Learning Blender: A Hands-On Guide to Creating 3D Animated Characters

Sculpt and Retopologize

While box modeling and poly to poly are probably the most “traditional” modeling methods, sculpting came to the 3D scene just a few years ago and it’s now widely used, especially for organic models. With sculpting, you create a very basic shape—topology doesn’t matter much here. Then you sculpt it, adjust the shape, and add a lot of detail to it. After that, you can use the Retopo (short for retopology or retopologize) process, which is basically creating the final topology for the model with a poly-to-poly method, but the geometry you create snaps to the shape you sculpted initially.

This is by far the most creative modeling method and artists love it. It allows you to focus on the shapes of your model and not have to ...