Modeling a 3D Spider Character in Blender

hi it's antiy in this video I would like to inspire you to try making 3D art in a ton shaded art style it's pretty easy to achieve this style I think anyone can do it if they give it a shot so let's get into it some time ago I saw this cool spider model made by Sergey macr I really like the model so I wanted to make my own version but dun shaded so I jumped into blender and started working on the body and the head I drew a silhouette in illustrator to help Guide Me In blender I then align the spider body to the silhouette as soon as I model something I always make a tune outline immediately after tune outline is really easy to make just duplicate your mesh make it slightly bigger flip the normals on it and give it a black material on the material check the back face calling check box remember that the outline is just 3D geometry like any other so you can edit and stylize it in any way you want next I started making the head of the spider as you can see the head is just a cube with subdivision surface modifier after that I made the mandibles hopefully you can see that every body part of this spider is really easy model to make 90% of the time I just make a subdivided Cube and go from there the mendibles are not done at this stage I'll go back and work on them some more a bit later in the meantime I started working on the first version of the legs however this is another thing that I'll change later and simplify a little bit my first idea was to make make these small leg segments that are fused to the head like Sergey head on his version so I made a few cylinders and using the snapping feature inside blender I distributed it along the head I also added the tune outline now let's make the eyes we'll tweak the eyes a bit later as well and try to make them more appealing but for now let's just make a rough first version the shape of the eyes is a simple rounded disc which I plac flush against the outline of the head I gave it a temporary red material for the contrast the outline of the eyes is regular geometry with a black material so nothing fancy there the way I made it is I duplicated the bottommost edge of the eyes then I converted it into a curve object I gave the curve some thickness I then made a bunch more eyes and placed them around the face the snapping feature inside blender came in handy once again but once all of that was done I added the tune outline to these new eyes and I was ready to move to the next step it's time to work on the legs I first made a blockout the point of the blockout is just to give me an initial idea of how I wish to distribute them so this step is temporary I'm using a curve object again with some thickness it creates a tube that's really easy to work with having the vertices that I can easily move around remember that you can control the thickness on all the vers individually now I started working on the final version of the foot the leg segments that's touching the ground I duplicated one of the blockout elements and used it as a starting point this is an easy object to model it's a fancy banana shape with a Groove in the middle the only challenge here is to get a nice Edge flow once I was done with it I moved it into place and duplicated it for the other legs and yes I forgot to outline it first but it's okay I'll go back to it in a second here I'm tweaking these legs that will eventually be deleted since I wish to duplicate an outline foot so I don't have to outline all three of them but at least this will serve as a more refined block out at this point I decided that I don't like how the eyes look I wanted a more interesting silhouette for the two front eyes something a bit more menacing a few tweaks later I added the outline back to these new eyes and this step was done I went back to working on the legs it's time to make a tune outline for them you know the drill duplicate make slightly larger flip the normals add a black material with a back face calling check boox enabled TW it like any other 3D mesh till you're happy with the result the little wedge on the legs needs a different approach the same thing we did for the eyes duplicate The Edge that needs an outline convert it into a curve object give the curve some thickness and a black material take it until all the visual artifacts are no longer noticeable the thing about this AR style is that unfortunately it can never look 100% perfect but you can get pretty close to Perfection just keep inspecting your outline from every angle you can and make sure it looks good I went back to the mandibles I needed another pair the smaller ones on the inside I also wanted to give them some more visual interest I played around with the shape and curved it down a bit it also needed some thickness I finalized the new mandibles with the tune outline the final piece of the puzzle are the leg segments that connect the foot to the body they needed to be tweaked a bit as well as outlined lucky for me they are the simplest object to work on just a simple tube it was a matter of readjusting some vertices and making sure they sit flush against the outline of other geometry and with these edits my spider was finally modeled outlined and ready for UV unwrapping and texturing the cool thing about this Arch style is that the model looks good even with no textures on it and it's pretty easy to work on as well all the techniques here are something that anyone can do give my video a like And subscribe so we can move on to UV unwrapping and finish up this project next thing I did was to unwrap the UVS and this was also the first version of the UV unwrap since I didn't know how I was going to make the textures I didn't know if there were any UVS that I could overlap so I decided to just separate all the UV Islands work on my texture and then later optimize the UV unrap to make a more efficient use of the space and then of course readjust the texture I won't bore you with this step shown in detail since there's nothing special about what I'm doing doing it's the same old work we've all done a million times by now select an edge where you want your seam to be right click Mark seam then select everything hit U and choose unw wrap rinse and repeat for all the objects then make sure that all the UV Islands have the same texal density by selecting them and choosing average Island scale then pack the islands the best you can since this is a temporary UV unwrap until we figure out what kind of texture we want once the texture is completed we'll go back and optimize the UVS like I said earlier after the UV unwrap I jumped into illustrator and started painting the texture if you are interested in how I'm previewing my texture inside blender I'll talk about it a little bit later I'll also tell you how to import your UV layout from blender to illustrator as well for the texture I added the base color first for the body and the eyes as you can see eyes started out red later I changed my mind since I thought yellow would pop a little bit more everything I'm doing in illustrator is beginner level I'm using the pen tool to draw a shape then I give that shape a color sometimes I modify the shape with the arrow tool and that's it if you know how to use the pen tool inside Photoshop you know how to use it in illustrator then I found a skull image on Google and I traced over it in illustrator I tweaked it a bit so it's not identical to the reference this is the skull that will end up on the body of the spider I thought it would make the spider look more dangerous and venomous but I also wanted to move away from the reference image as much as possible the reference image is all spiky and detailed I wanted to round it off a bit and make it fit my cartoony aesthetic while still sending a message that the spider means business after I drew the skull I started playing around with the shading masking feature inside illustrator came in handy The Mask tool works the same way in illustrator as it does in autoshop it's just that the masks are vector shapes so they offer a ton of flexibility once I was done with the skull I started shading other parts of the body as you can probably notice all of these shading shapes can be duplicated and moved to other UV islands and when you can duplicate something from one UV Island to another that basically means that you can simply overlap these UV Islands inside of blender that way you can save up on texture space and potentially make your texture smaller at this point in my texturing process I was starting to realize just that but in my defense I did say earlier that I didn't know how I wanted to texture the spider ahead of time I wanted to experiment first and optimize the UV layout later and as you can see I'm back in a blender trying to do just that optimize the UV layout and this was the first attempt a little bit later I'll change the layout again for me 3D work is always like this I try something and later I change my mind multiple times until I achieve my final result and yes this UV layout rework is messing up my texture but that's an easy fix in a vector program like illustrator Vector art is endlessly resalable and readjustable without ever losing quality that's another reason I like texturing an illustrator and speaking of Illustrator here we are back in there readjusting my texture to fit the new UV layout distribution you can see now how much more simple this texture is all of those leg and teeth segments are overlapped on top of one another so I just need one shape in illustrator to shade all of them at once and then I remember that the spider is symmetrical I can delete one side and mirror it over with a mirror modifier that way I only need half of my skull element so I can get the texture to be even smaller but just as sharp as before so now I'm readjusting my UV layout for the third time this project all creative work is iterative like this if I knew ahead of time what I wanted to do I would finish projects much faster but I don't I have to experiment and I have to keep changing my mind like this all the time is the nature of the beast but it's okay now I have a tiny texture that has the same texal density as my original 2K texture and the thing is there's a way to optimize this UV layout even further if I had the patience for it I could cut more Islands in half so that more of these shapes are mirrored over since pretty much all of them are symmet metrical but I've hit the limit of my motivation for this project I wanted to be done with it so I can move on to something else at this point I knew I was nearing the finish line so it was just a matter of tweaking this texture a little bit more to align everything correctly there were a few more things I did off camera and that's mainly to make a super simple rig and animate a walk cycle for the model I needed it for the intro sequence of the YouTube video but anyways at this point we're pretty much done with our tune sh 3D spider let's take a look at the final result not bad personally I'm pretty happy with how it turned out this could easily be a game character kind of looks like a bug type Pokémon if you ask me so now I'll show you the thing that I promised earlier how to export your UV layout from blender to your drawing app and how to link your drawing app with blender so you get an instant feedback while texturing to export a wireframe PNG of your UV layout in blend go to your UV editor then in the UV drop- down menu choose export UV layout tweak the export settings your liking save the PNG to a folder drag and drop it to your drawing app of choice to link your drawing app and blender such that you can preview your Textures in real time you need two things first thing you need is a free add-on for blender called Auto reload do a Google search on auto reload blender add-on then go to the GitHub page page for the add-on download the zip then inside of blender go to edit preferences go to your add-ons Tab and click install navigate to your zip and choose it blender should then install the add-on if you twirl open the add-on you can set how often it will refresh your textures I like to set mine to 0.1 the add-on lives on top of the blender's interface you can twirl it open and check the timer feature that feature will then start refreshing your texture in the increments of 0.1 seconds as we've said earlier the second piece of the puzzle is an action I recorded in illustrator this setion is very simple I recorded myself exporting my artwork to a folder of my choosing and then I saved the action I gave it a shortcut of F12 which means that every time I press F12 illustrator will export my art to a folder without bringing up any dialogue boxes if it finds art in that folder with the same name it will override it without warning which is exactly what I want and with these two things I can open both blender and illustrator at the same time I can then work on my texture in illustrator when I want to preview it in blender I hit F12 to activate my export action the action then saves my art then Auto reloading blender will refresh the texture and update appears in blender's viewport so yeah this is pretty easy and convenient way to texture my 3D art I hope this video was helpful and inspiring and I hope I see you around in my next video take care

Channel: Entikai

Views: 186,825

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Id: -aBoCd-Wj4I

Length: 13min 37sec (817 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 13 2024