2 Hours of 3D Character Creation Tips & Tricks

this tutorial is sponsored by the 3d coloring book a project specifically designed to help empower artists who are struggling with texturing a substance painter and to help show you that anyone can create beautiful pieces of art with just a little bit of practice and guidance to instantly gain access to hundreds of pre-made professional level models and hours of high quality tutorials click the link in the description and begin your journey today [Music] hey everyone my name is tadik and i'm a 3d artist from brazil throughout this video i'll do a quick breakdown on some of my thoughts on how to solve the creation of this character in one weekend i'll have a pass through the sculpting my way to do some fast optimization and quickly jump into substance to paint textures and do some final renders using marmoset toolbag 3. if you have any questions regarding this video or if you want to sign up for a mentorship with me please message me through my emails or through my art station page on the description below hope you enjoy so before i begin i want to show you what i'll be talking about throughout this video um first of all it's my pipeline i usually do a blockout first usually the blockout is within zbrush then i do sculpting i do some optimization that is retopology and uv creation for this particular model i didn't create any production topology the topology is it's all wrong i'll show you real quick um it's it's just a decimation and some zero measure if you really need some information about production or topology and game ready topology or stuff that is ready to be rigged you can look for some other videos within this channel but for this particular project i just wanted to sell the final image that is the the concept transferred into a 3d model this 3d model is still usable for a game prototype but as i said before it's not a really good game ready mesh it's really heavy and it doesn't work at all but as i said i wanted to create a project in just a weekend so continuing um i just do the optimization that is the topology and uv creation in the case of this project it's just a decimation and mostly automatic uvs i just lay out them and i want to paint them as fast as possible um after the optimization i do baking that is in my massage toolbag 3 i do the texturing that is in substance painter and some of the texturing might be done in photoshop and finally i go into the rendering that is in marvel set as well so before i really begin a project i lay out some references in iepref this is a really really simple pref board sometimes i have hundreds of images in this board but i really wanted it to be simple so this is the concept it's an illustration by thiago lemon i'll try to link him in the description below it's an amazing artist from brazil as well so he created this draw this in your style and i thought it would be nice if i wanted to model this in my style it's not really my style i i most most of the arts direction is still his original concept and there are some areas in in this concept that that i really needed to read um in order to try to guess what they were the hardest part was this one i i don't know what this is but i made it as a crooked spine i i think it's grouped um english is not my first language so sometimes i i may not say things as clear um so i try to [Music] organize my project in my mind and i really wanted it to be done in the weekend i got some references from [Music] um how i think it would look nice and how other artists did a similar project that that's a skeleton that has gold stuff i got a zandalari troll from team remembers i think this guy i i don't really recall this his name is dimitro it's dimitro yakovlev i'm i'm sorry if i'm butchering it but so i really like the way the gold is assigned to this role i i think it's specifically it looks um as if it's a jewel and if it's it's a resistant metal real nice uh and i've got a skeleton that has some similar stuff happening here i don't recall the name of these artists as well but if you look for stylized skeleton on our station it's pretty quick to find these images um there are some annotations here that don't really matter so let's begin um this is my first blockout and this is done in about i don't know five minutes and it's all about trying to get the larger shapes first so i just create a a random head and because he has a head he has a torso so i created the torso he has a overcoat so i created some some mass that is going to be the overcoat in the future um he has his arms the arms are separate pieces just as his arms are in here i at this point i didn't really know how to resolve the spine issue that that is the crooked thing so i just made a stray thing he has a skirt so i made a a mess that is going to be the skirt and at this point it's all really really flat and doesn't sell the the character at all but at least i have the information here at this point i try to get the sizes correct so how do i do this um all of the pieces are on separate subtools right now and i'll just use a plugin that is the transpose master in case you don't know the transpose master it is usually used for posing projects but on my case i usually use it to adjust the scale of the whole project because when i do the t pose i can start doing really big movements so yep so i can move everything all of these sub tools in one brush stroke and like this i can get the concept behind it and i activate the see-through on my z-brush and i just check how it looks like let me just make the pure ref larger maybe something like this all right let's just check all right so right now i can see both my mesh and the concept and i can do some selections and masking so i can recalculate the scale of the stuff okay maybe adjust the see-through alright so his head was really big on my first blockout but as i said it was done in about five minutes um after i do this let me just check the scale of stuff so i can see that the belt or his his legs are really really short and the belt is not on the correct position so i just i'll just move everything i think um in the case you don't know how to use zbrush uh i won't be able to teach the basic um tool set that i'm using right now that is masking and transposing um but you can always check out more basic basic videos or beginner directed videos because um if i was to to show every single tool i'm using it would take a really really long time so it's mostly the move brush and move topological i use sometimes move topological is kind of different because if i use move i move everything and if i use move topological i only move the mesh that i click it on the separate mesh so that is kind of useful like if i'm going to pull these legs i can pull them separately and if i was to use the move brush i would pull the skirts together and it wouldn't work the way i maintained it um so let's just all right so i'll get the spine and move it up a little bit all right so one things that one thing that really stands out is that he is really straight right now um right now his head and his spine and the belt area and the skirt and everything is one straight line and people are not like this i am going to take the move brush and i can make maybe take it to the front and take his legs to the back a little bit like this his arms are starting to get distorted so i'll just pull them back [Music] all right mostly move brush nothing really fancy on the way of brushes so after i'm done this is not the final version that uh of my scales but at least it's a start i'll just hit t pose to sub tool when i do the t pose mesh it creates this temporary project and when i do the typograph tool it projects to my original project so um in processes okay it's all done i can do this um by the end of the project i sometimes i do this transpose master thing if i feel that something is lacking on the character on the matter of i don't know if he really needs um a smaller head and they really have a lot of stuff going on his head he has his glasses and hair and beard and i want to drag everything together sometimes i do a typos mesh drag his head and his stuff together and i do it he posts up to and it projects to the end character so after i'm done with this i start to get some some of the shapes some of these smaller shapes in here so what are these smaller shapes um stuff like the crown that is below his head and i i need the the skirt to have a more skirt shape i i don't know how to say it i need the front of the skirt i need this glove and the boots look really terrifying right now so to make up to make this skirt i can do a really simple dynamesh i have a customized interface so um i do some stuff automatically i don't know how to explain it right now since this is supposed to be a really quick video but if you want as i said before i'm available for mentorships or you can always look for more information on on the internet as well this dynamesh was really huge so yeah so this is a really simple dynamesh i can use some masking i have a a mask paint that i created that i use for this kind of stuff i do this mask so whenever i do a mask i can create a polygroup from the mask as i said before i won't be able to explain what is a polygroup right now but you can always look for this information on another place so i do a polygroup from it and i do a delete hidden uh do a double so this is the basic shape of the skirt i can maybe duplicate this sub tool and use it as a reference for my front of the skirt i do this kind of stuff so i'll just do the mask and delete hidden so that's my front of the skirt as well nice all right so i'll create the crown i'll just append a cylinder position it right around where the crown is on the original illustration and i'll remove the top part we'll just do a delete hidden i'll also remove the bottom part because it's supposed to be a crown not a ball all right tell it hidden into a zero mesher maybe just make it nicer all right double uh for those who don't know where what double means it's that when a mini mesh is single faced the back faces are called backface curling is about making the back faces invisible and if i hit double the back faces are visible as well this is available in the display properties on your tool menu so i hit double man it's nice since i don't really want to be traveling throughout this menu i made it i made it into a button right here um so i'll be doing this kind of stuff for quite some time but it's all about making the larger shapes into smaller shapes i'll create the overcoat right now so just do the same thing i did with the skirt do a polygroup i didn't dynamesh whatever i left some really strange shapes right there i'll just maybe do a clay polish wow all right i should have done the dynamesh thing let me do a quick dynamesh all right so this really makes me makes it easier some more masking all right make into a single polygroup and delete hidden all right so uh in order to create his rib cage his bones i'll just grab this guy and do a really similar process to what i did so i'll just do a dynamesh maybe lower all right this is really really heavy for some reason i don't know why okay now it's working so i will do a drawing of the bone maybe something like this doesn't really need to be accurate but it's the way i do stuff so this is these are the bones i need make them into a body group and delete hidden whoops really cheating i will do a clay polish and all right doing a clay polish oops makes them rounder i think and now i can do a z modeler maybe i should do a zero measure first okay so i can do a z modular q mesh polygroup all or all polygons doesn't really matter so they will become his bones i don't i don't really care about the the whole stretch thing because i'm going to sculpt over them so i'm going to do a dynamesh again i'm going to my polygroups tab and do a auto groups and a mirror and weld so every mold is now separate into its own body group i can do some inflating maybe all right so yeah bones are done let me just get this into a double all right so i since i really wanted to make this project in just a weekend i tried working as fast as possible and creating every single asset or part of his body as fast as possible and as soon as i could because i had a deadline in my head so yeah that's how i did most of the stuff um let me just look through um the rope i did it really really fast using a spiral so if you get a tool that is a spiral helix i think i think that's it if you get a helix and you do not make it into a polymesh you get this initialize menu and inside of the initialize menu you can adjust the basic shape of the tool you got so here i got some options for the helix but if i grabbed a cone or a cylinder the options would be different so i can establish its coverage and its subdivisions and if i try to make any modifications it will say that i need to make it into a polymesh but if i make any shrink polymesh i lose the options on this menu so if i do some adjustments i don't really recall how i did them i don't maybe maybe it was a different tool yeah it was a spiral so i grabbed the spiral yep that's it initialize so um i can adjust the coverage and the thickness and you can see that it begins thicker than it ends and i want it to be equal so i think this is it yep let me just check yeah i will just do no twist all right i'll just do some coverage and i don't want a lot of thickness maybe 10 i don't know maybe and i want it to be more separate i don't recall what is it or radius all right so it does something like this and this is exactly what i wanted because this is really similar in shape to a rope we've just got some some divisions in here last subdivisions on the rope itself and if i do a make poly mesh grab my move topological i can do some movements to the shape and this is a a single shape so if i get a edge loop in here i can go all the way to the end and i can create a single um uv set from this thing that's exactly what i did so um yeah this is really similar to what i did with his rope let me just show the final one the final one was a bit thinner but it's the same thing it's a single polygon and yeah i i did a whole lot of move into it to make it look like a rope so sometimes it's really clipping but i don't really care about the clipping because it's just a single rope and maybe some people didn't even notice that it's there let me just wait for the quick save and so moving through after i'm done with this kind of stuff i'll be about right here so it's not really far from what i have on the block out and this is starting to have some more shapes and and from time to time every now and then i do the back check using the transpose master to check if everything's all right so i got the skirt and the front of the skirt to do these these kinds of cuts it's again it's really simple you just need to do a mask so let me just make some random drawing maybe i do it like this and make it into a polygroup and do a delete hidden and i got this drawing right here so i can do it multiple times maybe something like this i'm doing some random drawings right now but uh usually i will try to make it close to what i see on the original concept so if i do a deleting them it's right here sometimes you may run into this kind of issue you will need to remask and delete him it's these vertex vertices are still connected so if i want to make it into a straight cut i need to disconnect them in some way after that i can do a clay polish to do to make them rounder and less marked by the polygons and this is how you do the cuts all of the cuts were done like this and until the very end the mesh is thin it's just a single face and by the very end of it i will do a key mesh to give the thickness basically like this so the this thickness it's the final thing and it's a key mesh that i did um so moving through after i create a a single single skull like this so this is really basic shape just pulling a sphere and sculpted it and after i did a single skulls i could duplicate and give it a different shape maybe something like this and maybe one bigger eye all right give it a different drawing on the top of the head right now i'm doing a using a three dynamic brush and i really use a lot of the orb brushes maybe you do already know the art brush pack but if you don't it's a free download and it's amazing so i really use a lot the orb flattened edge it's even a hot key for me in this case shift x so i can use my brush i do a lot of solo because my computer is not it's not really strong so i i try to make it run faster by using the solo feature so i really like about what i really like is that it gives a really hard edge that's not present on the h-polish brush or train dynamic those really leave some [Music] some room that is really soft and if i use the flattened edges i can make them to really hard connections that is really great for stylized art but i use them for realistic art as well so i use it a lot as a negative brush whenever it is negative it it gives some some shapes that are interesting so it gives some really nice thick flat shapes that i can use so this is a sample of a skull i can maybe change its size and give it a place and do a duplicate and place it somewhere else maybe something like this yeah so most of the assets were done using similar workflows so i'll just do the the crow school that's located right here on the illustration this guy so i can grab a skull or a sphere whatever again i i don't really care about what i'm doing on the matter of block out so i can do a snake hook to pull in his beak i can use the clay brush to make one of the eyes and i use the clay again to make the other eye and i need to create this nose right now so again i try to bring the bigger shape into smaller shapes slowly i can use the pinch brush to give it a tip or a or the move brush so i can make it more triangular like what we see on the illustration and i get my favorite rush the yard flatten and give it some flat shapes because if it was round like this when i do the baking inside of marmoset it wouldn't give me what i need so let me just check so i use the hard edges as a reference to do some painting inside of substance so you can see some yellow lines going through here these are because of the flat edges and if it was soft like what it what you get through smoothing or through trim dynamic it wouldn't work at all so let's just come back i will go through every single thing that i did so the outlines and how the flames are made these are going to be parts of the presentation so don't worry if you think i'll try to hide something and the posing how i thought about posing him everything's going to be into some court some sort of presentation i want as i said i won't be able to show every single thing because of the time limitation but i'll try my best so i really want to give it real flat shapes and whenever i see something really round like this let me just yeah this material tool is good so whenever something is really around i don't want it i want to break every single thing and i can do some sort of fold right here or something since it's very stylized i don't really need to look at real bird skulls to check how they work but if it was a lot if it was less stylized or really realistic i would need some bird skulls references to work through i need some subdivisions in here i guess so yep these are really nice shapes that are coming through here i like them all right so i'll try to make the ice pop a little bit and right now it's been about five minutes only using the orb flattened it's kind of cheesy but i really like the results it gives whenever i bake stuff out of it i don't really care about the detailing inside of the the nose of the bird because in the future i already know that i'm going to give it a really pitch black color something like this and the color i gave to the center of the skulls doesn't really reflect a lot of light so the parts of the material that has this kind of black or this kind of black or this kind of black doesn't reflect any sort of light so it doesn't really matter what is sculpt inside of it so yeah that's basically it i i could still work through it but it's just a simple example on how i do this kind of stuff and it's really nice again how the brush makes the object appear to have a real hard shape that's the the brush i use the most project since basically everything has this kind of look like if we get the ground here right here oops give it color right so grammar has some what's happening it has some stuff going on right here that's only done with this brush it's on a smaller scale so i got it it's a small brush and went through giving it some rough passes because the gold is a different material than the bone so i wanted don't have one look and the gold have another look and that's just about the scale of the noises that i did while using this single brush this is the most important brush for the whole project um opening the pickaxe it's really simple it's a shaft that's a cylinder and at the top let me get the version that has the block out of the pickaxe it's this guy so the top part is just a a cube that i got a another edge right here and after some time i think i changed it the middle part just four um cubes that are twisted i can show right now how i did it so append a cube rate so you can maybe get it longer and razory measure using detect edges whatever doesn't really matter how how heavy it is oops so i can pull it to the front and do a mirroring weld i can get the gizmo to the center and duplicate it while holding ctrl putting it back oops rotating it again so oops it wasn't centered all right so this is the basic shape for the pickaxe after that i can get the customized gizmo and put in a twist that is done that is exactly what i did for the pickaxe thing right here that is in the illustration like this i i didn't know how many spirals were there in the illustration but i figured that for would would look nice if i had to maybe it would be true fragile and i don't know about three so i just made it into four it will look like it's a it's a more fit thing for a tool to have so let me just delete this all right um another thing that i do while sculpting is splitting stuff into different pieces so his boot is a single piece at least i think it is but i treated it as a shoe separate from a sock or a piece of pants or whatever for a really long time and after i had all of the shapes correct on the boot and on the leg i dynamesh them together and after that i did some over them um i think that's it about the listing part there's nothing really steep stuff oh so how are the flames made um when you are on a game engine stuff can have back faces so what are back faces um let me just go back to zbrush all right so if i have something like a head and i want it to to look inside of it i can flip the face oops i'm just going solo so i can trace this from inside out i add some detail let me just flip it back again so we'll just make some some sort of detail so i'll look it from the front and just do the same thing right here so if i flip it i see the drawing that i made on the back and now i see the drawing that i made on the front back faces are used in games every single day so the flames are back-faced meshes that i just modeled inside of zbrush how did i model them it's really mostly about sculpting can do a band add a sphere and what ah well let me just isolate this guy this guy all right so if i grab a sphere i can flip it and it is now a back face so i can see the skull inside of the sphere at all times and if i make the sphere smaller or bigger you can only see the back face of it and i can sculpt the sphere as if it was a normal object because it is so maybe i can just to make a demonstration i already knew beforehand before starting the project that i would use this technique and it would be good to show people the this kind of stuff exists most of the time we don't really notice this kind of stuff in games it's mostly used when the vfx department creates um magic or um elemental effects and yeah it's still a vfx thing but i wanted to add it into a still character because it was essential to him so this is my flame right now and if i get this flame inside of marmoset's tool bag i can give it a material that does not reflect how it looks let me just show really fast i should put well is this it no yeah let me add some metallic so yeah here here we can see how it looks like without the proper material and i can even get this guy and make him as the way i sculpted it inside of zbrush so this is my zebra sculpture but it is flipped and it has a emissive material with no metalness so it looks like it's a flame but it's just a a mess [Music] that i created like half an hour of zebra sculpting so let me just put it back all right yeah it gives a really nice effect and it's really nice to show everyone how it works this is really similar to how we do the outline thing that i'll show later so let's just go back so i i think that's it about the sculpting part um most of this stuff it's really about putting hours and hours of work in them there's no really really there there's some big secret about stuff it's like oh how did i do the spine well it's it's the same thing that i did on the coat i did on the spine i can grab this piece and i can maybe give some divisions and rebuild lasso tool i think yeah whatever i can give it different polygroups and give them a group's dynamesh and this is basically it's almost done i just need to do some sculpting over them there's no big mysterious secret about the rest of the things that i didn't show you can always interpolate the information that i presented you can always roll back the video and recheck how i did some stuff and again if you have some questions you can always message me so yep this is fine i can maybe give it some definitions i can and i can do it again for this guy and on and on so i can get tons of shapes and now i worked for a really long time for a really long time on this project even though it was only three days i worked for about um nine hours per day on it so i can show every single thing i done but all this interpolation for me and great information from other videos so you can see what i did after the scope done i do a decimation so i'll just load the decimation i think it's this guy so this is the final version of the topology that was used most of it it's just decimated versions of the meshes that i had on the high poly so this is a high poly and this is the low poly and again i this isn't uh appropriate for production and if you are new if you don't have a portfolio you will need a good uh topology go uvs to to show people that you know what you're doing in this case i didn't want to show people that i know good topology i have some projects on my heart station that have um rear topology done properly with edge loops and uv optimization for this project i just wanted to sell the image and that's what i did so i separated it into some subtools so it's this guy some of this stuff it's just the remaster like his pants and i don't really recall why i did this remesher it could be a a decimation and it wouldn't affect me on any way so this guy again i don't remember why i did it as easily measure but it looks nice like this it's almost almost good so this guy it's a pure zero mesher i do some polygroups so i can split them easier using the automatic uv from zbrush the uv master has a polygroups tab right here so if you create polygroups you can use them as a reference when creating uvs i don't i don't know if this guy has uvs but i can maybe open them no so yeah i can check the polygroups tab and do an unwrap and he will he i i always in portuguese we we say he it will use the polygroups as a reference and now i can flatten and it has the uvs i used these are the uvs i used for the pickaxe i just laid them out so they look a little bit better i don't really like when stuff is laid out diagonally like this because sometimes i want to use a texture that's straight um 90 degrees vertical or horizontal and i have this really strange angle that's not easy to work with so why in maya i do some uv layout by hand but yeah all of this stuff it's oh damn oh nice okay so let me just reload it okay this is the optimization it's just about grabbing a piece and doing decimation and using the decimation as a reference sometimes the decimation gives you floating triangles so it's a good idea to dynamesh everything that you that you're going to decimate to a really low poly stage and you're going to use them them as the final mesh because if you do a dynamesh you can you can avoid some problems that may arise yeah so yeah i can do a decimation and so this is the poly version inside of maya um low poly that is debatable it's 200 000 triangles it's extremely heavy for what we have visually right here but as i said before i wanted it to be over in a weekend so i didn't really have a lot of time to do real topology and think about answers to how to do stuff how to make stuff work so this is how i i thought that i could save time and go jump straight into texturing and rendering and on so in maya i get the character and i make and i give him some uv sets and material names and well i give it some color so i can know what is what so the rope has a material the skirt has a material most of the skeleton has one material the overcoat has one material the pickaxe and well there is the flame too but that's still not here because uh this is the bake setup i didn't even need the the rope right here because the rope wasn't baked at all i created the whole texture by myself i just punched a hole into the rope so i could um select an edge loop and then fold it and the rope was the only mesh that i created the uvs totally inside of maya everything else was created inside of zbrush like open the uv editor we can see right here um let me just open the hyper shade maybe uh instead of hyper shade i mean i might be able to select everything uh yeah so this is how the layout was done every every uv was the uv that was created inside of zbrush but the layout was inside of maya and uv are created for the rope whatever it could be a straight line it doesn't doesn't really matter um the pickaxe as i said before i made it into a straight line i created a new topology for the pickaxe so this is a zero measure and i deleted some stuff but apart from this the rest of the stuff it's what i had inside of zbrush and the overcoat um a lot of wasted space but as i said before i didn't want to sell the idea of a good uv i just wanted to sell the idea of a good image all right so skirt these these uvs are terrible totally terrible but since i give a lot of texture density instead of substance it doesn't really matter and by the by the distance that we see the stuff doesn't really matter either um yep one thing that i didn't mention while sculpting is that i created the eyes the eyes have uvs and they have different materials the the eyes they don't really need to be baked but uh and they don't really need to be painted either but i wanted to paint them and one of the eyes has a different color as we can see side of our illustration one of the eyes is green and the other is white so i just separated them so i could easily paint one or the other uh yeah i think that's it so we set up marmoset's tool bag i have the bake setup right here i do a manual explosion of the meshes i know that mars has fullback is able to do a uh another kind of explosion but yep let me just drag these guys right here okay so this is the big setup i have my high polis and my low polys right here so the cage is really huge right now so i i would need to make it smaller um this guy starting position so for eight nine eight so um i do bake um [Music] at first normals just to check how the cage is behaving and how how it looks like at first i just do the normals and multiple texture sets and i do them on a low resolution like 1k whatever whenever the i check that the cage is good and the bakes are looking good i don't have any issues with the high poly or with uvs or with a low poly i upped the texture to 4k even if i don't use 4k for the final textures i do a 4k bake because we're sometimes we need to do a higher resolution painting inside of substance painter and when we export we can export the 2k or the 1k version but having the the upper resolution it's safer because if if i need to 4k by the end if i have a 2k bake it's going to lose some detailing so yeah when it when the normals are done and they look good i do the object normals i do the position curvature thickness might be useful if we have some subsurface scattering happening i didn't use any subsurface scattering for this project so yep well um ambient occlusion it's extremely important and vertex color it's really important for the material like this most of the time i have different meshes for stuff so vertex color and material id is not as important for this project but i still get it and when the bakes are done it's time for substance painter here i have my substance painter loaded and here is what it looks like by the end um i tried tried creating a single gold material it's created through my bakes and through visualizing what i like as i said before i really enjoyed how these trolls the strawberry team remember gold look like and this other guy right here this is skeleton dude by dimitrov yakovlev this gold it's really great and i noticed how they used the curvature to create some contrast when when the edges meet so for my gold i tried doing something similar even though it's not as great as theirs but i think it looks fine i created the bone material and this i don't know what this is it's kind of a leather thing and the wood material was also completely done inside of substance and i'll go through each and every one of these i prefer creating my own materials even though i have some substance source stuff right here i have lots of downloads from substance source and i use them as references mostly sometimes i may use a substance source material but i prefer creating my own so if i was to create my own material i would how would i do this i will create maybe a new gold so at first let me let me get this guy right here let me isolate the overcoat um well it's kind of lagging let's wait a moment all right so here i have the overcoat completely isolated whenever i have a new project inside of substance i try giving every object a different color material like this bright pink because like this i know what is not painted let's just pretend that this is non-existent old so if i if i get a blank new project like this i need to give it a bright pink or a bright green blue so i know what part is not painted and i'll just create a new layer put it into a new group give it a name like leather and i'll just mask what's leather i'll give it a random color whatever um i'll just add a paint and i use the polygon fill inside of substance select this guy and this guy this is leather i think yep the rest of the stuff is gold so i can just oops just creating new layer i always use few layers i rarely use paint layers there are some rare occasions where i might use a paint layer most of the time it's all about few layers i don't really think that paint layers are any great because your layers are amazing i'll just grab this guy i'll give it the name gold give it a mask oh before that i need to give it a color of some kind like blue whatever paint and paint everything that's gold because i i still have separate meshes for everything i don't really have the need of a id map but if i was to create a topology for this guy most probably i would bake these clips of the back of the the overcoat on the same mesh and i would need a ig map to locate them but as it is right now i can use only the polygon fuel all right so this is gold blue is gold red is leather all right so let's give it a more close look it's kind of brown kind of gray so let's give it a grayish brownish color kind of like this and for the gold i'll give it a bright orange i i like giving it a more orange than yellow because if you get yellow a pure yellow sometimes it looks like i don't know it looks like copper let's give it a metallic look doesn't look as great as if we give it some red all right fully metallic i like starting with 0.5 roughness on all of this stuff okay so this is the basic of giving a separate identification for the materials so i can now work through to create the leather um i'll just add a noise of some kind i'll add a new fill layer this fill layer i'll give it some random color like red a black mask a fill inside of the black mask and some procedural stuff like some noise some grunge let me see some some range that has lots of contrasting to it like this all right i'll change the scale okay and let's give it some more similar colors change the scale again change the balance maybe or maybe invert the balance no but again okay i'll give it some height information not so much and it's still it's too much maybe back it up a little bit make it weaker make it a closer color maybe less opacity less height one feedback that i received is that there's just too much noise happening here and i agree i think that's just too much noise that i have and i can give it maybe um okay i can give it more noises right now because it's still not as much as i have on the final one and a fill get a new grunge maybe something like oh this one doesn't have as much contrast that i need maybe this all right looks great just change the scale give it more contrast change the color and the height map usually micro details like these don't need to be created inside of zbrush you'll see that there's lots of people that enjoy creating micro details inside of zbrush but for games i think it's easier if you don't have them because it's easier to change when inside of substance painter then easier to change from zbrush and then baking again and then you need to paint them again and then export textures and then bring them to unreal or unity or whatever so these kinds of stuff i think it's better and safer to have them inside of substance and if you have some proficiency with substance designer you can even create some custom materials that will make your life even easier i don't have the the necessary skills on substance designer but i'm looking forward to learning it in the future so yeah um there's lots of ways to to work through stuff and this is just another way to do it i can grab my maps that i baked and use them as references when painting one thing that i really like to do is using my curvature so i'll just get a overcoat this yeah so when i get the curvature map inside of a mask a mask fill i can use the curvature references those are the things that i really made clear when using that orbit brush that i mentioned before your flattened edges so whenever there's a clear edge it becomes really white and it's really gray the curvature so i'll make it more contrast and i think that's how you say it i can give it more contrast through a levels inside of the my mask using the levels i can make the whites stronger and the blacks stronger as well i need the the blacks right here because if if everything's gray it wouldn't work at all so like this and now i'm really making these edges appear right now the the layer is red but i can give it a more realistic color like a gray or a white this is extremely present on every kind of stylized texture you see and it's something pretty similar to what we see right here even though this is on a next level of quality but i think it's a similar process that was used right here you can see it so yep i i just paid attention to my references most of the time so yep i'll just work on the gold sum so the gold it's kind of the same i'll just give it less saturation maybe maybe make it a little bit darker so something like this maybe i'll give it some some noise so i don't have the same color overall and the same roughness and the same height over the whole thing i'll give it a procedural and i'll um i think i'll get the i don't know marble shapes i don't know i'll just grab anything and color [Music] i'll just give it a different color i'll just press c to change what i see right now maybe something like this maybe just change some height just a little bit and change the roughness overall let's see having the same roughness over the the mesh wouldn't make sense so changing the roughness it's really necessary on the leather i did something wrong right here maybe make the these edges rougher all right yep maybe like this so i can give it a no feel layer a black mask a fill and i can grab my curvature say overcoat curvature i can give it a levels alt click on the mask to show what i'm working on and use the levels give it more contrast so right now i'm looking at the gold maybe i can try to make these curves appear a little bit like this just check on the quality okay it's okay maybe like this all right so i can just change the color [Music] so let me check how the base color looks okay and change the roughness a little bit all right so this is basically how i work i can go on and on adding more fill layers even a black mask even they feel even a procedural and getting some stuff happening in here i don't know give it a pattern or whatever you can go crazy with stuff you can you need to test stuff out because that's how it works we really need to test stuff out and well wow it looks really bad so i can just go on and change the pattern maybe or give it a new grunge and wow it looks really bad again but it's all about testing stuff if you are a beginner on substance and i say you should just get a simple prop in here maybe a model a simple knife or a a table or a chair and try to texture it inside of inside of substance and then compare with other people with other artists how they solved their issues why do their props or their projects look good um maybe try to contact them and yeah it's all about doing stuff and trying to create things yourself let me just get these guys right here again i'll just hide the the ones that i created so this is the one that i created and we can see here we have some um some noise and the gold is pretty similar to what i created right now it's nothing really fancy it's just this i'll show now how i created the the wood texture let me just change my texture set okay so i'll just do the same thing again i'll hide the wood and it didn't process what is happening okay so yep so i agree i will create a new wood right here the textures that i gave inside of zbrush are really thin and are not really appearing right here so that's why i wanted to create a new wood i didn't think that was detailed enough let me just show i'll just give it a metallic look so you can see the reflections it's really plain as wood so i really needed to texture it inside of substance again because it just looks really bad i i should have worked a little bit more on the shaft or the handle of the pickaxe and well let's just texture it i'll call it wood and give it a brown color no metallic some some roughness a little bit more than what we had on the other stuff because wood uh if it's dry wood it doesn't really reflect a lot of light i'll try giving it maybe six five roughness okay so i'll give it a no feel layer and there are two two procedurals that i use a lot when creating wood it's this grunge map zero zero five and the wood by itself on substance painter if i create a black mask and add a few layer and drag the this grunge in here i'll just change the scale and it already looks great so yeah it's really fast it only looks great because the uvs are straight if the uvs were diagonal like what i had on zbrush by default i would have to rotate it because it would look like this it's not that it looks bad but i i prefer having the bark of the wood looking straight up or i don't know it will look awkward if it was like this now it doesn't look like wood at all so yep you would need to modify on the rotation by yourself if your uvs were not straight okay so having this i can maybe change the base color of it um maybe something like this change the height let me just check okay it's positive okay and the roughness is wet right now um it looks like clay so give it a little more shine maybe okay i'll add a new fill layer a black mask fill wood now this is the wood o1 i don't know if in the future they will release no wood textures but this is the procedure we use right now now this is a horizontal texture even if i change the scale you can see right here so i'll change the rotation to 19 degrees all right and i'll change the scale back a little bit maybe something like this i think it comes with too many knots on the wood i'll just change it to zero um maybe maybe give it give it some knots yeah i i i really need one knot oh all right we have one right here and one thing that i forgot it's too isolated i see that the gold was being painted okay so yeah right now it's okay uh give it some more wood color because white didn't look any good let's try black maybe let's see a more black color maybe maybe something like this i'll need to change the scale of the grunge map maybe 13 maybe maybe word it i'm not sure i'll try to no they okay um now it's all about trying to make the colors work together because right now they are fighting and it's not really good so i'll have to find some good looking colors something that's not too cartoonish i wanted to give it a more realistic feel to the materials so if the wood it was very saturated and very cartoonish looking it wouldn't fit together with the rest of the materials like the realistic gold and the realistic leather and the realistic bone even though the shapes are stylized i like having realistic materials going on let's see so yeah this is the basic wood it won't change from here it's these three layers i don't know if i created more layers yeah i created one more and oh it's the curvature i think or maybe let's see oh it's the it's the ao i used the ambient occlusion for something i don't really recall what is it let's check uh i'm not sure what's what the mate occlusion is doing oh i think it's creating this shadow right here yep i use the ao for one shadow and well yep that's it that's the basic wood and now for the rope the rope um it's completely uh textured inside of substance again i didn't do anything to the rope i just created the shape side of the brush on using that spiral method that i show showed some some minutes ago inside of the zbrush i didn't do any kind of sculpting or texturing of it and inside of maya i just opened the uvs and laid them out on a way that they would work together and inside of substance i just used some simple things to make the rope work that's just what is it let's just show it has a let's see if i can show it but this is not right at all okay but i have a stripes going on i'm not sure why it is not showing for you but i have these stripes going um why why is it not working okay oh these are the stripes so inside of the folder i made a stripes texture these are procedurals as well um you can find them under are they procedurals yes they are stripes so if i drag the stripes on the black mask field i can change the scale so the scale the full scale is just too big so i just made the scale larger i think it was three maybe 3.3 and gave it some rotation because sometimes the rotation will come off wrong like if it's like if it's like this it looks like looks more like tubes so it gives more rotation so it looks like spinning and yeah no no big secret so yeah i i had a basic brow inside of the field i had some lighter color and another stripes going on to give it some some movement some something that looks like a a line of some sort so it looks like a the fiber of the rope inside of it no no real big big stuff going on over here and now to the bone so let's just wait for the quick save real quick um well while it's quick saving i can say that the bone it's basically the same way that i painted the leather the black leather from the overcoat is the same way that i paint the bone so let's just grab skeleton and [Music] let's just look for the bones okay these are many many layers i i spent quite some time working on them let's just see what are these things oh these are the bones all right so i had a base color and i laid out some uh curvature so this is the using my curvature as reference to paint inside of the bone outside of the edges then i had something to make the edges clearer so let's just hide everything okay so this is the base paint inside paint outside this curvature is extremely important because it makes the the objects pop out a whole lot then i had is this my this is my curvature again no this is my yeah this is my embedded occlusion creating some artificial lighting in here and now i had some moisture noise so this is a procedural as well i had this moisture noise to give it some more organic shapes as i said before i prefer creating the micro pores and micro detail inside of substance because if i'm if my art director didn't enjoy how it looks like i'll just remove them and change them for something else or leave them blank right like this so yeah it makes it a lot more organic um now there's another procedural right here adding some more noise i painted it black right here because my my bakes my bake failed right here it it looks extremely ugly so i just painted this piece totally black and what is this by the end oh it's the yellowing of the teeth so i just painted a mask by myself by hand and made some yellow teeth when i created the gold for one piece i just copied the group and pasted over the other texture sets so every texture set has its own gold every single black hole like this it's a completely black completely rough usually we don't give a value of one roughness to stuff that exists in our in our world but since i wanted it to be really pitch black and i wanted it to not reflect any sort of light i wanted these these holes to have a value of one roughness and a value of complete black on the diffuse color so um yeah this is the texturing process and whenever you were going through texturing you need to go through your rendering agent in my case it is marmoset tool bag so i export these textures massage toolbag and check how it looks and when it's ready i do a pose on my case i did a pose using uh maya's human ik let me just open it real quick i can't show the the humanik process and how it looks like but i did the pose instead of maya using the human ik so this is the rig and after the pose is done we can do the outline so let's just before showing the outline i'll just go to my tool bag and open my render scene let's just get a new scene and let me open real quick it's this guy i think or yeah i think it's this guy um so yeah these are the final textures and without the outline it looks like this it looked like this for the first few hours and i noticed that it was lacking something so i decided to add the outlines so the outlines are done um in a really easy way let me just delete these or hide them maybe yeah all right let me just hide you real quick okay so the flames i didn't texture them they don't have uvs and the whole process of rendering them was inside of marmoset tool bag but i crea i can select everything and maybe i can show this guy first i will duplicate the mesh this can be done inside of any modeling software you can do it inside of blender or max or model it's the same process it's just different tools so it's a duplicate i'll name this guy maybe outline skeleton underscore outline test okay i'll do a 8-inch mesh transform it give me some mirror or whatever and inside of well oh it's because it's not a single mesh all right i'll need to select everyone in here make it into a single mesh and now it works edit mesh transform okay so when we do a transform we get into the attribute editor this guy and if we give it a local direction let's say one it inflates everything let's just wait um let's do it again just local direction no it's local translate sorry yeah so here we have an inflated version this inflated version is going to be with reverse normals and inside of maya you can have the shading back face curling in order to show to hide the back faces of your meshes so right now i have the back face going on and if i use my outline material i have a outline material right here this guy is going to become a outline so right now it's clipping a whole lot because it's it's extremely thick a value of one is just too much so i'll just add a value of let's say point two now this is more realistic and it's looking nice the same thing is done for the flames i'll just do it again for the sake of it i'll just grab this guy and duplicate him and i'll give him a transform the transform is going to be 0.2 local translate z oops he's already reversed so i have to give it negative okay so we have this guy right now and we can give him a new material whatever it's called i have it right here same outline and it's done when i export these guys into a tool bag i can give them some proper materials as i have shown before um some minutes ago one set of zbrush so i have the skeleton outline and the flame outline and these are this is if i only had the outline inside of marmosite when inside of marmoset's tool bag i try to give my characters a three-point lighting setup so i have my main light i have a backlight that i have some fill light on the case of this character i have two extra lights i have this guy and this guy so this guy creates a shadow for his head if he doesn't if he didn't exist you can see that his face is just too dark so i can light up his face like this using this light and this other light i used it to show up some more of the skirt and show up some more of his um below his arms below his rib cage because i think these these things are kind of hidden and kind of mixing together too much so i try to give give them more contrast one final thing is that i really like having my camera set up with a safe frame so i know about how will my final screenshot look like and one final thing is that i need a bloom in here so this thing still doesn't have a bloom but too much too much too much no no no well okay my computer just won't answer right now let's just wait for it to come back to life can i can i uh well i think i need it so yeah if your computer dies while using marmoset there there is this this button it really saves your life sometimes so yeah whatever well 0.2 is just too much 0.1 is too much 0.05 too much again okay so yeah it really depends on the strength of your emissive materials shoe so these guys are emissive back-faced materials the eyes are also emissive materials because i wanted them to feel purely white and the rest of the stuff is your usual pbr it's metallic roughness and albedo sometimes i use the occlusion map but these are the guys with a different material setup and another thing that i really like having a marvel size tool bag it's to give the lights uh give the lights to the sky the sky owns the lights so if i spin the sky if i rotate the sky i rotate the lights together i think it's a something that's really cool to have so i think i think that's it um i'll just i'll be available for anyone who has any any sort of question or if you're interested in mentoring with me and hope you enjoyed it thank you guys [Music] goodbye [Music] you

Channel: Stylized Station

Views: 9,987

Keywords: character tutorial, 3d character modeling, character modeling timelapse, character modeling in blender for beginners, 3d modeling tutorial, blender tutorial for beginners, stylized, tips and tricks, blender character modeling, 3d modeling tutorial #1, blender tutorial character modeling, 3d character modeling maya, character tutorial maya, character modeling in blender

Id: d0UTTUAJBd8

Length: 108min 4sec (6484 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 11 2020

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