Bringing a Galaxy Girl to Life in Blender - Flare Full Process Explained

today I'm going to be turning this character design into a 3D model but not just any 3D model we're going to make it look exactly like the reference image so that from all angles it looks like a 2d drawing I always start off my models in the exact same way and that's by bringing in my adjustable mannequin you can find a link to it in the description but I made it for myself to allow me to easily change the models proportions so that I can start sculpting and modeling more quickly to make my life easier I always match the camera resolution to the resolution of the reference image and this allows me to then view the reference image from the camera so I can start lining up the mannequin sometimes I'll play with the focal length of the camera if I see that the image looks very flat or has a lot of depth but for this one the default settings worked out perfectly at this point all I'm doing is pushing and pulling the mannequin around until it matches the reference pose there's really nothing fancy happening yet I'm just trying to get the model to line up with the image and keeping in mind that this is a 3D model I'm always checking it from every angle to make sure that the model flows nicely sometimes when modeling things from a single reference image they end up looking flat because you become so focused on making it look correct from one angle that you forget that the model has to exist in 3D space so it needs to look good from all angles this process usually only takes about 10 minutes and once the mannequin is roughly in place I can start sculpting to refine some more details so I can remesh the model and then I can start smoothing it out to remove all the joints and seam lines and I can easily do this with the inflate and smooth brushes I smooth out everything until the joints disappear and then I use the inflate brush to fill the area back in until it becomes relatively smooth after that I can do some basic sculpting with the clay strips brush to build up the forms sculpting isn't one of my strengths so I just roughly get all of the muscle shapes and anatomical details in place and then later I'll be refining this with retopology there are some amazing sculptors out there who can turn a model like this into a finished piece but that's not something I can do my sculpts always end up looking pretty bad but I know that I can fix it with modeling for the clothes I draw a mask and then use the mask extract tool which separates the masked area into its own object then I can sculpt until it matches the image what I'm doing here is called the blockout phase so all I'm doing is blocking out all of the major shapes and landmarks making sure that I have all of the different parts of the character in place it also helps to apply some materials to the different parts to get a feel for the proportions and how the lighting affects different areas if the model looks good with some simple materials you know you're on the right track the last thing I do is refine the face and add in some spheres For Eyes again at this point all I'm trying to do is roughly get things in place adding in the eyeballs really helps with getting the proportions of the face correct you'll see that I have to make some adjustments to make sure that the eyes fit but in the end makes for a better and more anatomically correct model once everything is in place and lined up with the image I need to start remodeling everything and the easiest way to do that is to get the character into a neutral pose I need to rig the character and essentially break the model until it's standing roughly in an A Pose the a or t pose is the most neutral pose because the arms and legs are away from the body allowing us to model easier in most cases you would probably model the character in a t pose from the very beginning but because I'm just working from one reference image I have to make the character in the pose then get them into a t- pose if this character had a model sheet then I could start from a t- pose but I'm limited to one image so that's why I have to model the character in the final POS First Once that's done I can start the process of retopology the faces of your character and how they flow are generally referred to as the topology so retopology means we're just remaking the model but this time we can make sure that things are more optimized and flow nicely the main reason for retopology is to reduce the number of faces on the mesh the fewer faces a model has the faster it can be rendered it can be textured easier and it will be easier to animate for my retopology I try to keep it as simple as possible I put a circle with eight vertices around all of the major landmarks of the body so the armpits elbows Eyes Ears neck and from here I know that all of these pieces should connect together because they have the same number of vertices it's just a big puzzle you have loops around the eyes and mouth and then you just have to connect them in a logical way there are guides that you can use for retopology but once you do it enough it becomes second nature and eventually you'll learn how to break the rules of topology like right here modeling hands is a pain so I can just steal these hands from an old model and attach them to the new one however you'll see that we end up with some triangles when connecting the hand this would worry a lot of beginners because most modeling tutorials tell you to keep everything as quads and the triangles are bad and in some cases that's true but it all depends on the use case sometimes the retopology just doesn't work out so you can use triangles to reduce the edge count so that areas join together you could easily hide some triangles under your characters hair or underneath clothes as long as the areas with triangles don't deform too much you can get away with it and in this case this is basically a statue it's not going to be a playable character in a game or animated in any way so having a few triangles here and there won't matter too much once the r topology for the body is finished I can start to do a bit of work on the material this effect is pretty cool and it's a pretty basic setup all I'm using is an image of stars and this is projected from the camera view so that whenever we rotate around the character the image will always stay in the same place this is fairly simple but but it allows me to really see what the character is going to look like when it's finished I also want to get the blue outline around the character so using the solidify modifier and a backface coling material we can create an outline but I don't want the outline everywhere it only shows up around the head hands and hips so I can use a Vertex group to control where it shows up all of the red areas will have the outline and the blue areas won't so now I can really get a sense for what the character is going to look like at this point I can just complete the rest of the retopology for the clothes following the exact same process process of putting eight vertices around the major landmarks of the mesh and then just connecting them in a way that makes sense with the whole character pretty much in place I can start working on the final Galaxy material I wanted to get a bit fancier with this by having depth to the Stars by giving it some Parallax I won't explain exactly how this works but the main concept is that we're taking the camera projection technique that I described earlier but instead of having it static to the camera we can do a bit of matth so when we rotate the camera the projected image actually moves and then by using multiple images that all move different amounts we can give the illusion that the different images are in front or behind one another another cool thing I'm doing here is using vertex groups as masks in the reference image I can see that the constellation only shows up across the hips so I can paint a black and white mask using vertex groups and then use this mask to only allow the constellation to show up on the hips I also use this same vertex group mask technique to remove the stars from the face at this point I can start posing the character to match the reference again this is exactly the same as the process I did at the beginning with the mannequin all I'm doing is posing the character to match the reference and because I did all of this work at the beginning you'll see me toggling on and off the mannequin to see where certain parts of the body should be at this stage the model looks pretty nice but we can take it one step further by adjusting the model to match the reference image exactly this is the step that takes a model from looking good to looking great concept artists spend so much time making specific decisions about a character and we need to honor those decisions and match them in 3D sometimes you'll hear the term off model and on model and these basically ask the question does your character look like the character in every situation on model sheets you'll see certain rules laid out by the concept artist whether it's certain shapes to stick with or Expressions that the character can and can't make and as 3D artists we also need to abide by these rules so that's what this step is I'm taking this model from a good-look model to a model that actually looks like the character I hope that you can see here that it makes a big difference the adjusted version looks a lot more Dynamic and the shapes are a lot more appealing the last thing to do now is to add line art I have a full line art video explaining all of the methods but I'm mostly using freestyle for the outlines around the clothes freestyle allows me to control the color of the lines which is a lot more difficult using the other methods so I can pick out certain lines like the seam around the shoulders and the creases in the hood and draw lines along these edges I also then project the texture from the shirt onto the model by using a separate UV map I have a regular UV map and one that I projected from the camera view you can then use the Clone brush in texture paint mode to copy the texture from the projected UV m map to the real UV map and then with a bit of clean up on the texture the model is done I did a small bit of Animation to bring it to life a bit but I'm really happy with how this turned out I love the character design and I love how the Galaxy material turned out I've uploaded a separate time-lapse video so if you want to watch that go ahead and check it out but I hope you enjoyed this process video and thanks for watching

Channel: Vertex Arcade

Views: 480,569

Keywords: blender, blender 3d, gaziter, galaxy, galaxy shader, blender character modelling, blender character tutorial, blender npr, blender texture painting, blender retopology, blender sculpting, blender rigging, wildfrost

Id: eHddD5OfuwI

Length: 8min 23sec (503 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 06 2024