POTHEAD – Create a Hard Surface Character in Blender

POTHEAD: Create a Hard Surface Character in Blender
With an adorable old robot as your guide, learn how to create a Blender character, step-by-step in this deep-dive course. Workflows include hard surface, subdiv modeling, hand painted texturing and procedural textures.

Step-by-step course on bringing a concept art character to 3d with Blender
Who doesn’t love an underdog ? Rusty and bruised, this little guy proves there is fire in him yet.

Pothead was first created in 2016 the great Tim von Rueden (@vonnart) as one of the original CG Cookie characters.

Today, our Blender trainer Jonathan Lampel breathes fresh life into Pothead and makes him shine… all in Blender.

Pothead is your guide for creating characters in Blender, step by step
In 40 lessons you’ll go from the default Blender scene… to a complete character that’s ready for a rusty adventure.

“Pothead makes for a great learning project because he is made up of mostly simple shapes – but with a few complex pieces thrown in.”

~ Jonathan Lampel

Chapter 1: Hard Surface and Subdivision Surface Modeling
Because Pothead is made up of several hard surface pieces, we’ll get the opportunity to talk about booleans, bevels, and creases in chapter 1.

But, because he’s also round and smooth, you’ll learn how to incorporate those techniques into a subdivision surface modeling workflow.

Chapter 2: UV Unwrapping and Texturing Preparation
The second chapter focuses on UV unwrapping and preparing Pothead for texturing.

It’s no small task, but with the right techniques the process becomes very straightforward.

Hand painted textures are perfect for matching the concept’s rusty metal appearance into a 3d shader, so we will paint our own in Blender, but we’ll also enlist the help of some procedural textures for the smaller, sharper, and more random details.

At the end, we’ll bake everything to one texture set – so Pothead can render quickly in Eevee and be exported to any other application
In 40 lessons and more than 17 hours of runtime, this is a fantastic project that covers a lot of ground…and skills that you will benefit from in countless future projects of your own.

Got questions? Let us know!
As always, we’ll be here to help you along.

Ask a question below – this will notify Jonathan and he’ll jump in to help out.