Creating a Realistic BRACKEN Model for LETHAL COMPANY

well it looks like people enjoyed my last video adapting the lethal company play model into a realistic style and I got to thank you guys for the support on that one I wasn't expecting as much of a reception as that was so we're doing it again this is going to function as a light sequel to the last video it's not essential to watch that one but it touches on some Concepts I might not explain as heavily here in regards to the actual creation process but on that note I do want to clarify some things from the last video firstly I don't believe in realism equals better lethal company itself is developed with a specific style in mind it's why the game is rendered the way it is and I honestly don't think these quote unquote realistic versions would actually merge well with the game's Aesthetics it's mostly for the sake of entertainment that being said a lot of people have been asking for a mod I don't actually know how to mod lethal company myself but the links are all there if people want to to take a crack at it there was also a fair bit of mention for a Gary's mod player model which has since been turned into a workshop add-on posted by arom so that's there now secondly I accidentally mentioned in the previous video that quads were the ideal polygon type for game engines quads are actually ideal for modeling because the faces have a more consistent Edge flow that makes for streamlined topology however in an actual game engine quads are always split into tries because it works more efficiently when rendering and it's less likely to result in shading issues when deforming the model it's also why the original model I ripped of the player model was all tries it was the in-engine version and was likely initially modeled using quads looking at some of the other character models in the game files this becomes especially evident if you don't know what I'm talking about here's a quick summary of polygons either way thanks to the people in the last last video who corrected me on this that's my bad so we've looked at the titular employees of the lethal company but what about the Things That Go Bump in the night behold the Bracken it's one of the more alluring entities to inhabit the game and a stressful one of that lose sight of it and it's liable to grab your head and break your neck stare at it too long and it'll charge your head on not to mention it has a tendency to drag your crew mates into the inky Abyss should it get to but what actually is it the in-game beastiary has an entry on this creature stating that its genius is entirely a mystery not very helpful but we can infer some other info in here its skin is the color and texture of a red beetro and the creature's name comes from the leaves that appear to extend from the creature's spine Bracken is a genus of ferns found all over the globe with the exception of desert and Arctic environments it can be assumed from this that the leaves protruding from the bracken's back while probably not the specific plant found on Earth may have a notable resemblance these are allegedly used for intimidation akin to a peacock but the lore is left deliberately vague to give this Beast a mysterious quality looking at the actual in-game model the bragon has a humanoid build with the exception of its legs which feature an unel grade structure this is the lower limb structure of an animal creatures like dogs and cats have digit grade legs meaning they walk on their toes while we humans have plant grade legs meaning we walk on the souls of our feet unel grade is a fancy way of saying they walk on Hooves it's an interesting choice for what seems to be a plant-based creature but who am I to judge the Beary entry states that the leaves grow from the upper spine but looking at the actual modle it seems these leaves are more so distributed along the whole vertebrae since the model itself is a more direct and recognized example we'll be going with that one for its Leaf distribution as always reference collection is the important initial step I didn't gather too many differing references for this one with my pure ref file containing screenshots of the Bracken in-game anatomical reference of both human and Anga grade anatomy and imagery of the Bracken f it was named after when I began blocking out the initial shapes of the play model previously I used subdivided cubes extruded and expanded to create the approximate shape of the character before moving on to further detailing however this time around we're working with a character that has much more organic shapes and as a result I'm going to use a different approach using something called metaballs in computer generated Graphics metaballs are surfaces characterized by their ability to merge into one another and create a single adjoint object there's a lot of complex math at play with these metaal and I truthfully can't explain the deeper mechanics of it but all you need to know is that they're objects capable of melting into each other in an organic way which is useful when creating a base body for our Bracken I'm simply able to piece these meta surfaces together to build an approximate silhouette of our creature looking at my references to block out the major landmarks of the body as well as the shapes that make up some of the musculature following this I laid out some subdivided planes along the back of the model acting as a visual placeholder for the brackens leaves so I could visualize that placement going forward as you can see we now have a relatively simple base mesh for our model and now we can move forward with some digital sculpting blender isn't ideal for this kind of process especially as the poly we'll be working with so it's time to export and move over to zbrush the industry standard in digital sculpting software you'll notice that I haven't made much effort with the bracken's head it's just an oval right now and that's because unlike the game's player model I intend to do a lot of the shaping and visual development right here in zbrush I begin by just sculpting in the major muscle groups and trying to define the shape further as well as marking on some creases where the leaves along the back would fit into so I can see where their placement is without having the actual placeholder objects for the leaves visible and obscuring my view While I Work considering the Bracken is largely humanoid and seems to mostly align with human musculature I'm mostly using that as my basis when sculpting this part with some creative lities taken where necessary a lot of the finer details are lost in the game given its simplistic style but I was able to notice these laid ridges along the belly of the Beast contouring up into the sides so I thought it'd be interesting to run with this visual Motif so you'll see me including more of these rigid surfaces on the model as we go moving on to the Head the Bracken has a somewhat diamond shaped skull complete with ridges on the besides these are uneven and Seymour kind of slices and denting In the Flesh I said the word finagle like three times in the last video so I promise I'll use cooler words but working on the head took a lot of tinkering given the original design is essentially a a flat surface with eyes on it given the creature does have eyes that means it must have eye sockets but as they say the eyes are the window to the soul Fen is a soulless apex predator so we've got to be careful not to humanize this thing I sculpted some eyelids but made sure to keep them pulled back a fair bit to prevent any restful eyes from manifesting you see eyelids are a key component of many for displaying emotion so without them creatures enter an uncanny state where you can't get a read on them they just stare moving on zbrush gives you the option to use built-in black and white images to act as stencils for your sculpting brushes this way you can create physical details like little bumps and cracks and this is what I use a on the surface of the model admittedly this isn't loyal to the Beast Jerry's claims of a beetro like texture but I didn't quite clock this at the time and got a bit carried away either way I think it looks a neat I took a quick detour back to blender here with the exported sculpt in order to just realign our placeholder leaves see they don't quite line up with the slits I'd made in zbrush for them and moving the musculature to accommodate the leaves would kind of mess with the flow of the shapes on the back so I just moved the leaves to accommodate the model instead jumping back in a zbrush I'd realized the face of the sculpt was still carrying too much emotion see even more than the eyelids the eyebrows carry all kinds of emotion and this guy has a thick old brow so I simply painted a mask on the eye sockets and pulled them forward flattening out the features a bit more and killing two birds with one stone the flatter facial structure is more loyal to the actual in-game design and we pull off a more uncanny appearance it's here that I'm actually pretty happy with what we've got so far and we're ready to go back in the blender for some more Tech technical development as I'm sure you know higher polygons means higher processing power required to render them which is why we don't see games with microscopic detail it's simply not viable but we still want to have perceived details in our models at least in these particular circumstances so instead we project these details onto a lower polygon model through the textures but to do that we need a lower polygonal version of our model to work with last time when I prepared the player model I built the model with a non-destructive work flow meaning I hadn't applied any modifiers and kept it fairly modular for easy adjustment as it went on however here we're working with an incredibly dense model that would be absolute torment to try and modify directly in blender so we must retopologize in 3D a model's topology is the way its polygons and edges are laid to make up its surface and can vary depending on its use case just like I mentioned earlier with quads and tries being preferred depending on whether you're using 3D software or importing a model into a game engine when sculpting on a digital model this topology is mostly disregarded in favor of making sure you get the sculpt you want which means we have to retopologize it afterwards according to the official blender 4.0 manual this is the process of simplifying a model's topology to make it cleaner and easier to work with this is generally done by outright recreating the approximate surface of a model and this is what we're going to do with our Bracken sculpt it's here that I'm actually returning to the subdivided Cube modeling I used to block out the play model in the last video but this time I'm using it to form a cage around the sculpt paired with a shrink wrap modifier that links this cage model with our sculpt I explained this in the last video but the shrink wrap modifier allows a mesh to be wrapped over another mesh for read topology this is exceptionally useful for getting a quick result without marking out every individual polygon as we go although we'll be doing this eventually we can only get so far doing this after retopologizing most of the body I knew I had to do the head without the aid of modifiers as that just was not enough geometry in the cage to feasibly Mark out the shapes properly the subdivision modifier mathematically Smooths out and divides the polygons into smaller sections giving the model more polygons to work with anded with the shrink WRA modifier it allows for some more of the shape to come through in the re topology in less time however it's only now that I've applied the subdivision modify blender that I have access to directly interact with the subdivided polygons rather than working with the original cage model now I can retopologize the head marking in each of the faces around its surface to create a clean retopologized surface that still holds the major shapes and silhouettes of our sculpt thanks to our new clean topology marking out the seams for UV unwrapping is easier than it would have been otherwise as a quick Cliff Notes from the last video UV maps are unwrapped versions of a model projected over a 2d space like if you unfolded origami at its seams and laid it over another piece of paper that piece of paper is the space where texture would be with the unwrapped geometry otherwise known as a UV map being where that texture would then be projected back onto the model with our freshly packed UV Maps we're ready to move on to substance painer our texturing program of choice again like zbrush this is a program specialized for its own purposes in this case texture painting the higher detail sculpt of the Bracken is exported with the suffix uncore High while our Reet apologizer measures exported with the suffix uncore low I've already explained the concept of baking but I wanted to give a more complete explanation this time around adobe's official page on the subject explains that baking is the term used to refer to the act of transferring information from a mesh into textures that substance painter can use for various effects in this case we're transferring the mesh data from our high detail sculpt into textures that affect our retopologized model the textures generated from this baking are as follows the normal map which determines the angle at which light hits the model and is the primary method of simulating more details on a model with fewer polygons the world space normal which is like a normal map excepted determines whether a surface is facing up or down the ambient occlusion a texture that simulate soft shatters on the model the curvature a texture that denotes the harshness of edges and its General surface properties the position which marks the top and bottom front and back and left and right sides of the model it's it's kind of like a much more simplified normal map that covers the whole thing and finally the thickness texture which shows which parts of the model are at its thickest points the normal map is our star player when transferring the higher details onto our lower poly mesh but these other textures also provide useful surface information when using specific features of substance painter and it generally makes our workflow a lot easier in the long run painting onto the model itself we work with a different set of texture types to quickly summarize again we have the bass this is our flat color without any lighting or effects the metallic this is what determines whether parts of a model are shaded like metal or not in this case we won't be using it since there's no metal on a Bracken as far as I can tell the roughness this texture determines what parts are shinier and which parts have a more matte appearance and the height on export this will be included in the normal map textures but while working in substance pan it operates as its own layer and assigns the elevation of a texture surface so to start off our textures I'm using a base of dark Browns and reds and layering in more colors using the thickness Maps generated during baking to create a more organic distribution of colors to achieve the beat red skin the gamees Beast Jer talked about while generally the baked texture set is meant to exist for smart features like dynamically generating dirt on a Model I'm just using some of our generated textures to pull more detail out of the texture itself and give it a more detailed look since the eyes are white glowing orbs they won't need a lot of work here and the Hooves just have a darker texture painted in with a shinier roughness layer to simulate the shinier surface of keratin found in hair and fingernails or in this case Hooves finally going back to blender it was time to get those leaves done I used the game's logo as a placeholder texture while I align the UV maps of the leaves to use up the whole texture space with each Leaf occupying the same space in the texture rather than sculpting in each individual part of these leaves I'm going to be using flat planes with textures placed over them this is an optimized method of displaying these kinds of details that's standard in many games and in particular hair for game characters in this case it would be known as hair cards and despite the fact we're not doing hair here the same principle still applies it's a texture with some transparency and it's used on a flat surface in order to simulate finer details on a character lethal company has some of these on its models and with one final stop back and sub painter I painted a leaf over the plane and used the height layer around its edges to create the illusion of thickness in the Bracken ferns exploring it back in the blender it worked about as well as I'd hoped for barring some minor adjustment in shape at newvs to get an acceptable result we're now onto the final stretch it's time to rig this character and just like the play model in the last video I used a modified rigify skeleton to assign parts of the Bracken to specific bones with a painted in intensity for each one given the lack of smaller pieces and a model with a fairly cohesive Edge flow I was actually able to achieve a fairly good result using just the automatic rigging features in blender that being said I still did some manual adjustment to ensure the final result was as good as it could be and I was honestly a little shocked that the leaves of the Model Auto riged just about perfectly given that usually pieces like this that come separate from the main model usually get lost in translation when using an auto riger this was especially an issue when doing the lethal company player model but after posing up the character and adjusting the lighting we've got a finished wait a sec where did it go wait wait wait I know I said I wasn't going to do another lethal company thing but it's always fun to create stuff and I saw people asking for it so I figured there wasn't any reason not to go for it after all this gave me an opportunity to talk about some other methods of creating a model and go over some things I didn't in the last video but to cap it off here's a final Showcase of the model for your viewing pleasure if you stuck around for the whole process thank you so much if you just skipped by to see the final product hopefully you think it's neat either way I really appreciate the support from everyone and I hope to have some eyes on whatever I do next whenever I get to it see you [Music] around

Channel: Bini

Views: 785,327

Keywords: Lethal Company, 3D, Blender, Video Game, Lethal, Company, Realistic, Scavenger, Game, Meme, Bini, Funny, Animation, Bracken, Horror, Digital

Id: gL4jmYn-q7s

Length: 17min 59sec (1079 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 26 2023