aye, i've been cooking in blender for a bit these past days. this is a journal talking about my experience creating the model you see here -> https://sheezy.art/lambda20xx/gallery/placeholder-guy-render-1

here are some thumbnails for quick viewing:

The actual part where I talk about the process

so first things first, I want to share two videos from a channel named Joey Carlino that immensely helped me through modeling and rigging my character. Seriously, I highly recommend his videos (shared below) as well as his other ones if you're interested in doing what I just did. I was just looking for char modeling tutorials and pretty much struck peak gold.

• Character modeling for beginners
• Rigging for beginners

There is also his video where it's basically an assorted picks of Blender tips which while general I still found helpful and interesting, which I'll link below:

• 50 Blender tips that will make your parents love you again (yes, that is the actual title)

Oh also he did make an "Blenders for absolute beginners" video. I haven't really watched it that much but considering the quality of his other stuff, I think it's worth sharing anyways

• Getting started - Blender for complete beginners

small tibit: I'm actually not a complete beginner at Blender. I first started using the program in 2020 and 2021, and it's been on and off since then up until now when I basically decided to just really sit down and get better at Blender actively rather than passively. IDK how much of my prior experience, abiet small, impacted my ability to go through the tutorials (esp the rigging one, i defos did rigging before in 2020) since I was already exposed to some of the concepts. I probably should get that out of the way because your experience will most definitely vary from mine. Spend as much time as you need on a specific concept or video.

With that out of the way, I want to share some of my additional thoughts:

I found it helpful to do the modeling tutorial twice, one with the character in the video and the other one with one of my own characters. First time I pretty much gave up halfway through since I was starting to lose motivation on his character and I felt like I understand what the concepts he's trying to teach are, and I just started the tutorial again with my own character and that went much more smoothly. I bring this up because it's usually a good idea to practice and do something more than once as opposed to following the tutorial once and then forgetting it. What I did here was try to follow it exactly as it was in the video and then doing it again with my own stuff to make sure what I'm trying to learn sticks, which it seemed to do. I feel like applying the lessons you learn from the tutorial in your own way and situation helps you remember it better than just following a tutorial to a T and trying to not deviate from it.

When making 2D -> 3D character refs, do not worry about making a pristine ref. A rough ref is more than enough as long as you are able to get the basic shapes and details down. Look at this:

The refs I was working with are the definition of "slapped together", and I managed to get by fine since I was able to translate the basic shapes and fill in the blanks myself. Also, I don't really bother with top-down refs so I just winged the hands. (they turned out alright in the end btw). I'll have to keep making more characters before I know for sure what ref style works the best for me, but yeah.

There was a comment on the rigging video worth sharing. Here it is (important part bolded):

Great tutorial... you know something I've learned in my Blender journey is it always takes you a huge amount of time to learn do anything the first time, but the 2nd time you do it takes about half as much time, and the 3rd time you do it take about half as much time over the 2nd. So for anyone watching this thinking it takes ~sooo~ long to rig a character (or do anything in Blender), just do it a few times in a row and I'm sure you'll be amazed how quickly you can do this whole process once you learned the basics.

When actually watching the videos, I found that I preferred that I have FreeTube and Blender maximized, and I would watch a section from the video, pause, tab back into Blender, and then do what I just watched. It beats having it picture in pictured and occasionally fucking up my video progress by hitting a numpad shortcut meant for Blender with FreeTube focused, slowing me down (that's part of the reason why i lowkey got frustrated when going through the modeling tutorial first).

Yeahg that's basically all I gotta say. Have some WIP screenshots I shared elsewhere:

one more thing, geometry nodes shader editor is fun as hell.

That's all, hopefully I make more models and get far more better at Blender because I still got some ways to go :P