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Bran Sculpts talked about his experience with Blender and showed how it turned into the 2D-like model of Dragon Ball's Launch.
It takes a lot of talent to make 3D objects look like they were made in 2D, and Bran Sculpts, a construction worker who likes to draw on his days off, definitely has what it takes. You can see his skill shining in his recent model of Launch from Dragon Ball, created in Blender.
Bran's hobby has always been drawing webcomics, but around 2 years ago, he started to get a little burned out and decided to steer himself in a different direction. While he had a month of free time, he tried 3D modeling/sculpting. He downloaded Blender and spent a month following tutorials from YouTube, and since then, he's been sculpting at least one character a month with the goal of learning at least one new thing per project.
Surprisingly, Bran has been practicing the "3D that looks like 2D" style for a couple of months only. Inspired by Software Consultant David Lettier and 3D Artist Craft Reaper, he wanted to try the hand-painted style that they were so great at.
"I ran across this really cool Peach fanart by MaxDei_00 that I wanted to try and model and paint. I messaged them and they granted permission. I watched a couple of KumoBlender's videos on YouTube to get me started and ended up making this Peach model. I also made a video where I break down the process."
"Since then, I've made a few more models focusing mainly on trying to match the anime style. I follow accounts like rukikuri who sometimes posts WIPs of what they're working on that give hints on things like how 3/4 views are modeled. I study WIPs and time-lapses to incorporate techniques into my own workflow."
When Bran first started getting into 3D, he chose Blender because he didn't want to spend a lot of money on a hobby. He didn't know if he'd be able to learn it or even like it. He found out that there were a lot of tutorials and information freely available on the internet for anything you'd want to do in Blender. He was also thankful for the community as everyone tries new things and always wants to share and show what they've come up with. "If I was aiming for a career change, I'd probably switch to industry standards, but I'm just having fun and Blender already does all of the things I want."
"Opening Blender for the first time and seeing the layout can be pretty intimidating. I would suggest doing some beginner tutorials until you get comfortable with the interface and how to manipulate 3D objects. The first tutorial I followed was Easy Froggy by MAR. Eve Sculps has a similar playlist on making a rabbit character. She takes things a bit slower and explains things a bit more. If you have the time, I'd suggest Eve's longer playlist.
I spent a month just following tutorials until I felt comfortable enough to try a project on my own. I made a video on my first month trying to learn Blender."
The Launch Project
For Dragon Ball's Launch, Bran tried to recreate her as close as he could using Blender. He took the reference image of the character and lassoed the arms to straighten them out, then went over the basic shapes that make her up on different layers so they're easy to transform and with different colors so he could tell where different parts intersected.
"After I have the shapes I need, I duplicate and transform the shapes into a T-pose. I'll make one for the front view and one for the side view, making sure certain landmarks line up, like the head, chin, shoulders, knees, etc.
After I get my reference finished, I pull it into Blender and scale it to fit the height of a Rigify rig so I can model to a close-enough-to-real-life-scale."
Head
As Bran noted, when modeling an anime-style head, there are 3 main edges that need to be nailed to get the shape right for most angles. For the front view, he extruded a vertex around the cheek and the side of the face.
For the side view, he took a vertex from the center and extruded it from the chin upwards following the reference. This gave a nice silhouette from the side.
Finally, he extruded a vertex along the 3/4 view. To view it at this angle, he went into the front view, rotated the view, got back into the orthographic view, and then moved my reference where he needed it.
"The anime-style face is all about the silhouettes, and the lines we just created will take care of these shapes from most angles. Looking from the front, we see our standard face shape, and as we rotate around, you can see the 3/4 loop will take over and give us our cheek shape while hiding the other loop, and as we rotate around to the side, our nose and mouth shape is revealed.
Now we can move onto the eye. Coming from a single vert, I ran a loop around to make a circle, following the reference, then rotated it around to match the angle of the face. You'll want to check this is a 3/4 view as well since in 2D, the eye shape in this angle is usually cheated.
After all of these landmarks are in place, we can start bridging them together, using a little guesswork on the nose and mouth corners. Bringing them back a bit on the y-axis usually works.
Once we get this whole face mask area finished, I bring in a sphere to use as a snapping guide as I model the rest of the head. I'm not going to bother modeling the ears or leaving a spot for the neck, these will be separate objects that will look connected later on due to the way the shader will make it look, so for now, close everything up."
When the head was modeled, Bran smoothed everything with the Slide Relax brush in sculpt mode to even out the quads. He then added a circle for the pupil and extracted some loops around the eye to make the lashes.
The material is an emission set to white, and, as Bran mentioned, the outline can be added with lineart. With the grease pencil object selected, you can go to the Modifiers tab to select what object or collection gets an outline, how thick the outline is, and what part of the object generates an outline.
Hair
For the hair, the artist added subdivided cubes to make up the bulk of the hair while using curves to shape the more detailed curly parts.
"She's been looking a bit weird in the face so far, so I took a plane and extruded it around to make her eyebrows, then duplicated, and scaled them down to make her eyelid crease. I finished off the eye area by duplicating a part of the eye crease to make the lashes.
For the hairband, I duplicated a couple of loops, changed it to a white material, and extruded it around the bottom of the head. I also added the line detail to the ears using curves. You can do this with textures instead but this early into the sculpt, I want to see the detail but don't want to do any painting.
Back at the hairband, I added a plane and extruded it out to the shape of the bow, and added a solidify modifier to give it some thickness. To finish off the head, I duplicated one of those curly curves and added in some more spheres to bulk up the bottom part of the hair."
Body
With the body, Bran made a sculpt that could be used as a snapping guide to retopologize over. He blocked out the body with subdivided cubes, matching the shapes with the front and side references.
"Now that the blockout is finished, I apply all of the subdivision and mirror modifiers, join all of the body objects, and remesh everything into one manifold mesh. Now we can go into the sculpt mode to smooth the transitions and refine the body a bit more.
Moving on to retopology, most of the time, you would want to start at the bottom of the head and begin working down the neck, but since our head isn't going to be connected, I'm going to start at the hand since, for me at least, it's the hardest part to do.
I start by adding a circle with 6 verts and extruding it out to the length of the finger with a slight taper. I'll add 2 loop cuts for the joints and cap off the end. Then I beveled the loops for the joints and moved the middle loops forward a bit for finger knuckles. Now we can place, duplicate, and reuse this to make the rest of the fingers. After connecting the fingers together, we can start working our way to the wrist. There's a lot of verts coming off of these fingers so most of the open spots of the hands will be used to reduce and rerout the loops. what I'm aiming for in the end, is to have an 8 vert circle at the wrist."
Moving on, Bran placed the retopologized hand on the wrist and extruded it up the arm, adding a few loop cuts along the way. Then, he duplicated a plane, extruding it out to the edge of the model's chest, then adding some loop cuts to finish the chest and connecting everything.
After the retopology was done, he went to the sculpt mode with the Slide Relax brush and smoothed the whole body to even out all of the quad placements.
"After that, I add a Rigify human meta-rig and start aligning the bones to the body. We can delete all of these face bones since we won't be needing them. Don't forget the hidden bone that's behind the main head bone. Once everything is lined up, click Generate Rig to get all of these fancy-looking controllers. Click on the body mesh, then shift-click the rig, press ctrl+P and choose automatic weights.
To attach the head, I selected everything above the neck including the hair, headband, and everything. Shift-click the rig, go to pose mode, select the head controller, hit ctrl+P, and choose Parent to Bone.
Now that everything was rigged up correctly, I started getting our naked Launch into a rough pose. We'll have to tweak the pose a bit as we add clothes, but it's nice to have a pose to switch to and from to see how the clothes are deforming."
Clothes
Back in the T-pose, the artist added a cylinder and used the Shrinkwrap modifier on the body to make the top. After that, he added some loop cuts, made some tweaks with the Grab brush, and did some proportional editing.
"To make her shorts, I duplicated some geometry from her crotch area and added a solidify to give it a bit of depth. Then I duplicated more geometry to make the rest of the details of her shorts.
The same deal with her 80s-style legwarmer workout sock things. Duplicate a few loops from the lower leg, separate, and add solidify to it. Scale some of the loops to make it look all bunched up and droopy. We can leave the feet alone, just add in some materials so they become her shoes.
So the cool thing about using a grease pencil for the lineart is that we can take advantage of freestyle marked edges. When we select an edge, press ctrl+E, and choose Mark Freestyle, the grease pencil will draw a line where it was marked. We can use this to make those seam lines on her shorts. We can also use this method to draw the belly button and the clavicle."
The next step is posing the mouth, Bran had to do it manually and then edited the mouth placement within a shape key. Afterward, he shaped the mouth into a circle using proportional editing set to Connected Only.
Finally, the straps were made by extruding a plane over the shoulder using snapping and duplicating it to create connector pieces.
Texture Painting
The last step in the project is texture painting. Bran unwrapped the parts he'd draw on, created a new material, and hooked it into a Mix Color node using the alpha, and then hooked it into the Emission node.
"Now the fun part, we get to draw a bunch of scratchy ink lines everywhere. I have the reference pulled up on my other monitor and I'm trying to match all the fold lines I see in the ref. Anything I can't see that's on the other side is improvised.
I also made Launch's moneybag using all of the same steps I talked about before."
And this is how you create a 2D-like Launch from Dragon Ball in Blender following Bran Sculpts' experience. Here is the video of the whole process: