How to Sculpt a 3d Character Bust in Blender - Step by Step Easy Walkthrough

[Music] hello everybody welcome to indie friendly tv i'm the friendly indie or at least i try to be and in this first video for the channel i wanted to do something i wanted to cover something that was pretty hard for me to get and get good at or at least you know serviceable at when i was starting my game dev journey and that is creating characters so i don't know about you but i'm not much of a drawing person i i can't really draw very well so i needed to find a way to design characters without the concepting phase really so i i needed to learn how to concept in 3d and in this video i'm going to try and show you how you can really quickly start sculpting your own characters okay so we're gonna start with a cube and we're gonna end up with this so it's gonna be a super simple character nothing too fancy just a guy and we're gonna use blender so i think that's enough talking for now let's get into the video all right guys we're going to start with a fresh scene here and the first thing we're going to do is delete the light and the camera awesome so whenever you're starting a new sculpt it doesn't matter what the subject is you need to break it down into smaller more manageable components and those components are going to represent the volumes and the masses of the sculpt and to make them we have to start with simple geometric shapes so in our case we're making a head which means a couple of spheres stacked on top of a cylinder for the neck and a kite like shape for the top of the torso so let's start by making the spherical shapes first okay now your first instinct would be to actually just start with the sphere so let me bring that in now the problem with this is that let me turn on the y frame the problem with this is as you can see the top and the bottom are both triangulated poles right and what that does is it creates like these weird pinched areas on the surface of the mesh and you don't want that you never want to be fighting with your mesh when you're working with it okay so so what you want is this band in the middle something that is evenly laid out and four-sided okay so instead of using a sphere i'm gonna delete that we're to instead use a cube and turn that into a sphere so select the cube hit control 2 and that is going to add a subdivision surface modifier with two levels so that's control 2 control 3 adds a subdiv 3 modifier and control 4 adds a sub d4 now we're going to go with a level 2 modifier because that is that has enough points to represent the shape that we want but not too many that it bogs us down and you're gonna see this later when we're sculpting the more polygons you have the more difficult it is to control the surface now control two only adds a modifier to the list which means this thing that you see here it's not actually a sphere it's still a cube blender is just giving us a preview of what it's going to look like when we apply it so i can just hover over this modifier here and press ctrl a this is a new feature in blender 2.9 if you're using previous versions you're probably going to have like a button apply button right here and in 2.9 you can also find the apply option under this drop down menu and now it's actually a sphere so i have access to the components inside it all right in object mode duplicate the sphere with shift d move it up a little bit just enough so that the bottom part is still intersecting with the original sphere now this is going to represent the cranium so we need to give it an oval egg like shape and i'm going to move it back a little bit all right so at this point i'm going to recommend that you guys watch a video by steve houston he's an amazing artist he covers in that video he covers uh the head construction how to simplify and really quickly create the head and uh it's it's a video about drawing the head but you know fundamental principles like that they can always translate into any medium that you want so whether you're painting or you're sculpting or what what have you you know it can always apply all across the mediums now one of the things that he talks about is this shape for the head it's kind of like this triangular guitar pick shape now the important part of this is this point right there now this represents the turning point between the front mask the face and the top plane of the head so there needs to be a clear flow to the back here and a clear flow downwards in the front so in order to do that we need to use the sculpt mode so i'm going to select both of these guys hit ctrl j and that's going to join both of them together into one object they're still both overlapping each other they're separate meshes but they're part of one object now which means now i can open the radial menu with control tab and go to sculpt mode now you may have noticed that in sculpt mode we have a different set of tools these are all brushes i'm going to pull out this bar here so that if you're new you can actually look at the different names of the brushes okay so i'm going to take the grab brush here and use the f key to affect the radius of the brush so this controls the area of influence i can start pushing and pulling the points now the problem is that it affects the cranium and the jaw at the same time and i want to be able to affect them separately so what i can do is go up to options and under auto mask i can choose topology and what that does is it only affects something if it's connected to the point that i'm manipulating okay so the cranium in this case is not connected to the jaw and so it's not going to affect the jaw now the other option is to use face sets right now we don't have any face sets let's apply them let's go over to the facets menu and under initialize face sets let's choose by loose parts and that is going to apply a different color a different face set for the parts the loose parts of the model and now it functions pretty much exactly like the topology option up here all right so let's go ahead and push and pull these points into the shape that we want and that was a little too far back so let's pull that up now you can have all different kinds of shapes for the face you don't have to stick to the disney formula you can try your own completely unique kind of faces so round shaped faces heart shaped faces rectangular triangular parallelograms whatever flows your boat just go ahead and try it in this case i'm trying to make a young male character so i'm going to go with like a chiseled jaw so more of a rectangular jaw with a little bit of a taper at the end now you really don't want to hurry through this process this is a very important step so don't don't like try and blaze through it give it enough time and everything will fall into place now one of the important parts that we should be paying attention to is right here this is supposed to be the eye line okay so i will place the eye somewhere on this on this line so just make sure that this divot right here is very apparent to you okay all right so just making sure that the front is clearly delineated from the top making the plane change really apparent by flattening the top of the head so now we can actually see that this part here is the front and from here onwards it's the top of the head now let's head back to object mode and add a neck we're going to start with a cylinder this time and for this guy i'm going to turn down the number of sides here to 16 and this is because when i have like 32 sides it the faces are way too small when compared to the faces on the head so let's set it back to 16 and we want to try and always get an even distribution across the whole model scale it down move it into place scale it up to give it some length all right i'm going to hit tab to enter edit mode and control r for the loop cut tool and use the mouse wheel or the page up and page down keys to enter uh to you know increase the number of cuts so i just want to add enough loop cuts to make them look you know close enough to squares and i'm going to select both of these meshes and hit ctrl j and i'm going to move it up a little bit i want the center point of the model to correspond with the center point of the world when i add the torso into the mix as well now let's head back to sculpt mode and shape the neck now the thing about the neck is that it actually slopes forward a little bit it's not straight up and down like this so from the side the base is not straight like this either it's at an incline all right so the neck actually flows into the head like this so let's just really quickly uh shape the neck now what i'm also going to do and this is very important in terms of design is that i'm going to add a taper at the bottom it's going to be a little thicker at the top and it's going to get a little narrow at the bottom now this is a principle that you really should apply in every artwork that you do now simple straight lines like this are kind of boring but when you give it a taper it becomes a bit more interesting okay so the the driving principle behind this idea is contrast so straight lines like this they don't have any contrast and something like this does okay the top here is longer than the bottom so contrast is very key to giving your art it doesn't matter what you're making whether you're sculpting painting drawing graphic design whatever you're into it is very it is a key component in making your art visually appealing so it's not even limited to visual arts this is a concept applied to like music and writing as well so try and add contrast wherever you can now i i don't know about you but it kind of freaks me out if i don't have like ears on the model the ears are very important for the orientation of the face and they also add a lot to the silhouette and and when i don't have that it feels just very wrong to me like something's missing so really quickly let's go back to object mode and this time we're going to start with a plane so rotate that 90 degrees on the x-axis like this and rotate that on the z-axis by 45 i'm going to move it scale it down and position it roughly where it needs to be so i take the simplest route to create the ears they can be pretty complicated so i i simplify for myself press ctrl 2 that's going to subdivide the mesh ctrl a to apply and that gives us like a circular basic round shape for the ear and then i'm going to apply a solidify modifier and increase the thickness a little bit yeah that should be enough and then i will apply a mirror modifier now the mirror modifier by default it mirrors across the center point you see that dot you see that that's the center point it mirrors across this so right now it looks like it's not doing anything because it's a perfectly round shape and even if it's mirroring across the the center line here it's going to look like nothing's happening so what we need to do is select this and we need to apply the transforms that we've done ctrl a to open the apply menu and i'm going to hit all transforms here and that moves the center point to the world origin and as you can see we now have the other ear as well now obviously the solidify modifier needs to be adjusted a little bit so let's turn it down okay let's go back to sculpting now and adjust the shape of the ears now like i said ears are a pretty cool way to break up the silhouette of the face and they can be like super expressive as well so uh give your characters some interesting ear shapes i'm going for a ron stoppable kind of year right now i might change my mind it's just you know what i'm thinking of at the moment i i don't really have i'm not working off of a concept here so i'm just trying out different things now right now i can't change the back side of this because the back is just a preview if i turn off the preview you'll see that this is the only thing that i can work on right now so to work on the back we need to apply the solidify but for now i just want to make it simple for myself and only um only work on the front side here okay if you find that your mesh is becoming like this wobbly mess with like edges being distorted like this what you can do is is hold shift and gently tap the surface and it's going to slowly correct itself if you go too hard all the all the things that all the forms that you built up it's going to obliterate all of that detail so if you want to be careful with it just gently tap the surface instead of instead of using it like a normal brush okay let's turn that back on and work on the shape a little bit more maybe something like this i would like something that kind of sticks out when when you look at it from the front so something very prominent now one thing i want to talk about is the focal length of the camera so right now if i hit n that's going to open the sidebar i'm going to hit 2 view and the focal length of the view right now is set to 50 millimeters so 50 millimeters is a pretty standard focal length but portrait photographers if you uh ever look at their work they tend to use 85 millimeters and above and that range of focal length you know 85 and above that makes your pictures especially if they're portraits they look a lot more appealing so i'm going to enter 85 here 85 hit end to hide the sidebar again and as you can see it's much more flatter looking so for a portrait i think this is a this is a better way to work okay so now that we have the final ear shape or as close to final as we can get in the blockout phase let's head back to object mode and then select both of these and join them but before i do that i have to keep in mind that the ears actually have the modifier stack still active and they're not applied and and that can cause some problems if i don't apply them and join both of them together it can actually affect the head model as well so if i press ctrl j now you will see that the solidify modifier and the mirror modifier are both no longer in effect so i'm going to undo that and the reason why that happened was because of the order of selection so i selected this one first and then i selected the head and that makes the head the active object so whatever you select last becomes the active object and when i join them it takes the modifier stack of the active object and uses that so as you can see the head doesn't actually have any modifiers and so when they're joined they get removed from the ear as well but if i selected in the reverse order you know the head first and then the ear and i press ctrl j you can see that it's doing some wonky stuff to the head and if i press shift z to show the wireframe you can see that there's another mesh inside the head as well so this is the solidify modifier at work so we obviously don't want stuff like this to happen it can cause some problems so i'm going to undo that and make sure that we apply the modifiers first before joining them okay with that taken care of let's uh add another cube and this is going to be our torso or the top of it so let's uh let's scale it and position it in the correct place yeah i think that should be good enough and since we scaled it uh non-uniformly as you can see it's not it's not uniformly scaled here we need to apply the scaling so ctrl a and hit scale and now i'll press ctrl 2 for the subsurf modifier with a level 2. let's hit tab for edit mode i will not apply the modifier right now i will go to edit mode instead because it is easier to uh shape this into like a very rudimentary shape for the torso when it's in this when when it's in the cube form because the cube is super simple it's easy to adjust and scale it horizontally here now let's go ahead and apply this ctrl a head over to sculpt mode and let's work on getting the shape that we want i'm trying not to make him look too muscular i think that should be pretty obvious i don't have exactly you know the character that i want to make uh but maybe i will go for like a high school student or a college student or something like that not i'm not looking to make like dwayne the rock johnson so a question a lot of beginners ask is do i need a pen tablet to do this stuff so you can technically do this without a pen tablet you can do this with a mouse but it's like using a bar of soap to draw or paint you could technically you know stick a piece of lead at the end of a bar of soap and you could draw or you could you can dip that into a bucket of paint and you can paint with it but it's not the the recommended tool for those activities no one is going to praise you more if you use a mouse to sculpt okay you're just making it hard on yourself the only people you'll impress will be like masochists so if if that is your target demographic then go ahead but otherwise invest in a tablet it can be like the cheapest thing that you find it can be a secondhand chinese knockoff with like footprints on it as long as it works as long as it it has pen pressure you can benefit from that and i would definitely recommend that you get it awesome and with that we have a simple base mesh and the next step would be to add the eyes and the nose but before we do that remember to save the file and not lose all your progress okay so i know i said that we were going to add the eyes and nose but before we do that let's actually just sculpt a little bit and and get our feet wet okay because up till this point we've all we've been doing is just using the grab brush really so um let's select the mesh hit control tab go to sculpt mode and head over to the remesh drop down up here and hit remesh and that will basically give the character a new set of faces that are much more equally distributed right and it will also join all the different parts together into one now the problem with this is that it lost a lot of those original shapes specifically the ears so i'm going to redo this so yeah we can just undo that and try again so i will turn down the voxel size by quite a lot remesh again and um yeah i think i'm going to try a lower number there you go that that seems better so let's turn off the wireframes they're they're just getting in the way now and let's start sculpting now we're going to move away from the grab brush i'm going to select the elastic deform it's basically the same thing as the grab brush except that it's much softer and it it affects a larger area so if i use the grab brush now you'll see that it kind of destroys the mesh it's pretty destructive using the grab brush at this point and this is happening because it there are just way too many polygons now too many faces the elastic deform on the other hand makes pretty large scale softer changes so if i want to change the shape of the head fix some of the proportional issues that i see here the elastic deform is a much better choice so let's go ahead and use that now as you can see it's a little too faceted so we can smooth out the faces and this happened because i kept the hard edges i didn't shade smooth so if you want to get rid of this before remeshing use shade smooth and it's going to give you a smoother surface from the beginning i don't really mind the faceted look because it can give me a pretty clear indication of where the forms are you know where the side of the face is where the front is and everything now be careful not to lose all the volume you can go pretty hard with the smooth brush like i covered before you can destroy all the forms that you have so make sure that you're you have a pretty light touch turn down the strength if you have to but don't destroy everything that you've worked on i'm gonna turn off the floor and the axis because i don't need them anymore they're distracting okay let's switch to the draw sharp brush and that allows us to carve into the surface so i want to make this this eye line really really apparent and i also wanna carve in the shape of the ear you know the the inside forms now you'll see that it affects the back side as well so we can actually stop that from happening go over to the tools tab and under advanced i can turn on front faces only and now it will not affect the back now the back side is showing up in the front though so we got to be careful about you know the thickness of our meshes now if the depth of this is a little too thin i can use the inflate brush turn up the size a little bit and just go over the ears a couple times and it will inflate it it will give it more depth now let's switch to the clay strips brush and i will carve in the cavities for the eyeballs he's going to have those big googly eyes so i want a big like big orbital area here now the last brush i want to introduce you to for now is this crepe brush this can be a really cool addition to your tool set and what this does is just like the name suggests it scrapes the surface of the mesh so you can use it to simplify a lot of the different you know planes on on the on the model that you're working on now i don't want to add too many details on the torso because it'll be covered by the shirt and i think i'm going to give him a hoodie as well and and quick sketches like this uh you know where we're just finding the character this is not supposed to be like the final uh the final thing that i use in a game or in an animation this is just me trying to find out the design right so for things like this you want to spend time you want to prioritize where you spend your time right you don't want to work on things that no one will ever see and no one will ever know so in this case for example i don't want to work on the torso because it'll be covered so whenever the form becomes too lumpy i just use the scrape brush and flatten it and simplify it stylized characters tend to have clean surfaces and again that's because the read the immediate graphic read of the character needs to be easy to understand it needs to be really simple so that the viewer the person looking at it can get exactly the information that that they need to understand who the character is um if you have a lot of tiny details a lot of bumps and lumps those can be distracting and unless those are actually part of you know the character they're an important feature you should try and remove as many of those bumps and lumps as you can now i actually want to add a separate mesh for the nose it's going to give me more control so let's remove this protrusion it was just there to have a quick representation of the nose anyway so there's no reason to keep it any longer now the clay strips brush we can sort of build kind of a muzzle for the mouth so the mouth actually kind of comes out of the surface a little bit it's wrapped around the teeth it's not flat a lot of beginners they think of the mouth as like a horizontal line across the face and that is not the case it actually comes out a little bit it protrudes but i still want to be careful here i am working with a stylized character in mind uh so you know i don't actually want to break the silhouette of the face too much okay so i will keep it fairly flat just working out the kinks here now the draw sharp brush i can hold ctrl and pull out some of the forms yeah i don't think i'm too happy with the ears so i think i'm going to change them they're no longer going to be ron stoppable ears i think i want to make them a lot more a lot straighter you know something that mimics the lines of the face so it's still not too late to make large scale changes we're still in the early stages of the sculpt but later it's going to be much harder to do that because we will have all the all the different elements in place and changing that the tiniest thing can can create a lot of work for us all right making the eyes is pretty simple just add a sphere rotate on the x-axis by 90 degrees scale it down and let's place it right there okay now we need a mirror modifier and this time let's use the mirror object function here so let's choose the head and that will make the eyeballs actually mirror across the center of the head move it inwards yeah so let's uh let's make the eyelids so i will duplicate this mesh shift d and scale the duplicate just a little bit not too much just uh enough so that you know you have a little bit of thickness to the eyelids all right let's hit tab go to edit mode actually first i'm going to isolate it with forward slash and then i'm going to hit tab shift z to go into wireframe mode and let's select the bottom half make sure to check around and have a clean selection all right now let's tap y and that is going to separate the top from the bottom bring everything back by hitting forward slash again and now i'm going to rotate this on the x-axis and let's go ahead and rotate the top as well all right and now let's give him a solidify modifier and let's give the eyelids a little bit of thickness here and lo and behold we have eyes cool so now we can uh you know edit this a little bit more open up his eyes a little bit the lower eyelids are usually a little bit behind the upper eyelid so move it back let's go ahead and apply transforms for both of them and apply the modifiers as well cool now let's select the head and go back to sculpt mode and now i will make sure that everything fits around the eyeballs so really just making sure that the eyes are actually part of the head and not just stuck on top of it because after this we will be joining them and merging them together now another question that beginners ask is do i need to know anatomy and the answer again for this one as well is yes and no in my experience it depends really on what you're trying to make if you're making something really stylized then you know basic artistic principles like composition color choices shape language and and you know the common artistic principles between all the all the different mediums that is what's going to benefit you more so a sense of proportion is more important than uh than specific knowledge of like bones and muscles but if you want to work with realism then yes knowledge of anatomy is going to be pretty necessary for you and really after a certain point both art styles can learn from each other so if you want to go for this stylized route then you can take a lot from actually learning about the muscles and and the bones and the structure of the human body and if you're a a realistic sculptor you would you can learn a lot from like the composition and the character design elements that the stylized character artists they tend to rely on so you can even if it doesn't matter which side you are on you can grow from learning from the other from the other side so i'm just trying to find an appealing shape here obviously if we were working with an actual concept then this stuff would have been solved for us already but i'm trying to find what works for the character that i want to make so i'm trying to get the top of this jaw to be straight and from over here i'm looking at this curve this is a pretty interesting angle and if you nail this then your character is going to have pretty appealing forms i learned that from dylan ekren's streams and he's a he's an artist at disney so you know you should check him out if you're interested in this sort of thing all right so with that done let's add a nose back to object mode add a cube again let's squish it and put it into place it's a rectangular wedge shape on the face so it shouldn't be too hard kind of reminds me of squidward now let's add a subsurf modifier ctrl 2 again and apply it scale it up apply transforms i always apply the transforms out of habit okay so it looks alright let's edit that in sculpt mode let's get this to look like something decent now if you don't understand any part of the human body feel free to look at references look at actual noses of people and if you don't understand ears then look at ears you should always rely on references you should never be shy about using them now something that really helps me when i'm modeling stylized characters is if i switch this editor over to uh another 3d viewport and let's resize the window here remember to change the focal length to 85 because it has a lot of perspective distortion right now and for these guys i want to create a new material remove the existing material create a new one and i don't want to use nodes here because in solid view it doesn't show the material unless you turn the nodes off and i'm going to come over here and switch to flat shaded and i can choose a straight black color for this and apply the same material to the nose and the eyelids i'm going to leave the eyes to be white because it gives us a pretty clear read of the eye shape now i don't want the materials to affect this editor here because i'm sculpting so i'm going to head over to this drop down and instead of material i'm going to switch to object let's turn off some of the extra stuff here so turn off the floor and the axis and the 3d cursor and the origin because i don't want any distraction from the silhouette so now this forces me to look at the shape that i'm working with and yeah everything seems to be pretty okay i don't i don't think i want to make any major changes to uh the character at this point it's looking pretty decent for this stage except maybe i can work in the nose a little bit i'm not too happy with the shape of the nose again i'm just trying to make some interesting choices here right and that comes with not being afraid to change uh change any of the shapes at any point you need to be comfortable playing with the forms and not be too tied down to any any uh decision at this point okay i'm also trying a little bit to break away from the straight disney look because they have like a a pretty set standard for the kind of characters that they make like they have a template for the male characters and the female characters and i just want to break away from that a little bit not that i want to make something too alien i do want to learn from them i want to pick up the stuff that works with their design and i still want to change it to be kind of my own thing but maybe it's just going to end up being very disney i don't know every stylized character is compared to disney i i remember when overwatch came out they were like disney characters in a game and then fortnite came out and then again disney characters in a game so everything is disney just like everything is dark souls i'm still kinda not sure about the eyes which is why i'm still not joining them with the head so let's actually use the grab brush to adjust the shape turn on topology so now i can affect the upper eyelid separately from the lower eyelid so again i'm using this opportunity to add contrast to the shape of the eyelids so you'll see that the middle part of the eyelid is a little thicker than both the ends the inside and the outside end they're they're a bit more tapered than the middle part and i'm constantly checking the shape that i'm getting here in the black and white view it makes it easy to decide whether or not i want to stick with uh with the changes that i made because you know it's it's free from all the distractions it doesn't have any of the forms so the forms are not distracting me the shadows are not distracting me it's just purely shape so i think i'm going to color the iris as well so isolate the eyeball and select the iris shape so i'll assign the same black material to the iris i think i want them to be a little bigger so ctrl plus to grow selection and hit assign control i to invert the selection and here i will apply the white material so now our judgments will be much more informed because we have the the irises in place and right now he looks a little too sleepy so let's go into edit mode select the eyeballs with a and rotate them yeah that's that's a much more neutral expression so tiny little changes can make a lot of difference i'm doing the same tapering thing with the lower eyelid as well okay let's add the eyelids to the head select both of them press ctrl j and select the eyes right click choose shade smooth and that is going to remove the the faceted look on the eyeballs so let's go back into sculpt mode for the head and hit remesh whoa so blender forgot the setting that i had for the voxel size so let's undo that and let's use this picker to find out what the voxel size is and so now it knows the voxel size and i'm going to hit remash cool so a little bit of cleanup is required there are some issues with this right but it's pretty easy to fix them with the smooth brush just be very gentle with it and let's also smooth out some of the transitions for the nose so wherever the nose meets the face needs to be a lot smoother and so now we can fill out some of the divots and the pits with the clay strips brush now you got to be really careful about making marks on the surface of stylized characters because every mark that you make it can aids the character a lot so if you're not working on an older character in our case it's a pretty young guy you got to be very careful with where you place the marks let's straighten out the eyelids and smooth out some of these transitions so the draw sharp can always be used to accentuate the forms and after using it just go over it with the smooth brush and it will it will make sure the transition is nice and smooth i kind of lost the middle part of the nose here so i'm going to use the clay strip brush add it back in all right so to make the lips all you have to do is make a mark like this this represents the parting of the lips and then make another mark where the bottom of the lower lip is located and just smooth out this part now holding ctrl we can pull out the shapes of the lips so when you use draw sharp normally it cuts into the surface but if you hold ctrl it's going to pull it out so this inverse function is part of all the brushes you can hold ctrl with any brush and it will invert its function okay just make sure that the lips look exactly like you want okay i think the lips are located a little too low here so i'm going to pull them up and that obviously it messes with the shape but i can just go over it again clean it up again this is a quick sculpt a quick sketch we don't need to be too precious with anything that we do so just keep checking your model from all sides and you will find some imperfections that you can clean up so you know wobbly lines that need to be straightened uh curved lines that need to be curved i don't know they need to flow smoother so let's just fix all that stuff and we'll be done with the head okay time to give him some hair so let's start with a sphere and let's just move it into position apply transforms scale it in cool with that in place let's jump to sculpt mode and by now i think you know the process right just use the grab brush and make the largest the biggest shapes first and then work on the smaller shapes after that now something that i remind myself of when i'm working on projects like this is that it is going to look awful till the very end when everything comes together okay so that feeling of oh no it doesn't it doesn't look right it just does not feel like what i want it to feel like it is going to eventually go away hopefully by the end near the end you can actually see what you were working on but before that point everything just looks awful okay so don't beat yourself up too much if it just doesn't look the way that you want it to there are two things about the hair that we can adjust to affect the the age of the character okay the first thing is the volume of the hair so younger characters tend to have a lot more volume and the second thing is the hairline so older characters especially males they tend to have receding hairlines whereas with younger characters you would have much fuller you know the hairline is going to cover is going to be straighter it's going to not have like that widow's peak kind of thing going on okay i'm going to re-mesh it re-mess it again till we find a nice amount of polygons so i'm using the scrape brush to introduce a little bit of planarity on the surface here the hair tends to be a lot more chaotic you know a lot more organic than the face the face has more structure it's more rigid whereas the hair it has structure but it it's uh it's a lot more free form a lot more free-flowing so before we get into that let's simplify the structure of the hair he's got some mutton chops i i don't think i want to keep that and now at this point i want to turn off the mirror function of the sculpt mode so let's press that and asymmetry always adds a lot more interest into your character so add that wherever you can again it's it's the same principle as the principle of contrast i'm going to start with a parting line here and let's use the elastic deform brush actually i think the grab brush would be a better choice because we we want to disrupt the shape right the elastic deform it tries to keep the shape as as best as it can pull this out select the draw sharp so i'm just trying to segment the bands of hair and as you can see this doesn't have a lot of resolution right now so i'm going to remesh so again i'm thinking about the silhouette and how to break it so i'm pulling out a couple of hair strands here and there it is pretty messy but i'm not really concerned about that this is a sketch i'm going to give him that wavy here so sometimes what happens is that it starts lagging because there are way too many polygons so i'm gonna remesh this again but this time i'm gonna turn up the voxel size so that means less polygons and in turn less detail but it allows us to work much more uh much more interactively because it's a lot more responsive now for areas like this like the part line where the two sides are way too far apart going over them with the inflate brush can actually bring them closer together so this is great for things like scars and cuts and bruises and we also want to give the hair some volume so this is a good brush to use so this lick here it seems interesting enough but i think i'm gonna have to balance that because right now a lot of the weight of the head is on the right side and it's not being balanced so just keep working on this and feel free to make changes don't be too stuck on one idea and if you don't like something just move on try something else so i'm looking at the silhouette when i'm doing this and i'm trying to make an interesting shape where the hairline meets the forehead remesh it again sometimes we can we can push the geometry too far and we need to remesh it just so that we get like a a fresh a fresh layout of polygons it works better sometimes i'm trying to make the hair flow better now there's another pretty cool brush it's called the snake hook brush and we can use that to pull out some forms like this okay so it can make a very short work of things like tentacles and vines and hair stuff like that it's a little hard to control um if you're not careful with it it can cause a lot of distortion in the mesh but it is a pretty powerful brush i'll just clean up some stuff a little bit and then we can make sure that these the form changes are pretty sharp and pretty noticeable they're all kind of bland they had no contrast so i'm adding a little bit of sharpness to the edges here and again you don't want that everywhere a little hint of sharpness here and there is good enough it's not you don't want to like sharpen every single edge on the model okay that is again not contrast if every edge is sharp means that you would need to introduce softer edges to add contrast so now he looks like he has two horns which could be interesting so i'm gonna add some more volume so yeah i think i'm gonna stop here for the hair um if this was going to be like the final mesh then i would need to polish up the hair a lot more but since this is a quick sculpt this is as far as i go and i just realized we have no eyebrows so let's let's add them in real quick i'm going to start with a plane hit tab for edit mode now i'll press m for the merge menu and i will collapse everything so now we have a single vertex now go up here and turn on the snapping function it's the magnet icon and under this drop down choose face and project individual elements turn that on as well so now this point this vertex is going to stick to the surface see that so let's place it right there and e to extrude select the edge and extrude that and keep extruding it till we get the eyebrow shape now let's tab back out to object mode and let's again add a solidify here add some thickness and then i want to give them the other eyebrows so mirror modifier so now we have a basic eyebrow shape that we can go ahead and sculpt okay and then sculpting here is just you know reshaping it it's not i'm not going to add any details just pushing and pulling the points i want his eyebrows to be kind of bushy and give him some thick eyebrows and as you can see eyebrows add a lot to the expression so you know don't forget to make them like i did now i don't want him to be angry he looks a little angry so let me change that yeah now he just looks like he's like done with you rather than straight up angry and it looks pretty decent in the silhouette view as well now in object mode let's select it and apply the modifiers right click shade smooth now that gets rid of the faceting but now it looks like there's a piece of turd on his head so um go to the mesh data tab and under normals we're going to turn on auto smooth and that's going to fix the weird shading issue all right so he's naked time to give him some clothes now to make the shirt we will paint a mask and extract that okay let's see how that works let's go down to the mask brush the hotkey for that is m i'll turn up the strength to 1 and turn off the pen pressure you really want to make sure that there are no holes in the mask otherwise there would be a hole in the shirt so it's a pretty simple thing just go ahead and paint the mask that is going to represent the shape of the shirt okay let's tune that that next size a bit i'm going to turn down the size and if we hold ctrl it will erase the mask so using both in tandem will give us a clean mask all right let's go to the mask menu and choose to extract the mask now i don't want to project to the sculpt because otherwise it would take into account the the clavicle that we sculpted here um it would project that onto the shirt so let's turn that off and i want to extract as a solid hit okay cool so we have a pretty nice shirt mesh so now let's go to sculpt mode and if you actually try to sculpt nothing's going to happen and that's because it's still masked so we got to go up to the mask menu and clear the mask and now we can sculpt so select an actual sculpting brush before doing that all right let's go ahead and turn down the strength and let's fill in some of these details that we don't need so i just want a simple t-shirt nothing too fancy here so implying detail here is more important than actually putting in the detail let's put in a seam line right there and another seam line that represents the top of the sleeves and now let's let's use the grab brush and fix some of the shapes all right cool so now let's make the hoodie so let's go back to the head mesh and go over to sculpt mode isolate this and we can see that the mask we painted is still there so this is something to keep in mind the masks that we paint they remain there till we clear them okay so let's switch over to the mask brush with m so now it's selected and let's turn down the brush size and let's clear out the front of the mask here all right cool so let's go back to mask and extract hit okay and we have a little bit of a problem down here so let's just delete that mesh and try again okay so this time we'll make sure that the mask is completely gone from the underside okay so let's check around to see if there are any stray masked areas so it seems okay now let's try it again cool so let's come out of isolation mode scale it up a little bit apply transforms and go into sculpt mode and let's uh let's pull out the hoodie here to be above the shirt oh and it looks like some of the points are still masked so remember to clear the mask with alt m and now it's pretty simple just uh lay it on top of the shirt make sure it doesn't intersect so using control with the elastic deform brush or the grab brush what that does is it can pull out the surface and it can push in the surface normally the way that those brushes work is that they push and pull to the side right so if you just want to pull towards you or push away from you you can hold down control okay so it's supposed to be a hoodie and so we want an actual hood part so let's bring in a sphere and make sure it's in place let's go to sculpt mode and shape it now i want to pull this part to the front and make sure that the hoodie is snug against the body because then it'll feel like it has some weight and it's time to remesh now let's use the draw sharp tool to create some folds and give it a little more interest okay let's change this a little bit it's coming straight down so make it follow the the rim of the hoodie okay so i think it's time to introduce a little bit of asymmetry so i'll turn off the symmetry function and let's add some asymmetry because that's just how close work now the back here is i don't think i'm going to render from the back i'm not going to show the back in the final render i think but still i want to add a little bit of that contrast and asymmetry and now for our final move we're going to add those what are they called laces laces in the front of the hoodie that you can use to tighten okay so this time let's start with a curve right let's move it into place hit tab for edit mode and let's select this curve point and move it right there now for the second point i'm going to place that and rotate it with r i'm going to turn off snapping here because i actually want this to dangle off of the model so pull that down and rotate the top point too cool okay so also make sure that the curve is not too straight you know gravity is pulling it down but it's it shouldn't be completely straight and let's duplicate that for the other side and move these points into place as well now the reason why i'm working on both of the curves separately and not just using mirror modifiers because i want them both to be to not be symmetrical okay so with that done let's go to the curve tab here and under geometry we can increase the depth and that is going to add a cylindrical shape on top of the curve so let's do that for the other one as well okay so we have like a tube like surface for the laces okay so let's add those tiny things plastic things at the end of laces where they called aglets let's start with a cube and to zoom into what we're working on we can hit the period key and that's going to frame the selection right so now i'm going to add a loop with ctrl r and place it at the bottom so now when we add our favorite modifier with ctrl 2 it retains the bottom shape much better than the top and it gives us the aglet shape okay right click shade smooth and in this case i want to turn on auto smooth as well a to select all s to scale that seems about the right size now i'm going to duplicate that over to the other side cool i think it's good enough so yeah we're basically done with the mesh we're done with the modeling phase so i'm gonna go around this guy give it a once-over see what needs to be adjusted and then we'll move on okay so with that done i think we should give our guy a bit of color and render him out so let's start with the head mesh and head over to vertex paint and now we can choose the color up here something like this this is good i think and just fill it in so on the right we can actually just see the flat shaded colors without any lighting information that should help us with our color choices all the other pieces are getting in the way so i'm going to isolate it with the forward slash key the reason why i'm not turning on the symmetry mode here is because it creates some irregularities between the left and the right side so they don't both end up looking the same okay so i use this opportunity to introduce some more asymmetrical elements so just go ahead and fill it in there's nothing too complicated about this to get a good vertex paint going we need a lot of vertices so something like this is only really possible when we have very dense meshes like this okay so low poly meshes don't really work very well with vertex painting so for them we would need to unwrap the meshes and then paint paint on image files so that we could get details but here since we have enough polygons we can just go ahead and paint directly on the mesh so the brushes are pretty easy to understand the smear brush can be used to extend the color and the average brush can be used to mix the colors with whatever you have selected up at the top left so we have red zones which would be around the ears the the nose and the cheeks and then we have the blue zones which would be around the eyes and around the jaw and then we have the yellow zones which are places where the bone is closer to the skin so there's very little fat for example in the forehead and that would be much more yellow than other places so when i say blue around the eyes i don't mean that there is like a saturated band of blue across the eyes i mean like uh a hint of blue so you could have you could start with the skin color and then shift it hue shift it towards blue a bit and that would be the color that you paint so now let's give him some red in the cheeks and it looks a little too sunburned so i'm going to try and average this out so it's pretty hard for the light to reach under the jaw and so if we add a darker color under there it would help with our renders okay for his lips i don't want to make them too red so i'm gonna i'm going for something like a darker shade of the skin so i'm gonna turn on wireframe to see where the lips are actually located it's pretty hard to figure out where they are in flat shaded mode so we just fill them in and now it looks like dead skin instead of lips so i think i'm going to have to add a bit of red and back to object mode and really quickly let's fill in the rest of the stuff here so for the hair and the eyebrows i think i'm going to go for like a darker color but you don't want to use 100 black because you don't find things in real life that are 100 black or 100 white okay there's always color in them it's not it's not completely black or white so a darker shade of brown would be more accurate than just straight up black so let's do the same thing for the hair a flat red for the shirt and like a dark navy blue for the jacket so for the hoodie part i think i'm going to go with like a green color that would complete the the trifecta you know rgb the three primary colors and that kind of color scheme always seems to work for like main characters you can't really vertex paint curves because they don't have any vertices so i'm going to select both of them and convert them to meshes first so with those selected i'm going to head to the object menu convert to mesh from curve and now it's an actual mesh object with vertices and everything so i can paint it and i'm going to add a darker color to the hair just because it gives it more depth so for the eyes i want to select the irises and duplicate them to make them separate objects first i'm going to select them and now i'll duplicate the faces now with that done i will separate my selection and that makes the irises separate objects and the reason why i did this is because it's now easier to paint the irises cool so now we're basically done with the colors and i want to add a little bit of asymmetry some more asymmetry because he's just looking straight at us and you know that could work fine but i just wanted to add some more interest so i'm going to introduce you to a new brush it's called the pose brush and it allows us to pose the model just make sure that you have a large enough radius because otherwise you'll be affecting a pretty small area and it's going to do some wonky stuff so make sure that the radius is big enough and adds some asymmetry there we go so it does create some deformations that we would need to clean up but i think the pose brush adds a pretty neat functionality to the blender tool set the problem is at the moment it doesn't allow us to affect multiple objects at the same time or at least i haven't found a way to do that so i'm going to have to look deeper into that but it's pretty easy to adjust these things and put them back in place i just have to be a little careful when i'm adjusting this be careful not to destroy the work that we did but still add a little bit of interest so yeah we're done with that let's move on to creating some really quick materials so i'm going to first head over to the rendered mode and i'm going to pull out another editor and switch that over to the shader editor and let's work on the shader so it's pretty easy just create a new material i'm going to call it skin and for the base color we need to bring in the vertex color that we just painted so shift a so there you go vertex color and plug that and nothing's actually going to show up because we don't have any lights in the scene so let's do that let's add a light so a simple point light will do just fine i wanted to illuminate the front of the face i'm going to increase the intensity to about 500 watts and finally remember to turn on use nodes because otherwise it will just ignore all the nodes that we're adding and now we can actually see the vertex color that we plugged in so if we turn up subsurface here it's going to start emulating subsurface scattering which is the effect of light passing through skin the problem is that when subsurface is active it ignores the base color and it takes the subsurface color so we're going to need to plug that into the subsurface color as well now we'll turn down the subsurface effect because it was a bit too much and i'm going to put the light away because it was too bright and it was washing out the colors and now let's duplicate the light and this is going to be the fill light okay so this needs to be much less intense than the main light so i'm going to turn this down now to affect the color that's coming through the skin we can go to subsurface radius these values they represent rgb so red green and blue and we can we can change this to affect the the kind of the color that's coming through when light passes through the skin so i think i'm going to overdrive the red component and that will make it more stylized the light here is just plain white so let's give it a warm warm tint and the fill light i want to give it more of a blue tint now this is basic lighting technique warm light versus cool light it's again the concept behind this the principle behind this is contrast so now i'm going to create a new material for the hair bring in the vertex color and plug it in and for the eyebrows i don't need to create a new material i will just select the hair material and it's the same process for the clothes i could actually use the same material for everything except maybe the head because of the subsurface effect and the reason why i'm not is because it offers me a separate control and once we've made the clothing material let's apply it to all the clothes i mean for the small amount of work that we did i think this looks fairly okay so now let's bring in an hdr okay that is a high dynamic range image and that what that does is it simulates an environment and it gives us a very a very complex lighting scenario that we would not be able to replicate by placing lights by hand so let's go here to color and bring in an image texture and just hit open and locate the image that you want so i've just gone ahead and downloaded an image from hdri haven it's free to use so for me it was a pretty warm environment and so now we can play around with the different materials and kind of fine-tune the look all right so with that set up let's go back to solid mode and i'm going to add a cube now this is going to represent the background of the image so i'm going to select these faces here and delete them and let's apply a new material to the background as well so we can control the color okay switch to rendered mode and this is what it looks like let's quickly adjust the the positions of the lights and i'm trying different colors for the background trying to find out what looks best it's really all about taste at this point what colors you choose uh is a very personal thing and you just need to be confident with your color choices so let's head over to the render tab here and switch our render engine from ev to cycles and the difference between them is that evie is a real-time engine it tries to emulate a game engine whereas cycles is ray tracing engine so it's a lot more precise and the results are much closer to reality so that pretty much covers everything i wanted to in this video the only thing left is to render the scene which which needs a camera so let's bring in one and place it where you want to and when we hit zero on the number pad it shows us what the camera is actually looking at and then we can use the g key to grab the camera and place it and r key to rotate it and find the exact angle that we want now finally to render something we can go up to the render menu and render the image this is the result from evie i'm going to switch to cycles now and render it again the cycles engine takes a longer time to render obviously but it's it's a much more precise render and i kind of like the look of this it looks like a miniature and that is it for this video thank you so much for watching this far guys i think i'm gonna try for a shorter video next time because as you might have noticed i kind of lost my voice by the end i'm not used to talking that much and i think the youtube algorithm it likes shorter videos anyway so you've been on youtube you know what to do like and subscribe comment below to let me know how i can improve i will be covering a lot about game development here so things like art visual effects programming game design everything that is related to game development i will try and cover that on this channel and that's about it so i'll sign off here bye

Channel: MarshmammL

Views: 397,461

Keywords: Blender, Art, Character design, Sculpt, Sculpting, 3d, Gamedev, Game Development, Indie, Indie dev, Unreal, Unity, Godot, Stylized, Character, Blender 2.9, Blender 2.90, MarshmammL, indie friendly, indie friendly tv

Id: KsDe1V9Dl-0

Length: 76min 14sec (4574 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 16 2020