Stylized Character Modeling Tutorial with Volume Builders in Cinema4D R24

all right so let's get started uh you can see my scene here um i have a few things set up in the objects panel i have my back rim light front fill light and hdri uh in my camera we're not in the camera right now so you can kind of see it pointing at the location where our avatar will be and then over here on the right you can see my eyes skin teeth tongue and hair material so we'll use those as we create the avatar should be fun let's let's dive in uh so first of all we're going to need a sphere so let's create it i'll left click on this option here and just release on the sphere object uh so let's let's get in there on the sphere now a sphere on itself probably isn't going to look the way we want it to look so i like to do a few few things when i create a sphere i like to switch it to a hexahedron just because it has uh better quads you can kind of see how those look uh when i turn them on and has that kind of a more balanced look so you don't get pinching at the poles um let's switch that to quick shading so i don't see the light so much um all right so that looks good um 16 segments is more than enough let's make it editable and we're going to change that the shape of this head a bit we're going to make it a little bit more stylized of a head and that's a little bit too deep so we want it to be about there and we can change the shape of this later with with some light sculpting which i'll show you um so there we have a pretty simple head shape maybe we can squish it just a little bit let's see how that turns out next we want to do is our ears so i like to create ears using a cylinder object so let's create that um first of all i like to rotate it so hit the r key then holding shift i click this red line here and it snaps to the five degree marks and then i drag it out rough position where i want it now you can make the ears look however you want but we want to position the ears roughly the same area where they're going to be on the character now we don't want to actually have to create two ears we want to use a symmetry object so let's go up here and create a symmetry object and drag the cylinder into it you'll notice that it creates here on the other side too that looks pretty cool right so now if we wanted to rotate the ear back and make it look more like an ear wood on a person you'll notice that it's tilted back there on the other side too so then if you wanted to change where this year is all you have to do is edit the one year and it changes position for the other one so this year while it might be good on its own there's a few things that's lacking in my opinion like it doesn't have that little nub in the middle that you see on some of the avatars that i've made um so we're going to make it editable first of all and then let's turn on the line so we can see the segments so some things we want to do we want to add an edge loop so hit go to the edge selection and m l to create an edge loop and we want it about there we want another one for the middle part here and i'm just left clicking there so let's let's select this middle loop but first i want to switch to faces so let's go you press u and then l and you can select this face uh then what i want to do is switch to selection by hitting e and then holding control click on the axis screen axis here and you'll notice it extrudes that down so now we have like this kind of nice ear shape which is going to look good once we start getting into the details so great we have our ears we have our head shape roughly let's add a nose this is really easy to do create a capsule rotate it 90 degrees move it into place and scale it down press t it switches to scale or you can click up here to the scale option and you can click anywhere outside of these three lines and it scales it down right so now we have our nose let's move it out a little bit it's gonna have a big nose all right that looks good to me okay actually i want this head to be a little bit taller let's switch back to the head and make this little taller want some more geometry on the bottom of that we can always tweak things later too all right so let's see what's next um let's add some eyes that sounds good all right so let's create a sphere and again make it uh we want these eyes to be the regular sphere because we want to have some of that geometry for the middle of the eye the iris the pupil and i'll show that later so let's let's get that high into position roughly okay and if you look at the ears you can use the ears to kind of place the eyes let's make these eyes a little bit bigger so we got one eye here we want to position it a little bit okay so that's your eye let's make that just a little bit bigger all right we want to create a symmetry object again because we don't want to create two eyes and place them manually let's get that in there look we got some eyes looking good all right let's name some of these eyes nose ears here i uh we got our head great and we can find which shapes they are just by the the objects panel here all right so that's good um the next kind of thing we want to do is add the mouth shape excuse me i like to do this a couple different ways but an easy way is to create a capsule and move that out we want to rotate that 90 degrees move it down and then scale it so let's see here so that's that's pretty good the chin he doesn't have really much of a chin does he well we'll see how that works out later alright so here is is where you can really start to see this take shape so we have our eye shape we have our nose shape so what we're going to do is start using what's called a volume builder so let's create the volume builder object and volume builder lets you use voxels to model a single shape from multiple shapes so let's drag in some of these objects we're going to take in our head our ears our nose and and the mouth so let's take those in to the volume builder all of a sudden whoa that looks really weird so let's then if you if you were to activate the render view you wouldn't see anything except for the eyes because they're not part of the volume builder yet so what you need to do is make this into a mesh too so holding left click and then you hold alt click and it puts the volume builder into a volume mesher so this actually creates the geometry from your objects that are inside the volume builder so going into the volume builder object clicking on left clicking on it you'll see a few things so these voxels are really big right now 10 centimeters so we want to make these smaller so we get a little bit more detail in our mesh so let's make that three and you'll notice that it looks a lot more detailed a lot more close to what we want it to look like obviously the mouth mouth isn't looking good so let me hope i didn't name the mouth let's change that so let's go into the mouth and change this to subtract from union and you notice it cuts out the shape of the mouth and let's say we don't like the shape of this mouth we can change it and the mesh will update so see that see how the mouth shape changes pretty cool and we can even move this in and out and it kind of works like a boolean where it subtracts the shape so this person is really surprised right now but let's say we wanted to make it look more like a mouth where this is just kind of like cutting into their mouth it's not like showing all of their you know insides of their mouth their tongue their teeth yet so what we're going to do is create a sphere inside of the volume builder and it's automatically going to add it in here now what we want to do with this sphere this is the mouth cut out so let's say mouth bag so that's the inside of the mouth so we want this to subtract as well but it's going to be a little bit different so let's go select this and move it inside so if you look at this now you can kind of see like it's subtracting a cavity from the inside of the mouth and you can position this to be exactly where you want it to be right but still this looks kind of jagged right you might be thinking like man that just doesn't look good that's because there's a lot of stuff that that isn't doesn't have enough geometry yet so we can do is go into the volume builder object again and add this sdf smooth object and it smooths everything out and we lose some detail that's because our boxes are still a little bit too big so if we go to lower this even further get two or even one we can start to see that we have a little bit more detail but there's still some some stuff in here so like this head there's only so many polygons that it has the base on so it's actually not smoothing everything out so we can put this all in a subdivision surface and put this inside of the smooth because when you add another object to this volume builder it um doesn't keep it in the same hierarchy as the previous shape so we'll call this head um now you can see everything is much much smoother which it looks really really nice so let's let's move this mouth bag a little bit and it's going to update a little bit slower than it than it did before but it's going to look really really nice once we get some more objects in here in more detail so let's see how are we feeling about this this looks good let's make the mouth opening a little bit smaller okay that's a little bit better and now we want to get some eye sockets so we're going to keep our eyes roughly where they are maybe move them in just a little bit we can actually duplicate this so holding or clicking on this and then holding control we can drag a copy of this into the volume builder so going into the volume builder object we can put this underneath the smooth because this is a hierarchy here and we want to subtract and you notice what it does is it actually makes little eye sockets so let's let's turn off the size holding alt and clicking on these it'll hide it from the viewport kind of see like we have these eye sockets now and that looks pretty cool so we can turn those back on but the eye sockets are a little bit big so let's make these a little bit smaller so that it doesn't look as creepy and now the eye like the edge the eye will kind of dimple in a little bit and it'll look really nice once we render it out so we have a basic shape here pretty straightforward but we don't have anything in the mouth as of yet so what we want to do is we want to add some teeth so we're going to add a top row of teeth let's do that let's create a cube as a starting object we'll scale it down get into place a little bit scale it down you've got to think like how big do you want these teeth right let's make these a little bit taller than that a little bit narrower but we want to have rounded edges so let's do that i'm going to turn on the fillet and make this a little bit more rounded and then make these these teeth a little bit deeper so those are looking that looks like a pretty good tooth in my opinion i can move that so it's like right at the edge of the mouth let it be nice all right so what do we want to do we don't want to put this inside the volume builder because it's going to be a separate object so let's get some um let's put this in a a cloner so you can hit alt click and it puts the this tooth object let's just put tooth and put this teeth um okay so that looks great so we have some teeth you can kind of see like they've been duplicated and if we were to change this object all the teeth inside this cloner would change pretty nice um but we don't want that that arrangement for teeth we want a little bit different so clicking on the teeth object we can change this to radial and now that's a little bit closer to what teeth are supposed to look like right so let's uh change where they start so you adjust this start angle and then if you rotate the cloner around you notice it starts to look more like teeth although they're positioned kind of weird we can fix that so let's let's create let's add some more teeth to this six because we really want like two teeth in the front right and we want let's let's just make this eight teeth and let's adjust um the spacing there so that they're further spaced apart sorry i'm way zoomed out aren't i let's space these apart a little bit more and then rotate so we have those two teeth like right in the front all right let's turn that off that looks good all right so let's move this back into place pressing e can switch to the move mode and move this back you might think like that doesn't really look like teeth yet and i agree so we need to make the radius of this a little bit smaller it's more curved because that's what teeth look like right and we need to adjust the spacing of these teeth again so let's get that rotated around how we doing one two three four right there that's about the middle okay let's position that uh change it to global positioning and now we have like that nice curvature of teeth let's put it a little bit closer to the front of the mouth so now when we if we were to light this the tooth the teeth would cast like a nice shadow but they still look kind of like like chiclet teeth right like that looks like pieces of gum that someone stuck in their mouth we don't necessarily want that so what we need to do is actually break this so how we do that is do a right click on the the cloner and do current state to object and that actually converts all the objects in the cloner to separate objects and we can either delete this or hide it i'm going to hide it using that alt double click which puts these red dots on it means you won't see it in the viewport and you can't select it so what we're going to do is adjust some of these teeth so you notice they start from the right and increment number y so we're going to keep this the center ones the same and select the ones to the left and right of the teeth and move those up a little bit using ctrl click select them move those up and the ones next to those move those up a little bit too not too much all right cool those middle ones are a little too low still there we go there now it has some variation now you could make each one of these teeth now different shapes um you could tweak them to make them a little bit more irregular but i'm going to keep them looking regular like this we can even move these down a little bit let's say if we wanted more teeth look in there we can do that we're going to create our tongue next so let's do that with a sphere make that a hexahedron scale it down move it into the bottom of the mouth and make it bigger because we want it to kind of stand out now this guy is kind of surprised looking you might think like ooh his mouth doesn't look good you know right so we need to do something about the mouth opening so what i like to do is using a bend object so a bend object really easy to use click on it and we actually need to what's going on here fit to parent let's try this out here bend oh no i don't want to bend i want an ffd that's right so fft gives you lots of control and you actually want to click on control click this and then the mouth you want to drag it under the mouth and then you can move this back into the volume mesher move it down below the smooth and change it back to cutout so now you have this this cage that surrounds your mouth going into the vertices select as long as you have ffd selected you can select these vertices that are on the cage and you can see they're kind of these little black dots and i like to select the area select and then just drag over one side and then you'll see these this gimbal here and you can drag this up and look at that now his mouth is curved a little bit that's cool select the middle ones the same thing curve those down looks like the ones on the right curve those up i just like the ones in the middle again to curve it down a little bit more and that's good so that looks good he looks like he's smiling great um okay that's looking good let's apply some materials to this and see how it looks so first of all we're going to take our teeth and put the teeth material on it we got our tongue we're going to put our tongue material on it and we got our volume mesher which we're going to put our skin and material on it and then our eyes start the very basics on the eyes and that'll be nice all right so let's see what this looks like through our camera kind of see like it's got that nice little look to it all right let's let's position our camera a little bit so that he's more center oh you know what we forgot we forgot a neck let's add a neck all right we're going to create a cylinder no a capsule let's create a capsule and this one is going to be in the volume measure it's going to be our neck and that looks kind of weird right let's put it in a subdivision surface neck and let's drag that down below the smooth that is a thick neck right all right that's no good all right so let's take our neck and scale it down and as we move it around we kind of position our neck the way we want it all right that is looking good great all right so let's switch out of our camera so we can not change our point of view okay looking good i think we're ready to work on our eyes a little bit so our eyes are looking good but they don't have any detail to them now we could go real simple we're going to create an octane glossy object call this pupil and we're going to give him some really big pupils but let's go into our node editor um octane live viewer i don't want that and i want our node editor and let's dock that over here all right so we got our pupil let's change this to black keep it nice and glossy and what we want to do with this is convert this i to editable and we want to select this interior loop so using ul for loop select select the pupil and then the material object or material panel drag the pupil right to the middle and we can put this over here for the rest of this all right so now we got some pupils we got our eyes i want to put those a little bit further in his head don't you think i think so that would be funny if if when you rotate these it gets kind of funny watch this so if you want to position the eyes to look a different way see how they kind of like they rotate funny like that so what you have to do for this is again do like a current state object by right clicking and you'll notice that each eye is part of the same object like when you rotate it it's like part of the same object so we're going to hide this using the alt double click and then i haven't found another way to do this i'm sure there is another way but let's say i have these these selected in this eye i go to select select connected and it selects only this i and then i do a right click and then split and now i have an eye that's only this high then i go back to the original eye object do it click here and then select um there we go select connected and then again right click split and now i can delete this combined eye and i have these two separate eyes but still when i rotate it would do something like this so with the rotate tool selected click here go to object axis and select per object manipulation now should work come on oh i'm still here that's what i'm doing i wasn't in the object or the modeling selection so i select this and then click on the selection for object manipulation and it's not doing it all right well we'll come back to that um all right so that's looking good let's switch back to our camera view see how that looks looks like a dude all right let's uh let's get some of our hair going um so i like to start again with the sphere but i base it on the shape of the head so i take my original head shape and i do a control drag outside of the cloner object or the mesher object and i make this the hair you kind of see like it takes over like his entire head and you can position it to make it more look like hair and then switching to face select i use um the sculpting tools so as long as you don't have any of these meshes selected you'll have like the sculpting tool come up and we want to have some symmetry make this a bigger brush i mean we get this huge sculpting brush and you'll notice there's a dot on the opposite side because i selected the x y z axis for mirroring and then when you click the the mesh will change so i can push his hair out of his mouth i can pull some some side burns out and when you change your your viewport it moves in the direction that you drag it in so that's looking a little bit better this hairline is looking a little bit more respectable still looks a little strange we can crank up like the subdivisions to get some of some some better detail now it's always going to look weird on the back with this particular method unless you like want to sculpt the back of the head and you want to get like some unique shape and we can do that with the hair to make them not look like ridiculous from like different angles but for the purposes of this tutorial will focus purely on like just making the basic hair shape looking good you can do this with with just clicking around and sculpting and you know getting the hair basically to where you want it and kind of shape it to make it look more like voluminous uh let's make it a little bit wider but let's say you wanted to have him to have like long hair you'd have to like add little hair cards and things like that it's not that hard to do i'll do that another tutorial on how to do like long hair on a character but this is getting kind of long in the tooth anyway so here's our basic kind of dude let's give him lower lower hair here there's hair is always challenging to sculpt in cinema because you got like all this stuff so we can turn off if you want to go back to our sculpting tool we can turn off the symmetry and the size of this um make it like a hundred and if you wanted like one side of his hair to be lower let's just keep it at 200. if you want one side of his hair to be lower you can like drag it down or even like duplicate the hair object so let's say we wanted to do that so now we have two hair objects which we can sculpt independently to create some some different shapes and like push it down in different ways so that it has some more interest you'll see what this looks like a little bit more like in the render because like it'll make it look like he's got like a part on the side of his head now that we have this these two like competing shapes oops lost the sideburns there a little bit all right so now we have our character it's looking okay maybe and we can pull that in a little bit pull that out let's smooth it i have my smoothing brush here and you can just click click and it kind of smooths some some sharper edges uh let me go back to our head main heads how's that look switch to our camera looks pretty good so let's go to our octane live viewer see how that looks live your window um i have our already this this set up looking at the setup it has path tracing enabled 2000 samples some lower specular depth gi clamp is set to 10 parallel samples etc camera imager um pretty standard stuff here nothing too crazy other than the hot pixel removal is set to 0.35 i've just found that i like that that look a little bit better so let's turn on the live viewer and see what that looks like and kind of see there's our guy the eyes could use some smoothing that's a little that's a little rough let's uh let's put him in a subdivision surface here so those eyes look a little bit smoother and you can kind of see like his hair is a little bit too small so we could take some time to clear like make his hair bigger so let's see what that looks like let's dock this over here sometimes you gotta refresh when you when you dock the live viewer all right so we're gonna turn off camera updates uh switch to the regular perspective camera then we're gonna we're gonna edit his hair some more using the sculpt tool um let's make his hair just come out a little bit and make his other hair go out a little bit more make it a little bit bigger he's got he's got a big forehead we could do things like adding eyelids which could look really nice it means that he's not doesn't have this like super surprised expression on his face um we can make this uh mouth a little bit smaller because it is looking a little big so let's let's scale this down a little bit so yeah that's that's basically it let's put this in a subsurface division again and then move that under here with subtract because it just wasn't really that smooth to me um you can kind of see like there's some dimpling going on here i'm not crazy about that we can select some of these so i can get rid of that yeah not ideal maybe i can change some of these so it has more height segments yep segments didn't really do anything yeah so it's it's decent right um you can still kind of see his his hair in the back of his head let's clean that up in the back of his mouth i mean don't want that i want that to be hidden by like the light all right so it looks pretty good and now that we got this looking pretty good you can kind of see there's something missing what might it be it's the eyebrows last but not least let's create those real quick these are real simple create a capsule move it out and rotate it 90 degrees scale it down you don't want it to be that fat right that's about good get it to be the right size let's move out of our camera view here and move it up again you want to position it roughly where you want it to be mirrored i like to rotate it a little bit let's get some of that moved here all right so that's looking good moved into his face a little bit and again we want to do something like we want to curve it so we're going to use the same method we used on the mouth using the ffd hit alt click oh sorry control click and then pairing it to the capsule by clicking and dragging and then we want to adjust it a little bit so let's do that clicking in here and selecting you can kind of just bend it right and it's pinching those edges a little bit so we can rotate them so that we don't get some kind of weird-looking distortion rotate that so this is some nice chunky looking eyebrows let's get as they stick and they're sticking out a little bit too much for my taste let's get it rotated in all right so we're good there now we can create our symmetry object drag it in and boom we have eyebrows switching back to our character let's move the sim whole symmetry object down and what's cool here is like we can change his expression oh boy's real real surprise let's make it let's drag the hair material on there and then if we make his eyes tilt down it can make him real angry is he going to be angry oh just kind of he's he's kind of maybe just happy maybe a little worried surprised that's looking pretty good the finishing touch uh so that's this character you'll notice uh he's pretty simple when you create you know other things like glasses on the character you want to model the glasses to make those look nice if you wanted to have long hair like i mentioned you want to model that hair to make it look nice and natural and interesting um there's additional steps you can go through like if you wanted to use this to rig you'd have to do a whole bunch more work but just getting this blocked out that's half the battle and it looks great and you can use this as your uh avatar on social media or on your website um and it'll look really nice and fresh so thanks for watching the video really appreciate you taking the time to watch it please like and subscribe leave a comment of what you think maybe even make your own and share it you can find me on social media at benfritz on twitter that's b-e-n-f-r-y-c put links uh in the video description and i'll be making a bunch more of these videos showing uh some cool things that i've learned using cinema and in octane super powerful tools thank you so much again for watching and see you next time bye

Channel: Spacergif

Views: 7,317

Keywords: 3d, c4d, character, modeling, tutorial, octane, octanerender, cinema4d, maxon, stylized, head, 3dart, portrait, toon, cartoon, help, volume mesher, volume builder, volume modeling, voxels

Id: p-N5nEgwdjE

Length: 38min 52sec (2332 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 27 2021