Graphics Tutorial for Beginners: Rendering your own character

As others have suggested, I’m making a GFX Tutorial.
This tutorial will be divided in three sections :

1. Getting your character from ROBLOX
2. Adjusting and modifying it in Blender
2.1 Rendering your Blender work
3. Adding a background to your character

All the programs I’ll be using for this tutorial are - ROBLOX Studio, Blender, Pixlr.

Obtaining your character model from ROBLOX
Make your character R6.
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Open a baseplate in ROBLOX Studio.
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When you’re in, you should open the ‘‘Explorer’’ and ‘‘Properties’’ tabs.
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I’m going to only copy my own character. Press ‘‘Play’’ in the ‘‘Test’’ tab.
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Navigate over to Workspace, and select your character model with your name.
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Select it, right click and ‘‘Cut’’ the model.
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End the test and select ‘‘Workspace’’, right click it and press ‘‘Paste into’’.
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Now that your character model is in there, right click it, and choose the option ‘‘Export section’’.
Name the file whatever you want it to be, and click save.
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Customizing and Adjusting your character in Blender

Open Blender

There’s going to be a ‘‘cube’’, just hit X on your keyboard and delete it.
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Press the keys Shift+F to move around, and use the keys ‘‘WASD’’ to move like in ROBLOX.

Now, open the tab ‘‘File’’ in the top left, navigate to the mid-bottom part and click on ‘‘Import’’ and choose ‘‘Wavefront (.obj)’’, Find your file and import it.

The character is going to show up as grey. This is how to fix it :

Select this ‘‘circle’’ shaped button near the end.

Click on it and select ‘‘Material’’
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Then, open the right side ‘‘Explorer’’ and find the option ‘‘Lamp’’ by scrolling down a bit, click on it.

A new icon is going to pop-up in the ‘‘Explorer’’. Click on it.

Now, go to the ‘‘Lamp’’ section and adjust them like this : ‘‘Specular’’ unticked, and choose ‘‘Hemi’’.
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The ‘‘Energy’’ can be set to whatever you like it, I like ‘‘1’’ or ‘‘1.5’’, I’ll choose ‘‘1.5’’ for this tutorial.
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Let’s get to bending ‘‘Limbs’’. First of all, select what you want to bend. I’ll make a waving pose!

To make a waving pose, you need to rotate your head. So, right click on what-ever you want to select and hold shift.
For me, it’s just the egg.
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Now that the head parts are selected, select the rotating tool.

Drag the head along, and decide how you want it to look.
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It’s a bit unrealistic for me, since I’m using the egg hat.

Now, for the most-important part, I’m going to bend the arm.

Before you do anything, you want to select the triangle in the ‘‘Explorer’’ and untick ‘’‘Auto smooth’’.

Select the hand, and use the rotate tool to rotate the hand a bit.

After rotating, you can use the ‘‘Cursor’’ tool to move the hand around.

It should end up looking like this.
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Now comes the ‘‘trickier’’ part.

You have to go to the ‘‘Object mode’’ while having your hand selected and click on the ‘‘Edit Mode’’.

Scroll down on the side bar on the left side, and select ‘‘Subdivide’’ once.
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After that’s done, just below will be the option ‘‘Remove Doubles’’, click on that.
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Now, move over to the selected hand. Right click anywhere on it.
It should be like this :
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Proceed further and click ‘‘Z’’ on your keyboard.
It will look like this :

Click ‘‘ctrl’’ and drag the mouse while left clicking.
I prefer dragging it til half of the hand is selected. It should highlight the part.

Click on the little ‘‘Sphere’’ next to ‘‘Edit Mode’’ and select ‘‘Material’’

Take the rotate tool and position it in a way that looks natural, it does look weird since my other arm is a different shape, but if yours are the same, it’ll look much better.
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Then, go back to the ‘‘Mode’’ selection tab and select ‘‘Object Mode’’
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Edit it the way you want it finished up, by rotating it and moving it with the tools you’ve used earlier.

You can move the other body parts in any way you want, just like we did with the arm.

Blender Sub-category '‘Render’'

For the rendering, you have to click the ‘‘Camera’’ button in the ‘‘Explorer’’

Now, move to the ‘‘Resolution’’ tab and make the resolution 10000x10000 for high quality.
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In the same ‘‘Camera’’ tab, scroll down and find ‘‘Shading’’ open it, select ‘‘Alpha’’ to ‘‘Transparent’’, You can choose it what you want it to be, but I’ll use ‘‘Transparent’’ for a transparent background.
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Now, to render it, you’re going to navigate to the very bottom and select ‘‘View’’, click on ‘‘View Frame’’ and position yourself properly in front of your character with Shift+F and ‘‘WASD’’ afterwards.
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This is what mine looks like after positioning my camera :

Now, for the final rendering steps, you have to go to the top, and select ‘‘Render’’, and press ‘‘Render image’’
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Allow the render to take some time, but the finished render should look like this :
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To save your Graphic, go to ‘‘Image’’ and select ‘‘Save as Image’’ and choose where you want to save it.
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Adding a background to your Character

To add a background, you can choose what software or application you want to use. For this case, I’ll use Paint.net, as it’s super easy to use.

You want to open your background picture, which you can download off Google.
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Then, upload your Character by using ‘‘Layers’’, and ‘‘Adding a New Layer’’.
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The GFX should be done, all you have to do is save it.

My finished product

I’m going to use this for a video, so I need an HD background. You can add whatever you like to.
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Now that you’ve learned how to make a GFX, Have fun making them!

42 Likes

Good very basic tutorial for graphics. I’d suggest if someone wanted smoother bends to subdivide it a bit more so they don’t get a weird stretched mesh. Also what a person could do is hit O on their keyboard which turns on porportional editing. This also smooths out the bends.

Good tutorial!

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