Learn to achieve AAA game quality characters with Blender. Demystify the industry-inspired workflow of digital sculpting, kit-bashing, and retopology to score the highest quality details on top of efficient, low-poly models. Follow Kent Trammell through this awesome course and build the robot of your hard surface dreams.

Chapter Overview

1. Block Out
   We gotta start somewhere. This stage is merely generating the basic shapes from which our robot will be forged.
2. Sculpting I

   I always try to get into sculpt mode as fast as possible with characters. At this stage we begin shaping rudimentary forms.

3. Sculpting II

   Further refinement of sculpted forms. The goal here is to sharpen edges and smooth surfaces to the point that they appear "hard-surfaced".

4. Retopology I

   Since digital clay is never going to appear perfectly hard-surface with a machined quality, this stage converts the sculpture to a subdivision-smoothable polygon model to achieve true hard-surface quality for our robot.

5. Boolean-based Kit Bashing

   Till this point, fine details have been ignored in favor of smooth, sharp-edged major shapes. For this stage, we'll use those major shapes as our canvas to add fine details like bolts, construction lines, and other robot-y details. We'll also use this stage to fill in any model gaps that have proven easier/more efficient to model with traditional polygon tools rather than sculpting + retopology.

6. Retopology II

   Another retopology. But this time it's the low resolution version that will be used in-game. This stage will leave us with 2 versions of our character: 1) A high-resolution version and a 2) low-resolution version.

Keep your eyes open for the second training in this series where Kent will take you through texturing and shading your robot character.

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