3D Stylized Character Workflow using Blender, ZBrush & Substance Painter

if you want to learn how to make ghibli style textures in substance painter the latest course from the 3d coloring book was made for you i'll leave a link in the description if you want to consider getting the course now let's get into this week's video hi my name is walinkan and i'm a 3d and concept artist working in game industry in this video i'm going to share the breakdown process of how i make the forest grow 3d modeling based on a concept i'm going to talk about the reference board the high poly the texture and the rendering i hope you will learn something from it so let's get it started before i start to sculpt i would prepare a reference board which will help me to build everything up normally it has a few admin reference some color reference some style reference and some guide images for specific details like crack or barks i like to keep this reference board clean and organized i know all of us must have a bunch of amazing images like me and want to put them all on the reference board but trust me too much reference images will be the noise when you need to focus more on your own works so i would suggest having around 10 to 15 images that will be good enough you can see i also have some realistic hair reference that's because i want to do some recreation based on the concept bars for the character phase and higher i would not my 100 trans concept art to the 3d so i prepared them you may not need them if you want to just match the concepts down after set the reference board up i'm ready to start to do sculpting the high quality is really important for a starlight character it decides at least 50 that how your final model looks in the rendering scene so i always spend a lot of time on sculpting there are four things that have been mainly focused on them sculpting the shape the details the smoothness and the proportion let me show you guys a video demo about the sculpting and explain why they are important the shape is the third or outline of the model it will affect the first impression of a character it will also help to create the dynamic or the sculpting but in this case i already have a beautiful concept so i don't need to consider too much about it and for the details i think there are two different types first is the shape details which will be created over sculpting second is the texture details which is added through texture maps like some noise and dirt a celex texture normally will not have super dirt or complicated texture map so i will finish most of details during high poly which are shape details and i should also avoid to sculpt too many small details on the high poly since there are also the noise so let's do more big details on the hair mask [Music] smoothness is also important since a stylist character will have a lot of big shapes without that much details on top if you didn't make everything smooth enough the high poly would look bumpy and unfinished what i would do is to not breathing the subdivision level until all shapes are good and smooth i like to use flatten and polish brush to adjust those bumpy areas and switch subdivision between low and high to do adjustments a proportion will decided the selfless level or the cartoony level of your character you have to keep in mind what type of stylist character you want to make the overwatch character and clash of clan characters are all stylized but they look totally different on visual and that all decided by the proportions and also proportion is a fundamental of the character so i will always make sure that my character have a solid and cracked proportion on every single step the other thing i would like to talk about is a hair for my case i will make fabric hair in blender so i did not spend time on making hair mesh strips but if you would like to use a higher mesh in vinyl render you have to make the hair much better look than mine when i feel the high poly is getting close to finish i will do poly painting sometimes it will help me to do the final check for the sculpting like bending bumpy area and checking the proportion and meanwhile i could somehow prevail how the character looks after texture i recommend you guys to do this also so the high quality looks good let's move to the texture for the installation i need to balance the clean and noise the cartoony character will not have too much texture information but if you just use the bright color that would be a little boring so i have to add some kind of noise but avoid add too much to break the stylus fill in this case i use substance printer to texture my calculator i didn't import the hair mask since like i said before i want to do fabric hairs in blender but if i want to make a game ready hairs i will import the hair mask as well you can see i assign different shaders to different masks so i could have some of them then texture some areas underneath but there are a bunch of huge shadow on multiple parts and some of them are garbage and like i don't want to see when the character reads her arm there is a ugly cave ao shadow on her skin even though it looks justified on the a post so the first thing i should do is adjusting the ao map it is hard to have a perfect ao map through baking whatever using marmoset or substance what i'm doing is to remove the ao map from texture seating panel since i can add in the big maps [Music] and then i insert it to the layer panel and i could just block all ao by black mask and manually reveal which parts i want the ao show up and i could adjust the black mask through brush [Music] so now there is no cast shadow on her arms anymore and other parts still have the ao through this way i could even change the ao's color and tone [Music] after this i will add ingredient color to the map if the model just had the flat color that would be a little boring and green color will make the flat color more interesting [Music] [Music] for skin parts i only add two gradient color layers but in some cases i probably add more to make sure the base color map is interesting enough and for some parts like arms that have some angle i will need to adjust the gradient angles as well you can see the color change on my character skin and then i will start to painting the values on the model like doing makeup what i'm doing is to enhance the structure of the character it is a little like painting the texture for the difficult map only models but no need to do very detail since more of forms and details already there i just make them more clear and stand out even though under pbr render the base color map will not affect texture performance that much it is still helped to improve the quality of the whole texture so i always spend some times on it and i think that is worth it [Music] [Music] [Music] so i'm satisfied with the value of the face let's talk about curvature curvature is like the highlight for detector and you could find them on most of the case curvature could help to make the stylus shape stand out more and also create variation but i would not add too much curvatures since if it is everywhere they would not able to enhance the important parts on the character so i will manually adjust the curvature through black mask remove the curvature color on the wrong place and also give them some variety [Music] when i finish these four steps i just need to add some materials and the character texture will look pretty good and ready for rendering so i'm gonna export all maps to the blender in blender i will add the faber hairs breaking and posing the character and then create the lighting room for her i did the hair through the particle system of blender you could also do this through maya and action but i think blender is faster and user friendly what i have to do is just assign different weight groups on surface and then generate the hair particles based on the groups and that will help me to split hairs to different strips and easy to add in the shape i could move those hair particle guidelines to get the hair shape i want through particle mode you could switch between different mode on the left top corner [Music] even though i want to do kind of realistic hair but i still want to keep the cartoony feel so i try to make the hair shape bulky just like the original concept this part this process will take a while since i need to adjust this particle guidelines step by step to create the similar shapes as a concept i will now talk more details about this workflow since there are a lot of free tutorials on youtube as you see the character is a bold that's because i limit the hair showing up in render wheel my my pc is not that good and it would be super laggy if i render too much hair on the viewpoint but when i do final rendering all hairs will show up let's do a rendering test i use cycles to do the rendering it is pretty close to arnold but i feel is faster and more stylish friendly than arnold it will more like a real-time render which is not a good choice for this case since the hair material will not display well in av you can see they are just some flat black color i also react my character in blender i would say it is not that difficult i just follow the tutorials on the youtube and make a pretty basic bragging to help me to pulse in my character you could try to do this in zebras or maya since i'm not that good at breaking i do not think i could give any good tips but i would suggest give a shot to blender dragon system it's pretty fast and easy to use [Music] [Music] just like maya i could painting joint with on the skin and that will help me to make the bending area more natural finally i move to the last step which is doing lighting and rendering i use cycles to do final image rendering you can see i have a bunch of lights including a background map [Music] those green lights are naturalized which created by emission color usually i will have at least three basic lights a main light a rim light and a filling light but case by case for some models i will have way more than three like this one but most of characters scene will just need these three lights to create a good lighting room since i will do some adjustments in photoshop i will also rendering a id map image out and that will help me to use lasso tool you could assign the id shaders to all mesh and bringing them through cycles so here is the final image i hope you like it my video are pretty much it and i'm happy sharing my creating process with you guys thanks for watching if you guys want to see more of my works feel free to check my other session by the link down below i hope you guys have a wonderful and creative day thanks

Channel: Stylized Station

Views: 49,637

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

Id: cDLgAFDf0V4

Length: 17min 1sec (1021 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 03 2021