Be Lazy!
Character in Blender without modeling
Most people start out with Blender because they saw one of the Blender Open Movies, such as “Charge”. But creating a short movie can be quite complex. Especially for beginners. Which is the reason I listed up here 6 ways to get a character without years of knowledge and spending weeks so that you can directly start animating.
Table of Contents
Buy or Download a Character
There are a lot of Websites, from which you can Download and Buy already rigged Characters like:
This is the perhaps fastest and easiest way.
But it also comes with downsides, like the fact that there is no possibility for customization.
You also need to be careful under which license those are published if you want to use it in a project you want to publish yourself or even sell it like an Indie Game.
Some characters are even modeled after existing characters, like SpongeBob; in this case, there is also a third party that holds rights to the character as long as they are not in the public domain, like Sherlock Holmes or Frankenstein.
Character Creator
Character Creator by Reallusion (which also created the popular 2D animation software “Cartoon Animator” and the popular Motion capturing Software “iClone”) is a Software, which allows you, to Create, Modify and Animate 3D Characters in a variety of styles relatively easy.
There is also a Blender add-on available that can import the character in Blender fully textures and rigged.
Overall, it is a great piece of software. The only downside is, that it costs $299, which is an extremely fair price for such a piece of software, but for a lot of beginners, this will exclude this option.
Go the stylized rout
There are many styles, which are fairly simple to create, like a low poly style or a Minecraft animation. And there are also a ton of tutorials for those styles.
This is an example of an animation I did a long time ago in the Minecraft style.
I think, looking back, one of the best benefits of stylized work is that it ages very well.
Also, if you decide to take the stylized route, you maybe can take something away from this article: 8 Tips for Better Low Poly Renderings.
Human Generator
Human Generator is an add-on that allows you, to create characters directly in Blender.
It also has a lot of options for customization, of course way less, than Reallusion Character Creator. Therefore, it is way simpler and easier to use, and also, with $68 for a personal license or $128 for a commercial license, it is way cheaper.
Mixamo
Mixamo is a free online platform that allows you to either pick premade characters or upload self-made characters and rig them automatically, and add premade animations to it.
Which allows you to create character animations really fast, like this one I made within a few minutes.
USE AI!
There are tools like Meshy AI for example, that allow you, to create all kinds of geometry, including of cause characters. Together with the free add-on Rigify, that comes preinstalled in Blender, you can make a custom character really fast.
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