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Character Creation: Creating by Reference, Rigging and animation

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 This blog post is a step by step walkthrough through my process of creating an animated character, detailing the techniques I used to create a coherent mesh and character animation. Fig.1 Screenshot of female human reference The poly modelling begins with a cube, using a reference photo in orthographic view to achieve proper proportions. I extruded along the body, scaling on a single axis to precisely control how every face appears. Where there was a need for more surface detail, I used Edge Loop to subdivide the faces. Fig.2 screenshot of the arms and head mid-development in  wireframe  mode. The limbs required a more intuitive approach to modelling as the arms/legs have more twisting, concave shapes. The model was inspected and adjusted in 3D at every transform. Fig.3 Wireframe and smooth shaded model of basic female character mesh After creating the basic mesh, I set about creating the specific character for the scene. Using my own concept art and a social media influ...
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Mise En Scene: Blocking & Camera Position

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In Cineamatography, a classic way to analyse film is the Mise en Scene (Studiobinder, 2026). A french term, literally translating to "setting the scene" it refers to giving everything inside the camera frame placement. That means: The Set Lighting Costumes Props Mise en scene is important to extracting the meaning behind art form and it is a useful visual language for analysing and constructing video with purpose and meaning (Studiobinder, n.d.). Fig.1 The mood board curated by themes of urban decay, and ambitious plans of the post-war era. From the mood board, I sketched concept art to establish a clear picture of the style & theme of the animated scene. Using perspective lines, the concept art uses props and sight lines to communicate the "streets in the sky" 1970s vision. the ornaments and architectural styles from different continents convey the international new vision, representing the built environment of multicultural cities. Fig. A scan of my sketched c...
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Forming an Idea - Creating Environments with narrative.

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When creating a 3D scene, planning is as important as implementation. In this blog, I will go through the process from the initial idea to pre-modelling stage. Starting with the requirement of creating a 3D environment, I found a direction of where I wanted to go. I started with urban decay of post-war housing estates in the UK, specifically London. Real-life Inspiration   Fig.1 Photography of Milford Towers, Catford & The Ferrier Estate in Kidbrooke. Streets in the sky vision of utopia, also architecture non apologetic use to deep red, and other saturated colours. Fig.2 The layout of robin hood gardens in blackwall, east london .windy corridor layout.   Fig.3 Overall layout of the buildings, and ground level view. Overgrown wildlife in-between concrete structures, with bushes and trees on the sides occluding the view of residents.   Fig.4. The Facade from inside, left and outside the brixton barrier block. Brixton Barrier block. Tiny, unconventional w...
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PBR: A Guide to Moving From Specular to Metallic/Roughness

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As of July 2019, the Blender Foundation Released version 2.8 with its new rendering engine, Cycles. (Blender Foundation, 2019)  Allowing for Global Illumination & RayTracing, Cycles is Physically-Based Rendering (PBR) Engine.  This addition allows us to create truly photorealistic imagery within a free, open-source engine built from the ground up for customisation. But to fully take advantage of the power of photorealistic rendering, a re-think of how to apply texturing is required.  In this blog post I will overview how to quickly suitably translate the old diffuse/specular workflow into the new diffuse, metallic & roughness environment, using the development of my 3D modelling project as a case study. Fig.1. My Initial Render preview of the scene, in EEVEE My model starts out with a homogenous material with specular set to match the shininess of the reference images provided. By starting out the texture process with material composition-first, rather than detail...
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When Normals aren't so Normal

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Required Software: Blender 3D, Photoshop (GIMP is fine too) Have you ever attempted to improve the efficiency of your 3D Models with Normal maps, only to be met with the disappointment of: Missing Geometrical Details Green Artifacts Broken Seams Inconsistent patterns Reducing these details can require a multitude of solutions for clean, visually accurate surface detail, while reducing vertex count. This can be paramount to ensuring for perfomance and effeciency in real-time 3D engines, especially when intended for Rigging & Skinning bones. Before you start baking:  Make sure that in your active mesh, your normal map is unconnected and the texture is selected (white selection line). Missing this will cause a Circular Dependency error and Texture not found. While creating the high-to-low-poly mesh this is a particular problem as the circumstances for each Texture Bake has different mesh translations. Take this Normal Bake for example: When using "Selected to Active" to tran...
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