Character Creator 3 Tutorial - SkinGen UI & Basic Operation

hey everybody in this tutorial we're going to take a look at the new SkinGen feature for Character Creator 3 so i'm just going to basically talk about where everything is if you're a newbie to a SkinGen this is the tutorial for you we're going to talk about where you can find all the SkinGen assets as well as i'm going to talk briefly about layers and some of the functionality of layers as well okay so basically if you're wondering where all your SkinGen content is there's a couple of sections here in the Content Manager the first one is for skin which i've clicked on right now and under Skin we have various subcategories uh Overall Full Skin you can see them highlighted right here skin base we go down the the list here all the way down to like skin details and blemishes and we can you know twirl open Blemishes there we see... in Blemish we see freckles and moles and acne and stuff like that let's apply some freckles uh to our character if we go to the Realistic Human Skin uh... Realistic Human Skin pack that is a purchase pack from the Content Store we have a variety of additional stuff here i'm going to just apply this Face Freckle 3Heavy to my character we double click it it'll just apply to my character and you'll see some freckles appear on her face and you get the option to add or replace a layer we'll just go ahead and add these freckles on and there you see our character has some additional freckles and this also opens up the SkinGen panel otherwise known previously as the Appearance Editor here and you can see we have this new freckles panel right here we can make it visible or invisible those are the freckles that we just added on okay and there's other stuff like Acme and Suntan and if you purchase the Realistic Human Skin pack there's additional stuff available for you in here as well we'll talk about that a little bit later on all right but we can go down to like you know stuff like Acquired which are all the tattoos if you go in here there's like stuff like Dirt and various scars and uh tattoos and again Realistic Human Skin... Realistic Human Skin pack there's a bunch of other stuff as well that you can add on there uh and the Makeup is all found in the next section here under Makeup you can see up at the top we have some various subcategories for makeup too Full Makeup Foundation Makeup Eye Makeup they all correspond to the respective folders down here you can go through this way or you can go down here as well if we go to like Lip Makeup for example we click on that folder let's just throw in some of this Acid Purple makeup for example here and there we go with this funky uh purple uh makeup color on our character's face now and we can even throw in another layer you can see over here in the Skin section we have all the skin stuff um all the skin layers for our character and under here we have all the makeup layers for our character as well okay and you can see we have right now the lips and the eyebrows we can take the lips off we'll talk more about this a little bit later on and i can add this Cordial as well we can add it on top of that uh acid purple color just to get a kind of interesting combination there and we'll talk about combining these all together in a little bit here now in order to understand your character's structure it's very important that you understand what a material is so over here in the uh SkinGen tab here you can see that we have material set to Head and there's also various other materials on the... on the character as well the Head and the Body material and you'll see that each material will have its own set of layers here so if we switch from Head over to Body we will see the Body has some uh you know different uh layers on there as well Naval capillaries and all that stuff we can go over here to uh Arm as well and the arm just has one single Elbow Decal just for the wrinkles on the elbow there and also for the leg there's a couple of noise layers there on the leg and finally we also have the nails as well here's a little diagram to show you which materials correspond with which areas of the body just keep that in mind you can apply different materials to each section of the body as outlined here in this diagram so the Skin and the Makeup sections in your Content Manager correspond with these two sections in the modify panel as well these uh in the SkinGen editor here the skin section and the makeup section and you can find all the corresponding layers that you can apply in their respective sections of the content manager and in the SkinGen panel you obviously have the Skin section the Makeup section as well as the Outfit section right below that you have all of your layer settings we're going to talk about materials in just a moment here as well as texture resolution and all that stuff and below that you have your layers your list of layers and your control list all the parameters that you can adjust for those respective layers now let's take a quick look at texture and blend mode right now we currently have the Head material selected and the texture is at 2048 by 2048 you can see if i zoom in really close we get some really nice details on the... on the cheeks a little discoloration under the eye and then you can see the pores and everything and if we pan down to the the chest as well you can see just you know slight moles and you know kind of subtle veins along the chest there so uh you know very detailed at 2048 by 2048 however sometimes for the sake of speed you may want to change the texture resolution to something lower so if i select the head i currently have the head selected right now they're all 2048 by 2048 if i change the head to uh say 256 by 256 what's going to happen is it's going to drastically reduce the resolution of the head there and you can see it's you know really really bland basically there's no details on it however if we go down to the chest you can see the chest resolution is still the same all right now if you want to update every material on the body at once what you can do is you can just go over here and select Update okay what that's going to do is that's going to update every single material on the body to 256 by 256 you can see now all those uh details are gone from the chest there just looks like uh really bland okay and there you go now if i change the head let's change the head back to let's go to the body uh just to make sure and check that it's a 256 x 256 you can see there it is okay and the arm as well 256 256 whoops and uh Leg and Nails so you can see when i select update they all update now if i for example went to the body and i was doing some editing on the body and i figured that you know i'm done the editing i can take it back to uh 2048 so i'm going to change my texture size to 2048 only on the body okay that'll just take a second to process and you can see the 2048 by 2048 texture is restored onto the body very nice and detailed there however if we pop up to the face you can see the face is uh still... the head rather is still very bland and uh blurry now if we change we don't have to go to Update if i change from the Body material up to the Head material as soon as you exit the material that you're working on say for example i change from Body to Head what's going to happen is now it's going to update all of those textures to 2048 by 2048 which is the texture that... texture resolution that i was just working on okay so you can see that the head resolution changes back to normal and now everything from the head to the body to the arms they are all back at 2048 so keep that in mind that you can update all the textures from here however if you also change materials it's going to update them all to the same texture resolution as the material you were just working on all right so let's go back to the Head here let's take a quick look at the Blend Mode alright so to uh demonstrate the Blend Mode i'm going to apply a quick Lip Makeup uh layer here to my character let's just go for the uh i don't know the Cordial here a nice uh plump uh red nice juicy red color and that will automatically bring my SkinGen tool over to the Makeup section here you can see we have the Lip uh layer that i just applied there as well as the eyebrows we can make both of them visible or invisible just like that okay no eyebrows is pretty freaky but if you you can see when i select the Lip layer here now we have the option for Blend Mode and there's four different blend modes Normal mode, Multiply, Overlay and Light these are the same as your blend modes in Photoshop basically if i select Normal what's going to happen is Normal is basically opaque it's going to completely cover the previous layer so there's nothing showing through if we change this from Normal to Multiply you can see Multiply basically multiplies the luminosity of the base color by the blend color so you get a darker more enhanced look on your blend if we change that to Overlay Overlay basically combines uh the Multiply and Screen blend modes um if your base color is light it's going to make it lighter on the top if your base color is dark it's going to make it darker uh just like that if we change from Overlay to Soft Light you can see it kind of just softens everything it can darken or lighten certain colors depending on the blend color uh basically it's like shining a diffuse spotlight on your image and you can see this image here has explanations for each individual uh Blend Mode you can kind of read them here and get more familiar with them that way all right now right below the layer settings section here we just talked about we have a couple of other options here this one is for show and hide if we open up this option here we can Show All Layers we can show the current... on the Current Material or for All Materials okay we can Hide All Layers on the Current Material or All Materials so for example if i hide all layers on... on the Current Material it's going to hide all the layers on the face so all of these um... uh ones here have been hidden and if we uh Ahow All Layers on the Current Material you can see that it looks a lot more natural we have those you know Freckle adjustments and everything added on there and of course you can do the same thing for Hide All Layers on All Materials and Show All Layers on All Materials as well now that'll be for the Head, Body, Arm... and so on and so forth keep that in mind you can also hide individual layers by clicking on the little eye icon here as well so there's the other freckles here you can see it's very slight a very slight effect we can take get rid of all this uh... let's get rid of them one by one so you can see which each one does here the Hemoglobin gives a little bit of rosiness capillaries on the cheeks there the uh kind of... the pores are a little bit harder to notice unless you zoom in but the secondary ones are fairly noticeable and again you can click on these one by one on the eye icon there make them visible or invisible you can also right click on the icon here and just go to uh... Show All Layers on Current Material... All Materials... Hide All Layers so same thing wherever you click... right click you can select and Show and Hide All Layers on the Current material or on All Materials there as well so unhide them let's go over to the Makeup section here really quickly and take a look at our character's Eyebrow layer now with eyebrow as with all layers you can actually Duplicate them as well once you click on them the Duplicate icon here becomes available and if we click on that it's just going to basically duplicate that Eyebrow layer you can see now we have two Eyebrow layers if we make one invisible you can see it basically just kind of thickens them a little bit almost makes them a little bit darker and if we take this Eyebrow_Copy we can adjust this by... you know maybe changing the Opacity we can increase the Opacity you can see the results up there this is the overall opacity we'll talk about that a little bit later on we can also go down here and do something like adjust the colors so if i take my Color under Material here i take the Color make it a little bit darker you can see we can increase or decrease the surrounding color there let's maybe just take this uh color swatch and choose that maybe something a little bit darker there so maybe something a little bit more like that and if we press okay you can see it just adds a little bit more uh you know thickness to those to those eyebrows because the background is darker so you know if you want thicker more uh you know interesting eyebrows you know you can just adjust the Color here you can adjust the Hue and the Brightness and of course the various other material parameters as well let's go back to the Skin section here and let's take a look at our freckles now if i select the freckles here beside the Duplicate we have an option here for a Mask we'll talk about that in a separate tutorial but beside that we have this one here which is uh... has a number of different options for Flatten... Make Static and Merge Visible Merge Down we'll talk about these one by one here so if i Flatten the selected layer what's going to happen here it's going to flatten this Freckle(0) okay it's only going to flatten this freckles uh... with the zero in parentheses there it's not going to flatten any of the other layers in my material i can flatten the entire material and All Materials as well but i'm only going to Flatten the selected layer in this case and you'll see that all these parameters i'll just keep the 2048 texture size press OK and you'll see all these parameters will disappear and we'll have only the option to adjust a few different uh texture maps here including the BaseColor map now if you can see my BaseColor map is like this currently if i want i can just double click on that swatch there and replace it we're going to use... this image right here i'll just double click that and replace it you can see now our freckles have been replaced with... you know almost like blotchy um... kind of skin disease kind of freckles there so that's what we've done there um now once you've flattened your layer that's the only thing you can adjust you can only adjust these uh... these maps right here so if i wanted to adjust the Normal map i can just do that as well and the other maps Roughness and whatnot i can adjust these however i only have one for the BaseColor map in this case and i'm going to Ctrl Z that we're going to get rid of this skin issue uh... just by Ctrl Zing it if only... if only you could do that in real life but that's basically what flattening a layer does and flattening a layer will actually save... help to save resources when you're loading up your uh... when you're adjusting your layer when you're loading up that section of your uh... SkinGen editor i'm just going to Ctrl Z this again here this will take it back to the original layer with the various different parameters which you can see here a lot more stuff we can adjust all right now next we're going to talk about options for making your layer static flattening your layers as well as merging your layers now in this image here you can see a number of different options that you can use to activate your editor a lot faster by saving resources and these are Make Static Flatten and Merge and we'll talk about these as we move along making static basically temporarily sets the layers into static mode and we're not going to be able to edit that you have to make them dynamic again we'll talk about that flattening them basically just kind of flatten everything you bake all the image layers and this greatly increases the speed when you're... you know switching modes in SkinGen and merging basically merges all the layers into a single texture and we'll go through that as well in just a moment here okay so let's talk about the Make Static option first okay so we can select any... any of the layers here doesn't really matter let's go over here and under Flatten and select Make Static now we can choose Make Static for the selected layer uh the Current Material and All Materials as well so if i wanted to Make Static the Current Material for example that'll make all the layers static so i'm going to go ahead and select Current Material and change it to 2048 by 2048 that's fine and what will happen here is you'll see the kind of the images for each layer have gone gray there's a little gray uh... border on this on the left side here as opposed to green and if we select them all the only option we have here is to edit the layer mask okay we don't have the option to edit anything else so Base Color if we double click on that Normal nothing okay Freckle, Hemoglobin all these layers same thing i can double click on the Mask though and we can adjust the Mask if we want but i'm not going to do that in this case all right you can make each individual layer dynamic by clicking on Make Dynamic here okay so for the Freckle one you'll see it between returns to the green border on the left there and all the others remain gray if you want to make them all dynamic let's just go to Make Dynamic and select Current Material okay and now you can see the return... they all return to the green border on the side and we can modify all the various parameters down there so let's talk about merging next okay so merging again saves resources you can Merge Visible i can merge the Current Material or All Materials again i'm just going to go ahead and merge the Current Material let's take a look what that does if we press OK notice that it basically merges everything into a single Skin Base and if we select that Skin Base we can see our Base Color map right here now this image will show you a before and after of your Base Color maps once you merge you can see the after Base Color map merges that Freckle layer onto my character's face okay so just be aware that any other layers you add once you merge those layers are also going to be baked into your Base Color map i'm going to Ctrl Z that really quickly and you can see all the layers returned to normal here now one special thing about merges there's an option for Merge Visible as well so for example if i make these uh... for this Freckle(0) here invisible and i go over here to my merge and now if i select merge... Merge Visible for the Current Material i won't have the freckles on that Base Color map however if i select Merge Down and i select merge Current Material let's go ahead and press OK if we go to our Skin Base here you'll see that those freckles will no longer appear in our Base Color map all right so i'm going to press Ctrl Z and quickly undo that whereas i'll have this visible and i right click and uh... you can also merge it down from here as well so Merge Down we'll go to uh... Current Material 2048 is okay if you go to our Skin Base now you can see in the Base Color map it will have those freckles and also the freckles will remain on a character's face so just keep that in mind when you're merging and you merge down um... anything that you have invisible will not be merged into the final... into the final merge i guess you can call it right now in addition to uh... you know merging all the layers and everything like that you can actually click and drag these uh... various effects on top of each other so all you need to do in this case is just like... say for example we click on the Capillary Cheek we can click and drag this layer just like this to the very top and again with this particular situation it's not going to make much of a difference i can take the freckles and click and drag them all the way down to uh... below everything and again because we're not really layering too much on top of each other it's not going to make much of an effect but that's more... more for like a makeup effect if you have makeup that's on you know... one layer on top of the other you can blend them in and basically kind of click and drag them and move them on one on top of the other for various different effects all right now in this section we're going to talk about material linking so you can actually apply material effects that affect multiple materials at the same time and that's what we're going to do right here so i'm going to go over here to my skin Blemish under Suntan Realistic Human Skin pack i'm going to apply this Sunburn Cloud to my character we're going to give him an insta-tan and you can see here that the poor guy forgot his suntan lotion got a little red on the chest and the arm area now currently we're on the Body material you can see we have the sun... Sunburn Noise and Sunburn Fullbody uh... layers here and the Sunburn Noise has all the effects and stuff uh... for the noise if we go over here to the Arm we have the same layers on the arm as well Sunburn Noise and a Fullbody here okay and all the same parameters and so on and so forth now if i go back to the Body here for example uh... notice at the top we have this section here that says Link Controls okay uh... link control currently it's activated we can deactivate it just by clicking it just like this okay uh... however right now it's active uh... if i go down to uh... let's say the colors... and i just see the Secondary Color of my uh sunburn here let's change it to something a little bit uh darker what's gonna happen is if i go down here maybe to uh like uh... not too dark but maybe i wanna burn the poor guy more than he is let's go ahead and select that color you can see that the chest will update there okay however the arm isn't updated even though Link Controls is on uh... in order to make the arm uh... correspond with the chest i need to go over here to Update under Texture okay so once i select Update then the arm is also going to update with that new change that i just made there okay you can see it's a lot darker there on the arms if i want i can just go back and make it a nice lighter color because that seems a little bit too uh... too dark i just press OK it's going to update on the chest again not on the arms so i need to go up here to Update and that'll update the arm as well now if i deselect Link Controls and uh currently i have Body selected i changed my Secondary Color to... let's say like a nice toasty red here for example and i press OK it's going to automatically update the chest it's not going to do anything with the arm it's only going to update the chest you can see right there i can change it back to... you know nice more tan color like i had before and it's only going to affect the chest and not the arms however if i select Link Controls and then i uh... you know adjust it to um... you know a nice um... toasty red again just like this and then i press OK again it's going to update on the chest and i need to go back to Update to transfer that effect to the arm and so you'll see the arm get a slight uh... tinge uh redder there okay just like the chest almost looks like a blotchy kind of skin condition there so that's Link Controls basically if you want the uh... the modifications to affect both uh... both materials what you need to do is you need to have Link Controls active and then you need to adjust... make your adjustments here and then go to Update okay if you don't have Link Controls active when you... when you up... do your Update it's not going to update to both materials now uh... there's certain things like Opacity up here this is overall opacity for this effect so if i select a Sunburn Noise uh this is not going to matter it's not going to matter if it's linked or not so if i go deselect link for example and i adjust the Opacity that's going to affect both materials the arm and the chest regardless of whether or not i have it linked okay just be aware of that in addition things like Sunburn Noise if i just enable the visibility even though i'm on the Body material it's going to affect both materials and if i go over to the Arm for example and do the same thing with the Sunburn Noise layer it's going to affect both materials there all right so just be aware of the linkage on those two the visibility and the Opacity up here all right and Opacity same thing for the arm as well all right so that's really all i want to show you in this UI tutorial uh thanks so much for watching and make sure you check out our forums as always at forum.reallusion.com and we have a lot of other... tons of other SkinGen tutorials you can check out as well and i hope to see you in the next video

Channel: Reallusion

Views: 27,556

Keywords: 3D character creator, create your own character, game character, royalty free 3D characters, rigged 3D character, character generator, Generate 3D characters, Make easy 3D characters, digital human shader, digital human, realistic 3D human, realtime human render, facial animation, skingen, realistic character, realistic skin, skin details, face details, skin texture, skin material, fantasy character, character makeup, sfx makeup, substance, texturingxyz, zbrush, reallusion

Id: OhcAUMel-fA

Length: 21min 45sec (1305 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 19 2020