How To Quickly And Easily Create A Human Base Mesh In Blender

Ever found yourself a little bit lost in how to start modeling characters in Blender?

Or have you tried to dive in nose first and start modeling that character from your imagination and give up when the results don’t typically go your way?

Thankfully, there is a better way to bring your dream character to life and increase the chance of you actually finishing your 3D model without much frustration. The answer? Start with a Base Mesh character!

To be honest, you’d be better off spending some time planning, designing and drawing your character using a traditional pen and paper, or a stylus and graphics tablet if you’re rich. Although, if you’re a bit of a dabbler like me and want to see results almost straight away, you’re best bet is to start off with a Base Mesh character.

Creating a 3D base mesh is usually the first thing you want to do when creating a character.

Benefits

There are many benefits to this:

• You get a sort of birds-eye view of your final character as you get to see the overall form and shape of your final character will look like.
• You can make changes to the characters shape easily compared to if you just go in and attempt to create the final model.
• You don’t need to care about topology, vertex distribution and any of that other complicated modeling stuff.
• You can very quickly see your final character design as the next stage after this is usually sculpting your final design.
• You save time as you don’t need to start from scratch again if you want to create another character. Trust me, in the 3D world, time is everything!
• You can use it as a planning/inspiration tool to come up with a design for your character.

How To Do It

So how exactly do we go about creating a base mesh character?

Simple, use a combination of the Skin Modifier, Mirror Modifier and Subsurf Modifier.

1. Mirror Modifier – First start with the Mirror Modifier. When you add the modifier, any changes you make to one side will automatically reflect to the other side. Since a human character is generally symmetrical, that will cut your modeling time in half!
2. Skin Modifier – This will help to quickly add mesh (or skin) around your edges. The Skin Modifier is the main ingredient when it comes to creating the base character mesh. It also makes modeling the character super easy and super quick. This allows you to play around with different forms and shapes for your character. Once you add the Skin Modifier, you can go into edit mode, select a vertex and start extruding (by pressing E) to see the skin modifier in action. You can start extruding out joints and body parts to create the full character.
3. Subsurf Modifier – Of course, it’s pretty cool to see how you can quickly create the body parts of a character, but at the moment, everything looks blocky and lacks that organic rounded look. You then add in a Subsurf Modifier to smooth everything out.

The main shortcuts that will be helpful for you to further refine the characters shape are Ctrl+A to scale joints and E to extrude.

So that’s it! Check out the video above to see the step-by-step how to do this properly.

Creating a base mesh in Blender can be super easy and won’t take up too much time. Best of all, you’re setting yourself up for an epic 3D character.

That’s all for now!