[FINAL, FINAL] CLASS ANNOUNCEMENT #7 (Apr 11, 2018): Thanks to those of you who have responded to the Questionnaire. The feedback is extremely helpful. If you haven't responded yet and you participated in the class - or even if you didn't participate - please fill that out and I will gift you 20 Breath of the Wild screenshots from my Switch.
[FINAL] CLASS ANNOUNCEMENT #6 (Apr 9, 2018): We've reached the end of the homework extension period and this class officially comes to end. What a month! It's been a thrill to see each of you forge your characters, learn new things, share tips with each other, and offer critiques along the way.
This thread will be open indefinitely but it's officially at the end of it's "class lifespan" meaning I won't be able to commit weekly time to it anymore and I will unpin it from the forum topics list. I'll pop in occasionally if I see activity but you all are more than welcome to keep working on their characters here if you wish!
UPDATE: Closing post on page 44 and XP has been added to each participating account.
CLASS ANNOUNCEMENT #5 (Mar 28, 2018): Week 4's stream is archived and available via the Past Events button on the Live Event page. Also a reminder that I'm extending the 'deadline' of this month and will be keeping this thread alive through the end of the first week in April. Hopefully that gives you all a bit more time to get your characters done!
CLASS ANNOUNCEMENT #4 (Mar 26, 2018): Week 3, done! Thanks to everyone who submitted by Sunday. I'm quite impressed by the neutralization and retoplogy work I've seen. It's a lot of work and I can see that effort in the WIPs and especially completed submissions.
Week 4 - the final week - dives into adding color to our model, primarily in the form of creating textures. Check out this week's breakdown a little further down in this description and see you tomorrow at the Live Event!
CLASS ANNOUNCEMENT #3 (Mar 19, 2018): Week 2 is accomplished and I'm finally caught up on submissions! Thanks to everyone who submitted by Sunday. We have some impressive character concept sculpts underway. In fact, I have yet to bestow a grade lower than an A this week.
Week 3 continues our 3-week character building production. Specifically we're going to look at pursuing an animation friendly version of our character - both how and why we would do this. See you tomorrow at the Live Event! Don't forget to RSVP.
CLASS ANNOUNCEMENT #2 (Mar 12, 2018): Week 1 is done! Thanks to everyone who submitted by Sunday. It's been a lot of fun seeing your caricature work and concept art choices.
Week 2 begins the 3-week process of building a character based on the concepts we choose. Don't forget to RSVP to the Live Event tomorrow - See you then!
CLASS ANNOUNCEMENT #1 (Mar 5, 2018): Class is in session! Today officially begins the BC2-1803 class. Please check the syllabus below for Week 1's focus and assignments. Begin watching the pre-recorded courses if you haven't already and begin looking for a cool, stylized character design for creating in 3D this month. The first Live Event is tomorrow at 2pm EST - SEE YOU THERE! 😎
Welcome to the CGCookie Class: Creating Stylized Characters with Blender! This class is designed to teach you everything you need to know about building stylized 3D characters. If you’re diligent in watching all content and hitting homework deadlines, by the end you will have a modeled and textured stylized character! It’s an intermediate-to-advanced class which means you’ll do best by having some experience with Blender and 3D modeling before committing to this class.
This is the second "Class" format where Citizen members are invited to focus together on a particular topic/skill for a month. Participation looks like this:
WHEN? The class will take place from March 5th through March 31st
Abstract: Stylization is any deviation from realism. Thus it’s a broad spectrum from slight liberty away from reality to extreme abstraction of reality. This week we're going to sift through various examples of stylized characters, noting their qualities, and categorizing a spectrum of stylization.
Goal of the Week: Train your eye and mind to stylize your perception. Practice simplifying and exaggerating reality. Loosen up your sculpting approach (gestural sculpting).
Pre-recorded course to watch: Art of Sculpting: Caricature Chapter
Week 1 Live Event (Already happened and archived!)
Homework:
Abstract: Story plays a big part in stylization. Not necessarily ‘narrative’ but background, personality, and purpose. The success of a character is strengthened by its developmental arc. The best artists create characters that are more than the sum of its pixels; more than the sum of its brush strokes and polygons; more than its final render.
Goal of the Week: Develop a story for your character; one that can fuel your creative workflow for the rest of the month. Then channel that story into the first stage of sculpting.
Pre-recorded courses to watch:
Week 2 Live Event (Don't forget to RSVP)
Homework:
Abstract: At this point a decision needs to be made about our character sculptures: A) Leave it as a sculpture or B) optimize it for ‘production’. Leaving it as a sculpture means it’s a static sculpture that can be painted, rendered, or 3D printed but not animated. Optimizing it for production means you turn your sculpture into a model that’s easiest to work with up to and including animation. If you opt for optimization, this week is mostly a technical and problem-solving task. We need to both retopologize our mesh and also neutralize it if the sculpt is posed.
Goal of the Week: Understand the concept of “production-friendly” and practice retopology.
Pre-recorded courses to watch:
Week 3 Live Event (Don't forget to RSVP)
Homework:
Abstract: Like Dorothy, our characters have so far lived in a black and white world. This week we’re leaving Kansas and adding color. There’s many methods for creating our character texture(s) including hand-painting, baking maps that accent the painting process (great for the less painterly character artists), as well as photo-sourcing. There's also a couple different formats: Vertex Colors and UV/Textures.
Goal of the Week: Get comfortable with painting textures.
Pre-recorded courses to watch:
Week 4 Live Event (Don't forget to RSVP)
Homework:
This thread is reserved for CG Cookie Citizens that are participating in the "Creating Stylized Characters with Blender" class. Its purpose is to serve as central communication for all participating Citizens (excluding Hobby plan Citizens) to ask me and each other questions and to post homework. As the instructor of the class, I will be monitoring this thread on a daily basis (especially Mon-Thurs) throughout the month of March to review homework and answer questions.
Free members are welcome to observe the thread but please respect that communication is reserved for Citizens.
Cool statistics! I want to add some conclusions, but first a disclaimer: I didn't participate in january's class, I only take a quick glance to some submissions.
With that say, this are my conclusions from the data gathered:
Our little renno work that was supposed to start mid-February didn't start March second. It was only supposed to last two weeks, and turned into just over 4. It was pretty miserable. One of the biggest shockers in all of it for me, is that .... apparently, when you get work done on your house in Germany, its common for the workers to make giant mess and not clean anything up. I made if halfway through the bookshelf (everything is covered in concrete dust) just today. Trying to get back to a normal, which includes no longer living out of boxes! We finally got storage/wardrobes stuffs and started unpacking boxes so we wouldn't have to move it out so the floor could be tiled. AHH! Anyhow, however the future classes go, I would love to randomly, or methodically "try" again. As I have a #3 jewel protector ... and my junk is a little more secure. =)
mmalhomsi just hold on, with the color palette having similiar issues, somehow hard to find the same color in Rendered view.
Anyway I started with Vertex Paint and not with the Texture Paint as Kent demonstrated, basically I should just put circle spots on the little giraffe but somehow they are blurred at their side, instead of being sharp as should be on the reference. But will check yet why
I spend the last few days preparing my character for texturing, plus I rigged her because I have a lot of free time haha! (If I sound pleased about this, it's only because my programmers made this my default tone of writing! I'm actually quite depressed!)
I made a quick coloring with materials, as placeholders, and I was wondering what do you guys and gals think? Should I go with these colors? Maybe someone with knowledge in color theory can give me some advice:
The render and the material view of her face look so different >_>
I plan to do the textures in Substance Painter, at least the clothes. Not so sure about how to deal with the skin, maybe I can make a simple subsurface material in Substance... I need to learn how to make my own materials urgently!
Getting the right colors sounds easy but it's quite draining! Maybe you just need a little rest!
Excellent work. The deformations look great. It appears from her expression that she’s exhaling, getting ready for battle.
Homework Submission - Week 4
All right, I think I'm satisfied with where I've got things.
I went with the non-shader style of texturing because it suits the character, which is based on a 2D cartoon-style concept to begin with. I understand now what everyone says about how Blender's painting functionality could be better. Not so much with the paint tools themselves - I suppose they're fine enough - but file-handling, referencing, linking, all of that is somewhat convoluted and unforgiving, and I imagine it could be done better.
After texturing the character, I modeled his typical equipment and textured it as well. And this is where I ran into a problem. Indy's jacket is supposed to drape over the items around his waist, but I failed to account for that when I sculpted and retopologized the jacket. Because of the shrinkwrap modifier I couldn't edit either object without severely distorting the shrinkwrapped mesh. It took a little while, but the way I worked it out was by blocking in a very simple mesh to surround the jacket, and then used it like a lattice, giving the original sculpt and retopo'd jacket a mesh-deform modifier and binding both of them to it. In that way I was able to edit both objects at the same time by editing the lattice. I'm glad I learned this utility, but it might have ultimately had little point, since at the very end of everything I ended up applying all the modifiers, decimating the mesh, and deleting all the sculpts anyway.
And before I forget, my ax texture, one of the very first exercises I did at CGC. I had looked at all of the other axes people had been submitting and decided to go with an old, very rusty and neglected blade because I hadn't seen anyone else take that approach. Sad to say I was rather unambitious with the handle though, but I did try to make it look like old wood:
Homework Submission Week 1
Yes, week 1, I know I'm a bit late. However, I just got my hands on a graphic tablet and I had to test it out, so I thought I might just do the first assignment. Sculpting with a tablet is so much more fun than with a mouse and if anyone is thinking about getting one, I highly recommend it.
I decided to go with Sylvester Stallone. Now when I look at it he seems to have a baby face a bit, but I hope it resembles him enough.
Homework submission: Week 4
One hour before midnight but I managed to finish the professor by the end of the month. :-) I fixed a bunch of things, most notably his eyes and eyebrows, and the coat pockets. I lost some detail in the retopoed head, so I baked a normal map to reclaim them. And I finally got to sewing buttons on his lab coat. No more duct tape solutions, yay!
And here is the axe I painted I while ago:
He looks AMAZING! I thought you used simulated hair for the mustache, but in a closer look, is it hand drawn?!
Ok, took me long enough but I made the retopo of the head. That should be the trickiest part of my character beside hands and well... toes. I still have some back thoughts about the nose. What do you say?
I think the shape of the nose is great for the character. A couple improvements could be made to the topology.
1. The nose (and maybe large parts of the sculpt as a whole; is this with subsurf?) has far more geometry than it needs to accomplish the shape.
2. You got most of the important edge loops, which is great. It would be good to have one more loop that circumscribes the nose and mouth.
3. There is a six pointed pole on the center line right between the eyes, This is not an ideal placement since it obstructs the center loop and will potentially experience significant deformation during animation (if that's in the plan).
Great job overall though, especially if retopo is a newer endeavor for you.
Well, we are mostly cleaned and unpacked now. I had planned to focus on one of my other characters but, I'm going to go with this one, since I already have a good blockout-base done, I should be able to get a decent sculpt, and figure out some texturing stuffs this week, thanks to the extension that is. Here's a snap from a character-storming session. His name is Moorkata. He's a sidekick of the character I wanted to do but meh, life. 
Just for kicks. I plan to sculpt him next after I figure out what I am doing with textures and stuffs with Moorkata. 
Homework Assignment Week 4:
Well it looked pretty good in ZBrush, but to get the resolution I needed for decent vertex painting, I had to subd x 8. This warped the geometry even with creases so when I backed it down to the base subd for export, the textures were crooked. :( Thus I've included a screencap from Blender using a decimated version, and then an even more decimated version at Sketchfab. I'll have to figure out some other method when painting my main figure, maybe just leave in ZBrush.
Also tried painting in 3D Coat which was pretty fun but was running into too many little issues and was pressed for time. Thanks for viewing!
Demon Ax by lhumungus on Sketchfab
Catching up on some of the streams and ... so I love the idea of a short-film boot-camp or something like that. Would be pretty awesome. 3 minutes of magic? Maybe several members of Team-CG could instruct various aspects with live-streams, have some mild overlap with each other, for an overall active-class/course that culminates just before Christmas with a shortfilm? Blood, Sweat, and Fears? I am in. I would think one could argue that someone should know just about anything of everything on the list I have. I imagine it to be a good progression for the path I am trying to take. But I would think overall, the goal would be to lay the foundational basics-for, and then have some supplemental "advanced this and that." Possibly with both, utilizing content that already exists on the site, worked into a "syllabus," and making "homework" out of some of it. The hardest aspect, I would imagine, would be ... to get several full teams- with no "drop-outs," and to have some people take on aspects/roles they might not really want to?
The "winning team" gets a CG citizen yearly -20% bonus? =D
Anyhow, Kent, please take at least 6 months to formulate a "short-film" objective class. haha
Well, as this class draws to a close. I have to admit that I have fallen by the wayside....
Tried to keep up, but a bit too advanced for me at this time. There was moments where I felt that it was just too beyond me, so took a days break and then back to it refreshed, But, I'm still going to continue to try and get the work completed, might take me a while, but ill get there...
Learned soo much over the month by doing homework and by trying to watch and apply the prerecorded material and really want to get to the end of the journey with my character.
been an absolute pleasure being part of it this month, and loved watching everyone grow and learn together :)