Elephant Sculpt - Follow Along Tutorial - Blender 2 8

hello and welcome to gabit media i'm grant abbott and today we're sculpting an elephant this is all part of the sculpting series i'm doing at the moment so do check out the playlist links in the description this is a beginner's focus tutorial but we are building on techniques with each of these videos so do check out some of the earlier videos in the playlist you can also go to my website gabit.co.uk which has all my free courses in order also if you like what i do then you can check out my new character course it takes you right from nothing through to making a great game character okay so this time i'm going to show you a couple of ways of starting your shapes off just here i've drawn out a plan using the annotation tool so you can click here if you click and hold you've got the options so there's annotate just there and i can start drawing my lines and i've sketched out an elephant here it's best to do this inside view so three on your numpad and go to side view you can come across here and hold and use the annotate eraser as well to rub things out and when you're finished make sure you come back up to the selection tool just at the top here now if you're not happy sketching things out then you can bring in my reference image that i have i'll just click on that it's best to make sure you're in front of you again and click and drag and pull it in that brings it in as an empty which you can see there and you can just press g to grab and scale it up and move it into position as you see fit i've moved them on top of each other because i'll probably chop and change between the two to talk about the different techniques so you can use either the annotation or the empty there and how i'm going to create this is to create some shapes first before going into sculpt mode and i'll show you that now so shift a to add mesh and then plane and that will come in here we can't see it because it's just off to the side go into edit mode and select all the vertices just make sure they're all selected then press m to merge at center so we've got one point just there i'll go back to side view and press g to grab and move that into position we're going to make the body and the trunk we'll do the legs separately that makes it much easier now i can press ctrl and right click and that will produce a new vertice and i can go all around my shape if control right click for some reason doesn't work for you it's just the same as e to extrude and you move it out so about the same distance that i'm using here and you can be fairly rough because we're sculpting it in later on so just where the body is when you get to joining them together shift select the first one so you've got the last one and first one selected and press f to fill now we've got an object that goes all the way around i'll select all and press f to fill in a face i'll just come around to the side so you can see that that's great now in face mode with three on my keyboard i can press e to extrude and pull that out backwards you can pull it out backwards or forwards can you see it going out backwards there's a little bit confusing because i've got the grid on my reference image there as well but you can see it coming out to there so g then x again just put it back a bit further so it's the width of the elephant's body we'll sort out the trunk and make it a different width later on next we need to sort out the legs so i'll go back to side view shift right click to bring the 3d cursor into position and shift a to add and i've made a mistake here because i haven't gone into object mode i noticed that because i've only got meshes available so i'll undo that go into object mode with tab and then shift a to add and then cylinder it doesn't make a huge amount of difference that it means i can move the cylinder now independently of the body so i'll scale this down with s r to rotate and move this into position so it's in line with the leg and then ester scale then z said to go in the local z axis so that's the z axis according to the shapes rotation now lastly into wireframe mode up top here into edit mode again select that bottom face and we can scale z 0 to flatten it out and then g then z and we'll move it onto that line there make sure that it's actually overlapping your body that'll be useful later on i'll do the same over the other side i can actually just copy this one shift d and then g to grab to move it across to the back and i can constrain that to the y so it's along the floor there rz 180 to flip it around and move it into position i'll go into edit mode this time grab the top face g zed to move in the local z axis and move it up into position and just move it back just a tiny bit and i'll line it up properly when we come to the sculpting if you're really comfortable with modeling you can go into edit mode and do some loop cuts here and then start positioning some of these into the right location but we don't have to do that so into object mode again i'll go into solid mode again as well and just see how our shapes looking now we need these to line up with our object and intersect it what i'm going to do first is grab the empty or the outline of my shape and press g then x and move that behind my model then that will make it much easier for me i'm going to select these two go to front view by pressing one on my keyboard but actually this is back view and i need to press ctrl 1 to go to front view i'll just model it the wrong way around it's not a big deal so g to grab and make sure they're intersecting i'll constrain that to the x-axis so they stay on the x-axis okay and make sure we're happy with the width of our elephant the legs are the hardest thing to reposition afterwards the body's not too bad because we can sculpt that into place but the legs are a little bit tougher that looks fine what we need to do though is the legs to be the other side but they must be precisely in line with the body and i'll explain further if i select on the body you can see its center point is down here and it's right in the center of our grid but it's not in the center of our object now if we start sculpting on one side of this it won't appear on the other side because it's using this center point as the mirror so if we sculpt over here it'll be trying to sculpt here and there's nothing there so we must make sure the center point is in the middle of our object if we want to use symmetry so we right click set origin and then origin to geometry that will push it right in the center of the mass so if i go to front view again you can see it in the center there however how do we make sure the legs are perfectly aligned with that center point so when we start sculpting on one of the legs it appears on exactly the same point on the other well we use the mirror modifier so come across the modifiers where the spanner is add modifier mirror and then we use the mirror object and we use the elephant's body just there and it goes into precisely the right position same for the other ones so cross the modifiers add modifier mirror using the mirror object we use that pipette there or pick up and choose the body now we've got the really basic outline of our elephant i'm going to apply those mirrors because i want to join this whole object together so apply that mirror there and this one here i'll apply that and i'll need to join all these together so select the legs first and then the body we need to do that because we want to keep the center point of the body and that's now the active object that means these objects will be joined to the active object so if i press ctrl j now it joins them all together and the center point is in the middle there which is exactly what we want now if i press n on my keyboard before we go across the sculpting if i go to item you can see that the scale is all set to one so we won't have any problem if it's not you need to press ctrl a and apply your scale so that all reverts to one then you won't have any glitches when sculpting if we go across the sculpt mode now you'll notice if you were using your annotated grease pencil as a sketch that it won't appear in sculpt mode you'll have to do it slightly differently so in layout you just have your object selected and instead of object mode you go to sculpt mode and it's all the same as if you were in sculpt mode except some of the background isn't displayed and so forth i'll drag out the brushes so you can see them and we can't sculpt on this yet we need to convert it so that these objects that are joined together aren't intersecting each other and we've got more polys to work with than sculpt we do that by coming up to remesh and a voxel size of 0.1 should be fine and just press remesh and you can see it all turned into one mesh and if we look on the inside you can see that these legs aren't cutting into the object anymore so that's great so the first thing we want to do is sort out the body a bit so it's not so square i'll use the snakehook tool combined with holding down shift to smooth so if you hold down shift to smooth it smooths it out nicely quick reminder of the tools f to resize your brush shift f for the strength and press control to do the reverse of the brush in order to use the snake hook tool successfully it's supposed to have dye and toppo on so i'm going to turn that on in the dyn topo options i'm going to change the resolution to 15 the detailing i'm going to use constant detail and i'm going to give it a detailed flood fill now and then let's start smoothing this out and for the trunk we can start pulling it inwards and then smooth out take a bit of care around the legs don't distort those too much i'm just smoothing the shape out at the moment not worried too much about what it looks like we'll line it up in just a second just holding down shift and going across and smoothing it all out okay that's a good starting point let's go to side view with through my numpad and start moving it back into position so just gently following the outline and the legs will need a fair bit of work so let's make the brush a bit smaller and pull those out careful not to adjust the bottom that's really useful that it's flat against that line there so they're lining up nicely taking a lot of care of that foot there you don't have to follow your outline precisely it's up to you how you want your style and shape to look that's good what you'll notice though you'll need to fill out on the inside with these legs as well and just smooth out and just every now and again jump back to your to your side view to make sure things are marrying up because when you smooth it does pull the topology out a bit if you need to you can go to the draw brush and just fill in areas with the draw brush to give it that volume and then smooth out back to side view and check that everything's all right that's good with the draw brush i'm just going to draw up here as well to give those legs a little bit more volume so they stick out just a bit from the main shape and the front leg as well it's best to look in perspective view for this just so you can see it there we go so it goes up there we've got sort of a rough looking elephant shape there i'm going to smooth out the head a bit more with holding down shift and just keep scrubbing over it so it goes nice and round and that's not looking too bad let's just have another quick check that we're following the outline that's not too bad at all okay quick bit of work on the trunk using the snake tool helping that to line up there that's great okay back to the draw tool and i'll just give him a bit more of a head around about there i want to follow that curve up so it's got that sort of nice artistic look and just tidy up anything in here as well just checking around my shape making sure the outline is quite nice okay now we can start adding some details so we can go to the dime topper and just turn it up a touch so maybe 25 and that should be fine and start thinking about things like the ears so make my brush fairly small and think about where the ear shape needs to be let's go to side view for that and have a look brush a bit smaller and then just draw in an ear so quite simple like that have a good look around and have a think if that's where you want the ear to be i think it can go a bit higher so we'll just draw a little bit more up there we're going to smooth all this out later on i'll do a bit of smoothing now so it tidies that shape up a little bit okay have a good look around again that looks all right let's put the iron as well that's going to be around here just to have a good look around once again making sure you're happy with the positioning okay i might go up a little bit with the ear and around again i'm still just thinking about the location of the year that's all i think that's working so we'll bulk it out a bit more so f to resize the brush and then just draw over this to bring the shape out it's nice and simple nothing spectacular about the shape because we're going to smooth it out and sharpen it up a bit later smooth this area out the front so it gradually goes in and then flatten this area by just smoothing it okay let's see how that's looking that's not too bad it's a bit blobby at the moment that's all right we can polish that up a little bit so just by smoothing out we'll certainly get there pretty roughly and then fill in areas that are losing any volume and smooth out and it's not too bad to do this when you've got a reasonably low resolution 25 is reasonably low when it comes to sculpting because when you smooth out it makes a huge difference to the shape the higher the resolution goes the less effect the smoothing has okay so we're sort of getting there just evening it out and making it look like an ear that's great let's go to the crease tool now remember to explain the controls at the beginning of sculpting okay so this one naturally digs in so we can just brush away and then smooth out the bit above it and brush away a bit more and it will gently dig into your shape and create that ear outline so just going around my shape and then smooth out around that if you want to make them a bit sharper you can hold down control with this one and it will sort of create a sharper line make sure you're smoothing all the time to smooth the areas around the shape and that's not looking too bad as an ear a few other bits to tidy up what i'm going to do is just do a detailed flood fill so it all has that resolution of 25 if your computer struggles then you don't have to do this but i just find it easier to sculpt and smooth out if it's all on 25 make sure you saved your work before you do that though and dyn toppo detailed flood fill that will give it all a resolution of 25 it's not pushed up my verts that much but you can see the difference it makes when i start smoothing out on my mesh especially on paces like the feet we can just give them a bit more smoothing okay we need a bit of a tail coming out here so let's get the snake tool once again go to side view just see where that tail is lining up around about there so let's come around and then pull the tail out it's a little bit tricky to control this but you'll get the hang of it and don't worry too much just get the rough shape for now let's go to side view and get a rough shape i'm not sure i'm going to keep it exactly the same as the shape that's here already but just make sure your shape's okay so somewhere around there and then you can just go to the inflate brush and inflate it out especially the end here and smooth up around his bum just going to go back to the draw tool and give a bit more volume to the legs so they're a bit more rounded and smooth out okay let's just have a quick look and see about the size of the tail needs a bit more inflating and using the snake hook just give it that sort of fluffy point look smooth things out and check that we're happy that looks okay okay i'm going to use the crease brush to give a little bit definition an outline to the legs so coming up here so they come into the body a bit and the front legs they're going straight a little bit straighter straight upwards like this and then we can start smoothing this area out so it's a bit more rounded if we need to you can dig in with the draw brush slightly so it's got a bit more curvature to it but again smoothing out the results let's have a look and back to the crease brush and make that crease come around and smooth out if you have to crease then smooth crease then smooth and we're getting there same here using the crease brush crease and then smooth out if you need to and that gives a bit more of an elephant look i'll just give a bit more there a draw brush just making this a bit more rounded and smoothing out and the elephant's leg attach more volume if you need to let's have a quick look at the outline make sure i haven't gone too far away the leg's a little bit wobbly there so snake at all just pull that back in that's good okay we're getting there i just want some tusks on the front so let's go to the draw tool for this make my brush about this sort of size and they're going to come out about here let's see if that's okay yep that's looking all right okay for this we might want to use the mask tool so draw the area in that i want to affect which is this area here make sure it's nice and obvious that that's that area so it's fully covered and with the mask options up here you've got invert and now we can only affect this area here so if i go to the draw brush for example i can only now draw on that well now i can use my snake tool i'm going to alt middle click on that so it's in the center of my screen and resize the brush and pull that out for a task just make sure i'm going in the right way might be a bit long that one now that's about right i think i feel like this bit needs to come down and this needs to come up a little bit so i'll bring this down in a second and i'm going to use the inflate tool that's good okay i'm going to turn my mask off alt m to get rid of your mask and we can start tidying up places now in fact let's use the snake tool to just edit this area here and bring it out just a touch that's good the resolution of this looks a bit off so let's just use the simplify brush and make sure that it's got the 25 resolution the simplified brush sort of paints on the resolution that you've got there i think when i use the inflate tool it took away some of that so i'm just making sure it's all there with the simplified brush and then shift to smooth out let's get the crease brush now resize and just come in here so it's extending out a bit more from there and maybe the smooth brush just to smooth these areas up that's not looking too bad a cute little elephant let's just tidy a few areas up just with the draw brush and smoothing out making sure we've got the right amount of bulk in places smoothing out any areas that we need to okay so there's a few minor bits of detail that i'd like to do and smarten up so i'm going to go to 40 now with the resolution and again do a detailed flood fill now be careful with your computer make sure you've saved your work before you do this in case of any crashes and i've gone up to just under a million tries and you can see the difference it makes when i start smoothing out areas like this so i can go over my mesh and just smooth out areas but it also allows me to add more details such as some eyeballs and things and the end of the trunk as well so i'll use the crease brush and just sharpen my crease up in here make it a touch smaller smooth round over the outside and then hold down control in fact i'll alt middle click so i can zoom in on the area hold down control and sharpen this bit up all the time smoothing out any bits that i need to okay the trunk just needs a little bit of work so let's get the snake up tool so let's come to the trunk drag it downwards there that woods around here and outwards this way and then get the drawbrush after resize cool little snout very last thing then i want middle click on where the eyes are move into those and gently draw in an eye can up the detail if you need to for this i can just do it in this section so i can up the detail to let's say 60. use the simplify brush and just paint in this area back to the crease brush and smooth out if you need to and there we go and then we have the simple shape of our elephant in terms of rendering i've used the same clay texture so if i come to this workspace down here and press ctrl spacebar you can see the node setup once again and if you need to learn about lighting then check out my how to make renders look good video if you want to show me your work then get across to the discord server and chat to me there otherwise thanks for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: Grant Abbitt

Views: 16,533

Keywords: understand, texture, paint, learn, blender, tutorials, 3d, art, graphics, game, material, guide, easy, painting, how to, gamedev, sculpting, sculptor, blender 2.8, blender tutorial, follow along, follow, simple, basic, beginner, 3dart, speed sculpt, 3d modeling, blender 2.8 tutorial, elephant

Id: C8Ww2HX8OGk

Length: 21min 27sec (1287 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 02 2020