Blender 2.9 - Stylised Character Modeling Tutorial - Blender Tutorial

hey hey welcome back guys this is keelan and in today's video we're going to be doing a little bit of character modeling and trying to reproduce some aspects of my poolside character here so if that sounds like fun as always start a blender and let's jump on into the video [Music] all right we're back in blender guys and i hope you're all keeping well as always today we're gonna kick this off with the character head and as usual i do like to take the starting cube and transform it into something pretty as often as i can so this is actually going to be the head of our character today so to start let's scale this down a little bit so select your starting cube then press s just to scale this down i do this because i if i'm not mistaken these grids are one meter generally in the real world sort of scale and your head isn't one meter wide i well most people's isn't anyway so i like to bring mine down to around here plus i find it easier to work with smaller numbers when it comes to lighting a bit later so something like that will do for me and then from there let's jump into the modifiers in our modifiers and add a subdivision surface modifier this is just going to begin to round this shape for us but we don't want a perfect ball shape do we so let's tab into edit mode press ctrl r to enable the loop cut tool come near the center point left click to insert that right click to leave it perfectly centered i know this is going to begin to give us a bit more of an oval shape but back in object mode i'm going to press s and z just to give this a bit of height to something like that and remember this is just my preference you know for my characters my style however you want to sort of finish up your characters and make them look it's completely up to you but from there i like to have a view for viewport preview of two but in the final render this is going to be three then we can right click shared smooth and there's the basis of our head now let's add a nose so shift a add a cube scale it down with s and let's use gy to bring this forward and i'm going to initially thin this out and i think i'll bring this back a bit too so tab it into edit mode let's press 2 to select edges i'm going to select this top edge and then gy to bring this back something like that and now let's add a subdivision surface modifier again and also back in edit mode let's press ctrl r add in another loop cut and just bring this down here maybe to give us a little bit more geometry and increase my viewport preview increase that one to three right click shade smooth and there's a nice pointy dose and all we need to do at this point is inside view here i'm going to move this into place and perhaps scale it on the one you know on the z axis with s and z here to give it a bit more height but you know this is just meeting grid now in terms of how you want your character to look that is completely up to you i think i want to bring this in slightly it's a little bit too pointy for my liking but so let's press two disliked edges i'm just gonna bring this one in a little bit and then perhaps the top one too something like that almost just like you're working with clay or something and just increasing the scale in little areas depending on your preference but there's a nose that'll do for the nose for now now let's make the mouth so with the nose selected let's do shift s cursor to selected so the 3d cursor is now at this point we can do shift a go into curves and i'm going to add a circle now a quick note if you don't have the circle or all these extra curves you can actually go to edit preferences and then cite add-ons search for extra and enable extra curves and extra meshes because you may or may not have some of the things that i'm going to be using so just enable those and you shouldn't have any issues awesome cool so as i said shift a in the curve and we're going to add a circle a little bit of a different style of mouth today and that is an awfully big circle so let's use s to scale this down g y to bring this forward and then press r x 90 to spin that 90 degrees there and initially let's scale this down a bit more and we're going to come into uh what was it data properties turn off my path animation we don't need that into geometry and here we have it the beveling option we just want to increase the depth here and i'm also going to hold shift while i do this which is going to make it a bit slower something like that and then tab into edit mode on this and a circle essentially consists of four vertexes and all i'm going to do is select this top one press g and then z to lock it to the z axis bring this down and then take the bottom one g and z to bring this up to give us this basic mouth shape it's very big so i'm going to scale this down even further jump to my right side view move this into place something like that and there we have our character mouth nice and stylized looking good now let's add in an eye shift right click to move this here and then shift a we're going to go for another cube scaling this down because he's awfully large once again s and z to bring this up on the sk z axis i did another subdivision service modifier you're going to get so fed up with me saying that but uh that's essentially what we're doing here we're using subsurface modeling to create these nice smooth stylish characters but let's increase my viewport to two rounded to three tab into edit mode and i just want one loop cut around the middle section here so ctrl r left click right click and perhaps we'll find this out slightly and then in top view i'm just going to move this eye into place right click shade smooth something like that looks pretty cool i'm digging it but of course we do need two eyes so whether eyes selected into our modifiers we can actually add a mirror modifier to make our life easier then inside the mirror modifier the mirror object is going to be ahead just like that cool and typical good practice is to make sure your mirror modifier is above everything else otherwise you can have some interesting results and what are we missing now i think we need some eyebrows and then we'll touch on the hair too so for the eyebrows let's just move the 3d cursor to the eye so i'm going to select the eye shift s cursor to selected then do shift a we're going to add in a cube again s to scale this right down g z to bring this up and then let's extrude this out a little bit so tab into edit mode press three to select faces i'm going to select this side whilst holding shift select this side and i'm just going to extrude both of these out at the same time so hold alt press e and we're going to do extrude faces along normals and now if we move our mouse up just keep going keep going and about they will do click like that and now we just want to add that little bit of curvature and to do that we're going to be using the proportional editing tool so it click up here then i'm going to press well actually no i'm going to hold alt and select this edge here which is going to select this full loop of faces and in front view if we press g and z and right now we can't see anything happening but if we scroll the mouse wheel in we can see we have this interest in the circle of radius what is going on here this is essentially the proportional editing tool taken effect which adds a little bit of a fall off to the action you're doing so in this case i'm moving the eyebrow up but the proportional editing tool is applying that effect to the rest of the shape in a bit of a less lessened form allowing us to create little curves like this and then with this bit still selected i'm going to do the same on the top i'm going to press g and y instead to do it forward and now we just need to curve this around with the good old subdivision service modifier just like that increase my viewport to 2 render to 3 right click shade smooth and now let's just move this into place so i'm going to select it g to move in the top view g to move and then r to rotate this slightly until we get a nice bit of positioning that we like i'm also going to scale this up a little bit too actually something like that oh it's coming off the eye put that back in there and also we're going to mirror this across with the mirror modifier something like that now we have a nice happy choppy face you can tinker with that as much as you like but now let's move on to doing the hair so along with the hair we're also actually going to need some ears otherwise he's not going to be able to hear a thing is he so let's start by moving the 3d cursor back to the center of the world so let's do shift s cursor to world origin and initially i'm going to add some ears in here so let's do shift a and add in a cube s to scale this down and then g and x to bring this out to the side and then i think i'm going to use s and y to thin it out just a little bit and then using another subdivision surface modifier inside of modifiers let's start to round this over cool i'm also going to just use s to increase the scale here and then let's go ahead and start adding a bit of extra detail so i'm going to tab into edit mode i'm going to press 3 to select faces i'm going to select this face and just press i to inset something like that then e to extrude this inwards and then i to inset one more time and now we've got this almost like a bowl shape because i'm going for this sort of stylized character approach so feel free to add as much or as little detail as you like but as we've done previously let's increase the viewport preview to 2 and the render to 3 right click shade smooth something like that now in front of you let's just press g to move this into place and then scale it as you require and we're also going to need another mirror modifier here to go ahead and mirror this across and then there then i don't know where their accent came from and now now we've got some nice ears on this character so all that's left to do is to add some hair now in regards to the hair i've used a variety of different techniques i think for this one i used some sculpting tools just to add a couple of you know cool you know spikes and stuff so i'll try to see if i can remember how i did it exactly but before i do i think i'm out of coffee guys okay and we're back i've got my coffee i'm feeling good and by the way this is decaf i wouldn't watch you guys thinking i'm running around full of caffeine all day i like my coffee in the morning and then if i have until the day is typically decaf so you know don't get too much coffee and it's not good for you [Laughter] [Music] even though i am an advocate for coffee i do like coffee i don't want you guys drinking too much of it but back onto the topic of discussion which was here so to do this today what i'm going to do is press shift a and just add in another cube whoop scaling this down then gz to bring this up to the hair region and let's add in a modifier and of course it's going to be the subdivision service modifier but a little different today i'm going to increase this to three in both of them and then in the drop down click apply and when you apply a modifier it takes effect it's no longer um just sitting there waiting for you to do something with it now this is what we call generate destructive transformations because if i tab into edit mode it's now actual geometry we can go in and edit this thing but all i'm going to do is in object mode hit s and z to scale this down s to make it a bit wider in general gz to bring this down to here into the general head area and we're going to go into the drop down here and jump on over into sculpt mode now if this is your first time using the skeleton tools don't worry you know we're not going to be using much of these really um the only thing i generally use is the grab tool so you can select this here or press g and then using f we can change the size of the brush that we want to use and i'm also going to enable x-axis mirroring first here and essentially what we can do is with the grab tool you can just click around and grab different parts of this mesh and begin to move them around something like that and all i'm looking to do here is to create a general hair shape that i like so i'm going to start around the side just to bring this here and then i'm going to turn off my x-axis mirroring to do some styling so imagine you've got some hair gel in your hand or some wax and we're gonna we're playing with somebody's hair so that's flatten it all out initially just neaten him up and by the way if you you know you may or may not know how to control your camera very well but i'm just middle clicking my car my mouse wheel here to let me rotate this character pretty quickly i'm no pro sculptor by any means this is you know i keep all my characters quite minimal so this just gives me the ability to create some nice curves you know some nice little styles to mix it up from time to time and try different techniques with you know myself creations but i think for the purposes of this tutorial something like that will do the trick what do we think look okay good bad let me know what you think and actually if you've made it this far leave a comment below and tell me keel i made some hair bro it looks cool [Laughter] thanks but from there um i'm back in the drop down here and into object mode julio something like that and we do have a lot of jagged edges so perhaps it's worth us adding one more subdivision here but you know depending on your computer this may or may not start slowing your computer down now so you could keep your viewport preview at zero and then perhaps keep your rendered one right click shift right click right click shade smooth and i'm happy to work with that for now i think that looks pretty cool and that's a nice character face if i do say so myself now let's just parent all this to the head so highlight everything shift click on the head control p set parent to object keep transform and now if i double tap r on my head we can take a look around and our character could hear he can see and gaze upon this new blank world in which he resides hello farewell uh zola whatever the song is from there where press alt r to reset your rotation and as long as i don't keep rambling and trying to sing in the middle of my youtube video we could probably move on to creating the body so let's do a quick transition into the body so this is the part that can get quite difficult for people because in the old tutorial back like 10 months ago when i first created that you know character tutorial which blew up by the way pretty well i don't know why because that was probably one of my least favorite videos and it i'm i'm like why are you guys watching this it's not good [Music] so but so what i tend to do is start with some basic vertexes and we're going to be taking advantage of the skin modifier to build out a general humanoid shape first so to start let's do shift a into meshes and add a single vert and just like i said earlier if you don't have the single vert option guys you do need to go to edit preferences into add-ons and search for extra and it's probably inside extra meshes so enable these you're gonna need them i promise you one day but with that enabled shift a mesh single vert add single vert now you can see it up here we've got the vertex in here and it's just a tiny dot in the center of our world from there let's go into modifiers and i said we're going to use the skin modifier which as you can tell is applying some mesh to our vertex and right now it's awfully large and very square so on top of that let's go in and add a subdivision service modifier that's going to begin rounding this this cube and what we can do you do need to make sure that you are in vertex select mode not face not edges but vertex select mode and then just grab this middle one and press e and you can start extruding this out in different directions in this case i'm just going to press z to start bringing this down towards the shoulders but it's really fat i know so what we can do is actually just highlight all of this ctrl a and stop bringing this down to start oh and i still have this proportional editing tool off we can turn that off for now and now that we've extruded this at once if we tab into object mode back in the edit mode we don't have those black vertices all over the place which is going to make this much easier to see so from here let's go on into x-ray view and now you can see we've got one dot here and we have another dot here so now let's start using this method to build out a bit of a shape so from here we're going to want a shoulder right so i'm going to select this press e and x to start bringing this over here towards the shoulder and as i said before we want to do half as much work as often as we can so in our modifiers i did a mirror modifier and it's very important that you bring this above the others so we have a nice smooth mesh here if i turn off x-ray you can see it's looking nice and smooth and we can see this character beginning to be built out here but now let's progress so i'm going to on x-ray because i find it easier to see the vertex is this way but with this selected let's press e and x to extrude out perhaps the upper arms and then e and x to the forearms round about there and then we'll do some hands but we're going to come back for hands right now let's just do the general shape of the body and then we'll finish up those extra little bits so selecting this middle one easy to bring this down towards the belly easy to bring this down towards the hips something like that and as we're going along if you want you can increase the scale of this by pressing ctrl a ctrl a and making this bigger or smaller and for the hips let's press e and x and now e and z for legs ctrl a to scale these down e and x again ctrl a to scale them down and you can see we're building out this general humanoid shape and this is how i start with everything eventually you probably want to get to the point where you just save a template which you then you know just copy and paste to work with the other characters but if you're starting fresh this is generally how i would do it okay cool so now let's begin to shape up the neck a bit more up here so back into edit mode i want an extra vertex here so i want to subdivide this edge so i'm going to press 2 click right click subdivide back into vertex select mode and then just ctrl a to thin this out a bit maybe and we could probably bring this down a bit too something like that cool that's coming along well and i do realize this part is probably quite convenient confusing it's quite an odd way to build out the character it's just one method that i sort of discovered and i enjoyed using but of course by all means if you have other ways that you like to create your character models feel free to do so this is just how i like to do them okay but i think that'll do for the general shape of the body now we need to do the hands and the feet so to try and keep this video as short as i can i'm going to do the hands and then i'll fast forward and let you try to do the feet yourself using the sort of same technique so to do the hands then let's tab back into edit mode into x-ray so i can see what's going on and initially i want to move this you can probably see this dashed circle we have going on here this is the root of the skin modifier um i'm not if i'm honest guys i'm not vastly sure what this does but i generally try to keep it at the center of mass of my character so i'm going to select the base sort of hip region vertex here and inside my skin modifier let's just mark this as root just like that and now coming into our hand quick tip if you hold alt and middle click you can change the perspective of where the camera is focused so alt alt middle click here and we're going to transform this bit into a hand and in order to do this what we can do is press e and x to extrude this out a little bit more now imagine we're moving into the palm of the hand and i'm going to mark this as loose this essentially means um we're telling the skin modifier don't add too much extra geometry to this because i'm about to branch this out into multiple fingers or branches or whatever it is you're looking to create from there let's select this and i'm going to press e to extrude once towards here which is going to be a thumb and then we want 1 2 three and four which is going to be our fingers and initially of course the shape is going to be all messed up but that's because the scale on the skin right now is far too large so back into x-ray i'm just going to highlight all of these digits ctrl a to bring it down and before you know it we've got a nice smooth shape and then let's select these four press e to extrude these out just like that um would you would you look at that we've got a hand coming along ladies and gentlemen i'm just selecting the vertexes here and pressing g to move them out spread out those fingers and then we also need a thumb so i'm going to select this one e to extrude this out and just like that we have a nice chunky stylized hand looking pretty cool if i do say so myself what do you think of that how do you like them apples his hands are very large aren't they if you want don't forget you can come in select all this control a shrink these down you can also select the fingertips double tap g to move these in and play around with your scales until you get something you like but i like it i think that's looking pretty good now i'm gonna fast forward the feet but you know feel free to slow it down but sometimes i do like to throw in a bit of a curveball a bit of a challenge so you do the fit yourself and or feel free to slow down this footage and watch me do it [Music] [Music] um and i think that will do for the foot so i realize it does look fat guys and strange i know but what we're going to be doing is we're going to be using the skeleton tools once again to add in those extra little bits of definition where generally you know as humans we're a bit more curvy you know i mean we're you know we're not flat like this you know we want this to look a little bit more realistic and just nice to look at but what i like to do as well i realize that we've got quite just the one face here it's always good really when you're making these characters to have a nice single line all the way down and to sort this i'm just going to type back into edit mode here turn on x-ray once again and this sort of hip vertex i'm going to press g to move this up and then when you get to a point where you go far enough from the center it it will split off into two to give you this nice center line i'm gonna leave that like that and then come back into into turn off x-ray there and then back into object mode and even though we do have these sort of curvy hips we're going to adjust that using the sculpting tools it's just good to make sure you do have a nice center line on your character and before we progress let's make some backups because it's always good practice because once you apply all of these modifiers there's no going back unless you just so happen to be able to undo but you know after you've done so many things you can't go back so let's just select the body here shift d to duplicate right click to leave in place and then press m new collection and i'm going to call this backups in big old capital letters click ok and then just untick this to disable it and now you've got that in there should you ever need it now we can go ahead and safely apply these from top to bottom so you want to apply the mirror applied the skin and then lastly apply the subdivision now if you tab into edit mode this is now actual geometry that we can play with and what we're going to do is in the drop down jump into sculpt and now we're gonna use this grab tool once again to start shaping this up and making our guy look a bit more manly so for starters we need to trim down those hips dude you're not that wide oh and before i forget turn on this x-axis mirroring so make him a little bit slimmer on the waist perhaps bring the groin area down at this point it's just preference really you know just because you're following my tutorial does not mean you need to create my character guys so perhaps i'll make them a bit wider in the body and from the sides bring that belly in a little bit god if only if it was that easy right you know let's slim down guys whoo and then bring the chest out slightly to make them a bit more bulky and don't forget you can press f to shrink the size on this tool because i think i've brought him out a bit farther i'm going to undo that shrink down my tool with f and then just bring out the chest a bit more and then bring out the back and his rear end and then also inside view let's bring his lower back in slightly something like that maybe just to make him a little bit more human shaped like he's got a bit of meat on him you know he's had he's had a couple of veggie burgers and he's uh he's uh he's he's filling out nicely you know there we go maybe something like that oh wait on the feed too so i'm gonna move to the feet oh quick tip if you do want to jump your focal point around like i've been doing if you hold alt and middle mouse click then you can jump the focus point just like that cool and i just want to flatten this off so in my side view let's press f to increase the scale on this i just want to flatten out this foot a little bit and perhaps exaggerate that heel a bit more something like that cool i think that will do so we can go up here now back into object mode and let's add a subdivision service modifier again and right click shade smooth and would you look at that i think that's not a bad base mesh for our character and as i said before if you are having a hard time with all these polygons and perhaps it's slowing your computer down just keep your viewport preview at zero look and by the time you come to render this will be nice and smooth but in the viewport you know for the sake of this tutorial i'm just gonna keep it on one so everything looks nice and smooth and it's easy for you to see the general look and style that i'm looking to achieve so what does our character need now um i think it's clothing right i want to put some summery shorts on this guy to make him ready to hit the pool so let's do that now so but in terms of making clothing my process hasn't really changed a whole lot i tend to duplicate a section of the mesh and then we're going to repurpose that for a piece of clothing so let's tab into edit mode on this pressing three so we are in face select mode and you do want to be in x-ray view so when we select a piece of the mesh like this we get in the front and the back so that's exactly what we're gonna do i'm going to click and hold i'm going to grab down to about there or maybe do i want a bit more no no just that bit like that and then shift d to duplicate right click to leave in place p separate the selection and then back into object mode and we can see now we have this new body002 which is the shorts so let's double click and rename this to shorts turn off x-ray and right now it's just sitting inside the character mesh so we need to go in here i'm gonna use the solidified modifier and bring in the solidify above the subdivision because it has brought the subdivision modifier along with it when i duplicated it from the body and let's just start by then in perhaps increasing the offset just so it's sitting on top something like that and i think i'm going to want to flatten this out so let's tab with the edit mode on the shorts press 2 to select edges and then whilst holding alt i'm just going to select this for loop s zed zero to flatten that out something like that i think that's looking pretty good actually that's turned out really well but if you need to don't forget you can always tab into edit mode and move these things around and scale this in different areas depending on what you need but i think something like that will do the trick all i want to do at this point is inside my solidified modifier i'm going to enable only rim and that just means the solid the solidify modifier isn't going to create a bunch of geometry inside the shape it's only going to do it on the outside that way you don't get all this internal geometry in the short set essentially we're not going to see so there's no point having it there and slowing down your computer but this is just like my sort of preference cool and i think that'll do for the shorts of monsieur they're looking good he's looking stylish and ready to hit the pool so let's now just bring some color into his life so in order to start adding color then let's go ahead and jump on over into material preview and this is where we can start adding some color and in terms so if you go into the drop down here you've got a couple of lighting options to play with to start i tend to use this one i think it's called yeah courtyard so i like this for the two-tone effect but remember this isn't what your render is going to actually look like in the final that's going to be in your render tab so there'll be another video where we'll go into rendering and stuff but for now we're going to stick to the material preview do some coloring and finish this guy up so to start that let's go ahead and select the body and inside the materials properties tab down here let's click new and i'm just going to call this material base and materials wise i suppose you know this is in the end this is a 3d virtual world so your character can be any color in the you know this color wheel is completely up to you but i'm gonna go for like a cartoony pinky skin color maybe something like that cool and i want to use the same color on the head so if i click on the head i know in the same tab in the drop down i can put bass in here and same again for the ears and i think i'm going to put the nose as a new material to call this nose because i like my nose to be a little bit of an off color because you know i think it just gives them that cool cartoony sort of appearance and then the lips let's make these perhaps like a red color something forced a bit much something like that maybe and then for the hair the egg is gonna need its own color i think in the design i made like a brown head sort of color so perhaps something like that and of course i want the same color for the eyebrows and then we need the eyes so i'm gonna make the eyes pretty much black and down here you've got a whole bunch of options you can tinker with but if you're new to blender generally i'd probably just play with the roughness with your art to start off and then as you learn more you can start tinkering with like metallic and all these sort of things so 0.25 i think i'm gonna go with i like that bdi sort of toy look i think it looks pretty cool and the shorts i want to make some cool stripy shorts to make them a little bit different so what we're going to do we're going to use some nodes for this and if you don't know what nodes are don't worry i'll explain it as best as i can but essentially what we're going to do now is jump on over into the shading tab and you zoom in if it's quite far out we're going to go ahead and click on our shorts and down here let's click new and i'm going to call this material shorts and we're gonna this is the node editor down here so make sure you have used nodes enabled if you can't see anything and so this is the color of our shorts right here but we're gonna use some additional nodes to go ahead and create a cool stripy pattern so to start in here let's press shift a search and i'm going to use a wave texture then we can plug this in to our base color and you can see what this looks like so from here if you want you can play the variables you can play with the scale and i want some nice thick stripes but i want them to be going vertical so in order to change that we're going to use some more notes i'm going to press shift a and we're going to use a mapping node plug this into the vector of the vector of the wave texture and on top of that we're going to use a texture coordinate node it's going to take the generator plug this into the vector like that and now what we can do is actually adjust these rotation variables to get our desired appearance and in this case guys i'm just going for some like stripey shorts so i'm just going to make this 90 degrees nice and vertical and then you can play whoop that is huge and then you can play around with the general scale to get a look that you want i'm going to go for something like that and then one more thing is going to be color so shift a and i'm going to look for a color wrap click and then just click in between to plug those into there and now if i click on any one of these color tabs i can adjust the color and make these any color i like i can't remember what color i went for in the original design it was like an orange a yellow color let's try this out something like that and i don't want this faded look so in linear let's change this to constant and you'll just have to drag this tab up to create some nice straight lines like that you know what that's turning out much cooler than i anticipated wow look at this guy captain of the sports swimming team i love it but to finish this up then let's go ahead and just highlight all of the character and then use g and z we're gonna bring him up to the x line of the world on on the base of his feet here so that way if you decide to go on now to perhaps complete my rigging tutorial you're in a good position to do so and just like that guys we come to the end of another tutorial but before you go i just wanted to jump in and give a big thank you for hitting that subscribe button i can't believe that we're over 20 000 subscribers now which absolutely blows my mind there's over 20 000 of you that like to listen to me talk absolute nonsense while trying to make a tutorial but if you did enjoy likes and subs i very much appreciate as always and if you would be interested in the source files for these tutorials feel free to head on over to my patreon where you can download those but other than that my name has been kielen enjoy the rest of your day and i'll catch you in the next one

Channel: Keelan Jon

Views: 12,512

Keywords: Blender3D, Blendertutorial, Design, Development, 3dArtist, 3dart

Id: R6436sX66YU

Length: 41min 3sec (2463 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 03 2021