Classic 2D Disney Animation Style Remade with Unreal Engine 5 - Part 1 | Character Creator & iClone

hi I'm Jose tejerin and today we're going to see how to create a cartoon character with cell shading in cc4 to take it to Unreal 5. first of all please note that this is the first of two videos and in this one we will focus only on the creation of the character and character creator for creating a character and character creator with a cartoon style has the main advantage of being able to directly visualize the results of applying a cell shading effect that makes it look like the character has been created using traditional 2D animation this as we will see below makes the modeling work much easier and allows us to correct the final result in a simple and intuitive way but this is not the only great advantage of the latest version of the program the other great advantage that makes character creator 4 the ideal program to create this kind of character besides the obvious advantage of creating a character with a completely professional and functional result is the customization of Expressions we will talk about this amazing feature later but first let's start from the beginning let's look at the character and the uses it will have we're going to see how to create a character for my video game the evil furry that you can already add to your steam wish list the character we're going to create will be for the Unreal Engine 5 in which it will be used in cinematic scenes but this method can also be used in not so cinematic video games with this in mind I recommend as always to be clear about the description of the character and the actions they will undertake in the story in this case it's a young girl who appears in a specific part of the story pretending to be a banished princess she's a Carefree sweet person who dresses in poor clothes and ends up falling in love with the protagonist of the story with this in mind and the cartoon style of the Disney film Snow White I looked for the perfect references and explore different designs until I found this one you can see in my case it has been very useful to look for the concept art of the Disney film to be able to see what ideas were being considered and to really understand what is the style of drawing that this film has it is a vital import that all of your project is under the same style to be a professional solid and credible work as you can see I didn't completely copy the style of the film but the bases are the same a main character animated by rotoscoping with flat colors without light or excess most of the time with unsaturated colors hand-drawn backgrounds and with very contained expressions for a cartoon animation we will see these issues later but for now let's start working with character creator 4. the first thing we will do when we open character creator 4 is to select the cell shading effect in the atmosphere folder in the stage section inside we can find the tune Shader folder with four cartoon filters I'm going to choose the line art one the effect hasn't turned out the way we wanted it to so we will have to customize it a bit if we go to the visual section we can deactivate the post effect and the global Illumination in the tune Shader section we can configure the effect to increase the thickness of the line and it's intensity in my case I will also remove all the lighting from the model to make it more faithful to the reference finally if we go to the main menu in the visual section we can activate the IBL and change the color of the ambient light from Blue to White to see the real color of the textures of the model obviously these textures are not cartoon so we will have to change them for flat colors in a program such as clip Studio when placing them on the model remember to remove the normal textures for all materials this is because the normal textures affect the lines and the cell shading of the cartoon effect and can be confusing leaving them would not affect the final result in unreal but I recommend in fact to remove all textures other than the base color in the case of the eyes it will also be necessary to change the Shader type from digital human eye to traditional to make the texture appear clean and without after effects in the case of the eyebrows we can be extra creative by being able to design their shape through opacity remember that you can also make them completely transparent if you don't want your model to have eyelashes like Mickey I recommend that you use Simple shapes and look at your vusettos and references to check that the result is appropriate this is a very important element in the expressiveness of the character another useful trick is knowing that character creator has eight sets of tabs leave the upper and lower assemblies invisible to avoid extraneous effects and to achieve a better visual result it is possible that when changing the opacity texture of the tabs you may encounter an error where the texture fails to load first make sure the image is a JPEG if it still does not work the solution I have found to this problem is to activate the skin editor by clicking yes in the floating window that appears when we deactivate the skin editor again the texture will load correctly another trick I recommend is to use the eyebrows as 3D models rather than as a texture to prevent the texture from distorting or pixelating when stretched and the cell shading effect will interact better with the face it is a good idea to use the cartoon eyebrows that care character creator offers by default and then customize them now that we have a fully cartoon model it is time to personalize it if we go to the morph section we can find several morphs that will be especially useful in this case head scale is a great step towards cartoonizing our character but eyeball scale and eye scale are also very useful after a couple more tweaks we can take it to zedbrush to do the rest of the work as I've said before I always work in zedbrush without perspective and I like to visualize the polygons I'm working with so I can accurately model the models another thing I want to remember before I start modeling because it is always forgotten and it is very important is the neck after modifying the size of the head the most important thing is to define the height and width of the neck but it is common for people to forget to adjust the width of the neck and profile resulting in the strain Sensation that the profile of the character is totally different from its frontal image in this case I decided to make a nephra TT style collar but obviously cartoonized this is the most fun part of the job at least in my case but remember that you have to constantly look at the sketches and references you have so as not to stray from the style and the result you were looking for I also remind you that zedbrush has an option to lower the opacity of the program let me show you another character from my video game the evil furry this is a slider at the top of the program that allows you to customize the opacity this way we can place the reference we want to trace behind it to make sure we do a good job this is very useful because it is common that even if we have the reference next to us we make our eyes too small the mouth too large or the ears too detailed in relation to the reference you can also see that in this case we've hidden the tear trough inside the skull to simplify the eye in this tutorial I focus mainly on the face but you should not neglect the rest of the body and especially the hands you can and should deform the character as much as necessary to achieve the same result as your sketch you may even be able to experiment and find some form or idea that is more appealing to you but it is generally better to leave the form Finding part of the sketch since we tend to be more conservative when modeling 3D than when making lines character creator is very versatile in this aspect and is prepared to solve automatically all problems with the character's rig when bringing the character back into the program just go to the adjust Bones menu and click on the auto position button we will soon see that the character is fully operational although in this case the eyes should be repositioned and speaking of the eye area do you remember that white line that used to appear between the lashes and the eye it's something that I personally don't like in a cartoon character to solve this problem we simply have to make sure that the eyelashes are partly inside the eye socket it is easy if you select only the tabs and move them slightly as with the rest of the model it is important to take it to character creator to check that the result is as desired often the result of the cell shading effect does not turn out as expected and we will have to make further modifications to achieve the perfect result so that a line is produced inside the character and not just on the edge of the character when we apply the effect in cell shading there has to be a very pronounced angle in the polygons that's why the upper part of the nose which is very smooth the nostrils do not generate lines but in the lower part where there are very sharp angles the lines of the nostrils are marked although this is not the case if we want to remove these lines we only have to smooth the model but we can also take advantage of this to create our own lines many drawings highlight the corners of the lips to give more expressiveness creating a line to achieve this effect is very simple you just have to form a very sharp angle at the corners of your mouth as shown in the video just be careful not to deform the mouth too much so that there are no problems when opening the mouth properly and take care that no lumps or deformations are visible when rotating the head when we are happy with the modeling result and we have checked that it works correctly in cell shading we can move on to modeling the final part teeth as you can see character creator has cartoon style Dentures for these cases and which are certainly better than the realistic teeth our model has however if you look closely it is rare for a cartoon to have all its teeth drawn most of the traditional animated films unify all the teeth making the result more pleasant and easier to draw so we're going to unify all the teeth into one Mass we don't want the character to look horrible every time he opens his mouth after all of that work so we are going to unify all the teeth for this we are going to use zenbrush and hide all the teeth inside the skull because we're going to use the gums as teeth as unpleasant as the idea sounds this is the best method I have found to achieve the same effect as a drawing you will see how if you flatten the gums and combine them in a single block you will get when applying the cell shading effect a fantastic result although of course you must first change the texture to a blank color and remove the normal textures of course the same should also be done with the tongue this is also a good time to make sure that the teeth are correctly positioned in the mouth but I can tell you that when we make facial expressions we will change their position to finish with this phase I would like to mention that although the art style I have chosen does not have glitter in the eyes this was not added by the Disney Studio until the feature film Bambi however I'm going to explain to you the two possibilities you have to add this glitter that brings a character's eyes to life the first method is to make the glitter part of the eye drawing which is the most common in the more traditional cartoons drawn on acetate and in the more modern drawings produced by hand using digital programs this visual result is something that most 3D cartoon animation has inherited some of them put the glitter as an after effect that they can move around the surface of the eye as they wish but we can do it in a simpler Way by embedding it within the texture the effect is very nice and uncomplicated but it is strange that the glitter is not affected by the upper eyelid in the next method we don't have this problem this is to illuminate the eye as if there was a real point of light something unusual in 2D animation but can be seen in the animation of Spa Studio to do this we are going to use the eye occlusion model above the eye to put the light point there we simply create a JPEG image as a layer shell and apply it to the texture it is possible that the texture has some problems but if you save the file and open it again the problem will disappear as you can see the result is a more realistic point of light but as we can't move it together with the eye it doesn't look so good aesthetically in parallel to all this work I've been making the clothes and the complements of the character in zedbrush I can't dwell on this part but I can give you a couple of tips when designing a character their clothes and hairstyle are a fundamental part of the character and it's advisable to design it directly with the clothes they will wear the most even if we then have to imagine what their body will look like when making these elements it is important to keep in mind that it's preferable to make simple shapes and big ones to make sure that that her character does not turn into a whirlwind of meaningless black lines in the same way as the rest of the model we should texturize the model with flat colors and check that the cell shading works correctly with the clothes however don't worry there are still some tweaks that can be made to improve the result when we take the character to Unreal but that will be in the second part of the tutorial where we will start talking about the physics of the characters accessories and facial expressions in order to animate the character and Export it to unreal I hope you liked this first tutorial I've really wanted to do it for a long time and I've put a lot of love into it I hope my tips will be a guide for you to create new characters and different styles see you in the second part [Music]

Channel: Reallusion

Views: 13,533

Keywords: Iclone, 3d animation, build 3d animation, animation creation, 3d animation software, animation software, animated character, animated 3d character, 3d character animation, character animation, Reallusion, 3d creation, real-time animation, real-time performance, unreal engine, rigged character, ue5, hair physics, cloth physics, avatar maker, 3d character creator, character maker, create a character, Disney animation, realistic cartoon character, Disney 2D style, rotoscope

Id: Ej9SugqqU8M

Length: 12min 46sec (766 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 16 2022