Over the last year or so I have received a number of e-mails from Blender users, mostly people new to Blender, asking how to do various things they have seen in my illustrations. It looks like, somewhere along the line, I have gone from Blender newbe to having four or more years' experience. Hopefully some of what I have learned can be useful to other users.
Often the most time-consuming part of 3D ilustration is working out how to do something, rather than actually doing it. These tutorials represent a lot of experimentation and research carried out while making my illustrations. They are not definitive—these are the methods that work for me.
* Since writing these tutorials Blender has gained a lot of new features and there are probably better and easier ways to do the things that I was trying to do here. *
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It took me ages to get fur that I liked the look of. This method is a bit time-comsuming, but it works.
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Use Empties to put image textures exactly where you want them. This is probably the most useful thing I know.
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The simplest way to make nice skin is by using the material settings and ramp shading. This tutorial also includes a section on Ambient Occlusion.
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UV Mapping can be fiddly, so I developed a method for texturing complicated materials like skin by using vertex painting and repeating image textures.
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Toon shading looks cool and Blender has some great toon shaders that you can tweak to get all kinds of effects. You don't have to have outlines or hard edges to the shading, and you can even dispense with complicated lighting.
Blender can seem very complicated at first, but fortunately there are a lot of good tutorials on the web with plenty of artists willing to share their hard-earned experience. The best place to start looking for help is www.blender.org . There are links from there to just about every Blender resource on the web.
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