Faces are EASY with this trick - Blender tutorial

modeling faces is one of those things that many people struggle with and it's pretty obvious when you notice how many people download models instead of making them which is fine but I know a lot of you want to make characters from scratch a common method is to use sculpting tools but if you want to animate it then you'll have to learn about re-topology which could melt your brain if you're new to the concept the method I prefer is box modeling and it's how I made all of these characters right here what's great about it is that if you're careful you end up with a good topology that makes animating easy no re-topology necessary and the way I learned how to do this is I found a bunch of pictures of face models with good topology I analyze them and simplify them as much as I possibly could until I ended up with the method that I'm about to show you [Music] the easiest way to start learning about it is by doing it with a cube so let's add in a cube with shift a and we can tab into edit mode right here and look from the front I'll add the first loop with Ctrl R and we'll put it right about here this is going to be above the eyebrow browse let's add another one in the middle and with that selected we can control B to Bevel and scroll up so that there is one more Loop in the center right there this is going to be about as wide as we want our nose to be if you want to have a nose let's add another one right here this is going to be below the eyes where around the cheekbones would be now we can go into face select mode and just select all of these faces right here and I to inset now if you want the mouth to be very wide you can use these faces right here and inset them like that but what I prefer to do is add Loop Cuts right here that cut through the center of the eyes vertically and then we can select these faces right here in eye to end set like that now let's create another loop cut right here this is going to help create an area for the nose if you don't want a nose you don't have to put this Loop then we can select these faces right here and I to inset and make this pretty small like that this is going to be for the mouth area now I can select these squares over here shift select these ones and I to inset one more time and now let's go back into object mode and and shift d to duplicate this and I'll just hide it in the outliner because this is what we'll be building off for all of the other examples at its most basic level this is the method and when you understand what all of the loops are for then you'll be able to use this method to make a wide variety of head shapes this Loop goes around the face and it's going to be used for the eyebrows and Trace the shape of the jaw these Loops go around the eyes and these faces are going to be for the eyelids and the eye sockets this Loop goes around the mouth and above the tip of the nose this area is used for the mouth and the lips you can use these spots for the nose these spots for the cheeks and you can use some of the faces down here for the chin all of these Loops will allow for easy face deformation when you rig and animate it and you can add more Loops for detail let's start pushing some of these points around to show you what it can do I'll start by adding a subdivision surface modifier to smooth this out just a little bit if you want it to be symmetrical you can turn on this symmetry option up here or you can delete half of it and use a mirror modifier let's select the these faces right here and pull them in and let's shift select these faces down here and E to extrude if you want the eyes to be more round you can use the loop tools add-on you just have to make sure it's enabled you can go to edit preferences add-ons and just make sure that Loop tools is enabled and for this I like to add another loop cut with Ctrl R to split the eyes in half you can just select this rectangle right here right click go to Loop tools at the top and circle now we can use S to scale and S and X you can just start pushing some of these around to make it a little more face shaped I'll grab these points from the mouth and bring them out so the mouth is a little wider we can also grab these and bring it down to kind of create some like laugh lines like that if you want cheekbones you can use some of the points over here and bring them out like that and if you want a bigger brow then you can use some of these faces or some of the points at the top right here and pull them forward a little you can use these faces right here for the nose and E to extrude and if you don't want the nose to be a big block like this then you can look from the side with three and just rotate it like that point sliding is going to help you quite a bit so we can go into vertex select mode and when you have a point selected you can press a g and then G again and it will slide along like that which will help you make some smoother shapes another thing I like to do is use the shrink and fatten tool which is alt s so we can just select some of these points in the middle right here and press alt s and you can see that it's going to push out like that in the normal direction we can do that with the points on the side right here also to pull them in if you want a chin you can use some of the faces down here you can just pull this out like that for eyelids we can just select these faces right here and I to inset just a little bit select the top and bottom points we're not going to select the ones in the middle and we can just drag these out and it'll look a little weird at first but we got to keep going so let's just select the faces in the middle now and we can e to extreme them Inward and if you want something that looks realistic then references are going to be your best friend so if you look at some references you might notice that eyelets tend to be quite a bit bigger select some of these points right here and move them up and we can also do the same thing at the top to create whatever eye shape we want and also drag some of these points up for lips we can come over to the mouth area create another loop cut with Ctrl R and I'll push it pretty close we can just select the top points and bring these up we'll do the same thing with the bottom take some of the points on the side move them a little closer we can move the center points in a little bit like that now let's add a loop cut in here with Ctrl R I'll select the bottom ones and GG to slide it all the way it's okay that it's on top of the other points for now we'll do the same thing up here and we'll press three to go into face select mode select these front faces I'll turn the subdiv modifier back on and when we pull this out you can see that it looks like lips now you might notice that in a lot of Rush references of lips but the lips aren't very wide on the edges right here they kind of just go right into the crease of the mouth sometimes the Symmetry option up here gets a little buggy so I'm actually going to delete half of the face you can do that by just selecting one of these loops with alt and left click X delete the faces then hover over this side and press L to select the whole half X and then you can delete those faces too come over here to the modifiers add a mirror modifier and make sure it's at the top and I like to turn clipping on also for more complex shapes we have a few options we have proportional editing multi-res sculpting shrink wrapping or a combination of the three proportional editing is when it starts to get really fun and you can turn that on up here by pressing this button or you can press o on your keyboard to toggle it on and off and I also like to use connected only so let's select some of the points around the mouth and we can press G to start moving it you can see we have this circle that's the area of influence and we can scroll up and down to change the size of that we can also rotate and scale with this so let's make this person a little happier and let's move the cheeks up a little too you can bring the forehead out and let's bring that down a little bit so it's starting to look maybe a little evil proportional editing also works with alt s so you can use this to thicken parts of the face like this when you get to this point I recommend just kind of going wild and breaking things as much as you can if you need some more detail for the head you can add a loop or two right here and I'll use alt s another thing I like to do with proportional editing is use the two sphere tool so you can use the shortcut which is alt shift and S or you can use this tool long press on it and then you have this option right here basically what this does is it takes whatever you select blender will try to turn that part into a sphere and you can see as we scroll up and down it's changing the area of influence so if you push it just a little bit you can get some very interesting shapes you can also use this to start off with a round head so we can go back into object mode Let's just hide this and turn on the one that we saved from before let's duplicate this again so we have an extra one go back into edit mode I'll add a few loops and we can select everything and ALT shift and S and you can see this is going to turn it into a spherical shape right here let's add a subdivision surface modifier and just like before we can start pushing some of these shapes around I'm going through pretty much the same steps for making the mouth and the eye sockets but for the nose let's just select these points right here and extrude straight out so we have a long nose now and again we can just use proportional editing to kind of go wild and make some interesting shapes when you add Loop cuts to something that's already round if you want you can smooth them out immediately after adding a loop you can come to this box down here and for smoothness usually what I like to do is just turn this up to 0.5 so let's just see how terrifying we can make this character be let's make this one very angry looking let's give this character a little bit of a chin also I like to also add some spheres for eyes so back in object mode we can press shift a I'll just add a UV sphere and pull it off to the side rotate it 90 degrees on the x-axis and scale it down you can add a mirror modifier to it and for the mirror object we can just select the head right here so now we have two of them then I like to go up to the snapping options up here and turn on face project and set that to Center so now when we press G and hold Ctrl we can snap it to the face right here so right now this is absolutely terrifying so let's come back in here and maybe move some of the eye area around to make room for the eyes let's add some lips in here too I'll just add a loop right here then I'll select it and extrude it out it's just going to be a little more simple than what we did before shade everything smooth see what this looks like with some lighting on it let's make these eyes black so it's pretty easy to make some very nightmarish characters for sure a quick shading tip for accentuating some of the creases is you can add a new material for the skin and we can use an ambient occlusion node so you can just add that and plug it directly into the base color right here and you can see already we're getting more definition around the mouth area right here and we can push this to the extreme with a color ramp and move the black stop right here up a little higher and if you don't want it to be completely black then you can turn it to whatever color you want we can bring back our base shape and duplicate it again and then hide the duplicate for multi-res sculpting you're going to need a multi-resolution modifier and when you have this in here you can press subdivide and this is going to look like the subdivision surface modifier but it's a little different because it actually lets you sculpt on the new topology that you see here let's press this maybe one more time and in edit mode Let's just create some eye sockets and a mouth real quick and I'll make a simple nose also and then we can go into sculpting mode with control Tab and you can just select sculpting mode right there now you have access to all of these sculpting tools right here so if you want a more defined brow or something like that then you can draw that in like this you can also use the grab tool to move parts around make your brush bigger with f like that and you can start pushing things around however you want in the multi-resolution modifier is pretty interesting because if we shut it off you can see that we just have our normal base mesh right here and it also lets us add and remove detail right here so if you wanted even more detail then you can subdivide it again and you can see now we have even more faces to work with while we're sculpting if you want the base mesh to actually be affected then you can use this checkbox right here which will actually change the base mesh as you're sculpting so let's make this one very sad instead we already made one that looks angry the snake hook tool can be a lot of fun for this also to get interesting shapes like this if you get any weird overlapping shapes you can hold shift and then left click like that and that will smooth things out for you like this and for all of this I'm just using my mouse let's put some creases around the eyes some lines on the forehead and I'll use the crease brush to tighten up some areas like around the nose let's give this character some eyes we'll go back to object mode and just the same way we did before I'll use UV spheres and the mirror modifier except let's come into edit mode and just pull this vertex in right there so it looks like we kind of have pupils so multi-res sculpting is a good way of adding detail which lets you still turn the the quality up and down so you can make it as detailed as you want really all right let's hide let's hide all right let's hide this one now and get a duplicate of our fresh cube right here and we'll talk about the shrink wrapping method so usually for this what I like to do is model just like a basic shape of the head that we want and you don't have to worry about topology for this really so I'll just add in a cube Ctrl 2 to add in a subdivision surface modifier we can tab into edit mode and I'll just start moving this around so I'm just making something that's a little closer to a typical head shape that we would expect from like a human character I'll just rename it reference so I can remember which one it is and I'm just going to turn up the viewport levels so it's a lot smoother this will help make the shrink wrap modifier a little more accurate and just so this doesn't get in the way too much I'm going to make it so it always looks like a wireframe and we can do that over here under object properties go to viewport display and we can turn on wire now let's bring back our cube right here we can select that go to the modifiers and turn on shrink wrap and then we can just select select and the outliner we can select the reference right here so for simple shapes like this you can actually shrink wrap this whole cube with all of the points in place directly to it let's add a few more Loops in here and let's actually just apply the shrink wrap modifier right here so when we go into edit mode you can see that it's actually stuck to the surface now and we can add another one if we want it to continue to snap to that surface right there face snapping will help you a lot for this so you can have face snapping turned on and it will snap to the surface of the reference so you can use this to get things into the right position where you want them like the mouth and the nose and stuff like that and when it's looking good to you you can just apply the shrink wrap modifier I usually like to add a subdiv modifier and then you can come into here and just start moving stuff around the way that you would normally like this so shrink wrapping the entire cube with all of the points on it and whatnot usually works pretty well for simple shapes like this but for something more complex like this weird big uh big jaw Chad head you can see that it has some spots that go in some spots that stick out in a strange way and if we try to shrink wrap to this then it gets kind of messy and hard to control so what I like to do is start from scratch and that just means starting with a cube like we did in the beginning and you can add each Loop one by one just like I showed you and you can use face snapping to snap it to the point on the reference where you want it to be and just like with the other one when you think it's looking good you can just apply the shrink wrap modifier add the subdiv modifier and then use all of the other methods that I talked about to make your character as complex as you want foreign just to show that it can be rigged I'll add in an Armature and rig it up quickly I haven't rigged many faces so don't expect this to be the best example but basically what I'm doing is using vertex snapping to snap the ends of the bones to the points on the face I turned off the subdiv modifier so I can reference the original mesh since that's what's going to be deforming this last bone will be for moving the whole head and you can use shift a to add that one in I'll select all of the bones that aren't in the middle and use Ctrl F2 to batch rename them so that they all end with a DOT L and that way blender knows that these are all on the left side then we can right click and symmetrize them and just so we can move the bones around more freely I'll disconnect them with alt P so they're still all parented to each other they're just not connected anymore now go back into object mode select the head and shift select the Armature Ctrl p and use automatic weights I also like to keep the Armature modifier above the subdivision now we can go into pose mode and move these bones around to test out some facial expressions some of the bones will probably move parts of the head more than you want so usually what I'll do is go into weight paint mode and select the large head bone and make sure you have Auto normalize turned on and then you can just paint on the parts of the head that you don't want to move around as much as you can see it deforms nicely and creases form in the spots that you'd expect like I said it's not perfect it could definitely use a little weight painting to make some parts to form a little better but considering this is mostly automatic weights it works pretty well if you want everything that I made in this video you can get that on patreon modeling heads is really fun now that I use this method but if you want your characters to be more than just floating heads you're going to need a body and the quickest and easiest way to model a body is what I show in this video right here

Channel: Joey Carlino

Views: 209,080

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Id: -QoLorR9qpY

Length: 17min 8sec (1028 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 07 2023