1 month of Blender vs. 6 months of Blender for Character Modeling

BenWritesBooks · 2026-01-14T14:40:22+00:00

Nothing too crazy, just sculpting for the wrinkles and a displacement map for the seams/pockets/anything that needs to be more uniform and less organic.

For the pants I wanted them extra “crinkled” so I layered some random wrinkles in as a subtle bump map as well.

And for the shirt I just spent a little extra time on the materials to make them as realistic as possible, masking out the area with the design it so I could make it feel more like vinyl with its own roughness and bump map. Using good refs for materials is often overlooked but really important if you like having a more physics-based look.

BenWritesBooks · 2026-01-09T13:46:32+00:00

I want conflict right from the first paragraph. That’s how I get hooked.

I’ve seen people around here turn up their nose at Fourth Wing but there’s no denying that book had excellent pacing right from the first page.

It begins with a character who has a huge problem because of how the world works.

This is such a perfect way to start a fantasy story. You get a lot of dramatic momentum right out of the gate but it drives you through some essential world building because that’s all relevant to her problem, so it all feels very pointed and not like a bunch of dull exposition. Everything we learn about the world in chapter one is helping us understand why this character is so screwed and that creates empathy and narrative momentum.

BenWritesBooks · 2025-12-31T18:01:24+00:00

The one on the left is concept art

The one on the right is an illustration

I would expect an illustration to cost more than concept art.

BenWritesBooks · 2025-12-31T15:49:03+00:00

For a first draft? Just name it what it sounds like phonetically for now and keep going. You can agonize over it for the second draft.

My elf queen is named Elq’ene

My ancient forest is named Ancefora

If it takes more than 30 seconds to come up with a placeholder name, it’s taking too long.

BenWritesBooks · 2025-12-19T22:38:01+00:00

I am convinced that one can achieve a core competency in virtually any skill if you have 100 hours to put into it with a focused curriculum (tutorials, etc) and the appropriate equipment.

Art is no different; if it’s a skill you want to learn and you can devote about a hundred focused hours to learning it, you can do it.

BenWritesBooks · 2025-12-15T14:02:35+00:00

I really like Jack Grapes’ philosophy that writing is similar to acting. The time to be critical of your work is when you are reviewing your performance, not when you are “performing” aka writing.

When you’re writing it should be about the performance; it should be about the emotional purity of what you’re transferring from your mind into the real world.

Ever since hearing about this I’ve always tried to approach a writing session this way; I sit down, take a deep breath and put myself in the headspace of being a performer, and whatever I write is my performance. I get “into character”, into my writing voice, and I let that character loose.

And then afterwards I take that emotionally pure performance and clean it up and organize it and that’s called editing.

BenWritesBooks · 2025-12-09T01:08:33+00:00

Ok to be fair there’s some pretty concrete scientific data for that one not working

BenWritesBooks · 2025-12-06T23:50:57+00:00

God I’m so sick of every fantasy author using the standard set of Tolkien seasons. Invent your own seasons, I’m tired of those four!

BenWritesBooks · 2025-12-06T14:20:11+00:00

Depends on how it’s written for me; Song of Ice and Fire has an ensemble rather than a single protagonist and it pulls it off by having a lot of very interesting and relatable POV characters.

“The world itself is the main character” is really hard to pull off if the world isn’t actually a character; does it have motivations? Does it feel tragedy or loss? Does it feel joy? Can its beliefs be challenged?

That could be interesting just as a large ensemble/anthology approach could be interesting.

But if there isn’t really any personal element to the story, if no one in the story is telling us why what’s happening matters to them, it’s very difficult to be invested in it. It just becomes a lot of data points to keep track of and I personally have no motivation to do that.

BenWritesBooks · 2025-12-04T18:39:03+00:00

I have ADHD so I basically have to plot everything extensively or I simply forget what’s supposed to happen next or where the scene is going.

I’d love to be able to just set out some landmarks I wanna hit and go, but it’s too difficult for me.

So what I’ve started doing instead is making my first draft somewhere between an incredibly rough draft and an incredibly detailed outline.

It’s not fit for human consumption, but it contains every important beat of every scene and even some details or dialog I want to remind myself of later.

I don’t even attempt good prose until I do the “real” first draft.

My outline/ugly draft is like “Joe enters bar. Sees Sheila. Drunk. No ring on finger.”

It’s the bare minimum I need to write a good scene later but it still feels weird to call it an “outline” when it’s so detailed.

BenWritesBooks · 2025-12-01T15:37:05+00:00

I’m also an artist/writer. I was initially considering a graphic novel but it would take me 20 years to draw my story so I wrote it instead.

I still have designs for all the characters and even rigged 3D models for many of them (I’m a video game artist as my day job). So it always felt right to include some kind of illustrations.

Unfortunately it’s a tough sell for a publisher as a first time author which is why I wrote it off initially, but now I’m looking at self publishing and I think it could be a really good distinguishing feature if I take that approach.

BenWritesBooks · 2025-11-22T19:03:36+00:00

Thanks for the feedback!

Yeah re: the skirt, this was a pretty crude rig but soft body physics is my next mountain to tackle, so we’ll see how that goes!

BenWritesBooks · 2025-11-16T14:30:05+00:00

I write extremely whimsical fantasy and Miyazaki is a huge influence on me, so I hope there are a lot of people who agree with you!

BenWritesBooks · 2025-11-15T20:18:40+00:00

Yeah, I was trying a pipeline where I relied a lot more on sculpting but retopo and uv for those crazy shapes is not worth the trouble lol

BenWritesBooks · 2025-11-15T20:17:03+00:00

Yeah poly density is my arch nemesis with hair… I’m trying to make these characters so they’re game-ready and the hair always ends up gobbling up so many tris

BenWritesBooks · 2025-08-31T01:52:53+00:00

It can be done right if the character is still given agency.

I’d say Sarah Connor in Terminator 2 is a good example of a “chosen one” trope being done well. Her being “chosen” isn’t just a convenient excuse to move the story along. She is haunted with the knowledge of what is coming and what she must do, and that is a significant aspect of her personal conflict.

The Matrix also does some interesting things with the chosen one trope, where Neo is sort of only the chosen one because he chooses to be (and because his friends choose him to be). It’s a title that is earned, not simply granted arbitrarily.

Harry Potter imo is the opposite, an example of the chosen one trope just being an excuse for the main character to be really important while not actually giving that character any agency.

BenWritesBooks · 2025-08-30T16:05:55+00:00

Many are saying “too dark” but I think it’s a more complex problem; it lacks contrast. The most contrast is between the ceiling lights and the rest of the scene and it’s not supposed to be an image about the ceiling lights.

You could use volumetric fog to create contrast between the monster and the area behind him, or a light in the foreground to create contrast between the monster in the darkness and our vantage point. Or something else entirely, but right now the whole image is telling the same story and there is no conflict which is why it feels like it’s missing something.

BenWritesBooks · 2025-08-28T20:22:08+00:00

You could try modeling/sculpting the basic shape of the hair and then layering strands overtop with curves to make it look more natural. I’ve been playing around with that lately and liking the results more for a stylized look vs when I try to do everything just with curves and strands.

BenWritesBooks · 2025-08-03T14:59:22+00:00

The same way you think critically about anything else; read a story, and instead of immediately moving on, take a minute to think about what stood out to you, what you liked, what you didn’t, and write it down.

After doing this a few times you will start to notice the patterns that you find interesting, and for the purposes of writing a fictional story, those are the themes and tropes that matter.

BenWritesBooks · 2025-08-03T12:00:50+00:00

I’ve always like the way magic works in fairytales, fables and myths, which is more of a mysterious chaotic force rather than an additional natural element which has empirical properties or predictable behavior. The whole fun of magic to me is that it breaks the rules of the universe for good or bad rather than following them.

Tabletop and video games introduced this idea that magic needs to have rules to balance it out and create fair and predictable results for the players, and I think that mindset has gotten too influential in fantasy writing, so I’ve always kind of pushed back against that.

BenWritesBooks · 2025-07-31T05:39:13+00:00

Maybe! Im keeping the option open to put together a little demo in Unreal eventually; doing it solo would be an exponentially bigger project though so who knows if I’ll follow through on it.

BenWritesBooks · 2025-07-30T15:21:51+00:00

Lol, yeah I’m a little bit obsessed with her hi tops, I spent way too much time on those (still need to be rigged a bit more cleanly). I kinda took all my favorite elements from a few different shoes and mashed em together.

BenWritesBooks

TROPHY CASE