How I made this game character in zBrush and Maya

hey guys so here's the final uh image that we're gonna be creating and here's a simple animation uh of the character in maya and the whole experiment that i'm doing is creating a quick character um all completely 100 done in zbrush and then um you know for animation instead of doing uh rigging i wanted to see if i can use blend shapes and morph targets so um to start the character i i jumped into a zbrush and started modeling was just a basic sphere and as you can see i'm just using the move tool and the standard brush just really basic stuff just kind of pushing and pulling a hole in the for the mouth and initially i decided to sculpt the character with the mouth open so then in my i thought maybe i can close it and here i'm just using the inflate brush to add the lips to the character and again just really basic and i don't really have an exact idea of what i'm going for but i just wanted to create kind of a fun cartoon fish so here i'm using a curved alpha brush to create kind of the the thing that hangs in front of his face i'm not really sure what it's called but i should have looked that up but um just a really simple uh shape and then i kind of inflated it to make it a little thicker put in the center and then instead of adding a sphere to the end i just simply inflated the sphere right out of the shape so i think that gave me the kind of a basic shape that i was looking for then i just grabbed the standard brush with the sub uh activated and pushed in kind of a couple holes for the eyeballs then appended a sphere and just kind of put the sphere in place where the eye sockets are and i wanted the eyes kind of be you know kind of large and cartoony and now i'm just kind of creating the eyelids that go over the eyeball and just using again just standard brush and inflate brush and just literally just uh packing you know adding more volume to the to the shape just really um simple stuff then i um i took my time with the eyeballs because i was thinking i want to make sure they're nice and uh clean and not too messy looking and then i also was trying to keep in mind that i'm going to be attempting to create a blink using the morph target so i wanted to create enough volume for the bottom and top lid and then here i'm just taking a plane sphere turning turning it into dynamesh and you can see it has 221 points at this point and my goal is just to simply create an eye a pupil by simply literally just drawing it with the poly paint um and i'm just experimenting with trying to figure out what the eyeball should look like and i really wanted something cartoony so then i added a couple little uh reflection you know dots and i thought that looked pretty cool um and then i changed my material to toy plastic to give that kind of a wet material look and let's see at this point i am just playing around trying to figure out what do i want my main body color to be then i just flip the eye bolt to the other side just using mirror and weld still just kind of experimenting and trying to feel what the shape should be i decided to keep the part that's sticking out separate i didn't merge it with the main body shape and for the tail and the fence i just literally just simply used masking to mask it out and then used a move tool to pull the geometry right out so just really simple stuff here i'm just taking the move brush and attempting to shape the tail to something that looks a little more interesting than adjusting the mouth just adding a little more volume all right next i drew um the mask for the thin and just use the old key to kind of clean the mask up and just simply using the move on tool i just pulled it out and as you could see i'm just literally just moving stuff around i'm not even using anything fancy just simply kind of treating it as a clay sculpture with um fun cartoony shapes so i was pretty happy with that mohawk fin on top i thought that looked kind of fun and next i pulled out the side fins and i'm using dynamesh at 344 resolution so that the main the entire main body is almost a million points and it's just enough to give me enough resolution to move things around at the same time not you know have it too low resolution so here i was just trying to figure out some kind of a fun tail on the back and then i was dealing with little um spaces that were uh happening once i re-dynameshed it so then i just inflated it inflated the shape and then re-dynamesh and then got rid of it i'm not sure why that was doing that here i'm just creating the tongue shape just simply putting it into place and puffing it up using the inflate brush then bending it use the using the uh kind of a large move brush then i realized i have that that point at the end there and i wanted to uh to get rid of it so i used the damien standard to create a line kind of uh down the middle just playing with the tongue a little more and next i think i decided to create a couple teeth but before i did the teeth i did want to set the tongue to be uh red to start kind of a start to feel like it's actually you know advancing forward and then for the uh teeth i just simply grabbed another sphere uh sliced it in half and using the move tool just kind of sculpted the teeth to be round enough where they're they don't look dangerous they still look kind of cute and um just simply duplicated a bunch of them to kind of align them in a row and um i was really trying to avoid having them look too duplicated so i tried to change the change the shape and the size by just scaling them and moving them around alright so once i got the teeth done i think the main body and with the teeth and the tongue really began to look kind of cool then i realized the uh hole inside the fish needed to be close so because it's dynamesh i was simply just inflated it and re-dynameshed it and got rid of the hole inside and here i'm just trying to jump between different parts of the fish and seeing if i can slowly begin to shape it more and more creating something a little more fun and uh interesting so a lot of times i'll just i'll just rotate the model a bunch of times and even if i'm working on some other part if i see something i'll go in and adjust it even if it's something you know else because a lot of times when you rotate it you get to an angle where something needs to be adjusted and a lot of times you don't really see that um that imperfection anymore here i'm just playing with the color and i decided to go with the purple a little better than the green and just using kind of a lighter color for the fins for the top and the side and the tail really simple stuff i just simply use the poly paint and the experiment that i was trying to do is i wanted to see if i can create an entire character um in zbrush including uh all the paint so i wanted to see if i can paint using the poly paint and not bring it into substance painter just kind of a fun experiment to see what that would look like and maybe um that would give kind of a different feel more more kind of a painty toy toy like feel um again just an experiment normally i would bring the model into substance painter and then use tools and substance painter to paint but using poly paint is a lot of fun the other really important thing that i should mention is i am working on the high res model and i'm not really i'm not really worried about using or creating the low res version yet so what i wanted to do is see if i can create a high model completely without any planning for the lower low res and instead of manually going in and creating quads in maya i wanted to see if i can just use z remesher and using the uh projection in zbrush if i could project the high res onto the low res a lot like what we do in substance painter when we bake textures but you can do something similar here in zbrush where you project your high-res model with the paint over the low-res base so you will see that um coming up but um at this point i'm just still creating more detail kind of keeping it very whimsical and playful and i was using the standard brush with the drag rectangular setup and just simply dragging things in different places and giving him kind of a lighter belly and then here i wanted to match the tongue color so i pressed see to to copy the color and then i turned on my back face to make sure that the paint as i'm painting it doesn't spill over to the other side so then i just painted the inside of the mouth and then i thought maybe i'll also add some kind of manual shadows as well just kind of paint paint in some of the darker areas and poly paint is great at that because it's it's it's very easy to paint and then uh use smooth brush to create fun uh gradients so here i kind of did the same thing i made the tongue to be a little darker in the bottom and then try to add a couple highlights on top just like you would with any painting program all right just having fun with the front piece here i was trying to make it a little uh lighter and again keep it fun and uh whimsical but at the same time make sure that it has kind of a same theme with the colors and it still felt like the characters a little bit too simple for me so i uh added a few more uh things to it here i was just dragging on kind of a almost like a scale um thing but i didn't want to overdo it so i just put it in a few key places i didn't want to make it look too busy and then here i just uh wanted to add some uh normal uh details so the the character doesn't feel too too flat so i was just using standard brush with some alphas that are default alphas and z brush where you could just grab the the lines and kind of just literally draw them on to create a little variation in geometry making it look a little more maybe organic so at this point i was pretty happy with the fish he was coming along nicely and here i just added a little more detail to the front piece again just trying to break up anything that's boring and solid and this uh seemed like a good way to add a little more detail if uh any real marine biologist watches this they'll probably have a problem with the fact that this is not a real reference of the fish but i'm just having fun creating something that is silly and colorful and kind of loud here i thought maybe i'll add a little accent of the um kind of a neon bluish that is in his eyes his pupils so i just wanted to add just a little bit kind of tie in the mood of of the character and see if it maybe felt a little better very subtle but um i thought that worked all right so the next uh step that i tackled is this is where i uh stop working on the high-res version of the fish and i i started to create the low uh rest so here i just combined all the teeth into one sub tool because i didn't need all those teeth to be on different layers and next i went through and made sure that none of the high-res pieces or layers had any subdivisions so i was checking to see if any of them i want to make sure before i come back combine them into one i want to make sure that they didn't have any kind of different you know subdivision levels um here i just thought maybe it would be a good idea to add a little uh color to the base of the teeth just so they don't look too too white and i was just simply painting that in with the standard brush and using the poly paint with you could see that my rgb intensity is very very low so i was trying to create some kind of a subtle effect once i painted the teeth i um realized that i can't really see it in the base so i have to bring the body back and touch it up a little more once i saw how it actually looked with the body and the tongue all right so then i saved the character and i think this is where i started uh creating the i'm naming each layer high because i'm intending to create a low right below it so each each element each layer is going to have a low version in the lower version there's just going to be a z-remeshed geometry of the high right so i didn't want to again bring it into something like maya and do re topology manually i just wanted to see if i can just generate a low poly geometry right here in zbrush so once i created a layer for each element i went into z uh remesher and started playing around with simplifying the geometry and completely ignoring the colors and the textures because what my intention was is to create a low poly version of each one and then after that i was going to make the uvs and you'll see me doing that and then once i had the low poly frame for the fish and all the uvs generated here in mine automatically then i wanted to try the projection of the high-res model onto the low-res model so that's something i haven't done for a while and especially in zbrush 2022 so i wanted to see how that works that's something that i used to do a lot before substance banner came along that was one of the workflows i don't think i would do this too much because i um i think still think it's probably best to create a low resolution base and then just subdivide it and uh sculpt detail on top of that while everything is uv and then just add texture or poly paint if you wanted to but in this case i didn't do that i wanted to see if i can just kind of do it the old way the kind of a backwards way all right so you could see i did the teeth i did the eyeballs and then i did the tongue so i'm doing it kind of a medium low resolution for each piece after the tongue i um moved on to to the body and with the body i tried a couple different things you will see me trying the z remesher and once uh the models was uh automatically z remeshed i actually tried to reduce the topology but you could see on the very top and the sides it began to break so i wasn't happy with the automatic zero measure and luckily uh there is still another option next to zero measure called legacy 2018 which is an older way of doing retopology and once i tried that that gave me a much better result for some reason at least in in this situation so you could see that i'm kind of concerned with the fact that the model did not zero meshed well to kind of my my liking so here i am turning on legacy 2018 and i set the target to 5k with the adapton and um that seemed to create a much better frame keeping the fins and the tail intact even after i reduced the uh the topology so you could see that the the the shape held much better and the uh legacy mode now this is not all that's not always the case so you kind of do have to play around and see what works and what doesn't but in my case for some reason this was a better way to go here i just quickly experimented to see what the unwrap would look like before i do all the pieces just as a test all right i copied the low res eyeball to the other side so now i have two of them and you can see now literally every single element is low resolution not uv'd and not painted but simply just the frame so now i'm gonna bring all the pieces uh down the list so i can combine them all or merge them into one at this point everything is still separated but in order for me to create the uvs i do need to combine everything into one so i'm just simply merging it down and i was happy that the i had groups auto groups so i could um take advantage of that when creating the uv so you can see i selected polygroups and turned off symmetry and this was the automatic automatically generated uvs they looked uh good enough for me to move forward all right here i'm just going through each piece and turning off the dynamesh mode i wanted to uh get ready and merge that the hi-res into one piece as well so you can see now i'm left with one high-res layer and one low-res layer and again low-res layer doesn't have the paint it's just now it has the frame the topology and it has the uvs and this is where i will move forward with projecting the high res onto the low res kind of baking over so both of them need to be selected both of them need to be turned on and then i simply went to project and i was playing with a couple different uh settings so dragging the projection about halfway on the mean and about 90 all the way to distance 0.57 seemed to give me a decent result and you can see how now the high res projected itself onto the low res the only thing i had to do for the loraz is i had to subdivide it a few times so i subdivided i believe five times to give me enough geometry to hold the new projection so once it projected i just had one tiny little spot on the on top to kind of to fix it wasn't a big deal and i could probably uh i could have maybe reprojected it and seen if that fixed it but i was okay with just touching up a couple little imperfections so right now you're looking at the version of the low res subdivided with the paint being projected again it's something that um i used to do a lot before substance painter came along and poly paint was really the main way of getting cool textures some this is kind of a older way of working but um it still works all right so once i finished a couple small touch-ups i um let's see what did i do next then i went to the texture map and because the um the low res model now has poly paint on it i created a texture from poly paint and you could see what that looks like so the texture looked nice and you can project it straight from poly paint onto your onto your uvs next i uh i dialed it down to one to create the normal map but that wasn't necessary because i um i am going to take the high res and the low resin bring it into substance painter for baking so i can get normal map from substance painter instead of doing it here but i just did it anyways just just as an experiment so you can see i have both the texture map and the normal map which i'm going to export export out for for substance painter so then i went to z plug-in uh multi-map exporter and then in there you can turn on would you want to export including the mesh you can export the low-res frame with the normal map and the textures i turn off the groups under export but i'm not sure that makes any difference because later i had to fix that in my anyways but here i just created the uh the maps so that only took 20 seconds then i went to my computer and wanted to double check and see what the maps look like before i went inside substance painter so this was the obj file that was exported out this was the texture map and this is the normal map but again i didn't end up using it so then i jumped into a substance painter and one of the things that um i did do is i took the high res model from zbrush and i decimated it to create a um a high-res version for substance painter so then i took the decimated model and brought it in uh into substance painter here to kind of create the bake for the character so that's what um that's what this is and here's the final result result of the low resolution and the decimated model being baked into the low res and it looks really nice and keep in mind all of this was automated so i was pretty impressed with the fact that i didn't have to do uh much to it all right so then i just imported the texture and kind of just dragged it into the collar slot to see what that looks like now i'm just playing with the roughness and i thought it was really uh neat that you can create a poly paint in zbrush and just simply import it into substance painter and it just works everything just looks really nice if you wanted to you can even use substance painter to add even more painting and detail but i didn't do that i just kind of left it the way i had it in zbrush so here i just exported all the maps and jumped into maya once i brought into maya you can see all the pieces on the left i came in with for the polygroup so then i just combined the mesh into one and change the edge flow to be soft so it looks nice and smooth and next i went to the substance plug-in and just plugged in all the uh maps and then i realized that i didn't have the ambient occlusion so i came back to substance painter and exported that out by using mesh maps so that's the ambient occlusion all right so once i use the plug-in it created the shader network for me so then i just simply took the material that maya created and just assigned it to uh to my fish of course it looked kind of dark because there was no light so i turned on the arnold lights and brought in a map hdr map and the following final result looked pretty cool so my experiment moving forward was to take the shape editor and create a couple different animations instead of using joins i wanted to see if i could create a few fun animations just using the uh morph targets just as an experiment so here i am just selecting the bottom part of his mouth and using uh verts and soft select to kind of define the area that i want to bend so again instead of use do using joins i thought it would be fun to try to see if you could also create fun deformations or expressions using just the morph targets and then in addition to using uh moving points around using the verts you can also use the sculpting tools as well to use that for more targets which is really cool because you can create some really interesting fun shapes that maybe it would be hard to achieve with joints so again just playing around and seeing what's possible so as you can see i'm using the verts to move points around and use the smooth sculpting brush to kind of smooth it out and make it somewhat appealing or soft so the shapes don't look don't have anything um too sharp all right then i created a few uh fun deformations for the tongue as well all right next i kind of uh pushed them off a little more i realized i thought it would be cool to see if i can actually close it all the way and i have to tell you i was really happy with the results and seeing that maybe wouldn't work for a game character specifically maybe it would i'm not really sure but as far as the animations go in maya using morph targets is definitely something that you can get really creative and have a lot of freedom so that was a really interesting experiment for me to see how far i can push the shapes and there's really no limits if the geometry is good you can create some really crazy expressions and stretch it especially for cartoon kind of animation this is a cool way to do things in addition to using joins right here i'm just creating kind of a fun blink so i'm just taking the uh top and the bottom uh eyelids and just kind of pushing them uh to close them to create a uh a blink and then i thought maybe it will be fun to attempt to animate the uh the hanging thing as well so i added a really simple stretch effect to that as well and then i used the same technique for the side and just simply move them just a little bit to create kind of a fun simple animation test and for the animation test i just simply uh set all the keyframes on frame one and then went to frame 24 and set keys there as well and then on frame 12 halfway i just sort of moved all the sliders that i made the changes to to see how they all look sync together and that was kind of the final animation experiment so later i would definitely if i would end up using something like this i would add a joint to the uh to the tail and the body but the you know the joints and the morph targets together uh create an awesome uh effect so i hope you uh had fun this was uh a fun little uh experiment and um i'll see you in the next video thanks for watching

Channel: Alan Balodi - 3D Tutorials

Views: 5,092

Keywords: zbrush, Maya, maya3d, 3dmodeling, 3danimation, zbrush to Maya, substance painter, tutorials

Id: pK96KoNNQdY

Length: 41min 17sec (2477 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 24 2022