Make BEAUTIFUL characters using a FREE APP (Blender)

this video is sponsored by squarespace 3d characters by disney or blizzard are made using teams of people each using a bunch of different apps in this video i'm going to see if it's possible to make a 3d character using just a single app you see whenever i upload a new video showing my process i often get asked why i don't just use blender my argument against this is that you wouldn't use a swiss army knife to open a tin when you've already bought an electric tin opener but you raved on about it for so long that i figured well it can't hurt to give it a try and the result surprised me actually as you'll see in this video you're gonna see me do everything from sculpting texture painting shading rigging lighting rendering compositing and banana smoothies all made with blender the only thing i haven't used blender for is the concept which was made by angel ganev and you'll find it linked below although i'm sure angel wouldn't have a problem drawing this using blender now i will preface this by saying i love sculpting in zbrush and i went into this thinking that it would be a fun one-off video and my workflow would revert back to normal as soon as i finish but was this the case let's start with a clip of my first impressions of sculpting with blender so what i want to do is insert a sphere no i don't i don't like that pole on the top i'm going to insert a cube instead and then sub divide turns the mystery on and let's start making a head i can't say expect to be using blend for sculpting all the time after this but you know i just thought it'd be interesting to see how we get on alright mask look at this i'm like a pro already i'm not i'm struggling okay let's add in a new shape for the body i really don't want to black out and jump into see your brush i mean i ca i'm not going to do that because then i'll have to change the name of the video and that would just be silly so new cube sculpt mod sub divide scale and y box mask invert remesh why is it not like me this is silly this is childish let's apply that oh there it is now i can do it give her a bit of a cheekbone i'm getting a bit confident now i'm going faster than it should be shift f oh that strength is it so beautiful it's not beautiful at all yet i'm gonna turn this into a masterpiece you just wear i really want to increase the resolution so it looks better you must wear it and just hold your nerve for as long as you can come on let's add some resolution just define that jaw a little bit imagine if i really start liking blender sculpting and i just ditched the z brush i can't do that kinda wonder if i'll find anything that i prefer in blender kind of looks like a mouth does it not try and do some eyes sure why not let's put in some spheres do you know what i can put eye designer eye straight in i don't even need to masturbate with this do i that's a nice little bonus it does actually save quite a bit of time doing it directly in blender i wasn't actually expecting to like sculpting in blender this much there are some really nice perks to use in blender i hadn't even thought of i'm gonna have to do some serious weighing up of pros and cons after this so clearly my opinion on sculpting in blender has changed and while i do still prefer the feel of sculpting in zbrush probably because i'm used to it but i hadn't realized was just how much time is saved by not having to transfer models between apps because even though the gobi add-on which transfers models between zbrush and blender automatically is amazing and saves a lot of time there's always a little bit of discrepancy with how the model looks between the two apps which i didn't have to contend with when sculpting directly in blender another big benefit was the ability to see the skull from different views while i'm sculpting it made me realize just how much time i usually spend rotating around the model to check each change that i make i spent some time refining what i'd done and after using some retopology tools to quickly build some eyebrows i was starting to feel pretty confident that blender would have a much bigger role in my sculpting workflow but i was keen to see how it would handle wheat topology now i have actually re-topologised in blender a few times using the speed re-top or add-on and it works pretty well but i've got to be honest i'm so bored of re-topology now that recently i've been grabbing meshes i've already re-apologized and wrapping them around my skull which tends to be much quicker than doing it by hand so i wanted to see if i could achieve this in blender and my initial thought was naturally to use the shrink wrap modifier however this proved to be quite problematic and i was a bit short of time on this project so in the end i just reshaped the new mesh to fairly accurately match the scope by hand and carried on sculpting i'll revisit this idea when i've got a bit more time but this worked just fine for now and i've still only used blender next i added in some teeth and turned the canines into fangs adding teeth is helpful for finding the shape of the lips since the lips wrap around them i then changed the shape of the ears to better match those found in the reference for the horns i added a curve and a circle and made the circle the bevel object of the curve this essentially means that i can now model the horns using curves which is really nice it also means i can share the hands procedurally by using a ram node next i moved on to the hair which is fairly simple in this concept my usual approach is to first create a simple overall shape to represent the hair mask before laying down hair strands over the top of it however since we're already in blender i figured i'd quickly rig the character first this way i'll be able to create the hair while it's already in pause saving time fixing things later on by setting keyframes i can easily switch between the paused and unpaused model by scrubbing the timeline ready to start the hair now i load up my last project and copy and paste one of the hair strands i then repeat this process all around the head which usually takes quite a while so while i'm doing that give me a few seconds to talk about squarespace who have sponsored this video now if you're looking to expand your presence online then you'll want to check out squarespace this all-in-one platform provides you with tools to build websites and online stores so whether you want to impress potential employers with a beautiful portfolio are you looking to sell your digital art squarespace has your back and it's really easy to set up too at least the way i did it i just chose the type of website i want and look through the templates when you find something that looks nice you just replace the content with your own and what's nice is that if my images don't match the size or resolution of the template squarespace resizes them automatically to save faffing around just go to squarespace.com to start a free trial and when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com forward slash dannymac3d and you'll save 10 of your first website or demand the base of the sculpt was made by modeling this simple shape around the body of the character now i didn't want the body showing in the final piece but i tend not to delete things if i can help it just in case i need it for something later so instead i assigned all the verts that i didn't want to see to a vertex group and plugged it into a mask modifier hiding the parts we don't need next on the to-do list was painting the skin which i wasn't much looking forward to to be honest usually painting skin is one of my favorite parts of the whole process but that's because i find zbrush really nice for it whereas i've always found painting textures in blender a bit clunky true to farm i started off with performance issues but i quickly realized that this was because i needed to turn in the resolution on my model now while i did continue to struggle to enjoy painting in blender i soon remembered that i was neglecting blender's procedural tools being able to tweak the colour of the ambient occlusion in real time is definitely a perk of texturing in blender i can also use a node or two to change the texture to orange an idea i'll revisit later when making the blue portion of the skin but for now i want to model those earrings before i forget these were made really simply using a cube which was modeled into this basic shape again i was able to share them procedurally using a ramp node like i did with the horns now at this point i ran into what i'd call a big issue when it comes to texturing in blender and when you paint in blender the app wants you to manually save textures to an image file onto your computer now this in itself isn't a bad thing and blender does remind you to do this if you try shutting it down without however even though i'm in the habit of saving my scene file every few minutes i had totally forgot to say about the texture then at some seemingly random point in time blender decides to erase the work i've done on my texture now fortunately for me it wasn't the most detailed texture work so it didn't take me long to repaint it but i can see this being a much harder lesson for some people after this i noticed that in the concept the eyes were different color and since the eyes share the same material changing one side would mean changing both so to get around this i selected the left iris and made a new instance of the material by clicking this number next to the material name now when i change the colour it only affects the left eye the next thing i did was make a blue version of the skin essentially i just duplicated the original nodes and tweaked them until i had a colour that i liked now at this point i'm starting to think that this skin would look a lot better with a roughness map so for this i applied a temporary flat gray material so i could better see the result as i've worked now the point of this map is to tell blender which part of the skin you want to be shiny and which parts you want to be matte and has quite a profound effect on the final look again since we're in blender i took advantage of its procedural shading and added in some overall noise to break the texture up a bit to create the effects of the character's skin flaking off like shown in the concept the first idea i had was to pair a mask the idea being that anywhere that i painted white would reveal the orange texture then anywhere painted black would show the blue this almost worked as tree but unfortunately it didn't add any thickness so it looked more like face paint than thick flaking skin so i decided to try again using geometry instead i duplicated the head and deleted the parts i didn't need before adding thickness with the solidify modifier the thickness definitely looks better but the current topology caused awful shading problems and i would need the mesh to be extremely dense to sculpt the details i wanted i also ran into a bunch of random problems too a bit frustrated i decided to move on to the hands with the intention of coming back to this later now on this occasion i didn't create the hands from scratch but instead used a rigged hand which i sculpted to suit my character however i'm going to gloss over this for now because it's something i want to talk about in detail in an upcoming video so make sure you subscribed if you're not already and click the bell so you don't miss it still unsure what to do with the skin i moved on to the flaky pieces which are essentially just reshaped cubes with a bevel modifier then i played around with the lighting but i was struggling to get nice shadows while simultaneously getting a nicely placed eye highlight then i remembered i have the fake highlight feature on my eye designer add-on and i've never actually really used it before so i decided no was a great time to start now when i'm lighting the model i'm free to focus on the shadows without worrying about the eyes now this is great and all but i still haven't addressed the issues i was facing with the face but i decided to sleep on it which turned out to be a good move because as i lay there trying to sleep i came up with the solution to the problem which in hindsight seems pretty obvious remember the mask i created that determines which part of the skin is orange well all i needed to do was plug that into a bump node and i can create the illusion that the orange part of the skin has depth i did bump into a problem with shading at the uv seams but this is quite easily solved by increasing the bleed value of the brush other than that painting the depth turned out to be quite fun and to create the glare effect on the earring i added another ramp node and used it to drive an emission shader then after a bunch of minor tweaking i rendered out the image so that i could move on to compositing normally i composite images in photoshop and the first thing i do is add color correction so that's what i did here it definitely behaves differently to photoshop but i started getting the hang of it next i wanted to try bringing back the lens flare on the earrings so i added a glare node and played around with the settings i then spent a good while just experimenting with different nodes and working out what they did which was fun but time was pressing to finish the piece so to speed things up i bought a compositing add-on for blender called enrich which reintroduces the familiar layer workflow found in photoshop this allowed me to make the changes that i needed without having to work out how to set it up using nodes it also gave me the opportunity to learn the knot anywhere since i was able to watch the graph being built with each change that i made before we see the final image you might be wondering what i thought of working solely in blender and if i plan to make this a regular thing well i must say i was definitely impressed by how much time i saved sculpting in blender and i probably will start using it as my primary sculpting tool i still much prefer how zbrush performs and how the brushes feel but i can't ignore how much time i save by sculpting in the app that i do almost all the rest of the pipeline with and besides if and when i want to use a feature that i prefer to use zbrush for such as painting skin textures i can quickly send my model over there using the gorby add-on so i get the best of both worlds the only other major difference to my usual workflow was compositing which as i said i usually do in photoshop and in this case i think it'll remain that way at least for now now the main thing photoshop has over blender for compositing is speed it changes in photoshop at instant whereas in blender it can often take a few moments to calculate even after taking steps to improve performance now unfortunately this was just too much of a problem for me but i will continue to experiment to see how i can incorporate these tools into my workflow more now all in all i'm glad i did this experiment because i learned a lot of little things about blender that i didn't know before and i think they all contribute towards an ever-evolving and improving workflow but most importantly it reminded me to keep an open mind about the tools that i use and about the tools that i don't which is something i think we can all do with being reminded of once in a while see you in the next one you

Channel: Danny Mac 3D

Views: 301,201

Rating: 4.9633408 out of 5

Keywords: pixologic, zbrush, blender, sculpt, disney, dreamworks, pixar, stylized, b3d

Id: o366hhdw9dc

Length: 16min 31sec (991 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 22 2021