Celebrating 1 year of Pothead!

Step-by-step course on bringing a concept art character to 3d with Blender

Who doesn't love an underdog? Rusty and bruised, this little guy proves there is fire in him yet.

Pothead was first created in 2016 the great Tim von Rueden (@vonnart) as one of the original CG Cookie characters. 

Today, our Blender trainer Jonathan Lampel breathes fresh life into Pothead and makes him shine... all in Blender. 

Pothead is your guide for creating characters in Blender, step by step

In 40 lessons you'll go from the default Blender scene...to a complete character that's ready for a rusty adventure. 

"Pothead makes for a great learning project because he is made up of mostly simple shapes - but with a few complex pieces thrown in."

~ Jonathan Lampel

Chapter 1: Hard Surface and Subdivision Surface Modeling

Because Pothead is made up of several hard surface pieces, we'll get the opportunity to talk about booleans, bevels, and creases in chapter 1.

But, because he's also round and smooth, you'll learn how to incorporate those techniques into a subdivision surface modeling workflow. 

Chapter 2: UV Unwrapping and Texturing Preparation

The second chapter focuses on UV unwrapping and preparing Pothead for texturing. 

It's no small task, but with the right techniques the process becomes very straightforward. 

Hand painted textures are perfect for matching the concept's rusty metal appearance in a 3d shader, so we will paint our own in Blender, but we'll also enlist the help of some procedural textures for the smaller, sharper, and more random details. 

At the end, we'll bake everything to one texture set - so Pothead can render quickly in Eevee and be exported to any other application

In 40 lessons and more than 17 hours of runtime, this is a fantastic project that covers a lot of ground... and skills that you will benefit from in countless future projects of your own.

This project is an intermediate one. While I will walk you through the whole project from start to finish, it's recommended that you have at least some prior experience with modeling, materials, and texturing before jumping in. If you're brand new to Blender, I would recommend watching these courses first:

1. The Blender Basics
2. Press Start - Your Simple First Blender Project
3. Fundamentals of 3D Mesh Modeling
4. Fundamentals of Materials and Shading
5. Fundamentals of Texturing

Want more CG Cookie Courses?

If you get inspired and would like to become a CG Cookie member after purchasing this course, send a message to [email protected] and we will be happy to help you set up an annual membership while discounting the amount you paid for this course on Blender Market.  A membership will give you access to our instructors, our community and 100+ CG Cookie Blender courses.  Be sure to mention your Blender Market Order ID and we will take it from there.

For more information, visit cgcookie.com or head over to our Creator Profile here on Blender Market.

Meet Your Instructor

Jonathan Lampel, CG Cookie

"Hey, guys! I'm an instructor at CG Cookie, the longest-running Blender training website. In my 5+ years of teaching Blender, I've created dozens of courses and taught thousands of new Blender users. Together, we can do this!"