Modeling for Animation 06 - Retopologising the Face!

get everyone to cohere with another kick-ass walkthrough this is part 6 of a multi-part series covering modeling for animation and this is a long one everyone so strap in grab a drink get comfy and pay attention because I think this might well be the most comprehensive video on facial topology on YouTube as of the time this thing was published I could have split this up into multiple parts but I figured that would be a detriment to you and to me and I didn't want to do any more editing so that and as you can see this is what we started off with it looks like trashed it's just a mess and then it turns into this ready for animation good for rigging great for doing a facial expression and all that fancy-pants stuff that you would want from a animation character and with a little bit of planning and experimental thinking it joins up seamlessly with the rest of the body that we completed in the previous videos and Before we jump into the modeling side of things I want to do things properly and explain why we're going to do the things in the way that we're going to do it so to start off with I want to talk about how we structure the changes in direction around the face with our edge loops the face itself has many twists and turns in terms of its muscle structure and the way it goes around the face and these changes are represented by these five star poles around the structure of the face and generally speaking they're in these locations the tip of the nose bridge the corner of the eye on the outside the middle of the cheek the point in which the nose meets the cheek and the upper cheekbone and all these five points represent changes in direction of the musculature of the face around the eye as it transitions into the cheek the jaw the nasolabial crease and the mouth and what you end up with when you start working out your edge loops is this general pattern of a sort of pentagonal shape around the eye and within that pentagon you end up with continuous edge loops to fill out the upper cheek lower eyebrow and the eyelids now for the mouth we have a similar situation we end up having a sort of star down there and near the change the direction of the musculature near the jaw and the mouth and appended one of these stars blue because it's kind of a circumstantial sort of changing direction so it depends on how you structure the cheek and the edge flow of the mouth the same can be said for this edge loop that I'm about to create here with this green line this one can be optional but I like the habit because it helps to frame the eyes nicely and I find when I animate squints and smiles that this loop really helps to keep the structure in line and for the most part this ends up being their sort of intersection in the change of direction between the cheeks the forehead and the mouth or the mouth itself I like to have one edge loop that goes over the nose and then around the chin to form that nasolabial crease which then in turn gives us a nice way to nest in the edge loops for the lips now let's talk about the overall structure of the eyes and lips so what I like to have when I model my eyes and lips I like to have a degree of symmetry throughout the structure of the upper and lower lips and eyelids so I like to consider the area of the eyelids to have four general quadrants so the upper left the upper right the lower left and the lower right so I'd like to make sure that there's a degree of organization there and that applies to the lips just as much as it applies to the eyes and we'll get into that in more detail soon along the cheek this is pretty much the only place where you'll get sort of a meshed like structure so I quite add up structure that is pretty uniform across the board there's no loops there so to speak and then we have a overall loop that travels around the face to sort of frame the jawline and the forehead now let's talk about one of the most important parts of the face mesh and that is the amount of spans between the upper and lower eyelids and lips now some people will say you need this very specific amount to at least get the right amount of deformation but I think that's kind of and it's circumstantial to whatever you're building but there is one thing I like to keep consistent and that is an even amount of spans on the top and the bottom of the eyes and lips so it is ten spans on the top of the eyelid I want 10 spans on the bottom of the eyelid to match and that makes rigging way way easier and it gets I've kept that symmetry across each four quadrants of the eye so in this case I have three spans in each quadrant and it's probably some modelers out there that are thinking oh man that's just too pedantic but my response then is you you try and rig it then by having that nice symmetry between the upper and lower eyelids and mouth rigging is way way way easier and I say this with absolute conviction because I've had the rib mind for years both professionally and on personal projects so you can see here what you should end up with is this nice circular infinite loops around the eye so if you have any spiraling going on that means you up but you need to rebuild it and the fourth just like the body will have a span that goes right down the center line at the base and that is a non interrupted loop and that means no stars in the center line of the face because again it's a total nightmare to work with and you can have a single loop that goes around the nose and that will help you build out the structure if you want to and it also provides the necessary volume you need to extrude out the tip of the nose and the nostrils and with the way that I build out the structure of the cheek I usually have a span that ends up traveling from the eye under the nose and some reason it just works better for me it deforms better I think it's a cleaner mesh and the distribution of the quads around the cheek and the intersection of the lips tends to be a bit cleaner in my opinion though I will say this is not the be-all and end-all in terms of edge flow design on the face in some cases they can just travel down to the opening of the lid but that's up to you and speaking of the lip we have a edge loop that sort of follows a nasolabial crease of the face so that's the crease between the nose and the lips and the cheek and inside that we're going to basically have some infinite loops that sit within that nasolabial crease to form the lips so just like the eyes we end up with that sort of infinite loop structure that isn't spiraling so if it's spiraling again you up but you need to rebuild it and you may notice on the top corner of the upper lip I've added back in that five star that gives me that change in direction that allows me to build out the muscle structure of the lips and then we have again an identical amount of spans on the top and bottom lip with a lot of those spans traveling up the nose to the skull and we can reduce those polygons at the base of the skull as we build out that topology so here just to demonstrate even amount of words across the top and the bottom lips and then some more spans in terms of edge lips going around the structure of the lips to fill those out that's about it when it comes to the overall structure of our edge flow on the face and you can make some concessions when it comes to this sort of design you can look at other people's approaches to this but generally speaking the underlying pattern is usually the same and again I'm just adding some loops here just to show you how the ear is connected it's basically just as you know an extrusion of faces basically but again there's plenty of ways to sort of adapt this to different designs and you know you've got to add nostrils for instance you just have to think cleverly about where you place that extrusions for the nostrils well yeah this is the general structure we're aiming for for our edge flow going forward and it's really important that you grasp the the reasoning behind it all otherwise you're going to get really lost very quickly okay let's jump into the actual modeling process so we're gonna create a single plane and then in it edit mode we're gonna split it in half and delete the other half and then we're going to basically mirror that with a mirror modifier so we have a mirrored version of that plane so we only have to model one half of the body all right so just line that up and then we're going to turn on snapping to faces in the menu there and then we're going to quickly grab each verts and sort of align it with the circumference of the eye and again let me read it right this is not the only way to do this sort of if you have a better way or a way that you find more comfortable do they go ahead and follow it but as long as you get that structure right it doesn't matter how you build it all right I turned on in front in the viewport settings for that object so I could see exactly what's going on without any obstructions so I'm just splitting up that quad again into one half and I'm just walking out the sort of area in which the eyes are going to sit in so I'm getting that but sort of pentagonal structure up and running as early as I can so these five corners are basically going to represent that changes direction that occurs around the structure of the eye and here I just being a little bit down tip about the placement but you know it can be rough it's rough and ready we're just blocking out things at this stage I added another subdivision and now I'm going to insert to create that first loop that represents the eyelids and then I deleted those inserted faces and now I'm just going to make sure I have a symmetrical amount of spans across that structure as always so making sure that's nice and clean so the top and bottom should have the same amount of faces on the top and the bottom and now just shaping those verts individually to make sure it's nice and clean it does always we're not working with a lot of geometry at the start we're keeping it nice and simple so we don't get lost inside of all that complexity [Music] okay once you're happy with that shake of your eye we're going to extrude out our first span that goes from the eye and under the nose turn on clipping so it doesn't overlap and this will make sense as you see it unfold but basically it will help us structure out the the nose and the nasolabial crease to get that working the way we want and there's at this stage that you can if you want to add a skin wrap modifier to your mesh and it will help just keep the mesh sticking to your underlying sculpt okay we're gonna add a single subdivision to the top and bottom lip on the inside of the eye and I'm going to extrude inwards to the center of the face to bridge the gap between the eye by which is also no coincidence that it also forms the bridge of the nose all right I'm also going to extrude one span down down the center line to help us form the structure of that mask look we talked about earlier and what's the pattern of extrusions I just did down but creating that first star hole that I talked about during our little analysis ie it's our first change in direction from the eye loupe into the sort of cheek loop that we talked about earlier and of course let's take some time to sort of just reposition things to make life a little easier okay let's lock out our next change in the direction which we're going to extrude a single face up and to the side and fill out that bridge of the nose so as you can see we have our second change of direction on the upper eye which interfaces with the bridge of the nose and the forehead and now let's just do some extrusions on the side of the face to get that mask shape up and running so we're just going to fill out that loop I'm going to merge some verts to keep that flow up and running so you could see that live taking shape and we're gonna and then we're gonna close off that loop by filling up that bottom face and now if we check out the first successful loop we got that mask shape up and running we got our inner loops off the eyelids up and running so now we can start to worry about filling out the cheek area so let's get that nasolabial cheek up and running so we're going to do some extruders there we're going to fill up that top of our lip there with a few extrusions and fills as you can see if I select that face loop we're building out our second loop around the mouth which will form our nasolabial crease so just a few extrusions around the circumference of the lips and we've got that loop going around the mouth just as I planned at the start of the video again just a bit of cleanup just repositioning a few verts to give me an idea of where I want that crease to sit so thickening that up a little bit now let's construct the loop that will form the destruction of the lips so it is extruding words and there we have it we have our earth major loop up and running I begin to see the pattern of rice I know I bloody and so again just spending some time to rearrange some verts not adding any extra geometry to skiing that structure in where I want it to be and making sure it's all very consistent so you can see the symmetry arise in that lip loop there and I've added a new loop in between that nasolabial loop just sort of add some more structure to the face so now we have all these loops designed exactly where I want them to be so with the existing loops now in place let's add some structural spans across the lips and the face so as you can see I'm making sure I'm staying consistent across the bottom and top of the lip I'm making sure that all those loops staying consistent so I'm just now structuring those verts in place just moving them around to fit the form of my face so again adding a few more spans across the eyes making sure it's consistent across the top and the bottom of the eyelids and that could take a little bit of trial and error I'm just getting that right they can see I added two loops in between every major span except the edges there and the amount of spans that you add is completely up to you it really depends on what you're building this for if you want less spans or more spans in mind then go for it as long as you have that underlying structure going on it really really doesn't matter because you've already blocked out those essential loops for the eyes mouth and cheek and this is especially important if you plan on going for a lowboy look or a high poly local you know you're building this for a game asset or a VFX asset the amount of extra geometry add and really make a difference in the presentation of your model so be conscious of what you're building it for as you can see I'm just making sure that I'm consistent across my loops I'm making sure that those spans are equal on the bottom and top and now I'm just rearranging some of those verts to make sure I get that underlying structure up and running and now I'm adding some loops to form the lips and eyelids and these basically just serve as structural or volume enhancing loops they aren't going to be cycling around the entire body they are basically infinite loops within those spans and then of course we were starting to extrude up that cheek and we've made that fourth hole just where we said it would happen in the middle of the cheek and for the bottom of the chin we're gonna build out the structure of the jaw line and again we're about to extrude out that next pole that changes the direction of the mouth and cheek structure into the jaw structure [Music] and with a few extrusions here I'm building out that gritted structure for the cheek mass and just rearranged that a little bit to get it looking a little bit more even and now we're about to make that loop that travels around the circumference of the face so with a few edge extrusions I'm going to map out that structure and then just fill in that gap and now we're starting to get that facial loop that goes around the entire jawline and around the forehead and if you didn't notice during that process we just created the fourth Pole that intersects the change of direction between the upper cheekbone and that lower corner of the eye loop and now I'm just extruding out some edges to be able to fill out that forehead structure and get that final lift that travels around the entirety of the face and now I'm just jumping into scope mode to just smooth out and even out that quad structure and with the skin wrap modifier turned on you can see it's sticking to the mesh quite nicely obviously there's some niggles there that we have to fix up but that's okay and you can see that wireframe there we're getting that structure exactly how we described it at the side of the video and of course just make sure that your centre line is nicely merged and there's no overlapping or clipping issues with the centre line of verse because that's potentially going to become a real problem if you don't keep an eye on that so you can see there's a bit of overlap so we're just cleaning all those up making sure they're not overlapping and you can really see that structure take hold already at this early stage so now's the time to sort of apply that first skin wrap modifier and then make a new one because then we can sort of fix in the current geometry in its place and then allow it to sort of breathe so to speak when we sculpt upon it or move things around it's kind of hard to explain but if you try and experiment with it you understand so there's a time we can potentially start working on the nose so very simple sort of structure with this stylized character all I do is sort of make an extrusion toward the center and then rearrange the verts to fill out that nose and the nice thing about this method is that at least with this stylized nose there's a continuous loop that forms that structure so I don't have to worry about cleaning up or redirecting any loops all the volume for that nose is sitting within that lip structure which is really nice and this simplified approach to building up the nose is perfect with something like an anime character I stylized this new style character that doesn't have nostrils that kind of thing if you plan on adding nostrils to your characters nose you may have to look up how to sort of work out that lip structure it could be as simple as adding some extrusions to the nostril or it could be something more complicated but it really depends on your research and how you approach that in a problem-solving manner so adding some extra edge loops down the center line of the face to fill out that nose and I'll link that up with the lip loops so now we have a nice clean amount of space going across the center line of the nose down to the lips and we're just filling out that core structure fixed make sure it stays as a Quadra structure by adding a few spans and then filling so that's looking pretty good with the shrink wrap modifier enabled we're just going to sort of sculpt out that nose a little bit let those faces and boots relaxed a little bit and get a more even quad structure across the face and of course make sure that center line structure is nice and clean so there's no overlaps I mean that's the worst thing you want when you start modeling adding a few loops in the center of that nose so keep that structure nice and volumous smoothing out with a few soft brush strokes off the smooth tool in scope mode and applying that shrinkwrap modifier so again more evenly distribute those faces and then adding a new shrink wrap modifier and you can see how much that makes a difference when you apply it every now and then reapply a new modifier that is so using the sculpt tools to smooth out the distribution of those spaces you're going to get a nice even distribution of the mesh across the face and that's really what you want across the board and of course once you've done sculpting out and smoothing out those vertices just check on a shrink wrap modifier and keep on moving so now I'm just adding some extra volume where necessary I might add a few loops around the jawline and the forehead but that of course is optional for you you don't have to do it it's really dependent on your model and the design you're working on so long as the lips aren't spiraling out of control you're on to a good thing I think so you can see I'm modifying the existing geometry that I have to sort of prepare for the next stage of the modeling process which is to fix up the skull and the neck so I'm just sort of lining things up to where I think they ought to be so where verts should lie and now I'm gonna extrude out around the circumference of the ear and the face is in which you do this is completely up to you because it depends on the design you're working with so it doesn't have to be these exact places that you're extruding from so long as you do it in a clean and orderly fashion it doesn't really matter so my whole philosophy about consistency and symmetry also applied to the ear so I'm going to keep this spans identical across that giant hole that will become the ear so two spans in each side in this case and I may want to alter this in the future but you know if it's enough for your model that's okay and that home will become the basis of the extrusion of the ear in the future but first we're going to work out the structure of the skull and the neck and right now I'm just basically cleaning up my geometry a little bit just put him into place where I think they should supply the the back of that whole of the ear should sort of sit behind the ear for that future extrusion so just getting that in line and just you know playing with with what's already there [Music] okay it's now time to block out the top of the scalp so I'm going to extrude some faces up and over to the top of the skull and I'm going to have it meet at the center of the skull and merge using that mirror modifier add a few spares to fill out the volume there and the skin wrap will do a good job of that apply that make a new modifier and we're good to go all right with that overlying structure up and running on the top of the skull it's now time to join it up with the front of the face so if to add a few spares and be a bit clever about this so there's going to be a so this is where that final fifth Pole from the eye where the change in the direction from the skull to the face happens so that that that last so that last piece of that Pentagon structure of the eye comes into play right now so ultimately what I'm trying to do is create a loop that goes around the crown of the skull so you'll see that happen as I sort of fill out this structure you can see by the way I redirected those faces those loops are now sort of traveling around that circumference of the skull and you can see me turning off and on that skin wrap modifier and sort of playing with that evening out the our quads making sure it's nice and clean and even adding another loop around the jawline using that as a structural loop as well and of course fixing up that centerline make sure it's not all up so there's the front of the skull down now it's time to did the back alright so don't make sure that those three spans that I created all four spans that I created that go around the top of the skull travel in the same direction around to the back so I don't get any like redirection so of faces that are you know flow around so I'm making sure that there's a consistency in the front and the back of the skull as well and you just noticed that I also added a change in direction at the back of the skull to be able to you know get those loops traveling in a way that I want and I'm sorry if it's the video footage is a little bit fast but if I was playing this at regular speed we'd be here all day so if you ever have to look at this and just take a pause let's pause the video inspect my method here and then continue on from there okay now that we've got that change of direction put in place I'm just filling in some faces that we can now continue the spans over the top of the skull down to the neck and obviously by a lot of things it looks like we have way too many faces going down to the back of the neck so we'll have to fix that in the future [Music] so just smoothing that out again making sure that distribution is nice and clean as you see I'm starting to get some niggles there so apply that string crap reapply it and then move on [Music] picks up that center line again as always and sometimes the shrinkwrap modifier can get in the way of that so sometimes just going to apply that shrink-wrap and then fix it after the back apply it fix up that center line and then you can bring back that shrink wrap if you want to okay now there's clearly way too much geometry that's going to be traveling down to the back of the neck compared to the front so we need to reduce the amount of geometry that travels down so to do that we're going to collapse a few spans into this structure that you see here so go to the hands actually and then we're going to delete those extra loops so we reduce that geometry and effectively clean up the back of the head and the reason I'll do this on the top of the skull is because the top of the skull isn't going to deform or isn't even going to be seen so having some redirected loops up there aren't really going to affect anything in the long term and now we can sort of fill up that back of the skull with the right amount of space or just count spans you need to fill it with fix that up and then start off by filling up that center line and then we have four spans at the edge of the ear there so I'm going to add four spans to the side here the middle and now can just grid fill that with the right amount of space and we're good to go perfect nothing too fancy for the back of the head [Music] [Music] all right let's get that neck up and running so you're going to fix up the bottom of the jaw first like the flesh underneath the jaw bone so we're gonna have that travel around like the the jaw is already doing now and then we'll extrude out the neck after we do that so just getting that structure in follow that same edge flow from the the front of the drawer there [Music] fill that interpret with the appropriate faces just like that all right and now we've pretty much ready to extrude out an X truck sure but first I might add a little bit more volume to the base of that skull before I extrude it out making sure that's all good to go so yeah just adding another loop just around the base of the neck before I extrude out Nick and of course this is entirely up to you how you do this as long as you got that underlying edge flow working it does really matter all right just smoothing that out now just getting that up and running for our neck extrusion and of course the neck extrusion is probably the easiest part of this whole process just extrude down and then add some space [Music] once you're happy with that extrusion just add some spans and then sort of sculpt in or you know strip wrap that again depending on whether that works it's up to you just get that next shape up and running and we can move on so throughout this video you might notice me apply and then removing and then applying the mirror modifier as well sometimes it's useful to apply the mirror modifier so you can smooth out the sculpt out on an overall basis and then sort of delete one half and bring it back I find that to be a pretty effective way to fix up certain sort of things like the neck and the gap between the eyes so again you can see me just cleaning up a few things I've applied the mirror modifier temporarily just so I can work through the existing geometry smooth things out make sure it's nice and clean so the distribution of the the faces are looking pretty good so far so now it's time to remove one half of the face and I'm going to bring back the mirror modifier so I'll continue on the ears and the mouth so for the mouth we're just going to pull down the existing geometry for now just to get it in line with the opening of the lips so like the eyes there is a certain point in which I like to make sure that there's a level of symmetry so there's you know four quadrants involved so making sure you understand where the corner of the mouth is and where that sits is really important choosing the right vertices to represent that is also really important a lot of people starting out doing faces almost accidentally extrude the lips out in an incorrect fashion like almost with a square fashion rather than a loop so try to avoid that so now that we've got that structure in place we can add a few more loops and just using vertex snapping with all face snapping with the magnet tool we're just snapping up those lips to get that structure in there and the lips himself require quite a bit of volume as well so don't be afraid to add more lips to the lip structure they aren't going anywhere they're just gonna be cycling around themselves so as long as they're not spiraling out of control you should be fine and again I'm adding some vertical loops down the center line of the lips just so I have some more volume to play with and again this is optional for in your case so it depends on the kind of design you're working with and that's the tricky thing about faces I can't exactly handhold you through the entire process step-by-step with every tool and there are other tools that can make your life easier as well I mean obviously there's the new poly build tool that I'm not using in the entirety of this video so if you find tools that are more comfortable to use or you want to try something different go for it but yeah going back to the structure of the face it really depends on the design you're working on so you know that's why it's really important to understand the way that the lip structure works because at least then you can adapt you know the poly building to your own design and understand where the loops lie so the all things considered the instructions I gave you at the start when we analyzed our mesh at the beginning before he built it is actually more important that this process of me showing you how to actually build it so understand the concept before you jump into the execution but enough of that going back into the modeling process you may have noticed that I actually deleted some faces at the top of the ear hole so I actually deleted some faces to give me some more geometry to play with when I extruded so I straightened out the ear shape and now in a very basic kind of way I'm just shaping out the ear based on that extrusion it looks kind of tricky at the moment but that will be solved momentarily as we start to optimize the geometry so I'm just selecting the faces on the bottom on top of the ear and just flattening those out as I plan on rig filling that like so so selecting everything there and this is why having symmetry is so important because now in this grid fill and have no issues with that process so I'm now just repositioning that year to match the orthographic views as much as I can and I'm also adapting from the sculpt and the the orthographic view at this point because the shrink-wrap tool with stuff like ears and eyes and mouths it doesn't work very well with that method so now it's really about modeling by eye rather than relying on the sculpt so I'm adding a few loops to the ear structure along the vertical to sort of add some more volume and this is not the only way to build the ear mind you I mean if you don't say more realistic in mind or something like that this method might not work for you so really studying how you can break down that extrusion and the way you've build out those loops is really important when it comes at you and I will admit I had to construct this ear about three times before I got something that I liked and yeah it could be a real pain in the ass I think the ears are probably the hardest part of the entire process to be honest so now I'm just trying to work out the process in which I want to get the inner ear up and running so I'm going to select these faces of the inner ear and then insert them a little bit so I have some extra geometry to play with but we run into an issue we get a sixth star at the corner of the ear and some people this would be fine but for me I can't stand the idea of having them so I'm going to read the rest some of that geometry so I'm merging at the edge of that extrusion or that inset on some verts and then I'm going to delete that new line of edges that we created with that in setting and then it's just a matter of redirecting the edge flow of the upper and lower ear to flow into the air the rest of the mesh I mean this part isn't the best way to doing it but for me it was the cleanest way of doing it so I'm trying to make sure that the edge flow of the upper and lower extra edges are keeping that mouth symmetry up and running so now I'm just redirecting some flow with the knife tool to make sure that all works out so I've eliminated that on that sixth edge star and I've also effectively added enough geometry to the ear that I can start working on adding some volume to that ear on the inside and now it's just a matter of first cleaning up the extra geometry that I added to the cheeks and the mouth so I'll probably sculpt letters out and smooth them out in a second so yeah just fixing up that alignment about edges so that's all consistent and clean from the top and bottom [Music] that's a bit of process just to smooth that out redistribute those faces a little bit yep bringing back those cheeks all right so now onto the ear again and because my approach for this ears fairly stylistic my method is also going to be pretty simple so I'm just going to select some faces that I want to get the inside of the ear up and running and then I'm going to sort of basically just extrude out some faces to get that inner ear up and running so that little bit that I haven't selected it becomes a little lobe of the inside of the ear and then I just basically work with that geometry to get the shape that I want and smoothing and adding some lips on the inner ear to get that smoothness the way I want and that's about it for this year very simple sort of structure but if you're going for a realistic year this is probably the worst method you can go for so again depends on your design so do the research find the right edge flow and do your best to get the result you want and yeah I mean honestly there could be a whole video series just on re toppling the ear alone so just think about that when it comes to designing your characters so just be aware now that I've got enough geometry it's just a matter of just sculpting that you know that shape of the ear to the style that I'm looking for [Music] [Music] so yeah just a quick little loop inspection making sure everything's up and running in with the goat so as you can see not much in terms of complexity in the loops and this one I found is kind of interesting because it loops in the exact same way from the bottom lip to the bottom of the eyelid so it actually terminates in the same spot respectively you can see we have the loops and the lips up and running perfectly structured we've got the loops around the eyes exactly how we describe it a style of video so now we're at the end game here we just have to add some eyelid structure and some inner mouth structure so yeah not that far from done [Music] and making the eyelids have more structure is pretty simple just extrude out an edge loop into the eye socket basically and then you can repeat that a few times just to make sure that strength of the structure is there but that's not where there is to it very simple and some people like to actually merge these edges into a into a start the back of the eye but I hate doing that so that [Music] and again this is an optical thing I like to splay out the back of the edges to sort of have a sort of clef on the on the inside of the eye this helps maintain some volume I find if you're going for a realistic eye you most likely have to think about more edge loops structure stuff around the corners of the eye like the other tear ducts and stuff like that so be aware about that if you plan on doing some realistic character design so now it's on to the mouth bag as they call it so basically we're going to simulate the inside of the mouth with you know extruding out a sort of bag like structure or the inner lip so I'm just extruding out some faces to get that inner lip structure up and running and it's really important that we have this because it helps maintain the volume of the lips when they open and close during animation [Music] they're just playing with the Bert's now trying to get the sort of fleshiness up and running around that inside of the lid and then we're going to extrude out a series of faces that sort of end up terminating as a sort of you know a mouth bag basically [Music] [Music] so now that I've got that overall lip structure out the way on the inside of the lip it's time to extrude [Music] and because we're effectively recreating the the throat of the character we want to have some extra sort of heaven for the tongue and the teeth to sit inside once we get around to modeling those and that will be in another video or two and I'm following the curvature of the neck a little bit and I'm just going to terminate just at the top of the throat because you obviously don't need to go that far [Music] now I'm just turning back on the mirror modifier and then I'm just going to clean up a few things make sure there's no you know intersections or is like that just like we always did throughout this video clean all that out and yeah then move on and now before I finish up mirroring this object I'm just going to clean up some mesh stuff let's show the distribution of faces is nice and clean throughout the model and just to avoid any fuck-ups and you can see I've probably up one bit there from a few attempts at mirroring so I ought to fix that up in the future but for now just cleaning up that mouth bag sculpting it out getting around this in there I mean that's just me being pedantic you don't have to do that but you know it's useful sometimes and now with that mirror modifier applied I'm going to refill that throat make sure you've got the the the grid feel working properly so you don't get any spiraling and that's the face done in a nutshell now it's just a matter of just a bit of polish adding lips where you need it and yeah just cleaning things up as we go and let's just bring back our original model with all those notes written all over the face and let's inspect it in comparison with our newly made model and look at that all those loops that we talked about the style video or all present they loop around the nose and the chin the lips the five points of the change in direction around the eyes the mesh structure along the cheek and the span or the loop that goes around the entirety of the face it's all there and this is why having a firm understanding of the principles of edge flow for the face are so important okay the final part attaching the head to the body so pretty simple affair I guess you can say I mean there's some planning involved but that's alright so first thing I'm going to do is erase or delete the neck as it was on my original base mesh of the body I've also extended it down a little bit further so I have a wider hole to work with let's move that out a little bit so now we have that sort of clavicle shape going on extrude up to get the base of our neck up and running and now it's time to join the the head to the body so select the head select the body control J and that would join it together alright so first thing I want to do is again I want to bring back the mirror modifier so we have only half the work to do and then the second thing I'm going to add a few spans down the center line of the body see see how useful it is and I'm sure some of you didn't believe that it would be so important but there we are alright so first we're going to merge the front and the back of the neck so we know that at least that centerline is working across the entire body alright it's gonna clean up that crotch just a little bit so in case we merge again and you know I don't want those things to merge on itself because of that looping attribute we have with the mirror modifier all right so that's so good alright so cuz you want to Nick we're going to merge the centerline of our arm down the center line of our Nick so we have it travel up the neck down the center like so okay so here comes the tricky part so obviously at the base of our neck we have way more edges than we have at the top of our shoulders so we need to actually figure out how to reduce the amount of edges at the base of our neck there and we have a similar problem at the front of the neck but the solutions for the front and the back are different so at the front of the neck we're going to redirect some edges to flow around the base of the neck and then back up the neck to the face the nice thing about that method is also it kind of simulates the muscles between the neck as well which is kind of nifty I mean it's not fully accurate but doesn't job so you can see there I just extrude it a change in direction there so that will allow me to get that that redirection of faces down around the neck fill up that edge there and look at that grid feel and we're good to go so we're pretty lucky with the amount of difference there at the front so the back is a little bit more different there's way more edges at the top than there is at the bottom so what we need to do is collapse some edges so similar to what we did at the top of the skull we're going to merge three spans and then delete two spans at the bottom there count our edges count the top and bottom see if it's all working no we need it we need to actually reduce it further at the top of the neck so we're going to do that once more to reduce those spans select those two spares at the bottom and now we have a nice clean amount to work with so if we fill that in there should be pretty lucky one two three four five done yes so that's about it now it's just a matter about cleaning up the distribution of those faces making sure it's nice and simple quad structure nicely distributed and looking appealing so the neck needs a little bit of work sculpting that that neck a little bit I applied the mirror modifier in this case so it made it a little bit easier to sculpt and especially those spares down the middle of the body now we need to redistribute those a little bit make sure they're evened out along the back and the front of the body but this is pretty much the end here I think we're pretty close they're done first you know adding volume where necessary of course cause you added more geometry down the middle of the body so it's time to clean that up a little bit Rita shared those vertices along the back and that should be plenty enough geometry there to sort of add some sort of volume to the back as well so you know take some time to modify the back and you know fill it in sculpt it out you know get the shape you want and again I'm doing the same thing for the neck as we speak and the neck looks a bit long so I might bring that head down a little bit but otherwise we're good to go and here's a little test with our mixer mode obviously mixer mode doesn't do face animation but it can animate the head a little bit alright so in about what an hour's worth of tutorial izing we've gone from a headless jack to a person with eyes ears mouth and that can be animated and reaped now look at that ah she's doing it she's dancing and that's how you reach ombo in a head in a nutshell I know it's gonna be frustrating the first time you do it you're gonna run into different kinds of problems and you will have to problem-solve on the go but I think you can pull it off and I'm looking forward to what you achieve so until then catches and have fun

Channel: Dikko

Views: 101,207

Rating: 4.9633131 out of 5

Keywords: animation, rigging, 3d, modeling, retopology, retopo, blender, blender3d, b3d, dikko, character design, character modeling, character, cartoon, learning, tutorial, mesh, walkthrough

Id: SwM19PgSdCM

Length: 52min 16sec (3136 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 02 2020