Excellent course with misleading advertisement?

[GDTVPrince]

For anyone reading, I’d like you to consider this as a genuine constructive feedback for the improvement of all of us. It’s gonna be a little long because I want to thoroughly explain myself and not be misunderstood.

I have zero complaints about Grant’s teaching style, the pacing and the solutions presented.
The major selling point of this course is the fact that we have a knowledgeable Blender Master that is not only skilled in using the tool but also teaching the tool.

Try as much as you want, you won’t find on Youtube any free course or tutorial that thoroughly explains the step by step in a digestive manner for beginners who never modelled a character before.
They do not offer any useful links, .blend files, references and detailed explanations.

This is the only tutorial I’m being able to follow and replicate after several failed attempts with free tutorials out there. Here we have an actual teacher and a community helping you trough the baby steps instead of Youtubers who pretend to teach while expecting you to know everything already .

I can’t be anything less than very grateful for you all.

But there’s something that has to be discussed:

I think there’s a huge discrepancy in what both GDTV and most of the community here think “Anime” is and what Anime actually is.

You can’t create a generic stylized character and slap the Anime tag on it like it’s an umbrella therm for any cartoon like style. In a real commercial game scenario, doing this would be met with a lot of criticism.

What’s the point of slapping your content with the Anime Tag if you’re not gonna fully embrace all of the cultural luggage, technicalities and informal rules attached to it?

You don’t have to be Japanese to make great 3D Anime Models, but if you really want to ride on the wave of Anime’s popularity, then at least make a serious effort to learn the common tropes and visual cues associated with the Anime Art Style.

Crucial topics such as Toon Shading, Outline Methods, Topology for Anime’s Extreme Facial Deformations, Japanese Proportions, Color Palette and Basic 2D Concepts for example seem to be completely ignored. Anime is a niche art style that comes with many requirements to be pulled off after all.

Thankfully, the excellent knowledge taught in the course can easily be translated and repurposed for actual Anime Characters.

Had the course been named Stylized 3D Character, this whole comparison wouldn’t be needed.

[mfortunato]

I agree that the style of the character isn’t true Anime. It’s more a western interpretation of an anime character - kind of like Avatar the Last Air Bender. I believe it may have been marketed that way because it would get more sales - since anime is super popular - far more than when I was a teenager. But the instruction works just as well for anime characters. One thing I have been enjoying about these excellent tutorials is after learning the basics, going back and doing my own take on the character(s) in the tutorials. I do think the face could’ve been better designed to be closer to anime proportions - but that’s where we get to have fun and make the character look how we want :).

[Rocky]

yes I agree with the comment above, Anime tag is selling point here. The character is resembling Anime style, and most people would agree with this. Hence it was named Anime over a Stylized 3D character, in which case both names seem true in that case. So that was an author choice to pick the name for this course like it is.
And btw I would not cared much about criticism, especially the negative ones, if anyone comments on my work that’s just someone else’s thought about that piece and you can decide what you can do about that criticism.
You can learn from it, you can ignore it, you can get curious and ask why they think their opinion of this piece is like that? Ultimately you decide what to think about someone else’s comment, but just because someone said something and it’s not constructive in any way then I don’t have to take in that input! Think about that, people will have opinions and they will comment anyway whether you like it or not, so my take is to be willing to take criticism and do not let that affect me if I think it’s not serving me or my work.

[GDTVPrince]

You’re only correct in a hobbyist context. If you’re not delivering any paid products for paying customers then you’re free to do your art and name it however you want it, and I’m all for freedom of expression.

But in this context, subjective concepts such as positive/negative feedback or ignoring customer feedback don’t apply at all. There is only valid and invalid customer requests.

Customers are not random people criticizing your work, they’re important people who finantially support your business because they believed in what you promised them.

Sorry, but it’s an objective truth that GDTV isn’t specialized in Anime Character Creation. It’s not logical for a company to advertise a product they’re not specialized in.
Anime is a tag that comes with heavy cultural baggage, never use it if you’re not going all the way in.

Anime fans are known to be picky, they’re often particularly interested in Art Style Fidelity rather than the content itself.

GDTV can survive the current exposed culture where claims of cultural appropriation run rampant. Many of us indies probably couldn’t. We can’t afford to lose any credibility points.

“Promise nothing and deliver everything”.

[VVruba]

Gotta say I kinda agree with the OP.

If you made “Making a Car in Blender” course people would expect to learn how to model a car in detail; at least including the interior, the undercarriage and how to make some realistic looking materials.
If you then proceeded to just make a toy car in just the general shape of a car with some basic materials slapped onto it people would be rightfully upset.

Likewise, calling a course “Make 3D Anime Characters in Blender” and delivering a caricature of an anime character with no insight into proper anime proportions, key-shaping, shading, etcetera is a bit misleading in my opinion. I think the only redeeming part is that you do see the end result on the course thumbnail so it’s not exactly hard to tell this isn’t a proper anime anime character course.

[Spellkaze]

Totally agree with you, I got it thinking on that and while I got some good results (body topology and how to start doing hair and rigging) I had to do a lot of study of faces, body proportions and texturing to get the japannese anime style somewhat right, I do think it should have been called 3D stylized character to avoid confusions, I do appreciate the basics of the course though.
I honestly think the course would be a 100% improved if GDTV commissioned an OC character sheet from someone who does very japannese anime styled drawings and then translate that into a course.

[mfortunato]

I am going through this course now. And while Grant’s character doesn’t quite fit as anime, the techniques to create a true anime character are no different. He does encourage us, multiple times, to use our own references and make our own changes, if we wish to do so. While I am following the body fairly closely, I completely redesign the head, using different anime references I found on the web. I’ll post my results when the poor girl has some hair . It’s still a Western take on anime, but it looks like how I want my “anime” pirate character to be (she feels like a pirate to me ).
And I want to emphasize how damn good this tutorial is. Learning character topology is hard (at least to me). The techniques to reflow topology that Grant teaches here are an eye opener. I don’t believe he introduced the other courses I have so far taken. Splitting the verts to shift the poles - it has been a game changer for me. I really am enjoying this course.

Bottom line for those on the fence about this course: BUY IT. Take the course. And feel free to use your own references. Grant offers the topology reference to help get you understanding topology and flow, but you won’t ever get a character reference sheet with topology on it in real life. So experimenting with your own reference sheet is also a good idea.

[BH67]

@mfortunato

you won’t ever get a character reference sheet with topology on it in real life. So experimenting with your own reference sheet is also a good idea.

I’d go so far as to suggest doing both - once with the topology guidelines, and then a different human character without them. Creating good topology is the sort of thing that you get better at with practice, and a graduated approach can only help!

[mfortunato]

I agree 100%. Well said!

[VVruba]

I guess since this topic is being bumped again I’ll butt in just to recommend the Dikko YouTube channel for some really good character modelling tutorials. It has some very high-quality tuts on both poly-modelling and sculpting characters as well as rigging completely free. Don’t know how well it stacks up to the course on here since I haven’t taken it myself but I think it’s still very worth checking out.

[GDTVPrince]

It stacks up perfectly because Dikko’s Modeling for Animation series goes much deeper regarding topology for animation.

[mfortunato]

Thank you for this information. I have just subscribed to this channel. Looks like some really great tutorials.