Blender: Facial Shapekeys For Beginners | So Cool!

welcome back to the channel and today we have a literally jaw dropping tutorial I'm going to be showing you guys how to do facial shape keys in blender and bad puns aside this has actually a really cool thing I'm going to go step by step I'm even going to be providing this model for free and the really cool thing about shape Keys especially if you're new to this I'll explain it is that it gives you the ability to use these simple little blend shapes you can blend them together in all sorts of fun ways they're easy to do and I'll show you how to do them and it just is something that you could incorporate into your rig eventually and it just gives you a lot of power with animation and stuff so that's all going to be in this Fun Pack tutorial and if you guys ever wanted to help out the channel a little bit one of the great things you can do is check out some of my other stuff on Pixel creative I do mainly Drawing Tutorials at the moment but um it's in the description below as well and if you guys kind of check that out it would really help me out and I hope you guys are able to enjoy this tutorial today let's jump into it and have some fun so first of all you're going to want to download the free model in the description below it's one of my own characters that I've just kind of cut in half and just gotten the top part of the body and this is going to be for testing the shape keys so go ahead in the description below on my gumroad you can get it for zero dollars download it and then jump into the blend file and then we're going to do the shape keys so once you open it up you'll have this and what you're going to do is you're going to actually select the mesh of the character and we're going to do some basic shape key things here so if you actually go to your object data properties you're going to see we have something here called shape keys now if you don't know anything about shape keys I'll quickly explain some Basics you're going to go ahead and in object mode you're going to press plus I mean the first time you press Plus on the shape Keys it's going to add in What's called the basis and that is kind of like just your original unedited base mesh right and anything you add from here on say you add another shape key that is what it's going to be blending so in the default state with none of these shape Keys being used or having any values it's just going to be at the resting basis okay so if that doesn't make any sense to you just keep watching and you'll understand so let's take the first shape key here key one and let's double click on it let's do something let's call this mouth open okay and let's now with that mouth open selected tab in to edit mode and it's inside of edit mode where we actually do the editing for these different groups and I'm just going to quickly show you guys an example don't follow along yet I'm just going to explain it if I were to grab this lip here like so and just bring it down right if you can see here now this is the edit that we have there on map open if I now go to the bases you can see all of a sudden that disappears because the bases is a whole different thing you could actually go into the bases and change something as well but you don't really want to just keep that as it is so let's just go back to the mouth open like I said don't follow along with it I was just giving an example so make sure you have the mouth open and selected you're inside of edit mode and you can go ahead and enable your proportional editing and make sure that connected only is enabled that's kind of important what we're going to do is like the shape key here as we've named it we are going to open a map so we're going to go into our right orthographic View and opening the mouth is the more tricky thing to do and that's why I'm starting with it but once we have that done the rest is easy so there are a few things you can consider if we go ahead and go to the X-ray you can actually see that there are um teeth in here so we don't just want to open the lips we actually want to have the whole jaw come down but how do you do that along with these teeth and everything and I'm going to be showing you guys some tips and tricks on how we can achieve that so let's start by coming to our right orthographic view we have the X-ray toggled on and what we're going to do is we're going to go to our face select option and we're going to make sure nothing is active we're going to press C that's going to be our selection tool we're going to grow it by Rolling our middle Mouse button and I'm going to start here at the bottom of the lip being very careful not to select the top lip and we're just going to go and select this bottom part of the jaw and some of these teeth here as well you can see we don't want and the top teeth selected just the bottom teeth like that okay and then what we're going to do is we're going to come and get our um 3D cursor and we're going to come up here to where the jaw would pivot right just right under the ear and when I click over here and let's go back to our move tool and what we're going to do is we're going to come to our transform pivot and let's change that to 3D cursor and now this is going to be our pivoting point so if you now go R to rotate and you can you can see we have the influence because we have the the proportional editing enabled and only the connected bits are there so if you go R to rotate you can see this is what's happening now what you want to make sure you do as well is you want to roll the middle Mouse button to control the fall off so let's roll it and let's get about this much jaw coming down and if you now toggle out of the X-ray you can kind of see this a little bit better and using that proportional editing method has really made things a lot simpler if you wanted to you could probably bring the tongue down but I would do that as a separate shape key anyway so what you want to do now that you have that done because we selected everything from the side of both sides were done evenly and we also have x-ray enabled here but if you wanted to come here and make a change in the front view it's important that this x-ray order not the X-ray but the symmetry is enabled for the X if I turn off the X symmetry now you can see it's only happening on one side so make sure with the mouth open we're going to make sure that X is enabled so we now change things here you we can actually have it happen on both sides so let's now go back and change this to median point because we're no longer rotating everything around the jaw and what we're going to do is we're just going to bring this in just a little bit in the corner of the mouth so what we want here as well is we want to displace the cheeks just back a little bit like this so now if we actually tab into object mode and we have that mouth open selected it has a value of zero if we now drag this through you can see we're going to have that mouth open Action Happening Here how cool is that so now we're just going to build on top of this so let's press this little X here all that's going to do is clear the shape Keys it's not deleting anything so you can see what happened there and then what we're going to do is we're going to create another shape key and let's call this uh you can call it anything you can call it Corner open or you can just call it smile I pretend I usually prefer to call it smile and we need to actually make sure that we let we label it as left or right as well that's going to be important especially if you're going to get into rigging it later so let's do the left first so I'm going to put underscore L that's just to be organized we're going to tap into edit mode now we have a fresh model here just like we have the bases and what we're going to do is we're going to take the left corner here which it might be from our perspective the right side but from the character's perspective it's left I'm going to take this corner of the mouth and with our proportional editing we're going to go g and we're going to first of all make sure to turn off the Symmetry because we only want to happen on one side and we're going to be careful to drag it up like so and then we're just going to rotate it slightly and that might look okay from the front but if we were to see that from the side it's not going to make sense unless we grab it and we also move it back a little bit and also displace some of these cheeks here a little bit and then that is going to look a bit more natural so now if you want to see what this looks like we're just going to quickly tab back into object mode now it's just at the best basis and if we now get that smile underscore L and we drag it we can see we have the smile and from the side we really want to see that displacement you can at any time select it and come in here and edit it that's the nice thing about doing it like this it's non-destructive so let's displace that a bit go back into object mode and let's see okay that is looking pretty good now here's the thing say for example you wanted to create another shape key and call it smile underscore R you could do that and go do that again but there's a cool feature here that's going to allow us to mirror things over as long as the geometry of your character is symmetrical which it is in this case things can be mirrored over so let's start by I'm just going to get rid of that let's just go and make sure that the thing we want to mirror in this case smile underscore L is at a full value of one and then we're going to do we're going to come to this little arrow and go to the drop down and we're going to go new shape from mix okay and what we're going to do now is while we have that key free here that's generated active when it comes to the drop down again and we're going to go mirror shape key and now if we get that key free and we drag it we can see it's happening on the other side we can now double click on this and call it smile underscore R because that's the right side and now we can control both of them how cool is that so what we can also do on top of that you can actually use multiple like I said you can use multiple ones so let's go to mouth open let's give that a value of about 0.4 and let's go and make her smile fully on the left and this is go a little bit on the right and you guys are now kind of starting to see how powerful shape keys are so when you do eventually get to the rigging stage what you would traditionally do is you would go and give these things over here drivers and then you can drive the shape keys and you can do it in a lot of ways you can use objects in your 3D scene and by moving them on a different axis it can control those and that's where you can incorporate this into your rig that's going to be a tutorial for another day but I hope you guys have enjoyed this and just for a bit of fun let's just tap into this is actually create a new shape key and let's just call it tongue now let's just quickly do something with that tongue as well so let's um go in to wireframe or into x-ray actually let's toggle on the X-ray there we go and let's see if we can select that tongue in the inside okay there we have it and what we're going to do is we're just going to rotate it down and bring it like so and now if we tab back out toggle off the X-ray let's see if we can actually um control that tongue as well and there you can see the tongue we can make that lower in the inside a little bit as well so by no means is this everything there is to know about doing this with the mouth in real life you would spend a lot more time getting the displacement here accurate and blending before between the different things with drivers and all that sort of thing but for the most part I think this is a satisfactory introduction for beginners when it comes to facial shape keys so I'll see you guys next time for another tutorial and I will upload um this finished version to patreon so you guys can kind of mess around with it and try it out and if you want to start from scratch you can download the free model like I said in the beginning and follow along as well and if you guys want to check out my other channel like I mentioned in the beginning it'll really help me out and I'll see you guys next time for another tutorial

Channel: PIXXO 3D

Views: 32,705

Keywords: blender tutorial, how to model in blender, how to use blender, blender, blender tutorial for beginners, Blender facial shapekeys, easy Blender shapkeys

Id: yg3RSTV2JnQ

Length: 12min 21sec (741 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 11 2023