I never thought the day would come where I would actually get comfortable animating characters in 3D.

A long time ago, I attended an “art school” studying media arts and animation. During my studies, I discovered 3D Studio Max, and was introduced to the basics of 3D characters. Just by looking at what was possible, I said to myself, “I could do this for a living…” But I struggled, and eventually I had to leave the school before completing the program.

I have yet to figure out how to make a full time living from my art. But thanks to the power of freely available software such as the wonderful Blender, I started to make some strides in learning how to model and animate… competently. Perhaps a little late thanks to the onslaught of genAI tools that exist now (which I will never use), but since I enjoy the actual creative process as much as the outcome, I don’t mind learning and working to master the work even if just for fun.

Hence I decided to use one of my character designs, a Random Practice Babe I call Hex Runner, and use her as a reference to build a 3D version. The 2D version looks like this:

And the design I settled for (for now) in 3D looks like this:

This is the ‘material preview’ look, not the rendered look, which I only used as a test. I would prefer to make a cel shaded model to better match my normal art style, but this was quick enough to put together for learning. All of the textures are just color sampled from my drawing. I worked the settings to make the metal parts look metal, the leather parts look like it, and the skin to have a bit of subsurface scattering. I wanted to do more especially with the hair. But I didn’t want to let my struggles with texture painting (the next area I want to improve at) get in the way of my focus, which was animation.

And speaking of…

My goal is to use Blender to make more versatile assets that I can use for both 2D and 3D projects. My focus is still on making 2D side-scrolling games, but I don’t have to limit myself. If I can figure out how to improve the look of the model, get a toon shader on it and steadily improve my animation skill, I could make top down or full 3D game projects without having to figure out how to draw a 2D character from so many different angles.

While modeling has a ton of nuance, the animation part is actually pretty comfortable once rigging is done. I don’t know how long it will last but I think I found my new focus for the time being.

For anyone who wants to learn this, I highly recommend looking into courses by Grant Abbitt, either on his YouTube channel or via the site Gamedev.tv. It was Abbitt’s Blender and Rigging course specifically that helped me understand enough to get as far as I did.

My next objective is to make a better character model. I have a base mesh that I built before that I’m kind of eager to turn into a character, and I want to make a visual design I can really feel proud of. That might mean texture painting or figuring out some other method of bringing color to the model (I’ve been looking into various ways of vertex painting that might make things easier).

More to come.

JP