Introducing: Rain

In the past months the team at the studio has been busy working on a brand new training series, focused on a very crucial production topic: character creation.

The first result of this training is the Rain character model, realised by Julien Kaspar. It's been extremely useful to have most of the team (especially the animation department) providing feedback on topics such as design, appeal and anatomy while the character was being developed.

Julien thoroughly annotated and documented every step of the journey, from exploratory sculpts, facial poses, mesh modelling, quick posing all the way to the final shading and lighting. All these steps are going to be available in the form of commented videos, along with all production files created during the process.

Here is the training outline:

1. Meet Rain: Introduction & Overview of the Training
2. Preparation & Conceptual Sculpting
3. Full Body & Outfit Sculpting
4. Expression Testing
5. Clean Retopology
6. UV Unwrapping
7. Stylised Texturing/Shading
8. Final Posing
9. Presentation & Rendering

You can check out a set of preview images at the Stylized Character Workflow project, where all the videos will be published on a weekly basis, starting next week!

Next up: rigging and animation

The Rain character will be fully rigged in the upcoming weeks by our brand new and not-yet-announced rigger Demeter (more info about him coming soon) and will be tested by the animation team.

Once the character reaches a production-quality level, it will become available on the Character Library for everyone to play with!

More training on the way!

With Blender 2.80 soon out in the wild, we are planning to refresh existing training, and produce some more workshops.

In the upcoming months you can expect:

• Updates to the animation training (by Hjalti, Nacho and Pablo Fournier)
• Updates to the Scripting for Artists (by Sybren)
• A brand new workshop by Andy

Do you have ideas for content you would like to see on Blender Cloud? Let us know in the comments!