Sculpting Disney characters is THIS EASY?

making 3d characters is easy you just give the software a drawing add a ball of clay then match it to the reference give it some paint add some light and render unfortunately it's not actually this easy but you already knew that because this video isn't 10 seconds long now if you want to see how that character was actually made then watch till the end credits and i'll link you right to it because in this video we're going to turn this awesome sketch by cameron mark into 3d we'll look at sculpting painting rendering and more so whether you aspire to work for pixar or you just want to see how this was made stick around because i'm sure there's something in this video for you if you don't know who cameron murk is yet then i'd strongly suggest visiting his instagram wall because as you can see he's an incredible character designer and painter and i'd like to thank him again for letting me reference his work shall we begin with my main reference off to the side i start with a ball of clay now if you see my other videos you'll know that i approach the head by finding a series of shapes the first of which represents the skull in its most simplified form which is this egg shape with a wedge attached when i'm happy with it i pull out a neck which notice travels slightly backwards rather than going straight down i add a new sphere to begin working the upper torso and this shape represents the ribcage and collarbones i'm keeping things nice and simple for now because the more detail we add the more difficult it becomes to make big changes with this in mind i check the proportions against the reference and you want to be very careful when overlaying your references like this for several reasons the most obvious in this case is that the drawing is paused the head is turned and slightly tilted towards the camera so when we try to match it our body is facing in the wrong direction now it is possible to pause the 3d shapes to match the concept but we want to keep symmetry for as long as possible to avoid sculpting everything twice i duplicate the upper torso and rotate it to begin the lower you might be wondering what the point of this is since the lower torso isn't in the concept not the final 3d model well the reason is because when we sculpt we're always comparing shapes and proportions and negative space with other objects on the canvas and by adding in the lower torso i'll be able to better judge things like the length of the arms and where the elbow should go i bring in a basic ear using something called an insert mesh brush and if you'd like to know how to make your own i've made a tutorial which i'll link below now i'm being particularly meticulous in this blockout because these shapes will be available in my next base mesh pack but more on that later i also think it's worth noticing how satisfying it is to say particularly meticulous go on give it a try good in it with the ears looking suitably cartoony i start making gate space for a chin i also make marks for the cheekbones and the temporal region of the skull these will help me find some playing changes later next i add a cube and start on the shoulders the shape i'm looking for here is a simplified shoulder muscle known as the deltoid the arms are made using something called z spheres now it's always helpful to add a bend at the elbow to judge the proportions better it also gives the arm a more natural look for the bobs i add in a couple of spheres and make them appear more natural by pulling them into a teardrop shape next i start adding muscles to the abs and i don't really need to since they're mostly covered up anyway but it's good to get in the practice to avoid getting rusty speaking of which it's been a while since i made a hand from scratch so here we go i start with a cube for the palm section of the hand and squash it to size now if you look in between your fingers you'll notice that the bottom section is further forward than the top and it's also got a curve to it and the thumb comes off the hand at quite an angle which can be quite tricky but don't forget you have real life reference right in front of you notice there's a slight taper from the knuckles to the base of the hand next i add in a cube for the first finger now the fingers don't all look exactly the same but they're similar enough to duplicate this once we've detailed it a bit to save time the length of the middle finger is roughly the length of our palm section and i start by marking out the knuckles on top and the creases underneath similar to the arm the fingers tend to look a bit more natural with the slight bend in fact i should have sculpted this hand in pause really given how complicated it is to avoid having to rig it so i'm going to confess early and tell you that i do end up replacing this hand with one that i ripped earlier and i don't feel like i've wasted time here though because practice is practice and it made me realize how rusty i'd become so expect a lot more hands in future videos for now i think it's time to move on to the next phase of the scope so i start carving out space for a face this drawing is all i have to work from so i'm trying to imagine how she would look in three dimensions a really nice thing you can do to help with this is to draw a wireframe of the drawing not only will this help you to understand the concept better but it will also push you to think in 3d and it will even improve your 2d skills as well i worked the head for a while but before i start the eyelids let's pop in some eyes i paint some plain black irises to help me place the eyelids in a second now that mark i just made under the eye basically represents the placement of the eye socket and cheekbone now personally i find it much easier to sculpt the top eyelid without a crease at first and then i'll carefully add it in later okay this has got to be the narrowest yet longest mouth i've ever attempted to sculpt so you might notice me struggling with it at first but i'm confident that it'll look all right by the end you've got to have faith in the process adding in a basic cylinder to represent the teeth is always helpful when sculpting an open mouth now it's up to you whether you replace it with more realistic looking teeth later now i realize it's difficult to get your head around this series of 3d shapes at first so i've come up with something to help you while i was creating this piece each time i got to what i call a key shape i put it to one side for later and let me tell you why they're going to help you level up regardless of whether you sculpt in zbrush blender or any other sculpting app the idea is to use these 3d models as reference as you sculpt which is a lot more valuable than using 2d images when you're trying to understand 3d form you can look at the reference from all sorts of different angles and even chop sections out to understand the cross section but that's not even the best part as you finish each level you can compare your progress with the reference using math targets or shape keys each reference image gets progressively more difficult so if you feel like you've mastered level one you can start from level two or three in case you do prefer to use 2d image references each model has been captured from an array of different angles for you to compare your work to as you sculpt if you're interested in finding out more check out the link below or above somewhere near this video to get yourself set up and moving on to the next level jumping forward a little i mask out some eyebrows and extract it's good to get things like eyes eyebrows and eyelashes in early because they're key elements to the facial expression even though i don't have the final paused expression in place i can feel her sassiness starting to come through already come on then let's start on this hair all i'm doing at this stage is trying to ignore all the details and focusing on the hair mass we can add details gradually as we go along try thinking of the character as walking towards you from a distance at first you see the silhouette or overall shape of the character as they get closer you start to see large shapes within the silhouette when the character walks right up to you you can see a lot more details within these larger shapes keep watching the video and you'll see that this is exactly how i approach the hair now unfortunately i forgot to record this bit so i've recovered the footage from the live stream as you can see but don't worry it's not for long to start the dress i just duplicated the body and deleted the parts that i didn't need i like the hair there's not really much to it for now but i'll come back to it later now i have a nice idea to create the necklace in blender which i started by sending over the head after duplicating an edge going around the neck and converting it to a curve i can use a couple of array modifiers to create these spheres around the neck then i can apply the modifiers and send it back to zbrush where i duplicate one of these spheres to make the jewel at the front i also add in a circle which i extrude for thickness to make the backplate for the jewel looking good marie remember those secondary hair shapes i mentioned i start by inserting a sphere and molding it roughly into the shape of the to use the technical term twirl a bit at the front to start these curls at the bottom i insert a cylinder and again just start pushing things around and laying on clear to indicate the directionality of the hair i'm not at all concerned about being neat because i know most if not all of this base hair will get covered later i continue this idea at the top too making marks to indicate directionality and form but i'll start extracting shapes out shortly i mask shapes on the hair that correspond with the marks that i've made and extract it's a lot easier to move these strands around as separate objects rather than trying to sculpt them into a single mesh it's also good to add planes to these shapes to give them definitive edges otherwise they end up looking like sausages i'm still not overly worried about the finer details though because these shapes will also get covered up by even smaller strands later in fact let's send all this stuff over to blender so we can get to work on that i'll quickly set up some lights and bring in the first hair strand before i start placing the strand i'm first going to tweak this shape which represents this cross section of the hair strand i'll rearrange the workspace so you can see what's going on notice that as i change this shape up here the hair strand down here changes with it and this is how i design the finer details of my hair strands i'll go into more detail about this in my cartoon head sculpting course which i'll release later this year once i find something i'm happy with i start laying it on the head using the base hair as a guide this does tend to take quite a while but it doesn't require a lot of brain power so it can be quite therapeutic the goal here isn't to completely cover the base her with these strands because if i did that there would be too much detail in the hair adding detail is good but if you add it everywhere you don't leave space for the eye to rest so i'll let the simple bass show through in places to model the glass i used a tool that i know a lot of you didn't know existed but has been there since forever called sweet profile 3d basically you control the profile of your model using this graph on the right which is really nice for objects with radial symmetry i then use my normal sculpting brushes with radial symmetry turned on to tweak the result after bringing it into blender and roughly putting it into place i'm now thinking i want to pause the hand now as i mentioned earlier i now have the problem of how am i going to get this hand into pause without going through the headache of rigging it that's where chloe comes in one of my rcs that doesn't show her face nearly enough so i'm going to try and fix that but for now well let's just rip her arm off oh chloe even with a rigged hand this was a really awkward pause to get the hand into and i ended up working it quite a bit in zbrush i send the new hand back over to blender and notice there's a ball missing from the back of the head so i add a plane and start shaping it into one half of a bowl then i extrude it to give it some thickness and add a mirror modifier to create the other side after tweaking the shape a little i add in a taurus to represent the knot in the middle that's good enough for me now i think the hair is looking quite cool but i also think it could be made better one thing i want to do is break up the silhouette a bit by adding in some breakaway strands like this i'm just duplicating the big strands and shrinking it right down and i do this at various points across the hairstyle next up it's time to replace those eyes with the eye designer add-on if you haven't seen it before it's basically a really easy way to get pixar style eyes into your character and you get all these controls down the side to change the look of the eye you can even back out the result and use it in a different app such as maya or a game engine i would definitely recommend checking it out using the link below but then i'm biased because i made it you might have noticed that i'm gradually sharing things as i progress such as a few purple objects in the scene using this colour purple was intentional because from a semiotics viewpoint the colour purple is said to signify things like royalty and power now this is because historically purple dye was very difficult and expensive to produce and for a long time only the wealthiest people could afford purple clothing though it's relatively inexpensive today the color purple is often used to signify this idea next up is possibly my favorite part of the entire process which is painting the skin and for me this is where the character starts to become alive especially when you drop a bit of red on the cheeks and nose and start painting the lips when you're painting skin like this though you don't want to overdo anything just lightly add colors and then go over them with the skin tone to bring them back a little if you google color zones of the face you'll find a bunch of images to help you choose some colors but remember that stylized characters are usually simplified in a certain direction so you don't necessarily need to go crazy with colors to get a nice result when we bring it into blender things are starting to look really nice now to get her into the pause i create a really basic rig for my character using just three bonds now if you've ever rigged a character before you'll already know this but it's very important that when the head is connected to a ball that you mosh your character to whatever music is on at the time like so then and only then can you start pausing i'll notice she's holding an empty glass so to fix that i duplicated the glass itself and deleted the stem then i closed off the bottom like this and the top like this and then added some colour so that we can see it through the glass this wine looks a bit watered down but we'll come back to that later next up are the ruffles on the outfit i started this with the understanding that i was going to be pushing and pulling clay around for the next few hours to get this into shape but someone on the live stream had the bright idea of doing this with an insert mesh like i did with the ear earlier now after a quick google search i found alexandra jackson had created said brush for just five dollars on station so i saved myself those hours and used that instead it still took some tweaking to get the result i was after but it gave me a good head start after this i started painting the hair like the skin i start with an overall base color and then start to add clothes over that when you're making roots darker like this you want to make sure it's not just a darker version of the rest of the hair otherwise it will look a bit muddy like mine does here now to fix this i came in with a slightly red color like so now this girl really needs her roots doing now but it's fine you can just lighten things up afterwards when i bring it into blender i realize for the first time in this entire process that this character is supposed to be wearing a bracelet now i didn't do anything fancy for this i just start with a sphere and just kept duplicating it until we had a bracelet with everything knowing place i start the final tweaking of the model now here i'm checking things like anatomy pause silhouette is there any intersecting geometry you know that sort of thing i can't say that i enjoy this all that much because each change makes such a small difference to the final piece and at this stage you just want to get onto rendering but it all adds to the quality of the final image once i'm happy with it though i move on to lighting the model and then of course rendering now before we see the final result i just wanted to ask that if you enjoyed this video and you learned something new please give it a thumbs up and share it on facebook or twitter or whatever you use it would really help and if you want to see more videos like this in future please do subscribe and click the bell so you get notified that's it from me see you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Danny Mac 3D

Views: 1,611,362

Keywords: pixologic, zbrush, blender, sculpt, disney, dreamworks, pixar, stylized, b3d, zbrush 2021, blender 2.9, blender 2.9 tutorial, blender timelapse, zbrush speed sculpt, zbrush vs blender, zbrush sculpting, zbrush 2020, disney princess, how to, time lapse, speed sculpt, blender modeling, blender 2.9 beginner tutorial, zbrush speed sculpt character, disney plus, disney channel, blender animation, blender sculpting, artstationday

Id: FXsGNRW6hZs

Length: 17min 50sec (1070 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 26 2020