Make Characters Fast With The Skin Modifier In Blender

[Applause] i'm going to be putting a few more sculpting videos up soon but before i do that i felt it was appropriate to show a quick way to make a character base that can be used for sculpting or even poly modeling i've seen a few other people use this technique but in my opinion it's still severely underused in the character creation process you can get a good character using this technique and nothing else a good way to get started is to have a reference image i made these ones a while back using some of my drawings as references it helps if you already know how to draw basic characters but if you don't i recommend finding some on pinterest or some other site like that it's okay to reference other people's work just don't steal it's not a bad idea to give some credit too if you do that who knows you might even make some connections that way in this video i'm not using a reference i'll just show you the basic techniques while i make two different characters all right let's go alright so here we are in blender 2.91 i'm just going to get rid of the camera and the light and everything in our scene and first thing we're going to do is get a plane right here then go over to the modifiers gonna add a mirror modifier this will make it easier to make our character symmetrical and then we're going to add a skin modifier and that's basically looking at all of the edges and kind of wrapping geometry around it and then we're going to add a subdivision surface modifier and turn the viewport level up to two right there and then we're going to tab into edit mode and get started and right now you can't see the vertices of the edges or anything so you need to hit alt z to go into this transparent view right here and that'll make everything a little easier to see then we're just going to merge all of these into the center with m and collapse and now you just have one vertex right there and we're just going to drag that up and this is going to be where our hips are right here one other thing we want to keep in mind is that this is mirroring right now but it doesn't merge unless you're really really close to the center we want to make that a little easier by either turning clipping on where if something's in the center it's not going to move like that so if you want to extrude outward you have to shut clipping off but what i like to do is just leave clipping off the whole time and just turn merge to point one and that way you don't have to be as precise for things to merge in the center right there so i'm going to start by extruding outward but you can see that it already broke and that's because we have to go over to our skin modifier right here and mark a root right here basically what you need to know is that if there's no root marked the skin modifier is not going to work correctly so now that we have this i'm just going to continue extruding downward for our legs right here look to the side right here and extrude on the y-axis for a foot and this is looking pretty chunky right now so i'll show you how to scale these down you can either select a vertex and ctrl a to scale down like that and you can also control it in the side panel here if you hit n under the item menu right here these two mean radius x and mean radius y you can select both of those to scale or you can just choose one of them to scale it only on one axis right there which comes in handy for feet you can also do control a and then x like that so now the feet are a little flatter right here you can do it on the y too give them some width really wide if you want flippers like a duck or something like that so we're going to continue extruding upward some shoulders it's going to be our arms right there up a little higher for neck and then up a little higher for the top of the head then right here a way i like to add points in the middle is with ctrl r and that is usually adding like a loop cut right there and then you can control shift b to bevel a vertex and i'm just going to put these pretty close to the edge right there and i'm going to select the neck and the top of the head scale those down and select the two in the middle and scale those up this is how i make a basic head shape like that and if you want to look a little more realistic from the side you can just drag where the chin would be outward a little like that and it'll change the shape and also don't forget that you can scale these on just one axis if you're looking for something a little wider or slimmer and also i noticed our root is over by the arm now and i'm just going to put that right in the center to help avoid glitches so i'm going to add a loop cut over here for the knee right there just drag this a little one thing to keep in mind is that you can't rotate points with the skin modifier like you would be able to with like with curves or something like that and that's just kind of a quirk with the skin modifier that you have to keep in mind when you're using this and we're going to scale up the center right here and as you can see the points kind of start connecting at a certain point once you scale them up and that'll help us later for making things look more organic going to add an elbow right here and pull that back slightly and i'm also going to add a point in the middle and this is where we start getting into like more fine-tuned weight distribution so i can scale this up a little and you can you know if you want the weight to be a little lower you can do that look from the side and pull that outward this guy is going to be a little chubbier but i want to be skinnier right here so i'm going to add another loop pull that up and scale it down a little we can also make it a little skinnier just on one axis right there too and you can experiment with moving the hips a little closer and also the shoulders for different results so if you scale this up a little higher and move it closer they start to connect at a certain point so keep that in mind also one thing that's really nice about the skin modifier is it makes making hands a lot easier so we're going to focus on a hand by going into seven top down and period on the numpad to focus on it and then we can zoom in so i'm going to extrude this outward and this is going to be our wrist area and i'm going to start extruding for some fingers right here we're kind of making like a fork shape right now this person is only going to have three fingers and also a thumb like that and we can select these three and just extrude those on the x-axis and then select all of the fingertips and just scale them down a little and so i found that this hand shape this shape right here works best for making hands for me anyway you definitely have to do a lot of experimenting so you can see when i move this closer it'll start to break so yeah you just kind of have to work around things like that and figure out what works it takes a lot of experimenting if yours doesn't look right you might want to try going to the point that's in the very middle right there that they're all stemming from and just scaling that up all the way and that'll kind of give you a more natural looking wrist and everything like that so then i'm just going to go through here and pull some points around to try to make it look a little more natural you can spread the fingers apart slightly make them different lengths things like that i think this is looking pretty good but i want to have some knuckles so i'm just going to select all the fingers right here like that and then right click and subdivide and we're going to add two cuts right there so now we have some knuckles also and looks a little broken from the side so i'm just gonna raise that up a little there and now we have some hands and if you go into wireframe and turn off optimal display for your subdiv over here you can actually get a look at the topology and it's actually pretty good this is something that could be animated and this would be a lot harder to model we basically just did it by making a stick figure so this is definitely a lot easier one thing to keep in mind too back in object mode if you right click on this and shade smooth it's not going to work you actually have to do that in the skin modifier and just check off smooth shading right here or else it won't work also if we shut off the subdiv you can see that this is actually what we've been modeling the whole time and the subdiv is just smoothing everything out so if you're going for a more low poly look you can definitely do something like that or you can just make it a little lower like this you can also go simple and then add like a smooth modifier or something like that there are many different ways you can approach this if you're looking for something a little boxier like that alright now that we have made this one character let's make one that's a little more complicated so we're going to start the same way with a plane mirror modifier skin modifier and then subdivision surface turn the clipping up to point one right here tap into edit mode make sure you're in x-ray mode like this and then merge everything to the center i'm just gonna run through and basically start the same way we did before so i'm gonna scale this down start a little smaller extrude for some legs like that make sure you mark the root in the center here we have a foot extrude up for the body here's some shoulders some arms extrude up for the neck top of the head and just like before one in the middle and then bevel that and scale both of these out a little and for this one we're going to make like a big muscular guy because uh muscles are kind of more complex shape wise so i'm going to make the head a little smaller just for some contrast now we have to move our point our root point back to the center again right there i'm going to pull that up a little and move these closer so i'm going to scale the chest up quite a bit now at a certain point it stops going outward this way and so one thing that you can do is extrude a point right here and you can see it if you leave it big enough it actually just adds mass you would think that it would kind of be like another arm coming from the center but it doesn't really work that way if you scale it down quite a bit that'll start to happen so you gotta make sure that it's big enough and you can definitely use this for parts that you think should have more mass so right here i want it to look a little wider because right now it's kind of pointy and so we can just scale it on the x right there and we can add another point at the bottom to fine-tune the shape a little scale the shoulders up a little and this guy we're not going to give him hands like before because we already know how to do that so i'm just going to give some basic hands like that and scale that up there we go we're going to loop cut for an elbow and loop cup for a knee right there okay so for some more complex shapes let's work on some muscles so we can add another loop cut in here and scale that up and if you want it to be more on one side than the other just pull it up a little you'll start to get more zigzag shape but you know just go for the the look that you're going for you know you can hit g twice to slide the point along right there that way you still have a straight line if you're going for that so for the forearm right here pull that up a little and i want to make that a little flatter like that and then we can scale this down for some contrast and if you want the elbow to still have a bump in there you can bevel the vertex and just add a third one in there with the scroll wheel and scale up the middle one right there pull it down like that just experiment find things that you think look good so this is pretty dramatic right now and i just want to add a little more definition for the shoulder right here so i'm going to bevel that also i'm just going to set that to 2 right here and we can scale this up move that up and down for different shapes you can see it kind of glitches back and forth so once again you you really do have to experiment with this try to get good results now we have some cartoonishly muscular arms and i'm going to work on the legs a little so for the thigh i want the mask pretty close to the knee right there and the calf the same way i just want it to be skinnier from the front like that and then we can push that back a little add another loop toward the bottom and i'm going to bevel the knee right there that way we can have a little bump for the knee like that and so this is what our second character looks like one other thing that's cool about the skin modifier is if you go over to the modifier panel you see this button create armature so i'm just going to duplicate this before i change anything and if you click create armature it actually puts bones in here for you and if you hit control tab you can actually go into pose mode and start moving this around right here but as you can see the mirror modifier is kind of messing things up so i'm just going to control z out of here and you just need to apply the mirror modifier first right here with ctrl a and then create armature and it'll create it on both sides so if you're trying to make a character that you can just get to posing really quickly this is a good way of doing it and one little trick since we don't have any ik set up here and everything is fk one thing that makes posing a little easier is hitting period and switching into individual origins right here and that way you can rotate multiple bones at the same time this is especially useful for things like fingers so if i press r and then x twice you can rotate multiple at the same time this would be good for quickly animating things like tentacles but it also works really well for things like fingers you can see we didn't have to wait paint or anything like that to get to this point so this is definitely a really fast way of making a character and just getting straight to posing and animating one thing to keep in mind is that when you create an armature that way it's going to create a bunch of bones where you might not necessarily want them like you wouldn't really need one for the top of the head right here so if you are going to use this for a long period of time or for a big project i'd recommend creating the armature that way and then you know going into edit mode and cleaning some of this stuff up and you know doing another like weight paint and stuff manually you'll end up getting a better result in the end but this is a good way if you're trying to just get into it quickly and so this may seem like a pretty simple character but we got to this point really quickly add a face to this and you could immediately start using it i think it's really powerful tool add some textures to this and this character can be done thanks for watching leave a comment below if you have a suggestion for another video and make sure to subscribe so you don't miss the next one that's all for this one see you next [Applause] time

Channel: Joey Carlino

Views: 361,521

Keywords: blender, cg, cgi, blender 2.9

Id: BXSD4LLtKfw

Length: 16min 34sec (994 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 22 2020