How to Make a 3D VTuber Avatar From Scratch, Part 2: Modeling

so you've got your character design and now you want to model it in 3d first get your hands on some 3d software like blender or maya blender is free and is what i use however i've also used maya and i can say the knowledge from one program to the other transfers pretty easily so it doesn't really matter which one you use you might have to do a lot of googling to find equivalent hotkeys and functions if you use maya to follow along here but on the upside you'll have some better uv unwrap tools to work with once you get to the texturing stage as i can say from experience blenders is quite limited in comparison it'll still get the job done though i'm about to go over a bunch of stuff really rapid fire to try to get you up to speed on the basics of how to operate with a 3d modeling program if i'm going too fast for you or if you already know how to do all this stuff skip to this part of the video here's what you're going to want to do select all this stuff press delete on your keyboard get rid of it you don't need it here we are in the three-dimensional world you can scroll your wheel to zoom you can click your middle mouse button to rotate you can hold shift and click your middle mouse button to pan uh second thing click add go to image reference navigate to wherever you have your turn around reference images you should probably save them as two separate things one for uh the front view and one for the side view add it to the thing press n to open up this little panel thingy here uh get all these to zero because that's not how we want it to be all right we need to get this thing off the dang floor now if you look at the top right here you will see an indicator of your xyz axes thing you use uh this right here this unlabeled green dot is where your model should be facing the why it should be at the back of your model so we pretty much just have to rotate it along the x-axis here uh think of it as a wheel basically we can click this we can go to a rotate tool here and we can like do it like this but to be precise we're just gonna go to x rotation up here and type in 90 exactly and there you go your think of it as a wheel that is rotating around like the long metal rod holding it up in a car that's what i mean whenever i say rotate around a specific axis now you're going to want to move this uh back a little bit now you might want to just like grab this but if you do that it's not perfectly centered anymore the x is no longer zero so you can grab the y arrow and move it exactly along just the y you can do the same here along the z axis or you can click this little square here and it'll move along both of them and wherever you want it but it'll still remain perfectly centered on the x axis not going left or right at all so i'm gonna put this around here for now and um we are now going to add a cube because you see we all actually know how big this thing is right now for all we know this could be like two inches tall or like 50 feet tall and you probably don't really want that when you are importing it into a game so in order to figure out what size is actually supposed to be we spawn a cube and we can see the exact dimensions of this cube right here now if you're a normal person just type in the height that your character is supposed to be for the z-axis right here if you're an american however uh i'm six feet tall exactly one point eight to round up to about 1.83 because i'm slightly above six feet tall so we'll just type in 1.83 here as you can see our reference image is actually way too big this is how tall the model should be uh we want to perfectly position this so the bottom is right along the grid like the floor here instead of going underneath of it uh you can click this up here like one of these dots to get a perfectly flat view or you can press the key on your keyboard uh one on the numpad sets it to a perfectly flat front view for example and you just line this up right here let me actually just move this for a second so it's on my way i'm going to zoom all the way in here uh now you can move things without having access to the manipulator object over there oh [ __ ] did i forget to mention how to actually get to the move tool you click over here to get to the move tool you probably figure that out if not i apologize but anyway you can also move things without doing that by pressing g and now we're moving it all over wherever and we can move it along only a particular axis by pressing g and then that axis so we want the z-axis right here now we are only moving it vertically up and down so i'll get that right along there and there we go if i wanted it to be perfectly precise i could have done something different but it doesn't have to be perfectly precise now we're gonna take this right here and try to line it up with the cube you can move it over temporarily uh now you're going to want to press s to scale it on down try to get the bottom of the feet directly lined up with the cube here and the top of the head directly lined up with the cube so it takes a little minor bit of trial and error but that looks pretty good it's like in between the top of the head and the hair so whatever uh i'll set it back to exactly the center so i'm just going to type 0 on the x up here and there we go cool we got our reference properly positioned and scaled gotta get rid of this cube now don't need them and we're going to add a another reference image so same process as before let's set all these to zero first of all rotate it along the x again now i'm gonna press three on the numpad to get a side view looking at it in this direction we're going to rotate at 90 degrees along with z you can type in 90 up here like i did for the x but another easy way to do it is you can rotate something and then type in a number for example 90 degrees and it'll rotate it exactly 90 degrees you can also do the same thing we did with moving it where we can type in a specific axis so if i press r to rotate then z to rotate around the z axis and then 90. then it rotates 90 degrees along the z axis this can also be used to scale things if i press s and then let's say i wanted to be really tall i could type in z and i could type in five and then we stretch it along the z by the factor of five it's a handy little thing to know but anyway we want this to be the same size as this so we're just going to copy the scale factor here whoopsies oh and we're gonna paste it in here bam we can also copy the z location so it will be perfectly lined up assuming these images are the same dimensions uh you should have probably made these the same exact dimensions at least height wise otherwise uh you'll have to do the cube thing again probably i'm sorry slide that over there and there's your references wow maca you might be thinking that's good and all but how do i actually [ __ ] make the dang thing well it's easy you just click add and add a cube that's add cube and there you have it this is your model this is what your model is going to come out of there is a difference between object mode and edit mode object mode lets you slide around entire things essentially edit mode allows you to actually edit those things like so now what exactly is an object well an object is listed up here in your scene collection this cube is one object if i were to add say a cylinder move this around a little bit this is another object also known as a mesh we have two separate things here we have our cube and we have our cylinder if we click on one of these things and go into edit mode we can edit the vertices or lines and faces of this but not this one because this is a separate object we try to click here nothing happens we gotta go to object mode click on this one and then go into edit mode to get this one now throughout our model we may have several objects that are part of the same overall model but are not necessarily connected maybe we'll be using this as hair or something you know we'll have some hair draping down there and it's not actually connected but we don't necessarily need it to be then at a certain point especially for things like vr chat we will emerge our meshes which involves shift clicking on multiple things and control j to join them and now this is a single object and if we go into edit mode we can now control the vertices of both of these and if we wanted we could also physically connect them to each other for example uh i delete this face move this up here delete this face you know i could like physically move these vertices towards each other and then merge them i'll explain how to do that in more detail later on but that's just a quick rundown of object and edit mode at this point i would like to explain something somewhat abstract but important now the thing is when you move or scale something around in object mode it's kind of like it can mess with things that's all i i can really say so you want to try to keep that to a minimum you'll also notice that the origin point of the thing is now up here instead of in the center where it was before that is also important as a general rule of thumb you should usually try to make sure all of these things right here location rotation and scale are set to zero or one for the scale in object mode because if it's like this weird things start to happen later on with certain interactions just trust me there are times where you will want to change things in object mode but for now uh stick to edit mode for this you can quickly change between it by going up here or just pressing tab and you'll notice that if i go over to move here um i can select whatever i can also press a to select all and then i move it like over here i'd scale it down do whatever i want with it uh the origin of this object is still down here directly in the center this is the point of reference for this object essentially if i did and move it in object mode up here and then like let's say i turned this into the head and i had some feet coming down off of it or whatever well the origin is right here so when it spawns inside of the game games usually put the origin right at the center on the floor so you might find out that once you're in game it ends up putting your head inside the floor down there so keep things normal here go to edit mode you can now begin changing things you can grab a vertex and move it around you can grab a line and move it around or even an entire dang face it's really annoying having a click up here every time you want to do something like that but you can press one two and three on your keyboard to quickly go between modes controls you don't do all that garbage i just did now step one uh we do not want to make our model twice so what we're going to do is hit ctrl r to place an edge loop down the center along the y-axis well around the x-axis but like in the center facing forwards just left-click there and then right-click to put it in the exact center select everything on one side of it you can hold shift to select multiple things hit delete delete faces now we have one half of a cube go into the wrench icon right here this is your modifiers add a mirror modifier now anything we do to one side will also happen to the other side you'll notice we can only see vertices over here if you click this then you can edit things on either side which i usually tend to do it's up to you though well it lets you select them and the transform thing will still be over here but whatever you will probably want to enable clipping because if you don't and you move something towards the center um you probably don't want that to happen but if you enable clipping and you move things toward each other they merge this is now one thing right here exactly in the center you might find that at some point you want to move things very close to each other but once you get beyond a certain point uh things like start auto merging when you try to move them for that just lower the merge limit add a couple extra zeros after that decimal point and you should be good by the way you see how it's annoyingly clipping through here go to view up here change the clip start add a couple zeros after that decimal point bam you see how the camera is like not aligned over here press delete or the period on your uh numpad bam we're centered all right on what we're selected i'm just trying to rapid fire through these tips as fast as possible to try to uh get you up to speed on how to do this now that we have our cube then we know how to manipulate things we're gonna go ahead and let me get this back to where it should be oh another tip right here you want these two things to be perfectly lined up uh select one of those select this hit by hitting shift click now we want these to be perfectly aligned uh like going like this hit s to scale hit x to scale along the uh x and now we can well we can do that or we can press zero we've scaled along the x-axis to zero these two points are now exactly in the same x location so let's start modeling i'm gonna press one to go to the front view here looks like we got some things that are not lined here either so i'm gonna do the same thing sx0 this is a combination you will often find yourself using sx0 we want to be able to line this up with this thing so click on this up here you now see through press a to select all move it up scale it down it's going to get a little weird because of our mirror modifier but that's okay just slide it into place and start getting what you need to get move things into place line them up with the body line uh lining up with the body not the clothes i'm not gonna be trying to model in these clothing folds yet it's generally best to make an entire naked body first and then put the clothes on top of it now we're going to need a little more deal wait hang on this thing right let's press three to go to the side view and um well let's grab one of these actually move that back press r to rotate get it in the rough general shape and we're going to need a bit more detail so let's add another edge loop let's press ctrl r again click here but this time we're going to slide it up to um bounce there actually i wanted to be a little lower down but i've already placed it i could go back and do it again or i could go up here click edge edge slide and move my mouse down it's kind of hard to see but it's down here now there we go now if we press alt while in edge mode and we select this press alt and then left click we have selected an entire edge loop alt click selects an entire loop of things going around it doesn't really work here because it's like the middle of the thing but if i like were to add a thing here then i um did it there then you would see we would select the entire thing it also works on faces you can press alt and then select all those faces it goes in whatever direction you're closer to so if i want to select like this cross section that i just did i hit it towards this but if i want to go horizontally i will alt click here oh let me turn off x right i would all click right here and it would select that face loop going around like that anyways i don't actually need this edge loop that i added for demonstration so i'm going to click this uh hit delete and dissolve edges bam now it's gone notice that i dissolved it rather than deleting it if i were to delete it then um well we don't really want that to happen all right so anyways i'm gonna select this edge loop go back to go back to side view and move it to line up with this a little bit better i want a little bit extra thickness here going forwards but i don't necessarily want to just like scale it raw because well actually you kind of need it a little bit here as well but let's say we didn't let's say we only wanted to scale it this way we would press s and then y to scale along the y and we can line that up just right uh we're gonna clearly need another edge loop right here so let's get that uh let's maybe select this edge up here and move that down to where it ought to be same with this one and it's basically just a matter of uh yeah if you keep at this eventually you will find yourself with a torso you might find that you need to kind of grab the corners here let's go to a top deal by hitting seven and kind of move them inward so it's not just like cubular there that's a bit more reasonable but we should we should probably have an edge loop down the middle here exactly uh we can move this out a little bit more or scale it along the x pretty much does the same thing here and there you can already see this is almost like a sack of meat i'm trying to think of what else i should be going over for you to know uh let's see important things this is the uh viewport display up here if you click this little arrow you can mess with a whole bunch of things like enabling normals uh if you click it and disable it you will kind of lose track of everything and you'll just kind of see the raw shape you're working with you can go to object mode click on a thing right click shade smooth to well shade it smoothly you can add a modifier here subdivision surface and see what it'll look like with more polygons you'll probably want your render and viewport numbers to be the same there's a reason we're doing this instead of just like adding the extra polygons raw it's a lot easier to add extra detail than it is to remove extra detail let me show you for example like let's say i apply this subdivision surface modifier it would like like up this a lot it would make it so it's no longer a modifier right now the way it's working is we still have our actual mesh and in fact we can click this to disable it and look at what we had before i'm going to shade this flat again because i don't like how that looks we still have our original mesh right here everything is exactly the same it's just that we can see what it will look like if we were to add more polygons to it uh we can click this right here to make it a bit less dumb there we go this is like on the actual thing now and let's say we wanted to apply this don't ever apply your subdivision service modifier until you're ready to which is going to be very very late in the process but if we were stupid and we applied it then um wow look at all this what if i were getting ready to go into like vr chat or something and i realized i had way too many polygons and the game is not gonna want me to be able to have my avatar in it what if i realize my performance is terrible and i need to get rid of a bunch of things well i would have to like basically [ __ ] go in and individually dissolve all these edges and stuff and it's a nightmare whereas if we have a low poly thing and we wanted to be higher poly we'd literally just add the subdivision surface modifier and then we're good of course you'll have to you know compensate here and there a couple places because you do end up losing like a lot of detail but you can add things like say yeah another edge loop right here uh we maybe we don't like how smooth this is what we can do is we can click this i'll go to the item tab right here and add a crease to it uh it's kind of hard here let me move it in here more like without the crease it smooths out but with the crease you can see while it creases time to uh first of all set this back to like one or two maybe two yeah that's probably about right but i'm going to disable it for now um right now we're just going to keep working with low poly uh let's add a neck as a demonstration real quick um i want to cut a thing here how do i do that press k for cut and i'm gonna click uh right here and actually i'm gonna i'm gonna click you can press escape to cancel out i'm going to click on this line and then this sign and that line and hit enter now we can select these faces here hit delete delete the faces and bam we got a neck hole now you might be thinking to yourself wow mac oh this looks like [ __ ] garbage but look at what i'm working with right here alright this is what i started with it will get all right eventually trust me speaking of garbage however we have some five-sided polygons here that's bad for reasons i don't entirely understand but you should try to avoid them you should try to make sure everything is four-sided and except for certain cases where it's kind of fine like um like if you have like a cylinder you can have the edge of that view in general try to have four-sided shapes how could we ever fix this though is five sides well what if we hit ctrl r and added an edge loop right here and then we took our knife tool and hit that and put it right there and then another one right there hit enter bam we fixed it generally adding edge loops or removing edge loops tends to fix certain things it can eventually be like a puzzle game where you got to figure out like what kinds of things like where you got to cut where you got to add extra geometry where you got to remove extra things and dissolve lines and stuff to keep that quadrilar shape stuff going on then let's add the neck i'm going to alt click to select this edge loop here and gonna go into a perfect well side view hit e to extrude and bam bam bam what do you know we got ourselves a dang neck this is awful hang on let me like line this up this should not be this wide it's very square what does it look like like this okay there we go that looks a little bit better uh let me demonstrate another thing real quick let's say let's say we added a head don't actually do what i'm about to do but i'm going to hit this and then hit face no mesh the face grid fill no not enough things for that just regular fill [Music] it's not worth [ __ ] wait no get that and then hit uh f to fill okay yeah whatever and we like extruded again and uh all right so let's say you already modeled in your head this is not how you would do it but let's pretend you did and you realized oh no my neck it's too thin or too thick or whatever how do i change that i get a hit alt click to select the edge loop for the face loop rather and like i could hit s to scale it up and down but it's scaling the other dang things with it i don't want us to do that i just want it to go outwards all the way allow me to introduce you to alt s scaling along normals when you hit alt s things scale in the direction that they are facing in every way all around it is incredibly handy and i did know about it for a very long time and i'm mad just remember that you can do this as an alternative to regular scaling it will come in handy a lot of times all right let's see a couple other important things in case you couldn't figure it out you can do that thing where you type in something for any kind of transform whether it's moving it rotating it scaling it let's say i wanted this edge right here to be exactly half its size i can press s type in 0.5 and now it's half its size i'm gonna control z to undo that also this is one of those programs where to redo something you press ctrl shift z instead of just control y it's kind of easier like this i guess this right here is proportional editing if you enable that then things uh okay so you're gonna want to while you're moving this scroll your mouse wheel up until the circle becomes reasonable size now you can control how big it is and control the radius influence and essentially it'll start dragging the things other than what you've selected along with you this becomes incredibly useful later on once you have more detail just keep in mind like for example let's say i want this right here to be a little bit wider but i don't want to go through the effort of like you know i'd say i had this off i didn't want to like scale that and all now this looks a little bit weird now i'm going to scale that and i gotta scale this a little bit more as well like no don't need to do all that just turn on proportional editing i can hit s hit x and then um as i'm doing this i can scroll the wheel up to reduce its influence and down to increase its influence however let's say we have like some [ __ ] pretend these are fingers like i don't know but say we we had something here and like i wanna i wanna manipulate these faces a little bit i wanna drag this like this and have this follow me a little bit but wow it's getting this part too i don't want that click here connected only there you go it will be less done now now you could keep doing this and just you know block out all the shapes to get to the silhouette right and all that stuff but i'm gonna have to stop you there see the silhouette of your model isn't the only important thing if we want this to not look like a polygonal nightmare whenever a limb bends we need to be very careful with how we make it and with how our edge loops are set up for example when it comes to making the legs you might be tempted to uh oh i don't know let's say you know put an edge loop right here or whatever to give a little space there and then just kind of grab this and extrude downwards however if we were to actually bend this leg let me just demonstrate for you real quick and also give you a brief tip about the 3d cursor press shift s you can click on a cursor to selected you can also go uh let's see is it here yeah 3d cursor and set the location to right about in the middle of the legs there and then if we select something and we change this up here to 3d cursor things will now rotate around there whenever we rotate something so if we're gonna rotate this you know let's turn that off um well things just don't really look the best this is going to look super bad when you bend them instead what you want to do is have a sort of bikini line shape something a little bit like oh let me turn that back to normal medium point something a bit like that now of course there's very little geometry here so this still isn't going to look good but if we were to uh bend it like this [Music] and i can't really demonstrate to you what the difference is because there just isn't enough geometry here and we haven't actually like done any weight painting or rigging or anything but trust me it's gonna look better once you start rigging it if it looks like this your edges should follow the same pattern your skin follows as it creases around bending points now generally speaking some of the most important uh edge loop locations and orientations are as follows first of all of course you want that sort of bikini line shape around where the hips connect to the thighs around joints you will want more of them so like for example along the legs we might have a couple here like this but as you get to areas that bend you want more of them so that there is more geometry to deform as those parts spend same around here of course the face is also incredibly important you want circular rings around the mouth and around the eyes if you want me to explain why uh i it's hard to explain but basically this helps these parts open and close more as your eye is blank because your mouth opens um the more there is here the more these lines kind of have room to expand outwards without like it's hard to explain i'm not an expert on this and then of course you know uh maybe you would have wanted to start your face with just a simple cube and you know just shape it into how you want like you got some nice quads here and like you'd want to um you know maybe this would be easier if i showed it in blender but we're already here so whatever you want to manipulate it's like that's the chin you can squish down and then for your eyes you would just i don't know draw some like simple quad structures with your edge loops or whatever and like oh yeah there's there's an eye right there but um you really want these concentric circles that go like this with all the edges around them with the quads and of course you're going to have to figure out how to actually connect those to each other without having some weird uh triangles like i could put this here and then like this here but then uh what the hell do you do here you got all the space do you put like an extra thing here and now we've got like a five-sided thing right here which we don't want so maybe we'll i don't know go down and you know you got to figure out how to do it if nothing else keep that in mind you want circles around the mouth around the eyes you want this set up right here you want extra topology around extra edge loops around joints if nothing else keep those things in mind and figure out how to work with it also these might not be at the right angle they might you might want them to go like kind of higher up like this because as your leg bends like this is kinda where it'll actually start to crease or some it's it's weird especially on models with uh interesting proportions of course it's all well and good to tell you what your model's supposed to look like once it's done but how do you actually get there well here's the thing i'm not an expert on this i can show you the absolute basics and give you some tips and tricks but it would be incredibly irresponsible of me to pretend i knew it adequately teach you to do everything like it was into making a proper model if you asked me to make a new model from scratch without following along with the video as i followed along with to make this one i don't even know how many things i'd screw up so if you were expecting me to give you a full rundown on this entire process myself i'm sorry to say i don't feel very qualified to do that and i'm going to have to direct you elsewhere now if you want you'd watch any number of courses on youtube now that we have multiple objects in the scene you can uh select the multiple objects by holding down the shift key if i select this one and hold down the shift key i can select the multiple objects okay and if you want to deselect any object you can just hold the shift key but if you're like me you do not have the [ __ ] patience for that so i'm not going to tell you to sit through all the fundamentals i mean you can if you want but that's not how i personally prefer to learn when it comes to these things i'm not doing this professionally i don't even know every single function of this program inside and out i just want the very specific pieces of knowledge that i'll need to make use of for my one singular purpose i got other [ __ ] to do i ain't about to dedicate my life to modeling a myriad of different things i just want to make an avatar so considering you clicked on a video teaching you how to make an avatar i'm going to assume that you're only currently interested in that specific knowledge as well when i made my first model i followed this guide this guy does a wonderful job of being entertaining and informative while getting straight to the point of things and without him i probably would have never tried modeling this series of him making a wizard lizard is an excellent place to start if you've never touched 3d software in your life and you want to make something simple like a little animal friend i however use it as a guide to create an alien with a very human-like body structure and well let's just say i bit off a bit more than i could chill see when it comes to creating something as detailed as a humanoid you'll find yourself with a lot of questions on how to actually do things properly i know i did i'm so proud of this model especially for it being my first ever 3d endeavor and i think it looks mostly passable but this thing is an absolute mess under the hood look at this and this and that and oh my god see i couldn't really find a similarly comprehensive high quality guide on making more complex characters at the time at least not for my purposes there were plenty of general 3d modeling guides but this guy was making it specifically with vr chat in mind just like i was doing it's incredibly frustrating trying to find guides that match the criteria of what you're trying to do because there are so many different methodologies when it comes to this stuff and it's hard to tell when a particular guide is even going to be relevant to your goals i could have looked up a general tutorial on making a humanoid but how would i know the skeletal structure in the rigging phase would be compatible with what if it wasn't even designed to be animated it was just a sculpt for 3d still frame artwork what if the presenter bored me out of ever wanting to pursue this so finding the right guide is extremely important that's where this next series comes in this is an absolutely fantastic and comprehensive series on modeling texturing and rigging for animation purposes using blender what's great about it is not only the fact that it goes over just about everything required to make a fully functioning character model but also the fact that it's by a guy who clearly knows what he's talking about when it comes to specifically modeling humanoids for animation and unless you're planning on using a cardboard box as an avatar you're going to want to know how to model a humanoid for animation i don't mean this is just for people who plan on making custom animations for their avatars your avatar is animating anytime a piece of software like a youtuber program makes it move trust me you want to know how to set these things up right this guy tells you exactly how to set up your edge loops and topology and make everything move as nice looking as possible tried apologizing a human face without a guide on edge flow i promise you will plunge yourself into a living nightmare so dicko here should get you started on how to achieve those proper edges i've been talking about he does assume you have some knowledge of the program already hopefully i've been able to get you comfortable enough with it but if you find yourself lost it might not be a bad idea to go back to the mora wizard lizard videos but you may find yourself lost if you're using blender to follow a maya guide wanna do what i did when i first started modeling download the free 30-day trial of maya and slam the gas pedal this has the added benefit of giving you a deadline forcing you to not be lazy about it just make sure to export your model as an fbx or something else that blender can recognize before your free trial expires and then you can spend the rest of your life in blender with maya knowledge that is very easily translatable or like actually pay for it but if you had the money for that you probably could have just commissioned someone for all this in any case if your goal is to make a humanoid character do whatever you got to do to be able to follow dicko's tutorials trust me that is where you want to be there are quite a few things i had to learn to do on my own for my particular model that were not covered in either of these series though especially when it comes to rigging and i'm going to use the rest of these videos to go over them along with offering some general helpful tips to make your life easier than mine you see this is about building i had to do things the extremely hard way before dicko made his videos then he helped me do things the regularly hard way now i'm going to try to help you do them the medium difficulty way i highly recommend you watch the entire remainder of this series before you start so you'll have an idea in mind of all the different things you have to account for and then watching it again as you reach each step along the process let's get started okay god where do i even begin here so i guess first of all i'll show you what my model ended up looking like let me give it a close uh let me shade this flat and like get rid of the subdivision modifier you might notice the face is weird that's because let me hide this armature uh the face looks weird that's because of this right here i will get into that on another then another date but basically here's the raw body without any modifiers attached to it you can see where i did the concentric circles around the lips around the eyes some extra edge loops around the elbows and the knees this is not my topology this is diko's apology like everything you see here was done following him including like these abs here which were pretty much not necessary but i figured i'd add them anyway like this could have easily just been a simple little like you know the way the rest of the body is i did not really end up doing the pelvis area that well actually you can see like there are lines following that crease pattern i was talking about but not as well as i kind of should have and that's just because of well dick and ass really i wanted a little bit of extra geometry over here to work with so that i could um yeah we don't need to link on that too much but i also had to add some extra like i listen we all have our vices the hardest part for me of this was figuring out how to do the clothing essentially what i did was i'm mod about the entire body first and then for the clothes i went ahead and oh yeah other tip here you can like get a selection circle thingy here you press w to cycle between selection modes um and i can increase the radius of this and select a bunch of things at once basically through the clothes you just select a bunch of things on the body and then uh you can go up here to mesh after selecting something click separate and now you have another object up here which is just those things there you go here and then you can press alt s to scale it and then bam you got close oh i probably should have copied that before separating it but anyways what i did was i did that i got the clothes um and they are not the exact same shape as the body underneath of them you might notice here uh let's see if i you can click on this and turn on wireframe to view a wireframe on everything not just what you are currently like the object you're currently on so i can show you you've got this line up here the sort of bikini line like vaguely it's not as perfect as it could be but on here you don't really have it at all i maybe should have tried to do that on here but it's hard they don't really go into like i could not find any tutorial on how to make like a long shirt most things are like regular t-shirts where it ends like right here um above where that sort of crotch line is so you don't have to worry about it but what i did was i made that normal t-shirt and then i extruded some extra things downwards and um it's it's i uh i tried my best it is functional uh if barely things don't bend ideally here but i was able to finagle it in the rigging phase to make it work but that was a whole [ __ ] nightmare anyways uh at a certain like you might be wondering well g mac oh that seems wasteful why would you have a body and clothes why not just do the clothes well because you can transfer your weight paints from your body to your clothes once you're rigging it and after that like at a certain point you can go into your body and just say yiddis delete us to whatever stuff and there we don't have any of that anymore we don't need it because you know and now you're going to want to do that once you start optimizing things both because you're going to be saving yourself on polygon counts to help performance and also because uh oftentimes your skin will clip through your clothes like if i were to bend this right now this is a uh yeah you see that let me turn on color you see how like the underlying mesh starts clipping through the overlying thing like you got it down here as well so you will be getting rid of underlying things eventually just for now just focus on modeling out the body and then the clothes follow the ditko series and don't worry about deleting the body until you get to the optimization stage which is way at the end i do have one possible complaint about the way he does it and that is the knuckles now these look fine with the subdivision surface off but once we add it uh and we like turn this off so we just steal the raw stuff maybe it'll help if i turn this on there's like these little weird bumps on the edges they're not really a problem for the most part like they're very hard to notice most of the time i did have like one scenario where with a certain lighting system you could see like it was being weird you'd see like a ridge right here with like a shadow where it seemed like there shouldn't have been one um it might be possible to like once you eventually apply the subdivision surface modifier to go in and manually fix it up a little bit but even that's going to be like a bit of an annoying process and yeah so if you're worried about that you might want to not necessarily do knuckles the exact same way he does but everything else he does very ideally or at least from what i can tell but look at his face that is that is beautiful right there speaking of the face let me revert what i just did i modeled my face differently than his he did like an actual eyeball inside the head um however most anime style what the heck is that let me go to a newer revision of this model this is like way back to before i deleted the underlying body mesh you'll see in a lot of anime avatars they don't have like ball eyes they have these sort of eye cavities with the floating iris inside and um it's not really hard to do let me um select this oh other super useful thing i forgot to mention ctrl l to select links this will select everything that is like physically connected to whatever your selection is i can press h to hide this so you can see this eyeball cavity um pretty self-explanatory you just like you'll have the eye hole and then you'll grab this edge and extrude inwards and then you know add a couple extra things here and there and then you'll have this uh thingy you can select this edge loop go up here face grid fill and it's probably gonna be a little weird you can mess with these span and offset settings uh that's fairly reasonable looking you wanna make sure that the shape of it uh let's say this is a top down view right here so like this is the front of the eye uh you don't want this you don't want this sort of eye bag in it because then when you have the pupil or the iris or whatever uh and it like moves to the side you might at certain angles start to see it clipping instead you want it like this where you have like plenty of room like make it go outwards as much as possible without it clipping through the side of the head basically that way when the iris moves you have more room over here i can show you what it'll look like if it was done badly let me alt h to unhide the iris but if i were to go into pose mode and grab this eye and move it towards here you can see looks pretty good at every angle however if i didn't have this like extra space right here if instead it was a bit more like uh you just shrink that down a little bit to simulate you know a bit more like that not as much room then [Music] well look at that you can start seeing like the white as it intersects with it you don't want to be able to see that make sure you give it enough room oh god the hair the hair the hair the hair so the hair was easily the hardest part of modeling this and i kind of struggle to even think of what to tell you if i'm being real oh jesus christ how do i even like if i go back to works in progress of the hair it's like this is what i was kind of working with it's i i can direct you to some videos that might be helpful to you depending on the style you're going for this is a relatively simple tutorial that involves using abstract curves to sort of guide your hair along certain lines involves making a series of strands that aren't actually connected directly to each other however this tutorial goes into this whole crazy setup where like the hair strands are connected to each other but they still flow around this like series of lattices uh i ended up following this i don't know if it made my life any easier i'll have links to both of these in the description i'll let you decide how you're gonna model your hair good luck is all i can say one thing i can say however uh something that i ended up doing was i made different versions of the hair or different objects i didn't just have one giant thing for all of them i had this that i could mirror this is like the sides of the hair then i had a separate thing for the front bangs this was because obviously these front bangs are asymmetrical and well you can't really have a mirror modifier to something that's asymmetrical so i would do work on like this and whatever i did one side would be done to the other so i didn't have to do it twice but then i would also have this front banged section i also had another like layer underneath to add some extra depth and well layers to it yeah it's just uh yeah and then eventually once i was satisfied with how i had this uh main chunk of hair and i was like okay i don't need this mirror modifier anymore i went through this arduous process of combining both of these things where i would like delete some of these faces here just make a like a hole right there and then i would delete some of these faces here and i would try to line them up and connect them and that took a while to get right and you i had to like delve into this [ __ ] like okay so eventually i would apply the mirror modifier to the thing and then i would uh oh yeah merging meshes by the way these are two separate objects right now in order to merge them and like actually physically connect them to each other you need to make sure your modifiers are the same so i applied the mirror modified to the other one and these two now have the same subdivision modifier which means we can safely press shift select and then ctrl j to join them into one object i would then go into here and um well here's where things get a little messy because i had to [ __ ] look for where i okay so like this vertex should go to um to to that that one is that the one it should go to uh if you go up here and you turn on face orientation it can help a little bit because this shows you like what is the oh that's wrong uh i'm gonna control a hit alt n and recalculate wait uh recalculate outside yeah uh blue here is the outside of something red is the inside of something so now you can kind of see a little bit better of like this was by far the worst thing i had to ever do in 3d modeling i would i would like count the number of edges on any particular thing so i'd be like okay how many edges do i have on wait hang on i'm gonna hit this ctrl l h to hide it okay so i have uh one two three four five six seven eight nine ten there so i'm gonna alt h unhide uh i'm gonna hide this so i need i need like ten here i have one two three four five six seven eight oh i only have eight there uh what if maybe if i get rid of like these and then and then that is that okay is or wait i i i had to like make sure they were the same shape and then once they finally were the same shape which i don't think this is but let's just pretend it is i'd have to be like okay so this vertex goes to this one this one i th is that is that the one is that what am i looking at right now i think it should go here so i move it here and then i shift click and m merge at center okay now they're connected uh then i had to like mess around with this stuff up here to make sure this was able to i'm just i'm just venting at this point but i'm not even giving advice i'm just [ __ ] rambling about what i had to go through now the reason i go through all of this instead of just having the uh you know like hey these are just going through each other that's fine right well kinda but also it's not really good form and there's a lot of problems you might not guarantee but you might run into down the line for example uh if you're going to have an outline around your model like i have on this one if we use an outline and all this stuff is kind of clipping into each other well thanks drug i'm a little bit [ __ ] lucky as you can see up here and if you don't want that to happen you're going to want to make sure that these are all actually connected properly you will also notice shading errors for example you can clearly see how it's shading right here this surface is in a different direction than this one if it's even like slightly off it's not going to look right you can see this edge where everything starts like clipping through so if you plan on using generated shading and or outlines it's pretty important to make sure things are connected properly if you don't plan on using either of those things which you don't actually have to i will go over that in the next video then i guess you can probably say [ __ ] it it won't exactly be the best way of going about it but i mean if it makes your life easier and it does what you need it to do then now it might be possible to get it to look kind of passable if you clip your hair in ways that kind of mimic reality for example avery here is working on their model and um avery and i are currently trying to figure out whether they'll be able to get away with just clipping things through here rather than physically connecting everything because the latter would be a very annoying process as i'm sure i illustrated in this video i told them to like very sloppily kind of merge their hair tentacles into each other at the scalp as you can see they're all kind of going in but they're going in at a place you'd expect because like that's the top of the scalp that is where hair goes in uh could you toggle it off the wire frame off again this to the right you can find you can do it no no there wait no you're in edit mode now so you're going to see it anyways you can click click on the viewport or that yeah that's fine no now the shading here is a little [ __ ] lucky but like hair is kind of a little [ __ ] at that point anyway so it might not end up looking that terrible if you do decide to clip through things here while using generated shading just be mindful of what you're trying to do and what your plans are for your hair with my hair uh things were not merging at the scalp they were clipping through i like the top of the bangs which is a very weird spot so it would have looked very odd if i chose not to physically connect them there is there anything you like to say to the audience all right continuing on through my many many files that i made throughout this documenting my journey and to expand on that point i mentioned about mirror modifiers and applying things and all that as you can see my shirt is asymmetrical however i have a mirror modifier on this here shirt and what you need to do for that is basically every single detail that you can add in that is on both sides added in uh this little sort of ridge sticking out here on there and on here collar which at this point was incomplete making sure all the topology is how i want it making sure that everything you know curves how i want it and only then will i apply the mirror modifier and begin making it asymmetrical by grabbing this for example turning on proportional editing and whoops oh yeah symmetry uh there's a thing up here that you can enable symmetry on and whatever one side you'll do together which in some cases makes mirror modifiers unnecessary but they're still good to have in general just make sure you're also aware of when this is or is not on so i'm going to turn that off so that i can move this down to you know i was a little bit more careful with how i originally did it but you know also on the topic of clothes don't model in clothing folds until after uv unwrapping oh my god my life could have been so much easier but you don't actually need to have a model in clothing folds at all you can just imply them with shading and normal maps and like texture work and stuff i personally chose to physically make them however and the way i did that was i would have like a line here and let's say i wanted to add one um i could just like take the knife tool and go to you know like that then uh get rid of these lines at the edges here dissolve them so that these are still four sided polygons and then i can do this alt s is also useful for times like this by the way because let's say i want this to come out exactly in the direction it's facing and normally you would like drag this and try to get it right but i can just press alt s and um it'll go out in that direction you also use proportional editing with scaling like along normals and stuff very helpful but the problem with this is once you go into uv editing and you start unwrapping your shirt i just realized never explain what uv unwrapping is we'll get to that next episode don't worry so here's what my shirt looks like unwrapped i come on if i select here we go you can like this is the torso right here see how it's all nice and square and it perfectly lines up and uh it lends itself well to this horizontal stripe texture i made that ain't how it started you might notice all these red dots on the edges here these are things i pinned in place if i were to select all of these uh clear that pen and then let the program unwrap it the way it wants to unwrap it we had this [ __ ] nightmare and it's like okay that's cool uh i'll try to put it on where it's now if i didn't have these clothing folds here my life would be a little bit easier because i could have used this uv squares plug-in and like make it into a grid thing but it doesn't really work when you have all this extra topology on top of it so what i had to do then was i went and i like selected this whole edge loop s y zero scale that to zero move that down pin those in place and i did it along and like made everything into a square which took longer than you might expect because i had to like you got to make sure the edges here are lined up with the edges here so like it's not good enough to just take this and scale it to zero on the x and move it aside and then do it right here two that's not good enough because when we look at the seam here that's not right i had to also grab each little dot right here and make it the scale each one of these to the same y value so that just wait until after you make this nice square grid for your clothes before you start modeling and clothing folds if you're even going to do that all right let's see extra tips uh save a new iteration every time you do anything destructive what do i mean by destructive well for example here's my body mesh i have several modifiers on it there's the armature so it actually has bones there's a subdivision surface modifier so it has extra topology there's this data transfer modifier to correct the lighting on my face well in blender let's say i was ready to add my shape keys for the different facial expressions every time my eyes move or my mouth opens that is a different shape key so i went in here and i only got the basis now let's make a mouth open up like open up big and wide and you know and then i made like 20 [ __ ] shape keys and then i was like all right cool i did it i'm gonna now apply my modifier my subdivision modifier because this is gonna be my high-res version for like vrm applications this low poly thing is gonna be for vr chat but now i'm gonna make the super fancy one foot modifier cannot be applied to a mesh with shape keys interesting that means if we want to make shape keys we need to get rid of all these modifiers well except for the armature that one's fine this is what is known as a destructive process because right now we can have our subdivision surface modifier and we can enable it on or off depending on when we want it to be smoother or not but once we apply it there is no going back we can no longer make it less smooth i mean technically we could if we added a decimate modifier but uh let me tell you this uh ain't gonna necessarily work too well actually this uh unsubdivide thing is doing a pretty decent job but that's not always gonna be the case there will many a time be moments where if you wanna decimate something it's it's not it's gonna be like a nightmare like right now we literally haven't done anything to it so it can very easily unsubdivide our subdivision that we just applied but like if we were to do a regular decimate thing and we collapsed some of these ratio down a little bit just make myself a little low a little crustier we applied that ooh yeah that's what we want right no so we're pretty much committing once we apply this subdivision surface modifier that means i'm going to click save as right here and name it a new thing mac o 71 apply sub and i'm going to be very sure that there wasn't anything else i could have done before applying that like i'm perfectly satisfied with how the body is at that point and i'm ready i know for a fact that i'm not gonna have too many tries too many polygons after applying that you can see if i will disable some of the subdivision modifiers and some of these other things uh with the subdivide modifier off on the body i have 58 000 tries with it on i have 88 000 tries vr shot has a thousand try limit you're not supposed to go above that so i gotta be real short before i do this but it's what i want other examples of destructive things can even be things as simple as uh changing this foot right here let's say i don't like how this looks maybe i wanted this thing to uh be over here more and then i like spent like 20 minutes working on this and like adjusting it and fine-tuning it and stuff i'm not going to just hit control s i'm going to save it as a new thing because i just changed something and i'm not confident enough to myself to know whether or not this was the best decision like if you're if just any time you do anything make a new iteration okay i have um nearly a hundred separate iterations you can see all the different things i did here and i'm glad i made that many because there were often times where i made a big change and i regretted it and i went back to like something from hours before instead of having to redo all that just just trust me on this okay it will save you from ruining your life anytime you make some sort of catastrophic screw up or you do something that it turns out it wasn't really what you should have done you can go through and delete all your extra blend files after your model if you really want but for the time being have them on hand ctrl s all the [ __ ] time do it every time i spam a bunch of redos there is about a 20 chance that blender will crash on me do not trust this damn program for a second it's also just terrible practice to not save often it boggles my mind that there are people who will do a bunch of work on something and then minimize the window without even saving and then go off to do something else then you have the power outage your windows decided for us to restart for an update while you're sleeping and you just lost everything you did the ctrl s hotkey should be as natural to you as control z i hit it pretty much anytime i finish any quantifiable action clean up the weight paints on my arms ctrl s add a new modifier ctrl s add a new edge loop ctrl s the only exception is when i'm making some sort of change that i'm not 100 confident i'm going to keep but is not big enough to warrant a new file iteration for example using the blur tool during weight painting i don't [ __ ] trust that [ __ ] and i like to thoroughly examine the results before saving you might want to extrude something only to change your mind and cancel it and then you'll go to extrude it again make sure when you control z you control z to before the initial extrusion otherwise you might find yourself with some double ghost vertices because when you do this then you hit escape it doesn't actually cancel your extrusion it just cancels the translation of your extrusion it's still there it's just not moved yet so if you go back too far you can always hit ctrl shift z to go to right before you do the initial extrusion you can move things around in object mode and set them at weird angles and then in edit mode click on local [Music] to have things be relative to how they originally were so i can move this up and down this way perfectly now at some point you will probably want to go back into object mode and select the item hit ctrl a and apply all transforms that will set location and rotation back to zero scale back to one and essentially reset it now the origin points back down here at the origin of the world especially if you want to add a mirror modifier to it otherwise yeah avoid adding extra geometry like the plague i already explained earlier how it's much easier to add extra than it is to get rid of stuff that's already there but you should really look around and ask yourself do i really need all of these right here or could i probably just dissolve a couple of these edge loops and then slide some of these down and not lose anything at all and i think that about covers it uh good luck and have fun watch dicko's tutorials and come back once you've got your whole model done aside from clothing folds and we will move on to the comparatively less time consuming texturing phase

Channel: Mako Ray

Views: 386,696

Keywords: how to make a vtuber avatar, how to be a vtuber, vrm, vrchat, vrchat avatar tutorial, blender character modeling tutorial, blender, tutorial, character, modeling, walkthrough, tips, advice, how-to, humanoid modeling, blender beginner, modeling for animation, proper modeling technique

Id: VV8WgcwqCzY

Length: 66min 1sec (3961 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 17 2021