How to Make a Teddy Bear in Blender - Tutorial

how can i improve my art that's what i get asked the most on twitter and various platforms and uh i thought why not make a video on it so i put the call out on youtube saying you want me to improve your art send me your blend file and i'll do my best so this is a new video format that i'm trying you can let me know in the comments if you like it um but anyways in this video i'm gonna be focusing on this teddy bear render and improving it i intended to actually work on the original.blend but as you'll see i realized it was actually going to be much faster just to remake it from scratch and i'll be going through each step so this is also a tutorial if you care to follow along you're welcome to anyway let's begin to me the most glaring uh issues that i see with this is the mesh itself the underlying foundation that everything else is built on so if it's wrong then you're kind of like shooting yourself in the foot before you even get anywhere right so um i can see that you you started with like sort of like primitive shapes and you tried to sort of create the body for it um which i used to do as well and i know you you know created them and sort of plopped spheres on where the the limbs are because you weren't really sure how to join them um and i can relate to that 3d is kind of confusing like that it's like how do you how do you make that work so the method you've tried to do is like poly modeling right um which is yeah you start with primitive shapes and you add edge loops you extrude things but then yeah you've got to like you know try and figure out how to create like more detail where none exists and then join that more detail with the lesser detail and it creates this it becomes a puzzle it honestly it's like you spend 90 of the time just figuring out how to join the dots and create an edge loop where it should go and you forget often that this also needs to look good so i would actually not suggest that the method that i would suggest is sculpting which previously was a pain in blender i wasn't a fan of it but 2.81 has made a number of improvements the biggest one in my eyes is that now there's a little cursor which will actually sit like on the angle of the face that you're about to draw on which is so helpful it's something that zbrush always had blended in now it does and i actually love it now it's a lot of fun so i would suggest sculpting now before i start i would also say the number one thing that beginners can do that will just immediately make their work way better is to start with a reference photo um it doesn't really matter what reference photo you've got to start with one and then go i'm gonna make that so you put that into the background add in a sphere and this isn't a sculpting tutorial but the whole point of this method is so you don't have to think about topology so you want to use dynamic topology which will create detail where it's needed and then you just use the snake hook tool to drag out the basic shape of the mesh and uh it's great it's just so creative to work this way and then you just you know use the inflate brush to make the body um you drag it out for the arms and stuff side note anytime you're making a character don't model it with like the arms down by its side because you won't be able to get into the like underneath the armpits so model it in the t-pose or the star pose in this case and that'll definitely help you later on but anyways doesn't take long about two to five minutes i guess i mean i have technically sculpted this about 10 times for this tutorial but anyways it doesn't take that long and then once you've finished with it you should have nice mesh that has horrible topology now you could technically render it as it is um but we want to add image textures to it which means we have to uv unwrap it and uv unwrapping a mesh like this just really isn't possible so we do need to do some sort of re topology and make that mesh data something that we can actually use so there is uh add-ons like re-topo flow by cg cookie or 3d coat you can go like really advanced into like making a beautiful mesh that's you know you can rig it and animate it and all that kind of thing and they do that for like movies and stuff but in our case we don't need to make like a really polished looking thing we just need something that we can uv unwrap and then like basic pose for a static render so uh thankfully blender 2.81 actually comes with uh remeshing tools so uh if you go into the that tab whatever that's called can't remember uh but you'll see something there that says remesh and there is two options there is voxel and then quadraflow so voxel will basically create like a almost like a grid shape over the top of the mesh um and then you choose like the size of the grid and then you hit go and it'll just basically make like faces like even even-shaped faces across the whole mesh and um it works in this case it actually works well for this one the quad quad reflow will actually try to read the shape of it and create like the flow of the mesh try and like make the topology i i didn't really find it to be that good to be honest it kind of made those like squiggly edge loops that sort of like spiral around itself i hate that so um we're going to use voxel which will work fine in this case so i went with .05 for whatever reason preserve volume will create it'll not preserve the volume it'll just do the opposite so i turn that off but anyways you end up with this yay so we're going to be using an image texture and i'll explain why later um but obviously to use an image texture we need to first uv unwrap it which means we need to place seams now obviously wherever you place a seam there is going to be a visible cut in the fabric but teddy bears have seams they're knitted together right so rather than being a hindrance seams can actually work in our favor to help make the teddy look more realistic so i just place seams down the middle and then wherever there's like limbs um ears neck that kind of thing and a pro tip i discovered this embarrassingly late in my blender career but rather than like individually clicking on edges or vertices if you just control click um it will find the shortest path to your selection which is amazing it makes uv unwrapping something like this so much easier because it's just one less thing to think about is just click click click click and you're done so with the seams placed just hit u unwrap and then you should get something like this now in your render you used a procedural noise texture for the texture of the fabric and it gets the point across like you can definitely tell looking at it that it's supposed to be fabric but again at this range it would behoove us to have some more fidelity in that texture so i'm going to be using an image texture this one here from polygon doesn't have to be polygon but i recommend it not only because you'll be helping the channel because it's my site but also because i know that this texture is actually hand model it's created digitally which after extensive testing uh we discovered that every fabric texture should be made digitally because a photographed fabric like it's interesting but like the the thread like uh the the weaves or whatever it's almost impossible to get it to line up left to right so even if it's made seamless it'll never actually be seamless you'll always get some sort of tiling effect so never use a photographed fabric texture make sure that it is digitally so this one here is digital and we actually only need the displacement maps to go ahead download that bring that into blender set it to non-colored data because it's not being used in the color ramp we want to feed that through a displacement node and then feed that into the displacement input and this will give us some fake bump change the scale however you would normally if any of the uv islands are like rotated the wrong way you can rotate them the color of the teddy bear is then just defined by whatever color you put into the color input and unless you want a shiny teddy i'd also suggest turning the roughness up to something around 0.8.9 something like that now this looks good but it is fake bump and uh we want to well i want to make a teddy which is like super high-res like deliciously photorealistic um so i want to actually make this have real displacement meaning that it will actually for each of those little fabric weaves it'll actually like extrude the mesh out slightly like it'll and it'll just it'll make the the the fabric kind of pop and it'll feel a lot more real it will increase render times though so this would only really be applicable for like a vfx shot where it needs to be 100 photo real but anyways to do that uh we go into the material settings and then where it says bump only for displacement you want to change that to displacement and bump then you need to add a subsurf modifier so that it's got more geometry that it can actually extrude it out so i add that set it to level three and this is where it really increases the render time so you know don't go too high but something around level three and it'll look pretty good now the teddy bear looks pretty cool but there is something that's bothering me and that's that wherever there is a seam it's basically like a hard cut in the texture whereas a real seam like a real knitted piece of fabric it's like indented right and i discovered a really cool easy way that you can actually achieve this in blender so what you do is go into edit mode and then use edge selection mode and then just select any part of a seam then go select select similar and select seam and this will select all of the seams in the mesh then you change it to vertex paint mode and then click that little vertex button there and that'll basically just mask it to the selected vertices that we had then if you change the paint brush to black then so many steps hit shift k it will then fill those vertices with the black color so we now have completely white but with black areas wherever there is a scene so we can now use that in our material by adding an attribute node and then typing the name of the vertex group which you can find in the object data panel so just you can rename it there and then put it in the attribute then you combine that with your displacement color map so like before before it gets put into the displacement map you put it in there with a mix rgb node set to multiply then we want to tighten that seam we want to make it look tighter than it is currently so we want to add a color ramp node and then basically just bring that white slider all the way back to really crush that black line and make it really really ultra thin and then finally if we combine this with the color input with a mix rgb node um it'll fake some like ao ambient occlusion and make it look like there's like a kind of a small shadow in there so this is a really simple subtle thing that'll like really make the seams feel real and it'll just like elevate your your teddy bear to actually something that looks like pretty cool he didn't have to do any sculpting to achieve it now it's time to pose this teddy because uh we modeled him in the star-shaped pose but it's not going to look very good for a render so i'm going to put him against a wall now you could there's two ways you could like rig him the long method uh or you could do it in edit mode but the problem with like moving arms and stuff in edit mode is like all the connecting joints just becomes a nightmare um but there is a new brush in blender 2.81 called the pose brush which i thought was a gimmick like when it came out i was like who's going to use that um but it does a really good job like around all the connecting areas like it's pretty honestly it's pretty comparable to like a full rig it just does a really nice job at like preserving joints and moving arms and limbs and things it's pretty brilliant and if there's any area you can't get to you just like mask it out and it's really good so um that's the method that i would suggest whilst we're in sculpt mode now is also a good time to turn off a symmetry and add some differences between the left and the right side because no teddy on earth is this symmetrical so there's going to be parts in a real teddy that's like more stuffing in this ear or like his head's going to be lopsided so you want to add those little differences you could also add in like some little folds and the creases in the arms we got some brushes on polygon for that kind of thing if you were interested but you don't really need them you can just sort of sculpt it yourself um look at reference and just try to copy any little folds and things you can find and then since we're pretty far along here we can talk about composition and lighting right so in yours you had it against a dark background and having tried it myself it's okay but i sort of realized it makes it look a little scary like a little too serious for a teddy bear maybe for like a horror teddy bear a scary one um but to make it look friendly i thought a sort of nice bright scene would work better so put them against a wall like the simplest scene i can imagine against a wall with a little floor trim and then a floor wooden floor and that's it um and then i just used like an area lamp off to the side really large to sort of imitate a window and that was it now that he's posed good chance to uh add a face so i just stole like parts of the mesh and made it a nose and made it black for the eyes it was just like squashed spheres that are made shiny um and then for uh the mouth so in all the reference it's like it's usually like made of yarn like it's just sort of like knitted and um i tried it first just using like a curve curve uh with like some thickness to it but it always just looked really fake and then i realized like in all the reference it's it like yarn isn't just like a constant tube it's knitted which means that like it's twisted right so what that means is it makes like a squiggly line so to create that i just had like three circles um and then i put that through a screw modifier and then put after that a curve modifier and um you increase the iterations to fill the length of it and then it creates like the look of yarn really simple and um it got the job done and i use that for the mouth and also the eyebrows um i noticed in a lot of images like some teddy bears that had eyebrows just gave a little bit more expression i thought that was kind of cool so now we have this and he looks pretty good but he looks noticeably hard he looks like he's filled with concrete so there are two things that can really make him feel soft and friendly and lovable and the first one is subsurface scattering so we all know that like you know skin and milk allows light to pass through it uh but so does fabric it doesn't need a lot but just a tiny little bit of subsurface will really help this feel soft and the second thing is our fur there is no fabric on earth probably that isn't surrounded by a layer of fuzz tiny little bits of stray hairs and fibers and that really helps to sell the believability so i set the uh the hair length to zero and then i just use brownian which just gives it like squiggly shapes which seems to match what fur does on teddies um and then for the the the shader i just used the principled hair shader set to the same color as the teddy and would you look at that we finished the perfect teddy maybe i don't know according to me it's the best i could do so if you want to download this maybe you want to try and improve it yourself the download link is in the description now if you're at this beginner stage and you're feeling a little bit disheartened at how much there is to learn i want to remind you that i have 15 years experience with blender so if you're just starting it would be illogical to think that you could immediately achieve results like this off the bat there's so much time in here that you just don't see and i'm guilty of this myself when i'm browsing art station it can feel disheartening to look at where you you want to be and where you currently are and not knowing how to get there and and just you have to remind yourself that there is just often decades of experience between where you are and where that professional that you're looking at is so don't let that dishearten you right there it's it's a journey it'll it'll just take time to learn and just familiarize yourself with it they went through the exact same beginner style process as you are now what matters is just being consistent in your practice and knowing that you can get there with uh with efficient practice how many buzzwords can i throw at you anyways i hope you enjoyed the video if you'd like to see more of these improving your art videos let me know in the comments or if you just prefer a normal tutorial let me know as well and subscribe to see more videos like this see you in the next one

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 1,245,478

Keywords: blender, tutorial, art, critique, how to improve, improve your art, rendering, 3d graphics, blender 3d

Id: Ebx2qbBlvh0

Length: 16min 50sec (1010 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 24 2020