Blender: Project Faces Onto Character Meshes

hello guys and welcome back to another blender tutorial today I'm going to be showing you how to do facial projection in blender and what this is going to involve and I'll quickly explain is that we're going to have a messy projection like a rough projection of a face which you can't really see here I'll explain it a bit later on and I'm going to take that meshy projection and take it to a nice clean UV map that we've made you can see over here we have this really neat layout over here now what's going to be really cool about this I'm going to be providing some free resources in the description below so you can have this exact same model to work with and you're also going to have the same texture so I'll be providing everything for free in the description so this is definitely worth learning now you can actually take your 3D models and you can project different people's textures onto them which is really cool so let's jump in you can also check out my skillshare which you can join for free for one month using my link in the description so let's jump in and I hope you guys enjoy it so if you want a head model to follow along with I'm going to put in the description below a link on my gun mode we can download this model over here which we're going to be using so you're going to go ahead and download the zip folder so here you can see I've already done that and then what you're going to do as well is you can use any kind of image you want but I found this one which I'm going to use you just want to call like a front on image of a face so I'm going to put a link to this unsplash image in the description below as well so keep that in mind so what you're going to do is you're going to just extract that zip file once you've downloaded it and then open up that blend file once you've opened that up you can see there's this head model inside and it's got a nice clean topology so what we're going to be doing is we're going to start by actually going over to our object data properties I'm going to go over to our UV Maps Now by default this has a UV map so we're going to double click on this and we're going to call this um let's just call it front projection okay so it's going to be our front projection and then what we're going to do is we're going to create another UV group and we're going to double click on this we're going to call this our main map okay because this is our main texture the the nice final result and then what we're going to do we're going to go into our editing workspace so what we need to do is we need to come over here to open first of all let's go to our desktop for wherever you have that photo downloaded for me it's on my desktop I'm going to go ahead and open it and then over here I can see it now what I want to do is I want to be able to go to my UV Maps over here and make sure we have the front projection selected and the little camera turned on that's really important then we're going to press a to select all of this and in our front orthographic view we're going to go here so we're going to press U on our keyboard and then go project from view so pressing the U key and project from View and over here we can see this now we want to actually see it here so if we go Z and we go material preview we can see in a second that there is nothing here so what we're going to do is quickly go over to our shading workspace and with this head material here which it currently has so this should have a material if it doesn't your whatever model you're working on just give it a material and then come to the base color just drag and type an image and just grab yourself an image texture and then simply go to the drop down here and then get that image that we've already opened up in blender it should be available and now we can see we can see this which is a mess we're going to go back to our UV editing and we should be in our material preview or you can even go up here change this to texture whatever you prefer the main idea here is we just want to be able to see the texture so if this all selected by pressing a we've already done a projection over here you can come over here and go s x and just flatten a little bit on the X and then s to scale and at this point you're going to have to kind of just match it up over here and what you can do is you go over here to your Edge select option so you can see through things a little bit better now this can be a little bit tricky so you might have to zoom in and look over here as well so let's start by taking the nose here so once you have approximately the size you're looking for so in this case I might make it a bit smaller what you're going to do is you're going to go over to your vertex select option and you're going to go to proportional editing and then you're going to come over here and zoom in and you're going to select the vertex and then pressing G you're going to move it and you can roll your middle Mouse button to control the fall off and you're going to line these up as best you can to the image so I'm going to go over here and I press G select this here it might be a little bit different for you depending on what you're working with but just line it up it's pretty easy and I'm going to grab the nose here I'm going to move it over to the side a little bit trying to line up the nostrils I think you guys kind of get the idea here of what we're doing okay and um let's grab the mouth here let's move the lips more in place you can see over here in real time you can actually select things and you can see if they're matching up so I'm going to bring the chin down a little bit till the lips match up better I'm going to adjust the corners of the lips you guys kind of see where we're going with this so I'm going to grab the nose here it's not really that hard and you just take your time lining things up and more time you spend with us the better it's going to be now the ears here you don't have to worry about because in real life you would do a second projection later on and handle that with a side image but for now I'm just going to take this and just take it as close as I can to the air over here even though that it's not really going to be relevant in a real situation so I'm just going to move that in I'm going to grab this move it in move this ear here but I think you guys get the idea and also the perspective here is actually perspective whereas in here we project it with orphographic so it's there are always limitations but we want to get as close as we can okay so over here it all looks like we've got a pretty good you could tab back out and you should be able to see without the wireframe in object mode this is what we have now you're probably wondering why don't we just leave it like this why do we have to do these two projections and the reason is is because we want a final map that is nice and clean because we can't really now go and put another texture here on the side so we want a final map that has some nice topology not this messy projection with a lot of overlaps so what we're going to do now that we have this in place our front projection is we're actually going to go now and click on our main map over here we're going to go back into solid view in this case I'm going to go over here and just go back to object okay and we're going to go to our main map and we're going to click on a little camera here in fact we don't even need to click on the camera just make sure you have the main map active and now what we're going to do is we're going to come over here we're going to go and do a nice UV projection so let's go over to our Edge select okay and then what we're going to do is we're going to select an edge or two up here and we're going to hold and shift and ALT and come down here and click and we're just going to work our way down in fact I don't think I selected the middle here so I'm going to make sure I get the middle so we're going to select the middle ones here going all the way back like this working our way down to the bottom here so we've got this nice line going to about here then we're going to go Ctrl e and we're going to go Mark same so we now have a seam then we're going to come here to the eyes and we're just going to shift and ALT click over here on this Edge shift and ALT click on this Edge to Loop select and then go Ctrl e and go Mark seam and there are a lot of different ways you can do this I'm going to select an edge going around the lip here Ctrl E mark seam and maybe the ears as well so I'm just going to go ahead and just select some topology around the ears like this I got the edge flowing around once again I'm holding in shift and ALT while I'm doing this so I can do multiple selections then I'm going to go Ctrl e and I'm going to go Mark same okay and now I'm going to go a to select everything and I'm going to go U and this time I'm just going to go unwrap not project from View so now over here we have this nice neat projection and for now I'm just going to come over here and just click on a little X just so we see our Square map like map space here and we're going to select all of this just rotate it and then s to scale it a little bit and then move it down at this point you can take these bits and just kind of move them around neaten them up a little bit I'll turn off proportional editing quickly so here you can see this is a much nicer UV layout than the rough projection that we did and what we're going to do now is we're going to transfer one to the other so we're going to take this projection here the front projection and and make a nice map so let's go ahead and do that now we're just going to click new I'm going to go to generate a type let's make it UV grid and let's make it 2048 so it's a bit bigger so 2048 by 20 48 pixels so that's double and let's go okay let's just come here and call it main texture and what we're going to do is we're going to go to our texture paint over here and let's once again just get rid of it over here come to the drop down let's select that main texture and we also want to go image save as and let's save that somewhere I'm going to save it to my desktop as a PNG and now we are ready to start using what we have here so let's press n on our keyboard to open up our tools here and what we're going to do is we're going to go to Tool and then what we want to do is you want to come over here to the texture slots and where it sees says here mode we want to change that to single image when I come to the drop down and select our main texture and the thing we want to also select is our main map so we've got the UV options here we have that front projection UV and the main map but make sure main map is selected once we've done these two things here what we're going to do is we're going to go over to our clone brush over here that's very important and now you're going to see this option down here under the brush settings called clone from paint slot and you're going to click on it going to come to the drop down and you're going to choose your Source let's choose that image over here so this is the one we downloaded from unsplash you can choose that and then you're going to go to your projection Source in this case we're going to go to front projection and now what you have is two different Maps now we're going to transfer to texture to a nice UV layout here with this nice map so now let's start painting I'm just going to left click and we're going to start painting and see now it's transferring beautifully and let's give ourselves a little bit more space over here and you can just come in here I'm just left clicking painting over it in fact we can grow our brush size a little bit and do it like this and you can keep going until it starts looking weird so in this case it's working at the front really well like this but obviously as you start getting to the side it's stretching a lot and it's at this point where I'm going to explain some things okay so what you can do now using this method is you can very Simply Now to have things up set up it should take much it should be much quicker now you're going to get a side image of a face right and what you can do now is you can go over to your object data properties you can go to your UV maps and now you can create another projection you can go over here and call it side projection okay and then you're going to do a side projection on a side image you get this whole thing that we did and then you're going to come back in here and you're going to use the Clone brush and you're going to paint now onto once again the main Maps you're transferring all of these different messy projections you're continually transferring them to this neat main map over here which is the whole idea of what we're doing here so this is how you do facial projection in a blender so I really hope you guys have enjoyed this tutorial and that you're able to do something with it so remember all of the resources are in the description below and feel free to give them a shout out see you guys next time for another tutorial

Channel: PIXXO 3D

Views: 37,811

Keywords: blender tutorial, how to model in blender, how to use blender, blender, blender tutorial for beginners

Id: iEDsK6L0CLA

Length: 11min 53sec (713 seconds)

Published: Sun May 21 2023