4 WAYS To Make 3D CHARACTERS In Under 17 MINS ! *ULTIMATE GUIDE* Blender, FaceGen, MetaHuman, CC3

when i first started getting interest in 3d one of the number one things i wanted to learn was creating 3d characters this is great for creating music videos short film or any type of advanced visual effects so let's get right into it what's going on everybody welcome back to another video today we're going to be talking about my favorite ways to create 3d realistic looking characters so we're going to go over the method that i use personally as well as we're going to talk about some other ways that you can do this for free as well as using paid software so within this video you should be able to find out which method works best for you so before we get started here quick word from the sponsor of today's video skillshare today's video is sponsored by skillshare skillshare is an amazing resource for people looking to learn something new whether it's technology business lifestyle tips there are thousands of classes available to you each course is sectioned out so you can learn at your own leisure there are plenty of class projects that you can use to follow along and reinforce your skills for the project lately i've been really enjoying this productivity master class by ali abdahl super useful when it comes to juggling everything in my life if you guys are interested skillshare is incredibly affordable less than 10 a month with an annual subscription if you guys want to check it out the first 1 000 subscribers to click the link in my description will get a 30 off annual premium membership even if you've already had a free trial of skillshare you can still take advantage of this offer to get a full year of unlimited learning and creative exploration all right so let's get right into it we're going to start off with my favorite method the method that i use personally and that is using face gen artist pro so i'll leave a link below if you want to look into it like i said this is my favorite method but it does cost a little bit 139 for the pro version or 69 for the home version all you need to do is go to create and load in the image of the person that you're trying to recreate so let me quickly take you through how to use face gen first you want to find an image where your subject is looking forward or of course you can take the images from scratch you want to get a nice forward looking photo with good lighting as well as some side looking photos but if you only have a forward looking photo i found that face gen still has really great results so i'll save this image in here and then we're gonna go back into facegen and load that in so we'll click load now we're gonna click next so all you have to do at this point is follow the prompt you're gonna see in the top right what it's showing you to do you just wanna select the eyes so easy as that once you've done that you click create from photos and there you go you get pretty great results i'm going to show you a little bit later how we can edit these textures that it generates for us so we can fix any of this you can go to this modify tab here and change anything that you'd like so for example if you think the nose is too long you can go to these sliders and make any adjustments so that's all well and great but the real reason why i love this method above all the others once you're finished you go up to file and it actually implements with das 3d genesis male or female models so if you don't know about daz 3d it's a free 3d software all about creating 3d characters they have a giant marketplace for different props different hair different plugins that you can implement in with this so it's really easy to download it and get started and have this really easy to use workflow where you can then export your character to any 3d software of your choice there's a bunch of different things you can mess around with i'm not going to get too in depth with it but anyways what you do is you name it genesis 8 mail this is the folder that you set up and dabs whenever you download that your assets folder and then you just click export so let's fire up daz and we'll set up our character so once you've fired up das all you need to do is go over to your smart content and you want to load in one of those genesis 8 basic male figures or female figures all you need to do once you've loaded in that you go over to the shaping tab here on the right you click over to where it says head and then you'll see here on the right all these different sliders for different faces that i've created in the past so all you need to do is search for the slider we name this one tarantino once you find the correct slider just take that and you bump it all the way up so you'll notice it doesn't look exactly like the character and that's because we haven't rendered it or added in any of our textures all this is doing is setting up the facial shape for your character if i want to at this point i can go through my different props my different hair and i could load it on here as well i can also use that dazz marketplace to add any clothes there's a lot of really great free options as well as some paint options so we'll give them a little outfit here i'll render out the hair separate so once you've made all your adjustments always make sure that you're selecting the genesis 8 mail in the top right here you go up to file and export i'm going to go ahead and export this as an fbx you can copy my options here and while this is rendering i just want to say if you want me to make any part 2s where i go more into what you can do with das in this workflow all the different plugins that you can implement into this just to make your characters look better and feel more realistic and alive just comment down below if you'd like to see that all right so i'm quickly going to show you how to import this in cinema 4d in blender in c40 go up to merge objects i'm going to find the file that i exported from daz and load that in alright and here we are the next thing you need to do is just load in your custom textures from face gen so for me i like to use this octane plugin so i can see this little live render view so to transfer all these textures i just select all of them materials and convert so once you've done that you start loading in your textures into the right place so if i click on my face and i click on my diffuse image texture i'm going to click these three dots so go to wherever you save your das assets folder you're going to want to go to runtime textures basedgen genesis 8 male or female and then find the name that you're working on here so here is all of my tarantino textures we'll load in the face and there you guys go so you just need to repeat those steps for everything else you'll notice there's a slight little error for the eyes so all you need to do is select the actual polygon just by opening up the joint object and finding the little triangle here switch over to polygon mode just by clicking on the left and then all you need to do is double click the eyes and click delete and that should fix your issue for the eyelashes what we're going to do is actually pull a genesis 8 default eyelash opacity map so to find that all you need to do is go back to your das assets folder and instead of going into face gen we're going to click back to the dash 3d folder and then go into genesis 8 mail and then load that eyelash model into the opacity you can also use that genesis 8 folder all those textures in there to load in specular maps bump maps for your faces make them look more realistic if i wanted to i can export out some obj hair from daz or some obj props usually i do the hair separate because sometimes it could crash the import but anyways i'm going to quickly show you how to do this in blender so the only difference for blender is you're going to need to install this daz to blender bridge so once you install that through the daz install manager back in your dash scene you'll now have the scripts tab so load the daz to blender bridge you can choose your subdivision for your clothing and let that export next hop into blender you want to go to edit preferences and then add-ons go ahead and just search for das in your add-ons and then check that on daz to blender armature then you just need to click the arrow on the right to show the actual control panel for it then click import genesis 8 model and it may take a little bit to load once these are all showing make sure you turn on your viewport shading we'll switch to our genesis male shape here and then down here on the right we're going to click on material properties and here you can see all of the textures just like i showed you in cinema 4d so you do the exact same thing where right here it shows your diffuse color you're going to want to go and load in an image texture and then navigate to that exact same face gen folder so for me i go to das assets runtime textures face gen and genesis 8 male and here we are tarantino so we'll load in the face just repeat those steps for the rest of the body and that is the full workflow all right so let's get right into the pros and cons of using the face gen and dazz workflow so for me ease of use setting it all up is pretty easy it implements with dabs which is great you have access to the marketplace external plug-ins and again das is a free software so there's no price point there in terms of the actual results you can use any image from the internet or take your own and you get solid photo realistic results compared to a lot of the other software's cons there is a price point but it's under 200 which for me is a great investment it may be a bit of a longer workflow compared to some of these other software so let's get into some of your other options all right everybody so next up on our list this is a software that's actually brand new we're going to be talking about the meta human beta the great thing about the meta human beta it's 100 free the only catch is you guys actually need to request access to be able to use this so i'm going to leave a link below where you can request access for me it took about 24 hours before i was able to actually use it to start using the software once you do have access you're going to need to download the qixel bridge software it implements in with those realistic photo scans from qixel bridge it's great for working in unreal engine once you download this qixel bridge software you pop over to metahumans right here and all you need to do is select one of these presets to start and then we're going to go ahead and click start mhc so a cool thing about this it's all through your browser which is pretty interesting so this is going to open up and again if you don't have this loading screen it'll say error or login or whatever that's because you need to request the access this is just going to be more of a general overview and we're going to talk about some key points you'll see you have your own tab for the humans you've created as well as you can click create metahuman to start from scratch now one thing to take into account some of these have this little warning here this character uses assets that are currently in development so if you are trying to transfer this human into your software of choice i recommend you stick with the ones that don't have this little that don't have this air sign or you may have to go through a few extra steps so you see here how interesting this is it's more of like a video game creator where you have this live preview showing you all of the different aspects of the character you're trying to create if you go to your level of details here you guys can see you can go from as realistic as possible all the way down to ps1 looking graphics here we're gonna put that on high ray trace you guys will see the shadows implement in there this is why i wanted to talk about this for being a free beta release right now there's so many different ways where you can customize these characters the only downside is you don't have that realistic facial reconstruction from picture to 3d model like in face gen or character creator which we'll talk about next so you do have to sculpt and do all this from scratch but the flip side of that is they have so many of these great presets that you can go through and they have so many different custom controls if you switch to sculpt here you can see all the different parts of the face which you can manipulate and change they have these nice little symmetry lines so it's really awesome to see how this is implementing with quicksole and there's more available options to us coming in the future for creating these 3d humans they also have this blending feature here where you can mix together where you can mix together different people the way you go about blending is you actually select these target points in the face and if you move them towards any of these different targets you're going to be able to blend it towards some of these different presets that you have here so once you've created your character to actually export this you want to click back to this my meta humans tab right here in the top left and now you're going to see your saved human character here so if you go back into qixel bridge you're going to see you now have this my meta humans tab over here in the bottom right you can change the resolution for your character you can also click this little gear here and go to your download and your export settings so for download settings you guys can choose all of the different textures that you want to download so your normal displacement ambient occlusion roughness if you want to add specular in there you could check that on you can choose how you want to export it fbx obj so for your models under meta humans you're going to see it says ua asset so that's if you're importing into unreal engine so keep that in mind that's your ua asset file you can also download just the source asset next let's go to our export settings here and you can choose your export target so are you sending it to unreal engine you can download the plugin to implement it there or choose your 3d software of choice alright everyone so that's metahuman pros high quality free amazing features it's owned by epic games so you have that qixel and unreal engine integration built in which is awesome i've been saying that unreal engine is the future for virtual production i think that once this gets through indie developers in the hands of the average person you're gonna be hearing about it a lot more in the future cons you have to wait for approval for the beta again it only took me 24 hours but that's my own experience there's no photo realism plug-in so you can't just import a picture of the person in the photo that you're trying to recreate have to do it all from scratch and the last con i'm not sure how compatible this is with other softwares but granted i haven't tested this out i just got my hands on it today so if worse comes to worst you may need to bring it into unreal engine first and then convert it from there into your software of choice alright guys so next up is the face builder add-on for blender now a lot of you always ask me how do i get into 3d what software should i use i use cinema 4d personally but i always recommend blender as well because it's free and it's an amazing 3d software that you can easily get into there's a great community there's great tutorials out there and there's great plugins just like this so navigate to the website i'm going to link this down below it's by keen tools all you need to do is click to download this zip folder once you've done that pop back into blender you're going to want to go up to edit preferences and then where it says add-ons here you want to click install and then you just need to navigate to wherever you save that zip folder so once you've navigated there just go ahead and search for it and make sure you check it on and then if you click this little arrow here it should now be showing all these little tabs face builder so let's go ahead and click create a new head so it's going to add in this head mesh and now what we need to do is bring in an image and start shaping the head to our liking and then projecting the texture so i'm going to create a 3d face of mac miller rest in peace to mac miller let's try and find some good reference photos where he's where he's looking forward just like this so we're going to go ahead and save this and we're going to click add images here under views so we'll load in that image keep in mind you can also add multiple images with different angles you can get all the different angles of the head which is going to make it better for sculpting but for time's sake let's just set up this front image so we're going to click it going to place us in this pin mode and if you see i can click and drag in so i need to do is set my pins and try and match that up with the image so i can get the right size of the face here so now if i click over to my texture tab here just click open that arrow and we can go ahead and click create textures you can also choose your uv shape well to keep that on butterfly and try it out again if you loaded in multiple images for multiple sides of the face or multiple different angles you can just click all and we'll go ahead and click ok so as you can see all these little black parts that's from me only using one image but there is a nice little workaround it says expand edges here percent i'm gonna go ahead and click that up to three percent all right and that's actually looking pretty good so not bad for a free blender add-on you're gonna need some more images if you don't wanna have any of these ugly missing spots but i still think that's a pretty good result so all in all face builder really great so for face gen the pros it's 100 free it integrates with blender which is 100 free so great for beginners and great for the huge community of blender artists who are currently out there and looking to make 3d characters another pro you get that photo realistic projection of your texture also it's easy to use with the pinning and the settings available to help you clean up any messes cons in my opinion the results aren't as good as face gen but considering this is free and face gen is 200 i think that's still a great trade-off and there's no outside integration for creating a full character you're doing this completely from scratch so a lot of you may prefer that a lot of you may like some of the other workflows where you have some of those marketplaces surrounded with it all in all this is a great add-on and a great way to create a realistic 3d face from scratch all right guys and last but not least we have character creator from re-illusion i've made some videos about character creator in the past another great option for creating 3d characters re-illusion is a big company so you're getting a lot of integration with this one similar to some of our other options reelusion also made iclone which is an amazing software for animating your 3d character as well as customizing them adding animation i made this tutorial about adding facial mocap using an iphone using iclone and character creator so if you want to check out those full guides a link will be down below so aside from all the amazing integration you also have some really amazing plugins available to you so to create a 3d character you need to have the headshot plugin for character creator that allows you to literally just drag and drop a photo and the ai generates a 3d face onto your character the shaping tools are pretty solid you can shape that all together and you can use the content library that reolusion has they even have a new motion capture library to make your character come to life in terms of realism super professional they have a skin gen add-on that gives you realistic skin details so all in all a great software for creating 3d characters only downside to get your hands on this package it's around 400 for all the plugins and all the software that i mentioned if you want the full character creator iclone headshot skin gen etc so if you want to check out the link below all these different workflows i've been showing have their own strengths and weaknesses so it's up to you to decide ultimately what you want to use to get the job done so for the pros and cons of character creator your integration is amazing you can integrate with all the other software that re-illusion creates so you have your iclone integration you have all those plugins available to you and you have new features coming out all the time because of this you're not just throwing together things from scratch you can really build your character from the ground up and the detail in these characters is top notch and professional cons of course is the price point the most expensive on this whole list if you're trying to get all the different software that i mentioned character creator iclone and the plugins and then the last con results for the headshot plugin not as realistic in my opinion compared to face gen there are some great shaping options within character creator and the headshot plugin alright guys so that's really about it i hope you enjoyed the video and i hope that this pointed you in the right direction to start you along your path of creating 3d characters and animating them this video is really just the starting point there's so much more that goes into creating 3d characters animating them designing them than just finding a software to build the character so if you want to see anything else leave it down in the comments down below and as always guys thank you so much for watching thank you so much for supporting and i'll see you guys in the [Music] next [Music]

Channel: Max Novak

Views: 133,869

Rating: 4.9652033 out of 5

Keywords: how to, create, 3d, characters, humans, faces, free, blender, c4d, facegen, max novak, blenderguru, pwnisher, metahuman, facebuilder, addon, plugin, preset, pack, reallusion, character creator, cc3, iclone, mocap, nft, adobe, premiere, after effects, how to make an nft, sculpt, zbrush, projection mapping, transition, animations, vfx

Id: 5AgCnY1X05Y

Length: 16min 43sec (1003 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 21 2021