Basic Alien in Blender 2.83.3

Took a break from the rank beginner tutorials to have some fun being creative with the basic building blocks. I’m always going to make aliens, and I’ve been doing it for more than a quarter century. Aliens, robots, cyborgs, and monsters. Green is also my favorite color. I’ve always loved ’em. This one’s greeting us, uuuuh, sort of. Next I’m going to attempt a UFO to put in the background.

So, again, these are elementary techniques anyone could learn inside a week, if not a day or two, or in a day if you are really committed and maybe get an early start.

If you saw my last post, I’ve just started learning Blender (OK, relearning the basics, as I never really got that far before], and working my way through some tuts. It can get a little confusing at times, but it’s loads of fun, and so different from my more usual digital painting approach. Here, I don’t even use my drawing tablet.

And the real glory of it is looking at a character from multiples angles, rather than just the one. I also fashioned a whole body for it.

And another view, just because I can:

I gave him — or rather her? — those backwards sort of chicken legs that are all the fashion among mechs these days. Her head has vintage rocket fins on it. OK, okay, it’s not supposed to be a robot, but the challenge was to make it with the basic building blocks I learned so far, and that doesn’t include any organic sculpting, or rounded forms beyond the sphere, cylinder, and cone. Yeah, it’s kinda’ cute. I was going for the child’s toy look.

I played with a couple lights, and messed with the reflectivity of the surfaces. There’s some weird/cool shit that just happens when you are working. For instance, I was working on the feet from a side view, and decided to arrange the toe pads in a fanned row:

Here’s the feet from the bottom view, and before I’d created the arms:

And here’s the finished feet. I got a little fancy with them.

The joints have Tinker Toy written all over them. My next tutorial is actually making a mech, so, this is probably the last time I’ll let myself get away with such a simple mechanism.

I made the suctions cups from cones, with a little extruding, sizing, and depressing.

I have no idea what my UFO is going to look like, or how I’m going to position it in relation to the alien, or how I’m going to light it.

For those interested in playing with Blender — which is FREE forever — they key is just starting off with some good tutorials. There are lots on YouTube. Right now I’m doing a course I paid $15 for, but is usually $195 (COVID prices?). It’s this one: Blender Character Creator v2.0 for Video Games Design Course. There are over 12 hours of instruction, and you learn how to make characters, including using organic sculpting, and to rig them and animate them… At this point, I’ve only finished the real basic stuff about how to use the tools.

We made this stick man, and I used what I learned to make the alien.

It’s gonna’ get a lot more sophisticated. Let’s see if I can make it through the whole course, or at least through all the sculpting parts (I’m not really interested in animation]. So far I can recommend this course — and it looks like it’s the only one needed to get quite far — but there could be some snafu’s down the road. I can’t really recommend it until I’ve finished it.

Stay tuned for my attempt at a UFO for the background.

~ Ends

And if you like my art or criticism, please consider chipping in so I can keep working until I drop. Through Patreon, you can give $1 (or more) per month to help keep me going (y’know, so I don’t have to put art on the back-burner while I slog away at a full-time job). See how it works here. Or go directly to my account.

---

Or you can make a one time donation to help me keep on making art and blogging (and restore my faith in humanity simultaneously).