Beginner Assignment!

🛑⚠️🚧Content not yet finished 🚧⚠️🛑

Everything below represents notes for Sepha to finish the YouTube vid and article with.

Your first full character!

Now we will put everything into practise, and create this character:

Firstly

We will establish our overall block in for sculpting:

Then:

We will sculpt the blockin, into a highpoly, using our sculpting brushes:

After that:

We will trace our highpoly, to create our lowpoly, leveraging its existing blockin that we made from the sculpt data.

We will then unwrap the lowpoly:

And bake our normals + other maps in Substance Painter

We will then refine the lowpoly as needed, adjusting to get the optimal bake, and then proceed onto texturing:

Once that is done, we will take all the assets back into blender, to prepare a simple render that mostly has parity with techniques and tools that our game engines have access to, finishing with your first full game character model and texture:

Lets get started:

Part 1: Getting setup. We take stock of the character concept, and plan what we need to do:

Part 2: Blockin. We establish our sculpt topology with box modeling and subdivision surface:

Part 3: Sculpting. We define the highpolys detail using our sculpt brushes:

For this section, find and commission some character art which can be used as refrence for the students to create a full character from.

They need to create something that can utilize:

1. A simple sculpted highpoly

2. A simple retopology

3. A simple unwrap

4. A simple bake

5. A simple texture

6. A simple skin with a simple armature

7. A simple animation

8. And a simple export to either unreal or unity.

Lastly, we need to do a recap. What did they actually learn?

1. They essentially learned the high level concepts of what the field is and the individual skills - but only at a beginner level.

2. While they know what these concepts are in general, they don't know how to do ANY of them "well".

   1. Their topology sucks

   2. Their unwraps will be awful

   3. Sculpting technique will be meh

   4. No understanding of hard surface, etc

   5. No rigs on their skeletons

   6. No proper PBR workflow with painter etc.

3. But what they have learned is the birds eye view of the entire process, start to finish. We now need to get them to begin mastering those techniques.

4. The second section of the course - we spend refining, and practising these concepts in detail. WE start to expose them to far better concepts of topology, more difficult bakes, and we fully embrace the PBR texturing workflow in Painter / Toolbag.

5. We Introduce rigging, and performance, as well as some novel approaches to making content

6. WE also introduce hard surface, and animation graphs.