosquid, but if anyone already uses models like this and could recommend whatever they use, that would be extremely helpful.
(If this isn’t the right subforum for this question, please let me know and I’ll fix it.)
There was a blender course just about doing this very thing. It’s called an overlay I think. You make a cheap scene and paint over top of the rendering image. Makes perspective very good in your 2d drawing.
There is his show called The God of High School. In it they have some movements of the characters that look so fluid and nice. Nicer than I’ve seen on lots of anime. Then I saw a making of where they actually mocaped some of the movements of the characters before drawing over that to get the right camera angles and movements worked out. This means even the best artists in the world can have some benefit from having perspective and pose worked out in 3D beforehand. It seems like a good workflow where all you need is a simple 3d base mesh rigged. I did a quick search on art station for some for you and found 4 that look pretty good. I’m sure other websites like blendermarket, cgtrader, turbosquid, etc have more for free. female simple male simple female more detail male more detail
There are tons of how to use rigify to rig them if you don’t know. If you are willing to spend some money AutoRigPro is pretty great.
@anon18318387 MB-Lab seems like it might be exactly what I’m looking for, I’m going to download it and give it a try! Thanks so much for linking me.
@humanartist Yeah, I know the paintover technique is often used when it comes to setting up environments, I just wasn’t sure if it was a good idea to rely on it for human subjects as well. Thanks for the course link, gonna try and follow through that soon.
@watercycles Mocapping and rotoscoping are both great tools for animation, that’s why I wanted to experiment with it for digital painting as well ^^ Thanks for linking those models, they might come in handy.
I guess it depends on your goal.
If your goal is to improve your drawing skills, e.g. for a professional career as a comic book artist,
I would be a bit more careful.
There are a lot of tutorials about the “right way” of using references out there.
If it’s about artwork, about depict something that you had in mind,
I would use whatever gets me there as close and fast as possible.
(just my opinion of course)
My best bet would be DAZ Studio.
It’s free, has decent characters, bridge add-ons for Blender, ZBrush and other 3D software
and easy to use posing abilities.
Alternatives would be Make Human and MB LAB.
If you want spend money there is also Clip Studio.
A 2D drawing software with 3D Avatars. (about $50)