Character creation with Cinema 4D - Part 1

[Music] hello John here welcome to my series on character creation inside of cinema 4d we'll be creating a 3d character from scratch by the Angela picked up a few tips on modeling UV unwrapping and creating an animator friendly rig you should be somewhat comfortable with in cinema but there's tips in here for all levels of artists I keep it moving so any questions please ask below and I'll be happy to answer if you found this useful please like and subscribe before we get started I'm going to show you a tool that I'm going to be using a lot during the modeling process and that is the stitch and sew tool so I have an object here that I want to connect this edge and this edge if I select my stitch and sew tool grab a point on one edge and bring it to the other it's going to connect now if I hold down shift and bring that edge over it's going to create new geometry in the middle of those two edges and if I hold down control and click over to that edge it's going to join them right in the middle of those two edges first things up we're gonna start with the head we're gonna make a sphere we're gonna bring that into a hexahedron type and we're gonna bring the segment's down to 12 we want to work with this low poly information as possible we're gonna place an FFD to former as a child of that and what the f FD de former allows us to do is to alter the shape of primitives without making it editable really really powerful tool so I can click over into point mode here and I'm gonna push and pull around my points to get my basic head shape before making this an editable object so you don't have to copy my shape here you can come up with whatever funky looking head that you can think of a lot of this gonna be pushing and pulling around points let's get this forehead up here let's pull this back let's go to the front view and I'm gonna make it a little egg in shape and we're gonna scale it down the x-axis just pushing and pulling points here yeah that's starting to look pretty cool give it a big jawline here all right I think I'm happy with where that's at at the moment let's get the back of the head positioned here and look at that that's still just a primitive sphere next we're gonna start with the body bring a cylinder in let's get that into position let's take the caps off of the cylinder because we're gonna be connecting this up to the head and let's bring those segments right right down into eighth we'll give it a few height segments so we can play around with the geometry let's get this into place and just a general size here kind of looks good here we're gonna make that an editable object and now we can start to form the shape of what our body is going to be so I'm gonna go into line mode here and I'm gonna select the lines around my body and I'm going to start form this out into a cartoony shape give it a little bit of a belly here and we're gonna taper this down and we'll eventually be connecting this into our head so this will be our neck here and I'm just pushing and pulling around points let's extrude out our neck here and let's get that ready to be positioned so we can connect that with the head cool look at that now we're got very low geometry that's what we want to keep it at the moment so let's start on our arm here let's bring in another cylinder let's get that into place bring our radius right down again we don't want any caps on our cylinder and we're going to bring our rotation segments down to eight because that will be connecting up with our body and you'll see how this will work once we start connecting all of our objects get rid of those caps there and I like long skinny arms I guess I model after my self let's give it a couple of height segments so we can start to deform that arm a bit let's label these guys we'll make that editable let's shrink it down on the y-axis here cool and let's push and pull these out now what I like to do is bring it back in the z-axis at the elbow because once we start to get into rigging this gives our joints basic idea of what direction this arm will be going and we'll be doing the same thing for the legs to give it a little bit of a bend at the knees so here we are just shaping this arm up you don't have to copy mine exactly but we're just giving this some basic shape a little bigger at the shoulder will would be connecting into our body here that's looking pretty good hope going back into object mode let's get that positioned up where we think will be joining into the shoulder here pretty cool you can see that head is still a primitive object and let's add us another cylinder for our leg here let's get that into place let's bring our rotations down to four add a couple of height segments so we can add some detail on the legs take the caps off and get that into place and we can also make this an editable object we can push and pull these lines around I'm gonna bring this knee out a bit in the thigh and now the heel I'm gonna bring down a bit and let's just move these guys in to where we think is a good place for our leg pretty cool looking right now no no but bear with me and we'll have something surprisingly cool in a short amount of time all right we're gonna taper it down towards the bottom of the leg make it a bit wider at the thigh so you've got four objects in our scene we will be connecting these guys our head we can connect that with the FFT and make that an editable object so now we have all of our shapes is editable and we are going to combine them all into one object and we can call this body and now we can get ready to start connecting these objects all right let's go into point mode here and this is where we're gonna be lining up the head and the body oh I've deleted the wrong point here let's undo that all right we want to delete this point right in the middle so now you can see where we're gonna be joining up our body and our head to create the neck so let's go into our line mode now we're gonna make a loop selection here let's just get that into place and I'm gonna strewed that out a bit and start the basis of our neck still dealing with very low geometry count here so we're gonna shift select loop the neck here and we're going to stitch and so here and look at that we have a neck now if I put this into a subdivision on Victor you can see our character shape starting to come together here alright let's get a subdivision object for the moment and let's attach our arm to the body however we want to do this let's make a loop cut along the body here and just about where we want to connect into the shoulder here and then in the middle and we're gonna add another right in the middle of our intersection here no I'll show you a little trick here let's go into our line cut here restrict it to our selection and we are going to cut from all the corners into this middle point here for our shoulder so we have eight lines that were connecting from and one last cut here and if I go into point mode select that middle point and go to bevel with zero subdivisions I can make a circle and then maintain our quads coming from our shoulder we can get rid of that middle polygon and what I'm gonna do here let's bring down the shoulder here but what I want to do is pull out these shoulder points to get them on this same position in the Z direction so I am going to do a loop selection here let's go to our set point value and on the x-axis I am going to set that all to the same number here pull that out a bit and we're gonna be joining up our shoulder to our arm here so we're gonna do another loop selection here stitch and so and voila we have an arm that's connected so let's look at that I can start to see our character taking shape and we're still dealing with a very low polygonal count so we're gonna do the same thing with the leg down here first what we need to do is go into our bridge mode here and add some more geometry here now you see that our polygon here had a blue face we want to reverse that so our normals are aligned correctly to make another loop selection in the middle of our polygon here and we're going to pull this down in position or groin for lack of a better term into the correct position here so we can get this leg lined up and eventually connect it here let's slide this point up along here check out our geometry here so let's go back to our loop selection let's get this leg up into place we're gonna rotate that around and scale it up a little bit for our waist here we're just gonna get into a general place here nothing scientific about this you expand up our hip size here we've gone past the zero in X over here so just bring this down a bit we're pushing and pulling all right let's grab both of our loop selections here and we're stitching and sewing we have a leg all right I'm gonna grab all the points on the right side of the body and I'm going to delete those because our body is going to be symmetrical so let's just make sure that everything all these points are 0 in the x-axis here let's go into our set point value and set it to zero in the x value now we're going to add a symmetry object and make the body a child of that symmetry look at that we have two sides to our body pretty cool and we can start to see this guy taking shape here let's get that out of subdivision mode here and we can start to work on our hands and feet so we're going to bring on a cube here and we're just gonna get that into a rough location and size pushing and pulling it around that's pretty big hand in the y-axis so let's get it down into shape here it's looking like it's a pretty good hand let's rotate that a bit and I'm just gonna make a pretty basic hand shape here no my fingers are gonna be combined into one shape and then I'll have a thumb off shooting on to that so let's add a little bit more geometry here we want the same amount of lines around our hand as we do at the end of our arm so we can make that editable get rid of that middle point there so we've got eight lines around our edge there and we have eight lines around the end of our arm to match so let's get these points into a position where we can better attach that into our arm let's scale this down I don't know there we go let's get this hand scaled down here and let's do a loop selection here bring up our wrist a little bit and bring it in to better match with our arm cool rotate that around a little bit all right now let's connect these objects like we have with the rest of our body parts and we can do loop selection on the end of our arm in the end of our hand stitching so and go up there that's how I want okay let's push and pull some of these hand points around so we can get a nicer shape for our hand here so our middle points we're just gonna pull in or pull out scale these guys down a little bit and just adding a little concave palm here no we can see when we put this into the subdivision surface we can start to see a smoother shape and we've got a hand on both sides because we're still in a symmetry object here let's grab our points let's hold these out just a little bit sorry I'm gonna go along than normal here let's pull out our points and make our hand just a little longer pushing and pulling always pushing and pulling alright let's bring in the far side of our hand here and that's starting to look pretty cool all right now let's think about where we want to place our thumb we're gonna bring in a cylinder and we are going to put x-axis here let's bring it into position and let's scale it down to our rough thumb size here let's get our radius right down here pull it here let's rotate and place it into position so where to go there it is cool and let's get our rotation segments right down to you guessed it eight because we're gonna want to tie that into our hand like we have the rest of our body parts let's pull it out here and let's add a few more height segments so we can deform thumb shape once we make it editable and I'm gonna just shape this thumb a little bit thumbs are kind of wide fat not very tall so let's bring it down in the y-axis look see what we did here our cylinder we're gonna grab all of our points what we're gonna do is optimize so that's gonna join our cap into the rest of our thumb here let's scale this down now we can grab our end point and we can pull that out a little bit and that's gonna be the tip of our thumb again at this point we're just gonna delete and we're going to be adding some cuts in sorry we can connect our objects here we're gonna make some cuts along our hand where our thumb will be joining up so there we go and then one in the middle for a good measure it's pretty good it's got a point mode here we can delete this point and let's grab our corner points and scale them in a little bit so we have a little bit more of a circular edge loop here so again we're gonna shift click where we want to join stitching so and we're going to attach these two objects cool now we have a thumb let's see how that looks it's a little goofy so we'll push and pull some of these points around but more or less you can start to see our character taking a little more shape so let's go into point mode and let's start pushing and pulling our thumb around until we're happy with our general shape so let's make it just a little shorter and at the base of it I think I'm gonna want to pull this out a little bit so let's move this hand down a little bit cool it's actually not looking too bad let's get out of our subdivision mode and let's grab the base of our thumb here and let's pull this out a little bit we want that little wider in there and for a stylized character this is starting to mmm not look too bad all right we have hands look at this guy let's get out of our subdivision mode and right what do we want to start on now I guess this guy needs feet let's just close up that Polly gonna hold the bottom and let's make a cut around where we would like our foot to come out of the body yeah right about there sure now let's grab our polygons at the front here and let's pull them out I'm going to go into extrude mode and extrude that a bit and pull out our feet Wow pretty cool let's get those points all lined up in the x-axis so let's grab all of those bottom the foot points go into our set point value mode we're gonna leave the X and the y we're gonna set it to the same value where we want it to be so that's all lined up along our ground now we can start pushing and pulling these points around in our foot to get it shaped out roughly here all right get our toe moved over a little bit there pull that guy out oh now we can always go back into our subdivision mode and see how that's starting to look let's make those a little longer now we will be adding more geometry into shape these feet out a little more but for right now let's just push and pull our points around go into our polygon mode face mode and let's make a cut around the sole of the foot and let's make a loop selection on those faces and let's extrude those out just a little bit and that'll give a little more detail in our foot know that looks a little too much let's undo that let's just pull it out just a tad go let's make a few more edge cuts here to give some more definition into our foot and we've got a shoe is starting to take shape here alright now look in the short amount of time how far we've gotten with this character okay I want to start working on the face here added in a nose and a mouth so let's make a cut along where we think we want to place the nose let's grab this polygon and we're gonna do an extrude inner and we're gonna bring that in a little bit remember we're in symmetry mode here so we can turn that off let's just delete this polygon here and we're gonna bring these points in to 0 on the x-axis using the set point value tool again so we're down to 0 great so now we have a nose on both side of our face we can go into our slide mode here and push and pull some of these points around to get the very very basic position of our points for our nose I can grab that polygon and we're gonna extrude this out now you see it's pulling out along the normal so we have to delete this polygon again and set these points back to 0 in the x-axis so our symmetry looks correct and look at that we have a nose how simple was that let's push and pull some of these points around to smooth off this nose a little bit but more or less that's like not a bad looking nose let's get to work on this mouth let's go into our polygon mode here let's make a loop selection around the middle of our mouth here and we are going to grab these two polygons and do another extrude inner get that mouth into position here again we're gonna get rid of these middle polygons and set let's get rid of this leftover polygons we can select all click optimize and that's gonna get rid of all of our unnecessary points let's set those all to zero in the x axis and let's get our basic mouth shape into position here and we can go to our slide tool and slide these points all along their edges here get a very very basic mouth shape I'm gonna grab these polygons here get out of symmetry mode for the moment and we are going to extrude that back into the mouth fun stuff we can get rid of those polygons again we can select all of our points and optimize again and get rid of unnecessary points oops I've got this guy selected we just want to pull these points into zero on the x-axis again there we go if we go back into symmetry we have a mouth look at that and that needs a little bit work okay what I'm gonna do here is that I'm going to connect this body and it's symmetry and I'm gonna make that into one object I'm gonna do this a few times you'll see me do this when I am modeling just so we're getting this mouth into shape I will be deleting the right side of that body and putting that in back into symmetry mode but it's just something I will do every once in a while so let's push and pull these points and lines around our mouth until we're happy with our basic shape okay no I'm gonna scale that up a bit and let's push this adding a little more definition with an extrude no we can go to our side view and we are going to make the inside of our mouth a bit bigger so we're not seeing the walls of our mouth from outside let's just make these hole lines a little bigger inside that mouth now we can see our cool-looking mouth start to take shape the lip is a little harsh on the edges here so let's make a loop cut around the mouth and we can push and pull some of these points actually we want to think of it let's do another loop cut on the inside of the mouth so those middle points are going to be our lip and let's smooth their transition into the surrounding geometry so let's always switch back and forth into our subdivision mode just to see how our character is going to look it may look a little funky while we're dealing with our low polygon count character but when we switch over into subdivision mode you you get a better idea of how our end character is going to look so we're always pushing and pulling around points let's see let's grab the right side of our body I'm going to delete that half again and let's do a loop selection make sure that we are in zero in the x-axis we're gonna add our symmetry object back in put our character into it and look at that now we can push and pull on the side of our mouth and what we do on the left side our mouth is going to have on the right side because we are inside of that symmetry object let's pull these points down a little bit and let's soften our edges here look at that you can really start to see our mouth taking shape here well the edge is a little harsh for my liking at the moment but we can take care of that pretty easily let's grab that middle point here and let's just soften that in we can see when we go in a subdivision mode look at that alright cool so we've got a nose and a mouth aren't looking too bad with the Purdy low polygon count let's just grab some of these mouth points here and pull out our upper lip then you guys can play around with these shapes for as little or as long as you want until you're happy with how your character is shaping up okay let's create some eyeballs we're gonna bring in a sphere and let's get that into position let's rotate that 90 degrees around our P heading and let's place that where we want it pants bring the radius right down on that and let's pull it out to the front of our head we are going to place an FFD deformer inside of that sphere give it a few more points to play with there we go and again we can switch over into our point mode and we can start to shape up our eye so I want to stylize this a lot and make it into a teardrop shape for our cartoony eye let's bring that right down in the z-axis and let's just pinch it in along the top of our eye and you can start to see how I'm thinking I want my eye to look here just scaling our points around he looks a little stunned at the moment but I think we can get this looking halfway decent let's just bring this guy back where he's going to be meeting our face and let's get him rotated around and stuck to where we would like to place him along our face let's get him set right back and cool let's get our subdivision on we're gonna add another symmetry object here we're gonna place that eye inside of that sentry object so we have two eyeballs now whoo-hoo cool look at that let's just make sure we're labeling things as we go along we're not going to be making a ton of objects but you know it's nice to keep your projects semi coherent especially when you start making larger and larger scenes so let's start adding a little more detail into our character let's get these shoulders a little bigger here and let's push and pull out some points along our shoulder top and bottom here and let's get things spaced out here connect our symmetry object for our body here while we're playing around with some of this geometry let's grab this neck here and let's get this into place for where our cowl or line is going to meet for our shirt always checking how things look in the subdivision mode let's get this neck a little more defined in shape here now let's let's pull this chin out a little bit it's a little flat face so let's add a little more definition in the bottom of his jaw here that doesn't look too bad let's get back let's make a cut along our neck here so we have a little more definition where our head meets our neck let's make a loop selection here and let's just scale the top of our neck in a little bit you have a little more shape into our neck that looks good let's make a cut along for the bottom of our shirt here and we are going to scale out the bottom edges of our shirt and then we're gonna make another loop cut at the bottom or the top of our pants here we're gonna scale that right in and that's our shirt you can pull these lines up and scale that edge in a little bit and oK you've got a shirt pretty easily with a few loop cuts let's bring the bottom our shirt down a little bit closer to the waist and that's looking alright let's make another loop cut in the middle the base of our shirt to give it a little more definition bottom now I'm going to again delete the right side of our body and we're gonna throw that into a symmetry object and we're going to get working on our shirt sleeves so let's scale the edge of our shirt out cool we're gonna make a loop cut where our arm will meet our shirt sleeve and we're going to scale that right down and we're going to push that inside of the end of our sleeve always switching back into subdivision mode to see how things are looking feel we need another cut in here so there we go starting to come together here that's a weird shape so let's go to our top view here and let's just grab all of our lines here and let's scale that in the z-axis bring that down a bit so we don't have as oval shape and cool well we've got our shirt starting to take form while we're in the symmetry object here we need to add the bottom of our pant leg here so we can make another loop cut just above where our shoe is and we can scale that out a little bit checking in our subdivision mode and let's make another loop cut here and we can see this definition on the bottom of our pants starting to take shape here so let's grab both these loins let's just pull this up above the shoe and that's starting to look pretty good and let's scale that up a bit all right got some bell-bottom action going here let's scale the rest of our pant leg up a bit to match and we can bring these guys in just a little bit so we're not intersecting on the x-axis and look at we've got our pants with just a couple of loop cuts and scaling out at the bottom all right just looking at this mouth a little bit think I want to tweak some of these points while we're still in symmetry mode here let's get out of subdivision mode and go into our point mode here and let's just smooth off some of these not a bit of a smile to the edge of our lips here the funny-looking character we have going on here right let's get rid of our ffd to former so we can't see it in our viewport here now I'm gonna commit this body to our symmetry again so we are all connected and we're going to make the color on our shirt let's do a loop cut where we want our color to be go into our edge tool and we can pull our collar up a little bit in our shirt you know we can scale that out a little bit again to get a little more definition we add in another loop cut and look at that we have our shirt our pants our shoes with just a few more cuts in our geometry we need to add some hair to this guy let's go into our polygon mode here and we are going to select the right side of our head of where we want to add our hair to again only selecting the sorry left side of the head and let's add a point there and let's split that from our body so we have new geometry to work with there add that into a symmetry object and we can hide our body and there's our awesome polygonal hair let's label that and put that in a subdivision surface it'll smooth out our hair a little bit just bring our subdivisions down a little bit let's connect that subdivision because we want to work with this add a little higher polygon count can go into our brush turn on smoothing here and what we're going to do is just smooth out the edges of our hair so we're gonna just using our brush just going along the edge of our hair and you can start to see this political block of hair start to take shape now let's just smooth all around our head oh it's not looking bad turn our body back on now we have the edges of our hair sticking up through our head which we don't want and we will take care of here a second let's just read the label list into hair let's select all of our polygons and let's scale it down a bit and we're going to grab a loop selection on our points here and we're also going to scale those right in so they're inside of our head let's grab our polygons again go into extrude mode and let's just pull those out a little bit awesome there's one level and let's do another level of extrusion look at that helmet he's got four hair okay let's go back into point mode here we've got our inner point selected which we don't want to affect so let's go to invert selection go back into our brush tool in our smoothing mode and we are just going to smooth his hair right back into his head and he's got some stylize polygonal hair going on here pretty much just want to do around the edges bring this top in a little bit wow he is going to be a ladies man let's get this all smoothed out here son dude yeah that's not looking too bad cool now let's add a little more definition into his hair here that's the way these corners but we want to make a part into his hair how would I go about doing that let's hide our body and let's grab our hair object and what I'm going to do is just select where I want my part to be I can go back into my brush mode and I'm going to select surface and let's bring the strength right down and if I control click and paint that I'm going to get a little separation in the polygon there and it's gonna push away from where I'm painting and we have a hair part starting to come in so look at that got a happy well maintained character here let's just get all of our objects properly labeled here cut our hair let's get that out of there let's start to add in some teeth I think that should be the last thing that we need to add to make our character a character and get on to our you ving process so let's add in a cube for a tooth and we are just gonna push it around until we get it into place and the right size for our tooth that's not going to be anything too crazy here so whatever values you find works for your tooth all right and we're always pushing and pulling around here we will be simply adding this into a cloner object to fill out the rest of our mouth all right let's make that a fillip object so we have some rounding on our edges bring the radius down a little bit that looks pretty cool got baby Huey going there we've got our tooth pretty much into place here let's put that inside of a cloner object we don't want it in the y-axis it's not about six teeth in here you can see that it is eight centimeters along the x-axis so we're gonna position those exactly eight centimeters apart I'm gonna add a little step rotation so it rotates back into our mouth so it rotates along our fake jaw line here and then in my x-axis I am going to put this over four centimeters because that's half of the eight in width that we are can now call this our L underscore upper teeth cool now what I'm going to do is go into my mirror tool and our naming we're gonna replace the L underscore with our underscore and axis we're gonna go XY and mirror so now we have our right upper teeth and what we can do is just in our rotation make make sure we're selected the right upper teeth go negative eight along our rotation there now you see that we have our upper teeth very cool let's group these into a null object here rename this upper teeth let's grab these guys and in the Y we're just gonna go yeah point to five just to stagger them up a little bit in the y-axis let's control drag this guy so we now have our lower teeth and let's get rid of the staggering that we just did because we want those all to be even along in the y-axis and just drag them down and back a little bit and let's get them placed in our mouth not hyper-realistic I know but it works for our stylized character that we've got here you know let's just see how everything looks in place here and let's turn our hair back on ups let's put an R on our hair and this is more or less what our character it's going to look like and we're ready to UV unwrap this guy and texture him

Channel: BigGreenMug

Views: 83,654

Keywords: cinema 4d, 3d modeling, big green mug, tutorial, process video, 3d character

Id: p0IyzJa-0Q0

Length: 50min 11sec (3011 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 11 2017