Ice Breaker Activity: 3D portrait

In the online class, we were asked for this Ice breaker to make a 3D portrait. For this, I decided to make a 3D model in Blender to test the program to see if it will work.

My idea was to make me in my cartoon form but with a space suit. To do a 3D model, you need a reference for your character so it's easy to model from your drawings. For this, I made a drawing of my character with a front view and a side view for easy modeling. 

The pose that this character is doing is called an A pose, this pose is used for modeling characters that you want to animate, the reason being to have less distortion on the body when bending any part of the body, for example, arms, legs. knees, shoulders, etc. I also decided to make my character low poly, to make the process quick, and to give the character an old-style, like old PS (PlayStation) characters.

Because I was very new to the program, I followed a guy named Grant Abbitt that has good videos explaining how to do characters in a simple way.

I first started by placing my drawing in the program and started doing the upper part of the legs.

I went up to the belly of my character to the chest and shoulders.

I continued through the arms and then the head. The reason just half of the model is selected is that I have the model mirrored, making it easy for me to make the character.

I made some cuts in the area of the eyes so I can model them later on. Then I made the hands and the hair of the character. The hands are very difficult to make in 3D, so I decided to make only the thumb and the index finger, the rest were all together.

The last step was to model the legs and the feet so I could start adding color.

I added color and a simple texture to my model to not complicate the work.

I didn't want the character to be this empty background, and I had some time left, I decided to make a small idle animation of him inside a spaceship.

For this, I took a free stock image from Freepik.com and I put my character on an invisible plane that would show the shadow of my character. I added bones to the character to do a smooth animation of him standing to achieve my final product:

In Blender, I got to see all the easy ways to do something good in a small-time. This goes to show how useful the program is when known how to use it. The only problem with this was that it took a long time to render all the high-quality frames, and that's a bad thing. Next time I will try to make the video or the animation simpler so it doesn't take long.

References:

Abbitt, G (2020) Low Poly | Anime Girl | Blender 2.8 [Youtube video] available from: https://youtu.be/E5HnnGcGvmc [accessed on: 11/04/2021]