As a gamer, I’ve long been interested in 3D modelling, although like most things, I’ve never really taken the time to learn how to do it. Sure, there have been attempts – like a few years back, with the expensive desktop with a ridiculous amount of ram and a pair of GTX1080 graphics cards that I bought specifically for 3D, but life got in the way, and I could never seem to find the time to stick with it.
But that is about to change, especially since I tipped my toe into 3D with my recent purchase of an Ender 3 V2 3D printer, as this gives me a great excuse to delve back into modelling as I look for more complex, impressive prints to keep me occupied over the coming weeks and months.
Before we jump into the meat of this article, I think it’s worth point out its purpose, as it’s not just informational, helping others who are also looking to get into 3D, but primarily, it’s for myself, giving me a reference that I can easily come back to on future projects, should I get stuck or muddled as I learn.
It’s also important to keep in mind that I’m new to this, so when it comes to things like terminology, or the specifics and/or reasoning behind any of the steps outlined here, remember that I’m a novice, so might not be the best source of knowledge right now – although hopefully, with a couple of months, that changes.
With all that out of the way, let’s continue with my new project – what it is, where it is, and the new skills, techniques, and tips I’ve picked up along the way so far.
Table of Contents
Picking a project and getting started
If you’ve been following my blog or social profiles, you’d have seen my first 3D project – the pair of Pokemon cookie cutters, created in Tinkercad. While this was a fun, great first project, it wasn’t particularly difficult, requiring a little experience of Photoshop and not much else. So, with my next project, I figured it was time to start upping my game, and specifically, one that would help get be started with more advanced 3D modelling techniques and tools.
Another thing you’ll know if you follow me, is that I’m a huge fan of the Dino Crisis games from the late 90s – the first two, on the original Playstation, and not the “dinosaurs in space” crap-sandwich that was Dino Crisis 3. This, along with the fact that my blog is dinosaur-themed, seemed like a great place to start with my new project, combining my love of retro gaming and dinosaurs with my rekindled interest in all-things 3D.
After deciding on the theme, I headed over to Thingiverse and did a quick search for “Dino Crisis”, which returned a low-poly model of Regina – the main protagonist from the first two games – made by user ArtValk.
While it’s only low poly, being better as a game asset than a model to display, to me there’s something particularly cool about printing “real” models from the game, this type of model is also pretty basic, being better for a novice like myself than anything overly detailed. And although I definitely intend to create my own models in the future, I don’ yet have the skills to pull off creating my own Regina model from scratch.
Getting some 3D modelling software
Now that I had the model, I needed 3D modelling software. There are plenty to choose from, but for anyone just getting started as a hobbyist, your best bet is to go with Blender – it’s completely free, being offered under a GNU General Public License (GPL) license.
For anyone unfamiliar, Blender is a very powerful tool in the right hands, being capable of outputting the sort of models and stunning visuals of high-end “professional” software, without the $1,700+ annual license fee of something like 3D Studio Max.
If you want to sample just what is possible with Blender, check out “Sprite Fright” – the latest short film from the Blender Studio team. This short shows that while Blender is free, it’s certainly no slouch, being more than capable of producing content of a commercial quality.
I won’t go through installing Blender – it’s pretty easy, download it and follow the onscreen prompts. Now that that’s done, it’s time to boot it up and get my character model imported for rigging. Once you’ve done that, and the software is on your machine and ready to go, you’ll probably want to head over to YouTube before you do anything else.
There is a ton of great information on there, with loads of tutorial videos and guides published by the Blender community, which will give you everything you need to not just get started with Blender, but to also get good at it. It can be a little tricky at first, but with most things, with a little perseverance you’ll pick it up and will be making decent models in no time.
Rigging up our character model
Now that Blender is installed and ready to go, open it up, delete the default cube, and import the model, by navigating to file > import > Stl (.stl) and then selecting the model file. The mesh that loads will likely be ridiculously huge, so you’ll want to scale it to something a little more sensible.
Scaling in Blender is done by selecting your mesh in object mode, pressing “S” on the keyboard, and then using the mouse or trackpad to scale. Before doing that, make sure to change the pivot point for your mesh to “3D cursor”, which will keep it’s Z-axis position fixed while scaling it.
Next, you’ll want to add a character rig. If the concept of rigging is new to you, it’s best explained as adding a skeleton to your mesh, which allows you to pose and animate it. When it comes to picking a rig there are a couple of options here, which mostly depend on how complex your mesh is – or what character it is. For my case, as it’s a simple low-poly human character, so I only needed a basic human character mesh.
To add the rig, make sure you’re in object mode and click add > armature > basic > human (metarig). Once you’ve added the rig, you’ll need to scale and position it, so that all of the various parts of the character’s body match up to the rig, putting all the bones in their right and respective places.
But before you start grabbing and scaling the rig, click on it to select it and toggle “x-axis mirror” from the options in the header toolbar. This setting will mirror what you do on one side of the rig with the other, saving a bunch of time when lining up arms and legs.
To properly position the rig, select specific bones, or their heads or tails, and move them by using grab/move by pressing “G” then “X”, “Y”, or “Z” to select the axis, before moving then with the mouse or arrow keys. You’ll want to switch between views to align everything up perfectly, which shouldn’t take more than 10-15 minutes, even for a novice. With any luck, you’ll end up with something that looks a little like this:
Once you’re happy that the rig is properly aligned, navigate back to “object mode”, select the mesh first, then the rig. With both selected, right click and select parent > armature deform > with automatic weights. Now your model is rigged and ready for posing.
Now that the mode is rigged, let’s pose it
Rigging the model is the easy part, posing it was much more difficult – especially for a novice like myself. To begin, select your rig while in object mode and switch to pose mode.
The most difficult part about posing that I found as a novice, is just being able to think in 3D. It’s all a little alien and unatural at first, working out which bones to rotate, on which axis, to get the desired result. It’s a real trial and error process and took me a little time to get to grips with, being far more challenging than the process of rigging the model.
You’ll definitely want to load a reference image of the pose you’re trying to replicate. To do this, select object mode and navigate to the camera position (mine is on the X-axis view) you want the image to be visible from, then click add > image > reference and then find the image on your computer that you want to use.
It took me somewhere between 30-60 minutes to be happy with the pose for my model, you can see the results below – I think it’s not bad, especially given my lack of experience both with Blender and 3D more generally.
If you’re unhappy with the pose and want to start from the beginning, press alt + r to reset all rotations and alt + g to reset all translations in pose mode. This will undo everything you’ve done in pose mode, resetting your rigged model back to its original pose. Don’t worry if you have to do this a few times, I took me a good couple of attempts to get my head around posing the model.
What’s next
There are still a few things to do before I can give the model a print, the most obvious of which is adding a weapon for Regina to old. The interesting thing about the reference image – which is official game art, and not something fan-made – is that the M16A2 rifle with mounted M203 grenade launcher in the reference image isn’t one of the weapons available in either of the first 2 games.
Because of that, and given that this is a low poly model, going for more of an in-game asset aesthetic, I’m thinking to switch it out for the Franchi PA3 shotgun. So, look out for an update once I’ve done that, bringing me closer to attempting an initial print of the model. Besides the weapon, I also need to do a bit of light reading on any other steps needed to slice and prepare models created in blender for printing.
Beyond that, and while I’m a huge fan of the Dino Crisis games, they aren’t my favorite dino-related gaming moment – that would have to be level 3 “The Lost Valley” of the original Tomb Raider game, where a giant T-Rex comes out of nowhere.
I remember playing this back in the late 90s with the whole family sat around the TV taking turns, and in particular, asking a shop assistant in what was then Dixons, now Currys, about progressing in the game after we’d gotten stuck. We listened in disbelief, shrugging off the guy’s help that involved “…making your way through the T-Rex” as him pulling our leg, just to go home and play through it.
This has me thinking about doing a similar project with the Tomb Raider game, seeing if I can recreate and print of the T-Rex encounter. I’d like to see if I can use the TRViewer by Popov to extract the T-Rex and Lara models from the PC-version of the first game, importing these into Blender to rig and pose. This isn’t something I’ve attempted yet or have any experience of, but there’s a guide available over at the Ninjatoes papercraft weblog for anyone else who might be interested in this sort of thing.
I’ve started messing around with this and the models you can get out of TRViewer, so watch this space for more on this project in the next couple of weeks, as hopefully I’ll have a little progress to report.
That’s all for now, I hope that you’ve found this useful or, at the very least, mildly informative – until next time, happy modelling!
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