Snow - Stylized Character Creation Recap

hi and welcome i'm julian cusper and almost two years ago i made this video and also a course on the blender studio website since then i created a second character for this particular lineup of open source characters i did all of this live on the blender studio channel and there are even more time lapses on the blender studio website but this video is meant as one big recap of the creation of snow so what did i do differently in comparison to rain and why and also i want to talk about some of the updated features in blender and updated techniques that i'm using in comparison to the first video and also some more tips and new things from what i've learned that can maybe also help you creating characters for film if you want to learn more in detail there are various courses on the blender studio website on these topics and of course the stylized character workflow that this video is still mostly based on but i hope these tips in this video help you out and this video motivates you to learn more about character creation so in the first video i laid out this workflow of creating characters step by step only that rain didn't have a 2d design concept i just went straight to sculpting and figured out her design there with various head sculpts but for snow i actually went into 2d drawing first to get a good idea of the concept i want to pursue for all of this i used grease pencil in blender it also works great for 2d concepting this is actually fairly easy to start with by starting a blender with the 2d animation template here on you can add layers to the site for your sketches colors or cleaned up drawings just like any other painting software you can also create variations by switching to a different frame and drawing so this will just animate the crease pencil object this way i was able to very quickly sketch out various versions of snow this then led to a drawing in pose and in color as my main concept and then some turn around line drawings for the head and also one feature that i love about concepting and grease pencil are the editing and sculpting tools so you don't need to redraw everything constantly you can also just morph it into something else which can be really convenient to start with the sculpting i imported the drawings or other references by just directly drag and dropping them into the 3d viewport instead of using dynamic topology like with rain i only really used the voxel remesher with the shortcut control r and shift r to add more resolution and geometry this way you have to add detail step by step really forced to do it but still always sculpt the basic shapes first and refine them equally throughout the entire character even during the sculpting process i constantly compared the sculpt with rain to make sure i don't stray too far away from the already established design i of course wanted to improve some aspects based on things i learned last time but i couldn't do any drastic changes these are these two characters are part of the same lineup and they need to fit together also i reused the hand model from rain i really recommend reusing parts of all the models or even entire characters as a base to save time the more you get a hang of sculpting human bodies the less you should be slowed down by having to do it all over again and again the sculpting tools in blender are powerful enough to reshape any character as you wish for the clothing i used a different workflow this time instead of modeling or extracting the clothes i sculpted solid big pieces first these big chunks made it very easy to change and remesh the objects since it was a very clear volume once i was happy i masked and extracted the surface to get thin cloth pieces that i wanted to work with afterwards and then i used the quad remesher to get some workable topology quickly and added more definition via the multi-rest modifier even though i quadrimeshed the hands head and body separately since that was less error prone i joined the objects and bridged the edge loops in edit mode to make them all as one object this way i could also add less resolution on the entire body and more on the hands and heads so when i subdivide them i would get more detail in the places where there needs to be more detail because there's no use in having the same level of resolution on the belly as on the entire face only for the face did i do a little bit of light remodeling so that i could already add an inner mouth and a little bit of preparation for the expression sculpts this topology doesn't need to be super clean it only needs to roughly have the right direction of loops or edge flow as it's called around the lips and laugh line and eyelets for example to get the details from the original scope back i added a multi-rest modifier and started subdividing it a bunch of times and then i added a shrink wrap modifier for the head body and hands each with a vertex group assigned to define where each should shrink wrap too with the modifiers then applied onto the multirest modifier i could then smooth out the transitions between the three areas and have all the high detail sculpts on one object once i was happy with all of the sculpted details it was time to test the design i started out with some basic shape keys for the expressions again like closed eyes and an open mouth one of the things i did differently from last time though is that i started painting and face sets in sculpt mode these are great for hiding parts of your sculpt quickly but also for masking off entire sections effortlessly from there on out i added more and more shape keys for various expressions to check if the design is appealing or if there are any issues in the proportions by animating and driving these sliders i could quickly switch between expressions and mix and match them by scrubbing through the timeline some adjustments that i did because of that was for example lowering the nose bridge a bit and tweaking the eyebrows and adjusting his inner mouth these are the sort of things you would only know from experience or asking for feedback or in this case by actually testing your designs and seeing what is still wrong with it unlike with rain i ended the testing with a four pose sculpt this was actually surprisingly easy to do without adding a rig this time by using the pose brush transform tools and face sets in sculpt mode i just had to join all objects together and add face sets to everything to clearly define the individual limbs if the pose brush is not using the option connected only it will even move near surfaces together like clothes and hair mask expand lasso masking and the face sets also made it very fast to target certain limbs and quickly rotate them with the transform tools as well all of this was also done with shape keys so the original resting pose would stay intact i also compared all of this with rain so they both work well side by side this is where i wrapped up the 3d design phase and after a while started the live streams on retopologizing snow i went into a very different direction than with rain rain was made with topology that is very generic that would be easily applied to any character that doesn't have to pronounce facial features big feature films use this approach a lot where they have one really well made retopology and then morph it into any background or secondary character they have because they already know that this topology works this saves a lot of time but i also made the mistake with rain to start very high res with the retopology this is actually not a good idea since it can get you stuck with too much geometry too soon so for snow i started with the absolute minimum amount of loops and then went higher only when needed i also made a very custom fitted retopology for him each loop is very customized for his facial features and proportions this lowered the amount of loops overall but increased the amount of poles so they had to be placed well to not cause any stretching when subdividing while vtopologizing i liked to mark very important loops as seams or sharps to make them really stick out in as these red and blue lines this is really just to help distinguish them visually while working on the retopology it doesn't do anything else retopology can be done very differently and there are no perfect solutions for rain i went for very clear patches and poles leading into each other snow is a good example of how the structure can be a bit more messy visually but overall better for this particular character and as a result with almost half the amount of geometry on the entire body each limb of the body was also retopologized as a separate mesh and only bridged with a rest once the loop count matched and wouldn't change anymore and here's a good tip for clothing retopology try to place loops exactly where the real seams on the fabric would be this will help a lot later during uv unwrapping and texturing even the hair was re-apologized in the same way to keep the style consistent for the uvs this time i relied much more heavily on the live unwrapping feature of blender it's a bit unfortunate how hidden this feature is since this is the best way of unwrapping and editing uvs in blender it's really useful to be able to pin certain uvs to keep them in place and have others automatically unwrap instead for example if you want to stitch pieces together or you want to straighten certain uvs or rotate and align areas this time i also used udems for the main body if you don't know a udem is essentially a one by one uv space if you use more than one you can also use more than one texture on that object so that way the head hands and the body could each get their own set of textures with different resolutions for more detail i also pinned the middle loop in the center of the uvs so i can easily mirror the uvs later on this can be done by for example using the mirror modifier with the bisect and mirror uv options enabled even udems work with this and then once you apply the modifier your mesh and your uvs will be perfectly symmetrical and then for the surfacing unlike with rain i didn't texture paint that much this time to add more detail i mainly just paint it or generated low resolution masks to define where procedural or high resolution patterns should appear like a mask for pores lip wrinkles or the iris textures just like with rain i used tileable textures again to add fabric patterns on straightened uvs these i got from various cc0 texture libraries like texture haven cg bookcase and cc0 textures the issue is that these textures often come with some extra color variation and details attached often i only want the detailed patterns and add all the color variation myself so an easy trick i like to do is for example in krita or any other image editing software to take the image and start duplicating the layer then blur it until the detailed patterns are gone and you're only left with the color variation you want to get rid of then set the blurred layer to gain extract and it will extract the difference in this case that's the detailed pattern that was blurred out and then just save the texture and you have exactly that pattern that you want to use but i didn't just make neatly laid out udems i also added additional uvs for procedural texturing this time since uvs are essentially just coordinates in two dimensions the hue and the v direction you can use them to add additional effects for your shaders for example i unwrapped and straightened uvs along the sleeves collar and the hip to add a darker strip of fabric procedurally with a seam in between the two collars it's also much easier to add non-destructive stitches this way along the uvs almost completely resolution independent basically the only thing i texture painted by hand on the clothes is a height map for smaller wrinkles on the clothes and i mixed that in with the other texture patterns after i was happy i did some renders for tests and turntables and then tweaked it afterwards and then once that was done i baked the entire note 3 down into a set of pbr textures just like last time one thing i didn't mention in the previous video is that i can really recommend to set any black and white or normal map texture to non-color instead of srgb this will give you more accurate results especially for normal maps and also in the original video i didn't go that much into the rendering site so essentially once i have the post shaded character i set up a camera and some lights most of this is based on the three-point lighting principle and done in eevee since there i can see the changes in real time once i'm mostly happy with the results i switch over to cycles for the final setup and further tweaking since cycles and ev share most of the settings you don't really lose much in the progress for the ground i added a reflective plane as a nice bonus for rain i added a bit of displacement with water ripples from raindrops for snow i originally went for well snow but this ended up to be way too distracting so i changed it to a subtle frozen texture in the end i did a bit of retouches and compositing directly in blender for this i organized the character his eyes and the background into separate collections then i created three view layers that will each render out a different part of the final image the first layer renders out snow with a transparent background to achieve this you can just toggle the check mark on the background collection in the outliner this check mark will only be checked for this particular view layer this will just exclude anything from inside that collection and it will not appear in the render in the second layer i rendered out only the background but with snow still visible in the reflections for this you can toggle the indirect only option in the outliner on the character collection this way anything in that collection will never be directly visible but only indirectly in the lighting and reflections on other objects and in the last layer i rendered only the eyes with a bit of a different lighting setup so that there's no distracting reflections you can enable the holdout toggle and the outliner on the rest of the character for this so anything in those collections will be rendered as alpha zero essentially like a mask then you can stitch these layers together in the compositor add some glare and color correction some nice gradients for the background and you're done and that's it thanks a lot for watching if you're interested in more tutorials on this topic or the files of these characters visit the blender studio website once snow is fully raked he will be made available as a creative commons character for you to use for any project you like but until then you can also get the full access to the entire library of creative commons characters and assets on the blender studio website enjoy

Channel: Blender Studio

Views: 54,950

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Id: BJHede3Oagw

Length: 17min 48sec (1068 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 16 2022