Blender Beginner Tutorial - Character Illustration Modeling - Blender 3D Tutorial (Free Models)

hey guys this is kielen and welcome back to the channel i've got an exciting one for you today so in today's tutorial i'm going to show you how i created these character illustrations in blender now these are quite trendy and i've actually used them quite recently in a web design project and i'll also include some links below where you can download my original project files and some high resolution images to use in your own designs but with that out of the way it's time to improve your skills startup blender and follow along with me are you ready let's go okay so the overall premise and technique we're going to be using this tutorial is modeling using the subdivision service modifier and so as an example the first thing we're going to do is model the head so i'm going to keep the starting cube here and this is going to be the basis of our head nice and straightforward so firstly let's shrink this down quite small because the cube itself is quite large but i'm happy with this scale and then come over here to the modifier tab and add a subdivision service modifier increase the viewport by one and this is the basis of our head and now you might be thinking it's a bit round but of course all we have to do is tab into edit mode and adjust accordingly so if we want to perhaps make the head a little bit longer we select this point and face gz to bring this down and then perhaps press ctrl r i'm going to insert another loop cut here just to add a bit more geometry and then select some faces scale this down scale this down on the bottom here perhaps select some edges we're going to bring this one up until we build out a bit more of a head shape and then perhaps bring these two in scaling them along the x-axis there and lastly a little bit on the side of the head and the top of the head and then just like that using the subdivision surface modifier we've got a bit more of a head shape and underneath the hood it's just this very basic shape but because the subdivision service modifier is doing its thing it's smoothing it all over really adding that extra geometry and just like that that's that's a nice basis of a stylized head okay so let's bring this up and we're going to move on now to do in the neck and the body and then we'll come back and do the hair and such so firstly let's go ahead and create a neck so i'm going to do this using the skin modifier on some extra vertexes so let's do shift a go to meshes i'm going to add a single foot if you don't have the single vert option in your meshes just come up to edit preferences and type in extra and just make sure you enable extra meshes and extra curves here and you get all the good stuff then okay so once you've got your vertex here i'm going to add two modifiers skin and subdivision this is huge right now and you'll be familiar with this technique if you watched any of my other videos because i use this technique all the time and all we need to do is make sure you're in edit mode on this view attacks go into vertex select mode and in order to scale this down we need to use control a and that's just gonna bring it down nicely i'm gonna increase my viewport by one and then let's press easy to extrude this up okay cool and then i'm just going to go into object mode bring this up into the head just like that and that's looking pretty good to me now we've got the head and the neck now let's move on to the body so i'm going to press shift a and guess what we're going with cube scale it down because it is massive um gz bring this down here let's go ahead and add a subdivision surface modifier and okay so we're gonna have to build this out very similar as we did with the head so type into edit mode i think initially i'm going to select this bottom face gz and bring it down because i want it to be a little bit longer but then i'm going to increase my viewport by one just to give us a bit more shape and then press ctrl r and add a loop cut in down here and you can keep an eye up here i've put the reference somewhere on the screen just to give you an idea of what i'm going for but of course as like with all my other tutorials feel free to experiment you don't need to make the exact same thing that i am you can always do your own thing and i do i do encourage that okay cool so that's looking good to me now i wanted to put a bit of an angle on this guy like he's almost in an action pose to an extent so perhaps let's go ahead and let me just shrink this down here and perhaps over here too just scale them down on on their own axes there okay and then what i'm gonna do i think i'm gonna turn on my what's it called i'm gonna turn on my proportional editing tool and what this is gonna do it's gonna give us a nice radius of effect when we're applying certain changes so i want to create an interesting curve shape in the body which might sound weird right now but if i press 2 to go into edge select mode hold alt which is going to select alt and click here which is going to select this entire loop and then i'm going to press g y and then you can see how it's affecting everything right now but if you scroll your mouse wheel up that's going to reduce the overall area that this proportional edge into edit to editing tool will affect i'm just going to just going to bring it out a little bit like this okay that's looking interesting and perhaps bringing forward a little bit cool i'm digging it looking interesting to me i think i want to put a little bit occur of a curve in the neck too so i'm going to click on the neck time in the edit mode press alt c it's going to x-ray mode so we can actually see inside here then press 2 to select edges i'm just going to click on this edge right click subdivide this is going to give us an extra vertex to use here and then let me just come into right side view i'm going to bring this back whoops turn off proportional editing now okay gy to bring this back and then i'm just going to bring the head up a little just so we can we have a bit more of a curve on the neck to look a little bit more natural and if you want to smooth this over click on our vertex here and just press ctrl shift b this is going to bevel that vertex and give you an extra bit of geometry there okay cool i know it's looking quite strange right now isn't it but don't worry it's all gonna work out trust me so let's move on to the arms so i'm just gonna hold shift or right click here and then we're gonna do the very very similar thing that we did with the neck and use the skin and the subdivision surface modifier to go ahead and build out some arms so shift a add a single foot add single foot skin and a subdivision surface modifier ctrl a scale this down and just build out some shapes so i'm going to go ahead and just give him like as if he's got his arm up or something so if i come into right side view first and then e to extrude and e to extrude very blocky right now and funny looking but trust me it's all gonna work out so i'm also going to highlight this vertex over here mark it as the root and this tab in the edit mode on this thing and into x-ray mode just to adjust the angles to make it look a little bit more natural maybe something like that and i also want to smooth this out a little bit too so just like we did on the neck click this vertex ctrl shift b and then you can also scroll your mouse wheel up if you wanted to add some extra vertexes in there and this is just really gonna give us a nice curve to our arm here and i like it you can also increase your viewport to get more of a defined shape and then i'm also going to type back to edit mode turn on my proportional editor highlight this vertex at the end and just ctrl a to scale this down then use your scrolling mouse wheel up depending on how much of the arm you want to affect just to give it a bit more of a gradient where it gets thinner towards the wrist okay i like that that looks pretty good to me okay and then let's go ahead and add a actually we'll just duplicate it so shift d tap x just to lock it to the x axis and we're just going to bring it over here okay and then all we need to do is tab into edit mode turn off proportional editing and adjust our this side of the arm so that it's you know that looks okay i think i'm going to delete up to here in terms of vertexes so just highlight these x vertexes and then just extrude something else out so perhaps bring the stone here and then e to extrude this down here okay something starting to look quite interesting and then perhaps tab into edit mode ctrl shift b fail this out proportional head didn't turn on and then control a and then ctrl a scale this down proportionately and perhaps bring it up a little bit and now we have two arms that's looking kind of cool i think i need to bring it in slightly here because it is looking he's looking a bit like a tortoise isn't he so tab into edit mode here and i think it's this one up here is a little bit too far out lock that to the y axis and it's more down here that i wanted okay cool that's looking interesting okay so let's go ahead now and finish up the legs and then we'll have the basis of a very basic shaped out mesh so shift a and then we'll do control shift a here add a single vert same again skin and subdivision service modifier ctrl a scale it down turn off proportional item right now and we're just gonna extrude out some legs i'm gonna come back into right view mode here just so i can get a good angle and then whoops make sure you have vertex selected and then e to extrude and e to extrude it's gonna adjust bring this up inside the mesh and i'm aiming just to get some sort of maybe semi action pose so we stand in there and let's go ahead and go into front view duplicate lock to the x-axis and then adjust the front view okay that's looking kind of cool perhaps bring this in slightly here and over here we also might want to bring this up i'm going to double tap g to move this along its edge and then using the proportional editor tool like just like we did last time time to edit mode and then ctrl a and scroll the mouse wheel up just to give this a bit of a size gradient and same over here ctrl a just like that okay that's looking cool and then i'm going to increase my viewport by one on both of these to keep it consistent across the board and we can see the general shape of our character coming along here okay that's looking good to me so let's go ahead and give him some hands and feet also so time into edit mode on this foot here i'm going to come into right view and let's go ahead and just press e once and then twice to extrude out we're not going to put a lot of detail on the feature right here i'm literally just going to do a shirt a bit like a little foot shape same over here type in the edit mode on this one and then flip down here and fold out here and you can use ctrl a if you want to shape these up a little bit just turn off my proportional editing tool but i'm going to keep them a little bit chunky and like that because i just think the feet look a little bit quirky and in terms of hands um just like we've done before when you shift right click to move it to the handy to the wrist and use shift a and add a cube and then just like we've done with everything else i'm going to add a subdivision surface modifier come into my right view time to edit mode and let's press alt z to go on x into x-ray then move this out to elongate the hand cross move it up ctrl r put the loop cut in the middle here somewhere highlight these scale them down and then perhaps scale the entire thing up a little bit and perhaps select all these middle ones gz bring those down and bring this up just to get some sort of hand into top view mode rz just to line this up accurately and that's one sort of stylized hand and what we can do is if you come up to here to our snap to tool go on the drop down change this to face and then press click on our hand shift d to duplicate and then hold ctrl and then you can see when you hold ctrl it snaps to the face that you're hovering over so just snap it to the wrist just to get the basis and then let's go ahead and i think i'm going to rotate this one on the y-axis by 180. easy to bring it down and then you can double tap r just to sort of get a nicer shape and if you wanted to thicken this out to s scale you press x twice to scale this up on its local x-axis and perhaps do the same up here s x x widen these up increase the viewport on both and now we've got the general handshapes too this is stylized and basic so we're not going to do individual fingers and such purely for illustration purposes so everything's really straightforward and simple okay and now let's quickly adjust the head angle bring it inside a little bit and perhaps bring the neck forward slightly and rotate the head so r and x just to tilt it up slightly and then move it across the y axis there just to get a bit more of a natural shape okay this is coming along really well so all you need to do now really is to start building up the hair i'm going to add in some ears also so let's move on to the hair okay so to start off the hair i'm going to go into right view mode click on the head and do shift s cursor to selected and then i'm going to do shift a and add in a cube scale it down and then let's go ahead and add a subdivision surface modifier bring this up increase the viewport by one and let's start by increasing the scale till it's sort of contained by inside or just outside the head so you could go there if you wanted to and that's there's an afro but i'm gonna go for something a bit more stylish let's say so all we need to do here is to start adjusting our shape so i'm going to add in the control i'm going to add another loop cut here with ctrl r initially right click to center it up and then in x-ray mode which makes you an x-ray mode so that when you are selecting these vertexes you're selecting them on both the front and the back so into right view mode and then it's just a case of shaping up a hairstyle i'm going to go for this tall fringe saw look so initially let's just bring this up bring this into the back of the head and then add in some extra loot cuts where you want to start shaping it around the head control out here and this is going to be the root of the hair perhaps here also and then add in some vertical cuts and this looks messy initially but what we'll do afterwards is come in and do a little bit of cleanup but it's just a case of adding an extra loop cut where you need it and then and then shaping out the general style that you're going for and of course doing this entire process we will have to adjust it from the front at the back too because you can see right now we've got this good shape going on but if we go with the front view whoa what is going on there you might be thinking but it's okay we're gonna fix that so initially let's just go in and add a loop cut down the center here right click to keep down the middle scale it up ever so slightly and then we can move this down lock that to the z-axis there and let's go ahead and bring in the side so i'm gonna go into front view mode and turn on if you come up to here we can turn on the mirror tool so now if i do anything on uh on the x-axis it's gonna mirror straight across the other side so if i highlight all these press g and x can bring these in and then we'll do the same down here just a smidge whoops just a smidge okay and we're going to need to bring it in on the sides a lot more so what i'm going to do is turn on our proportional add-in tool i'm going to select this here g and x press scrolling mostly left to bring this in a lot more and then do the same here g and x to bring these in okay and that's looking kind of cool all right now we've got this sort of big here big fringe thing going on and all we need to add here really is some ears so i'm going to do the easy way here so i'm going to click on the head shift d x to lock to the x axis then scale this down then scale it along the x axis just to thin this out scale it on the y axis too and then place this on the side of the head here remember we can use control to snap it to the faces because we've turned that on in our snap to tool okay there's an ear and then come into our ear here add modifier go to mirror and then click the selector tool and click on our head and we've also got two ears okay you may or may not want to scale down your hair and play around with the shape a little bit more it's just going to take a little bit of time for you to adjust to get something you're happy with for the purposes of this tutorial i think this will do that's looking pretty good to me okay cool let's move on now to do a bit of cleanup we'll do some coloring and then we'll render this out okay so let's go ahead and touch all of these things up so initially i'm going to go through all my pieces and apply all my modifiers i've tried to keep them all around a viewport of two right now and that's because when it comes to actually joining all these pieces together i'm gonna add an additional subdivision service modifier over all of these so they'll be subdivided with equal values so let's go ahead now and highlight all of these and what we're going to do is use ctrl j which is going to make them all one object here okay and from there let's go into a modifier add modifier and add a subdivision surface modifier you can increase the viewport by one if you want and it's really starting to get smooth now this will be dependent on your machine how well it can handle all these different polygons but you can go ahead and decrease that and then what we're going to do anyway is right click and shade smooth and now we've got this nice smooth looking character love it it's looking pretty good to me so let's go over now into our material preview and i'm going to click this drop down and change the hdri preview to this one just because it's a little bit brighter which tends to be more accurate then i'm going to gz to bring this up and we're also going to go ahead and click on our character here object set origin to center of mass this just makes this little yellow dot here which is the center of mass of the object right in the center so if we start to rotate it's perfectly aligned to the center of mass there so what colors are we going to make this thing well initially i'm going to give him a base which is the skin color so come down to our materials properties and i'm just going to call this skin and for me i'm going to make him a slightly pinky color but of course you can have purple green yellow we know any color you like and then of course we need to tap into these individual objects underneath so let's go ahead and type in the edit mode and then you might be thinking okay it's all one object now so how do i select the individual arms and the legs how do i do this well all you need to do so we're going to color in the shirt here so the sleeves let's say and the body just hover over the shape press l and it's going to select this individual object and then same for the chest and same for the other arm then come over here and add a new color i'm just going to call this shirt and then click assign and that's going to assign the color right here to whichever meshes you had selected at the time then you come out of edit mode and you can just adjust the colors accordingly i'm going to make this like an orange color like it was in the design like that and when it comes to getting a nice soft look you want to make sure you turn your roughness up a little bit because this will reduce the shine i like around 0.75 or 0.8 i think it's a nice balance of the both and i'm going to do the same with the skin to around 6.8 okay and now let's finish up coloring the rest of the characters so back into edit mode hover over the legs l and l plus and i'm going to call these legs and i'm going to assign those and give them a darkish purpley blue color and also increase the roughness to around 0.75 and lastly we just need to adjust the here l under here plus new here and assign that to the head so i'm going to give him a hair color of perhaps a yeah perhaps like a orangey red color here i think that's quite nice increase the roughness to 0.7 or perhaps 0.65 because i like a tiny tiny bit of shine on the hair here and we're almost done really now it's just time to jump in to the render options because this is with magic really happens because if we jump into our camera view right now just click here total camera let's adjust this so find an angle you like i think i'm going to do something around here and then when you when you've got an angle you like come into view and we're going to go align and align active camera to view then all we need to do is to do the final adjustments so n view lock after view zoom this out until you've got the perfect angle that you like i'm happy with that and then come back in turn this off press n to close that menu and there we are now we're good to go and render this out okay so the first thing i'm going to do is come up to here into our rendered view and it's a bit dark right now so we're going to we're going to adjust the scene but some of the first settings i like to adjust inside our render properties here i like to come down to color management and change the look option to high contrast this just makes all the colors a lot more vibrant and colorful and just you know really makes them pop very very nicely and then now it's just a case of adding in some light so we've got the base light here what i want to do is g to move this down to the front of the character around about here just off to the side slightly and i always use a basic three-point lighting setup so you've got your initial light and then i want to shift d to duplicate we have one light off to the side here because whenever you have your primary light here which tends to be one of the brightest the point of this light is to light up the main part of your character here but of course in doing so you're going to create a lot of shadow on the other side so this light is just here to complement i'm brightening those shadows a little bit so i'm just going to reduce this down to around 400 maybe because it's only there to brighten those shadows not get rid of them and then i'm going to go ahead and duplicate this light again to bring one behind and the point of this backlight is to add a nice bright color and sort of almost like a light silhouette to our guy here to a little character which you can really increase the brightness here i'm going to go for 1200 and you can also change the color too just to get some different tones depending on what you're going for i'm going to lean into i'm going to lean into the pinks and the blues slightly here and the purples and you can see this adds a nice sort of tone along this here okay now if we jump back into a camera the shadows are quite harsh so what i'm going to do is click on our main light and if we increase the radius this softens those shadows really well maybe around 0.85 now we're getting a lot of shadow flicker here but don't worry about that right now because this is only occurring in evs because it's time to show you the magic so if we go over here into our render properties and then to render engine and drop into cycles you can see we get this beautiful shadow these lovely colors and it's looking really nice and you can change your device to gpu if you have one that's just going to render it out really well and also come down to film and i think i'm gonna change the transparent you can add a background if you want i'm just gonna leave this as transparent for now which will give you the opportunity just to drag this into any any way you like and that pretty much does it for today's tutorial all that's left to do here is to come up to render and render out our image and i'll quickly fast forward to the render for you and we're almost there so one last thing you see how we get this grain when we're rendering well we can fix that we come into our layer properties here turn on this option here de-annoy using data come into compositing use nodes now what we're going to do is we're going to use something called a denoiser if you press shift a search for denoise click on that and just throw it in between these then drag in your denoising normals into the normals you denoise an albedo into the albedo now if we just use f12 to render this one more time i'm going to skip into the final render and there you have it our beautiful character illustration whoo that was a long one today i hope you enjoyed and if you made it right to the end go ahead and leave a comment below and let me know but my name has been keelan if you liked the video like the video subscribes are always appreciated but until next time have a nice day and i'll catch you in the next one you

Channel: Keelan Jon

Views: 19,606

Keywords:

Id: YR7mE42fGz4

Length: 30min 41sec (1841 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 14 2020