My First Blender Project Pt1

I’m now working on some 3D for work so I thought this would be a great chance for a crash course in Blender. I’m working with Blender 2.49 mainly, both because I haven’t got around to trying out 2.5 yet and also because I can’t get 2.5 to work on my Mac at work for various reasons.

So, here are some WIP images of what I’ve been building, early modeling screen caps and some early textured renders, testing out the rig.

The character design came from the client, I’m not sure where the original design came from but I didn’t have a lot of reference for him, so I tried to model him as closely as possible. I can’t show any of the animation tests I’ve done so far, since it’s for a commercial but I’ll post them in due time. He is fully rigged (that was a learning experience, my first character rig in Blender) Basically, I’ve gone through the whole process of building, UV mapping and body and face rigging from scratch (including the wings, 6 limbs altogether!), using any tips, tutorials or videos I could find on the web. Believe me, there are plenty. A few frustrating hours here and there trying to figure certain things out, or losing stuff I’d done, mainly through my own inexperience. But all in all I’m really pleased with how it’s turning out so far. Here’s my current, and pretty much finished model and rig, with final UV texture.

So all I need to figure out now is animation, lighting and rendering. Piece of cake!