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I am very new to Blender, and into CGI for that matter.

I started with Sculpting, can form decent human face, and now into sculpting body structure.

It's true that there are lots of materials scattered around for learning Blender. But they are not structured for a beginner to learn from.

My question (it might be off-topic, but please bear with me, as I really have no clue about Blender) is what is the work flow to create animation in Blender?

I know a few -

  1. Modeling - Box modeling, sculpt modeling.
  2. Texturing
  3. UV Wrap/Unwrap
  4. Material
  5. Lighting
  6. Rigging
  7. Animation.

But there are other topics also, like weight paint etc. I just want to know the topics for successful completion of a video file from scratch.

I'm asking this because if I know the topics, I would search for those topics and would be able to learn Blender fast.

Please help.

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  • $\begingroup$ It depends what you are trying to do. Most of the other things you will search will fit within one of these categories. They are just specific methods to do it. $\endgroup$
    – J Sargent
    Commented Jul 17, 2017 at 13:42
  • $\begingroup$ @VRM I am going a make a video. What topic I should learn? $\endgroup$
    – Man_From_India
    Commented Jul 17, 2017 at 13:43
  • $\begingroup$ @Man_From_India Take a look at my answer for the basic 3d model production steps: blender.stackexchange.com/questions/63246/… $\endgroup$
    – Paul Gonet
    Commented Jul 17, 2017 at 13:53
  • $\begingroup$ @Man_From_India in blender an animation can be a) keyframed b) simulated c) both. For a basic animation, you need only some object changing some of its properties: for that you just need to keyframe different values of a property. Texturing, UV, matrials, lighting are not needed but often useful to give the animation rendered result some sort of visual result or(rigging) to help keyframing. Start here docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/animation/introduction.html $\endgroup$
    – m.ardito
    Commented Jul 17, 2017 at 13:55
  • $\begingroup$ @PaulGonet Off-topic: Whoa i just checked your answer. First: nice joke :D Second: That was the most in-depth answer i ever saw arround here. $\endgroup$
    – Reaper
    Commented Jul 17, 2017 at 13:58

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This depends on your personal workflow and/or the workflow of your contractor/employer.

Basically (if we wanted to create a simple animation, with just a character) (in my experience) it's always something like this (some of the following tasks are usually - but not always - done by different artists):

  1. Concept phase (Where rough concepts and ideas are gathered and refined - mostly 2D)
  2. Concept models (Very rough models to proof the concepts work in 3D and in general)
  3. Sculpting (Basically "creating" the character in 3D, with all the small details. This results in a highpoly model)
  4. Retopologize (Highpoly models are hard to work with, so you take the model and "rebuild" it, with less polygons. Sometimes - often in games - you have a polycount budget. So your model isn't allowed to have more than x polygons/tris. This results in a lowpoly model)
  5. UV-Unwrapping (In order to "paint" your model (e.g. put a texture on it) you need to unwrap it and create a UV-map. This UV-map is also used for baking)
  6. Baking (You can transfer all the details from your highpoly model to your lowpoly model via a normal map (texture). This normal map and some other maps are generated by "baking")
  7. Texturing (Basically paint your model. This is where the grey chunk gets fancy ;) )
  8. Rigging (In order to animate your model, it need a skeleton. Rigging is basically giving your model a skeleton, which you can animate)
  9. Animation (The skeleton - and with it the model - gets animated)
  10. Lighting (In this stage, lighting is set up. Also arround this time, everything is put together (if that's not done via compositing))
  11. Rendering (Everything is rendered. In small/simple scenes you can put everything in one scene and render it out. However, in more advanced and bigger scenes, the stuff to render is usually split up in several renderlayers, which are then put together in compositing)
  12. Compositing (Like described above, this is where the different parts of the renders are put together. This is also where mat-paintings and VFX are "put in")

I hope this helps you understanding the basic workflow. As you can see, 3D and CGI is a very complex topic.

Greetings

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  • $\begingroup$ nods it's really complex. Low poly means the subdivide should be less, right? But even in dynamic topology, if I want to add details the poly count rises. $\endgroup$
    – Man_From_India
    Commented Jul 17, 2017 at 14:00
  • $\begingroup$ I just edited the post. I forgot a point (Baking). It's now added. And i edited again, changed the order $\endgroup$
    – Reaper
    Commented Jul 17, 2017 at 14:02
  • $\begingroup$ @Man_From_India If this answers your question, could you please mark it as answer, so it's not displayed as unanswered? Thank you. $\endgroup$
    – Reaper
    Commented Jul 17, 2017 at 14:26
  • $\begingroup$ just to clarify one point. It seems tgar retopology lacks details. Should we unwrap it? Do you have any good tutorial about these workflows? $\endgroup$
    – Man_From_India
    Commented Jul 23, 2017 at 0:36

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