Blender Specialization: Master Character Animation & 3D Rendering

Next, you will learn how to play with lights, shadows, colors, and geometric models to achieve strong compositions.

Lights and Geometry

17m

Rendering and Exporting into Photoshop

It's now time to render the composition! I will show you how to export the 3D model into Photoshop to add the final details.

Adding Textures 1

In this lesson, you will learn how to add textures to the Blender render to make it come alive!

Next, it's time to impose the right background to create the desired ambiance. Here, I will demonstrate this process by blending in my selected background assets. Then, I will edit the image to enhance certain cinematic aspects and make it look like a movie scene.

Adding Textures 2

15m

Exploring Project Dimensions

In this lesson, I will model how to set your project settings according to different social media dimensions.

Rendering on Slow Computers

To conclude this unit, I will give you some final tips and tricks on how to optimize your Blender preferences, in case you can't afford a high spec computer.

Module 3

Step into Tonq’s playful universe where live-action meets the surreal. With tools like Blender, Photoshop, and Premiere Pro, you'll learn how to turn real-world footage into animated scenes full of personality. By mastering roto-animation, you’ll bring your own quirky characters to life—blending reality and imagination in surprising, eye-catching ways.

19 lessons (4h 32m)

Finding Inspiration

In this lesson, I will start looking for inspiration for my course project. I don't typically make mood boards, but I do collect inspirational content in a less formal manner. When it comes to creating your own project, you're welcome to follow my methods or gather references in a way that suits you.

Reference Footage for an Animation

Next, I will give an overview of the criteria I look for when searching for a skate clip. I will also discuss the things that you should take into consideration when recording your own.

fSpy: Scene Building and Match Moving 1

To get started, I'll show you how to take a still frame from your clip and, using fSpy, calculate the camera orientation and focal length. This can then be brought into Blender, where we will model the basic scene and track the movement of the camera using the match-moving technique.

fSpy: Scene Building and Match Moving 2

In the second part of this lesson, I will continue preparing my scene ready to track the board and the character.

Animating the Board and Character 1

In this lesson, I'll demonstrate how to set up the rig with the board and character, exploring how the principles of roto-animation work. It's a really simple technique that can give incredible results.

Animating the Board and Character 2

Now that my board is ready, I will move on to the character. This may seem like a daunting task at first, but don't worry! I will break this process down step by step so that you can achieve a realistic pose, with accurate weight distribution and joints that don't pop.

Animating the Board and Character 3

Here, I will continue manipulating my animated character according to the reference video. Once I have everything lined up, I will watch the clip from different angles and clean up any imperfections starting with the board (as everything is centered around the board!).

12m

Animating the Board and Character 4

It's time to make the final adjustments to my animated board and character. I will first smoothen the pathway of the skateboard so that it flows more fluidly. Once the animation is finished, I will show you how to loop it.

18m

Lighting and Texturing 1

You're now ready to begin the modeling process! I will start by modeling any smaller details and adding in some greenery, then I can begin texturing the scene using projection mapping and the texture painter.

Lighting and Texturing 2

I will now move forwards with the painting process to enhance the background of my piece, before progressing to the shadows.

At this stage, I encourage you to get creative with your scene. Something fun that I don't yet have is a shadow of the person filming. I will show you how this can be done to add interest to the animation.

Lighting and Texturing 3

Character Design and Simulating 1

In this lesson, I will begin designing my character! I'll take you through my most common methods using hair dynamics, modifiers, cloth physics, and even some geometry nodes!

Character Design and Simulating 2

Let your imagination run wild! During this phase of the process, you can instill a lot of creativity and uniqueness into your project. I will give you an example of how I like to incorporate my own personal flair by introducing you to a second character design, one with ribbons.

Character Design and Simulating 3

In this lesson, I will complete the ribboned design by working on the cloth collisions and tightening the whole thing up.

Character Design and Simulating 4

For the third and final character design, I will show you how to develop one of my favorites: the banana man!

Rendering and Final Touches 1

To conclude this unit, I will go through the essential render settings in Blender. Once you have a clear understanding of this, you can bring your render into Adobe Premiere Pro to do the final edit with sound.

18m

Rendering and Final Touches 2

Finally, I will show you how to line up the markers of the three character designs to create the final compilation with smooth transitions.

Creating Characters with Other Methods

In this lesson, I'll go through some alternative methods for creating characters and introduce you to some other programs that can be helpful for more complex designs.

General Blender Advice

Here, I'll share some final tips and advice for navigating Blender along with some add-ons that I think are essential for my workflow. Plus, I'll demonstrate how to embed your watermark into your scene!

Story, Movement, and Design

Module 4

Join Leanne Rule in a delightfully offbeat world where everyday life becomes hilariously animated. With Blender as your playground, you'll learn how to model, texture, and rig quirky 3D characters from scratch. Explore storytelling through movement, gags, and expressive scenes—perfect for bringing humor, charm, and a bit of chaos to your own digital universe.

19 lessons (2h 40m)

In this lesson, I will be breaking down what makes a good joke, and how you can translate that into a visual joke for animation.

Storyboarding

What about the inspiration? I will teach you how I quickly sketch out my ideas and form them into a storyboard. You will realise that you don't need fancy drawing skills, just a pen and paper!

Sketching Characters

Characters are essential in any story! Therefore, now you will learn to decide how you want your characters to look and what kind of energy you want them to have.

The Worm: The Basics of 3D Modelling

To start with, you will learn the very basics of 3D modelling. I will teach you to use basic shapes and built-in features to form a worm character. You will also learn to use the subdivision modifier to create smooth and clean shapes for a character.

The Worm: Texturing

In this lesson, you will be learning how to texture the character and add colours to it to help bring the character to life.

The Worm: Rigging

I will show you how to use basic bones and rig up a character ready to be animated. You will learn how to assign bones to a model, and make sure everything works as it should be.

The Seagull: Modelling 1

It's time to go to the next level! Now I will teach you to model a seagull. You will also learn how to extrude with much more details and create more complex shapes.

I will continue showing you how to model the seagull during this second part of the lesson. Besides, I will share some tips and tricks to model more complex characters.

The Seagull: Modelling 2

The Seagull: Texturing

Here I will use similar techniques as I did with the worm to colour the seagull in, and you will learn basic node editing to add some patterns and textures to a gull.

The Seagull: Rigging

I will show you how to create more complicated rigs for characters, and how to connect them properly to your characters.

The Background

First things first, you will learn how to set up basic background details that will help you to add more context to the scene.

Lightning the Scene

This is my favourite step of the whole process! Lighting is key to adding atmosphere and the way you light a scene can hugely affect the whole feel and mood of the piece. Therefore, I will teach you how to light a scene properly and effectively.

Setting Up the Camera

It's time for you to learn the basics to set up a camera in Blender. Then, you will learn how to use depth of field.

The Seagull

Animating can be a very, very long and fiddly process. However, once you understand all the basics of animate and keyframe, the process is straightforward and lots of the same. In this lesson, you will be learning how to animate the seagull.

Now I will show you how to use simple keyframes to make the worm move and interact with the seagull.

The Worm

15m

Bringing All Together

Here you will see how to quickly model and animate the poo. Then I will teach you to bring all the animated parts together and check that all looks good and loops appropriately.

Now it's time to show you how to render an animation. You will learn the basic settings to render and how to apply different settings depending on how powerful your machine is.

The Rendering

How to Convert It Into a GIF

Have you ever created a GIF? During this lesson, I will teach you how to convert your project to a GIF using Photoshop.

Online Promotion

I will show you where to put your work online. Besides, I will share with you tips and tricks for getting seen by the right people so you can start finding work and put all your new skills to use!

Introduction to 3D Character Creation

Module 5

Step into the imaginative world of Mohamed Chahin and learn how to create 3D characters that tell a story with just one look. From sketch to final render, you'll bring a unique protagonist to life using Blender. Explore modeling, lighting, and color techniques that transform ideas into expressive, lovable characters full of charm and emotion.

18 lessons (3h 24m)

This lesson is all about gathering references for our project. I'll show you how I come up with ideas for my characters.

Initial Sketches

Once we have all our references, let's sketch the rough concept of our 3D illustration. To do so, I first do a small thumbnail to work out the composition and find the basic shape; then I create a larger sketch with more details.

22m

Working on the Sketch on Photoshop

In this lesson, I'll show you how to open the photo of your detailed sketch on Photoshop for tweaking and color correction.

Introduction to Blender and Blender Basics 1

In this lesson, I'll give you an introduction to Blender shortcuts and Add-ons we’re going to use in this course.

Introduction to Blender and Blender Basics 2

After showing you the essential shortcuts we're going to use, I'll create a simple robot from a cube and teach some more shortcuts along the way.

Introduction to 3D Lighting

Light has a big influence on the mood of a scene and helps support the storytelling elements. In this lesson, you'll learn about different lighting types and how to use them in Blender.

Let's start modeling our 3D scene! To do so, first I'll teach you how to block the initial shapes of the character: the monkey shape and the space suit.

Modeling

Blocking Out Secondary Elements

Once the main elements are blocked, we'll continue blocking out secondary elements of the scene, such as the banana, the plants, and the belt.

Blocking Out Additional Elements

Now I'll add other objects which contribute to the story of the character, like a spaceship and stars. The process is again the same: we add a cube, tweak it, and extrude geometry to shape it like the sketch.

13m

How to Bring Your Character to Life 1

In this lesson, I'll show you how to add details to the objects by adding geometry and modifiers to get a smoother model. First, I'll start working on the space suit, the hands, and the backpack, and then I'll continue with the face.

17m

How to Bring Your Character to Life 2

Once the details on the monkey's face are done, let's move on to the remaining parts of the body that need to be smoother.

Adding the Rest of the Details 1

In this lesson, I'll add the final details to the rest of the objects in the scene as well as to the space suit, specially around the neck, arms, and legs.

13m

Adding the Rest of the Details 2

Now, I'll add even more details to the planets and the spaceship. And last but not least, I'll finish up the monkey's backpack and helmet.

Secondary Elements, Composition, and Background

This lesson is about tweaking secondary elements and working on the composition. At this point, we can start moving objects around, maybe duplicate stars and planets to fill up the scene — it's mostly about making the composition look better.

Character Color Palette and Lighting 1

In this lesson, I'll show you how to add materials one by one and try out different color palettes. This is basically a trial and error kind of step.

15m

Character Color Palette and Lighting 2

Now let's add some light! To find a lighting that fits the mood of the scene, we'll need to try each light separately and maybe make some adjustments to other elements, such as size, intensity, and color.

Rendering and Saving Your File

In this lesson, I'll show you how to render your final image and tweak it in Photoshop to do a few last adjustments like saturation, lighting, and color.

Ready to Share on Social Media

Last, I'll talk about the platforms you can use to share your artworks and why it's important to show your work on social media and follow other artists as well.

Module 6

Explore the dreamlike edge between reality and imagination with James Tralie as your guide. Using Blender, you’ll learn how to transform everyday observations into detailed 3D environments full of mood and nostalgia. Through lighting, modeling, and texturing, you’ll craft atmospheric scenes that feel both familiar and surreal—perfect for telling stories through space and design.

14 lessons (2h 52m)

Exploring the Environment: Reference Material

In order to achieve photorealism with 3D, it is critical to develop a keen observational eye. In this lesson, you will explore the world around you to understand how light and textures work in real life.

12m

Sketching: Mapping Out the Project

Now I'll introduce the course project and talk about how to initially sketch out your ideas, either with pen and paper or on the computer. This stage will give you a rough idea of the direction you would like to take for the project.

Blender and 3D Modeling 1

Here I will introduce you to the wonderful world of the free software, Blender. I will walk you through useful hotkeys to navigate the 3D space, simple modeling techniques, texture/shader creation, and more!

Blender and 3D Modeling 2

Let's continue exploring Blender and the essential tools it has to offer! I will show you how to create a simple texture with the shader editor. Then, I will teach you how to add lighting to the scene and import HDRIs for full environmental lighting. Finally, I will add a camera and manipulate its view and properties.

Setting Up the Blender Workspace

In this lesson, I will show you how to set up some free add-ons to help speed up your workflow. Some of these are built into Blender, while others need to be sourced online. Though these are not required, I'll also direct you to some paid add-ons that could interest you for this project or future projects.

Blocking Out the Scene and Setting Up the Lighting 1

In this lesson, I will set up the camera viewpoint and guidelines, so I know where I need to place objects in the scene. Then, I will block out the main elements of my scene in 3D to fill the foreground and midground. Next, I will teach simple sculpting techniques to add displacement and imperfections to the surface. I will keep a keen eye on composition and my reference mood board during this process.

17m

Blocking Out the Scene and Setting Up the Lighting 2

In the second part of this lesson, I will consider how light is going to influence my scene. I will teach you how to set up simple lighting using an HDRI and a sun lamp to know where light and shadows will intersect with your 3D geometry. This will help you further explore your scene composition and how the viewer's eye will move through the frame.

Modeling Details and Refining the Scene 1

In this lesson, I will add more details to my scene to really bring it to life. I will continue to iterate on my initial designs and return to my references throughout this process. I will work from the base template I created previously and refine many details, including the main building and landscape elements. Not only that, but I will also explore advanced texturing techniques to add realism to my scene.

Modeling Details and Refining the Scene 2

Now that I have applied textures to the sand in my scene, I will continue exploring advanced texturing techniques to add more details. I will also work on the texture of the background to add realism.

Adding Natural Elements and Details 1

Let's add various natural elements that will really take the scene to another level of photorealism! In this lesson, I will explore using images as textures (including ones I have photographed myself). I will specifically show how I photographed a coastline and used those images to create a crashing wave texture to use in my renders. Next, I will focus on realistically scattering plants to make my scene more believable.

Adding Natural Elements and Details 2

At this stage, your project should really be taking shape. It's time to progress to the final steps in Blender. I will add some extra models to fill out the scene. Since I'd like my scene to look like a house, I will include different elements like a bed, a nightstand, a hammock, lamps, and curtains! Let's have fun experimenting and designing our dream house!