Hi,
I'm Union Casper and in this video I will show you the
workflow of creating stylized characters in blender based on my experience in
film productions at the blender animation studio if you find this topic
interesting visit the blender cloud where I go into far more detail
by giving a step by step
tutorial course on the subject.
This tutorial is, in a way, a brief version of the full course.
So be aware that I'm not going to dwell on any details.
There's a link in the description, but let's just dive straight in.
The full character creation.
Workflow is often not very linear and can include different
steps based on the type and style of the character.
In this case, I'm giving a somewhat idealized simplified workflow
as the very first thing. It's necessary to know what the character is supposed to be.
In this case, it's not going to be overly cartoony or realistic,
but sort of a mix of both.
This way the style is abstracted enough to not be uncanny,
but also not too detached from reality to still feel grounded
Apart from that, you should have an idea of who your character is supposed to be
nail down individual points like ethnicity, gender, age, time,
period occupation attitude and potentially more
really nail down who you want to create.
Then, before this leads us into doing some first concepts,
it's good to do some research
this step might make you re examine your character,
but it also should inspire and guide you on creating it.
They need to be references on the character itself.
Maybe you have an actor in mind as an inspiration for example,
you should also gather references for the style you want to
use which are likely going to be artworks by other people.
Which is okay
then there are also references on the technical execution.
If you want to go for a fur coat then find out how other people tried
and succeeded before you were just going to save you a lot of trial and error.
And of course you should always include references from
real life like anatomy and fabric behavior and more
know how real life works before you recreate and abstract it.
Once you have all of it display it onto a collage ideally
nicely organized in size and groups based on importance and categorization.
My personal recommendation is using pure ref on a second monitor,
phone display or even printing it out on paper.
Now it's time to work on the design of the character.
The ideal scenario is to work from an existing concept before going into three D.
This might be your own drawing or someone else's with their permission and credit.
Of course
I have to admit
that in my case I didn't work from any drawing but I can highly recommend you do so
since it will save you a lot of time throughout the process.
The concept should embody a lot of the preparation from
before and serve as a reference for the model.
It's good to start off the three D.
sculpting with some simple blocking,
which means laying out the overall proportions with simple shapes.
This can be done by creating and placing cubes,
cylinders and spheres and sculpting them roughly into shape
from here on you add more definition and detail over time. Step by step.
It's okay to keep the shapes very plain and rough
for now until the overall shapes are set in stone,
definitely keep multiple objects around.
You don't need to sculpt everything from one object.
Also make good use of symmetry options to save time
to not really worry about running out of geometry to sculpt on.
There are helpful tools and sculpt mode
one is dynamic topology which is enabled with control D.
Which creates and removes geometry dynamically. While you are sculpting
in the options,
you can further define things like the resolution and the re meshing method.
There's also the new fossil re measure that re measures the entire object
almost immediately with the shortcut control are based on its volume alone,
which is a much faster and reliable method with much better performance.
It even re measures intersecting objects if you merge them.
You also don't actually need to use that many brushes to get the first sculpt going
simple draw. Crease smooth and grab brushes are usually enough
once everything is roughly where it should be.
It's good to finally merge the separate objects either with the Berlin modifier
or by just joining them and re meshing everything with the vaccine every measure
afterwards,
you can paint the objects with vertex colors to get
a better impression of how the character will look like.
This is very helpful but also remember to turn the colors off from time to time
since they can obscure the actual shapes of the sculpt.
You can even paint in things that are not there like
eyebrows and eyelashes to keep things fast and flexible for now
for the hair,
you can again use separate objects or extract geometry from
a mask or by using the skin modifier or even curves
to create separate hair strands or ponytails.
Afterwards add vertex colors to those as well.
If you don't have a strict concept or to follow,
you can continue to polish the head sculpt or
create design variations before settling on one of them.
Just make sure that you increase the resolution and polish
for the final head sculpt until you are happy with the results.
Different matte caps or even your own custom
ones can help you see surface imperfections more clearly
and don't worry about losing the vertex colors at this step,
since they can always be repainted afterwards,
they just serve as a pre visualization right now anyway
and again keep references on the site, especially when sculpting things like hair,
which can be very tricky to pull off if you're not used to it
for the rest of the body. It's basically the same thing.
Starting with basic separate objects To block out
the proportions and shapes as a good workflow.
Also try using the mirror modifier with a custom
mirror object that serves as a center axis.
This way you can easily keep the entire body
symmetrical no matter the transforms of each object.
Also don't forget to apply the scale with control
a of your objects to avoid weird brush behavior.
It's good to sculpt the character in a resting post like 80 posts
with very straightened and angular limps or in an a post which is more relaxed with
For example, 45° Arm Angles.
The depot's is a better resting pose for later rigging and animation while
the a post will give you more accurate defamation in the animation.
If the character is leaning more towards a realistic style,
keep sculpting and refining the proportions and shapes
until you're happy before joining everything together
for the clothing.
It's again good to extract new objects from masks and refining them further
by adding faults wherever there should be
compression and stretching in the fabric.
Vertex colors will again help you with your impression of the character
so far and you get to experiment with different color palettes.
If you decide to change the overall proportions of the character,
it's easier to merge all the objects of
the body together and adjust everything together.
Just be careful about any modifiers. You might have still active
afterwards. You can split them into individual objects again with a shortcut P.
And edit mode,
you can again create variations of the outfit but extracting them
via masks is not the only option to create them.
You can also, for example box model, a shirt
subdivided a bit
and shrink,
wrap it back onto the sculpted body and continue to finding it from there.
Keep adding more sculpted parts of the outfits until everything is there.
Some objects can remain a bit rough until you get to the final polishing later on
before settling on the design completely.
It's a great practice to test the current one and see if it can be tweaked in any way.
This is also important for the later of rigging and animation
to have a style guide already at hand
before work can start on that.
It's important to have a better mesh to work with instead
of the highly dense sculpt of the head right now,
I can recommend to either roughly remodel the head manually from subdivided cube
that you snap back onto the sculpt with a shrink wrap modifier
or to use the new quadri measure in the object data tap to the site.
Just make sure to have enough overall density and place the
geometry a bit more accurately around the eyes and mouth.
With some manual modeling
Also make sure the eyelids have 3-4 edge loops on them to be able to close them too
at an inner mouth and some teeth and the
tongue that closely represents the later polished result.
But it's okay if they're a bit rough for now
to get most of the sculpted detail back.
You can add a multi resolution modifier subdivided a
couple of times and add a shrink wrap modifier,
shrink wrap the original scope onto the new one
and apply it and you will have the detailed version on the multi rest layers.
Just make sure to not shrink wrap any geometry
that wasn't there in the original sculpt like the inner mouth and in her eyes
with the vertex group and some white painting.
You can exclude parts to be shrink wrapped by adding it to the modifier
at some shape keys,
model and sculpt on each one to get
different facial movements and mix and merge them.
However you like to create various expressions.
Be careful to only work on the base resolution,
not any of the multi rest layers
for this task.
You essentially only need the grab and smooth brushes to
move stuff around and relax areas a little bit.
Start off with the basics
like close my eyes and an open mouth.
You can create the same shape keys for multiple objects and either animate them
together or even hook them up via drivers so that they all slide together
from their work your way up with simple smiles,
angry shouts and very stretched and compressed expression tests
this will inform you if the current proportions work well or need to be tweaked
but by the end you should have some appealing expressions to show off as well.
Like always references are important.
Even if you're just filming yourself to know how a face is really supposed to move,
you might realize the eye shape doesn't really work with all the expressions or that
the eyebrows are too high by default or the teeth are too low and small.
Just tweak those areas until it looks right.
Just make sure to always get some feedback from friends or
co workers before moving on to the next big step.
Or if you're in an actual production,
sign it off like all the other steps by an art director or whoever your superiors
to make it all look even better.
You can add some additional asymmetry to insert more character and
appeal into each expression and you're done with a general design
from here on
the task is to create the actual production ready asset and finalize the style.
The sculpted character so far is sadly impossible
to rig and animate in any production.
So the model needs to be cleaned up.
This is where the reader apology comes in
read apology is about creating a version of the model that has the
lowest necessary amount of geometry with the same shapes as the original one.
Especially when subdividing it.
Just create a new object and either start from a simple base object
or just poorly model it all the way starting from the face,
Make sure to use a mirror and shrink
wrap modifier and enable face snapping in edit mode
to keep things close to the original sculpt
from here on it's all about extruding, ripping, cutting,
filling and merging geometry to get the topology you need.
There are a few things that make up a good read apology.
The edge flow is very important,
which is the direction of the loops that are going around the surface.
These are all made from quartz which our faces with
four sides and their lead into different directions via pulse,
which advertises with less or more than four connected edges
but never go above five connected edges.
Otherwise they might become really visible.
It's very much a puzzle where you need to
create an efficient and very functional version of your objects
that supports
any sort of movement compression or stretching that will happen with it
once it gets animated.
For example, just like for the expression tests,
it's good to add some extra loops on the eyelids since
these will have to close to and need that extra geometry
joints need a minimum of three edge loops to be able to bend while keeping their shape
if you want to exaggerate a crease somewhere in the face.
For certain expressions also have a minimum of three edge loops
ready like at the last line or between the brows.
Using the subdivision surface modifier will smooth the
entire results so be aware of stretching.
That's why you should mostly rely on evenly sized squats all over the place,
especially on areas that will deform a lot or very curved
increases and hard surfaces are an exception usually since the
former needs more density to stay sharp and the latter
doesn't need any extra loops to deform. Well,
it's generally a good practice to start from the face and to reach,
apologize each limp separately from there and stitch them together afterwards.
Make the loops generally follow the shapes and muscles of
the body to support the direction they will reform too.
Make sure that most loops lead back into each other.
You don't want some loops to spiral all over your objects.
At some point you will have read apologized everything that was sculpted,
which is when you will have to model things that weren't already there.
But first add a multi rest modifier
subdivided a couple of times and apply the shrink wrap over it.
Then click on apply base and get rid of the multifarious modifier to.
Now your anthropology will have the same volumes as
the original sculpt when adding a subdivision surface modifier
from here on out you can model in some inner islets in a mouth,
polished the already existing teeth gums and tongue and model in some proper eyes.
When you get to the clothing, you can duplicate parts of the body
to have a good base to start from.
This is also the time to add some more definition to roughly sculpted
objects or adding seems and nice pockets to pants and other details.
Once it's done,
make sure to have the asset
in the correct world scale like roughly 1.7 m in my case.
And it's time to go to the next step.
Just like the topology is the first step to some good rigging and deformations.
The UV maps are the first step to good textures and materials.
Just imagine you take some scissors and make multiple cuts on your cleanly
model character unfolded onto a flat surface and place an image on top.
This flat unfolded mesh
is a UV map
and that's how texturizing a digital model is done
to achieve this, you can select edges and edit mode and tack them as seems.
These edges will be the cuts on the U. V. S.
Once you have them placed you can unwrap your mesh
and the UV map will be visible in the UV editor
by enabling the stretching overlay,
it will be more visible if the U. S. Are less ideal in certain areas.
Also already using the UV map to add a color grid texture onto
the model will also show the distribution of the UV space better.
The goal is very much to place just enough seems
to evenly lay out the mesh with minimal amounts of stretching
but just like it's impossible to create a perfectly flat map of
the earth without some areas being a bit bigger than others.
Some imperfections will be hard to avoid.
Also try to avoid placing too many seams that are in the face.
For example since under certain circumstances it can be easy to spot the seams
hide the seams as best as you can.
Once you have your ups nicely unwrapped it's
time to adjust and organize them better.
They should be laid out in a way where they take
up as much space as possible from the one by one.
UV space.
Having the place in a symmetrical way. Can also be very helpful later on.
Make sure the U. V.
S are generally having the same scale unless you want
some UV islands to get more texture resolution than others.
It's a bit like packing your luggage and making
sure everything fits in perfectly without getting all messed up
for areas like the eyes and lips.
It can also be helpful to select that geometry and projecting it from the view,
smoothing them out a bit and stitching them back to the rest
whatever makes the V. S more evenly distributed.
If you start adjusting movies like this in detail,
Remember that you can pin UV points with the shortcut P.
So that they don't move when unwrapping those ups again.
Also make sure that none of the UV borders are too close together
and that no UV should ever overlap unless you know what you're doing.
You can also use UV sculpting tools for wider smoothing and grabbing of
areas but be careful not to cause too much stretching with it.
Scale some areas with proportional editing enabled to
get some more evenly sized SUVs at the
cost of some more stretching it's always a bit of a balancing act between the two
for the clothing. It might also be important to have the UV.
Maps laid out in neat rectangular patches
this way it's very easy to just slap on some fabric
patterns without having them distorted or go into weird directions.
Just pin the borders of the islands and enable life unwrapping
then adjust the borders to be as rectangular as possible
and the rest in between will automatically conform to it
And keep comparing it to the grid texture and the three D. View.
This will be a good reference on how distorted the textures
would be and how much texture resolution each area gets.
Go through all the different objects with these principles
and you will have some clean functional U.
V. S
to texture. In the next step
to get the character some colors. We need to add textures.
Add a shader editor in the interface to edit the note based materials and
an image editor to see and paint on the textures in a two D.
View.
Also as a pro tip enable the note Wrangler add on in the preferences.
I can recommend to just use the default principle be sdf shader in the notes.
Since it has basically everything one would need during the text ring,
then start out with a basic colours.
Do this by adding and painting on image textures or vertex colors
and plugging the note outputs into the base color of the shader.
Most notes can be freely mixed with the mix or G. B.
Note and each have their own advantages. Use the material preview mode
in the view port which displays everything you're working on
control, shift, click on any note to see that output directly.
Start out with most primary colours and then mix in secondary colors.
You can also then start mixing an ambient occlusion or cavity inputs, patterns,
noise and specific painted in details.
Just blend the notes together either by using screen to Brighton.
Multiply to Darden
Or mix to blend between two inputs.
Also make sure to paint on the alpha
channel which is the transparency on an image texture
to use as a mask By plugging it into the factor afterwards.
The well aligned rectangular UV is for
the clothing will really become useful now since
images like clothing patterns can just be
slapped on top and they will immediately align
extra details like stitches can always be painted separately on top afterwards,
definitely keep all of these influences
in the colour as separate notes because once you are done it's time for the shading
the other,
most used inputs in the shadows apart from the base color
are roughness to define the glossy shine or the lack thereof.
Metal nous,
if the surface is metallic
and normal to add fake high frequency details that we didn't model in already.
If you want parts to be transparent like glass or ice,
you can use transmission
and to just make them use fade away or just completely disappear. Use alpha.
You can also use speculator to tone down the glossy highlights
but if you want to have it really realistically accurate,
increase the roughness.
Instead,
pluck your individual notes from the colour
also into color ramps and hue saturation value
notes to change and then remix them for the other inputs of the shade up.
Try to keep everything organized well enough by clumping notes together,
framing them or even grouping them,
change the lighting conditions and test how the materials react,
adding additional lights and rotating them around manually. Can also help
in case of the skin. It's also good to add subsurface scattering or S. S. S.
And short to give it that waxy look like the light is shining through
to give a nice fake hair look on modeled hair.
I can recommend the anisotropy shading which adds
a directional distortion to the glossy highlights.
Turning the anisotropy to one by itself is not really going to look convincing or
even good since it just adds a spherical pattern based on a world access,
you need to create a second UV map added as a tangent
note and plug it into the tangent input of the shader.
The orientation of the U. S.
Will then influence the direction of which
the highlights will be distorted towards.
So all hair strands need to be laid out as flat as possible and aligned vertically.
Now the shiny streets are going horizontally across the surface
instead of the fixed spherical direction of before
to fake individual hair strands of hair.
You can paint a black and white texture with small
value differences and plug it into the anisotropy rotation,
adjust that same directional map with a color ramp and plug it into the roughness,
add color
and you're done.
Keep testing and tweaking your materials in both Eddie and cycles and optimize it
towards the render engine you want to use later on for the final rendering.
Once you're happy, you might have a hugely complex nonsensical no tree.
This can be then simplified by only looking at the necessary inputs
that lead into the shader and baking everything down into a set of image textures.
Just make sure you have cycled set as the render engine.
You control, shift,
clicked on the part of the no tree you want to bake and select
an image texture note where you want to bake it too and it should work
to speed up the baking process,
set the samples to something pretty low, go absolutely overboard on the tile size
set the bake type to emit with a generous margin and click bake
ideally. Once you're done, your character should look good whether you use eV
cycles or just material colors in the view port.
Just like we wrapped up the original design with some expression tests.
This is the time to put everything that we made so far to the test with a full post.
This is to see if there are any last adjustments that
should be done like tweaking the proportions of the body fixing,
stretching, et cetera.
Of course it's also great to not present the character in the current resting post.
The rectify adding in the preferences can really help to get some rough poses going,
add a basic human rhetoric and adjust the placement size and
orientation of the bones in edit mode to fit the character.
Don't forget to enable X. Mirror to save yourself some time.
Once you're done, click on generate rig and there it is.
Select your character then the rig and with
control P parent the objects to the amateur.
With automatic weights.
With this done you can do some exploration in the overall post.
Experiment and see what you want to go for
since the rig is pretty procedural.
There will be issues if some deformations are outright broken.
You can manually go into weight paint mode and paint out some issues.
Make as many poses as you want until you find your favorite in the end.
Don't forget to look at references and
even make references from yourself if necessary.
I recommend to have a second view port to the side and set
the shading to be completely black maybe with some dark grey outlines.
This way you can see if the silhouette is readable enough.
The post can then be tweaked towards a single
camera angle or any perspective you want to render,
make sure the post is dynamic enough with differences and angles,
enough asymmetry and whatever else you have in mind as well.
In this example, I wanted something comfortable and confident,
not a super happy victory jump or something like that,
but something way more contained and down to earth.
Have an idea in mind of what kind of post you want.
Then apply the amateur modifiers as shaped keys
and then you do essentially the same thing as with the expression tests,
add more shape. He's for various nondestructive fixes
in the defamation and keep comparing it
to the original resting posts because the proportions
shouldn't change. Of course
this is very easy when animating all shaped keys to zero
on one frame and enabling all shaped keys on the next one
creating variations. This way is also a good opportunity
if you notice that the arms actually look a bit
weird and length or the hands are too big.
Now is the time to make last changes before committing to the end result.
Also sculpted expression that you like and polish it until you're happy
from here on out.
You can play some lights a nice environment and render a final image,
render multiple angles or even a turntable to
show as much of the character as possible.
A so called clay render is also good to show off the model itself where it's rendered
colorless in diffuse gray with only the bump
and normal information at most from the materials,
add wire frames on top as well to show off the clean topology you created
Brenda does also Western tables and you have a
complete character for production that you can show off
from here on there. Of course, more steps like doing an actual rig for the animation,
animation testing and the rest of the production.
But in terms of finding and developing the design and style of the character,
these are the steps you need at the very
least to create a complete stylized character workflow.
If you're interested in more educational blender content,
a huge asset library of all the blender,
open movies or you want to support these projects.
Head on over to the blender cloud and say hi in the comments.
You will also find a fully rigged version of this example
character called Rain and various files from the creation process.
I hope to see you there and thank you for watching