Create Any Animal in Blender 3 - Detailed Beginner Tutorial

in this video we'll be creating this cat with a bit of a Halloween theme you can then use these techniques to make pretty much any animal you can think of we'll start by modeling the cat bringing in reference images to trace around we'll also use some basic rigging so it's very detailed and in depth and therefore takes a little bit of time I've made it as beginner friendly as possible but it's not for complete beginners if you're a complete beginner then please check out my complete beginner's guide a free mini course Link in the description where we make this wonderful scene you can see here even better you could try one of my low poly modeling courses which are super affordable again for complete beginners with very methodical steps making low poly characters or Landscapes like this check the links in the description for the discount codes and check out my website and playlists on this channel for more great content so let's get started making this Halloween style Cat so I'm in a new startup file I'm using blender 3.31 and my shortcut keys are displayed at the bottom corner here now to start with I'm going to use some background images for the cat so I've got the folder with those in open here you can download these from the link in the description or you could choose your own image of an animal of course you don't necessarily need a front view a side view will probably be enough within blender you can go to front view with one on your keyboard or you can use the Cartesian coordinates up here by clicking on the minus y and that's front view then I can select the Halloween cat front view and drag it into blender like so and that comes in right in the center there facing the front if for any reason you rotate it by accident you can always press alt R and ALT G that removes any rotation and grabbing or movement and then you can press RX then 90 to rotate it around the x-axis 90 degrees and of course press enter I can then move that into position by pressing G then Z and G then Y and so on is actually helpful to have it behind the middle here then we can model in front of it so press G then y to move it backwards makes a lot of sense let's bring in the side view image and then start positioning them so I press three on my keyboard to go to side view or you can press the minus X just here and let's find the Halloween side view and drag that in and you can see it's perfectly along the y-axis I'll press G then y to move it back a bit and G then X to move it behind the box again so we can model in front of the two images let's start lining them up now so one to go to front view I can't see the cap very well behind the cube so I can go to wireframe just up here and then select front view which incidentally isn't empty so it doesn't render it's only there as a guide now it's very difficult to see the x-axis going across the bottom here behind the image so we can make it slightly transparent to help us to do that we go to the object data properties just here and we've got an option here called opacity if I tick that bring it down to something like 0.2 I can now see my so I'll zoom in Just a Touch G then Z to grab in the Z axis and put it down slightly the blue line is the z-axis so that's the middle and it seems to be nicely in the center there perhaps G then X to just move it across very slightly if I want to be really precise there but it shouldn't make too much difference okay let's middle Mouse button to come out of that view and we need to start positioning side view so I'll press three on my keyboard to go to side view select the side view image and once again object data properties tick on the opacity bring that down to point two it doesn't have to be precisely 0.2 I just find that's the most comfortable I'll zoom in a bit G to grab and move that into position somewhere around here it doesn't matter too much where you put it on the y-axis but roughly in the middle makes it slightly easier more importantly is that those feet which are a tiny bit wonky line up with the floor which we can see in green across the bottom there so let's go into perspective once again with middle Mouse button and it looks like they're lining up well we can check this by selecting our team Cube going to front view once again and let's position that to the bottom of our cube is on the floor there and I'll go into edit mode so that's edit mode up here and select the faces at the end here select that top face and you can see that's selected there back to front view G then said to move that up so it hits the top of the head just there I'll go back into object mode so I can select the background images if I need to then across the side view make sure it's lining up with the top of the head it's close but it's a little bit short so this image is slightly shorter than the other image so if I select the image and I can now scale this up and position it now you could press s to scale and then try and grab it and get the correct scale somewhere around there that's easy enough but I'll undo that because there's a quicker way my 3D cursor in the center of the grid so shift s will bring up this Pi menu cursor to world origin and that will bring it to the center of the grid like this and I'll go back to side view I can come up to the middle here and use the 3D cursor as my Pivot Point now I'm going to press s to scale you can see it's scaling up so I can be slightly more precise just remember to change this back to median Point otherwise it can get a bit confusing so we've set up our background images as you can see there and we're ready to start modeling so it might be a good time to pause the video here and catch up with me placing your background images into the scene okay so hopefully gotten okay with that now I'm going to select the default Cube and delete it because it's much easier if we use a plane to model our cat so I'll press shift a to add we can go to the add menu up here and under mesh we've got plane now remember we're still in wireframe view I'll go back to solid mode so we can kind of see it a bit easier and I'm going to press n on my keyboard and go to item now you can see the location is set to zero so it's right in the center of the grid and the rotation is set to zero so there's no rotation added to our object now we want it to line up with the side view and we're going to start with that so I'm going to press r y 90 and press enter that rotates it around the y-axis 90 degrees and you can see that written in here now later on we're going to mirror this plane so we only have to model one half of our cat the mirror uses the local axes which takes into account the rotation here so that can get quite confusing because you might try to mirror along the x-axis so there's one over here and it mirrors over to here but it will look like it's not working because there's some rotation on our object we can actually apply the rotation and make this its natural state by pressing Ctrl a to apply and then rotation you can also find that menu under object and apply now you can see that my rotation is set back to zero so this is its natural state okay so let's go to side view with three on my keyboard I'm going to scale this down and move it let's say into the middle of our cat and we're going to start by modeling the body and the head of the cat so we'll zoom in I'll go into edit mode again so that's edit mode up here and tab is the shortcut key for that you can tab into object mode and back into edit mode you can do this by selecting either vertices or edges I'm going to choose vertices so I'll select on those and then I can select vertex like this by box selecting it as the easiest way and press G to grab and move that into position and move the others so I have something like this so now it's probably a good idea to pause the video and catch up with me if you haven't already set up your plane remember to apply that rotation and go into edit mode and move it into a position similar to mine pause the video and have a go at that okay so for the next bit I need to bring out this edge here and again you can be an edge mode for this or vertex mode I find it slightly easier to stay in vertex mode and I'll explain why in a second but in order for that to work I need to select both the top and the bottom so in a sense it is selecting The Edge down here and I can press e to extrude and pull that out and the extrude command creates a whole new face and I can left click to set that then I can select the vertices and move them into position that's why I slightly prefer staying in vertex mode I don't have to box select like this because I might accidentally grab a Vertex like this incidentally you can hold down control and box select to remove that or I can just select one and shift select the next then e to extrude and move that across here remember we're not doing the legs yet and I'll move these into position something along these lines maybe move that one back up a little bit so it's at the top there and then again select these two e to extrude and put it to the back somewhere around here now a question you might be asking is how big do I make these rectangles well you're trying to follow the shape of the curve and I could add for example another one in here but the more you add the more you have to edit so you want to try and keep it as simple as possible so this is roughly following the curve even though it's missing a tiny bit here but we've generally got the shape with only four vertices at the top there however at the back it really isn't following the curve of the cat's bum so we'll need another cut through here there's a couple of ways of doing this the easiest is to press Ctrl R for a loop cut and then when you move your mouse over your shape you should find you can put a loop cut in the middle and then you left click once to set that Loop cut and you can position it and left click again to set the position now if any reason your Loop didn't go all the way through your shape then you might have to look up remove doubles but that's outside the scope of this tutorial for now I'm going to select these vertices and move them into position so we've now roughly got that curve there and that looks great I can select the ones at the front E2 extrude and move them outwards and move them into position now I'm going slightly off the curve here and once again select those I'll control click to deselect that one we need to extrude across here and E to extrude again across here move those verts into position I'm not going to do the legs yet but they will come out of this area here but we can do the head so I'll select these vertices here need to extrude I can actually scale them all down together like this and then move them into position and then e to extrude up to finish off the neck like this okay so if you haven't already pause the video here and catch up with me creating the body of your cat like this now the head is a little bit more tricky and that is certainly the bit you'll find the toughest but try and follow along with me the best you can and you should be fine now probably the easiest way for beginners to understand is just to do a kind of circle around the head so for this I'll go to Edge mode just so you can see that's a viable technique as well as choosing just vertices I'll select this edge here and E to extrude outwards like so you can also rotate that with r on my keyboard to kind of move those vertices into position and scale it if I need to with s on my keyboard and I'll extrude that up here extrude that round to here and rotate it don't worry about the ear at the moment we'll put that in later and once again round to about here another one there and I'm just pressing e to extrude left click and then moving it into position now I can select the bottom edge of this one and extrude it downwards like this and for these last two here if I zoom in a bit so you can see that more easily I can select both of them by shift left clicking and press f for fill again you can find those commands up in the face menu here so now we're left with a blank area in the middle here now if I alt left click on one of these edges remember I'm still in Edge mode here I can select that entire Edge Loop that works for all Edge Loops so I can alt left click on these ones and the big long one going across the middle there so I'll left click on that I'll press n to get rid of this side panel and I'll come up to the overlays just here and turn on statistics that's slightly helpful because we can see the amount of edges we've got selected here you can also see whether your shape is matching up with Mine mine's got 27 faces at the moment again if yours looks exactly the same as mine but you've got a different number here then you've probably got some doubles so back to our Edge Loop now I can carefully fill in Faces by selecting two edges like this and pressing F to fill but it's a little bit awkward I'll undo that select my Edge loop again with alt left click go up to my face menu and there's an option grid fill now because I had an even number it was able to fill it in with quads nice and easily which you can see here I'll undo that and you can see my eight edges there if for any reason you didn't have eight edges you can just come across to any of your faces and maybe press Ctrl R to do a loop cut and then when I press alt left click I've got nine edges so maybe I could put another one in here by Ctrl R and double left clicking then select my inside up to the face menu and grid fill and once again it fills it in nicely with quads you might want to go in now and move some of your vertices I'll press one to get to vertex mode which is the shortcut key for vertex mode up here and I can start selecting these and moving them into position and I'm just evening them out so they look a little bit more uniform if they're more evenly spaced it kind of helps modeling later on but doesn't make too much difference Okay so if you haven't already pause the video here and catch up with me creating the head for the cat okay so you should have something that looks similar to mine now if I go into perspective mode by holding middle click and come around to the front here you can see that it's just a flat object so we need to give it some thickness in order to do that I can select everything with a you can also find that in the select menu here and what I want to do if I come around to front view with one on my keyboard and zoom in just a touch you can probably see the object origin just there I'll just show you that from the side again that's the object origin so go back to front view and with everything selected I'll press G then X to move it off to the side so it matches up with the neck just there so the object origin is still in the middle of my cat here but the faces I've created are off to the side over here now so you can see what's going on I'll come around to the side slightly here and we're going to add our mirror modifier so across the modifiers that's the spanner or wrench icon here add modifier mirror now that should create an exact replica opposite the object origin along the x-axis so there the x-axis highlighted there in the mirror modifier and there's our mirror this always goes around the object origin so if I press G then X and move it further away from the object origin the other side also moves further away I'll right click to cancel that movement now if for example yours ended up looking like this or maybe like this that's because you forgot to apply your rotation at the start so if I go back to the x-axis and turn off that Z it should flip across the other side there if it doesn't press tab to go into object mode n to bring up your transforms your rotation should be set to zero if it's not press Ctrl a and apply that rotation and it should work across the x-axis so now's a good time to catch up with me and add a mirror modifier okay I'll go back into edit mode and I want to join these up so with everything selected I can press e to extrude and pull them in together now you might notice it overlaps one another and I can go all the way out to the other side and overlapping geometry like that is not helpful so I'll left click and it's not quite together but it's close if I turn this option of clipping on and now press G then x with all those inside faces selected you can see I can only push them together they won't go any further so they clip or stick together in the middle so I'll do that once again I'll undo those steps and turn off clipping with everything selected so that's a to select all make sure clipping is turned on E to extrude in the x-axis and pull it into the center and we've got the body of our cat then now the frustrating thing about this method is that we've got lots of inside faces if I go to wireframe mode you can hopefully see those inside faces there they're all still selected so I can just press delete and then faces to get rid of them and you can see we've got a nice solid mesh now with no inside faces inside faces can cause lots of problems later on so you must try and get rid of those I'll go back to solid mode now and then we're ready for the next steps so just pause the video here and extrude your mesh out so it joins together in the center so at this point we want to start thinking about the tail and the legs now if I come around to the bottom here we know that this area makes up the leg if I go to side view with three on my numpad you can see that there however if I were to extrude out now the legs would be joined together so we obviously can't have that so I'll undo that what we're going to need to do is Ctrl R to do a loop cut all the way around the middle there now before I do that so I'll just right click to cancel that I'm going to go to front view into wireframe I can press the shortcut key Z to bring out the pi menu and choose wireframe this way I can then easily select the outside faces like this and I'm just going to press G then X to move those outwards I can move the neck ones in a little bit later on now I can select the top ones here come around to the side and control click so I don't select the back ones there as well back to front view G to grab in the x-axis and move those ones in so if I come around to the side you can see what we've got I'll press set again and go to solid mode this time so you can see roughly the shape I'm getting here don't worry we'll smooth the shape out later on and we'll extend this side of the head we've got a nice area to add our Loop you cut it now so I'll press Ctrl R to do a loop cut and double left click so that's to set it and set it in position that gives me these outside faces now so if I press three to go to face mode here I can now select these outside faces go back to side view and E to extrude and start extruding them down now this will be easy in wireframe so Z to go to wireframe and one to go to vertex mode and I can now start positioning these make sure you don't just left click on them because you're only selecting that one vertex go back to side view make sure your box selecting so that you select both so with both those selected I can now start moving them into position and again we just select all extrude down and move them into position I'm keeping it fairly simple so not too many extrusions you could later on add some Loop Cuts in if you wanted more geometry around the joints for animation just make any minor adjustments to follow that curve then across to front view and start lining it up here you can see that this middle section here needs to come down a bit so I'll just go back to side view and see what I've got selected there so just that middle section that's good back to front view and I can press G to grab and move that in move these in and then start repositioning all these areas again do make sure your box selecting so you get the back vertices as well and I do just need to grab this section here and just move that back up so that's the middle vertices in there now you might be thinking what happens to the right hand legs of the cat's body they're just lining up with the other one where right at the end is when we start posing and positioning the cat so for the moment it will look a bit strange with both legs next to each other but that's absolutely fine so I'll go into solid mode so you can see it a bit easier and you might want to pause the video here catch up with me making sure you've got your front leg looking like mine you could if you're a bit more confident challenge yourself to do the back leg by yourself okay let's go around to the back leg and select these two here into side view into wireframe and I'll zoom in need to extrude and then into vertex mode and start positioning these again don't add too many Cuts because you can always add more later but the more you add the more difficult it gets to edit you will of course have to add a few more Cuts around the feet because there's more detail in the model there okay so we'll go to front view and It's tricky to see what's going on here but hopefully you can see that these middle verts going down here are the back legs you might prefer to go to solid mode so said to go to solid mode and then perhaps come around to the back here but unfortunately our reference images are in the way we can hide those very easily just by clicking on the eyes there and I can now start positioning the back leg a little bit more sensibly so again box select vertices G then X to move that in I can press alt left click if I want to select an edge Loop and again G than x now if I try and select all the leg like this if I'm in solid mode it won't select the ones that I can't see but solid mode can be helpful to visualize the shape so what we can use is x-ray mode which is this one just here so I can now select them all and then I could bring them in perhaps go to front view there and bring them in to around here the foot at the bottom looks thin so I'll select those come back to front view actually select those bottom ones there and scale in the X can then select these ones bring them in slightly and we might just want to bring these ones out slightly let's just have a quick look at that yeah yes indeed so I can also rotate them just like that I'll come out of x-ray mode so you can see the results there and that's getting there so pause the video here catch it with me and create the back legs okay so lastly the tail again to face mode select that back face there into side view bring back my reference and I'll zoom in again I'll go to wireframe e to extrude up and start moving these into position do remember to box select so that you select the ones in the background as well and just extrude out following the shape now a shortcut for this is to hold down control and right click to create an extrusion around like this so I'm just holding down control and right clicking my way around you might just want to reposition them every now and again when you get to the end you will have to bring them in attach to make them a bit smaller okay that's working well it's a little bit thick as it gets towards the end so I can select these ones and G then X to move those in and then just taper this slightly so G then X and G than x and that's looking fairly good and lastly let's select these last two here G then X to move those in and I can continue that a little bit with the next one as well let's go back to solid mode and see how we're looking okay that's working quite well so pause the video here and catch with me creating the tail now we need to create a bit more of a cheek to the face so I'll come into here interface mode and select by holding down shift and box selecting these faces here round to front view make sure I can see my reference image e to extrude and pull it out so it's the size of the cheek there again it looks a bit odd so let's think about starting to round out the shape let's start with the back if I go to Edge mobile 2 select this Edge from here and if I hold down control and click this Edge just here it selects the shortest route between the two if I press GG so double tap G I can Edge slide it along towards the middle and then GG once again I can add slide it back down and that kind of Curves out the shape let's do it on the back of the cat's bum just here so GG and slide that back like so so double tap G for Edge slide a really useful tool for smoothing things out now for the legs if I go from here let's say to here and I press GG I can't go this way because if I do the same on the other side it will just flatten out again but I can press GG and go in towards the middle and kind of curve it around this way hopefully that makes sense so I can slide towards the middle in the x-axis but I can't come back along the y-axis this way I'll do the same for this front leg here for example so GG to move that in and from the middle here down to the bottom here GG and can you see how it's created that curve on the legs and if I do the same for the front I can go all the way up to here down to the bottom here remember to control click to select that whole line GG to slide it in then this one from the middle here down to here with control click GG to slide it in and you can now see we've got a little bit of curve to the legs on some of the edges you can alt left click and select an edge Loop like this and GG to slide it in and the same for the inside GG slide it in alt left clicking can sometimes be a little bit more Awkward because you have to know the edge Loop and the ins and outs of it so just use the control left click for the shortest path if you're confused I can round out the underside of the body a bit by selecting these and pulling them in I can also select this from here to here and GG and bring that upwards as well and we've got a bit of curve to the body I can also do the same for the tail if you alt left click here you should be able to select the edge Loop and GG to slide it inwards and the same for this one here you should be able to alt left click and slide it inwards as well with GG now to explain this idea of edge Loop selection further if I alt left click on this Edge Loop here the selection stops when it reaches any vertex that hasn't got four edges going off it and they're known as poles so I can shift alt left click and it will go all the way around to here which is another pole if I zoom in on that area and select these last two so again it won't go through polls but I can select all those around there again GG to Edge slide and GG to Edge slide in and it's created more rounded face like this there's just a few areas like from here holding down control to here and GG to Edge slide and I can round that out as well okay so pause the video here take a moment to round out the body of your cat okay from here it gets a tiny bit more tricky as we go to more detailed areas such as the ears and the eyes and the face in general now there's several ways of doing this a nice easy way is to go across to the sculpting workspace and I'll move in on my object I can change the size of my brush with f and if I hold down shift and tap on my object I can smooth some of these edges out if I press G I get the grab brush which is down here I can pull out the brushes so you can see the names I can just bring the mesh in and pull it in so it's a shape more of a cat's muzzle there and bring the front of the cat's head in slightly if you look at the reference image we've got a muzzle here and then this is very much the back of the head so we want to keep the shape of the back of the head and just bring these other areas in slightly so you can roughly see what's going on there if I go to side view just to make sure I've matched up still with my reference image I could just left click and pull these areas out and every now and again I might want to smooth out by holding down shift and tapping the left Mouse button let's go to front view and see if we're lining up so a little bit of pulling about like this with the grab brush and we slowly get there so we got more of a cat's head just there might want to smooth out the neck a little bit at the back so can hold down shift and maybe all the way up to the top but as you can see if I undo that this area moved an awful lot so if I hold down shift and tap you can see it moves inwards and if I go to side view I've kind of lost the shape so just be aware of that particularly big areas of polygons like this you'll see a bit more Distortion in the shape so you might just want to move these areas by hand if you feel you need to and always go back to your side view and front view and make sure it's all in position now one last thing you might notice that the cat looks a little bit strange it's got some dark spots and then very light spots sort of overly reflective that's because the normals are pointing the wrong way and I'll explain more of that in a moment but for now just pause the video make sure you've caught up with me using the grab brush and the Smooth by holding down shift to edit the shape of your cat pause the video and have a go at that okay to explain about normals I'll just go to layout mode and you might be able to see it here a little bit as well it's got an unusual reflective look now under the overlays just up the top here we've got an option called face orientation and you can see it's all red and red means it's not good it's facing the wrong way now you don't need to follow along with this bit but if I go into edit mode and go again to my overlays and scroll down and choose this option here I can display the normals now you can't see much except for maybe up the top here you can see a little bit of blue and these tiny blue dots that display mode that I changed to just there shows the direction the face is pointing so the normals if I select all with a and press shift n that will reverse the normals and you can see all those blue lines now pointing outwards so we've got no Reds and that's much better now if I go to my overlays again I'll turn off the normals option here and the face orientation here and now I'm going to go back to object mode you can see hopefully that it's lost a little bit of that strain reflectivity it's something you'll notice more as you get more experience but do always check the face orientation make sure everything's blue that can save you a lot of problems later on so pause the video here and check your normals or face Direction and reverse it with shift n if it's all in red do make sure you're in edit mode for that so I'll just turn that off now we're ready for the eyes and ears so I'll go to front view and we can see it's roughly around this area here I'll go to edit mode and choose just that face there let's go to face mode and choose that face and then round to side view and it looks like we're going to choose these two here I think that's going to work the best let's just move around our shape make sure that's a good location back to front view and wireframe so we can kind of see those faces back to side view and I might want to just maybe move these across the front like this so we've got a nice big area for the ears and then once again choose those faces okay go back to solid mode makes it a little bit easier to see back to front view and E to extrude outwards and move those in position e to extrude again scale down and E to extrude again and scale down and just move that out to there let's just see how we're looking in side view that's not too bad so you might want to pause the video there and catch up with me before we start shaping the ear a little bit more so pause the video and have a go at that let's come in and start editing the shape slightly so probably this one g to grab and move it back inwards like this and rotate it around a touch this is where it gets a little bit tricky to model but probably somewhere around here maybe I can scale that up slightly as well perhaps just a touch more rotate it round and somewhere around there I think it doesn't look too bad let's move back a little bit and have a look yes I think that works nicely so you're looking for something that's a little bit similar to mine so flatter at the front here but keeping a little bit of curve at the back and you might find if I go into Edge mode I can Edge slide these along so GG and you can do an edge slide with vertices as well so I can move these along as well like this but it's probably not too necessary to do that you can see the rough shape there and it seems to be looking fairly good so pause the video and try and reshape your ear so it looks similar to mine here you might notice it's got a tiny bit of twisting and turning can you see how this quad here if I move up to there suddenly turns into a triangle so looking at that it's not so great and we can probably just move this one back to solve that anomaly it's not too bad now and you're probably wondering why it does that well all these quads they're really great for modeling and it makes it nice and simple as we can do things like Loop cuts and extrusions nice and easily but they are all rendered as triangles every quad you see is rendered as a triangle hence why you get these triangles like this when a quad goes around the corner anyway enough of that let's work on the eyes so go to front view and we want to be able to see our eye so I'll press Z to get to wireframe and there's our iron there we want to be able to cut out that shape now this is much easier if I come around to the side here I'm going to select all these vertices here and maybe a few at the front here just anything that I don't really want to get in the way so I want to cut out the eyes in the front here so I want to be able to see these and I want to be able to hide these and I can just press h to hide now when I go to front view with one on my keyboard I can easily see an area to cut out I'll move these vertices to the top here so we've got a space for the eye in the middle there and this is the top of the muzzle so I'll bring this right down to that muzzle area there I'll just go to side view it does seem that our side view and front view aren't matching up completely so I'll kind of go halfway I think that's very common with reference images as it's not that easy to draw them and match them up perfectly now what I can use is the knife tool so I can press k for the knife tool my cursor will then change to a knife and I can literally just left click all the way down to here and then back again and finish up to here and press enter that cuts out the eye nicely now you may notice that we've got these funny faces now if I go to face mode and select this face here it goes all the way around the edge it's not particularly good to have that we can tidy that up again we could use the knife tool k for the knife tool and cut from there to there and press enter and tap from here to here or you can go to vertex mode select two vertices and press J to join them and you'll get a line between them now you'll notice that this is no longer a quad and so far we've been modeling with quads or rectangles and that's the best practice I'll just press alt H to bring back the rest of our mesh and said to go to solid mode so you can really easily see those triangles there and there I'll press k for the knife tool because we can easily make that one a quad across here rather than an n-gon as it's known so that would be a face with more than four edges now triangles aren't necessarily bad they just make it awkward to model if I wanted to do a loop cut through here and press Ctrl R we can't because we've got triangles in the way and that's why you try and stick to quads as much as you can also it can make your topology your faces look a little bit distorted if I come around to this side you can see the triangles really easily there compared to this nice quads here but again that doesn't matter too much so we've got our eye now and I can select those faces and E to extrude bring those in slightly and I think I'll scale them down a touch as well so we've got our cat's eyes just like that so pause the video and catch up with me cutting out the eye and extruding those eye faces inwards okay so lastly I think a nose would help back to wireframe mode and once again I'll hide the back faces over here select those H to hide remember alt H is to unhide back to front view and let's cut in a nose so from about here down to here and press enter and again we've got an end gone there so we might want to cut our way down to here to get rid of that you can have end guns and they work but it is usually better to at least triangulate the mesh than you know how the polygons are going to be rendered Don't Panic if that didn't make too much sense you can just cut it up in the same way I have here and that'll be just fine I'll just go back to solid mode so you can see that so we've got a nose shape just there and that will become important when we come to use our subdivision surface modifier in just a moment but for now we can leave that as it is so I'll press alt H to bring back the rest of my mesh alt a to deselect all and back into object mode with tab so pause the video here and catch up with me and cut out the area for the nose okay so lastly to make this cat look more smooth more cat-like we're going to use a subdivision surface modifier so that's another modifier we've already got the mirror modifier over here under our spanner or wrench if you're American we can go up to add modifier subdivision surface modifier and you can see it's coming out a lot smoother now got a little bit of distortion around the nose but generally speaking it's looking fairly good we can also right click and shade smooth and we've got it really nice and smooth now and it's looking quite good now I can go into edit mode and you'll see in edit mode that we've still got our basic shape so what the subdivision surface modifier is doing is dividing each face into four and smoothing it out so if I go down to zero levels we can see our original and when I had one level of subdivisions it adds those faces and Smooths them out if I turn off optimal display go back to object mode and go into wireframe mode you can see all those extra faces there in fact if I turn off x-ray mode you'll see them a little bit more detailed there as well but I'll go back to solid mode and turn on optimal display the optimal display means that you don't see all those extra faces because it can get a bit awkward to see what you're doing when you're modeling and if I go up another level you can see it Smooths out even more the further you go up here the more taxing it is for your computer the longer it will take to render and if you go too far your computer will crash so be careful so pause the video here and add in your subdivision surface modifier okay so we just need a little bit of Tidy Up in the shape so if I go to Edge mode I can select these along here GG to Edge slide those bring them back a little bit this one as well maybe bring them in Just a Touch like this let's just look at front view go to wireframe and x-ray view just to make sure we're lining up and see if we got the shape right it's fairly tricky to see but it looks roughly okay I think I might need to just come in a little bit there that looks good now we can't really see the outline of the nose but if I go to face mode select that face and press e to extrude to put it out suddenly we can see the outline a bit more let's go back to object mode so you can see the results of that makes this Edge a little bit sharp as well but what's happening there if I go back to edit mode is that The Closer you have two edges together the sharper the edges get so if I want to stop this Edge from being so sharp I will need to select these vertices hard to see that one but it's in there and if I bring that down a little bit further like this and this one down further you can see that it's smooth that top Edge out there I might just want this a little bit more rounded so G then y to move that back just a touch so it's a bit more curved and that's looking fairly successful if you don't want it looking so sharp you can select that face and then scale it down a bit more and it will smooth it out because those edges aren't so close together okay so pause the video and catch up with me sorting out the nose and rounding out the face a little bit more so in this next part we want to be able to pose our cat and put it into a nice position there's two ways of doing this the first way is to go into edit mode and actually move the legs manually now don't follow along with this but I'll show you what that looks like so if I go into x-ray mode select these bottom legs here and move them backwards I could move the legs however you can see that both legs are moving at the same time because of our mirror modifier so I'll go back into object mode and turn x-ray mode off I would have to apply the mirror modifier in order to change the legs separately so I'd come across the modifier and in this menu here I could choose apply now I can go in and select the legs separately so back into x-ray mode can control box select to get rid of these ones and that one there in fact it's the other leg that goes backwards but not that it makes too much difference but I'll select this one instead make sure I've got those faces selected as well and then we come across the side view start rotating it and placing it into position and that works okay and I can start editing and moving these around as I see fit now that's okay if you've got a very basic pose but what we're going to do is add an Armature to our cat so you could actually animate it if you want to and you can put your cat in far more complicated poses far more easily so I'll undo all those steps back to solid mode and I've got my mirror modifier back so let's add an Armature or a skeleton for our cat so we can pose them first of all I'm going to turn off the reference images because we don't need those at the moment this will be easier in side view so three on my numpad rounder side view and I'll just move us into the middle a bit more and just bear in mind I'm in object mode for the cat and I can press shift a to add and I can and Armature so this is a basic Armature now if you're completely new to bones and armatures you might want to have a look at my introduction to animation series check the links in the description for that but I'll give you a very quick rundown at the moment we're in object mode and I can press G to grab to move this bone into position so I'll just move it somewhere around here and that can be the end of the spine just there now the first problem is we can't see the bone through the animal but with that bone selected I can come down to the object data properties just here and go to viewport display scroll down to the touch and there's in front just there and now wherever I move to the bone will always be visible in front of the cat so back to side view and now's a good time to pause the video here and add in your bone and make sure it's in front of the mesh now if I want to add more bones to this I need to go to edit mode so it's very similar to meshes where you've got object mode and edit mode with bones you actually have object mode edit mode and pose mode edit mode is where you make the skeleton and edit the bones position pose mode is for when you actually start animating it and posing it of course so into edit mode and you can just use tab for that again and there's three parts of the bone there's the main bone the top and the tail I can press G to grab with the tail selected and move that to here is the start of the spine and E to extrude out and we'll just e to extrude out again e to extrude out again and we've got a simple spine going across the top now you might be tempted like I have here to copy the bone structure of the animal however the body will eventually be attached to these bones and in order to attach it it will be thinking about what's the nearest bone to the corresponding vertex to think about which parts of the animal are controlled by the bones so these vertices sees around this bone will be controlled by that bone and these vertices here by this bone and so on so actually we want to move this D to grab in the z-axis further into the middle probably somewhere around here so it's not quite mimicking the spine of a cat which is purely at the top because we want these vertices here to be affected by this bone we don't want it to be all the way down at the bottom because it could look a little bit strange when it's bending around the middle position here so we're keeping slightly to the bone structure of a cat but bearing in mind that we want to attach these vertices here to this spine bone so let's continue with this tail of the bone just here e to extrude up and a couple there for the neck and E to extrude up one for the head now if at any point I think actually I want two bones in here I can select that bone right click and subdivide and now I've got two bones in that position you don't want too many bones it can be very awkward to pose and animate with too many let's select the base of the bone here and E to extrude outwards up for the tail and we'll just go all the way around the tail I'm not going to really pose the tail much but just in case you wanted to we'll have some bones going all the way around here this possibly might be too many but it doesn't matter too much it might be a good idea now to check that you are in the middle of your mesh just go around to front view like this making sure that the bones are lining up with the center I've been moving my bones inside view so they shouldn't shift off center but if they have you can select them all and scale X zero and they will all flatten out in the center so back to side view and we want some bones coming down for the legs but before we do that maybe pause the video here and catch up with me creating the bones for the tail and the body like this they don't have to select here and E to extrude down like this you can shift right click to move your 3D cursor and shift a to add and it will automatically add a bone because that's the only thing we can add for an Armature in edit mode I can then G to grab to select that in bone and come down to the bottom like so now I've got three bones here but we actually need four bones here positioned more like this and then we have an extra one here if I select here and press e to extrude it's the wrong way around and that will get a bit confusing so I'll move this up select that main bone right click and subdivide then I can have two and move that one further up so you need four bones for each leg and this one here bends backwards and the way I remember that I think of thigh bone the shin bone and then the foot bone having the metatarsals and then the toes so that's the leg there we can select all these shift d to duplicate and move those across there and then just reposition these slightly as this cat is a sort of stylized shape and we're roughly in the right place now I'm going to select those all the way down there at the front and those at the back and come around to front view and line them up so G then X and that's looking around about right you may want to just move these out very slightly like this same with the back one so select that g then X that makes sure that these vertices will line up with this bone now you can do the same for the other side but you can use what's called symmetry in order for that to work though we need to actually label these bones I'm going to be a bit lazy and not label all the bones of the spine and the tail but I will label the leg bones so with that bone selected you can either come to the Bone properties here and you've got the name up there or you can press f2 so this is back leg one and then we need an underscore L for left there's different types of naming conventions you could use but this one works so you may as well also use it and press enter then on to the next one F2 to rename back leg 2 underscore L and I'll go through naming the other ones in the same fashion same for the front of course front leg one underscore L for these ones okay so just double check that you've got those all named correctly now I can select those and select these come out to the front and just double check that your object origin for your Armature is right in the center that's where the Symmetry point will be and then I can right click and go down to symmeterize and you can see the new legs on the other side and if I select one you can see that it's got underscore R for each of these legs so pause the video here creating your leg bones and then using the symmeterize option okay let's come around to roughly the side view again just so I can see the legs on the other side as well and let's take a look at how this will animate so I can go across to pose mode I can also press control tab for that to bring up this Pie menu and go to pose mode like that now when I select the bones they highlight blue also when I animate them by rotating around the x-axis in this case you can see that moving that bone and the subsequent bones down the chain along with it I'll undo that so if I select this one for example and press R then X it moves all the ones down the chain and this one will move all the ones for the tail chain then if I come to the legs and choose this one it moves the legs by itself what about if I want to move the whole Armature along let's say it's walking let's try and select this bone and press G to grab well that's going on its own this one g to grab that's going on its own so I'd have to select those together and move them together and then we've also got the legs as well so I'd have to select the tops of each of these and these as well and move those all together so that's not particularly effective what we need is ideally one control bone just before these two bones that will move our whole Armature and we need the legs joined to the spine so when we move the spine the legs move with it so I'll go back to side view back to edit mode remember you have to add bones and move their initial position in edit mode so control Tab and that takes me to object mode because it assumes that you've already edited your mesh if you've gone to pose mode already so I'll have to come up to here and choose edit mode I'll deselect all and shift a to add to create a new bone D to grab and I'll just move this here and rotate it round like so so it's kind of sticking out of its bump but this is going to be my main control bone for the whole Armature so I'll need this chain and this chain attached to this and the legs attached to the spine chain which is also attached to the main bone and therefore move the legs as well first let's attach the tail chain and the spine chain to our control bone we do this by selecting both those bones at the beginning of the chain selecting our control bone last so it's the active object you can see that because it's highlighted yellow and we need to parent it you can come up to the Armature menu and go to parent here or I can press Ctrl P to parent there's two options here keep offset and connected we want to keep offset not that it would make too much difference if they were connected but you can see there's a dotted line now so I can position this bone somewhere different away from those bones and it will still work as my control bone if I wanted it to actually be connected then I would select connected but it's okay to have a bit of distance and it's handy for this to be away from the other bones because it'll be easier to select so let's get to pose mode now so control Tab and across to pose mode now if I select this one and press feet grab it moves the other ones with it because this is the parent of these children here so back to edit mode now we want to do the same for the legs we want those ideally to be attached to the spine I'll show you why in a moment but we'll select both these select that spine bone and Ctrl P keeping the offset to make sure they keep that distance and don't move I'll show you what happens if I press connected they actually jump to the end of the bone I'll undo that and Ctrl p and keep offset and you can see they've got those black dotted lines let's go across the pose mode and see what that looks like I'll select this bone R to rotate and now when the spine moves the legs move as well so now's a good time to pause the video and catch up with me making sure you've got those parented connections now it's important to say at this point this rig is a very basic rig and there's far more complicated ones that are far better than this type of rig but this will get you started and you'll be able to pose Your Cat And even animate it in a very simplistic way so a quick challenge to you is to attach the front legs to this bone just here it won't make too much difference if it's this bone or this bone as both will give similar results so pause the video and have a go at that okay so hopefully remembered I'm in pose mode at the moment so I need to go across to edit mode then I can select both these and this one probably Ctrl P to parent keep offset so they don't jump to the end of that bone now let's jump across to pose mode and I can start animating different parts of my Armature and the bones will work together okay so how do I attach the cat to these bones well it's fairly straightforward luckily we'll go back into object mode you select the cat first and in fact it's a good idea to save at this point just in case you have any problems so select the cap first then shift select the Armature second so the Armature is the active object that will become the parent and when we move that it will move the mesh of the cat and then we press Ctrl P now this menu is slightly different and what we're going to choose is with automatic weights and that means the amount of influence given to the vertices to each bone don't worry if that doesn't make sense just choose with automatic weights okay let's see how we got on so I'll select my Armature go into pose mode first of all I'll move the control bone so G to grab and it's moving the whole cat then let's try a leg so I'll rotate this one around the x-axis and it's moving just that leg quite well by the looks of things it's stretching some of this across which is helpful because that acts like skin and that's why we still keep this fairly close to the top but not all the way to the top up here and we can go around rotating things and seeing what they look like maybe come around to the side here and rotate around the z-axis and make our cat look side to side and just test things out and see how it looks and it's all looking pretty good so I'll undo all those steps and what you can do to undo any movement is select all with a and ALT R to remove any rotation and ALT G to remove any movement now before you try that if you haven't already there's a few problems that can happen if for any reason let's say I select one of these bones and move it to a different position and something else is moving you need to actually look into way painting and again that's beyond the scope of this tutorial but there are other tutorials on my channel which can help you for some reason you got an error called bone heat weight failed that's because your cat may have some doubles so I'll just quickly go back into object mode select my cat go into edit mode select all and you should be able to press M to merge by distance mine has removed zero vertices because I didn't have any doubles hence mine worked but if it removed some hopefully you'll be able to parent it to the mesh unless you've got something like some inside faces there or something like that so just have a good look around your mesh if you keep getting that error so take a moment to parent your cat to the Armature okay so at this point let's go back into object mode select my Armature and start thinking about the pose so into pose mode I'll go to side view and I'll bring back my background image select that backbone there rotate it until it's into position roughly around there and let's rotate the foot so it's upright like that and you can always G to grab these ones move them down any that are at the base of the chain you can press G to grab but this one for example I can't press G to grab it just rotates it so that's in position I'll select this one here back to side view are to rotate move that into position rotate that and just move it down a little bit like so I think it'll be good to have some sort of arch in the back so I'll select this one R then Zed to rotate it around like that I'll then Z to rotate it around like that and actually let's give this one a little bit of rotation as well so sort of turning around the corner and maybe this one a little bit of rotation in the said this one as well R then said and the head as well Heartland said so we've got a gradual turn to the neck and that looks really interesting you can edit the tail if you want to as well I don't think that needs too much effort and I think that's looking great so if you haven't already have a go at posing your cat you might want a similar position like mine or create your own that you find interesting the last thing that I'm going to go through with you is just adding some materials to our cat so I'll hide the background image again go into object mode so control Tab and select the cat now you might be thinking where is it in my outliner well it's actually under the Armature now so there's our plane you could even rename it but there's only a few things in our scene so it doesn't make too much difference let's go across to the shading workspace now I'll zoom in on the cat I'll create a new material and I'll call this black this is going to be a black cat and change the color to Black and that was nice and easy wasn't it I'd like to give it a little bit more roughness as well somewhere like that and that works nicely also I want to give the eyes a bit of a Halloween look because we're close to Halloween and for that I can go into edit mode now notice when I go into edit mode it jumps away from the Armature that's because if I go across to my modifiers we've got this button here which is display modifier in edit mode so you can actually display it in edit mode it's a little bit confusing though because it's all the way over here so I'm going to turn that off and just use the base mesh I want to select the eye faces so these three here and I'm going to give them a new material slot so in the slots add a new slot and assign those faces to that slot I'll show you those slots again so there's the black that the rest of the faces have got and the ones I selected and assigned they have this new material we haven't actually got a material in that slot at the moment and that's why it's just gone white because that's the default when you haven't got a material I'll create a new material and I'll give it an emission so let's give it an emission color of maybe a light blue you can set it as yellow if you want or something like that it's entirely up to you I might change this later as well and also you might want to up the emission strength there can't see a huge amount changing but perhaps if I go across to render mode and set Bloom on you can see those glowing now and that looks quite fun and hopefully now that's given you enough information to make up a small little scene with a cat in one last thing that you might want to do I suppose is Select this face here and actually the ones around it so you can press Ctrl plus to grow the selection like this and I can give this a new material slot so once again to the slots new material assign those again it turns white until we add a new material and this time I'll scroll up and change the color to black but I'll make it shiny so it has a bit of a glossy nose let's go out of edit mode and see what that looks like that kind of works I suppose maybe not quite a glossy but just slightly more glossy than the rest of the cat and there we have it how to make any animal in blender in quite a long time but hopefully it was worth it to you and you learned a lot let me know how you get on in the comments below and if you do finish it then do tag me in Instagram or Twitter or whatever you might use you can find the links to my social media in the description hopefully you enjoyed it thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Grant Abbitt

Views: 95,792

Keywords: understand, texture, paint, learn, blender, tutorials, 3d, art, graphics, game, material, guide, easy, painting, how to, gamedev, cat, halloween, 3d model, long tutorial, modelling, rigging, posing, animals, make animals, 3d animals, blender tutorial, blender beginner tutorial, blender 3

Id: GHv42up5xA0

Length: 57min 32sec (3452 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 15 2022