First Human Character

Alrighty, so I already know this entry is going to take a couple days, and possibly cause me a few headaches, but it should be fun. I'm going to create a human-like character in Blender 2.5 starting with an orthographic sketch, and moving on to a double-view mirror-editing technique. If you haven't already seen it go to my last entry about My Blender Beginner Resources and see Peter's Massive Blender Tutorial for an example.


The Orthographic Sketch
An orthographic sketch makes things easier to shape. In order to model in 3D, you need at least two views, and it is best to choose two important views - front and side. To start I drew an orthographic view. In order to properly create an orthographic view, you need to pretend that your character is facing you inside of a glass box. If the subject is facing you and you turn your box to the right (clockwise from the top), your character would now be facing left. This is an important concept to learn! Here is my example below. You may understand clearer from the sketch:

character faces front & left

If the figure on the right was facing the other way, this would be wrong!

Also, you may notice that I drew parallel lines and labeled them on the far right. This is so that both drawing are drawn on the same height scale. The head must be the same height, the torso must line up, the legs, arms and feet must be the same height in both drawings!  Seeing as your 3D model will be a composite of both views, they need to share the same heights.

Well, this is it for now, more to come. I'll talk about setting up Blender to begin modeling next!

My Blender Beginner Resources

Starting off, I was very tentative.  I didn't understand how I was going to be able to create 3D objects on a 2D screen.  I thought modeling would be super technical and complicated, but once I got used to navigating the view and using the basic tools, I discovered that it was surprisingly simple.  I could write some tutorials on the basics, but it would be super redundant seeing that there are great resources out there already.

Blender.org Video Tutorials

As I said before, I started Blender with little to no previous knowledge or experience with 3D programs, so my first stop was the Blender.org website. They have a listing of 7 video tutorials that will give you a basic introduction to Blender.

Getting Started With Blender:

1. Downloading & Installing

2. Navigation & Interface

3. Modeling

4. Materials

5. Animation

6. Rendering

7. Lighting

Gryllus.net Blender (2.5) 3D Design Course

This is a free course that teaches Blender from square one and is probably one of the best recourses I've found.

Gryllus.net/Blender/3D.html :

Learning Units 1-5

Learning Units 6-10

There are links to great videos and he has lists of projects that you can do. Two very helpful videos in Unit 2 were about rotation, pivot points, and center points :

center points & origins

pivot points

Peter's Massive Blender Tutorial

Peter's Massive Blender Tutorial is a kick-ass 9-part Youtube tutorial series by PXstriker that teaches you his method of modeling low poly characters. I suggest getting comfortable with some basic controls first - he goes a bit fast.

Chapter 1 - Blender Basics (basic commands)
Chapter 2-1 - "Modeling" (setup mirror modeling & model the body)
Chapter 2-2 -  continued (arms & joints)
Chapter 3 - "Hands"
Chapter 4  - "Heads" (hair)
Chapter 5 - "Meshing the Meshes" (combining meshes / attaching)
Chapter 6 - "Texturing" (UV texture maps)
Chapter 7 - "Bones" (armature & animation)
Chapter 8 - "Rendering"

HotKeys Reference

Here is a great reference for hotkeys that's gotten me out of many a sticky situation:

Blender HotKeys In-depth Reference

How I Killed Blender With Subsurfaces... Oops

During the week or so I have been working, Blender has only crashed once, and that was my fault - I added a subsurface modifier to a mesh then set the subdivisions to, say, possibly 100! This cut up the surface of a mesh into thousands of smaller polygons, and created some kind of math that my computer couldn't handle. Needless to say - don't do that when you learn how to use subsurfaces and subdivisions. 

Anyway, this is how I did it, and this is also how to create a subsurface modifier if you are curious:

• In Blender 2.57 open a new project
• Right click your default cube (it should already be selected)
• Go to your Properties panel (hover your mouse over a panel and press SHIFT+F7)
• Go to Modifiers (the wrench icon) > Add Modifier > Subdivision Surface

If you look at your cube in the 3D View window you'll notice that it has "rounded out" into a clumpy spherical shape. If you increase the subdivisions, this breaks up the 6 faces of the cube into more and more polygons. With the next two steps I managed to kill Blender.

• Found Subdivisions option and set to 100 (or anything over 7 I've come to find)
• Pressed Enter ( KABLAMO - broken )

click to enlarge

As a side-note, I found when you set Subdivisions, be sure to set both View and Render.  If you don't adjust the Render property, your rendered image or animation will look different than your view.  Keeping the View number low when making a model and rigging animations helps the program run faster in real-time playback (there are less polygons to keep track of).

Invert Z-Depth ( Back-Face Culling ) in Blender 2.57

These are some of the first things that I created to start off in Blender and how I made them.

A Cube Inside of Another Cube

My first few creations were inspired by an artist on Deviantart.com - Cezkid.  He makes 3D pixelated 8-bit video game characters (voxel models) that I found to be pretty novel - Cezkid Voxel Characters. He uses Google SketchUp not Blender.

cube inside of another cube with Invert Z Depth enabled

So at first glance, this cube looks quite unimpressive. You'd think it was just a cube with a big blue border around it, but it's not. And it wasn't that easy to figure out how to execute.  I asked Cezkid for some leads and he mentioned "back-face culling". Well it was a lead, but it did me little good because Blender doesn't have an option named back-face culling or anything similar.  Also, this was my first model, and I had little to no idea how to determine the visibility of a polygon or face.  After many hours of Googleing and tweaking, I happened to stumble upon the Invert Z Depth property (Zinvert in earlier versions) by accident - success.

Brief Invert Z Depth Explanation:
These are two cubes- a small one ( solid grey material with Recieve Shadows and Cast Shadows turned off and Z Transparency turned on), and a bigger blue one ( solid blue material with Shadeless and Invert Z Depth property turned on).  This creates a mesh (the big cube) that has transparent faces when they point to the camera.  This also works on two-sided faces in case anyone's wondering. Read on to see exactly how I did it.


Invert Z Depth Tutorial:
You don't need an actual mouse with a wheel for this tutorial. A touch pad will suffice.

• Open a new Blender project
• Right click on the cube in the 3D View to select it.

  

  selected cube object

• Go to Properties Panel (SHFT+F7) and select Material



Materials icon in Properties panel

• Scroll down to Shading and check Shadeless



set Shading to Shadeless

• Scroll down to Options and check Invert Z Depth



Inver Z Depth

• Place the cursor in the 3D View and press the ZKey to show the cube in Mesh mode.
• Be sure the cube is selected and press SHFT+DKey to duplicate the cube. 
• Press ESC (otherwise the duplicated cube will move around)
• Press SKey > type the number .5 > press ENTER (this scales a cube down to half size)



scaled cube inside duplicate in mesh mode

• Now be sure that the smaller cube is selected and go to the top of its Material panel.
• Remove the Material by pressing the minus-looking button.



Remove material and add a new one

• Press the + New button that pops up.
• Check the Transparency option and enable Z Transparency (THIS IS IMPORTANT)



enable Z Transparency in the smaller cube

• Scroll down to Shadow and un-check Recieve.



un-check Recieve in Shadows option

• Press F12 to render!

If everything went smoothly, you should see this:

 Hope this may help anyone who may be looking for something similar. I have no idea how this will hold up under other scenarios or circumstances, but it worked for this example.

Other Objects
Here are two other objects that I created with the same concept.

Setting Up Blender 2.57

What - It's Free?
Yes, Blender is open source and is no cost to download and use.  I didn't know that a free program could be so elegant.
Download from official site : http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/

Shaking Hands With Blender
So when I first approached Blender, I wondered if it would even work on my machine. I have an Asus Eee PC 1005HAB Netbook.

Brief Specs:
Memory - 2 Gib
Processor - 1.60 GHz (Intel)
Operating System - Linux Mint

Nothing special to say the least. I was worried that my little netbook may not be able to handle a 3D program, but Blender is pretty gentle.  My computer and Blender make pretty good friends. There is no lag (except in Weight Paint mode, and it takes a while to render animation). So even if you think your computer may not accept Blender, try anyways. What's the worst that could happen?

Blender 2.57

I'm using Blender 2.57.  This has been one shortcoming in my learning process since it seems that the entire interface has had a complete makeover since previous versions. They have reorganized a lot of things, and even some of the hot keys are different from 2.4 and before.  I have been reading a book "The Official Blender 2.3 Guide" and have been fumbling with interface - trying to find certain properties or tools and such.  Even most YouTube tutorials haven't caught up with the new interface.
In short, if I have trouble finding this or that, and I figure it out, I'll post it up here, both for my own reference and for others who may be feeling the same pain.  Oh, the woes of being a noob.

Linux and Blender
According to Blender.org running Blender in Linux (as opposed to Windows) is beneficial when it comes to speed, you can read more here: http://www.blender.org/education-help/faq/linux/

Installation on Linux
My installation experience - the short answer - I didn't install it myself.  I'm new to Linux so I had help. Initially, I installed version 2.4 from the Software Manager, but I wanted the latest version.  Now I see that Software Manager is dishing out version 2.57.1 so it should be alright to just search for Blender and get it from there. Good luck, with your installation!

Purpose

I am new to Blender and 3D modeling in general, so I decided to start a blog to track my progress and share this experience. I'm a 2D artist with little to no 3D modeling experience. I fumbled around with AutoCad in college for a required course, and it almost turned off my interest in 3D modeling completely. My interest has been revived with the prospect of modeling, rigging, and animating characters for game engines.

Up to this point, I have been working solo with Blender for a week (reading books and watching tutorials on the web).  I'll upload some things I've created so far and post my favorite links.

Enjoy