Character Modeling and Rigging, Ghost with the Skin Modifier || Blender 2.93

[Music] in this one we'll be creating this ghost character right here i was planning on making a video about modeling a witch but it's taking a little longer than expected so the ghost is first if you want to see the witch video make sure to subscribe and if you want any of the character models you've seen this month all of them are available on my patreon including the rigs animations and environments from the thumbnails if you want another video about modeling a ghost character tade made a cute one that i really like and if you haven't heard of his channel it just hit 10 000 subscribers and it should definitely be on your radar really good stuff here's a summary of what i'll cover we'll start modeling the ghost using the skin modifier method that i've used in my other recent videos then we'll apply some of the modifiers so that we can add a face we'll make a simple rig so we can add poses and finally we'll add a material to bring it all together all right let's get started alright so here we are in blender i'm using version 2.93 for this one and for this ghost the way we're going to get started is just by adding in a plane right here tab into edit mode make sure all of these points are selected and you're in vertex select mode up here hit m and choose at center so these will all just merge into a single vert right here and now we just need to add a few modifiers so come over here to your modifier properties tab i'm going to add in a mirror modifier first then a skin modifier and then a subdivision surface modifier and i'll just bump that up to like three or something like that and we're going to be going into x-ray mode a lot for this which is alt z like that you can also get there by pressing this button up here and when you're in x-ray mode it's kind of hard to see the edges so i like to use a matte cap for this and you can turn that on up here and select matte cap and the one that i like to use lately is this normals one it shows you which way things are pointing and all that and it's much brighter and easier to see when you're in x-ray mode so if this is hard to follow and you want a little more explanation of how the skin modifier works you can watch this video right here so for this we're going to go into edit mode right here again make sure you're in vertex select for this and i'm just going to drag this up here and this is going to be our head so our ghost is going to be kind of like you know like the ghostbusters logo kind of ghost where it's pretty humanoid but it doesn't have legs instead it has this kind of like wispy tail thing so this is where our head will be and i'll just extrude that downward on the z axis like that and then we'll look from the side with three and we'll extrude this out like that and this will be our tail so you can scale points down with ctrl a like that or you can do that in the side panel by hitting n and choosing radius x and radius y right here you can just select both of them and drag them at the same time like that so i just need to scale some of these down so they're a little skinnier and if it looks too rigid like if it looks like that's too flat right here you can add a few more with ctrl r like that and just smooth it out slightly okay and i'll actually add another one up here and just move this all back a little like that okay so now i'll use ctrl r again to add a point in here this will be i guess where like the neck would be and then i'll put another point right here and this is where our chest is going to be and we're going to extrude arms from this and i'll extrude again and you can see this is way too big right now so i'll scale this part down quite a bit and we can play with this so if this looks like the chest is too wide right now you can pull this in closer both of these closer but if you scale this down too far you can see the the topology kind of changes a little bit so you really do have to play around with this quite a bit until you make sure that the shapes are looking the way you want if you scale it up quite a bit they will kind of merge together like that and it'll be a smoother shape so what i'll do is like keep this one pretty close and then extrude another one and then we can scale both of those up and i do want the end to get a little thinner like that i think that looks all right the head is a little flat on top i want it to be a little thinner like that but actually i'm going to put a little tail on the head too so i'll bring this out like that and we'll scale both of these down quite a bit i might have to play with this a little also until we get a shape that we think is good so i think maybe this would be better with a point in here to kind of like control where the the face is supposed to be that should probably be a little smaller also it's a lot of trial and error as you can see and you can control this point right here by moving it up and down or scaling it in and out like if you want to have more of an actual neck you can scale this down quite a bit like that to have like an actual face you know if you do this and you want more of a chin you would just add another point in here and scale that one up also like that so instead of the root being at the tail right here you can see this little circle right here that's the root i'm gonna place that on the chest so just select the vert for the chest and choose mark root over here on the modifier and this just makes more sense when you convert it to an armature later so next we can give our character some fingers so this shouldn't be too hard i'll drag this up so it looks a little flatter another thing you can do is just select these two points if you want them to be completely flat select these two points and hit s to scale z and then zero and that will flatten it out on the z-axis now we can just extrude this a little on the x-axis right there and this is where we're going to extrude our fingers so our ghost is going to be a pretty simple character so i'm not even i'm not even going to give them a thumb and i want to flatten these out on the x-axis too so i'll hit s to scale x and then 0. we can select these again and extrude those out on the x-axis and then scale them down i might have to scale these ones down too because they look kind of broken right here so scale them down and hopefully they will look kind of normal eventually another thing we can do is just select this point right here and scale it up until that problem goes away which is something that usually works and that's why we have this one right here to act as our wrist because if we don't have that and we scale this up it'll just get bigger and bigger so this wrist kind of like stops it for us and we can select all of these if we want this to have a smoother slope and not get wide right here we can just select all of these points right here and scale those on the y axis to bring them closer but you might have to mess with the scaling to get them to not break you also want to check to see how big they are compared to the rest of your your character's body and right now they seem a little small so i actually think i might make them longer first bring these out a little you can just select them all and scale them like that so we have some like silly cartoony fingers right here i think that's looking all right so i think this is about as far as i want to go with the skin modifier so what i'm going to do is go back into object mode right here and before i go any further i'm going to duplicate this in case i want to go back and change anything so i'll duplicate it right here with shift d and right click so it's in the same spot and we can just hide the first one right there we know that this one has our modifiers unaltered so next we need to apply some of our modifiers so that we can add a face and we'll also create an armature at the same time so right now you can see without any of our modifiers on right here this is all we have it's just some sticks so we need the mirror modifier for our armature to be mirrored correctly so i'm going to apply the mirror modifier right here and before i apply the skin modifier i want to create an armature and you can see it creates an armature right here we have this skeleton now and we'll use that later but now we're going to apply the skin modifier right here i actually don't want this armature modifier right now this was added when i clicked the create armature button for the skin modifier so we can delete that and it's also going to create a whole bunch of vertex groups for us and i'm going to delete those two with this button right here you can just click that and go to delete all groups and now before i apply this i basically want to turn this down until it's as low poly as possible but looks like there's enough geometry for me to make a face so i think this might actually be good because i don't want to make the face very complex this looks like enough space for an eye and i can put the mouth right here so i'll just apply that too and if you want to smooth this back out you can put another one on so i'll just hit ctrl 2 to add a subdivision surface modifier back on top and you can see when we go into edit mode now we have a few more points to work with right here so i want to mirror this too which is kind of silly we just deleted our mirror modifier but we had to do that for our skin modifier to work correctly we have to do it in the right order so i'm actually going to delete half of this before going further so i'll just hit alt and left click right here and then i can delete all of these faces with x faces like that this is an easy way i found to delete half of your your object you just um you just delete one of the loops right here and then this floating piece you can just hit l on it to select it and then delete that also now we can go over here add the mirror modifier and just make sure you put it above your subdivision surface one uh or else there will be a weird seam in the middle so now just make sure you're in face select mode for this and i'm going to add an i right here so i'll select that face and hit i right there and if it's connected in the middle you just have to hit b and it will disconnect it like that so that's going to be our i and right here this is going to be our mouth and this i want to be connected in the middle so i'll hit b you can see it connects we can just make that as small as we want like that then i'll select both of these and extrude those on the y axis just a little and you can see it created the seam in the middle so i'm going to hit control z and before i extrude this i'll just hit clipping on the mirror modifier and it'll make it so that won't happen i'll extrude it now on the y-axis and you can see there's no seam in the middle and now if you want you can reshape the eyes so instead of the eyes being like very circular like that i'll just pull this face out a little maybe this one in to have some like longer eyes i can pull this one down and i'll pull that one up so we kind of have these longer eyes now and you can check from the side to see if you need to mess with any any of the points to make them look a little better sometimes you have to um pull them in or out like that but i think this is actually looking all right and i don't think we really need to do much to it it looks pretty clean okay so now we can get to rigging and this one i'm going to keep rigging pretty simple i'm not going to do a whole lot of ik i'm not going to be doing a whole lot of constraints or inverse kinematics or anything like that i do have a few other videos with more advanced rigging techniques that i learned and you can check out one of the videos here i also have a playlist that's just character creation and rigging and stuff like that so you can check that out too so first thing we'll do is just select our rig our armature right here and go into edit mode with tab and if we want to get rid of any of these points now is the time to do so so we might not need this point right here we can just select where they meet and hit control x and it will dissolve them we just have this one bone right now that will control our head by default when you create the armature with the skin modifier it uses sticks if you don't like the way those look you can chain change those by clicking this button right here object data properties it looks like a little running person you can go down to viewport display display as you can see it's set to stick usually it would be set to octahedral and that lets you see like the direction your bones are going so i don't like it when my root bone is connected so one thing you can do is just select all of these bones that are connected to it and alt p and clear parent like that and you should be able to move this around now but it's kind of silly you want to select those again and then select this one last i'm holding shift when i select all of these and hit control p and instead of connected use keep offset like that so now it's parented but you can see it's not actually connected you can tell it's parented because we have this dotted line right here so now it's a little more apparent why i put the root in the chest because when you create the armature it makes sure that all of the bones are like coming from that direction if you go back into pose mode you can see when you rotate this it only rotates the head or if you rotate this it's only rotating rotating from the end of the tail because of the way like the parent structure is like flowing it would be a little more annoying if whenever you uh moved the tail it moved the entire rig you'd have to flip everything around and do more editing so i like to put the root where i want all of the bones to flow from if that makes any sense so back in edit mode another thing we can do over here viewport display is turn the names on and if you want to be able to flip poses and mirror poses you should just delete half of your skeleton so i'll just select all of them on the left side right here the left side of our screen and hit x and delete bones and then you can select all of these ones over here everything else is in the middle so we don't have to worry about those we can right click names auto name left and right and it'll add an l over here and this is the right side of our screen but it's the left side of our character like if you were looking through the eyes so it gives them a dot l and with those still selected you can right click and symmetrize like that so now they should have the same names except one of them has a dot r and one of them has a dot l and when you do that it'll allow you in pose mode to change one side and if you want to you can mirror it by selecting those again hitting ctrl c and ctrl shift v and it'll mirror to the other side like that which is really useful when you're animating so i think we're at a point where we can parent our character to our armature so i can just select everything in here and hit alt g and alt r and that'll just reset the rotation and location back in object mode we can just select our character and then select our skeleton and ctrl p and parent with automatic weights and that's pretty much it now we should test it out by selecting our armature and hitting ctrl tab to go into pose mode we can move some bones around and see if they look good it looks a little rigid so you can select your character again go over here and one thing i like to do is try putting our armature modifier before the subdivision surface and sometimes that makes it look a little better and i think it does you can see it keeps it a little smoother now if you want to pose this around you totally can one thing i like to do and it's really useful for fingers and things like this tail right here is hit period and choose individual origins for your pivot point and now when you select a chain of bones like this and rotate it you can see it's like rotating each of them individually and you can get bones to curl like this so when we have this curling you can see it makes this look a little more rigid you can actually see the segments so one thing you can do to fix that or make it a little smoother is use bendy bones but to see the bendy bones properly we have to change this from octahedral to b bone and now these are big and chunky and i don't like the way they look so you can actually scale these you can hit a to select all of them and f3 and just search for scale and you want to use scale b bone and now you can scale them down to make them as thin or as thick as you want so just select the bones that you want to have multiple segments so i'll just select these ones right here and then you can click this one bone properties like that and you can see we have this option this menu uh for bendy bones so when you have multiple selected you want to hold alt before you change this or else it will only change one like that so when you hold alt it will change all of them so i'll just turn this up to something like six and you can see it's a little smoother now we could also see what it looks like when we move this too so we can just test it out i think that actually looks pretty good and it looks a lot smoother now it doesn't look as segmented if you want you could do the same thing for your arms too one thing that i didn't do is add an elbow so unfortunately if you wanted to do that you'd have to go in here you could just select both of these and subdivide them but when you do that it's probably gonna break the weight painting and you can see that it did so if you do add some bones and it ends up breaking uh your weight painting and it's not deforming correctly all you have to do to fix it is select all of your bones in pose mode make sure you select all of them you can just hit a and then exit to object mode select your mesh go up into weight paint mode right here and then up in weights you can choose assign automatic from bones and if it works correctly it should basically do the automatic weight painting again with all of the bones that you had selected and we can check that see if it worked by selecting our armature again and going back into pose mode and testing it out and it seems like it worked all right now we'll add a material to this so we'll go up to the shading tab right here so i'm using look dev for this and i'm just going to add all the materials in eevee but this should work fine in cycles too i tested it out in a different file so before i start i'm just going to make sure that there's like a light in our scene and i already have one up here and i'll just move that a little closer and if you're using look dev and you want the lights to actually work you have to go up here and choose scene lights like that and now you can see it's actually making a difference and i'm going to make this a little darker by going up here and changing the strength down quite a bit like that shade that smooth and now with that selected i'm just going to turn off overlays and gizmos just so we can see a little more clearly okay now we can add a new material up here we're actually not going to be using the principled shader this time so you can just delete that what we're going to do is add in a diffuse and a transparent and we're going to mix these two together with a mix shader like this so you can just plug these into the first two slots and then we'll plug it in and if you're using ev this the transparency might not work correctly so what you can do to make it work is hit n in here and go to options so when you change the blend mode from opaque to alpha blend it will work with the transparency now but it still looks a little broken and that's because we have to turn show back face off like that and now it'll work the way you expect it basically so we're actually going to blend between this with a different node called layer weight and we can preview that with ctrl shift and left click like that and i'm going to use facing right here so i'll plug the facing into the factor and now we'll plug that back in and if you want this to have a more extreme effect you can bring in a map range and put it in here and it looks like these are flipped so i'm just gonna plug them in like that to flip them around because what i want is the outside to be visible and the inside to be a little more transparent so we can move the from in and from max around to get some different results if we want and if you want to change it so it's not completely transparent that would be changing the two min so we could change that to something like point one so that you never see all the way through it's never completely transparent i also like to change this from linear to smoother step just to create a slightly smoother fall off personally i like the way this looks i like being able to see through the ghost i think it's kind of neat another thing you can do if you want your ghost to glow in the dark to explain this i guess i'll turn the strength all the way down if you want your ghost to glow in the dark you can bring in an add shader like this and add some emission to it like this and just add as much as you want basically change this to something like point one something like that you can use this color right here if you want it to look a little more natural i want some actual color in here instead of our ghost just being completely white so i'm going to use a method that i showed in my skin modifier video that i just made and that's by bringing in an image texture and using a palette i already have my palette loaded in here if you want to use this same palette you can download it for free on my gumroad i have a link in the description what we have to do is just select our ghost right here and i have my overlays and all that turned off so i'll just select my ghost right here tab into edit mode select everything and hit u to unwrap and just smart uv project like that and it should work fine you don't really have to worry about how clean this is and we'll just plug this color into the color of our diffuse right here and now you can see there are a bunch of colors added and these are just the colors that are in our palette i also like to change this from linear to closest and you can see all of those lines sharpened up now i'll also plug the color into the color of the emission too and i'll change this to like .05 or something like that and now to control where we want the colors to be we can go into uv editing right here and we just have to change this back to look dev so we can see the colors and if we zoom in here you can see all of our faces and all that so we can just select everything over here come over here to the uv editor and just hit s to scale and zero and that should scale everything down like that and now you can select this point and move it wherever you want to change the color so instead of just going for white i think i'm going to use like a really pale blue or something like that this is like a teal and then i'll just select the face for the eye right here and select that right there and for the mouth and hit control plus to expand the selection now you can see we have a little dot over here you can move that wherever you want so this is going to be a little more blue and a little darker and if you don't like the way this looks you can sharpen up these corners quite a bit by just selecting the loops right here right now i'm in edge select mode you can just select the loops right here for the eye and for the mouth and then hit n and you can turn the mean crease up like that to sharpen it so i'll just turn that up to like 0.5 or something and now we have some colors so you can see this node setup works in cycles too but you can see the tail and stuff through your character and if you flip it around you can kind of see the face through the back of the head too so if you don't want that to be the case it's a pretty easy fix you can just add another mix shader right here and we'll plug this transparent into the second one and we'll add a light path and the one that we're going to use to plug into the factor is transparent depth like that and you can see it clears it right up you can't see any of the back faces basically and you also can't see the face through the back of the head anymore alright that's it for this one once again you can find all my project files on patreon my next videos will be on modeling a witch character and a different animated ghost scene so subscribe if you don't want to miss those and leave a comment if you want to suggest other videos i'd like to thank my patrons for their support and i'd like to thank you for watching have a good one [Music]

Channel: Joey Carlino

Views: 9,108

Keywords: blender, cg, cgi, blender 2.9

Id: Xohpu92K8VI

Length: 24min 41sec (1481 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 19 2021