I have yet to spend a ton of time character modeling. These characters are the best of what I’ve made so far.
Legfish#
The first character I made. Inspired by a figurine my wife made with some leftover clay.
For this, I used a Skin Modifier and Subdivision Surface based workflow. Joey Carlino has some great tutorials for this on YouTube.
The significant advantage is that we only work with a skeleton instead of actual geometry until the modifier is applied. This approach delays the need to think about topology, which was very helpful as this project was one of my first ever in Blender. The branch merging behavior confused me, so I avoided this workflow to have 100% control of the topology. In the future, I want to revisit this approach. Now, I am confident I can fix things by hand as needed.
Cat Knight#
My first run/walk cycle! I’m proud of it. At first, I was resigned to using Mixamo because animation is too hard. Their library wasn’t compatible with my stylized characters’ oversized heads. The animations were too “real” as well. The model is cartoony, and the motion should be too.
I read the first few chapters of The Animator’s Survival Kit because winging it produced unsatisfying results. While my focus will never be animation, learning the basic concepts went a long way.
I box-modeled this mesh instead of generating it with the skin modifier. To make things smoother, I used Catmull-Clark Subdivision and then used the Un-Subdivide operator to keep the amount of geometry manageable while still getting a bit more smoothness/roundness in the mesh. I got to try out some topology tricks at the knees and elbows to help them deform properly.
I just copied the head and cut out some parts to make the helmet. Same with the boots. I lifted the armor from the Synty Fantasy Hero asset pack and played with the scale until it fit the character. I don’t plan to keep it long-term , but it looks good enough for now.
Gobgob#
Because I already had a stylized biped base rigged, I reused that, modeled a new head, and stitched that on. After extruding the ears, I learned a bit about rerouting edge/face flow. I like him a lot.