Make Low Poly Characters in Blender!

you may be struggling with making them up by the characters well today I'm gonna help you by the end of today I'll walk you through all the steps you need to make a little poly female character in South London let's go or the step one we can actually start off with the face so to do this all I'm going to do is I'm going to delete everything so a DX to do everything goes to front view and I'm gonna go shift a go image reference then I'm just gonna go find this image which I will leave in the link down below cool then I can just move it over to line it up select over here change the opacity down to 0.25 just to make it a little see-through cool let's draw our actors back take this here rotate it and then reset it 180 and then just kind of get it centered on the z-axis so it's kind of still in the middle cool next go shift a add in a mesh Cube cool ready for Adam you should have a panel it's called Auto mirror so go edit ultimate ultimate if it's not enabled go to edit preferences add-ons install it right now cool all this does is custom half and then add the mirror modifier so what we're going to do is we're just going to get the proportions for now so let's take this down here to the middle uh like Alan drag what's up and then let's take this back take us forward we kind of just need something to work with right now just getting the head shape let's add edge Loop in the side view bring this in to kind of round out the face and you can also take this Edge forward do something over here kind of round out the face a bit cool now we also kind of need to defiled shawl like that and then later we're gonna need to extrude the neck down so let's make space for that as well as you can see I'm just trying to get the head shape let me go head slightly longer that's workable you can also bevelish just to get an extra Edge Loop um and I think her hair is adding quite a bit of volume that's not actually there uh our head's a bit too round on the side should be a bit flatter in my opinion maybe we can make something like that or what I like to do sometimes and just go nav tool and then just go down the middle like this which adds a triangle which some people get triggered by but who cares let's do there change join it and then it goes back like that it makes it look nicer who cares about triangles cool let's go okay for enough tool let's go make a hole for the neck to extrude it down let's go select here J and then what I'm actually going to do instead of having these two edges gonna X dissolve edges I'm going to go okay drag that back drag that back and we could even just join these two together instead which creates an end gone probably not great doesn't create angon one two three four five yes it does so let's do that and then we have a another and gone didn't do much wait one two three four yeah that works there we go now we don't have end gone anymore you guys cool that's just for the jaw now that goes back I can also go back also complete that back and now we have space for the neck so what we're gonna have to do though is merge this together and then we can take this down for the neck so the reason I'm either head first is because now that we have this we can start using this for the proportions in my last video I went through this but basically all you need to know about this is that you can take your head go shift a add a cube and then we go to object mode all those object properties viewport display in front no no in front okay someone in front and then wire so basically what this does let's do another one in front we may reset other three sales Red and then with this we use this to get the proportions for the rest of the character so I'm going to go change this is uh seven obviously not horizontal we want it vertical so we get her heart so I'm going to change the Z to negative one you can see that's how high she's going to talk she's gonna be all right cool so you can have different proportions throughout this uh but what I'm going to work off of is roughly we will have like slightly higher than the middle so this will be like the bottom of the body uh and then lucky of the shoulders here and then you have the feet obviously go down to here so like there give the knee go there I'm not that big a little small so like a knee there I think half and then shoulder um it'll be roughly about three heads long okay cool so let's go shift a at a cube and start working on the body so first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to drag this up to the shoulders drag that down to the bottom okay and then drag that forward just like in in the rough proportions like that cool and the guinea is asked to just work like quickly just to kind of block out the proportions of your character cool so let me get actually get rid of these overlays and then we have this face so what I'm going to do is going to go Ultima again to edit Automotive cool there is to write the shoulder up a bit and then what I'm going to do is I actually want to have let's go in oh she's let's take these up a bit and then what I'm gonna do is go Ctrl R add you down the side and then G suas to Edge slide select again G twice to Edge slide and they can maybe also eight slots inwards there we go that actually looks pretty decent cool so you can see here now we have six vertices down here for the um legs and then we also have six vertices up here to turn to the arm which I guess is not that optimal but we could probably use some sort of like triangle or something uh to kind of finagle that to get a the armhole cool and then my favorite way to make a neck is just by taking this vertices going Ctrl B to Bevel press V for vertex and there we go then just enough to hold shift do I get the middle there and then there so now we have the right size for Nick I'm going to use the loop tools so a rifle select so your body have to right click uh so new tools Circle there we go uh get cool so we take the neck uh delete these faces showing the face to the body and then Loop tools Bridge another useful function of new tools so you can start shaping this neck a bit as well sometimes I like just hop into sculpt mode just to kind of start moving points around a bit easier than I would in edit mode um just helps change proportions around pretty quickly yeah cool that is working so what I'm going to do is add an edge of the middle and scale it down a bit just so we can get like a nice curve through it uh there help us out shaping stuff more bring that down so it's not have a super harsh Edge well I can also get rid of this head shape now don't really need it let's maybe chewing that jaw out of it cool so uh easy way to kind of get the Shoulder to work is we could just take this down probably is not going to eat because we have far vertices uh because the problem is either we take this in here which kind of messes up the chest or we don't have six vertices for our arm another option is we can just take this edge up here to get this kind of six edges Circle it for the edge loop with the edge Loop um kind of like get it back to be there and it kind of works just gives us more topology up here we could even bring that down bring that out uh kind of like a type of uh what's called I don't really like that maybe get it back to Apples before in there cool that works gonna bring that up for the kind of like it's a pelvis bone like little tab sub sort of bridge there okay and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to select these three these three phases extruded uh before extreme down turn off clipping then I'm going to extrude it down and then there I'm gonna go Loop tools Circle right goes down okay actually I think a nicer way to do this is I usually prefer if uh make like a gap between the legs so it's a way you can do that if we take all of these vertices up then we can extrude that in like that and then that creates the pelvis so then you have to drag that in just to create that shape and F like that and then we bevel this and then so we drag that back add another Edge Loop so we can retain those six vertices it can maybe Loop tools Circle and then scale it up it just gives more control over the shape of the body if we do it this way so there we go that's for like the far okay wait uh I think I've messed up my proportions let's see wait this is one three one two three four five six yeah that's about eight one okay I'm talking about it okay cool let's go make this slightly shorter than Maybe you can reshape everything with scope mode we can even use proportion editing if you want yes there we go screw that down it's going to be even smaller for the angle then this is for the calf that's going to be a lot bigger okay so big problem with the the bars stars go forward like that try to organize the shape of the body have a proper curve in it helps to use reference and kind of see how all the curves work I think she's learning leaning too far forward okay I think that knees too long so making characters is mainly a like a bunch of experimentation see what is going to work and what it's gonna fail so stop answering our proportions something much completely flop something much then it work out um I'm not really happy with this but maybe it will work I think I'll move to the face so there yeah I think the legs might be too short now when I add the feet in beats always quite hard to model uh but we can get it done so just extrude it forward and then you can see it gets out that so I'm going to select the first control r or you can just go shift H to hide everything else then we can just work on the shape of the foot without having to worry about the rest of it so there we make it slightly longer and then there sometimes being helpful just to grab like reference of like like The Souls of shoes or something like that like the the insides of it just to kind of see what shape the foot would be um they do make it the inside of a bit too thin and also you might want to angle your feet outwards a bit uh that quite helps quite a bit cool cool that kind of works let's fill in this hole and unhide everything else and then we can actually shape this to look more like a foot let me bring this in a bit and okay then shape that let's bring this down also sometimes like adding in like a inwards piece like that just to even add some more curve to it and then also you can bring down the twos sometimes like that and then even bring down the foot quite a bit cool that actually quite nice so we go proportional editing at the top G just drag it down like that and then maybe let's bring this this down a bit as well kind of light it up a bit more the middle and yeah I'm actually quite happy with that now that the feet are in cool and then the way that I like to do for adding in the arms to get the right proportions is let's go add in the cursor click it over here shift a go add Circle okay oh this will rotate 90 scale this up so basically I only have it roughly about three heads long so to do this uh I line it up here so then one two and then three cool let's make it about that long Okay so this encounters the uh like the full arm and the hand so how we do this is we take like a shoulder we bring it down a pose is the best t-pose is too far up and then two all the way down is too far down especially when you're bringing your arms up and down it messes up quite a bit so we take this we get dark hand and halfway from that um sometimes helps to add some sort of like curve into it because like if you bring your arms out the side having like fully Street's not that natural relax it a bit you can kind of see that your upper arm will go down a bit like this so your upper arm will go down then your forearm will kind of like go over and then hand kind of thing and then your heart your arms also kind of go back a bit so there and then there and hat cool so let's just go take this this face that we had made earlier see if we get this to work extrude it out take it down to the wrist like that and then edge up bring this forward and there we go we already have some sort of like curve in it maybe scale that down bring this up so this will be for like the shoulder uh not sure about that but we can mess around with everything cool and then I usually like to add like one edge up in the middle for the bicep and then one for the forearm so the forearm kind of be scaled up and then bring that in so from the top your bar your Trill forearm will be less like curved um and from the front you'll be have more of the actual that curving in the shape and then in the bicep in the front it's not curved that much you can kind of keep it a bit straighter and then we bring like a Artful triceps slightly and then out for the Boss episode like that cool what you get us to do if you want is like a model in some sort of like shoulder you could do that like here bring this up you can even like model in with triangles if you want to uh I'm just going to bring these in I'm going to bring that down I'm not 100 sure about this whole part here but uh we'll see a neck mop is slightly too long as well not sure just feels slightly off maybe bring it outside the I guess that kind of works something else I like to do sometimes is just add in like a kind of like collarbone kind of look like that doesn't help that now because we have like a truck like a traps look right now yeah that looks quite nice cool then we have to do the thing it's adding more triangles again so people get triggered cool so let me add the kind of like natural curve there to the arm and then we extrude the handout and then fingers like that so that's way too thin so let's go take this G to move it out take that g to move it out and we don't really want this because we have the all the details over here and here and not the vertices down the middle so what I'm actually going to do is undo this and I'm going to take these uh delete this one take this rotate it like a bat and then we're going to take these these are like that these like that and then just to delete edges so now I have this Edge and this Edge go Loop tools Bridge so that we can kind of get it to be flatter yeah so now if we drag these out you can see we also have an edge loop on the top in the middle it's going to add that extra detail and you could also kind of move these vertices around to accommodate for that so it's just that incremental rotating uh just to make it the transition not too harsh cool so there we extrude this down for the fingers uh we can fill that in and then just go J to join them and then like round it out like your fingers would be uh maybe I should scale this up it's kind of like very thin and then we can take that back uh something to help with the arms is just add more edges over here uh you can add more detail in and then also later when you bend the arm you'll get a lot better the affirmations on it cool you can even add another one on that side if you really want to go all out but for now that's fun it just helps because then I can solidify in the kind of elbow placement uh and kind of get that like change of like angle I'm just going to bring this bicep down it's kind of like hangs down a bit okay so fingers uh you could either just have it like two edges like that or if you want more you can just bevel it and get your three I'm gonna leave it on two because simplified um cool there and then one way to do the thumb this is pull that out and then this is going to be the base for the thumb so we take that scale it down and then bring this up so it's not like super rectangular because the thumb is more square-ish but this was round but you know what I mean not size extrude that out you can take that there what I like doing is dragging the thumb down like that so kind of like hangs over the Gap like that cool and then we have about there scale it down cool I think the fingers are way too thick like there cool as you can see the hands or the arms are looking a bit too long so I don't even stick with my guard that much let me bring that in a bit cool see proportion wires uh light it up there there I don't know if that's exactly middle but oh well and then maybe change the size of this hand a bit cool so now you can literally take this and use this to change everything with the like proportions and everything now that you have a decent Bass with its apology um and you should get some decent deformations out of this anything else I'll say to improve it a bit is the same thing here just add in an extra Edge Loop maybe two if you want to go Black full art and then prove it and you could even do the same thing up here uh just have like another Edge you just to kind of improve the uh The Edge flow a bit and then later when you're doing deformations it will improve just by having all of that extra like vertices to work with uh while doing it so yeah so if you just have any issues you can just kind of start adding air tubes around it which should help of it I hope this video was helpful and I hope you like the style of it let me know what I can do next to help you out with blender and go click over here if you'll learn how to make really nice low poly faces cell blender cheers

Channel: Thomas Potter

Views: 11,518

Keywords: Blender, blender tutorial, b3d, 3D modeling, Character design, Game development, Low poly, Female, Character creation, Basemesh, Topology, Workflow, Proportions, Sculpting, 3D, low poly

Id: dl7geQJgxI8

Length: 23min 6sec (1386 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 04 2023