First Human Character

Alrighty, so I already know this entry is going to take a couple days, and possibly cause me a few headaches, but it should be fun. I'm going to create a human-like character in Blender 2.5 starting with an orthographic sketch, and moving on to a double-view mirror-editing technique. If you haven't already seen it go to my last entry about My Blender Beginner Resources and see Peter's Massive Blender Tutorial for an example.


The Orthographic Sketch
An orthographic sketch makes things easier to shape. In order to model in 3D, you need at least two views, and it is best to choose two important views - front and side. To start I drew an orthographic view. In order to properly create an orthographic view, you need to pretend that your character is facing you inside of a glass box. If the subject is facing you and you turn your box to the right (clockwise from the top), your character would now be facing left. This is an important concept to learn! Here is my example below. You may understand clearer from the sketch:

character faces front & left

If the figure on the right was facing the other way, this would be wrong!

Also, you may notice that I drew parallel lines and labeled them on the far right. This is so that both drawing are drawn on the same height scale. The head must be the same height, the torso must line up, the legs, arms and feet must be the same height in both drawings!  Seeing as your 3D model will be a composite of both views, they need to share the same heights.

Well, this is it for now, more to come. I'll talk about setting up Blender to begin modeling next!