Art Tutorials

Avatar Creation for Social VR, Part 3: Character Modeling

Note: This series is an ongoing work in progress, and the video tutorials in particular will be updated and published publicly after I have finished recording the entire series. For now, the visibility for the videos has been set to shareable link only – if you have feedback on their clarity, pacing, or even whether or not the jokes land, I would welcome it in the comments here or on Youtube.

 

Welcome back! It’s now time to sit down and get your hands dirty, we’re going to spend a lot of time pushing verts and pulling faces. In this section we will run through character modeling, where we start from a cube, and finish with a character mesh.

The previous entry in this series focused entirely on the technical details of how to use Blender for polygon modeling, whereas now, we get into the workflow and thought processes involved in character modeling.Unlike the other parts of this series, poly modeling really makes the most sense when demonstrated, so I encourage you to watch the video first, even if you intend to work from this written walkthrough.

We’ve got our reference planes and the mirrored cube we set up last time ready to go. The process of modeling this avatar took about eight hours, so, again – be patient with yourself, take your time, and try to have fun.

 

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Avatar Creation for Social VR, Part 2: The Blender Interface and Project Setup

Note: This series is an ongoing work in progress, and the video tutorials in particular will be updated and published publicly after I have finished recording the entire series. For now, the visibility for the videos has been set to shareable link only – if you have feedback on their clarity, pacing, or even whether or not the jokes land, I would welcome it in the comments here or on Youtube.

So! Welcome back! This is part two of the series, which introduces the Blender interface, setting up your project with reference image planes and your starting cube, and introduces the tools you’ll be using for mesh editing.

We’re going to create this avatar by manipulating edges, faces, and vertices individually, by cutting, tweaking, and extruding until we have a completed model – a process sometimes called poly modeling, or box modeling.

Later, I’ll be producing another series after this one that gets into the sculpting workflow, but if you’ve never modeled anything before, it’s probably best to start with an understanding of box modeling. It’s a process that you can do entirely with a mouse instead of a stylus, it will get you acquainted with the blender interface, and doing everything edge by edge, vertex by vertex, will help you gain an appreciation for your polygon economy, which is vital to have, when creating avatars with a decent performance rating.

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Avatar Creation for Social VR, Part 1: Introduction

Note: This series is an ongoing work in progress, and the video tutorials in particular will be updated and published publicly after I have finished recording the entire series. For now, the visibility for the videos has been set to shareable link only – if you have feedback on their clarity, pacing, or even whether or not the jokes land, I would welcome it in the comments here or on Youtube.

Hello! My name is Root, and I would like to talk to you about the process of creating an avatar for use in VRChat and other social VR applications. We will be making this avatar from scratch, primarily using the popular 3d modeling and animation software, Blender. But first let me take a moment to talk about why I am creating this series, who it is for, and what to expect.

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How to Draw

I need some lorem ipsum to set my blog up, so here’s an essay I wrote a year or two back. I was asked how to get started drawing, and I gave this answer:

1. Identify the thing about drawing that interests you – a specific subject matter, telling stories, making art to make friends happy, etc, and start with that. Find the fun, because fun is what keeps you interested, even when it’s hard and nothing you draw looks as good as you want it to and nobody’s paying attention to your work. I think a lot of beginners get discouraged when they approach artists they look up to for advice, who then immediately begin barking about fundamentals, gesture drawings, drawing from life and so on. All of that can wait. 

There’s a lot to be said for just having fun drawing whatever you want, in whatever way that you like, because that initial exploratory scribbling is going to build hand-eye coordination and help you overcome the fear of a blank page. Drawing as a creative habit has a very low barrier to entry – all you need is a paper and a pencil, after all – and the temptation among experienced artists to immediately turn that initial spark of interest into a tedious chore is, I think, a fantastic way to scare people off of it.

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