Take it the Next Level with Custom Expressions in CC4!

my face when i finished the donut tutorial my face when there's a sale on at blender market my face when i accidentally set the voxel size to 0.00001 and remesh my face when blender crashes and there's nothing in auto save hey guys today i thought i'd keep the re-illusion streak alive and talk a little bit about some more new features coming in the upcoming launch of cc4 let's jump in first up is the native morph slider editor in the expression profile editor what this allows you to do is customize and fine-tune the facial expressions of your character right in cc4 no need to export out to another program now everything can be done right here which definitely streamlines things in cc4 you have a default template over on the left panel here and this panel provides every character imported into cc4 with a set of basic generic expressions you can modify these basic expressions or even add your own unique ones by using the expression editor to accentuate your character's unique look so how does it work in cc4 we have our character here a fun stylized vampire we can apply an expression over on the left here in the expression editor in this case let's increase the brow rays to 100 so the left eyebrow is now raised as high as it can go as per the default settings for a stylized character like this though you may want something a little bit more dynamic and punchy and that is where the new native morph slider editor over on the right comes in to save the day so over on the right if we want the eyebrow to be higher and more angled for example we can adjust the height slider to move the brow up farther away from the eye and we can adjust the angle slider to make the angle of the brow more steep like this the end result is an eyebrow that is a lot higher and steeper which in turn makes the expression a lot more dynamic and engaging you can lock in this adjustment back over on the left you can click here to update the expression slider this means that next time you move the brow rays to 100 it will move the eyebrow to your new customized more dynamic position you can also quickly mirror over this custom expression to the other side by clicking here which cuts our work in half you can also make use of the bone system native to cc4 to customize expressions even further so here in the bone list we can select the root bone of the jaw and pull it downwards like this with this larger opening for the mouth when we adjust the morph sliders for the mouth opening height and corners the mouth really opens up and takes on a really unique shape more befitting of the character we can also adjust the teeth to fit this new more dynamic mouth shape now when we adjust the expression slider for the jaw open the mouth shape and opening is a lot more dynamic than the default you can also use the native morph slider editor to fix the placement of teeth quickly as well here if we adjust the mouth left expression slider we see the character's mouth move to the left the teeth however do not to fix this over on the right you can adjust the scale morph slider for the teeth to shrink them down back over on the left you can update the expression slider to take into account the teeth scaling and now when you move the mouth left expression slider the teeth stay hidden with the eye blink set to 100 we can see it doesn't quite close the eye all the way so over on the right native morph slider editor we can adjust it to close it up better you can see that the eyelash is a little out of sync with the eyelids though and this can be fixed with the edit mesh editor and like before to update the iblink expression slider just click here and then to mirror it over to the other side just click here so here you can see some great examples of the customization you can get just by using the native morph slider editor right in cc4 really dynamic engaging expressions that fit the stylized nature of the character here really takes our characters to the next level all without having to complicate your workflow with more software on that note however if you did want to work in another program the next new feature is the ability to do just that edit the blend shapes external to cc4 by making use of cc4's fbx export feature this allows you to customize your character's expressions and gestures in the 3d program of your choice the native morph slider editor has amazing functionality as we just saw but the team over at reillusion realizes that every artist is different and then you may want to edit in a program you're more familiar with so how does it work to edit externally just go up to the file menu and select export fbx then the program of your choice reillusion has been working hard at integrating their software with blender so let's select blender and then jump over there now we're over in blender just select the shape key that you want to adjust and edit in the manner you see fit here we're going to use blender sculpt tools to fix the eye blink expression with that done the updated blend shapes are saved when you export to a new fbx back in cc4 select your new fbx with the updated blend shapes tick replace all sliders with the same name and all the expression sliders in cc4 will be updated to reflect the adjustments you just made in blender the expressions update when using the face puppet which is great the ability to update all the expressions via fbx works for all fbx tools such as 3ds max maya and blender and here you can see the difference between the default 50 stylized and 100 stylized expression this allows you to apply many different iterations and exaggerations of one expression which is great for adding variety to your character's movement quickly and lastly is the new smoothing tool the delta mush this feature allows you to smooth out the geometry of your models very easily right in cc4 another great time saving tool that streamlines your workflow and saves you from having to export to an external 3d program and then import it back in so how does it work in cc4 you see if we take a default character and really exaggerate some of its features using the morph sliders like this we end up with a character with very jagged and sharp geometry which isn't the best when it comes to animation this is where the delta mush feature comes in here in the edit mesh menu you can smooth the whole body at once for example by just selecting all the vertices clicking delta mush preview then apply now the entire model is much smoother and thus better set up for animation if you notice that there are still areas where you want more smoothing you can focus the delta mush tool to work only by selection here we can see the chest neck feet and thighs still have geometry that looks a little close together and with sharp angles so we can smooth it out even more one by one like this so quick before and after shot of the base mesh we can see the smooth version looks a lot better if you wanted to add accessories just drag and drop from the smart gallery and cc4 will line everything up to your model you may find that the geometry of the clothing and accessories is also jagged with sharp angles which again can be fixed using the delta mush tool like before just select the desired area click delta mush and apply you can adjust the power and area of the tool through soft select radius bias strength and iteration fields here to gain more control over the smoothing you can set the strength and iterations low and just click the apply button multiple times until the geometry is in your desired state you can also use delta mush to smooth out geometry that behaves unexpectedly when applying expressions here we can see the geometry around the brow and mouth begin to clip and overlap when we adjust the expression sliders back into the edit mesh menu select the affected areas click delta mush then apply until we have it where we want it but make no mistake the delta mush tool isn't just for fixing it's there to also help create clean smooth meshes on each custom slider this allows you to further build original unique expressions that stand out from the generic ones and because this tool is located under the edit expression panel this means that the custom slider can then be reused and recombined with other morphs in future projects so that's it for this one i hope that shows how you can really take your characters to the next level for that animation or game you're working on thanks for watching i hope it helped and we'll see in the next one

Channel: Russell Midfield

Views: 4,338

Keywords: blender, blender 2.8, blender tutorial, blender 2.8 tutorial, blender sculpting, blender sculpting timelapse, blender sculpt, blender character, blender character modeling, blender retopology, blender character design, blender stylized, blender stylized character, stylized character, blender 2.9, blender 2.9 tutorial, blender 2.9 character, blender UV unwrap, blender texture paint, blender hand paint, blender rigging, blender unity, blender unreal, blender unity character

Id: caLxXKXav-s

Length: 7min 43sec (463 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 12 2022