Character Turnaround with Blender's Grease Pencil

[Music] everyone how's it going today I'm going to teach you how to set up a character turnaround okay so what we're looking at on the screen is a front side and back view of a character that was supplied to me by a patreon supporter by the name of Kelly Johnson who's given me kind permission to use their character as the example for this tutorial so let's begin I'm opening up 2.8 beta fresh so I can show you how to set up your workspace for maximum effects all right so why don't we go ahead and we see everything is here I'm just going to bring bring this line down and turn this into my properties panel we need to go down to our scene settings and change our units to what are required now because the client has asked us to create this in the imperial system feet and inches we have to switch over to imperial setting up the units is vital because everything then has a real world value to it okay our length is feet which means that everything here including this cube so if we were to say add a plane and we needed to make the size of that plane ten feet and align it to view I'm just going to go to wireframe view each of these small squares is one foot right so we would move something like that up and then that plane would be 10 foot by 10 foot I'm gonna get rid of everything the light and the camera because we don't really need it and I'm gonna go back into front view and I will hit my Z key to go into rendered view this means that everything that shows up is gonna show up exactly how it renders one thing that I like to do is I like to set my world color to something like a white or a very light gray okay so you can see the the grid here which is kind of important to start with but then when we don't need it again we can bring it all the way up to white or we can go to our overlay sitting over here and just disable the grid altogether okay but for now let's leave that grid on let's have this at a greyish value what else well we only need the one screen so why don't we put our mouse over the split there right click and hit join area so that we've got the maximum drawing area that we we've got so now let's go ahead and build a a grid object with some numbers of the side to indicate how tall the character that we're drawing is so I'll start by going shift a and adding a plane I will align that to the view and it does need to be a 10-foot plane so let's zoom in here gonna go in an edit mode by hitting tab I'm going to grab those and holding down control I'm just going to move those up what we want to do is split this into foot measurements and the best way to do that is now to go ctrl R to get our loop select and then we click here once and twice and then our loop and slide contextual menu comes up and we can adjust our our operations so the number of cuts will slide that up to 9 so that you can see there that each of these lines corresponds to the 1 foot mark ok select all by hitting a X we're going to delete only the faces alright so we've got this grid now I'm just gonna box select these and I'm gonna grab these into the x-direction over here so maybe this is gonna end up being a 20 foot by 10 foot board okay and that's about it now one last thing I'm overlays if you enable wireframe this means when it's deselected you're actually gonna see the wireframe of the object and this comes in really really handy now optionally you can also add some text so I'm just going to align that to the view maybe I make the radius 1 foot there we go and on the text we can just start to write out numbers we can slide that over there and we can position it to the the point where now so this this line here would be indicated by one foot then you can just shift deduplicate make that numeral two and so on right so I'm just going to go ahead and that do all of that and then cut back here now one final step you can't join that the text exactly unless you went around and fiddled with the text effects so that they get spaced out at exactly one foot so by selecting them all 2.8 has this great feature now that you can do one operation for many objects and we need to convert these to either a curve or a mesh so I'm going to hit f3 because I'm not entirely sure the convert to shortcut is and I haven't assigned one yet f3 and a search for convert to click on that curve from mesh or text click on that they all become that and then you go ctrl J and now that is one object all we have to do is D duplicate bring it over here let's shift select that again ctrl J and now we've got our grid and now we're going to create our grease pencil objects so we're gonna go again shift a grease pencil blank and that has been created right here at the origin let's take a look at some of the stuff that we've got to set up for the grease pencil now the grease pencil has got its own properties tab now there's a few options in here including layers which we're going to get to in a second viewport display is quite interesting because under that there is this thing called canvas but let's set this canvas up so obviously the scale has to be 10-foot but we don't really see anything at the moment let's go into perspective mode so we can see what goes on when we do this so just gonna make this 10 foot 10 foot subdivisions 10 when we go to our overlays panel you'll see that under grease pencil we've got a few options and one of them happens to be canvas now if we tick on that you can't quite see it because it's grayed out so what I'm going to do is going to make the world there we go I made the world background:white so now you can see it and you notice this annoying thing the canvas is this square grid that we see here but every time we try to rotate the view and I'm just doing that with my middle mouse button the canvas seems to be facing us it doesn't lock on to that grid that we've produced how do we get it to do that first and foremost alright so I'm just gonna go to my grease pencil object over here and I've draw your attention to the top of the screen where we've got stroke placement and this little thing called view this is the drawing plane this is the plane that whenever you do a grease pencil stroke it's going to attach it to this thing this particular plane and we've got four options one is view and the other three are the two axis planes so if we lock that to the front XZ all of a sudden that plane gets locked to that XZ plane okay similarly if you were to switch it to the side or to the top you get these other planes as well but this is what we want it to do now the origin is smack bang in the middle and this grid while it's nice you know we kind of want to have it scrunched in here so what we're going to do is first off make the y-direction the scale five so that's correct and then we need to offset it in the y-direction go in the front view here to get it exact and it seems to be a very odd placement okay it doesn't exactly correspond to five for some reason so you sort of have to slide that up but once it's there you'll notice that by subdividing it ten times we now get all these subdivisions along the x-axis which are really good plus this half foot mark over here so you can draw characters to that sort of accuracy now if you were to subdivide it twenty times you get a greater degree of accuracy but it's always bound within that ten by five grid that we've produced okay but I'm just gonna knock that back hen because it gives us a nice grid to work with all right and so that's our setup now we can begin to explore the grease pencil and begin to draw our character let's first off start by adding a new layer so we click on that new layer it automatically is called GP layer we can double click there and we can call this blue line why did I call this blue line this is going to become clear in a moment now if I take my stylus pen over here and I begin to just draw you'll notice that we've got a draw pencil and we've got a default material material dot zero one here in the drop-down ok now this material also can be manipulated in your materials tab now if you're a blender user you know about materials and the grease pencil has its own set of materials okay and I'm gonna take you through a couple of the parameters that you get with this they're a little bit more familiar than you might expect what have we got here well we've got a preview okay I'm not gonna call this anything just yet we also have stroke and fill right you'll notice that this looks like a straight bar of black but it's actually two swatches as you see here in the solid you've got black and you've got something that's transparent the right hand side is controlled by the Alpha so why don't we go ahead and quickly draw a circle or a shape here okay there we go we've got a circle actually let's make it a little bit more obvious okay there we go we got a stroke right now if I was to drop the opacity of this stroke or the Alpha you'll notice that that stroke slowly disappears similarly if I was to click on the fill and increase the alpha the fill appears so we have control over both the stroke and the fill just like an illustrator or Photoshop when you're drawing vectors so if you treat this like a vector program everything starts to make a lot more sense so let's go ahead and increase the Alpha on the stroke now watch I've got my swatch set to HSV right I don't have it to RGB although the the Alpha is there present in that slider as well but I'm just gonna have it on HSV for now the mode type under stroke you've got lines dots boxes which just means you know what happens when you draw so dots as you can see here draw the dotted lines boxes draws square lines and the line is just a straight line you can have a textured stroke if you wish but I'm just going to leave this on solid and under fill' you've got a few other options including solid this checkerboard pattern for some reason the texture means that any texture that you want to import into blender you just have to go open and it will text you the fill with whatever you've selected gradient means that we've got a few controls here color and secondary color let's just bring up the opacity here so we've got black and white the gradient is linear shifting this around a little bit we can actually see our gradient there however you work with gradients you've got that option as well I'm just gonna leave it on solid and I'm gonna make the color something like a gray so that we know okay so once you've built that material every time you draw something okay you see that it acts like a vector okay so you draw a shape and it automatically fills it for you now if you don't want the fill you can unselect it and similarly with stroke so you can just have fills instead of strokes and of course you know you can have all sorts of colors that you want so if you want a you know a red here or an orange you can have colored lines colored fills let's get some in materials in here okay so I'm gonna go ahead and import some now once they're imported you have to add them one by one because they're all here but they actually need to be loaded in your material setting and so this one is called a blue line which very simply means that if I was to draw in the blue line texture I get just a blue line and this sort of simulates my non repo blue pencil that I like to use we hit the plus here I'm gonna add in an inks and I'm gonna add in my fill black my fill 20% gray now these materials are ones that are dear ones that I created for my own purposes and they work for basically doing grayscale drawing so now why don't we take a look at our brushes okay so if we go up here where it's you see this says it's draw pencil that's what the material the the brush is called we've got a selection of brushes if we were to change this to fill you get a fill area at all and if we were tainted changes to the eraser we get a selection of erasure brushes okay so setting these to one of these three options gives you a contextual menu now of course everything has a radius control a strength control that you can also enable pressure sensitivity for the material that you want to choose in this case I'm just going to leave it a blue line for now and then a number of options now the options do things like you know the number of samples that are that a brush will have to look a lot more smoother or more clearly defined post-processing settings like smoothing allow you to set a couple of iterations and then if I bump this smoothing up that means that if it's a bit wobbly it actually smooths out a lot of the more wobbly stuff that that you've drawn and if you want to really adjust and really tweak the the pressure sensitivity or the strength of the brush as you're as you're drawing all of these things are very familiar to photoshop users or illustrator users okay so I've got my blue line layer and I've got a material assigned to it now one other thing I can actually pin a material to a particular brush so if I only ever want to draw a blue line with my pencil I can click this pin here and I'm drawing away with my pencil and you know it's quite nice okay but then I want to draw in inks for instance okay so I go draw inks and I change that material over to inks black okay and I begin to draw with the inks brush maybe ink over that and whatnot right and then I want to go back to my pencil so I go back to draw pencil when I'm drawing pencil it has automatically gone back to blue pencil so let's go to erasure and I want to select the erase stroke what this does is it will erase any stroke that it touches so that's a quite sort of like the nuclear option of erasure brushes so I'm gonna teach you a couple of methods that are going to make your character drawing really easy you can use a couple of modifiers to simplify the process and the one I'm going to show you the most is mirror modifier because it is essentially a a symmetrical character so if you get your base symmetry down then you can add in asymmetrical bits later on but let's just take a look at symmetry let's go over to our modifier stack and in grease pencil and draw mode you've got the add grease pencil modifier and under that step we actually do have a mirror modifier now by default what this means is if I draw on this side it's going to mirror it or if I draw on that side it's going to mirror it okay but if I want to draw over here it's mirroring it along the world axis so that it flips across the x-axis because that's what we've got but if I went to Y or even said and let's zoom out here a little bit now you can sort of see well Y obviously hood flip it in another way which we haven't got enabled how that flips and that's all well and good if you want to draw a character right here you know you want to sort of like have a head and arms and and whatnot okay that works really well but what if I want a mirror and draw something over here there's a trick and it's gonna go to object mode here for a second and add a cube shift a cube I'll just scale this down so it's not that intrusive and I'm gonna grab it and I'm gonna bring it over here in my x-axis okay not even going to label it because once we're done we need it anymore but selecting our grease pencil now we can I drop a tool this object cube and we can say that this is the object that we want a mirror across and so now you see how it's lined up with this line I begin I go back in to draw mode and I begin to draw and that's where the axis is okay so now we've got a way of drawing a character that's not centered that's pretty cool so now I'm all set up to start drawing my character and I've been given the brief that it's the Bruce Timm style Superman which means I can't show you obviously for copyright reasons but if you google Bruce Timm you'll notice that it's a very stylistic type of character with a very broad chest narrow hips cartoony style he's about six foot and so we've got our six foot mark right here and we've got our cube right here where we can begin to sketch and so with my blue line I've got my mirror modifier enabled my blue line layer enabled here for my pencil and I can begin to draw you the proportions are okay but I can fix these up before I go any further I can go ctrl tab switch over to edit mode and you'll notice that the the mirror modifier if we enable edit mode now we can see it okay I can go B to box select and I can select all of those hands there and if I just scale in the Z direction grab and the set up you'll notice that the mirror is also adjusting to that but there's a there's more to this scale down alright I want to enable this smooth but I want to sort of roll it right in make it very specific and now everything kind of stretches along with that proportional editing tool and if I even wanted to I can grab a point and do things like really get in there and adjust these curves and and you'll notice that these are all Bezier handles just like in Illustrator or whatnot okay and so you can very quickly adjust your drawing in edit mode before you go back in to draw mode and say okay look I'm quite happy with that I'm ready to ink now so let's create a second layer and I'm going to double click there and call this inks now again I've got my mirror modifier still on but I'm gonna lock my blue line layer so that there's no accidental erasure or drawing over and I'm gonna drop the opacity of the blue line quite substantially and then with my inks I can select my draw ink brush and let's have a look here what's a good size that's a bit too much we definitely need something smaller some maybe about a 20 might be good for more of the outlines and now we can get a little bit more detail in there and you can see how that pressure sensitivity really helps out okay and I can quickly draw character in inks you so we have our basic inks there and look I'm quite happy with that and for the demonstration purposes is really great and this is about where I think okay you know the mirror modifier serves its purpose no longer need it because everything else from here on in is just going to be a modification of this or we'll make sure we're out of draw mode and then we hit apply and now whenever we draw if we went back into draw mode and we draw okay you'll see that it's no longer symmetrical which is just fine because what we want to do next is add just a touch of asymmetry now I've got this habit and this is a personal preference what I like to do is to draw this foot out on its side because now in this one instance we have actually got a reference for the side foot you know it would sort of help to definitely finesse up say like some of these inks over here so that the knee doesn't look so so wonky right but we can really get a good indication of what both the front and the side foot looks like the easiest next part is to do the back and the the way you do that is just basically just go edit mode box select left let's select everything you hit shift D and with the X we've made a duplicate no you're just gonna move it but we can move it right here for now but now in draw mode what that means is that we can use this as our reference for the back but because we want to indicate that it's a bat first we want to flip this so let's go back into edit mode okay let's make sure that it's nothing selected except for these strokes over here and then without s x- one we have now flipped it and now we can make this into a reverse image we probably don't even need the blue lines for this to be honest and so what we want to go ahead and do is erase any detail which sort of says okay this is the front of the character okay but we want to definitely keep out this keeping our solid outline so that we can do things like okay so here's our hairline for instance and you know something like that can keep this asymmetrical and ears always look a little bit different from behind okay right and so things like that there's also this erase point which means that the points themselves can get a race this is it even a nicer brush to use foot for hard surfaces and and why am i racing all of these well that's because there's a KP so we might leave some of those cave lines but let's erase all the points that we don't need so that we can now draw in the points that sort of make up the rest okay so this is going to be obviously coming down like this and like this like that okay this and then of course the cape could probably maybe something like that going for it of course we need to erase these pole that's that's a bit much so again gonna have to bring that back and you notice that we're by accident erasing the blue line as well okay that's because the blue line I unlocked it but if you don't want to erase the blue line for whatever reason you can just lock that I don't mind at the moment because the details really need to be consistent as well now hands look a little bit different from behind as well so what we're gonna have to do is bring in that palm in there and in this case it's it's quite simple to to fudge and that would be the finger that we use so you can erase all of these internal points so that we can now do this we got this back finger this finger will obviously overlap on here fold there and then we see that finger so now that is what the hand from behind would naturally look like okay so let's do the same with this one because we're not in mirror mode yeah maybe we should have started with that finger finger finger now of course we need a side view and that's the next one that we have to create so I'm gonna go back into edit mode so that I can select all of these and I want to move him right over so that I can fit in a side view over here now what's a side view but sort of like a half of your front view so I'm gonna deselect everything now there's a couple of ways to do this I mean the the easiest way that I know how is sort of like select most of what you need let's go shift D grab with G and X to move over like that okay and go back into draw mode and then we can just begin to erase what we don't need but this is where I think the blue line might come in handy so I'm gonna take off the inks for now and I'm gonna lock that and with blue line let's go back to our draw pencil which should have its blue line on it we can go ahead and make the modifications we need you now most people who do turnarounds don't add the arm in I'll show you why in a moment so let's bring back our inks lock that off I would probably erase these inks to be honest and again I'm just going to do a quick speed ramp here you and I'm kind of happy with that so how about that arm and we'll go to draw pencil and so obviously the shoulder is about there okay and we want this bent so we've got this tricep that would be bulging like that and the bicep that would be bulging like that we've got the elbow about here actually yeah there's there's our elbow and then our wrist would be here before our our fingers here and our thumb you and so basically that is how you get a decent character turn around I'm gonna do one more thing and I'll probably just speed through this I'm gonna go ahead and fill in the color all right so I'll start you off so let's go a slick blue line add in a layer and let's call this color fill right and we're gonna lock off the blue line lock off the ink so there's no accidental editing and how how do we do this well we first off choose something like a draw block or draw marker and then we just use that to fill okay and now filling isn't like coloring in filling let's go to fill great 60% for his head is actually tracing an outline okay and the conventional method for this sort of stuff is to go from lightest to darkest or spots that would appear behind other spots before you go ahead and fill in other ones so for instance if I was to go with my fill gray for the Cape those areas will be covered up by this okay and they're naturally the next area that I would probably fill would be the face so I'm gonna go ahead and color this dude just using these methods so here we have it we've got our guy in our front side with arm and back view but I want to show you just a couple more features to really finish this up and to really show you the power of grease pencil and some of the modes that you have access to now I'm gonna create a new layer and this is this is completely optional but I think you're gonna want to see this I'm gonna call this shading right and I often add this layer in Photoshop and illustrator and stuff like that because I can work with the transfer modes you know overlays add subtract that sort of stuff to get a range of effects that adds something to the color so you can get you know highlights on chin areas or whatnot but there's an added bonus here and and that is this weird sort of masking thing it's called clamp any pixels outside underlying layers drawing here's how it works okay so I'm gonna on this shading thing I'm gonna take a draw block and I'm gonna go with a fill eighty percent and I'm gonna say that I'm gonna have a highlight on this side of the face okay and I'm gonna go outside of the area right I'm gonna bring the opacity down so it looks quite nice then I'm going to hit this see what it does it clamps it to the Alpha of the underlying layer now if I bring that down under the inks now it kind of looks a little bit better because the inks are on top okay and of course I can give this a transfer mode like an overlay or an ad right and sort of like really play around the opacity okay so we can already get all sorts of effects now some tracks really interesting subtract actually takes it all the way now if I brought that all the way up the top and bring the opacity all the way up subtract actually acts like a mask and now you can cut away areas of your painting it you needed to okay so there's a few extra options in there to really go to town would stuff and so here we have our final file with all of the layers and I've included a shadow and highlights with this clamp any pixel setting which has been really interesting to work with I've found that it works best with shadow areas rather than highlights and thank you to Kelly Johnson who supplied this this character Kelly's given me kind permission to include this file as a free download for you guys to take a look at so look that's all from me thanks for watching guys I hope you got a lot out of this bye for now [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Paul O Caggegi

Views: 63,104

Keywords: Blender, grease pencil, character turnaround

Id: ywuiImWAsZ4

Length: 33min 34sec (2014 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 11 2018