Hey, I am jelle, And today, I am going to
show you how you can make your very own 3D character for your game,
I’m going to go over every step, from the first sketch, to a controllable character
in a game. Over the past year I’ve made a bunch of
little games and I feel like I’ve learned a few tricks along the way to make characters
quick and easy, but still have them looking great! So let’s get started! A game character is created in a bunch of
different steps, I will go over the following parts: Drawing your first sketch
Creating the 3D model Texturing the Character
Setting up the rig Creating the animations
And creating the character controller in a game with working animations. The first step is creating a concept, Today I’m going to make my avatar. I usually create some sort of sketch but you
know, I have drawn my avatar a bunch of times already, so I’ll just *boop* that in. I create a front view with the character standing
in the t-pose, and a side view to get another perspective in, this is great for the modelling
phase where we want to get different angles to reference. I’m just going to keep it simple and give
my character a t-shirt, jeans and of course, a pair of sunglasses! Okay, when you are happy with your concept,
I mean, mine is basically just a sketch with my finished face, but you can go as detailed
as you want of course, it’s time to make the 3D model! Let’s open the 3D program of our choice:
Blender! Before we get started there are some plugins
I always use when I create a character: Go to edit > preferences > add-ons and search
for : loop tools, rigidify and images as planes. With the images as planes plugin installed,
import your concept drawing and set it up to be about 1.8m tall, just like me. duplicate and rotate it to have an image for
the sides as well. When I need a quick and smooth 3Dmodel, I
use a method called subdivision surface modelling .
This means that I create for example a simple cube first and then, add this modifier called
subdivision surface , who would have guessed that. This subdivides the object and smoothes out
the polygons. So you can easily create smooth shapes with
the basic shapes from the cube you just created. I like to keep the subdivisions to a minimum
for the game, because you want to have as little polygons as possible to make your game
run much smoother. To make sure I don’t have to do any double
work, I also add a mirror modifier, so when I move stuff on the right, It automatically
does the same thing on the left. So let’s start modelling! The basic human shape goes like this, you
have the center core, with a head on top, all created with some loop cuts and extrusions. When you create your character, it is important
to think in edge loops, you see, the body and head all have nice loops going horizontal
and vertical. So we want the same things for the arms,
If we would just extrude the arms straight, we would have a lot of weird loops and the
shoulders would be harder to move naturally. That’s why I like to extrude the shoulders
first and the extrude the arms down from there. That’s much more natural, just take a look
at your own shoulders. I do the same thing with the legs which creates
a nice pelvis. Extrude the legs further down and plop out
some shoes. You can add some extra loopcuts along the
ends of the clothes and scale them up to create some differentiation between the separate
clothes. Move some more points around to shape out
the body to fit the sketch you made. If your character doesn’t need to do any
fine grabbing movements, than I would just not create the separate fingers, just add
a thumb and you good to go, remember, less bones = less work and better performance! Okey, so after some more tweaking, you will
arrive at something you will be kind of happy with. You can add some other stuff to the character
like a pair of sunglasses to hide the face, that way, you won’t have to worry about
any complex facial topology. You can go crazy wild with the hair, but as
you can see, my hair isn’t that exiting, luckily, a buzz cut is the easiest to create,
just extrude it a little bit. Okey, so we have our 3D model ready! So now it is time for the texturing! Before we can start adding colours to our
character, we need to uv unwrap it, which is basically trying to lay all the polygons
flat on a plane. But, as you may have noticed when you’re
doing the Laundry, it’s kind of hard to lay it flat with all the parts visible. That’s why we add seams, virtual cuts along
the model where we tell the program it’s okey to separate the flattening. The easiest parts to unwrap are your clothes
of course, because that’s how they are created! Look at you shirt and find the seems where
your shirt is sown together. Just select the edges that kind of follow
those lines and go to uv> mark seam. Do the same thing for the pants and arms,
try to find a line where you take your virtual scissor and after your cuts, you the skin
will just lay flat, kind of like an animal rug. [take cow hide] After you’ve cut all the parts go the the
uv editing tab and go to uv> unwrap! And tadaaa! You have some nice flat parts of your model,
perfect for texturing. Oh, and when you have different objects for
your character, and your not planning to affect them in your game, it’s more performant
to have just one combined mesh for the character, because my character will always keep his
glasses on, I’ll just join them together with the character. At this point there are two parallel realities
where each has there own way of texturing, There is the easy and fast, but less artistic
way, and the longer but more freedom way. The easy way to texture your character is
by creating a color palette and importing it in your material in the shading tab. Move all your uv islands out of the way and
place them one by one to the correct color. And you’re done already, super quick and
easy. However, I like to have some more control
over the materials, so instead of using just one material with different colours, I like
to make different materials for all the real different materials on the characters. So just add a bunch of different materials. Because we’ve already unwrapped our character
we can easily select the polygons by selecting just one and pressing “L” to select all
the linked polygons. Then click apply and do the same for all the
rest. before we start texturing, be sure to maximise
the uv island to get as much pixels per polygon as possible! The big advantage of this method is that we
can easily apply a whole bunch of different properties, not just the color. I always like to give my materials different
smoothness values. the smoothness, or the inverse, Roughness
determine the sharpness of the reflections, if you look at your sunglasses for example,
you see that the reflections in the glass part are way sharper than the frame parts,
where you can barely tell it’s even reflecting. You can use some pre-existing maps from the
internet to quickly add some realism and break up the large flat parts of the model. Okey, so you see I didn’t model the mouth
because that’s hard and time-consuming to make it look good, so what I like to do is
just draw it on. So I drew a mouth texture and if you leave
the mouth as a separate material on a duplicated set of polygons on the face, you can animate
the mouth by setting up different drawings on a texture which you can move later in your
game. What a nice smile! After you’re happy with your materials,
it’s time to optimise. To make your game run smooth, you should try
to have as little materials as possible, but you see, we have a whole lot right now. Luckily there is a thing called texture baking. Which means that we place all the different
textures onto one single image, according to the uv map we made earlier. And that for each property, so in this case,
the color and the roughness texture. So the shirt texture for example will be baked
on a texture, but only on the parts where the shirt polygons are. We can bake textures by adding an empty image
texture in each material you want to bake, be sure to select a size as a power of two,
something like 2048x2048 should be plenty! This is because we can then later more easily
compress the texture to smaller sizes to squeeze out some extra fps. and then changing the
renderer to cycles and selecting the bake menu. There, you can select which property you want
to bake, so we’ll start with the diffuse channel, which is color, and deselect the
direct and indirect lighting because we only want the color information none of the lights
that are in our project. After waiting, you’ll see the different
colours being baked on the texture you created for the character. Be sure to save the texture before baking
another texture because blender will overwrite the texture if you bake something else! We’ll do the same for the roughness channel. And something as a nice bonus. You see that in the render settings of the
eve renderer I activated the ambient occlusion tab, but in a game, that effect is expensive,
so what if we could calculate that beforehand. Luckily, there is such a thing! You can also bake the ambient occlusion of
a character onto a texture! So just select the ambient occlusion and bake
it out! Okey, now that the textures are baked, duplicate
the character to make a back up, and remove all the other materials on the character,
except the mouth, and replace it with a new material. Then drag your recently baked materials into
the shading tab and link them the to the correct channels. Texturing done! Now it’s time to give our character a skeleton
to make him move. Also known as a rig, because we’ve activated
the rigidify add on, we can just insert a human rig, ready to be used. Another performance tip is to use as few bones
as possible, so just delete all the bones you don’t need, all the face bones can just
*boop*, and also you won’t need that many fingers! Now that you only have the bones you need,
it’s time to match them to your character, you can turn on the x symmetry so you only
need to do half of the work. Grab the bones and move and rotate them in
place. When you’re happy with the positioning of
the bones, select the mesh, then shift select the rig and press ctrl P to parent the mesh
to the bones, with automatic weights. If you did it right, your character should
now be linked to the rig. Go into pose mode and test it out, if find
there are any part that move a little weird, you can always tweak the bones in edit mode. If there are parts of the mesh that move too
much, or not enough, you can select your rig first than your mesh as well and go into weight
paint mode, here you can tweak the amount of influence each bone has over a certain
polygon. The redder the point, the more it is influenced
by the selected bone, you can check by shift selecting a certain bone. Be sure to turn on auto normalise to make
sure every point has a total influence of one, lower the weight of your brush and click
on the points you want to be influenced more. We’re almost done! The hard part is over and now it’s time
to have some fun with the animations! I like to just create all the different animations
on my timeline and then split them up later in unity. For this example I will create 3 animations,
and idle loop, a running animation and a jump. Start by limiting your timeline to however
long you want the animation to take and go into pose mode, select all the bones and right
click and add a keyframe for all the bones, then turn on the record feature and go to
frame 1. You can now move your character into the pose
you want and when you’re happy, select them all again to set a keyframe for all the parts
you didn’t move. Copy the keyframe over to the end of the clip,
go to the middle of the timeline and start tweaking the body to make.it look like he’s
breathing in. And tadaaaaa, you have an idle animation! Do the same thing for the running animation
by moving over the timeline to the next 30 frames and set up your base pose in the start
and copy it over to the end. for the center pose, you want the exact opposite so what
you can do is select the start frame, ctrl C and then go to the middle and press ctrl
shift v to paste a mirror keyframe! Now just create some in between poses where
the feet are on the ground and play with the arms and head to make it a bit more dynamic. Lastly, we’ll add a jumping animation by
making him as small a possible at first and then exploding him straight up! With a wind down to the end to make sure there
is no static frames in the animation. Okey and that was all the work for the character
in blender! You now have a fully rigged and textured 3D
model to use in your game! So, let’s set it up shall we! Select the rig and everything in it and export
is as an fbx. Open up a new unity project and put it in
there. Go the the materials panel and extract the
materials into a new folder. Next import all the images you created and
start setting up the materials, but as you can see, there is no where to place the roughness
map anywhere, if you’re using the standard renderer, you will have to make it as an alpha
texture of your color map. You can do this in the image editor of your
choice, I use affinity photo, invert the roughness texture so it will become it’s inverse,
also known as a smoothness texture and convert the greyscale roughness texture to a mask,
apply the mask to the color texture and export it back into unity. Put it in the albedo channel and select the
albedo alpha as the source for your smoothness And put in the occlusion texture to finish
things off! Tadaa, your textured character in unity! Now, go back to the 3D model tab and go to
animations, here we can split up the animations we created earlier in blender. Name them accordingly and apply the changes. Okey, so now, we have an animator component
on our character and create a new animator controller for the player, open it up in the
animator panel and drag the three clips into it. We need 2 parameters to control the animations. A boolean for when we are running, and a boolean
for when we are jumping, set up the transitions between the different clips and make sure
exit time is turned off. With all of that set up, it’s time to create
our controller script, you can do a bunch of different ways to control your character,
but for this example I chose to use a character controller, I based my script on a unity example
and added the animations boolean controller to make the correct animation play when the
player is doing certain things! okey, we're very close now our character is correctly animating, but our camera isn't doing anything And the real final part is setting up a cinemachine
camera to follow the player at a certain offset after all that hard work, and we are finally done! Our character can now move and jump and stop
and do noting while looking cool! Exactly what I need for one of my future projects! Now it’s your turn to make your character
do what you need for your game! There is a bunch of different ways to make
characters for your game, this is jus how I like to do it. Of course it is important to create your character
to the needs of your game! You have probably noticed that all my characters
look pretty different because they al move in special ways or have to do special things. I hope you learned something today and that
you will be able to create awesome 3D models for your games as well! You can find all the source files in the links
below so you can play with them however you want. Like the video if you enjoyed this and subscribe
if you want to see more games in the future! And I’ll see you guys next time, where I
will be back with another fun little game! Bye!
