cmiVFX - Blender Organic Modeling Techniques

Foundation Workflow
Setup background-images to have your reference-pictures right in the viewport. Use the grease-pencil to trace images to create a better outline. Paint in 3D-space, use layers and define custom-colors to create flexible and even animatable modeling-references.


Mesh Modeling
Learn how to efficiently use Blender's mesh-modeling-tools. See how the knife-tool works and how you can easily control the edge-flow with the knife in combination with loop-cuts. Rotate edges and faces to quickly adjust your topology.

Modifiers Interoperability
One of the many nice features in Blender is the modifier-stack. By combining multiple modifiers like for example mirror, array, mesh deform, smooth and subsurf-modifier you can create complex shapes out of just a few vertices.


Weight Mapping For Manipulation
Use vertex groups to control the area that should be affected by a modifier and use weight-painting to have an intuitive way of controlling the influence of that vertex-group. All that can be done easily and in a non-destructive workflow that let's you make changes and corrections until you are satisfied and, if needed, let's you finally apply the modifiers and make these changes "real".

Sculpting Tools That Rival Expensive Commercial Solutions
Another great feature in Blender are the sculpting-tools. Especially for organic modeling there couldn't be an easier and more intuitive way of working than just paint volumes onto your mesh, pinch areas, smooth details and so on without having to care about vertices. Use multi-resolution to interactively subdivide your mesh and work on the different levels. Rough out the volumes on lower resolution levels and fine tune your mesh on high res-levels. Customize your brush with procedural textures, or create your own brushes by using blenders built in image editor.

Retopology
Sculpting often leads to high-density meshes that are great for stills or texture-baking but completely unusable for animation. The solution for that is to rebuild the geometry by using Blender's retopo-tools. Simply paint your vertices and edge-loops onto the mesh according to the topology and let Blender take care of the rest.

Shrink Wrapping
Combine the retopology tools with the shrinkwrap-modifier and paint props like cloths, coat or armor right onto the mesh while using an offset that will prevent your meshes from intersecting. Create perfectly smooth surfaces with the subdivision-surface-modifier and use the crease-tool end edge-split-modifier to create sharp edges.

About the Author
Sebastian König is a German 3D-artist who is working as a freelancer and CG-instructor for several years now. During his studies for Education of Art he discovered the joy of modeling and creating 3D-Animations with Blender and hasn't stopped since. Being a passionate Blender-User he has been teaching Blender at the University of Art and Design Halle/Germany. He has been working for various studios and companies as a 3D-Artist and freelancer. During the dozens of projects and jobs he completed with Blender he got a profound knowledge of almost every aspect of this great Open-Source 3D-application.