[FINAL, FINAL] CLASS ANNOUNCEMENT #7 (Apr 11, 2018): Thanks to those of you who have responded to the Questionnaire. The feedback is extremely helpful. If you haven't responded yet and you participated in the class - or even if you didn't participate - please fill that out and I will gift you 20 Breath of the Wild screenshots from my Switch.
[FINAL] CLASS ANNOUNCEMENT #6 (Apr 9, 2018): We've reached the end of the homework extension period and this class officially comes to end. What a month! It's been a thrill to see each of you forge your characters, learn new things, share tips with each other, and offer critiques along the way.
This thread will be open indefinitely but it's officially at the end of it's "class lifespan" meaning I won't be able to commit weekly time to it anymore and I will unpin it from the forum topics list. I'll pop in occasionally if I see activity but you all are more than welcome to keep working on their characters here if you wish!
UPDATE: Closing post on page 44 and XP has been added to each participating account.
CLASS ANNOUNCEMENT #5 (Mar 28, 2018): Week 4's stream is archived and available via the Past Events button on the Live Event page. Also a reminder that I'm extending the 'deadline' of this month and will be keeping this thread alive through the end of the first week in April. Hopefully that gives you all a bit more time to get your characters done!
CLASS ANNOUNCEMENT #4 (Mar 26, 2018): Week 3, done! Thanks to everyone who submitted by Sunday. I'm quite impressed by the neutralization and retoplogy work I've seen. It's a lot of work and I can see that effort in the WIPs and especially completed submissions.
Week 4 - the final week - dives into adding color to our model, primarily in the form of creating textures. Check out this week's breakdown a little further down in this description and see you tomorrow at the Live Event!
CLASS ANNOUNCEMENT #3 (Mar 19, 2018): Week 2 is accomplished and I'm finally caught up on submissions! Thanks to everyone who submitted by Sunday. We have some impressive character concept sculpts underway. In fact, I have yet to bestow a grade lower than an A this week.
Week 3 continues our 3-week character building production. Specifically we're going to look at pursuing an animation friendly version of our character - both how and why we would do this. See you tomorrow at the Live Event! Don't forget to RSVP.
CLASS ANNOUNCEMENT #2 (Mar 12, 2018): Week 1 is done! Thanks to everyone who submitted by Sunday. It's been a lot of fun seeing your caricature work and concept art choices.
Week 2 begins the 3-week process of building a character based on the concepts we choose. Don't forget to RSVP to the Live Event tomorrow - See you then!
CLASS ANNOUNCEMENT #1 (Mar 5, 2018): Class is in session! Today officially begins the BC2-1803 class. Please check the syllabus below for Week 1's focus and assignments. Begin watching the pre-recorded courses if you haven't already and begin looking for a cool, stylized character design for creating in 3D this month. The first Live Event is tomorrow at 2pm EST - SEE YOU THERE! 😎
Welcome to the CGCookie Class: Creating Stylized Characters with Blender! This class is designed to teach you everything you need to know about building stylized 3D characters. If you’re diligent in watching all content and hitting homework deadlines, by the end you will have a modeled and textured stylized character! It’s an intermediate-to-advanced class which means you’ll do best by having some experience with Blender and 3D modeling before committing to this class.
This is the second "Class" format where Citizen members are invited to focus together on a particular topic/skill for a month. Participation looks like this:
WHEN? The class will take place from March 5th through March 31st
Abstract: Stylization is any deviation from realism. Thus it’s a broad spectrum from slight liberty away from reality to extreme abstraction of reality. This week we're going to sift through various examples of stylized characters, noting their qualities, and categorizing a spectrum of stylization.
Goal of the Week: Train your eye and mind to stylize your perception. Practice simplifying and exaggerating reality. Loosen up your sculpting approach (gestural sculpting).
Pre-recorded course to watch: Art of Sculpting: Caricature Chapter
Week 1 Live Event (Already happened and archived!)
Homework:
Abstract: Story plays a big part in stylization. Not necessarily ‘narrative’ but background, personality, and purpose. The success of a character is strengthened by its developmental arc. The best artists create characters that are more than the sum of its pixels; more than the sum of its brush strokes and polygons; more than its final render.
Goal of the Week: Develop a story for your character; one that can fuel your creative workflow for the rest of the month. Then channel that story into the first stage of sculpting.
Pre-recorded courses to watch:
Week 2 Live Event (Don't forget to RSVP)
Homework:
Abstract: At this point a decision needs to be made about our character sculptures: A) Leave it as a sculpture or B) optimize it for ‘production’. Leaving it as a sculpture means it’s a static sculpture that can be painted, rendered, or 3D printed but not animated. Optimizing it for production means you turn your sculpture into a model that’s easiest to work with up to and including animation. If you opt for optimization, this week is mostly a technical and problem-solving task. We need to both retopologize our mesh and also neutralize it if the sculpt is posed.
Goal of the Week: Understand the concept of “production-friendly” and practice retopology.
Pre-recorded courses to watch:
Week 3 Live Event (Don't forget to RSVP)
Homework:
Abstract: Like Dorothy, our characters have so far lived in a black and white world. This week we’re leaving Kansas and adding color. There’s many methods for creating our character texture(s) including hand-painting, baking maps that accent the painting process (great for the less painterly character artists), as well as photo-sourcing. There's also a couple different formats: Vertex Colors and UV/Textures.
Goal of the Week: Get comfortable with painting textures.
Pre-recorded courses to watch:
Week 4 Live Event (Don't forget to RSVP)
Homework:
This thread is reserved for CG Cookie Citizens that are participating in the "Creating Stylized Characters with Blender" class. Its purpose is to serve as central communication for all participating Citizens (excluding Hobby plan Citizens) to ask me and each other questions and to post homework. As the instructor of the class, I will be monitoring this thread on a daily basis (especially Mon-Thurs) throughout the month of March to review homework and answer questions.
Free members are welcome to observe the thread but please respect that communication is reserved for Citizens.
FUh...
I've found blend1 file that seems to be alright. Had my 5 minutes of panic and regret tho.
Hello, all and Kent.
Just a check in. I realized that the bulk of my issues currently are big-fat-nub with little experience. Lower poly-UV map, Higher poly normal. Get detail lower poly count achieved. Is this thread open indefinitely? I am finally to a point that I consider "done" with my core sculpt. He's missing some of his tech gadgets that ill work on later. About to get to making my UV map and finally opening substance painter. Anyhoo! I'll post files and a sketchfab later. Just introduced myself to that on Friday with my Facebook debut.
Thanks Jere! Speaking of maps, does anyone know how to get opacity masks to work in sketchfab? I have seen plenty of models that use them, but I tried every possible setting on those feathers and could not get it to work properly.
I can't provide a pro-critique, but I think that looks really good! I like how you kept the scar in the model, and in general the spacing of your quads looks appropriate to me.
Discovering the true scope of the pain I am putting myself through. Wow .... substance painter is awesome .... and HUGE ... lol ... UV's are mostly done. Realized some procedural errors. "Multi-mesh composed "object" good - makes substance work like loads .... easier ... lol. Check.
Modeling a ball, make it a ball formed by at least 4 objects or "subtools" in Zbrush. lol Anyhow, I think I am on the path now. Zbrush also has a nifty "project" feature which I can use to transpose higher poly detail onto a lower poly mesh with the normal map. My noob failure trying to force all detail into the model itself. So I can crash systems everywhere. I supposed this will be something else I'll have to figure out, how low is too low? At the moment I do not know where I stand on getting a less dense mesh and maintaining the detail with science and stuffs.
I'm really interested in how this character is developing, so by all means keep posting.
A note about that Sketchfab upload though - it is highly off-center and difficult to pan around. I'm not sure how Sketchfab determines the center of rotation of a model - whether it is the global XYZ of the scene, or the origin of the object or the parent object or what....but perhaps try applying your model's position/rotation or recentering it on the grid maybe?
Homework Submission Week 4
Poor Ulbricht had to be decimated almost beyond recognition, but he made it into Sketchfab. The texturing process took quite a long time, but that was what I thought before the rigging and weight painting. Wow! I used every bit of the class extension Kent graciously gave us. I had a great time meeting everyone and seeing the inspired creations of you all.
It is strange how big I made the eye texture. One of many things I learned what not to do on my next project. Another one is not to apply the Subdivision Surface modifier too soon. Shape Keys are not your friend with dense geometry. Ha ha.
See you all next time and a big thanks to Kent for making this class happen.
Well even decimated Ulbricht looks great. The textures are so detailed that if you strapped them on a cube they would make it look like a viking lol
Homework Submission Week 4
so here we are...
after a lot of effort i ve finished working on my homework , and despite technical limitations , i have to say that i m really proud of the end result!
i have enjoyed this class very very much, and i recommend it to everybody.
i never thought that i ll do what i have done , i'm a hobbyist , and thank to this class i done in weeks what i used to do in ages.
thank u my dear classmates , it was a pleasure to be among u . i cant wait to see ur future projects!
@theluthier Sensei ; thank u for everything , ur devotion ,kindness ,and patience. i owe u a lot !
and thank u to CGcookies !
now it s time to take my art more seriously, and invest in a tablet and a new pc ;)
Ps: please forgive my bad english !
a last request Kent : can u please make a final stream to close the class ! pleasssssse :)
Yeah, I'm not sure what's going on, think it just got bugged somehow, because the setting matches exactly my first upload. Only thing that is different, I made some changes to the model. Couldn't figure it out. Was being having like it was in first person even though it was in orbit. I started me efforts today to generate my working low and high poly models, reworked into groups for easier experiments in Substance. Something else sort of happened ... it had been bothering me a bit more each time I looked at the model. The fact that the head felt more like an ant ... rather than a mantis. And well, there's going to be some ant insectoids in my story .... because well .. African folk-lore. Anyhow, Here's the original SketchFab and here's today's efforts. I will need to regenerate my maps as well, I suppose ... before I hit Substance with fury.
Low-High-and JFC-polycounts.
mmalhomsi You created a masterpiece. You also have a point about the last stream. The class seems to need a final live or recorded word from the instructor to have a sense of closure. It is probably the sign of a good sensei that the students want more.
Masterpiece indeed! Excellent work! So many details so well executed. The only small adjustment I would recommend is to lower the saturation and brightness of the rust on the knife. This is a portfolio piece for sure.
I love how she turned out ssilenthans! She would be so cool as pedestaled figurine. Your shading quality gives that kind of feel. Really nice job.
Really happy to see you take her all the way to completion. A+ work, easy 👏
Thanks for joining this class! Bear with me as I'm eager to get the next class prepped and on the calendar. A post-class survey is coming ASAP (this week sometime) which includes three options to vote on for the next class (in May likely)
PS: Oh and did you do the axe exercise?
Good call Mark - I think from now on I'm going to suggest people upload their un-smoothed version to sketchfab. Everyone uploaded this way, so no biggie. Now we know.
But still, I can tell it's a clean retopo pprocyonlotor. Good A-quality work!
Awesome retopo, 
valandrath! That time-consuming work paid off. It's very clean and uniform. And I too like that you modeled the scare into the base geo. Good stuff. You've earned an A in my book!
The orb looks super clean as well. Another A
Adam is progressing well, ssilver0199! Out of the gate, I might suggest that you change your background color to something other than black since the harsh shadows make the character's silhouette disappear a bit.
Are you going for a game-res asset?
PS: This thread will be open indefinitely but it's officially at the end of it's "class lifespan" meaning I won't be able to commit any more weekly time to it. I'll pop in occasionally if I see activity but users are more than welcome to keep working on their characters here if you wish!
NONSENSE 
csehz. No need to be shy - It's important for everyone to respect each other's relative level, including respecting yourself. Everyone starts at the same level; there's no fast tracking.
And besides, this little giraffe is quite the cutie and you successfully completed each week's homework. Awesome job! You've earned an A this week in my book. Thank you for participating and sharing your work this month 🙇🏻♂️
PS: Did you do the axe exercise?