Create FACIAL EXPRESSIONS in Zbrush FAST with Scan Data!

hey what's up guys i'm eric and in this video we're going to take a look at how you can quickly add a full set of blend shapes and good topology to a mesh that you've sculpted in zbrush with a little help from scan data now in the last video we sculpted this head that we're going to use in this video from a sphere and so it doesn't really have great topology it just has a basic zero mesh but what if you want to add uvs or have good edge flow that you could use maybe for animation or something like that well there's something that we can use to really speed it along now it's always a good practice to reach apologize by hand just to learn edge flow and learn the fundamentals but sometimes we just want to do stuff fast that's where this asset from 3dscanstore.com comes in if you've never used their website before they have a bunch of scan data for textures faces all kinds of things they have a free asset called the multi-expression base mesh which is a base mesh with uvs and a whole set of blend shapes on it and what's cool is that the uvs on this mesh are standardized across everything in 3d scan store so any of their textures and stuff you can apply to a model with these uvs and use their assets which is pretty cool and so what we're going to do is we're going to take this base mesh that they've provided and we're actually going to mold its shape to our sculpt but we need a tool to do that and that tool is called z-wrap now there is a whole program called r3ds and the company is russian 3d scanner but they have a plug-in called z-wrap that we can use to get a great result and is going to be perfectly suitable for stylized characters like what we're doing here and so z-wrap costs about a hundred bucks but you can get a 30-day free trial if you just want to try it out so this isn't a free method necessarily but i think it's a method that's pretty cool and could be worth it so i want to talk you through the process and show you the result so here we have the base mesh that they've provided it's just a basic male head and if we scroll down to the layers you can see that they have a whole set of layers with blend shapes that have eyes smile different phonemes different different expressions different mouth shapes pretty much everything you would need to make a cool expression on your character and these trend towards realism obviously because of their scan data but we can still use these for our character and get a pretty cool result so that's what we're going to try now you install z-wrap just like you would any piece of software and once you install it it adds a location in your z plug-in folder in zbrush that we can launch it from so you want to have selected the mesh that we're going to target to which is the which is the base mesh that we got from 3d scan store and then we're going to also turn on the mesh that we're targeting from which is our sculpt from the last video now we can go to z plug-in z-wrap and go ahead and run z-wrap give it a moment to think you'll see it brings up this menu right here where it's a side by side of the base mesh and of our sculpt which is pretty cool now the basic premise of z-wrap is that we're going in and hand placing points on both meshes to indicate how it should conform to the other mesh and so we're going in and saying hey the corner of the eye is right here we're identifying that position on both meshes and once we do that enough times on enough different areas of the face the program has enough data to understand how to conform the base mesh to your sculpt and get a clean result and so that's what we're taking a look at so there's a couple things to note here um you can see there's different settings across the top one thing i like to use is the sync views button in the top right this just makes it so when you move one model it's moving the other model in the exact same way and just kind of helps you visualize and keep track of what you're doing so to start you can choose a area that you want to focus on and we're just going to place a few points so you just go ahead and just click and i'm going to start with the eye so we're just going to click around the eye a bit in the inside corner and then we're going to just kind of go around the lip and you'll see as we put these dots down they have numbers 0 1 2 3 and so this is very important because we need to make sure the numbers match the position of our mesh that we are targeting from so you'll see 0 is the corner and then we have one two three and then five is the outside edge so just make sure that we keep track of that so you're clicking in one viewport and then you're clicking in the other viewport now you don't have to click at the same time you just have to keep track of the numbers that you're clicking to make sure that they're lining up side by side so i do one eye and then i repeat the other eye i think there is some symmetry options but i've had some weird luck with it so i tend to just do it by hand on both sides and i'm sure there's instructions about like exactly how many areas you're supposed to cover but i like to just be pretty comprehensive and get a bunch of the really refined areas so i'm going to do the eyes i'm going to do the inside of the nose the mouth the ears and maybe a few other points here there just to give it a lot of information to work with in terms of how to retarget this mesh once we're happy with that we actually can save the layout of our points for future reference in case we need to redo this and keep in mind that saving these files off are unique to both meshes so on the left you have the load save and reset for your source mesh and then you have the load save reset for your sculpt on the right side so you have to save those individually in order to load them properly then at the bottom you see that we're selected on select points now we can switch over to wrapping so we go ahead and hit wrapping there's a few things that we can hit there's rigid alignment which is good to hit before you start wrapping which just try to roughly line them up and then if the scale of these was way off you can also hit match scale which will attempt to resize them but ours were pretty close so you're not going to see a huge change here and then there's some other settings too there's preferences to like really dial in uh and control how the wrap happens we're going to keep these default because i find that they're usually fine there's also edge sampler which i think is a rough and dirty way to wrap but we're doing the full business so once we hit rigid alignment and match scale we can go up to the left hand corner and hit start wrapping and you can actually move the viewport around as is happening but it's going to take a while so don't feel like it's frozen most likely it could take maybe a minute or it could take 10 or 20 minutes based on the detail of your mesh so just give it some time you can you'll see that that mesh slowly gets more in line with your mesh as it goes through all the steps then eventually it'll finish and you can hit done and then when we go back to normal zbrush you'll see that the base mesh now looks like your sculpt which is really cool and if we go to the layers tab you'll see that all of the layers are now on your sculpt and so suddenly a sculpt that was just a default face has all these options for expressions we have eyes closed eyes tight brows down all the different mouth shapes and stuff like that which is really cool and then since these are focused on realism we can actually go in and sculpt on them and make changes to them so for example the closed eyelids was a little rough and so you can just hit record in the layer and then just re-sculpt on top of that expression and make changes that fit your character or since we're doing a stylized character you could go through and smooth out some of the detail and wrinkles to make it a little more simplified but these are really good templates that get you close in just a few minutes which is awesome and then you can kind of make changes and really make them work for your character which i think is really cool if there's any issues like around the mouth sometimes some areas don't quite wrap correctly we can just go in and clean that stuff up smooth it out reapply our mouth poly groups anything that we need to do so that we can get a nice clean result so as long as you don't have any of the layers recording you can make changes to the overall mesh and then anytime a layer is recording you're modifying that expression so keep that in mind and so just to finish it off we can run through some of our expressions on a more finalized mesh to kind of see the results there's still some more work i would do with these absolutely but it's pretty cool yeah like we mentioned in the beginning drap isn't free you know it is 100 software so this isn't necessarily a cheat method but if you're someone that likes to do a lot of faces and you want to be able to give them expressions and stuff and this is something you do often it might be a good investment because this is a really really fast way to be able to do that and i think it gives you a good result because the 3d scan store base mesh has very very clean topology and very clean uvs so it's a nice base mesh to use and build on the last thing i want to talk about is how do you actually blend these together to make an expression and you can use a combination of storing the morph target and new layers go to morph target store morph target and then we can go to one that we want to start say browse raised we can raise the brows and then go to our brush our morph brush and morph one side so that only maybe one brow is raised and then we can turn off the recording and you'll see that it'll store in our custom layer and then once we're happy with that we can delete our morph target store another morph target and then do another layer move that layer around and just kind of repeat that process so it's this process of storing a morph target messing around with it deleting it storing it and then kind of continuously working on your custom layer until you get the expression that you want so it's a bit clunky but it will get you a cool expression [Music] [Music] the other thing is you can also just send these to maya so if you go to z plug-in maya blend shapes you see there's a panel for blend shapes and if we hit send to maya it'll actually go through all the layers export those as meshes and then kick us over to maya with those set up on a mesh with blend shapes already intact in maya so you can see if we go to the blend shape window here we have all the sliders for blend shapes to give us a expression which is really cool so if you need to send this over to maya to put it on a rig or something that's how you can do that so this is very powerful and very flexible and gives us a lot of control about how our facial expressions look obviously you could just do this whole process and sculpt your own facial expressions but by using that 3d scan store free multi-expression bass mesh we get a jump start to kind of working on stuff and helping us visualize how our character looks smiling or frowning or surprised or whatever pretty cool stuff i think that's going to wrap it up for this video in the next video we're going to do episode 2 of stylized hair where we're going to use imm brushes to give her a hairstyle so definitely check that out if you like this kind of content please consider subscribing and hitting the thumbs up i appreciate it if you have comments or questions go ahead and drop a comment in the comment section below i always try to get back to that stuff and i hope this was helpful don't stop creating i will see you next time take care bye [Music] you

Channel: hart

Views: 6,793

Keywords: art, game art, gaming, games, 3d, 3d art, digital art, stylized, stylized characters, character art, video game art, cg, computer graphics, cg art, art education, art tutorials, game art tutorials, sculpting, modeling, 3d modeling, 3d sculpting, digital sculpting, texturing, retopology, zbrush, substance, painter, zbrushtutorials, hair, stylized hair, sculpting stylized hair, zbrush hair, xgen

Id: cqt0S4ab3Qw

Length: 12min 4sec (724 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 04 2022