Create A Stylized Character - Part 1 (Blender 2.91 Tutorial)

so i'm in a brand new blender scene here um only difference i've already deleted the camera and the light out of the scene but today we're just going to jump in and get this and start creating a low poly claymation looking character head sort of like some of the character styles that i do such as okay so i have myself the cube here our little default cube and we're not gonna delete it we're just gonna work with it so the first thing i like to do is add a subdivision surface level of two so you can do control two or you can if you're used to adding it over here on the modifiers panel just go here under this this modifiers panel add a modifier and add a subdivision surface but make sure your levels of viewport is turned up to two this is important and we're not actually going to keep this on because we're going to use all this geometry so i'm going to hit this little drop down arrow and hit apply or an easier way to do this is say you have a um a bunch of different modifiers going on and don't remesh and then you have like a wire frame you know what i mean you just have you have just some stuff going on and a quick and easy way to to do this is just apply all of these without having to click through each one it's just ctrl a and down here to visual geometry to mesh that everything's applied and all of this is workable geometry um but obviously we don't want to do all this i'm going to back up we only want this subdivision level of 2. so we're going to apply it this way but before i do so i'm going to go into edit mode and i'm just going to throw in one more loop cut right around the center there and then i'll tab back into object mode ctrl a and apply this visual geometry mesh and then we now have all these points which is nice because we want to use all these all right so before i go any further i just want to point out the fact that we have to keep in mind the obvious role the uncanny valley right we don't want to get too close to being a human that is just weird and we don't want to sort of stay too far away that it's not a human so you wanna i always like to just keep my my models in um like pretty pretty like blocky and shapy form otherwise it can start looking too close to a character and in return looks too far from the character if that makes sense and there's cool levels of contrast you can work with like you can make the shape of the character super blocky but you can do a nice skin shader and you can do nice rendering and that's actually like what pixar does is the hair looks so good and the skin looks so good but but the models don't look don't match that level of realism it's just such an amazing level of contrast that really helps you stay out of that uncanny valley and that's what we're gonna go for so i'm gonna give it another subdivision surface level so i'm gonna hit control two and some of you are asking about this but if you go into edit mode now um you have your your wire frame that sort of goes around this but you were wondering how how to get that softer look so it's really just this button over here this this this mesh button which is actually the same as this if you click this this is gonna show this in the edit mode so if you click that um but this way if we just right click and shade smooth now we have a mesh to work with and make characters out of so let's let's keep going so um the mouth is more likely to start next um this is a method i i i use i learned from keel and john so i'm going to shout out to him link a video up here in the corner and also check out his channel in the description um he taught this amazing way of making a character mouth and i think it really fits my character style so i um so props to him because i love this style of mouths so and it really it's as easy as you just grab these two vertices here and i just extrude them on in and you have to be careful because this can get too rounded so how he does it is he goes into edit mode and then you'll just grab this edge loop here and just give it a little bevel and then that'll start softening it out a little bit and then you can even shape this a little bit so you're going to want to pull pull the corners up here and then so grab this hold ctrl click to the back then at the front and you just want to grab this whole loop here and i'm just going to bring it down a little bit on the on the z-axis it's just shaping this a little more into a mouth just to get a little more of like a general smile shape all right so on to the nose so the nose as you may have guessed i just start with this little guy and i will do a bevel on this but if you just try to do control b to bevel you can't bevel an individual point unless you do ctrl shift b then you can pull out a section like that and then the nose is really going to help you get a lot of character expression just based on the shape of the nose the shape of the nose i find tells a lot about a character and it's really cool i'm just literally scaling the nose up or down or smaller or wider taller and just seeing how the character feels after that it really just brings out different characters and it's really cool to play with so we're gonna just as we beveled that out we're gonna go ahead and extrude that out and i like to give it two levels of extrusion so we have that guy and we can do one more and just scale this one down a little bit and then by holding alt you can grab this one and you can really just play with the shape like i said so we'll scale it on the x and maybe bring this guy up this is where you can just sort of play play around and find where for your character fits so next thing we're going to sort of work with the eyes here i eyes can get tricky and they can start getting into the section where they're looking too much like they're looking too real or they look too fake um so we'll work with that so there's a couple things you can do i just grab these two here and i just straight up move them in and we start creating these little eye sockets and that gives a nice little natural brow section as well as like cheek section and we can actually fix that cheek section by bringing that up a little bit and just give them a little more puff right just because cheeks puff naturally you know cheeks puff man can we get that on a t-shirt somewhere this is cheeks puff man actually that could be taken out of context so i don't want that on my t-shirts okay let's um so now i think it's a good time to actually start shaping the head so pretty wide right pretty lego like um might not exactly want this but this is a great place to just just grab everything and just start scaling it left and right you know scaling it on the z-axis and stuff and just if you grab this proportional editor and you start grabbing things and because we don't have careful you don't have mirror mirror modifier turned on so you can easily throw once out of whack um just make sure you're just grabbing the same amount of vertices on each side and just giving things little pushes and pulls until you until you find something you like and if you don't like it then just revert back to how it was um another thing to keep in mind is actual shape of a human head um there's a there's a quick and easy way to to design a human head is you start with sort of like a sideways egg on the top and then this little face cone here thing and then these will kind of just you know these will connect i mean that's more of a bigger egg but these can just start connecting like this and then the side will come back in so if you just hold the letter d on your keyboard if you have a wacom tablet or a little visual tablet it makes it easier to do this but you can still do this with your mouse all just fine um but i like to just draw right over the characters sometimes and let's just start thinking about how does how about my characters had to look and you don't have to trace your character but you know just generally work with the shapes you have and then just just a quick little draw over your character and then you can start sort of mapping out hey i kind of want kind of want this shape and you don't want to get too close to where it starts being humanoid you know because i like again i like to keep that cartoony low poly look but this is generally just a map now and we're just gonna literally use it like a like a silhouette i'm just gonna grab some vertices in the proportional edit mode and just start clicking and dragging around just doing a little push and pull and get in places getting vertices into the right spot and this will really help just start defining a more characterized look and it won't look so blocky and then you might find that once you do that the whole head is looking a little bit fat so you can just scale it in on the x-axis and you're starting to get to the point where you have a you have a head shape and again these were just for for looks so i can go in here and if you hit n under the view and then under annotations everything you have is here so you can either just turn them off like this or you can hit the minus button to get rid of them yeah so we're looking at our character okay so what are we seeing here the head's looking a little strange up at the top so i'm gonna give it a little a little more pull and you might wanna go up a little bit just to get a little rounded off okay all right that's that's gonna be okay i think for right now actually i kind of want to do this guys a little bit a little bit i like to just pull this one up just give it a little bit not so 90 degree angle you know just keep it keep it looking nice when you create a character out of these shapes you're going to generally get the same topology especially if you do it every time so you can start remembering like how things look and work and there's always the same region i extrude from every time so i always grab these four vertices which you can sort of see that there's like this bounding box here and you can see these little corners right everywhere there's one of these corners you have a little square here so if you're if you're following along um you'll you'll see this square and then it'll just be these four here if you have the nose over here the four on the far right so i think i'm gonna grab these guys and in this case also this one because you just want to give yourself a little chin space to it so that's an important thing to keep track of so you can start with a little inset here by hitting the eye key and then just extrude downward and i usually do some multiple extrusions so i do like one a second extrusion here or i can then go into vertex selection move this one out oops one move it out you can start like shaping this into more of a circular shape um and then we can start getting into the shoulders so i'll grab all of these here again actually you can actually delete these two if you'd like and then you just have a little hole here and then you can just keep extreme your way down extrude down a little bit and scale out on the x and the y and you just keep scaling your way down the torso like that so you do like three or four extrusions once you get to the shoulder you're going to want to do like one extrusion bring it down again and scale this i like to scale it back in and then i just scale it bring it down one more time to about there and then i give another little loop cut here and i can pull these these three out here just like that and just give them a little bit of a belly because characters have bellies you know what i mean don't act like they don't oops you can work on the chest region too if you'd like so we'll leave our character there for now actually i'm gonna scale this neck in just a little bit this is just just to have a general idea of a shape of a character for the torso as it will complete the rest of the character as we keep going on okay so i think this is a good place to add in our skin shader if you didn't watch my skin shader tutorial already or you want to make your own feel free to do so but this is a perfect example of if we've made our skin shader already it's this easy you just make a new material on here so it's gonna look like this once you click on it and just change your timeline to a shader editor and click new and then we can delete our principal bsdf and then here's where we have to bring in our skin shader so you go to file you can either link it or you can append it appending is probably nicer append and then you go to where you saved it where your asset library is and then once you find where you where you keep the skin shader you're going to just open that one up and then find and remember it's not a material but it's a node you've created and in your node tree just append the skin bsdf and then it's in your data and you can just you can find it from multiple places you can click add and it's under group over here or again shift a the easy way probably under group and add in the skin bsdf shader we created i'm gonna look at my character here in cycles and just to look at just to get an idea of how it's going let's throw in an hdri i like that hdri i think i'm gonna leave the hdri on for now because i like it okay okay so we're in cycles um it's time to do the eyes so you can do the eyes multiple ways i have an eyeball that i've created that i like to just reuse a lot which i recommend you do and i'm let me know in the comments if you want to see an eyeball tutorial i'm not going to go in depth creating one this time but we will make it make a temporary eyeball just for this so just create shift a you can add a uv sphere and i like to rotate the uv sphere on the on the x-axis 90 degrees just because of the topology we get makes it super nice to um you can see we already have these rings here that we can start using for like the the pupil and the iris and the white of the eyes all that good stuff so we can go into into eevee here just for a second i'll give this a new material and we'll just start with a nice little shade smooth now this eye isn't going to be anything fancy bring the roughness down here so it's reflective i also want to add in a clear coat so it's almost like there's like a coat of clear liquid on the outside it makes the eye look a little a little shinier so you go to edit mode and we go to the side view of the sphere if we just grab the edge selection we can just go along this side here by holding ctrl and just clicking all of these vertices so we really want to just be make sure we're as you can see here we're selecting just one side of the ring so once you've created this sort of plus shape you can hit u and then mark seam so we're actually going to actually unwrap this because there's a really nice eye texture right on textures.com and it's free to use so so if we grab everything with a you unwrap if i were to make another little section here we can see how our unwrap would come out and it's this perfect little flower pattern and it makes sense right because look at this this would be the front of our eyeball and these are all the places that we sort of split it along the back and it opened up just like if this were like a flower bud and and um it sort of opened up like that almost like if you took a bell and you ripped it apart so our eye is looking good and now all we have to do is add an image texture in and if you've already had a node wrangler uh if you already have the node wrangler add-on you can just do control t on your principal bsdf and it adds in this little thing and we can open and just go to your textures file and wherever you've saved your textures from from you can scroll down and find it and right here textures.com there's just this nice little eyeball and if you click open image if you look in the material view it's already going to apply it properly because because if you look here right we've unwrapped it right over right over the hole so we're just going to make it look a little nicer so i'm just going to go ahead and grab the very center here and then if i hit o to turn on proportional editing um i can just scale this out and as you scale this up you're going to make the whole you're going to make the iris smaller and generally you want it to be smaller um but just you know keep in mind your proportional editing limits and scale this down and i think that's looking okay maybe you don't want it so rough like .035 might be a little better you know bring up the roughness just a hair but this is this is going to be generally a decent eyeball for now um you can move it out of the way and then just scale it down a little bit and just to help get it in place one easy method you can do is add a modifier to this to this eyeball and then add if you add a mirror modifier check this out you can mirror it with an object and if you just mirror it with the cube wherever you place one eyeball it's going to place one exactly on the other side so we're just going to sort of place this into place and we're just going to put it right in that little gap we've created and we might want to actually you know adjust things move things around as we see fit so scale this in maybe bring them back a little bit cool and then you have your eyes in place now they're looking really bug-eyed and we're gonna fix that okay eyelids and here's how i do them here's my method for eyelids so i grab edge selection mode and i grab these two guys and i hit shift d escape and i duplicate these two over here as well just so they're two separate objects you have to do it separately and if you grab all these together you can extrude these up and then we're just creating little panes of skin really so once you do that you're just going to grab both of them which you can do i just did with the l key if you hit l like l l and then now we can also hit e to extrude and just make sure you're extruding along the y axis here just bring them out a little bit if you run into an issue like this by the way where it looks like it's pinning it to the very edge even though you have this turned on it means you have an issue with normals so um which you'll usually end up having that somewhere along this line is you can get rid of this by just clicking selecting everything list a and then do shift n and it will recalculate the normals grab just the bottoms and extrude them out just one time and i like to grab with the vertex selection just this middle one and pull it out just to give it a little lip of an eye cool so grab these i'll let you grab these middle guys then and pull them out and this is really where you can just start shaping the eyelid um and it just sits in there really nicely once you do this so grab both of these and go to the side view here and literally just place it over top of the eye give it a little rotation and again we have to we have to fix this so it so it just wraps the eye nicely but i'm just going to grab the side of this here grab this side over here and scale it in and we're going to do the same for right here bring these in a little bit on each side and remember it's okay if your character is not perfectly symmetrical i used to worry about that too much and um it actually ends up giving your character a little more life if they're not robotically perfectly symmetrical here we go and then remember just keep going and pulling things out were they where you see fit and nice you made a couple little eyelids and just to top it all off we're going to duplicate it from the bottom too so and a lot of these eyelids here are where you're going to get a lot of expression out of your character so like you know how much are the eyes coming down like that or are they up like this you know anger sadness you know the drill select both of these eyelids here i'm just going to shift d bring them down and then scale it on the z axis negative one just so we have just so it flips it perfectly upside down and we can just sort of make this bottom eyelid now this bottom eyelid is not as intrusive as the top one in some cases but once you make eyelids like that that are disconnected you'll see here that i think it looks really nice this is how i do a lot of my characters i just give them those little eyelids my character's looking a little a little weird because we still have to add details to it um you can go ahead and go ahead and give it another shade smooth right click because you need to do that every once in a while okay so we're getting there all right let's add some details on the inside so we might want some teeth so with teeth again we can do this same method where we just keep duplicating and we're using parts so let's duplicate this top bit and let's bring it out here on the on the y-axis and we can scale it in the y-axis and scale it up and then if i just extrude it up we have this little bit to work with so i like to add loop cuts just to give it a little more of a boxier feel just because teeth can be sharper you know they don't have to be so soft like the full the full shape of the human and just give it a little arc just make it look a little nice think of think of a little shape you're making this just like a little a little rounded edge and here would be your teeth and as a matter of fact you can even give it one more little guy right down there if you if you want to just to make it feel a little better um this needs a new material so if i hit l to select this you can under here duplicate this or add a new one in and then new and assign and we can probably a good time to start naming materials so teeth skin so teeth and then we can just move this right back into place from the side view so on the z-axis and once once you put your teeth in you'll probably start to find that your characters are looking a little a little more expressive not so weird once you go into this top view teeth are probably looking a little a little much there alrighty let's add in some eyebrows too so just like we did for the eyelids we're just going to go ahead and duplicate some parts out so duplicate that bit duplicate that bit l so both these selected scale them on the on their axes and just extrude out a little bit one thing that's helpful here for eyebrows is grabbing with the face selection making one side a little thinner than the others so i'm gonna scale this out and then i'll make this scaling proportions thing to individual origins and scale that guy down and then we can bring this back these don't have to be crazy but they definitely you definitely need eyebrows otherwise it will start making your you won't realize why your character looks so creepy but they don't have eyebrows it's just do me a favor just google image search celebrities without eyebrows and you'll see why you always need to have eyebrows in your characters one thing you can do here if you want if you want to make one side have the perfect eyebrow you don't want to have to deal with that the other side we're just going to keep reworking a nice little eyebrow here maybe we'll give a little loop cut here scale it up just just make just you know make it look feel right don't make it feel too forced and um i grab the eyebrow and set it a little bit make sure it's clipping with the mesh so that way it's like looks like it's part of it delete this side just totally delete that eyebrow so either your cursor will be in the middle or or if it's not you can just uh holding alt select the center loop cut here and then do shift s and then cursor to selection and that will make sure it's actually right in the center which is important because if we change our pivot point to the 3d cursor and we select this one we can just duplicate it with shift d and then we can scale it on the x-axis to negative one that will perfectly place it on the other side and then if we hit everything again make sure we just just cancel our normals with a shift n and just recalculate our normals see here we can already tell our character is feeling a little a little more expressive and we might actually now ever you know everything is a balance so once you create the eyes you might realize well the nose is a little big or wonky and then maybe you'll shift the nose a little bit and then you'll realize the mouth needs work like it's it's all character it's all preference on how you want to make this character and even right there i can oops let me scale this guy down because i i just think it needs to be a little scaled down and bring it up do a little rotation all these things are tools at your disposal and just making characters feel right how you want them to be this is this is your your baby your character make it make it so perfect a little stubby little nose i love it i love everything about that a little a little much there and bring you can bring individual origins down individual individual sides it's all about your personal preference with these characters and what how how they're making you feel so i'll go into this view and one thing is eyebrows or skin color so we can actually make a hair material now we're not going to get into actually making hair on this tutorial but we can do that in the future but for now we're just going to make a pretty basic hair shader that's very low cost in the render so we can just assign the hair to that and then now down here in the hair i'll close out this and then i'll just get a nice little hair color just something right in here just something right okay let's see what that looks like might wanna make it a little darker yeah all right this character's got a vibe now for the hair you can actually just something quick and easy bring up the roughness and then bring down the specular there you go that's something there i don't always do ears in my characters but for the sake of this tutorial i will and the ears are going to be very straightforward and simple it's going to be just like we did with the eyes i'll just add a new cube in i'll scale this guy down a little bit maybe bring it down the x-axis i can add a modifier we will mirror it we will mirror it's over the cube and then we can just place our ears right in here and it might help to just go ahead and do a control two just to give them a nice little soft shape and we can just start playing around if you want to do what we did before you can click this little button here again and it will snap them down into into the spot you can even if you want give this one a little bevel just to have a little extra shape over there and then once it's in there you can just grab this back this back little ear part and just give it a little rotation make it feel make you feel welcome make it feel like it belongs in the scene right click with a shade smooth and then might as well give these guys the skin material so how we're looking now i might want to bring these forward a little bit if i go into the render view all right yeah i'm feeling that and it looks like the last thing we're going to do here is uh add some hair in so the hair there's multiple ways to do this but i like to go up in here in this just sort of go on the side view and then if you hit c to get your circle selection brush here i like to go along this this top part is right where the scalp likes to start and go around the back and just sort of find where the hair feels like it's naturally going to end so let's go to about there and then just work your way up and know that you're actually selecting uh faces on both sides of the mesh doing this so this is if you want to decide does your character have sideburns or not i don't know they might this guy will and you pretty much want to select a shape that's kind of like that if you hit escape you've selected the scalp and what you can do is just shift d to duplicate it and scale it out for now just so we can play with it a little bit and if we go into the face selection mode or sorry if you go into the edge selection mode with two i like to just start grabbing these corners here and filling them with the face so anywhere we did like a harsh step like this face these two face this one face cool now i'm gonna grab it all again go to three the side view and i'm gonna go back to wireframe and we can scale this guy down inside the mesh which is important to make sure we're from all sides inside the mesh and then we're going to want to extrude this out to get a full hair so um you can do alt-e and extrude faces along normals and just bring it out a little bit and now we've created this weird little hair shape that we're going to work on but just know we have hair now which is good it's good so scale it down just to make it feel right um you don't want to actually scale in on the x-axis and the first thing i like to do is um i like to go into the vertex selection and then grab these guys here the bottom two and with proportional editing selected and we turn on connected only we're only going to affect the vertices connected to this this piece of mesh aka just a little hair skull scalp and you can just give it a little tuck inside the head or just near it nearer to the head so that way it just feels less like it's poking out for no reason and you can do the same all around the mesh scale this in and one thing you might find is once you place this hair down your ears need to be replaced which is why it's white the mirror modifier makes it easy just to click and drag and move them somewhere else and again like we've been saying the whole time you place one part of the mesh and then you realize actually this needs to come down a little bit overall and then the top of the hair i like to just give it a little more of a flat look just because generally hair tends to do that so you just grab the top bits here turn off personal editing just bring it up a little bit scale it on the z-axis just a little bit and you can just scale it in general i really know now you're into the whole hair sculpting phase where you can get crazy with this if you want to and um again you don't have to have your character proportional you can grab one side and just give it maybe a little bump you know something just oh yeah like that's that's a hairstyle sweet right this side comes in um and if i tab into edit mode here again i want to select this hair portion and go to materials and then assign that hair the same hair so now when we look at it in the rendered view we have our hair material there and um this character has a very wide jaw so i kind of like it but i do think it should come in a little bit just from being honest with myself just scale along the x-axis just a little bit maybe i don't want to ruin the whole mesh there we go scale these guys in oh beautiful oh yes this is a character this is for sure a character if you can start hearing the voice your character's gonna make or you can see what kind of character they're gonna be you know your character is getting there so there we go we've box modeled our character we gave it some materials and um and yeah um we can go further with this in future tutorials where we can actually add hair under this character and finish out the rest of the model and rig them up and get them ready to go but for now this is a pretty solid start to the head model all right thanks for watching and um let me know in the comments if there's any other tutorials you'd like me to make i definitely read all the comments and i love seeing what you guys have to say so um if if this helps you out let me know in the comments and if there's something else you want to see again let me know in the comments i love seeing it so thanks for watching everyone and stay tuned for the next part of this tutorial coming soon [Music] you

Channel: FruitZeus

Views: 24,763

Keywords: Creating A Character Blender 2.91, Create A Character In Blender, How To Make A Character Head, Character Head Blender 2.91, Blender 2.91 Character Tutorial, Character Tutorial Blender 2.91, Character Head Tutorial Blender, how to create a character in blender 2.91, Stylized Character Blender 2.91, stylized character head blender, Create A Stylized Character In Blender, How To Make A Character, how to make a character in blender, how to make a character in blender 2.91

Id: v_yosYypL2k

Length: 34min 29sec (2069 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 13 2021