Venom’s Lab 2, Character creation

By Pablo Vazquez

3 years have passed since the previous Venom’s Lab!, a lot changed, Blender went from the old interface on 2.49 to a shiny feature-full 2.63.

This DVD is focused on creating a character from scratch, although some features from the previous DVD will be used, Blender has renewed its mesh system completely so we will take advantage of that and re-visit all these techniques, the Hair & Fur system, new UV tools, new shortcuts, new interface, and much more. Below you can find a list of the topics to cover.

Goal is: Next time you want to create a character, you know exactly what it takes to make it!

Watch Teaser Trailer:

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 Pablo has released a cool mini tutorial!

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Venom’s Lab! 2 is a bilingual DVD, audio in both English and Español

This DVD includes:

• 1080p Full HD Videos (1920×1080)
• 2 Audio tracks, default is English, 2nd track is Spanish.
• All the resources used, including characters, textures, and teaser trailer files.
• Software: Blender 2.63a, VLC video player

By Purchasing this DVD you support the Blender Foundation projects.

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DVD Content

• • 01. Concept

    You have to start somewhere, we will kickoff with thinking about the character we want to do, get references and plan ahead with some concept art.

• • 02. Modeling

    Face, eyes, body, everything modeled from scratch using poly-by-poly, respecting edgeloops and taking advantages of the tools we have in Blender’s new mesh system, BMesh.

• • 03. Sculpt

    Sculpting is pretty common in character creation pipeline nowadays, we will use it to fix proportions in our character, and sculpt some details we can bake into textures later, using new tools present in Blender 2.6x such as masking.

• • 04. Fur

    Koro is pretty much entirely covered by fur, it has 4 different particles systems, each one with a different purpose and its own settings, vertex groups to control influence, and textures.
    Do not worry, sounds more complicated than it actually is 🙂

• • 05. Texturing

    UV Mapping is extremely important when texturing complex organic shapes such as characters, Blender is known to have one of the best UV editors in the market, we will prove that! Using some of the new tools included in 2.6x.

• • 06. Introduction to Koro’s Rigging

    This chapter will show off Koro’s rigging, while not explaining the basics, focus is to show some features it has for special deformation using MeshDeform and ShapeKeys, plus some tricks I used for the trailer.
    As a bonus I will include a free chapter from Nathan Vegdahl‘s DVD on Rigging for 2.6x

• 07. Behind the Scenes

  Now that we know how to create a character, we will go behind the scenes the teaser trailer to explore the pipeline and all the little tricks involved, so you know the way to go for your next animation!