Poly Modeling Faces NO SCULPT REQUIRED

g'day everyone dicko here with another kick-ass walkthrough got a pretty fun one here for you people today especially for those who do not enjoy the process of sculpting characters or do not have a tablet to be able to do so that's right you lucky pricks today we are going to start a series on poly modelling characters and it's actually a lot easier than you may think and with the right drawings i either write reference you may be surprised how quick it is to actually get a character done without a base sculpt in fact sometimes i actually rely on this more than actually sculpting out my characters simply for the reasons that i'm going to show you today and one of the big reasons here is simply that it requires less computing power so if you're running a really shitty machine at home or you don't have the budget to upgrade your computer but still want to create some really cool characters this is the method that you will most likely want to try out and i want to reassure you people out there that are going to try this video that the models you produce out of this method are not going to be worse than the ones you would get if you had a base sculpt to work from in fact the quality of the models are going to be almost identical the only difference here is that if you wanted to say bake down some extra details like skin pores wrinkles that sort of stuff you won't be able to do that without a base sculpt but that being said even if you have this model up and ready by the time you want to add those details you will still be able to sculpt those details onto this model using say a multi-res modifier or just chucking it into zbrush up to you and you'll still get a really great result in fact you may even get a better result because you already have the underlying topology to work from so that means that you may in fact be saving time rather than making your job harder because you already have that clean efficient base mesh to work from so even if you don't have the sculpt done you can still rig you can still animate and you can always come back to sculpting the extra detail as a texture map if you really feel that you need to have that detail in your mesh and if i haven't already hinted at this already with the little subtitle at the bottom of my screen you can get the working files from any of these videos coming up on patreon so feel free to subscribe to that and you'll get ad free videos and you'll also get the working files for this series along with anything else i produce in the future so if you want to support the channel and you want to get some cool stuff along the way feel free to sign up otherwise just feel free to like and subscribe if you just enjoy the content all right so let's jump right in and talk about what we need to do to get started very first thing you'll need is a character design so you'll need to have an orthographic character design of at least the front and the side of your character so if you have a face that you want to design make sure you have at least a decent sketch of that character design and that the features largely line up in both the front and the side view so the eyes the ears and the lips for instance they should all kind of be at the same height they should be at the same scale and relatively in line with one another in the front and side um it's almost impossible in my opinion to get a perfectly aligned image unless you are really really careful but at least something that is consistent and easy to read is enough to create something that's really cool now if you cannot draw if you do not know how to draw what i suggest is that you at least try and find some decent reference online of a character that you like if you want to practice at the very least you can find references of orthographic character drawings online and use those as reference if you want to create something completely original but still don't know how to draw then what i suggest is that you find someone that you know that can draw and either give them a peace offering to create something for you or give them actual money and if you're even more broke than that then maybe cook them a nice meal as a thank you or something who knows well once you have that image we then bring it into blender in both the front and the side of you as image planes and then we are ready to start modeling now there's one thing i have to mention about this video uh the first 20 minutes or so around 25 will largely cover the overall loops you need to create in order to build the structure of a functional animation ready face so the loops that you will create to make this work will largely be covered in about 25 minutes that being said this video is going to go for around one hour so the reason why it goes for an hour is because although you can create the loops needed to create the structure of the face fairly quickly a lot of the time spent when building out a character face with poly modeling is just pushing verts around ie cleanup just creating the structure from the existing base that you've created so i'm going to show that process on and off in a time lapse like speed so even though again the video goes for close to an hour the actual time spent on pushing verts around is probably closer to around four or five hours in my case so this is a method that does require patience if you first build out your mesh and you're like why does it look kind of alien like it's most likely because you just need to be pushing around new birds and adding um adding loops where needed to create extra volume so um be aware of that so i will show you when to add loops when necessary but apart from that i'll be doing time lapses where i'm just cleaning up what's already there now speaking of loops the name of the game is about loops and isolating structure isolating points of volume now the big thing that a lot of people who start out doing character modeling fail to do is understand where these loops go and i've talked about this in the past in detail in my previous series on character design now one of the big things you want to try and avoid as a poly modeler especially when it comes to faces is having certain regions of the face having huge amounts of poly density whereas others just don't have any density at all you want to have a fairly consistent mesh density throughout your model and one of the simplest ways to try and maintain that consistent density throughout the mesh is by isolating loops that help you build out volume and structure and these loops also help you avoid the common mistake of many modelers whereby loops end up traveling all over the body that don't really need to even be there in the first place there's so many examples of for instance details from the lips affecting the amount of polys that hit the eyes or for instance um incredible density coming out of the nose up the bridge of the nose around the skull and then having to fix that down the back of the spine those sort of things can be mitigated if you just isolate your loops properly and that will allow you to still maintain volume maintain detail without the nightmare of having to clean up high density meshes in other parts of the body and as you can see from the spinning head that has been showing for the last minute or so the most important parts to isolate are the following the eyes the cheeks the nose the lips the nasolabial crease and finally the ears and the ears are really tricky and i think one of the most important things to try and isolate within its own region because they can really affect the way that the mesh flows from the eyes and the mouth so be very careful about that one but the key point to make from this demonstration here is that each area is fairly relatively isolated to one another if you added a series of loops to maintain volume on the lips they're not gonna really affect any other part of the body if you're gonna add extra detail for the eyelids for instance they're gonna be isolated to the eyelids themselves nothing else around the body again with the nose for the most part adding detail to the nose is isolated to the nose region itself don't be afraid to pause this video have a look at the loops and just really see how things are actually isolated because it really does help and the very final advantage to all of this crap that i'm just been talking about for the last 10 minutes just to introduce this method is that this is all perfect for animation so if you want to rig this character for animation to do lip sync to do acting these loops will help you build rigs that work all right that's also one of the most important things to take home from all this that i've been talking about for the last 10 minutes so enough of this crap let's just get right into it and start modeling this character all right we're going to start with the default cube remove one half with a split and then we're going to go straight into adding our reference planes so just bring in the picture i have it as a single image and i just duplicated it as a null so one on the front view and one on the side view line up the middle of the face to the middle of your world in the front view and then sort of line up the side view to sort of where the ear sits or where the jawline sits center of the head on the side so you'll see me do that in a second bear in mind these are not actual textured uh meshes these are uh images that are just attached to a null so they won't render in the 3d space which is really useful so that's the great thing about nulls in blender is that you can actually attach images to them and use them as references really cool stuff anyway you can also set the projection to only show on the side or front view and you can also bring down the opacity so it doesn't get too in the way of your modeling so tweak with it to how you will go with whatever's most comfortable for you and then once we're ready to go we can start to model out the general i guess you can say circumference of the head it's always a good idea to actually move those also into their own collections so you can actually disable um the interactivity of it so you won't accidentally click on them when you start to model your mic mesh all right line up the well the side of that cube to the side of the head delete the outer edge or out of face and we're going to bring in the edge of the cube to around the mid section of the nose and the reason we're going to do that is so we can build out the circumference of the profile so i deleted the base of that as well so that would leave a hole for the neck and then just start adding some basic uh edge loops in the middle of that so judging it from the structure of the nose the lips and the forehead just add a couple of edges to sort of allow you to build out that structure so you'll see what i do now so inside of you i'm just grabbing those edges i'm bringing bringing them in line with the face and then now just using vert selection i'm lining up the side of the face with that sort of profile adding edges as i go so add as many or as few as you need to get that general circumference or that general profile working in the side view this will help us structure the overall volume of the face and it will also be a good basis to start off for the lips the eyes and the nose you can do the same thing for the back of the head add a few verts when you need to or add a few edges when you need to in the back [Music] and then just pull them into place [Music] the back isn't as important right now but if you feel like you just want to get a general idea of it just add whatever you need now the idea here is not to add too many edges at this stage though just enough that it allows us to get a general profile going i'm not going to include the nose here either not yet at least because we have to extrude that later on down the track so i'm just getting the overall structure of the i guess you almost say the skull but um you can start to see what i mean so even in this stage you start to see that profile come out in the perspective view all right so once we've done that general sort of layout i'm going to add one more edge here just for the lips we can start to actually work out the structure of the um the face fairly quickly so once you've done that have a look around making sure that you're happy with what you've got so far we can now start to extrude out our first loop and that first loop is going to be a part of the lips while the structure that will become the lips the upper lip and the lower lip and the nasolabial crease so this is the first loop that we're going to do and it's just going to be a very simple extrusion out the side bring it down to where the corner of the lip is and then you're gonna have to do a second extrusion to be the corner of the lips do another extrusion to make it even on the bottom and then we're gonna add an extra edge loop at the base of that lip and then fill the gap by pushing f all right once we've done that we can already start to move them into place with the cheek so making sure that you have your orthographic view visible we're going to sort of estimate the depth of the lips by pushing back the image or pushing back the um the verts to sort of fit the sketch and this is why it's really important to have a generally accurate sketch in both the front and the side view to allow you to get that that structure right that volume right so you can see here i also remove the inside faces of that lip because we're going to bring them back later what we've done already though is created the loops that will allow us to create those lips in the future so just again you'll see myself just going through and refining what's already there fairly often is to build out that nasolabial crease so that actual loop will go over the nose and then around to the cheek and it will actually join with the um the lip loops as well so again we're getting that second loop up and running that thing that will isolate those cheeks from the lips so again create that loop in a similar fashion to the lips same sort of structure keeping it relatively symmetrical on the top and the bottom and then start pushing those shapes pushing those verts that you've made to sort of fit the structure of your sketch again having that orthographic picture will help immeasurably and already you can see in the perspective view there that that structure is already starting to take place we're starting to get the um the loops around the cheek and around the um the lips working pretty good well pretty well next step is to get the eye loop and i call this sort of like the incredibles mask loop to go around the face and this will help us isolate the eyes and the upper cheek so again pushing those verts as you go if you want to we then extrude out a loop that goes around the top of the cheek or under the eye up around the eye and then over to the forehead so um again uh that's the third loop that we're isolating so we talked about that in the introduction so there's our initial i guess incredibles loop [Music] and you can see it's always never as pretty when you go into perspective view but it's very easy to fix with such simple geometry the nice thing about this loop as well it also provides the structure for the eyebrows so if you want to get some nice emotive brow shapes you have that sort of masker-like loop that helps maintain that structure some artists don't use this loop um others just prefer to have a single loop around the eyes a single loop around the cheeks and then they sort of link them together in a similar fashion but without that mask shape that's completely up to you both are just as functional and just as useful i just did a fill command across those loops and as you can see it all links up perfectly because we're keeping track of the geometry as we go along and as you may have noticed in this video just a moment ago i also added a single edge on the outer end of the eye to maintain the symmetry of that loop so as you can see the top of the eye has two edges the top of the bottom of the eye has two edges and then the each of the sides of the eye have two edges as well so you have a nice even distribution of geometry so far and that becomes really important in the future when you want to rig because if you want to have a joint based topology you can have an even amount of joints on both the bottom and the top of the eye to allow you to get a nice consistent blink and nice consistent deformation of the eye so i'd like to make sure that the bottom and the top of the eye for the most part have even amounts of faces or edges so you can see it here basically it's symmetrical across the top and the bottom and i think yeah i do think that this is really really important and straight away once i've got this general geometry you can see i've got the eye loop extruded out from that um that incredibles mask loop and now i have the eyelid loop ready to go so the general loops that we were talking about at the side of this video the eyes the cheeks the lips and the nasolabial crease have already been established the only thing left really is the nose and the ears to get our major loops in place now's the time to take stock look at your geometry and just start to tweak what you have alright so tweak what you have don't go too fast um reposition the verts to maintain the volume you need for your character okay that's really really important you don't want to overdo it so once you've done that and you've repositioned everything where you think is sort of the correct place to go you can start to fill out those additional loops so for instance i'm starting to fill out the loop around the eye and filling in some grid structure within the cheek so you can see as i mentioned in my previous videos there's always a grid like set of faces around the outer cheek and what you end up generating from that is a five star pole at the apex of your cheek beneath the eye and at the upper cheek so that's just completely normal that's correct um you know it will give you the structure you need to be able to build out that um that cheek structure i've added two edge loops at the corner of the lips on both the top and the bottom to maintain that symmetry so just like the eyes you want to relatively make this the top spans equal to the bottom spans of your lips that will also help in in the rigging and animation process really important in my opinion makes it so much easier so already you can start to see the structure of the face come to life um i am going to add a eyeball now to allow me to make sure that when i'm modeling out the eye it's going to take shape around the eyeball so i've added a single eye and then i'm going to mirror that with a mirror modifier if you find that the mirroring is not working just apply your transforms and then it will work so be aware of that so with that eye in place we can then go ahead and mirror the face in the same fashion turn on clipping and then we can start to uh frame the eyelid well the basic form of the eyelid around that sphere so pushing those verts to make sure that you know they're sort of sitting just outside the eye of course you're not going to get a perfect mould around the eye yet we just don't have the geometry in there yet to work with but you'll get enough structure to get a decent understanding that if we subdivide it it will sort of follow the structure of that sphere and just take the time be patient and just push those verts around where you think are necessary once you've done that we can start to work out other areas of the face and or add more loops more structural loops where needed so you're doing it on a i guess a level of detail um basis so when you need to add those structural loops then add them so for instance i just added them now on two on the top two on the bottom to allow me to build out that volume around that eyelid all right so i'm only adding things when it's absolutely necessary and i'm doing it in a very considerate fashion so i'm not just haphazardly adding loops all over the place like some people would do i'm trying to make sure that the work that i put in now won't give me grief in the future that's one of the most important things in my opinion that is so overlooked when it comes to modeling a lot of modelers will say oh just do whatever you need to do to get the structure right first then fix it later why would you do that it's just a pain in the ass all right so now you can see here that because we've established that eyelid loop we can easily start to add volume around those eyelids whilst maintaining isolation of those lips they're not traveling all around the face they're now self-contained within the eyelid area and that will help you prevent any egregious balance issues in the mesh and at every stage of this process i'm always going back to those front and side views to make sure that my edges and what i create is lining up with the sketch all right that's really important because it helps to make sure that what you're going to create is in line with the design you want to make so always switch between your front and side views sometimes in my case i like to have all three present at some time or another other times i like to break it up and have a far away view to make sure that what i'm looking at isn't um ridiculous and then i add detail when needed so you can see here that i've actually added uh three extra loops in that eye area because you need quite a little bit quite a bit of volume to be able to work with within the eyelid area and although i said this is not a sculpting video i still use sculpt brushes with the mouse to smooth out and redistribute those edges as needed um this is not a sculpting method it's just me clicking away i'm not doing anything particularly precise it's just a faster easier way to get your edges and your faces redistributed faster than tweaking every single vert one by one because it just takes ages you don't need a tablet for this to work you can just use a mouse but it's still miles faster than if you were to move every vert um individually even if you're using soft select it's still faster once i've done that i'm just starting to work out the volume of the brow so i already have the structure there to allow me to do that and also the forehead so just moving those verts around in this case i am moving around individually because there's not many to work with whereas with the eyelid there's plenty there already there's a bit of density there and you kind of need that density in this case if only to allow you to be able to make blinks and rig it in such a way that you have that flexibility they will stretch out and become more uniform as you deform them the key here though is that when you need that density it's contained within those regions where density is required so eyelids lips etc notice i'm not giving you absolute precise uh step-by-step instructions here because it's really dependent on the character you're creating the kind of detail you want to get out of your character and the kind of defamation you want it to have so you need to get a general understanding of what you want to create in order to work with this technique that being said it's up to you you have a lot of freedom in this in this method as well so feel free to change it up uh from what i've done so far now let's move on to the lips i've done a quick extrusion of the lips to get that volume that first initial loop and then i've scaled it down flat that loop is actually flat um and now i can actually add the loops around the lips so sorry that you didn't see that i forgot to record that area it's literally an extrusion inwards and then flatten those lips and that allows you to get that loop going around the lips that you can um start to build out that volume again it's the exact same loop that's already there all i've done is added an additional loop and then shaped those edges to match the lips so there's no complexity there it's very simple extrude inwards align and then match according to the sketch and then to add additional volume you just have to add more loops so add a few loops to maintain that volume and as you can see just like the eye when i add those loops they stay within the lip area they don't extend out to the cheeks they don't extend up to the nose the majority of the volume comes from the loops that are self-contained within that lip area bear in mind we will still have to add a few vertical spans down the bottom and the top of the lips to get the structure of the chin and some of the nose but majority speaking it's all about that circular loop that goes around the lips to maintain volume okay once you've got that general shape sorted for the lips we can now move on to the nose so we're going to do an extrusion of the nose to get that structure out and then we're going to start to form the loops that are involved around the nostrils and around the base of the nose now this can be a little bit confusing for some people but with a little bit of patience and a little bit of um i don't know just analysis you'll be able to sort it out pretty easily i think [Music] okay so the first initial extrusion for the nose will take place uh just at the just above the midsection of the eye on the vertical and at the base of the um the upper lip so select the faces as you see here and you'll be able to get a decent extrusion so you don't want to go too high you don't want to go up to the bridge of the eyebrow but somewhere um just below the eyebrow is a good estimate i reckon so something like this extrude out and then just shape what you already have in accordance to the nose structure that you have for your sketch okay so there is a little bit of cleanup involved here so we're going to delete the upper faces of that extrusion so select those delete those and we're going to re-attach that um the span that i have selected here to the bridge of the nose so add a span as well if we have to to maintain a little bit of structure on the bottom and the top of the nose so this one will actually go around the structure of the nose and start merging those together so the reason why they add an extra span on the top of the head is because we added an extra vertices when we extruded so we need to maintain that edge flow so then just start to mold what you have to the rest of the um the sketch doesn't have to be too accurate but enough to get an idea of where you want to be for the design now if you um if you just want a simple nose that doesn't need nostrils this is about as far as you need to go especially if you want to go for that sort of soft anime style nose that doesn't really have any volume this would be enough and you can just sort of sculpt that into place but in this video we're going to do nostrils so we're going to add a bit more structure a bit more volume so once we've cleaned up our distribution of vertices we will start to add that structure afterwards another now this is another good stage where you can kind of take stock and look at the structure of what you've built so far and make any adjustments so if you don't like the volume of the cheeks or the um where the lips are sitting at the moment this is a good time to do that because the geometry is still simple enough that you can edit it without any issues and um because it's not so dense you can also sculpt it and it will change things a lot quicker than if you had more geometry so you can see here i'm just going through and just cleaning up what i can and just making sure that you know what i have is in line with the sketch so the sides of the nose and the bridge in those do need a little bit more volume so i've added a loop that spans over or sorry under the nose and up to the skull and you can see that it's starting to get a little bit dense around the skull area and eventually we will compress this or eliminate some of those spans at the top of the head whilst also providing a little bit more structure around the bridge of the eyebrows so that little section above the nose but below the forehead that little part that compresses when you frown or get angry will create that structure that will give you the volume you need to be able to mold that so again now i'm starting to add some loops around the um the the cheek area or the lower cheek and the nasolabial crease and i'm starting to mold the shape of the nose before i add any extra loops inside the nose itself so just getting that volume right first before i start to add extra complexity and again going through and cleaning up as i go along is also really important so when i say cleaning up i mean like just molding what i have to fit the volume of the sketch [Music] [Music] now once i've done that it's now time for me to build out an isolating loop for the nostril so what i've done is i'm in setting a series a single loop to form that nostril i push ctrl b to make sure it um doesn't extrude inwards at the center of the face as well and that has given us the structure we need to create the nostrils nice thing about this as well is that it stays within the nostril area itself so you get a natural curvature within that area when it comes to rendering it looks really natural we'll show you how efficient this is just by pulling that smooth tool it already starts to form that extra volume and just like always once you've made some sort of major change in this case a major loop um to your model go through clean things up as you will see what you can get out of what you've already got existing um before adding any additional geometry so if you're happy with what you got here this is a point where you can stop if you don't want to add nostrils but you still want to have a little bit of volume this is probably the perfect time to just say oh yeah that's good enough i can move on to something else um so yeah it really depends on what your design is also making take note of what i'm doing here with the lips if i'm adding uh spans to our top lip i'm adding spans to the bottom of the lip so i want to try and keep that symmetry going on be conscious of it because again it really helps in that uh in the future when it comes to rigging then i'm just jumping into sculpt mode and just using the smooth tool to just quickly um roughly smooth out parts where i need to i'm adding loops around that nasolabial crease and the cheek to add volume where i need to but again it's staying isolated to the cheek it's not traveling up the face it's not going down the neck it's not going around into the ear it's isolated to that cheek area and that allows me to sculpt that out add volume when i need to so now it's time to think about adding nostrils and it really is again case-by-case basis depending on what your design is but here you can i've decided to keep in my thought process in this video to show you um some of the trial and error um practices that i go through when it comes to these sort of things so you can see here i'm trying to figure out oh maybe it's starting to look a bit dense up the top of the skull so maybe some redirection is required so what i've done i've actually deleted the bottom of the nose and i'm actually re-linking some geometry to basically reduce the amount of spans going up the face so just a quick deletion of some uh faces and then redirecting some of those spans to fit with the geometry that i have for the lips so again you can see i'm just deleting some geometry because i don't really need it anymore and i've re-linked that with a merge so again this is completely down to your needs so again case by case basis but at the same time i'm also being conscious of my loops i'm trying to make sure that if i'm going to delete something i'm not going to delete major loops so you can see that around the nostrils that loop still exists if i were to click that edge loop it would span right around the nose that result the amount of density going up through to the skull is way less than what it was previously that gives us a lot more leeway to add geometry where we need to and get a more consistent mesh so i've added back a few things now that i've done that deletion and now i have i think i have the geometry i need to be able to construct that nostril so you can see here that um with a little bit of trial and error a little bit of thinking about it now i can start to um build out that nostril and the cool thing about this um this method here that you may be watching here is that the nostril naturally curves upwards into the nose into the nostril so that that loop around the top of the nostril loops back up into the nose so you get automatic structure out of that which is really really useful and just with a little bit of tweaking we can start to work out the shape of those nostrils and the shape of that nose and you can see here that uh right now the face still looks a little bit alien like but with a little bit of sculpting a little bit of um tweaking of the verts you will start to get the structure you need honestly at this point the answer isn't to add more geometry but to push and pull the geometry that already exists all right that's why i'm speeding up the footage i'm not really adding any extra geometry i'm just working with what already exists in the mesh [Music] it's at this point in my opinion that i feel like the nostrils need a little bit more volume so the easy trick for me in this case was to basically just um bevel out an extra loop for the nostrils themselves and what we end up getting is another isolated loop to allow us to build out volume without affecting the rest of the model [Music] [Music] [Music] okay for the tip of the nose i felt like they needed a little bit more structure so what i've done i've selected a bunch of faces i've done another inset and then i push that forward and i have basically a analogous extrusion so then just with a little bit of tweaking i now have enough structure for the tip of the nose to create any sort of shape i need so maybe a button those or just making a little bit more pointier offering a little bit more structure and volume in that area again not affecting the rest of the model [Music] it's at this point that i have to make a judgment call do i follow the sketch exactly or do i start to look at the model in 3d and see where the problems lie and in my opinion the problem at the moment with this particular character is that the eyes are far too far back in the skull so i've moved them forward i've gone against the sketch because the sketch is still fairly graphic in the way i've drawn it and i'm going to just adapt what i already have and try and keep it within this scope of the sketch but also not make it look weird so um make sure that when you are ready and when you feel it's necessary to go away from the model um the sketch model at least make any adaptions as needed and you'll find that you know as you work things through you'll get a nice clean uh accurate model now it's at this stage that i want to start to work out the um the top of the head and you can see there's a lot of spans going up to the the skull and i want to reduce that a little bit and i want to do that in a functional way and the way i'm going to do that is by redirecting some of those edge loops or face loops to connect to one another go around the bridge of the eyebrow and then back down to the nose and you may notice that just like in my previous series on character design i sometimes apply the mirror modifier so i can get a cleaner transition between the edges and then i re-apply the mirror so in this case i've brought back the mirror modifier to allow myself to add a few more loops that are symmetrical and you can see now that i'm going to start to delete some um edges here when i start merging things together to allow myself to get that structure and it's a really simple solution just merge three of those spans around the um the tip at the top of the nose and then smooth out and as you can see we get this nice clean uh structure for the um the bridge of the eyebrows to think the part between the two eyebrows and it also reduces the volume of edges spanning up through the skull along with that i've added a few structural loops along the vertical line of the eyes so keeping that symmetrical again i'm adding a few spans on both sides of the eye making sure that it maintains that symmetry so now what we're going to do is create our final loop and that final loop is the one that goes from the eye around underneath the nose and then back up to the other eye so this does require a little bit of redirection of faces so we're going to do is delete some of those faces around the bottom of the nose create an extra edge loop at the base of the nose and then just link that up with a fill and what you'll end up getting is a loop like this that goes from the eye corner around to the base of the nose and then back up to the other eye and then just fill in the extra face that we just deleted and bob's your uncle we're good to go and this helps to reduce um the amount of polyes going down into the lips because we don't want to have too much density up there we want to keep it consistent so again we're trying to maintain consistency here and you can see here again we need to add a little bit of redirection around that nose a little bit so what i've done is um again offering a bit more structure around that nose so um if you get lost just um watch back on this clip see how i've uh deleted and re redirected those um those loops and you should be fine again this is really dependent on whether or not you need to have uh a really strong nose design after that it's just a matter of cleaning up the existing loops more sculpting more softening more pushing and put pulling verts that sort of thing and you can see just how efficient this method is in creating a really functional face design [Music] and it's at this point where we can start to fill out the jawline and this is pretty straightforward just create a few loops at the base of the chin and just link up the loops that you know are already coming down from the side of the face um making sure that you are maintaining a clean edge flow again uh you can see here that i'm just working with what's already there uh merging where i need to and this then grid filling um the gaps basically so being conscious of um your geometry at all times at the very least and then you can see it works out really well you can see here that i have the mirror modifier turned off so in this case i'm going to re-mirror the mesh to get the same symmetry across and then again going through and tweaking what's already there [Music] [Music] now this part is completely optional i decided to add a little bit of a cleft in the um between the lips and this is just a a matter of redirecting some um some faces so completely optional you don't need to do this i just did it to offer myself a little bit more structure around that lip area so again don't have to do this it should be fine being said i'm still being very mindful of making sure that i'm not adding additional loops going around the entirety of the face i'm trying to isolate that loop within that region again maintaining structure without affecting the rest of the face you're hearing me say that a lot today but it's really really important [Music] um [Music] [Music] [Music] so all right let's do an extrusion for the thickness of the eyelids because now we have enough geometry that you know i'm i'm comfortable adding that volume into the inside of the eye just enough to be able to get some fleshiness in that eyelid and you just basically make a series of extrusions back into the base of the skull it's something that you that no one's going to see but by adding that volume you're making the eyes feel a little bit more natural and a bit more fleshy a bit more solid so just enough that um you get that um volume and don't worry about the rest it's all good but you can see that once you turn on subdivision um surfaces it uh really does make a difference and then from there and it's just a matter of tightening up those um those edges making sure they conform to the shape of the eye make sure they also fit the geometry of the design all that sort of crap [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so filling in the skull is probably one of the easiest parts of the process it's just a matter of creating a series of grid like meshes fairly simple link up in logical steps so do the crown of the head link those up then start to fill out the correct the top of the head and then just making sure you're keeping track of your edges link them up as needed and you start to build out that structure um very straightforward stuff um as you can see uh it's not even worth talking about it in too much detail it's just a matter of just working with what you've got and just making sure you're not adding extra edges that will end up going down the face there's plenty of edges that go around in the face already work with what you already have and add them to the skull do not add them to the face alright [Music] [Music] okay just think logically about doing the back of the head and the um the jawline you want to make sure that you have the structure of the jaw and the um the base of the skull links up in a natural position so basically at the base of the ear so that's going to loop around to the base of the ear you can fill in that with a grid fill as you can see and then with what's left you can probably just extrude out the neck making sure that you're also maintaining volume of the skull throughout this process it's always a good idea and again i'm just using the um the sculpt brushes in this case with a mouse i'm not using a tablet here again there's not enough geometry for you to be too worried about using these sculpting tools for that it's fairly low poly so um you shouldn't have any issues just using a very soft brush with a mouse and pushing and pulling verts as you need to all right so for the neck it's just a matter of extruding out that neck add spans around that base of that neck and then just mold it to fit the design all right home stretch the only thing left to do is the ears and in my opinion it is the most difficult part of the entire process um just a few more tweaks with the overall model um again we're going to keep doing this the entire way through anyway but um once we get onto the ears you'll see that it is quite uh interesting all right so as you can see here i've extruded again inwards twice in this case to create two spans of loops that will contain the ear structure from there i'm going to extrude out what i'd like to call the cup of the back of the ear and that will help us build out that um the initial structure for the back of the ear so you don't end up with stretch like ears this will help us avoid that strict ear structure then merge the ends of those at the end and create a single loop in the middle to maintain our quad structure [Music] [Music] okay once you've done that you're going to go into side view and that's when we start to build out the structure in the loops of the ear itself it really depends on the kind of ear you're going to design but in this case i'm going with a semi-realistic approach so you may need to have some reference on hand to sort of determine where your loops will end up going but basically we want to try and work with what we've got and then sort of uh try not to go overboard with adding new loops especially down into the face we want to avoid putting extra loops into the face because they all end up going towards either the eye or the mouth so um i want to avoid that so in this case i'm just looking at the way on off screen and looking at the way that the ear is structured and i'm trying to just estimate where i want to put the loop so this will actually take a little bit of trial and error on your part it took me about three or four tries in my case and in the case of just me doing this every day there's never an ear that i haven't done exactly the same as the previous year so um it's really determined by the design that you're working on um that being said if you like the design that you create for one character don't be afraid to keep that on hand to duplicate across to another character so once you've done it once and you like the topology that you've got there's nothing wrong with you reusing what you have alright so um do it once do it well and then maybe you can reuse it so you can see i'm just working out the basic i guess the peaks and troughs and then i'm working out the dips so in this case the dip at the top of the ear is sort of like a split between two loops so the reason why we have those two spans around the ear at first is because one it does actually add a few extra spans to work with and secondly it contains most of the structure within the ear itself which is great for avoiding any spiraling any crazy stuff going on on the face or on the back of the head as well treat it more like a puzzle than it is a straight and fast method because there really isn't a straight and fast method when it comes to the ears it's sort of just work with the design that you have on hand um if you want to go with super cartoony you don't even have to go this far you can probably just get away with just an extrusion and then mold the geometry to fit the look of your um animation so for instance even in my case with black curtain with the um character eb her ears aren't even attached to the head they're actually just single square planes with a texture on it so it can be as simple as that and then you may look at me moving around the camera uh looking around the the geometry and just that's really just me being um working out my thought processes for the rest of the structure it it does a lot of the time come down to you just moving the camera around seeing where things are going to go how things are structured around the model and seeing things from different angles so it really is important to take a moment take stock of what you've created so far and see if there's any underlying issues and sometimes it might actually be a good idea to even see how it's rendering because the way it looks in the viewport may actually look a lot different to when it looks rendered um so that also takes it's worth taking into consideration so if it looks good in the render and it's not going to be deformed very often you can get away with some pretty average topology that being said i'm still trying to avoid um any egregious uh craziness when it comes to adding extra loops so i've only really added an extra loop up the head and the nice thing about that is that it terminates at the scalp so again it's not traveling around the entire body it's largely just being contained to the region of the ear itself and areas where major deformation isn't going to take place so after you've done that you can really just start to work with the geometry you've just created and just sculpt things into a place sculpt them into the design that you had in mind and if you need to make any other tweaks again just work with what you got and once you're done with the ears you're pretty much done with the face um apart from some things like maybe a mouth bag for inside the mouth or you know eyebrows that sort of thing they can all be done pretty easily um the underlying structure for the face it's basically animation ready at this point you can even texture it you can unwrap it you can rig it and it will all work really well um like i said all you need to do at this point really is just refine what you already got i don't think you need to add any extra geometry unless there's some really specific reasons for it to exist um and sometimes it might even be worth as you can see in a minute a second ago um removing some geometry if you feel like it's not necessary so um yeah it's a back and forth and at this point it's really just about cleaning up what you have and you can see me just working with a lot of what i've got and if you feel like having a little bit of fun with the render feel free to just create a really basic shader in this case i i made the same sort of shader i did for um my previous series where it was on texturing where it was just using the amine inclusion node and a ramp to determine color um color values and add a little bit substance scattering and that was it gives you a good idea of how it kind of looks when you texture it anyway that's it from me um i hope you enjoyed this video if you enjoyed what you watched so far feel free to support the channel by liking subscribing and all that sort of crap if you want to support it even further feel free to sign up for my patreon where i will actually be supplying the working file for this model so this is not for any sort of film or anything like that so you are free to download it use it as you will you can even re-imagine the character to whatever style you want so feel free to sign up there and download these files for your own use apart from that next video will be about creating the body without any sort of sculpting required followed by some clothing and finally the hair and some basic shading so um yeah stick around for that and all i'm going to say for now is catches and have fun cheers

Channel: Dikko

Views: 354,504

Keywords: animation, rig, rigging, armature, blender, blender 2.8, b3d, maya, 3dsmax, c4d, tutorial, learning, 3d, 3d animation, 3d rigging, character, walkthrough, tutorials, tute, beginner, guide, robot, cartoon, animated, no sculpt, poly, poly modelling, step by step, edge flow, mesh flow, face, faces, head, eyes, nose, ears, mouth, neck, blender 3

Id: YCX54Nffuys

Length: 59min 17sec (3557 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 06 2021