Blender Rambling | How I Made Amber 3D

Just a quick little BTS of the process. It took me 3 weeks to make this model, mainly because I was learning things as I went. I should clarify that this is not my first run in blender. I’ve attempted 3D for a few years on and off. I’ve done the Donut Gauntlet in the past and have attempted to model many times, but this timeI think things have started to click.

Phase One: Planning

Of course, I started with a reference. I wasn't as thorough as I probably should have been. I just wanted to get the general proportions and map out the "loops" since I planned to poly-model her rather than sculpt her. At this point I just wasn't super comfortable with sculpting yet. Though that would change later on.

Phase two: Modeling

I started with the head since I really wanted to make sure I got her face down. I followed Dikko’s tutorials on modeling primarily. I was getting a little worried at this point since I was primarily hoping to pull off a more 2D look, so really had to trust the process in this phase and hope it looked good once I got to the texturing phase because she was lookin’ really…buggy at this point…

After painstakingly modeling the head, I did not have it in my heart to poly-model the body, and I wanted to speed things up. So I did take the time to sharpen my sculpting ability to make the body. So I can just retopologize it. When it came to the hands and feet, I did recycle some open-source assets given to me since I really couldn’t be bothered I’m not gonna lie, but everything else from the head to the ankles is all me lol.

As for the hair, I used Nurbs Paths to make locks of hair and followed the ref I drew. Yan Sculpts has a pretty helpful tutorial on that!

Honestly the fact that the "Amber Stare" translated in 3D was a bit of a morale boost. So we move on.

Phase Three: Texturing

As I mentioned before, my main ghoal was to have a more psuedo 2D look. All of the shadows on the models are either painted in by hand or baked in. No actual light engine affects the model. I just wanted to make sure she looked good with only flat colors. I’m still working on her texture so this might not be the final product. There’s a cool addon that came out that makes the texture painting process more intuitive!

Phase Four: Rigging

Pain.

Naturally, this is where the most time went. There’s not much to say about this portion. It’s just very tedious. I used Auto-Rig Pro for this one, but honestly I don’t recommend it. It’s a lot more intuitive than Rigify, but there are a lot of limitations I’ve found, so moving forward I’m probably just going to stick with Rigify.

Luckily, she survived the rigging process and she was ready for animation!

Conclusion

Working in 3D was always something that I wanted to tackle and impliment in my art but it was always so daunting to me, but now I feel a lot more confident and I feel like I’ve opened up a lot of new possibilities! Especially for animation! I don’t think I’ll be distributing my models any time soon. Mainly because these models are sorta optimized for my own workflow and I hold them near and dear. But expect a lot more animations from me! in the future! Big shout out to Poxygon and Absoflak for helping me out! Check out their work as well!

To Be Continued…