Reference: Actions

Ah yes, one of those "holy ****" moments where everything comes to light. Actions have been driving me crazy. It started to seem necessary to have keyframes at the head of every animation/action. But why!? Ah duh! You don't need some of those beginning keyframes if you wanted to blend two actions!!!

Reference: Blender's Action Editor

Some handy info on Blender's Action Editor for animation.

Tutorial: Weight Painting

Some useful info on how to weight paint your character rig when blender's auto weight-assign needs some fixing.

Blender Tip #1, Axis Constraint

Most tools can be constrained to an axis by pressing either the X, Y, or Z key after you've activated a tool. This works for tools like G (grab/move), S (scale), and R (rotate), and there's probably more. One of my favorite uses for this is to be able to flip anything (ie: a group of polygons selected in the UV) exactly. To do so, select your object, press S (scale), X (to constrain to the X axis), then type -1 (to flip).

Reference: Cherry Darling

This is a great example of a how a low poly model with great textures can used to capture the likeness of a film character. Check the source for more.

Manga Blur - Low Poly Model

Very low poly! 100 polys on this character, rigged and animated. This video also includes wireframe mode!

Reference: Lara Croft Wireframe

A comparison of the first model of Lara Croft compared to the one used in current-gen systems.

Workshop

I wanted to detail my progress on modeling my most recent character. I recently found a handful of tutorials on Youtube demonstrating how easy it is to lowpoly model characters in Blender. (Those tutorials can be found here on our Low Poly blog. So I whipped up these front and side drawings (based on an old drawing in a sketchbook) of a toddler sized ninja turtle. And proceeded to model it.



Modeling:





Texturing:





Texturing Details:







Rigging:

The rigging for this character was aided by these tutorials.



Animation:

And finally, the animation. It took a little over a week to get to this point.

Reference: Textures - Shining Force EXA

A good look at how developers of Shining Force EXA have achieved a look that reflects the illustrative style of their character designs.

Tommy Tallian

Check out the work of Tommy Tallian, a fine example of low poly characters created for video games. Also a good way to see how his UV textures have been organized.



Tommy Tallian

Tutorial - Rigging (by bugzilla)

Followup Videos:

Tutorial - Peter's Massive Blender Tutorials (Texturing)

The following is the next chapter in Peter's Blender tutorials and focuses on character rigging, however I don't recommend following it since I had a few problems with it. I'm posting it for reference. I have a better character rigging tutorial coming up in the next post.

Tutorial - Peter's Massive Blender Tutorials (Modeling)

These should get you started.

Getting Started

Welcome to the Low Poly Project blog! This is the sister blog of my Facebook group, meant to organize all tutorials and references that we've accumulated so far. The Facebook group is private but everything on this blog is open. Hope you learn something!