LEARN LOW POLY Character Modeling - Blender 3.5 Full Course - Model | Rig | Animate | Clone | Export

welcome to this video where I'm going to teach you every step it takes to create low poly characters like these I'm going to install blender 3.5 will model the character step by step will colorize the character we'll create accessories for the characters model hair and create the Armature and we're gonna white paint the character for the Armature create long clothing we'll animate the idle animation and the walk cycle and we'll make a female version of the character with long hair and then we'll do quick cloning and turn this character in minutes into as many characters as you want we're gonna finish off by importing the character into unity and animating it and doing a mixamo import as well and I want to give a huge thank you to my patrons because without you I couldn't make videos like these and to say thank you I'm giving the tutorial tier 10 of these characters and I'm giving the Game Dev tier 30 of the characters and the hero tier on my patreon site will get access to download and use a hundred of these characters and you can use them in any project you want prototypes free games paid games commercial games does the same thing royalty free and I hope you make a really successful game with them so head over to patreon.com if you want to be a patreon and support this channel but now let's learn how to make them head over to blender.org and download the latest version of blender I'm using 3.5 click to install blender and it's going to be yours to keep forever because it's free how cool is that and I just accept the license and click next next next next next next next and just default installation will do just fine then you can start a blender and just accept the default and save the new settings and click on the side of the splash screen to get started if you're super new to blender this is the viewport that we're mainly going to be working in and to the left here is a camera that we're going to delete so I'm going to click to select it and then click delete button on the keyboard to delete it and I'll do the same for this light up here to the right to the top right is the outliner where the objects will be listed and below that we've got a properties panel that we'll be visiting but we're going to go into this shading tab at the top and here we're going to click on the default Cube and that's going to bring up the node editor where we can configure our material I'll expand the viewport a little bit here on the edge and then you can open up your browser and go to tinyurl.com infancia palette and here you can download a set of palette files that I've got and it's just a bunch of PNG files click on the download link here and save it anywhere on your hard drive once it's downloaded you can show that folder and then just extract the files by right clicking on them and going extract all if you've got windows or anything else that you can unzip them with we're mainly going to be using these two the infencia palette O2 Albedo and the emissions textures resize the Explorer window and see so you can see the blender window too and then you drag the infancia palette O2 albedo.png into the node editor and also do the same for the emissions texture just click hold the left Mouse button and drag it into the node editor now we're going to hook those up to the material and the first one we're going to be dragging from the output of the Albedo texture onto the base color node and then we'll drag from the emissions node onto the emissions input node of the material I'm also going to change the strength of the emission to 20 and we're not actually going to be using the emission for this one but it's going to be here anyway because it's good for the future if you want stuff to glow like eyes on a cool character or something like that and now we can go back to the modeling tab where we actually came from and normally here's where you'd model but I recommend that you go to this UV editing tab instead because the way we colorize this object is going to be really handy to be in this view instead there's a drop down to the top left here that you can click and we can see the Albedo texture here so we know what colors we have to play with and now at the top right of the viewport we're going to change with this little drop down arrow here and we're going to select the texture button so we can actually see the texture that we're going to be colorizing the object with if you click on this you'll see that the cube turned black in my case and it might not be the same for you it's because the active texture node in the node editor is set to the emission texture to fix this we need to go to the drop down in the top left corner and change to the Shader editor and then just toggle between the two textures and make sure the last one that you select is the Albedo texture that's plugged into the base color and then we can toggle back to the in this case I switched it to the image editor so we can see the image again and now we can see the correct texture in the viewport that we're going to be modeling with use the middle Mouse button to rotate the viewport and hold the shift key and the middle Mouse button to pan the viewport this is going to be extensively used when we're doing the modeling sometimes when you model the polygons on your mesh will be facing the wrong way and to make sure that we spot this if it happens we go back to the drop down in the top right viewport and then enable back face culling when this is enabled if a face is inverted you'll be able to see through it otherwise that might not get rendered in a game engine for example so you want to have backface culling enabled so you can spot those mistakes in that case now we're about to start modeling when the object is selected press tab on the keyboard to enter editing mode and then at the top here there are three little icons the first one is vertex the second one is Edge and the third one is face and we're going to be toggling between these a lot when you've got vertex selected you can click on vertices and select them to edit them when you've got Edge select you can click on edges to select and edit those and if you've got face selected then you can click on full entire faces and select and move those around use the keys one two three at the top of your keyboard to toggle between these modes and you're going to be switching between these a lot so you best learn the hotkeys and in the top left we have to switch the view to UV editor I'd put it on image before and that's scaringly similar but we have to be in the UV editing tab here and now when you select the face it's represented in 2D on the left on the texture and you can see if I select all the vertices here on the left and press G to move them you can see that they update on the cube so whatever is shown on the quad on the left there is actually represented in 3D space as well let's do another quad here as well I'll click to select it and press G to move it around that's the hotkey to move it you'll be using that one a lot and you can see how it updates on the cube if I press a to select everything here and on the left now we're going to be using some more hotkeys I'll click a on the left as well and select all the faces so all the vertices I press s to scale it and you can see how it's scaling up and down with the mouse but then we hit zero on the keyboard and that's magically gonna shrink those UVS down to an infinitely small point now when I press G I can move this little orange dot around and whatever color I place it on is going to be the color that the mesh is showing and this is going to be extremely useful because when we model our characters we can instantly change faces to have different colors rather than having vertex colors or Texture painting the whole thing so you'll find out soon enough that this is going to be extremely useful to quickly colorize your low poly character next to speed up your modeling use the numpad keys 1 3 and 7 in particular to toggle between front side and top view and not all the computers especially laptops have the keypads or numpads and you can actually go up to edit preferences and then go to input and here you'll be able to toggle emulate numpad and now the top keys on your keyboard will act as a numpad the downside of course is that unfortunately you'll have to remap the keys for one two three to select vertex Edge and face select or you could just plug in an external keyboard so you get the numpad I'll switch off the emulation for now again and then we're back to normal and now it's important that we spend a little bit of time to talk about the coordinate system and the axis and blender uses y positive forward and that's the green axis and you want to make sure that your your characters are facing in this direction when you're modeling them so they end up correctly in the game engine and blender also uses the x-axis or the red axis here the horizontal one and it's got the z-axis for up and down and this is different from Unity for example that uses the z-axis as forward so it's a bit confusing but just make sure that you model your characters now facing forward so their face is going to be aligned as is if they were looking down the green axis very important so you have to twist your viewport with the middle Mouse button to make sure that the character is facing along the Green Arrow very important we're going to enable a couple of add-ons that come with blender so go to edit preferences and select add-ons in the search field type in Auto and then select the add-on called mesh Auto mirror enable this one and then in the search field type in Loop and enable mesh Loop tools as well now you can close this down the window and we'll have a couple of add-ons that were going to be really handy for low poly modeling we have the auto mirror and then if you're in edit mode with tab then you have some Loop tool add-ons as well and we're already going to use the auto mirror tool now so when you have the object selected under the edit tab go to automator and change the orientation to negative and then click the auto mirror button and you won't necessarily see anything right now because the object is mirrored but since we're in object mode you can't see it so when we press tab to go into edit mode you can see that there's a split through it and on the right under the properties panel click on the little wrench icon and we can see that it's applied the mirror modifier when we are in mirror mode I can only edit one side of the object I can select on this side by clicking on a face but if I try to select on the other side it's not possible I press one on the keyboard to go into vertex select and if I select one of the vertices here in the middle and I try to drag it past the center point it's not going to be possible and that's because we have clipping enabled on the mirror modifier if I disable clipping and try I can actually separate the vertex there so you want to make sure most of the time to always have clipping enabled that way you're not going to get vertices that are poking through to the other side you can enable clipping again and also move the vertex back into its correct position if that happens and now we're going to start with the character so we have pressed tab to get into edit mode and one we've selected to get into vertex select with a mouse over the viewport press a to select all the vertices and if you double click a you can deselect all of them that's handy so a to select all of the vertices then I'm going to press Ctrl numpad 1 to get the back orthographic View and that's actually looking backwards which means that we'll be looking at our character's face thus facing forward we can zoom in a little bit here with the mouse wheel and now we're going to be putting this torso in place so I press s to scale it down with the mouse and when you're scaling it can behave a little bit strange in Auto mirror so if we use the middle Mouse button to pan around a little bit we can see roughly how it's affected our torso when we scaled it down I press Ctrl numpad 1 again to get back to the back views and I press G to move it up you can see that the clipping in the auto mirror is taking effect here because we can't really slide it past the center point which is good I slide it up a little bit and I place it under the one meter Mark that's where we want our torso we're going to make this character a three head height which is a pretty common cartoon feel I like the that proportion for the characters and then I press 3 to get into face select mode and I select the topmost face of our character if I don't see this little Gizmo to move it I can press shift space bar and then either press G or select this move tool you could also select it on the left there and now we get this little handy access tool to drag these spaces along a perfect axis if I go back to the control numpad 1 view to see our character from the front I can start to slide up and down and now I'm going to press e to extrude and that's actually going to create some additional geometry for us to work with and we're going to be using e a lot to extrude our faces up down left right and in this case we're sliding up a little bit on the Torso I press 2 to get into Edge select mode and the bottom most Edge that we have there by the hip I'm going to slide that in on the x-axis and you should have a shape that looks pretty much like this if you're following along now and then I press 3 to go into face select mode again and I select the lower slanted face there and I select the and I press e to extrude it and then I drag it out a little bit and press s to scale it down and this is going to be our top part of the leg the upper leg just below the hip now that we've got a low poly hip let's go back to control numpad 1 to see the front of the character and now we can start to move it in a little bit with press G to move it in and then press R to rotate it use that Mouse to just drag it to make it a little bit flatter again so we don't have that angle on it then I press e to extrude it down press R to rotate a little bit so it goes flat again G to move it to where the knees are e to extrude the legs down again and then e to extrude the foot and now we're going to flatten the foot to the ground here as well and there's a little trick we can do we can press s to scale press Z to lock it on the z-axis and hit zero and return let's do it again just to show it a little bit more exaggerated s to scale Z for z-axis 0 and hit return and that flattens it up on the item here we can actually Force this Z coordinate all the way down to zero and that makes sure that the foot is perfectly flat against the ground it's very important that the origin of the character is Right Between the feet up zero zero zero in the scene that makes it a lot easier to make the game now let's rotate the viewport and extrude a foot select the front face here and then we can flatten that by scaling it on the y-axis and hitting zero and then we press e to extrude it out and here's our low poly foot another thing that's important here is when we extruded the leg down we stopped at the kneecap and pressed e to extrude again and at least one line there is important and we're gonna increase that to two probably later on because it's important to have some geometry when we deform the body you can't just have like a long stilt there that wouldn't really Bend probably so that's why we extruded it down halfway down and then extrude it again now we're going to extrude the Torso so select the top face and press e to extrude the torso up and then press e again to extrude a piece for the chest realize now that the Torso part is about the same height as the legs and we're up to just about the one meter Mark let's move it up a little bit more then we select the side face and extrude it out and press s to scale it down and this is going to be the beginning of our arm then from the front view of the character we press R to rotate it and get a little relaxed pose here e to extrude it and S to scale it down and tweak it with R to rotate it to get a good angle out and then e to extrude it from the elbow along the axis to the side there and then skip nail it and move it with G and try to position it roughly where the hand would be this could take some practice to get used to press e to extrude again and S to scale it down to a wrist and then e to extrude the wrist here we're going to extrude the hand now and we're going to make a palm out of this and that needs to be a little bit flatter so I press e to extrude it just a tiny little bit and when we've got a little bit of a distance there press s to scale it and press y to scale it on the y axis and then e to extrude it to where the thumb would begin we're going to have a square thumb and then e to extrude it once more to get the palm of the hand then we're going to press where the thumb is going to be and press e to extrude that face and now we have a very basic low poly Palm there are a few things to consider when you're making Huns for your low poly character and I tend to either choose one of three options either I go for a static hand just a palm like this with a little curve on it or sometimes I actually rig the hand as well to get it to deform so I can grip objects in some extreme cases if you want a super low poly character that's only going to be viewed for a distance you can actually just have a little a square lump at the tip there but now I press Ctrl R to introduce something called a loop cut and use the mouse wheel to scroll up and down to choose how many Loop Cuts you want and we're going to introduce some extra geometry so we can curve the hand here because we're going to go for a static curved hand I select the top face here and here's an interesting thing we can actually if we just try to rotate this front face now you can see that it's only rotating the very first face and we have something called proportional editing up here at the top which is the O is the hotkey for this and if I enable that and then I press R to rotate you can see that it affects the whole body now and that's because I've got a massive radius on this proportional editing but if you use the mouse wheel to to move it down you can reduce the size that it affects and now when we rotate it we get a little bit of a better effect to just affect a little hand there and I curve the tip and it's a little bit tricky still to get it right so there are some different ways you can you could either do it manually or use proportional whatever works but the important thing is that we're going to curve this geometry now to get a little shape of a hand here again if you're not comfortable with proportional you could either do this manually instead for example if I instead of rotate and I press Ctrl Z to back it out a little bit and then I move it down and then I rotate it then I don't get that really strange unnatural curve and this is I'm gonna make this handle a bit like a Lego hand if you imagine they're always ready to grip something and I think this was pretty good so I press 2 to get into Edge select mode and I switch off the proportional editing and then I tweak the handle a bit by just moving it on the axis tool here if you don't see this little Gizmo remember it's shift space g or use the little tool on the left there with the arrows pointing in all directions to get this Gizmo and this way you can drag the edges in this case along those forced axises so you don't go off into the distance so we're going to get a little natural curve here and this is going to be a static hand we're not going to be animating it and then we're going to do the same for the thumb here I'll move it in a little bit press Ctrl R to add a loop cut because we need a little bit of extra geometry if we're going to rotate it select the tip face or to rotate it and then put press G to move it down a little bit and then you can press Ctrl numpad plus and that's a really handy way to expand and grow the selection and likewise if you press Ctrl numpad minus you can shrink the selection again that's going to be very handy later on and now we've got a bit of a natural curve that is in between a fist and a palm and I think most cases when you animate your characters this look of a hand is going to be pretty sufficient for most of the needs if it's not going to move and it's going to save a lot of Animation time if you can get away with having a static hand like this again think of a Lego guy it's always there ready to grip something that you want to put in it and you don't really think too much about it if it's not moving the fingers properly and especially if you're going to make a little platformer game or something then you're not going to spot it so much now we're going to make the neck select the top of the character and the face there and then e to extrude and S to scale it in and here the scaling is a little bit off because we're near the center so I had to move it in a little bit with G now we're going to make a massive big head here so I need to extrude up the nickel a bit and then I press s to scale it out and we're going to go big and then I press e to extrude it a lot again and then go to the front view of the character and then I just move it up even more and I want to make sure that the head is a cartoon head so it's about the same height as the entire torso or the entire legs so it's a three head High character a cartoon character you can of course do it to your choice if you want to have something smaller you can do that but for this video I'm going for the cartoon characters the low poly if you think of a Mario character or something now we're going to shape the head so I press Ctrl R to introduce a loop cut about halfway or a one-third way up the face and the way I shape my heads usually when I do the low poly count is I move the bottom like jawline out a little bit like this along the y-axis to get a little maybe a little bit strange space but I also move all the the bottom of the jaw out a little bit further as well and put into place and this is going to be where you tweak a little bit to find your particular style but I'll show you how I've done it and I press Ctrl R and then add another loop cut on the neck there and press s to scale that down a little bit because uh it was doing too weird of a shape there and then I press Ctrl R again and here's the other feature that I usually feature on my characters and I move out this so I get this little Extrusion at the the lower jaw and then I move in where the eyes are going a bit um put a little bit about of a 45 degree angle there to get some cheekbones or something and then you can slide up usually I toggle a lot between Edge mode or vertex select here and I toggle between these modes and just try to start shape the head out press Ctrl R for another loop cut and then I select the top face and press s to scale that down and then G to move it a little bit and here comes the first part where we're going to start to tweak a little bit so I press one to get into vertex select select vertex one by one press G to slide them in any direction that you want and use to rotate the viewport a lot here with the middle Mouse button so you can get it from different angles because when you move a Vertex it's going to move it into the viewport's axis so I usually tweak the viewport and with some practice you start to get a feel for in what directions the vertices will move when you have it in this viewport so tweaked a little bit it's a bit like a pigeon keeps repositioning its head to realize what's going on in the world and likewise you should use the middle Mouse button do a little tweaks rotate the viewports back and forth and find how you can tweak the vertices here so keep rotating to get the profile or the silhouette View and then start moving all the vertices in around the neck toggle between Edge select face select and vertex select here and then just shape the head and if you're following along you could either look at this and try to replicate roughly there's no specific unit distances or anything like that work that we're going for we're just going to try to get the size of the head that's about the same size as the Torso and then in this case I want to resize a little bit so I select the top face and press Ctrl Plus on the numpad because I wanted to make it a little bit bigger to match that three head high and then by growing the selection with Control Plus on the numpad you can go all the way down there and then press s to scale it in uniformly scale the whole head up there so I think this is a pretty good shape this is roughly what I tried to go for and again you can tweak this a little bit later on as well you don't have to make sure that everything's perfect right now we're going to repeat this process on the body too to get off this square look a little bit and you'll notice now if I press to select these edges you can hold the shift key to select multiple edges like this and often we do this but there's a good way to do it as well if you hold the ALT key and click on one of the edges here it'll actually Loop select around this so it'll save you a lot of time and then I can press s to scale this out and we'll start to shape the body and again like we did the head pretty much we rotate the viewport gradually with the middle Mouse button and then just move them with G Slide them press Ctrl R to introduce Loop Cuts where you need them and then we can start to get the shape and usually I like to stick to these cartoony like proportions so I put little chubby bellies on them or skinny legs or skinny arms and things like that and we're going to be colorizing this later on as well and I'm realizing now that the feet are a little bit too narrow so I select the size of this hold the shift key to multi-select there and press s to scale them and press X to scale them on the x-axis there and then I want to create a bit of a boot here so I press Ctrl R to create a loop cut there and another control R to do a loop cut that I scale down to get the size of a boot and and then I press Ctrl R by the knee because we're going to need another fold there so when we when we deform this character we need a little bit more geometry there so when it's actually bending the leg I mentioned you don't want it to be like a stilt so that's why we have that one there I'm gonna make the bottom of the feet even flatter as well again like the cartoony look on these so we have to do the same process for the arms so Ctrl R by the elbow and then resize that a little bit down and then press Ctrl R by the wrist because we need the the formation geometry here be careful so you don't add a loop cut like this on the side even though it's tempting to add the geometry it's going to create a lot of problems later on so try to stick to the low poly look and just add the loop Cuts around the limbs like the arms and the legs instead of going for the full thing because otherwise you get tempted to start putting loads of polygons on this character so I'll move the chest in a little bit and then back in and think about this is just come with practice when I've been playing around with the way the characters are post so I try to get a little S curve on the back and for the legs it's important to get a little Dent by the kneecap here so when we deform the legs later on that we're going to have to make sure that they fold correctly with the inverse kinematics is called so it's important I go into Edge select mode and I alt click on this uh on this edge here or Control Alt click it is to do a ring select in this case instead of Loop and then I slide it on the y-axis to get a little natural bend on the knee and it's important you don't want to have super straight legs because again when you animate later on they might flip in the wrong direction that then I do the same for the arm here by the elbow I in Edge select mode I hold Ctrl and ALT and I clicked on one of these edges here and then that ring selects all the way around and I slide it back to get a little natural curve around the elbow and this again it's going to make it easier later on when we animate so that legs just don't flip out and start bending the knee in the wrong direction and again rotate the viewport and make sure you tweak a little bit here and there until you're pretty happy with what you see all right so I'm pretty happy with the way the character looks now so let's put a bit of a splash on color on him so I press three to go into face select and press a to select all the faces and hover the mouse over the left side now and make sure that they're selected as well you might have to press a and press G to move that little orange dot now and that'll move all the faces I put them on a skin tone there and that just colorizes the entire character hold the ALT key in and press on an edge like this on the Torso and then press Ctrl Plus on the numpad to grow the selection so we cover the Torso the arms and the legs and then I have to hold the alt and shift key and remove some of the selection on the head because I just want the clothing area now and then again move the mouse cursor over to the left side over the UVS and press G and move it from the skin tone onto a color of the clothing and let's just pick something red here so it's a bit of a like a big pajamas or a jumpsuit or a furry or something I don't know but let's start here so now we we've got some basic colorations and this is going to be super easy for us to colorize the character so select under the feet the faces press Ctrl Plus on the numpad to grow the selection and then we can move it from the skin tone onto a black for example for black boots and this is how we go about to color all the characters hold alt and click on the edge like this and loop select around the leg and up towards the side around the Torso and then shift select these triangles that were in court and then I can move this one to a brown pair of pants and actually miss the face under the crotch area now so he's got a bit of a red patch there between his legs but let's just ignore that for now I spotted that later on we can continue to reshape the character even though we're in the colorization phase if we see stuff that needs tweaking just a toggle between the different Edge or face or vertex select modes and tweak the purchases and and the polygons as you need here we might want to put a belt here now so when I'm still in editing mode now we can move this onto a black color here and just pretend that this is a belt and either you can just I like to keep it super low poly like this so I just colorize it like this because they look good enough and it's up to you if you want to start to add some additional polygons to extrude the belt I do that for some of my characters if I want a little bit more of a shading or details and lately though for the super simple low poly ones I just colorized it like this if you wanted to extrude it you can alt click on the edge like this and select the faces around it press alt e and extrude along face normals and that it'll extrude all the faces out in the way their normals are facing press Ctrl Plus on the numpad and then I can change the selection here and on the left I scale it down to zero all of these vertices and that creates a bit of an extruded belt but for this character I don't think that's necessary so I control Z out of that and I'm just going to stick to it like this super simple and just have the black polygons around the belt there I'm pretty happy with the the way that looks and we can just work along from here now is probably a good time to save so I go to file and save us and I just give it a name here and for my tutorial tier patrons you can actually download this blend file if you want already so you can play around with it I'll save it in different stages here then we can add some fake shading so if I select around the tip of the army or the sleeve and I'll just move these to some darker red and whatever there's natural shading or dark areas for example that's a good spot then you can just make sure that you lower the tone a little bit to a deeper red in that case even for my standards the joy is poking out a little bit so let's move that back in maybe not quite that much so I'll press G to move it in a little bit and from the top view I'll press R to rotate it and get a bit of a more natural slant so we don't have a the Jaws sticking out too much now we're going to do the eye I usually do that as separate geometry so I select this front face here just above the cheeks and I press shift d to duplicate it and it's sticking to the center and it's because we have clipping enabled so if you look on the right side now under the modifier here I can disable clipping and then I can press s to scale it down and it's not glued to the center like that and I can move it into place and you want to re-enable clipping at some point so you don't forget it but first I'll extrude it I'll press e to extrude the aisle a bit and just get something that looks a little bit like an eye and then you can just shape it to the way you want it I press G to slide it and you print you can press G twice actually to slide it along the edge that'll keep the proportions there and I move it up and I just like to have these little vertical looking eyes and remember to enable clipping in because otherwise you'll regret it later on when your mesh starts to break apart in the center and hover over the geometry there and press L that will select all the linked geometry and since the I is detached from the other part of the mesh they'll just select the eye on the left side hover over the coordinates there and press G and move it on to Black and we have a set of eyes here that's pretty suitable for this character I can move them in on the x-axis a little bit closer and then you can scale them I like to have them a little bit tall like this so it's not round eyes I like to keep these little like I don't know tall looking centered eyes on the head like this this is pretty much how I do all the eyes and I usually don't add anything more onto the faces I don't do noses and I don't do mouths because I don't think they suit the Style and what I do some sometimes I put facial hair like beards and stuff but they look a bit spooky if you start putting like a static just open mouth on them or something so I'm pretty happy with just keeping the eye look but that's just my preference if you like to add a modeled faces go ahead you can do it it's definitely possible so it's up to you I also rename the character now instead of having them named Cube all the time even though I got a lot of characters named Cube press f2 on it just to rename it and then usually I press shift d to duplicate then I just hide a copy of it as well so even though I've saved the file I like to keep a pretty basic template to start off where I can just go back to if necessary so I usually just hide it with a little icon there on the right not just to show you we can have some fun with this character I select all the Faces by clicking a and on the left I'll just Mark around the red vertices and I move them on to Blue and we've changed the top color to Blue and likewise I'll box select around the brown vertices here and move them down to blue jeans or pink pants or well whatever color you want so you can quickly change the colors on a character like this so when you start making clones you'll knock them out in no time another thing we can do is let's modify this and play around with the character geometry a little bit and on the arm here for example around this sleeve if I hold the ALT key and click on one of the edge in Edge select here we'll do a loop selection and then you can press X and this is the delete or dissolve and we'll do dissolve edges and that actually removes the edges there you can see how they just disappeared and those weren't necessarily super necessary on this character at the moment except maybe good for the information if we remove this one too then you see that it just cuts it all the way down to the wrist and then you start to see this little red shade here and if we look on the left side it's actually gradiently sliding from from where we had the dark red onto the bright red and you're going to notice this especially let's do it here if we select the edge loop around the wrist and dissolve that X and select result you can see that it's sliding across all the gradients here and if we zoom in on the left side on the UVS it's because it's spanning across you can scale this down by pressing s and then press zero on the keyboard and then hit return and then we can place that somewhere and that will actually solidify the color back to where you want it and this is going to be important when you start modifying the characters later on that you know why it's going gradient like that so again Mark the stuff that's going gradient scale it down to zero and then hit enter and then you can move it and in this case maybe you want a short sleeve chart so I can put that back onto the skin tone shift select the skin tone color just see where you've actually placed that skin tone and then you can select around the new area and drag it down roughly to be in the same place to match that skin tone in this case could also be if you want to match the color top or the shoe shoe colors or whatever let's add some geometry with Ctrl R for Loop Cuts again and select this so we can create a bit of an arm that looks like a t-shirt and if you press G to slide like this you can press G again and that slides it handily across there or along the edges so that's another handy one GG like good game slides stuff along the edges so let's slide it up and then Ctrl R and then scale it down with s and I'm realizing now that these arms are super long in fact they're way too long for this character I didn't really spot that before but now I'm realizing it's like Pinocchio's nose except it's just the arms so I'll think I'll have to fix that all right so we'll have to address those arm arms in a little bit they have to be shortened but before I do that let's play around a little bit more with the shape first I'll alt select on this edge here and color that so it's part of the T-shirt so we go for the darker red to simulate a bit of shading there and now we're going to reshape the arm a little bit and again use a lot of ALT key and clicking on on edges to get Loop selects and then press s to scale them and then select the different edges like this uh I'm selecting around the shoulders like make a make a a few muscles on this guy and press G to slide it around and then again you can do different things like alt clicking on the edges to get save yourself a bit of time you can also enable proportional editing if you want remember that's the O hot key if you want and use the mouse wheel that'll save you some time if you want to change the overall shape of in this case I want to beef up the arms a little bit so I press s to scale it with proportional use the mouse wheel to change the area of how much it affects it press Ctrl R to add Loop cuts and then try not to go overboard but add enough Loop cuts and enough geometry so you can have the shape that you want so remember as the scale is your friend and G to move stuff around proportional editing is really good control R to add Loop Cuts is really handy and then just play around with it and now we've certainly got from that semi skinny guy we've got a bit of a beefy guy now with some spent uh most of it is days just bench pressing stuff apparently he didn't care about the legs uh so you can have a lot of fun with just uh creating a lot of different characters and see how quickly you when you get the hang of this uh I'm doing it pretty slow now for the tutorial when you get the hang of this I mean you've done 10 20 30 characters you're gonna be able to do I think some of the characters that I make take like five minutes to make from from the template and the beautiful thing is that they're all going to fit the style that you've created from the first one so if you're making a game or making assets for a game or a little mini video or something they're all going to match it and I I'd like I'd love to play around with the proportions so in this case let's scale down the legs even further not only did he Skip Leg Day He inadvertently like did them backwards or something he rested his legs instead rest day on the legs and then just kept pumping iron on the top also sometimes around the neck here you can press Ctrl R to add a loop cut around the imagine this is like a t-shirt select the faces and change the color remember you can select one of the skin tone colors to get a matching and then box select around those ones and move them down to the same place you get a bit of a v-neck there you can just have a lot of fun with this change the colors now he's suddenly got a belly top so we put skin tone on the belly as well this is uh getting a bit out of hand now and I'm not so sure uh where I'm heading with this to be honest so we've got a beefy guy now with the a very questionable top here super skinny legs I think I'll have to cancel out of this one so let's just delete this guy and then we remember we did a shift d duplicate of this one so wrist enable our template again and then we can just uh do another Shifty to duplicate this one store him to the side a little bit hide them and then that was just to demonstrate how quickly you can start modifying these later on I think we need to fix the length of these arms now they just feel like they're too long so probably run into problems if I started to animate this so from the front view of the character it's actually the back or the graphic view funny enough press alt Z to enable x-ray mode and then if you hold either you can box select Press B and box select like this and then just move them back and when we have x-ray enabled it goes all the way through the mesh you can also hold the Ctrl key and hold the right Mouse button down and that'll lasso select around something if it doesn't work with box select B for box select you can use the last time instead and then press G and then just move it up to maybe that's a little bit better proportions for our arms they would just wait too long before super long elastic elasto man and you can toggle out of the x-ray mode there with alt Zed so you don't see through it anymore so this looks a little bit better for our low poly character no more long arms since we made the changes to the arms that are quite significant I'm going to update that a little duplicate so I'll delete the old hidden clone that we had and I'll just make a shift d duplicate of this one and hide it again so we have one with the correct arm so you don't accidentally enable the long armed version later on now we're going to talk a little bit about props and clothing and Huts in particular there are multiple ways you can add Huts to the characters and also backpacks and things like that to demonstrate I'm going to select the top faces here of the head and one method is to do shift d to duplicate it and if I scale it now you see that it looked like it was part of the head but that's because we had proportional editing so I'll have to disable that and now when I press G and or if I scale it it actually just scales the new ones there so let's make a bit of a like a baseball cap thing here so I extruded that a little bit with alt e to extrude Long phase normals and that solidifies the capital a bit it still looks a bit weird it just looks like something onto his head so we had to reshape this a little bit but this approach is actually creating a separately geometry based Hut so I'll select the outer edges here of the hat so I can scale them out and move them down a little bit so first let's move them down move them out in the X Direction and then scale them along the y-axis and then I'll select the bottom faces here and I'll extrude them I'll press e to extrude them downwards for the cap and then Ester scaled them up and you can shape the cap in whatever way you want if I select the front edge here move it down select the front face and press e to extrude and scale it with s and then move it in with G and then I can press rotate from the front view there and shape it a little bit into a cap and then I'll move the back down a little bit and you can again just like we did with the character toggle between one two three The Edge and the vertex and the face mode and then just tweak it to your liking now you have to be a little bit careful because you've got a head inside that cap so you can't really deform it in whichever way you want because it might start poking through we'll color it in the same way we did with the other stuff so I select all the faces and on the left side I hover over the coordinates and I press G and move them to a blue cap and now suddenly we've got a separately based geometry hat so it's got some pros and cons the pro with having a separate cap like this is that you could detach it so if you wanted to take it off for example then you could do that but the problem that we have is if I move it in we start to have internal geometry that causes problems so you have to be careful so in that this case it's the Caps interior but it also also be the head that's poking through like this so that's one of the issues that you have to take into the consideration if you're going to do separate geometry like this the benefit of having a separate hat like this is that you can move it off you could create a separate object if I press p and separate by selection it actually takes it off the character right there and creates a separate one we can press just F2 to rename this one and call it hat and in a game engine this could be a separate object that you just the parent to the Head it'll automatically follow the head around and if you have a ragdoll or something and you want to knock the hat off you can just detach that cap and set it to not have a parent and then just add some Physics to it and it'll fly off so that's pretty cool if you plan to be able to detach the caps and stuff you want to do that and notice how it inherited the Pivot Point at the bottom there the feet of the character so you'd probably want to change that to have the pivot point in the center of the Hat instead so we're starting to add a bit of extra time now to take care of this but if I right click into set the origin it'll flip out because we've got the mirror modifier on and that's based on that the origin should be in the center of the so there's a little tweak we can do to fix that there's a way we can do this if I go into vertex select mode and I select one of the front vertices here and shift select one of the back ones I can press shift s and then go cursor to selected that puts the 3D cursor where the center of those two vertices are and once the cursor is there the 3D cursor I can tap out of the edit mode right click and do set origin origin to 3D cursor and now it's actually set the correct rotational or origin for this cap so it's better for the game engine that it's uh they got a pivot point roughly by its mass center it's not exactly but it's pretty good if I move the Hat up I can select the interior faces here hold the shift key down and then I can move the color so we get a dark blue in there again it's like a fake shading method that I use usually to do Interiors of hats so it looks a little bit more shaded or natural we can also select the front faces here and change the colors to have a bit of a black cap and you could just do loads of different caps this way if you wanted so this method is to do the separate geometry and now we'll look at the alternative the alternative is to model it into the character itself so I'll press Ctrl R here and put another loop cut here and I'll select one of the front faces and I'll just extrude the cap from here I'll do the same like before from the front view I'll press R to rotate and G to move it down a little bit and then at the back of the head I'll select one of the edges and just slide it down on the head so it fits the head a little bit better and that's how simple it is to make one that's attached to the head so you can't take that one off in the game engine but the benefit is that it's not going to cause a lot of extra work or problems I can select the faces with a shift and just color it the way I did before blue cap and then move the vertices on the left by pressing G and sliding those vertices onto the black cap very quick to do it this way and the limitation of course is that you cannot take the cap off and in a similar fashion we can also add hair this way I press tab into edit mode again on the object I press 3 to go to face select I shift select a bunch of faces here around the head and then up on the left side press G and move those vertices and suddenly we've created a hair color sometimes you want to extrude these for a little bit of a thicker look so if I select the faces again and press alt e extrude face along normals then it'll slide them out and then I have to press either Ctrl Plus on the keypad or in this case I select them manually and then you can press select them on the left there on the UVS and then move them into place I missed the top there but you get the gist of it and that way you can start creating a little thicker hair so see the Blue Line there should have been differently but let's just cancel out of that one Ctrl Z and go back to The Way We Were so we've covered a little bit now how you can do the caps in two different ways and we're going to stick to this cap now the one that's integrated to the head I think in most cases that's going to be perfectly fine you start to venture out of into scope creep if you want to start doing detachable caps and it might take more time than you need we can also do a k which is a knife tool and if you press K you can randomly click a little bit where you want the edges to go and this way we add some geometry so we can color it a bit differently otherwise you might be limited to just have what the polygons that are already there are doing knife tool is really handy to get custom shapes and you can really start to get the look that you want now of the polygons but you have to be a little bit careful as well the way you add them because sometimes it can affect the way the character deforms so keep an eye out from that later on if you have a lot of knife Cuts along your character it might be a bit of a penalty on that when you start to deform the mesh that it moves a bit strange but it starts to really add a lot of flexibility to the way we can do hair and also clothing on the characters but I'll control Z out of this one again and we'll just leave it super simple and plain like this one if you want to remove the cap of a character you can select the faces and just press X or delete and just delete the faces and that'll leave a big hole in the head but don't panic too much when this happens you can actually quite easily repair it in Edge select mode two on the keyboard hold shift and select the top faces and then you can e to extrude them up and then press the F key and that'll actually fill an empty hole like this and that's how quickly you can just repair a broken mesh like this so Extrusion and using the F key will seal the holes like this and that's how quickly you can remove a cap so again don't be afraid sometimes if you need to do some operations like that but I think we'll keep the Gap so we'll Ctrl Z back and put the cap back just wanted to show you how quickly you could actually fix something like that if you did want to remove it so far everything we've done with the character has involved Symmetry and sometimes you want to do stuff that's not symmetrical for example if I wanted to put a little patch here like a name tag on this character I'll select the chest face here and I'll press High to inset then we get an additional face here and if I change the color on this one on the left side I'll put G and move it to White you can see he's only got a pair of headlights on his top instead of a name Target and we don't really want that so I'll Ctrl Z out of that and in the mirror modifier we'll have the Tab out of edit mode and then press Ctrl a over the modifier to apply it and now when I do the inset and then change the color then we've not got symmetry enabled anymore so I can start to add my custom little logos and the patches and things like that and also if you want to do the knife tool for example if you want to do something like something that's hanging over the shoulder then a strap of some sort you can use the K key for the knife tool add this strap the way you want it and when we colorize these now we can select the faces and just what we've done before as usual on the left side press G to move them onto black in this case and we've created a strap that's going across the shoulder there so if you don't want symmetry in as late as possible in the process you want to apply the mirror modifier and then start modifying the meshes most of my characters are symmetrical but some some things like zombies and things and sometimes soldiers and stuff you want to disable the symmetry so you can make them a little bit different especially if you want stuff that's cutting across and now we're pretty happy with our character now it's uh facing in the right direction everything seems to be in place here so I think we're good to go right now we're going to create an Armature which is basically like a skeleton for this character which will allow us to animate it make sure that the cursor is at the center origin of the scene 0.0.0 and then press shift a and add a new Armature and the bone is going to be placed here at the bottom and we want to go in and change the viewport display here to say in front so make sure you do that setting because then you'll be able to see it through the character when we tab into edit mode and we select this bone not the entire Armature just the bone and then I do shift space g and then I get this little Gizmo and we can move it up along the blue z-axis here and then I'm going to take the top part of the bone and drag it down and we're going to create this little pelvis bone here and place it just by the pelvis this is going to be the root bone of our character that we're going to be extruding everything else from select the top one and press e to extrude and then press the middle Mouse button to snap it onto the z-axis and then place it roughly in the middle of the spine and then do e to extrude again and bring it up to the neck and then e to extrude again and remember the middle Mouse button to snap it to the blue axis and then put it to the top of the head now I'm going to select this bone here on top of the spine bone and e to extrude it out and this is going to be our shoulder bone and see that it's attached now and I'm going to escape out of that one we're going to press alt P here to disconnect the bone because we want to move this independently now when we press G we can move it out to where the clavicle would be roughly Let's uh but reposition here inside the body and then select the tip do e to extrude and go to the Elbow e to extrude again and go to the wrists and then e to go out to the through the hand as well this is going to be the our final bone if we look from the side here there are a few Alternatives here you could rig this hand and put more bones than one we're going to be just just using one bone for this character but you could theoretically also extrude these finger bones if you want to be able to grip weapons and other items you could do that and also you'd have to extrude the thumb and do all P to disconnect that one and put a couple of bones in a thumb it's a bit fiddly to position them you have to rotate the viewport and do some G to move them around but something like this could do with a single finger to control the palm and also the thumb but I think for this one we don't really need this level of detail but the parenting there is pretty important as well so you can see the hierarchy that the finger and the thumb bone would have to be parented by the hand bone but again we'll control Z out of that because we're just going to be using a single hand bone here and keep the hand static that's going to work for 99 of our cases for the type of game that we'd be going for then I select the pelvis one or the tip where I extrude it and we're going to drag that one straight down snap it to the axis with the middle Mouse button do alt p and disconnect this bone and press G to move it and put the top where the hip is and make sure that the bottom is by the knee e to extrude down to the foot and E to extrude again to the bottom of the foot and from the side view now we're going to be moving these bows a little bit it's very important that you put the knee a little Bend to it there because when the inverse kinematics is going to be animated later on it needs to have a little tendency to flip in the right direction and then we move the foot bone into this little weird angle here so it's by the top of the heel to the tip of the toe roughly then I also put a little natural s-curve to the spine so I just try to select the spine bones and press G to move them into place and also the neck bone some minor refinements and then for the elbow same as we did with the knee selected joined by the elbow press G to move it back and I use that from the top view here and this should be pretty good for our main structure or the hierarchy then we're going to name the bone so select the pelvis bone there and press f2 and I'm going to name this one to pelvis select the first spine bone and press f2 and name this one spine one and then this one above will name the spine two press f2 on the head bone name this one head press f2 on the shoulder and name this one shoulder dot L very important with a DOT L naming here and then on the upper arm we'll name this one upperarm dot L again very important with a DOT L and then we do lower arm dot L and we're going to have hand dot l the l dot L is going to help us to symmetrize this in a minute then we name the upper leg bone to upper leg dot L then we do lower leg dot L and finally we also do the foot and we call this one foot dot L and I'm going to show you why it's so important to name them dot L if I do a to select all the bones while we're in edit mode press F3 and type symmetrize and magically it will just create the arm bones and the leg bones and it'll take the dot L and just change that to dot R and that saves us all the work of doing one of the sides so that's why we're using this naming scheme of dot L when we created the left side bones of this Armature but before we symmetrize this we're going to be adding a few inverse kinematics bones and if you don't want know what inverse kinematics is to animate legs without ik would be very problematic you would basically have to select the legs and if I press Ctrl Tab and go into post mode here which is what we're going to be using to post the character you can see when I rotate the spine it works but if I lower the pelvis down then the feet sink through the floor and it would be very problematic to animate the character in a walk cycle if you don't have inverse kinematics because by default it's called forward kinematics and you would have to manually try to rotate the legs and place the feet and when you change the height of the character the way how high it up is up in the air you'd have to manually try to tweak the legs to fix this we're gonna click on the kneecap bone in edit mode and do e to extrude and then select that bone and do alt p and do clear parent and then press G to move it in a little bit to the front select this joint down by the heel and E to extrude that one alt p and do clear parent but leave this one exactly where it is this one we're going to be going into this bone Tab and unclick deform and same thing for this bottom one here by the heel these are going to be helper bones for the inverse kinematics and we don't want those to be deforming the character it's very easy to forget those and you have to do them manually as well one by one you can't select both and changes because it'll only change it on one then and here comes a very important step press Ctrl numpad 1 to go to the front view of the character press a to select all the bones and press shift n and under other select view axis this will align all the bones and the accesses to be aligned towards the front view so when we paste mirrored poses later on they will end up correct if you paste a mirrored pose later on and the arms are poking in the wrong direction or the leg it's because you forgot this step so very important from the front view to do this now I'm going to show you how to set up the inverse kinematics so select the lower leg lower leg dot L and then press Ctrl Tab and go into pose mode and on the right side when you've gone into post mode you should see this little blue bone icon and if you click on this one it'll bring up a few new options and we're going to add a bone constraint and we're going to add inverse kinematics and up here we're going to change a few parameters to get this set up correctly first we're going to click on this Target Field and select the Armature and then for bone we can see that I haven't actually named the bones correctly that so we should really do that one to help us along a little bit better so to do this well Ctrl tab into edit mode again and then this bone by the heel will name ik Target dot L and this one in front we're going to press f2 and rename this one to ik poll dot l and these two bones are going to help us to set up the inverse kinematics so control Tab and go back into pose mode and now we can pick for the Target bone here we actually picked the target dot L bone and for the pull Target we select the Armature again and for the bone itself we pick ik pole dot L and that flips out our Armature don't get afraid this is a perfectly normal if it tilts this like this but we're going to fix that right now under chain length set this one to two because it's going to be controlling two limbs but now the leg is poking in the wrong direction and we have to change the pole angle to 90 now and that should flip the foot in the right direction if it doesn't flip it in the right direction you've done something wrong with the the shift end step that we did before so reverse a little bit and make sure that 90 degrees will poke it to the front otherwise you'll end up in problems later on now when I select the pelvis bone and move that down you can see that the foot is actually staying in place but it's tilting down so we still have some work to do here to get the foot to rotate correctly and also the foot doesn't rotate the way we want it so I'll control Z out of this and we're going to fix it so select the footbone.l and for this bone we're going to go into this little bone tab here at the green bone and expand relations and untick inherit rotation now when we're lowering the pelvis the foot is not going to be rotating anymore but we have to be able to rotate the foot and we should really be able to control that with this little bone by the heel that we also use to control the position with and to fix this we go to the select the foot bone again and then we add a constraint here and this constraint is going to be the copy rotation and we have to select the Target and it's going to be the Armature and the bone that we select is going to be the ik target dot L now it's poking in the wrong directions only and that's also perfectly normal because it's copying it from World space so we change the target here from World space to local space and the owner from World space to local space and now it's nearly done but when we rotate the target Pawn it's actually rotating in the incorrect rotation because it's flipped 180 degrees and the only axis that's actually correct is this one around the z-axis so that's the only one that's actually rotating correctly since it's mirrored and the bones are actually aligned in different directions to fix this we have to select the foot bone again and under here we change to invert the X and the y-axis now when I rotate this target bone we can rotate around the x-axis and around the z-axis and also around the y-axis and it follows the rotation that we expect when we rotate it when we animate our character and now everything should be set up so when we lower the pelvis the foot stays and we can rotate the foot independently when we animate the character now you can do control Tab and go into edit mode and press a to select everything and finally we're ready to press F3 and right symmetrize and hit enter on this and now we've got our fully configured Armature for this character and we're going to be ready to animate this we can test it again control tab go into post mode move it around see that the feet are working let's rotate the arms all looks good the head looks good now it's time to save again and make sure that we get a new version here so you can follow along if you're a patreon on the tutorial tier you'll be able to download all these different part files if you want to jump in at a specific position now that we've finished creating the Armature we can parent our low poly character to the Armature itself and bring it to life select the character and then shift select the Armature and press Ctrl p and set parent to an under Armature deform select with automatic weights and that does an incredibly magic job of re-parenting this character now if I press Ctrl Tab and go into post mode when we rotate the arm bone here for example you can see that the character is deforming beautifully the hands work the lower arm works if I rotate it and we're low poly now so we're going to get some stretching but overall I think it does an excellent job we rotate the head we lower the pelvis and see that the legs work really good too we can rotate the foot lift the foot and see everything seems to be working pretty good and it's not going to require a lot of tweaking in most cases you could even leave it exactly like this without hardly any tweaks at all there could always be improvements but to save time and if you're going to do a lot of characters and it's good enough then I think the automatic deform usually works really really well and here you can see on the knee which is why we needed those little extra pieces of geometry if I select this when I go into edit mode I remove and dissolve one of the lines here around the knee you can see that the deformation is a lot more severe here by the knee especially behind the knee there it really folds it with just one line if we were to have no line there at all it wouldn't even be able to deform it at all if we take away the ones down here by the feet we get the little uh discoloration issue there but you see how important that little piece of extra geometry is if I control Z all the way back now we can see that we get a pretty good deformation around the knee and it keeps the shape pretty good you could always there's some specific workflows that you could do to improve this even further but I think just a double Loop cut there is pretty good it's going to serve you pretty well in most cases one place that you might find on these low poly characters that you have some issues is on the eyes since we created that with separate geometry and you cannot really tell so much from it here but usually the eyes lag behind a little bit and you'll probably notice it in some severe cases when you move the head around and some cases for some objects it'd be worse than others and I recommend that you always use this little fix press Tab and get into the edit mode of the mesh press L to select all the vertices of the eye and then press Ctrl G and then here we're going to do remove from all and that clears all the weight data from all the vertices on the eye here so it's not going to be connected to anything press Ctrl G again set active group to head and you won't see much of a difference here but we're actually selecting the active group to be the head press Ctrl g once again and then assign to active group now we've actually made sure that all the 100 of the weight of the skeleton is going to be affected by the head now for the eyes so when we rotate it now it looks pretty similar but now we can guarantee that the eyes are 100 following the head that method is also useful if you have things like backpacking you want to assign that to with a spine or if you have a hat everything like that just use that method to ensure that it's fully weight painted in edit mode and in vertex mode if you select the vertex and look up in the top right of the airport under item you can actually see the vertex weights and if you click on a Vertex you can see head here for example has got different types of assignments when you click on them and the number there is between 0 and 1 and that's between zero and a hundred percent how much that bone is going to be affecting this vertex when it's moved one area where you might actually run into a few issues on characters like these is up on the top of the leg by The Hip there you can see when you move the leg that it's really poking out on the hip there and sometimes you you get away with it you can keep it like that but if you really want to have it a little bit better than this then you have to go into weight painting mode and to get into weight painting mode you select the Armature and then shift click with the left Mouse button on the character itself press control Tab and go to Weight paint and now you can see if it's a blue color it means that a particular bone isn't affecting that area at all and it fades all the way through green yellow and red to where it affects the most you can hold the shift key and click on a bone and see how much this affects it and if I select the upper left leg here you can see that it affects the hip there a little bit you've still got some green so you can change the strength just at the top here of the viewport and the weight and what we need to do is reduce the weight now from 1.0 which is the default slide that one all the way down to zero and then we need to bring the cursor in rotate the viewport a little bit with the middle Mouse button and then right on the hip there now we need to find it and just click and hold the left Mouse button and reduce the weight paint here and it could be a bit scary you might actually paint on the wrong one so be a little bit careful here but keep trying to figure out where the vertices are and then find them and then gradually remove the weight from there until if you feel happy with it and this might take some practice but by the end of it you can control Tab out of this and into pose mode again an object mode and see how it affects it so you can use Ctrl Z if you go a little bit too far and you can also do if I now increase the weight a little bit to half as much and I repaint it back a little bit to see what it looks like and then I press control Tab and now when we go back into the normal edit mode here we can see that it looks a little bit better on the bomb cheek there on the back or on the hip but maybe we still have a little bit too much effect on the front of the leg there so it's really down to personal preference and you might have to Pivot a little bit until you get the right gradient there okay so just to recap on the weight painting here you can select the Armature shift select the character the order is important control Tab and go into weight painting mode and then when you shift and left click onto a bone it'll show how much weight that bone is applying to the mesh some of the bone here show up as pink or purple on the mesh and that's because there are not the form bones those are our ik helper bones and they're not set to deform the mesh at all dark blue means that it has no effect green to Yellow to Orange to Red means that it's got maximum effect multiple bones can affect the same vertex and like I said most of the time I don't really do too much changing here and often none at all so if you're happy with it if it's good enough for your game or your purpose I would just leave it alone but if you need to you can come in here and do some tweaking something that can be a bit tricky is if you have longer clothes like a robe or a long dress or something so let's try that out and I'll just make a copy a shift d here on the character and hide one of them so we have a backup copy and then I'm gonna click on this little eye icon there to hide the Armature and then I press tab into edit mode and let's just modify this mesh a little bit so from what we've learned before we can do all those operations Ctrl R to do a loop cut in this case we can I'm going a little bit quicker here just to show you what we can do I press Ctrl R again and I scale and I press G to move these vertices and edges around so I'm going to make a little bit skinnier here so we can fit a row around this character and usually the way I do it is that around the waist here I put some Loop Cuts so I get an edge around the waist here that we can use for the for the dress or the robe you have to make sure now that you narrow down the legs a little bit because you don't want them poking through the clothes so I go around here and I scale down the legs quite a lot and around the bum area and the hips and then I select the edge again around the address and i e to extrude it and I do it a couple of times you want those Loop Cuts around the dress there as well or the robe because it needs to be able to deform and I scale it out and again some of the key things here is keep the legs skinny underneath there and the hips because the skinnier they are the better that you won't really see them anyway you really want to try to minimize the risk of them poking through later on the key thing when you model is say use the middle Mouse button rotate around your character use alt Zed to see through and just to make sure that you pull out vertices and edges so you get a good shape on your clothing or on your character and with this x-ray mode it can be a little bit tricky to see inside so again I I recommend that you twist around the viewport with the middle Mouse button so you can sort of identify from a depth perspective which line is which when you extrude like this usually the interior there catches the color that was inside so you might want to touch those and colorize them here's the trick ISO select the leg now and in edit mode and then I press h to hide it the H key will hide that geometry it's not deleted but now we can see much clearer inside when we need to edit the interior of this mesh here and then I select the interior faces there and I also select one of the red exterior faces and then I select the vertices on the UV side on the left there I press s and type 0 to scale them down to zero and then I move them onto the red there and I go for a little darker red there so it looks more like a shaded color and then I do alt age to unhide it so the legs are still there luckily enough and nothing no harm was done to them it was just making it a lot easier to do the interior there that also works for weight painting if you need to hide geometry like that when you do the weight painting if it's in the way since I extruded the long clothing there it just copied the vertex with it weights so I'm going to select the character shift select the Armature do Ctrl p and do the Armature deform with automatic weights again and let's see how good of a job it does now when we go into post mode with control tab we can see that it did a pretty good job actually the it's catching a few of the weights from the legs so as the character is bending it's just the penetrating a little bit through there and again you can probably get away with that most of the time you're never going to get it perfect there's always going to be animations that you're not going to be able to uh to prevent that from happening but I think most of the time it's pretty okay especially when legs go into extreme positions like poking straight out or straight back you're always going to have them coming through the only way to avoid that happening would be to create bones for the longer clothing and animate that separately but that takes a lot longer so you have to be prepared for probably quadrupling or even 10 folding the workload if you start to add bones to the clothing and if you can get away with it I recommend just making it good enough I go into weight painting her to see if we can make any changes to it and when we see here we can see that the the legs here I'm increasing the weight a little bit on the longer clothing and you can edit that while it's actually in the post position there so as I paint in the weight we could see that it actually saved the clothing that popped out from penetrating through the bones there and that's pretty good uh we've got some issue there on the hip that we can see so we should really fix that one too and that can usually be fixed by editing the interior mesh it doesn't really matter how skinny that is so I can press Tab and go into edit mode there alt sets so we see through and then I select the interior edges there and just narrow the waist down a lot again it doesn't really matter how skinny the character is because you're not going to see it so I recommend going ultra skinny and now when we go out of edit mode we can see that that's saved that little penetration there and that's looking pretty good so remember the automatic weight painting works pretty well and you want the legs to also affect the long clothing not just the spine so when the character does bend it looks like the legs are actually deforming the clothing a little bit and go into weight painting if you do need to tweak those weights a little bit and make sure that the legs are actually affecting the long clothing as well okay that was it for the weight painting and the longer clothing now we're gonna go into the now we're going to go into animating the character which is always exciting you can keyframe animate right inside here blender and create your custom animations there are places like mixamo and things where you can download finished animations I prefer to make my own animations most of the time because then I can make them really suit the characters so I'm going to go into the animation tab here at the top I'm going to put on screencast key so you can see what I'm doing in here and then I'm going to go to the drop down and change the view here so we can see the texture and I'll just enable the texture view there and I'll do the same on the left side here this is just a separate view without the Armature so we can see our little character here as well down here we have a timeline that slides currently from frame 1 to 250 and you can see the end frame here is set to 250. and this is where we're going to be seeing our keyframes I'm going to go to this little drop down and change to action editor and this is where we'll create most of our actions and here I can create a new action so click on this to create a new action and then we can click on this text field and enter and I like to start by creating an animation called underscore T pose because when you export animations to Unity for example it often picks the alphabetically top sorted pose as the preview post and then I'm going to click on this Shield icon which sets a fake user and thus to prevent the animation from accidentally being deleted if it's not associated with any object at any point and we're going to record a keyframe now for our T post so I'll move the mouse cursor up into the viewport press a to select everything all the bones and then I press I to insert a keyframe and we select the location and rotation keyframe and now down in the timeline we can see all the keyframes for all the bones here in the action editor we only need one keyframe on keyframe number one here even if it's got 250 as the end frame it doesn't matter we just need a single keyframe as a single pose here that's all we need to do for the tpost animation or the t-post pose and now we're going to click on the button here to create a new action and this one we're going to rename to idle and then again we have to click the fake user Shield icon to prevent it from being accidentally removed if you do any changes to your objects and now it's very important to click the record button at the bottom of your screen any changes that we make now onto the bones itself in terms of rotation and position are going to be recorded wherever the head is on the timeline so if I do something on frame 28 here it would insert a keyframe mirror you can go to the start of the timeline by pressing shift left arrow that goes back to the first frame and since we copied the idle animation all the keyframes are already going to be on frame number one I switch off specular Lighting in the viewport so I can see the character a little bit better and then I start to rotate and position the bones where I want them it's important to be on frame 1 in this case I lower the Arms by rotating them down I lower the pelvis and that's gonna automatically bend the legs as we've got inverse kinematics and then I rotate the feet into position and I move the right foot back a little bit and the left foot forward try to find a relaxed pose by lowering the center of gravity a little bit bending the legs somewhat and then bending the arms in a relaxed position maybe you can find your own way to do your own idle animation and you could always look at references I often find that a lot of games exaggerate the idle position quite a lot it's quite funny to see how heavy they breathe sometimes then what I'm going to skip forward now to frame 20 by just dragging on the timeline and now I'm going to do that little Breathe In Motion so I raise the character up a little bit and then I bring the collarbones up where the shoulder bones and I have to compensate the way the arms are rotated as well I also tend to rotate the shoulders back a little bit so imagine yourself inhaling a big fresh breath of air then you can scrub the timeline by holding in the left Mouse button and dragging on the timeline at the bottom and you can see how the animation performs when we're happy with this it's only recorded the keyframes that are actually changed and that's okay now I Mark the top summary keyframe of frame one and I press shift d to duplicate it and that will duplicate all the bones keyframes and then I drag them to frame 40 and now we should have a cycling animation here that Loops a nice idle animation I change the end frame to frame 39 and the reason why I don't put frame 40 is because we don't want to duplicate that very keyframe we wanted to cycle just before this so I'm putting the last keyframe on 40 but the keyframe 40 is identical to keyframe one and that's why we Loop it on 39 so the next frame will be number one again and now we've got ourselves a nice idle animation with breathing heavy breathing breathe in breathe out so remember just raise the character up pull the shoulders up and pull the shoulders back a little bit and then back down into the relaxed pose for looping animations I also recommend that you mark all the keys down in the action editor and press shift e and go make cyclic F modifier in bracket this one will actually set the animation to be cyclic so if you play the animation even past the end keyframe it's still going to repeat the same animation over and over again this could be useful when you animate inside of blender but it's also useful because when you animate the characters the trajectory curves of the animations will actually match up better if they're on cyclic if I press Ctrl tab to go into the graph editor then we can zoom in this View by holding down the control key and holding down the middle Mouse button and dragging the mouse up and down I can zoom in and out of this graph editor and the graph editor will show you the animations and how they actually interpolate and bend between the different key poses because they're not linear by default they actually follow an East curve motion so when you Loop the animation you want to make sure that it's actually continuing on the curve so the way it finishes off you want to have it so it's set that the next keyframe that's beyond the view is actually going to be merging nicely into the First keyframe on keyframe one you don't really need to understand all the details here but make a habit if you're making a cyclic animation like a walk animation or an idle animation to mark all the keyframes and press shift e and go make cyclic you can switch away from the graph editor by clicking control tab again now we're going to make the final animation which is a walk animation so I click to create a new animation I name this one walk and just to show you here on the drop down we can see that there's no F prefix here and that's because we haven't clicked the fake user so we click the fake user to protect it from being accidentally removed later on I nearly always forget the keyframes that I need so usually I do a Google image search for walk cycle and there's plenty to choose from there and for this animation I'm just going to go for this one and there are the four first keyframes in this lab we're really going to be interested in you can pick a cycle that you prefer and try different ones different times and this one I'm gonna go for this one that's in this little section here and I'm going to be looking at the first four frames because the animation there on that particular image actually repeats itself and shows the other legs so this one the first four frames that we're going to focus on is the contact frame The Recoil frame the passing frame and the high post frame and I go to side view with three on the numpad and then I go to the first keyframe of the work and animation and I select the pelvis bone and I press shift space g to make sure I've got the Gizmo and I move the pelvis down then I move the leg that's closest to me backwards by sliding the control bone of the ik target bone there towards the back and then I select for the left leg I pick the control bone for the ik and I move that forward and I rotate it up so this is going to be the first keyframe of our walk cycle and then I select all the bones and while I'm hovering above the bones in the viewport I press I and I insert a location and rotation keyframe and then I skip forward I skipped the second frame and I go straight to number three so the animation won't be too fast and for this Frame we're going to look at the second frame in the animation reference so I'm going to lower the pelvis bone down and then I'm gonna use the foot that's closest to me the right foot and move that back and rotate a little bit down I'm going to do the front foot and flip it down so it lands on the floor and then comes back and you can scrub a little bit between these frames and see how it performs and then for frame five remember we skip number four so it doesn't go too fast I raise the pelvis bone up and then I pick the foot that's closest to me I move it forward this is the passing frame and then for the front foot I'm gonna try just slide it back by moving that Target ik bone back a little bit and then I'm going to skip forward one frame and land on number seven and we go to the High post so I raise the pelvis bone up and then I continue the motion by sliding the furthest away leg the left leg back and then I'm gonna do lift the foot on my right leg the one that's closest to the camera and then just tilt the foot a little bit as he's ready to be planting that down and those are the four keyframes that we're going to be using for this walk cycle those are the only ones that are important now I press a to select all the bones while I'm over the viewport and then down in the action editor now I press Ctrl C and then I skip to frame nine and I press Ctrl shift V very important to have the shift key there and here's the magic when you press Ctrl shift V it pastes the same animation but mirrored so it's actually going to create that walk cycle automatically for you we do need to repeat the first keyframe so make sure you select the first summary keyframe and press shift d to duplicate it and put it on frame number 17 and then we change the end frame to number 16 remember we don't want to go all the way to 17 so it repeats that keyframe twice and then we're going to have a looping walk cycle and you probably have to do some tweaking to see if it doesn't work exactly the way you want you can always tweak the way the legs move a little bit and have it perform a little bit closer to the walk cycle animation that you saw on the keyframe sheet now we also need to do something with the arms and to do that I go to the front view and I rotate both arms down on keyframe one that's the first step and then I go number three on the numpad so we get the side view and the arm that's closest to me we want to do the opposite of where the leg is doing so I'm going to move that forward by rotating it and rotating the underarm alert forward too and on the left arm I'm going to rotate the upper arm back and I'm going to rotate the lower arm on the left side down then we Mark the arm bones alone press Ctrl C skip forward to frame number nine and do Ctrl shift V that's going to paste it mirrored then I go to frame 17 and I press Ctrl V again to repeat the first arm positions and if it doesn't work for you if you start to get some funny Behavior it's because you've missed to align the bones along the view axis so go back to when we created the Armature and make sure that you did that step where you press shift n and align the bones with the view axis from the frontal view of the character and remember now this is a looping animation so I Mark all the keyframes to Shifty and I make it cyclic and if I press Ctrl tab we can see all the curves here in the graph editor that they seem to be repeating really nicely and we should have a really nice smooth motion when this animation Loops looks pretty complicated right it's allocating it does most of this automatically so you don't have to do so much of it yourself you just need to put the keyframes and blender will automatically blend and animate and interpolate between all of these by itself sweet and then we can just do control tab again to get out of the graph view we just needed to show a little bit what it looked like we don't need to do any changes at all in here as I inspected the work animation I thought it behaved a little bit funny it had a little bit of a strange foot movement that I wasn't quite happy with and this is quite common for me so I just scrubbed through the different animations and see if it's got some sort of emotion that doesn't seem too natural it's maybe a little bit difficult to get it right the first time so you can compare it to the walk cycle keyframes that you found on image reference and then you can do some tweaks to your animation and just keep scrubbing back and forth to make sure that the feet move the way you think they should and in the end I was quite happy with the result and I had a walk cycle that I was quite happy with and it's a little bouncy character perfect for low poly rapid and it should be fun and for an exercise now you should be able to just Google a run animation cycle and then try to create a run animation and to do that remember you create a new copy of an animation you could copy this walk animation delete all the keyframes and then just repeat the process and try to do it so that you create yourself a Run Cycle instead of the Walk cycle as well so that's your own little assignment now if you want to give it a go exactly the same process applies as we did for the walk cycle so you could follow those steps but just use a different reference image and add yourself a Run Cycle good luck and here comes a really fun part of the process now we can clone this character into many others so select the character press shift d to duplicate it select it in the outliner and press f2 to rename it the template and now tab into edit mode press 3 to go into face select select the top face there press Ctrl Plus on the numpad to expand the selection and we're going to delete those faces and now we're going to repair the head by going into Edge select mode with two pressing e to extrude and then at the top we just press F to cap the top there and we've repaired the head so it's pretty good to have a template that doesn't have a built-in cap or anything we should have a pretty neutral simple character there and now we're going to duplicate this one again I'm going to rename it to underscore template so it gets at the top a little bit easier to see and now we're going to create our first cloned character here so I press shift d on the template and I hide the template with a little eye icon in the outliner and then we're going to create our first female character now so it's going to be pretty much a clone of this one to begin with but we're going to make it a little bit more feminine so first I'll press f2 to rename it we'll name our Eve and then I press tab into edit mode and then we just have to go back to what we did before really and refine this character so what should we do we'll press Ctrl R to create a loop cut around the waist and then press s to scale it down and then I press Ctrl R for another loop cut and scale that down I press 2 to go into Edge select and then I just move these around a little bit so I move the chest area out a little bit to make it more female-like and then we're going to make the legs skinnier here so I'll press Ctrl R to add Loop cuts and maybe we'll put some short pants or something and then I'll just scale down the edges around the leg there so remember if you practice this a lot you could just get the keystrokes down and the keyboard shortcuts and you'll get the hang of this in no time and remember also we learned earlier in this video rewind if you need to how to colorize the characters so we select faces and on the left side we press G to move the UVS into the area of the colors that we want so now we've got a pair of shorts apparently but we'll go up to the neck area and see what we can do here usually I just keep twisting the viewport and I look a little bit from these different angles and I press Ctrl R around the neck here and we should change this to skin color or skin tone so I just make sure we did what just what we did before how to treat the UVS there and then we press G to move the vertices little bump down on the chest area and keep in mind now just keep the middle Mouse button press down every now and then do little slight rotation so you can see the different angles and see where it looks decent and where it doesn't and then just keep tweaking it you could look at reference images at the same time if you've got a separate monitor or on your phone or something maybe you could get some ideas from just Google some random images there and here I spot that we actually got the wrong color in the crotch area there so I uh recolor that to be the same as the bouncer now I'm going to extrude a skirt so we did that earlier as well when we showed the weight painting there on how it worked with the longer so it's exactly the same process just around the waist area there I extruded it downwards and we've got a little skirt and change the colors and I keep repeating myself but this is very important use the middle Mouse button to tweak your rotation all the time and then just see that it looks alright from all angles and then I select all the faces and then I just move the red ones and move them onto pink and then for the pants there that were brown or the underwear in this case I guess then I move them onto a light blue and then I select the feet here the speed faces and change those to a purple and there's nothing new here but it might feel a little bit awkward in the beginning but if you look at the beginning of this video again and again then you'll get the hang of it I'm pretty sure that with some practice and if you start cloning this character now you're gonna be an expert in no time so give it some time and keep practicing and you'll get there I do Ctrl R for Loop cuts on the arms and then I shrink them as well I keep tweaking the waist and this is my process all the time I just rotate rotate rotate and I just look from different angles and do little tiny tweaks and I keep toggling between one two three and one is the vertex mode two is The Edge mode and three is the phase mode and then usually for the female characters I change the face a little bit to make the cheekbones a little bit higher in this face a little bit more narrow that's just down to personal preference however you want to do it and usually when I clone characters I just keep it doing them a little bit different I twist the eyes a little bit back and forth and do it and for this one we're going to put hair on it so I select a bunch of Faces by holding the shift key and then I do alt e and i extrude faces along the normals and after I do this I've got a set of hair that I can use and I change the UV Colors by on the left side you have the faces selected already press G to move the UVS into the correct place and then I can extrude the hair downwards and we just use all the different keys that we've learned already before we be we press G to move them s to scale them and we press e to extrude we toggle between the different selection mode between one two three which is vertex Edge and face and keep refining it looking from different angles use the middle Mouse button to rotate around the character make sure it doesn't have any super dodgy things and then just try to position it to whatever either a reference or if you have something in mind or just play around with it use R to rotate and use S to scale G to move e to extrude and the Beautiful Thing now is that if I press play it's pretty good weight painted already because a lot of the stuff that came along with the weights that we had because when we extrude something it copies those from the previous weights that you had so the hair just follows along pretty good we have some issues here that the underwear is poking through the hip there so that needs fixing and we probably want to change the hair the way it moves a little bit to follow maybe the other part of the body the first thing to fix is uh the underwear area here that's poking through the clothing so with tab into edit mode do all Zed to get the X-ray going and press one to get the vertex select and just move those vertices in and then I switch to Edge select and I scale them and it just move them in again you're not going to see this very much at all if at all so you can just scale it down move it in and just make sure that it doesn't come through and it's always good to have a little animation that you can test with you can have different animations for the hair if I think it's too static so when you rotate the head it just copied the weight paints from the head cheekbones before that we extruded from first I'll add a little bit extra hair so I go back into edit mode of the character and I extrude a little bit of extra hair and then we can see now when I rotate the head it's not so nice it just moves the hair into the body so we need to fix that a little bit that's why I tend to do more male characters than female it's a little bit faster to do the male characters if they have shorter hair but we'll go into weight painting mode so I'll select the Armature shift select the character go control Tab and go into weight painting mode and then when I have the upper spine selected and then I have the head selected I can see how the weight paints are affecting and the spine isn't affecting at all now so in order to fix this we need to add a little bit of the weight paint on the hair for the spine bones because now it's a hundred percent head so I shift click the upper spine bone and then we're gonna try to fix this hair a little bit now so we see what the weight is at 0.338 here and then I can try to paint and it's difficult because now you've got a lot of vertices there so we can fix this by going back into edit mode of the character and then I just select a whole bunch of faces that I don't want to edit so the whole body basically I use the control num plaid plus key and then I press h to hide it and then we go back into weight painting mode and now suddenly we can work without having too much risk to damage anything else and with the top spine bone or spine bone two selected I can add the weight paint and let's increase the weight a little bit and then paint the hair and since we're in an animation already we can see that the hair is moving out and I select the head bone and I reduce some of the weight on that one by lowering the weight and then with the headphone selected I paint the tip of the hair there and you can see that it's reducing the weight on the how much the head is affecting it so it's a balance there to find between the different bones so the balance in this case is between the head bone and the spine two bone to see how much should the head affect and how much should the spine affect in this case and again this is a trial and error a little bit and see whatever works for you pretty sure you'll come to a situation at some point that you're pretty happy that it's going to be good enough and remember that that's a keyword make it just good enough it's not going to be perfect there's always going to be issues with it we're working with low poly now we're working with very limited ability to make sure that stuff doesn't penetrate all the way through and we don't have any extra bones for the hair now because we want to save time and make a lot of characters in a short period of time so just make it good enough and you're not gonna in quick animations like we have on these low poly characters you're not Really Gonna notice too much if it goes through a little bit I also changed the weight paint at the tip of the hair so that also follows spine to Bone a little bit so it doesn't look so static and after some tweaking here in the weight painting mode we just go back into edit mode and unhide the everything so we can see the whole character again it's pretty good to go now I'm happy with the way the hair gets affected now a little bit by the spine bone there as well so I think it's good enough so in a matter of minutes now we've got ourselves a female alright upon closer inspection we've got some penetration issues here on the legs again so let's just quickly fix that one never too late to repeat then solidifier or knowledge a little bit so how do we fix that do you remember well first of all we need to probably get rid of the legs a little bit we'll show the Armature with a little eye icon tab into edit mode of the character hide the leg by selecting some faces and pressing H because we don't want to paint the legs by mistake we go into weight paint mode and then shift select the upper bone here and then we just paint about half the weight there on those vertices and then just make sure that the skirt comes out a little bit along with the upper leg bone there and it's automatically mirrored there we increase the weight a little bit make sure that it comes through and again it's a little bit difficult when you don't see the colors you see the weight paints instead so you might have to talk a little bit in and out of the weight painting mode to see what you're actually doing in the end but after some practice when you start cloning these characters you'll get the hang of it and in this case I actually select the lower bone as well because it wasn't enough to just do it on the upper bone so I maximize nearly the paint on the upper bone there and in this case I actually select the lower bone now as well and I add some weight to that and maybe not sure that that's the best approach but it works for this character especially for the walk cycle at least you might run into some issues later on when you do other animations you'll have to just see what works for you and depending on what type of animations you've got but this looks good now we've got no penetration that's always good or is it I don't know so that was quick to make a second character now we've just got 98 to go I think I spent about 10 hours in total to make 100 characters by looking at some references and let's make another character I duplicate the template again and on this one I'm gonna put a helmet on it and I'm going for the approach where the helmet is actually the head itself instead of creating a separate helmet to save myself some time don't plan to have the need to take this helmet off or anything like that so I'm just editing the character's head now as if it was a helmet so in edit mode I again I toggle often between one two three which is vertex select Edge select and face select I use a lot of G to move s to scale and Ctrl R to add Loop cuts and I rotate the viewport a lot with the middle Mouse button to see where anything's poking out I try to move that in do a lot of scaling and G to move so I'm going to repeat that a lot and so are you this is why it's so important to learn the hotkeys imagine if you had to go on the menu every time now and click on the little gizmos or drop down menus or anything like that so it's definitely worth learning those hotkeys just make sure that you practice them and it will stick in your mind I'm sure of it because the workflow just becomes natural at the end you toggle between these like it's breathing or blinking or something so for this character I'm going to do some armor let's I still haven't colored the head but let's do some sort of a Roman look I don't know if it's Roman but I'll do some sort of a semi-skirt thing let's modify the shoulders and maybe put some armor on here so I'll move the shoulders out a little bit Ctrl R around the neck move the chest area down and refine all the vertices so you've heard me say this a billion times now toggle between the different selection modes just select all the edges vertices and faces and press G to move them around as to scale them e to extrude Ctrl R for Loop cuts and press G and G again to slide verts and edges along the edge so if you just want to slide them press G rapidly and that that'll work good now I'm going to put armor on it so I'm going to shift select a few faces here so I'll press three to go into face select and then around the chest area over the shoulders and then on the back I select those I'll do alt extrude along face normals and on the left side I press G and I move those onto a gray color instead so we've got some sort of a metal armor here I toggle between the different selection modes and I extend the arm a little bit further again this is low poly so we can exaggerate those quite a bit and then I move around the edges in this case the I don't know what you call this thing it's like not a skirt it's not a kilt it's uh not pants it's not I don't know what it is it's just something that hangs a little bit in the front and the back so press Ctrl R for another loop cut and it's a bit tempted to sometimes get into a little bit too high of a low poly situation I tend not to put Loop Cuts around the vertical axis to add that adds a lot of details so I always try to do my Loop Cuts around Limbs and around waists and around the head instead instead of going for for those vertical Loop cuts that because that will cut through all the body here I'm going to change as well the top color I move the UVS onto skin color so it's going to be a bear bear topped armored vehicle I nearly said it's not vehicle let's narrow down the waste a little bit more and then when you hold the ALT key in Edge select mode and click on one of the edges it actually Loops selects it all the way around makes it easier for you to select around different Limbs and then I use a lot of scaling here just to shape the arms and use Ctrl R to add a few additional Loop Cuts if you don't have enough geometry to work with to shape it the way you want and then just use your imagination when you create all those characters and sometimes I just play around with it I do skinny legs big arms I do big arms skinny legs and don't be afraid to exaggerate the proportions quite a bit when you create these cartoony characters for the head I'm transforming it to the helmet now I selected the top faces and then you're using Control Plus on the numpad and then I change the color to Gray on the left side with the UV so I just grabbed all of those from the top of the head and moved them onto the gray area and for the eye I press I to insert that face and then we can just colorize the center face to a black color and that's just a quick way to get the eyes there you could also extrude them inwards a little bit but I didn't feel that that was necessary I created some additional leather armor by just extruding the top of the forearm as well and then just within a matter of minutes we've got ourselves a little armored soldier of some sort or a warrior I'll extrude the front of the legs for some metal armor here as well and just use your imagination or look at references to think of a different type of characters that you can create now and for this character we don't really need to change the weight painting at all because when we've modified and added some geometry it just inherits those weights from wherever I extruded it from and for this character since there's nothing long that's hanging or swinging then it's pretty good all the weights are are good as they are you don't really need to remap them and also when you do a loop cut with the control R if it's in between two weights it'll automatically calculate what the best value is in between there and you don't really have to do anything with it so if there's a Zero Effect on the inner vertex that you do and it goes to one on the outer vertex if you do a control Loop cut there Ctrl R right in between it'll get 0.5 on the weight so automatically it'll just blend those so that's it we've got ourselves three characters now that are all working with the same Armature and just press on and make 97 more and you're up to 100. you've got eight hours go for it no only joking you got plenty of time just have fun with it I'll save another copy of this and again my patrons on the tutorial tier and above will have access to this very blend file and its different stages to finish off this video I'm gonna show you how to export and import these into a Unity project and also to upload them to mixer mode to do some testing with the animations so I'll create a new Unity project there and this is not really a Unity tutorial now and this is not really a Unity tutorial now so I won't go through everything in detail here it's better suited in a different video I just want to make sure that you can see how it works when you export and import so I just follow the process to create a new Unity 3D RP Universal render pipeline project and I use unity2022.2.10 but the processes looked very much the same in the last few versions of unity so it should be very similar to the way you would see it on your version and now I'll switch back into blender here from unity and you have to enable the Armature and the meshes that you want to export and you have to select all of them so make sure that you've got the Armature and the three characters in this case selected and you go to file export fbx and when you've got this export panel here you need to browse to the location where you want to save them and I usually save them straight into my Unity project hierarchy because Unity will automatically import them so I create a folder called meshes and it's important on the right here that you keep limit to selected objects change apply scalings to fbx units scale and then you change the forward access to Y forward and that will automatically have up to Z up and then we can name this file and I'll just remove this part 6 here so low polycactor.fbx and then click on export fbx now if we go back into Unity it'll automatically import this one so in our project folder here and if I go into the meshes which is the folder that I created I can drag this low polycactor into the scene now and that automatically creates our characters in there it actually brings all three characters in there I'm gonna rename this folder from meshes to low poly character and then I'm going to create a new material in here let's name this one common because usually I use the same material for nearly everything that uses this texture then you have to browse to the palette files that we were using for this project remember we started by downloading that one so the Albedo texture and the emissions texture I dragged those into the unity project and then for the common material there I drag the Albedo texture to the base map and then we enable emission and drag the emission texture in and set the color to white there and then I have to select all three characters go into the materials under the inspector and then drag the common material onto the material and now the characters all have the correct material in that hierarchy now I can select the eve and Warrior and I disable those in the inspector and all that's remaining now is a copy of Bob here in our hierarchy and in our scene view so we can see our character that we modeled just before in blender here represented it works really nicely inside of unity what we will see here though is for Bob that our rotation is wrong it says negative 90 on the x-axis and and that's because the axis system in unity and blender are different to fix this I need to click on the low poly character in the project folder go to the model tab in the right there and click bake axis conversion and hit apply that will rotate our character into the correct rotation and we can verify everything it's facing down the blue arrow now which is the z-axis and that's forward in unity so that's correct and we see that the rotation is zero for the main object and for Bob itself so everything is good to go now if I click on the low poly character again in the project and go to the animations tab we can see that we have the three animations here and we've got the T pose and then we've got another t-post and another t-pose and this is not looking correct so we're actually going to fix this now I'll switch back into blender and we've got a few T poses here that are incorrect and these uh have been linked automatically when we did some of the operations when we duplicated the characters it copied the T posts and sometimes maybe you forget the record button and you start ending up with a bunch of these animations so it's pretty good that this happened I can actually show you how to get rid of those down here to the left I'm going to split and create another viewport and we're going to change this one on the drop down and we're going to select the non-linear animation window here we got the three T poses and it's one for each character here and these animations we have to get rid of and it's a bit difficult to know we haven't really worked in the non-linear animation editor here and you would have thought you could just right click and remove it but it doesn't quite work that way and and these are actually linked to the characters it doesn't have the fake users and we didn't see that little F prefix there so on the right here up in the top outliner we can see that there are some animations linked to these and I want to remove these and you can delete them by right clicking on them and doing delete but on the search field you can type animation and that actually brings up all the animations and then you can specifically right click on each of the animations and do clear animation data and when you do that they start to disappear from the non-linear animation editor and we need to do this for all of them that we've created up here and now when I do the drop down here we can see that it says o here for Orphans instead of f for fake user so those ones next time we restart Unity these will be actually disappear from in there and here we have an issue now because we got none of the ones that that are just named underscore T posts and they're all orphaned so we need to make sure that we bring back one of those fake users so I'll pick one of the tposes.001 I click the fake user Shield icon and we just rename this one to underscore or t pose I must have accidentally removed that data so be cautious when you work with this you want to make sure that you have your animations there or your actions and that it's gotten f as the prefix for the fake user otherwise you really risk loosen those animations if you clear them from the different objects in the outliner or if you remove them from the stashed positions in the non-linear animation editor so make a habit to go to the drop down of the action editor and make sure that the animations that you want and that you need to keep are down there in the list it has the F prefix anything in that drop down with an O prefix will disappear and get deleted forever if you restart blender so anything with an O next time you restart blender it's gonna be gone so make sure to make a habit of going to the action editor drop down and make sure there is an F prefix for your actions otherwise you risk losing them even though it's convenient to export actions as they are I'm going to show you the way I work with the animations now and how I recommend that you export them as well you select the Armature in the outliner and in the non-linear animation editor we make sure to remove anything that says stash on it here and then we're going to select which actions we want to export so I'm going to go to the action editor and we've got T post selected there for the Armature I'm going to click on push down and when I click push down it adds it to the Armature on the left there in the non-linear animation editor then in the action editor I change to the idle animation or the idle action and I do push down again and on the left we see now that we've got two items for the Armature we've got the idle and the T pose I could do the same here by pushing down the walk animation that would be in the normal workflow to export all of them but instead of doing this I want to show you how you can add animations in the future so I'm gonna remove the walk animation again just select it and press delete and then we're just going to export the idle and the T post for now and I'll show you how you can add so I go to file export fbx we browse into the low poly character folder and then I'm actually going to delete this one first because here's a bit of a quirk I've found that if you overwrite the fbx files when you export them you can run into some problems with the animation so I'm going to go back into Unity first and delete this one you want to make sure that you try to export your character and get it sorted as soon as possible and you don't really have to modify it so much in the future and that's why I'm going to show you how to add new animations later on because you don't really want to overwrite that file in the future now we go to file export fbx and we make sure that selected objects are there the fbx unit scales forward must be y forward and up must be set up and now under bake animation we expand this we untick all actions and you have to have nla strips still enabled now when we go back into Unity it will have imported our low poly character again I have to drag it into the scene again and repeat the process that we did before so under model it will have forgotten that we want to bake the axis conversions so I tick that and click apply and we have it flipped now to the side and you might wonder why that happened and that's because I accidentally only exported one of the characters and by default if there's one character it doesn't create a hierarchy and the rotation will be incorrect since it's on the root object so if I just drag the character in again it should be correct and we can verify that it's facing forward in the blue z-axis that's correct and it doesn't have any rotation on any of the axises so everything's looking good but we want the other characters as well we don't just want Bob here so that's because I forgot to select the other two characters when we did the export so I delete it once again you have to get used to this I also have to remove it from the hierarchy and we want to do it correctly so let's switch back into blender again we have to redo this again and uh you're gonna notice that this perfectly normal to have to do this a few times this time I make sure that I select all the characters so we have to select the Armature we have this shift select Bob and we have this select Eve and Warrior and now with all of those selected very important to include the Armature and all the characters go to file export fbx make sure we got selected objects and all the changes that we did before fbx unit scale and forward and then under bake animation remember let's double check nla strip is ticked all actions is unticked and then we export now when we switch back into Unity it will have re-imported it we've got all the characters this time including the Armature we drag it in but again now we've read on the process so remember what we have to do go to the low poly character under model take bake axis conversion and hit apply and everything's back to where we wanted it to be if I look here now we've got the Armature we've got Bob even Warrior and all the correct rotations they're facing down the z-axis the blue axis very important to get this right in unity from the get-go and it's very important to get the accesses correct from the beginning you always want to have your character facing down the blue z-axis facing forward because that is unity's reference to forward so all the game logic that you create to have a character moving forward it's going to expect that you want to move along down that blue axis and the forward direction for the character if you just make do and think like oh I'll just live with it and have a fake rotation there and maybe it's facing in the X Direction you're gonna run into problems for down your project where it doesn't make any sense so make sure you get it correct from the start okay we're just gonna have a look at Bob now so let's hide the other two characters by disabling them in the inspector and I'm going to go to the animations Tab and we can see now under animations here that we've got a t-post and idle and it looks a bit quirky down here in the preview window and I'm not sure if that's got something to do with the access conversion it didn't used to be that way but in recent versions of unity I've seen it but it's not really been affecting how it works so I think we'll just have to live with it for now it still works pretty good in the game itself but the preview is a bit messed up unfortunately but what we do need to do in here is that we need to select the poses that Loop and both of these will do that so make sure that you tick the loop time on both of these and once you've done that you have to hit the apply Button as well and this tells Unity that these animations are going to be looped to preview this we have to add an animator so on the root object of the character I'll do add component in the inspector and we add an animator and we have to create an animator controller so I'll go right click here in the project and do create animation controller let's just name this one animator for now and I drag the animator component reference then we double click on the animator and go in and create a new state I right click create new state let's just name this on default then we're going to pick the animations and it spits off screen there but I just drop down make sure that I pick the idle animation to begin with and everything else should be able to be left the way it is so let's go back out into the scene view here and press play and now we should have an animator and it's just showing from the camera angle there but which is located behind by default but it's it's got the animation there and it's breathing let's fix the camera a little bit so we'll align that one to the view here we can do this by going to game object and align to view and now when we press play we'll see a little bit better angle on the character and it's standing there and it's breathing it's and it's got our idle animation for its default here I'll create a new Cube as well just to put a little pedestal and put our character on something to stand on so you can see how it's anchored to the ground and then I'll just rotate the light angle as well so it's not hidden like this we want the light to come from in the front so we can preview it a little bit better now we're going to get back to that walk animation so I'll go back into blender and you'll be in this situation where you want to add animations in the future a lot make sure that you go into the and lay editor and delete those one with the delete key that we had before in the action editor we change it to bulk and we do the push down again so now we just have a single block animation in the nla editor then all we need to do now is we have to select one of the characters is enough and then shift select and make sure the Armature is selected as well go to file export fbx everything is as usual selected objects fbx unit scale y forward and nla strips needs to be there and all actions unticked and then we're going to name this one just walk animation.fbx and this is the workflow that I recommend that you do in the future if you're going to add animations just import them as separate animation files we still have to go back into the model Tab and tick bake axis conversion and hit apply you're going to get used to that workflow and under animation here we have the walk animation and this is going to be a looping one we can preview it down here still looks a bit quirky I don't know why fix that Unity please and then we have to make sure that we tick the loop time however that's important and then we click apply on this one as well and now we can change the preview of our character and I'll go into the animator and let's just replace this idle animation with the newly imported walk animation go back into the game View and press play and now our character is playing the walk animation and it's going to be a different tutorial to blend between these and I'll show you how to do that in a separate Unity tutorial but this is the gist of it and I think this workflow works really well just make sure that you export the character with maybe just the t-pose and an idle animation in the base fbx files every other animation that you do I recommend that you export them as separate fbx files because that will not destroy any of the previous work that you've done you want to try to avoid having to re-import the fbx files that contains the meshes so use separate fbx files for your animations use the nla editor to push down the animations that you want to export make sure it's clean like that and Export them import them and then just keep adding more and more animations that seems to be a really good workflow so there we have it our characters are working really well we can switch which one is active let's disable able Bob actually literally an enable Eve so this is what she looks like in there works good let's disable Eve that sounds so hard horrible sounds harsh and then we'll enable Warrior and all three characters here work really well and you could theoretically have hundreds of these and you could have separate fbx files you name it you could uh have literally 100 characters or a thousand maybe ten thousand who knows now I'm going to show you how to go into mixer mode as well that's going to be the last step of this very lengthy it's either long tutorial or a short course I'll let you pick so let's export Bob here for mixamo I'll go to file export fbx and now we just have Bob and the Armature selected I'll create a new folder and let's just call this one for mixer mode to keep it tidy and then here's important go to path mode and do copy in the drop down and then enable this little box here which says embed textures otherwise you'll just have a white character inside of miximo and this way way it's gonna include the texture that we've got for our material and then the rest can be left pretty much the same as we've done previously selected objects fbx units scale y positive forward and now we've exported our fbx files for mixamo so I'm going to head over to the mixamo website now and login now we upload the character I click on upload character and I browse to the file here and we're just going to have it upload to the website and here we go we've got Bob included and you see now that it's uh super wrong he's tiptoeing and he looks uh somewhat uncomfortable and that's because I exported this with the walk animation so to do it correctly let's delete the walk animation let's set the T pose that's the one we're going to use so we redo the process make sure his post in the T post make sure Bob and the Armature is selected let's do the same export make sure the path mode is copy and the embed textures there everything else is just like before and we'll try this again let's close it upload character select the character file browse to our fbx file and let's upload this one and hopefully now we should have a bit of a better post that looks a little bit less painful here we go it's included the texture and it's playing one of the miximo animations let's just click next here and try one of the animations should we search for maybe a swing dance animation let's click on one of them and here we go Bob is now dancing I like to speed up with the overdrive here for the low poly characters it just looks a lot more suitable for the style that we're going for so that's it bob is now dancing swing inside of mixamo and we've uh got the characters running in unity and everything's good to go now you're all set to create thousands of characters for your games so thank you for watching this tutorial or like I said it's either been a very long tutorial or a very short course so I'll let you decide which one it is and thank you so much for watching and if you do like this video please give it a thumbs up and subscribe if you haven't already and a big shout out now to my patreons I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart oh that sounded emotional now I really want to thank my patrons because you're really helping me out to do these things and to reward you guys I'm actually uploading my own characters so the tutorial tear on my patreon will get 10 of the characters that I created The Game Dev tier on my patreon will get 30 of the characters and the hero tier you guys will get all hundred of these characters and you can use them royalty free in any game project that you want to make if you to make prototypes if you want to make a free game or even if you want to make a commercial game and make a fortune on it you can use these characters if you're a patreon as long as you're a patreon of mine and you've got access to those files you can use my characters too but I also encourage everyone to create their own characters so go ahead everyone enjoy it have some fun let's do some low poly stuff and uh yeah enjoy it

Channel: Imphenzia

Views: 109,394

Keywords: blender, low poly, character, armature, animation, walk, gamedev, indiedev, weight paint, unity, mixamo, lowpoly, skinning, blenderlowpoly, lowpolyblender, imphenzia, imphnezia, impenzia, howto, course, blender course, blender 3.5, blender3.5, low poly in blender, ik, inverse kinematics, mirror armature

Id: PTWV67qUX2k

Length: 120min 46sec (7246 seconds)

Published: Wed May 10 2023