How to Make a Cute 3D Character in Blender

so you want to know how to make a cute 3D character alright so the thing about the term cute is that it can be pretty subjective but as long as it makes you go or it triggers your acute aggression then the job is done but anyway let's get right into it so here is a list of considerations you can make number one style of choice so what style are you going for immediately I'm already thinking about Chibis but even that is still pretty vague so you need to ask yourself more questions so are you going for a manga or anime look children's illustration look claymation Disney or any other looks you can think of so do you want regular eyes anime eyes or button eyes what kind of body proportions do you want so I would personally tackle this by referring to what inspires me at the moment so you could refer to your favorite shows your favorite artists your favorite Video Games Etc so from my case one of my favorite artists is poopy cat and I've been a fan of her character design and just her Works in general for quite some time now another artist whose characters I've referred to countless number of times would be a dear friend of mine Kali tifan I've recreated their Works a number of times now and I think there's no shame to it but when you do so don't just go through the motion instead recreate them with intent study them ask yourself why they did this or that number two shape of choice so let's talk about shapes in character design the three fundamental shapes of character design are squares triangles and circles so forget about anything else in between for now squares and triangles are typically associated with these traits so pause the video if you want to read them but the shape that we want to focus on today is the circle why circles are often referred to as friendly approachable welcoming cute and many more so clearly we want our character to be cute and all the things I just mentioned we want our character to generally have a soft rounded silhouette number three character proportions so in this picture we have an adult a young child and a toddler so what makes a toddler so irresistibly cute yes the toddler is really cute because it's a lot tinier than the others but it's really all in the head to body ratio so the average head to body ratio of an adult is about one is to six but if you look at a toddler the head-to-body ratio is a lot closer averaging at about one is to two and a half so now you know why Chibis are so cute but we can push this even further we can bring the hit to body ratio up to one is to one and even up to one is to half just make sure you maintain the thickness of the limbs and body when shrinking It Down For maximum chunkiness number four anatomical features our goal is to achieve a soft rounded silhouette so ideally the smaller the body the less anatomical details you would want so try to leave out details such as any hard creases Define facial features elbow joints knee joints finger joints bone and muscle definition you don't have to Omit every single detail but if you look at your character and you get a sense of uncanny valley the features are probably not soft enough just experiment until it feels right for the style I'm going for I personally like to view my character's face as a bean so be it the front three quarters or the side view it should somewhat resemble a b what type of eyes do you want do you want standard eyes with a sclera Iris and a pupil or do you want button eyes what shape of eyes do you want how big do you want your eyes to be so all of this depends on the style you're going for again I would suggest referring to what inspires you at the moment by the way a rule of thumb For Eyes is to keep them in eye distance apart no doubt this rule has been broken time and time again but ideally the more realistic the shape of your eyes are the more you would want to abide by this rule or you're gonna end up with a creep vest now here's a more personal take the pupil the iris ratio is more important than the iris to sclera ratio so yes a big Iris could make the eye appear cuter but I feel that really dilated pupils play a bigger part which is why cats are so damn cute I mean just look at how big their pupils are though you could have a regular sized Iris and really dilate the pupils and still have it look cute but you could have the iris be really huge and the pupils too small and it'll just look like it's staring right in your soul so a few more questions you can ask yourself do you want your character to have a nose or not what shape of ears do you want how low do you want the ears to be how many fingers do you want to do even one fingers do you even one feet again all of this depends on the style you're going for at the end of the day no matter what you pick go for a soft anatomical features if unsure just stick with circles number five scale though there are a few things you could play around with regarding scale for example character scale so how small should your characters be an average adult human head measures at around eight to nine inches or 20 to 23 centimeters so if your character proportion is three adult hits tall just take 23 centimeters times three so now if you want to go for a miniature scale the traditional scale for figurines is about 1 is the 12th you could go all the way down to one is the 64 or 28 millimeters which is the average scale of DnD Miniatures so if you're going for one is to 12 then that would be 23 times 3 divided by 12. then just add a Cuban blender type in the values and use it as a height reference texture scale if you want your objects to appear extra tiny like toys or Miniatures you can consider scaling down your textures such as fabric dirt fingerprints scratches Etc objects relative scale another thing to think about is the relative skill of different objects so let's just say in terms of size and average sized car like a sedan is relatively bigger in scale than a human being but the more you could reduce the discrepancy in size between the sedan and the human being the more cohesive and toy like it would start to look for instance take a look at this piece that I did so the car is so compressed and small that the character would hardly fit in the car but that's what makes it appear so toy-like another factor that could influence the cuteness would be oversized clothes so I feel that the perfect hit to body ratio to pull this off would be one is the two or two and a half I mean I think these examples speak for themselves number six like seriously when in doubt chunky five like what's a spoon when you have a chunky spoon what's a cup when you have a chunky cup I rest my case last thing on the list camera placement and settings so clearly this has nothing to do with character design but I thought it could be something to think about first thing I want to talk about camera placement is eye level so things that fall below our eye level usually seem small random clusters of objects like Keys coins stationaries Hardwares on your workstation or Joe's head over here Joe mama usually are below eye level but if you held them up close to your face above your eye level they can appear larger than life so a quick trick to make your character appear small just place them below eye level I highly recommend checking out Tanaka tatsuya he does these really cool miniature photography where he re-contextualizes everyday objects very cool you can see that most of his pictures are below eye level too so the last thing about camera placement is the distance now there's nothing wrong with tighter shots but you could emphasize how tiny a character is by just pulling back your camera now for camera settings I want to talk about the recommended focal length so some miniature photographers go for white macro lenses because you can move the lens really close to the subject while maintaining focus without having an intense amount of lens compression allowing their Miniatures to look more life-sized however for our case we want to embrace how small our character is kinda like what Tanaka Tazia does so he uses a macro lens with a focal length of 90 millimeters and usually telephoto lenses have a higher amount of lens compression keep in mind any focal length Beyond 85 millimeters is considered telephoto okay what on Earth is lens compression you may ask lens compression is the effect of background elements appearing a lot closer to the camera than they really are in real life it is usually more apparent in telephoto lenses so the longer the focal length is the more apparent the lens compression becomes and then there's orthographic cameras which pretty much has a lens compression of the ultimate ultimate telephoto lens because it's so compressed that the distance no longer becomes a factor so you wouldn't be able to tell if a person moving towards you is actually moving towards you in fact there is a type of lens that does just that and it's called telecentric lens I'm going to break down how this works in blender in an overly simplified way so a perspective camera utilizes perspective projection and shoots out Rays from a single point called the center of projection and these lines of projection become wider or narrower depending on how short or long the focal length is the Rays will eventually converge back into the center of projection but before they fully converge the rays are intersected by The View plane and these points of intersection corresponds to what we see in a viewport so a short focal length equals a wider field of view resulting in a much more intense perspective Distortion and the more extreme the ability to tell whether an object is near or far away is in contrary longer focal length equals a narrower field of view causing the background objects to appear much closer than they really are and that is called lens compression so if you move your camera really really far back and zoom back in you'll end up with what looks like an orthographic camera but it's still not an orthographic camera why an orthographic camera utilizes parallel projection so it does not have a center of projection but instead shoots out parallel rays due to the parallel lines of projection Parallax is now completely out of the picture very much like a telecentric lens if two objects are the same height no matter how far or near you place them in front of a camera their height will appear the same this is compulsory if you want to create isometric art because a term isometric means equal measure and it's actually a type of view that falls under the orthographic category of graphical projections so all you have to know about isometric is that it's simply defined by the 120 degree angle of the two horizontal axis so what camera settings should you use from all of this explanation there are two things to take away one high lens impression can be an indicator that your subject is really small too orthographic cameras are compulsory if you want to make isometric art so if you like the look that a telephoto lens gives then go with a perspective camera with a focal length above 85 millimeters if you like the look of isometric art or orthographic dioramas in general go with an orthographic camera keep in mind that this is just the list of considerations not some hard and fast rules but let's say we apply every single one of these considerations what could we end up with let's find out so I started the process by sketching a character that is three hits tall or one is the two while keeping in mind to stick with rounded shapes throughout the process once I'm happy with the shape of the character I would then sketch over it so I ended up going with a bean shaped face with big rounded eyes small nose and low ears I also ended up giving her some really oversized clothes I layered a really huge coat over her blouse topping it off with a huge sling bag that is kinda too big for her to store her little potions which I find really cute and some round glasses to really emphasize on the rounded nature of the character now that I'm done with the sketch it's time to sketch out the pose I was pretty loose with this one I just wanted a rough idea of what I had to recreate in 3D so this is what I ended up with and now it's time to bring it over the blender so I ended up going for a head size of 20 centimeters on the left we have a cube that is 20 centimeters in size and this is to act as a guide to make sure that her head maintains in that size for this part of the process I'm really trying to focus on making sure that her head looks like a bean from the front from a three-quarter View and the side now fast forward I'm gonna give her a small nose that way I know where to place the ears now I gotta make sure that it's Round And Chunky Okay cool so now for the eyes I've been doing this a lot lately so instead of immediately cementing on the eye sockets I would instead sculpt in a rough shape of the eyes that way it's a lot easier to manipulate the sculpt so now if I wanted to change the shape or the size of the eyes it wouldn't be that difficult to do now I'm gonna block out the rest of the body by using subdivided cubes I'm going to extrude faces at Edge Loops well this is not a step-by-step tutorial but if you guys want a time lapse just let me know in the comment section down below but anyway just use any shape of mesh that you think is suitable for what you're trying to make one thing I did was to duplicate the head and put it on the side I mean since our character is three heads tall what better way to measure it than to actually use her head now fast forward again now to her hand I ended up going for four fingers because less fingers means more space for chunkiness now it's time to block out the rest of the clothes as you can see I'm starting with different shapes of meshes for the coat I'm starting with the cylinder so yeah start with whatever mesh you think deep for the eyes I went for a regular set of eyes with the sclera Iris and a pupil now being a YouTuber it's tradition to plug your own stuff so be sure to grab tiny eye 1.1 and are now free on my gum road so I just masked and punched in the eye hole and then I just tweaked the size of the pupil which I eventually realized that even with the settings maxed out the pupils weren't dilating enough so I had to tweak the threshold and now our character is high as a cloud as for the props I'm looking for any opportunity I could find to add thickness to them for maximum what's the word trunkiness now I'm just gonna throw in the base colors but what I want to talk about is how I made the fabric textures so there's a Shader note in blender called the magic texture and according to the blender manual it is used to create psychedelic textures but we're not going to use it for that reason if you scrub through the depth it's almost as if they're giving you a variety of fabric textures so we're gonna make use of that for this case I didn't want to do any UV unwrapping so what I did was I set the texture coordinates to object if you apply scale the textures will then be evenly distributed for the cape and bag accessories I used depth number five for her coat and her bag I used depth number eight for this case I'm going to stick with depth number eight bring up the scale plug an effector to the bump node make sure it's connected to height normal to normal bring down the strength of the bump to about 0.5 lower the Distortion and get rid of the creepy cavity so I could call it done but let's have more fun bring in a color ramp and increase the white values and you will notice that it will start shaving off the top of the fabric pattern you could do the same thing with the black values and alter the width of the fabric pattern and now we want some color variation on the top of the fabric pattern so let's bring in a mix note set it the color keep in mind black equals a and white equals B now plug in the color ramp to factor color pick the base color for a and b then slowly increase the brightness value of B and now we have successfully highlighted the top of our fabric pattern but now it's a little bit too clean so let's bring in a nice texture another mix node and another color ramp set our fabric pattern to a and our noise texture to B set the blending mode to multiply now we have the noise texture canceling out some of the fabric pattern replace the old Factor crank up the brightness value of B and you'll see that you now have a nice variety of highlights now let's add some fabric fur add a new material reuse the material you have made click on this icon to make it a new material name it fur throw in a printable hair bsdf and plug in a mixed note into the color socket now an EV under curves make sure you choose strip add a new hair particle change the hair length to about 1 cm change the diameter root to 0.1 the diameter scale to 0.03 these are just the settings that I typically use change the material defer set children to interpolate it go to roughness increase the random value and decrease the size now the first looking a little stiff so under viewport display and render increase the steps to 5. this is like the equivalent of subdivision now just play around with the display amount or the emission number and we're done do the same thing for everything else groom her hair blah blah blah so pretty early on in the process I've already roughly set up the camera as you can see I've placed her below eye level and that's why she looks really small and also I'm using an orthographic camera so that's it this is my final list of considerations and this is how it turned out [Music] thank you guys so much for watching if you enjoyed the video please leave a like um if you want to see more of such videos consider subscribing and also we hit 92 000 followers on Instagram and 1.86 000 subscribers on YouTube so seriously thank you all so much for the support you all have been showing lately watch this video next if you want to see me turn one of your 2D characters into 3D bye guys thank you

Channel: tinynocky

Views: 840,399

Keywords: blender, 2d to 3d, tinynocky, blender 3d, blender 3d character, blender 3.4.1, blender how to make a character, blender how to, how to make a cute 3d character

Id: UVH7dMh3o3M

Length: 17min 45sec (1065 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 31 2023