Create FPS Character Arms in Blender

[Music] okay so i've done about a dozen videos already on weapon design so it should probably come as no surprise that one of my favorite genres of games are fps titles everything from rainbow six siege to escape from tarkov i'm an absolute god-tier player at and you do not want to step to me on any given day all right but now it's time for me to ascend to even higher levels of creative genius as i start learning how to create my own games using unreal engine and i noticed that in every other tutorial everyone just simply downloaded a character or a set of arms from whatever respective asset store they used and of course me being an artist was like no no way i'm not having this i can only use hands that were created by my own hands so throughout the course of this video i'm going to show you the entire process of creating a set of hands and arms for an fps character as this is usually the only extension of your character that is visible in the viewport the modeling process will cover everything from base mesh sculpting retopology and texture painting all done within blender after that it's time to get into rigging and weight painting so that we can start animating our characters arms with animation sets that cover everything from reload drawing the weapon and firing for the blender portion of modeling everything i do can be accomplished in vanilla blender but i am going to touch on a number of paid add-ons and resources that i find instrumental in the creation process so while i hope you'll enjoy sculpting modeling and rigging as much as i do if you're just looking to prototype stuff in unreal engine or you just want to test out animations with your weapon models then just go and download some arms off the marketplace i won't tell i'll try to leave links to all the resources that i use for this video so feel free to check those out and good luck on your respective projects furthermore if you have technical difficulties with anything that's covered feel free to leave a comment below or consider joining my discord server where we have a growing community of awesome people who would be happy to help you with whatever issues that you're having i also just started a new community challenge section in there which is a good way to test out your modeling skills so please feel free to jump in so to get started if you already have a character model that you're working with then all you have to do is rip off their arms and skip ahead to rigging otherwise you're gonna have to go for the process of creating a base mesh in blender luckily i had this blender base mesh sculpt that i started some time ago and i've actually used in different capacities throughout several projects using a base mesh like this will help to ensure that your arms are a little bit more anatomically accurate and before you jump into the sculpting process it goes without saying that it couldn't hurt to do some research and level up your anatomy skills when i started this bass mesh sculpting project i started with a basic block out of the body and then i created another object and began sculpting out the form of the palm i used a curve and a taper object to create all the fingers and then converted the curve to a mesh and then remeshed it to the palm i used the same process to remesh the hand to the rest of the body from there i focused on refining the arms hands and fingers as much as possible but i know blender still has a tendency to complain when i start going into the multiples of millions of polygons in my scene so i took the simplified brush turned dynatopo on set to constant detail at a much lower resolution than i wanted for my arms and i brushed over the rest of the body simply to decrease the polygon density i then increased the dynatopia resolution to something much higher and brushed over the hands and arms so that i could get a lot more detail out of these areas and since my character would have most of his arms exposed i decided to give him some big schwarzenegger style biceps satisfying to me as a camera after i was happy with the sculpting process it was time to jump into retopology as this is a necessary step to get an animatable gamerez mesh for me i'm only re-topologizing the arms as this is the only part we need in this instance now retopology can seem like a little bit of a tedious and time-consuming process but it's really pretty easy to set up in blender however the hands and fingers can be a little bit tricky so i'm going to be using a re-topoflow 3.2 in order to accomplish this now read topic flow isn't absolutely necessary in order to accomplish this but i highly recommend it because it has some amazing tools that will really help to speed up the retopology process for me i start by using the contours tool to set a bunch of edge loops to form the character's arms and all of the fingers i then use stroked patches and the poly pen tool to bridge the fingers with the palm if you need help learning retopic flow or any particular tool just select the tool that you want and press f2 to bring up a good help menu that shows you all the hotkeys when utilizing that tool now when you're going through the re-topology process don't be too concerned with detail or creating too much geometry because you'll be able to subdivide your mesh further later on once you've created the entire topology for your character's arms before you exit re-topo flow don't forget to use the relax brush tool to ease the topology to the underlying mesh this will help to create a really smooth topology that will subdivide very nicely once you're done with free topic flow now once you've exited retopo flow go over to the modifiers tab and you'll see that retopoflow auto generated a mirror modifier for symmetry and a displacement modifier set at a very low strength which will come in handy for a number of purposes going forward now real quick go into edit mode and let's just check real quick to make sure that everything we did in rotapo flow came out the way we wanted it so first select your entire mesh hit shift n just in case there are any flipped normals and then go to select select all by trait and non-manifold just to check if there are any interior faces or other geometric errors that could interfere with our mesh now if you're leaving a large open hole where the arms end like i am in this instance then that should be okay for this project now if you want to start getting some of the details from your base mesh sculpt back what you can do is first activate that displacement modifier in the viewport then add a subdivision modifier set to cat mall clark followed by a shrink wrap modifier select the base mesh sculpt and now your topology will adhere to the base mesh underneath these modifiers are useful for when you export your final game res mesh it might be useful to disable them in the viewport for now because they could really slow things down when it comes to the texture baking and animation process now we are almost to the point of going into texture baking and texture painting but before we do that i'm not too happy with just having some plain exposed arms so i actually want to give our character some tactical looking half finger gloves so i'll go into edit mode and simply select the area of the hands that i want duplicate it and then separate the selection i select all the open holes on our new glove mesh with a seam and then i give it a solidify modifier with a positive offset value now you can go ahead and you can apply some of the inherited modifiers such as the subdivision and shrink wrap modifier and then go ahead and apply the solidify modifier as well going into edit mode if you cut all the seams around the open holes you should be able to use the face select mode to select all the interior faces and then just delete them now close all the holes with a grid fill and we should have an airtight mesh i'm going to go ahead and duplicate this mesh and just make a slightly more high res version by adding another subdivision modifier and also creating some patches of float geometry just for a little bit of detail you can definitely put a whole lot more work into this than i did and get something that looks a lot more realistic but this is sufficient for what i'm trying to do now it's time to uv unwrap our model so that we can move on to baking and texturing but first go to the mirror modifier on both the gloves and arms of your character and go to the data drop down and hit the check box next to mirror u also check to make sure the check box next to vertex group is enabled go ahead and mark all the seams to properly unwrap your mesh mine looks a little something like this next i'm going to be using the uv pack master 2 add-on to pack all of our uv islands ok so the first thing that i want to do in the uv pack master tab is i'm going to scroll down to the drop down for packing box in there i'm going to hit enable packing box and since i know that our uv islands are going to be mirrored horizontally i'm going to scroll down to the packing box coordinates and where it says packing box p1 i'm going to change that from 0 to 0.5 with that you'll see a yellow outline which will indicate that our uv islands will be constrained to half of our uv grid and with that i'll pack our uv islands using the packing method provided by uv pack master to make the most effective use of our uv grid now we can move on to baking and texturing now this process still isn't the most efficient or intuitive when it comes to using only blender so if you have access to another texturing application such as adobe substance 3d painter or qixel mixer go ahead and use those otherwise this guy did a pretty good tutorial on baking and creating a skin texture using only blender so definitely check out this video and you know maybe uh go ahead and subscribe as well so while i've talked a lot about baking in previous videos it's likely that you'll still have a little bit of clipping occurring in between the fingers of your character i wouldn't worry about this too much and i would simply go to blender's texture painting workspace and use the smudge brush to correct all the areas on your normal map while painting in the viewport make sure that you have symmetry enabled next you can go ahead and generate the other images for your skin texture and other texture outputs i'll be using a single material for all the textures for both the gloves and characters arms now like i said texturing in blender isn't the most intuitive so feel free to export your texture sheets to an external application such as photoshop or krita to do some old school 2d texture painting and as was shown in the texture painting video you can export your textures from blender using a plain object and an orthographic camera now it's time to move on to rigging this is the process of setting up a bone armature which will determine how our mesh is going to deform when it's animated first off go to your add-on preferences and make sure you have the rigify add-on enabled this will be very instrumental in the rigging process there are also two other free add-ons which i highly recommend that you download for your rigging purposes the first one is a bone layers add-on which gives you much better bone layer management than what's available in blender by default the second one is a pretty simple batch rename tool that allows you to quickly set proper naming conventions for all of your bones both of these addons will be linked in the description below now the rigging process essentially involves creating an armature which will deform our character's mesh this is followed by creating separate bone layers which will house the constraints and controls that we want for properly setting up our animation rig so while the deformation bones are the ones that directly influence the character's mesh we will only be interacting with these control bones which house our custom properties controls and constraints such as the ability to switch between forward and inverse kinematic so if you enable the rigofy add-on and you go to create a new object armature you should see that you have a human meta rig available we're going to be using this as our deformation skeleton so i'll generate this armature and i'll start matching it up my arms hands and fingers i like to get things a little extra precise so i'll constantly be switching between my character's arms selecting an edge loop of vertices hitting shift s for cursor to selected then going back to the armature selecting the bone that i want to match to that location hitting shift s and selection to cursor a tedious process but it helps to be a little extra precise here and once i have the shoulders arms and hands matched up to the appropriate locations i'll go ahead and i'll delete all the other bones and with all my bones appropriately placed i'll go to the object data properties tab which is a little running man right here and go down to the rigify buttons tab and hit generate rig and then i'll parent this rigofy rig to my character's mesh with control p and automatic weight selected so while the rigofy add-on will do an excellent job in taking out the grunt work of having to set up an advanced rig in blender i still recommend learning the basics so i would encourage you to go check out perrick piccott's effective rigging in blender tutorial it's one of the best out there i've also been diving into his new course alive which is a comprehensive guide on animation in blender and i'll no doubt be talking about that more in the future so if you parented your character's mesh to your rig using automatic weights then you've already handled a large majority of the weight painting process this means that the correct portions of your character's mesh should be assigned to the appropriate bones however you're probably not going to get out of the weight painting process that easily as there's still going to be a need to do some corrections and cleanups to your vertex influence especially around the areas of the hands and fingers and making sure the correct influence is set to any accessories such as the gloves okay there you go you have your arms they've been modeled they're textured and now you can animate them next step is to bring in your weapon of choice so import your weapon and start creating another armature which will control all the moving parts of the gun and a central bone which will be the root pivot point i'm going to be giving a bone to every moving part such as the bolt the loading ramp and individual bones for the shotgun shells or the mag if your weapon has a magazine next set up a camera above the character's shoulders to preview the first person perspective move your weapon into place in the viewport and then start posing your character's arms in the position of him gripping the weapon once you have a idle grip pose that works for you go to the object data properties tab and create a new pose library save this pose as an entry in this pose library so that you can reference back to it when you're creating all of your different animation actions next it's time to parent the weapon to the hands by using a child of constraint in the bone constraints property tab now this can work either way either by parenting the right hand to the root pivot point of the weapon or parenting the root pivot point of the weapon to the right hand personally i prefer the latter next use a child of constraint to parent the left hand to the root pivot point of the weapon you can set additional child of constraints to parent the left hand to the shotgun shell or the magazine or whatever other part is going to be used to reload your weapon but leave these zeroed out for now and only key their influence when you're ready to create a reload animation and now you're all set up so go ahead and start trying to animate your weapon you'll want to create a few basic things you'll want to create a draw animation a fire animation different poses for hip fire or ads as well as animations for either running walking or jumping with the weapon but whatever you do make sure that you hit the check box next to the animation actions which says fake users i don't know why but you need to make sure you check this so that it saves your animation data otherwise you're in for a rude surprise when you close out of and reopen blender when you're ready to go ahead and create a reload animation select whichever hand is your reload hand and key the child of constraint to whichever part of the gun you're going to be using to reload now setting the keyframes on these constraints can be a little bit tricky ultimately you need to set a keyframe where the influence is still set to 0 or 1 before you want to set the constraint to whatever the part of the weapon that you want to reload this way the influence value does not average over time as you're creating your animations it's also probably a good idea to leave the influence of the weapon's root pivot point on the reload hand set to one throughout your reload animation this way things match up and you can easily reset it back to the idle pose at the end of the animation otherwise there's little more that i can say about animation at the moment just practice practice practice there's a lot of other tutorials out there such as thrifty donut or hyper's old tutorials even though hyper's headset microphone kinda makes me want to but they're still good tutorials also you can find huge compilations of reload animations from all of your favorite fps games posted to youtube i recommend watching a few of these compilations with the playback speed turned way down so you can see all the fine details that are included by the animators so go ahead and play around with animations for as long as you want to when you're ready to export export your file as an fbx and make sure that the bake animations check box is checked go to the drop down and you can lower things such as the sampling rate and the simplify value to get more of a lossless export out of your animations just know that the export time and the file size will both be increased and with that you have an awesome set of arms and all the tools needed to create awesome animations and reloads in unreal or whatever engine that you decide to use let me know in the comments if you're interested in seeing more about unreal or other game engines in the future otherwise i hope you found some part of this video useful if you had technical difficulties feel free to leave a comment below or consider checking out the discord server otherwise good luck on your respective projects like and subscribe [Music] you

Channel: Tosmo

Views: 3,214

Keywords: Blender 3d, Blender tutorial, Blender 2.9, blender tutorial character modeling, blender tutorial animation, blender fps animation, blender fps arms, blender reload animation, unreal engine, unreal engine fps, blender rigging, blender rigify, uvpackmaster 2 blender, retopoflow, blender retopology addon, blender texture painting, blender to unreal, create fps unreal engine 4, first person shooter, fps reload animation

Id: iJTEhOoIFs8

Length: 18min 7sec (1087 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 11 2021