(Part 2) Top products from r/blender

Your sculpting technique is fine but your anatomy is atrocious.

The rib cage and abdominal musculature anatomy is off. You don't just have abdominal muscles on your lower trunk. Also the abdominals should have a limited width. To the nipple line would work but your nipples are set out too far. They should be in the mid clavicular line but you don't have any clavicles. The 6 pack is nice but the hole in the top one would hurt as it's not present in real life and is where the xiphoid under the bottom of the rib cage should be. So your abdominals are to high and too wide and too bulky. There should also be one long one below the navel which is way too low. The pecs attach to the sternum and manubrium and go to the inside of the arm. That's what forms the axilla (armpit). The lat in the back and the pec in the front. So along the sternum the pecs should go outward not downward. Also that deep line separating the pec from the shoulder would sever the pec muscles from the arms. That is not existent in normal anatomy. People do tend to shift there humerus foward but that is an abnormality caused by bad posture and muscle imbalances. There is no rib cage giving the upper trunk its form. The serratus muscles are just sliding downward and fading out instead of inserting onto the ribs along the lateral side under the axilla. You've created a new muscle under the arm that doesn't exist. The deltoid muscle is nonexistant in the front and top and is in the wrong place on the back. There are three heads to the deltoid. The anterior (front) middle (on top) and posterior (rear). They blend together midway down on the lateral side of the humerus at about your cutoff. The posterior one attaches to the spine of the scapula where your attaches to nothing. The anterior attaches to the lateral aspect of the clavicle (which you don't have) and the anterior acromion. The middle attaches to the lateral acromion. The upper traps also go outward from the nuchal ridge on the skull to the acromion on the top of the shoulder then down the back along the spine of the scapula to the spinus' of the vertebra. The lower trap is also on the spine of the scapula to the vertebra and the lateral aspect goes down diagonally to the 12th vertebral spinus process. So you have no lower trap. The lats sweep up from the lumbosacral fascia which starts along the upper boarder of the illium (which again does not exist) moving laterally and inserts onto the humerus in the same medial groove the pec inserts into. You con't have any lats either. You also don't have any paraspinal muscles along the spine and you have no posterior hip fold where the glut medius is. I could go on and on.

You NEED to read a book on artistic anatomy. I love Bridgeman's books. They would be great for you due to your focus on muscles.

The Human Machine (Dover Anatomy for Artists)

Constructive Anatomy (Dover Anatomy for Artists)

You MUST start with the bones. Get a GOOD inexpensive or free skeleton. Put it in a separate collection and use it as a reference so you know where the bones are and can attach the muscles appropriately. Once you know your anatomy that will be superfluous or only needed as a check. But you really REALLY need to learn anatomy if you are going to do this kind of work. It LOOKS good but anyone who knows anatomy will go "nope, it's not right". When you create art about a subject always keep in mind that somewhere in your audience there will almost always be a content expert. Like me. An an artist, I always strive to impress them. If I make a spaceship, I keep in mind as best as I can the physics involved. You con't need the math. Just like in art anatomy you don't need to know the innervation of the muscles like a doctor would need. You need to know enough that you can sell your art to an expert. Keep that in mind as you do all your art. That is one thing that will separate out the pro from the amateur. There is always artistic license ... but not with human anatomy. Even is you're doing an anime or cartoon, the best artists embed their knowledge in the subtle way they do their linework or design their mesh. That's why we buy it.

I hope that helps. Don't give up or get frustrated. Your sculpting technique is good. Your knowledge must match. One thing I learned doing art is that a good artist researches and expands their knowledge about not only their craft, but their subject matter as well. Do that and you can only get better.

Good luck.

Word to the wise: If you've spent a good deal of time going over tutorials on the net, you're ready to buy a real book. Books you can buy at Amazon are so much more complete and thorough and helpful than the freebie bin of the internet. Remember, however, that this year's selection of books generally deal with blender 2.4x

Tony Mullen is a good author.

The node editor is basically an editor for data and operators, and how they relate to each other. It has several different modes, such as the compositor and the Cycles material editor. If you want to know more about the Cycles material editor, read danrich2910 and candreacchio's posts, they covered most of the basics there.

If you want to know more about the compositor, Lord Price does a good (if kind of old at this point) overview here: http://www.blenderguru.com/videos/introduction-to-the-compositor/

The compositor is actually pretty similar to Photoshop or After Effects in some sense, except that it's node-based. Node-based compositing is actually quite superior to the layer-based systems you're probably used to, but for most people it takes a bit for them to wrap their head around it. It's really very simple, you just have a set of building blocks to script out whatever it is you'd normally do in an image editor.

If you want to get really serious about using the compositor, I highly recommend this book: http://www.amazon.com/Art-Science-Digital-Compositing-Second/dp/0123706386

Especially with node-based compositors, it's very helpful to know what it is you are doing under the hood. (I could never really get which input went where on the alpha-over node until I started reading through this and learned about the "over" operator and what was actually going on back there)

It's up!

I hope it helps you. I still have a few minor formatting issues from the .mobi conversion, but the material looks good. Let me know if you have any questions or requests.

The proportions seem off, specifically the eyes are too close together. Check this out. I also recommend Figure Drawing for Dummies, great book that covers human body proportions in detail.

'Stop Staring' is a great book and thoroughly explains the fundamentals including how to do animation friendly topology.

https://www.amazon.com/Stop-Staring-Facial-Modeling-Animation/dp/0470609907

Thank you! I appreciate those pointers and resources more than you could know. Is this the book you were referring to?

I mostly followed the key poses laid out in Character Animation Fundamentals. Added a little bit of follow-through and overlapping action myself but probably couldn't have done the big parts as good on my own.... yet, I hope.

Borrowed the rigged character from VMComix on Blenderswap.

I recently purchased this book, http://www.amazon.com/Game-Character-Creation-Blender-Unity/dp/1118172728
Which covers everything you are asking for, this was my first try at a written tutorial, which I found everything fairly easy to follow. I would say it's worth the money.

I've found this which is only slightly larger than the intuos small (i think).

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008Y40DQU/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B008Y40DQU&linkCode=as2&tag=thebestgraphicstablets-20

Given i have a small desk and i would like it to be portable i think something this size could be quite good.
>
> You can also set it to mouse mode, but that's never worked for me so I cant really comment on that.

I can see myself using the mouse instead of the tablet so that shouldnt be a problem

Work on your anatomy, in 2d first. I highly recommend this book: http://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Complete-Guide-Artists-Dover/dp/0486272796

I bought this book and reference it from time to time, he goes over a lot of the tools and blender interface and then goes into a step by step process of building,texturing.rigging, and animating his character, I think if you register the book you have access to the online portion of his book/his materials. I think its like blender 2.6 something he uses.

heres a video preview

http://www.blendtuts.com/learning_blender

http://www.amazon.ca/Learning-Blender-Hands-On-Creating-Characters/dp/0133886174

Use the real link. Not some Facebook go between


https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0134663462/

For others, this is for version 2.78 if that matters.

Get the "Essential Blender" book.

There was a lot of conflict and infighting going on with the style for Quake. I think the colors they went with were a compromise.
Romero was pushing for medieval, while the rest of the team wanted to continue Doom's direction.