 So the first thing I really want to do and like this is my own little startup file So I already made some adjustments to the workspaces and brushes and The theme also like I like to just customize my theme in like some various ways So I have my general workspace over here, which generally has like a little more like a relatively big 3d viewport and nice and big outliner because At some points, I just when I generally work on production files The outliner turns to 10 tends to become pretty big so there's going to be a lot of objects and collections and The deeper your outliner will be the better. So by default I think there's just an outliner right over here, which is just way too small for the purposes I need and then over here There's a little time line over here, which I can scale down or up and then just Change the editor as well. I'm also like throughout my modeling process I'm going to have like some custom menus and pie menus So for example, I made like a little pie menu over here to just like switch between my most used editors So I can immediately go from the timeline to the dope sheet or Any other one so I can go to the info editor and just have a look over here This is just my personal setup to speed up my process a bit more So instead of just going into this menu and switching between editors slowly I can just do it immediately and seamlessly What's first so pretty much the first thing I want to do is I have this already the sphere over here, which is nice but I Want to block out the character so get a General sense of the proportions and the three-dimensional shapes before going further into detail after that, I will go Likely detail the model as far as possible in terms of the models So I can get like essentially we get everything we want out of the 3d design and Then after that there will be a cleanup session where I'm just going to go over it I'm probably not going to sculpt the character because it's really just such simplified shapes that there's no real need to go into Sculpt mode and use dynamic topology and the remesh on all that stuff. It's really kind of overkill We don't need that fine control over the shapes We can I can mostly just box model it and then use sculpt mode for various small little tasks and tools But still I like to differentiate the the modeling process into like the the initial sculpt like the blocking and then the sculpting and Then having that detached from the actual Production model so even though we're going to box model everything. It's still going to be the sculpt so later on We can just go in and clean up the model do some topology tweaks redirect some loops here and there Anything that will be most optimal for the animation for getting any deformations we need But during the sculpting step It's really just about getting the shapes and all the details in there anything that we want to have in the 3d model so and that was just like a little run down on like what I want to like how I would approach this I Also can recommend definitely to save regularly and with multiple files And have like auto save on like I have a blender set up so that it like auto saves every like two or three minutes So I never really lose any progress if it crashes Which might as well do because I'm using like in development version of 2.83 to get To essentially test all the latest features, but also be at the mercy of all the crashes and bugs so We can already start making a new collection over here I already set up like a main first collection over here called settler and then in that collection We have this little it's essentially the default cube, but I just subdivided it three times and turned it into a sphere So that's a way better default cube for most of the projects that I start up with And then I have another collection over here, which is just called helpers. It's usually just excluded Disabled rather like the terminology changed a bit over the over time So it's disabling a collection and in that collection. We really just have this a little Empty over here. Let me actually check over here if I can turn on screencast keys. That'd be amazing Yes, I can So you can at least see What I'm doing over here. Can I move it a little bit to the side? That would be great And I actually I'm just gonna keep it here because otherwise it's gonna clip into the tool bar at some point Awesome Also one thing you might notice I already set up like a little pie menu over here to change The different UI elements of the editors. So I don't have to press T and N anymore I just have it set pressed. I have just have it set to N So essentially whatever I'm doing. I can just disable any of these UI elements Just with one key, which is kind of useful. It's still relatively new. I just set it up But I might not keep it. Let's see how annoying this actually is to get used to But yeah, I'll just keep the oh god I just keep the screencast keys over here on the side. Apparently the the add-on is not working that well anymore Anyway We have the little helpers over here with a Empty in the center. This is great if you want to use like mirror modifiers and you always want to have them centered So I'm just I just usually have one of these in my files And then I can just create another collection over here and it just called this reference and What I'm going to do over here now is I'm just gonna Have my little file browser over here and I can just drag and drop the turnaround into it It's not working Here we go So now we have this guy over here You can just scale this up With a nice little reference empties we have these little widgets over here on the side to resize and and Adjust the the empties, but you can also turn them off. It's usually what what I do I like to just use the so here in the gizmos tab you can just Disable all of them any any one of them that you don't need for me. It's usually all of them They're just kind of in the way unfortunately But yeah, at least the transform gizmos kind of useful so I can just hit Yeah, alt g to reset the transforms the The location at least so that it's in the center and I'm noticing that the it's actually kind of offset Let me just fix that So is this relative? Yes, it's relative. So just point minus point five and Minus point five and it's going to be centered actually Let me have this at zero because we want to have the The origin of the world to be the ground level. So this is going to be definitely easier to handle so let's just Place the sphere already where we kind of want it So this is the front view. So I'm just gonna move this over to the side Can I actually? Ah, yes transparency, this is nice so I can toggle this on and then I at least get to see the grid This will help a lot for just like Centering this guy Yep, so this is ref front And then I can just duplicate this I can set the pivot point to the 3d cursor. So we can just rotate this 90 degrees Other direction from the top and then go to the right and move this all the way over here Actually another thing that I might point out at this point. I right now I'm still using like my own Experimental key map where I changed all of the usual modal operators to the tools. So don't like the Just for context because Otherwise it might be a bit confusing why suddenly the the tools are actually constantly swapping around So that's actually how I'm modeling this right now So yeah, now I can look from the right and the front and this is nicely aligned It doesn't actually matter how deep you place this into. It's just important that the height is the same I like to kind of like align it like over here with the feet and the body So this is nicely centered. So but you could also just align it with the face I guess at this point. It doesn't really matter. We can shift around stuff later on again anyway And yeah, I can just look at this again and Just rotating this 180 degrees and actually there's this nice little feature in here probably Actually, let me check I have an experiment much with these guys over here So, yes, we can define which fate which side is visible from these reference empties So we could by default. It's on both So if you look at them from both sides, they're going to be visible You can also change. I guess the depth. I guess this is when you have multiple Empties on top of each other. It's like some sort of depth drawing method So this is not something we need to bother about right now But the side is important. So we can set it to front and then if we then only the front side of the empty Which is pointing backwards right now is going to be drawn It's going to be visible in the viewport. So if you look at it from the front, we're not gonna see it so now I can just like go back out of local view and We won't see this one. This one can also be set to front. This one can be set to front. So now Yeah, so now we only see the reference that we actually need So, yeah, this is the thing I was I was I guess it is yes, so Yeah, it will need to choose between one of them if you're facing towards one of them more than the other So if you use the depth toggles, you can set one of them to be to have essentially priority to be in front So that's nice, but the way it works by default is sketch is actually for fully in it. Okay so yeah, this is Essentially almost good to go we can set this one to be over here from the back Perfect we can still adjust these later on but I'm just gonna widen the outline over here a little bit If you look at the outline actually most visibility toggles are disabled by default because these are the ones that you only really need to use most of the time it's the eye toggle to toggle viewport visibility and this also works with Shortcuts like age and old age and all that stuff and then there is the little check mark Which lets you disable an entire locate an entire collection and this collection then can't just be unhidden with Hmm with H or old age. So this is just completely disabled. You won't be able to see it So these two types of visibility toggles are actually kind of nice Actually, it made one moment Just disconnected my mouse from charging Okay, but the one we want to enable here right now as well is the select ability what I want is I Want to have the reference collection To be set as unselectable So now if we select in the viewport it will only select the The objects in the settler collection or anything that is not in any collection right now So that's kind of nice. So we don't accidentally constantly select the reference empties so yeah You can already see the The turntable is a bit off, but that's fine So now it's really about going in And blocking out all of these different shapes Okay, let's actually go over this just a moment more before we go into the modeling One thing I forgot to do is actually rename these guys. So this should be Side I hope it is yes, and this is the back Bam And then another thing I just noticed is that we could do it like the way of drawing these little reference empties We could do it with the side option over here, but there's also a little check mark over here called display only access aligned So it will we can just select all three of these guys And hold alt and then click the check mark and it will then check mark that thing for all of them So that's like a little hidden shortcut. This should be made way more obvious But you could also use right click and then Copy to select it and it will do the same thing So now Yes Now what this option does is it's going to display these only If the axis is perfectly aligned with the empty So if we just rotate slightly outside of that axis, it's just going to immediately disappear So if we view it from the back, we're going to see this Empty from the side this one and the front this one And this is just purely based on the The rotation of these empties. So it's yeah, it's just going to take the y axis as Basically the front facing one Yeah, and that's essentially it right now