3D Flour Sack Blender Tutorial: Model, Texture, Rig, Animate and Render an animation !

[Music] hello and welcome in this new video tutorial in which we are going to model to texture to rig and animate a floor sack 3d character in blender this is going to be a tribute to what we usually learn to animate when we start 2d character animation and but i wanted to translate it in 3d so this is the end result of this tutorial we are going to create this from a to z from start to finish this tutorial is a long one and it's normal because 3d takes time you're going to see everything it takes to create a shot like this in real time with my explanations and thought process remember to take breaks it's really important to experiment to do your own research and have fun it can be intimidating for beginners at the beginning but with passion and time you'll get there i would like to apologize for my french accent as you may have heard i'm not a native english speaker if you have any trouble following what i'm doing you can always look at the shortcuts that will appear in the bottom right corner of the viewport as you can see every key that i'm pressing and every clicks that i'm doing with my mouse are represented there so let's start by modeling our character i'm going to select the default cube then pressing tab in order to enter in edit mode and by pressing s and y i'm going to change the depth of the box pressing z s and z i'm going to change the height and then i can put my character above the ground by pressing g and z like this now using the face select mode by pressing the three key you can also click on those buttons in order to switch between vertex edge and face selection using the face selection i'm going to select the top one and pressing s i'm going to scale it a bit to taper a bit my box now i'm going to add a mirror modifier in order to use symmetry uh this will be really useful because i can model only one side and everything is going to be replicated on the other one in order to do this i'm going to add a loop cut by pressing ctrl r and this loop cut i don't want to move it so in this step i can cancel the the motion basically the displacement so i can press the right click or the escape key in order to put it in the center now i'm going to split my mesh along this selection in order to do this i can press the v key and as you can see it breaks my model in two parts but i don't want to move uh this part so i will console the motion by pressing the right click but my mesh is a split is being splitted in two parts right now i can deselect everything i i can put my mouth my mouse on the on this part pressing l in order to select the linked geometry and i can press x and delete the vertices i now have um on the one side of my model and i'm going to enter in the modifiers section and add a mirror modifier and as you can see now everything that i'm doing on one side is being mirrored on the other one only one thing that i'm going to do uh for in the mirror modifier is to activate the the clipping option as you can see by default the vertices in the center are not welded together so we're going to use the clipping option so the vertices in the center are only lying on the y and z plane and they are perfectly welded together so now i'm going to add another loop cut that is going to separate the chest part of my character and the belly part to do so i'm going to press ctrl r again and i'm going to slide this loop just a little bit above the middle of my character like this and from the side view by pressing the three key i'm going to push this selection uh in the front and i'm going to rotate it a bit and by pressing alt z i can enter in x-ray mode this allows me to select through so i can deselect by pressing alt a you can see the shortcut there again and by pressing the b key i can select using this box selection method and as you can see this allows me to select through uh the the mesh so this is really useful you will see me always going back and forth between the x-ray mode and the solid mode the solid mode basically won't allow you to to select vertices in the back but using x-ray you can see that i i'm allowed to do so so from the side view i can deselect everything select the top part and i'm going to align a bit the top of the floor sack like this so maybe this is a bit high so i'm going to select the top and i'm going to lower it down a bit yes something like this is better for me now what i will do is add a subdivision surface modifier we are going to go back in object mode we are going to add a modifier that is going to be the subdivision surface and as you can see it will help us to make a rounder model we can increase the level here let's increase it to three and we can also press right click on uh in the viewport and use the shade smooth option in order to have a smooth surface what i don't want though is in edit mode i don't want to see the subdivision surface so i will disable the option only for edit mode by pressing this button so i will be uh able to to to look at the real geometry this is much better and i will really advise to do so but as soon as we as i will press tab and go back in object mode as you can see i'm going to see the results so this is something that i will do a lot in order to check the the result but i will be really it will be really uh it will be better to see the the real topology here so now we can go in face mode select the sides and we can scale a bit decide to to taper the the this side and we can also push it a little bit bit toward the back by pressing g and y and now we are going to add more definition to this model i'm going to add two edge loops there and two edge loops there and each time you are adding something in your model you should one way or not or another change uh the geometry that you've added you you need to feed it uh in your model it's really important that it's not uh put like this and that you you consider it okay as you can see the result is not really uh organic and we don't want this but before finishing that i'm going to add one cutter and two cut in the bottom and i'm going to select everything and i'm going to press right click and use the smooth vertex option this is going to relax the geometry that we've selected but one thing to notice is that i you don't you won't have this option in the face selection as you can see there is no smooth uh vertices option so we are going to save this option in the quick favorite menu so you press right click while in vertex selection mode you right click again on the on the option that you want to save to your quick favorite and you add it to your quick favorite because i've already added it's already there so if i'm pressing q you can see that in my quick favorite i have the smooth vertex option and i can press q left click cue left click view left click and you can see that my mesh is going to be relaxed a bit okay so now i'm going to modify the this geometry to to have a better shape language overall and to do so i'm just going to push vertices around it's really important to note that you need to to move uh your viewports and to to look around your model from every point of view when you start modeling uh a character uh it's going to be very messy at the beginning or at least not very appealing at the beginning and it's a very iterative process you need to push things you need to like like if you were using play-doh you need to push things to construct things and step by step you're going to to to have a much nicer forms and a much nicer model but if you don't spend the time looking around pushing things stretching things um and compensating for the geometry that you have that you added sorry you are not going to have a a good looking model so as you can see i'm looking around i'm pushing things i'm going into face mode for instance for sele in order to select this and push the belly i'm looking from the bottom to see the curves that this is creating um i'm going to round a bit the the the back i'm going to add another cut here to to to create um how can i say a very very [Music] marked transition i would say and i can also use the the proportional editing by pressing the o key as you can see it's also this button there and when i'm using the proportional editing it's acting like a soft selection as you can see when i'm moving there is a circle around the mouse and if i'm scrolling my mouse wheel you can see like i can change the radius you can also press minus and plus but it's not working in this case on the numpad but as you can see so no it's pager page down sorry but i'm never using that i'm always using the mouse wheel and you can see that it's going to to help you achieve very organic forms and very organic fl a very organic flow in your topology the topology is the term describing the organization the the the organization are the the composition if you want of your of your vertices uh it's the it's the way the the the the loops that you are creating are describing the shapes that you want to represent it's important to have a proper topology in any modeling in any at least organic model that you've that you're creating because when deforming the character later on uh it's going to react uh to the topology that you have so if you have a really bad topology and you have uh it's working it's working well while being static but when deforming it creates bad creases or uh the for instance the eyes are not able to close or the cheek is not working or things like this it's going to to be very hard to rig and even not possible so as you can see i'm going along my model i'm pressing tab often to to see the result using the subdivision surface i can see that here uh i would like to have two cuts instead of one so what i can do is i can use the pivot tool by pressing ctrl b i can split this edge into as you can see so i'm going to split it like this i can select the the belly face and i'm going to push it a bit to emphasize the belly part of my character and yes basically it's this step i cannot teach you uh a very one method for doing this it's the idea is really you look around you push things you you tweak things you you need to to carefully watch at the lines that your um geometries the lines that your topology are following so in this case you can see that this line is quite smooth this line two this line is quite a bit jaguar so i can push it like this so yes each time you can see something in your model that is a bit how can i say a bit uh destroyed or a bit off you can just tweak it and it's going to help you in the long time to to to to model much nicer shapes so as you can see here it's going too high so i can move it up and down and i think like this we are in good shape of course we are going to add tons of things so don't be in love with with what you are doing right now it's really important to to to know that everything that you are doing you can change it and you can adjust it so i know that a lot of beginners are worried about uh they are doing something and it's turned up looking bad but they don't want to change it because they spent a lot of time and you've put the effort tweaking vertices uh so if you think that that's it i have done it once and it's done but this process uh when modeling or when doing 3d it's very iterative again so now what we are going to do is uh plan the geometry for the eyes so to do so we are going to add one more cut here and we are going to deselect everything by pressing alt a maybe we will have to add one more edge loop there but you can see that now i have too much edge loops here in terms of my body it's going to stretch you can see it even in the uh in the object mode with the highlight of the of the default light here so what i'm going to do is before creating the geometry for the eye i'm going to slide this loop and i'm going by pressing g twice i'm going to select this loop by pressing double click on it by double clicking on it if you can't if you cannot double click on the loop in order to select it you can also press um alt click um if you didn't have the if you don't have the emulate three button mouse option in the preferences here by pressing f4 you have in the input section you have the emulate three button mouse option this allows you to navigate in blender using the industry standard way of navigating in a viewport by pressing alt and left click you can rotate around and by double clicking an edge it's going to try to select the edge loop that is connected to to this so i prefer to double click on an edge loop to select it right rather than clicking on the alt key okay so everything now is a bit uh better in terms of space but in those loops and now here i'm going to create geometry for the eye what i'm going to do is create what we call the mask so the mask is um going to be maybe i'm going to select uh let me let me think yes i'm going to select this geometry or maybe maybe this geometry and i'm going to press i in order to inset uh this those faces uh and in order to take the mirror modifier into account i'm going to press b in order to turn off the boundary uh i can left click to validate and what i've done is in face mode you can see that i've created this face loop and this is a face loop that is going to go around the eyes and it's going to define the cheeks and this is going to be um separating the eyes the the eye section from the the eyebrows and the cheek so this is a really important topologic line topological line so now that we've added it we're going to shape it the way we want so don't worry about the speed that i'm putting there in order to manipulate my thing take your time you can see that what i'm doing what i'm visualizing in my head is this line uh i'm i'm taking vertices by pressing alt b i'm moving them using g uh when you move them you're moving you're moving uh along the view that you are looking through so uh when pressing g you can see that i'm moving the vertex at this angle in this view angle so that's why i'm always i'm constantly turning around so if i want to push the corners off of my side here i can push them in this view and i will be sure that they are going to be pushed back okay if you want to to look at the top it's also a good indication for the turns that your shapes are going to do so here basically i'm just modeling the eyebrows and placing them at least and i'm i'm i will be also pushing the cheeks so i can go in face mode here and i can push the cheek in front like this okay don't worry about the things now it's okay if it's a bit messy we are not done yet and we have tons of options to clear everything later the part of the muzzle i want to push it in front so i'm selecting many vertices and from the side i'm going to create like a sort of curve like this and you can see that it starts to resemble a face mask okay so now i'm going to select this vertex i'm going to delete it and you can see that i have a circle kind of shape here that will represent the eye socket so in order to model the eye what i will do is i will add a sphere by pressing uh alt shift a sorry i'm going to add a uv sphere and in the options for the uv sphere in the bottom left here i'm going to add 16 segments and eight rings we don't need more than that and i'm going to rotate the sphere a 90 degree on the x-axis by pressing r and x and 90 typing 90 on the numpad and you can see that the i the iris part of my eye is going to point in this direction so it's pretty okay so now i'm going just for as a reference i'm going to add a material that is going to be sclera called sclera sclera is the white of the eye it's the white part of the eye and we are going to add another one and this is going to be iris and this is going to be black but we won't see it in the viewport unless we go down here in the in the bottom and we enable the color for the viewport display so we are going for the viewport display to put a dark color also this is uh because we will be in solid mode in solid view viewport rendering so this is this button here the viewport shading you can also go in eevee in material um i don't remember the name in the material deportuting and you can also go into ev like this or you can press the z key too in order to have a pi menu that is going to show you the the option so i'm pressing usually z and going in solid mode like this so i'm going to scale this i am going to place the eye in object mode something like this will do the trick right now and as i told you we created two materials and the second materials is for the iris so i'm going to select the iris and i'm going to assign this material and i'm going also to scale it a bit to scale this selection a bit to make it a bit wider and i'm going to press right click shades mousse and also adding a subdivision surface just the the shortcut for adding a subdivision surface is control one or control two control three control four etc in fact control one is going to create a subdivision surface with one level control two two level control three three level etcetera etcetera you get it but now i'm going to place the eye right there and in order to mirror it to the other side i'm going to add a mirror modifier but i'm going to mirror it before subdividing it it's going to be more effective and i'm going in the mirror object to select the body which represent the objects that i want to mirror my object onto so maybe i can put the eyes more toward the center and now i have uh two temporary eyes i'm going to select my object back press tab to enter in edit mode and i'm then going to select this geometry scale it a bit and extrude by pressing e and scale so extruding something means from your selection to elongate if you want some geometry that will be connected to it and in this case i've extruded and scale it down to create this other loop like this so i'm going to select the inner loop by double clicking on it and what i've done basically here in terms of workflow is i've protected the mask and i've protected the eyes okay with one loop and the other and i've also defined here i have a definition of a line that is going to flow through the center here representing the the nose part so i'm going to select again this loop and now i'm going to activate the snapping option here or pressing shift tab and i'm going to snap onto on faces and i'm using a line rotation target project individual elements move rotate and scale this is going to allow us to to project our selection onto other objects so you can see that when i'm selecting this vertex and pressing g it's going to move but being snapped onto my eyeball this is pretty convenient because i can start modeling my eye really quickly by you can see putting the eyelids on top this is just temporary of course we are going to tweak everything i'm going to disable uh the snapping option by pressing shift tab again and now as i said very iterative process i'm going to compensate for the new geometry i'm going to push and pull vertices around i'm going to [Music] try to do my best with the geometry that i have to compensate for this new geometry and integrate it in the flow of my character okay so of course i don't want my my loop to be snapped directly on the eyes so from the side view by pressing also alt z i'm going to rotate it a bit and i'm going to extrude it scale it down and i'm going to create the thickness of the eyelid after that i can scale it a bit and try to to to put the eye inside and for the corners i'm going to push them back because from the side view it creates a top plane and a bottom plane and you you you should remember that the the eyelids have thickness and the eye lies inside with the cornea here and the bottom eyelid is always in the back compared to the front so if i i put a straight line for the top eyelid you can see that it goes forward the bottom eyelid okay let me remove my annotations like this so that's what i'm looking for when modeling this okay i'm going to push this in and in this in the inner the corner of the eye inside like this and you can see that i don't have that much geometry it's okay for now i don't need more for now i'm going to select this and push it back a bit inside i'm looking when i'm doing this i'm looking at the flow of this line you can see that it's it was started to it started to to look a bit um messy around there so i can click it because i'm seeing it and i'm then going to add another loop there and the cool thing is that this loop is just going to help me to create the the corner of the eye i can add one more there too and select those vertices and create like a more vertical vertical line here for the eyelid i clearly need another loop there so i'm going to select this loop that is going to wrap around my mesh and i'm going to use the bevel option by pressing ctrl b and i'm going to split it into like this then i'm going to select the geometry there and as you can see by rotating turning pushing filling the form i'm able to shape the lead it's really a matter of going around going on top knowing the shape that you're looking for here i know that i'm going for an eyelid that as thickness so i'm doing that this way here if i want to focus my view on the selection i can press the period key on the numpad and now i'm rotating around this and you can see that i can push this inside a bit more for the corner of the eye for the eyelid i can push a bit the eyebrow on top it's just a matter of again turning turning around pushing things there is no perfect it's not it's not a perfect science you need to look to have your own artistic judgment for this and here you've noticed that the line that i've added is going to crease a bit my geometry in the back and in the front so what i can do is i can use the circle select by pressing c and you you've noticed that i've switched in face mode by pressing three and i can circle select some geometry there and i can press q and smooth submit this geometry it's going to relax a bit the geometry that i've added i can push this inside a bit to create the spine maybe i can select all those vertices there is a really cool way in blender to select a line you can select a point a vertex you can press ctrl and click to another one it's going to select the shortest path between those two points so this gives me access to this selection that i can push back a bit inside okay right now what we can do is we can move things around and we can select the inner loop of the eyelid we can extrude it scale it and push it back in the eye we can also extrude it once more and we can using smooth multiple time you can smooth it and scale it again as you can see it's going to to work perfectly for what we have to do and from the side i really need to to be sure that my eyelid is my top eyelid is in front of the bottom eyelid and it's not the case you can see there is a pretty big gap between them so what i will do is i will select the inner loop of the eye pressing ctrl plus multiple times this is going to expand the selection and from the side view i can rotate everything to make my top eyelid in front of the bottom one okay this is going to be modified here a bit and i'm going to realign some loops so here the flow is going to be realigned same thing for here as much as possible remember to it's really important again to to move around your mesh to go in the in the view that does that does represent the best viewpoint for you to to move your things around so something like this in my case we'll do the trick okay i think i can select the outer loop of the mask so it's in in many cuts as you can see because we have poles here um that that will terminate the the edge loop so i can double click here press shift double click here press shift double click here and i will scale the mask just a touch and i will add a new cut in the middle there then i will select this loop press shift this loop and press q and smooth this to relax a bit this geometry and then using edge um no no maybe using face i'm going to select the eyelid and i'm going to push this in front like this and then tweaking for everything that i've made this okay so it starts to look um look more and more decent but we still need now to go back in our mind in the artistic side of things and we will have to now judge um the the proportions of this eye so what i'm going to do is by pressing alt o i'm going to enable the connected proportional editing so alt o is basically switching this option uh connected only here it's the shortcut and pressing o you can activate the proportional editing and um the connected only option gives you access to a mode where you can only move the geometry that is around is connected around uh the selection that you've made so in this case you can see that i'm not moving i'm not moving bottom vertices here if i didn't have this option pressing alt o you can see there is a dot in the icon in the center you can see that the points are moving down there so i'm pressing alt o to use the only connected method and i'm going to now shape my eyelid a bit better i'm really looking for what we call apex for the curves apex are the top part of of curves so if you look at an eye especially pixar's eyes for instance you will see that they have they have curves that are very clearly defined there are there is a really good reference that i can share in the description from pixar's cocoa where they show how they have designed the the eye and where are the the the top part of the curves in order to to make the eyes look really nice and this is uh what i'm looking for here so you can see that i'm trying to get the corner of the eye right there and once i've modeled using proportional editing i can readjust by disabling the proportional editing and i can re-shape my flow so modeling is always a question of going back and forth between artistic and technical so in this case i think that the eyes could be closer together so i'm going to select using old z i'm going to select the inner loop of my eye that i can put down by the way and i'm going to press ctrl plus multiple time and i'm going to press o to activate the proportional editing i'm going to scale my mouse to increase the size of this and i'm going to put this a bit toward the inside a bit more and i'm going to push the eye more toward the inside so no after after filled after thought it's not that great so i'm going to just to push the eye a bit inside maybe rotate it a bit just like this okay so one thing that i want to do is for sure i don't want to see the top part here of the eyelid because from the front it we don't see it we see the bottom one but we don't see the top so pressing alt z i can access the geometry below also in in the back so i can push also this behind maybe i can push this more toward the inside of the eye and push it back then and now for sure i will have to add one more loop cut here to add thickness let me increase the space over there i can also using the circle select and the face mode i can also select only this and pressing smooth in order to relax the geometry and i'm going to push this more toward the center of my character and i'm going to select some loops there be careful not to select the back of the of the mesh when you're selecting something you can always move around to see if you're using perspective to see if you're selecting the right thing so as you can see here i'm probably all right i'm going to lower the eye down a bit and i'm going to push this eyelid back a bit because it's too present as you can see i've automatically added the proportional editing option and from the side i think it's going to be alright for now so i'm going to add one loop cut more on top of this and maybe i can select the edge of the bottom by pressing the two key i'm entering in edge selection mode by pressing shift i can add to my selection and pressing g twice i'm going to slide this lower eyelid to smooth it a bit it was a bit uh too pro to too important and then maybe here i can without the proportionality thing i can push it back a bit to create the crease of the eyelid maybe you know what i'm going to lower down everything there so it's it we have more room and it's more it's less sharp less creased same thing for here maybe i can give it a bit more space and for the thickness of the eyelid i will [Music] push that down a bit so it creates a rounder shape using the subdivision surface i'm going to push the corner inside a bit more and selecting the inner loop there i can also scale it down a bit on the z axis to create a thicker eyelid maybe not that much but like this it's probably going to be all right okay so we spent a lot of time on the eyes but um as we always say the eyes are the window to the soul so it's really important to get them right now we will spend a bit more time on other things and we are probably going to come back to the facial features so we the the other features that our floor sack will have is the little knot that we have that that it has that he has or she has on the on the corners so in order to do so i'm going to um think about my geometry my flow so i know that i will have to add one loop cut here because it's going to maintain the geometry a bit better i'm going to scale it a touch just to incorporate it correctly and i'm going to think about how to uh place my geometry so probably i'm going to select this and pressing i to create an inset i can scale everything after my inset and i will use a really cool add-on that gives me access to many tools that are very useful such as the circle option the flatten option it's called mesh loop tool if you press f4 in the preferences and go to addon you can pick the loop mesh loop tool add-on you can just enable it like this and now if you're pressing right click you have access to the loop tools and you can click on circle and it will create a circle based on your selection this is quite awesome so now what we can do from that is just select adjust for the geometry again something like this and you can also from that maybe scale it a bit more extrude the selection scale it and now from that we're going to extrude scale extrude like this scale extrude extrude extrude scale and this is going to create the top um the knot for the top so this is just the basic topology now we are going to select our notes by double clicking any edge loop there and by pressing ctrl plus we can expand the selection and we are going to relax everything by pressing the famous smooth operator and now i'm going to realign this using proportional editing i can select my thing by pressing alt z i can select through proportional editing i can scale my my my brush with my with my mouse wheel and i'm going to try to push this like this and of course i'm disabling the proportional editing and i'm going to reincorporate everything much better like this trying not to lose the shapes that i've created again modeling is very it's a very iterative process push and pull things i can scale this loop a bit so here for the notes i'm going to add one more loop this is going to crease this part and what i want is a nice s shape not a c shape like this so to create this shape i'm going to scale there probably going to scale there too but i'm going to need to add some geometry some more geometry there like this so let's also select everything and let's inflate it to inflate something you can scale it along the normal by pressing alt s you can see it inflates the thing that you selected and we are going to again scale some loops so it betters it so it better works with what we've done and here i'm going to extrude the top part once more by entering into face mode and i'm going to push this vertex a bit more to make it a bit more pointier and again i want this s shape i want the curve to be wider here and less wide and thinner toward the bottom so here it's the artistic side the artistic part of me that is talking i'm going to add one more kit here thinner there yes it's much better like this i think okay so we also are going to uh scale this so i'm going to sell select it using my proportional editing i'm going to scale it a bit and as you can see i need to readjust some some things here and there okay something like this um one thing that i've noticed and that i'm not really happy with is that the eyes are maybe too low so i'm going to destroy this loop by selecting it and pressing x i can remove the edge loop as you can see it's still being uh it's still connecting the rest perfectly and i'm going to select using the circle select and the x-ray mode i'm going to paint my selection like this and i'm going to lower down the intensity of the proportional editing and i'm going to move my eyes a bit higher to the top therefore i'm going to move my eyes to to the top okay so now i want to remove the backge effect the bags of the eyes for my character he looks really um tired it's my case but i don't want that it's that it becomes his case so i'm going to select this and i'm going to press q and smooth multiple time it's going to remove a bit the effect not that much but just a touch in our case and i'm going to select this those edges using the shortest path method pressing ctrl again and here one thing that i've noticed is that i want the iris to touch the bottom to be more toward the center and therefore i will need to adjust using the proportionality editing i will need to adjust my eyelids along the rest so one thing that you can do if you're if you want to be very precise in a certain aspect of your modeling you can isolate things so in this case i'm going to press ctrl plus multi multiple times uh with one loop selected and i can press shift h to remove everything else and you can see that now i have a much much better view and in my case in this case i can see better what i'm doing and i can see the the right vertices the right geometry that i need to move so just pulling and pushing the corner inside remember that you have geometry inside and that it it's it's stretching the geometry too here it's probably best if i push it back in the front here it's very tight but it's meant to be in this case because we have a crease and i'm going to add more space on top of the eye and also by pressing alt h i can make the other parts come back and using the proportional editing i'm going to wrap this part more around the eyes by selecting the corner of the eye i can push it like this i think it works better remember that the eye is very very round it it wraps around the sphere and from the side i really want this eyelid to come in front so yes in this case i feel it's going to be much better so i can push vertices around there making maybe the top lead a bit more important i can maybe push the corner the outer corner of the eye a bit higher to make it more happy to make my character looks more happy i'm happy sorry and i'm going to also try to uh without the proportionality to create a more important mass for the lower eye so to do so i'm going to select some few vertices and you can see i'm going to push them my goal here is to really get what i want and then correct the the mistakes that i've done by doing so so like this it's going to flow much more toward the chicks it's it's looking much better i think so yes something like this is definitely going in the right direction for me maybe i can push this more inside maybe i can also bring the the eyebrows shape at least the eyebrows a bit better so as you can see again it's not that difficult it's just push and pull and your artistic sense maybe here i can fix this flow push that toward more the inside and from using x-ray i can also bring the inside more straight remember that here it's more straight and here it's more round like this it's just a matter of taking your time pushing things around looking around and one thing that i will want is also to have a better a sharper section there so to make that i'm going to select this loop and i'm going to bevel it by pressing ctrl b and as you can see it's going to sharpen the corner of the eye but it's also going to sharp sharpen everything else so what i'm going to do while it's selected i'm going to enter in x-ray mode and by pressing c i can use the middle mouse button and deselect some edges there and now i'm going to use the smooth operator multiple times and i'm going to push that back a bit and you can see that it looks much better it's it's wider behind even though it's still a bit tight so i'm going to select some vertices and press mousse again and by hand i'm going to realign some loops so i'm really watching for those lines trying to to find the perfect curvature maybe it went too far there in terms of the corners i'm going to pull it back toward the front just take your time put music and it's going to and the job is going to be done of course here i'm doing the things a bit fast but if you're doing it slowly it's okay too it's not there is no rush doing this so just take your time watch it from every angle and with time and practice it's going to be uh second nature for you okay so now that we've worked again a bit on the on the eyes um we are going to maybe maybe you know what i'm going to take the corners and push it a bit more inside so the eyes are less wide this was a bit wide so i can do that uh for sure i know that we i that i will have more geometry inside so i'm going to add one more loop cut here because when deforming the eyes will this will stretch the the leads will stretch so it's important for me to add them right now and to also accommodate for that in the sections where it's very tight okay so now we are going to select uh the top part here by pressing c and alt z and alt z to go into um x-ray mode and c i can select everything there and you know what i'm going to select this too and i'm going to shift d to duplicate it and i'm going to rotate it and incorporate it in the bottom right there so uh if i'm looking at this from the top it's probably more toward the front so in this case i'm going to remove this vertex and by pressing x i can delete the vertex and i'm going to place my corner like this maybe making it a bit wider like this and i can select this edge shift select this edge and pressing ctrl e i can bridge edge loop and as you can see it's going to try to match the the loop of my both my loop it's starting to connect them and it's actually working perfectly in this case i can adjust my geometry as always maybe making it closer to this one and here i can add another edge loop that i can scale on the y axis like this and i am going to again push and pull things in edge in vertex mode with whatever with whatever selection mode fits the best with my workflow so here i'm going to select this loop this loop pressing smooth a bit just to to smooth everything to relax everything i can push this edge loop toward the back maybe this loop here if i deselect in x-ray mode if i deselect everything but but this i can slide it and you see to just to compensate for the for the space in the back i can do the same thing here using the shortest selection path and i can also maybe using the proportional editing add more mass to the to the butt part make your forms round same thing here i can push the belly i want i want my character to have a bit of a belly it's going to be more interesting to animate push it a bit from the top here you can see it starts to flow down maybe i need to split this edge loop in two to create the roundness that i'm looking for and also i can select everything but the everything but the ears the legs and the eyes so i'm selecting back this this this this this and this and i can press q and relax everything you can see it starts to to look a bit better and one thing that's that you need to notice is that when you relax something in blender uh it will actually um you will actually lose volume lose some volume so you can press alt s to without the proportional editing to to to gain back this volume a bit okay so i guess it's starting to look much better i can here uh select the lower lead plus the chick against music a bit especially there i wanted to flow it down a bit more making sure again that the top plate goes in front of the bottom lip of the bottom the top eyelid sorry in front of the bottom [Music] eyelid maybe i can add once more a loop around here and making it flow more toward the bottom again using the shortest selection path i can do this kind of thing and here this gives me a way to really easily sharpen the the the ridge of the of the eyebrows not that happy with the way this is flowing so i'm going to smooth it once more and from the side i'm going to check if everything looks right it looks okay but i can push the muzzle in front in in the back sorry a bit more and i can try to make a better looking curve here okay so one more thing here for the for the the legs the bottom nuts i'm going to remove one loop by selecting it and pressing x edge loop i'm going to push this a bit uh to the top i want to shorten basically the the legs but i'm going to inflate them by pressing alt s and again finding the the right curve here this is going to do i think a much better job and using the proportional editing i can flatten one side and open the other one this is going to represent a foot in a much better way because when we were when we will bend this foot we'll have something like this and this is going to to be easier to to shape when animating when finding the poses of the foot okay maybe from here i can shorten the side using the proportional editing again so i've removed a bit of volume around the head and again moving pushing pulling things here i can smooth a bit more maybe with this part and i will try to fix here's some very harsh angles again this tutorial is not meant to show you a step-by-step follow me tutorial everything that i'm doing i'm doing it for my own model you should apply the the idea of what i'm doing and not follow pose step by step and replicate what i'm doing you will of course learn nothing you need to grasp the workflow um the concept if you want more than the the step by step you don't want to copy you want to you you can copy of course the the character that i'm doing but you need to copy it on yourself on your side not following uh step by step what i'm doing you need to just adjust for your own model the things that you're seeing not the things that i'm doing here i'm going to push the side of the cheek of the eye to to form the cheek a bit more i'm going to round her to make the cheek a bit rounder you can see it creates a nice bump and i think that for this part we will call it done because we have a lot of things to do a lot of other things to do okay so last thing maybe i can push this very takes a bit more with the subdivision surface it's going to be more pointier like this okay so now what i want to do is to texture to unwrap this little guy and don't worry we still we will still be able to to tweak it a bit in terms of modeling if we need to later on but um i want to to tweak this little guy to to unwrap this little guy and and to make it textured maybe this the this is too hot too [Music] too much in terms of size maybe i can just inflate it a bit and make it less important same thing for the bottom leg i was a bit heavy in my in my proportions maybe like this it's it's it's more it's looking better from the three-quarter i'm also looking for the the bump here if it's working fine okay so let's just texture this little guy but in order to texture it we have to unwrap it meaning to unwrap the uvs so to unwrap the uvs what we'll do is pretty simple we will select the edge that is going through the mesh we are going to press ctrl e um and mark seams mark sim sorry we are also going to select this and mark sim we are also going to select this loop and mark seam and for the inner leg we are going to select this edge there you are going to remove it so we are going to clear the seam why am i doing this it's because imagine that you select the oldest part there and that you put you you cut here with a knife you open this shape flat it's going to um to be unwrapped from there and this is going to open pretty nicely and evenly are going to do the same thing from there here we are going to remove this cut from the seam control e clear seam and you can see that from there it's going to be cut from there and it's going to open nicely from this view you can see that we will have this we will have this it's going to be fine now we can save i'm going to call it fluorescence and we can apply the mirror modifier by putting our mouse over it and pressing ctrl a and now as you can see we no longer have the mirror modifier but we can still by using this option enable symmetry when modeling so it's not going to work if we add some geometry but you can see that if the model is perfectly symmetrical we can still uh tweak some stuff okay so we are not lost completely if we want to to adjust the the character so let's unwrap it we are going to go in the uv editing section select everything press u unwrap and you can see we have unwrapped perfectly or our model now pressing this button we can go into island selection and i'm going to using the ctrl key i can snap and i can press r and rotate my islands i can adjust them like this it truly doesn't matter if you where you place them here it's not meant to to be a video game model and you can just find the space that you you have and adjust them like this but it's better if you lie them um on an axis and in this case it's going to be close to symmetrical here okay so we have uv unwrapped our model and now we are going to texture it just to show you what i've shown what what i've explained if i'm selecting by going into face mode and pressing l over one ear uh here this uh seam that you can see on the outer edge here it's exactly this cut so imagine that again you've cut here it's being opened like this and it rolls around its center if you want its center axis and it like basically unwraps and flatten on the uvs and that's exactly why we've done this okay so now that we have this what i want you to do is to paint a tileable texture for our character and this is going to be a fabric a kind of fabric texture and in order to do this i'm going to plug my tablet and we are going to do this inside blender it's not going to be the perfect way to to do it if you prefer to use some dedicated tools such as photoshop or krita uh you will have much more control but we can do it in blender so let's do it in blender and we also are going to paint an eye in blender and we are going to apply uh everything into the shade into a shader for our floor sack and also we are going to create a shader for the eye so let's do that let's plug the graphic tablet okay so what i'm going to do now is go in the texture paint section and we are going to just paint the texture in this view so i'm going to press new and i am going to call this texture fabric text and i can um change the size of the width and height and a nice way to do this is you can select the slider drag down and you can press times two and it's going to do the thing for the for the two um the slider at once and i'm going to put a mid-gray color for the background and pressing okay so if you're using a tablet a graphic tablet in the preferences i really advise you to press the emulate three button mouse option because when you are using a tablet you don't want to click on the middle mouse button or set up your stylus to have the middle mouse button so now you can navigate using ctrl and alt to zoom you can press alt and drag around and this is a and of course you can use your left click to to to sculpt to to paint sorry a nice feature of blender is the is the ability to paint tileable textures so the first thing i want to do is to remove the view of my uvs like this and i want to press n and i want to go in the tiling option and click x and y this is going to repeat my brush stroke so as you can see when i'm going down or i'm going in this direction if i'm pressing this sorry you can see that it's it's repeating it's tiling my brush stroke to the other side and this is cool because this is going to um help us uh design tileable texture textures that are not breaking on the edges we can also in the view click the repeat image that is going to show you uh the texture and infinitely on both axes so let's right click and select a darker color we are going to change the size of the brush by pressing f and in a very i don't know why it's always going okay and in a very organic way we are going to paint striations like this i'm not using a line tool because i want this to heal organic this is going to be a fabric kind of texture and we are painting it gray because we are going to tint this texture in a shader so i can press f again to add more variety to my strokes to darken a bit uh some stroke and you can see that i'm free to choose where i want to paint because it's repeating infinitely you know note that usually i will do this kind of stuff in krita but here i wanted to do a 100 blender tutorial it doesn't matter if the space is not right it's approximately okay for a case and what i want to do is to give it a feel of um of handmade so i'm going to get a darker color and i'm going to increase the the strength of some lines darken the corners some corners well sorry so getting a darker brush if i zoom out you can start to see what i'm looking for try not to make obvious repetitions i know it's hard when painting tileable texture textures so yes you're looking for something like this and now i'm going to press n and grab a light a lighter color and pressing f to change my size i'm going to lightly very lightly feel my squares and in the unevenly meaning that i don't want them to be equal and very geometric looking it's very it should be very organic that's what we are looking for handmade at least so i can press s to pick a color that is under my cursor and then i can go back and refine a bit some parts it doesn't matter what we are doing in the details it matters though that we are doing it properly as a whole texture so you can see that it looks kind of a fabric kind of a kind kind of it looks like a fabric so this texture i can remove the repeat image i can save it by pressing image save as or shift alt s and i can save this texture okay so it's saved on my side and i will apply it to my character so to do this what i'm going to do is go back in object mode for this and i'm going to enter in the shading workspace selecting my character and here in the shader that we are going to rename body we are going to shift a add a texture that is going to be an image and fabric and if we put this to our character you can see that it's really not fitting well so we will have we will add um an input texture coordinate to fill in the uvs even if it's already the case by default but we are going to also add in the vector mapping node on top of this line it's going to connect automatically and if we if we select the first slider in the scale and go down we can change the repetition of the [Music] of the uvs and you can see that we can find a better a better looking uh tiling for our floor zack but now what i want to do is to remove the roughness it was too too shiny we don't want this i can also lower down the specular aspect of it and i want to after the fabric texture i want to box select this pressing b move it using the g key and i want to add by pressing shift a um take in the converter i think color ramp i want to convert my grayscale image to uh to different colors so as you can see here the darks the darker the darkest color of my image are going to be uh corresponding to this slider and the light lightest color are going to corresponding to are going to correspond to this color so if i'm changing for instance this to a blue and this to red you can see that basically we can uh we can color the different uh the lines plus the plus the fabric the inside of the fabric so we are going to make the lines pretty dark and we are going to choose uh a color that fits for the the whole sack okay so it's looking kind of okay now what i want to do is to add a bit of bump to this character i'll just notice that if you're using ev you will have a small issue it's going to look a bit pixelated but because we are going to put just a bit of pump map it's going to be fine i think so we are going to add a vector node called bump that is going to take our grayscale texture this one into the height and we are going to put this normal into the normal of our principal bsdf as you can see from the from a very close point of view it's looking not great at all but we can remove a bit the strength even more just to make it very subtle it adds a bit of life to to this to this material and it will and it will work okay so remember to save you can when you save you can press plus in the file in the file view to add a number to your file and this is good because you're saving different versions of your files so now we are going to press save as and we have a new iteration of our project so now what i want to do is to paint an eye so i'm going to go in the texture panning view again creating a new texture it's going to be close to white too white but a bit toward the yellows because in the the white part of the eye is never white in fact the the white part of the eye is called the sclera by the way but it's never white it's a bit toward yellow so i'm going to call it i and i'm going to press ok so it's easier to do what i'm doing here in blender to do it in krita or photoshop but just for the sake of doing everything in blender again we're doing we're going to paint our eye here so what i want to do is to first change the fall of my brush to this brush as you can see when i'm pushing the radius it's creating dots okay i want to remove the falloff pressure and it's going to create a perfect dot for me without any pressure from my stylus the falloff is a bit harsh to the end what i want to do is to add to put this point to the bottom add another point and create this very s very steep fall-off as you will see when i'm going to increase the brush it's going to create a very slight gradient to the border of my of my of my brush so first thing that i'm going to do is a very dark a very dark and round brush like this and then i'm going to lower down my brush pick a brown color and try to center it a bit like this i'm going to pick again a dark for the pupil trying to center it again something like this approximately and then i'm going to change my brush fell off to something like this this will give me a normal brush but i'm going to add back my pressure sensitivity and by pressing s i can pick the color under my brush and now i will change it a bit so you can see i can change it and i will try to to paint the iris like this so it doesn't matter if i'm going on top of of the edge right now i'm going to fix that a bit later but you can see i'm trying to to add some variety and to stress and some striation to to to my eye that's the idea for now i can pick a darker brush too adding basically randomness to to have it to this thing i can also make a a smaller brush size by pressing f and i can add some vein like strokes like this this is just a very quick and dirty eye making but that's going to do the the the trick for us what we have to do i can also add some brush stroke on top of the gradient on top of the black outer edge there not that much but it's just you to for now make it looking better and one important thing is to also change the tint of the color so i can add a bit of green here and there you can see it adds some variety in the in the eye i can add some purple here and there okay and now i will go back to the black and by hand i'm going to overlap this and paint the center i can always go back to the other type of brush with the other fell off in order to to make it work but in this case it's going to be okay again here i'm going to pick the color under my brush and make the borders a bit more a bit less visible fade the the border out okay adding new veins here and there maybe more subtle this time more more thin i can select the center of the eye the color by pressing s and now i can pick a white brush i can change the opacity by pressing shift f and i will darken the top part of my eye like this and i will then select a white or a bright color adding some brightness here and there but not in the dark part not in the dark section and you can see it reasonable on eye it's not perfect but it's reasonable on eye so now i'm going to press shift alt s to save this texture calling it i and we are going to map it to our eye so in order to map it to our eye what i want to do is to first unwrap the eye so i'm going to select the eye and press shift and press slash in order to isolate only the eye section i'm going to select this edge press ctrl e to mark the seam and if i'm going back in the uv workspace selecting everything and pressing u unwrap you will see that it will unwrap the eye um again pressing slash if i only want to see the the eyes in this view going back and shading here i'm going to plug the texture of my eye adding a texture node basically i'm going to plug it into color and you can see that the material was called iris before i'm going to call it i again and i'm going to remove in the material section here the sclera so my eye is only having one material for now so back in the uv editing i can press z in the viewport material preview to see my texture and you can see that here i have my uv so this one is going to be pure white because it's the back of the eye and this one is going to be mapped to our eye so if we bring back our character by pressing slash and go in front we can try to match how the eye will look like something like this remember to center the loops around this we have an issue with this is that you can see that the texture here is uh probably grabbing part of the of the eye it's because it's repeating the texture is repeating in the shading so what we can do is here in the in the input texture we can remove this and say we want it to extend so meaning that it will pick the if we go back in you'll be editing there it will pick uh the border edge color so even if we put this island there it will extend the white part of this texture and pick that for everything that is outside the square okay so now we have an eye it's not looking great because we don't have the reflection in the eye so before doing this what i want to do is i'm going to select um the center vertex there and i'm going to press ctrl b to bevel it but you you can see i cannot be though one vertex in order to bevel it you can press the v key and if i'm pressing v i'm beveling it i'm beveling only um only a vertex and i'm going to size it the size of the [Music] of the of the iris and i'm going to finally uh extrude this part inside once and two time okay so like this i'm creating the whole of the iris and the inner part in order to make it more work working better in terms of topology i'm going to extrude and i'm going to right click merge vertices at the center to create only one vertex like this and because we're using subdivision surface here it's creating something weird so we can also add a crease there okay anyway i can select this point press ctrl plus twice more than twice just to the edge here and i will add a new material for this called iris iris and i'm going to assign it as you can see it's not going to use my texture anymore but i can i can also add a loop there to just constrain it to the border again and my iris is going to be completely black but it's it's not going to receive any light to create this effect we are just going back in the shading tab we can just remove the shader and anything that has no shader in the output is going to be pure black without um receiving any any light okay so this is cool but this is not creating the highlights that we want i'm going back in the eye here i'm going to lower down so we can lower down the roughness if we want to do something like this but we are not going to go with this approach so i'm going to push back the roughness to something like this and removing the specular because we are going to use our own method for creating the specular reflection so an eye is composed of um of the iris the sclera the white part the the pupil and i don't know why i've called this iris it's called pupil actually sorry so this is the eye iris so this is the iris plus the sclera and what we are going to do is we are going to add another part and this part is going to be the cornea so to add the cornea we are going to go in the top view maybe go back in solid view it's going to be easier we're going to select this part of the eye with x-ray activated so everything like this we're going to duplicate it right click to cancel the motion the the displacement and we're going to rotate this 180 degree by pressing rz 180 we're going to push this part in front and scale it a bit and for this ukraine we are going to create a new material and assign it and call it cornea so we've assigned to this selection the cornea material now what we want to do is to select this part which represents the cornea and we want to extrude it in the front and scale it a bit and we want basically to create a bump we can do this once more and maybe we can select this edge and pressing g twice we can slide it a bit but what we are creating is a small bump that will catch the light the reflection of the light [Music] the cornea as you can see when we are shading is not transparent and of course we want it to be transparent so the first thing that we are going to do is to remove the principal cheddar we are going to add a glass shader but the glass shader is not transparent by default we need to activate transparency in ev to do this we need to go in the settings of the material and activate blend mode alpha blend and we need to activate screens plus screen space refraction and we also need to go in the ev settings there in in the screen space reflection activate them and the refraction too okay so as you can see now we have um [Music] an effect of a glass material that is working quite cool quite good with our eye maybe it's a bit thick so we can scale it down a bit and pushing it back just a touch like this okay so if we press alt h to bring our character back you can see that we now have an eye that is not perfect of course if it was for for a real production i won't um get this approach but for something uh for a quick character like this this is uh working perfectly okay so another thing that i want to do is to paint a texture for adding some dust on the character and some ambient occlusion too so we are going to do that really quickly just before i can press the proportional editing and change the shape a bit like this to add more volume to the side remember that we are in symmetry enabled for doing this and i'm going to add a new version of my character by pressing plus save as okay it's working perfectly so what i want to do now is go back in texture paint mode and i'm going to enter into material preview and on top here i'm going to add a new texture by pressing plus and i'm going to add simply a base color that i'm going to call ao for ambient occlusion and i'm going to press ok if i'm going back in the shading you can see that my texture should appear there and the ambient occlusion effect is just something that is going to be darkening some parts that we are going to paint so i what i will do is i will multiply this texture with my texture underneath by pressing shift a i can bring a mix rgb node i can put the ao texture on top of it and i can use the multiply blending mode in fact something important to notice is that when you are multiplying whites with any color it's going to output the color that is just um just there and if you're multiplying uh black with any color it's going to return black so here what we are going to paint in texture painting uh is just dark color so you can see that it's going to multiply on top but it looks like the effect is very subtle and it's subtle because in the shading here the multiplier node is half by default so we can push it to one and you can see that now uh it's it's working much better okay so we are going to push it to one and in the texture painting here we are going to to fill back the texture so i can make the slider go down and up to to paint and you can see that by default my texture was on white so i can fill my texture back to white like this and paint over until it's everything is white you can see the effect there and i'm going to take a bit of of black here and i'm going to paint around the eyes to create the shadow for the eyes and if you want to you can also re-enable here the uvs and you can see that we can also paint on top here the inside so let's do this for for this section unfortunately here you won't have symmetry but this is going to to do the trick for us and don't hesitate to paint that really um really dark because you can lower it down later of course and you can tweak it later but for now we are doing it very broadly and i'm going to paint the corners there and we're going to adjust later on the thing so i'm going to disable the symmetry symmetry x mirror i'm going to remove it i'm going to add some dust effect here and there so something like this if you want to see only the texture you can go and go back into solid mode you're going to see only the texture that you're painting on if you press s you're going to pick the color that is right under your cursor in the texture in this case it's going to be white i can increase the the strength of my of my brush and i can you see cut a bit to make nicer dust effects of course you can add add more more things to to this character pressing s i'm going just to do it very quickly just to show you how it works be careful about the seams not to show them it's very very quick and dirty but it's just to show you the process okay it's not meant to be a final final piece if you want you can smudge to the paint like this be careful about the performances it's quite it's quite consuming something like this if you want to you can also add some striation so let's look back in the how it works in the material preview maybe we can emphasize the seams a bit we won't add the the real seams but you can do this if you want to using another texture and an another blending mode but for now we are just going to do this it's going to be okay for us okay i i i forgot to to add the symmetry but you can turn it back if you want to do it in symmetry mode when usually you paint seams it's always a good idea so in this case i'm going to add back the symmetry it's always a good idea to with a lower strength to paint around a a wider brush uh brush stroke not that hard but it's going to give you the indication of depth a bit better like this okay so from the bottom view the seam will be probably right there i can paint it like this and from the top view the seam is there you can paint it like this and add some some some stroke of ambient collision so you can see it does the trick remember to save your texture pressing shift alt s the first time and we are going back to shading and in the shading we are going to lower down lower down so this effect so it's not that that much visible even though uh i i still think it's it's too much so i'm going to lower down some parts especially in the eyes here it's going to be much better like this okay so let's stick with this okay so now that we have um our character we can watch it in eevee so eb is the the render engine that we will use to to render our character you can see how it looks with a simple light you can also in the light here change it to area and you can change the scale of this area light rotate it like this you can change the color to a slight yellowish color you can also duplicate this slide by pressing shift d shift e and we are going to place it in this side and maybe make it as a disk this time this is just for getting the reflection in the eyes and maybe we can change the color to a very slight bluish color a cooler color and this is uh looking quite okay for the time we have to spend with this okay um maybe the last thing that we can add is some fluff uh fluffy hairs on top of this uh i'm just going to show you how to do that really quickly we can go in the particle system we can click on the plus here we're going to call this hair for now it's going to be a hair particle system we are going to increase the segment amount to something like seven and we are going to lower down the size of each strength each hair strand sorry and we are going to lower down the number to something like 20 okay um now what we want to do is go into the advanced mode we are going to enter in the um in the physics section and we are going to apply some brownian motion just a bit to add random randomness to to the strength to the strands sorry and we also will be going to the children section and call and add the interpolated uh option to add more strength strength and we will go to 20 maybe maybe 20 is okay and in the render amount we are going to to give 22 and we also maybe in the i think it's still in the children we are going to go in the roughness and remove and move a bit the the end point this is going to add even more randomness to to the to the hair shapes and we can also at this point go in the render section we will create a new material called hair or strands so is this the new material no this was body i'm going to create a new material and call it strands here yes and for this if i'm going back to my particle system called hair in this case i'm also going to add b spline in the render but i'm going to pick the strands particle the strength strands material sorry and what i want to do is also go in the in the in the in the render settings for ev in the air section we're going to select strip to add some thickness to to those uh those strands and we also are going to change the air shapes to having a lower diameter something like this it's going to work well for us and finally i'm going to add the um in the input of my shader i'm going to add the air info and as you can see the air info there is an intercept method and it's basically creating a gradient from black to white on the on each strand so you know that now you can add a color ramp onto that and just picking the dark color for the darkest part and a bright color for the brightest part you can see it it blends perfectly with our character one thing that i don't want though is to is to let the eyes here having hairs so i'm going to select both inner loop not selecting any other vertices only the inner loop i'm going to press ctrl plus many times until there and i'm going to add a vertex group with this selection so i can assign the selection you know what i'm going even to select the the inner vertex vertices and not the outside one like this only the mask in fact and i'm going to assign the vertices to this group so all those vertices have a weight of one and i'm going to call this group prevent or protect protect hair let's call it protect hair and now in the particle system section in the bottom uh in field weight not field weight but vertex group in the density section i can select protect hair and you can see that it only gives me hair on this but if i click this arrow it it's going to do the reverse effect so you can see that now i've added some small hair strands on top of it to make it more realistic okay so i can save and now i'm i think i'm ready to to start preparing my character for rigging we're actually almost finished i i just want to tweak a little bit the eyes again uh the shape of the eyes so using proportional editing i'm going to so pressing the o key i'm going just to change the corner here and push it a bit inside i don't want the the eyes to be as wide as they were so something like this is going to work and i'm going to push the inner part of the eye a bit further and doing something like this we can maybe also i don't know if it's okay but we can add one loop um but in order to add a loop we will have to to to find our symmetry again but one trick that we can use to do to do this is just add the loop but don't move it uh pressing right click to console the motion uh the displacement i can do the same thing here and i can cancel the motion and as you can see now uh those loop are the perfect mirror so i can slide this a bit lower like this and it will work on the other side it added a more more dense crease a more how can i say that a more important crease and it will work perfectly with our character i think okay so let's go back to uh our rendering i think it looks much better much nicer like this uh maybe push this a bit higher again okay so now it looks much better so what we will have to do in order to prepare our character for the reading stage is to apply the scale of our characters so one thing also that i've noticed is that the particle system is on top of the subdivision surface i want uh to put it before because otherwise it's going to put hair um on the final geometry after the subduction surface was applied but i want uh to put my hair strand on the actual real polygons so that's why i'm doing this and now as i said we are going to apply the scale of our character if it's not being applied so check that your scale here is one one one if it's not the case it means that you've scaled your object in object mode if you want to apply that you press ctrl a and you apply the scale you can also apply the rotation and the location so so our character is being normalized in term of transformation so now what i'm going to do is i'm going to add the skeleton for this character but before i also have to to split both eyes in two objects so i'm going to apply the mirror there and i'm going to select uh this eye so remember this eye is in two parts you have the cornea plus the eye inside so i'm selecting this pressing p to separate my selection and now i have another i the problem is that the origin if i'm rotating the eye is based on the orders ipvo so what i'm what i can do is pressing slash on my numpad i can isolate this eye i can select the actual eyeball not the cornea edge loop in the center and i can press shift s in order to put my cursor to selected as you can see the cursor is now in the center of the eye and we want uh by going back in object mode to press right click and set the origin to the 3d cursor so you can see that the the orange dot representing the origin of the character of the model sorry the object is actually centered and if we rotate now the eye rotates uh at the good location i can press slash on my numpad to go back so now my character can can can use his eyes to to create different expressions okay one good thing to note is that in blender if you want to reset rotation translation and and scale you can select the objects that you want to to reset and you can press alt r so for instance with the eyes i can press alt r and you can see that the initial rotation of my eyes were not correct so i'm going to undo as much as possible so the eyes are lying in this are looking forward and you can see that the rotation for those eyes are not 0 0 0 so i'm going to put 90 degree here 90 degree again here and i'm going to select both my eyes and i'm going to press ctrl a apply rotation now you can see that the rotation is 0 0 0 meaning that the object default rotation or the object default orientation is this one so now when i'm rotating the i and pressing alt r it's going back to the default orientation uh clearing out uh the rotation to zero okay of course i can do the same thing with ctrl g ctrl alt g sorry all cheats putting back at the trans the location to zero zero zero it's clearing the the the transformation but in this case i don't want to do this otherwise the eye won't be in the eye socket okay so now my character is ready to be rigged i can put my cursor in the center of the the wall by pressing shift c and because my character is being mirrored along the x-axis i know that the center of the world is at the center of my character vertically so going back in solid mode i will also select my lights press m um in order to move them to a new collection i can click new collection i'm going to call this scene okay and you can see that in my outliner i have a new kind of folder if you want that i can activate and deactivate this is going to be good in our case because we don't want to see the the lights and the and the camera for now okay now we're ready to rig this character let's add an armature object by pressing shift a and we are going to rename this armature object to rig and then in viewport display in the object properties tab we are going to check the in front box this is going to make sure that this amateur is always visible on top of everything else so now we are going to enter in edit mode in order to set up the bone placement for our armature edit mode is really the mode in which you are going to lay out the bones if you want uh there is another mode called the pause mode that you can access by pressing tab and if you press tab uh control tab sorry while being in object mode so if you are in object mode and you press control tab you go into pulse mode and the modes are also available there in the in this drop-down menu and in pose mode uh you are going to animate the bone and you also are going to set up different constraints uh meaning the behavior the behaviors of the bones but edit mode while pressing tab is the mode in which we are going to add different bones so this default bone we are going to rename it as the root bone and in the side view we are going to press r x and 90 degree on the numpad in order to align it with the floor and then we with with the g key we can place it above the underground like this we then are going to add another bone by pressing shift a and we are going to place this bone approximately like this and you can see that a bone in blender has a tip and as a root and in between is just the bone actually so we can place the root near the pelvis we can place the tip near the bottom of the head i consider this part to be the head and we are going to extrude another bone for the head like this what we want to do uh is a mechanism where the character has a kind of squash and stretch motion uh to do this we are going to add a constraint in the pose mode and we are going to add a very specific constraint called the stretch to constraint that will help us doing exactly that but before doing this i need to unparent this bone uh and make it free floating around because now if i go in pose mode and select this bone you can see that the head is going along with it because it's connected to it but we want to disconnect the head and also to unparent the head so we are going to press alt p and clear parent if now i go back in post mode by pressing tab you can see that the the bone is not following anymore and the head is free floating okay what i want to do in pose mode now is to select the head and then select the bone that is going to receive the constraint you can see that the bone that is going to receive the constraint is slightly lighter so i'm selecting the head pressing shift selecting the body and um you can see that now the active bone is the body i can press ctrl shift c to open the constrain tab that are using targets and in in our case the target is the head and we are going to use the stretch to constraint so you can see that now the bone of the body is going to be green and if we go in the constraint menu for the selected bone at the head has no constraint but the body has one constraint and it's called the stretch two and as you can see everything was set up correctly so if i'm moving this bone you can see from uh the in the viewer that the the behavior looks like what we want we have a squash and straight motion this is pretty cool if i move the root bone you can see that nothing is coming with it so what we are going to do is we are going to parent the head to the root bone by pressing ctrl p and keep offset so first select the head then select the root bone and press ctrl p keep offset you don't want you don't want to use the connected option otherwise it's going to connect literally the bone from root to tip and that's not what we want so now if we move the root bone the head is coming with it and for now we can also parent the root the the the bone of the body in the same manner and everything is coming with it so before continuing let's rename this bone um body so let's press f2 sorry and we're going to call it body then we're going to rename the head by calling it head and now i want to show you a very blender specific thing in blender you have bones that are called b bones and b bones are bones that can act as curves as bezier curve this is something very unusual you won't see that in a lot of software but we have this behavior for kind of free you will see that the setup is really really easy but before setting it setuping this bone we are going to go in the object here properties and we are going to display our object as wireframe you can see that now we see through the bones it's going to be easier in terms of visibility and we are going to go in the global settings for our armature there and we are going to change the type of bones to b bone so now we can see b bones it's only going to affect the visibility of the bone in the viewport it's not going to change anything in regards to the the behavior and the features of the bone so don't worry about that but this is going to show us uh something that we really want to see and it's the type of um bones that we are going to look at it's called bendy bones if you go in the the panel the bone properties panel you can see that it's the properties for the currently selected bone and we have here the number of segments for our b bonds and you can see that using this viewport type viewport display type we can see the different segments it's not the case with the other types of the other visibility type and now as you can see we have a curve that we can change and this bone even if it's still one bone has a lot of behavior encoded inside it so we are going to create a small curve like this for this bone a small reverse spine if you want and nothing is changing in term of behavior you can see that we still have uh our stretch constraint but one thing that's really cool with b-bone is that you can say that one bone is going to be the handle of the bezier curve so because this is a basic curve it acts exactly like if we had if we add bezier in blender you can see that this is a bezier with two points a bottom and a top and you can also change the way the curve is looking by rotating the handles scaling them etc etc this is exactly the same behavior for this b-bone so let's go back in pause mode select everything and let's press alt g to cancel the transformation and alt r to conceal the rotation and everything that was added to this bone why i'm doing this in pose mode you can see that i've lost the curve so because i i did a small mistake i i changed the curve in pause mode again pose mode is the mode where you set up you animate sorry the the bone or you set up different constraints you want to if you want the the curve to be by default you need to do it in edit mode so we are going to do this curve this slide curve in edit mode and now if i'm pressing alt g alt s alt r in order to reset rotation uh position and scale you can see it's not doing anything we still have the basic original pose for our bone okay but as i told you this bone has another option we're going to scroll down and we're going to set up the handle we're going to check absolute for the end handle and we're going to select the head and as you can see the head is now following uh is now pointing at the head and this is really cool when we are rotating by pressing r twice you can see that in free roll mutation a rotation mode you can see that we we can twist the spine that's exactly what we want for this uh this rig now in edit mode we are going to add another bone at the root of this bone by pressing shift s we can bring the cursor back to the root and we can press then shift a to add a button right at this location and we are going to change uh the size of the spoon this bone is going to be um defining the the pelvis if you want a for our character and it's going to be uh the initial location for uh our uh for the root of the body but we can change the visual aspect of p-bones by pressing ctrl alt s it's only changing the visual it's not changing anything else it's not going to affect the way the bones are going to behave it's just a visual uh a visual add so ctrl alt s we're going to scale this bone a bit uh bigger you can also use those two sliders if you want so you if you select them you can change the the size on the z-axis and on the and on the x-axis or if you want to change it using shortcuts you can press ctrl alt s and you can press x for instance to only scale the bone on the x-axis okay but again this is only visual this has nothing to do with the behavior so maybe we can make it wider and a bit less thick something like this is okay for me okay so now we can um say in edit mode that this bone instead of being the child of the root it's going to be the child of the pelvis by pressing ctrl p we can do that and we as you can see now in pose mode if we select the pelvis and we move it it's working perfectly and we can also say that this uh this uh bone is parented to the root bone so we can press ctrl p and parent it with the keep offset option so now the root is controlling steel everything but the pelvis is uh is the root of the the stretch to bone okay so now we are going to add bones for the eyes so i'm going to select my eyes in object mode i'm going to place my cursor at the location of the eyes the eye the selected eye by pressing shift s i put the cursor there going back into my armature in edit mode i'm going to to create a new bone and as you can see in my snapping option i was back to increment we were in face mode but you can press increment here and when you are in increment if you activate snapping you can as you can see you can align your selection to the to uh to increments so in this case it's going to be useful to to place my cursor my bone aligned in along the y axis but if you don't want to activate snapping for doing this you can also press g and press ctrl in order to temporarily activate the snapping so this works like this i'm going to change the size of my eye and i'm going to bring it bring it a bit forward like this so i'm going to select this eye bone and i'm going to call it i dot l and the dot l is really important because blender will understand that this that it is the left part of the skeleton and we'll have a ton of features that are not a tone but we'll have a lot of features that are going to to help us symmetrize the rig and also mirror different poses if we follow this notation so you can put dot l or dots and a lower l if you want to also but you have to stick with the dot l notation to benefit from some from the mirror features so this button is going to be parented to the head by pressing ctrl key we can do that and as you can see now if we move the root bone everything is following and now we have a bone that is going to orient the eye now we are going to place to set up a very similar a stretch to constraint bone for the ears so let's select the mesh let's grab one loop for instance this one let's press shift s cursor to selector to put it in the center of this loop and go back into edit mode for your arm material and press shift a to spawn a bone at this location and we are going to place the tip at the tip of the ear like this then from the top view you can select the tip of the bone and place it more correctly like this this bone is going to be called ear dot l and we also are going to add another bone that we're going to extrude so just extrude the bone from the tip and we are going to disconnect this bone alt p clear current again this is going to be the controller for the ear for the stretch two that we are going to apply and this bone is not aligned with this one so we want it to be aligned to do this we're going to shift select the ear bone and we're going to press ctrl alt a and this is going to be aligned perfectly okay so now what i want to do is maybe i want to shorten the size of this one so i'm going to go into the normal transformation orientation when i'm activating gizmo just to show you you can see that it aligns we were in global uh you can see that it align the axis to the normal of the bone so if i'm selecting the tip i can move my tip in the direction of the bone this is pretty useful so let's go back in global here and maybe we can scale a bit the visual of this bone by pressing ctrl alt s okay so let's set up in pose mode the same type of constraint that we've done for the stretch too so we select the target we shift select the the the bone control shift c stretch two we have a stretch two behavior we can select both both of those bones in edit mode we can shift select the head we can compress control p keep offset and now the head is is the parent of both of those bones this bone is free floating but because the stretch 2 is pointing at it it looks like they are connected but it's not the case actually and for this bone in edit mode we can increase the number of segments and we can push the curve a bit backward like this on the y in and out okay and lastly we are going to set the n handle to the ear dot l but before that not not before that but we are going to rename this as ear controller dot l okay this is working quite fine i think one thing to notice is that this bone this bone and this bone are going to be bones that are going to actually deform the mesh they form the character those bones so this one this one the eye and the and this one are not going to deform the mesh they're just there to help the animator move to move the character so we need to uncheck the deform checkbox so blender won't take them into account when deforming the characters so let's do that for those bones and from now on from now on we are going to to do this for the bones that would that are not meant to deform the character okay so i think that we are quite doing well here the other thing to do is to also duplicate this setup to the bottom here and we are going to rotate everything i can scale that and i i will simply try to match this and you will see that it's not going to match very well but we are going to fix that in a moment but just before doing that let's rename this bone as leg dot l and this one as leg underscore ctrl c t r r l sorry dot l and we are good to go so what i want to do is i want to enter into this edit mode of my the edit mode of my mesh i want to select the loop i want to press shift s and for this bone i want to snap the root to the cursor shift s selection to cursor nothing new i'm going to place this route approximately at the right location and for now i'm just going to remove the segments just to see if it's placed correctly i'm going to select the tip press shift s cursor to selected i'm going to select this bone pressing shift s selection to cursor and i'm going to select this button finally i'm going to shift click this bone and pressing ctrl alt a to align the root the controller to the bone so now we are back with a good setup as you can see but we have an issue is that this bone this setup was pointing uh with the if we go back into the normal view with the z4 and in this case as you can see it's also the case but it's slightly uh not it's slightly unaligned so what i want to do is i want to select both bone and press shift n to recalculate what we call the roll the role of a bone is the by pressing ctrl or you can change it it's the alignment of the bone it's the rotation of the bone around its around its main axis so you can see it orient the bone and it changes the forward direction uh in blue of the bone you can also press n and you can see the the role that exists there so what we're going to do is we're going to change the role of both of the of those bones and we're going to press shift n and we're going to align this with the minus y-axis globally so it follows the global axis the y-axis so it points forward basically so now i can in edit mode add some cut back and i will just reverse by removing the minus here and the minus here i will reverse the curve the curvature of my bone and i will also parent this bone to the pelvis and i will parent the this to the root i won't parent this to the pelvis because i want that when i move the pelvis i want the food to stay on the ground okay so if i'm placing the food there and i'm moving the pelvis forward and backward i want the the foot to stay to stay on the ground okay this will act like a kind of uh inverse kinematic if you know what i mean okay so now i think that we are ready to maybe rig the eye so we are going to add another bone at the location of the of the tip of the eye by pressing shift s and shift a to add a bone and we are going to scale this bone and we're going to put it forward like this let me go back in global transformation mode and what i want to do is this target is going to be called i target dot l and it's not going to deform the mesh so i'm going to scroll back uh scroll down and remove the deform option and i'm going to say that this bone is going to follow this one so first select the target then select the bone that is going to receive the constraint and press ctrl shift c and let's add the damn track constraint damn track constraint is basically making a bone look at another another one um so that's pretty cool feature so i think that now we're ready to mirror the rig in order to mirror the rig we can press a in edit mode and we can right click and call the symmetry symmetrize option and because we've correctly set up the dot l notation you can see that blender is changing the name of all of the other bones by dot r and everything should be set up and parented correctly and you can see that both eyes are working so yes everything should be fine one other thing that i want to do is to add a bone that will control both eyes both eye targets to do this i'm selecting both of them pressing shift s and cursor to selected it's going to put the cursor in the center uh in the midpoint of those two bones and we're going to press shift a to add another bone let's change its scale like this let's call it i target mastery let's remove the deform option let's select both i targets select finally the master and ctrl p we can keep offset so now when we move the master it brings with it the two child and i want to do something very um [Music] very specific for the eyes i want that when i move the head you can see that the target because it's not parented to anything is not moving with the head this is something that could be useful but it could also be useful to have the target following the head so what we're going to do is we're going to add a constraint on this head target in the on this i target sorry on the master and this is going to be called the child of constraint and this is like if we had um a procedural way of parenting something to to another so in this case i want to pick the wig i want to pick the head and as you can see when i'm rotating the head the constrain will act like if the target was parented to the head you cannot see the relation lines the right relationship lines like for the other one because it's not uh it's not a static link it's um it's a link that is uh uh defined procedurally if you want and the cool thing is that we have a slider for every constraint that represents the influence so in this case 100 is represented by one and if i put zero you can see that my head when i'm turning it it's like if the target was not parented anymore so what we will do is we is we will expose this slider um to in the viewport with what we call a custom property we don't want the animator to each time come back to the backstage of the rig and to go in the chat of constraint and and do and change the influence and animate this influence we want to have a more easy controller somewhere in the ui so what we are going to do is we are going to select this bone and then the bone option there in the bottom we are going to add a custom property properties to it by pressing add and this property as you can see it's there we can click on edit and we are going to call it i folder okay and it's now here what we want is that when we slide the slider we want this slider to affect the influence of this of the child of constraint to do this we are simply going to right click on the slider copy as a new driver and we are going to paste on the influence as a new driver and you can see that now it's purple there and when i'm changing the slider here you can see that it reflects um in the influence of the child of constrain whatever panel is open there it's still working behind the scene and the cool thing is that if i'm putting one here and then moving the head you can see that the target is following and if i'm put changing the influence back it's unparenting the target okay so we have i think um now the basic uh the a very very basic rig that we can try to bind to our mesh uh of course if you want to push the strip further you will do things such as isolate the eyes into separated bones so you can still have access to the orientation of each bone on the eye you will do things such as more precise eye key there with bones that can footroll and flatten the back of the leg et cetera but we are not going to go that far because i still want this tutorial to be uh easy to follow so this is going to be good enough but just notice that if you want to push that rig further um it could be a good exercise and it will help you better understand rigging and there are tons of small things that you can do to improve the animator's life but for now let's stick with that let's try to bind this trick to the character so in order to bind this character to the rig what we are going to do is use what we call weight painting there are multiple ways to bind a character like this to a rig for instance you can use mesh deform cages you can use lattices maybe you can and you can weight paint and we are going to in our case weight paint there are multiple issues with each method and i think in our case we will be able to manage weight painting quite well with the shapes that we have so one thing that i've noticed is that this bone is not called correctly so let me call it pelvis it doesn't matter because it's not a burn a bone that going that is going to deform but anyway it's always great if you can if you can define a good names so what we are going to do is select the character shift click select the rig and press ctrl p and with automatic weight now if you select the character you can see that in the vertex groups we have a lot of new groups that are corresponding to the name of the bones and basically it added some weights for each vertex for each vertices uh that are uh going to follow some of the bones so some of the bones so for instance if we select this character enter in edit mode automatically blender is set to some vertex to follow a bone in particular so sorry if i'm selecting the armature in pose mode and rotating my character you can see that it already started to move and look and look deformable the issue we have is that for now if we look at the modifier stack we have a new modifier called the armature and this armature modifier is trying to deform the mesh after the subdivision surface happen i don't want this i want to move it below everything and we also are going to check the preserve volume option in order to make it work a bit better and you can see that the deformations already looks much nicer like this we have a lot of work to a lot of work to do though but this is going to be fine so now what i want to do is to check what uh blender has done for me for the legs you can see it's quite bad we are going to fix that same thing for the ears you can see that it's quite bad too but we again are going to fix that one thing that i want to do is to open a new window by dragging the corner like this and here i want to be in material preview and i want to remove the overlays so it will it will show me only my character this is going this is going to be a good helper for me to to see how my character deforms in the final stage of course we don't have the [Music] the subdivision surface activated in the viewport so ex you you accept uh expect a better looking result when we will have when we'll add it back later on but for now i prefer to work with the actual geometry okay one thing that we can add also on top is maybe the wire frame so in this panel you can add the wireframe and this is going to be okay like this so i want the the eyes also to follow uh the eye bone so in order to do this i'm going to select the eye shift click the armature press ctrl tab to enter in pose mode and select the bone that is going to be the parent of the subject and then i'm going to press ctrl p and boom okay i'm going to do the same thing for the other bone so select the eye select the bone in pose mode press ctrl p bone and if you move the target now the eyes are looking around and following the object as you can see okay so this is uh one thing done uh the thing that i don't like is when it's stretching um a lot you can see that the eyes are going out of their socket so we will paint the influence of some vertices around the eyes to always follow the ad and not being deformed by the stretch so in order to do this let's stay in this pose because it's a very extreme pose and let's select the armature first then shift click the then go back in object mode and shift click the mesh and press ctrl tab in order to go into weight paint mode the weight paint mode is the mode where you can paint the influence of of the bones um on the mesh that you are currently weight painting you have different brush that will help you paint the weights and we have different settings that before continuing we need to be sure that our checked to ease the process the first thing is in the options here you want to check the auto normalize option okay then in the if you press n in the tool settings you want to activate vertex groups x symmetry meaning that when you're going to paint uh the influence on one bone on one side it's going to be replicated to the other side as you can see blender in this panel has created for us other groups and if we switch between them you can see that uh it represents the uh influence of the bone red meaning maximum influence blue meaning zero influence or less influence and actually you can see that i have a black representation and this is because i've checked the option active for the zero weight and this is showing me where there is no weight at all no influence at all so you have all your groups there but there is a nicer way to edit the groups is to select the bones by pressing ctrl so if you press ctrl you can see that you can select the bones when it's purple it means that this bone is not deforming okay so in the case of the head we are going to paint using the ad around the eyes to make sure that the eyes are always following the character at least the ed sorry so you paint the head area you can paint it like this let's paint a bit more in red and for now it's going to be okay like this okay we don't want anything else to to to to move to move with something else we only want the ad so if you want you can also disable temporarily one eye this can this is going to be useful in order to see the weights inside so again here we want to paint the inner eyes so we are sure that the ad will be stuck with the head bone okay again rigging weight painting it's a very iterative process so you're going to to iterate over the different weights that you're creating okay so one thing to note is that we've checked the auto-normalized option in the options here this is ensuring us that we have uh our vertex are uh at the maximum of 100 influence if you don't do this blender will go over 100 and create weird behaviors so for instance uh this vertex here is shared between the head and probably the body but at the end it has a 100 influence meaning that it is uh equally probably equally um balanced between those two bonds okay maybe a bit of this one but we are going to fix that okay so here it's the influence of the head and we want to use the blur brush then so maybe i can add a bit of the muzzle and a bit of this part too like this to create a smoother transition and now i'm going to use the blur brush in order to blur my lines and i want i really want to look at the lines that are uh forming by my geometry my topology and i really want to have something nice so let's add this one to this this one to the head 2 like this i don't want the mask to be moving that much and you know what i'm also going to twist my character because it's going to be a very very extreme pose and i'm going to control click on this part and i'm going to blur it also a bit let's blur it like this and let's create a nice transition between everything there okay always check in this view is going to be easier to see so we still have good deformation in this case i think i can press alt r to cancel here the character is looking nice i can maybe add a touch around the crease there from the back it's not great so let me stretch the back a bit with the blur here it's okay and around the ears it's probably bad so i'm going to for sure blur this and i'm going to try to stretch the controller of the ear so let me reset everything let me go in the very bad and complex and extreme pose and let me check what everything is doing so in this case this vertex that is poking through i'm going to add it back to the head and now i'm going to try to stretch the ear backward like this very very hard you can see that i can for this one that is deforming i can blur a bit the the thing maybe it's too much so one thing to note is that if you have the other parts you can also blur it and because we checked this symmetry with vertex group it's going to work maybe here i can remove it so if you cannot with blur work with it you can subtract or substract here or here maybe it's being added to another bone maybe it's there yes it was added to the to the spine so i'm going i'm removing a bit of the the weight from the spine to the top there shouldn't be there anyway okay make sure that everything is working fine so here i can come back and i can maybe remove a bit the influence of the ear around there because the ear shouldn't oh sorry shouldn't stretch that too much so maybe i can blur from the ear i can blur a bit like this okay so i guess this is going to work well for us let me check when the character is down a bit we still have the head motion we still have the ear that is working much nicer you can see that now we we don't have a huge deformation around it like it was the case before oh we still have some vertices behind that are moving we don't want this so you wait paint them and you you are going to remove them by using the subtract brush let's select the body right now and now we are going to do the same process for the leg so when i stretch the leg you can see that a lot of things are coming with it we don't want this so i'm going to remove a lot of this and i'm going to push that leg forward and stretch it i'm going to again select this leg and maybe here i can blur around it not too much and to blur also the body but maybe the body here should be much more overlap overlapping around the leg so let me add a bit more mass there like this again we are pushing the character in very extreme poses which is the best way to set up this kind of cartoony character i think okay so here it's pushing back the joint inside and here it's pushing back in front so it's not perfect but i think it's going to be all right for now maybe we'll have we will have to add some deformation bones later on we'll see we'll check one thing for sure that i've noticed that as bad is when i'm stretching the bottom here is stretching too much so probably in this case i will i will add some bones that are going to constrain that i don't know if maybe i can add weight to the to the pelvis um i'm going to try to remove the in the bone options i'm going to try to remove the restrictions for the pelvis to deform and i'm going to try to to weight pain the the pelvis so to do that i removed the pelvis i i sorry i checked the deform option in the pelvis i shift click the mesh i go back to weight paint you see it's violet it's magenta and i can add geometry and it will automatically create a group called pelvis for us maybe this is going to help us maintain the geometry a bit better so i can add uh add some weight to the bottom there maybe a bit more in fact let's add more like this let's also add a bit of geometry for the back maybe it's going to help us with the the legs and let's blur that let's blur also the the spine come back to the pelvis the leg maybe blur a bit the leg i have a vertex here that is very well defined very well stretched sorry so i'm going to blur this here as much as possible let's add back this one let's push this one a bit this one you see i'm when i'm pushing it it's going too far so what i can do is i can lower my intensity by pressing shift f it's going to add less weight maybe something like this okay we'll have to check if when i'm coming down it's maintaining the geometry a bit better so yes of course i cannot go further than this because you can see that it's stretching too much there maybe i can add a bit of geometry a bit of weight from the pelvis to maintain the the butt area like this not too much but just a touch starting to look a bit weird but anyways maybe doing the work maybe on the hips too let's blur that let's check so again we can twist the twist looks still okay we can stretch looks still okay we can squash looks kind of okay it was looking better with a bit more weight down here so let me add a bit more weight to the pelvis create a nicer curve like this i can add a bit more weight to this to this here maybe to the spine this time the leg is still going fine as you can see now i have a restriction restricted motion and this is good because it looks like everything is working fine except that we are moving vertices to the opposite side i don't want this so i'm going to subtract them okay maybe i need to add this vertex a bit more to the leg so i'm going to blur it maybe i'm going to do the same with the back here a bit you can see it's deforming a much better like this okay so let's check i have my body my pelvis that by the way i can turn around if i want to do a dance uh when i'm turning it around it's doing something like this which is okay the stretch is still doing fine maybe you know what i'm going to add even more weight to the pelvis so let's select the pelvis and add some weight in the front by using add not too much just a touch like this that we are going to blur anyway i'm going to create like a sort of a belt sort of um under underpant underwear so something like this just to test yes it's keeping the weight a bit better but it's not here i'm going to blur of course everything so it's not doing it too much creating a nicer transition we can maybe add more weight to the leg on this part let's let's add to a bit more weight to the spine so you can see it's just a question of testing adding a bit testing how it looks blurring things at the end you want to blur as much as possible to create nicer looking transitions i feel it starts to to come along i'm going to add more stretch to this location again trying to blur let's blur everything like this okay so now if i'm selecting my mesh clearing here everything i think i have a better much better uh deformation right now um it's stretching scratching i can still twist uh the twist in the relaxed pose is still working quite fine i have the stretch that is looking much nicer but i can still do better and in order to do better a better job what i what i'm going to do is so first i also need to check of course the legs so the legs are doing fine except that it's taking here too much weight from there so i don't want the belly to be impacted as much as that so this is a it's better remember we are animating a floor sack not a full human so okay so it's quite nice but you can see that sometimes here it's very harsh in terms of deformation so what we can do is we can apply on top of that on top of the armature a modifier called the smooth corrective modifier and we're going to put it above the armature and this is going to help us round the [Music] round smooths the deformation basically and you can see that it works a bit nicer but sometimes you lose volume when you do that so be careful not to use it too much okay and one thing that i want to do is i want to protect my eyes from this modifier because sometimes as i said we are losing volumes so i don't want to lose volumes for my eyes so i'm going to select my eyes so deselect everything just select the loop of the around the eyes for both eyes deselect anything else ctrl plus multiple time and i'm going to create uh with this selection i'm going to create a new vertex group that i'm going to call protect smooth let's move it on top and i'm going to assign with a 100 weight to this if you are looking in the in the viewport if you select this protect smooth you can see that you have uh you have something like this you can blur a bit the results around your eyes like this and this mask we are going to feed it in the corrective smooths here protects mousse but we want the reverse meaning that we want to affect everything that is not in this mask okay so it should now apply but not for the eyes so if we select our character and we remove that you can see the difference the the smooth is being applied on and off we can even move the factory to one you can see it gives even more smoothness but again we're losing volume a lot so you can also reap it as much as you want be careful with that because it's very consuming it's not very effective in terms of performances but in this case um because the character is simple and because we are not that much concerned with performances i guess i can use maybe six repetition with a factor of one okay in other software it's called delta mesh and this this operator and it is a very very well known so you can see also here when i'm moving this it's not a good sign that the body is moving so um and let me check if i have other issues like this no it should be okay so what i want to do is select my mesh select my um select my ear and remove the paint here i don't know why it was doing this okay let's go back to the ear it's not deforming anything else here it's okay the pelvis is doing fine the cool thing now is that because we added a bit of weight we can turn the pelvis around and it moves we can do the mr bean the mr bean pose um and i think we are good to go with this character uh now we'll add some facial expression uh using shape keys okay so this will be the next stage is to to create blinks for the eyes so let's do that right now so in order to add the shape keys for the eyes we're going to isol or isolate our character mesh like this but we are going to select everything but only one eye so it's going to be easier for us to create the shape keys what i want to do is i want to protect myself from touching other uh other vertices so i'm going to select the inner part of my eye and i'm going to press ctrl cross control plus multiple times like this and i'm going to press shift h i don't want to to touch any other vertex for my shape key so here in the shape key panel in object mode we are going to add a base key that is going to represent the state by default and then we are going to add another key and this key is going to be top eyelid dot r because it's going to be the right eyelet that we are going to move down so we are going now to use the connected proportional editing pressing alt o and we are going to put the value of the shape keys to one so before doing that make sure you're in edit mode and that the the value is two is one there and we are going slightly but surely to lower the top eyelid so one important thing to notice is that the corners shouldn't move that much only the top part of the eyelid should go down like this so this is going to be a very tedious process but if done correctly this is going to work pretty well make sure not going too far from the original pose otherwise it would look weird when you animate it and sometimes it's also good to remove the proportionality thing and to make sure that the lines are spreading correctly like this okay so this is one probably shape key you can see that the eyes is going down you can maybe go inside now make sure the geometry inside is working properly to keeping the thickness of the eyelid correct one thing that is really cool that is in blender you can press shift b and drag a box and it's going to center your view around the the zone that you've selected this is sometimes really useful to to tweak to go in very tiny sections so this is the top eyelid that i can move down make sure that the inside is matching a bit with the rest okay so important that when you close the eye it's the the top eyelid that is coming down and the bottom eyelid is not moving that much okay so something like this is okay i think that i've moved too much the inside corner so i'm going to compensate for it by moving it up a bit or maybe just the other side in fact the corner there moving it down just a bit yes it's much better like this for me and i'm going to make the other eyes the other eye reappear by pressing um by pressing alt h and you can see that we will have an issue uh the eye because it's round and the shape key is going straight to the point to the final position it's very it's linear linear sorry we'll have an issue and uh we'll have to add a courage a correction shape key that will um correct the roundness of the eye so we are going to call that top eyelid correct dot r and this shape when the when the top eyelid is at 0.5 so in semi close we want this at one to be pushed forward okay so we are going to compensate for that and we are going to create a mechanism that will automatically blend those shape keys for us with only one slider something like this so we're just compensating for the roundness so when the so this is the correction you can see that it's just pushing a bit forward the eyelid and when this is at one the the correction will be at zero um so the top eyelid here still should be at the end a bit bulgier so i'm going to do that very carefully following the shape of the eye okay making sure everything is correct right there so you can see that it's going down but in the middle this will push a bit forward to compensate for the lack of volume in the rotation so we're going to use that a bit later but now what i want to do is i want to do the lower the lower eyelid so but i lead dot r i'm going to put the value to one i'm going to select the bottom lead and push it a bit up just a touch push it a bit forward this is not going to be very very pronounced because usually you cannot do that a lot if you try even with your own eyes you won't have the ability to to to push the the eyelid that far so it's like it's okay you can see it's just a tiny motion if if we need it okay so now what i want to do is to of course mirror those shapes so in order to mirror shapes in blender what you can do is you can select the state where you want to mirror so we are going to mirror the this one so we are creating a shape that corresponds to this one in order to do this we can go in the in the arrow there and click on new shape from mix so it's going to create exactly the same shape key so if i'm removing this one and i'm moving this one you can see that i've basically copied my shape key and what i'm going to do is i'm going to click here mirror shape and you can see that now it's on the other side okay so we activate this one let's do the same process with the correction i'm going to push it to one i'm going to click new shape from mix top i lead correct dot l if you deactivate the right you can see that it's still the same shape key and now mirror shape boom it's on the other side let's do that with the bottom eyelid remember to put everything to zero when you are duplic when you're creating a new shape for mix so the bottom eyelid is 100 percent new shape from mix but i live dot l uh and mirror this shape mirror okay so now we have all the shape keys that we need i'm just going to put zero here so in order to create an easier control for the animator we are going to add some custom properties to drive those shape keys so in order to do this what we will be doing is on the rig uh on the headboard in pose mode we are going to add um custom properties so in the bone here let's add four properties the first one is going to be top top eyelid dot l from zero to one uh then top eyelid dot r from zero to one then but for bottom eyelid dot l from zero to one and here but highly dot r from zero to one so you can see that the sliders appears here i can select them all and press zero to to push them back to zero so now what we want to do is we for the top eyelid first we are going to create a new driver and we are going to copy um as new driver and in the shape keys here for the top eyelid we are going to paste the driver and now if i'm selecting this bone the head bone and moving this control you can see that the eye is going to close but the issue is that it's not moving also the correction that we want when it's 0.5 so remember that when it's 0.5 here i want the correction to add some bulge uh on the shape key so i want to activate the correct shape keys the correction shape keys to one so in order to do this i will also so i will let it at 0.5 here and i will also in the shape keys select the correct correct here eyelid and i will paste the driver in the same way the problem is that now the the slider is just a one-to-one mapping meaning that it's 0.5 in the correction shape keys but when it's 0.5 here we want the shape keys to be 1 in the uh in the correction slider so we will have to find a way to map this value to 1 when it is 0.5 and back to 0 when this is one okay so you can see that now the bulge is not working really well so in order in order to do this what i will do is i will open the driver editor in the in in this window so we are going to open the driver editor there and i'm going to select uh my mesh and you can see that here we have our two shape keys or two drivers sorry so for the cur i'm going to hide the first one which is the top eyelid and this curve is representing the curve um for the correction and you can see that for now our value is at 0.5 what i want to do is add the end here for this key so i'm going to zoom out sorry for this key i want it to be at zero so i'm going to put the value at zero okay and not if not the value it's at frame one uh the value is zero here sorry and now i will select the handles of my values and you can see that it starts changing the value imagine that here we are at 0.5 this is the value of the slider 0.5 and when it's 0.5 we want the the curve here to touch one okay so what we can do is we can make this tangent a bit longer like this and we can make it touch the one value and you can see the slider here is changing and when it's reaching one it means that it's okay okay so now the cool thing is that uh when this line behind is playing this one is creating this motion okay so it's it's basically activating to one the the value when it's 0.5 and deactivating the correction shape when it's moving to the other side so if we look at the shape key for this one if i'm moving the eyelid you can see it's working pretty well with the bold in action okay we're just going to copy that so in order to do that we are going to recreate exactly the same thing what we can do to save some time is to go in the drivers that are already set up there we can copy this driver the first one for the top lid dot l we can apply it to the to the top lead.r by pasting the driver we can do the same thing with the corrective shape and paste so now of course when we select this and we move the right nothing happens but if i move the the top lead both shape keys are working we just have to change the name in the driver so here uh for the top pleat dot r in the driver section you can see this is the path to the slider we can just change the dot r here and same thing for here the dot r is the name of the the slider so now if we go there on the head we have the other one working and this one working with the same idea okay last thing we'll have to do is to select the boat eyelid to to do a the same behavior for the bot eyelid and this is going to be really easy because we have only one shape here so we're going to copy as a new driver for the bot eyelid dot left select the mesh but eyelid dot left paste the driver and let's do the same for the last one about id.r and copy as new driver and paste it in the final situation in the final checkpiece let's move here to a 3d viewport again and now we should be able to animate really simply the eyes so you can close the eye like this with the top and the bot eyelid dot r you can as you see move it a bit higher and you have um you have a blink you can really easily create different shapes like this and of course you can animate those sliders and this will be um good enough for why we have to do sometimes animators like to also have um controllers on the head uh i think that the the last thing we have on the facial features on the on the face the better it is for animating if you look at riggs from pixar animation studio you can see that they have controllers that are following the skin of the characters this is two advents for this tutorial maybe i will cover that kind of things for another tutorial but but i think it's better if we separate the facial features from the mesh we want to see always the mesh and talking about that i'm going to in order to finalize the the mesh basically here i'm going to zero out everything in order to finalize the the rig what i want to do is i want to add um some colors and i want to to s to hide the bones that i will never touch so those bones here and the eyes i will never touch them so i'm going to press m and move it to a different ball layer layers for the bones are there as you can see and they are completely uh completely available to you if you want both of them you press shift and you access to both of them but this is the only one that we are going to manipulate okay one other thing that i'm going to do is i'm going to add colors for my layers for my bones so i'm going to create bone groups three bone groups the first one is going to be called center or default sorry then we have left and then we have right so the default group here is going to be by default blue the left is going to be red and the right is going to be green and what i want to do is i want to say everything that is going to be on the left i'm going to assign it to the left everything going to be on the right i'm going to assign it to the right and everything else so to the center i'm going to assign the default group and now i have shapes that are colored and the last thing that we can do is we can add some custom shapes for our visuals so we can replace the visual of the bones so we are going to create um two custom shapes mainly one circle and one and one circle in fact only one for now so let's add a circle like this and we are going to connect the two center like this by pressing f creating a line like this this is going to help us orient the shape and this shape i'm going to press m and move it in a new collection called shapes okay so it's now separated and this circle is going to be called [Music] usually we call wgt for widget circle and what i can do with this uh this shape is i can select for instance my head and i can go in the option for the bone and in the viewport display i can say i want a custom object and i want a circle you can see that it is not aligned perfectly in the right orientation so what i can do is i can rotate my shape in edit mode 90 degree like this and now it's going to be aligned in a better way and i can use this controller instead of the block same thing for this one i'm going to use the custom shape widget with widgets but you can see it's very little very small sorry so i can scale it like this and this is going to help us use the pelvis usually for the pelvis i'm not doing a shape like this i'm more doing like a v shape but for for our purposes here it's going to be fine and for the ears i'm going to i'm going to try to change it for the widget too probably it's going to be much nicer let's do that for everything let's just circle legit circle for the roots usually for the root we do another type of shape so i'm going to do that i'm going to duplicate this i'm going to model a shape that will be symmetrized so let me symmetrize this mirror on the x and the z axis and i'm going to extrude here something like this to represent the direction of the root this is going to be called this shape is going to be called woodjet roots i can select this bone i can go in the viewport display of the bone and put the widget root and as you can see it's not aligned in this case so i'm going to rotate it back i'm going to apply the mirror and i'm going to apply here the rotation and scale so this is the original orientation and in this case i can even scale it a bit more so it's wider okay so this is the root of my character now for the the eyes let me try to add the widget root again because i think it's fun so yes i'm going to add the widget root and i'm going to scale it to something like 0.2 same thing for this one widget widget root 3.2 and for this one i'm going to add the widget circle uh now i'm going to create another one another shape again so i'm going to duplicate this one and i'm going to rotate it and i'm going to select those points and press o for proportionality and i'm going to scale this like this create a sort of mask i'm going to remove this edge and this is going to be widget [Music] i master and i'm going to select this bone again and with in in pose mode and i'm going to add imaster and of course i need to apply the rotation uh i need to sorry rotate it 90 degree and apply the rotation and this is going to be matched normally i can scale it a bit and also in edit mode what i can do is i can put the center of this bone in the center of those ones so i'm going to select those two bones press cursor selected and i'm going to shift this bone to the center by pressing selection to cursor and this is quite weird actually so let's do that again shift c cursor to select it and i want um oh and i want this uh this bone to be hmm okay so now in fact i'm going to to lower down this until it matches oh yes the the roots in fact should be in at the same location so you know what i'm going to select both of the root press s z 0 to flat my scale on the same axis and it should align everything okay so now i have a target that is better looking for my shapes sometimes it's also it's also a good idea to add thickness to your shapes so for instance you can add [Music] i think it's called the skin modifier and you can you can change the weight by selecting all your vertices inside and pressing ctrl a it's going to change the weight and i don't remember if yes it's creating a shape like this you can see it's sometimes much easier to see so we are going to do this for all of our shapes so go back in object modes like this shape i'm going to make it a slightly less thick i'm going to repeat the same process here add a skin modifier press ctrl a to lower down the size here select this shape and press ctrl a oh and press sorry a new modifier add a new magnifier called skin select everything inside and ctrl a to change the thickness of the shape and now when we select the rig we have this much nicer looking shapes okay um it's maybe still too thick so i'm going to select everything and scale again this too i don't like when it's too too too much present and the last thing that you can do is also go in the viewport display object and remove the in front option for your rig so now it should when you press alt z you should see your rig but the geometry is not inside okay maybe this shape is a bit small so i'm going to scale it here and maybe this one too like this and i think that now we have something quite okay remember for your widget to remove the render visibility you can also remove the viewport visibility because everything there will be replaced in the bone it's still visible for the bones but it's not visible as a mesh so now everything should work properly i think we have finished the the rig for this character uh at least it's a very very simple rig one thing that i don't like also is to see the relationship lines to do to remove them you can uh go in the view i think and you can go that's not view sorry it's um in the object visibility no [Music] i don't remember where where it is item it's somewhere maybe it's in the scene it's called relationship lines oh now it's in the oval lays here so you can go in the overlays and you can remove a relationship lines and you see it removes the parenting lines and with that um we have our rig ready to be animated i hope this part was not too complex i really encourage you to follow it again if you had any trouble of course with more time we could achieve that much better rig but for the time we have i think it's going to be fine okay before going on i i just noticed something in the leg that bothers bothers me uh you see that the the geometry is like merging in this case and this is probably due to the smooth uh operator uh so if we go there and we deactivate it you can see that we have a much much better shape for the leg but not for the not for the rest of the body so what we'll do is we'll add uh in the protect smooth uh modifier we will remove the leg from the smooth operator so let's remove let's activate back this operator and let's [Music] and let's select the legs so we are going to select um send the center loops like this quit press control plus add this and this is going to be added to the protects mousse group as you can see we should now not use the smooth for the leg which is better because we now have better much better deformations here and uh we will do a probably the same for the for the ear yes so let's grab let's select the point for both ears control plus multiple time until here and let's add this to the to the weight to create a much better shape for the ear you can see it works much better okay um i'm also going to add more and more uh segments in those bones so five six six is going to be better i think it's going to add much more uh detail to the curve but be careful not adding too much um uh segments to bendy bones as sometimes they can they can make really bad deformations but in this case it's it's okay i think maybe we can also add one more in the in the spine before animating this character there is one thing that i want to polish it's the uvs for the eyes because now when the eyes are closed uh the uvs around the orbits are quite stretched so we are going to correct that by just simply going into the eye controllers and we are going to lower every take all the sliders by taking the first one and drag and dragging down and we're going to push everything to the right to close both eyes together so now what i want to do is go in uv editing and you can see that here we have a very stretched uv unwrap for the eyes so we are going to select our character we are going to select everything by pressing a in edit mode and now here we are going to select the edges the edge loops and we are going to try to accommodate for the stretch you just need to follow the procedural texture that we've done so something like this as you can see will do a much better job so i think it's okay for this eye let's do exactly the same thing for the other one it's it's okay if it's not symmetrical for this part it's not very important of course there are better ways to correct the uvs you could have just re-unwrap the uvs and correct the texture for the ambient occlusion but i i don't want to spend too much time for that so this is going to be okay for what we are going to do and this is why usually um we model the character with the eye closed uh it's for having better deformations for the uvs when the eyes are closed so next time if you want to model the eyes with a closed shape uh you will have to spend much more time doing your shape keys but it's actually worth it if you want uh a more i would say polish character but in this in this case it's going to be just all right for us so i'm going to open back the eyes and now we're ready to animate this character so let's go so we are going to animate a walk cycle for this character so let's get started i'm going to first disable the controllers that i don't want to see so i'm only going to see those ones and one thing that i want to do in order to ease the process is i also want to take the root and the target for the eyes and move them to a second layer so i only watch while working the main the really important bones that are the the pelvis the the head or the chest and the ends and the legs so from the side i'm going to start defining the different key poses for my character i'm going to enable here auto keyframe to add all keyframes automatically and i'm going to go in the first key here and i will be adding my first keyframe so i'm going to move my character like this and i'm going to create what we call the contact position so the contact position is going to be really important for us uh because it will represent the pose where both feet are on the ground so as you can see my controllers are slightly tilted so i'm going to untilt them like like this and i'm going to from the opposite view rotate this one so it creates a kind of foot shape even though i know it's ridiculous to say that but i want something more or less like this i'm going to put my pelvis like this and i'm going to push the controllers for the feet a bit more inside in the contact pose okay so this will be the contact position um for the contact position when both foot both legs are in a v shape usually the pelvis is tilted like this and we are going to do a double bounce walk cycle uh very joyful walk cycle so the first pose is going to be a up pose meaning that the legs will be a bit more visible and the character will have a thrust like this upward and we are also going to [Music] um counter rotate compared to the pelvis the pelvis going in this direction and the head the chest is going to the opposite direction and this is going to add a bit more um a bit more joy if you want in the in the in the character one thing that we can do too is to very very slightly uh turn the chest the pelvis like this but that's it's going to be very gentle for the ears don't worry right now we are going to deal with them later so let's copy this by pressing ctrl c i just realized that i don't have the shortcuts let me add them back and we are going to paste that um in the 13th frame in reverse so in order to reverse the pose you can press ctrl shift v and as you can see it reverses the pose which is really useful and at frame 26 we're going to paste that back and now i'm going one frame back using the right the the keys the right and left keys and i go i'm going to press ctrl end to end my animation there so now i have a cycle okay so now i'm going in the middle to add what we call the uh the down pose um the sorry the the passing position uh and this is going to be still an up uh position so we are good to go for that and i'm going to uh let me check i'm going to here approximately to uh move to cancel the rotation by pressing r alt r sorry and i'm going to place the feet on the ground and this foot is going to be turned a bit more and i'm going to make the pelvis go a bit higher so we see a better shape for our feet and i'm always going to try to make an s shape representing this as a flat shape for the foot and this one is like this okay so maybe i can put the chest up a bit and this should be the passing position let me copy this passing position to the to the 19th keyframe in reverse and you can see that we we start to have something that looks like a walk it's not great of course because we need to add the passing position uh the down position sorry so for the down position i'm going to plant the foot on the ground like this it's okay and i'm going to turn this foot and drag it a bit behind or you know what i'm going to reverse the curve for now and i'm going to lower the pelvis very much like this to create the thrust the bounce in the in the character let me select everything ctrl c going to this position control shift v you you notice also that i can label the keyframes so i'm going to take those one the contact position and i'm going to choose this visual so it's it's more visible maybe also the the passing position i can do that and the rest is going to be maybe blue i don't care about the the real name i just want different visuals for my keyframes so you can see that now we start to have uh something that more or less look like a watch but it's maybe time to adjust a bit the visuals so i'm going here to increase the pelvis a bit and again mirror each time i'm doing something i need to mirror the corresponding pose on the second foot so this part basically is the first foot planting on the ground and this one is the second okay and this makes a full complete circle walk cycle sorry okay so now at frame 10 i'm going to add um another down pose meaning that the pelvis and the chest are going to go down and i'm going to have here a reverse shape for the foot and this feet is going to be inside of it like this this is good this is going to create the double bounce effect so i'm going to select this pose paste it in mirror and you can see that we have the double bounce effect so this is a very common walking cartoon um and we want of course to enable to to polish everything so one thing that i will add is in the passing position here i will put the i will put the sorry the leg a bit outward like this so let me select this and copy it in mirror ctrl shift v and you can see it adds a bit more attitude to the the leg i can also here start the rotation a bit more this creates a more interesting pose and for this extended pose i can also i will try to tilt a bit more the pelvis like this it creates just a small touch you know just a small accent on the on the rest and in this case i'm going to also uh rotate this a bit in the same direction just to to push the accent even more on the chest okay so i think we are in good in a good direction i want to focus a bit more on the foods so now here and there i want to make the food touch the ground this is the down position so in both case the food should touch the ground so let me just find an edge that will work well in this case this one is okay so i'm going to copy this pose again back to its mirror pose here going there we see that the stretch is too much so maybe i just here in this case you can see that it's very very stretched so maybe i can lower a bit the rotation for the curl so let me copy this this pose here and this pose right after we can see a snap a snapping motion that is quite nice and i'm going now to only look at the rotation of my gizmo you can see that here when it rotates maybe i'm losing too much rotation so i'm going to copy this pose and removing a bit of rotation when going forward like this so the funny aspect of this character is that it's standing on on the feet basically but but it's hard for him to or her i think it's him more him to to to walk okay so maybe one thing that i can do to make it a bit more realistic looking in terms of weight is maybe i can push everything down for zero um maybe 0.01 so let's try g z 0.01 minus sorry gz minus 0.02 and this is going to lower down the y motion on this key i think it's going to be better but in order to do that for all the keyframes i can simply go press press control tab and go selecting the curves that corresponds to the y location i think in this case so if i'm selecting the y location by pressing my by selecting my curve here i can press l to select the all the key and you can see that it's it's this keyframe i can see that this is probably uh the the keyframe for the pelvis so i can move them both down and you can see it works like a charm like this okay while we are here maybe we can try to to tweak a bit those curves so here maybe i can in fact maybe i can select all those keys and no i don't know i think so it's okay like this in fact let's try to know in fact the curves are right now are pretty good for me at least okay so i like when the character is more close to the ground it looks much more funny to me okay maybe we can increase so i'm going to press ctrl tab to go back in my timeline maybe i can hear um in the case of the the passing position maybe i can increase and and higher and and make the the pelvis a bit higher you can see it creates a more a more cartoon cartoony effect um i can also maybe anticipate here the effect a bit by turning that slightly before always copying the previous position remember to do that and because the character is um because the character has two bones maybe i'm going to try to reverse the curve there it looks looks it looks quite nice but it's too much so i'm going to remove a bit of that and you can see it looks in the final result it gives him more an attitude that is a it's quite funny so to animate the ears what we're going to do is first place them um we are going to make them uh bounce side to side so i'm going to rotate them like this maybe one being more up than the other like this let's try it like this i'm going to paste this frame 13 and 26 okay it looks like this you can see that the motion is linear because this is not fk bones uh with bendy bones um when you are animating from one post to another the bones are going straight from one bone to another [Music] not bendy bone so with the stretch two constraint that we've created because the bone is free floating in the air it's not describing an arc so what we are going to do is select both ears and push them at frame 6 and 29 so you can see that now it's a bit better it's still not the best what we're going to try here is to counter the curve here position 4 and frame 4 sorry and here um i'm going to do the same thing but in reverse or maybe to the other position sorry something like this would be more suitable for us and here frame 10 we're going to do the same thing but in reverse and frame 22 like this okay so you can see a slight hiccup somewhere so now i don't know where it is so let's first move this frame to frame 7 instead and i think here this is pushed too far so frame 7 and frame 16 maybe here we're going to lower down frame 19 so we're going to lower down everything okay so let's take the first frame and make sure it's the same in the middle ctrl shift v it's okay this one oh i have a small gap here so i'm going to select both of them ctrl c ctrl shift d oh i just realized that the shortcuts are not there anymore so let's do that and maybe frame seven here okay let's walk let's look at this okay this one this one is the second one so i'm going to paste it there it's okay this one is the up ctrl shift v and the last one should be okay maybe the the gap is just in the visual of the bones if i'm looking at only one bone it looks quite fine actually the only thing i'm not really happy with is the that the b-bone inside is rotating but only on the top so let me bring back the [Music] the b-bone and let me see if i can in edit mode um if i can change a bit d is in is out so it works better so let's first do that in the here in the in this mode to see if it adds something so maybe we can push a bit d out i guess so okay let's bring back that to zero and let's in edit mode push the d out to 1.2 maybe and 1.2 here and one 1.2 here and let's see if it did a better job yes it works much better we have a much better floppy ear motion okay let's take our controller back and one thing that i want to do too is now i also want to be sure that from the side and this the ear are in this position so i'm going to wide widen the the gap between them and in the in the passing position here i want to basically with this those key frames i want to create the arc back so as you can see the controllers are not the best in in this case um but it's manageable anyway so in this case i just want to push this one a bit forward and backward and i'm going to which frame which ring was it those frames let me go back i don't remember the frame it was okay i think it was i think it was frame 10 so let's move that a bit back and this a bit forward because it's going to finish the arc and frame 10 means 22 in the other side okay so now i have a better arc like this maybe the curve is snapping too much as you can see it it breaks here like clap clap and i don't want that at that here you can see bam the the change is pretty much hard so let let me decrease this a bit only by changing rotations so i'm going to replace my keys and here same thing i'm going to remove a bit of the curve frame 10 so 22 is the mirror key okay i feel it's much better like this so from the top you can also see that the head is not moving at all it looks very static so we are going to try uh first let's have a new copy of this and we're going to try to now animate the head a bit so it's going to be very very very very subtle but when the character will be in this position maybe we can make it back a bit so let's try this then okay maybe it's it's not that great after all so it's hard to manage here because the character is not moving forward so we'll have to we'll have to to play with our rig a bit to find a solution to to this not so appealing motion but in fact you know because the character is walking on its place maybe if just as a test i animate over one foot the root motion just to see i need to put the keyframes as linear by pressing t and linear maybe it's you know in fact maybe it's working quite fine in our case so okay i'm going to cancel the root motion and maybe maybe from the top i can tweak a bit here and there in my poses let me check from the top the head is turning but it's not moving so maybe i can try to push that forward so on the z axis i'm going to push the head a bit forward like this just as a small test push it less on the extremes there and give something that it could be interesting even though it's not very logical so it's going forward then maybe here we need to push it backward a bit on the y y-axis let's copy this goes backward it adds a very you know bad guy motion so it could be interesting you know what i'm going to enter in edit in curve mode curve editor by pressing control tab and i'm going to look for the the axis that is going to be forward i think if i display the axis it's the z-axis so the z-axis is the axis that goes forward for this bone so i'm going to hide the quad union and everything else here i'm just going to take the z-axis z location and you can see with the motion it goes forward backwards forward backwards so i can remove those keys here to make it more as you can see to make it more um how can i say logical uh with the with the curves maybe you can you know what i i can also try to by pressing l i can select the curve i can also try to by pressing v choose the free handle type and i'm going to try to exaggerate as it's going to be very very intense but it creates a a more snappy head let's scale this here no it's not it's not good in this case but anyway i'm going to try different shapes here and there going to make a more round curve maybe like this it's interesting create some more create some more disco pose and of course if i want to lower down the effect i can scale this curve on the y axis as you can see it works and if i'm moving the curve back and forth you can see that i can reverse i can i can push everything back and forth making it quite funny okay so i'm going to push it slightly backward like this and now i'm going to work on the the same curve but for the pelvis so i'm going to hide here all my curves except the y location that i want to try to animate so on the first keyframe i'm going to place it backward just a bit the 13th keyframe i'm going to do the same but in reverse forward and frame 26 i'm going to copy this keyframe so ctrl c ctrl v so let me select this curve hide everything else by pressing shift h and let me try to remove all this thing so you can see it creates a belly motion that is quite interesting maybe let's add at frame 7 another keyframe here only on the only on this curve so pressing only on the selected channel maybe i can try to create the same thing that we've that we've done um previously like a motion forward no it's not it's not doing great maybe you can do a double a double bounce as you can see it creates a very funny effect but not quite what i want maybe i can just scale a bit this handle to create a more more smooth effect and i will of course lower it down i don't want it to be that that much present and if i want to select my curve you can see that i can push forward the the the pelvis and i can push it backward too if i need to to create a more scary scree scary can of course so let me push it a bit higher like this and i will also recenter my keys i think like this it's going to be fine maybe i will try also to rotate the pelvis no it's going to be too much so okay let's stick with that uh the other thing that we want to animate is um [Music] uh maybe we want to desynchronize the ears so i'm going back into [Music] into my curves as you can see so it's quite a mess here because um in terms of maybe i can try to fix that a bit let me check if i remove those keys no i cannot i cannot do that because i need to compensate for the for the the stretch to constraint so let's do that for now uh was not ideal in term of rig but it was meant to do a lot of other stuff usually in this case you will have to create what we call a switch fk ik uh but in this case it will be a switch between this type of bone and an ik version of it uh it will do a much better job but in our case uh i think we are going to be fine with what we have now but anyway what we will do is we'll desynchronize the ears so in this case i know that the frame after uh the last one will be this one so i select it and then i'm copying it right after like this i'm selecting all my keyframe and i'm to synchronize it by one frame as you can see it adds a bit more uh life to it i can even do it twice two key frames no just one was fine in my case and now one thing that i usually like to add before i need to save of course but one thing that i really like to add usually is to to just work on my main keyframes but just change a bit a tiny bit the angles so so the the the walk is not purely symmetrical so you know i'm going to add in some extremes you know i change a bit things here and there just as a slight adjustment only on one foot step this creates a less um less obvious i will say um less obvious [Music] how can i say less mechanical walk so i'm going to grab the the this curve back and maybe it's still too much so and maybe i can scale it a bit more on this axis i don't want it to be too much present so like this i think it's much better okay and again i said i said i wanted to desynchronize both footsteps so here in the down position i'm going to increase the down so we don't have the same down position in the extreme here maybe i can extend the leg in this case not too much but just enough something like this gives more life to to the character okay one thing that we can animate too is the eyes so uh we want the target to follow it's okay but we are going to select the head and here in the items we are going to animate the eyelids so i'm going to go back into the dop sheet uh here click on the the summary icon here as you can see the colors are very annoying because of the bone group so we are going to deactivate the color deactivate sorry the colors by going show group colors here and what i want to see is those four things so what i can do is basically i can disable everything else just to stick my head here and i want to create a blink so to create a blink i'm going to also remove all the keys that were that were added there and to create a blink we are going to select everything here and press 0 and and press i sorry on it to add keyframes for that as you can see and we are going to go a few frames later push everything down okay so this was not registered for whatever reason so let's go back there and open the ipad this is quite strange give error relating numbers so zero zero zero zero and here one one one and one okay so let me let me add my keys back so here i want zero quite strange behavior i'm going to add a keyframe and here i want one and i'm going to insert a key i don't know why it's not working um let's add everything back maybe it's a bug okay it was a bug due to that and this is quite annoying actually uh maybe it's because the the bone is it's not activated anyway um so what we can do is to finish this blink we can um select this and make it last one frame and reopen and select those frame and push them back so you can see it creates a blink like this so the timing of the blink will define how the character is reacting so if you have a more long blink as you can see the character looks more chill but in our case we want it to be very excited so we are going to do a very fast blink like this um and also one thing that is quite nice to do with cartoon characters is to offset the the blink so i'm going to select the r both are channel so this those keyframes plus those keyframes by pressing b and i'm going to offset them by one frame and you can see that creates it will create a do do how can i say that uh letting a latency i can even push the latency a bit more and you can see that in this case it can work too maybe i can select everything put my cursor there and scale i'd link to elongated um i think like this maybe it's too much you know what i'm going to scale it back once one more maybe like this look it looks fine and okay i'm going to save and now i think to finish that of course we can spend a lot more time animating this this character but to finish this uh tutorial i want to add a studio lighting and to add different setups and to render a small animation okay so to do that i'm going to go back in object mode i'm going to add a plane a floor plane and um this plane i'm going also to extrude the back like this multiple times to create a studio light a studio plate i'm going to add some cuts there not going into details because you know how to do that if you manage to model the character and i'm going to press shift click shade smooths and i'm going to add a subdivision surface modifier and if i'm looking at the camera right now i want to rotate this a bit to the side but here i'm going to go back in the timeline and disable auto key i don't need the turkey anymore so i'm going to rotate my studio maybe scaling it a bit and i'm going to put that in by pressing m in the scene collection and i'm going to make the scene reappear now when pressing uh once looking at ev you can see that it's going back so i need to of course remove my my key because i added a key a scaling key i didn't want that it wasn't a mistake i was in auto key so i'm just going to to to put to set up my my my scene now what i want to do is to um maybe go close closer to my character a bit on the left let's tilt the camera a bit or no let's console the field it's not what well it was not great uh but now what i want to do is i also want to have a better lighting for for this this this little scene so let me add a material for the ground i'm going to go in the shading tab right now i'm going to go in eevee mode i'm going to remove everything that obscures the way and i'm going to select my character and i'm going also to okay i don't know why i have a wrap here but i'm going to re-enable back the subdivision surface selecting my character i want to change to saturate those colors a bit more it's too too sad so let me saturate this and push that towards the the orange a bit more let's make this a bit brighter looks better i think and we are going then to select the ground floor let's call that floor let's look at the material by pressing a to select all my nodes and dots to to focus on them and i'm going to find a color for the floor so we can try changing the roughness to zero for instance increase the metallic aspect to create a like a reflective floor this could be interesting um i'm not really a fan of the lighting that i've done so let me bring back the gizmos here i don't like this harsh shadow so let me go into the view here and let me push this slide outside but let's increase the what values by maybe maybe even more like something like this i really don't want to have very harsh lights here i'm going to rotate this light to the side and push the value even more not that much maybe 2 2 000 watts is better and you know what i'm going to lower down the in this case the value for this light i think like this it's better and i'm also going to push the the back of the studio lighting a bit further so i'm going to press s x s y and y again to scale it in local mode and i'm going to skip it on the z axis again to to have the back a bit more scaled and s x and x again to skate it on the local will give me a larger studio okay so one other thing i want to do so later on i will come back on the animation to be sure that nothing is clipping through the floor um if you press f12 you you can see the the result that you have it's looking quite okay but i'm not very happy with the the reflection so let me remove a bit of the reflection on the floor i don't like this artifact there and i'm not for now quite sure why they are there so maybe it's because of the roughness so let's find a better way and anyway we don't have the viewports uh backgrounds so i'm going to go to a website called hdr i heaven and i'm going to download a free hdr and import it into my scene so i've picked one called veranda 1k and i'm going to add it i've tried different one but i think verdana 1k was fine i'm going to add a texture of type environment texture notice that i'm in the world node and i'm going to plug it as you can see it looks like this and of course now the reflection on the ground is too much but what we are going to do is we are going to work on that material but it's giving me a lot of um environment lighting i don't want that so i'm going to lower down the intensity to maybe something like 208 and i want to also change the color of this light to a more purpley purple and light not that much but like this i think it's going to be much more interesting and let me select the background and let's go back to this color so maybe uh maybe orange will be better maybe uh in fact i don't want maybe metallic let's remove the specular let's put the roughness to 100. i think it will look better like this maybe i can also put a top light so light on top of everything that will also light the the back the background of the studio so i can add this light and scale and scale it like this and i can increase the intensity to 10 000. this is going to be flattening everything else but you can see that now i can push maybe to the to the purple the colors a bit and this is going to work i think much better let me come back to my character and maybe i want to push the colors even more towards i want to saturate the color even the colors even more let's try that so now it's it's maybe too much but this is going to be a lot of time for testing things maybe i want to have darker lines there maybe something like this looks okay we're going to polish the animation a bit because i'm not a fairy fan of a lot of things that i've noticed i'm going to in the shadows i'm going to add contact shadows this is going to improve the lighting maybe on this one too contact shadows i can go in the ev settings and i can also go into the shadows and check high bit depth increase the cube size quality to 1 24 and the cascade for the shadows to 20 48 i can also add ambient occlusion and i can also check the motion blur the motion blur will be nice because it will add a blur effect as you can see on the animation so if i'm pressing ctrl so let let me just change the size here we are going to render a 50 render if i'm pressing ctrl f12 it's going to render the animation you can see that we have motion blur uh being added uh to our render and it looks quite uh interesting and if i press ctrl f f11 i will have the result the resulting animation that that plays in the player of blender of blender so in order to tweak a bit this animation i'm going to try so i'm going to go back in the layout panel and i'm going to push back by going into the curves the z location here the curve z location i'm going to push it forward a bit because it and and maybe i can scale back on the z-axis the motion back and forth okay so no maybe it was too much so let's reduce that but for sure i prefer something like that it's a nicer curve now i'm also going to try to push the animation so for the stretch i'm going to try to push the stretch even more just because we can and was this key oh sorry uh i didn't had um auto key enabled so what's this key i'm pushing it and on the other pose this one i'm pasting it mirror you can see it creates a much more under interesting pose and i have an issue with my eyes that we're going to fix later on in fact not later on you know what let's console that let's go back with the blink that works fine let's go there and let's um hide everything else for my controls and here i'm just moving up ctrl c and ctrl v uh you know what i'm going to do it by hand i'm eyeballing it it's going to be okay okay and the the squash parts the down part i'm going to squash it even more here frame four the equivalent i think it's this one i think it looks a bit more interesting and the second squash let's push it down a bit more too maybe not that much and i would like to add more a rotation on the head just to test so one there and here there i guess it gives a more interesting shape and you you see that at the end i'm finishing my or my rotation down a bit i'm not letting only one key push everything [Music] so let me look at that full full frame rate in order to do that uh i just remove ev because it's taking too much time okay so now one thing that i want to do on top of that as i want to be sure that all my foot positions are laid on the ground so i'm going to hide this and i'm going to go frame by frame and touch the ground for the poses that should touch the ground or shouldn't here maybe this is squashed a bit more i'm going to touch the ground here touch the ground here touch the ground and here touch the ground okay i prefer seeing that having shadows that reacts actually correctly to my character and you know what i'm not a big fan of the lighting so i'm going to be more bold with my lighting so let's save this file let's cancel the auto auto key and let's try to be more interested interesting with the lighting so i'm going to try to add another light maybe on top maybe a sunlight with like five maybe this is going to help us no backward maybe no this is not going to work because we have the the studio behind so let me try to take this light and make it more angular on the character create a more important angle maybe let's post it so we can see how it works okay i want basically a light that creates a rim or maybe you know what i'm going to create a simple fill light with this one so let's push it to to 5 000 just to fill the light here let's increase until it works let's make it a bit to the top so the highlights in the in the ear looks fine and now let's add a third light we're going to create a simply three point lighting lighting sorry to push the back here the silhouette of the back and here we're going to put a high number to start with and this is going to be more truecross turquoise i don't know how to say that in english but this one is not going to cast any shadows or maybe yes it does because it's going to cancel the rest so i'm going to push that [Music] that light really in the back change for square shape uh maybe i need to change the size if you change the size you're basically sharpening the the light the light rays also as i as you can see here as a as i'm changing it you can see it's it's softened the the light now if i'm going to for one meter light i'm trying to push it to describe a perfect silhouette for the back like this now i can reduce it something like this maybe i will use the sun in fact but let's try no i cannot use a scent sorry because the the background is going to obscure the light so maybe maybe i will have to render the background separate in a separate way if we look at this it's it's much more nice it's much more nicer sorry so what i can do maybe is just take the take the studio and just for the sake of it i push by pressing g and y push that very far away [Music] it's taking too much light on the ground unfortunately but i think i have the right amount for the character so if i'm pressing f12 here's the res the result i really don't like to have that much light on the ground so maybe i can um no it's not going to do it so the roughness is one specular is it's going to be too much of course so i won't add any specular maybe by changing it to a simple diffuse and changing the color no it's going to be the same so maybe i'm going to to try to use different lights so here i'm going to to change it for spotlight but anyway i'm very sad with the transition so let me remove for now the the rim light and let me create another light that i can put closer to the character and change it to turquoise maybe like this it's going to work well enough for what we have to do maybe here i'm going to um so i'm going to remove the shadows for this one because it's not doing a lot of things as you can see and here i'm going to enable contact shadows by default it was the case and i'm going to lower down the the size of the disk to have a much better rim light for the back of my character you can see i can see the shape the shapes a bit better and i'm going to bring back this studio lighting to create a more dramatic scene so let me check how it works i feel it's too [Music] too contrasty here one thing that you can do is to be sure that in the post processing in this in the rendering no in the past process where is it make sure to be rendering in filmic so it's already the case you can also change maybe the exposure the exposure a bit if you want to here but in this case i'm going to stay with one not changing a lot of things or reset the value i don't know what what the value was by default it was zero sorry and we can also try with different uh run with different look i don't want something very contrasty so maybe i'm going to to increase the shape of this light i'm going to lower it down and make it more important more present in the the rendering so push it a bit toward the right a brighter color maybe the floor in orange is not the best maybe you can stay with a more grayish floor i don't like that a lot uh i'm going to shorten the shadow by making the the rim light a bit higher i'm going to turn it a bit also and this light is maybe too much angled so i'm going to inside reinforce and and advise emphasize it sorry and then maybe i'm going to push a bit more the the strengths of this one so let's let's render let's do a test render by pressing ctrl f12 with this setup just to see the result and anyway at the end we will add so i can press ctrl f f12 to see the result so you can see it looks quite okay maybe the the animation is a bit fast for the character uh maybe we can change this so let me check you still have the here we still have the we are in x-ray mode so i want to remove the extra the x-ray mode maybe we can select the animation as a whole and we can scale it to by pressing s to 30 frames let me check 30 frame and put the end to 30. so it's no it's bad because it has destroyed all the timing that we had so either we double it either we we stay like this so i think we we're going to stay like this i'm not very happy with the with the floor maybe i can go into into shading and i can create i can create a specific specific texture for it so i'm going to add a texture of type let's do a wave texture let's look at the results something like this maybe will help us i can add some not that distortion but maybe i can maybe i can try adding some distortion and change changing the scaling and then adding a color ramp and make this constant so with a constant shape you can see that you can have very distinct colors [Music] i'm going to rotate a bit the background let's render everything with ev in this viewport and of course i'm not going to to let this part like this i'm going to remove the detail maybe i can add a bit more detail here and i'm going to try with different colors so let's go back with the orange one i'm going to select copy and paste the color and now i'm going to add slight tunnel difference something like this let's render everything by pressing ctrl f12 so you can see that the the hair the fuzziness of the er hairs are is looking fine we still have a foot that is going to through the ground we are going to correct that later but now i think with this background it's looking a bit a bit better uh let me add try to add more hairs so in the modifiers here we are going to show the hairs and we are going to go in the display settings for the particles here and we are going to add more let's try with 50 and let's render this ctrl f12 this is the cool thing with blender is that now the rendering time with ev is really fast especially if you have a good graphic card ctrl f1 to 2c yes with a bit of with a bit more hair you can see that it looks a bit better we are going to try to add hair dynamic i know it's it cost a lot but maybe we will manage to to make it work so you just tick um air dynamics and you will see it will try to add some dynamic to the error so we are going to to enable enable that and to render a scene with it let's press con control f1 i don't see it working really well it's creating the artifacts i think it was the the the things that we the the the last thing that we that we added that was too much uh maybe one thing that i can try to do is to select the target for the eyes and i'm going to okay and i'm going to i don't know why i'm not seeing anything for the keys but oh maybe i don't have any keys for this but i'm going to change the orientation of the eyes to the side i think it's going to look quite good uh you can see that the eyes are poking through it's maybe because my shapes are not that well defined in the my shape keys maybe you have to to correct that a bit but let's see how it looks like this one thing that i want to do is maybe going back with the roots i want to rotate my character a bit toward the camera and maybe again the target i can now rotate it a bit we're making him look up yeah making him look up looks quite fun i think and cute so we are going to do that i'm going to save press ctrl f12 to render another version of this animation and i'm going to press ctrl f11 to see the result one other thing that we can add as an effect as some bloom so you can go here and you can check the bloom and for the bloom you have to find the good amount so the the knee is going to basically the intensity is the intensity of course but then you have to find good values for the threshold etc so in our case we're going to lower the radius a bit we're going to change the color of the bloom for something very um turquoise uh maybe it's too intense and the knee it's not working that great here maybe pushing it pushing the threshold a bit lower like this something that you always have to play with so now one thing that i want to do too is to try to add depth of field so to do that we are going to look at the camera settings and one thing that you can do is also change the the focal of the camera so for instance making a less a more short focal will will create a more dramatic angle to the character so maybe we can go with 50 25 millimeter focal uh remember that you're in auto key so you want to delete your the keys that you've created and i'm going to rotate this camera like this and re-center my character a bit to the right so maybe going back with a 35 i don't want anything to go above my camera and i'm going to to shut my my character from the from below turning the camera back again like this lower to the ground like this and i'm going to activate depth of field and for the depth of field i'm going to lower the distance and try to get the right focus for my character i'm going to play with the f-stop something like this i'm going to render the animation maybe the hairs could be a bit more uh dark so that's what we're going to try to do now so ctrl f1 to see the result look it looks much better i think with the with a bit of depth of field so let's add uh let's change the the material for the [Music] for the for our character here it was um the hair this trans color so here we can apparently i've lost a texture i don't know why okay so let's go back to this trends i've just undo so when i'm selecting apparently this material oh it's not apparently it's when i'm selecting the material here uh i'm changing the material sorry i'm a bit tired i think um so let's go down with a darker color and for the for the root and for the tip let's do the same thing like this i guess the material is not being rendered correctly so i'm going to go back in the render and i don't understand why it's not being shown correctly oh of course i need to to put it in a diffuse shader instead okay now i have what i want and maybe now it's too too too dark so let me push that back like this let's try just one frame by pressing f12 so we have a lot of motion blur and depth of field so we're not seeing a lot of things so maybe we can lower down again everything so let's render everything to see how it looks maybe we can increase a bit the size of the hairs the root and the tip so we are seeing more of them so okay let's do that by going into the hair shapes the diameter roots we are going to increase it a bit not too much the tip and we can increase the tip too something like this and let's remove a bit of the color for the tip of the for the tip of the of the object okay so one thing that i'm probably not doing that right here is if i'm looking at the the a picture in black and white so i don't know i don't i think i can do that here um for instance with the red you can see that the character is not detached from the background a lot at least for the reds for the green it's a bit better for the blue too what i can do anyway is i can still try to change the color of the floor a bit let's push them down to to create a more a more interesting setup and you know what i don't like the fact that we have twice the same color the monochromatic colors so maybe let's try something more fancy and more more fun [Music] fancy something like this it's it's really really bizarre but maybe it's looking a bit better i think so i'm rendering with ctrl f12 and then going to press ctrl f11 to see the result so let me check frame by frame oh i still have the foot going through the ground and here too so let me go back to my animation pressing ctrl s let me check that effectively here it's the case and i think it's because also the ground is very close to us so i'm going to add another loop cut [Music] here i'm going to push the ground flat and to make sure that all this part here is flat on the z-axis so i'm gonna i can press s z and zero to be sure that it's the case so you can see that it should be resolved a bit more right now and anyway we are going to still go through each keyframe i can remove this and you can see that from this one to this one it's not going through the ground so i can push it manually on the z-axis oh i've not pressed alt key sorry let's do that with auto key probably with the same issue with the other other foods here here it's okay maybe here it's not on the ground let's make it touch the ground i think it looks much nicer like this it's very subtle but anyway if it's working let's re-render everything and i'm going to add one more thing in the shading of the the of the character right now the the the character is looking very uniform uh in terms of uh color so i want to just simply add in the uv in the shading tab sorry i want to add to to create a small color variation on top of that so i'm going to use a texture called muskrave or maybe not muskrave must grave or [Music] yes maybe musgrave is going to be fine and i want let me check if there is one other maybe noise noise now this is going to be better because i will have i will have color output so let's clear that and let's go in the real material which is the body uh okay i don't i cannot paste it so let's go back to the noise noise here and um [Music] before multiplying the ao here i want to add a mix rgb node but on top of the color and i want to mix with the color of the noise texture you can see that it adds a bit of textures on top and here i can push it to the maximum to see the result and i want the i want to change the hue of my character and now when i'm going back with the rest you can see it adds a touch of realism or just a touch of color changing maybe i can do it in overlay see the result a bit better i can add more variation and you can also change the scale of the noise and how much details you have and the roughness so i'm going to so you can see we can see a bit of bending bending sorry so i'm going to maybe lower down again the effect but anyway it's looking quite interesting like this so let's lower down a bit the factor and going back in into my camera if i can let's uncheck auto key to be sure that we're not doing anything bad the depth of field is maybe too much so i will lower i will lower the f-stop but i will push back the depths to something like seven like this let me render only one frame it's going to look much better i think so one thing that i will try to add on top of that by going to the curves is i'm going to add one key for my camera location and i'm going to try on the z on the x location here which is this this key by pressing n i can go into modifiers and i can add a noise modifier this is going to add some noise to my camera i'm going to press ctrl and middle mouse button to scale the viewport to see the amplitude and i'm going to lower down the strength of this and i'm going to change the scale also you can see it creates a nice um nice bending a nice how can i say a nice offset the issue i have now is that it's not being cycled so i think i can add no i cannot add i cannot blend this so [Music] now apparently apparently we cannot um [Music] we cannot mix that so let's do it by hand so here i'm going to frame four maybe move a bit by auto keying so i need to go back to my timeline i'm going to go back here just move a bit the idea is to add more life to the camera and the last frame is going to be the first frame so you can see that here it's maybe too much so i'm going to go back here too and now you can go back in the curves and for all the curves um we can for this one flatten flatten it maybe we can remove the euler and scale by pressing x selecting the the channel and pressing x and i'm going to flatten my curves here flatten the curves here too just to remove a bit the effect pressing dot to focus on okay let's select everything back let's select this key press dot to focus on it s and y and y to to scale down the the motion you can see it adds a very subtle kink in the camera we can render everything again and try to see how it works pressing ctrl f1 to see the results i have too much motion on on this axis [Music] oh no sorry i have too much motion in the up and down axis so the z so i'm going back to the z select everything press dot you can see here okay like this i think it looks much nicer i can save i'm not sure with the the colors in the in the back i can re-render everything but you know what this time i'm going to render full resolution to see if everything looks right in terms of motion blur and then we are going to add a touch of of compositing and we are going to call this tutorial done so you can see the results right now in the player of blender the camera is really really subtle as you can see but it adds a bit of of life to to the thing um i'm not really liking the the bloom so i'm going to remove it i think it's it is not very subtle okay and um so now i think that okay let me just try one one last thing with those eyes so now they they are good where where they are i think okay so now i'm going to go in the compositing section i'm going to click use node to see the result i'm going to press ctrl shift click to click to create a viewer node and i'm going on top of that pressing v and alt v you're going to zoom and unzoom the the background and now you can add for instance uh color balance a color balance node we're going to just to touch change the values we're going to push the reds push the violet into the [Music] into the shadows and push the turquoise into the midpoint and of course i can lower down the factor for all of this and i can render this final compositing in in the in the end like this so let's try with this and i think again i've changed my mind i want a background that is not blue this is going to take me a lot of time to choose to decide what are the best colors maybe green i don't like that much green but no let's bring orange back usually i put my backgrounds for my small shots i put them all in orange so before going further i want to do something else uh again it's not that i've changed my mind but it's that i think it's going to be much better so yes in fact it's that i've changed my mind but i'm going to select my camera uh back i'm going to remove the keys that i've added for the noise because i for me it's not looking that that that great but i'm going to make my character walk around the scene so in order to do this what i want to do is i want to go in what we call the nla editor so i'm going to add another tab here and i'm going to select the non-linear animation editor and as you can see we have the rig action and the rig action is the name of the action in which we were animating in blender an action is like a clip if you want and the default name is the name of the object and action at the end so we can go here in the dop sheet and we can go to action editor and rename this walk cycle and you will see that it changes for walk cycle here so this is the clip that is not on the nla we want to add it on the nla the nla is like a edit edition timeline if you want for animation and we're going to click on this icon to push this clip on the timeline so what we want to do is maybe increase the number of time that we have let's say 150 why not and for this work cycle we are going to go in the um we are going to change its settings so you can see that the frame start is one and the end is 30 but we want it to be 25 and i also want to repeat this animation clip so here oh okay sorry i'm i was wrong the the start is one here the frame start of the clip and the end is 25 and what i want to do is to repeat this clip as much as possible so i'm going to extend even more and you can see that it's doing the same thing for us it's basically repeating the the action okay so here i'm not rendering in real time uh let me remove this window um or no let me come back here but in fact what i will do is i will go in the scene options so i think it's there not the scene the render option sorry and you have a simplified checkbox here that will give you access to the maximum number of subdivision that you have that you want so i'm going back to zero that's going to accelerate the frame rate and here you can see that i have my final frame rate so if i want to change for instance the the time this um this is playing here i have the playback speed uh playback scale i can increase the the time and you can see that my character is working much slower this is not usually you something that you want to play with a lot because usually you should animate right from the start but in my case i'm going to lower to lower a bit the scale by increasing here the playback scale to something like 1.048 it's going to be okay and one thing that i want to do now is i want to bring back the [Music] root um the root of my rig and i'm going to animate this character going from there in front of the camera and going out okay so i'm going to go in the action editor creating a new action calling it root motion and i'm going to place my character outside of the view and this is why it's important to have a root a root bone something like this i'm going to place it right there and i'm going to insert a location key i'm going to go to the frame 1 and 50 and i'm going to put my character outside the view and inside a key i think that this is going to be alright maybe the character should be rotated a bit more so i'm going to remove this key and i can be very precise in the alignment of my root motion so i can press g and y and y again to go into local mode and i can put another key here the problem is that you will see that my character will ease in is out in terms of its displacement i don't want this so i'm going to select both my key and set them as linear by pressing t so just i'm putting back the shortcuts sorry so you can see that now what we have to do so it's working because the root motion is applying on top of the other cycle and because in the cycle we didn't touch the root motion it's basically adding everything together okay so here i need just to see if my i i don't want the the the food to be sliding so let me go in the view of this character you can see it's sliding too much so what you can do for this is maybe you can bring back the keys you need to find the best keys for this motion sometimes it's maybe a bit more something like this maybe let me un let me disable the every option there my character is still sliding a bit so i'm going to push the key a bit further away still sliding it's getting much better maybe i'm sliding more by the way i'm pressing ctrl space to maximize the window i think i'm close to how it works okay let's try like this uh one thing that i want is to be sure that the character is out of the frame so i will put my last frame like this and i will render a 50 or 20 version of this i'm going to save control f12 to render everything and this is going to take a bit of time so i'm going to pause the render recording so it took approximately 30 seconds and 20 percent scale so you can see the character walking around and we have like we can play it infinitely like if the character was doing a round trip the only issue i have is you can see the the shadow at the beginning popping there um so maybe uh maybe in your case you want to to push the the character a bit uh a bit back and uh a bit back in the in the in the scene uh it's still sliding i can try to fix that but i will spend a lot of time in this tutorial i think you get the idea so i don't want to bother you bother you with with too much uh time in this tutorial i know it's already pretty long the last thing that i may want to do is coming back to the to my camera i'm going to go back in the timeline here removing ultra key and maybe i'm going to shut this character a bit more to the side like this we can also change the aspect ratio to have a less high viewport move it move the camera a bit to to the to the to the top you can see it looks better and one thing that i want to do is just at this point i want when the character flies there pass by there i want to add a location keyframe move back a bit sorry a rotation keyframe move back a bit tilt the camera a bit and bring it back so rotation something like this but much more fast and much more subtle and then maybe using auto key i can add some random keyframes at the end it's just to to add some motion maybe in fact you know what instead of that i'm going from there to maybe add some in fact let's let's try to do that with the noise again i'm going to try to to do um by location adding a location keyframe here and i'm going to try to create a noise effect by going so let me just collapse the by right clicking in the middle collapse the nla and i'm going here to select the z-axis of the camera adding back in the modifier modifiers and noise so it's going to tremble a lot from up and down i'm going to change the strength and the scale and use the restrict the range [Music] here you can see that i can start the noise at some location and end it a bit later and this is going to create if you if you choose the right in and out this is going to create a smooth blend for your uh for your camera so as you can see maybe it's not if i'm selecting the axis it's quite strange that it goes not in the right direction i'm quite surprised to be honest with you this is the x this is the z it should be on the z location if i'm moving it up or down it should go up or down and not sideways maybe i've made something wrong let me remove the x and the y location okay we have now the right motion it's just a small ad head bob if you want maybe i'm going to start it from a bit before and make it after there we're not filling it that much in the end result i can push it a bit more to the right and maybe i will increase the strength just to see the motion a bit more okay let's decrease the strengths of everything let's push the let's push this frame a bit down so we can see the fix the foods sorry the idea is just to make a like a wave effect when the character is passing by so maybe it's i can increase the depth a bit to make more more noise maybe it's too much too let's increase again the strength again maybe it's too much and maybe change the scale again so it's less present maybe something like this we want to feel the in motion coming you see we want to feel that it's going from far away and and that at the end it tapers down a bit okay just something like this is a nice touch to add at the end creating a more a light a live camera so i'm going to render this again in 20 uh in quality 20 to see how it looks and then i'm going to render that to a better quality and we will end this tutorial so here is the final result with a much more good looking quality you can see that the trembling camera adds just a touch of life to the scene we can also try but be careful because this is quite heavy on the machine we can try to do a cycle render so we are going to choose a frame that is good looking such as this one and we are going to switch to cycle cycles and we are going to just for the sake of doing it we are going to go into denoising and we are going to add in the render the open image denizer and we are going in the performances we're going to choose the gpu if you have one it's much better and we are going to in the performances for the gpu we are going to try with a more uh important tiling and we are going to open to just first before test that in the viewport you can see that instantly the render will be much better but of course it will take a lot of time to render in this case you have much nicer reflections you can see but again with the denoiser it's taking much more much less time but you can see that we have a much better definition of of lighting etc but in our case because the character is not the best ever possible and everything is not too i would say a production level it's more more like a test if you want rendering it with ev is already pretty nice one thing that you can add if you want so i'm just going to to to show it really quickly you can add volumes um to your scenes so in this case you just have to create for instance a cube that will go inside everything like this and this is going [Music] to be in the shading tab you can go in in ev we can add a new prince a new shader for this let's call it volume and we are going to add a principled volume psdf and not bsdf but principal volume and we're going to add it right there and now you can lower down the density to 0.01 for instance and in the color you can change it for something like a reddish tint like this and you can also grab um you can change the anisotropy in order to have less sparkles in the reflections and we are going to take for instance a 3d texture such as a noise so you can grab the noise texture and you can put the [Music] color around you can put the factor here and i'll put the color there and if you watch carefully and here you make very steep adjustments you can see that it creates us like a very subtle smoke effect you can increase the amount of scale and uh yeah it's quite fun actually so why not why not trying to to use this in our in our render the only issue with that it's is it's not going to be animated so you should add a vector a mapping node here in the vector field you need to bring back a texture coordinate and plug the generated option here and now with for instance the z uh not the scale but the z location you can make it move or you can make it move it you can make it move like this for instance or even better you can choose to to put an empty in the scene so let's add an empty a sphere for instance and you can pick the volume and you can the volume sorry and you can say here you want it to be scaled to the empty so the empty is called mta by default i think and now you can you can animate the empty but it's not working and you want the object this should work much better okay the scale is too big too important now so let's let's make it much subtle and you can see that now when i move the mt it's moving the the scene so in into the scene so i can create a smoke effect that is going to be animated with it so let's for instance i put a location there in the timeline so let's go back in the timeline first let's go there press i let's go to the end put it there and let's make it linear sorry and now when you look back you can see the smoke effect going through your character um but it's not going to to tile perfectly in our case so one thing to to make it tile if you want you can also rotate the thing so instead of doing a location you can create a 180 degree rotation on itself so you can go to rotation here on frame on the last frame 164 you go in the in the rotation here you put 360 and you insert a key and it was the y actually it was the y location i wanted the z location does the rotation sorry so 360 and you add by pressing insert key you have you add the key and if we look at the empty in this viewport you can see it's going to do a 360 degree rotation maybe in our case it's too fast oh i've removed my keys sorry i only want to unlock the auto key and put it in the center of the and then you you make your keyframe linear so you can see that it's creating a sort of okay motion but it's it it's going to cycle so the the cycling is going to work but uh if you want uh to make it with less speed and still cycle you'll have to find all the ways um but in this case it's going fine uh maybe the smoke is too too much uh too much intense in terms of color so the more you go to the dark the less the smoke is going to be visible so we can adjust just a touch like this adding more details changing a bit more the scale it's just to make a very subtle effect in the end so i don't understand why it's not working fine in terms of displacement but because maybe i've done something wrong i don't know object transformer i've only changed the oh i've only changed z so this frame should be equal to this frame in terms of noise apparently it's the apparently it's right but i don't know why but you know what i'm going to re-render the scene just to see in a very low resolution like 20 percent just to see if we if it's interesting to add the smoke effect of course if if it was a [Music] a more uh final feature film animation you won't do a fog effects like this you will simulate them using the smok uh simulator engine mental flow in this case in the case of blender but [Music] just as a small tricks or you would even render it on plates and and composite the fog on top of it but just in this case because it looks funny maybe we can add a bit of smoke let's just check the animation in the end you can see it took approximately 24 seconds it's going to it's it's too abrupt in term of uh in terms of animation so yes i'm going to go back to i'm going to remove the mt first i'm going to select my volume remove the animation that i had in my volume so that i had something on my volume okay so i'm removing the keys and here i'm going to remove the noise and just let and remove these two and just let the fog be what it is something like this and in the settings here for the fog the volumetric you can choose where it starts so you can push the fog a bit further or closer like you see like like you want we can push it a bit closer creating a more nice nicer atmosphere you can also change the color maybe like this it's going it's looking nice adding a bit of blue in the in the in the scene maybe i can lower down the scene the the effect let's try to push it towards the purples and let's look lower it down a bit and you can see in the volumetrics you can also choose to have a better volumetric by changing the tile size so 2 is going to be better lower size increase if you ram and usage in quality so let's stay with four and you can also increase the samples but in our case it's going to be okay we can also also add volumetric shadows this is going to add a more realistic lighting and you know what let's go back with i'm looking for a nice color it could that could help us define the the smoke a bit more and uh the density is maybe too much let's decrease it to 0.6 okay so i'm going to render this at 80 and we're going to watch the result together okay so and here is the final result of uh this course uh it was a bit long but this is the time it takes to create something like this actually of course there are tons of things that could be improved i wanted just to create a complete tutorial from a to z in one in one shot so this is why um we spend less time on polishing the rig the animation and the modeling etc but with this tutorial you should have all the knowledge now to be able to push this exercise a bit further um you know how to model a simple shape you know how to texture inside blender for instance in this case it should have been better to texture in another software such as krita or photoshop we've created a read for instance with a lot of with a lot of controls with not a lot of controls for instance for the ears it was quite a bit uh it was a bit of a pain to animate so you could for instance use fk controls for the ears that would have been a bit better you could add you could add eye keys for instance in the legs to to make them easier to animate and split the body into multiple parts using multiple stretch constraints but again i wanted to go through the rig as fast as possible for someone beginner to intimidate in for sorry for a beginner to intermediate user um and for the lighting it was also done pretty quick a lot of the thing that we have are following again a very iterative process it's the more you put time into it the more and you play with what you are creating the more um effective your final results will be but for tutorial i think it's uh good enough i hope you enjoyed this tutorial um congratulations to have finished this tutorial because uh it takes a lot of time and effort and um you really need to put hard work when doing this kind of stuff so if you watch this video in its entirety so good job well done um and uh i hope you are going to do really cool projects don't hesitate to subscribe it's if it's not already the case if you don't want to miss other videos that i'm going to do and i wish you the best of luck for your projects see you

Channel: sociamix

Views: 115,121

Keywords: Blender, tutorial, cartoon, character, animation, rigging, 3D, modeling, texturing, shot, learning, course, eevee, FlourSack, flour sack, armature, walk cycle

Id: QjKp7NvgD1Y

Length: 331min 4sec (19864 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 04 2021