Starting off with a reference for the 3D model was great to assuage my general unease about modeling a character, but starting with a simple cube was daunting. That’s why I sought out a helpful YouTube tutorial to hold my hand and walk me step by step through the process of using the shortcut tools, extruding, rotating and pushing this way and that the vertices, edges and faces. It walked me through the basics of blocking out a human figure, starting with simple primitives and gradually refining them into something more lifelike.
I began by mirroring the cube, hollowing out a basic cube, which would serve as the foundation for the torso. Following the tutorial’s advice, I applied the mirror modifier to ensure symmetry, a crucial step when modeling organic forms. With the clipping option enabled, I could freely move vertices without worrying about accidentally breaking the model’s center line.
At this stage, the process felt intuitive. I pulled and pushed vertices, extruded faces to form the rough silhouette of the chest and waist, and even started defining the curvature of the spine. It was satisfying to see the basic shape emerge so quickly. I found myself growing optimistic—maybe this wouldn’t be as difficult as I had feared.
That optimism, however, was short-lived. The real challenge began when I moved on to blocking out the extremities—the arms and legs. I had decided early on that this initial pass would be a rough draft, meaning I wouldn’t dive into intricate details like fingers or toes just yet. My goal was to establish the overall proportions and posture before refining smaller features.
But as soon as I started shaping the arms, I hit my first major snag. In the front view, things looked acceptable—the arms protruded naturally from the sleeves, and their positioning seemed correct relative to the torso. However, when I rotated the model to check the side profile, I realized I had made a critical oversight: I hadn’t considered the actual thickness of the arms. I had to resort to guesstimating. Another oversight? Not considering the rotation of the arms. In times of need both in drawing and now in 3D modeling, I turned to Gottfried Bammes’ anatomical studies and cross-referenced them. His detailed breakdowns of muscle structure and proportion gave me a rough mental blueprint of how the arm should look in space.
I began adjusting the vertices, ensuring that the arms had proper volume. The upper arm needed to be thicker near the shoulder, tapering slightly toward the elbow, while the forearm required a subtle curve to suggest muscle definition. It wasn’t perfect—after all, this was still a rough pass—but it was a significant improvement over the flat, rubbery limbs I had initially created.
While working on the arms, I also took the opportunity to refine the torso in greater detail. The initial block-out had given me a vague sense of the body’s shape, but now it was time to introduce more nuanced forms.
I focused on the rib-cage first, carefully curving the vertices inward to suggest the natural dip beneath the pectorals. This helped break up the otherwise boxy silhouette. Next, I turned my attention to the stomach; instead of leaving it as a flat plane, I sculpted a gentle outward curve near the abdomen, followed by a subtle inward taper toward the waist.
The hip bones proved to be another interesting challenge. In real anatomy, the pelvis creates distinct protrusions at the sides, and I wanted to capture that in my model. I carefully pushed and pulled vertices, ensuring the hips weren’t too exaggerated but still noticeable enough to suggest underlying bone structure. I might’ve gone a bit too far with my careful push and pull, however, which created a couple of problems for me down the line.
The wise words of my painting teacher from high school came back to me: “Don’t do it badly now and expect to fix it later, but do it right now, so it wouldn’t need fixing.” Indeed, I did very much so do it badly and then expected to fix it later. Maybe future me would provide the solution for those pokey love-handles.
My next step on the road to modeling, though? The head.
