Create Base Meshes for Sculpting Quickly & Easily

hello and welcome to gabit media i'm grant abbott and today we're looking at creating base meshes such as beasts humans vegetation really quickly and easily and we'll be using the skin modifier to do this now there's lots of techniques to do this cg boost has just come out with a video themselves about using the trim tool to do this where they go through the whole creature process and also they do a great really detailed course on sculpting which they're just updating at the moment and if you buy now you can get the updates later there's a link to that in the description it's an affiliate link so you'll be supporting me if you click on that it's a fantastic course really detailed and really useful if you want to become a sculptor in blender also there's my own character creation course and we go through the sculpting process to create a full game ready character and incidentally i use a different technique for creating the base mesh within that so you can check that out this video is meant for beginners to intermediate levels but certainly not for complete beginners a good understanding of the interface and the basic tools is essential so first of all what is a bass mesh well it's a simple mesh and a starting point for your sculpts it's very difficult to just grab a blob or cube and start pulling elements out and hope they go in the right direction to create a starting point for your mesh and it's much more efficient to model out that mesh and not to go straight from the basic sphere like i say there's lots of ways of doing this i mentioned a different way in my character course cg boost uses the trim brush and i'm going to show you using the skin modifier so here i am in blender 2.93 alpha all the tools i'm using are available in all versions of blender at the moment so you shouldn't have any issues so i've got my basic startup scene and i want to bring in a reference image to create my mesh from so here i've got a really simple reference side and front view and it's a good idea to find one of these or create it yourself this is actually taken from my learn how to draw creating game art course so if you're interested in making your own reference images then check that course out you can get a discount with the link in the description and you can also download this reference image again link in the description so once you've downloaded the reference image you can click and drag it into your file and it will just plonk it in like that it's come in perpendicular to the camera so with it selected we can just press alt r to remove any rotation and alt g to move it into the center like that then if i press r x then 90 it will rotate it around the x axis 90 degrees now s to scale and scale it up let's go to front view and line it up now so one on my numpad for front view and we're doing a female so i'll press g to grab and move it into the middle there now it's difficult to see my grid in the background so with my reference image selected i can come down to the object data properties down here and i can change the opacity so tick the opacity box and i find point one is the most useful now i can see my grid and there's my red line which i'll use for the base and i'll line up the middle just there there's lots of other useful options here such as only displaying it in orthographic instead of perspective so as soon as i go into perspective we don't see it and it's only an orthographic so if i press one that's the only time we'll see it i'll turn it back to perspective for the moment because we need to move it about and we need to duplicate this so if i come around to the side here we need a side view so shift d to duplicate and i'll just left click so it puts it in the same place and we've got another empty up here i'll rotate this around the z axis 90 degrees and now you can see them on top of each other there and we want to line up the side view so i'll press g then y and move it to the front and i'll actually move it in front like this not overlapping like that but in the front and if i come around to top view slightly i press g then x and move it across as well i'm also going to select this one and g then y and move it backwards so where the cube is is where i want to model and i don't want the reference images to overlap this so i push them backwards and push them to the side i'll just select this one g then y and move it roughly to the middle so when i'm in side view i've got my side view to work on i'll just move it back a touch more there we go so it's in the middle there and front view we've got the front view to work on okay so now we're ready to set up our object for sculpting so for this i want to add a single vertex the easy way is to enable the extra object add-on so go to edit preferences go to add-ons and type in mesh and there's the extra objects add on just there close that down and when you press shift a now you'll have a single vert the other way if you can't be bothered to do that is to select your default cube go into edit mode make sure you're in vertex mode with one and then press m merge at center and that will go into the middle there now i can move this into the middle of my character so g then z and move it up to that point there make sure you are in edit mode and make sure you're in vertex mode as well when you do that now i can extrude this out and have another point in the middle there e then said to extrude in the z axis to there e then z e then zed and i've got several points there in fact i'll move this one up slightly so it's about there e to extrude out this way e to extrude down down to roughly the heel and i'll go into side view in a moment and do the front of the foot you only need to do one side because we're going to mirror it in a moment now often when you sculpt it's helpful to have separate objects say for the arms or for the head especially if you want to do lots of detail on the head but not the rest of the body so if i select this vertex shift d to duplicate and move that out and then e to extrude down here and e to extrude down to the wrist and you'll probably want an extra object for the hand so shift d to duplicate i'll just move that out so we can see it slightly e to extrude for hand and then you can make fingers as well but i'm not going to go into detail about how to make hands and fingers you'll be able to do that once you understand how this process works now at the moment they're all one object so what i'm going to do is separate them out so a to select all p and then by loose parts so p to separate by loose parts just there and now when i go into object mode they're all different objects okay i'll go back into edit mode with this one to side view now and start just lining these up so g to grab and just move them about now i select the arm and start moving that about and lastly the hand so each time going into object mode then into edit mode to edit it oh and for some reason i forgot to do the legs so let's click on this object back into edit mode e to extrude down here and then for the toes just there okay so back to object mode and to make this solid we go to the modifiers down here add modifier and then skin modifier that makes it quite fat and weird but we can go add modifier and then subdivision surface modifier that will smooth it out still looks a bit weird but we can change that around in a moment but we also need to mirror it across the other side so add modifier and then mirror i'll just scroll down and show you the mirror options just down here there's a bisect option so if we tick that that will actually cut it in half for us so it's not duplicating itself and overlapping so basically it cuts it in half for us so we don't have to so make sure that bisect is ticked in the x-axis an important point about this is that you are mirroring by the object center just there if your object center is somewhere else then you're going to have problems with your mirror if you need to know more about that then check out my quick tips playlist where i talk about the mirror in depth we'll edit this in a moment but first of all we need to add it to the arms and hand if i select my arm and my hand and then the body and press control l i can link the modifiers together so in this version it's called copy modifiers it might be called link modifiers in your version okay so it looks like it hasn't worked but we need to go into edit mode and select one of these and mark root so it has to have a kind of root point saying where do you want me to start from and i'll do the same with the hand so just there select one of these and mark root and it doesn't make too much difference where the root is okay so now we need to edit the size of these so let's start with the body into edit mode again i'll go to my x-ray mode just there and then i can select on these and press ctrl a to scale them and then you can start scaling them up it doesn't have to be precise because we'll edit this later on same with the arm so i'll select all and just press ctrl a to make them a bit smaller and the hand if i select all and press ctrl a and you can come in here and add some fingers if you want to so e to extrude a to extrude a to extrude and so on if i zoom in a bit and just show you without x-ray mode you just got to be a bit careful that they don't overlap too much like this so you would have to select them ctrl a and scale them down and can you see it changing like this and occasionally if i scale it down to here you can see it's glitching a little so watch out for those glitches like that if you get that then just adjust your scale very slightly if adjusting the scale is not working then just grab a vert and move it around the place so you can extrude out and have extra fingers and be a bit more delicate than i am here but for now i'll undo that and keep it nice and simple okay so we're almost ready for sculpting all i need to do now is to apply all these modifiers so i can sculpt on top and to do that i can press ctrl a visual geometry to mesh if you have an earlier version you might need to go to object and then convert to mesh just there and that just applies all the modifiers and does the same thing i can select these both and press control a and visual geometry to mesh or go up to object convert mesh and like say they apply all the modifiers and do the same thing okay so i'll start with the body we can now go into sculpt mode by clicking on the sculpting workspace and start sculpting so i'll go to front view and i'll expand my brushes out so you can see what i'm using the two most important ones to start off with are the inflate and the grab but before we start sculpting it's a good idea to remesh our object the remesh options are up here and you can also find them down here but if i press shift r then i can get my voxel size for the size of my faces and i probably want them to be about maybe 0.45 for me anyway it should be the same for you if you follow the steps as i have but more importantly look at the actual size of the faces so somewhere around there for me is what i'm looking for then to actually remesh we press ctrl r so shift r to see the size and then ctrl r to activate the remesh and you can see it there activated i can then come in with my grab brush f to resize the brush shift f for strength and i can start pulling this around and trying to match up with my bass mesh underneath now if you're doing it from front viewer like this if i go around to the side you can see it's a little bit wayward it might just push in the middle bit and leave the back bit you can hold down shift and smooth out and then it will start smoothing out your mesh and hopefully going a bit closer to your reference image keep jumping from side view to front view to sort these areas out and keep smoothing out ah and i've just noticed it's not mirrored to the other side now since 2.92 i think they've turned symmetry off so you can turn it on there but obviously i've edited one side already and it's not updating on the other well that's okay we can come to this drop down and symmetrize but we're going from the positive x on this side to the negative x on this side so i'll go to that drop down again positive to negative just there and then symmetrize and i'll jump to the other side and this time i'll keep the symmetry x on and now whatever i do on one side will be mirrored on the x-axis to the other you can also turn on x-ray mode so you can see your reference in the background and then just get a bit closer now the reference isn't perfect it's just what we're using in the drawing course to block out simple characters but it's quite good to think about the block shapes rather than having any details of muscles and so forth means this should just be a base mesh and we're trying to get the big details in before doing any of the finer details so we can start to squish all this in using the grab tool mainly but every now and again you might need the inflate brush and once you've got to a certain level so around here you'll probably want to remesh once again because we've distorted all the geometry and stretched it and squashed it into different positions so if we press ctrl r now you can see it does another remesh and sorts that out and then we can keep going in and editing so every now and again ctrl r to remesh so i haven't used the inflate brush much but if i click on the inflate brush you can see for things like the carves you can just inflate them out the legs and if there's anything that's too thick you can hold down control and then it will squish it in as well for areas where you need a dent you can use the crease brush and then ctrl r to remesh and you'll get the shape back the crease brush can be useful when you start adding a little bit more detail in areas and combine that with the inflate brush especially in these areas works really well now i'm kind of getting into the sculpt here and probably going a bit beyond a base mesh but hopefully it will give you an idea of the brushes i'm using when i'm starting out my sculpts so to go to other objects control tab will take you to the pi menu and you can go to object mode and then you can choose another object and then control tab and go to sculpt mode then shift r for my remesh ctrl r to actually apply it and then i can again start sculpting these objects so control tab object mode control tab sculpt mode they have updated that and you can actually jump between different objects but it's not been put into the full version just yet so check my sculpting playlist for a separate video on that when they update it fully now once again i forgot to enable symmetry for these so i'll turn the symmetry on and i'll also do the symmetry so it goes across the other side and you can see we've got a very basic bass mesh here which we can then build on and start adding to so that's how to produce bass meshes nice and quickly and once you get used to this process it is very fast i've sped the footage up now so you can see a bit of me sculpting once i've got the base mesh down i start using tools like the clay strips and the crease more often and i start remeshing to a finer detail so that i can put more detail on my object if your computer is a bit slower you might want to separate out even further so the head for example have that as a completely separate mesh then you can add that finer detail to the head without having to remesh the whole model to a much higher resolution you don't even have to join it to the body you can put some sort of necklace in there or a curled scarf or something like that and hide the seam between the two and there we have it probably a little bit further than a base mesh but hopefully you get the idea from this about how quick it can be and it doesn't have to be humans it can be creatures or vegetation or whatever you can think of so if you've got any questions comment below thanks for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: Grant Abbitt

Views: 100,826

Rating: 4.966495 out of 5

Keywords: understand, texture, paint, learn, blender, tutorials, 3d, art, graphics, game, material, guide, easy, painting, how to, gamedev, sculpting, sculptor, gameart, game assets, blender tutorial, blender 2.9, game design, models, 3d models, stylised game art, stylised, stylized, game development, game dev, game objects, base mesh, blender 2.8, skin modifier, sculpting in blender, blender sculpting, blender 2.8 tutorial, blender character modeling

Id: 7EJRlWitYmo

Length: 14min 51sec (891 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 18 2021