Blender Tutorial | Your own PS1 Mascot! - Part 1: Character Modeling

hey everyone in this tutorial series i'll be showing you how to make your own ps1 mascot character back in the day it seemed like everyone was trying to latch onto the same kind of popularity that sonic had bubsy jazz jackrabbit spyro gex all of them got that 90s attitude now i will say that this isn't an entry-level blender tutorial i'm going to be covering everything modeling uv mapping texturing shape keys facial and body rigging and finally animation i'm going to be focused and more interested on explaining the technique on why you do something instead of explaining every keystroke you need to get from a to b i'll explain some important functions as they come up but i expect that you don't need me to tell you to press e to extrude things with that said let's get started with the series so like every mascot character from the 90s it's got to be an anthropomorphic animal of some kind some basic color scheming expressed body type and some quirky assets or themed to sell the design so to demonstrate this as an example um green pirate crocodile that'd be king k rool from donkey kong uh fighter pilot fox fox mccloud and uh one last one uh red squirrel and a hoodie well that's conker so we just gotta settle on some basic ideas and we can get started i got a whole list of animals that i keep saved and i have a raffle game that i use to generate ideas for the sake of this video i'll just run that and see what i'll be doing uh zebu what the hell is a z-boot it's like oh it's like a it's like a breed of cow all right okay so going into the character modeling process it's a good idea to have a plan for what the final model should look like so if you got the time and patience for it you should collect references for your model either anatomical references or artistic inspiration do this to build a general feel for what you want out of your character and if you're really patient what you can do is draw out a reference sheet to show how your character should look in different positions and orientations i however am not a planner or a drawer i tend to do things on the fly so you might see things that are not in the final product and i'll point them out as i go so to begin the modeling process i'm going to start with the head which is one of the key focuses of a character it's where the eyes are naturally drawn to and to make the head i'm going to utilize the power of a subdivided cube so in my empty default scene i'm going to place a cube at the world origin and go into edit mode i'm going to subdivide the cube with the smoothness set to 1. now another reason why i'm not explaining every keystroke that i make is because i'm using a key layout that is specific for my workflow i still use the layout from the 2.7x era of blender so my hotkeys might not be the same for you but i'll try my best and with the cube subdivided i'm going to set it to shade smooth and delete the right side of the cube so i can add a mirror modifier for the mirror modifier it's important that you enable clipping and this is to prevent the vertices of your model from passing through the mirroring point and makes them stick together like this and here we have the bases for our low poly head if you want a more human head you can take this vert here in the front and hit alt v to rip the topology to create a ridge for the nose for more animalistic heads we can take the bottom front face and extrude it out to make a snout and maybe add a loop cut for extra detail and for a bill what you can do is you can take these three edges subdivide it and extrude out the resulting faces and scale them down to get a bird's beak and for either bird or animal snout if you want even more detail you can select the mouth subdivide these edges here and rip the topology to form the opening for the mouth i'll be making a facial rig for this character so i'll be doing this so with a few small references i quickly found online and with proportional editing turned on i took the head base and tweaked it to fit the shape that i needed by simply dragging things around until i was satisfied basically i'm comparing my model to the front and side references and then adjusting it based on my understanding on the structure of the skull i'm subject to modeling a while back i received a few questions in the comments that i wanted to address because i think they're important to understand as you model one person asked me why i worked with quads and not tries when it came to modeling ps1 style models as tries were used for the most optimal geometry and another person asked me if they had to adhere to only using quads for good topology so hopefully this will address both of those questions for modeling quads are just easier to work with and blender is designed with this workflow in mind there's a reason for this and it's based around how the quads tile and there are selection tools based around this idea that allow you to select rings or rows of faces for the ease of editing purposes while try style in a way that is not conducive to this kind of selection and by working exclusively in tries this makes the process harder than it needs to be and secondly if you're 3d modeling you're kind of already working with tries whether you want to or not all faces are made up of tries whether or not you can see them or not and that's because they're calculated for you most times you won't notice the difference however sometimes like here the profile of the faces will go against the shape that you want them to be and to quickly fix this i simply select the two adjacent verts that i want to connect and hit j to join them and this will correct the face's shape so i hope that answers both of those questions once i got my head into the shape i wanted it to be it was time to add the eyes ears and whatever else i needed for the head starting with the ears they added a cube and then deleted the face that would be inside of our character's head no reason to draw polygons where you can't even see them from here i extrude out the ear to a tip and then collapse these edges back here to make it bored low poly then i extruded this edge ring into the head and then i did some more shape tweaking and triangulating for the horns i added an equilateral triangle by adding a circle with no fill and set the vert count to three then a place where it should start in to extrude it out quickly i held control and clicked to the points that i wanted them to be then i brought the horns to a point and then rotated them to match the reference and to finish up the head for the eyes i did something that i would later change the eyes would be planes that sat on top of the face like this however as you can see instead of just using a plain mesh i decided to use a circle i don't know what i was thinking i think i was going to try to have the eyes use hard edges with no transparency but i eventually changed my mind on this i was also going to give the character a monocle but i would also later decide against this the only original features i kept the same were the eyebrows which were just simple planes as they should have been moving on to the neck i again added a circle but this time not by mistake i set the vert count to four and deleted the vert on the right side and used this to create a small segmented neck mesh i used this instead of a cube because remember we're using a mirror modifier and a cube would give us this shape which i'm going to be using for the torso but it's also higher poly than what i would want the neck to be by making the neck this way it'll lower our poly count and with it shaded smooth it'll give the illusion that it's actually rounder than what it actually is now for the torso like i said i'm using the cube to make the shape and after adding the cube to the model i'm going to delete the face where it's going to be connecting to the right side if we don't delete it now it'll cause problems as we extrude the torso down and bringing the unneeded face down with it not only is it an internal face which won't be seen it will also cause shading and normal problems which will be visible in the final product for the shape i wanted to make it rather exaggerated i wanted it to be bulky top heavy a complete unit if you will or for those of you who are more interested in terminology he's going to have a mesomorphic body type so i need to exaggerate the musculature but i also got to follow the curvature of the spine so it did not have a flat body shape for the pelvis i duplicated the lower half of the torso and moved it down later on i would delete the underside of the torso because it wouldn't be seen from the outside anyway for the legs i was initially kind of messing around and i just wanted to see what would look correct for this body type that i was making i kind of just took a cube and started extruding it i extruded down and when i came to a joint i just extruded enough to make a new face and then extruded to make the next shape i initially had it the wrong way around however when i flipped it despite what i had thought the topology was already perfectly structured for this deformation i just had to shape it up round it out at the joints as best i could and add hooves i also triangulated at the points where the legs would bend then i just sort of shaped the body around it to make it fit better i don't know why i always do this to myself but i always seem to end up with these digita grade legs i just can't bring myself to use something different for characters like this speaking of different legs it pays to know your anatomy so you can translate it to your models after all not every character is going to be the same and you should know how they work so that way you can structure them properly for instance here is a sample of a few different legs across the animal kingdom that you can use with topology and rigging for demonstration purposes from left to right we have the humanoid leg the standard quadruped leg and the quote unquote backwards legs that birds have in actuality these three leg types are just varying expressions of these four bone groups of the leg the upper leg the lower leg the foot and the toes us humans stand on the bottom two bone groups and as we walk we roll up onto our toes as for animals however they stand on the ball of their foot with varying lengths of the thigh shin and foot bones for a lot of quadrupeds the first three bones tend to be relatively similar in length with the thigh staying parallel to the foot bones whereas for birds their thighs tend to be either short or located inside their body like penguins of course i'm only speaking generally i'll leave the actual research up to you but if you're interested the small demo scene is available for download in the description below when it came time to do the arms i really wanted to sell them as being big and bulky so i decided to extrude them out from a pentagon i got from adding a circle mesh with the verts set to 5. however when i got them into place i kind of felt weird having the legs being connected as they were and the arms not so i caved in and joined the upper and lower arm segments together and because of that i had to give it a little bit of extra topology so that way they deform properly if you're unfamiliar with the ideas of rigging a mesh or how to consider how a model would deform when you apply a rig here's how i tend to think about it with any kind of limb or joint if we're talking about an organic one like an elbow as these represent when a joint bends one side will expand while the other side will contract if there's no topology for this to happen it'll just kind of collapse at the joint and it definitely won't look good so to fix that we just need to take this edge here that'll be the joint and bevel it by two segments till we get three edges like this now the mesh will have enough topology to bend on this side but the problem is now gonna happen at the inside of the joint where the mesh begins to clip in on itself as you can see this is a problem because it's causing the faces to shimmer from overlapping fortunately this has a few solutions number one you can just simply pinch in these two edges here on the inside of the elbow and that'll fix the shimmering problem but you might get this weird divot on the inside when deforming which could be solvable from either weight painting or shape keys but i'd like to avoid weight painting when i can and i'm not going to cover shape keys until a future video option 2 you can collapse the inner edges to a single edge like this this is what i used for the legs and they worked fantastically however they worked good because they were modeled with the 90 degree bend in them and as it stands right now when bending the arm inward there is some extreme distortion happening here so for the arms i generally avoid the structure which leads me to the option i prefer to go to option three instead of collapsing them down to one singular edge i take the inner edge and slide it away and triangulate the ejection faces of the elbow to get a structure like this and to fix the shimmering issue i scale this inner edge of the arm in and now when the arm deforms it looks much better than the previous versions and with that knowledge i applied this to my character's arm for the hands i was gonna have a slight challenge to get a clean shape at this angle but to get started i added a cube and scaled it down then i set my transform orientation to normals as i would be using this to make sure that the hands didn't get all wonky it didn't help in the immediate sense it wasn't behaving like i would expect it to and i had to rely on scaling them on the normals by hitting alt s but when i transformed individual faces at a time it behaved much better once i got the cube into a position that looked good i shaded it smooth and got to work on extruding out the rest on the inside where the thumb would be i took these two wedges and subdivided them to get this face here which i then took and extruded out i took this edge here and slid it back into the wrist and then extruded this space out here to form the thumb as for the rest of the hand i took the face where the knuckles would begin and extruded them out and using the normal transforms i moved it to keep the fingers aligned with the hand and of course since the index fingers are longer than the pinky i fold this part of the hand down to represent that now that the majority of the model was done i decided it was time to clean up a bit the character is absolutely giant and buried into the world floor plane if i exported him as he is right now it would look a bit like this so we gotta shrink him down a bit and put his feet on the ground so i'm just gonna go into object mode and select him to pull him up until his feet are sitting on top of the floor flame and then scale him down until he's about two meters tall and once this is done i hit ctrl a to apply the location and the scale of course these aren't the only things that you should be cleaning up you should make sure that your model doesn't have any doubled vertices that the normals of your model are facing outward and that there are no strange internal faces in your model now all these things can negatively impact the rest of your work making uv mapping texturing and rigging much more difficult so to check for these in respective order for doubled vertices select your entire measure and hit m to bring up the merge menu and hit merge by distance to get rid of any doubled vertices for normals you can go into the overlay drop down here and turn on face orientation and this will display all faces as either blue or red blue meaning outside red meaning inside and we want the entire mesh to be blue the eyes and other mesh planes like the eyebrows will look red from certain angles but as long as they look blue from the front it's fine if you're red blue color blind what you can do instead is turn on the face normals here which instead will project small lines from the faces and the goal is you want all of them to be facing away from your model to do this what you can do is you can select the entire model and hit alt n to bring up the normals menu and hit recalculate outside and for interfaces that are not recalculated properly you can just select them and hit flip face to correct them to the way that you want them and for internal faces you want to be in face select mode then go up here to select and then down here to select by trait and then you can collect internal faces this should select any weird faces that could have formed during the modeling process so you can delete them finally after cleaning up there's one last thing that i have to add before the modeling portion of this video is over and that's the tail now the tail i wanted to have a little bit of asymmetry so the tail mesh can't go into the character object because of the mirror modifier it has to be its own separate object like the monocles which i haven't deleted yet so to make the tail i added a circle with the verts set to four and deleted the soon to be internal face i then selected and extruded it down and when i got to where the tip would be i flared the tail out and triangulated it at the bottom so i could poke these faces out at the bottom to get this sort of paintbrush look and with that we have basically finished the modeling portion of the character and from here we can move on to uv mapping and texturing which is the next big bulk of the character making process anyway i hope that was helpful be sure to like and subscribe or leave a comment telling me that you like this video it's one of the only ways that i know that it's worth continuing if you want to support what i do you can support me on kofi or check out any of my other important links down below but other than that yeah that's all i have to say so see ya

Channel: TheSicklyWizard

Views: 110,560

Keywords: Ps1, Character, Modeling, Tutorial, Design, Process, Deformation, Cow, Minotaur, Planning, Segmented, Limbs, Rigging, Ps1 Graphics, Low Poly, Character Design, Character Modeling, Mascot

Id: dT-07G6lbtA

Length: 14min 31sec (871 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 25 2022