ZBrush Tutorial - How to Open Character Mouth

hey guys welcome to another video in this Channel today I have some very cool tricks for you especially if you're working with characters I'm gonna show you how to get the amount of a character open I've been working on this character on my free time for a couple of weeks now and I think we're going to be using him on one of our premium courses so what we're gonna show you or what I'm going to show you is how to open the mouth of a character so that we can sculpt the inner side of the lips the inner side of the mouth and make sure that this character is perfectly ready for any type of Animation later down the road so before we go there just want to quickly remind you that if it's not October 13 yet you still have a chance to participate in our first 3D contest where we're giving away 100 to the first price you can check the video right around here it's going to be flying the little like flag information you still get at the time of this recording you still got like four weeks to finish so make sure to participate join your Discord Channel and let's go to the video the first thing you need to do of course is you need to finish your sculpture as you can see right here I got a very good amount of detail can we push this forward like further of course we can make this thing look even better if we spend even more time but I feel like we're in a good position to both open the mouth and prepare him to do maybe some textures so what we're going to do here is I'm actually going to be cloning this so that I don't have to work on my main file I'm going to be working on the secondary file right here and what we want to do is we want to open the mouth just a little bit and create a little bit of a pocket of air where the teeth and everything is going to be so let's start by appending a sphere and what I'm going to do with this sphere is I'm gonna go to transparency and I'm gonna make this a sphere very very small like this okay now this sphere represents the mouth back which is where our teeth are where our gums are where our tongue is certain Studios will tell you that they want to have the throat go all the way back so I'm just going to start sculpting this to generate a little bit of the throat back here and this is mainly when you're going to have a character that's gonna be like ah screaming a lot that you're gonna see all the way into the inside of the mouth you probably have seen this shots where where the camera starts inside the mouth and then it goes out and the character is like screaming so you're gonna see the whole life structure right so in those cases you definitely want to have something like this and then as we move forward I'm going to start creating a very very thin effect right here now you can see I made a slight mistake here by not by not doing um symmetry from the beginning so let's go back there there we go turn on Symmetry and we just bring the throat in so we're just going to create this is called and this is a I wouldn't say like new method but it's something that's been done a lot more recently thanks to live booleans we're going to be using light booleans right here so now I'm gonna be bringing the the very like inside of the mouth right here and we definitely want to add a little bit more volume in this area there we go now you got to keep in mind that the jaw is right here and this is where we would have like the lower teeth so you definitely want to capture as much as possible from this area right here now we're going to use a function that's a function that we don't use that much or at least I don't use that much which is the freeze subdivision levels functions because as you guys know this character right now is made out of subdivision levels we have multiple subdivision levels that we needed in order to get to this very high level of sculpture could we have done with this with dynamesh and the answer is yes of course you could have done this without image but it would require a very very high resolution and it's not always the most efficient way to do it so once we have this I'm going to hide this fear just a little bit and what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to the lowest of division level or probably close to the lowest right around here seems like a good idea and I'm going to use my mask lasso to mask out the jaw of the character right around here even a little bit of the of the what's the word of the chin and of the neck is fine now that we have this I'm going to control click to soften the mask I'm going to control click outside of the object to invert the mask I'm gonna reset the pivot point and I'm gonna move it to where the jaw usually pivots from which is around there and I'm gonna move this back okay you can even press Ctrl and move this and it should give you a little bit of a of a like deformation effect I'm going to soften this up a little bit more there we go not too much usually when when I'm doing characters and I'm opening them out I I don't like going like this because it becomes a different face expression and that could potentially create some issues so you usually want to do like uh like a relaxed sort of like Jaw drop very similar to what happens when you're like on the train or on the bus and you just fall asleep and you do this like that's the kind of like amount that you want to have enough so that when you do the bakes the lower lips do not bake onto the top lips so in this case in particular I would say something like this should be more than enough of course we're gonna have to do a little bit of resulting so for instance here with my mood brush just a little bit less there we go with my mole brush I'm just gonna bring my my neck up a little bit because I don't want to have a lot of uh contraction right there and there we go so if we go all the way back to the to the highest of division level you're gonna see that we have a little bit more space in between the lifts keep in mind that this technique that we're doing will require us to do some resculting so unfortunately that's not something that we can really uh uh avoid we're still gonna have to redo things that's why if I know that my character is going to be going into a production pipeline for games or for something where I'm gonna need the mouth open I will usually after I finish the I would say the initial blocking of the face and stuff like that I will open the mouth at that point so that I don't have to redo a lot of this details if you want to know a little bit more about the way we do these things I do have a course about the stylized character creation and we do go over that as well so over here I'm gonna just uh bring this thing back in I'm gonna light Boolean and this one is gonna be a negative light Boolean so as you can see that's going to be cutting into the character and creating the whole mouth back that we need right there as you can see yes we are going to be destroying a little bit of the overlap but that's it's part of the trail so here's where the freeze subdivision level is going to be working because what we need to do is we need to do a remeshing okay so first I'm going to make this a light Boolean so I'm going to go here to Boolean and I'm going to make Boolean mesh this is gonna of course do the Boolean operation it's going to remove the mouth back from the character and it's going to leave me with this hollow element however it's gonna also delete the subdivision levels and I don't want that to happen I want to rebuild all of those subdivision levels as as nicely as I can so there's two ways that we can do this we can freeze set of division levels and we can use the following technique that I'm about to show you which is the Reconstruction of the subdivision levels so let's go there we go so as you can see over here if we go to our Umesh we're going to have our character ready to go what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back to this one I'm going to delete this we don't need it anymore and we're gonna disable the live booleans now I'm gonna append the new U mesh that we have right here and as you can see it's pretty much the exact same thing the only difference is that of course this one does not have the mouth closed however this we don't have any Dynamics everything is like just um like a final uh if you can say that so what I'm gonna do here is I am going to smooth out the borders a little bit of course let's turn on symmetry so I'm going to smooth out the borders a little bit here on the character and once I have this I'm going to use my trim dynamic to start flattening a little bit of this effect now as you can see it gets very complicated to work because we have a very high subdivision level so what we need to do is we need to either Siri mesh or dynamesh whichever one you prefer in my case I'm actually gonna see remesh so I'm gonna go over here to Geometry I'm gonna go to Siri measure I'm going to say Siri measure this will give me something that's sculptable it's not animation ready topology we're going to talk about that in a subsequent video please let me know in the comments if you want me to see I want to teach you guys how to do like complex udms and texturing with this character so let me know if that's something that you guys are interested in and I'll be happy to record something as well also if there's any specific topic that you you want me to talk about in our videos here or in our shorts please let me know in the comments I really need your help there because I've been running a little bit dry on Creative juices so I really need to to find some things or some topics that you guys want to learn about so there we go we got this character right here now what I need to do is I need to check how many millions of polygons this guy has as you can see it's 10 million polygons so I'm gonna go to this guy I'm gonna do one subdivision two subdivisions three subdivisions four subdivisions five subdivisions 12 million polygons is what we're getting and we want to do now is we want to project all of the details that we have from this guy into the new guy so we select our new guy and we're gonna go to project and project all right now what's going to happen here is it will try to find the projection areas where it can't through the projection it's gonna either mask it out or it's just gonna give me an error and I'm gonna show you how to fix this error in just a second let me pause real quick because this might take a little while and this is it as you can see we have finalizer projection and now if we turn off our other character right here we're gonna see this so it actually did a fairly decent job in projecting this thing of course we get some errors here in the lips because it didn't have any information you can see the corners of the lips also need a little bit of uh of re rework it there but I'm just going to start softening and what I'm actually going to do is I'm going to go to the lowest subdivision level and I'm going to start softening at the lowest subdivision level so that we get rid of all of those like super jaggedy like polygons and effects so we're just gonna clean that up and there we go and by doing that we've successfully opened the mouth of the character and not only that we have all of the information that we've sculpted before so all of these points all of the pores the scars everything is there now here what I recommend doing is something called um subdivision cleanup or subdivision by cleanup level this is what we used to do back in the day when the when I first started flexibrush we didn't have dynamesh back then so if you had an error at a very high like subdivision level you would need to go to all of the lowest subdivision levels and start cleaning things up that's one of the things that I feel like a lot of youngers cultures are issuing or struggling with they they just see Dynamic and they think that's the solution and the and the and the best option to do everything and there's so many other technical things like I'm a huge fan of C spheres for instance where you can learn a lot of this as well so again as you can see just level by level cleaning all of the subdivision levels and then we go to the final level and all of the Peaks and the and valleys should be pretty much over now it will be get it will be a little bit difficult to clean up some of the stuff right here because the lips are in this like open position my best advice is use polygroups so if we go all the or all the way down to the lowest of division level we can get to this polygons right here and what we can do here is I'm going to press Ctrl shift and use my select lasso to lasso out the lower jaw like this now if you guys don't know about this there's a very cool option on the poly groups menu that's called a grow if we go sorry in the visibility menu It's called grow where you can grow more polygons as you can see right here and bring more of the loops uh into your into your scene so in this case I'm going to be very careful I'm Gonna Leave This guys out like that and here there's a couple of different ways to do it for instance there's some people that really like have a really like clean um cut here on the on the jawline I'm not super like precise about it to be honest so all of this let's clean that up so all of that like jaggedy edges I I don't really care too much what I do care about though is the uh the inner like back of the mouth so here I'm gonna invert this and one thing I can do here is I can do some other groups and we should get are we getting weight there we go so you can see all of the math there so I'm gonna do other groups so that we get two different polygroups right there now I'm just gonna hide this guy right here invert and this should give me the full like a mouthpiece right there perfect so we just Ctrl W again to group this out and that's it so now we have successfully created a division between the polygroups did we just gonna have to control W the colors were way too similar so there you go now let's say you want to close close the mouth right like we we can start working here like this is what I would do I would just go here and start going up in subdivision level and once I'm in a good subdivision level we just grab our basic um like clay Builder brush right here and we can start rebuilding the lower Outlet this is a very traditional way to do it again we can use things like the trim dynamic and just clean it up to get the mouth start looking a little bit better usually the the lower lip and the inner lips they are quite puffy on the inside of the mouth so that's why you're doing this polygroup and this division is really important because it will allow you to sculpt that inside part right there and then we can do the exact same thing on this one right here so just go here and we start being careful there with the back face masking okay it's already known if you don't let me know in the comments and I'll explain it so backface I'm asking too to make sure that we're not pulling any of the points from the other lip like that right there how do we activate back face masking on the brush and then on auto masking and then back face mask there we go so now I can work here without any fear of pulling the other part of the lips down so all of this volume we need to start recovering it rebuilding it there was a scar on the on the left side of this lip that we definitely would need to to rebuild as well so as you can see little by little our character here is recovering his uh his lips let's add a little bit more volume here we have enough polygons that we can do all of this and and there shouldn't be any issue I would probably polygroup the the upper part of the head as well so that we can work on this without having too much finish there we go they're looking a little bit better now the final thing that we can do here well first of all we need to we do need to go uh as slow as possible here and this like corner of the mount you do want to make it a little bit sharper otherwise it might become a little bit difficult to to read later on uh this is another one of those things where if I know that this is going to be a very important character and you're going to see the lips a lot and stuff like that I will probably do a proper retopology before even opening the mouth because it's easier to create the mount back from a proper retopology in this case it's not really the end of the day if we don't do it but it might get or it might make sculpting a little bit more difficult so here's the final tip or the final trick that I want to show you and that is at the layers we can use layers so I'm going to go to the lowest subdivision here let's grab our mask or our element oh there we go mask it and invert the mask and what we're going to do here is we are going to create a new layer oh sorry I need to go to the highest subdivision level so we're going to go to the highest of division level we're going to create a new layer and then we're going to close the mouth okay so as you can see this guy has a little bit of an underbite let's close them out right there actually I kind of want to like soften the The Mask a little bit more there we go let's move this up oh that's way too high remember this Gizmo should be close to the area where the mouth is supposed to be we can close this a little bit right there and then at this point I find it a little bit easier to just use my move topological and just move this thing up let's see if we can do it there we go invert the mask and do the same thing on the upper side there we go remove this and of course we will need to do some cleanup right there I do believe we can go to lower subdivision levels and clean this up a little bit more and now my mouth is closed so if I go to the highest of division level now and start recording we're going to be able to switch between an open mouth and a close math so with a closed mouth I might be able to sculpt certain details that might be a little bit easier we can send this to a rig or something so that he can get a better look at how the character is going to look and with this one right here we're going to be able to sculpt on the lips a little bit better so I would say something like about there is a good point for the for the open mouth element like you don't need to go super super aggressive like what like like what what like with what I have before you can keep it like this as long as you don't get too much bake information again from the top of the lips to the bottom of the lips and uh yeah that's pretty much it my friends that's the way you open them out instead of zbrush now we can go back to our original one which just transfer this to the original one and we are ready to go on to the next stage which is more detailing of course all of the discovery sculpting bringing in some teeth or creating the teeth ourselves so that we get the the inside of the mouth and preparing this for um later a proper retopology for animation so that's it for this one of my friends thank you very much for watching this I hope it's been useful for you and if it wasn't you're not subscribed a subscription could be really good for us it's going to support the channel and it's gonna allow me to continue to share all of these tips with you also again let me know in the comments what kind of other things you want me to do and I'll be happy to upload here in the channel that's it for now I'll see you back on the next one bye

Channel: Abe_Leal3D

Views: 6,931

Keywords: ZBrush character mouth, open jaw ZBrush, ZBrush sculpting tutorial, ZBrush character tips, mouth articulation in ZBrush, 3D modeling mouth, digital sculpting techniques, ZBrush basics, character design tips, 3D sculpting jaw, ZBrush tutorial for beginners, character mouth techniques, ZBrush model detailing, jaw movement in ZBrush, character facial features sculpting, ZBrush guide for mouth, 3D character design tips, ZBrush mouth tutorial, abraham leal, abe leal 3d

Id: -pdJOuIxAx4

Length: 18min 23sec (1103 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 20 2023