Creating Disney-like Toon Girl Using Character Creator and ZBrush @3DCharacterWorkshop

have you ever wanted to animate one of your sculpts one of your characters that you've made in zbrush well I know I have I make characters every single week when I stream live over on maxon's Liv stream you may have seen me over there hi my name is Shane Olsen and I've been working in the game industry and toy industry for the last 25 years 10 of those years I spent working at Disney on Disney Infinity and now I teach how to create stylized characters full-time with my course online so I've made so many different characters but usually I just make a bust just ahead because when I do my live streams that's pretty much all I have time for and I usually use sculptor Pro I don't use anything fancy like zeser or anything like that and I always thought man how cool would it be to rig some of these characters up or at least even give them a body or some clothes and it's a daunting task it's a lot of work but recently I've ran across this software by the good folks over at re illusion called character creator I I've just barely scraped the surface and it's absolutely blowing my mind and they've integrated it so well with zbrush that you can send your characters back and forth and you can give them bodies rigs facial animation motion capture it's just goes on and on you can even render over there with some great lights some great materials and it's just fantastic and I've been having an absolute blast and today I wanted to show you my process that I found from taking a bust over to character creator giving it a body and giving it a rig and some motion so I go from something that looks like this this is a bust that I created during my live stream and I ended up with something like this and it's fully rigged with a body with clothes with animation just full facial animation it's just it's it's insane it's really fun and I can't wait to do this to more of my characters so let's go ahead and get started the first thing we want to do is we want to prep our zbrush file to receive the base avatar from character creator now there are two ways to rig a character in character creator the first way is using a tool inside of character creator called ACU rig and with that one that's kind of like an auto riger if you've ever used an auto riger you basically pick the points and then you say go and it will build a skeleton skin the body and then you have animation which is really really fun really nice but if you actually use character creators base Avatar then it just blows open the doors to a whole variety of things you can do with it like you can add clothing and different materials and just a whole bunch of stuff it's really really cool and so that's what we're going to do but the limitations are you have to stick with a human character like a humanoid and you can use that humanoid base mesh to to match it to any character that you have that is a humanoid style character it's not really not really monsters or anything like that but humanoid like fingers five toes that kind of thing okay so with this character it was the original design is by my good friend Josh Black and I just wanted to call him out really quick I'm going to hide that concept art and we're going to just start with this mesh and I have a base ruler that I used to use when I would do 3D printing for the Disney Infinity figures and I have that right here and it just so happens that it helps us out when and we are adjusting the scale between Character Creator and zbrush it's really nice you don't have to use the ruler but if you want to I do give this away for free over on my website 3D character workshop.com it's right here on the ruler and you can use this ruler and I'll show you how to use it to set up the scale but before we do that you'll need to head on over to reill usion website and download the re illusion Hub this is how you access all of their software so zbrush pose link they're both free you can download them this is what allows character creator to talk to zbrush and this is what allows zbrush to talk to character creator after you get these installed then hop on over to zbrush and select your ruler subtool and then over here I've I've mounted my Z plugins over on the left hand shoulder and you'll see zbrush pose tools installed right here and and at the very top you'll see this resize menu right here okay and to get this going what I like to do is grab this slider and just let go of it and because sometimes it will select a a different subtool and I want to select that ruler sub tool again and then type 200 and the reason why I'm typing 200 is because this ruler is 200 cm tall which is 2 m that's where you see 1 m 2 m it's 200 cm and then when we're all done typing 200 we want to hit resize with it's very important with our ruler selected and it will go through all the sub tools and then it will ask you do you want to resize it to 200 CM it it might say 2 or 20 for you uh it just depends on what your original scene size was and then it'll go through and how you can check to see if it works is you scroll down here look at the export scale and it should say 100 right here okay so I'm going to go ahead and close that and we have our head we have our ruler we can hide our ruler and then we need to do a couple things to get this file ready to receive that base mesh so it works with go Z and you want to go open preferences go down to go Z right here and then you want to click this top button that says import as sub tool the reason why we want to hit that is because we want to append the character to this current subtool so we can match the mesh to our head okay so I'm going to click on that and then we want to hit clear cache files just to clear out any extra data that might be hanging around and so now our file is ready to receive it so now we're going to go over to Character Creator and this is the final product this is like the cooking show final cake but we're going to go back and we're going to load in a base mesh so this is a base mesh that I worked with the reallusion team to create because usually the base Avatar is a realistic character and it has like realistic eyelashes and all sorts of stuff realistic skin with pores and all all of those things that you really don't need for a stylized character so I asked them if we could make a new one that is a little closer to a stylized character to start with it'll just save us a lot of time and that's what this is looking like here and also we got rid of the alpha on the eyelashes and unfolded them with the realistic character they're folded so they get some nice parallaxing but with stylized characters we unfold them and get rid of the alpha you can add an alpha later if you want by the way and then these are just some basic eyebrows that we'll be getting rid of because we'll be using the eyebrows that we bring over from zbrush but basically this this is our base mesh right here this will become available very soon if you want to get this base mesh you can sign up right now in the description below to get on the waiting list and you will be notified when this becomes available okay so they're going to make it available to everyone and then if you look over here if you click on the scene tab you can see there's the eyebrows that are by themselves and then there's all of these ccore whatever pieces that will be coming with this character okay so with this we are going to push it over to zbrush so if you have the plug-in installed you'll see this little go Z zbrush right here and if you click this this dialogue will come up and it will you will see this list of all of these parts and you'll have to have this I I missed a step you'll have to have the character create selected before you hit go Z and then you'll see all of this stuff and then I recommend clicking on this eyelash check boox and all that does is that will separate the eyelash geometry away from the body so you can edit it over in zbrush you can actually turn on Dynamic subdivisions if you want and give it thickness temporarily in zbrush but anyway I like to do that and then I just turn on a pose which is this pose that it's in right now and then you don't have to click on this check boox right here because we already set up our scene with the ruler but if you don't have the ruler and using zbrush hit resize and you can scale it that way you can use this instead okay that works just as well and we're going to click on go Z and we're going to send that model over here and it will load in one subtool at a time to scale you can start to see it come in okay now our base mesh is in here and it's appended I've also organized my original meshes in a folder just so I I can move them around if I want to okay so you'll see that her head is too low it's not matching this head and you can do one of two things you can move the mesh to match your head or you can move your head to match the mesh in this case I'm going to actually move the body to go down and match where the head is in space so I'm going to select my Gizmo and there is this transpose all selected subtools right here but there's a little shortcut that we can do to reverse this okay so in this folder there's this gear and we can click on this and say transpose set okay and what it'll do is it will hide everything except for what is in that folder and we can move the head around like this by itself so this is if we were going to move the head this is how we would do it or we can invert that selection by holding Control Plus shift and tapping on the back background and that will invert everything and then we can move the body to match the head and we can move the Gizmo up here okay by holding down alt we can just move this Gizmo and then zoom on in there and then we can move this body to match the head and we can also scale the height if you want now before sending this body over here there is a step that you can do which is you can go into the morph adjustments inside of character creator and morph the body to look closer to how you would want it to be as far as proportions and stuff like that and I believe Michael pavlovich has a really nice video on how to do that if you want to look that up okay and anyway we can just match this as close as possible I like to try and match the eye and just kind of get the scale correct as close as we can we can scale the whole thing up and down so you can see that eye then we can move it so the nose kind of matches and the eye is close enough and then what we do is we're going to move the rest of the mesh around and match that head by hand as close as possible now I'm not going to do the whole thing here but I'm going to show you the technique that I use and before I get into that I just wanted to show you that character creator has plugin called headshot 2 right here and that is a mesh mapper and how that works is you take your mesh that you made in zbrush and you push it into Character Creator and then you can match that mesh on top of it using very few points and not have to go through this extra process that I'm going to show you now but if you don't have that plugin you can just do it by hand like I'm going to show you here okay but that is a really neat plugin and it works quite well okay so basically I want to hide everything except for the head my original head and this new mesh so I'm going to go in here and just hide everything including the eyes everything the mouth the teeth it comes with teeth and eyelashes we don't need any of that stuff it does have an ambient occlusion for the eye and it also has a tear line around the eye it's kind of like an outline and you don't have to worry about those two things because when we push it back to character creator it will automatically adjust those to the mesh which is super nice so we don't have to worry about those I'm going to hide this eye and this eye occlusion now we only have this base mesh right here and my original head now it's it's not quite there as far as how lined up it is but it's close enough and now we can just start grabbing our move brush making sure symmetry is turned on and then just kind of nudging everything around to match okay like this nose and these lips I like to just barely Peak it outside of the surface another thing you can do is turn on transparency so you can see the underlying mesh and you just get it as close as possible and then you can see the head is is a lot smaller underneath here so you can just take this and nudge it all around to match you can even move the head underneath it again if you don't like the alignment as you start to move this stuff around that's basically all I do and once I get to a point where it's really close you can project portions of it you can either project the color or the geometry or both okay you just have to be careful when you're projecting the geometry because sometimes it will project like if the lips are too close to each other it will project both lips and it will overlap the geometry and get confused so like in the back of the ear right here it could project the back of this ear over onto the back of the head and vice versa so you just got to be careful when you're when you're doing projecting same with this eyeball but essentially you just nudge this all into place to match your mesh underneath it's really easy and it doesn't take that long I think it took me about 30 minutes to do this process and again head shot is much quicker to do this but this is kind of fun and relaxing just put on some good music and go for it you know and then once you're done and you have it the way you like it then you can move the eyeballs the Brows the hair and everything to match this position okay so what I mean by that is when you pushed over the Avatar it came with new eyeballs right here like these eyeballs and see how they're not lined up so again what you can do is is you can hide the base mesh show These Eyes show these eyes and then line them up okay so you would take the new eyeballs right here take the Gizmo and Center them turn on symmetry Center it reset it and then just kind of Center it in there scale it up and match it as best as you can front to back look at all sides when you're doing this and then you can check it later on okay so essentially that's the eyeballs and it has they do come with a cornea and everything and when you push them over there it looks really really nice so then when you're done you can hide these and then you can uh show there it this one doesn't come with brows like eyebrows we're going to be pushing these eyebrows over there and using them and then it does come with teeth so you'd have to put the teeth the tongue align those inside the mouth and then you want to align these eyelashes to the eyes um you can show the head like this see how they're off and you can show your eyelashes and then match them up so just push these around and mash them up one secret with these eyelashes is when you're holding down shift you can to smooth this out you can see it's holding on to that Outer Edge it doesn't smooth so there is a a smooth brush called Smooth cloth if you choose that smooth brush will turn down the Z intensity a lot it will actually smooth down the edges so it won't hold on to those edges so that's a really good way to to smooth down these eyelashes and line them up and then we're going to do kind of a a cooking show method here and we're going to to load in what it looks like after I've done all the matchmaking and lined it all up okay so this is actually the new base mesh you can also subdivide it and do some more projecting and then you can do some poly painting so I I did a bunch of poly painting to paint her makeup and her whole body and it looks kind of strange because I painted some ambient occlusion here just into the skin because I also created a shirt and a skirt inside of zbrush I just made a skirt out of a cylinder and then I actually used the base mesh and I duplicated it and deleted everything that wasn't the base the top and then I Z remeshed it and I made a shirt and that looks like this and this so now we have let me just show you these meshes really quick so this is what the skirt looks like it's just a cylinder that's been uh moved and then this is the top that's Ben Z remeshed but I started with her her body to build that from and then the base mesh you can see this is the actual mesh from Character Creator and it has really nice topology and again it's been subdivided it's okay to subdivide it's just not okay to weld anything mirror and weld or cut or slice or any of that stuff you have to leave the mesh intact all the points exactly the the correct number because every dot has a number and if you mess up that numbering system it's not going to work so just be very careful with that you can move scale rotate do all that as much as you want okay I've also adjusted her hands and I've adjusted her body to be the proportions that I want this character to have so I've just smoothed down her arms and her legs to be thinner and just to kind of match the aesthetic that her face has and now she has the same hair I did decimate at this hair down and Z remeshed it so um I can push it over to character creator with here I'll show you the wire frame really quick this is what the wire frame of that hair looks like you can subdivide over in character creator or you can use normal Maps stuff like that I'm not going to get into that too much today this is kind of a a highlevel demo just to show you what's possible okay but now that I have all of this done and lined up you can see that we have the original hair the original brows and I'm not going to push these lashes over there I'm going to use the lashes that I adjusted down here okay so those lashes since we remember we split that off of the body so it's going to come over with the the Character Creator stuff so what we're going to do is the best way to do this is to push over the specific parts of your character get that working lined up and then push the rest of everything else over okay so and anything that starts with a cc I actually put this in a folder like this and I'm going to show all of the CC stuff and remember you don't have to line this up and you don't have to line this up okay it's lined up because I already went back over and back again so it's already lined up but you don't have to worry about it if it's off and then I'm going to hide this and hide this and don't worry about the uh subdivision levels you can be on a high resolution subdivision level and it doesn't matter because it's going to just automatically push it over to the lowest subdivision level before it goes over there okay so I'm going to I'm going to hide the browse for a minute and we're I'm just going to select the the body it doesn't matter which one of these you select then what we're going to do is I'm just going to go back over to Character Creator and make sure we're good to go we don't have to have anything selected it'll just work okay so now that this is ready to go I'm just going to hit go Z visible okay and once I hit go Z visible it's going to take everything that's visible and push it over to character creator okay so over in character creator you can see that the new action instead of create now it says update okay it's going to update all of these pieces and parts to match and push it into here the thing it's not going to push in there is the texture okay so we're going to have to do something different with the textures but it's fun to watch this change to our new proportions so remember this was the base tune mesh and then you can click on merge all props and adjust bones to fit the morph okay we're going to select a pose again we don't have to click this because we already set up our scale I'm just going to hit update and it's going to push everything into this body okay so now we have the the new proportions are quite vastly different okay so now we can look and see how our eyelashes are are new and our shape of our head is new the shape of the body is all refreshed it's using the same eyes but it's using the old eyebrows from the old tune now we can click on those eyebrows right here and we can just hide them or delete them either way we're just going to do this because we're going to bring over um some more accessories and hair and things and stick it on here to make it work okay but we're going to test this first that's why I like to just do the body first and then test it and this is this is the beauty of character creator this is where it starts to blow your mind because this is rigged this is fully rigged it's it's got UVS it's got skin weights the whole thing it has a whole bone system if you use their base Avatar their base mesh you get it all for free and it feels like cheating it's this used to take so much time and so much effort and I'm just going to tell you that this base mesh is built on Autodesk fullbody FK ik rig if you know what that is okay what that means is you get the benefit of using that rig and other software so if you're wondering can I push this to Unreal can I push this to Unity or Maya or wherever the answer is yes because it's using that rig really really smart and you can um also push it over to motion Builder it's yeah it's really really cool okay so let's test out the Motions if you notice down here there's this motion button we're going to click on here and there's a whole list of different motion we can try so I'm going to click on this female idle one just for fun and load that up and all of a sudden boom she's rigged and has motion so we'll push space bar to play and she's just kind of leaning and looking around and it's just it's crazy to me that that's a thing okay so if you want to go back to the a pose you just hit this remove we'll just hit the arrow down remove and click on this restore bind pose and then it just goes back here you don't need to do this by the way you can just push your stuff over while it has animation on and it doesn't really make that big of a difference but me being old school I just like to have it in the a pose when I push stuff over so we're going to go back to zbrush and we're going to select our new uh parts and pieces that we want to send over so let's hide all the CC stuff and we're going to send over the hair the brows and then the top and the skirt so I'm going to just select the skirt so we can just see these things so we got the hair the Brows the top and the skirt and everything else is already over there okay I'm just double checking to make sure we got our lashes okay so now again all we have to do is hit go Z visible so go Z visible send that over now we'll get a new dialogue box over in Character Creator and you'll see that it doesn't say update it says create okay but there's two things that we need to do with two of these because they're cloth click on these and change this to cloth okay and change this one to cloth and then brows just make that an accessory and the hair make it an accessory let's see I can bring that out so you can see accessory accessory cloth cloth and you can change them once you get once you push it in here this is you don't have to really care about this too much but it does help okay we can say uh merge all props hit update and you'll see it update here and boom now we have it okay and we can zoom out and you'll notice that we don't have our materials on anything it's using the base skin color of our tune base and then we we don't have any textures on any of these new pieces okay so what we can do is we can click on let's say the hair and you can either load in a new material if you've made a material in zbrush I'm going to show you how to do that in a little bit and basically this base color if you click on this base color and double click it you can go load in a texture okay or it comes in with poly paint so if you have something that has poly paint all you have to do is come over to the scene and click on this little Cube and it will show poly paint so we can do that with the brows and the top and the skirt okay so now they're all colored and this is just a background image by the way yours might not have a background image but this is just an image back there and you can just get that from the the scene you go to content scene background and just find them back back here under texture anyway I'm not going to get too much into that that's kind of the the the the setup you can also mess with lights I'll get into that a little bit later as well okay there's a couple special things that we need to do with the hair and the Brows so with the hair we're going to click on this and we're going to go to modify and then attribute okay and over here you'll see this list of things and right here you can see it says create hair brows and beard so let's click on that and it'll ask if we want to reset the facial expression just say yes and then we have the hair selected so we're going to click on this base hair all but if you have a character with these different types of hair positions you can select those things like if the hair band went behind her ear and up over the head like this you can select this one we're just going to select this and hit apply okay and then it's going to just weight this hair to the head and then if we select the browse while this dialogue is still up you can select the browse and you'll see this little eyebrows right here select the eyebrows and and hit apply and it will skin weight those brows to her brow okay so they'll follow the skin okay so now we can test this motion okay so we'll go to motion we can go to uh facial rig full face just try it out sometimes you have to tune the face like you have to tune the eyelashes to match the eyelids and things like that so it's not always perfect right out of the gate but yep see when she blinked her eyelids her eyelashes didn't quite match so you can go in and you can tune those by going into the facial editor okay just know that that's possible but see all of a sudden she's just looking around she's fully rigged if you're wondering what this little Green Dot is when I'm rotating I just have a 3D connection space Mouse that's also supported by Character Creator and it's really really really nice to just spin your character around and check it out and you can do that while she's animating and moving and it's it's wild I love it I can't get enough of this I'm telling you so it's all this it's just crazy to me to start with a base mesh that I was just making during a live stream and now you know all of a sudden she's animating and looking around and she's almost there a little bit more tweaking and and we'll have it but let me just show you really quickly how you would load in materials so actually before that let's talk about skin weight so if you bring something in here and the skin weighting is not quite right it's really easy to adjust so if I grab her skirt say her skirt wasn't uh really let's let's try body rig full body and this will do a full body test okay so she's standing here and she she'll do like deep knee bends and it will break her skirt okay like this see how it's not quite nice so let's see I think you can see this little point right here and what you want to do is go click the skirt and same place just click on modify attributes and there's the skin weights tab just click on that and this is a lot like doing skin weights and Maya or blender or something like that um you'll see these there's these twist bones and these leg bones if you rightclick on a Twist bone you should see it show up in the waiting okay I got it to show up so if you right click on the bone you can see it's like has the skin waiting and you can go in here and you can also select the bones over here in this list and you can use the paint brushes and then just do some paint weights or you can adjust the strength and the weight here by hand or you can just brush it right here so that is how you uh adjust the skin weight of of anything that you have that you need to to tweak okay so when you're done you just click on the skin weights and then to apply materials you just select the character the main character or whichever part that you want to add textures to and in order to get the textures out of zbrush it's really easy you go over to zbrush and you select the object that you want to export the materials off of so I'm going to go to the highest resolution of this body right here and I want to export these textures now character creators base mesh comes with UD dims if you don't know what udims are they're just a a bunch of different UV Maps or UV sets so it's multiple UV sets is what it uses so zbrush doesn't support authoring them so character Creator's base mesh Avatar has udims on it which means multiple UV sets and you can't really mess with those UV sets here but you can export the textures that belong to those UV sets and how you do that is you go to the multimap exporter right here and you select whichever Maps you want but for here we're just going to select the texture from poly paint right here so it's going to take the poly paint that's on here create new textures and put them wherever you want and you just select the size of the maps that you want and then you just click on create all maps it will ask you where you want to put it and then you save it somewhere just remember where you saved it and we'll go back to character creator okay so now we're back in Character Creator and we want to click on this texture tab up top here and you'll see there's this long list of of textures right here okay and this is everything that makes up the body so if we pop this open and we click on the body we can see all of the body pieces so if I select this head you'll see all the maps that are attributed to this head and if you want to paint on these textures there's this button right here that will send your map to your texture editing software like Photoshop or something like that okay so you can double click on this to load it and I'm just going to load the one I exported earlier right here and you'll notice that it changed see that so if we zoom in here it now has you can see where the skin tone changes to right on this neckline right here okay so that is one udm right there okay so now um I can just go through here and assign each one of these like I have the nails and the lashes and everything all of those baked out of zbrush including the eyes and I can just load those in right in here okay this is another cooking show version this is after I've done all of the materials they're all updated and loaded in here you can see she has all of her materials and she also has some high heels on like where did those high heels come from well the really cool thing about character creator is they have a store they have a store full of assets and character creator also comes with a whole bunch of assets for free that you can use including these high heels and if you use the base mesh Avatar to create your characters this way you can utilize all of those assets okay most of them are realistic character assets but that's okay you can load them you can push them over to zbrush make them styliz change the textures on them or change their shape make them more stylized more exaggerated push them back here and you can use them on your characters it's really cool where you find those is under content so content and then there's these projects so you can see a bunch of other characters right here there's different actors there there's even different skin tones so you can put it's so robust it'll blow your mind okay there's even makeup and hair and cloth if you click into any of these folders you can actually start to see some of the thumbnails it'll show you what it would put on your character see they for more realistic stuff but they're there there's cloth shoes lo and behold there's the high heels right here okay all I did to make those high heels go on her is just click drag and drop drop into the scene and it just stuck them right on there so you can also do custom ones right here if you want to load in your own and then save them like if I wanted to save her hair I could click on the hair and hit save right down here and it would save it to your your custom area Okay so there's also lights you can add there's textures and backgrounds and all sorts of stuff it's just it gets deep and what's really really nice about this is It's a realtime PBR renderer like you know Eevee or maret toolbag or something like that it or even like unreal it will render your characters out so you can display them and you don't have to take them into those other programs it's all right here and you can render them and adjust the lights you can adjust the subsurface scattering you can adjust the materials you can make her lips more glossy by going into the the roughness map and and painting in the roughness so her lips are shiny you can already see that her eyeballs are shiny right here but it's it's making the the shadow happen right here and the background image it's just really really nice and so this yellow light right here is in there and how you can access these things that are already in here is go to scene and you can see here's the character and all the props and everything and then you go down to there's other props like this Shadow Catcher And you can adjust that shadow catcher and everything you can adjust is over under modify attribute and you can start messing with things over here okay and you can also grab there's a direct light and there's a global illumination anchor so you can do Global illumination over here once you select one of these lights you can click on this rotate and you can rotate the light see how I'm rotating this this uh Rim light around the edge of her right here okay and you can also adjust the Shadows if I zoom out you can go down here and you can adjust the shadow catchers on the floor and again like I said you can drag in motions onto her it's just absolutely unlimited and it blows my mind it's so much fun and once again I can't wait to grab more of my characters and do this exact same workflow with them just like I did with her and once you have this scene set up you can just bring characters right in here and have the same lighting the same atmosphere everything like that it even has volumetric lighting if you want like it's kind of like a foggy light if you want to do that like I said subsurface scattering and there's so many additional plugins that you can use there's one called face tools that allows you to go into each of the morph targets for her expressions and really push them big and and you do that over in zbrush Michael pavlovich also has a video on that and so does real illusion they have some tutorials on how to set that up and it's it just it's awesome it's awesome I love it and another thing you can do is you can drive her animation with your iPhone so you can have it map your face and and look into the iPhone and have her talk I guess with your voice if I have this deep voice but I can and you can also do it with video and make her sing so if you had a video of say a lady singing you can map her face from that video and and lipsync your model to that music that sound it's so so much fun and like I said the geometry of the mesh is really really robust you can push it quite far before it starts to stretch and so any humanoid character you can really get away with a lot and bring your characters to life it's so amazing thank you everybody for watching me today I really appreciate it and I hope you have an absolute blast setting up your characters with character creator again my name is Shane olssen and we will see you in the next video thanks for watching

Channel: Reallusion

Views: 9,577

Keywords: 3D software, Reallusion, 3D character creation, character animation, 3D character creator, create your own character, game character, Talking Game Character, character generator, video game development, character maker, video game characters, how to sell your art, ZBRUSH, character creator, create clothing, 3d sculpt, disney characters, character artist, shane olson, toon base, pbr render, custom character, zbrush facial rig, GoZ, animate ZBrush characters, rig zbrush

Id: V7riIRl9Y_c

Length: 41min 29sec (2489 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 27 2023