Character Modeling, Skeleton With The Skin Modifier || Blender 2.93

[Music] in this one we'll be creating this skeleton character right here i put a few reference photos in the description if you want to use them to follow along and if you want to download the project file for this video which will include my texture and rigged character you can find that on patreon all of my characters this month will be put over there so it's a good month to join here's a quick summary of what we'll cover we'll start with the skull which will be basic low poly modeling and using the subdivision surface modifier to smooth things out for the body we'll use the skin modifier this makes all the bones pretty easy to make because we only have to model the edges and the modifier takes care of the rest and last we'll hop into the shader editor to create some simple materials and we'll use some texture painting to paint the eyes and nose black alright let's get started alright so here we are in blender i'm using version 2.93 for this one so first i'll just bring in the reference image for our skull so i'm just going to drag at the corner right here and open up the image editor you can press this little folder up here so a lot of the time people will put their references right in here on a plane so that they can model on top of it but when i drew this i didn't try to make it symmetrical really so i'm kind of just using it as reference over here and i'm not going to try to match it exactly but just try to get close so i'll start off with a cube shift a to add that in and i like to use a matte cap when i make things transparent and i like to use this one just when you go into transparent mode it's a little easier to see and i'm just going to hit ctrl 3 to add a subdivision surface modifier and then we can tab into edit mode and start editing i'm going to subdivide this first a little bit maybe like this much and i want it to be more spherical so there's actually a shortcut you can hit f3 and search sphere and you want to use mesh transform to sphere like that and then when you pull it it's turning into a sphere like that alright so now i'm just going into x-ray mode with alt z you can also do that with this button up here and i'm pretty much just going to push points around so i'll just try my best to make it look similar to the picture i know it's not going to be exact so don't worry too much about getting it perfect so this looks a little too wide oh yeah one thing you can do to make this a little easier is also delete half of your mesh so i'll just delete it and add a mirror modifier you just want to make sure that is above your subdivision service modifier like that or else you'll get that weird seam in the middle so now i can just select everything and kind of push it to the middle but if it's overlapping because i didn't turn clipping on so i'll just turn clipping on over here and now it should work fine when i push it towards the middle it looks like the curve is kind of like at the top right there so i'll just push this part up slightly like this you can also use proportional editing up here and then use the scroll wheel to change the area of influence just make sure to turn it off when you're done i'll pull some of these down to start the area where i'm going to make the teeth a thing that i'll be doing a lot in this one is selecting points or edges and hitting g twice to loop slide like that so i'll push those up because that's going to be where our teeth are are extruded from i'm also going to want this forward a little i think the front i should make a little thinner like that because these teeth are pretty small so i'm trying to keep a lot of the faces pretty similar size so this one right here is pretty big so i'm just gonna slide a few of these loops forward like that about halfway okay and now these planes right here just making sure i'm in uh face select so these faces right here i'm just going to select and hit s z and then start to flatten those a little make them a little flatter and also pull them in slightly and then i'm going to hit alt e and extrude individual faces and these will be the teeth right here but we need to clean these up a little first of all there's a face right here in the center that we need to delete so just select that delete it and now we can select some of these points and hit g twice to edge slide until the teeth look like they're good size and if you hit g twice like that you can see there's like a line that it's going on that it's sliding on and if you hold alt that line will extend and you can go further than you normally would be able to another thing i like to do is change my snapping up here to edge like that and now when you hit g to move it you can hold ctrl and it will snap two edges like that so i'll snap it here i'll actually snap take this other one and snap it there too and now i know that this line is going to be parallel so i can hit g twice and then alt and bring it back a little like that and i'll hit g twice like that too so now i know that these lines are parallel and i can do the same thing over here like that i like to select the bottoms of the teeth hit n to open up this side panel you can turn the mean crease all the way up to flatten the bottoms like that and that only works with the subdivision surface modifier and you can select these interfaces also and turn those up and it'll just make the teeth a little flatter like that so i'm just going to select both of these and push it in because i want the teeth to be a little more closer to the same size i guess you can also slide these points up here to change the angle that they're at so this one is all the way over there all right that's looking okay you can look from the side and see if the angle looks good to you i think i want it to kind of keep curving the same way as the face so i'll just pull them back a little like that and you can make them as long as you want looks like we need some cheekbones right here i think what i'll do is i can extrude them from here so i'll just select that face and hit e to extrude and then x to go on the x-axis also flatten it with s x and zero so it's flat on the x-axis like that you can pull this edge out a little and change the shape however you'd like and i'll take this edge and uh and i'll slide it with g slide it up like that the head still looks a little wide so i might take a few of these points in here and just bring them in i want to make sure that the teeth are going at a good angle too so it looks like i may need to move some of these around i'll pull that back slightly so it has a slight curve to it but i think maybe i'll pull this edge back like that and if any of these don't look very smooth to you you can change those if you want also okay next i'll work on the eyes so for this i'm going to be using this loop tools add-on but you don't have to buy it or download it or anything you just go to edit preferences add-ons and search for loop tools and it should be in here you can just turn it on so i'm just going to go into face select mode up here or you can hit three and i'm just gonna select all of these our eyes are pretty big so i'm selecting a lot of faces hit i and if it's snapped together in the middle like that you can hit b and when you do that they won't be connected anymore in the middle so i'll just pull that in very slightly and next you're going to want to turn clipping off for this go to loop tools circle and then you can scale it down i like to turn clipping off for that because if you don't then it merges a bunch of those points in the center before you get a chance to scale it down then i'm going to turn clipping back on and for this i like to switch up here the transportation print that transportation transformation orientation to normal and then you can kind of spin this around on the normal like z axis and now i'm just going to scale this around until it's a similar size as our eye a similar shape i think i can scale this up on the x like that and i'll spin it on the y move it around i want these to be far enough apart so that there's room for a nose in the middle this might be able to be smaller and lower now i'm gonna move this a little i'll slide that this way that way we have more room this is a little messy so you might have to come in here and push some of these around until it smooths out it just looks a little lumpy i'm just trying to push a few of these until it doesn't look like that also going to turn this black back to global i try to keep it pretty low poly so when i have to do things like this it doesn't take too long i'll just clean some of these up they're a little straighter now and you can select these faces inside e to extrude and s to scale and just bring it in slightly like that and you can pull it in to actually make like an indentation for the eye so i'm going to do that one more time like that and this this one right here i'm actually going to right click it go back into loop tools and circle again so that's more circular and then i'll scale that down and place this kind of where i have the little eyeball right there you can pull that back as far as you want really later we'll actually color the inside of these black i'm actually not going to do this little brow poking out i tried that earlier on a different model when i was practicing and it just didn't really look good when i was doing it that way so i'm not going to mess with it on this one but i just want to clean up some of these i'll bring this one up select some of these loops in here like this i'm going to bring this one up a little higher with loop slide like that i'll do that right here too so now i should be able to select this face and inset with i but i do want it to connect in the middle so i'll hit b like that and just scale it in very slightly now i can just select these and hit g twice to loop slide some of these until it looks like a good shape i'll just select that and bring it in because you can see the nose is pretty narrow i select some of these and slide it up even further so that i can make the nose taller i think that's a good shape just select that and set it again very slightly and then pull it in like that and if you don't like how it looks like if you think it needs to be more narrow or more wide you can select this face in here like that and you know control it that way i might need to change where some of the points are up here because it looks like it's shaped a little strange there's kind of a slight ridge you can see when i'm loop sliding with hitting g twice it kind of like locks two lines that become highlighted so whenever you hold alt it's that line that gets extended so if you want to go forward in this direction you have to go back a little until that line is highlighted like if it's going down then it's not going to go in the direction i want so and i think i want to make a slight indent at the base of the skull where the neck is going to go i'll just grab this and make sure that it goes up a little right here towards the bottom i can also slide this and i think i'll just pull this part up like that so there's like a slight indent now so next i'm going to get started with the body and i'm going to bring in my reference photo for that but instead of putting it over here like we did with the skull i'm actually going to be dropping it right in the viewport and modeling on top of it it'll be a little easier for me to reference it that way so i just navigated to the picture that i drew of the body and you can just drop it in like that and it should appear and if it doesn't you've got to make sure you're in object mode for this if you're in edit mode it doesn't really work so now i can just hit alt g and alt r reset the location rotation and i'll just rotate it 90 on the x so that it's facing the right way and i'll close this to make some more room because i'm not going to be using that reference anymore and then with the photo selected you can go down here to object data properties and you can change the opacity things like that so i'll make it pretty low and i'm also going to scale it up until i think the body looks like a decent size and i also want to move it as close to the center as possible obviously this isn't a symmetrical this drawing so i'm just kind of getting it close obviously when i model this i'm not going to be trying to get it exactly because this is a pretty rough sketch so now i want to lock this um an easy way to do that is coming up here and you can just click this button right here and it'll make it so you can't select it in the viewport and if you don't see that you've got to go up to this little filter button and then you can turn on which things you want to be able to see like that so i usually have selection visible in the viewport and visible in the render like that if you want some image references i'll release some photos i'll just take a picture of the final model and you can use that as a reference if you'd like but just know that you don't really have to know how to draw to make characters you can really reference anything you can reference photos you can reference other people's drawings for getting proportions that you like things like that you don't really have to to draw to model all right so to get started on the body i'm going to utilize the skin modifier quite a bit so i'll get started by adding in a plane i'll just drag this down here so we can actually see it tap into edit mode select everything and hit m and merge at center and that'll just create one single vert right here and then we can add our modifiers onto there so i'll come over here to the modifier panel modifier properties and add in a mirror modifier i'll turn the merge up a little higher so that we don't have to get as close to the center for it to merge then i'll add in a skin modifier you can see it has some thickness now and i'll also add in a subdivision surface modifier and turn the viewport levels up to two like that now we can tab into edit mode and hit alt z to go into x-ray or once again just hit the button up here we can scale this down with control a if you want a more in-depth tutorial on how to use the skin modifier to make characters my last video is about that and you can check that out i'll put a link up here so i'll just scale this down quite a bit so i think i'll stick to the right half because when we hit 3 that is the side that we're actually looking at so i i try to keep things consistent when possible and i'll also hide the head for this so i'll start with the spine and just e to extrude and i can hold z to constrain it on the z-axis and just bring it down right here so that's going to be our spine and actually let's look from the side now make sure that this is actually connecting to the skull up here so that should be high enough i'm also going to drag this so that i know it's going into that little indentation that we made select this again back in edit mode and x-ray and i'll use ctrl r to put another point in the middle so we can give this a slight curve something like that now what we can do is we can just take one point and duplicate it with shift d like that and if when you do this there's no thickness wrapped around here you just have to make sure that each separate disconnected part has its own root so it might be hard to see in the recording but there is a circle around this point right here and that means that it's the root this is something that's important with the skin modifier select a point and hit mark root over here and that'll add a root so i'll get started on the collarbone right here i don't actually want it to connect in the middle right here so i'll just keep them kind of close scale it down a little like that and just get a shape that looks pretty close and if your image is getting in the way you can either change the opacity or you can just hide it so i know this part lower part is supposed to be in the front and this part is supposed to be in the back slightly like that and this i might want to bring a little further back and closer to the center like that and if they're merging too soon you can always come in here and change the merge distance to something smaller so i'll change it to 0.01 so we can get it a little closer basically just want it to connect to the back of the spine i'll do the same thing for this one i'll just bring it in a little closer so to smooth this out one thing that you could do normally is just come in here and add another subdivision surface modifier and instead of putting it at the very end you put it at the very beginning and it will smooth things out like that but sometimes this gives me some errors because what it's doing is adding in multiple points in here before it gets to the skin modifier and sometimes it can mess with when you're scaling these up and down so i think for this instance instead of using this method i'm actually just going to be more destructive and bevel these so to bevel uh vertices you can hit ctrl shift and b like that and you can just go as far as you feel like you need to and if you hit c that will make it so they can't overlap and you can just bring them as high as you want or as close as you want until they're overlapping basically and you'll see it creates a little glitch but we can clear that up later and you can add more segments by scrolling with your scroll wheel on your mouse like that so i'll just add a few until it looks smooth enough and right now we are gonna have two that are overlapping right here so you can just select everything hit m and then merge by distance and that will make those two points merge because they're right on top of each other so this is pretty much what we're going to be doing for the entire skeleton so i'm going to duplicate this point right here and we're going to get started on the ribs so i'll start in the center right here so i'll extrude that out you can see it disappeared once again that's because this is a separate piece and we need to add a root so with that selected just hit mark root and you can see it cleared right up and i'll extrude this back like that and then on the x-axis and once again i don't want it to merge in the back i just want it to connect to the spine so i'll push that back right here and i think this front part i'll pull it forward a little so that our ribcage actually has a little more depth to it and if we want we could also pull this part forward too but i would recommend because we have all these points in here using proportional editing for that and you should also change this to connected only because otherwise it's going to be pulling everything else around it but if you choose connected only it will only work for things that are actually connected you can see you can turn it up as high as you want and because nothing else is connected it'll only affect the collarbone like that and then turn it off when you're done for the ribs i'm going to extrude this down the front and this is going to be like the sternum i'm making bones that exist in the human body but i'm not being very strict about how accurate the anatomy is so you know this is pretty cartoony so don't fret too much about making things completely accurate unless that's actually what you're trying to do and i'll put a point in the middle with ctrl r it looks like i added it to the wrong part so i'll add it to right here instead i'll make this a little more dim and if yours isn't looking like it's merging correctly in the center you might have to scale some of these points around with ctrl a you can also control them in the side with these two values right here mean radius x and mean radius y you can just select both of them like that i'll add a point right here so i can put a little bend there also keep it kind of similar if you want to go into orthographic view but from behind you can hit 1 on your numpad but hold ctrl while you do it and that will flip it around view it from the opposite side i should pull these a little closer you can hide this to get a better look at your reference underneath we should smooth these out just like we did with the collarbones so i'll just select these points right here and ctrl shift b to bevel those but i think what i'm going to do is back out of that and get rid of these right here first and maybe add them in after so select these again and bevel them as far as they'll go merge the points that are on top of each other like that and now i should be able to select these points right here and just drag them down slightly like that maybe i'll enable proportional editing for this so i can smooth it out a little while i'm doing that make sure that the collarbone isn't cutting into our ribs and overlapping too much so bring this forward a little like that and just play with this until you think it looks good okay so next i'll get started on the hips so i'm just going to select this point and duplicate it and i want this to actually merge in the center and i want it to start where the spine ends and then i'll just create a loop that goes up like this and merges back and we probably need another point right here and then i'll bring those two points forward like that so we're creating kind of a little like base for our spine to sit in and for our legs to start and eventually we will smooth this out also and we can connect these two points right here by selecting those two and hitting f like that and you might have to scale these around or mess with this point right here because right now you can see it's a little broken that's just one of the quirks the skin modifier that looks pretty good now i think i'm going to add another point up here though to control the shape a little better it looks like this might be a little wider than our reference so i can pull it up so select these two now only those two and ctrl shift b to bevel them like that and then i just want to merge those points that are overlapping with m and merge by distance so i'll get started on the legs and the arms but i should mention when i do this i'm actually going to skip the joints and i'll make those separately without the skin modifier i'll just use like rounded cubes or something like that so i'll get started i have to move over to the left side for this left side of the screen for the arm because i didn't draw the right side so i'll just select a point and duplicate it bring it over like this and i'm just going to go like all the way down right here just so i know both segments of my arm will be parallel basically and i'll just hit ctrl r to add a point in here and loop slide that with g twice and when i get to a spot i want i'll hit ctrl shift b to bevel it but i want to make it so there's only two points then i'll select that edge right there and i'm just going to delete it delete edges now i'll have to add a root to this so that the skin modifier works properly so with this i want to create more complexity with the shape so i'll hit ctrl r to add a point in here and i'll bevel that too and move it to the edge and select those two points and scale them down slightly or i can scale the ends up a little just to create a little uh dip in the bones and it just makes it a little more interesting shape in my opinion so i like doing that so for this part of the arm in real life you know on the real human body this will actually be two bones that like rotate around each other so what i'll do is just select these and scale them down so they're a little thinner like that and then i'll add a point in the middle with ctrl r and i'll pull it out like that very slightly and then i'll connect the ends right here by selecting them and hitting f and again add another point in the middle and pull it out so now we have like a kind of an oval shape or like a diamond we can bevel these slightly you only have to do it like a little like that and i'll select the ends if i can it's pretty small i made them pretty small select the ends like that and just delete those edges so they're actually two separate bones now you know what actually i'm going to bevel this first to get it a little rounder like that and if you want to scale these apart from each other you could just select these two and scale them like that but proportional editing will probably help you and i'll scale those maybe with a sphere fall off like that okay and i'll also scale that down with ctrl a and you can select entire portions with the l button but you know if you're in vertex select you have to hover over a point to select it if you're over an edge it might not really work for you i'll just scale those down a little if you don't want them to be clipping into each other you can move them away from each other too and for the fingers it'll be pretty easy we can just duplicate one of these over just make one finger like that duplicate this whole thing so now we have a bunch of fingers we just have to place the fingertips like that and i'll do the same thing for the thumb like that okay and we can add a few segments in here for each of them again you can use l for that and i'll just subdivide these a few times you don't need to add too many points just enough so that so that we can like change the shape so i'll select the middle of each of these and i'll try scaling this up with ctrl a i'll use proportional editing ctrl a maybe i won't do the thumb for now only the fingers and i want to scale the ends down so i'll just select everything and scale them down like that until the tips look pretty good i'll scale these up a little more scale this down a little too and then and then select the center and scale that up okay so that looks pretty good for the hand but you can see when we look from the side it's not really lined up in a good way so i can select all of these i'll just select all of them like that and just hit control plus until everything's selected and then look from the side i'll just pull it back until it's in a good spot now we can get started on the legs so i'll just duplicate this point right here and i'll do the same thing where i just drag it straight down following this and i'll do the same thing again where i put a point in the middle and then bevel it but i only want two points and then i'll just delete the edge in the middle i'm going to make sure this has a root and for this one i'm not going to be following the shape of these feet that i drew exactly because i want them to point forward which means that our bones when we create two bones right here i'm going to be shaping them from the side angle like this so i'll scale this down slightly and control r to add a point in the middle and pull it out like that and then i'll connect these two points with f i accidentally kick the trash can then i'll bevel these end points very slightly and select the edges to delete them then i'll just pull this out a little more and bevel it until it's about as round as i want so i think that should be fine a point in here and bevel it to the edge with just two points so i can change the shape select this part and pull it out a little scale them down and create like a decent bone shape i like it when the bones are a little thicker at the ends i think it just looks nice and i'll try to do a similar thing the end up or if you you know want to change the shape of this you might want to use proportional editing to keep it smooth so for the toes i'll just duplicate this point and drag it down a little right here and at this point i'm pretty much just guessing with the shape and doing what i think looks good so i'll scale that down a little and extrude it outward i might want to see the size of the head as reference for this so i think maybe the feet should be a little longer so i want kind of big feet now i can change the shape of these scale everything down i want the tips to be pointier now i can just duplicate this a few times i'm only going to make three segments select this whole thing and shift d to duplicate and just drag it on the x axis like that and i can do that one more time in the opposite direction so i want to rotate these side ones now so they're kind of pointing towards the foot like that um so i think the easiest way to do that is hitting period and changing the pivot point to active element so now the last point that you select will it'll pivot from there so i'm going to turn off proportional editing deselect and reselect this part right here and i'll just rotate that on the z axis maybe negative 3 degrees like that and i can do the same thing on this side so i'll just select the whole thing and deselect and reselect until that's our pivot point and i'll just rotate it three degrees like that and we can just move these in until they look like they're a good distance apart and i'll change the pivot point back to median i don't like how thin these are so i'm gonna change the thickness of these and these you can actually make them thicker on just one axis ctrl a and see if x is the right direction it looks like it might be well it looks like they're going the right way though so i'll select this scale that up on the y or on the x until it's as thick as i think it should be so maybe about that much and i'll do the opposite for this one and scale it up on the y until it looks about as thick as the other one like that and i forgot i want to make the edges thicker on this one all right that looks good okay so for the joints now that you can see in this reference i'm just going to create a separate object for that so i'll shift a and i'll add in a cube right here and hit ctrl 2 to add a subdivision surface modifier there and i'm also going to want a mirror modifier and i'll just use the skull as a pivot point and i like to put this at the top so now we can go into edit mode and just place these wherever we want them to scale that down quite a bit and i don't need merging at all for this so i'll just shut that off over here and i'll just start from the bottom and i'll just duplicate this so i'll add one bone right here a bone right here and one right here so we have like the heel and a few foot bones like that and you can shape these however you want them you know i'm just kind of pushing things around until i think they they look good it's less about anatomical accuracy for me and more and just kind of like implied detail select this with l and duplicate it and we'll add a kneecap so i'll scale that down a little flatter on the y-axis and i'll duplicate it again and we'll create a little part in here so i'll duplicate this again up here and scale it down it looks like the legs aren't really in the right spot so i might have to move those first select the joints that you made because they're separate objects you can select the joints and the bones and tab into edit mode for both of them so you can select all of them at the same time and just pull that back so i might pull that in slightly actually i'll make this pretty big so now we'll make a shoulder some joints here and then the hand so once again duplicate this cube right here i'll start with the shoulder bring that forward scale it down quite a bit and this will be at the top see i don't want it to be clipping into our collarbone too much i can just pull that out i guess i'll put some joints on this side because that's just where our arm is where our drawing is so i think i'm going to do the same thing for the knee our elbow would be pointing this way on the y-axis so that's where i'll put the bigger ball i'm actually going to rotate it until it's kind of pointing with our arm bones like that and i'll duplicate it and pull it forward and just scale it down a little should maybe be flatter right here and now we'll make one for the hand i want to keep a similar angle so i'll actually just duplicate one of these over like that and i'm going to add a loop cut and instead of putting a whole bunch of bones right here like there would normally be in your hand i'm just gonna put one and if you hit period and go into individual origins you can scale the sides at the same time like that i'll just push it into place over here you know what i'm missing eyeballs i'm not going to use this anymore so i'll just delete that so this should be easy first i guess i should name everything again i'll use a cube that i will just subdivide so i'll hit ctrl 3 make sure the viewport and render are the same for this and i'll add a mirror modifier and use the skull right here as the pivot point and now you can just scale this down and place it where you want a thing that i like to do is change the snapping option up here to face and change it to uh median right here and now when you're moving this around you can hold ctrl and it'll snap to wherever your cursor is like that so i'm going to make the eyes pretty small while you're doing all this make sure you're saving you don't want to lose any of your progress our character is done being modeled you can select everything right click and shade smooth for our bones right here because it's using the skin modifier you have to hit shade smooth in the modifier right there or else it won't really work right next thing we should do is uh is add some textures so we can go into the shading area right here and to make this a little easier what i'm going to do is just duplicate this collection like that you can right click and hit duplicate and then i'll hide this and this will be textured like this just in case we change anything around i think it's nice to have a duplicated one before you make changes you could also just save a new file so in here i'm actually going to apply our mirror modifier and our skin modifier i also want to apply the mirror modifier for our joints so i'll apply that now i'll select the joints control select the bones and hit ctrl j and now they're just one object all right so i'll add a material called bone we can a to select everything and then ctrl l to link the materials so now everything should have that material and if we change the color you can see it's changing for all of our objects in here so i'll make this kind of like a pale yellow something like that that's looking pretty good and if you want you can add some bump mapping here to create some imperfections the way i like to do that is just with a noise texture and add in a texture coordinate so normally i would use object texture coordinates but if you're planning on animating this that's not really a good option so i'll use generated for this you could also use uv but you would have to uv unwrap your bones which is an option but i'm not going to do that in this one then i'll add a bump node right here and plug that into the normal and i'll hit ctrl shift and left click and if you're using the node wrangler that'll just preview the noise texture and i'll bring in a map range and i'll just change the from max i'll plug that into the height also it might be easier to view this way yeah it is easier so when you're changing the from max you're just changing like the highest point making it flatter like that i'll also change this to smoother step just to create a slightly smoother fall off you'll see when this loads it'll be a little smoother so i'll bring that down pretty low something like close to 0.35 and then you can just scale this up until you have as much detail as you want i might turn this down even lower i think that looks all right and you can see it's on our bones too so i'll turn the distance down to 0.1 and the strength around 0.5 so now it's got some subtle like pitting like that so i'll come up here and hit this button that looks like two pieces of paper for a new material and change this to eyes and i'll just delete these right here because we don't need bump and i'll change the color back to white by turning the saturation all the way down and the value all the way up and i'll turn the roughness all the way down too so that our eyes are shiny so the way i like to make the pupil for the eye is with a texture coordinate and i'll use uvs for this the uv texture coordinate i'll bring in a vector math node don't worry we're not really doing math i'll just change this to length and what this does is it looks at the like zero zero points on the uv texture is just in the corner over here and it tries to figure out the distance so so at the zero zero mark we'll just look black and the further away it gets the more white it will get so i plug that into here and we can preview it with ctrl shift left click i'll bring in a math node set to greater than and now we need to move this so the way i will move it is with another vector math and change it to add the way this works is very similar to a mapping node and just changing the location it works pretty much the same way except it doesn't have all of these other options now we can just push this like this until it's in the spot that we want it's hard to know where the right spot is so you can see it moving around right here there okay now it's moving closer to the center and when we look with the greater than and turn it down now we have a pupil right here but if you want to be able to move it around better without it clipping the edges like that what you need to do is you actually need to uv unwrap this so this is actually really easy because it's a cube so i'll just go into edit mode and hit this uh slash on the numpad and what you can do is just select the edges right here shift select like that and i'll select these right here too and when you have all of the selected hit u and mark seam and then select everything u and unwrap like that and now if we want i'll just set these back to zero and i'll go into the uv editor and what you can do to make this easier is just select this and move it so this center square is closer to zero like that and then we don't have to guess so much when we go back into shading you can see our pupil is already pretty close to the center and it's not cutting off as it goes to the edges if we go diagonally i'm sure at some point it'll get kind of weird right there but we just won't do that with the eyes just to make this a little more cartoony bring a mapping node in here and you can scale it to make the pupils like taller you can change the people size with this greater than and if you have any weird shading errors like you do right here you can just select your skull and go down here to object data properties under normals there's this option called auto smooth okay so i want to paint our eyes black right here so we're gonna do some more uv unwrapping and this won't get too complicated so don't worry too much we'll go over to uv editor right here and add in a new texture i'll call this skull and i'll change this to something a little higher like 2048 and i want the background right here to be completely transparent so i'll turn the alpha all the way to zero like that and you want to make sure alpha is checked hit okay so you can select everything and you can see this is what we have right now and it's kind of hard to see what's going on but basically what i want to do is separate the eye i'll just turn off the subdivision surface modifier it'll be easier to see and i'll select the loop for the eye make sure that's going all the way around and you can mark that as a seam you mark seam i'll do the same thing for the nose right here u mark seam and then we can hit a to select everything u and then unwrap and it's looking a little better now but i think i want to unwrap the head a little more so i'll grab this edge and just start uh continuing the selection by hitting ctrl and left click like that and i'll mark that as a scene and then select everything and unwrap and in here if you think these are too close you can select everything over here uv pack islands and then this option right here you can change how far away they are from each other so i'll change this to like point one and you can see they're spaced apart a little more okay now that we have this i'll go back into shading i want to create a different material for our skull so i'll just hit this button right here is basically just copying this texture but now you can see it's bone for our body and bone001 for our skull i'll just change this to skull and we'll add in an image texture and i'm going to choose the one that we just created which is just called skull and i want to use uv texture coordinate for this so we just need to set up our image so that it's still using the the bone color that we want so for that i'll hit shift a and bring in a mix rgb right here we can plug the alpha of this into our factor right here and the color into the second slot and we can copy this with ctrl c and paste it right here we can plug this into the color and see how that looks and if it's correct it should look the same okay yeah because this doesn't have anything in it now but when we go over to texture painting we should be able to actually start painting in here our skull the texture we're looking at is transparent so i'll just go into look dev for this and now we should be able to actually draw on here so i'll change this color to black and that's one reason why i separated the eyes and the nose because you can see they're just floating as islands over here and instead of painting directly on our head like that we can paint them over here so i can just start painting like that and we can just fill this in completely and if you want to see a little more clearly you can turn off the subdivision surface modifier in the viewport like that and it should update over here also if you want to change the size of your brush you can do that with f like that and i'm just filling in the eye like that and the nose right there okay and you can also paint over here i'll turn this back on so a thing that i like to do is just add um a slight fall off around the edge so instead of just painting directly on like that because it's really dark what you can do is come up here to the active tool and workplace settings and i'll make the strength something like point two something smaller so when we draw we have to continuously draw for it to get darker like that and i'll also change the fall off right here to uh sharp that makes it so that the center is the darkest and then it gets it has like a very smooth fall off you can use that to get kind of like a little darkness around the eyes like that and if it's like looking too dark you can just turn this down a little i'll turn it to 0.3 and because we're still using the mirror modifier it's already it's updating the other side also which is kind of convenient for us you can add whatever details you want in here if you wanted to add like a crack in the skull or something like that but i'm not using a tablet a drawing tablet for this i'm just using my mouse i'm not going to go too crazy with the details i just want there to be a slight darkness around the eyes so that it doesn't look as sharp i guess you can do the same thing for the nose if you want if you want to be really smooth you can trace the entire edge like this and hide that sharp seam but i don't think it looks very clean and now back in here if it looks weird you just have to switch this from texture to material or you can just look at it in a render view or look dev and this is our little skeleton one thing that is very important if you are drawing texture maps you have to make sure that you save your image so you can go into texture paint right here right here we have the skull if there's an asterisk right here that means you have to save it that it's not saved anywhere because if you close it without saving it when you open it back up your texture will be gone so we'll just save this somewhere and make sure you save it with uh alpha rgba because you want there to be transparency and i'll just turn the compression down and i just saved it in the same place where our blend file is for this character alright that's it for this one let me know in the comments what you liked about this video and what you would like to see more of i excluded rigging because it would make the video quite a bit longer but if you all want that i can make some more videos about it the project file on patreon will include the rigged character just so you know thank you to my patreon supporters and thank you for watching have a good one you

Channel: Joey Carlino

Views: 11,484

Rating: 4.9814529 out of 5

Keywords: blender, cg, cgi, blender 2.9

Id: g4_hQBKLiQI

Length: 48min 27sec (2907 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 11 2021