Open source software-Blender-How to create a 3D animated cartoon in bender software

What Will I Learn?

Write here briefly the details of what the user is going to learn in a bullet list.

• You will learn how to make a 3D cartoon in the blender software

Requirements

Write here a bullet list of the requirements for the user in order to follow this tutorial.

• Minimum (basic usage) hardware
  32-bit dual core 2Ghz CPU with SSE2 support.
  2 GB RAM
  24 bits 1280×768 display
  Mouse or trackpad
  OpenGL 2.1 compatible graphics with 512 MB RA
• Blender should run on all systems that support OpenGL 2.1 and above, with recent graphics drivers.

For Windows users, in case of problems try installing the latest drivers from the graphics card manufacturer website (Intel, NVidia or AMD).

• These requirements are valid for Blender 2.77 and later. However, Blender 2.76 and earlier still supports Windows XP and OpenGL 1.4 graphics cards.)

Difficulty

• Intermediate

Tutorial Contents

A full description of the topics of this video tutorial, plus the contents of the tutorial itself.
Before i get into it i just want to point out that this work for is never inear and what you"ll find is that you"ll end up jumpinmg backwards and forwards as well as working on differentaspects concurrently but this wil show generally the order in which you are to proceed when
craeting 3D characters now im going to keep the description of each section quite basic .So i thinmk that this introduction to 3D workflow will be quite useful .

1. The concept
   So in a studio environment the 3d artists will usuallu work from a concept so you want your portfoio to show that you are capable of translating a 2d concept into a 3d character you know one of the most important things or i guess insightful thnigs to have your portfolio is something thatshowcases a transition from a 2d designto a 3d model right I know in the example on the screen I'm working from aphotograph which is a lack of foresight by me but I would recommend working from a character designers concept and the reason for this is because if your design skills aren't as good as a dedicated character designer which is quite often the case then you'reeffectively limiting how good your final 3d result can be so I recommend finding a great design in a similar style to what you're hoping to achieve and then
   that going hacia is if you can work for him it you'll find that generally speaking the artists loved the idea of their work being translated into 3d just don't use it for commercial purposes unless otherwise agreed
   

####2.modeling and sculpting
modeling and sculpting are similar and interchangeable practices but it's useful to understand how to differentiate between the two so what used to happen before digital sculpting became the norm is that everything was modeled in an our own modeling apps such as Maya or blender this type of modeling is when you create a 3d object by selecting and moving vertices edges and faces sometimes referred to as poly modeling or box modeling and for hurt surface models this is fine because it lends itself to a more precise workflow and as such it's still the preferred approach to heard surface modeling today however modeling this web becomes incredibly tedious for organic modeling and doesn't really offer a practical way to add fine details to a model which is where sculpting comes in Oh sculpting is in essence modeling the angle is essentially the same but there's some important differences sculpting uses a brush Barre system so rather than selecting and moving individual vertices you use a brush to manipulate many vertices at the same time now by its very nature this is Ammar artist friendly and intuitive approach to organic modeling and another important difference is that with modeling you work with a relatively low number of polygons whereas in sculpting this number can get very high before later being reduced by
3.Retopology

I'll talk about in a moment in the early days of sculpting and is still a common practice to their what you would do is create your best mesh in your modeling up and then bring it over to a sculpting
up such as ZBrush or Mudbox to add details of the top
and you were approached and the approach I take is to start working directly in ZBrush from scratch so just to recap modeling is very good at heard surface but not the best suited to organic and sculpting is very good at organic but traditionally not best suited to heard surface but being said ZBrush has made some serious advancements in recent years for hard surface modeling making it more than a viable choice my sculpting tool of
choice is ZBrush and my modeling tool of
choice is interchangeable between Maya
and ZBrush
Reeta apology as I mentioned earlier
sculpting involves working with a very
high number of polygons and the problem
with this is is that it's very taxing on
system resources so what we need to do
is to dramatically reduce the number of
polygons used to describe the mesh
through a process known as reach apology
at first this process might seem to
eliminate all the sculpted details
however once we get into the baking
section of this tutorial we'll bring
those details back and for that we're
gonna need to keep hold of the high poly
mesh as well as well as reducing the
number of polygons with rece apology you
also need to consider how best to
arrange the polygons for clean
defamations when we start animating done
correctly reach apology will improve
rigging UV layout map baking and the
performance of your computer
Rita Paula G also improved sculpting
workflow so I will always reach
apologize my characters quite earlier in
the sculpting process my Rita Paula G
tool of choice is 3d car though I do
find myself using Maya more as their
reach apology tools mature simply out of
convenience
UV mapping UV mapping is a process of
mapping out the 3d co-ordinates of your
mesh onto a 2d surface
if you've ever created the blueprint of
a box when you were younger and then cut
it out and folded it together
laying out you v's is the exact opposite
to this so what you do is create the 3d
object and then create the 2d blueprint
from lap once your 3d model is mapped
onto a 2d plan you can then apply 2d
textures to your model
my personal UV mapping tool of choice is
unfold 3d Maya along with Maya's native
UV tools
surfacing once your model has UVs
you can then move on to surfacing which
essentially involves describing the
surface qualities of the material on the
character I will split this section up
into two subcategories baking and
texturing I would also consider shedding
to be part of this category but I will
discuss that later when I talk about
rendering baking baking is primarily the
process of taking the high-resolution
sculpt and the lower resolution reach
apologized mesh and calculate in the
differences between them once a computer
has done this it will then create one or
more 2d Maps which when applied to the
lower resolution mesh
we'll bring back all the high-resolution
details this is normally in the form of
displacement maps normal maps and our
bump maps backing is also capable of
producing maps that specifically help
with procedural texturing which is
fundamental to working in substance
painter my baking tool of choice is
interchangeable between ZBrush and
substance painter texturing texturing is
when you get to have some fun because
you start adding materials to your
character you then manipulate these
materials to start describing things
like the color is it shiny or rough is
it dirty or wet is it skin or cloth or
leather that sort of thing this is
usually done using a combination of
procedural and painted textures my
personal texturing tool of choice is
substance painter and Photoshop
rigging rigging is essentially turning
your static character into a digital
puppet it usually involves creating a
skeleton that sits inside the character
to which the character mesh is bound
once the mesh is bone to the skeleton it
then needs to be weighted which is
essentially the process of making sure
the mesh behaves as it should when the
skeleton is moved around so in other
words behaves as it should when it's
animated or in my case paused a
professional rigger will also create
lots of controls for the animator to
easily manipulate the skeleton how they
require in my case however I don't
really need this level of control so I
only tend to make the most basic rig I
should also say at this point that I
don't always rig my characters but
instead pause them directly in ZBrush
this is only if I intend to create one
pause if I need to make several pauses
it would be worth the extra time to set
up a rig since a rig can be reused my
personal rigging tool of choice is Maya
groom there's two types of her use for
3d does Polly her are realistic style
her I do both and you can see a free
tutorial on how I create Polly her using
the link below however in this tutorial
I'm talking about realistic her which is
so complex it gets a category all of its
on you need to become part 3d technician
per her stylist to produce a good result
rather than trying to control each
individual strand which would obviously
be far too laborious and time-consuming
the her is controlled by a series of
guides and are curves so the first step
is to get your guide stone which can be
done in a few different ways you could
either place and shape them all manually
you could import curves from another app
such as ZBrush are you could convert
Polly her into curves I'll use Paulo
hair as a template on which to draw your
own curves you also need to take care of
things like density tapering clumping
masking variation etc etc grooming also
involves its own special kind of shading
so you can see it's quite a big topic to
digest my personal tool of choice for
grooming is x-gen in Maya animating
stroke pausing so personally I don't
usually animate my characters but I just
wanted to add it in here so beginners
would not worry it fits in the pipeline
what I do however and as will you if
your end goal is a portfolio piece is
simply pause the character since the end
result is just a still image as I've
already mentioned sometimes you'll do
this in ZBrush sometimes you'll do this
in Maya in fact quite often I'll
actually use a little bit of both do you
remember that I said once the character
is bound to the skeleton it needs to be
weighted well doing this properly is one
of the reasons why rigging takes or long
so what I like to do instead is give it
dirty weights and what I mean by this is
that I'll just spend just enough time
waiting it but the inevitable bad
defamations dance hits who long to clean
up in zbrush therefore my personal
pausing tool of choice is ZBrush and our
Maya
rendering rendering is when things start
to look really awesome closely linked
with rendering is lighting and as I
mentioned earlier shared ink so again
I'm gonna split this section up lighting
lighting it as I say is closely tied
with rendering but it's also considered
an art in its own right lighting in 3d
is somewhat the same as you would expect
in the real world in say a photoshoot so
for example you might use a key a fill
and a rim light in order to shape your
subject and direct the composition and
mood of the shot however in the real
world natural light is often taken for
granted
you can't take natural light for granted
in 3d but tools such as global
illumination and image based lighting
really helped speed up achieving
believable results shedding shedding is
when you start to see the final look of
your materials it's when you take all
your 2d maps from baking and texturing
and plug them into your model
essentially be it a game engine or a
production renderer
however shedding doesn't necessarily
rely on 2d Maps and can be done
procedurally within your rendering app
this allows for a lot of control over
the final look
okay so rendering takes everything that
we've discussed so far the modeling the
grooming the texturing the animating the
lighting the shedding it takes all of
that and calculates the color of each
individual pixel on the screen and it's
worth noting that an important aspect of
offline rendering is passes which allows
you to render many different elements
separately so that they can still be
tweets individually beyond the rendering
process which I'll talk about in the
next section
my personal tool of choice is render man
for Maya
compositing so the last step is
compositing which consists of pulling
all those passes into a compositing app
and arranging them into a final image
passes can refer to different objects
such as a character or a car or a
building etc our passes can refer to
several layers of the same object such
as color specular subsurface scattering
depth mapping et cetera compositing
might also mean bringing in something
that you haven't rendered such as a map
painting and this process generally
involves a lot of color grading in order
to unify all the separate elements into
the final piece and my personal tool of
choice for compositing is Photoshop okay
guys I hope you found this tutorial
useful

---

Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

---