3D Character Creation Tutorial For Beginners

taking a 2d concept all the way over to a finished 3d character can be one of the more complex tasks that you can do a viewer new to the world of 3d with so many technical terms and different packages that do similar tasks it can be real easy for a beginner to get lost along the way in this video I'm gonna be breaking down step by step my own 3d character creation pipeline and hopefully bring clarity if you have been struggling with the 3d modeling the texturing or the rendering of your 3d characters so stay tuned for my 3d character creation tutorial for beginners in the video coming up what's going on you 3d modeling beast this is Jo musi and welcome to my 3d character creation tutorial for beginners and in this video I'm gonna be sharing step-by-step my 3d character creation process I'm going to quickly break down each step of the tutorial so you have a better idea moving forward with this tutorial is about so first I'll start with pre-production pre-production is basically just the concept art that you may receive from another artist or maybe your own reference sheets that you create next we'll move on to the modeling part and this is where we'll spend a bulk of the time because there are definitely a lot of different options for creating your meshes right whether you choose to sculpt first or you choose more to do a traditional route we're modeling and then doing sculpting on top of that you have a lot of choices and I'm gonna break down each of the ones available to you parallel to modeling I'm gonna be covering cloth creation and hair creation and both of these connects will be modeled or they can be actually simulated or created an alternate way and I explain the differences between both moving on we'll take a look at texturing and this is where things start to come life you start adding materials you start adding colors and I'm gonna go ahead and share my techniques for creating realistic or stylize textures and really just making them fit within the realm of your character moving along will cover posing which brings in Riggin and some animation into the mix but it's definitely important for you to be able to pose your characters especially for presentation purposes from there we'll move on to shading and lighting where you adding materials and lights you're pulling all your texture maps in and you're really just preparing everything for the final phase and finally it's rendering where you set up your scene and you hit the render button the render engine of your choice is gonna calculate everything that you put in front of it and it's gonna spit out images and it's up to you whether that image is your final or if you want to do final tweaking on that or further tweaking on that you can go ahead and export out layers and composited in a package like Photoshop to even have more control of your final image so we're gonna be covering all those things so without further ado let's get on with the video pre-production so pre-production is the initial design face of your character before it actually is to be modeled and fleshed out as a 3d character this process does have various routes that you can go about it a lot of people think that it could just be concept art but there's actually a multitude of ways in which you could do a pre-production okay the first one would be concept art and concept art is just a 2d illustration now not all concept art is built the same so if you get concept art from an illustrator that is not really a seasoned concept artist then him or she was basically creating that piece of art for creating a piece of art and the intent was not to create a fully finished 3d character so you as a modeler you're gonna have to do more translation work because that reference right might not match exactly into a fully realized 3d object versus if you had somebody that actually does concept art more often they're gonna be able to create a 2d illustration but they're actually gonna make these drawings actually with a 3d design in mind that fits in a real physical world we can then move on to sculpting right so since the emergence of packages like ZBrush blender has sculpting so anytime that you can get in can something by the mesh it's a lot easier to push and pull and really get a good idea before you start modeling of the final look of your character and actually prefer this a lot of just going into ZBrush and creating a rough sculpt and that way I can take that rough sculpt and take it into a package like Maya clean it up and do my base form from there I also want to talk about reference sheets I used to do these in Photoshop but now I've switched over to a package called PRF and basically what a reference sheet is it's really just all these different images that are gonna be used for reference and inspiration and usually it's laid out as one big image where you can go in there and I usually use reference sheets in conjunction with a 2d constant so I like to think about pre-production on a sliding scale so the more thought on the concept art that that artists put the more experience that he has creating 2d illustrations or sketches that are meant to be translated and he put the time work has the experience to know what's gonna translate well and has explored all these options already design options then that means the less that I'm gonna have to explore design options or the less that I'm gonna have to make sure on my end that it actually translate into a finished 3d model modeling so I like to split modeling into two realms or two techniques the first is poly modeling poly modeling might seem more like an outdated technique and this is where you basically just stick your concept or your blueprints into a viewport so maybe like a package like Maya blender moto where you're just basically taking some references and modeling on top of that with polygons hence the name but I like to just think about this as how much exploration do I have to do right so this is how evaluate if pod lis modeling is gonna work well for me so for hard surface it's very easy for me to create hard surface elements in Maya because I know exactly what they're gonna look like and I don't have to explore a lot of shapes but if my concept art is relatively light or maybe it's illustration or relatively loose then I will actually go into sculpting versus a pod li modeling for the start of my project so I do my sculpting in ZBrush and I like to just explore the shapes and see if I can start to translate that 2d concept into a design a 3d design that actually works well right so from sculpting there's different avenues that you can start right you can start with a severe but you could also start with a base mesh right so sometimes it's easier to bring in a base mesh say I'm doing a human character instead of starting with a sphere I will start with a base mesh because that base mesh already has the topology of a face right of a human face of the human head I have a my loops in place so even though each of the heads is gonna differ a little bit it's not gonna differ that much right because the reality is human heads for the most part stick to a similar realm of proportions so that means that I can sculpt I can push and pull but at the end of the day I already have my topology in place right so from sculpting if you are doing the concept in face I want to talk about decimation and maybe you've heard this term before but maybe you have a real loose concept that is comprised of millions of millions of polygons and unless you're doing the roots apology process in a package like ZBrush and you need to export that well ZBrush is very very good at handling a very high polygon count but maybe if you take that into blender or Maya that's not gonna fly as well so what decimation actually does it reduces the poly count your mesh but keeps the actual shape and silhouette and details intact so it's a way of preserving the overall shape reducing the poly count that allows you to take it into a package like Maya so you could do your reads apology so what is reach apology will reach apology is basically redrawing your apology right so you have a loose concept a loose sketch right that's done in 3d just really a mush of digital clay that needs to be cleaned up for production purposes right and these steps are not necessary if you actually don't care about having a production mess right so if you're just doing a pretty concept piece you can't actually do everything within ZBrush so you can sculpt you can poly paint and you can render the package like ZBrush but if it needs to be animated or moved then you will need to actually do route apology and most likely you will need you these as well cloth so I put cloth next to modeling or parallel to modeling because cloth can be modeled it can be sculpted and I have done that in the past where I have tried to sculpt cloth and at first I've seen artists do it within ZBrush and I was inspired and I said you know what I'm gonna work really really hard to get good at this but I figured this is really really hard and it's hard because cloth has a lot of moving elements right so upon learning more about cloth the rabbit-hole goes pretty deep so I learned that cloth actually has a different type of folds type fold z folds right a lot of different moving pieces so different types of fabrics create different types of folds right so maybe if you have a Jean fabric it's gonna be completely different than maybe a sweater or a cotton based t-shirt right so there's a lot of moving components and it's not to say that you can I sculpt great wrinkles and great cloth because there is artists that actually have done it but I think consensus wise or the majority it's really hard and I see a lot of artists struggle with cloth more really than anything else so I see a lot of great you know Anatomy a lot of good hair but when it comes to the cloth and I was trying to doing it by hand I see that it could be a lot of weak points and it was a weak point for you know my characters for a long time I put the time in I studied the anatomy and I got mixed results right and then I heard about this package called marvelous designer and marvelous designer is a package that initially was intended for fashion designers to just come up with different styles or different garments and just simulated in 3d eventually through the artist got a wind of that and they started using them for their own characters for their own pipeline so I tried it and I got excellent results now you don't have to go in a marvelous designer you could actually sim cloth in end cloth in Maya or your 3d package might have a cloth sim of their own that you can experiment with but marvelous I got better results in my opinion than in cloth so I liked it I used it and it gave me a really good base mesh to actually then taking a ZBrush and apply those fine and wrinkles so that was my pipeline now the one thing about marvelous is that it's not so hard to actually learn the package but the true challenge comes from getting good topology and getting a clean base mesh right and I'm not gonna dive into that process because it is a little bit more complex that I want to talk about in the scope of this video but you know it is a little bit of a process to getting a clean mesh from marvelous or just a cleaner eat open so that was my experience with marvelous and the results came out really really good the base mess came out really really good and once I had the base mesh those smaller details were easier to sculpt in ZBrush because I already had the major landmarks of the shape of the folds of the cloth environment so why am I talking about environment in a character creation video and that's because and this is just my personal opinion as artists but recently I have started to create pedestals for my characters and if you see these character pedestals right here you see that over time to get more evolved right so for this Robocop scene it was a pretty generic one then I moved on to this apocalypse one here where it was a little bit more involved and for my latest character the mechanic I even pushed that further right and this might come from a little bit of my background as 3d printing I also do like to collect collectable statues but I noticed that collectable statues look really really good on a pedestal right and I think that it serves if you create a character pedestal I think it serves or helps tell that character's story right and that's why my pedestals have actually gotten more detailed I've done more textual work over time because I want to tell a better story about that character hair and this is on the same plane as modeling because modeling it is an option to crate hair right and really depending on your final output your final look sculpting might or might not be an option so if you want super realistic hair most likely modeling or even doing hair cards won't be an option and you'd have to go into a grooming solution so let's talk about the modeling first and for this character the mechanic I chose to model good base mesh then I took it into ZBrush and sculpted the details on top so the modeling process was relatively straightforward I just used curves and from those curves I will lock between them and then model out the base mesh which then was taken into ZBrush to sculpt on added details and a modeling does work well for stylized characters the other option which still is closer to the realm of modeling is doing hair cards hair cards are popular in video game characters and hair cards are pretty much how they sound like they are planes or shaped planes and then you use a alpha map as a transparency to actually chop into the planes and create the actual strands and fibers right so it's just really basic modeling and an alpha and really it's more of a texturing trick than real hair and the last solution and if you wanted something more realistic is grooming so Maya has x-gen ZBrush has fiber mesh and different packages have different grooming solutions essentially grooming is where you take hair guides and for those guides you actually use to style or groom the different hairstyles that you want and through the render settings you could allocate more hair strands or more density to those guides that you are creating and this will give you a pretty realistic result if you do things properly texturing so texturing is the process of applying a color information or color maps to your model and texturing does technically go beyond just color information like high roughness madona so it does actually encompass way more than color so what do you need in order to apply a texture to your mom well the first part is you actually need you these right you v's are coordinates that 3d models need in order to wrap a 2d image which is essentially what it is onto a 3d model and the process of you being has come a long ways and now most packages support unfold operations we're really on the model you select the same lines that you need unwrap the model you will be able to see how much distortion you are having so have you ever seen models with the checkerboard or a checkerboard like pattern is actually to check for distortion as you're doing the process of you these before you actually get to texture and apply texture that otherwise will be distorted due to a distortion within that UV layout so once you have your character nice unfolded and those UV shells looking correctly you can move on to the actual texturing process back in the days Photoshop was a tool for this and Photoshop is still used but now a lot of artists actually choose to go with packages like substance painter or even Mari to actually create their Maps and the good thing about doing it in 3d is that you are applying it right on the mesh it makes things like Dilling which seems not so much of a headache and you get instant feedback on how those texture changes are being applied to your 3d model the last part of the texturing process would actually be baking of the maps in baking of the maps so I worked in substance is basically just exporting all my maps out and getting them ready for my final render engine and the different maps will plug in to different parameters within my shader and this is where I get to decide the resolution of the maps samples the actual anti-aliasing the details of the map so all these things have to be decided before you export slash bake your Maps posing this is something I took granted for a long time and I think a lot of students or beginners do this where they will submit a character in a pose or a T pose and while it makes sense for a production process for the character to be in such poses presentation-wise it's actually a very weak way of presenting a character and it really takes all the life away from a character so the first one is rigging right and rigging is its own discipline and I'm talking about rigging for animation luckily for modelers rigging for or just posing is actually a little bit simple of a process so I use the auto rig feature within Maya where it allows me to place some guides within my model and then from those guides I can create bones even add custom bones relatively easy and then bind those bones to the mesh which is called skinning you so using the quick rig will give me a quick dirty rig with actual FK I K controls which is our controls that make it easier to pose and I will pose the character and then if I need to adjust weights I'll either use the component editor or the paint weights tool to do some quick dirty weights and from the quick dirty weights I can go ahead and export that model and going to ZBrush and it really just fine tweak or sculpt on top of that and really just blend out any imperfections or even add muscle deformations to my characters another thing that I've actually done too is use grouping and pivot points which is almost like building a bone hierarchy but you will do it with groups within a package like Maya and I actually did this for moving the hands of this mechanic character and the last way to pose is if you're in ZBrush you could actually do this in a sculpting fashion right so you can mask different parts of your model and you can use the transpose tool to actually bend those limbs and I have done this also when creating characters and really just concept poses as well shedding the lighting so let's go ahead and start with materials different materials are gonna have different properties and those properties are gonna go ahead and reflect what that material should look like in the real world right so something that is metal is gonna have metal properties is gonna have specularity properties that are probably a lot different than the skin material which is gonna have specularity and maybe subsurface scattering and different parameters in order for that material to behave differently moving on is lights and lights and lighting is actually an art form in itself and I didn't really understand this until later but lighting just besides the fact of just placing lights and you know hitting a render it's also the set up and a lot of thought has to go into the setup of your lighting in order for it to be effective and in order to convey the right mood for your character and the other things that a light actually helps to do is make your character pop from your background so one of the most important things about lighting is that it should do justice to your model so if you spend a lot of time creating this beautiful model this beautiful texture setup but the lights don't do it justice you're really just thrown away a lot of the work that you did right along with standard lights you want to look at things like HDR's which are high dynamic range images and this is one of the things especially for things that are shiny or reflective that is very important so when I first started doing characters I did a lot of hard surface characters a lot of reflective materials but I don't have an image in the background so what ended up happening is you have a highly reflective material with nothing bouncing of it right so no color information no actual to reflect onto those surfaces and ultimately if you step back that really looks really really fake because in real life you know we don't have a studio set up for most things right so if we put a soda can in the outside in a hot sunny day it's gonna reflect part of that environment right if we take a picture of our car and it's reflective in which most car paints should be it's gonna reflect some of that environment so that's really what kills a lot of the realism in some renders when you know students are just starting out is they put in just standard lights without having any HDR's any image information bouncing off those reflective surfaces rendering this is where everything comes together and your render of choice will actually compute all the information or all of the scene that you have laid out in front of it right so things like your lights your textures your geometry everything comes together and a lot of the final render quality is depending on your render settings so the level of anti-aliasing how many samples you've set up subsurface scattering for your skin if you have global illumination or not the quality of these shadows so you really want to look at rendering as a cost benefit scenario you really want to understand what each setting does and your cost for higher settings is more time now the caveat to this is that sometimes some higher render settings don't really do a great deal of improvement over your render but can exponentially increase render times so that's why it's just a good practice to actually know what actually is changing within your scene as you up certain settings and what is really not doing anything at all there's also different render engines and there's also different dedicated render software so for example Maya you can get a render man you could also get Arnold you could also get a redshift or you could also get v-ray and a mole all of the renders and those are just loaded up like a plugin but they are dedicated software's like key shot and you could even do real-time rendering in a package called tool bag and that's a package that I actually been using more over Arnold just due to the fact that to me it's a little bit easier to get a one-on-one correlation and just overall setup with the textures that I do with in substance painting conclusion character modeling is one of the more challenging things that you can do as a beginner so if you know my channel you know that I do a lot of hard surface modeling videos a lot of hard surface models and once I learn hard surface modeling like once I learn how to do a car I felt confident that I could do the next car right or that I could do anything religious hard surface related with ease but with character modeling it's something that I'm always learning something new to do right and I think that's where a lot of beginners basically get in trouble because they go right out the gate they want to do a very complex character with very different moving pieces and assets right so they want to do the muscular guy with the jacket with the jeans and he's flexing he's in a pose he has long hair flowing and that's what they shoot for that's what they get the reference and when they start the process they're like wait I have to figure out how to do hair I have to figure out how to do cloth I have to figure out how to pose this character so my advice is that start out small maybe you could focus on anatomy and posing and do that and get a couple of bad models out of the way and I say that because most modelers me included or any character artists that you do follow their first models probably weren't that great right and over time they get enough bad models they get enough practice and they improve slowly over time right so you're not going to nail your first character model right off the gate especially if it's a very complex one with layered assets and effects and Alexa T right so start out small and then maybe once you figure out the anatomy the posing okay I want to add some good poor details so you start researching that and now you get good poor details I want to get better at expressions or even blend shapes right so you focus on that and then maybe you can go ahead and add a more complex hairstyle where you're grooming and then finally you can go ahead and start adding clothes you could start sinning and you could really just work incrementally towards a more believable yet complex character

Channel: JL Mussi

Views: 81,970

Rating: 4.8810668 out of 5

Keywords: character creation, 3d character modeling, maya character modeling, maya character rigging, maya tutorial for beginners, maya tutorial, maya tutorial 2019, maya tutorial modeling, 3d character modeling blender, 3d modeling tutorial, 3d modeling tutorial maya, zbrush timelapse, zbrush sculpting, substance painter, substance painter tutorial, blender character modeling, zbrush character tutorial, maya retopology, maya retopology tutorial

Id: cbAVBh4Tc78

Length: 29min 12sec (1752 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 09 2019