Draw character concepts from any angle & any lighting. Gamechanger tools!

hi everyone this tutorial is for 2d artists who want to apply their existing skillset in the 3d world and take advantage of some really cool concept that 3d software has to offer to follow this tutorial you'll need a copy of blender which is free over at blender org and quick disclaimer what follows is not exactly software training rather I'm gonna brute force our way directly to the creative part but I'm confident that even total newcomers to 3d will be able to follow this so here we go upon opening blender you'll be greeted with a scene like this go up to the top of the screen here where it says camera and click this eyeball icon to hide the camera now with the cube selected push s for scale and scale the cube to about there click your mouse button to lock that in now push ctrl or command 4 move over here to this wrench icon and click this apply button lastly go to this menu object apply scale now head over to the sculpting tab up here because we're gonna do some digital sculpting ok navigating 3d space in blender is all about the middle mouse button control middle Mouse will pull in and out middle Mouse by itself will orbit and shift middle mouse button will move side to side up and down I like to map my styluses back rocker switch to the middle mouse button this will help speed up your workflow alright so our brushes are on the left and I'm gonna pick this guy here the snake hook brush you can change your brush size with the square bracket keys and I'll use this brush to block in the general form of a human head by default blender will make your sculpture symmetrical from left to right but the back and front remain independent alright go over here and click this dine topo button say okay to the warning then unfurl that menu and change the detailing from relative to constant then set the resolution to 10 and now we can keep sculpting I'm gonna start digging out the eye sockets a bit then I'll switch my brush to the draw brush and I can use that to make the protruding forehead and start the relationship between forehead and eye socket holding ctrl will invert your selected brush so in this case I can use the same draw brush to also dig into the surface orbiting around here doing some general shaping now I'll go grab the strips brush and a hold control which makes it into an ice chisel and I'm using this to get some simple fundamental forms happening now see all those rough marks if you hold shift it'll turn any brush into a smooth brush this is an extremely handy shortcut anyway continuing on with the snake hook brush here which is probably the most common brush I use switching back to the draw brush now though to start pulling out the nose finding how it connects in with the brow trying out the clay strips brush to pull out the ball of the nose and then using the snake hook brush to just shape everything and that's a process I will rinse and repeat the entire time you know throwing some digital clay on the model to get the volume where it needs to be and then you can chisel it shape it and detail it to your heart's content after laying in the mouth I like to reference this view because it helps ensure that that mouth is wrapping around the tooth cylinder in my teaching experience this is one of those areas a lot of people get wrong it's very easy to underestimate just how round that form is when I do general shaping like this I like to play with a large brush size on the snake hook tool which allows me to manipulate overall relationships like this and then of course smaller brush sizes to tweak individual features there is a brush made for this overall kind of deformation it's called the elastic deformed here to tweak proportions and you can see how it's just slightly more gentle than the snake hook brush I think this view is really helpful when it comes to checking your work because everything is so foreshortened you can evaluate the profile of all the forms one on top of the other and these should conform to certain rhythms I'll use my asaro head here as reference first the eyes do not sit straight on the head there's a bit of a tilt to them like this the cheekbones have a similar rhythm just a little bit more amplified the mouth as we've seen is very cylindrical and the line that traces the jaw is longer but just as steep and then there's this often neglected shape of the underside of the head which I like to think of as a triangular shelf oh yeah and from this angle the tip of the nose will roughly line up with the eyebrows I'll compare those rhythms to my sculpt and I'm on the right track here in profile I can evaluate the design a little bit more and of course you can make a million tweaks before you're satisfied but remember we'll be drawing over this what I need here is not a finished character rather just an accurate blocking of the forms this is also why I'm not sculpting the eyes I'll handle them later in 2d I'm not gonna go crazy with the ear either just some basic volume there to hold its place holy crap this guy looks like Patrick Stewart okay we're done sculpting go to the Layout tab and I want to get that grid out of the way so go up here and click off floor the two crossing lines remaining there are the x and y axis those will be helpful in a moment but I don't want them to intersect the head so let me just move to a good spot here then I'll push a to select all then push G and Z to move things on the z axis blender is very shortcut heavy anyway now the magic starts click this button here to switch to rendered view we have a single light source in the scene that guy right there and if I push G I can move it around this is where the axis reference is handy the green line is the y axis so if I push G Y I can move that light over here in front of the Model G Z I can move it up and down along the z axis and pushing G X you guessed it okay we need to find a camera view to draw from press numpad 0 and we're looking through the camera now click this tiny little arrow here go to the View tab and click lock camera to view now we're moving the actual camera with the same shortcut keys that red box is really annoying so hit the HOME key to bring the camera to full screen now find a camera angle and lighting position I came up with this now we want to lock off this camera so click up here on camera then click on the item tab and lock these six properties now go to add grease pencil blank and lastly click on this orange button click on viewport display and click in front time for the fun parts up here switch over to draw mode we need to tell blender to give us a black line so click this button click this plus button and click the new button assuming you don't have carpal tunnel syndrome yet go ahead and start drawing now this is not a drawing tutorial so I'm gonna speed up a little bit here but basically this is where you can find the design of your character and go from something general to something specific I'm adding hair eyes I'll put some clothing in and blender does give you some brushes to play around with you can access them by clicking on this little button here change your brush size with the F key and set your brush opacity with this slider up here all right finishing off that drawing that looks pretty cool if you want to adjust the darkness of the shadows click on this world icon and adjust the strength slider now get ready for this go up here and click back to object mode click on the blank background to deselect those lines go up here and select the light push G and we can still move the light around will you take a look at that I'm basically relighting a 2d drawing in real time I can generate 50 different options in seconds this to me is magic and it's where this technique really pays off ok let's do a second drawing from another angle I'm gonna make a new camera with add camera then I'll push ctrl numpad 0 to switch to that camera and as I move that camera you can see the illusion we'd previously created for organizations sake I'll double click on this grease pencil thing and rename it drawing 1 and then I'll click the eyeball to hide it just for fun I'll duplicate the light source with shift D and move that around to illuminate the shadows a bit that lights a bit too strong so I'll click on the light bulb icon and change the power to 600 I'll find a new angle for this one let's go for something different I've added the grease pencil blank just like before and now I'm drawing let's venture out a little further with this concept make him into an astronaut or something now I want to show you how to make new layers and change your colors to make a new layer go to this icon and click the plus button this slider here is your layer opacity to make a new color go to this icon which is where we set the black color click the plus button click new then click the color box and you can set any color you like and those are the tools I'm using to now complete this sketch this could also be a fantastic workflow for storyboarding or creating like a reals stuff like that and of course now my favorite part playing with the lighting I'll darken the atmosphere pick my light source and look at this maybe his mask would be like illuminating his face from below yeah this is I'm a total kid in a candy store with this stuff if you want to switch back to the first drawing select the first camera here and press ctrl numpad 0 then of course hide the second drawing unhide the first drawing and there go now even though we started with a 3d sculpt this is ultimately a 2d piece of art as you can see as I rotate my view around it's only designed to work from one angle but this is where the next technique comes in I threw together a different sculpt just to keep things fresh I'll head up here again to add grease pencil blank and switch over to draw mode but this time I'll click on this origin button and set it to surface and I'll set this offset number to point zero five so watch what this does if I draw a line just down the middle of the head and then I orbit the camera that line is now stuck to the surface of my sculpt in other words I'm drawing in true 3d space so what I'm gonna do now is just start drawing on this model now this is very different than what we did in the previous two examples the most obvious difference is I'm changing my camera view to accommodate all angles of the model and just kind of marking it up as I go I'm also not trying to draw a finished two-dimensional picture you know a two-dimensional picture only works from one angle and is the illusion of 3d I want these lines to work from all angles so what I find myself doing here is identifying overall rhythms of the head as well as overall 3d forms and volumes and kind of tracing my lines over them like these lines that go around the back of the head for example in a way I'm kind of further describing the intricacies of the sculpt so I'll do this until I feel like I've covered everything and of course what we have now is a very interesting kind of 3d line drawing and at this point you could do all the lighting tweaks we did before but I want to show you this simply go up here and hide the sculpt and we're left now with only the 3d lines that's already pretty cool although it's very distracting that we can see right through the thing the solution is pretty simple click on this arrow and under the View tab set the end number to something like 21 this cuts off the amount of depth we can see a value of 21 works here but just play with that number until it works for your scene and this is pretty cool too almost from a learning perspective we get a real nice sense of how lines describe 3d form and you know which lines become important as we see the form from different angles you can use this as an interactive teaching tool to instruct you on how you can draw your care ders from any angle and if he asked me it's just plain cool to explore and present character ideas this way there's so much potential to explore here so yeah have fun with it all right thanks everyone for watching special thanks to my patrons for your generous support if you like these videos I'm on patreon you can also find longer lessons at Marco Buchi art store calm and as always subscribe to the channel for ongoing content I'll see you next time

Channel: Marco Bucci

Views: 869,231

Keywords: Marco Bucci tutorial, digital painting tutorial, digital illustration process, Blender grease pencil, sculpting characters, character drawing tutorial, visual development Eevee, video game art design, game dev art, concept art video games, 3D concept design, how to draw characters, movie production design, 2.5D art tutorial, draw human head, draw fantasy characters, pro art skill, digital painting, character design, concept art, 3d art tips, 3d art, 3d painting tips

Id: mGRt24fYYWU

Length: 11min 33sec (693 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 04 2020