Hey, welcome to video number six. In this tutorial series for the ZBrush face tool plugin
for character creator 4. In this video,
we're going to concentrate on the dynamic wrinkles. We're going to create all those crevices and details
that are form when we have a different expression. And it is really, really fun. Is one of my favorite parts of the process,
and these plug in makes it really simple. We only have to tweak a few sets, 13 expression sets
and then character creator or the rig inside CC4 will take care of the rest
and it will apply to different wrinkles dynamically as we change the expression.
So it's a lot of fun. Let's go ahead and jump straight into it. All right. So before we get started with the sculpting
of the dynamic wrinkles in this video, I just want to give you a quick recap of what we did in the previous video,
which is, you know, this comparison that I have here on the on the screen, basically,
the character we started with in the previous video was the one on the left hand side,
a very weird, creepy smile and then we went ahead and we took the expression of
the smile to get something a bit more natural and more, more realistic and more genuine. So this process is very important
and this is the reason I'm highlighting it here, because in order to get the right wrinkles
or in order to get these dynamic wrinkles, we need to get these expressions right. So if you haven't actually completed the 13 expressions
for, you know, or tweak the 13 expressions to get something
that is more natural, then it's going to be a little bit harder to get
the dynamic wrinkles to work in in a natural way. So make sure that you tweak all your expressions
and then we're going to move on into the wrinkles. Now, let me give you an example of the wrinkles
or the dynamic wrinkles. So I have here this guy with an expression of,
I don't know, like shock or disgust or yeah, it's pretty surprise. And these wrinkles that you see
here are the top of the eyebrow. Some of the ones here with the
with the smearing of the of the nose they're not that that evident a little bit subtle here
the ones here at the corner of the mouth all of these are dynamic wrinkles. So let me give you a comparison before and after. So the one on the left hand side
is the same expression. Using the character
that we ended up with in the previous video. And the one on the right hand
side is with the dynamic wrinkles applied to it. as you can see, the one on the right hand
side is a lot more expressive and in my opinion it's a lot more natural. And this is all done thanks to the dynamic wrinkles. So we're going to move on from something like this
into something like that, basically. So we're going to add all of these details,
but you'll see it's a lot of fun. I just want to give you an example
of how the dynamic wrinkles actually work. It is really cool. so I want to reset these to zero
and this is the character that I ended up with. We all the dynamic wrinkles already apply to it.
So I want to come back to this. Let me go ahead and let's actually put them a pull
these nostrils up so you see, let's get closer here. What is happening. So it's just applying that wrinkle or those wrinkles
dynamically leave them as it is. And then let's go ahead and clear this up
and then use these controllers to pull the eyebrows down as well. There we go. So this is an angry expression. So that's pretty cool. Just remove
that. Going to set it back to zero. Just show you a couple more
with the corners of the mouth. And I'm just choosing
the ones that are more obvious, really. So you see, as he smiles, now we have this
additional level of detail with the smile, right. That he wasn't there before. So pay attention to the, you know, to the line
or to the fall that is form as I push this up. Right. So that's pretty cool. And you see also around the eyes
that there is also some extra lines that are appearing. And we can exaggerate that by, you know, pushing
the cheekbones or the cheeks up and squinting the eye. So all of this is happening dynamically and it just makes the whole expression
a lot more interesting and a lot more genuine. Obviously,
this is a bit too extreme, but you see the smile. It has changed things quite a bit, right? Let me also show you the eyebrows as we push them up and we get to the forehead
full of these nice wrinkles that look pretty realistic. I like I said, these ones are dynamically applied
to the animation or to the rig, Right. So basically we can sculpt these lines
in just one single layer, right. But then if I go ahead and only move,
let's say the left eyebrow up, you'll see how only this area would be applied on only the wrinkles in
this area would be applied, which is pretty cool. Right? So again, these are pretty exaggerated,
but as you can see, just adding these extra level of details
and these dynamic wrinkles really helped to push this this character into a much more realistic space,
even though it is somewhat stylized. So let's set this back to zero. what I'm going to do is actually load up the previous
file that we ended up with in the previous video. So this one is the one that I already, you know, already tweaked all the expression
and the dynamic wrinkle. So we're going to start from scratch, as in
we have all the expressions ready and we're going to focus only on creating those dynamic
wrinkles. So let me just show you what that looks like. So as you can see, it's pretty much the same thing. But now if I, let's say, push these eyebrows up, you know, it is working, but it doesn't generate
any extra wrinkles. So that's what we're going to concentrate
on doing in this in this lesson. Let me just show you also the corners of the mouth. I think these ones are pretty obvious as well to see it is working nicely, creating the nice expression,
but we don't have those extra lines. So let's go ahead and leave it just like smiling. And what I'm going to do is send these to ZBrush. I just want to mention that I don't have any version
of the ZBrush open at this point. And I think it's important to recognize
that it works as well without having ZBrush open. So what I'm going to do is click on Kevin
or the name of the character, right click on plugin ZBrush face tool,
and I want to click on Face Tool. So this process, if I click okay, best model
only again, the same deal we'd been doing before. This time I'm going to make sure I maintain the level
seven of the so that I can really get into the high level detail for the,
you know, for the crevices and all the wrinkles. I want to click on GOz. Now, this process is going to also start up ZBrush,
so it's pretty convenient. You only have to click one single button and adjust
a few settings if you want to have something specific. But other than that,
which is wait until see brush is open and the entire project is set up in ZBrush
and we continue from there. write. So here's the character in ZBrush. And I just want to point out something
that is quite interesting as well. So I do have multiple versions of ZBrush. I run different versions
depending on what I'm working on. So this one is version 2022.0.5. And as you can see, this is still my custom UI. So the cool thing about this
is that this is the version of ZBrush that I was working on
just before I load up this project. So it just recognizes the latest version
and it just opens that up. So I'm just going to go ahead
and create a new document. I'm going to make it double the size and drag these in
and want to change the material. And it's go ahead and click on preferences and Restore
the standard UI so that you can follow along. I'm also going to get rid of the 3D cam view
as well as the thumbnail here on the left hand side. So on that the preferences thumbnail and cam view,
I'm going to turn this off and off perfect. I'm also going to go and click on AAhalf. So it's going to show me half of the document you'll see when I click a have
because this is a larger document. I want to get rid of all these sort of anti-aliasing
and jagged edges. So let's click on that is a lot better. All right. So we are ready to continue these details
that you can see here. Those are created with the base
layer of the or the detail layer. So let's go ahead and talk this all for a second. And let me just set up the Z plugin back here. Here. And let's go ahead and open up these ZBrush Faisal's
There we go. So we have the detail layer enabled. Now the way that you edit these dynamic wrinkles
is, is the same way, the same process of sculpting in zeros. But the way that they work
in CC4 is slightly different. So there are completely different or a separate system
from the detail layer that we have here. So just keep that in mind. There will be like separate
layers of separate, is a separate system. So it's good to have a base, you know, a base
layer of details like I have you here already, and then you can add your expression
detail separately. Right. And I'm going to show you how you can
sort of compare the two. So if I go ahead and let's
go ahead and start with the start with the smile, because that's what we have currently. Let me just check. Yep.
So we have this smile here with the character. I want to click on Mouth Smile, click on that again,
the behind the scenes. So what the plugin is doing
is going through the subtitles, especially, you know, selecting the head, going to their layers
that have been generated based on the expressions and enabling that a specific layer that has the mouth smile
so that we can add the details. All right. So now we have this
and let's go ahead and open up the layers. You see the mouth Smile is currently recording. That's what the what the switch is doing. And we can go ahead and turn on and off
the detail layer so we can do it from this switch here. We can just click on this icon
right here, turn it on and off. There There we go. So this is currently
there's no details in this expression or in the dynamic wrinkles, but I can just go ahead
and turn on this layer, which again, it is the base layer, and then I will be able to see
both or the contribution of both details. Right. So that's pretty important. Let's go ahead and start recording again, just by enabling recording in the mouth smile
and we're going to create the first wrinkle, the first set of wrinkles. Now I'm going to also make sure that I'm in the high
so division level, which by default should be once we click on this one. so subdivision level seven. Perfect. And I'm going to go ahead
and bring in one of my custom brushes. So let's bring in the light box again.
It doesn't have to be these. You can use the damn standard brush. It's
a pretty good replacement to what I'm going to use. So I'm going to use the skin brushes within the skin brushes. I'm going to use the wrinkle pusher 2. So or maybe the wrinkle push
not the number to the normal one. This one is going to give you
a much more control effect. All right. I'll also want to make sure that I don't have symmetry
enabled because, you know, when you get to this level of detail,
very rarely you'll have a very symmetrical shape. So it's going to go ahead and add some lines in here,
maybe reduce the intensity a tiny bit. And these are the lines that are going to be formed when we have that this expression. I'd maybe pusher is a little bit too strong. Let's go with number two. Just a different way of generating these lines. Now we go. So just think about in terms of the expression,
just think about what are the areas that get pulled, like the skin gets pulled
and it generates these, you know, this contraction, these compression folds
or wrinkles around the face. So you probably won't need as much of these wrinkles
anymore because, you know, there's no compression. Yeah, we're actually pulling the skin up. There we go. and I'm going to actually use the dam standard brush
so you can follow along and it will give you a much more like a stronger
effect, really. So I'm going to push this like so. And this is another part of the process that is
really important to keep an eye on your references. Again, just look at the different expressions and see
what are the lines that are form, if you can compare, I mean, if you have a maybe an actor or something
that you have a couple of different expressions, just compare which lines are in a more neutral pose
or the opposite of all the smiling and then you will be able to see.
So I'm going to push this in a little more so you can see the effect and I kind of like I'm exaggerating things
a bit in here, but I just want to make sure that the effect is pretty evident
so you can see what I'm doing. You can also use the standard brush
and maybe add a tiny bit of volume. Again, just think that any volume that you add for
the wrinkles is going to be added as the normal number. So he's not going to actually displace
the geometry too much. That's done with the expression. If you want to add a tiny bit of volume, because ultimately when you add or when you create
wrinkles, you're ultimately adding volume. So there's going to be compression. And yeah, so this is kind of like the idea behind it. All right.
So this is pretty obvious. Just to make it even more obvious, I'm going to actually do some a couple of lines,
maybe with a thumbs on the brush, a couple of lines around here on the nose,
because that also gets compressed quite a bit. And you just accentuate those lines in there. There we go. All right. So I think that looks good. And if you want to compare the details that you did
and the crevices that you created compared to the you know, to the base layer of details,
you can just sort off the detail layer and you'll see it look, it's going to look
a little bit weird because it's just details on there on this specific mouth layer. So it's not it's not great, right? It looks like a little bit wonky,
but it doesn't matter. Remember, all of this is going to work nicely together. So as long as with this, you know, detail layer,
everything looks good. That's all you need. So that's it. That's how you can sculpt
a, you know, a series of wrinkles for a specific layer over a specific expression. Let's
go ahead and do a couple more. I want to click on the Browse race. I'm going to click on that one. And again, the same process there behind the scenes
is that it just switches to a different layer at once on the recording of that specific layer and that you can sculpt all your
all of your details in there in that layer and then you know, CC4 will take care
and dynamically apply it or assign those details. So I want to use a different brush. Let's use this one day Wrinkle Sharp
This is probably what I need for this one. All right? And you'll see that
I already kind of like defined some of these lines. So I'm just going to make use of them push this in. Just kind of like exaggerated
what I already have. Right. And as I show you in previous lessons,
you can go ahead and use this smooth brush and just completely smooth out this this indication of details
and then just create a new one completely. All right. Now, the other thing that you can do
so that you can really see the areas that you need to affect or tweak in
terms of the wrinkles is to enable the range. So I'm going to click on range and this is something
that we've used in the past, is just going to load up a texture file that, you know, contributes
to the areas that are going to be affected. When we use these brows and we just push them up. So we're going to concentrate the effect
on these areas. Let's go to render
we also covered these in previous videos. We're going to lower the opacity
a little bit, a switch the dam standard brush and push this all the way down a bit more, trying to maintain
like an asymmetrical detail here as well. So the model is more realistic. All right. Not too bad
that let's go ahead and add a bit of volume. Like I said, depending on how extreme this is,
we can add a bit of volume with the standard brush. So just adding a tiny bit of compression
and it's probably very visible. Like if you look at it from this angle,
it is pretty flat. So I'm just going to add a tiny bit of volume
and I'm not pressing very hard at all. But now if you look at it from the from the side
still needs a bit more volume actually. You see it has like these sort of compression
and is producing the bulging of these areas. All right.
So just keep in mind that everything that you're doing in terms of volumes
here is only going to be translated as a normal map. So if you want to, you know, edit this with the wrinkles and the expressions,
you can do it in one single one single go. and here's an important thing
to remember with these tutorial Here is my goal is to break down the process in easy,
digestible steps that you can follow. But if you want to, you can actually
create the wrinkles alongside your expression. So you can combine the effect of the previous video
and this one in a single go. So all I'm doing now is adding those details
in the high of the visual level. But I can very much
well go ahead and go to the geometry palette, maybe go to the subdivision level one,
maybe not that much. So the usual level two and I can actually edit
the volumes a little bit easier. It doesn't matter really in which subdivision level
you do it. It's just that working on larger,
you know, that's proportional changes on an increase in volumes like I'm doing right now
in a low subdivision level, it's a lot easier to control
and you end up with things that are a lot cleaner than if you try to do the same thing
in a high subdivision level. So really
what I'm doing right now is editing the expression similar to what we did in the previous video. And in this video all we doing is the same process,
but we're doing it in the highest subdivision level with all the details, The The really cool thing about this whole process
and what makes these plug ins so interesting is that we can decide at the time that we send it back to CC4
if we want to send the expressions that we edited. In other words, the,
the main sort of secondary volumes, some forms or if we want to send just the wrinkles
as a form of what I saw as a normal map or if we want to send both at the same time, don't worry,
I'm going to cover all of that in just a second, but I want to make sure that you understand
that the difference. So I'm breaking down these in different steps
or different videos, but you could if you wanted to add just expression
at the same time that you also tweak the, you know, the crevices
and all of these wrinkles that had form. So I'm happy with this one. Let's
go ahead and do one more before we wrap it up. Let's
go ahead and click on the Mouth Pucker for example. And because we have the range switch enable, is you
going to update the range or with a different texture? right? So subdivision level seven and I'm going to go ahead
and use the next use this on the brush. Actually to enhance the volume of some of these lines
as well. Again, look at the reference, see how they change? What are the volumes that are more prominent. And let's switch back to the dam standard brush. This is a process that takes time. And I would actually spend a lot more time
that what I'm doing right now. I just want to give you the overall workflow so that
you can, you know, spend time doing this on your own because at the end of the day, what I'm doing is
it's actually really simple as just a matter of, you know, use the references so that you get something
more realistic and, you know, be patient and adding those details manually.
But that is the idea, right? So I just added those those lines.
So that is perfect. right. So now let's go ahead and add one more actually
so that we can have a few options to compare it. So let's click on the Eye squint. So we've done 1, 2, 3,
and this one is going to be the fourth one. And And there we go. As you can see, this one is pretty limited or the range
that you can use to create these wrinkles is pretty limited. So let's go ahead and use the dam standard brush to add some lines like so. So I'm just going to exaggerate some of these compression folds that are form
when the characters sort of squint the eyes. So I'm just going to add a couple of them
in the same thing here. we can add a tiny bit more around the nose. All right. So not too bad. And I think I want to do one more just because
this area, we haven't touched it too much. So I'm going to click on nose sneer,
you don't have to turn on and off the layers. That's what they the plug in does automatically for you
so you can switch between one and the other and you will automatically be in that sort of layer
adjusting the, the wrinkles for that layer. All right.
So that's a little better. Let's go ahead and use the damps on the rush
to add sort of compressions here. And of course, we can also use the standard brush just to add a bit of volume. All right.
So I'm kind of like rushing through this process. Like I said, this is something that would take time
to adjust all of these things. it's actually a very fun practice
if you want to add these type of details. So I think we've done five,
and that's enough just to showcase the whole idea. I want to go ahead and click on update to
Character Creator and this is where the magic happens. All right.
So we get a popup window here and this is where we can decide
what are we going to actually send back to CC4 now, at this point, I just want to say that
if you're interested in seeing the entire process of me sculpting these details
and how I approach the adding of these wrinkles with these dynamic wrinkles in ZBrush, there is also a bonus lesson,
which is just the time lapse of me sculpting all the details for all the expressions
at the end of this video series. when you get to this window,
this is where it becomes relevant. Whether or not you decide to add
just your expression morphs and your wrinkles at the same time
because you can totally do it. So I want to turn of the base of this
because we're not doing anything with the base. And in here we can go ahead and the expression morphs
if we want to, right? If you these are some like large proportional changes
and you added more volume to it. You can totally update your expression morphs,
or you can just update the wrinkles to the normal maps. So you see, that's why you have these two here now, in order to keep things organized and every step
kind of like separate in its own video, I'm going to go ahead and turn all the expression
morph. This is what we did in the previous video. So right now we're just concentrating on the wrinkles. So you'll see we have the normal map enabled. So with these wrinkle to normal enable
and obviously are normal switch enable
which is going to be creating a normal map. want to actually change the resolution to 4k,
I want to deselect all. And then I'm going to enable
the ones that we actually tweak. So we tweak this one, the mouth pucker, the mouth smile
the nose sneer, and one more the brows up compress. I think now we did another one. So smile, brows raise, the eyes squint. All right, so these five
these are the ones that we worked on in these layers. Now, if you, you know, live everything
selected on send, that is not going to be a problem. It's just that, you know,
those expressions are going to have no wrinkles at all. But you can come back
tweak them later if you wanted to. So just those five.
So let's go ahead and click on update to CC4. All right. So file successfully export it. Let's go ahead and switch to CC4. And as you can see, we have these little pop up window
asking us why we want to do so. We're going to activate the expression wrinkles. This is because this current project doesn't
have any dynamic wrinkles, so I'm going to activate it or I'm going to click on update to activate that
and it's going to use that normal map that is created from what we sculpted in ZBrush and applied
dynamic wrinkles. So pretty simple stuff. You get this pop up, click on update
and then just wait a little bit. All right.
So CC4 finished generating all those dynamic wrinkles. And as you can see straight away,
it sort of like generates those maps. So let's go ahead and do a quick test
when I click on edit facial here. And it's actually use the corners of the mouth
and when I push these down and you see how these nice wrinkles that we created in
ZBrush, you know, just gets generated as we use or as we push these up, and we can do exactly
the same thing for the bottom one if we wanted to. So I would recommend just go through all the different
expressions and create the wrinkles for all of them. I want to also test the other ones that we created. So let's push the eyebrows up. So you see we just add these wrinkles. Yeah, that works perfectly fine.
We also have the mouth pucker actually. So the set is back down beat and I want to use this
controller to create those wrinkles here. Yeah.
So everything is working fine. You see, the wrinkles are generated dynamically. So a really easy,
a very, very convenient way of working. And as you can see the expression is very,
very powerful, right? Once you have these additional lines,
these dynamic wrinkles and when I said it back to zero and the other one that
we need to out is the squinting of the eyes, I think. Yeah. And the nose, the sneering of the nose. Yeah. So that's also working fine. We have those nice expressions happening here. Right. And the tiny wrinkles that we created for the eyes as well. When he squints. Perfect. So a lot of information
and a lot of things happening in this video. But ultimately,
all you have to do is send your character to ZBrush using the Face Tool plugin, in ZBrush
just go to the highest of level by clicking in the one that or in the expression
that you want to add your wrinkles to. The plugin is going to automatically
give you the range. If you have that enabled and you can in the high subdivision level, whether it's
the six subdivision level or the seven one, you can go ahead and add your wrinkles. Once you're happy with all of them, click on the character creator 4 and it automatically
is going to apply them in the system. So you'll have all your nice
wrinkles happening dynamically. Let's go ahead and test only one side
so that you can see what I mean. So remember, we sculpted the entire kind of like forehead
when the character had the eyebrows raised up. So right now I'm only pushing one up. And you see, we're still getting all those wrinkles
in one single, one single go. Right? So that's pretty cool. All right.
So that's about it for this video in the next one, we're going to concentrate
on actually creating a nice expression that we can use for a render. I'll see you there.
