Jamie Dunbar has an introductory course for character design in Blender that covers all the right stuff.

Creating characters in 3D can be a scary undertaking. There’s a lot to learn, such as when should I sculpt a character and when should I model it by hand? Is it cheating to use a pre-made rig? What format should I export a final animation?

The Blender community has a lot of great tutorials. Unfortunately, very few of them cover the entire character design pipeline in detail. With over 30 hours of content, Jamie Dunbar’s character design video series takes an intense dive and covers the whole process. The series includes everything from setting up your reference images to begin modeling, all the way through to creating an initial test animation.

There is a free, but slightly cut down version available on YouTube.

You will also find an unedited premium version available on

Blender Market: https://blendermarket.com/products/character-design-for-production

and Gumroad: https://gumroad.com/l/kYajJ

About the Instructor

Jamie Dunbar has been running Dragonboots Studios, an animation studio based in Brisbane, Australia, for the past ten years. He has a wealth of experience with character design. He has created animated cartoon characters for the Myer’s Christmas display and the Texas Children’s Hospital.

In his spare time, Jamie helps run monthly meetup events for the Digital Labourer’s Federation, an Australian animation and VFX group with over 3,000 members.

Dragonboots Studios

 https://dragonbootsstudios.com/

Artstation: https://archdragon.artstation.com/

Brisbane DLF: www.facebook.com/groups/brisbanedlf