Blender Character Project Masterclass: Create a Fantasy Mushroom Character

1. Welcome to the Blender Fantasy Mushroom Character Masterclass!: Welcome to the Blender fantasy Mushroom Character Master Class. If you ever wanted to create your own three D stylized characters but felt overwhelmed by complex workflows, this class is the perfect place to start. My name is Caroline Condi. I'm a three D artist with over seven years of experience creating three D environments, characters, and illustration. Throughout my work, I've realized that the best way to learn TD art is by creating small and fun projects that teach you multiple skills at once. And this is exactly what we will do in this class. Together, we will build a fantasy mushroom character from scratch while learning the core steps of a simple character creation workflow. We'll start by gathering references and creating the concept of the character. Then you'll learn how to transform these two the ideas into three D art by modeling your character and adding facial features to give it personality. As we progress, you will learn how to use shape keys to create expressions like blinking and smiling to make your character feel more alive. We will also explore procedural materials where you create stylized textures only using Blender without any external image files. After that, we will create a simple rig so that your character can be animated and posed in a simple environment. Then you learn how to create your own art style by setting up the lighting camera and render properties to create a render that best showcases your artistic w. By the end of the class, you have a fully modeled, textured pose and rendered fantasy mushroom character while gaining experience on some of Blender's most important tools and workflows. Let's start creating. 2. Gathering References: Welcome in our second lesson on creating a fantasy mushroom character in Blender. In this lesson, we're going to be gathering references for our project and creating the character concept. Here I have on Blender, a few images that will serve me as an inspiration for my character. It's nice to search for different styles, for example, I have here a more realistic one of what a mushroom looks like. I have this iconic toad of Nintendo. I have this beautiful art here, and I also have a few three D inspiration. When you are modeling a character, different shapes can convey different personalities and different emotions for your character, not only the expression, but also the shape of it. This is a huge part of character modeling. As you can see here, a more rounded shape can give you a more cute and more soft look. A triangular shape could be a little bit more out of the box, a little more weird, a little more quirky. It depends on what you want to transmit in your character. So the goal here is that you grab images that will inspire you into create the project that you want of your character, not by imitating, but by grabbing a few references that could guide you to the right direction. So in my case, I'm going into a more huge style of a character, more rounded one, so I grab this one. So the next thing that I'm going to do is to sketch the concept of my character. And you can do this by any medium that you like. It could be digitally in your preferred software, it could be even on Blender, but I like to sketch my concept by hand. 3. Character Concept: So let's start with the concept of the character. I like to sketch out in a piece of paper, but you can use Blender or software of your choice. The idea here is that you can start by creating the concept of your character into D and creating a plan that you can translate into the TD software. Even though you have references, it's nice to draw so you can translate your own artistic view to the model. So, for example, for my mushroom character, I want to design this character kind of happy and bubbly. And as we know, different shapes can convey different emotions. So a triangle, going to convey something really sturdy and maybe quirky. Around shape is pretty bubbly square shape you think of well structure character. So from a mushroom, I want to use the round shape, but I also going to use the triangular shape because of the top part. So this top part is going to be between coats a head for my character, and the round part is going to be the body. Let me fix that. So if we were to structure this characters only on a triangular shape, let's see how this looks. Maybe we have little part here. And if I was going to have a triangular shaped mushroom and kind of imagine him this he'll be kind of hiding behind his head. He would be a little, you know, maybe a little shy or maybe a little bit scared. So he looks pretty distressed. I'm hiding me high in my head. No, I'm not that great with drawing, but you can see what I'm trying to convey here. So if I were to create the happy bubbly version using round shape, I more imagine and more outgoing. I don't know why I'm drawing this kind of puffing here. But as you can see, when you choose a shape, it kind of dictates everything that you're going to create. So his little legs is going to be rounded. Be a little bit more happy, kind of a jig leap of vibe, have little freckles. So you can play around with your character. See what divide that you want. So this part is pretty fun. You can play around. As you can see, you don't need to drop perfectly. You just need to have an idea of the shape, what you want your character to be. So what I'm going to do now is combine these two shapes. I'm going to be doing something in between. And at the same time, I'm going to start to think about I'm going to model in T D. So my character is going to have this triangular shape for the head and kind of a round shape for the body. So this is the overall shape. And as you can see, what I need to figure it out is how I'm going to combine these two part here. So if I was going to model it, it's already going to be a thing that I would have to think about. So let's see how we can create this shape. I'm going to start by just sketching. So for the base of this triangle, it's going to be around shape. Kind of feels like a party hat. Now I'm going to add some details to the top. Now I can already see how I'm going to construct this in a three D model with a rounded base going into a tapered point from a bottom up perspective. But also we have this nice profile here. There's both ways that we can construct this in three D. You can do a bottom up with circles, or you can use this profile and do a spin that is called in Blender, so you can create this shape. Now I want to tackle the body. So I'm going to use this bottom part here and I'm going to be doing it slightly flattened at the bottom, just so I can add little legs. I want to add, like, make it feel like it's sitting down for now. And I need to resolve this top part here. I need to do slightly flattened at the bottom here just so I can rig everything. I want to rig his little legs, and we're going to see this later. But basically, the mushroom is going to be a cute face. To resolve this encounter here, I'm going just to draw out the profile just so I can have an idea and I go here to the front, I want to continue this curve down. I'm going to do something like this. And from this taper. I want to basically continue this shape here a little bit inward and outward. This is going to *** part. This is going to be shaded. I'm going to add this little ice. Just like the bubbly one, I'm going to add the freckles. And I'm just going to do, like, black eye with a little shimmer in my treat. Kind of looks like an onion, what I just row. So I think I'm going to just a little bit of the shape. So maybe this top part is not as rounded. So maybe if I taper a little bit more, it still looks like an onion, it's because. Okay, so I'm going to sea in it a little bit So right now, I basically have the base of what I want for my character. From this, I can see that I want this top shape here, like a head like this and it's coming in like this and doing this kind of shape right here, not exactly like this, but more or less. We have this profile, this round part right here. We have the taper in at the top, and we have the body going in a more rounded curve right here and to a flat more or less like this. From this, we can already start to see how we can create this inTD and the more details that you add to your drawing and plan out, the easier it's going to be for you to finish your project in three D. So let's get back into our three D software. Okay, so now, as you can see, I took a photo of my sketch and I added to Blender, and I also did a lin art version, because I'm going to use this one to convert to a gris pen so that we can edit here. I also have here a color palette. What I like to do is to take a screenshot of my references and send it over to Adobe. Let me show you. So here on Adobe, I like to bring over any references that I have and extract the color palette of it and you can move around and choose the color that you want and you can download and export into Blender. Now to transform my image into Gris pencil, I need to select it, go to Object, convert, and trace the image to Gris pencil. You can adjust the settings here and see what looks best. Now you can see that I have a different object called Gus pencil. Let me select, press G, and move over to the side. So now you have a three D version of your drawing. If you go to Edit Mode, pressing tab, you can see that we have lines here that you can even alter. So what I'm going to do just to refine this a little bit more. I'll go to edit mode, go to stroke, and simplify my stroke a little bit. Right now, I'm not doing the Tree D model itself, but this is a way that you can use Blender to create your character concept and test out different lightings, different poses, different colors, and see what you like. That way, when it comes to create the Tre D model and your materials, you have a clear direction of what you want to do. Right now, I'm going to select my object and I'll go here on the top part and go to draw mode. Here on the bottom, you have different pencils that you can use. I'm going to go over fill and select my material. Here at the bottom, I have this black material. I'm going to create a new one and here you can see that we have the line and fill. Let's select this color here, the red color, and I can fill my object as you can see. I'm going to play around a little bit with different options and different colors. A Now I'm going to choose my preferred color and I'm just going to add a few details. Let me move this to the side. Right now, if you have a drawing tablet or something that you can draw on, it will be better, but you can do this by mouse. It's just a way that we can think of the concept of the character, but also thinking about how well model and texture it. So for my character, I would like to add freckles and a blush to it to make it look cute. I'm going to go over here, create a material. Let me chooe this as a base. And to copy a color, you can just hove to copy a color, you can just hover it, press Control C and Control V. So right now, I'm going to my object, go to dro Mode, and I can use this marker here and I can go here and create this. Why am I doing this? This is not going to be the Tree D model itself. I'm going to add a texture here to the bottom, and I'm going to create I'm going to texture paint this part right here onto the mesh. It's going to be black. And this is also going to be painted on And the cool thing about this is that you can go over to the material that you created and adjust the color. Right now, I'm going to think about what I'm going to model and what I'm going to texture. This is important for your workflow. I already know that I want to make the eyes and the mouth interactive. I want to do an animation of blinking and moving the mouth. I'm going to model the eyes and the mouth. Eyes is going to be modeled. The little freckles here are going to be hand painted. This detail here that I want to do top down. I want to use a procedural texture, and I'm also going to map in a cylinder shape. I'm thinking I will need to test this later, but we need a map with waves like this to map this. So for this is going to be the wave texture. As you can see, here we have two different ways that are going to map out. I'm going to use the wave and I also need hand paint. As I'm seeing here, I'm going to need two UVs. For this one, I'm thinking that I can use the simple mapping, the generate mapping that's going to generate a mapping in the cylinder shape, and I'm going to need one UV for the hand painted on top of this one. And this is all going to be constructed in the material. For the eyes and mouth is going to be a regular separate material and for the stop head. I could model little dots here. I think my reference here, as we can see, this one, it looks like it's painted, but this one it's little models on top. You can approach these both ways. But I want to do this by texture too because if possible, I don't want to have this separation here. So this looks like a Voronoid texture that I can use, and it's going to be in two colors. I think I'm going to use a color ram between the red and the white or the beige and it's going to have a nice gradient here. I want to have this gradient. And another test that I'm going to do in this model is to see if I can have all of these in one texture. So basically, the stress part is going to be this part here, but I'm going to connect. So what I'm thinking is that maybe I can create the procedural texture that would only select this normal facing up here and apply my color. For this part, I'm going to think as my model. This is my UV map, and I have the head here and the bottom part. I can add a mess gradient between black and white, or I can use the real colors. This gradient is going to paint everything on top one color. At the bottom another color. That way I can have this gradient effect right here. This is a way that I can tackle this part here. But this is all ideas. I will see at the end if they work or not, you can always go back and change what you thought and strategize other workflows. But this is the co part about creating your concept character. Right here, I only have one pose, but if you are experienced in creating characters, you will have different poses and different colors. I suggest that you take a look at the blog posts from Tatiana. It has a lot of guidelines for you to create your characters, and she's really a professional when it comes to create characters, the colors and everything, really amazing concept. Yeah, I recommend you to sketch out different ideas, test out different color palettes, expressions, and research your favorite artists. That way you can create a nice plan for you to construct your character. In the next lesson, we're going to actually start three D modeling. 4. Modeling the Mushroom Character : Welcome. In this lesson, we're going to start modeling the base of our character. Right now, I'm going to duplicate this final object that I have here by pressing Shift D and moving to the side. I'm going to rename it by pressing F two, and I'm going to move it to a new collection, by pressing M, new collection, and I'm going to disable everything else that I have here on reference. I'm also going to disable this annotation right here. Let me just adjust this. I'm also going to enable my grid and my exis that I disabled. Okay. Now I have here my little guy. There's a couple ways that you can approach modeling this, for example, you could start with a circle here at the bottom and move up extruding this circle and adjusting the size here up until the top here, or you can add a sphere and scope on top of it, or you can do the way that I'm going to show you right here, which is using the profile and spin use the tool spin of Blender to create the model. Let me show you how this looks. The first thing I'm going to do is to add a curve. You can go here under Ed curve, or you can press ship a curve, and add a base here. I'm going to go to Edit mode and delete and I'm going to draw my curves. To help with this, I'm also going to add a modifier. I'm going to add a mirror. That way, everything that I do on one side is going to be repeated on the other just to help me visualize the shape. If you have a drawing pad, this will help you draw or you can also do it manually the curve. I'm not going to follow this drawing. I'm just going to think about how I want my silhouette and use this as a base. Okay, so this is just a base. And the fun thing about this is that you can draw the shape, but you can go here and select your curve and adjust. I'm actually going to delete these verdict. I Okay, so now I have this flat. You can see that I have on the floor here. This is my silhouette, and what I'm going to do is go to enter mood and rotate under X, and I'm actually going to use my three D courser as base. Going to adjust a little bit more. I'm going to save a backup. I'm going to name this. I'm going to create another collection called backup. I'm going to do a copy. I need to convert this to a math. That's why I did a BCA. Before I do that, I need to remove this. What I'm going to do is make sure these points here are on zero on zero Y because they need to be aligned. Going to disable this. Now I can go ahead and cover to mesh, and you can see that we have a lot of dots. I can control this amount of dots before. Let's go back and I can adjust the resolution preview here under shape and I'm going to reduce this just because I don't want a lot of vertex for now because I'm going to apply a subdivision later. Maybe something like this, maybe four. Now I can go ahead and convert to mesh. I'm going to select everything and I'm going to use the spin tools right here. Now, I can extrude all the way around and you can see here on the top bottom. I can do 360 and I can control the amount of steps, the amount of subdivision. Let see. I believe this is enough. Now we already have our shape based on the silhouette. Okay, so now this is the main shape of the character. I'm also going to do a backup. And now, instead of adding subdivisions, I'm going to add a multi resolution just because we have a control under scope. Let's click subdivide Shade Atosmoof and it's starting to take shape. Now let's compare I'm going to live this right here. As an inspiration. Okay, so I think I need another subdivision here. It's too taper at the top and I can do tiny adjustments. And I also want to add some variation here. Even though I'm going to rig this and it's going to follow along my rig once I animate, I want to make this top part of the face, like the head is a little bit backwards. So if this is the front, I'm going to activate proportional editing. And in the median point, I'm going to move everything. E Okay, so now this is the base body of the character. I'm going to tweak it a little bit. I'm going to add the mirror again just to be safe. Okay. Now we have our mirror. And I'm going to do little twigs here on the body. It could use sculpt, but I'm just going to do this manually. I don't want to grab the part there. I'm also going to join this part here. You can see that I had problems when I spin. I'm going to select everything here and I'm going to merge at one and actually delete. Let me see how is it going here. Yeah. Also here at the top, I have to merge all of the vertex. You can do it manually or you can add a modifier called weld. Okay. I think it was too much. Okay, so this is the model base. Now, for the little legs, I'm going to do a separate object. I'm going to add a cylinder. I'm going to isolate this by pressing dot comma. Y. Going to be her little feet. I'm going to move this to the side. Item. This too small. Okay? This looks okay for now. This is just one object. I just a little bit shorter here. I like this, but it looks like it's closer to the ground. Now I have a base for this model. The last thing that I'm going to do is to add the eyes and the mouth. This is also going to be a separate object. I'm going to add a UVspere and it doesn't need to be that detail it bit less. Same thing. He looks pretty scared. And his little mouth. For this, I'm not going to use a mirror, but I'm going to copy this. This is going to make my life easier. We're going to do the. So for the mouth, I'm just to use half of the circle. Is not centered. Centered, but this is not so I can press B and select the center. So, to make this better, I'm just going to use half a circle. So what I'm going to do here is press Shift G and select by normal. And if I increase this, it starts to select more the back face here. A little more. Select this one, actually. Okay. And select this. Going to remove these pass here and I'm going to select these edges here and add to a vertex group. And I'm going to assign. Now I'm going to adjust the best that I can to this part here. Now, so I don't have these gaps here, I'm going to add a shrink wrap. Now, all the vertex are glued here. But if I go to select my perimeter, just the vertex that I select are on the surface. I'm going to activate the wireframe. Okay, so I can go here and adjust a little bit more. And I'm going to need to maybe add another. This is okay. I'm going to actually change the mouth. I'm going to add another curve. And I'm going to add not enough set. I'm going to add an extrude. Going to add an extrude, and I'm going to apply the same modifier, a shrink wrap. Stages. Apply a mirror to be safe. Mirror and another shrink wrap. Instead of on surface, instead of nearest surface point, we're going to do target normal project. This way is going to target the normal of that one. Let me replace. Didn't make a lot of difference. For this one, I'm going to add just a tiny offset so we don't have the glued face. And bust. I'm using this one. Really cute. Okay, so I just want the little black part and I can do animation later. I'm going to just rename this. So this is the body. We have mouth. We have Feet. And the eyes. I'm just going to adjust the orange in here. I'm going to select all of them, and I'm going to move up. I can't select the mouth so this one. Okay, so this is the overall shape of the mushroom. In the next lesson, we're going to do a little bit of animation. We're going to make those eyes blink and the mouth move by using shape keys. Y. 5. Shape Keys & Character Expressions : Welcome. In this lesson, we're going to do shape key animation. Let's open the timeline window here at the bottom. So this is a timeline. It goes 1-250, and we can use this to alter our mesh and control. So let's select the eyes and move over here to the data. Right here under vertex group, you have shape keys. If I go ahead and press add a shape key, this is going to set the basis of my mesh. If I have another one, I have a key, and you can see that I have a value going 0-1. This is the default position of my mesh. Let's change it. With this key selected, I'll go to edit and I'm going to select this bottom vertex here and I'm going to move my mesh. More or less like this think a little bit. Let me see if this looks better. No. I think smooth it's better. Okay, and go to object mode. So now you can see if I go to zero again, it goes back to that default position of my vertex. So this is shape keys. You can basically displace your vertex and control from a value from a slider 0-1. And this is cool because you can do a lot of animation. So let me go back here and adjust a little bit more. Okay, so now we can use this lighter on my time night. So if I press Space Bar, you can see that the frames are rolling here. So if you press Shift and left arrow, I go to frame one. And I can send my value to zero, and I can make a keyframe. While hovering value, I press I and I have a keyframe here. If I move my slider a little bit to the front and move, I can insert another key frame. Now when I press space bar, it slowly changes the match. Pretty simple. We can go here and do this fester. And you can do this repeatedly. If we go to the graph editor, you can see the curve that is setting this animation. I can go here and select the vector, it will be a sharper. Animation, I can move here to make it this faster. And I can do this cycle. For example, I can make a blink and then open his eyes. But I want to do an animation where it blinks and it smiles at the same time. So for this one, it's going to be a little bit different because I have a curve here. And this is going to be my one. So this is going to be my default. I'm going to insert a key, and this is going to be my zero. Now you can see that we go from straight face to a cute smile. Really quick. Okay. Now, as you can see, I have the animation on my timeline and I want to control actions. So I'm going to delete my key frames and I'm going to go to dopest and to my shape key editor. Now I'm going to key frame zero to one again. I'm going to rename my action to smile, zero to one, and I'm going to do the same thing for the mouth. Actually 1-0. A and I'm going to rename it Sima Now, I have both my animations here. And if I go to non linear animation, you can see that I have both my animations here. If I go ahead and click Cover to NLA strips, I can control this easier. Okay, so now you can see that I have this my animation and continuing to the end. So I want to smile and then go back to another expression. So I can go here and create a new one under Chapeki I'm going to name it Parker face. And I'm going to go from one to zero. And I'm going to create right now. You can see that I lost my I'm smiling and then going back. But since I'm not holding this, I need to add this to the same strip. You see that I smile and goes back. So I can do the same thing from this mile hell. Two. Then it goes back and I can also make him look mad. Let's go to the eye. For this, I'm going to add another shaky. Let's make him sat and not going to make him mad. Let's make him sad. I'm going to do the other way around. Like Make him sleepy, tired. Let me try this again. I think this actually looks better. I'm going to have a little bit of overlap, but I think it's okay. So for this, I'll need to have my key at zero and this at zero. Then I'll move my key to two. And then it comes down. For my mouth. I can just live the way that it is. Just going to adjust so this is smiling, poker face and set. So this is just really quickly how you can add expressions. And here I'm adding it into separate objects, so it's easier to move around. And humanoid characters, usually have in your body mesh, you have your eyes and your mouth that is going to move in the same mesh. But this is fun way that you can test out shape keys really easily and see how they behave in your mesh, and then you can continue to improve and feel secure to do other forms of animation. So just play around, and in the next lesson, we will start adding materials. 6. Creating Stylized Procedural Materials : Welcome to our next lesson. In this lesson, we're going to add and create different materials for our mushroom. So this is where we left off in the timeline. So let's go to the shading tab. I'm just going to add a simple black material for the eyes. I'm going to bump down the roughness and apply the same one for the mouth. You can select the control L and link materials. Going to increase the resolution a little bit. Since I'm going to use IV, I'm going to set up a few lights. So I'm going to add a sun. 6,000 for now. I'm also going to add a point light just so we can see the reflection on its eye. If I increase radio, you can see the reflection better. I'm also going to go under EV and activate tracing. Can leave FS GI approsmison off. I'm going to leave it off for now. Here I have AGX I'm going to use standard because you have better control of the colors. Okay, so now what I'm going to do is combine my feet to the body. I'm going to apply this one just so I can have more or less the same resolution on my body then here. And then I'm going to join both of them. Well, this says mirror mirror and bisect. I have mirror on the other side. So let's apply. And then I'm going to join ControG Okay, so now I can add another Wood resolution on top of this one and it's going to subdivide all of these. Since I'm not going to do sculpting, I could use just a simple subdivider but I'm going to leave it like this just in case. Okay, so now, if possible, I want to create one texture for all of this. So the first thing I want to do is to create a base material. And let's see what we can do about the division of colors at first because this is going to be crucial. So what I'm going to do is to add a gradient and apply it to the base colors. So now you can see that goes from black to white. I want to invert this. I can select and press Control If you have the node wrangler add on, you can go here and search for node. If you have this, you can just press Control T on any texture that will add a texture coordinate. So now you can control the direction of the texture. So if it goes, it starts to rotate on Z. So now we go from top bottom to top. So let me see what's happening, okay? To the material. Going to sable. Blur here. It's kind of confusing. Okay, so now I can control my and I can control the amount of black. So this sits already in the right direction what I want. What I want right now is to make this white and the black part closer together. I can do that by adding a color ram that I will control of these values. If I go and bring this together, I can actually control exactly where the grading is going to land. With this, you can see since this part of the mesh is going inward. I have a little bit more of white here, which is okay by me. I think it will have a nice effect. So maybe if I leave it like this, it could look like the top part is kind of reflecting the red light here at the bottom. So I don't mind. It could look good. I also have this nice gradient. Here, I will need to rotate this a little bit less. Let me see if we can not this value. I rotate on the g two. Kind of cute. Let me see. I also want to add a little bit of variation here. I'm going to add a noise. Let me see what happens here. See if I can multiply both these. It's kind of confusing the sun. I actually just going to leave the world on because I want to see what's happening here. Okay? This is better. And I'm going to hide this for now. Okay, so now if I multiply this, I have that little gradient here, which I really like. And I can adjust the amount of roughness. Anything that's bothering me is that this is pretty white. Maybe I want to have this kind of variation here. I like this. Okay, so right now, I have a procedural mask, and I can even take this further because I added the gradient here. Maybe I can add those wave textures going down in character's body. So see. I want to add a wave texture. If I connected to here, you can see. How it's mapped. Here you can play around. I saw the roughness. And I can even make a little bit. Okay, so now I'm going to map according to an UV, and I don't have any UVs here, I believe. Only UV I have are the cylinder here. So let's add a simple UV. I'm going to press U, and I'm going to do a cylinder projection. I already like this. If you remember when we were strategizing a workflow, I thought of mapping this as a cylinder. And I believe this is a quick way to do this. You can see that it goes from the sides here. It's not exactly the same, but I can go here and let's see. Yeah, I do maybe a scale like this. Yeah, I still think this is better, and we are going to mix with the other one. So let me see I want to, and this is happening because I'm mirroring my object. So actually, let's leave it like this. We don't have to mirror it because, yeah, this is already good. Okay. Let me adjust the scale. Okay, so now I need to join both of these MAX. Okay, so now I need to join both of these textures that I did here. So let's mix them. Okay, now I can control this vector here. I'm going to grab my gradient and add another colom. I'm going to invert. I know that I can already invert, but I want to control the amount. So I like this variation here, but it's looking a little bit too straight. So maybe I'll grab the modply This is more realistic. Really like this and this is cool because this is all procedural. No hand painted, we already have a nice base for the mushroom. The only one last thing that I'm going to adjust, this is feeling too sharp. I'm going to leave it like this. Let's move on. Now, basically we have a mesh for all of the body right here. And now I can use this to add color. So let's see. If I mix this with the red color, what happens and add this to the factor. So now I have a mix between red and white. Okay, so the first mix of color that I want to do, let's see our references again. And where is my drawing? Okay, red and purple pink. I'm going to play with this. Let's see. There's my color palette here. Weird. We Can I grab this? Let's see. Now, the mess that I want to use is this one for this. So let's connect this. Maybe I do something like this, let's see. Okay, so now I have a base color. Now for the ripples here, I can mix again and maybe I could do just maybe an ending occlusion. But this factor, I'm grabbing the white here. So maybe I need to invert this too. No, not this. I'm just going to invert this. Maybe I prefer this. Yeah, but I will need to grab just this vector here. But I need to multiply it. Not sure. Wait, I can simply just change to overlay. And this looks even better. Yeah. You can even change this to constant to be really sharp. Yes, so it's better. We'll change the direction. Distortion. Yeah, I don't like this. Okay. Mm. System. This is better. I can also use this factor to create a little bit of normal. A little bit of material displacement. Let me see if I can. Yeah, I like, also using the normal. Okay, the only thing is that I don't have my factor here, so This is getting a little bit confusing. So let me organize this real quick. So this is wave texture. This part here, gradient. Noise color. Basically, these are masks that we are using to multiply our color and our normal. We can also adjust the roughness one and zero. I B, just leave a little bit of shine. Okay, so the last thing that I'm going to add is the little dots on top. Let's see what we are missing if we are missing something. Oh, the little checks. So cute. Let's do the top part dots first. Okay, so we need to add another mas to this, which is the Voronoi. This is the color of our night and we can also do distance. Let's go to randomness and reduce. Scale. Raf nothing. Also nothing. Scale. Okay. T D. Smooth. I think smooth will work better. Let's see. And let's add a color and see if we can create to invert. Little dots. They are irregular dots. But I like this way. Okay. It's because the way that they are being met also maybe if I can use the same one from the wave, we are using a cylinder V. Yeah, it's a lot more regular this way, but too much, maybe if you can apply. Yeah, I prefer the way that it was before. I think this is a lot better. Now I have another mask, but I want to multiply just on this red part here. I need to do this before before this overlay here. I need to do this right here. If I do this, you can see the mask right here. What I think I will do I still have a little bit of the normal here. I think it's the displacement. Yeah, it's the displacement here as you can see, I need to add a mask for these two. Let's see this first. What I can do here really quickly is just copy this. I'm going to use the black as the red, and this is the white. Simple as that. If I want to change the dots, I can go here really simple. I can make them pretty sharp or I can make it soft. I want to make kind of in between. And instead of white, let's see how it looks with the darker color. It's kind of I'm still going to adjust this. But I think I won. Still not sure about the colors, but this is a nice thing. I can change anytime I want. I want to darken this, but I want to control the a yeah, I think this is better. This way I have control over the darkness here and the color. So if I want to change this color, I can go here change to some nice combination here. Really indecisive about the color here. But also red and green are nice. Okay. So now this white color here, I can also change a little bit of green. And the cheeks. Now I have this cute procedural texture. I'm going to add a little bit of texture pink. To do that, I'm going to go to the body and I'm going to add a second UV. Because right now, let me see how this is working. I have this cylinder projection here. I'm going to do a front face because I think it will be enough. Let's see. Project from view. So now I'm going to press F three, and this is all the same material. I'm going to set the image texture. I'm going to create a new one, 1024. Let's just do 248 just to be safe. Face. We need alpha, new image. Now, if we go here we go to face, we have a black texture. Let's apply this and also we need to adjust our new UV. Go here to UV Map and the second one. Let's rename this. Pace. I'll go to texture paint. Phase, right? Let me see. I need to add Alpha. I need to add Alpha to all of this. Let me see if I can bucket paint Alpha. I don't believe that I can D I said to Alpha? That's why not enough Iteris. Now we can go to paint. I can't see anything. Okay, this is enough. Now I can go over and select a shade. I really love to see what I'm doing. And select Mix. Okay, I can't see right here. Do I have it connected? Oh. Okay. Texture paint. I just want to. I don't want to paint hard. I want to paint soft. Do. D. Done. It's okay. Is it okay. I'll go back to select. Yeah, I don't want to repeat this texture. So I'm going to change this in my shading tab. I have a repeat. I'll go to clip just so I don't have checks there. What I'm going to do is to add. Mix Ed. Okay, I'm going to do more pink. Oh. No, I'm going to fix this. Okay, I'm going to change the back part. I'm going to do contras in normal. I'm just going to scale. And then, yeah Since I'm adding it, let's say mix. I will need a different factor. The factor could be the Opha, I believe. Yeah. But now this is too strong. I kind of prefer Ed. Let's see multiply and the factor B off. Yeah, it's too dark. Yeah, this is cute. My to change this a little bit. I'm just going to I can see this better. G to actually copy this color here. I Now I'm going to use the pink heart. This was supposed to be black. I actually kind of love it this way. I love this material. I can even go here changed. But I like this. I can even do an animation of him gaining. I'm definitely going to do that. The top part. Getting shy or something. So before I move on into the rigging process, I'm going to do a little bit of adjustments on the material and on my mesh. The first thing that I want to change is the mapping of the little x because I want to do a sitting animation. This is going to show. I'm going to go here under UV map. I'm going to do a projection from bottom up, Cultro seven. I could do unwrap, but I think this is faster and it's going to solve the problem. So I can go here and go project from ville. I like the way that it goes all the way around here on the side, we have this, but still really good. I'm going to just just A little bit. Okay, I noticed that here I have an artifact from applying my mood resolution before. I'm going to adjust this by selecting the verdict. Since this is not going to show, I'm just going to merge at less. I think it helps a little bit. Okay. The next thing that I want to adjust is the normal map here under the material yeah, this normal map is not working very well. I noticed this artifact here. Actually, what I need to use, it's a bump because the input of my texture is black and white, so. Let's add this to the normal and let's add this directly to height. As I can delete. So this worked a little bit better. Going to increase the distance and I can see that we have more noise here. I'm actually going to reduce a little bit of the distortion. Okay. I'm also going to change this color. Going to do the more bluish tint to make it look like this red is showing up later. You can even do, like, an animation like like this at the end. Where is it? I actually think I will reduce just a little bit. It's nice, yes. And since I added the little check blush, I was missing some shine on your eyes. It looks a little bit flat from this black. So what I want to do is to add little shines, but I want to do this procedurally as well. It's okay to go here. I'm going to add radio texture. I think it's a gradient texture. Actually, spherical. Now you can see we go from black to white and we have a sphere here. I'm going to add my texture coordinate and I'm going to use MUV for that. Yeah, I have one UV for this and I have a mirror, which is okay. So I'm going to adjust so it fits more or less like here. And the center of this is here under zero. So in my X, I believe it needs to have 0.5 or -0.5 and 0.5. Yeah. I think this works. So it's exactly at the center of my mapping. And I also want to control the black and white, another color M and I can leave it like this, just a little dimension to the eyes. I just want to add a shine. It's going to be aesthetic shine, but it's okay. So I'm going to use constant. Shine. Now I can control where I want this. I can press shift to make this light go a little bit slower here in 5.1, great. I don't want him to be looking cross eyed because of this, so I'm going to go here on their mirror and we can change UV. Here now we have the same direction. Let me just the shine. I'm also going to add a second one. I'm going to duplicate this. Now I just need to change the direction. I kind of like the way that this one kind of warps to the side. It makes it look even better. Okay. Let's see how it looks with the keys. I mean, it's static, but just a little effect. Do Okay. I can adjust this later. I also having that little artifact here. So let's see how I can fix this. The displacement is causing this issue here, even though I tried to fix this. I'm using the wave. Since I'm doing your cylinder procession, I already assumed that I was going to have problems at the top part because the cylinder kind of warps all of the textures right here. Maybe I won't use the displacement on my wave texture. Let's see if I can use another one. We can use on this one, still have a little bit of material scle placement, not vertex. That fix the stop part because I'm mapping. I'm using the wave texture, only the wave texture that is coming all the way to the top, from the bottom to the top. When I'm mixing this with the other ones with the stop part, it's actually removing the wave from this part here. That solves the issue. I'm still using the wave here. Okay. Now the mesh looks good. For now, one more thing. I'm going to duplicate this material here, this black material for the mouth just because I don't want any shine. I'm going to remove this and actually bump out the roughness. I just remember one more thing that I want to do is to play a little bit more with the roughness of this because I'm just using base color and Alpha. Although it looks good, I just want to test how this will work. Okay, so now I have more shine here on the ridges, which I kind of like. It could be the other way around. So this red, let's see, the base color. Okay, so the black is really shiny and the white is rougher. And this became a little too shiny, so I'm going to reduce just a little bit. Okay, now we have a little bit more shine here, and this is it. Okay, so this is it for this lesson. In the next lesson, we're going to start rigging the body and doing some tweaking on the animations. 7. Simple Character Rigging : Welcome. In this lesson, we are going to learn to rig our characters. We are going to be doing three different animations using A strips and then combining it with the blend shapes that we already have for the facial features. So here we have our character. To make it move, we can just do like this and rotate them. We need to move this vertex separately. For example, if you want to move this leg, we will need to select a certain amount of vertex right here and then rotating. That's why we use rig. When we rig our character, we are basically adding internally bones in our mesh and saying, Okay, I want this leg bones here to move this amount of vertex. And in a smooth way, this is going to move strong and then we're going to have a smooth fade out here that will be controlled by the movement of this wig. So that's what we need to do. So I'll go under modeling. Let's go under not a sculpting. Animation. Yeah, let's go under animation. We go to this front view. Here we have the timeline that we use. We can see that we have the animation for the face. We can't see here because it's under these animations right here. But let's forget the face animations for now, let's focus on our bone first. Okay, so the first thing that we need to do is to add an armature, and these are the bones. You can see here that I have under light. I'm going to move here to the mushroom collection. And here we have armature pals and an armature. Okay, so now I'll add the bones where I want my character to move. I want this to be the center spine. I'm going to rename this. I'm going to add one more here. I can extrude. I'm going to rename this. Top. He doesn't have any arms, so I don't need to add any movement here. I want to do a hip motion here. This is the left. He doesn't have any knees, so I'm just going to add another bone here. And from here, it is actually hip, but Okay, so this is basically everything I need for ***** character, really simple. And if I move, happens. Here, I'm going to parent the eyes and my mouth into the body. In 5.1, I can just select both of them and press Shift and hover over the object that I want to parent. This is pretty useful and it was updated in 5.1. If I move the body here, you can see that actually if I move the armature, it doesn't do anything because we need to parent the body to the armature. Control and I'm going to use with automatic weights. Now, if I go here and go under weight paint, I have my right foot selected. You can see that the ik of my left foot is grabbing vertex seal this part here, which is too much. I basically want to move just this part and a little bit more. But this is useful because it already did initial weight on the vertex. So right now, I'm going to adjust the vertex that I want to use for each rig. Okay, so here, if I paint, red is going to be one and zero is going to be black. So what I can do here to just reduce a little bit of the influence of this bone, I can go here under levels, and I can adjust the offset a little bit less. But, yeah, I lost the red so I can gain Okay, so only these bones here this vertex here is going to be influenced by the top part. Looks okay. I'm just going to adjust all of these. For this one, I also need to add weight to this part here. I'm going to paint it a little bit. For this part, it's going to be a little bit more difficult. I will have to test out the animation because I just want the hip movement to be really subtle. So let's see. Yeah, for this part, I'm only going to lift the foot on, so I'm going to go actual edit mode and select all of this, and I'm going to remove from this. The same thing for this one. Actually, the right leg didn't Okay, it's the right foot. The same thing for this. I so right foot, left foot, right leg, left leg, top and spine. This looks good for now. Now let's test out the armature. Let's use this one. Here I'm under edit mode. If I rotate this, this is not going to do anything with my mesh, so I need to go under pulse mode. Now, if I've moved my leg, I'm only moving the little foot. This movement is only going to be on this is right here. Here I can already tell that I'll need to adjust a lot of the weight. Let's see. Yeah, maybe I'll just do a little bit of hip rotation in the walking animation. Just a little bit instead of rotating on the X. Maybe this can work, but I will need to influence more. The idea here you just a little bit of this hip movement, so the legs doesn't stay in the same position when it walks. But here, Oh, little wobbly. The goal here is to do three animations. I want to do a little walk animation. I want to do a jump animation which would be interesting in a sitting position. Doing jump, something really small. I need to increase a lot of the weights for the movement. Let's see here. I also need to adjust to include the eyes include the eyes so this bite movement here. The top part is the easiest one. No problem at all. Okay, so let's just for the sitting position, I'll need this to be a little bit longer. This better. I think this was an automatically map to the armature as well. So I will need to do this individually with empty groups. I won't need all of this, so I'm just going to remove so I don't get confused. Now it is attached. So I'll need to do the same thing for the mouth. Let's see if we have probles because it's a curve. I hope not. Okay, so now from the mouth, I can appoint the vertex weight. So I'm going to create a copy of this duplicate collection just to have a backup. I'm actually going to have to apply, which means I'm going to lose the shape keys that I'm going to have to make this later. But I think this is the fastest way that I can do. I will cover this to mesh. So yeah, I lost the shape keys. And the animations, let's clear them. Now I can hook just like I did with the eyes. And Now, it's moving your courtly. Front part, step. I adjusted all of the weight paint, here we have the movement of the spine, just a little bit. The top part, we have both hips and we need to rotate this there there at once. It's just a little bit of movement because I don't have any joints on this character, so it's just the impression of movement. Also we can rotate the legs. I'm having problem with the normal here, believe. I'll see what is happening here. Mm. Just notice a problem with the weight. Left foot. Okay. Assign one. Maybe I have this is connected to another exactly. I'll go to edit mode again and remove from the left leg. I think maybe I painted it. Now the next part is to start animating, I have my eyes and mouth attached to the armature and the body with automatic weights and I have all of the bones named. I'll start with the most complex one. I believe that is the walk animation. So I create a new action called walk. And I'm going to, just walk. And for this, I want to set this position, and I want to rotate them both at once, and I'll look a little bit. First. You remember the notations that I have. Okay. Okay, so just grab the rotation of the right leg and not the left leg. 12. Okay, so now I'm going to remove the zero. Let's see from the top to. So to this and back, copy and paste. Here, and here. Let's see. Really quick. Really subtle. No control F. Now I'll go to the graph editor. I'm going to select this. No cycles. Shift contra Now the little animation that I created, now it's cycle through all of the movement. Now let's add more movement to the little legs because now it's too subtle to notice. Tulsa infin I will go back to the timeline. So in this first point here, he's throwing his leg forward. So like this. So cute. And in this movement, this is going to be positive. And for the other, like, the other way around. Now, same thing. So both of these, go to the graph editor, contro Shift M. I think shift F. There was a way that I could. Anyway, I forgot to copy it. The first positions. Okay, now, cycles. Now we have both of these. It's pretty notice about. The first one, let's see. Yeah, but it's moving, it's moving the texture. I'm satisfied with this walking in place. Okay. Now, when my character is walking, I want to move my spine a little bit too. If I go here and move or let's see and move my spine, let's see what happens. Just a little bit. I could feel like he's bouncing a little bit. That's what I'm trying to say. He's bouncing. I have a snap to target. Yeah, I think it could be a nice effect here. So I'm going to adjust a bounce to this and also a movement here. He's moving forward, just like this. Actually, I'm going to make it seem like he's hopping. So when he's at the center, it's going to actually be lower. So let's change this. We'll go to invert. So lower higher. Lower. And higher. So in one loop, he has more bounces. So in this first loop, I'm also going to move this on six, it will be pointed backwards. The rotation on six is going to be straight. That's why I set. And on this, it's going to go backwards. I'm just going to copy this really subtle movements, but it makes a difference. As for the cycles. Now let's see. Pretty cute with the eye animation. I think the head is too much wobbling for the rest of the body. I'll just adjust the top part, but I think maybe the weight of the top part, it could be a little bit more influential. Like, for this part here, maybe they should move as one. So let me adjust the levels. I want them to gain. That's not working. Yeah. So this should be affected maybe as one and affect a little bit more of the stop part. Maybe I exaggerate it, but let's see. Yeah. Okay, so I think this is good for the walk animation. Now, I will go to the non linear animation, and I'm going to transform this into an action of my armature. And you can see that now I can walk and smile at the same time. So I can go here and make the set animation. Oh, this one is Well, it doesn't feel set right now because I need to add the movement of the mouth here. Let's see if Okay, I'm having some problem there with the shape keys. So yeah, I'm going to adjust the shape keys. Well, let's do smile. Okay. I also need to just demuth. So I'm going to make it. I'm going to apply a solidify because honey moth here disappeared. So let's see. So for this one, I'm going to add a solidify. Mm. This will solve the issue. Okay. Now I'm going to add a second animation, which is going to be the jumping part, and then I will combine with the book that we already have. Now I'll do the jumping animation and it's going to be a separate one. So let's create let me save. Create another armature action called jump, and I don't know how he's going to jump. Let me disable the I'm going to open another one here and leave it non linear animation. Let me just disable this disabled. Now, let's go to the pause mode. And from here, I'm going to set these positions, and he's going to reset. And this little leg going to go even further. In this position wait again. I'm going to exaggerate this movement. Just this. Jump really high. And the rotation, I didn't snap the rotation at first, right. Can just go here. What? Hi. And backwards. Jump. And for the stop part. Jump. And this go back? And then goes back. This also comes back. This, like go forward. Then well to the side. Mm let's see. He is walking, he jumps and professional lands. Let's send this to 36. Not this. Jumps lands and this needs to go backwards once again. Then he stands straight. We jump leging needs to be way faster. Okay. So now what I want to do is combine both of these animations. So now I have the jump and the walk. So let's convert this to another strip. And I want my character to jump after they walk. So right now, this is disabled. I'm going to enable the walk animation, and it's not working well because this is influencing. So let's set this to nothing because it does nothing before start. This is going to replace. This is holding. I want this to hold to continue to cycle through. Let's go down here and we can set frame start and end. We can also combine these two. Let's see. No, I don't want to combine. I want to blend in and blend out, and this will help the transition. So you can see that now, even though I set, see, we have that jump between these two animations. If I go ahead and set here, even though you have a little bit of We don't want that. So the cool thing about NLS strips is that you can combine different animations and we'll do a smooth transition between them. So let's do a plant out and a plant in. You can see that he prepares himself to jump, but it's not cut. So it's a little bit better and you can't be co arm of these settings until you find a good result. I'm going to add one more idle animation jumps, sets in his position, just like he did with his little head, I want to add an idle animation when he goes from side to side. I'm going to do that. The Ido animation is going to be with him, sitting. Just grab this final here. Need to be the same position. Maybe I'll make him move his little legs a little bit. No, actually, not from side to side. He can rotate this direction. Oh, that's so cute. Hmm. Just like me can stand still. Move his legs all the time. Yeah, but here I need a cut. Okay, so I just did the rotation and I'm going to set the handler type to vector. Let's see. Kartik maybe. No. Circle. To robotic. Almost there. To leave it like this for now. Going to add the movement from side to side. It's like here. Here. And just a little bit later. This is heavy so really to the side. Of press the rookies. So he starts a little bit later. So he's turning to the side and it gets too heavy and it falls. Now, this again he starts to go to the other side. And this one hold this position a little bit here. And when it reaches this point, it falls to the other side. Maybe this was a little bit fast. Falls. It goes and it falls more or less the same distance. So let's see. Falls? He turns this feels heavy. Okay. Really cute. I just need to make him Okay, let's go back to the default position. Now we have him bouncing, moving his legs. Okay. I'll send this as an shape and send this here. Hold, we don't want to hold. Let's enable the walk and the jump. Okay, so this hold forward. This is holding forward. Perfect. I cycle once more to the end. Let's see. I'm going to press tab and go to the graph editor in the pulse mode. I'll just select everything and then going to cycle. I and now I'm going to increase again. And now he's repeating. Okay. Now I need to see while I work. It's holding his left leg. Why? Let's see if it's Looks like I lost the movement. It's weird. I Somehow lost his movement. Okay. Yeah. That was my bed. I changed the way that I rotated it. And let's see how this messed up the idle. Yeah, I lost the rotation on the legal. That was stupid of me. Let me see if I can. This little rotation. Why did I invented this? Hm, I need to adjust this pink stuff. To remove pins. Lips. Let's rotate it again. Let's just rotate like he's balancing himself to this side. It'll make more sense. And then it goes back. Yeah, this even makes more sense. So the other side, his other leg is like this. And he balance himself Okay. So now let's add another blend out and blend in. Let's check the animation walk, jump, and idle. Got a little bit of an artifact here. I don't think I'm going to add a blend out because they start at the same position. So let's see. Mm. His spine is lower. I'm going to adjust this jump. Let's see how his spine ends. Let me set back Actually, go to adjust spine height in the atom. Mm hmm. He falls to zero, which is actually the default for him. So let's set zero all from the beginning and finish the jump with 02. And I think. And when he fall, I didn't adjust. When he falls, yeah, I actually missed that. Right here, he needs to be zero again. Zero. Yeah. This is it. Say again. Really cute. Really cute. Okay. Now I want to combine the movement of the eyes and the mouth with this. So let's see. He's smiling. And then he jumps and he's focused. And I had a little problem here again. With the mouth. I'm going to hold. Hold forward. A And is it just enough? Oh, that's so cute. That's so you Turku. Okay, so this is the final animation of our character. He can walk. He's jumping and have little cute idol. In the next lesson, we are going to be adding camera and a little environment. 8. Art Style: Welcome. In this lesson, we're going to define an art style for our character. Then we will render it in different poses and even export a video animation of it. Here I have 23d view ports. One is under solid view of my character, and this one is the render view. If I go here, I can see that I'm using the scene lines of my project and the scene world. Since I'm using IV rendering, which is real time, this is really close of what we have in the final render. If I go here under my render settings, I have my ray tracing on I can activate fast global illumination approximation, and you can see that I have more shadows here. And if you go down, we have color management, which is different ways that you can view your render. So here I'm under standard, which is more true to the RGB colors. But we also have this one. You can see which one you prefer. I prefer to use standard because I'm going to do a more stylized look. You can also use this to view the exposure of our character. If you go under false color, you can see that the green is less exposed and the yellow is most exposed. What does this mean? If I go here under sun and if I increase the strength, you'll see that we will have some red areas. This is showing that this part is super exposed to the light. Let's go back to standard, and you can see that this area is light and we don't have a lot of contracts in this image. Even here, I can see that I need more shadows here. Everything is too overexposed. Now, let's go back to our references. So here I have examples of a few different art styles. This one is more treaty look. This is kind of a tomb shader drawing. And we have also this really treaty looking character. So if I wanted to go this route, I could activate PSGI approximation. I could go here under light path and decrease the intensity of my indirect lighting to create more depth to my character, increase this one. So you can play around with these settings to achieve your final result, of course, also adjust the sunlight. But I'm going to go back Control Z. What I want to do is create a more stylized look like the tomb shaders that we see on these characters. A few ways that you can approach this is by modifying your shader. The way that I'm going to do this is by modifying my shader. I'll go here under shading again. I'm going to select my character, and here we have our shader for the body. Going to organize this real quick. And to organize, this I can drag here and search for reroot. And this will create another point that does nothing. So I can go here and just try to keep this more organized. A This looks slightly better. I can see the overall of my shader. So this. What I'm going to do is to add a shader to RGB. This is useful to create stylized environment. I'm going to connect the color ramp. E. And I'm going to connect and we will see what happens. Here we have our gradient because of the color ramp that is controlled by the light that I have on my scene. If I go here and reduce, you can see that it starts become gray or overexposed. This is cool because I can go here. I can go under my character and use a constant and I can really define the shadows of my character. I'm going to disable this point light for now because as you can see, it's also interfering on my character. White is going to be the parts that is over exposed. I'm going to add a gradient. Here on the outline, I have a little gray here because of my world setting. I'm using a gray and I have one string. I'm going to disable it. I have better control of my shadows. Okay, so now, this is going to add the shades of my character. I'm going to convert this point light into an area light. I need to open a new type here just so I can control them both at once. And what I want to do is to add a ring light coming from behind my character. And I'm really going to have to expose this and really scale the light. You can see that I start to have little rim here. A a I have a really intense light coming from behind on all of my character. So here we have a nice constant shade on our character. Now, if I go here under my base color and connect it directly to the surface, you can see that I don't have any shade on my character. I'm going to combine this with the shape that we made. I'm going to drag my base color and search for a mixed note. And connect. Let's see what's happened. Now we are mixing both factors and we have the color and the shadow. But as you can see, this is too overexposed. Instead of mixing, I'm going to try out darken because I want to keep the white as it is, and I just want to add the darker shades. If I go all the way up, you can see that my white are still true to the color that I have. So I can lift this at 0.6. I'm going to reduce the sunlight to one Maybe. A little bit less. We don't need to use only black and white colors. I can go here under my gray color and I can apply some tint. You can see that under my gray, I can apply different colors. I'm going to use a bluish tint. To So I'm going to grab a second one, and I'm going to add mix add another color rip. And from here, I want to use a pink shade. So what you said to me more my colors. Nor is my Okay here. Okay. I'm going to lower this a little bit more. This is too overexposed. Let's see. Let's this. A Okay, so you can adjust all of these settings and play around with what you want. If you want a more violet kind of glow, you can use shader to RGB to achieve the style that you want. Once I have my camera setup, I will adjust this better bit because as you can see, the way that I have my point light and the sun will interfere with my character. I'm going to go ahead and create a group. I'm going to name it to shader. Now I'm going to add this to the eyes. I'm going to copy. I'm not going to use a tint. And you can see that the little shine here disappeared. I'm going to leave a black and white. And instead of darken, I'm going to add. This way, I can add the little dot. If I go here, it goes bigger or smaller. And this dot is going to move according to the light. But you can live without it if you want. Okay. Now, let's set our camera. I'll add my camera under collection. To go in the camera, you can pass zero in the NN PED. And if you press Shift and quotes, you can navigate by pressing ASD W. I'm going to frame my character. And then I like to go here on my rotation and set this to 90, zero to a more rounded value. And instead of doing this, I like to go here under shift and move here because this way, we don't have distortions of our character. Right now I want to have a real true representation of it. Let's press F 12. You open this window. Here we have our character in a black background. If you want to explore this with an Alpha channel, you can go under here, film and select transparent. This way, if you render, you have a transparent background. You can go here and save. Render and make sure that you have your color under RGBA, because if you have under here, it's not going to have the transparent background. My character is floating and I want to ground it. I want to create some shadows. I'm going to create a simple plane. I'm going to add a plane and scale it. I'm just going to make sure. I'm going to create a studio. This is sharp. I'm going to do a bevel and shade autos move. Here you can see that I have a problem with my area light. I edit my point light, actually, my area light just to create this rim on my character, but I don't want it to add any light to the plane that I have. The way that I can do this is to move this plane to another collection. Environment. I'll go under my area light and go here under shading and light linking. Here, I can select MV. If I disable, you can see that is now removed from my plane. Now I'll add a material. You can do a transparent reflection. Let's see how this looks. Now I have a ground for my character. But since I'm doing a stylized look, I don't want this kind of reflection. I just want the shadow and I want it to be pretty sharp. I'm going to use the same shader RGB that we use for the character. The first thing I'm going to do is to replace this by a diffuse shader, because to use the shader to RGB, we need a color. Same thing, color ramp. Now I can drag this. And really closely, you can see that now I have a constant. If I selected just my diffuse and now we've shader to RGB. So from here, I have my character with a shadow, but you can see here that my character is lost in this white background. One cool thing about this is that you start to notice the way that affects the different backgrounds on your character. If I go under here, select different colors. You can start to test out the colors that you have from your character to fix this problem if I have a really bright background, even if it's just like this, I'm going to add an outline to my character. To do this, I'm going to use geometry nodes. I'm going to select my character and go under modifier and add a geometry node. I'm going to add a new one, and I'm going to name this outline. I'll go here under geometry notes. So a quick way that we can do this is by extruding all of our character outwards and then applying another material on top of it and flipping the faces. And we also need to activate the backface cooling, so the backface of our shader doesn't show. So let me show you. We need to grab the normal of our character. Normal and true normal. Now we're going to set a new position. So if I connect this, you can see that we can change the position of the character. So what we want is to set the position based on normal. But to do this, we need to scale. Actually the offset. Now we can extrude the character or make them thinner. Here I'm going to connect under this input, so we have it right here. And it's just going to be a small extrude. Here, nothing happens because you need now to flip faces. Now you can see, but the faces are inverted, as you can see, I'm going to leave this this way and I'm going to set a material. I'm also going to connect this to the output. I'm going to duplicate this body material here. You can just leave black or any other color that you like. But I'm going to use the same body material and I'm going to modify it a little bit. Actually, let's just leave this body outline. And the reason that I'm duplicating it is because I'm going to change some settings. Like I said, to make this work, we will need to activate the B face cooling. So as you can see, our material is inverted. So this creates the new border This creates a new border of our character. So we need to combine what we did with the original geometry. So I'm going to drag and I'm going to join the geometry. Okay, let me dsp shadow too. You need to design both because we don't want the camera to vis it or even to create shadows in our geometry. So if you have your settings like this, we can go ahead their shading, select the body outline and modify it a little bit. So I can darken a little bit. Let's increase the size just so you can see better. So we can darken it. We can just leave it black. I like this option because it gives you an outline without showing too much. If we have a color just this color, let's remove the displacement. It gives a more cartoony look, which is cool too. You can play around with what you want. But if you have a darker background, this cannot show that much, or we can use white. But I'm going to use the same shader. So you can see that we have a few tints. And I'm going to remove this. Okay, so now let's disable it and render. Now let's compare with this new version. So we kind of got this separation here from the character. Now we have our character with the shadow in the background, but I want to test different colors of my background. So what I'm going to do is to use this as a mask. Pressing F. I'm going to name this shadow mask. Because if you move the sun shadow will move accordingly. Now I'm going to use a mixed node in the factor. This one. And I'm going to connect. So if I change this color here, I can control the color of the shadow. And this is cool because I can grab this little color here and make the shadow tinted, just like my character to keep everything in the same color palette. And this I can control the background. So I can see that the characters more ground than that before. Now what I can do is to play around with my background. I'm going to add a gradient and a color ramp and connect to the white color. Here I need to map. You can press Control T if you have no wanglar activated, and this will pop up. So now I will need to rotate this and I can create a gradient effect if you want. But I want to add just a circle here. I'm going to change this to spherical. I'm also going to change the texture coordinate because right now it's generated and I want it to be static. Connected to window, I'm going to change this to constant, and now I have a sphere here. I'm just going to reposition it And you could do a cool effect for a character, for example, a little circle. It's a little hard to get something like this. But I want to create a base. Reduce to 80, I'm going to make this 0.40. This is mimicking a stand for my character. The cool thing about this is that I connected to the window. If I go here and move, this is aesthetic. It's always at the bottom part. Now I can use this to play around with the colors. This is mimicking a dark background. This I don't need RGBA. So I'm going to name this dark ink. I'm going to add one more and duplicate and name this light. I'm going to apply assign this. And I'm going to create a colored one. And in here, I'm going to test some of the environment colors that I would use with this character. So I'm going to use my reference board. So let's test this color here. I'm going to try to catch a yellow color. I'm going to invert these colors. I can go under here and flip Color Ramp and adjust this. Let me just check the way where Okay, so now I'm going to do a few renderings showing different sides of my character and also different poses. 9. Character Poses : I'm going to copy this camera and I'm going to name this Oto and change because for this one, I'm going to use an orthographic view. I want to have a front view of my character. I'm going to backup and I'm going to create a copy of my character. Okay. So this one is at the center. I'm going to move the sun. So the shadow doesn't interfere with the other characters that I'm going to add. I So I'm going to duplicate this collection. I'm going to name this collection mushroom scent. Mushroom left. I'm going to select all of the objects and move 5 meters. As I said, left, I move and changes to the right. So right and left. Okay, so now I have three poses of my character. I'm going to select the left one. Let's move to the animation. Okay, so for the first character, I'm going to do a front view. So I'm going to go over the armature and move from the pose position to the rest position. This is the default. This will be the T pose of my character, but it doesn't have arms, so it's an eye pose, I believe. For the second one, the centered one, I'm also going to move in the rest position. But I'm going to rotate it so we can view from the side. And the last one, I'm going to leave this animation on. I'm going to rotate it slightly. Now I'm going to render it with all the different backgrounds. The pose point. Now I'm going to use the same ones. I'm going to go back and do a setup of the different poses that we have in the animation. Remove from the pose position. And the first character, he's going to be walking. I'm going to activate the only show selected, and I want his eyes to be mine. Just like this. For this one, he's going to jump. On top of this, I'm going to key frame a location higher. Oh, I also want his eyes to be wide open and his mouth on the front. Like, he's concentrated. And this one he's in the idle animation. I think this side and he's going to have Uh and for this one, and I'm also going to low him to the ground. Pretty cute. Animation color. Now I'm going to duplicate again the center one and I'm going to do the animation render. I'm going to disable these ones. Okay. So for this, his animation. I'm going to use the default camera here, respective camera. I'm going to change his location. The first thing that I'm going to do is to attach this area light to my character because I want this ring to kind of follow him. So if I move him to the side, we lose that ring. I'm going to attach this to my character. I'm going to move this pressing shift and insert it into the ometer and also moving to the same collection. So now if I move my character, the ring glide kind of follows. A I'm going to increase the size of this plane here just because of the shadow. Think a little too fast. That's why I wasn't seen. And also, I will snap the height just a little bit. Going to change just to. I'm going to move this frame to a vector because I want him to stay like this and jump. I'm going to lure this just a little bit right here like this. No. And let's see. I'm losing the part where his spine goes a little bit down. So let me just Maybe this is a little bit too early. A little bit too fast. Right here, I'm going to add another qui frame into a little bounce. Just a little bounce here. I think it's okay. Okay. Then I can just leave it like this. Just going to select this one. Not this. Just a little bit. He's still going out of the frame here. I don't want to move out his frame, so move the camera. Here. And now I need an object for him to sit on. So I'm going under environment. Add a simple UVspere. Now I'm going to move to the highest point right here. I'm going to use proportional editing. I'm going to use shape key. Let's shade this to autos move. I'm going to close this off and just create a little bevel here. What's a sub division. To duplicate this material, use this. I'm going to do a lighter color, and this is affected by the plane of my character. So I'll go for the area lights. There's shading and disabled sphere. For this one, I think I'm going to reduce a little bit of the exposure. It's a little bit too intense right now. Okay. I need to add the tune shader for this one. Let me this. Actually. That's it. A car. I think this is okay. Now I'm going to add shape keys. So my default is going to be this one. Let's move to the animation. Let's close this off. Okay. So my character jumps really high and he lands. So I'm going to adjust the base the basis. Let's move this. So let's make this bigger because he's jumping pretty high. He's here. I Okay, this is the base. Now to one, we're going to move right here and I'm going to move back to move and move this down. So this is going to be the one. This is zero, one. Okay. So now let's key frame. This is going to be one. And when he's right here, let's add zero. And let's see when he starts to push down. So his little leg is there, so I need this to be lower on the basis again. Let's change the key. This is too much. It's going to be one. Let me do this again. This is the basis Kiwa. Let's lower this part together. Okay, so I'm going to hide up until here, so this won't get affected by the movement. Now what I need to do is just to connect this again. Just move this down a little bit. Okay. When he goes up, it's going to ease up a little bit less, and then it goes back a little bit less. So let's see. Cute. I'll move this a little bit more to the side, just so I can see jumping. Let's see if we don't have any overlap of meshes, like here. Two is this. Okay. Okay. The dark environment for this one. I'm going to use the dark one. Okay. Now I'm going to do just a render test of an image. There's two ways that you can export a video animation. You can export by frame, so you need to select a folder on your computer. For example, here, I'll have 250 images, and then you can combine it in another software and create a video. Or we can just go under here and select video. And render animation. This is going to take a little bit longer, but it's pretty fast, as you can see here, we're already at frame eight. Now I render all of my images and videos and I add it to Blender and you can play your videos inside Blender. Here we have our character. Here I created a little environment for my character, and we have all of the poses, different lightings. So this is it for our lesson. I'm sure by now you have all of the tools to create your first character in Blender. 10. Class Project: Design Your Own Fantasy Character: Now it's time for you to create your own fantasy mushroom character. For this class project, you will take the character that we've created and apply your own artistic view to it. You can experiment with different colors, materials, facial expressions, lighting, and render to bring your own personality and art style to the project. Maybe your character is cheerful and friendly like mine or it's a serious garden inspired by a fantasy world that you like. This is an opportunity for you to create your own design. Once you've customized your character, past using the rig that we created and upload your final render to the Project Gallery. Feel free to add a short description of your character and any creative decisions that you made. The goal here isn't to copy what we made in class, but to use the techniques that you learn to make a character that feels like your own. I'd love to see the characters that you create. 11. Final Thoughts and Next Steps: Congratulations on completing the course. You've now taken your character from an idea to a final render, a workflow that includes a lot of planning from modeling, texturing, posing, lighting, and final render. That's an incredible achievement and a great introduction to character creation in Blender. As you continue your Blender journey, try creating new projects, experimenting with different art styles, and using the techniques that you learn from this class. Every new project that you create will strengthen your modeling and artistic skills. You haven't already, please make sure to upload your character to the Project Gallery. I would love to see the creative ideas that you brought to life. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the course discussion forum. And if you enjoy the class, please consider leaving a review. It helps us improve future projects and rich more students. Thank you for joining me, and I'll see you in the next Dunder course.