Hello and welcome to part 4 of the this character modeling tutorial series for Blender 2.6!
This character modeling tutorial series is on modeling a cartoon, ground hog character in Blender 2.6. In this tutorial David Ward takes you through the complete process of creating a cartoon character model, including all the steps, hotkeys, tools and more. A few topics and tools covered include: box modeling, mesh editing, proportional editing tool, mirror modifier, extrude, particle fur, and much more.
What is covered
In part 04 of this character modeling tutorial for Blender 2.61, we finish the rigging for the ground hog by using the Rigify add-on, including making a few custom adjustments to the generated rig. After rigging we move on to create a small turn-around scene to pose the ground hog character on.
Here is a preview of the final result from this section of our cartoon, groundhog character modeling tutorial series:
This tutorial should be under number 4: not 3. I guesse that is why the final result picture is not showing up and the web page never finishes loading up?
we’re having some technical difficulties with the site at the moment, please stand by
Another excellent tutorial, espcially using Rigify.
The site looks OK again to me. When I got here it was like a text list with some pics but now it looks its old self. While it might say Part 3 at one point it says Part 4 on the Video and also on the top border in Firefox so no probs there.
Thanks again
Andy
It’s more than a year later and the problem still hasn’t been fixed.
Can one of the people at Blender Cookie please make a blender game engine tutorial on how to make a First Person Shooter in blender. Make it good to please. Everything from realistic guns, to movement, to shooting, to collision damage, to blood, to reactions, to level creation, to lighting, to AI, and pretty much everything that goes into making a First Person Shooter, please make this series and you will most likely gain thousands of more viewers towards the sight. Think about it. Thanks in advance.
Have you checked out David Ward’s series on the game engine? http://cgcookie.com/blender/2010/05/13/game-enginecharacter-part-1/
Great result David! “Magnifique”, like we use to say in french…
Another really good tutorial. Thanks for your work.
so great, love your tutorials.
keep it up
I havent finished part 2 yet.., I need to get a move on
Hiya David. Sorry to post on part 4 but I expect you look at these comments more now
Basically on part two I went to sculpting and my Grab brush has just completely disappeared. I pressed the shortcut G and nothing happened so I looked at the list and there is just no grab brush there.
Any ideas?
I tried using a separate build of blender that I have on my laptop as well and there’s no grab brush there either.
sometimes they’ll disappear for no obvious reason; you can still create a new one tho, just create a new brush (by clicking the “+” below the big thumbnail, then go down to “tool” and change it to the grab tool
You may have deleted it on accident with the “X” underneath the brush display panel on the left. I’ve done that before xP
Another great tutorial David. With you and Jonathan, I just grab a cup of coffee and watch in admiration as the tutorial unfolds. Don’t always actually try to reproduce what you show us – just make a mental note. Then maybe in a month or two I will be trying something and say to myself “Hey David did that” and go back a follow the tutorial again. (“Texturing a Troll” is one I commonly use/follow.)
I also like the relaxed style – you run in to a problem that needs solving and you tell us. Just like when I model something – I too get a “what happened there?” moment though I probably get more than you. In a strange way, it gives me more confidence and determination.
TY for all the enjoyment.
gryff
Very helpfull!
Thanks Dave. I always look you up first for animation solutions. Nice job here; the original Rigify feature tut out there was a little overly complicated if I remember aright. I’m very glad to have this as a reference to replace it, especially since you demonstrated the exact troubles that always plague me. lol By the way, if you want to spherify a plane, you have to go into top mode and select only the outer verts, then To Sphere. Then the next inner loop and so on… I like the Groundhog! Nice work, and thank you for the showing me about bias! I guess it is like the Sharpen Node. Handy…Peace
Great Tutorial
thx
Great Job David! Nice tutorial!
WOW, very quick results. Thanks David!!!
Two Random Questions:
1) can yu bake fur/hair to a low poly model? (if I wanted to use the character in a game but want the hair detail)
2) if I wanted to put clothes on him would I make it a separate object or model it into the object during the modeling phase?
Jeremy
Please help me!! I do not work Ctrl+Alt+S.
Another great tutorial. I had some difficulties with the part eyeballs/bones: my groundog’s eyeballs were each time projected at the level of his toes, but I manage to correct it after, I don’t really know how.
Apart of that, everything is explained pretty clearly. You are a excellent teacher Mr. Ward, thank you again.
Fantastic tutorial series Dave! I had a blast and learned a lot.
thanks mr. Ward, i sure enjoy these
character series. all the finished user
submits are AMAZING, cheers
Great tutorial as always David.
You covered a lot of ground,(hog) with this one.
Thanks again…
I don’t think I can complete Part 4 until I have more rigging under my built. It’s kicking my butt!
Jeremy
I hear ya. I thought I had the finger axis aligned. Applied the rigify only to find out the scaling on the fingers bent the fingers unnaturally. Re-tried with the axis aligned another way. Same problem. I sort of gave up. Trying to find my cgmasters rigging DVD to just bite the bullet and manually rig it myself. Gotta learn at some point.
Just completed watching the whole set of four(4) videos. Very well done, comprehensive, entertaining, I learned a lot watching how you work. Your commentary and humor are helpful. Thank you for making the effort.
Paul
Excellent I have learned more about box modeling, texture mapping and so on the list is endless from this series than a years worth of book reading. And as always there was a few rib ticklers as well i.e the man boob part had me chuckling.
You have a great way of teaching may it long continue.
Hello there,
After i did the thing at 33:00, my eyes are still doing so weird as they did before. Does anybody know why?
Bradley
Hmmm, I’m having the same trouble with the eye, I’ll post what my problem was once I have it figured out. Other than that I’m amazed at this series!!! Nice Work!!
Yeah found it!!
.
I did the couple of things that David did before he paused the recording just like David did. Then I parented the eyes to the forhead-bone, but it didn’t work. When i didn’t do that couple of things before the pausing and just parented the eyes to the forhead-bone, it worked just fine!
I hope I helped couple of people here
Bradley
I may have had the same problem, What fixed my problem was selecting my eyeball mesh in object mode then shift-selecting the corresponding eyeball bone and hitting Control-P, and choosing to Object.
I did this one little thing after following the tut and it works just like it should. Hope this helps!
Brilliant Tutorial Dave, very instructive. I think it’s really important that people know to resize the rigify rig in EDIT mode, NOT Object mode. Also that it will save much blood, sweat and tears to zero all the rotation, scales and positions. (Alt-G to reset character at origin, Ctrl-A to apply scaling and rotation) before doing any rigging. Man has that lesson cost me time….
Hello there,
If I parent the eyes to the head bone, my eyes moved for the most part and it just looks weird. (I use the eyeballs of the “creating an Eyeball” tutorial)
Does anybody know what I’m doing wrong?
Bradley
Loved this tutorial! Learned a lot from it, great tips you showed us. Have you ever tried 3D printing?
This tutorial has been absolutely amazing so far, until about 33 minutes into this video… Now I have no idea what you did, what things you clicked et cetera, and I’m just stumped. I connect the things you say to connect and they still float about like mad things. This part of the tutorial was just a mess :S.
But besides that part it’s been AWESOME.
Anyone have ANY solution?
Solved it. Having the eyeballs set as armatures and not objects was causing the deformation for me. Well at least that was the last thing I changed and then it started working.
so I want to kind of restate my last comment, as it was posted in a moment of frustration. It has a negative tone to it because of this, but I really do love this tutorial. A lot!
I came into this tutorial having never done anything except maybe a little box modeling (and failing at that). From this I have learned to model, texture, use particles to create fur and much more stuff that’s no doubt ingrained into my mind to be brought up only when needed and not just recalled.
This has been an excellent tutorial with only one hiccup in it. I have thoroughly enjoyed it, sir
.
Hi David.
Your tutorials is fucking cool, I really like it.
cheers!
When I hit user preferences as you do in Part Four Ground Hog, I get a windows window saying Blender has stopped working. Need to get that armature rig.
Bill
Thankyou for the tut there is some very valuable information inside, I did have a problem with particles going wild once i animate it, i have my armature at the top of the stack, can you offer any help?
is there a V-ray for blender? coz almost every 3D package has it support, but not with blender,=(
There sure is! http://bdancer.github.com/
For some reason, the model moves, but doesn’t coincide with the armature.
when i generate rig it only generates on thing around the groundhogs head can someone tell me why it didn’t generate everything
Hi there,
Have you modified the other bones in some way other than simply moving, rotating and scaling them?
I didn’t do anything like that intentionally.
i changed the origin of the bones because it wasn’t in the center and was stuffing up my x-mirror, could that have done it?
Mr Ward your character modeling tutorials are terrific, there are a lot of tricks I have learned from them already. There are two things I just cant get around though with my latest projects.
Number one is, I tried to make a knight chess piece using the mirror modifier for making the head. The trouble starts when I get to the stand of the chess piece. If I try to join the head to it the mirror modifier turns off, and I cant extrude the stand from the bottom of the neck because it is so misshapen. My next problem is that I wanted to make a fairly cartoon style gecko. I found a way to make his body really nice, although I haven’t got around to extruding his legs yet. My trouble is mostly to do with his head, especially around the eyes. What I am going for is to have a rim around his eye that pops out a little bit. and then has a crease where it joins the head. I also wanted to have a slight bulge just behind this crease to give the effect of a large inner eye socket. Every time I try to do this though, my rims always end up looking funky like the lizard had two pipes under his skin pushing his rims out. There are a lot of things about these rims that don’t look right but I wouldn’t know how to describe them, except that even for a cartoon lizard they just don’t look natural. Even if you can’t help me with the rim problem, it would be nice to know how to shape his head and how to texture his skin to have bumps or scales, and how to give him a color scheme assuming that one day I will have this project completed.
Daaaaaaave I have 2 odd problems! D:
1. The hair particles are darkened on the stomach area like its fur is wet?
2. Though the whole Groundhog was mirror modified (Exact same on each side), the UV island with the main body, wasn’t mirrored? The left side is huge and stretched out and the other is small?
I’ve no idea of what I need to do xD
Hey David, i am having some bugs with the teeth of my groundhog. They are not following the head the proper way. I’ve already checked the weight and everything but the are not following the head. What should I do? Please help>
Fun tutorial!
I noticed that after modeling with the mirror modifier for such a long time, I almost thought it sufficed to brush just the right side of my mouth. Too bad it does you cannot apply a mirror modifier in edit mode and real life.
Your very GOOD