So I finally finished creating an anime character on my own from scratch. There are several points I did differently from the course.
After searching through other materials, instead of building up from vertex, I decided to start with low poly, form the rough shape and subdivide it to make more details. At first I got a bit confused but using pole at same position as in course and understanding the flow of the mesh helped me a lot.
Unfortunately modeling head and face wasn’t as easy as body part. It was much more complicated than body and many reference topologies I found on the internet were very varied. In the end I managed to create a face but its topology isn’t clean as references.
I skipped shading in texture painting… or in other words, forgot about it until finishing current model and taking final renders. My mind was completely at “I finally finished it! Let’s go to next project!” stage when I realized that so I decided to leave it as it is.
Overall I’m happy with the result, although it still seems a little bit off from actual anime style. But considering even big companies had hard time when trying to make 3d anime style, I guess it’s just difficult to achieve.
Moral of the story: if I’m to make anime style 3d for my game, I’ll probably just get ok-to-modify-and-use model online and use that for base! 