Stylized Characters Workflow | Face Tools Tutorial

hey everyone in this tutorial we're going to take a look at how you can create stylized expressions and wrinkles with face tools when working with a stylized character like this you may want to utilize the tune Shader settings in Character Creator and send them to zbrush so let's start with that in character creator you'll find the tune Shader option in the visual settings panel when we activate it the initial results don't look good because this character is currently using the digital human Shader which we need to switch with the PBR Shader simply select all of the sub meshes of the character that use the digital human Shader and set the Shader type to PBR under texture settings the tune Shader only utilizes a single light source in this case our directional light therefore we'll want to rotate that light to a position that looks good in this case it creates a shadow on our backdrop which we can hide via the scene manager in the project settings you can also choose choose to set a background color back in the tune Shader tab we can also use the interpolation option to smooth out the jagged light borders and adjust the edge width and intensity to the preferred level it's important here to adjust the intensity balance between the light and shadows as well as this greatly affects the end result you can also edit the material brightness directly via the base color or diffuse map it's also recommended when using the tune Shader to minimize the intensity of the normal map to ensure a smoother more tun style appearance once you've tweaked everything to your desired levels it's then time to send the character over to zbrush Via face tools once the model is loaded up in zbrush we can custom paint the diffuse map to get started click on diffuse to display the map set it to Flat color and then mrgb at the top and poly paint from texture to convert the diffuse map to poly paint from there turn off the diffuse map and go ahead and begin the character painting here we're just adding a few stylized touches to our character skin once you're finished click on update to character creator to update the poly paint result in the update options we only need to select the poly paint to diffuse option and remember to set our 4K texture to ensure the resolution is not lost once the export is complete you can see a good before and after here with all of the additional tweaks we made okay so that's how you can quickly refine the stylized appearance of your character starting with the tune Shader let's take a look at editing expressions and wrinkles next each cc3 plus character contains a default expression system that causes wrinkles to appear in certain areas of the face when different expressions are used however the default system is intended for more realistic characters and when using tune Shader mode with a stylized character the initial results will not be ideal as you can see here so let's go ahead and use the facee tool plugin to do some editing I'll use the m smile expression here to demonstrate when we switch expressions and open the layer you can see that the Expressions layer is set to recording mode I'll use apply mask to focus on the area of the mesh affected by the smile expression in recording mode you can switch to a low subdivision level when changing the shape if you only need to modify the expression here I'm using the lowest subdivision level to enhance the shape of our mouth smile to start if you want to modify the expression wrinkles and normals you'll want to switch over to a high subdivision level and turn on color eyes to display the paint and wrinkles here I'm just using poly paint to paint the small wrinkles in the expression layer again we don't want it too detailed here just basic enough to give us a simplified stylized smile wrinkle around the mouth you'll also want to ensure that you smooth out any detailed mesh edits that represented the previous wrinkle system once finished go ahead and update to CC once again this time we want to make sure we have expression morphs selected as we edited that at subdivision level one and also wrinkled diffuse since we only did the poly paint on the appearance and not any mesh editing 4K again for the wrinkle resolution and we only need to select the mouth smile expression now back in character creator we can use the edit facial tool to give our character a smile and check the editing results you can see the simple smile lines appear on the diffuse map as our wrinkles you can also see the updated diffuse map in the wrinkles tab under wrinkle set 3 which covers the orange highlighted areas of the face on the thumbnail a quick before and after shows us the difference between the default smile wrinkle and the newly stylized set that we just created by deepening the smile via sculpting and giving us a bolder yet more focused wrinkle result via poly paint here's another quick example of a custom wrinkle paint job on the browse with the brow drop expression even adding additional emphasis markings on the forehead which is still within the mask area again export only needs the wrinkles diffuse and the browse drop expression to be selected with that done you can get a pretty cool tune style emphasis on our angry expression here's one final example this time doing something a little different with the neck Titan expression template in this case we're modifying the mesh at at subdivision level one to get the base expression geometry correct and then adding a slight bit of poly paint emphasis on the neck rolls you can see that this has a strong result and can be very complimentary to add passion and intensity to angry or disappointed expressions using a combination of the techniques shown here can really help to add a bold and energetic touch to your character's expressive performance we hope you enjoy using face tools and stay tuned for more tutorials in the future

Channel: Reallusion

Views: 9,553

Keywords: Iclone, 3d animation, build 3d animation, animation creation, animated character, animated 3d character, 3d character animation, character animation, Reallusion, 3d creation, real-time animation, real-time performance, unreal engine, rigged character, 3d model, hair physics, cloth physics, avatar maker, 3d character creator, character maker, create a character, body animation, avatar animation maker, human maker, character builder, zbrush, facetools, stylized character

Id: -CV3irfqgNU

Length: 6min 41sec (401 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 10 2023