Hello everyone !

Welcome to a...retrospective ? Of my first year on Blender and 3d art in general :) I do this mostly for myself and see which areas I need to improve aswell as see the progress I made so far but if my ramblings can help someone or maybe convince someone to start their 3D journey I might aswell post it !
(And obviously, feel free to contribute in the comments, be it for an insight, a correction or just a funny joke :p)
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Ok, so lots of ground to cover with this first entry, where to begin ?

Obviously, Blender and any other 3D program can be overwhelming, you can easily be bombarded by information from all kinds of sources. I felt like this for a good while, especially since what I did before was just messing around.

Firstly, blocking out said character. I realize today that blocking out each limb/extra bits/fur/etc is essential, I still have a lot to learn on this anatomy wise, proportions, weight, muscles and all that good stuff. My latest model is leagues away from this silly dragon guy but I still feel like I can progress further, especially making characters have very specific bodies and "shapes".

Moving on to the second part, sculpting ! I'll go into more details in later entries because sculpting is a huge step. What I can say for now is that it's easy to get lost trying to make everything as perfect as possible, and obviously it is hard to take a step back and appreciate what you did especially as a beginner. What helped me was the feedback of some close friends or family members when the sculpt was in the early stages to see if the general shape was good. Looking at references here is paramount, even now I catch myself trying to sculpt something without having references. I recommend PureRef for this, it's easy to handle and perfect if you don't have a second monitor. I also learned (slowly) to not obsess over every single tiny detail for the sake of one's sanity.

And now the dreadful part (at least that's how I felt), retopology. Ooooooooh boy…

Retopology is...complicated, not the action itself but HOW it is done. I'll go into further details as I go on but this is where I first considered giving up. There are hundreds (if not thousands) of tutorials, available models for references, courses... I felt overwehlmed. I took it slow, understood why certains loops are the way they are, if the area bends/deforms then you must understand why the vertices are that way. BUT do not, I repeat DO NOT feel bad about having imperfections, your model doesn't have quads only ? A triangle at the bottom of the foot ? It's alright, don't worry about vertex counts or optimizing it. If you want to redo a certain area, (for me it's Always the shoulders or waist/crotch areas) don't go crazy over it.


After the retopology, I feel like there is two choices, you can put some bones in your finished model (for animation/posing) or get some textures on it.

Let's start with the "easier" option, textures.

I though texturing a model was simple, I was an idiot. It is not. By "textures" there is actually a lot more than just colors. Normal, height, roughness maps, they each play a role for a 3D model. Normal map ? Details like scales, "fur" effects or even scars and other tiny thing you couldn't do with the geometry of the model (or shouldn't do !). Roughness ? Makes your model shiny or not (roughness near 0 will look like latex/plastic). There are plenty of tools to make textures, some paid, some free. I would definitely recommend trying a bit of everything, see what tool feels natural to use (and use the frial trials). Blender can give you decent results but it might lag a bit if you are dealing with 2K textures and above. This is where I learned about seams, UV maps and also messing around with the shader editor. For my lizard guy, I used Krita for the colors/patterns, the normal map was done directly in Blender.

Annnnnnd this first entry is already long enough, so I'll go into animation/weight painting in the next one :p

Cheers !

PS : I wanted to post this earlier this month but I was down with the flu :/ (I'm better now though)