The Amazing New Human Generator for Blender!

hi everyone today i'm going to be telling you about an amazing new add-on for blender i've been playing with recently called human generator it does pretty much what it says on the tin it lets you generate humans for the use of various sliders and presets massively reducing the effort required for basic character creation in blender they have not paid me to make a video about it but i had the opportunity to test it before release and i had a lot of fun with it so i want to show you how it works and share some of my thoughts they were also kind enough to make me an affiliate so i'll leave my link to the product in the description here i have a character that i've created using the tool along with a few manual modifications afterwards one of the great things about making characters with this add-on is that it's all contained within blender everything you create can be modified further using all of the regular tools you can go into edit mode and make small tweaks to the face you can go into texture paint mode and add any extra marks you like you can even groom the preset hairs to be more to your liking the generated rigs are quite substantial and are set up with ik constraints and the quality of surface details is surprisingly impressive for a generated object installation was both simple and really interesting for this add-on because the creators have set up a separate web page to explain the process more effort has been put into the add-on settings interface than i've seen for any other add-on so far it's been designed to support additional packs that can be made by the community and each of these packs can be labeled categorically depending on what they add following this there's even an inbuilt tutorial using a custom interface that actually runs inside of blender meaning you're given an explanation of how it works within the actual software which i thought was really cool i've never seen an add-on do that before as for using the tool the main interface is kept on the right end menu under the human gen tab you start off by choosing a base character which is categorized by gender and ethnicity the values for visual differences in these categories can also be changed later so this doesn't necessarily restrict the final look of the character upon choosing the base type you will see the character appear along with the rig this character is also already fully textured as you can see if we jump into the rendered view i was very impressed with the quality of the faces in this tool given the fact that everything can be changed in real time not just the shape of the character but also the look of the shaders which we'll look at later if you've clicked off of the body when you click back onto it the adam will know that we want to make more modifications so it's quite a smart system so let's take a look at what we can do on the right we have the basic body sliders there's muscular overweight skinny and chest and you can see how the body shape changes in real time as these values are modified when changing the look of the body everything is done in stages once you're happy with a certain stage you can progress to the next one sometimes you can move backwards and make edits on previous stages but sometimes changes will be made permanent but the color of the button to move on to the next stage will indicate this to you taking a look at modifying the face now this is where most of the parameters are different categories are put into collapsible menus to help with organization and again you can see how the changes are made in real time for the upper face you can modify the upper skull eyes ears and nose and for the lower face you can modify the lower skull mouth cheeks jaw and chin following this the next phase is for shaders this is where you can change the surface appearance of the human including things like eye colour and skin tone under main settings this is where the tone is there's also an extra redness slider so you can further modify the tone to make it more red or yellow you do also have the option to enable subsurface scattering that is much more computationally expensive so i would recommend leaving that off unless you really need it then there's eyes this is pretty self-explanatory you can change the color of the iris although it says pupil these two color values pretty much define the inner and outer color of the iris i was also impressed with the level of detail for the eyes it seems they've implemented quite realistic shader for this there's an interesting section they have here called dark light areas this is pretty much where you would have darker areas around the eyes and highlights around the brow and cheeks too much of each i think looks a bit strange but i think a mild amount actually helps with realism then there's freckles so you can see quite a full coverage of freckles appear as i turn that slider up and then there's also speckles which are just for other blotches of discoloration for this example i'm going to give this character a small amount of freckles and now we move on to beauty spots this is basically for small randomized moles and other marks on the face to add a bit of asymmetrical detail the amount slider increases the presence of them and the opacity slider just controls how visible they are there is also a seed value for randomizing scattering of the marks across the face the next section is age this is where we can add skin sagging and wrinkle effects it's pretty self-explanatory it lets you simulate the advancing years for your human then in the beard shadow section you can darken the areas where facial hair would typically grow and indicate the presence of some stubble but we can actually add some hair particles here in a minute and now we're done with the shaders we have the hair section and this is where we can add hair to the character by choosing a preset any preset we choose can be modified afterwards by changing the particle settings or grooming the hair manually so if i pick short one you can see that after a moment the hair will appear on the character if i look in the particle settings you can see a list of all the hair particle systems acting on the object there's eyebrows eyelashes hair top curly and hair short fade so you can see this hair preset has been split into two different systems you can make the hair longer manually by changing the length value in the particle settings but they have sliders to help with this in the addon interface anyway i'm going to change the preset now to pixie short so we can demonstrate manual particle grooming now if i select the character and then go over to the particle edit mode if you have overlays enabled then you'll be able to see the different parent strands of hair then by clicking and dragging you can change the flow of where they're facing when you go back into object mode you will see the hair has updated so this goes to show that you can use the presets as a starting point and then adjust into something more to your liking from there anyway i'm going to reset it back to the pixi short preset and then we can carry on with the demonstration underneath the hair options we have the facial hair presets so we can quickly add common looks to the character i think i'll go subtle with this double short preset when clicking on these don't be surprised if it takes a moment to recalculate everything for the character now already looking at this i think this character looks pretty damn good especially considering how customizable everything is looking here on the right again we have basic hair length controls for different hair systems on the head eyebrows eyelashes areas of facial hair etc by pressing this button at the top we can optimize the scene by choosing to hide the children of the hair system meaning that we will only see the hair guides you might like to disable this when making simple changes if you're on a machine with low processing power but i'm going to turn this back on and in doing so you might notice that the eyebrows suddenly look thicker this is because we're seeing the true values so what i can do here is play around with the hair length and material values to adjust the look to my liking one thing i like about the hair material settings is that they have a lightness value so we can easily move the hair from brown to a blonder color there is also a redness value as well if you wanted to go a bit more ginger extra effects include what they call pepper and salt as well as roots to essentially discolor areas of the hair so there's lots of controls here to get what you're looking for now you'll notice that when i press next tab it will reset the hair so it disappears this is more of a safety optimization feature to prevent you from making changes that would ultimately freeze blender but you could still go back to the hair phase if you wanted that is until you press the finish creation phase button which basically solidifies the design of the character now for the sake of teaching you where to find particle parameters i'm going to show you where you can set the number of child particles being displayed if you go into the particle settings make sure you have the right particle system selected then in the children section you will see two values display amount and render amount if you make the display the same as the render amount then the hair will look the same in the viewport as it does in the final render so if your computer is powerful enough to handle the hair systems in the viewport at the same time then you can override the settings made by human generator so i've gone ahead and made them more visible again and if i zoom out you can see the whole character here turning the overlays on in solid view we have a rig here which we can now use to pose the character we can select it and go into pose mode now as i said at the beginning ik constraints are added automatically which means if you grab the hand bone and move it you will see the arm follow along but you'll also notice that both arms are moving at the same time which we might not want we can stop this from happening by going to the tool tab in the end menu on the right and disabling the x-axis mirror option now when we move the hand only one arm will be affected taking a look in wireframe mode the topology for the human character is really consistent and well made the edge flow seems to be pretty perfect especially around the face and areas that bend like the fingers but we can see supporting geometry has also been added around the joints the eyes are controlled by the rig as well there are three bones for this first of all each eye has its own independent bone to control the direction so if i select these and move them we can see how the eyes and the eyelids move this is much more obvious in the rendered view as well but you don't have to move both of these bones together because there is one parent bone in between them which will move both of them at the same time this one you can essentially use as a look target to tell the character where they should be looking okay so there's still more that can be done human generator also gives you a library of expressions and poses that you can apply to the character in one click so if we select the character again under the expression tab there's a variety of presets we can choose from so if i choose the brow rays right we're going to see the eyebrow rays you can swap between these at any time so maybe i'll choose angry yell just to show off the mouth and teeth you can keep playing with these and again use them as a starting point for any more complex expressions you might want to make i like the brow right ray so i'll leave it at that for now now we're going to take a look at poses these are for the rest of the body again there's a nice selection available by default i'll choose the standing looking up one because i think that's quite a good pose for showing off the model with this lighting but is that all nope because they made an entire clothing system as well this add-on has been designed around a content pack system which means other creators can build and distribute new packs for the tool which could include new presets and clothing i'll choose one of these and after a moment it will be applied to the character and then we can look around it to make sure everything is okay again just by clicking on the other options you can swap between them human generator will handle the deletion and creation process automatically i quite like this basic casual one it's one that would be quite easy to customize maybe even put a logo on the shirt heading down we can take a look at the footwear a few different options here you can also randomize the selection if you're not sure what you want to go for now if you thought that was all then you'd be wrong because on top of what we've seen already they've also added a pattern system where you can customize the clothing inside of the interface without having to do any shader work manually although of course the option is still there if you want complete control so after clicking on the clothing item you will see the human generator interface change now there are color roughness and normal values and then if you press the add pattern button it will do exactly that and then you will have a new drop down area with a variety of options to choose from each of these can then be modified using the color values underneath again the same thing with shoes green and orange is a bit of a strong choice so maybe i want to make it a bit more gray scale it's very quick and easy to do now like i said it's all fun and easy editing these options in the human generator interface but because all of this data is being generated and saved to the blend file you can modify these results in any way that you like if you don't like how any of the shaders work then just change them open up the shader editor and get working away now a quick tip i want to give you about lighting and presenting the character is that it seems that denoising works really well in achieving a stylized look i suppose it's a bit reminiscent of a sims character i can make a few more adjustments to lighting and materials until i find something that looks good i really like this result as someone that has struggled with making human characters in the past this was a lot of fun to play with oh and speaking of manual changes even though there is a wide variety of parameters for modifying the look of the human there are still some limitations one thing i've noticed is that there aren't many options for asymmetry in the face at least not in version one those of you that have known me for a while know that i have a bit of a crooked nose and i'm feeling a bit underrepresented here but with the power of proportional editing in blender we can fix this very easily in edit mode select any vertex turn on proportional editing by pressing o it will be indicated by the blue circle above when you move the vertex surrounding points will also be affected depending on the falloff which you can increase or decrease by scrolling forwards and backwards so with very minimal effort and a few seconds of work i can give this fine specimen the crooked nose he deserves what a masterpiece anyway if you're interested in picking up human generator it's available on the blender market and there are two licenses available at the time of recording this there's a 68 personal slash portfolio license and a 128 commercial license depending on when you're watching this you might be able to get your hands on an early bird discount but that might not be available if you're watching in the future if you'd also like to support my work then i have left my affiliate link for human generator in the description so hopefully you found this interesting i'm very keen on seeing how the developers will continue to improve this tool as well as all the amazing things the community will make with it and if you want to check out my work feel free to subscribe maybe check out the patreon join our discord server or explore the website at curtis holder online so thanks for watching stay safe and i'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Curtis Holt

Views: 302,167

Keywords: blender, curtis holt, human, generator, creator, procedural, person, people, rigged, addon, body, template, sliders

Id: b3at8PXN9sk

Length: 12min 32sec (752 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 20 2021