Making a Low Poly Modular Monster in Blender

so this guy here is called Barry and he's my modular monster I've tried to make him so you can change up things like the head and different parts of the armor and stuff like that and I'm going to talk you through the process of how I did this now this is just an overview so if you want a more detailed approach of how to learn these different techniques then do check out my courses Link in the description and of course if you've got any questions then do comment below I read all the comments so I'm interested in what your thoughts are so let's take a look at how I made Barry so as always I start off by bringing in some reference images and you can see it's quite a basic sketch it's just the outline there's nothing special going on there's no colors or anything like that it really does help a great deal to have a reference image to go by it just speeds the whole process up so it's a good idea if you can to draw something out even if it is a basic sketch like this you can see also that I've got two side images one with an arm and one without I felt the arm was quite big and bulky so I thought it might be useful to have an extra image there so I could see the body behind the arm once the references are in place then I get a cube and you can see it's symmetrical so I obviously add a mirror modifier to it and then just start adding topology to the cube with Loop cuts and tracing around the outline of the shape from the reference images now I'm keeping it really simple to start off with I can add a bit of detail later on but you want to block out your shapes to start with so maybe just a couple of loop cuts on each object and also I've split the body into lots of separate objects the idea is to make it modular so I can change out the objects when I want to so it's important to overlap each of these objects so it doesn't have a gap and it does make the modeling fairly simple you just have all these separate objects which aren't connected so it's quite easy to just build up the shapes it's important to make sure you're moving around your object when you're modeling you can see here that I have to jump to side view and it's obviously the wrong shape so make sure you jump from front view to side view regularly and move around the object to make sure it's working together things are overlapping and it looks right now currently the character has a kind of squat position that's not the best way to start off when rigging so I do later on just lift the legs up slightly and make him stand more upright you can also see here in the trunk that I'm adding a few extra polygons to get the shape of a bum but nothing too complicated you can probably also see that I don't worry too much about topology I just use the knife tool cut into it and then tidy it up later with low poly objects you don't have to worry too much but you do have to think a bit about how it's going to deform when it's rigged so making sure you have a reasonable amount of topology if you're going to have any bends in your mesh for the most part the bends are actually where I split apart two objects so the knee in this case is actually where the two objects meet so a lot of the time you don't need the extra topology when you're modeling in this way now for the lower leg you can see that for the most part I'm just taking an object duplicating it and then reshaping it but occasionally that just doesn't work and I have to start again with a new mesh and in this case it's a cylinder so occasionally if you find that it's a bit too messy you can just start that shape again and rebuild it hopefully you can get an idea of how I'm building this with wherever there's a joint that's where I start a new object the idea behind that is if I create one foot I can just swap it out with another foot nice and easily because it's not joined to the other objects it did work in principle but there's a few things that I need to work through in order to make it work as I want to and you can kind of see by the end result it is roughly working but I would have liked to have had more shapes for the arms and legs and so forth I ended up having just more armor and different heads for the most part so here I'm just blocking out the head again and it's important to say that once again that you make sure you block out everything first make sure it's in the right position because if I start adding detail to these shapes and then I need to resize them it can be a little bit awkward if they've got too many polygons on them you can also see that I jump around the shape quite a lot so I was working on the head for a moment and now I'm back to the calf it's kind of tricky when you're working on a particular part of the model to make sure that it's exactly how you want it and it's only when you move away and come back to that part of the model that you realize it's slightly out of alignment or something like that and here on the trunk you can see why it's important to have those two sketches one with the armor one without because I wouldn't have been able to see where that trunk position was with the arm in the way now when building the arm here I decided to put in a kind of shoulder joint this is the only one where I actually add a joint in I felt it would work better with the animation to actually have a joint that his arm rotates around so moving on to the arm here again still trying to keep it nice and low poly nice and simple I do add a little bit of shape as you can see there to the kind of tricep and bicep still nice and low poly so nice and chunky easy to modify and nice and simple and you can also see I'm spending a fair bit of time getting the shape right it's quite important to get that initial shape right with this really low poly form before adding any details this process is also true if you're going to make a base shape for sculpting you've got to make sure that everything's in the right position and it follows this format very closely it's just by the end you'll join all the objects together and you'll start sculpting on them now when I started working on creating the hands I thought that I needed to have the character in more of an a pose or closer to a t-pose in fact because I didn't want any problems rigging so his hands are quite close to his thighs there I didn't want any weight painting issues so I moved the hands out and basically went away from the reference image at this point when modeling the hands it's obviously best to create one finger and then duplicate that across try not to make all your fingers the same size lots of people seem to do that but fingers are not the same size they're also not the same thickness so do think about that as well when creating your hands for the style I kept the hands really chunky so the fingers are all just Cubes but I probably could have rounded them out just a touch it all just depends on what sort of style you're going for really so at this point the shape of the body is almost there just making a few last adjustments so it's at this point that I can go in and start at least tidying up the topology and maybe adding a bit of detail where I need to you can see on the chest I decide to bulk it out a bit and round it out a little bit I'm also making sure that the shapes overlap in an effective way I felt his trunk area looked like he was wearing nappies at one point so I wanted to change that around and make it a little bit more effective like some sort of loincloth or something like that so although this is kind of the detail section I still am changing the shape very slightly in some places it's at this point where I thought about the position and thought about the rigging so I decided to make the character stand more upright that's a little bit easier when it comes to rigging the legs if they're splayed out to the sides like they were it might be difficult when animating and setting up the ik or inverse kinematics in the leg it was at this point that I thought about the overlap of the lower leg and the thigh so I decided to put a kind of knee on the top of the lower leg I could have just put a ball joint in like I did with the shoulder but I felt like this was going to work a bit better I think it did in the end but it took a bit of fiddling about with the actual model itself to get it in the right place so I'm thinking ahead a bit to how it's going to animate and how it's going to deform when the leg bends what I'm trying to avoid is a big gap showing when the leg bends so that's why you'd either have a ball in there or this technique I'm using here which is to put a kneecap on the lower leg so at this point I want to work on the face now and decide on what sort of character it's going to really look like I tend to not think too much when I'm modeling I literally just get the knife tool cut in pull out shapes and then start almost sculpting the shape around if you do that sort of technique then you do have to make sure that you keep it low poly don't add too many polygons in there otherwise it gets really messy really quickly and don't be afraid to delete faces and delete polygons when it is getting a bit messy I decided to go for a sort of orc character to start off with and I create lots of heads later on some ways it's a bit like sketching on your model and you just pull things apart move them about see what looks good and see what doesn't I suppose I probably wouldn't recommend this technique that I'm using here of just sketching out on your model to beginners because it can take a little bit of experience in terms of how to sort out the topology at the end having said that it is quite fun and it's quite creative you just pull things out and use the knife tool to cut into your model it works quite well you just have to be a bit careful not to add too much like I keep saying keep it really simple really basic and don't be afraid of removing complete sections or if let's say the top of the head wasn't working just delete it and start again that's absolutely fine but you do kind of need the skills in order to fill the shapes in and make them work again once you've deleted them so there is a little bit of skill and complexity to that type of sketching I suppose and you can see here that I'm returning back to the hand so I wasn't completely happy with the shape that it was and I like to give it a little bit of a natural look before rigging on the upper arms I want to be careful again that there's no gap between the upper arm and lower arm when it deforms so I do go in and make sure I'm happy with the shape this is where I start thinking a little bit more about the anatomy I'm not being super precise here of course but I am thinking about how the shoulder deforms and joins it at the upper arm and things like that and once again I do that kind of kneecap thing that I did below but this time with an elbow so it kind of sticks out and overlaps nicely with the upper arm again you'll notice I'm not worried too much about the topology I'm just trying to get the right shape first and if I feel I need to I go in and tidy up the topology later on but you can generally see how this kind of shape tidy up process is working here like the hands have that sort of curve so I create that here and again a little bit of understanding of anatomy and understanding what a hand looks like really helps here it's amazing how many times I see beginners models and their fingers are all the same size and it's all really flat try and make your hands a bit more natural you can also see how I'm jumping around the model quite a lot as I see things that are out I think oh I'll go and sort that out and then I noticed something else somewhere else on the model and that's quite important I would say to have that process of jumping around and changing things as you see them because the longer you work on something the harder it is to see how it's not working so it's good to jump to another part of the model and then back to that part you can also see my process of just cutting into the shape to add a little bit of detail and complexity and not worrying too much about the topology at this point but occasionally you can see there I just tidy up a few points by joining them together and that's just a edge slide making sure that my merge vertices is on it's funny looking back at the video I can really see some of the issues but I slowly get to those as I notice them but it's sort of screaming out to me as I look at it now but it really is often the case that whilst you're working on the model you don't notice those problems that's why it's really good to take a break between sessions so you can come back to your model with fresh eyes it's really good from a health point of view as well to not sit at the computer for too long so do make sure you're doing that if you are working on these sort of projects now if I'm being honest I think the upper body or the upper bit of the Torso is the weakest part of this model I tried at this point to give it sort of a big huge neck muscle look but it didn't quite work with the low poly shape and it's sort of working but not quite the chest just looks slightly out of place it looks like a huge chunk of rock rather than any sculpted muscles what I was trying to avoid is adding too much detail because you can see it's fairly low detail across the model so adding more polygons would have made it look a little bit unusual in one area so at this point I'm fairly happy with the shape and I start thinking about rigging I'm using the rigify rig here if you do want to get into rigging an animation I would strongly recommend looking into rigify and trying to understand it there's a really great course from toddle at CG dive I'll put a link in the description to that that's where I actually learned rigify myself and he does a really great job of explaining things and of course create your own rigs but it just gets really complicated the only problem I did find with rigify was then going from blender to Unity or any game engine in fact it's really hard to convert your rig and you'll need special add-ons for that I'm going to do another video on this sort of process talking about the ins and outs of this type of thing but to cut a long story short I found that actually the auto rig Pro paid for add-on is the best approach in my opinion if you're wanting to get your models from blender into Unity or unreal it's just that bit easier and it's not too expensive for what it is there are other options which I'll talk about again in another video now the one limitation of rigify you can see that I just deleted all the face bones there you have to be a bit careful when you're deleting aspects of the mesh you can see there's an extra bone just inside here that I'm trying to get and delete because if you keep that in you'll get errors when trying to create your rig and that kind of is the only downfall to rigify it is extremely complicated for a beginner and it's really hard work to try and get to grips with all the complexities in order to make your rigs and again that's why I would recommend autorig Pro it does make things a lot simpler so in this section you can see I'm just lining up my skeleton the most awkward bit about this is definitely the fingers but the best tool for that is to snap to volume it will snap to the middle of the finger or the middle of any mesh that you are over the top of I've sped this bit up 10 times just because it's a little bit tedious Watching Me Snap My Fingers but you do have all your mesh in the right position then you can press this special button of create rig and you can see the type of rig it creates here touch 2 complex to talk about in this tutorial but you generally can just parent your mesh to this rig in the normal way now so in other words just select all your mesh objects and then select the rig last and parent them using automatic weights but I'm actually doing it a slightly different way here I'm selecting each individual mesh and parenting them to an individual bone on the rig the idea being that I don't need to do any weight painting because the mesh will deform exactly with that one bone also for the kind of modularity if I wanted to change out the hand I could change out all those hand pieces and parent them to their precise bone a better example is probably the head because that has One Singular bone so I can create lots of heads and then just attach them to that One Singular bone it is a little bit of a long process when it comes to the fingers and actually it's probably just easier to select all those objects around the hand and parent them together using the automatic weight system so you can see here that I've got my rig ready and I'm just sorting it out so I only have the bits that I want to work with to rigify kind of works in layers and you can have certain layers selected or not and at this point it's just a case of testing my rig and seeing if it works I did miss a couple of bits and I used automatic weights for those so the chest and the Torso that kind of made sense because it had a bit more topology and a few more bones surrounding it so obviously the next stage is animation I haven't recorded that whole process that's quite long and I'll probably do again more videos on that later on and separate them out but as a quick overview I use the action editor and that creates singular actions in this case the big attack and you can see it's a very basic animation then there's the attack small which is just a singular arm swiping across the body and I've selected the rig now so you can see the actual keyframes a bit there nice and simple again and you can also see I've got lots of these extra actions that's because I left the record button on whilst moving a cube by accident but they're easy to delete here's my death animation again very basic just Falls over and Splats on the ground and then there's the other animations which I'll show you as well the biggest problem I had with this was rigify and unity so these do work in unity but only with the generic rig so when you try and get them to work with a humanoid rig it doesn't because the parenting is all a bit weird and again you can get add-ons to sort that out which I'll talk about in other tutorials Auto rig Pro however doesn't seem to have that issue it's got special buttons that you can press to say make this rig ready for Unity or make it ready for unreal which is really quite nice so at this point with everything working that's when I can go back and start making different heads different pieces of armor and so on as you can see the final results are just here and the great thing is when I create a new head or something like that and parents it to that bone it all works perfectly so hopefully you enjoyed this overview if you've got any questions do comment below if there's any particular Parts you want to see of the process in a bit more detail then do let me know and I'll try and do a tutorial on those and as always thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Grant Abbitt

Views: 32,538

Keywords: understand, texture, paint, learn, blender, tutorials, 3d, art, graphics, game, material, guide, easy, painting, how to, gamedev, low poly character blender, low poly blender, low poly, unity characters, unreal characters, animation, animating characters, modelling characters, blender tutorial, blender 3

Id: jNfjtu9pb5M

Length: 18min 22sec (1102 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 17 2023