This article is not about creating a toon character from the scratch in Blender, it is about adjusting a natural humanoid model to look more like a toon.

Import to Blender

It’s not very difficult to manipulate the topology of models using Blender if you know some basic principles and you can even do this for rigged character models. Let’s star twith the original mesh that we imported to Blender (e.g. as obj):

The model is a streetcop that we got from the Dexsoft and he is looking like a serious cop. To let him appear a little bit more like a cartoon model we will increase the size of the head and decrease the length of the legs.

A bigger head

To scale up the head we need to select the faces we want to enlarge first. So make sure you have x-mirror enabled and that the selection of faces is done also for the faces that are not visible:

Then press the C-key, enlarge the selection circle (using mouseheeel) and with face-selection enabled select the head:

Now press the S-key and move the mouse to scale the head up:

After scaling you have to bring the selected faces a little bit up by pressing G-key and then Z-key and then moving the mouse upwards.

Shorter legs

This task is a bit more complicated. Go to front view (1-key or Ctrl + 1-key) and then press B-key to select a box range. Select the legs like that:

After that we scale down the selected faces along the Z axis (S-key, Z-key and moving the mouse). Then press G-key and then Z-key and move the faces down:

Or just use the gizmo to move them down the Z-Axis. Then comes the tricky part: Select the feet also (again B-key) and after that press Ctrl-I to invert the selection. Then use circle selection (C-key) and the shift-key down and with that deselect the faces that were stretched by our scaling action. The selection should look like this now:

Then use the gizmo to bring the selected faces down:

Your model has the look we wanted but when your model is rigged, you have to adjust this too.

Adjust the rig

So select the rig, switch to Edit-mode and first adjust the leg-bones. Be sure to have X-mirror enabled:

Then select the upper part of the rig and move it down along the Z-axis til it fits our model again:

And that’s it. You model has a funny toon style now and can be exported for Unity for example or other engines:

Of course you can manipulate other parts of models also like bigger hands or feet or whatever comes to your mind, have fun.

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