Helpful External Resources

There are many helpful guides and resources across the internet I'd love to share but I don't have the justification to just make a single page for each with just a link in it, so this is here as a list of various resources that have helped me in my processes! I'll be adding to this list over time.

Guides

General

Royal Skies (Youtube) - A great Youtube channel that offers quick and useful tutorials for Blender and various short tutorials on small topics, has saved my patience on more than one occasion.

Rigging

GuiltyGear Xrd Development Staff Talk: Modeling for Skinning - A presentation by Arc System Work's dev team on various professional principles for "skinning" to help with weight painting and rigging overall.

GuiltyGear Xrd Development Staff Talk: Bone Placement Tips for Action - A presentation by Arc System Work's dev team, goes over ideal bone placements and common mistakes for bone positions that result in odd pivots.

Recommended Blender Addons ^{(that aren't CATS)}

TexTools (Free) - Excellent for creating good UVs, it's absurdly useful and I use it all the time. It has saved me multiple times when default Blender has failed in UV tools.

Abormal (Free) - A tool for editing vertex normals, incredibly useful for creating precise stylized shading.

Retopoflow (Free) - A tool for doing retopology in Blender, is incredibly useful and high quality.

EdgeFlow (Free) - Great for making nice curves among other things, I use this all the time.

F2 (also known as Spider Script) (Free) - Incredibly useful for my style of modeling, allows you to select a single corner vertex with two connecting vertexes to create a full face. This one is included by default in Blender, no extra downloads, you just need to enable it.

(here's a gif below of me using F2 and EdgeFlow in action)

SKkeeper (Free) - Allows you to keep shape keys when using modifiers such as the mirror modifier, I should heavily note that you should not entirely rely on it, it does not always work all the time.