Flying Mage

Hello, today I am going to run you through the process of how I modeled, textured, and animated my first character.

For this project, I used Blender as my modeling software and animation software, with Substance Painter as my texturing software.

Before I started modeling, the first step I took was to create a reference photo of the character I wanted. I knew that I wanted to create a character that resembled a mage, so with this idea in mind, I scoured the internet for clothes that I believed would fit a mage-like character and complied a reference photo using what I found.

To note, in the final model, I decided to pivot away from the capelet and opted for a shirt instead, as I found that the model looked better without the capelet.

Prior to this project, I had zero experience with character modeling and animation. Mainly of my other projects were focused primarily on hard-surface modeling, so this project had quite the learning curve for me to tackle.

In my journey, one of the most important things I learned was proper topology. I realized that quite early on, from watching a ton of character modeling and rigging tutorials, that if I didn't prepare certain parts of my mesh for deformation--like its joints--the character would not animate well later on. With this mind, I spent lots of my modeling time on ensuring that the elbows, knees, shoulders, and etc all had the sufficient topology to deform correctly.

To prepare my character for texturing, I spent a few hours UV unwrapping it. For me, UV unwrapping is one of the more tedious processes. Yes, Blender and other modeling software can UV unwrap automatically. However, in my experience, more often than not I find that the automatically generated UV maps is not as optimized or organized as I like it.

Thanks to the hefty amount of time I spent UV unwrapping, my texturing process went smoothly and I was able to completely texture my character rather quickly.

After I finished texturing, the next step I took was rigging my character. In Blender, rigging is thankfully quite simple, as the Rigify add-on allowed me to instantly create a human rig for my character; though, I still had to spend some time weight painting nearly every single bone, as Blender's automatic weights were creating many issues as I posed the character.

Before I started animating, the first thing I did was to create a environment for my final scene. Using a few house and environmental meshes I had lying around, I created a simple background for my character to fly around in and set up a basic lightning set using Blender's sun light.

Finally, after modeling, texturing, and creating a environment, I started animating. First, I searched for a reference of another character flying. Specifically, I wanted to base my flying animation on the fantasy show Frieren. So, using a few of show's scenes, I spent a few hours breaking down how the characters in Frieren fly and applied what I learnt to my own character while adding a bit of my own style.