Fast Character Modeling With The Skin Modifier || Blender 2.93

[Music] if you can draw a stick figure you can model a character if you've seen my videos before chances are you've seen this one about how to model characters fast and you'll know that i'm not exaggerating when i say it's probably the quickest and easiest way to model a character in blender you all seem to like that video but i noticed a lot of the comments but i noticed a lot of the comments were just the same few questions so this one is meant to answer all those questions as well as teach the basics of the technique i have a bunch of character modeling videos planned for october so this is a perfect time to talk about this again and if you want to download the characters i make all of them will be available on patreon here's a summary of what we'll cover we'll start with talking about the skin modifier which is what makes this whole process possible meanwhile we'll be building our character from a single vertex and a few modifiers basically we're just extruding the vertex to draw a stick figure i'll show you how to add some personality to your character by varying line thickness and creating mass then i'll show you a quick way to add an armature the skin modifier can take you really far but if you want more detail you can use what you made as a base for sculpting after that we'll add eyes and some color by the end of this video you'll be able to make a simple completed character all right let's get started alright so here we are in blender i'm using version 2.93 and to get started i'm just going to add in a plain tab into edit mode make sure you're in vertex select for this i'm going to select everything and hit m to merge you can merge it at the center and that's basically just going to turn all of those points into one single point so you might be wondering why i started with a plane if i'm just going to turn it into one vertex well if you want you can delete it and you can actually add in a single vertex but to do that you have to go up to edit preferences go to add-ons and search for extra objects and just make sure extra objects is enabled then you can hit shift a and you can actually add in a single vert if you want you can even add in suzanne the monkey tab into edit mode select everything hit m and merge everything at the cursor and still we have one single vertex you can do it whatever way you want it doesn't really matter too much so now we need to add a few modifiers so you can come over here to modifier properties and add in a mirror modifier because we want our character to be symmetrical next we can add the skin modifier and this is going to give our character some thickness and then we can add a subdivision surface modifier and this is just going to smooth it out and i'm just going to turn the viewport levels up to two so it's a little smoother and i want our mirror modifier to be a little easier to use so that points don't have to be as close to the center for them to actually merge so to do that we can just take this merge distance and turn it up to something higher like point one and now you can see it doesn't have to be as close to the center for them to actually merge like that you can also turn clipping on if you want which is just going to make points in the center not able to move to the sides like that but i like to leave mine off and just have the merge distance something a little higher like that if you want to shade this smooth normally you'd be able to go back into object mode and right click and shade smooth like that but you can see it's not really working with the skin modifier you have to do that over in the modifier panel by clicking this smooth shading option like that we're going to be using x-ray mode a lot so we can see through our object and you can do that with alt z or you can hit this button up here that looks like two squares overlapping and if you want to move your object around without hitting g using this little gizmo right here you can turn that on up here there's a little drop down and you can turn it on for moving rotating and scaling if you're wondering why my shading looks like this i just have a matte cap on so you can turn that on if you want can go up here to shading there's a drop down i switched mine from studio to matcap and i'm just using this normal lighting one right here all right so back into x-ray mode with alt z with the skin modifier you can scale up your points with ctrl a like that so you can see i'm scaling it up and down now normally you'd be able to select things and hit s to scale things up but that doesn't work with the skin modifier you can also hit ctrl a and then x and that will scale it only on the x-axis or you can hit y to scale it on the y-axis like that if you don't want to use these shortcuts you can hit n to open up the side panel right here or there's a little arrow and you just want to make sure you're an item and you can see there are these two options radius x and radius y you can click and drag to select both and turn both of them up that way or you can just use one if you want it to be flatter or something like that so to start our character i'm going to go into x-ray mode and hit ctrl a to scale this down quite a bit drag it up this is going to be where our hips are and we can basically hit e to extrude to draw our character stick figure style so this is going to be our leg we can hit e to extrude and then y to extrude that just on the y-axis i'll extrude this part up that will be our spine that can be our shoulder right there and we'll have arms this will be our neck and our head right there and if we want we can make our feet flatter by selecting that point hitting ctrl a and then x you can see it's getting flatter now right there but it's not symmetrical and that's because our root is on this side so when you're using the skin modifier you have to have a root and you can tell where it is by the circle surrounding it so it might be hard to see in the recording but there is a circle around this point and if you want your character to be symmetrical you have to make sure that the root is in the center so to move it you can just select a center point i like to keep mine on the hips so i'll select that right here and in the modifier panel you can hit mark root like that and now you can see that our feet are symmetrical now another thing to keep in mind is that if you have any disconnected parts like this you have to make sure that each separate portion has its own root so if i add a root right here now it's working but before it wasn't because there was no root all right now we can start scaling some points up so i'm going to start with the head i'm going to hit ctrl r to add in a loop cut like that ctrl a to scale that up quite a bit i want this to be a little more spherical so i'm going to bevel this point with ctrl shift and b like that and that looks a little too wide so i'll select those again and hit ctrl a to scale them down and if you want a different head shape you can select this point right here and when we pull it forward you can see we're getting a little more of a chin so you can experiment with that to get different head shapes another thing that the skin modifier allows you to do is if you scale points up that are close to each other they'll kind of merge with each other like this you can see they're merging and they'll kind of share each other's mass you can get smoother shapes out of it like that so you could also do this with the chest like this and at a certain point it'll kind of merge with the shoulder right here and you can get different shapes depending on how close or far away your shoulder is it's easier to demonstrate with a shape like this you can see that when i scale the center point up it'll slowly start to smooth out the shape and you can see that it's kind of merging with the other points if i scale it up high enough it will just be one smooth shape connecting like kind of all of them this is a way to control like how much mass there is on certain parts of your character and you can create like some more complex shapes this way so i want our character to have a skinnier neck so i'll hit ctrl r to add a point in here and i'll scale that down and if you want the neck to be skinny and long you can also bevel that one with ctrl shift b like that i'm going to scale the hips up with ctrl a until it kind of merges and we get a smoother shape and if you want the torso to have a different shape you can add a point in here with ctrl r and you can scale that up too so if you wanted to have like more bottom heavy or something like that or a bigger chest or you can use it to have like a slimmer waist or something like that you can also change the leg shape quite a bit by scaling up this point right here if you turn it up high enough you can have a character that's shaped like a pixar mom or something but i think i'll leave mine right here so i'm going to select the wrist and pull it up slightly right here and if you want to extrude this in the same direction that it's already going i found the easiest way to do that is by hitting ctrl r to add in a loop cut like this then you can hit g twice and that will slide the point along the loop like that you can also select the point on the end hit g twice the same way and you can see it's not going further than it already was until you hold alt and then it'll allow you to go further like that as far as you want so i'm just going to scale both of these down this is going to be our wrist and this is where we're going to start making our hands so i'm going to hit 7 to look from the top select this point right here and the shape i found that works best for hands is just kind of extruding fingers from the center like this so we'll have three right here and we'll have a thumb i'll select all of those and scale them down so it's a little easier to see and it's already kind of coming together like that then we can just select all of these points right here and extrude them at the same time with e and we can do the same thing for our thumb and the reason i add a wrist right here is so we can select this point and scale it up with ctrl a and when you scale it up high enough the mass will merge with the other points around it and this point right here we'll keep the wrist small so now you can move these points around with g or scale them apart for a more natural shape like that or you could scale all of these points up where the knuckles are so that they merge together and have like a smoother shape and if you're not happy with the amount of digits that i have right here you can make as many as you want with this setup so i'm just going to select these and hit shift d to duplicate them and then i'll just select this point and that point and hit f like that and you can just do that a few times like that and then i'll select all of them and move them to the center and you can see sometimes it'll get kind of broken and you have to move them around a little bit for them to start working correctly but a lot of the time just scaling this point up more will fix it so this might be excessive but it's just a way to show you that you can make as many fingers as you want personally i like to stick with four digits on my hand if you want to add some knuckles you can just select all of these points right here and right click and subdivide and i want to have more knuckles than this so there's this little box that pops up when you subdivide it you can just open that up and change the amount of cuts like that so now you can see we have the correct amount of knuckles and for the thumb i'm just going to add one with ctrl r like that and now i think our hands are looking pretty good if you wanted to make your character look bigger you could move your shoulders further apart and also scale them up a little as well as the chest so i'll just scale the chest up really high right there and if you want the chest to come out more too or the back you can just scale outward kind of like you would with an arm except you'll go uh straight out like that and if you scale it down a little you can see the mass is kind of merging like that and right now this just kind of looks like a like a ball or something like that so if you want it to be wider you can just use the slider up here to make it a little wider so now we have a big chest and you could do the same thing with the back if you really wanted to so i'll do the same thing scale it down a little you might have to scale your shoulders up a little bit for the mass to look correct if you wanted to add some muscles on the arms you can hit ctrl r like that and i usually will just add a point in between the elbow and the shoulder like this and you can scale that up you can do the same thing for the forearm right here like that and if you want to be wider you can just do that up here you can hit ctrl a and then x like that so now it's wider in the forearm if you want it to be even sharper in here you can just bevel one of these vertices right here with ctrl shift b like that and if you use the scroll wheel you can add in extra points like this so i'll add in one extra point i'll scale all these down a little smaller and the middle one i'll scale up so we have this little part for our elbow so if you're trying to make it look really extreme that's one way you could do it that's just an example of something you can do but i'm gonna hit ctrl c until our character goes back to the way it was another way to change the shape of your character really quickly is with proportional editing so you can enable proportional editing by hitting o like that um or you can just hit this button up here so when you do that you can just select a point and hit g to move things around and you can see there's this circle now and if you move your scroll wheel it'll change the area of influence like that and this is a way to change the shape of your character pretty quickly so if i wanted to i could kind of just take the head move it forward and this will kind of make our character more slouchy and the proportional editing just kind of makes the transition smoother so now we have a slouching character like that and this works with scaling also you can see i'll select this middle one and hit ctrl a and scale it down like that and when i scroll around you can see it's scaling pretty smoothly and and moving to the other points if you don't have proportional editing on for this you would have to scale them down each separately and it just makes it easier when you're using proportional editing another thing you'll notice is that instead of following the chain it will kind of scale everything down that's in the circle so if you want to scale things down that are only connected and touch the connected parts first there's actually an option for that and this drop down right here you just have to check connected only and then it'll try to see what's connected and scale that down first like that you also have a bunch of different fall off shapes in here if you don't like the shape that it's producing and now the base shape of our character is pretty much done and you can see if we turn off all of the modifiers this is the only thing we've actually modeled so far so you don't really have to put in a ton of work to get as far as we got if you want your character to be more blocky you can turn off the subdivision surface modifier and you can see now we have this it's like really low poly another thing you can do is change this to simple like that and you can add in a smooth modifier like this and this will let you control i guess like how blocky your character is if you want to be just a little smoother around the edges so you have a few options if you wanted your character to be asymmetrical i'd recommend using a mirror modifier just to make all the symmetrical parts that you want to make and when you're ready to make asymmetrical parts you can just apply this and now when we go in here you can see we have both sides so if you wanted to have like one arm that's longer than the other or something now you can have one giant arm or something like that another thing the skin modifier lets you do is it actually lets you create an armature you can see there's just this button right here and when i do that it adds these bones in and if you go to pose mode it'll actually let you pose it immediately it weight paints it for you so i don't have my mirror modifier applied over here so it's kind of creating some weird errors but if i just hit ctrl z until that goes away and then apply the mirror modifier and then i can add the armature now when i go into pose mode it should work fine like that one downside of using this is that when you're creating complex shapes like i did with the head right here you have a lot of extra bones that you don't necessarily need like i wouldn't need this part at the top or i might not necessarily want this many bones in the neck but if you're just trying to make something really fast this is an option for you if you're using this to make a rig for a character that you're planning on using for a long period of time it would make more sense to come into edit mode and clean it up a little and then you could re-parent your mesh to your armature so i'll just hit ctrl z until that goes away and we have our mirror modifier back so i think one of the most asked questions on the other video was about creating small details specifically with sculpting which is something you can do but you have to apply your modifiers first so if you want to go back and edit this i recommend hitting shift d to duplicate it first and then you can hide it right here and now if you want you can always go back and turn that back on and it still has all the modifiers there but on this one we can just apply this one and you just want to start from the top and apply them going down like this and now that everything is applied you can tab into edit mode and you can actually move this around however you want for instance you could come in here and bevel this and create a nose or something like that and if you wanted to smooth it back out you could add another subdivision surface modifier in here like that and i'll shade that smooth also so now we have a little nose you could also use proportional editing in here too or if you want you can go into the sculpting tab up here and you can start sculpting on your character however you like if you want more fine details and you're not worried about the topology you can turn on dynamic topology up here and this will allow you to create more fine details like this so next i'll add in some eyes with shift a and i'll choose a uv sphere like this i'll rotate that on the x by 90 degrees look from the front scale it down a little first i'm just lining up one side right here then you just want to make sure it's actually in the front not inside the head too much and we can add a mirror modifier to this over here and for the mirror object we can select our body right here and that will make it so that there's actually one on the other side so when you have this where you want i recommend hitting ctrl a to apply the rotation and apply the scale select this right click and shade smooth and you can use the same method to add some eyebrows too if you want so for the eyebrows i just used a plane and used a mirror modifier to bring it to the other side a solidify to give it some thickness and then a bevel modifier so that it's a little rounder on the edges like that so when you have these where you want them i recommend applying the mirror modifiers like that so with this body right here we already applied the skin modifier but if we wanted to add an armature in we can just select this one right here from earlier before we applied the modifiers and we can go over to the skin modifier and hit create armature so we have this armature right here made for us and then i'll just hide this one again we can go into edit mode and clear up any bones that we don't want anymore so for this one at the tip of the head select it and hit ctrl x to dissolve it like that and now you can see it's gone i can do the same thing for this right here for our neck and if you come over here to the tab with the little running person on it it's object data properties you can go down to viewport display and turn on the names you can see that right now all of the names have just the default names like that i'm going to select all of the bones in the middle right here hit period and use the 3d cursor as our pivot point hit s to scale x and then zero and if any of these are not centered that will completely center them right there as long as your 3d cursor is in the center of the world if it's not you can hit shift s and move the cursor to the world origin like that now we can hit a and right click and choose names and auto name left or right and that will give everything on this side a dot r at the end and when we have that we can right click it again and symmetrize and it'll flip all of those bones to the other side so you can see now that this bone is bone o4 dot r and this one is also bone o4 except it ends with dot l naming it like this allows you to do certain things that i'll explain a little later but for now i'm just going to turn the names off just to get rid of the clutter and back in object mode up here i'm just going to select our body then shift select our armature and hit ctrl p and parent with automatic weights now you can see when we go into pose mode you should be able to move your character around just like you did before but you can see when we move our head that our eyes and our eyebrows aren't attached so an easy way to parent those is go back into object mode select your eyes shift select your eyebrows and then shift select your armature and go back into pose mode and with just your head selected you can hit ctrl p and parent to bone so it's going to take your eyes and your eyebrows and make it so that it's parented directly to the bone so now when you move your head they should follow just fine a quick tip for posing fingers is you just select all of them and then hit period to change your pivot point to individual origins and now when you try to rotate it your fingers should curl like this this is good for posing fists and things like that but you can see it only works when you have individual origins turned on for your pivot point if you try it with median point it's not going to work the same way and naming our bones the way we did will allow us to mirror poses so i'll just move one arm like this and if i hit ctrl c and then ctrl shift v that'll mirror the pose to the other side and that only works because of the way we named it with the dot r and the dot l you can also flip a pose by selecting everything hitting ctrl c and then hitting ctrl shift v and that will just shift the pose to the other side all right now we'll add some materials so i'm just going to hide our armature for now and we'll go over to the shading tab right here so you can just select your body right here and add a new material and in here the only thing we're going to do is add in an image for this image i'm using a palette that i created and you can get that for free on my gumroad i'll have a link in the description so to add in an image you can just hit shift a and then search right here for image texture like that and you can open up your palette so i already have mine in here and i'll just plug the color into the base color right here and then we need to add a texture coordinate so shift a search for texture coordinate and i'll just plug the uv into the vector right here and right now this is not uv unwrapped so the quickest way to uv unwrap is just by selecting your body going into edit mode and selecting everything with a and then you can hit u and choose smart uv project and you can just keep the default settings and hit ok and now we can see our image is actually working but it's kind of blurry the way to fix that is over here changing this from linear to closest and now it has a hard edge like that we can select our eyes and our eyebrows and add the material to that too mine is still just named default material and this is all the setup we have to do in the shader area so i'm just going to change this to the uv editor and make sure you choose your palette up here you can see when i select everything and go into edit mode we can actually see our mesh over here so you can just select everything over here with a hit s to scale and then zero and it'll scale that down to a single point like this and then you can move that around with g to change the color to whatever you want so i'm just going to put this up over here to green because our character is going to be green and now you can pretty much just select parts of your mesh like this and over here hit g to move it around and change the color so i'll just box select like this and we can create a shirt you might have to clean up some of the edges over here just to make sure that they're actually connected and just like before you can just come over here and hit g to change this to whatever color you want so let's just change this to a slightly darker color like that maybe and i'll just box select right here for the pants you can see now we have two dots over here so we can just select the one that's skin color and move that somewhere else like this and i'll just select some loops on the feet with shift alt and left click like that and then just keep pressing control plus to expand the selection and that's not symmetrical so i'll move that down to wherever i want the shoes to be and i'll change the color maybe to black have black shoes you can do the same thing for the eyes and i'll select the center right here and hit control plus to expand the selection and we can just move that to black so we have some black pupils now and i'll do the same thing for the eyebrows too all right that's it for this one my next videos will also be about character modeling so subscribe if you don't want to miss those i'll be posting this video's project file on my patreon along with all the characters i'm modeling in future videos a huge thanks to my supporters over there thanks for watching have a good one

Channel: Joey Carlino

Views: 130,461

Rating: 4.9693127 out of 5

Keywords: blender, cg, cgi, blender 2.9, among us, amogus, amongus

Id: DAAwy_l4jw4

Length: 23min 59sec (1439 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 05 2021