Turn ANYONE into a 3D Cartoon Character ! w/ Blender

[Music] what's going on guys welcome back to another video today one of my favorite tutorials i've ever made one of my favorite things i'm so excited to teach you about we're gonna be creating 3d characters you may be asking yourself why do i need to create a 3d character learning the skill opens up so many different doors of opportunity you can create album art doing this you can create animations for your music videos or any other videos with your 3d characters you can even 3d print the models that you design and have physical collectibles you can sell them as nfts whatever it's all up to you i think it's a great money maker i think it's fun i think you can really get creative with this first we're going to start with some inspiration i want to show you guys some examples beautiful thing about this you don't have to create it in the style that i'm going to show you there's many different styles there's many different ways where you guys can really create some cool stuff we're going to be trying to create a 3d juice world i really really love how a lot of these look you can really get some like interesting stylistic cartoon designs this guy is nick baron i'm going to leave his instagram down below uh he creates some really amazing stuff everything from nfts different album artwork different little stylistic animations this one's showing mac miller in different styles really cool you guys can of course build on this i'm going to show you the absolute basics for getting started here's another awesome guy kat yum i'm pretty sure he's worked with rip and dip before so he's done this in like commercial aspects here you can see the 3d creation with trippy red holding it so again really cool really fun let's dive in and show you exactly how you can do it yourself for free using blender and before we dive in as always i do want to say if you're new here consider subscribing slap a like on the video if you do enjoy means a huge amount to me with the youtube algorithm comment down below anything you'd like to see next let's get started if you guys don't have blender installed go ahead and install it the link will be down below like i mentioned earlier 100 free we're not using any plug-ins we're going to keep it all beginner-friendly once you're in blender we of course need our base mesh this is a big step for determining the style of your character you guys have two options here option number one you can completely start from scratch and you can model your own base mesh or option number two you can just download any free cartoony base mesh yourself you can search for any of those base meshes on something like cg trader on turbosquid there's tons of free ones i'll leave a link to the free one i use below and of course if you want to do it all from scratch i'll leave some tutorials where you can set up reference pictures and fully craft it all starting from nothing i think the base mesh is just a bit easier a it saves you time we can customize the base mesh to our liking in a bit to fit our needs if you're planning on making multiple different versions it's nice to just have a base mesh ready to go so choose your option here i'm going to start off with my base mesh here so once you've installed that for free using the link below i'm going to go ahead and click file import and i'm going to import in our fbx they're going to give you two options here the high poly and the low poly we're going to go with the low poly because we're going to customize a bunch of this we don't want tons of information and polygons so here's our base mesh if i zoom in here you can tell everything doesn't look as smooth to make everything a bit more smooth with our base mesh selected we're going to go down to the object data properties and under the normal section here we're just going to check off auto smooth and you should see everything look a lot more clay-like so now let's get into our creative phase let's figure out what we're going to be designing and start getting a overall vision of what it will look like to make this easier i recommend you use reference images so we're going to try and create juice world from the armed and dangerous video i went on google images and i just saved this reference picture here it also shows the clothing he's wearing which will be useful later when we go in and design that to bring that into blender as a reference if you go up to edit in preferences and go on to the add-on section you guys can search for import images as planes go ahead and check that on and then all you have to do is go up to file import and then click images as planes find your reference image and import that in to see the image on your plane you want to change to the viewport shading mode in the top right and with that plane selected if you need to rotate just go ahead and click that orange square the object properties and you can change any of those values to align it properly you can place that in your scene just by selecting it and clicking g to move it around you can click s to scale it down now we have a good little reference setup a good workstation to start designing our character so let's start off by adding in our eyes in object mode we're going to click shift a and then we're going to add in a sphere you can scale and move the sphere around using g in s and position it on the face where the eyes would be once you have that first eye in place we can select that sphere click ctrl c and ctrl v to copy and paste it and then move that duplication over into position as our second eye to smooth the eye out just select the object go up to that little object tab in the top left and go to shade smooth so pay attention to the steps that we just did because it's an important concept for the rest of this workflow we're adding in different basic objects and then manipulating them to fit our character i'll dive into this a bit more once we get into making more complex facial features and i'll tell you about my three-step process for modeling anything from scratch so stay tuned for now let's just keep working with the basics so let's add in some materials and we'll start with the skin so select our base mesh we're going to go down to our material properties tab and we're just going to click the little plus sign to create a new material you can double click and name that skin so under base color just click on it because we have that reference image already pulled up we can just click the little eyedropper tool select the exact skin color easy as that so great let's go back to the eyes for a second and we're going to add in some pupils i'm going to click shift a and then add in another sphere we're going to select that pupil object and in the object data properties so that little tab with the orange square under scale we're just going to squash the sphere a little bit by changing one of those scale values so it's more oval shaped and then we can click g and s to scale and position it over top of the eye where we want it you also want to make a material for the pupil so select it go to your material properties click the plus sign and make a new material and name it pupil and then just change the base color to black go ahead and click ctrl c ctrl v with that pupil selected and then by clicking g just move the duplicated pupil over to the second eye so now let's add in some eyebrows using similar steps to what we just did before i'm going to click shift a and this time i'm going to add in a cylinder so again just like we did with the eye you can position it using g you can scale it using s go to your material properties and create a little eyebrow material so again just like before material properties plus sign to make a new one choose your base color duplicate that to add the second one once you have those two eyebrows and you're good to go so you have the basics of modeling down just using those primitive objects and positioning them where you want what if you want to create something a little bit more complex for example our facial hair there's only so far circles cubes and cylinders can take you so let me show you the three-step method that's gonna make modeling anything extremely simple like before in object mode we're gonna click shift a and we're gonna add in another cylinder so step number one you want to create the basic shape using your primitives but this time we're to shape the cylinder so that it's in the rough shape of a mustache you want to kind of create like a minecraft version of what it's going to look like so to do this we need to switch over to edit mode so select our mustache click tab to quickly switch over to edit mode these options over here on the left you're gonna see you can either select the vertices the edges or the faces let's go to face select mode and then we're gonna select the top part of that cylinder and we're gonna click e to extrude the face so this is extremely important here guys make sure you note these few couple of shortcuts e to extrude is extremely important once you've clicked e and you've extruded the face and you left click to put it in place with that face still selected you can click g to move it around you can click s to scale it up and down or you can click r to rotate it so use those different positioning tools to again create your little minecraft rough draft shape of a mustache if you need to keep extruding so you click e extruded a bit click click s scale it a bit if you need to [Music] [Applause] once you have your basic rough shape let's move on to step two step two is smooth the mesh out so you have the rough shape of what you're trying to make but it's just a little bit too sharp and blocky you can select your mesh you can go over to the modifiers tab and you can add a subdivision surface this splits the faces into smaller parts making them look more smooth just make sure you guys don't go overboard with this because the more you subdivide into smaller parts the higher the poly count gets so if you have something with a super high poly count it's going to use up a lot of memory it's going to raise your file sizes and it's going gonna make your computer start chugging a lot so again just be careful make sure you don't sub divide too many times and that should make things look a lot better now step three you have your general shape you have it smoothed out but maybe you just need to finalize the look a bit more make a tiny bit of changes how do you do that step three is by using your sculpting tools so if you select your object and just like we went into edit mode before you want to click that little drop down and go to sculpting mode here you can use any of these sculpting tools to shape this object in any which way you want you can add texture using this you can do a bunch of different stuff stick to the basics and just find the grab tool it's the little it's the little yellow one here use that grab brush you can change radius you can change strength whatever just use that grab brush and try and shape the mustache a little bit better very simple very easy once you've done that let's add the mustache to the other side of the face back in object mode just ctrl c ctrl v to paste it and then in your object data properties find your rotation change your rotation so that it's on the flip side of the face so let's quickly review that three-step process so so step number one you want to create a primitive so a cube a circle a cylinder you want to use the extrude tool the grab tool the scale tool to create a basic shape of what it is you're trying to make step number two is you want to smooth the mesh out so you want to subdivide it by going to the modifiers tab adding a subdivision surface and just bumping those sliders up a bit and step number three to finalize the shaping you go to sculpt mode and use that grab tool or any other or any other different sculpting tool just to finalize the look so let's go ahead and do that let's create a small beard this time this time i'm going to use cubes so again shift a create a cube and we'll name it beard i'm going to go into edit mode and i'm going to select the face of the cube i'm just going to click e to kind of pull it out a little bit i'll click g to move it around and again i'll just keep doing that until i have a rough shape of our beard next we'll smooth it out add those subdivisions shade it smooth and then sculpt it voila we have our facial features so keep that in mind that's a very essential step for creating any of the little small parts on the face so before we move on to the hair there are two quick tips that i want to mention number one let's go back to the eyes and we talked about smoothing if your eyes are kind of jagged on the edges you can just add a quick little subdivision onto them just to smooth those out number two you guys can use any of these steps that we just talked about to alter the facial features in any way so for example you guys could select the bass mesh you could extrude to try and make like a mouth shape you could add in teeth just by clicking shift a using those steps that i showed you um and making like a different facial expression you guys can make eyelids alter the face with the sculpting tools alter the eyes step for determining the style that you're trying to create so blender is your oyster have fun with the process and keep those steps in mind while you're putting together your final piece now for the hair there's two different ways that you guys can do this the first way is similar to how we made the eyes in the facial hair where you click shift a you add in a sphere you name it hair and you just kind of place it on the head using your grab tools your scale tools and then you use the sculpt mode to sculpt the hair to your liking so that's one way the second way and this is the way that i did it the method for how we're gonna do this is important because it's similar to how we're gonna make the clothes and blender later on i like to select the object i like to switch to edit mode and then i like to select the faces where i want the hair to be so just use your selection grab the little circle selection tool hold down shift and just select all of the different parts of the hair and make sure you take your time here make sure you don't miss any parts because whenever you create the mesh out of this you'll have like a big missing chunk once you have that hair base selection you want to click ctrl d and you want to right click as soon as you do that to put a duplication right in the same spot where the selection is now what you can do with everything still selected just right click on the selection and you want to go down to separate and separate by selection so in your object tray on the right you can rename this duplication to hair base let's give this hair a bit of volume with the hair selected we're going to go to modifiers and we're going to add a solidify modifier you can change the offset to something around 1 or 0.8 and that'll just kind of puff it up a bit more you can just go down to your material properties create a new material name it hair base and you could go down to your base color and just source your reference image for the color of the hair also make sure you select that skin texture and click the little negative just so that the hair paste material is the one that is assigned so now for the specific dread parts of the hair we're going to do this similar to how we added the facial features with a couple of different steps so first off what we're going to do is we're going to click shift a and we're just going to start with a cylinder so with our cylinder selected in edit mode we're going to go ahead and extrude the top face around five times so just click e drag it up a couple of times then we can just go and use our sculpt tool like we've been doing for everything else that three-step process to get the rough shape use references here if you guys are stuck either cartoony references or real world references just to kind of get a rough shape from different angles so make sure you're rotating around in blender and sculpting the way you want so now let's create a custom material so that we have this sort of color gradient for the dreads because as you see it's sort of blonde it's sort of darker near the top and then as you go down it gets more blondish to do that let's go and open up our shader editor with our dread piece selected also if you haven't already go to your material properties with it selected and just create a new material for the hair once you've done that you should be able to see the notes pop up in your shader editor we're going to click shift a and we're going to add in a color ramp node go ahead and connect that to the base color of your main principle bsdf shader on your color ramp you want to select the right input and change the color to black and on the left input you want to change the color and use your color dropper to pick a correct hair color from your reference image sometimes the color dropper can be muddled so if you need to go ahead and just tweak that color a little bit next we're going to click the plus sign to add another input point for our color ramp and then again use your color picker tool and select another part of the hair that way we can have this sort of gradient going from lighter on the far left have a little bit of a mid tone in the middle and then black on the right i'm just going to readjust those input points so that i have the correct gradient that i want for the hair once you've done that go ahead and click shift a and add in a mapping node connect the vector section to your color ramp and then click shift a again and add in a texture coordinate node and then go ahead and connect that generated section to the vector section on the mapping node from here you can use the mapping node to change around the scale the x and y positioning the rotate the rotation until you have that color ramp projected the way you want it and again to smooth this all out we're just going to go to the modifiers and add in another subdivision surface and bump up those settings slightly we have a nice smooth piece of hair so once you have that material locked in we're going to go ahead and just duplicate this dread piece a couple of times we're just gonna scale rotate um and move them around the head and position them in a way that we want and this is a huge tip here guys pay attention to proportions even though we're working in a cartoony fashion so things are not as correctly proportional you want to make sure that the hair is a correct scale you want to make sure that the eyes aren't too small or too beady really take your time here and make sure everything looks the way you want i think that's the biggest mistake i see people make is they make the eyes too small the hair too small for the head so again it just takes a little bit of time a little bit of experimenting with your scale positioning so on so forth once you're happy with where these dread pieces are placed go ahead and grab your sculpt tool and you can kind of use the grab tool to push them down onto the head or make any other little adjustments if you'd like all right you've made great progress so far before we start on the clothing i'm going to show you guys our lighting setup so if you guys want you can use the time stamps if you prefer to create the clothes before we do all the lighting before we set up the camera you could do that and then just come back here after either way let's go ahead and create our camera and position it so i'm going to delete the default camera and i'm going to click shift a and just add in a new one then what i'm going to do is just go into camera view by clicking the little camera button and then with our camera selected you can go down to your object data properties and just change the little position sliders until you have everything framed the way that you want it now let's go in and add in our lighting so we'll pop off of camera view make sure you guys change to the viewport shading rendered view so you can actually see how things are going to react with the light we're going to click shift a and we're going to add in first our key light so adding our key light we're going to give it a 45 degree angle so just go down to your object data properties on your rotation just give it a bit of a turn make sure it's pointed at your subject under our light settings i give it like 100 watts of power i try not to change that value and then i'll just go in and change around the environment everything else to tweak the final look so let's add in our fill light we can click shift a again add in another area light and this time we'll just position it on the right side and again we'll object data properties angle it towards our character this will remove the shadows on the other side that our key light is creating next what i'm going to do is just add in a 3d psych as our background so i found this cyclone model online i'll leave the link below um it's kind of just like a ramped studio stage i'm just going to file and import in that fbx just scale it up a bit i'll go to my material properties for it and i'll just create an orange base color and of course you guys can choose whatever color you want the cyclone gives a nice little gradient for the lighting and then you can add in some backlights so this will add a bit of depth from our background it'll also kind of give a little bit of illumination on the ears the hair so pretty simple again shift a add in our light angle it point it at the back you guys can go in and just experiment with other lights if you'd really like i added another backlight with a bit of purple color just for some color accenting it's really up to you once you have that basic three-point lighting setup you're pretty good to go in terms of cinematic lighting quality and it gives it a nice studio feel to finish it all off i'm going to go to the environment settings here and i'm going to load in an hdri so you guys can go to polyhaven.com i'll leave that link below and you can go to the hdri section and search for any of these hdris and hdri is basically a 360 environment when we plug it into our scene it's going to change the reflections and the lighting and how all those things react with our model so let's load it in to the base color here we'll just go to environment texture and we'll just play around with the strength until we get something we want you guys can play around with the textures on your actual character just to mess around with the skin tones make things more reflective or less reflective we can select our base mesh which has our skin material and in our material properties i'm just going to play around with the specular and the roughness until i have the skin looking the right way you don't have to mess with this much i think the only other thing i did here was click on the pupils and i just made them a lot more specular bumped down the roughness so i could have that sort of like shiny cartoon look in the eyes another side note here i'm doing all this in the eevee renderer which is a lot faster at the end we're going to render in cycles which looks a lot better in my opinion but it is more taxing it's harder to navigate so i recommend put everything together in eevee at the end we're gonna switch to cycles and i'll show you all my render settings alright so that's that i think the only other thing i did was duplicate the pupils one more time flatten them out and just make them white it made the eyes a bit more basic and just kind of popped out a bit more thought that looked cool let's put some clothes here we don't want our character in the nude the whole time so let's talk about how i go about doing that so i do want to say i do prefer to use a software called marvelous designer for 3d clothes you can sew the parts together it's nice for dynamic movements in the cloth there are a lot of blender add-ons that allow you to do the same thing but if you just want some quick basic clothes here's what you can do just within blender and if you do want to see some marvelous designer stuff down the line with this workflow let me know down in the comments i'm definitely down to do something like that in the future let's go ahead and just select our base mesh and we're going to switch over to edit mode you also want to check on x-ray mode here this little button just so whenever we select things it's going to select the parts behind it what i like to do is click and hold on our circle select and grab the box selection tool and i just like to select the area on the torso where our hoodie would be so go ahead and select those parts make sure you're not missing any parts so there aren't any holes within the mesh you can hold down shift to add on to the selection um you can switch between your tools just make sure that's all selected out and like we did with the hair base we're going to click shift d to duplicate and then we're going to right click just to put that duplication in the exact place where it is currently with everything still selected just right click and go to separate by selection so now we've cut out the hoodie part you can double click on that object and name it hoodie and to puff it up we can go in and add a solidify modifier so with our hoodie selected go to our modifiers tab and add in solidify i like to add a offset of between one or 0.8 or one just to give it a bit more depth away from the skin you can go down to your material properties and you can create a new material name it hoodie and choose a base color if you'd like we're going to add in the exact hoodie texture from the arms and dangerous video in a bit so if you have any jagged edges on your hoodie here you guys could always click k and use the knife tool in edit mode just to kind of cut that part away just click click make a straight line and then you can delete those faces or you guys can just go into sculpting mode and sort of straighten everything out once you have that sorted out we're going to do the same to create some pants select your base mesh grab your box selection tool and just grab the legs we're going to click shift d right click and we're going to right click separate by selection and name that pants of course add your solidify modifier offset it a tiny bit there you go now we have some clothing repeat those steps for the shoes as well so now let's add a bit of details to the hoodie just to make it look more like a hoodie and not like a t-shirt right now it's sort of just a t-shirt and then we're going to go in and add our exact texture from the music video so first off what you want to do is go into edit mode with our hoodie selected and you can go and select the specific vertices to sort of taper different parts of the hoodie for example um you can scale up the sleeves a tiny bit just by selecting them with your box selection clicking s you can sort of taper the cuffs on the hoodie just by selecting them clicking s making them a bit smaller so again select the different parts sort of taper everything give it more of a thicker material appearance and of course you guys can go into sculpt mode and add more intricate details if you really want now for the hood this part is a bit more tricky so because we're only rendering an image from the front facing angle i'm not going to go super into detail creating like a fully 360 degree hoodie i'm just going to do it fast and easy so it's passable as a hoodie what you want to do is in edit mode you want to be in edge selection mode and you want to alt left click on the top neckline that should select the edge around the neck you can click e to extrude it up and you can click s to scale it out a tiny bit so now you have this sort of circular collar what you want to do is just add some 3d depth to that so this time click e again and just left click and then click s with that new extrusion and scale it down a tiny bit so you have this round circular part around the neck once you have this ring around your neck you can go into vertex selection mode and you can just grab the parts of the hoodie click g and just place them in the parts that you want so it looks a bit more like a hood over the shoulders of course add your subdivision to smooth it out you can go into sculpt mode and fully make it look the way you want also side note for the hood what i like to do and this is personal preference i think it's just easier once we mess with the uv mapping you guys can separate it like we did with the other parts with that hoodie still selected before you do anything else go ahead and just click shift d right click separate by selection and name it hood and that's about it that's how i quickly just made that little hood again it's not going to look nice in the back but it works great just for quick images so now let's start getting the texture from the music video onto our clothing so luckily enough the reference image i had had the exact name of the bey hoodie that he wore in the music video so i'm just gonna search on google images and try and find a good picture of that hoodie once i find it i'm just going to right click and save it and then back in blender i'm going to select our hoodie with our hoodie selected go down to our shader editor and we're going to go ahead and click shift a and we're going to add in an image texture node in that image texture node let's go ahead and just load in the reference image that we saved from google and then let's connect that node into our base color for our hoodie material so now you can see the texture on our hoodie but it's not projected correctly so let me show you a quick fix so in edit mode we're going to go ahead and select the entire hoodie and then we're going to switch to the uv editor mode in the little drop down just go ahead and select the hoodie reference image now we want to click u and then select unwrap so now you should see the parts of the hoodie and how they're projected onto the image so all you have to really do is just select the specific parts you can select the one that looks like a torso obviously that's the torso part use your selection tools to grab all those parts click g click s click r to position it scale it rotate it onto the torso so that it's projected correctly do the same for the sleeve parts if you guys want to add the blue color to the cuffs of the sleeve or the bottom of the hoodie you guys could always just select the exact cuff parts and unwrap those specifically and then again just scale it over top of the blue or you could even just make another new material and just copy the reference color and apply it to the cuff area so it's up to you on how you want to do those little minor details you can do the same for the hood select the hood object go to edit mode and click a to select all the parts open up the uv editor click u unwrap it and then just position that circular hood area until you have a projection that works well so super fast super easy the only downside to this is we're only setting up the uv mapping for the front perspective so if you are creating an animation or a perspective where you can see the back you guys will have to unwrap and do the uv projection uh for the back side so keep that in mind reuse those steps that i just showed you if you need to do so so to make these clothes a bit more detailed i'm gonna load in some custom clothing normal maps so i got these maps from travis davids you can search for clothing maps online i'm sure you can find a bunch of free ones but either way once you have something like this in the shader editor for our hoodie all you have to do is just load in an image texture node or you could even just find the image and just drag it straight into blender then connect that normal map to the normal little node connector for our main principal shader check out the difference adds a lot more realistic detail i'm gonna do this with the pants as well i'll just go through my clothing textures folder i'll find one with jeans i'll go to my pants object i'll go to the shader editor and i'll just start dropping in those image maps and connecting them to the places that they correspond and that is about it from here your character is complete you can choose if you want to animate it if you want to pose it i'm going to leave you guys two tutorials for that below uh we talked a bunch about mixamo so tutorial number one we'll talk about taking this character plugging it into mixmo which is a free service owned by adobe it can auto generate rigs for your characters that have none and you can pick from a different library of animations to choose from and then just import back in the animations or alternatively you guys could use the second tutorial i'm to link to create a custom rig straight within blender if you want to animate yourself or if you just want to put it in a different pose of your choosing so i'll leave that down below it's like 16 minutes but it's more thorough than what i can tell you here i'll go quickly through the steps for that while i show you the footage of what i did um what you want to do is just go to edit preferences and enable riggify and then you want to click shift a and add in a human armature you want to scale it down and position it in the correct place once you position all the bones correctly you want to click control a and just apply all transformations and then in object mode go to your armature settings and just generate an armature once you've done that you can go to your post mode and you can use your armature rig that you just created to pose the character however you want again that full tutorial will be down below it takes that quick explanation it shows it a bit more in depth and it also goes through a bunch of common problems and how you can fix it so i recommend you just watch that so hope you guys do enjoy again slap a like if you guys would like to see a part two if there's enough interest in something like this i could definitely make characters in different styles like some of those references i showed you at the beginning or i could talk about making accessories posing animating making 3d clothes that are dynamic and move with the movements of your animation there's a whole world of things you can do with this and that's why i'm excited for it and i think that it's a great thing that you guys could do and apply to your own work to generate money or have fun with your hobby or print out collectibles or do whatever to render this all out and admire your creation you guys want to go to your render settings once everything's finalized you can switch from ev to cycles you can also change from cpu to gpu compute so you can utilize your gpu in the processing makes it a lot faster and easier for samples i just put it at 250 everything came out very clean and that's really about it go to your output settings from there and you can choose the folder where you'd like to output it i just output it as a png if you guys want you could do tiff or whatever we're only rendering the first frame here so i'll just put the render frame start 1 frame n1 and i'll click render animation i love how this looks i think there's amazing things you guys can do with this as always guys thank you so much for watching thank you so much for supporting and i'll see you guys in the next [Music]

Channel: Max Novak

Views: 250,634

Keywords: blender, create, model, 3d, hip hop, rapper, stylized, character, cartoon, animation, album art, nft, free, preset, pack, plugin, max novak, animate, rig, render, juicewrld, armed and dangerous, trippie redd, music video, workflow, visualizer, npr, sculpt, sometimes, wishing well, lucid dreams

Id: UrlfRvxKV_s

Length: 30min 55sec (1855 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 10 2022