Create an original 3D character using Blender

I haven’t put any progress since the last update as I started focusing on Inktober at the beginning of October, so I figured I’d put a final update to call this one done.

I definitely underestimated the effort to get the base model up and thought I’d move on to the clothing/armor much sooner but never quite got there. That said I have a great base to start with going forward, learned a lot more new tricks with blender, and an still use this for future game dev projects.

So work and life has been extra distracting but im consistently getting time on the weekends at least. Not quite the 16 hours per week i’d hoped, but maybe closer to 4 - 8 hours at most.

That said, super happy on progress but I doubt i’ll make it to any animations/texture. Next up it once final look over the base model, and then onto making the armor/clothing.

Day 11 - I’ve been working my way restructuring my base model. It’s not super apparent in the screenshot, but the base model started as separate objects for each limb, on the left side, but I’m slowly reworking the right side, welding together the limbs and then separating them, for how I’d like for once I get to rigging and animating.

Day 9 (great for branding) - I’ve spent way less time than planned. Maybe about 4 hours in total with how busy other things have been.

That said all the progress so far isn’t showable in an image but has been a lot of cleanup, tweaking, and decimating the original model since it was a lot higher fidelity than I want/needed, nor was it quite structured in the way that I like. Most of the inspiration for the original concept, as well as the style i’m shooting for, harkens pretty closely to the characters in Ashen and Absolver which I’m adding here partly for my own reference.

For now I’m leaving the milestones as is, but if I had to wager by current progress, I likely won’t make it to animating and the materials work I do will likely just be flat/simple materials in Blender rather than any fancy pbr textures and things that I hoped to spend some time learning.

Day 1 - I stumbled upon a base mesh to use rather than create one from scratch. Despite having experience creating simpler models with blender, I’m quickly realizing how over my head I am when it comes to creating actual characters and working with that in 3D. My initial focus was going to be properly learning tools and tricks for the actual process but I think I’m going to pivot to just have a rigged model I can work with as the outcome, regardless of its quality. So next steps are going to be blocking out all the clothing/armor bits.

Here’s the original concept I drew up in the past that I want to recreate in 3D.