haracter creation is your chance to let your imagination run wild.

If you already have
ideas, it’s easy to hit the ground running. If you don’t have ideas….well…. That can be a
different story.

We’ve put together a brief beginner’s guide to tutorials that will help you create
characters. Some offer ideas for finding inspiration, others offer sound advice for
developing technique or workflow.

We recently had an opportunity to sit down with a freelance illustrator who’s working on
a hush-hush indie game right now. Now, she doesn’t have a full blown tutorial for us, but
she does have some tips and “guiding questions” she uses to create and inform her
own characters.

Her name is Lauren Walsh, and you can check her stuff out here.

1. Tips From an Illustrator

Her first tip? References, references, references.

Even the designers of the most fantastical creatures will start with references. They will
take the skeletons of different real-world creatures and pull them together, building this
amazing monster by first designing its skeleton. The foundation is everything.

The best way to ensure the strong starting point for your character is to reference the
real world.

Walsh says history can be a huge help. She recommends collecting from history as
much as you can, both images and information. Certain things around today once
served a different function, and tracking that progression can lead to cool ideas for
intricate character decisions.

Take, for example, high heels. In today’s age, we understand them as an elegant
footwear option for almost exclusively women, or men dressing up as women. Or men
who are also rockstars.

Anyway… way back when, heels were used exclusively by Persian men while they rode
horses–it was easier for them to fire arrows with the extra stance-security the heel
provided.
When Europeans caught a whiff of Persian culture through an emissarial trip, the high-
heeled boot caught on with the aristocrats.

When the plebeians started to wear heels too, the aristocrats did the only logical thing…
Jacked the heels even higher (since they’d be useless if one actually had to walk in
them on cobblestone streets!

Fashion is a tricky beast to track, and you can find more to this story here. The short of
it is, eventually women start wearing the heeled boots to make their outfits more
masculine in the 1600s. Then, another hundred years after that, men weren’t wearing
them and women’s heels had grown taller.

Today, we think of high heels as a women’s shoe. Hundreds of years ago, it was worn
by men to shoot arrows. It’s that kind of function to form thinking that can lead to really
innovative character designs.

Here are some other questions to consider:

 How do you convey personality through appearance? (Think Overwatch)

 How do you convey rank or hierarchy?
 How does the environment impact your character’s physical features? Posture?
Skin? Height? Weight? Body language? Stance?
 How do religious or cultural influences impact your character’s features?

When it comes to character creation, observation can be your best friend. Observe the
world around you and pull from it what interests you.

Oh, and also observe the tutorials below.

2. Creative Bloq: Art and Design Inspiration

The team over at Creative Bloq put together a list of 100 Amazing Adobe Illustrator
Tutorials. Page 5 of that list has 12 tutorials tackling character design.

The character design tutorials cover quite a range of topics, from “How to Draw Happy
Tree Friends Characters” (for those of you who are familiar with that grisly series) to
creating comic book style or hip hop style characters.

If you’re looking to do some illustration work in Adobe Illustrator, this tutorial selection is
a good place to start. The selection is broad enough that you’ll be able to find a tutorial
that walks you through the steps to design a character you’ll actually want to
design, and it’s free to use.

3. Envato Tuts+
The contributors over at Envato Tuts+ never take a break, it seems. Posting new
tutorials anywhere from 1 to 3 times a month, the newest content is constantly
being updated with new tutorials dealing with character design.

Since January 9th, the site’s been updated to include how to create a cute rooster in
honor of the Chinese New Year using Affinity Designer. In December? They
added tutorials on how to create a reindeer character construction kit, or a unicorn
in Adobe Illustrator.

If you go further into their database, from May and March of 2016, you can learn how to
draw creatively using photo references–a tactic highlighted in our artist interview
introduction. There’s another tutorial for “10 Top Tips for Creating Unique Character
Designs.”

These tutorials are great if you’re looking for help turning your real-life inspiration into
fresh characters, or if you’re looking to develop your skills by copying successful
illustrations.

If you want to start with the basics you can check out their Easy Character Design
tutorial collection. This section features similar variety at a more accessible skill level.

4. Vandelay Design
The Team at Vandelay Design compiled a very helpful resource containing 60 tutorials
on character design using various software options.

There are tutorials for creating pirates, monsters, grumpy bears, and cute red-haired
boys. It’s all in there, and it’s a great place to find a tutorial for the kind of characters you
hope to design in the future.

The only downside here is that there’s no search feature, and every tutorial is listed
in a single column on one really long page. Since there are about 60 tutorials, it can
be a little tedious to search through and find the one you want.
Still, a little extra time searching is a small price to pay for a character design tutorial
that can unlock your skills and kick your creative juices into gear.

5. Autodesk: Make Games Campaign

Autodesk’s Make Games Campaign has video tutorials that walk you through creating
characters (and environments) in 3D. It will show you how to take your concept art and
render that as a 3D model. It also shows you how to add colors, textures, and lighting to
give your 3D models a unique look.

An important element in 3D rendering is rigging. This is the concept of building a

“control structure” for your character. When you build this structure, animators can then
give them movement and bring them to life in-game–or you can animate them yourself!

Theses tutorials will show you how to add movement to your characters and
objects after the rigging process. You’ll learn how to bring your characters to life, all
by yourself.

The tutorials focus on MAYA LT. If you don’t have it, you can download a free trial to get
through the tutorials and see if it’s the kind of software you could see yourself working
in. The game kit is also available for download on the site.

And if you’ve never worked with Maya LT before, don’t fret. They have a handful
of Maya LT 101 tutorials to get you started.

Video Game Design Guides:

 The Ultimate Guide to Character Design
 Intro to Video Game Art
 Beginner’s Guide to Game Mechanics
 Console Video Game Development Checklist

May 12, 2018