Hi and welcome! I'm Julien Kaspar and almost
two years ago I made this video and also a
course on the Blender Studio website. Since then I created a second character for this
particular lineup of open source characters.
I did all of this live on the Blender Studio
channel and there are even more time lapses on the Blender Studio website. But this
video is meant as one big recap of the creation of
snow. So what did I do differently in comparison
to rain and why? And also I want to talk about
some of the updated features in Blender and
updated techniques that I'm using in comparison
to the first video. And also some more tips
and new things from what I've learned that can maybe also help you creating characters
for film. If you want to learn more in detail
there are various courses on the Blender Studio
website on these topics and of course the stylized character workflow that this video
is still mostly based on. But I hope these tips in this video help you out and this
video motivates you to learn more about character creation. So in the first video
I laid out this workflow of creating characters
step by step. Only that rain didn't have a 2D design
concept. I just went straight to sculpting and
figured out her design there with various head
sculpts. But for snow I actually went into 2D
drawing first to get a good idea of the concept
I want to pursue. For all of this I used
grease pencil in Blender. It also works great
for 2D concepting. This is actually fairly
easy to start with by starting a Blender with
a 2D animation template. Here on you can add
layers to the side for your sketches, colors
or cleaned up drawings just like any other painting software. You can also create
variations by switching to a different frame and drawing. So this will just animate
the grease pencil object. This way I was able to very quickly sketch out various
versions of snow. This then led to a drawing in
pose and in color as my main concept and then
some turnaround line drawings for the head. And
also one feature that I love about concepting
in grease pencil are the editing and sculpting
tools. So you don't need to redraw everything
constantly. You can also just morph it into
something else which can be really convenient.
To start with the sculpting I imported the
drawings or other references by just directly
drag and dropping them into the 3D viewport.
Instead of using dynamic topology like with rain
I only really used the voxel remesher with a shortcut ctrl r and shift r to add more
resolution and geometry. This way you have to
add detail step by step. You're really forced to
it. But still always sculpt the basic shapes
first and refine them equally throughout the
entire character. Even during the sculpting
process I constantly compared the sculpt with
rain to make sure I don't stray too far away from the already established design.
I of course wanted to improve some aspects based on things I learned last time but I
couldn't do any drastic changes. These are
these two characters are part of the same lineup
and they need to fit together. Also I reused
the hand model from rain. I really recommend
reusing parts of older models or even entire
characters as a base to save time. The more
you get a hang of sculpting human bodies the
less you should be slowed down by having to do
it all over again and again. The sculpting
tools in blender are powerful enough to reshape
any character as you wish. For the clothing I used a different workflow this time.
Instead of modeling or extracting the clothes
I sculpted solid big pieces first. These big
chunks made it very easy to change and remesh
the objects since it was a very clear volume.
Once I was happy I masked and extracted the surface to get the thin cloth pieces
that I wanted to work with afterwards. And then
I used the quad remesher to get some workable
topology quickly and added more definition via
the multires modifier. Even though I quad remesh
the hands head and body separately since that
was less error prone I joined the objects and
bridged the edge loops in edit mode to make
them all as one object. This way I could also
less resolution on the entire body and more
on the hands and head so when I subdivide them
I would get more detail in the places where
there needs to be more detail because there's
no use in having the same level of resolution
on the belly as on the entire face. Only for
the face did I do a little bit of light remodeling so that I could already add an
mouth and a little bit of preparation for the
expression sculpts. This topology doesn't need
to be super clean it only needs to roughly have
the right direction of loops or edge flow as
it's called around the lips and laugh line and
eyelids for example. To get the details from
the original sculpt back I added a multires modifier and started subdividing it a bunch
times and then I added a shrink wrap modifier
for the head body and hands each with a vertex
group assigned to define where each should
shrink wrap to. With the modifiers then applied
onto the multires modifier I could then smooth
out the transitions between the three areas
and have all the high detail sculpts on one object. Once I was happy with all of the
shape keys for the expressions again like closed eyes and an open mouth.
One of the things I did differently from last time though is that I started painting
and face sets in sculpt mode. These are
great for hiding parts of your sculpt quickly
but also for masking off entire sections
effortlessly. From there on out I added more
and more shape keys for various expressions to
check if the design is appealing or if there
any issues in the proportions. By animating and driving these sliders I could quickly
switch between expressions and mix and match them by scrubbing through the timeline.
Some adjustments that I did because of that
was for example lowering the nose bridge a bit
and tweaking the eyebrows and adjusting his
inner mouth. These are the sort of things you
would only know from experience or asking for
feedback or in this case by actually testing
your designs and seeing what is still wrong with
it. Unlike with Rain I ended the testing with a
four pose sculpt. This was actually surprisingly
easy to do without adding a rig this time
by using the pose brush transform tools and
face sets in sculpt mode. I just had to join
all objects together and add face sets to
everything to clearly define the individual limbs.
If the pose brush is not using the option
connected only it will even move near surfaces
together like clothes and hair. Mask expand,
lasso masking and the face sets also made it very
fast to target certain limbs and quickly
rotate them with the transform tools as well.
All of this was also done with shape keys so
the original resting pose would stay intact.
I also compared all of this with Rain so they
both work well side by side. This is where I
wrapped up the 3D design phase and after a while
started the live streams on Retopologizing Snow.
I went into a very different direction than
with Rain. Rain was made with topology that is
very generic that would be easily applied to
any character that doesn't have too pronounced
facial features. Big feature films use this
approach a lot where they have one really well
made retopology and then morph it into any background or secondary character they have
because they already know that this topology
works. This saves a lot of time but I also
made the mistake with Rain to start very high
res with the retopology. This is actually not a good idea since it can get you stuck
with too much geometry too soon. So for Snow
I started with the absolute minimum amount of
loops and then went higher only when needed.
I also made a very custom fitted retopology for him. Each loop is very customized for
his facial features and proportions. This lowered
the amount of loops overall but increased the.
well to not cause any stretching when subdividing. While retopologizing I liked to.
Mark very important loops as seams or sharps
to make them really stick out in as these red and blue lines. This is really just to
help distinguish them visually while working
on the retopology. It doesn't do anything
else. Retopology can be done very differently
and there are no perfect solutions. For Rain I went for very clear patches and
Poles leading into each other. Snow is a good
example of how the structure can be a bit more
messy visually but overall better for this
particular character and as a result with almost
half the amount of geometry on the entire body.
Each limb of the body was also retopologized
as separate mesh and only bridged with a rest
once the loop count matched and wouldn't change
anymore. And here's a good tip for clothing
retopology. Try to place loops exactly where
the real seams on the fabric would be. This will help a lot later during UV unwrapping
and texturing. Even the hair was retopologized
in the same way to keep the style consistent.
For the UVs this time I relied much more heavily
on the live unwrapping feature of Blender.
It's a bit unfortunate how hidden this feature
is since this is the best way of unwrapping
and editing UVs in Blender. It's really useful
to be able to pin certain UVs to keep them
in place and have others automatically unwrap
instead. For example if you want to stitch
pieces together or you want to straighten certain UVs or rotate and align areas.
This time I also used U-Dems for the main
body. If you don't know a U-Dem is essentially
a one by one UV space. If you use more than one you can also use more than one
texture on that object. So that way the
head, hands and the body could each get their
set of textures with different resolutions for more detail. I also pinned the middle
loop in the center of the UVs so I can easily
mirror the UVs later on. This can be done by
for example using the mirror modifier with the bisect and mirror UV options enabled.
Even U-Dems work with this. And then once you
apply the modifier your mesh and your UVs will
be perfectly symmetrical. And then for the
surfacing. Unlike with rain I didn't texture
paint that much this time to add more detail. I
mainly just painted or generated low resolution
masks to define where procedural or high
resolution patterns should appear. Like a mask
for pores, lip wrinkles or the Iris textures.
Just like with rain I used tileable textures
again to add fabric patterns on straightened
UVs. These I got from various CC0 texture
libraries like Texture Haven, CG Bookcase and CC0 textures. The issue is that these
textures often come with some extra color
variation and details attached. Often I only
want the detailed patterns and add all the
color variation myself. So an easy trick I like
to do is for example in Krita or any other
image editing software to take the image and.
start duplicating the layer. Then blur it until the detailed patterns are gone and
you're only left with the color variation you
want to get rid of. Then set the blurred layer
to gain extract and it will extract the difference. In this case that's the detailed
pattern that was blurred out and then just save the texture and you have exactly that
pattern that you want to use. But I didn't
just make neatly laid out UDIMs. I also added
additional UVs for procedural texturing this
time. Since UVs are essentially just coordinates
in two dimensions, the U and the V direction,
you can use them to add additional effects
For example I unwrapped and straightened UVs
along the sleeves, collar and the hip to add
a darker strip of fabric procedurally with a
seam in between the two colors. It's also much
easier to add non-destructive stitches this
way along the UVs. Almost completely resolution
independent. Basically the only thing I texture
painted by hand on the clothes is a height map
for smaller wrinkles on the clothes and I
mixed that in with the other texture patterns.
After I was happy I did some renders for tests
and turntables and then tweaked it afterwards.
And then once that was done I baked the entire
node tree down into a set of PBR textures just
like last time. One thing I didn't mention in
the previous video is that I can really recommend
set any black and white or normal map texture
to non-color instead of sRGB. This will give
you more accurate results especially for normal
maps. And also in the original video I didn't go
that much into the rendering side. So essentially
once I have the post shaded character I set up
a camera and some lights. Most of this is based on the three point lighting principle
and done in Eevee since there I can see the
changes in real time. Once I'm mostly happy with
the results I switch over to Cycles for the
final setup and further tweaking. Since Cycles
and Eevee share most of the settings you don't really lose much in the progress.
For the ground I added a reflective plane as a nice bonus. For rain I added a bit of
placement with water ripples from raindrops.
For snow I originally went for well snow but
this ended up to be way too distracting so I changed it to a subtle frozen texture.
In the end I did a bit of retouches and compositing directly in Blender.
For this I organized the character, his eyes
and the background into separate collections.
Then I created three view layers that will each
render out a different part of the final image.
The first layer renders out snow with a transparent
background. To achieve this you can just
toggle the check Mark on the background collection in the outliner. This check Mark
will only be checked for this particular view
layer. This will just exclude anything from
inside that collection and it will not appear
in the render. In the second layer I rendered
out only the background but with snow still
visible in the reflections. For this you can
toggle the indirect only option in the outliner
on the character collection. This way anything
in that collection will never be directly visible but only indirectly in the lighting
and reflections on other objects. And in the
last layer I rendered only the eyes with a bit
of a different lighting setup so that there's
no distracting reflections. You can enable the
holdout toggle in the outliner on the rest of
the character for this. So anything in those
collections will be rendered as Alpha zero,
essentially like a mask. Then you can stitch
these layers together in the compositor, add
some glare and color correction, some nice
gradients for the background and you're done.
And that's it. Thanks a lot for watching. If
you're interested in more tutorials on this
topic or the files of these characters, visit
the Blender Studio website. Once Snow is fully
rigged he will be made available as a Creative
Commons character for you to use for any
project you like. But until then you can also
get the full access to the entire library of Creative Commons
characters and assets on the Blender Studio website. Enjoy!