Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hello. My name is Will Forrest. I'm a three D artist.
I've been working in the industry for
about 15 years now. During my career, I've worked on TV, stuff, virtual reality, some games and
product rendering, as well, all sorts
of different things. More recently, I've
been doing a lot of AI based motion capture, character retargeting and making promotional videos
for, you know, the new wave of AI startups, demonstrating what the
new technology can do. I thought I'd put
together a course, having discovered some
really interesting, new AI generated three D models, technology that is
pretty mind blowing. It's still not quite there, but with a bit of tweaking and a
bit of editing and a bit of three D know how you can get those models working
in your game. Welcome to the course. In this
hands on set of tutorials, you'll explore a streamlined workflow that
bridges cutting edge AI tools with industry
standard three D software to create optimized
models for games, animation, product
visualization, or digital art. Whether you're a three D artist, game developer or
creative technologist, this class will teach
you how to understand the strengths and limitations
of AI generated models, how to clean and re topologize message geometry for
optimal performance, refine mesh details, and UVNwrap
for texturing workflows. By can apply PBR textures using tools like
substance paint. So you'll be able
to rig and animate a cleaned up AI
generated character. We'll work through real
examples from importing and evaluating raw models to making them usable in a
professional pipeline. By the end of the
course, you'll have a complete understanding
of how to turn AI generated concepts into
high quality production ready three D assets. So if you have a
bit of free time and a spare couple of hours, why not give this course to go?
2. Overview: Hello, and good evening. I thought it might be a
good idea to try and break down the workflow I've been
putting together recently. The idea is to take
an AI generated three D model and turn it into something
you can actually use. It's not been around long, but generative AI is just about coming to the point where you can actually
work with it. There are a few different
platforms out there. But the one I'm focused on is hyper three D and
specifically the tool Rodin. This one caught my
attention because not only does it do AI, three D model generation, but also it has some
other tools here, which are really, really useful. Um, the HDRI generator, which is up until
now has been I mean, if you're doing working
visual effects, you'll know that you
need to take a 360 photo of the environment that
you're filming in before you start filming and make
sure the light is constantly matching the light coming from the scene
from the camera, as well. So that's a very technical, very specific job you need
to get right from the start. But now, with AI, you can just throw a
photo of the scene, and it will guess the
environment around it, which is something
pretty impressive. There's other things
here like a Well, hang on what we got, we got
this texture generator. This is kind of iffy, well,
I've had to go with it. It's not very accurate,
but it's getting there. It's closer. Other things like, you know, turn the vector
into a 3d3d model, lots of other things like that. But the one that's
really kind of looking good so far is this
one called Rodin. Um, and yeah, this is what I'll be working
with on this course. It's going to be a
combination of this and several other tools and software because you'll get something
out of it with this. Maybe you'll get about
70%, maybe 60% there, the rest, if you want
to build an avatar or a three D model or an
environment using AI, you still need to have
some 3d3d artistry skills, some three D design skills, and you need to know a lot of the technical workflow to get that model usable or get
it into your project. So this is what I'm going to
attempt to share with you.
3. Generate the Concept: Part one, generate an image. I like to go for something. Let's say I can take a
photo where you can take a photo of yourself or any
image you want. Turn it. Let's say, we'll
build some kind of Fortnite character that you can eventually use as a skin
in the game if you like, or in your own game or well, let's just stick to Fortnite for now because it's
easy and accessible, and everybody's
familiar with it. So, okay, so let's just say, typing something here,
magical platform. This is you probably
already know about this. So let's go. So create hang on, Fortnight style, night style. Avatar based on, I don't know, let's say, a well known, famous personality that doesn't have any copyright
attached to it. A good one could be who's
cool but also accessible. Let's just say Bruce Lee.
I'm sure he doesn't mind. If we use his image
here, let's go. Okay, Fortnight Style
avatar based on Bruce Lee. Let's go. That's something. That's the whole body. Let's
just do the head for now. We're gonna break this down into different parts because
we're gonna get more detail on the face. And it's gonna lose detail
if you do the whole body. So let's just say just the head. Let's hope it picks
up on this prompt. No. Um Okay, Fort
Knightdale Avatar head. With our head. Based on Bruce Lee. Let's see
what we get. There we go. Perfect. That's pretty good. Okay, let's say
yes for that one. Boom. Alright, now
we have our Well, now we have our we've already
done our concept art. That was done in 5 minutes. Let's click Generate, and
let's see what comes out. This will take maybe a minute or two. Let's see what happens.
4. Generate the Model: Okay, that took about 1 minute. So we've got and here
we go. So here we go. We have a rough model. There's no textures yet, so
don't be put off just yet. Is a rough model,
Bruce Lee's head. Cool. Right. There's
a few images. A few There's a few options
we need to decide on here. Is it symmetrical? It's more
asymmetrical, isn't it? Because it's hair, it's not asymmetrical. So let's
keep that that way. We don't need a te post
because it's just his head. You could just drag this along. Simple, keep it simple because it's more
fortnight game ready, yeah, we want. We
don't want complex. I don't really know what edges
means, but in this case, but let's just see how it
goes. See how it gets on. So redo be about another minute. But I'll just fast
forward the video. Okay. Well, it looks pretty
much the same, doesn't it? But yeah, it's closer to
where we want it to be. So now, if we click Confirm, see how many polygons we want. I think 8,000 is
fine for the head. When you combine it with the
body, um, not symmetrical. No. When you combine
it with the body, it will increase the
polycunt a bit more, so no need to use
too many for now. So gonna take another minute. Uh, Alright. Let's see how that looks. Right. Now, Okay,
that's built the model. It's actually turned
it into polygons. It's, you know, decimated it, made, you know,
topology workable. Okay, now, I believe we
can generate the texture. Click Generate Pas restore.
Let's keep that on. It might help with the topology. We'll fix it later anyway. We're gonna redo all the
geometry later anyway. So, as long as we get as much
detail in there as we can, without it looking
too cluttered, then we should be okay.
So it looks okay so far. Look at that. Okay, here we go. Cool. Looking good. Because we're gonna come
back and fix the textures, but I mean, bloody
out, look at that. Right. I saved you not I maybe ten or 20 downloads that it starts
asking you to pay. So hopefully, if you're using
this for the first time, you'll get something that you can use within the
first few goes. Okay, there we go. Just
drop that in there. Right. Now while we're here,
that's there. That's fine. That's saved. We can come
back to that anytime we want now if you
go into the mine. Don't look at this stuff.
This is for other people. You don't need to see
that. Okay, cool. Right. That's the
one we just use, just click on it
again, and it's there. Super. Takes a second, but it's there. Proof,
proved. Proven. Right, going back to Roning
to the image generator. Let's actually create.
What did we write before? Fortnight. Night
style us avatar. And that gave us what
we want to begin with. So let's see what happens there. That's cool. A bit cartoony.
Let's try another one. He's looking a bit muscular, a bit vascular there. He's got some kind
of weapon there. I'm not sure why.
Let's try one more. That's too muscular.
I think yes. I like that one. Okay,
let's go with that. Boom, generate. There we go. Give it another minute. Can sit here and admire this for a bit while we're waiting. If it will allow
me. Like I said, if it doesn't mean, it won't it will never be perfect the
first time you do it. That's the whole
point of this course. Is is trying to make it it's
never gonna be perfect, anyway, but it's
gonna be usable. It's gonna look good.
This looks good, but, you know, you
can see things. You can't really work with that. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, here we go. It's close
enough to win eight pose. But maybe I can tell
it to be a te pose. Um, detailed
symmetric, asymmetric. Let's keep it symmetric, 'cause we're just
using the body. So keep it a metric
whole. Not symmetric. Game ready complex character. Let's see what happens if we don't like to
go into a tepose. That's more like it. Okay. Let's try that. Confirm. We're of an Epos, but, just as valid. It was just me looking
for a new microphone. I think if I speak close enough, it actually works much better than if I just
have it floating around. Something I discovered
about half an hour ago, even though I have a degree
in sound engineering. Imagine that. And
I've never used it. Okay, Generates Face restore Na. We've already got the face.
Okay. Here we go. Well, okay. Not bad. It's very muscular. Um, but, you know, if you want to try a
few different ways of doing it yourself,
you feel free. For this course, I'm
just going to use this overly muscular
caricature of Bruce Lee, okay? I might shrink his
muscles down a bit later because it doesn't
look to me like Bruce Lee. He's a bit more
nimble than that. But I'm not
complaining. This just takes a bit of trial and error, using the right, prompts. So let's confirm.
I'll look good still. Don't worry. I don't have any particular
looking mind at this point. I have, um managed to build avatars pretty close
to the source images. So if you are looking to
make something specific, that's still doable,
still possible. Um, okay, so I'm gonna put
that as an FBX and download. Let's go. We're gonna fix all these textures
and everything. Mm, looks like
something, doesn't it? I you go here's the geometry,
wireframe if you want. Okay, we'll just call this body. Body dot zip. Okay, let's go. While we while we're here,
let's just do that. Shaded. Cool. You see why
we didn't go for the face. We're doing the face
separately because if you're only if you're
maybe winning the lottery, that you'll get everything
perfect or usable. So, okay, it's funny, there's a ray tracer inside
this web browser software. It's something else,
something new. So you can actually Christ. That's definitely never
been done before. Not that I know of. Right. Downloaded. Let's go.
Right. Let's get these two. Let's just call this
head so we know what's what. I'm gonna pause this
5. Remesh the Model: Right, then. But
it's in I'm using Cinema four D. You might
use something else. You might use blender,
or you might use Maya, or you might use TDS Max, or you might use soft Dimage if you're from the 90s,
but you won't be now. Let's see. So let's grab
this and grab this. Put this here, right?
You might just think it's a case of
boom, boom, boom. Put them together. Done, chop this head off, replace
it with that one. Okay. The, done. But
what's the problem here? Let me check my workflow graph that I built together before. I'll show you what you
need to do, right. Let's get some textures
on here first, and then I can demonstrate it. Call this head, call this
body. Start with the head. Take off the reflection.
Don't need that for now. Um, little workflow tip for you. If you find yourself
spending hours looking for where to put it, g on. Put there. That's just good. I think it's done it
three times. Okay. Well, we're on ahead. If you
spent hours looking for I'm doing the shaded
one because it's just easier to see
what we're looking at. Does have PBR, as well, but I'm not using that just yet. Just solo that, and
you can see what's up. There you go. It's in there. If you're in Cinema four
D, just go to Viewbot. You know, you can increase the viewing the viewpot quality. If you go to Viewpot and
then boom, there you go. Cool. Let's go in the body. What was I saying? If you are like me, did it
actually make these? Let's just pop that
in there, 'cause maybe I have too many pins. Oh, there it is. Okay, sweet. Um, yeah, if you get stuck looking for
things all the time, just I really
recommend downloading this 'cause Window search
is not very good at all. So let's just say I want
to find something that I can't be bothered to trawl through my
folders looking for it. Then I don't know. Look, eight Whose I to
have at There it is. Boom, done. And that's the most handy tool
I've ever found, 'cause the window is such
it's absolutely useless. It's just called everything. Go and get it right now.
I'll change your life. Okay, back to the
model and the body. Right. Ahead. I'm going to
demonstrate the problem here. You're probably already way ahead of me, if you could ever. And this might be one of
the reasons you're watching this course because it can be fiddly, and
it can be a lot of, um, yeah, it can be finicky, trying to figure out
the best weight, the best order to do it without wasting lots of
time and faffing, which is what I've done to
get to be able to do this. I already done all the
faffing, so you don't need to. Um, right, here we go. So that's the head.
That's the body. Um, the workflow we're going to use, I'm
jumping ahead now, but the workflow we're
actually going to use is, volume meshing. Yeah, volume
builder. We're gonna turn it into a series of voxels. Um, I'll tell you what. My spreadsheet that
I had put together earlier is actually telling me, I need to scale up
the textures first. Let's see if you're
using the frio version. And, um, I am gonna do that
now. I am going to do that. But I want to make sure
you understand why. So let's just cut off the head. I'm gonna do this rough for now, just so you understand it. So, let's just chop
this head off first. In the most kind way kind, human humane way possible. Using polygon
selection. Hang on. What's going on
with that? Is that on soft selection? Come on. Ring loop. Loop selection. No, Loop selection. Here we go. That's very
odd that he's doing it, that I just that's
selecting everything. Okay? That doesn't
usually happen. Doesn't usually happen that way. Let's just grab
it like this and, uh, convert that
to pod don't it. Convert that to polygons. Okay. And the head is gonna
sit in there somewhere. Boom, boom. Like I said, I'm doing
it in rough for now. And then, yeah, I
just fill this hole. Change it to grids. Cool. And then you
got your head. Boom, right. What
we're going to do? We're going to combine
these using oxals. We're gonna combine these
using volume measure, workflow, SDF, workflow,
sine distance field, which is a super fancy way
of turning your mesures into something made
of a different mesh, but carrying the same shape. Read upon the signs if
you're that interested. Right, let's put
them both in there. Axel size too high, put it to one, maybe
put it to not 0.5. Try and capture all the details that you've had
from the beginning. Let's try not 0.2, 'cause we're gonna reduce the polygon
count on here anyway. Let's put it into a mesher. So volume builder,
and then volume meshre at the end,
okay? Remember that? Okay, you see, you've got
all these kind of squares. You can see the polygons
are still there. So let's it's
actually captured all of the non all of the
actual smooth polygons. What you actually need to
tell it something else. You have to tell it to
smooth everything first. It won't affect the
polycunt when you do this. So that's something
neat. So yeah, do that. Just to what I'm doing.
It all makes sense. Um, it's just this one step,
I'm just showing you how. I'm not showing you
all the science and the uh how they make it. I'm showing you
how I'm not gonna tell you how to make a violin, if I'm a violin teacher. So right. Let's see. Where am I? Okay.
Let's smooth that out. Use a smoothing, I mean, the volume builder. Come
on, you can follow. That's not difficult. And
set that to LapikanFlow. That's one I usually
use, smooths it out, but keeps all the
contours in place. Right. Right. What happened to my textures?
Okay, that's the problem. This is where we're going
to get the problem. I put the head there.
What's gonna happen? Nothing. I put the body
there. What's gonna happen? Nothing. Even if you're
using just one mesh, it's still going to, you're gonna lose
all your polygons. And then what you're
supposed to do? You're gonna lose all your UVs. Your polygons are going
to be completely changed, as well, but that's the only way you can
get this to work. So how do we keep these two separate texture maps and put them onto
one texture map, but also keep the same
UVs as the original. If you look at the head
and you look at the body, they are very different. They look like that. And
then when you look at the mesh, look at the mesh. Well, it doesn't
have any UVs at all, but it's just gonna create
some mishmash there. So that's not going
to get you very far. Um, what I would normally do, and I will show you
again later because there's too many
polygons is remesh this. This is gonna take some
time to do polygon count to maybe 80,000 polygons. Right. There's your problem. That's gonna be thinking
away for a while. Okay, next thing you need to do, very important is we're gonna
use the sculpting brush, the sculpting tools
in Cinema 40, just to smooth out the join between the neck
and the head there. So sort of drag in the middle. You can change the size,
middle mass button, and then just just
smooth this all out. Anything if we can
actually start again, we'll put symmetry
on because I think this mesh is symmetrical. It should be. Okay.
Yeah, that's fine. Let join, try try and
make it look natural. So all the topology flows. So, nothing weird, sticking out. Um, Yeah. Okay. It's a good fusion
of those two meshes. Okay. And finally, before you
take it to the next level, let's save this out. Um, I'm gonna call
this target mesh. Go to the UV Editor. Nope. Um, see? So this is a UV map. So yeah, the UV layout
made by the re measure, which we don't need them
by the volume builder, so we want to clean
that up a bit. Let's turn off. Did
I turn off symmetry? Hang on a second. Turn off
symmetry there. All right. Um, Okay, we'll just do a quick, um, auto UV because we're gonna be painting
it in substance anyway. So the actual, you know, direction of the mapping
isn't too important. So let's have a look at this. Might take a minute. We go. There's our UV layout. If you want to organize it
a bit more neatly, try clicking packed here, it might increase the spacing between each of the
UV tiles, like that. That looks a bit nice
though doesn't it? Okay, you can even
check on the model, how it looks, if you like. I won't tell you
that much, though, because this is all going
to be painted repainted, you know, by hand afterwards. So we just need to make sure there's nothing overlapping and most of the UV islands
are more or less, you know, uniform like that.
6. Upscale the Textures: Right. Number one, first. We need to upscale the textures because they
come in a bit too small. You don't need to do this if you have the business version, but I'm going to do it 'cause I don't have the business version. So let's find these let's find these textures.
Where did I put it? Start with their head. I'm just going to start with
the diffuse texture. I have this tool. Well, first, let's
put this to 4,096, turn it to four K. Have a
tool here called scale up. Uh, I think it's good. It seems to be good. It
seems to do the job. There are very likely better AI upscals
than this right now, but this seems to
do a decent job of things. It's called scale up. If you want to have a look
for it, I paid for this one, but I think there are
free ones out there, too. If you're not sure about
that, you can use the detail. If you don't want
to pay for it, use a detail preserving upscale, which seems to do more
or less the same thing. But the scale up one is, like, says it's AI generated. So I just use it anyway. 'Cause I paid for
it, and I have, what do you call it, a
license that doesn't expire. Um, but yeah, that's
made it four K. Okay? So try Holt, S, change it to PNG,
put it in a folder. Where are we? Uh, just say textures. Look all this texture
diffuse four K, render. Give it a minute. While we're doing that, let's grab, let's
just put it here. Now, let's get the diffuse
for the body. Not that one. The body. Like I said, Yeah. That's for the body. Hang on. That's for the head.
Okay. Same process. 4,096. Scale Boom. I can sharpen it. I don't need too
much denise on it. You'll also notice
that this will make it very difficult to paint later. We're gonna be using
come back to that. I'm gonna confuse you with
all this information. So that one's head,
texture diffuse. Body. Body. Hang on. Okay. So you call
that body diffuse. Body diffuse. Okay. They're not
even in the folder, but never mind. Right. Okay. So we want these textures
to be on one material. So how are we gonna get two textures on a single material? Well, it's not that difficult. You need to Well, it's
fiddly. It's fiddly. This is again, you still need to know a few
things about computers.
7. Combine the Textures: Well, the first thing you
need to do is to export the head and the body separately,
two separate objects. So I'm gonna bring
them into a new scene, and then I'm gonna
go to head, export. As I already have it here, but I'll just save over it
just to demonstrate and body 'cause we're carrying
over the position, you know, to translate
space as well. So that's important.
It stays where it is, and it has to stay in line with the mesh with the target mesh that
we've just created. Okay. So bringing this into
blender than I did before. Just start a new
scene in Blender. So delete those file, import. And coming to there we go. Body Import, head. There we go. Materials still attached
because we did them as FBX with materials embedded. Right. What we need to do now let's create a
texture window here. So just drag this
little X across, give it a couple of goes and
it will work eventually, go to the UV editor on this
little corner button here. What we need to do now
is if you have well, first things first,
you need to have the lily texture
packer installed. This will take the Texas from
two different materials and put them into one
material, very handy. So if you don't have
you can get it. Um, from this guy
Elliot Michelle. From his Guod, I'll send it I'll put a link
in the description, or you can just type in
Lily texture packer. When I got it last
year, it was free. It might be able to you might
be able to get it for free. I don't know, because
I live in Spain. They have different
tax laws here, but yeah, you might
be able to get it for free as well if you
just type in zero. But, you know, It's only $4. So even if it's not free, it's not gonna change your life too badly for the worse, is it? So, anyway, this will
save you a lot of stress, and this will solve
a lot of problems. Mostly made for, you know, city planning and stuff. And but by it. Let's go. Yeah. Why you have that installed? I'll just install it by
going there and zipping and finding the in it, yeah, the initiate file, which is all in the
documentation here. So yeah, install
the ad on there, and it will appear
up here as enabled. Then what you need to do
is select select ball. That's both objects. Go to object and then lily
texture packer. Important thing to
do here is to say, is to tell the maximum
texture size is 4,096. Unless you want to go
bigger, but for now, I will go with 4,096. And now yeah, once
you've hit Return, if you go into click
on this image, the background image for UVs, then this is what will appear. So both textures squashed up into into one material
into one UVs layout. So that's what we want. Um, okay. Since the UVs have
changed now on the body, Yeah, it's also adjusted
the UVs on the body, so we need to select it all again, select
everything, export. Make sure you do this, or
it will mess things up. And this will be
our source mesh. So we'll call it sauce. Mesh. This is the raw, this is, This is where we're
getting the text from, so call this cause I already done a ton of
others export to FBX. Um, bringing this
back into Cinema four D. You can probably combine
it in blender, as well, but I just find it easier
to do this sort of thing in Cinema 40, so I will. Um, so let's connect these two. Let's just check
on the U V Editor. If you see here, you've
got both one side there, one side there, boom, boom. Um, I can probably get rid of this inner part there, but I'll leave
it there for now. Um, so bring in this texture. We only need one material now, so just change one. If you click on this X
here, you can see it in the can see it in the texture UV editor, but since there's no materials, it won't show just yet. So, this one is body. So
let's just add a color. Add the color that we've
already made in there. Um, but one thing I forgot to do we need
to save this image. So save us and packed
image. I'll call it. Oh, seven. Alright.
Just refresh there. There you go. Okay, so
that's appeared there. And let's put this same material on the head, and there we go. Um, even though the head's
in slightly the wrong place, we can just make sure
we'll just copy the Y translate from another version. See, it's right there. Yeah. Body head is like 150, so
let's just put that in there. That's Strange. At times two. No. What's important
is that you have, you can use the
original positioning. Just make sure it's in exactly the same position as you had it. Or it will not bake correctly. So All right. Oh, that's why. That's gone up too high,
so the head should be, I guess, the same as it was
to begin with, which was 155. Standard. Alright.
Okay, get rid of those. So these two have the same
same material applied. Good. So we can just,
uh group these. Well, we can connect
these together, turn it into one
mesh, call it, sauce. And now this will be
our final source mesh. Right. We'll save over the
last version, and there we go. Right. That looks
a bit wonky there, but if you go into the viewport, set that higher,
that will fix that. It's a texture
preview. Okay, right. Okay, so next, we need
to take our base mesh. This is our target mesh. Let's call it target mesh. Okay. I already did that before, so pretend pretend you
didn't see that. Okay. Target measures here. We want to get the
material onto there. Still, I mean,
even if I try now, it's not gonna work because
you can try it yourself. The UVs, it's not
matching the UV set. So if we go on
Lily packed image, still nothing on hi res,
viewport, still nothing. So what we need to do is to
go into another application. In this case,
substance designer, I'm going to use to
bake the textures from this model
onto the new mesh, and I'll show you how
to do that in the next
8. Transfer the Textures: Right, we're in
substance designer now. There are several different
ways you can you can do this. As far as I know, it doesn't really doesn't have this tool in cinema four D. But you can do the same
thing in blender. In Maya, I know you can. I don't use Maya
so much anymore, but these are the three ones
that I do know it works in. If you wanted to have a look for a similar tutorial to do this in Blender,
then have a look. I did struggle with
it in blender, but this way, it's a lot
more straightforward. Um, okay, so we're going to map the texture from
the source mesh to the target mesh to
our new mesh, okay? And, yeah, let's have a look at how we do
that. So just start. Right click New package, right click again
on the package. Link three D scene. And we want to use
the target mesh, which we've actually
called base mesh. Um, let's just re export that and
call it target mesh just so we don't get mixed up. Yes. Maybe better without the material. I
might confuse it. Target mesh. Boom.
Uh, refresh it. Refresh it. Once it's
done. Target mesh. Import that. Okay, that right click on this
target mesh here. Bake model information. Okay, we've got this
window, we'll pop up. Lots of information, but we only need to use a
small amount of it. So here we go. Set up high definition meshes. We need to add our
source mesh here. So go from files, source mesh. So that's where we're getting
the information from. Let's bring up well, let's bring up the
size to four K first. Baker's render list,
go to add Baker, transfer texture from mesh. And then the actual
texture that we're using. Is this lily texture that we
created in blender before. So to see the textures, you need to go to all files. Otherwise, it will only
show PSD or whatever. And the most recent
packed image, is this one from 10:00 A.M. This morning. Let's see. Right? Just, yeah, tell it to
save it into a folder. I've made a substance
design folder here. I'm going to create a
subfolder because sometimes it can conflict and give if you results if
you don't have if you don't have enough folders
or if it saves over itself. Um, yeah, if you're trying to render over an
image that already exists, then sometimes it
can be glitchy. So you've got to be
careful where you save it. So saving it into an empty
folder seems to work for me. Um, yeah, you can put the
subsample in quite high. I do it as two for now. I'll
push it up again later. And the press render. So what that's done, it's
taken the body and the head, and put that it's laid
that all out into one usable texture, okay? I think I'm happy with that, so I'm just going to put this up to eight by eight. Let's do this really quickly. Another software like My Blend
it can take a few minutes, but this is, yeah, using GPU acceleration,
I guess, I don't know. It's much more
refined, much quicker. Okay. Um, brilliant. So that's already saved. That will be saved into
this path that you decided. So let's test this out
back in Cinema four D. Here's a target mesh, creating new material just for testing. And see, and just
put that in here. And there we go. It
seems to be working. Good. Back up to 48.
And there you go. Everything where
we want it, cool. And that is on our
target mesh, okay? So, if you look at
the differences here, um, What have we done here? We actually It doesn't
seem like a lot, but we've actually
fixed these scenes. We've done all the cleanup. We turned it into one model. You know, this is
a common technique in three D scanning, as well. When you want to if you
have a three D scan, the textures, the UVs
are all over the place. This is a good way to
clean up the UV map, clean up the geometry at the same time and be able
to edit that geometry, be able to animate
the geometry, too. So Yeah. Let's just, cool. We can even reduce the polyson here even more if you want to, so and it won't. If you're using the remeasure, you can keep the uh transfer
attributes. Set the polygon. Well, let's just set the
mesh density to 50%. We will see what comes out.
Yeah. And as you can see, the UVs are in the same place. The main difference
being this seam here, we are fixed, so cool. Didn't take too long, did it? On the next video, we're going to be
cleaning up the textures. So in substance painter, we're going to be just
blending the seams here, fixing parts of his
face, you know, where the AI's kind of
made a few mistakes here. We can just paint
that ourselves. And obviously, it looks
a bit shiny, doesn't it? But yeah. But this is all
part of a process. It means you don't
have to know how to draw a character's
face anymore, which is something
incredible, right? Okay, next video,
substance painter.
9. Paint the Textures: Okay, I'm in substance painter. So we need to bring in
the target mesh here, so go to new and this is our new low polymsh. Wonderful. Um, so to begin with, let's bring in the
textures that we built from substance designer.
So just this one here. I've actually used the shader, the kind of preview
texture for all this, but to do it yourself, you might want to use
the diffuse texture, and you'd have to do the
same procedure we did from blender with the normal map, the roughness map, any
other maps you have. And also perform
the same procedure in substance designer that we did before for
each map, as well. So. This is why I'm using a simplified
model for this because it's a lot of workload, but it means, well, you don't need to know how
to illustrating three D, which is a very
specialist skill. So let's go. So let's start by adding a fill. And let's grab this texture, drop it into the assets library, undefined, texture Import to the current project,
wherever you have it. And in the base color, add this material that you've just this texture
you've just created. And there you go. There it is. Okay, so far so good. Let's do away with roughness or any other kind of any other channels here.
Go to keep it simple. Um, then we just, we
just start painting. So let's grab a
brush, new layer. If you press well, first, let's get rid
of height, rough. Normal put roof all the way to the top just in case
it messes with it. If you press C that will go
to the color channels, um, I feel like it could be more difficult doing it
this way because I'm actually painting onto
the already rendered. Um Let's just, um, m Yeah. I just clean this up. Pressing P to pick the most. Would you pick the color there? Were you just cleaning up any discrepancies
in the texture. Yeah, I might not be
necessarily that part. And and Okay. Relatively smooth blend. Um, let's come in here. Yeah, if you'd been
clever and, uh, use the diffuse map, then you wouldn't be having a problem I'm having right now. It'll just be some, you
know, like a solid color. Yeah, just do your best to
clean these textures up here. So it all depends how much time you want to
spend doing this. Hopefully you have some kind of knowledge of substance
painter already. Basic controls are paint
and brush. Pop it there. You can use the lazy mouse
if you're not really good at drawing and
it will, you know, it kind of be like dragging dragging a piece
of string through paper, so it kind of follow
along like that. Sorry. Yeah, piece of string
covered in paint. Okay. Wace you're happy
with it? Yeah, once you're happy with it,
you can start rigging. Um, I may do this
process again because Okay. So in substance, just grab a brush
and start painting. Um, just go to kind of use the closest colours to
blend this all together. I Yeah, well, you can color
this out you want. You can probably just
go into aftereffects, put all the skin to one color, you know, key out the
skin, key out the yellow. And, um, it would make
it easier to work with and having to paint
everything like this. But I'm just showing you
a couple of methods. I mean, I'm assuming you have some understanding
of three D workflow. And if not, maybe this is
some kind of inspiration to see how much work
there really is involved, and maybe you want
to do it yourself. All right. And this, I believe is why AI isn't coming for
our jobs anytime soon. You see that's looking decent with the lighting
and everything. You can just keep
touching up that, you know, until it
looks how you want it. Since the since the texture, since the AI generator, it saw all this shading
in the original image. Just try to transfer
that over to the to the model, as well. Um, you can see. Just gonna colour this in
here. That's shaded anyway. Or pet let's just
kind of in a bit. Just to make it less
obvious what it is. Um, and after we do this, we'll go to the rigging, okay? Okay. You put symmetry
on if you want. Okay. A rough quick workflow. You know, lots of things
you can fix here, painting on there,
painting on here. Yeah, take your time, make it look how
you like, and learn the tools while you're
at it if you don't know them because this is what
the course is about. Like I said, it will get
you about 70% of the way there. The AI will. But you'll still need to
know a few things about computer graphics to get
it to the final stretch. Okay. Scribbling here,
scribbling there. Please use your best
artistic attention. Don't be like me. Don't just scribble
over. Take your time, do it in after effects
if you prefer key out, you know, change
them to flat colors, and then that'll be
easier to shade. Or recommendable to do
it that way, actually. Then you can it's easier to
edit later if you need to. Well let's call
that done for now. Okay. That looks like
something, doesn't it? Can't tell me it doesn't just, uh let's actually, let's
just fix the eyes, as well. That was one of the main
things we needed to look at. So it would be eyes, uh bring that in here. See? It's not like it
doesn't take something. Ooh. It's just, move that part.
Just cleaning it up. The eyes are another story. There are other techniques
to do eyeballs and things. Facial rigging, as
well. Actually, within roonin there is a facial rigor. But it's more for realistic
looking characters, which is what you
might prefer to use. Maybe I'll do another course about that
at some other time. But, yeah, once you
have it looking good, you know, take your time,
fix everything you can. Then we'll come then we come the time to export the textures. And yeah, so just
file export textures, pick a folder, put it in there. Let's be you really, really need In this one, you
only need the color channel. You can probably do the
roughness, as well. But I'm just working with
color just for simplicity. Export. Boom, let's see
how that came out. So this is our final
cleaned up texture. And let's see how that looks. So on our model, import
the texture that we just created from substance
painter. And there we go. And when you add
lighting and everything, it will look normal. Lots of smudges and stuff here, but you can fix them. I hope you fix those. Just
make it look nice and neat. You know, this doesn't need
to be yellow here after all, and it will take some tweaking. But the main thing is, you've got the
shape of the face. You know, you got all this,
this is like illustration, three D illustration and uh not the easiest thing to pull off if you
don't know anatomy or, you know, facial structures
and things like that. So good time saver, just for building the base mesh. You can make the
eyes more shiny. You can fix those up
and make them round, make them darker, do
anything you want. Alright. Okay, next stage,
we're going to rig it. We're gonna make it
dance. We're gonna make
10. Rig the Avatar: I'm going to be
using this piece of three D software called
Acurig from rear Illusion. If you prefer, you can
use a Mixamo Mixamo fuse or just called Mixamo
now, isn't it? Rig your own
characters that way. But I found this can be, well, just as good, if not better
and it's pretty accurate. So, let's get our
most recent mash. It's the target mash. I can still stand to
reduce the polls on there. But I'll leave it
like that for now. So, target mesh, input that in two here. Alright. Normally press force symmetry,
symmetrical, rigged body. Give it a minute. Super quick. Takes
a few minutes. Right. I will automatically. If your model's clean enough, it will automatically
find all these elbow, wrist joints, et cetera. Knee, yeah, bla, bla, B. Okay. And then just click on. If it's not right, you need to move it around
yourself and make sure it's all manually
aligned like that. But to me, this seems to
have done a pretty good job. I'm just gonna keep moving forward. We've got five fingers. We've got four
fingers and a thumb, but it will read the
thumb as a finger. Another minute. Mm hmm. It's pretty easy. It's another workflow
that has been consolidated some
time ago. But, yeah. Hands, the hands can sometimes be difficult for it to track,
but this has done okay. You know their little
stubby fingers, but it's a stubby, vasculo and stubby handed
stylized version of Bruce Lk. Okay. There we go. You can't really, um, show the textures in Accuri, so you can't export these, uh, default motions, either. But let's just export
this, and I'll show you how to import it. Import another animation
to this character. Okay. I always call
this Bruce Rick. What? Um, yeah, so actor core has a few free motion
capture animations. Um, let's just find something
free, just for now. These are all free
on the main page. So if there's anything
fighty, I don't know. Relax, walk, walk
walk, down to sit. Break door. That could be good. Let's do this break,
dawg. It looks pretty cool. At the car. Check out. Set free. Make sure you have an account. Takes a minute to register. But you don't have to
pay anything unless you want the extra features
or extra animations, and they're not too
expensive, either, like two or $3 per animation,
which isn't too bad. Okay, download it
in my inventory. Break Door. Click on this icon. We just want the
motion. We don't need the we don't need the robot. Dirty FPS. That's fine. Replace first frame.
Yeah, I could just start at the first place in the depos. That means you don't
have to worry about the, yeah, doing that manually, which is a handy
feature from Aca Core. And once that's downloaded,
11. Animate with Motion Capture: Import the most recent
rig that we've, you know, let's
import the rig first. Okay, control shift. Oh. Mm mm. There we go. Let's just
have a look at this, with the textures
and all its glory. And it was this
substance painter one. Put you put default.
There you go. Cool. Alright. Brilliant. That's all
smooth around the side. You know, spend more time
than I did because I'm just a lowly tutor who's just waiting for the
next gig to come along. Um, yeah. Make sure the hands look good. The heads don't look good here, but you need to go back
and forth a few times. Like I said before,
if your hands aren't really looking right, like, you don't want
these stubby fingers. You can just take a hand from another source, just
mesh it together. It's almost like kit
bashing a person. Um, hands are pretty
easy to find. The main point of this course is some things are
not so easy to find, like a specific
character's face or human, you know, specific, you know, really specific, illustrative
design like that. So Where's this hands? This hands and this finger. Yeah, that only has two.
Put it on the other side. How's this look? Well,
it does something. Maybe not the right way around. Okay, it does something. I know they'll leave
it like that for now. Um, the main thing
I'm showing you now is the rigging process. So you need to right click on here, rig character definition. Open manager. It's
not working that e. So before I do
that, that's here. It's in the depos. That's fine. Let's find this animation
we just bought. Mm, it seems not to be working. Oh, already exists, apparently where to
put it? There. Okay. Um, just drag that in.
When you drag and drop it, it will Icemapty will recognize the frame
rate and the length, so that will save you
time faffing later. Um, and let's just bring this
one instead to this side. Okay. So those are roughly
matching the same shape. Um, yeah, as long as the feet are kind of
touching the floor. As long as everything
follows 90% of the, you know, you see
these two skeletons, for example, they want to
match as closely as possible. Sometimes you'll
get characters with different proportions
and different sizes, even an animal
rigged to a human. But it will always be
reading the rotational data. So as long as there's
some kind of correlation, and it'll be more
accurate in this case, using because it's
a human to humans, let's try and get as
close as possible. And that seems pretty close
enough to me for now, but feel free to go
in and you know, move this, make it straight, make everything
match this skeleton to the other skeleton. I hydrogometry, puts that one hide the polygons because there's two
different skeletons. But yeah, just try and make sure they're matching as
close as you can. Um, okay. Going into going
into the hip joint. The root joint is not gonna
help with your rigging. Not necessarily that's more for global positioning in
unreal, for example. So right click on the hip and go to rigging and go to
character Definition. Open manager, Extract skeleton. It's only recognized a few
it's recognized the spine, the neck and the head, the rest. It's looking for this
word here, hips. If it's a hip, then it's
going to put a hip there. I only says hip there, so you
need to put a hip instead. One way to do it is to tal it, which strings to look for. So now it knows
Um, do that again. Hip. I know it's there. The hip joint needs to
be the root, as well. So when it says root
here, ignore that. Hip joint is the root joint. Um, okay, so the
torso part is done, spine, neck, and head.
Left arm, clavicle. It's looking for so
it's better practice. It's looking for neck
twist up arm clavicle. But it's looking
for shoulder, but it needs to look for clavicle. So change just to and clavical. Okay. See what happens. There you go. Right clavicle,
but it needs to be. And try that instead.
There you go. Underscore plus clavicle. Copy this over to
the right clavicle and just change right. Okay. And then if you
extract, there you go. It's telling cinemapordy
which bone is which, which bone is the arm,
which bone is the bicep, which bone is the elbow
and wrist and so on. So it can transfer that information from
one rig to another, from one skeleton to the other, and thereby transferring
the animation. Right. What have we got next? Upper arm. So this
is looking for arm. So if we go for upper arm,
make sure it still says. And we still want to
use the underscore because there's an
underscore in here. Extract. There's a
lot of arm twists, so I didn't really
want those arm twists. Uh, yeah, we can exclude
twist, so twist. Well, extract. Okay, let's on the
upper arm left. Cool. Copy this across to
bicep on the right arm. You should only have to do
this process once per rig. Can be a bit. Time consuming. But once you've done it once,
you can do it quick. It's actually quicker to just, you know, drag and
drop each one in here. But I'm doing it the longer way because this
is actually much more it makes more
sense in the long run. You can actually save these
presets, which I'll show you. Okay, forearm, joint. So
what have we got here? Forearm, it's called
left and forum. Just change that to help,
underscore forum, extract. Yeah, we don't want twist again, so twist in exclude. Boom. Put this again in right
for Tate that to, put that to twist. Extract. Oh, taste. That's why. Extract. Boom.
Okay. Hand. We want L and hand. Extract. Copy to write and hand. Extract, right. Fingers. How does that work? Right? What do you
got for the fingers? Um, thumb is actually called L, so it's just the same process. Just change L and thumb. I'm sure it was a
quick way to do this, but it's not that I know of. And then change again
to write and thumb. Okay. Hey, that's working. And
then we're just gonna go. Oh, copy that. To to too. And then from right toe right. Right. To right and right. Extract. What do we got pinky toe? We don't
need a pinky toe. So forget about toe.
Extract. Again, don't need to. That's for the foot. But else we got ring, yeah,
put toe on all of these, then toe, this
doesn't say middle. It says mid, okay? Middle to mid extract, um, toe, middle, toe. Index, toe, middle, toe, ring, toe. Two. Okay. Might try that again. So to Pinky, ring, ring, index. Yeah, Corp. That's fine. And they're all left on the
left and right on the right. Good. And then clavicle, right. Right, right. Yes.
Left, left, left, left. Yes, yes. Legs not far no. If you're still working on this, if you're still following, then I applaud you.
It'll be worth it. We're just in the final stretch. So Tio, what we got, we
just want it to be L. Underscore and Thi. Copy that and then
just test that one, but we don't want Twist either. Twist. Nope. Um, drop
that in everything here. Shin. So we got that a calf. So calf. We don't want twists
there, either. Let's get rid of twist in everything. Foot
won't have a twist. Pi won't have a twist. I
don't know if shin will, but let's just put
that there, too. Uh, Shin extracts, foot. Change that's it. Foot, Extract. Good. Right thigh. Shin. Right, shin, foot. Right. Foot extract. And then your toe, it's
basically your toe base. The part where the toe bounces. Your toes this part
where the toes begin, so um an up to, toe. And right toe. Base. Base. So. So B Okay. I got 53 joints. You got the root
joint, torso, hips. Okay, everything is
where it should be. Everything should be where
it's supposed to be. Um, that's one. Let's save this preset. This is gonna save the
text that we put in here. I'll save all these
rules to look for. So save Right. And it's saved that preset here. I do have another
actor coal one, but some of the
different meshes have different different bone maps. Okay. And now, in the target
mesh, which is this one. That's connected
to that one, okay? I believe. Yeah. It doesn't need any animation. I don't know why
it has animation. So let's just remove
all the animation, select everything,
select the scale part, and then control shift to, uh, delete as you click. Um Okay, open manager
for the second. We need to rig the second
guy Extract skeleton. Oh, it's gonna take forever. Load preset. What have we got? Extract skeleton.
Ah, there we go. We just did all that.
All that work we did. No, we never have
to do that again as long as we're using
this exact mesh, this exact rig or bone map. So okay. Cool. I have the presets that I've
made for other projects. So there's, like, metahuman
and I've got ones for Mix Mixamo is usually
the easiest because it, um, Mixamo just tends to work. Press extract and it
knows everything. It's the most industry
standard naming convention, so that's very handy,
saves a ton of time. And that's the most
tasiest part of character remapping
or re targeting. So now I just want to
get this animation. It starts actually at 18, doesn't it? But I'll
come back to that. This animation onto onto
Bruce Lee here. Let's go. So with the Bruce Lee
rig, that's all in place. Set reference pose. Make sure this one
set reference pose, create Solver and
then take the e, the character
definition tag from your first character from the animation and put it in this source character
slot there. I don't know what
happens. Right, press F eight or press play. And then now strange
it's not moving, is he? Because, um, the reason for that is you see, this has a very strange setup, these actor core
rigs, so try not to be put off because
it can be confusing. The actual movement
normally in a normal rig, the character position
would come from the hips. But for some reason, the
character movement on this is coming from the root,
which can be confusing. Okay, maybe it's set for games, maybe it's set for
something that I'm not accustomed to, but right, all we need to do is really drop the root of your Bruce
character into the scene. Make that a child
of this joint here, which is moving the entire body. So let's just try doing that. You might need to remove
the solver again. Drop that in here. Okay. And also set
reference pose again. Make sure that's set again. Click on your Bruce Lee mesh. Try and remember
which one is which as well. Create silver. Drop that in there,
and now, in theory, you should be copying the animation and also walking along and kicking down the door. Boom. Breaking boundaries. Sets a geometry only. We'll
see what else we can do. C put a gun in
there if you want. He go we made that
from start to finish. You know, well, there's things that I would
change some of the rigging, but that all depends on
how you want to do it. So look at it from this way. It looks even better, okay.
12. Quick Render Setup: Yeah, I thought I'd
do one more video just in case you were
interested in seeing how I made the video from the
promotional video that I made. She looks something like this. This guy, okay? So I did this using
Octane Cinema 40. This is using the retargeted
mesh from before. So that's all there. That's just put into it. All
I've done, really. There's no actual
real compositing. I've actually just
taken an HDRI. You can get anything from HDI, Polyhaven if you look
it up, you know, polyhaven, for example,
loads of free HDRIs, you know, just 360
environments that you can use. Yeah, the floor.
That's just a plane with a material octane material
using the shadow catcher. So that's without, that's with. Also, the octane camera. I've used a few effects, like a bit of post processing, bit of bloom, just to
give it something extra. That's with it off.
That's with it on. Also with some of
these lens effects, they look pretty cool like
a chromatic aberration. That's without, that's with and a little bit of lens flare, which you can see on some parts. Let me show not every part. Let me show, here we go. This is a bit of lens flare
there. Looks pretty cool. Very easy to do octane. For the animation, I've just attached the
camera to a null. I've put a target tag here. I've then taken this gun. Well, I should explain
the gun, as well. I found the gun from just from a free one
from a sketch fab. And just converted the
materials to octane, you know, and attach that
to the hand joint there. So that's working fine. And where was I? Yeah. So the camera is looking at is targeted
always going to be pointing towards this knoll inside
the gun knoll there. And yeah, I've just added a little bit of camera shake
using the vibrate tag. So, you know, low frequency, just to give it a handheld look. And I've also animated
the the knoll slightly. So it moves around, moves
around the guy here. Very ever so slightly. A C shape that you can see
here. And that's it, really. And that was a very quick
little thing that I did. That took maybe 20 minutes
to pull off. So yeah. Um, yeah, if you want the black and white version from the end of the video, just, all I did was just reduce
the saturation to zero, and then added a film
grain in after effects, which is very simple. Okay, I hope you got a lot
from this mini course. Um, yeah, if you're new to three D or whatever and
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So yeah, if you if you're interested in any other
kind of courses, um, related to three D or even AI, using it as a tool in three D, rather than, you know,
being worried that it is going to take
over all our jobs, which is not yet anyway. There's still a lot of
work that will be needed by studios that does
relate to using AI, but also using genuine
existing three D skills. So there you go. I'll see you in the next course.
William Forrest, 3D Generalist & Motion Designer
