Creating Blendshapes within the ZBrush Layer System - ZBrush Top Tips - Paul Deasy

hey everyone my name is paul dc i'm a lead character modeler working in the animation industry today i want to show you a function within zbrush that i use on a regular basis in the studio that helps with doing blend shapes this is something that will allow you to move or deform a mesh and record it within a layer that can be dialed in and out so what we want to do is for a full facial expression what we'll usually do is create what's called macro expressions which is part of an expression so you have say an angry face where you might have the brow down the lips corners down maybe the nose flares and the eyelids close a little bit so you would have there's your macro expressions is your brow down your mouth corners down a nose flare all that's three layers and then an upper lid down a lower lid up all in separate layers and then you can combine them because you'll also want to say for example have a happy face in which case you'll have cheek up a cheek up expression and you'll also need that lower lid up to follow up with the cheek so um for this example you can see i've got this character here and this is a walk in progress character and it's um conducive to just show you how this how this is going to work so i wanted to make an expression on this guy's face you can see i've got some subdivisions here so i can sculpt into this a little bit more but what i did was i i created the i sculpted the head and i did a quick retopo on it which you can see here and this didn't take long i then if i go back you can see i've got a previous version of the foil now this is the same character but the face completely neutralized you can see how different that looks and your facial expression uh is is it is key to to any character and it gives them life so here you can see he's his entire face is neutral obviously that the body is in a pose this is before i paused it but i've created some layers here and they've got as i explained macro expressions so you can see we've got mouth open you can see how i can just dial them in and i can dial them in anywhere in between so we've got melt wide got mouth corner up got the lower eyelid down sorry the upper eyelid down the lower eyelid up we've got a corrective here which i'll show you now how that works and you can see it doesn't make any sense on its own but it will now in a second and then we've got the brow up now these blend shades of course are just to help me to land a shape or an expression that i want for this particular character in production it's slightly different obviously the technicalities of the process and need to be adhered to so um for braille up it will be the the brow would say flat and you'd raise the whole thing up and then within the rig you would split that into different parts so the animators can shift the angle of the brows whatever way they want um so i'm going to show you how here we can create a new layer and add a new expression so you'll see it it's it turns black but you can quickly just fill the layer and then that will take that away and now we're going to create just real quickly the melt corner down so you see in the middle corner up it's the same thing just in reverse obviously so we're just going to pull these down real quick and zbrush is great for this because obviously the brushes are that we all know and love are fantastic for creating these nice organic shapes uh obviously you've got um the option for masking which helps a lot and um another thing is morph the morph target system within function within within zbrush helps with this a lot and i'll show you how that is now so now we've pulled this down we can just name that mouth corner down cool so we'll zero that and now let's say you are doing uh your blend shapes within our software because you know you've got your your pipeline where your your rigging and animation and so on is done so you've done some shapes in that other software so you can export assuming that you're you're using the same mesh of course uh you can export that from that other software you can create a new layer just fill that again pull this down you see the untitled layer here while the record is on you just want to go up to import and now we have robbie brow down this guy's a bank robber so his name is robbie banks um so here you can see we've got the brow down macro expression so if i want to say pull this brow down a little bit more let's dial this out for a second now we've got the neutral face again we can go down to morph target and i already had one stored there so it'll look like this when you go down to it start a morph target go back to your layers dialing your brow down we can name it bro down real quick hit enter hit record and now we're going to edit this shape a little bit so say we want to pull the inside down a little bit more and you can see as i'm doing this now i could use a mask of course and which might help but using our morph target we can pull stuff down a little bit and then i can go in i can mask out around that eye and now i can just go to our if i go b m you can see the morph brush here so oh now i can paint out where i don't want this layer to effect and what that's doing is it's actually painting back in that neutral pose that we start so i can close it back into the oil a little bit and just smell this dial it back smooth it in and then again because i want these things to work together i can go up i can dial in our upper eyelid down hit record again on my brow down and now i'm editing remember i'm i'm record on the brow down so i'm only editing the brow down and then i can just smooth here pull this up make it a little bit straighter and we've got the two things that are working together so and see if i dial this out i've only got that so the upper eyelid even though we had that dialed in the upper eyelid is completely unaffected because we weren't recording on that so this allows you to how to also combine and you can see this is where correctives come in where we have the mouth wide and then the mouth corner up which combine together because again they've been done separately so when you combine them together you can see that we're getting a little bit of a problem with a pinch here so what we do is we create a new layer and that's going to be our corrective so we like i did with the eyelid i dial in the two layers and now instead of editing one of them because i want them to work on their own i create a new layer which will be the corrective with those two layers dialed in at the same time and hit record on the corrective layer the new layer and so you can see here i have smile void corrective which is where i've done this and you can see i just fixed that with that layer on and now i've created my corrective so now these shapes can work together so this allows you to create a multitude of different expressions so i could create this smile with say the braille let's say the brow down we can pull that upper eyelid down and give them that kind of sinister look so there's another different kind of expression of course you can add more and more the more you need i can also move the mouth up slightly um or you can in fact go into minus if i want to move it down so that's also handy to remember and i could also pull them out in and have something in the middle or same any of these whatever i want in the middle so let's say because i've do done all these separately i can also have for example i can whiten that mouth i can use our mouth corner down a little bit and i could raise the eyebrow brow up and maybe take that lower eyelid down a little bit and the upper one a little bit bit of a squint so it looks like it's kind of better to cry so now i have a combination of multiple different ones and i can add as i need for this for for production you'll have a set amount of blend shapes that need to be corrected so you can cover whatever expression is required by the end by animation um so for for this function you can also go over to the blend shapes here so i just want to neutralize everything i can just turn off all under the z plugin you have maya blend shape so i can just turn off all and and this will allow me now to create um whatever expression i need so say it was let's get something close to what i have in the other one and we've got the brow up and the lower eyelid up a little bit and we have the mouth open which i haven't added here but you know as i said you can add as many as you need as many as you want and once you have something that you're happy with if this is something where you're adding um or editing a blend shape that you've got for a production um situation where you're you want to add some um like flesh out a blend shape a little bit better this is great for for that and i recommend that i do that all the time um and for for this particular example say i have this and now i can hit bake all and now this is now part of the mesh so now i can go in i can add some subdivision levels and this is my facial expression i can go in and i can sculpt into this and do whatever i want so i hope that's helpful enjoy making some facial expressions on your characters and until next time thanks

Channel: Maxon ZBrush

Views: 16,876

Keywords: zbrush, zbrush tutorial, zbrush beginner tutorial, zbrush 2019, zbrush 2020, pixologic, zbrush free, z brush, sculptris, pixelogic, zbrush live, zbrush download, zbrush core, zbrush trial, zbrush brushes, blender, 3d coat, 3d modeling, digital sculpting, zbrush student, etsy, zbrush character modeling, zbrush character, zbrush sculpting, zbrush realistic face, 3d printing software, 3d modeling software, zbrushcoremini, zbrushcore mini, zbrush mini, figurine, zbrush 2021

Id: hr8l9464QVg

Length: 13min 30sec (810 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 14 2020