Absolute Beginners 3D character in Blender course

So you have heard about Blender, and you want to jump in on this free but powerful program?

Or you already use Blender, but don't know how to make a character inside it?

Weather you are a complete beginner or a bit more advanced Blender user, you could find something for you in this course.

This is the Absolute Beginners 3D character in Blender course and we will be making this cute guy here concepted by Deema Egorov.

My name is Niko and i will be your host trough this creative journey. I am a 3D character artist working in the industry with more than 13 years of experience. I also have more than 15 courses made for character creation, mostly in Zbrush. Now i started to work in Blender only, and i will show you the workflow to create a 3D character in Blender from scratch, rig, pose and present it. We will make some props to practice hard surface modelling in Blender, but since i am a digital sculptor we will emphasize on the sculpting part. I will show you the complete workflow to make a character with clothes, props, pose and present it for your portfolio. 

In the course we will start by going trough the most important things a beginner should know about Blender. Then we will start sculpting pretty quickly and i will make a basic quick human head to show you that sculpting is not scary at all. Then we will start our mouse hero from the head while i show you all necessary things and guide you trough the whole process of creating a character from concept as well as making it fast and easy in Blender. After that we will make the basics of the body, hands and fingers. With each step we will learn new things and we will repeat the things we already learned to solidify our knowledge. 

Then we will make the sweater and i will show you few ways of making clothes for your character. After that we will manually retopologize the head of our character, using just the tools that Blender provides by default. Although i will show you much faster and useful addon for automatic retopology - QuadRemesher. We will then detail the head and make the glasses.

Following we will be learning basics of lights, cameras and environment textures. Then we will make the tail for a while, before texturing the eyes. We will jump into manual retopologizing the whole body fast and efficient, using various techniques, invented by my humble self :). 

Refining the sweater and making the hood will be our next tasks which we will finish with great success. After that we will make UVs of the head and ears and make some texturing work on that too. Then i will show you some hardsurface techniques by making a cleaver weapon. We will also see some character examples from the game i worked on for 3 years from Gameloft, since i work there for 15 years already :). 

It will be time to learn basics of hair and fur making in Blender. We will see how to create, adjust and groom our fur. Then it will be time to learn how simple it is to put bones and rig our character so we can animate or pose it. We will pose it and then fix the pose to achieve best final results. Then we will learn how to make transparent background and floor shadows. Lastly we will see how to make a turntable animation to present our characters from all sides. They are 3D characters after all.

This course is for absolute beginners in Blender and in character art, so no previous experience with any 3D software is required. Of course if you like to draw it is definitely a plus :). 

Some people say Blender is a lot of things, but none of them is at the right level. I would say from experience, that Blender is good enough for everything i need to make a full character from high poly to low poly and UVs. In this course we will do a character for portfolio, so we will do a high poly, posing, lighting and rendering. So if you want to make your first character and eventually start your 3D character career, you first have to try it and see if you like it. So lets dive into the world of 3D character creation in Blender!