Stylized Character Workflow with Blender

hi I'm urine caspo and in this video I will show you the workflow of creating stylized characters in blender based on my experience in film productions at the blender animation studio if you find this topic interesting visit the blender clout where I go into far more detail by giving a step by step tutorial course on the subject this tutorial is in a way a brief version of the full course so be aware that I'm not going to dwell on any details there's a link in the description but let's just dive straight in the full character creation workflow is often not very linear and can include different steps based on the type and style of the character in this case I'm giving a somewhat idealized simplified workflow as the very first thing it's necessary to know what the character is supposed to be in this case it's not going to be overly cartoony or realistic but sort of a mix of both this way the style is abstracted enough to not be uncanny but also not too detached from reality to still feel grounded apart from that you should have an idea of who your character supposed to be nail down individual points like ethnicity gender age time period occupation attitude and potentially more really nail down who you want to create then before this leads us into doing some first concepts it's good to do some research this step might make you re-examine your character but it also should inspire and guide you on creating it they need to be references on the character itself maybe you have an actor in mind as an inspiration for example you should also gather references for the style you want to use which are likely going to be artworks by other people which is ok then there are also references on the technical execution if you want to go for a fur coat then find out how other people tried and succeeded before you which is going to save you a lot of trial and error and of course you should always include references from real life like anatomy and fabric behavior and more know how real life works before you recreate an abstract it's once you have all of it display it onto a collage ideally nicely organized in size and groups based on importance and categorization my personal recommendation is using pure F on a second monitor phone display or even printing it out on paper now it's time to work on the design of the character the ideal scenario is to work from an existing concept before going into 3d this might be your own drawing or someone else's with their permission and credit of course I have to admit that in my case I didn't work from any drawing but I can highly recommend you do so since it will save you a lot of time throughout the process the concept should embody a lot of the preparation from before and serve as reference for the model it's good to start off the 3d sculpting with some simple blocking which means laying out the overall proportions with simple shapes this can be done by creating and placing cubes cylinders and spheres and sculpting them roughly into shape from here on you add more definition and detail over time step by step it's ok to keep the shapes very planar and rough for now until the overall shapes are set in stone definitely keep multiple objects around you don't need to sculpt everything from one object also make good use of symmetry options to save time to not really worry about running out of geometry to sculpt done there are helpful tools and sculpt mode one is dynamic topology which is enabled with control D which creates and removes geometry dynamically while you are sculpting in the options you can further define things like the resolution and the remeasuring method there's also the new voxel romesha that Ramesh's the entire object almost immediately with the shortcut control are they on its volume alone which is a much faster and reliable method with much better performance it even Ramesh's intersecting objects if you merge them you also don't actually need to use that many brushes to get the first sculpt going simple draw crease smooth and grab brushes are usually enough once everything is roughly where it should be it's good to finally merge the separate objects either with poly modifier or by just joining them and remeasuring everything with the voxel romesha afterwards you can paint the objects with vertex colors to get a better impression of how the character will look like this is very helpful but also remember to turn the colors off from time to time since they can obscure the actual shapes of the sculpts you can even paint in things that are not there like eyebrows and eyelashes to keep things fast and flexible for now for the hair you can again use separate objects or extract geometry from a mask or by using the skin modifier or even curves to create separate hair strands or ponytails afterwards add vertex colors to those as well if you don't have a strict concept or to follow you can continue to polish the head sculpt or create design variations before settling on one of them just make sure that you increase the resolution and polish for the final head sculpt until you are happy with the results different matte caps or even your own custom ones can help you see surface imperfections more clearly and don't worry about losing the vertex colors at this step since they can always be repainted afterwards they just serve as a pre-visualization right now anyway and again keep references on the site especially when sculpting things like hair which can be very tricky to pull off if you're not used to it for the rest of the body it's basically the same thing starting with basic separate objects to block out the proportions and shapes is a good workflow also try using the mirror modifier with a custom mirror object serves as a central axis this way you can easily keep the entire body symmetrical no matter the transforms of each object also don't forget to apply the scale with ctrl a of your objects to avoid weird brush behavior it's good to sculpt the character in a resting post like a tee pose with very straightened and angular limbs or in an a pose which is more relaxed with for example 45-degree arm angles the depot's is a better resting pose for later rigging and animation while the a pose will give you more accurate deformations in the animation if the character is leaning more towards a realistic style keep sculpting and refining the proportions and shapes until you are happy before joining everything together for the clothing it's again good to extract new objects from masks and refining them further by adding faults where ever there should be compression and stretching in the fabric vertex colors will again help you with your impression of the character so far and you get to experiment with different color palettes if you decide to change the overall proportions of the character it's easier to merge all the objects of the body together and adjust everything together just be careful about any modifiers you might have still active afterwards you can split them into individual objects again with a shortcut P in edit mode you can again create variations of the outfit but extracting them via masks is not the only option to create them you can also for example box model a shirt subdivide it a bit and shrink wrap it back onto the sculpted body and continue defining it from there keep adding more sculpted parts of the outfits until everything is there some objects can remain a bit rough until you get to the final polishing later on before settling on the design completely it's a great practice to test the current one and see if it can be tweaked in any way this is also important for the later rigging and animation to have a style guide already at hand before work can start on that it's important to have a better mesh to work with instead of the highly dense sculpt of the head right now I can recommend to either roughly remodel the head manually from a subdivided cube that you snap back onto the sculpt with a shrink wrap modifier or to use the new quad romesha in the object data tab to the side just make sure to have enough overall density and place the geometry a bit more accurately around the eyes and mouth with some manual modeling also make sure the eyelids have three to four edge loops on them to be able to close them to add an inner mouth and some teeth and a tongue that closely represent the later polished result but it's okay if they're a bit rough for now to get most of the sculpted detail back you can add a multi resolution modifier subdivide it a couple of times and add a shrink wrap modifier shrink wrap the original sculpt onto the new one and apply it and you will have the detailed version on the multi wrestlers just make sure to not shrink wrap any geometry that wasn't there in the original sculpt like the inner mouth and inner eyes with a vertex group and some weight painting you can exclude parts to be shrink-wrapped by adding it to the modifier add some shape keys model and sculpt on each one to get different facial movements and mix and merge them however you like to create various expressions be careful to only work on the base resolution not any of the multi wrestlers for this task you essentially only need the grab and smooth brushes to move stuff around and relax areas a little bit start off with the basics like closed eyes and an open mouth you can create the same shape keys for multiple objects and either animate them together or even hook them up via drivers so that they all slide together from there work your way up with simple smiles angry shouts and very stretched and compressed expression tests this will inform you if the current proportions work well or need to be tweaked but by the end you should have some appealing expressions to show off as well like always references are important even if you're just filming yourself to know how a face is really supposed to move you might realize the eye shape doesn't really work with all the expressions or that the eyebrows are too high by default or the teeth are too low and small just tweak those areas until it looks right just make sure to always get some feedback from friends or coworkers before moving on to the next big step or if you're in an actual production sign it off like all the other steps by an art director or whoever you superiors to make it all look even better you can add some additional asymmetry to insert more character and appeal into each expression and you're done with a general design from here on the task is to create the actual production ready asset and finalize the style the sculpted character so far is sadly impossible to rig and animate in any production so the model needs to be cleaned up this is where the rete apology comes in reach apology is about creating a version of the model that has the lowest necessary amount of geometry with the same shapes as the original one especially when subdividing it just create a new object and either start from a simple base object or just pulley model it all the way starting from the face make sure to use a mirror and shrinkwrap modifier and enable face snapping in edit mode to keep things close to the original sculpts from here on it's all about extruding ripping cutting filling and merging geometry to get the topology you need there are a few things that make up a good Reeth apology the edge flow is very important which is the direction of the loops that are going around the surface these are all made from quartz which are phases with four sides and they're led into different directions via polls which are vertices with less or more than four connected edges but never go above five connected edges otherwise they might become really visible it's very much a puzzle where you need to create an efficient and very functional version of your objects that supports any sort of movement compression or stretching that will happen with it once it gets animated for example just like for the expression tests it's good to add some extra loops on the eyelids since these will have to close too and need that extra geometry joints need a minimum of three edge loops to be able to bend while keeping their shape if you want to exaggerate a crease somewhere in the face for certain expressions also have a minimum of three edge loops ready like at the last line or between the brows using the subdivision surface modifier will smooth the entire results so be aware of stretching that's why you should mostly rely on evenly sized quads all over the place especially on areas that will deform a lot or very curved creases and hard surfaces are an exception usually since the former needs more density to stay sharp and the latter doesn't need any extra loops to deform well it's generally a good practice to start from the face and to read apologize each limp separately from there and stitch them together afterwards make the loops generally follow the shapes and muscles of the body to support the direction they will deform to make sure that most loops lead back into each other you don't want some loops to spiral all over your objects at some point you will have Rita politest everything that was sculpted which is when you will have to model things that weren't already there but first add a motorist modifier subdivide it a couple of times and apply the shrink-wrap over it then click on apply base and get rid of the motorists modifier too now your etiology will have the same volumes as the original sculpt when adding a subdivision surface modifier from here on out you can model in some in our eyelets in a mouth polish the already existing teeth gums and tongue and model in some proper eyes when you get to the clothing you can duplicate parts of the body to have a good base to start from this is also the time to add some more definition to roughly sculpted objects or adding seams and nice pockets to pants and other details once it's done make sure to have the asset in the correct world scale like roughly 1.7 meters in my case and it's time to go to the next step just like the topology is the first step to some good rigging and defamations the UV maps are the first step to good textures and materials just imagine you take some scissors and make multiple cuts on your cleanly model character unfolded onto a flat surface and place an image on top this flat unfolded mesh is a UV map and that's how texturing a digital model is done to achieve this you can select edges in edit mode and tag them as seams these edges will be the cuts on the UVs once you have them placed you can unwrap your mesh and the UV map will be visible in the UV editor by enabling the stretching overlay it will be more visible if the UVs are less ideal in certain areas also already using the UV map to add a color grid texture onto the model will also show the distribution of the UV space better the goal is very much to place just enough seams to evenly lay out the mesh with minimal amounts of stretching but just like it's impossible to create a perfectly flat map of the earth without some areas being a bit bigger than others some imperfections will be hard to avoid also try to avoid placing too many seams that are in the face for example since under certain circumstances it can be easy to spot the seams hide the seams as best as you can once we have your UV is nicely unwrapped it's time to adjust and organize them better they should be laid out in a way where they take up as much space as possible from the one-by-one UV space having the placed in a symmetrical way can also be very helpful later on make sure the UVs are generally having the same scale unless you want some UV Islands to get more texture resolution than others it's a bit like packing your luggage and making sure everything fits in perfectly without getting all messed up for areas like the eyes and lips it can also be helpful to select that geometry and projecting it from the view smoothing them out a bit and stitching them back to the rest whatever makes the UVs more evenly distributed if you start adjusting UVs like this in detail remember that you can pin UV points with the shortcut P so that they don't move when unwrapping those UVs again also make sure that none of the UV borders are too close together and that no you v's should ever overlap unless you know what you're doing you can also use UV sculpting tools for wider smoothing and grabbing of areas but be careful not to cause too much stretching with it scale some areas with proportional editing enabled to get some more evenly sized UVs at the cost of some more stretching it's always a bit of a balancing act between the two for the clothing it might also be important to have the UV maps laid out in neat rectangular patches this way it's very easy to just slap on some fabric patterns without having them distort it or go into weird directions just pin the borders of the islands and enable live unwrapping then adjust the borders to be as rectangular as possible and the rest in between will automatically conform to it and keep comparing it to the grid texture and the 3d view this will be a good reference on how distorted the textures would be and how much texture resolution each area gets go through all the different objects with these principles and you will have some clean functional UV s to texture in the next step to get the character some colors we need to add textures add a shader editor in the interface to edit the node based materials and an image editor to see and paint on the textures in a 2d view also as a pro tip enable the node Wrangler add-on in the Preferences I can recommend to just use the default principle psdf shader in the notes since it has basically everything one would need during the texturing then start out with a basic colors do this by adding and painting on image textures or vertex colors and plugging the node outputs into the base color of the shader most notes can be freely mixed with the mix RGB node and each have their own advantages use the material preview mode in the viewport which displays everything you are working on ctrl shift click on any node to see that output directly start out with most primary colors and then mix in secondary colors you can also then start mixing in ambient occlusion or cavity inputs patterns noise and specific painted in details just blend the notes together either by using screen to brighten multiply to darken or mix to blend between two inputs also make sure to paint on the Alpha Channel which is the transparency on an image texture to use as a mask by plugging it into the factor afterwards the well aligned rectangular UVs for the clothing will really become useful now since images like clothing patterns can just be slapped on top and they will immediately align extra details like stitches can always be painted separately on top afterwards definitely keep all of these influences in the color as separate notes because once you are done it's time for the shading the other most used inputs in the shaders apart from the base color are roughness to define the glossy shine or the lack thereof metalness if the surface is metallic and normal to add fake high frequency details that we didn't model in already if you want parts to be transparent like glass or ice you can use transmission and to just make the Meuse fade away or just completely disappear use alpha you can also use specular to tone down the glossy highlights but if you want to have it really realistically accurate increase the roughness instead pluck your individual notes from the color also into color amps and hue/saturation value notes to change and then remix them for the other inputs of the shader try to keep everything organized well enough by clumping notes together framing them or even grouping them change the lighting conditions and test how the materials react adding additional lights and rotating them around manually can also help in case of the skin it's also good to add subsurface scattering or SSS and short to give it that waxy look like the light is shining through to give a nice fake hair look on modeled hair I can recommend the anisotropy shading which adds a directional distortion to the glossy highlights turning the anisotropy to one by itself is not really going to look convincing or even good since it just adds a spherical pattern based on a world axis you need to create a second UV map added as a tangent note and plug it into the tangent input of the shader the orientation of the UVs will then influence the direction of which the highlights will be distorted towards so all hair strands need to be laid out as flat as possible and aligned vertically now the shiny streaks are going horizontally across the surface instead of the fixed spherical direction of before to fake individual hair strands of hair you can paint a black and white texture with small value differences and plug it into the anisotropy rotation adjust that same directional map with a color ramp and plug it into the roughness add color and you're done keep testing and tweaking your materials in both easy and cycles and optimize it towards the render engine you want to use later on for the final rendering once you're happy you might have a hugely complex nonsensical node tree this can be then simplified by only looking at the necessary inputs that lead into the shader and baking everything down into a set of image textures just make sure you have cycled set as the render engine you control shift clicked on the part of the node tree you want to bake and select an image texture note where you want to bake it to and it should work to speed up the baking process set the samples to something pretty low go absolutely overboard on the tile size set the bake type to emit with a generous margin and click bake ideally once you are done your character should look good whether you use Eevee cycles or just material colors in the viewport just like we wrapped up the original design with some expression tests this is the time to put everything that we made so far to the test with a full pose this is to see if there are any last adjustments that should be done like tweaking the proportions of the body fixing stretching etc of course it's also great to not present the character in the current resting pose the rigify adding in the Preferences can really help to get some rough poses going add a basic human metric and adjust the placement size and orientation of the bones in edit mode to fit the character don't forget to enable X mirror to save yourself some time once you're done click on generate rake and there it is select your character then the rig and with ctrl P parent the objects to the armature with automatic weights with this done you can do some exploration in the overall pose experiment and see what you want to go for since the rig is pretty procedural there will be issues if some deformations are outright broke you can manually go into white paint mode and paint out some issues make as many poses as you want until you find your favorite in the end don't forget to look at references and even make references from yourself if necessary I recommend to have a second viewport to the side and set the shading to be completely black maybe with some dark gray outlines this way you can see if the silhouette is readable enough the post can then be tweaked towards a single camera angle or any perspective you want to render make sure the pose is dynamic enough with differences in angles enough asymmetry and whatever else you have in mind as well in this example I wanted something comfortable and confident not a super happy victory jump or something like that but something way more contained and down-to-earth have an idea in mind of what kind of pose you want then apply the armature modifiers as shape keys and then you do essentially the same thing as with the expression tests add more shape keys for various non-destructive fixes in the deformations and keep comparing it to the original resting post because the proportions shouldn't change of course this is very easy when animating all shape keys to zero on one frame and enabling all shape keys on the next one creating variations this way is also a good opportunity if you notice that the arms actually look a bit weird in length or the hands are too big now is the time to make last changes before committing to the end result also sculpt an expression that you like and polish it until you're happy from here on out you can play some lights a nice environment and render a final image render multiple angles or even a turntable to show as much of the character as possible a so-called clay render is also good to show off the model itself where it's rendered colorless in diffused gray with only the bump and normal information at most from the materials add wireframes on top as well to show off the clean topology you created Brenda those also has turntables and you have a complete character for production that you can show off from here on there of course more steps like doing an actual rake for the Meishan animation testing and the rest of the production but in terms of finding and developing the design and style of the character these are the steps you need at the very least to create a complete stylized character workflow if you're interested in more educational blender content a huge asset library of all the blender open movies or you want to support these projects head on over to the blender clout and say hi in the comments you will also find a fully rigged version of this example character called rain and various files from the creation process I hope to see you there and thank you for watching

Channel: Blender

Views: 1,178,268

Rating: 4.9554935 out of 5

Keywords: blender, b3d, blender 3d, 2.8, 2.80, blender 2.8, blender foundation, sculpting, modeling, character, design, art

Id: f-mx-Jfx9lA

Length: 28min 44sec (1724 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 19 2019