Honestly, I’m not entirely happy with how it turned out, but I learned a lot in the process, and sometimes that’s enough.
The Santa Muerte figure stands in a sparse environment – just a dark background and a single candle. The idea was to keep things minimal so the focus would be on the gesture of death itself: a slow, deliberate movement, almost meditative.
The design itself. I’m not happy with it, and I know why: I didn’t give myself enough time. The design reads as “Santa Muerte-adjacent” rather than a fully realised interpretation. The details don’t cohesively tell a story the way they should. I rushed through the refinement phase, and it shows.
I struggled with modeling from the start and then I combined that struggle by expecting myself to produce high-quality work in a short time. Because the character design didn’t fully land I dimmed the lights to hide what I wasn’t confident in. The single candle creates mood but drowns out form. A death ritual should feel intimate, yes, but not as a cover for incomplete work.
What I’d change: Give the design time. If I do this project again I’d give myself enought time just for the character design and iteration. Multiple rounds of sketches, feedback from others, reference gathering. No rushing to 3D. Model with intention, not speed. I’d spend more time blocking out the silhouette in 3D before detailing. Make sure the proportions feel right before committing to texture and rigging. Be realistic about scope. A fully realised 3D character with textures, rigging, and animation in one week is ambitious.
This project was always going to be about learning, not perfection. I came in wanting to explore death through visual language, informed by cultural research and ritual. I did that research. I grounded the character in Santa Muerte iconography. I created a moment of animation that (despite its flaws) communicates something about reverence and stillness.
This semester was busy, I expected too much from myself, I didn’t do enough research. All of this shows, but I learned. I may be disapointed with myself, but I hope to have grown through this project.
Roman, I hope you still accept my blog-posts. GLG Lay
I decided to create a very simple (Rigify) rig just so that the model is pose-able.
Step 01: Activate the Add-on Rigify.
Step 02: Add > Armature > Rigify Meta-rigs > Human
Step 03: Go into Edit-Mode and move the rig to where it’s supposed to be.
Step 04: Apply transformations in Object-Mode for good luck.
Step 05: Select the model, the rig last.
Step 06: Press Generate Rig.
Step 07: Move your rig and find mistakes!
Step 08: Send it to Maria and she starts all over again because Rigify is messy. (see: her blogpost)
Step 09: Be shook as to how good the rig is.
(While the rig is amazing, the Grease pencil got lost along the way so I had to add it back in, which was harder than expected. I drew everything again bc it broke sosmehow.)
Step 10: create a small animation that’s vibey but no one can’t see the character design because you are unhappy with it!
Let me start with the course itself. Patata School’s podcast-style teaching approach, where two people talk through the process together rather than one instructor delivering a clean structured lesson, is something I have mixed feelings about. It made me irrationally annoyed at times and I couldn’t fully explain why. Something about the pacing of it. That said, objectively it works. Especially in the earlier sessions, the lectures were genuinely detailed and thorough, and even coming in with only a basic knowledge of Blender I was able to follow along without constantly getting completely lost. The moments where I did get stuck were usually fixable with a quick search, which is about as much as you can ask for from a tutorial course.
What I’ll take away from Patata School specifically is the sheer density of useful things packed into each session. Shortcuts I didn’t know existed, workflows that made obvious sense once I saw them, features I’d walked past in the interface a hundred times without knowing what they did. That kind of practical knowledge is hard to pick up just from reading documentation or watching random YouTube videos. Having it delivered in context, at the moment you actually need it, makes it stick in a way it otherwise wouldn’t.
The later sessions were thinner. The compositing lecture in particular felt like it ran out of steam, covered less than I’d hoped, and caused more friction than it should have due to version differences between the tutorial and my Blender setup. But that’s one weak lecture out of seven, which isn’t a bad ratio.
Goals vs. Reality
The original goal, stated clearly back in blog post two, was to create a short animation of a custom character with facial animation and voice acting. Around ten seconds, nothing too cinematic, but something complete.
What I actually ended up with is a four second running animation of a character based on a provided reference, no facial animation, no voice acting.
Is that a gap? Yes. Am I embarrassed about it? Not really.
I said early on that the goal was optimistic, and it was. What I underestimated wasn’t the difficulty of any single part of the process so much as the cumulative time cost of learning something properly. Watching a tutorial is fast. Following along in real time, pausing, rewinding, googling the thing they glossed over, taking notes, applying it to a model that’s slightly different from the one in the video, fixing the things that broke because of that difference — that’s three or four times slower. Every session took longer than I expected, and by the time I got to compositing the scope had naturally narrowed down to something achievable rather than something ambitious.
That’s fine. The goal was always a rough target, not a contract.
What I Actually Got Out of This
More than I expected, honestly. I started this semester having never seriously touched 3D. I can now model a character, apply materials and cel shading, rig a humanoid figure, fix weight painting errors, set up a stage, create a looping background animation using the NLA editor, and put together a basic composite. That’s a real set of skills, not just theoretical familiarity. I could sit down tomorrow and do a similar project without needing to follow a tutorial step by step for most of it.
Facial animation is still on the list. It’s a big enough topic that squeezing it into these ten posts was never realistic, and I’d rather learn it properly than rush through it just to say I covered it. That’s a separate project for another time.
And the bigger picture hasn’t changed. The whole reason I started down this road was the idea that the framework I’ve been building for my master’s thesis — the one for analyzing morally complex characters — eventually deserves a practical output. A character built from the data. Something that embodies the patterns rather than just describing them. I’m closer to being able to do that now than I was at the start of the semester, which was the point all along.
Honest review of this lecture: it was the weakest one in the whole course. And coming from someone who actually enjoys compositing, that stung a little.
What They Covered
The main thing Patata School showed in this session was how to add a hand-drawn effect to the final render using a Displace node in the compositor. The idea is to introduce a subtle wobble to the image that makes it feel more like a drawn animation rather than a clean 3D render. In principle, interesting. In practice, it didn’t work for me because the tutorial was recorded on an older version of Blender and the node setup behaved differently in my version. I had to figure out a workaround myself, and even after getting it to work I wasn’t particularly happy with the direction they were going aesthetically anyway, so I altered it to something that felt more like my own style.
What I actually didWhat the Tutorial told me to do
Beyond that, the session covered adding depth of field, motion blur, and a small camera movement, which I mostly improvised in the moment rather than following any specific instruction. How to actually render the project wasn’t explained in any meaningful detail either, but I’d picked up enough across the previous sessions to get through that on my own without too much trouble.
There was also something about removing the weird edges that were showing up in my shot, which I genuinely didn’t follow. I’m going to fix those in DaVinci Resolve in post instead, which honestly feels like the more sensible place to handle that kind of cleanup anyway.
General Feeling About This One
This lecture left me with very little to write about, which is itself kind of telling. The tips were basic, the main effect was a niche visual style I’m unlikely to use again, and the version gap between the tutorial and my Blender setup caused more friction than it should have. For a compositing lecture aimed at someone who wanted to add a proper finishing layer to their shot, it felt thin.
Not every session can be a revelation though, and the previous ones more than made up for it. The render is essentially done and I’m reasonably happy with how the whole thing looks.
The next post will be the last one: a full reflection on the process, how far I actually got versus where I hoped to be, and what I’d do differently if I started over.
I’ll be upfront: I was properly scared going into this one. Animation felt like the part where everything could fall apart. You can have a great model, clean materials, a solid rig, and then the moment you try to make it actually move, it looks terrible. That was my main fear going in.
It didn’t fall apart. In fact I’m genuinely surprised by how well it turned out for a first real character animation in Blender.
How the Character Animation Works
The approach Patata School uses is straightforward in principle: identify the key poses of the movement cycle, set those as keyframes, and then go back and adjust the frames in between. For a running animation specifically, the most important thing to get right is that the feet actually contact the ground at the correct moments. That’s what makes or breaks whether a run cycle looks believable. The parts where the feet are in the air matter less and give you more room to be loose. The ground contact frames are where you need to be precise, and most of the finessing happens around those.
One setting that made a noticeable difference: enabling the Pole Angle for the knee and elbow controls in the rig. This snaps the joints to point in a consistent, correct direction rather than flipping unpredictably as you move the limbs around. It’s the kind of thing that seems like a minor detail until you turn it off and suddenly your character’s knees are pointing sideways.
I’ll be honest that I didn’t go all-out on the animation quality here. This is a practice project and the goal was always to get something working rather than something perfect. That said, even with a relatively quick pass at it, it looks quite good. Better than I expected given the time I put in. I can see clearly where it could be improved, but for a first attempt I’m not unhappy with it at all.
Animating the Stage
Getting the character moving was only half of it. The background also needed to move to sell the illusion that the character is actually running through a space rather than jogging on the spot in front of a static painting.
For the plants I started by copy-pasting the bushes across the stage to get a few of them distributed across the scene. Then I created an Empty using the Arrows display type, which acts as a parent controller object. By selecting all the plants and then shift-selecting the Empty, I could parent everything to it, meaning whenever the Empty moves, all the plants move with it as a group. I then animated the Empty moving across 100 frames and set the interpolation to Linear so the movement is perfectly consistent, no easing in or out, just a steady scroll. The result is that the background appears to fly past as the character runs.
To avoid having to extend the animation manually to fill the full length of the shot, I used the Nonlinear Animation editor. You push the animation down into a block in the NLA editor, which turns it into a reusable strip, and then you can set how many times it repeats. I cranked the repeat count up until the strip filled the entire 100 frames of the shot. Clean and efficient.
I repeated the same process for the other background elements. The floor texture was the most interesting part of this, because you can also animate properties that live inside geometry nodes. So instead of moving an object, you’re keyframing a value in the node graph, which then drives how the texture scrolls across the surface. One thing to keep in mind: to actually see the keyframes you’ve set for a node property, you need to have that specific node selected in the Shader Editor. If you click away, the keyframes disappear from the timeline, which is confusing the first time it happens.
Where Things Stand
That’s essentially the animation done. And with it, I’ve made a decision about scope: facial animation is a deep enough topic that covering it properly would take several more sessions on its own, and these blog posts were never meant to go on forever. So I’m leaving it out for now and treating it as a separate thing to come back to.
The last step is compositing and rendering the final animation, which is what the next post will cover.
Short one this time, because honestly there isn’t that much to say. Setting up the stage for my animation was by far the easiest and most straightforward part of this whole process so far.
Before I actually got into it though, I noticed a leftover issue from the previous session. The Grease Pencil eyes I painted onto my character were still behaving strangely, changing brightness depending on the viewing angle. The fix was simple: in the Grease Pencil material settings, turning off the Use Lights option makes the material ignore scene lighting entirely and display at a flat, consistent brightness regardless of perspective. Should’ve caught that earlier, but glad it was an easy one.
Building the Stage
The lecture covered placing the ground plane the character walks on, adding a background plane behind the scene, and applying textures to both. The textures were set up using a geometry node structure that I’ll be honest about: I just copied it from the tutorial without fully digging into how every node connects. It worked, it looked right, moving on.
The one thing worth flagging here is clipping. If you place objects far enough from the camera, Blender stops rendering them by default. To fix that you increase the clip end distance in the camera settings, which extends how far into the scene Blender is willing to render. Easy to forget, slightly annoying when you do.
Two Things I Actually Learned
The pre-made objects in this part of the course were already prepared by Patata School, so I just had to bring them into my scene rather than building them from scratch. Which sounds simple, and it is, but the way you do it in Blender was new to me. You use the Append option from the File menu, navigate to the external Blender file you want to pull from, and select the collection you want to import. Everything comes in exactly as it was set up in the original file. Very clean, very practical, something I’ll definitely use again.
The other thing I picked up is that you can add 2D images to a 3D scene as mesh planes rather than just flat image textures floating in space. The advantage is that mesh planes actually interact with the scene lighting and cast shadows, which makes them behave like real objects rather than just stuck-on graphics. That immediately made me think of 2.5D projects, which I once tried to pull off in After Effects and found genuinely painful. Doing that kind of thing in Blender, with proper depth, lighting and shadow, seems like a much more sensible approach now that I know how it works.
Other than that, nothing dramatic happened this session. Next one is animation, which I expect to be considerably less relaxing.
Of all the things in this process I had been quietly afraid of, rigging was at the top of the list. By quite a margin.
My only real previous experience with rigging a character was painful enough that it left a mark. Hours of work on a model that was significantly simpler than this one, with very little to show for it at the end. So going into this session I had a specific kind of low-grade anxiety about the whole thing. The kind where you keep putting off pressing play on the tutorial because you already know it’s going to be hard.
It was hard. But nowhere near as hard as last time, and that’s almost entirely down to having a clear method to follow.
How Patata School Approaches Rigging
The starting point is Rigify, which is a Blender add-on that comes bundled with the software but needs to be manually enabled in the preferences before you can use it. Once it’s active, you get access to the Rigify Basic Human Meta-Rig, which is essentially a preset skeleton built for humanoid characters. Instead of placing every bone from scratch, you start with something that already has the right structure and just adjust it to fit your specific model.
The process goes like this: add the meta-rig, scale it so it roughly matches the proportions of your character, and then apply the scale before doing anything else. Skipping that step causes all kinds of strange behavior later in the process, so it’s worth being careful about. Then you go through and reposition each bone so the joints sit exactly where they should on the model. Elbows, knees, shoulders, hips. The goal is to get the skeleton to match the character as precisely as possible.
Two things Patata School emphasized here that genuinely matter: first, make sure the bones are placed at the actual joint positions, not just roughly in the right area. The quality of the deformation later depends directly on this. Second, and this one is easy to overlook, bend the limbs very slightly before generating the rig. Just a small angle at the elbow and knee. This tells Blender which direction those joints are meant to bend, and without it the automatic weight painting can get confused and produce some deeply weird results.
Once the bones are positioned correctly you hit Generate Rig, which converts the meta-rig into a fully functional control rig with all the handles and constraints you’d expect. Then you parent the mesh to the rig using Automatic Weights, which attempts to figure out on its own which bones should influence which parts of the mesh.
Attaching the Hair
The hair isn’t part of the original body mesh, so it can’t just be parented with Automatic Weights like everything else. The approach here is a bit different. First you apply all transforms on the hair object, which is one of those steps that sounds boring but prevents a lot of confusing behavior down the line. Then instead of parenting directly, you add a Child Of constraint to the hair and set the head bone as the parent. This tells the hair to follow the head bone specifically whenever the rig moves.
The catch is that after setting this up the positioning usually shifts, because Blender is recalculating the relationship between the hair and its new parent. The fix is straightforward: hit Set Inverse in the Child Of constraint settings, which snaps everything back to where it should be. Once that’s done the hair moves cleanly with the head, exactly as it should.
The Part Where Things Got Funky
Automatic Weights is impressive and also not perfect. In my case it produced two specific problems that needed fixing.
The first one: my Grease Pencil eyes were stretching when I moved the head. Not a subtle stretch either, a full-on horror-movie distortion. The fix was to manually weight paint the eyes so they were fully and exclusively influenced by the head bone, removing any competing influence from surrounding bones that had crept in.
The second one was genuinely funny. My ears were moving with my arms. Not the head, the arms. I have no clear explanation for why the automatic weight process decided that’s what should happen, but it did. The fix here was simpler than I expected: I selected the ears in Object Mode, went into the vertex groups, found the ones corresponding to the upper arm bones, and deleted them. With those influences removed, the ears behaved correctly.
After sorting out the weights I also went back through the materials, because moving the character around revealed a few spots I’d missed in the previous session where faces either had no material assigned or had the wrong one. Small fixes, but worth doing properly before moving on.
And then everything worked. Genuinely worked, arms moving right, head moving right, ears staying where ears are supposed to stay. I was relieved in a way that probably says a lot about how the previous sessions had gone.
One Honest Note
The tutorial wasn’t completely step-by-step for every problem that came up. The instructor ran into different issues than I did when generating and applying the rig, which meant I had to go and research some of the fixes myself rather than just following along. A bit frustrating in the moment, but probably good practice for the reality of working in Blender independently, where you will constantly be troubleshooting things the tutorial didn’t cover.
Next up is actually setting up the stage my character will move around in. Before that though, a quick note: the next lecture in the Patata School course covers how to give your character weapons to hold and animate them accordingly. Interesting, but completely irrelevant to what I’m building here. I’m skipping it for now and will come back to it if I ever find myself working on a project where that’s actually useful.
Okay, this was the session I’d been looking forward to since I started. Modelling was interesting, sculpting was a struggle, but giving my character actual color? That’s the kind of thing that makes it start to feel real.
And it delivered. This was by far the most enjoyable session so far.
A Few Things I Didn’t Know Blender Could Do
Right at the start of the tutorial I learned something completely unrelated to what we were actually doing, but useful enough that I want to write it down anyway. Blender has built-in presets for HDR maps. I had no idea. In the past I always downloaded them from Polyhaven whenever I needed one, which is fine, but knowing there are presets already sitting in Blender is the kind of thing that saves time on smaller projects where you just want to quickly preview how something looks under an HDR environment. Not needed for this project specifically, but definitely filing that away.
Color Space and Why It Actually Matters
Before touching any materials, Patata School explained something I’d never really thought about before: color space. By default, Blender uses AgX as its viewport color transform. AgX is designed to handle high dynamic range rendering in a more filmic, photorealistic way, which makes colors look richer and more complex. The thing is, for cel shading, that’s actually a problem. AgX processes and remaps colors in a way that can shift your shading tones away from what you actually set, which means the carefully chosen highlights, midtones and shadows you defined in your material don’t come out looking quite right in the viewport. Switching to Standard color space disables that processing and shows colors more directly as they are, which gives you much more predictable and accurate results when working with stylized, flat shading. I tested both and the difference was noticeable. Standard was clearly the right call here.
Setting Up the Cel Shading
This is where things got genuinely interesting. To achieve the cel shaded look, you build a material in the Shader Editor using a specific node setup. The core of it is a Color Ramp node, which lets you define exactly how light behaves across the surface of your model by setting distinct color stops for the highlight, midtone and shadow areas. Instead of a smooth gradient from light to dark like you’d get with a standard material, the Color Ramp lets you create sharp, defined bands of color, which is what gives cel shading its characteristic flat, illustrative look.
To drive that Color Ramp, you feed it the output of a Shader to RGB node, which converts the lighting information from Blender’s rendering engine into a color value that the Color Ramp can then remap. This is the part I’ll be honest about: I don’t fully understand why the Shader to RGB node works the way it does at a technical level. The tutorial explained it and I followed along, but some of the underlying logic is still a bit opaque to me. What I do understand is that without it, the Color Ramp has nothing to remap, so the whole setup falls apart. Sometimes you just have to accept that a thing works before you fully understand why it works.
Once the skin material was set up, the rest was straightforward. I duplicated the material, swapped the colors in the Color Ramp to match the other parts of the character, and assigned each material to the relevant faces on the model. The really practical upside of this approach is that every material has its own highlight, midtone and shadow colors that you can adjust independently. If you want the clothing to have a cooler shadow tone than the skin, you just change it in that material without affecting anything else.
One thing that saved me a lot of frustration: if you lose your face selection after assigning a material, you don’t have to reselect everything manually. There’s a Select button right in the material tab that reselects all faces assigned to that material instantly. I cannot count how many times in the past I did this the hard way without knowing that existed.
One Thing to Keep in Mind Going Forward
The session was mostly smooth, but one thing became clear pretty quickly: assigning materials to specific parts of a mesh is significantly easier when the mesh is clean and well-structured. Selecting the right faces in a chaotic or dense mesh is genuinely annoying, and my model was noticeably more complex than the one in the tutorial. Something I noticed a bit too late, and something I’ll think about much earlier next time.
But overall? Best session yet. The character is starting to look like something.
Alright. Lesson two is done. And if lesson one took longer than expected, lesson two took longer than that.
I genuinely cannot pinpoint exactly why the hair gave me so much trouble. It wasn’t conceptually complicated, the process is pretty straightforward once you see it laid out. You start with basic geometric shapes, subdivide them until they’re rounder and softer, join everything together, apply the subdivision, and then smooth it all out with sculpting tools. Simple enough on paper. In practice I spent way more time on it than I’d like to admit, staring at lumps that refused to look like hair no matter what I did with them.
I think the honest answer is that sculpting just isn’t naturally where my head is at. Coming from a background in film and motion design, I’m used to working with footage, keyframes, timing. Things that move through time. Pushing and pulling geometry in 3D space with a brush is a completely different kind of spatial thinking, and apparently mine needs some work. That said, the process was still genuinely interesting, because up until this point I had absolutely no idea how you’d even approach creating a 3D object in a weird, organic shape. Now at least I have a method.
A Few Things That Actually Made Sense
One thing that clicked really nicely was the asymmetry tip. When you’re working in a simplified, stylized character style like this, perfectly symmetrical hair looks artificial and stiff. Adding small variations, a strand that goes slightly differently, a volume that’s a bit fuller on one side, makes the whole thing read as more natural even within an intentionally simple aesthetic. It’s a small detail but the difference is visible.
I also picked up a workflow trick I’m going to use constantly going forward: how to create a clean round shape from a cube. You loop cut the cube at specific points, then apply a subdivision surface, and you get something much smoother and rounder than you’d expect from the starting geometry. This is how Patata School approached the ears, and it works really well. A circle that actually sits cleanly in 3D space, built from a box. Genuinely useful to know.
The other thing worth noting is how to place symmetrical objects on a character that weren’t part of the original mirrored mesh. If you want to add something like ears after the fact and have them appear on both sides, the trick is to keep the point of origin at the center base of the character, move the object into position in edit mode rather than object mode, and then apply the mirror modifier. Because the origin is centered, the mirror lands exactly where you want it. Clean, no manual placement on the second side. Once I understood why it worked it made complete sense, but figuring it out in the moment would’ve taken me a while on my own.
The Grease Pencil Part Was Actually Fun
After everything I just described, getting to the face was a relief. Patata School uses Blender’s Grease Pencil tool to draw the facial features directly, eyes, mouth, a few hair strands, in a hand-drawn 2D style that sits on top of the 3D model. The result is this slightly goofy, dorky character that looks like it came out of a children’s illustration, and I mean that as a compliment.
I had a genuine laugh looking at what I produced. Preschool-level drawing, objectively. But it has personality, which matters more than technical precision at this stage.
One thing that helped a lot here: switching between Origin and Surface mode in the Grease Pencil settings. In Surface mode your strokes are applied directly to the surface of whatever object you’re drawing on, so the face actually sits on the body rather than floating in front of it. Makes the whole thing look much more cohesive.
The One Thing That’s Still Bothering Me
The body smoothing didn’t fully work out. There are a couple of visible dents along the mirror axis where the two halves of the mesh meet, and no matter how much I poked at them with the sculpting tools, I couldn’t get them to disappear cleanly. Eventually I just left it. Sometimes you have to accept that something isn’t perfect and keep moving. Spending another hour on a seam that might not even be visible in the final render isn’t a good use of time.
The hard part is done though. Next up is materials and color, which I’m genuinely looking forward to.
Okay, so. First actual Blender session. Let’s talk about how that went.
The short version: not as smoothly as I’d hoped. The longer version is what this post is about.
I started with Patata School’s course on modelling, rigging and animating a character in Blender — specifically the modelling part, which is obviously the foundation everything else is built on. The idea was to follow along, pick up the workflow, and come out the other end with something I was reasonably happy with. And I did, eventually, come out with something I was reasonably happy with. It just took about three times longer than I expected, and my process looked nothing like what was shown on screen.
The Tutorial Speedrun Problem
Here’s the thing about tutorials: the person making them already knows how to do the thing. Which sounds obvious, but the implication of that is that they move fast. Very fast. The Patata School instructor basically speedran the modelling process — doing everything naturally, intuitively, without stopping to second-guess a single vertex placement. Which is great to watch. And completely useless to imitate in real time if you’ve never done this before.
About fifteen minutes in I abandoned the idea of following along step by step and switched strategies entirely. I freestyled it — using the techniques and tips they explained as a loose guide rather than trying to mirror every single move. Honestly? Probably the right call. Trying to pause, rewind, copy exactly, and keep up with commentary at the same time was already turning into a mess. Better to internalize the logic and apply it in my own way than to fall three steps behind and lose the thread completely.
The Actual Workflow (Which Was a Genuine Revelation)
The technique Patata School teaches for character modelling is, in retrospect, so obviously sensible that I’m mildly annoyed I didn’t figure it out myself earlier.
Step one: draw your character. Two views — front and side. Import both into Blender and place them on the X and Y axis as reference images. Then you model on top of them, using the drawings as a guide for proportions and silhouette. No guessing, no constantly rotating the camera to check if something looks right from a different angle. You just follow the drawing.
I once tried to model a character in Blender completely without tutorials, completely without any system, and it was genuinely painful. I had no idea what I was doing with the topology, no sense of the right workflow order, and it took me forever to get anywhere near something that looked like a character. So seeing this approach laid out clearly was a proper eye-opener — even if it sounds simple in description.
The actual modelling sequence goes: torso and head shape first (no hair at this stage), then one arm. Once one side is done, you delete the other half of the mesh and apply a mirror modifier, which duplicates everything symmetrically. Then you model the remaining leg on the mirrored version and you’re done with the base shape. Clean, logical, and dramatically easier than whatever approach I was taking the first time I tried this.
A few other things worth noting: Patata School strongly emphasized starting with simple, low-poly shapes and only adding a subdivision surface modifier once the foundation is solid. The reasoning is that trying to fix bad geometry after you’ve added a lot of subdivisions is a nightmare — far better to get the base right first and then let the subdivisions smooth everything out. They also use the Auto Smooth Shading option at a later stage to clean up the surface normals, which makes a noticeable difference to how the final mesh looks.
Oh, and a shortcut I didn’t know existed: Ctrl + 2 automatically applies a subdivision modifier at level 2. Genuinely useful, saved me several clicks.
Adjusted Expectations
By the end of the session my expectations for the final outcome had taken a fairly significant hit. Not because the tutorial was bad — it wasn’t, it was good — but because actually following a tutorial, pausing to take notes, rewinding to catch something you missed, and then trying to apply it yourself takes roughly ten times longer than just watching it through. What looks like a forty-minute process in the video is a four-hour afternoon in practice.
Which is fine. That’s how learning works. But I’d be lying if I said my mental image of a polished ten-second character animation with facial rigging and voice acting didn’t get slightly hazier by the end of it.
