Hey all! I know that Blender has a steep learning curve--I'm up the slope only a little bit--but I don't have $700+ for Zbrush, or money for any other program. Anyway, I had pretty much given up hope since Blender was so difficult for me, but I stumbled upon some tutorials that really helped me and I thought I'd share them here. They are very good for beginners. tutor4u on youtube has blender tutorials that took me from View attachment 364 to View attachment 365 . I hope it can help you, too!
3D total is a good site for tutorials. While they don't have as many for Blender as other programs, they're usually decent quality and cover a variety of topics for any given program. http://www.3dtotal.com/index_tutorial.php While this series of tutorials is for an older version of 3ds max, you might find some of the base techniques will work in any program. This is the set of tutorials I followed when I first started dinking with figure modeling. If nothing else I can make some pretty awesome looking ears. Joan of Arc - Body Joan of Arc - Head Joan of Arc - Ear Joan of Arc - Assembly Not sure if these tutorials on Renderosity for Blender are any good or not ... R'osity is geared more towards Poser/DS, but modeling tips are modeling tips so there might be something useful in a couple of them. I can't vouch for the Blender community there, but I doubt it's as crazy sauce as the Poser one.
3D Studio is free for students if you have a .edu email address. I haven't tried blender in years but at the time I didn't like it. I learned everything a while ago from a tutorial by Eric Maslowski - it is this.. but I can't find an actual link for it. If you can find it it is very useful. He basically goes through drawing the polygons on a reference photo, then using that drawing to create the object by tracing the polygons with the line tool in 3Ds, then using the side view to pull out the vertices to the proper depth. I think it is a good method for beginners because they can start in 2D and then once they get into the 3D part they have a plan to follow.
Sculptris is another free sculpting software, which was purchased by pixologic (the makers of zbrush) It can be infinitely re-meshed, so you dont have to worry about having a perfect base mesh. It still has a lot of the same organic sculpting feel as zbrush, and it's free! I'd recommend a pressure sensitive tablet or cintiq to get the most use out of it. Its a good stepping stone to eventually owning zbrush, and you export meshes into other programs for finishing/tweaking http://pixologic.com/sculptris/
