How to Make Anime FACE in Blender Explained! + Custom Shadows

what's going on everyone 2AM here and today we'll be creating an Anime styled face and head that has additional features such as the mouth area which is suitable for more Dynamic deforms and topology that supports getting the exact Shadow shapes that you want this video is a part of a full character creation series from blender all the way to Unity so check out the playlist and or subscribe if you're interested anyways this process has three steps versus a blockout phase where we block out the structures of the face step 2 is the process of filling all of those in and step three is preparing the normals for our mesh okay so let's get started by the way we will not be using a subdivision surface modifier let's tab over to edit mode and merge this Cube down into one vertex with merge at Center and add a mirror modifier on the y-axis create a three by two line for the chin and a two by seven line for the rest of the face that's the anime face broken down into two lines over on the negative y side view you can continue to follow my proportions I'll drag this over by three to the left and the top vertex by four Some people prefer flatter faces in which case just make it closer to the center now let's extrude this bottom vertex two to the right and up by four still on the side view and follow the rest of these extrusions to get the nose and the mouth area of your face there's your forehead and let's link this up with the side and create a loop cut in the middle now let me explain to you something that we'll be doing all throughout this process which is average in curves since we're not using a subdivision surface modifier we have to do this manually so I will be subdividing points using Ctrl R which is actually the loop cut shortcut but here on the chin line I Loop cut it three times then I'll nudge the three verts down then nudge that one vert down working towards the middle so here it will be five verts and again I'll do five first nudge those a bit move down to three nudge those and then the last one creating that curve so keep this in mind for the entire process also if you're following along please remember you don't have to follow every single cut that I make there's no magic exact number of subdivisions it's a flexible process so don't worry if it's not exactly the same as mine for this part specifically though I did a two Loop cut and then a three inside it to create the lips inside the mouth line I drag those middle vertices out to define the lips you can make your tweaks at any point this is a good time to tweak the size of the lips and also their positioning in relation to the rest of the face created the lip crease here but we don't have to worry about this part too much until later because after this part we're gonna block out the rest of the structures of the face here I'm going to define a circle for the nose area so I'm going to subdivide around here and block out an oval like shape that will meet at this point in the bridge of the nose this will be important for creating a no Shadow and notice how I move that area to be parallel with the angle of the nose so we'll just join that up there tweak the shape to our liking this teardrop circular oval type shape and now let's block out the mouth area this will be around the bottom 40 percent of the face again just block out the basic shape like this and make it follow the angle of your cheeks I connect it to the middle of the nose block out I subdivide and average the curves as necessary and notice from the front it just follows the frame of the face and is a bit smaller than it now let's block out our eyes personally when I make the eye outline it will be the final number of subdivisions after it's complete the other parts of the blockout as you can see will continue to be subdivided but after I block out this eye it'll have its final number of vertices so use this subdiv density as a reference for the rest as a general guideline your eyes should probably be more than one eye width apart don't forget to rotate your eyes to align with your face this is the rotation I prefer because it looks good in multiple angles here I average out the curve on the top of the face mesh and now I'll match the rest of the block out to the subdivisions of the eye if you notice I'm also subdividing them to a line with other vertexes in the mesh also don't worry about perfection at this stage she thinks something has too much or too little that's okay as you go along you can dissolve vertices or even add more especially when we start building the poly after subdividing the forehead line I will be pretty much satisfied with this blockout that's all we really need for now so we're at step two now where we'll start filling in the faces I extrude the entire eye Loop scale it down and move it in then create a face for the inner eye I'll click the original eye loop again extrude it again but this time I will scale it outwards finding the area just right outside of the eye I dissolved a couple vertices here and move the face a little bit in from the side because it doesn't need to be that wide from the side and it will make the mouth Loop and the chin Loop align easier later now let's define the nose a little I like to create a thin line of faces like this from the center of the nose and when it goes up it will span out like so as it travels up the nose bridge and towards the forehead and I'll align it to this first vertex that I see here at the top of the forehead and again averaging out the curves no subdivision surface so we have to manually create these curves and make sure that they're spanned out well now it should be pretty straightforward to join the faces of the eye and the nose Bridge also sorry for no shortcut viewer on this part I close the program and it turned it back on and I forgot to turn viewer back on but it'll be back shortly now I will start modeling the nose and I'll follow this curve that I made earlier which will make it easy to define the nose Shadow solve a Vertex here on the Outer Loop because it's a little too dense try to match them up so actually this inner circular nose Loop is where the shadow is going to be and I'm going to make another smaller one inside it which is where the edited normals will be now that sounds confusing to you don't worry I'll explain it more later in the edited normal section but for now just worry about having two of these circular Loops directly beside each other now let's puzzle out this nose starting from the tip these are topology skills and make it work the best you can honestly as long as you have these circular Loops like I mentioned and it follows these Loops then you'll be fine here is just a game of adding and or removing vertices until they line up neatly and just repeat that process until this whole nose area is complete we'll do these bottom faces dissolve vertices span it out a bit here I had to do a loop cut and dissolve one more vert so that I can keep everything quads for now here at the start try to keep everything quads eventually our mesh will have to use triangles but I'll explain why and why it's okay later I'll annotate a green line for you you don't have to do this but it's just so that I can show you something later I shade smoothier and looks messed up that's because some faces are facing the wrong way you just do a quick recalculate outside and it should be fine I recommend binding um recalculate outside to your quick favorites because you'll have to use it more than once in this process now let's flesh out the nose to cheek area three faces is a good density for this area because we'll need some structure to define the shadow shape that we want let's take care of the curves here by pushing it out so the cheeks aren't flat or hollowed in and I can quickly do this chin strap area because I aligned the vertices already create a few more Loop Cuts here to follow the density before I Loop cut it twice along that other direction now we can connect that area with the cheekbone area and start working towards that direction now this part should be smooth I usually have trouble getting it like really smooth but that's okay we can do a little bit of scalp mode to fix it later but for the most part completing this area should be pretty easy if you want you can go back to the blockout section and see how I align these vertices so that when it comes time for this area it's already neatly lined up now in cases like this where I can extrude multiple vertices I'll leave a one-phase space so that I can easily use the F shortcut to fill those in without having to merge anything like so let's take care of the curve here as you can see it's a bit hollowed in which is incorrect maybe I should have started from the face and go downwards instead of from the eye upwards that would have made it a little more efficient but after spanning this area out and making sure it's curved properly the rest of the side top of the head is pretty easy and after this there's only really the mouth area left this is also why I narrowed it more from the side earlier so that this could just be two faces instead of like three okay let's deal with these lips because this lip line should actually be two should actually be separate so let's subdivide there leave the edge in between and then you can just follow this lip structure and just make sure that from the side it's also um angled properly this one I'm gonna make it five faces uh wide so I'll subdivide those two middle ones then instead of using Loop cut to subdivide I'm just going to select everything here an entire lips then right click subdivide subdivided these middle mouth lines earlier but I'm just going to dissolve them because actually we don't need them because this whole area inside this mouth Loop is gonna be the whole triangulated area that you usually see now don't be intimidated that this part is also flexible I am just joining the lip with the outer mouth loop with triangles ensuring that they are evenly spanned out use my paint skills but this is the best way I can illustrate to you that the triangle should be pointing radially outwards and if there are lip areas that are are more dense than the outer mouth Loop areas you can use double triangles if you need more references you can just Google Guilty Gear face topology and Google Images now could I do a better job spanning this out more evenly yes but this is just for the sake of an example anyway so it's just a quick and rough job and it will get the job done and the purpose of this again is like for example if you have a really wide or big mouth expression then all you have to worry about is moving those middle lip vertices into place instead of also moving a bunch of vertices in between the lips and the cheeks so that's finished and it looks a little weird like you can see the triangles in the default 3D view but once the Shader is applied once the normals are edited it's going to look fine here I advise you to assign the bottom and top lips to different vertex groups that way you can easily select them because as you can see they're overlapping so it will be difficult to select them manually so after this will be the back and the top of the head but before we move on to those I quickly want to make the mouth box while there are still no faces blocking it we just screwed in the inner lip Loop open it up vertically fan it out if we want close it up with f and the purpose of this is just so that you can have that inner mouth color you don't have to worry too much about the shape I'll also assign this to its own vertex group so that I can easily hide it with h if I want to I like to start out by quickly extruding the side of the face and the bottom of the chin so that we can quickly establish our neck loop I like to move up slightly the bottom area of the neck and chin and here from the bottom I'll start shaping out the area of the neck extruding one more row of faces and then curving them so that it's circular and also moving it upwards slightly my neck Loop will have 11 vertices which will become 20 once mirror modifier is applied and this will match up with the neck loop from my body which is 10 vertices multiply that by two one subdivision surface is applied but let's just move up and angle that neck Loop in place and extrude it out and then we're done with this section now to make things easier here in the long run I like to add a sphere object to the scene which we'll be using as a snapping guide for Arts apology so I will scale and move that into place head over to scout mode with mirroring on in the y-axis tweak the forehead shape with inflate and use grab tool to grab it into the neck area feel free to add a subdivision surface to this guide sphere now we can turn on snapping and change to face nearest so that our mesh will snap to the guide I like to start at the neck area where the mirror modifier is splitting our mesh in half the snapping made them go off to the side but let's just make sure these go straight up then create an appropriate amount of loot Cuts try to go for the smallest amount that still captures the shape of the head I turn on in front option for my face mesh here so I can see it easier then continue to extrude these faces upwards along the mirror modifier now here on the side of the face I'm going to start reducing things into triangles so that our mesh has lower polys here I'm just showing you like after this part it's all going to be covered by hair anyway so if there's any issues caused by these triangles it really won't matter I also have more of an explanation of why it's okay to create triangles here in the description if you're interested but again the goal of this is to have a lower poly count and we also try to line up these vertices to the ones we just created in the back of the head so emergencies done while maintaining even spacing I'm just using M A to quickly merge at center after selecting two vertices I want to merge I'll just quickly complete this bottom area now after getting a better look at the topology and visualizing how I'm going to join everything up I decide to space these parts out because in between this and the side of the head will just be two faces two rows of faces so I'll established that there in a line between that and the edge loop loop cut it and then quickly fill in those faces one more triangle merge here so that it lines up nicely now we'll do a similar process for the top of the forehead to the back of the head so again this area will be more dense in the number of subdivisions so we'll have to also merge those down and again I'll do that at the point where it's already covered by hair so any structural issues will not be visible so I try and go merge these down into three faces which will match the three faces on the back now they're not exactly the same size yet but once we join them up then we can start averaging out their sizes and spanning them out into the appropriate spacing and this is typically how you want to do this the whole Loop along the mirror modifier is clean and our little topology puzzle mini game is here at the corner of the top of the head perfect and this part comes along pretty easily once this is all done you can tweak the spacing between your vertices and you can also go into sculpt mode and sculpt it as you desire I'll just ensure that my middle vertices join up now don't forget to turn off snapping as well as your in front option and you can also delete your guide mesh once you're done with this snapping final step let's prepare the normals with a knife tool in edit mode I carve out this triangle shape across two faces this is a general area where my Rembrandt triangle Shadow will be for cuter characters it's probably better to be around the middle of the face rather than directly under the eye this will be the first of two knifed Loops we will create this is the second one right outside of it the one on the inside won't be where the edited normals are this one that I'm creating on the outside will be the actual shape of the Shadow or light it must be the exact Loop that's outside of that first triangle that we made and again I'm just marking them in green here for your reference I will do a similar approach as I make this eye crease Shadow this one actually was a little big but I'll show you how I modified it later so here I actually started with the outer loop and then knifed in the middle one you can do it in any order that you feel that cut was just to ensure that there's no end gone AKA five or more edges in one face and I just dissolved and simplified the geometry in the middle so again the one in the middle will have the edited normals and the loop right outside of it will catch those edited normals I covered this technique in my quick normal editing video but here I just create a plane while still in edit mode I'll toggle on the visibility of the normals here and increase the size so that I could see it better and here I'll just duplicate and rotate This Plane around into the normal angles that I need so I need one that faces left one that faces directly forward indicated by the direction of the purple lines let's duplicate the left facing one and turn it slightly to the middle duplicate the front facing one and turn it slightly to the left let's also have one that just faces straight down so rotate that 90 degrees like that and let's work with these for now now click one and only one vertex from the front facing slightly angled plane and copy its vectors using mesh normals copy vectors I suggest you add both copy and paste vectors to your quick favorites by right-clicking them in the menus and clicking add to Quick favorites so that you can quickly access them by pressing Q after copying that single Vector we'll paste it on the entire front face so select the entire front face face and paste that Vector now we have simplified normals for our entire front face which will make the Shadows cleaner and these other planes normals will give us special eye shadows for the rest of our details so starting with the nose let's copy one vector from the slightly angled side facing plane any Vector there and let's select everywhere inside this innermost nose Loop all of these vertices and paste the vectors there now we'll do the cheek triangle shadow um actually we'll have to create another plane for this it will just be the same as this plane right here that I selected but angled the angle the opposite direction so slight angle to the right go ahead and copy one vector from that and paste it in these four inner vertices let's take a vector from this bottom facing plane and apply it to this eye crease area by pasting the vectors there and this was too big for me so I dissolved the vertices that I knifed and then reuse the knife tool to create it in the area that I actually wanted to be in then of course we have to replace these vectors into the appropriate places we can also now copy the vectors from the surrounding faces let's quickly create a material and a Shader so that we can see these shadows in action here's the basic tune Shader setup that you can just pause and copy if you want under the light properties of our scene light we have to turn Shadows off and in our scene properties in Shadows we have to turn off soft Shadows play around with your light settings until it's to your liking I like to use a Point light and position it in front and slightly above the face keep in mind that the light is an equally imported part of the entire custom Shadows equation so if you're exporting it to a game engine you have to also edit the light setup in that specific game engine as well as of course the Shader I use Mark's theme on this Edge Loop that separates the face from the rest of the head you can apply a left-facing normal to the side of the head if you want but for the entire back and top of the head I am just going to apply a reset and that's in the same menu as copy and paste Vector the edited normals don't matter there as much because again we won't see those parts now we're going to apply the mirror modifier so that we can take our fully front-facing normal and apply it down the middle a lot these are normals that we can't access until we finally apply the mirror modifier so I'll apply that all the way down the front part of the face and for the most part you're pretty much done you can add some bottom facing normals to the neck and here's where the ear would be for those that are curious I'm not adding an ear to this one because it will be covered by the hair anyway there's your low poly ear that's when you run out of budget for your graphics team one important thing I'll tell you if you move around any of these vertices now in edit mode you are also moving around their um normals you're messing up the normals and you're rotating them and then you'll have to apply them again so my recommendation make a Vertex roof for the left side of your face make one for the right side of your face so that you can quickly select them and reapply the normals as needed you will eventually have to move them around if you're using shape keys to animate your mouth with all that being said please like the video If it helped you out consider subscribing to see the next part which will either be the eyes or the hair check out the new patreon if you want to file download of this for Just Two Bucks and of course that will include downloads for all the other files as well currently we have a basic hand file foot the head we made in this vid available to freely download study and use in your models of course you'll also have access to the other examples I'll have during the rest of this series and I'll see you in the next one peace

Channel: 2AM

Views: 86,696

Keywords: blender, 3d, modelling, make 3d anime girl, make girl, make girl blender, make 3d girl, vtuber, make vtuber model, how to make, how to make girl in blender, make anime girl, tips, blender tips, blender anime, goo engine, goo blender, anime, how to, how to model, anime body, how to make face, anime face, model anime face, blender face, blender anime face, female face, anime girl face, female anime face, 3d anime face

Id: uptuXWNWpk0

Length: 19min 17sec (1157 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 18 2023