The Definitive Guide to Digital Doubles

g'day blenderheads and digital laborers in this video i'm going to show you how to make well me creating digital humans has been the holy grail of vfx work for decades and it usually requires multi-million dollar hollywood budgets and some very talented artists to be able to achieve it however in the last few years that gap between hollywood superstars and the average amateur in their bedroom has diminished greatly and although this avatar may not be perfect yet i really do think it's testament to how far we've come in such a short time all right hey wait what hey come on man far too expensive to render for this whole thing uh hi there i'm the real jamie or is he no no we're not playing that game go on get out of here there's a lot of different ways you can go about creating a character like this guy there's photogrammetry and 3d scanning there's simply sculpting him from a sphere and then there's a whole bunch of 3d programs out there that can automatically generate base meshes for you to work with so with all the options available to us where do we start i think the best place to start is with your limitations what is it that you can realistically afford to do and what might be outside of your scope and budget so for this project i gave myself three rules one i want to try and keep as much of this as possible inside of blender so as awesome as they are i won't be using say zbrush or character creator two i want to try and do this on a shoestring budget so there's not gonna be any ten thousand dollar scanning equipment used here now that said i do have a rococo motion capture suit and that's obviously quite beneficial however anywhere that there is a paid tool or add-on that i have used i will make sure there is a free alternative for you guys to use in the description below and three i've only got a month or so to figure this out i want to use this digi double in a short film that i'm working on and i don't have a year to try and crunch through all of this so with those rules in place let's jump in so sculpting a character from a sphere is out of the question that will take me far longer than a month and i don't have access to high quality 3d scanning equipment what i do have is a copy of human generator for blender this is a paid add-on but i love human generator because it gives me really high quality models with eyes teeth hair clothing and textures for frankly a stupidly low price now that said if this price is still out of your budget make human and mb labs are both free and also produce quite amazing results another option is metahumans which look absolutely stunning but it's a real pain getting them into blender at the moment i'll make sure that there's links to all of those in the description below for all of you but for now i'm going to press forward with human generator before we jump into blender we're going to want some reference photos to work from in the past we take a bunch of photos and try to match those in 3d and don't worry we'll still be doing that however if we take a few extra photos can now import these into a program such as meshroom meshroom is a free photogrammetry program and i'll be using these photos not just as reference but to generate a 3d mesh that i can use for even more accurate reference there'll be a link to download meshroom in the description with references in hand we can now open blender and make a start with human generator i've already imported a couple of full body front and side images to line up my model with i've also imported the mesh room model so i have a fairly accurate 3d reference i can use if you can try and use the same camera with the same focal length to take all of your reference photos then make sure that the camera in your blender scene is also using the same focal length different focal lengths will distort your images in slightly different ways making it more difficult to match up features by default blender doesn't show your textures when your viewport is in solid mode and these human skin textures are quite detailed and will slow down your computer if you switch to material mode but if you stay in solid mode and change your viewport settings color to texture you can get a nice representation of your textures without slowing down much at all if at first you see another texture such as the normal map go into your shader editor and simply click on the diffuse texture this will force the viewport to use the last selected texture human generator has a ton of sliders you can play with and in the recent releases you can even overdrive most of these to create more exaggerated or even cartoony characters creating a character with these tools really feels a lot like the character creators from say skyrim or many modern mmos keep in mind the idea here is to get as close as possible to your reference you're unlikely to get a perfect likeness just using these sliders alone i'll be showing you later how i go in and manually sculpt additional details there's also quite a few options for skin textures such as tone roughness freckles and normal map strength as with the face shape sliders this is still just a starting point expect to have to add some additional tweaks to achieve a perfect likeness now a little tip here i'd recommend leaving the subsurface scattering off for now unless you have quite a powerful machine this setting chews up a lot of computing power so i'd suggest turning it on towards the end of your creation process hair is an extremely important feature and without it it can be difficult to get a proper feel for your character human generator comes with a stack of preset hair options both for the head and the beard as well as eyebrows and eyelashes as with the shape of the head these are still just a starting point and we'll need to style all of the hair to get a better likeness since human generator has given us some hair presets to play with this will mostly involve either adding or removing new hairs combing it into shape or adding a little bit of extra noise to make it a bit more scraggly i also add a completely new hair system to add some stubble around the whole face unfortunately human generator doesn't have a default hairstyle that's close to mine i have quite thin hair and a very high widow's peak so in this instance i choose to create an entirely new hair system to create a new hair system or if you're using mb labs or make human here's the steps i'd recommend going through to create your own hair firstly create a new vertex group and paint in the rough shape of your hair plug this vertex group into the density slot under vertex groups you can also plug it into the length slot if you like then use the hair editing tools to comb and cut the hair into place better finally under children use the interpolated setting to scatter additional hair if you try and use interpolated without the vertex groups i found it just scatters hair all over the body [Music] okay i think this is as close as i'm going to be able to get with human generator alone unfortunately it still doesn't look very much like me now don't worry this is perfectly normal as good as these auto generators are they are just a starting point in fact as a test i tried doing the same thing in metahuman and although the results are also very nice it still doesn't look very much like me so to take things to the next level we're going to need to sculpt these extra details by hand getting the proportions of the face right is one of the hardest parts and i always struggle just trying to eyeball it so one thing i like to do is drop in a bunch of slightly extruded planes so that i can line them up to important features such as the center of the eyes the lips or the tip of the nose this makes it really easy to see when major landmarks are out of alignment and to be able to quickly fix them [Music] i really struggled a lot with the lips on this sculpt how much they bulge out how much they pucker where exactly that line of color is between the lips and the face where it begins and ends it was all really difficult for me to figure out and none of this was helped by me having a beard when taking photos and even more importantly when doing 3d scanning i'd strongly recommend having a shave first i had shaved my beard back to almost a stubble and it was still throwing me off another option i want to try next time is using the multi-res modifier to do this sculpting the human generator meshes are actually fairly low poly and trying to do detailed sculpting on them was quite difficult smoothing your mesh is much easier when you have more polygons so i think i'll be trying this on my next attempt one thing where people often get stuck is only using the front and side view photographs as reference as you can see here i spend a lot of time looking at my model from various different angles from underneath the chin from above and from some three-quarter angles these alternative angles allow you to see things you can't always see from the front and side views in particular getting the curvature of the cheekbones or figuring out how sunken the eyes are compared to the eyebrow ridge these things are almost impossible to guess from front and side views alone being able to see these shapes is exactly why i created the 3d scan in mesh room and i encourage you to do the same or at the very least get photographs from all of these different angles this sculpt would not be nearly as accurate without them [Music] you'll notice i often go back and forth between sculpting the shape of the face and tweaking the hair hair particularly facial hair on men plays a huge role in how we perceive the shapes of the face a beard can both emphasize and hide certain shapes for example i deliberately cut my beard along my jawline with sharp turns because that makes my face look more square and therefore more masculine going back and forth between sculpt hair and textures was essential for me human generator mb labs and make human all come with pre-built textures which will save us heaps of time human generator in particular has some fantastic skin materials however i did briefly jump into substance painter to tweak the colors slightly to match my skin tones better if you want to tweak your textures outside of blender please use human generator's built-in baking system to do the exporting i wasted quite a lot of time trying to get blender's default texture baking tools to work before discovering human generator comes with its own special tools the default tools just don't work in this case some general rules to keep in mind while painting skin areas that are close to bone such as the forehead or the cheekbones tend to give a yellowish tint fleshy areas such as lips nose and around the eyes end up being more red and areas with facial hair often appear slightly blue now these are just some broad ideas to keep in mind make sure you always look very closely at your reference for specific details although i used substance designer for this process all i'm really doing is adding additional blobs of color substance has an intuitive layering system as well as a ton of built-in alphas and brushes which definitely saves me a little bit of time but there's nothing i've done here that couldn't also be done in blender or a 2d program such as photoshop or to set up the subsurface scattering i add a hue and saturation node to my diffuse map allowing me to add a bunch more red to give the impression of blood under the skin with the textures properly set up i go back to tweaking the shape of the original sculpt remember that 3d is often an iterative process sometimes it can be hard to tell when something is wrong until something nearby is fixed first now that i know the textures are more accurate it seems obvious that the issues must still be with the original sculpt over the next week or so i go through multiple different iterations getting feedback from both friends and the blender forums as i go now showing that entire process would be extremely long and honestly not all that interesting so here's a quick overview of the major milestones this first image is what i got out of human generator by default currently this looks almost nothing like me in the next iteration i can start to see shades of myself poking through but this version still mostly looks like a neanderthal at this point i can start to see a lot of myself there's still a little too much neanderthal in there but this could at least pass for my long lost brother eventually i reach a point where it suddenly feels like i can see myself looking back at myself it's a really weird sensation so although this isn't quite perfect yet i'm happy enough to move on to the next stage now that i'm reasonably happy with the face it's time to turn my attention to the clothing human generator does provide a bunch of clothing assets and hopefully you can find something in there you like but personally i'm not a huge fan of most of these outfits i found them to be a little low quality perfectly fine for games or even architecture but not quite good enough for the film quality that i'm aiming for while i was testing the metahumans i discovered that i quite liked one of the outfits they had with a little bit of work i was able to export this out of unreal engine unfortunately when i imported these models into blender i realized that they were triangulated now i was optimistic i could fix this using blender's try to quads command but it gave me far too many bad edge loops i even tried to re-topologise the outfit by hand but this took far far too long i actually wasted a lot of time trying to make this work in the end it ended up being faster to model the clothing myself although i did end up keeping the shoes from human generator honestly modeling clothing isn't all that difficult for the most part it's a bunch of tubes that are wrapped around arms and legs what makes clothing look like proper clothing is a combination of folds and wrinkles as well as seams to achieve all of these i used a multi-res modifier and sculpted the details by hand blender's cloth sculpt brush was priceless here i was able to grab bits of clothing and for the most part just kind of wiggle it around a little bit this gives some very natural looking wrinkles i could then go up a level or two on my multi-res modifier and sculpt over these folds to really make the details pop with these sculpted details in place i uv unwrapped all the clothing and jumped back into substance painter the clothing textures are relatively simple for the most part they're simple colors combined with some of the default fabric bump maps that come with substance substance also has a handful of cloth smart materials i was able to use to quickly add details like wear and tear at this point all of the modeling and texturing is done it's time to figure out how to make this guy move now rigging a character like this is a pretty involved process and it really does need its own dedicated video so join me in the next lesson where i'll be teaching you about facial motion capture the ar kit and the face it add-on [Music] i never seen anybody

Channel: Jamie Dunbar

Views: 2,608

Keywords: Blender, sculpt, 3D, tutorial, digidouble, digi-double, clone, cloning, portrait, digital double, Human Generator, Meshroom, Make Human, MB Labs, FaceIt, Auto-Rig Pro, Animation Layers, clothing, hair

Id: e5fHgj59VDQ

Length: 15min 45sec (945 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 22 2022