Blender Make Dynamic 3D Characters

1. Intro: If you want to learn how to make a cute little dynamic character and animated in Blender. I'm gonna be showing you how to do that in this course. My name is John Gray and I'm looking really forward to take you guys through the whole process here. We're gonna be starting with just some rough concepting. Then we're gonna be working our way through some basic modelling, making some features. And then I'm gonna be showing you guys how we can make a rig animated a little character and a dynamic part of this course is going to be using a little bit of cloth simulation to make some sort of dangling thing under a character for lack of a better word. And overall it's just a fun little learning thing here did you guys can do? And I want to see what you guys can come up with. I want to really encourage customizing this concept and this idea. And really making it your own animation that you can be proud of and show to your friends, family, and whoever you want to. So let's get into it and I really hope you guys enjoy. 2. Initial Concepts: In this part of the class, I'm gonna be showing you guys how I make my characters with just some really simple methods. I'm going to be using GIMP, which is a free program. But this is not so much about how to use GIMP. It's more about just my process. It doesn't matter if you use some paper, if you use crayons, it really isn't the point. We're just going to bash out some concepts is a ton of fun. I want to show you how I do it and I will be providing this GIMP file if anybody's interested in it. But it's not essential that you do this part of the class. To follow along, I will provide all the resources and concepts that you need as we continue here. If you've decided to go along with Gimp, I'm going to quickly show you how I approach this. Once again, this is not a lesson on how to use GIMP. You can definitely use any medium you want, but I'll quickly give you an overview. So once I have opened up, I like to go to file and I click on U, comes up with a create a new image box. And you can just leave the default settings as they are. I usually leave it at 1920 by 1080 and I press Okay, and it'll create on the layer section here a layer called background. Now if you want to create an additional layer with transparency, you can come down here and click on this little create a new layer tab. It comes up with this new layer box and you can go to the field width, makes sure that it is set to transparency, which should be by default and then press Okay, and then on top of your background now you have a layer that you can draw on. So I'm gonna go to my paintbrush tool up here in the tools section. You can just hover over it and you can see it says paintbrush tool, just left-click on it. And underneath here you're gonna see all the different properties that relate to the tool that you're using. In this case, if you have a graphics tablet, which I do, you can come here to the dynamics and click on it and change it to whatever you want to work with at the moment, I'm just going to use a mouse anyway because I know a lot of people don't have a graphics tablet and I'm going to just demonstrate how easy it is. So with that paintbrush tool selected, come here to the size of your brush and just bring it down. But at about five pixels with that layer selected, I'm just going to quickly draw out a few basic shapes. So I'm gonna go over about four. And these will be like the foundation of our different character designs. Just a shape to start with that we can build on top of it. We're essentially just experimenting. So I'm gonna quickly speed that up as well. You can see here I really quickly just drew out for basic shapes here that are going to be the character is essentially over the concepts. So what I will select to do is create an additional layer. So I'm going to press the button down here again, make sure it's transparency. Press Okay. And on this new layer of that selected a, you can draw out some simple eyes. You can also increase the brush size if it makes it a bit simpler. And then just draw out some cute little I. And so I'm going to speed this process up as well. Here you can see I've just place them where I think they would look good. And then you can just go over here to your fill color. I will select it, just change it to something that I think would be like a mouth color. So maybe a little bit of a pinkish, reddish color, maybe a little bit darker on the value. And with that, I'm just going to draw out some little mouth shapes trying to make them all a little bit different, a little bit more unique. Then another cool thing you can do, It's really simple. Just create another layer and make sure to drag that new layer underneath the attitudes. So just left-click and drag it down above the background and make sure it's selected. And then you can move your brush here, just increase the size a little bit. And then this is completely up to you. You can choose different colors and then just paint over each one of them, adding in a color just to kind of get an idea of what they might look like with a little bit of color. Here you can see I've just painted out more different colors for these different shapes here. And you can already see just by doing this kind of random shapes and adding little facial features, adding some color. You're already just quickly in just a matter of minutes, just building a quick idea of some cute little character concepts. You can even take it further than that. You can create another layer on top of the one that you added the color to. Make sure that layer is on top of the color layer and move that one, you can go for a darker color on the fill and then just add some shadowy areas. We think there might be a shadow. So I'm going to just paint them all roughly where I think it'll look good on these characters like this, maybe on this guy as well. And then with that layer selected, you can go to Filter blur and then give it a Gaussian blur and then just blurred a little bit like that press Okay, and then you can select your color layer here. So select Color layer, didn't go to your fuzzy select tool up here, and then just click into space here and it'll select everything around this color shapes. Then select the shading layer we created here if the little dark spots, and then just press delete and it'll get rid of all of that extra. Then with that layer selected, you can just drag the opacity down a little bit. And that just gives you some quick dirty shading as well, which is kind of fun, just brings them out a little bit, makes them look a little bit more three-dimensional. And you can play around with that opacity as well to change the amount there. Now that we've added these quick dirty shadows here, you can also just make sure you have that layer selected. Click onto new layers button here again, create a new layer of transparency and it's just new layer. You can also just, with your brush selected, just go to your colors and change it to something like a bright yellow and increase your brush size. And then you can just paint some areas to make some highlights. I noticed isn't quite accurate to how you do it with real 2D illustration. But this is just about getting some quick results and knocking out some quick concepts. So maybe it's a little bit of reflection coming from the top here. And then you can go with that layer selected to filter also blurred out with the Gaussian blur like we did with the shadows. So maybe that much, and then you can select your color blob. So we've painted here to select that layer, once again to fuzzy select, and then just click somewhere into space. Select those highlights that we just created so that layer and then just press Delete. And now we've deleted the excess around it and trimmed it a little bit. And with that layer selected, you can actually just drag the opacity down a bit as well. You can also go to the layer where we did some of our sketching and select that and then bring that opacity down a little bit as well. So that's how I make some really quick concepts of characters. I do this all the time with just random shapes that I put together. I do some really rough, dirty shading and I really just want to get across the concept more than the actual tool application that you use. It doesn't matter if you do this with paper, you can just do doodles and sketches, but just get some concept going, do as many of these as you want. I can already see some ideas here to really pop out to me and I really liked what we're gonna do now is just create another layer and just draw some little ideas, some little body parts that we could dynamically animate later in Blender. After we've done our animation, just took a little break before recording the rest of this. And you might notice some things look a little bit different with the shading. Well, I did is I selected that shadow and highlight layer. I just went to filter again and Blur and just gave it some more Gaussian blur and it just looks a little bit better now. And I've just made the sketch layer a little bit lighter and less noticeable, but very small change there. Like I said, we're going to create a new layer. So select the top layer and press the button down here for adding a new layer. Once again, transparency, that's okay. And by the way, feel free to keep naming these layers as you go. I usually I name the layers, but I'm being a bit lazy today, but with the top layer selected, what you can do is make sure you have your pen tool, use whatever color you want, whatever size you prefer, and then just sit back, have a look at your characters and think about the colored concept to shape what sort of details might work. So maybe for this character here, I'm gonna go with maybe even a smaller brush quickly. Let's maybe paint some flames like this. I'm just using my mouse here. Maybe like a skirt of fire. That looks pretty cool as a concept. And maybe just a little guy here. I think some cute little wavy tentacles might look cute, wrapping around like that. And then maybe distort very person here in some sort of detail there. Once again, I'm really just using my mouse here, doing some really simple concept. And maybe for this one here, I won't put anything in the bottom, but maybe something at the top, wavy like this. Just like that, it's easy to concept some little additional details. You can always hide the layer, create another layer and draw on top of that. And you have layers you can toggle on and off for different concepts. But you guys understand my thinking here, how I approached this. Just add different things to get a randomly and just see what sticks, see what works. This is one approach you can take. So at this point I'm going to select one of these characters that I think it looks kind of cool. And I'm going to flush it out a little bit more in a separate GIMP file working on it. Now I'm going to just do that behind the scenes and looking at record that if you guys eventually finish watching this class and you want to design your own character, I'm going to encourage you to kind of flush out the design yourself a little bit more. And I will be providing in the upcoming parts any sort of references or resources that I use, a wheel provided to you guys. So you'll always be able to follow along San worry too much about that, but yeah, have a ton of fun. We have the concepting. It honestly is a part of it that is really fun because it's easy, it's not too technical and you can do it with whatever medium you prefer. I'll look forward to seeing you guys in the next part where we can start making this guy or girl, whatever you want in 3D is going to be a ton of fun. 3. Model The Body: Okay, So if a new scene open up and blender, I'm using Blender free point O at the point of recording this tutorial when you're watching this, it might be that there's a newer version available, but more or less thinks should be the same. So in the default scene of Blender, there is a default cube, a camera, and a line. Now, once again, I am expecting that you already know some of the basics of blunder. This is not an absolute beginners course. Feel free to check out some of them are outer stuff on Skillshare that goes through that in more detail. But what you're gonna do is you're going to select the light here and just delete it by pressing Delete on the keyboard and also the camera here. Just so you know, I do have my screencast keys enabled down here, so you can actually see the keys I've pressed, and that should make things a little bit easier. I'm using a Windows computer, but also in the resources folder there will be a list or a Word document showing the different hotkeys for both Mac and Windows, which should help you out as well if you're still kind of learning all of this, is that a thing we're going to be starting off with? Our modelling is just a default cube. That's our mesh object that we're going to start with. And for a bit of reference, I've gone and sketched out one of our character designs from the previous part in a little bit more detail, I will be providing disk GIMP file in the resources, so check it out. And inside of Derrida's also just a PNG image that I export it out of GIMP. Now we're not going to be dragging this image into Blender, anything like some of my other classes on Skillshare. Or you could just have it opened up somewhere, maybe even on a different monitor. And when you need to see it, you're in Blender and you're working, we need to see it. You can just go back and check it out, wants this class and then just go back. Yeah, You get the idea here, very simple shape. So we're going to start with the head here, the head part of this guy. And we're going to model that. And we might even modeled a little dangling thing here at the bottom before moving onto the next parts, I pretty simple to do. The work you're gonna do is you're gonna select your default cube by left clicking on it. And if you hit one on your number pad on your keyboard, you're gonna go into your front orthography v. Now once again, you should already understand the basics of Blender, but let's do a quick overview. The number pad. If you don't have a number pad on your keyboard, you just have to conventional number line. You can just go up to Edit Preferences and in the input section and just go to the keyboard section and just go emulate number pad and then just your conventional numbers will be like a number pad. But once again, you guys should already understand this as you go on with this tutorial. So we've dad cube selected, we're going to press Tab to go into our edit workspace. And we're also going to go to our modifiers. We're gonna be doing a box modeling method here, which means we are going to be relying on the modifier, in particular the subdivision surface modifier to round things out an average Frank's out. So let's go to the Add Modifier here and just give that a subdivision surface. Now you can see here we can see what it all looks like. We can still edit and manipulate the points here in 3D space. But the modifier is not something that's actual mesh geometry yet we haven't applied it. So if we went back into object mode by pressing Tab and we came here to drop down and we applied it, didn't have back into edit mode, that's now actual geometry, and we no longer have that as a modifier. So I'm just going to quickly undo that, go back into edit mode, which add modifier. But what we're gonna do is just scale things a little bit. So we're going to press a to select everything in edit mode. We're going to go S, x and this skeleton, the X a little bit. And if we actually look at our character here, it's just a circle that's a little bit squished out almost like a bowl of dough that's sank a little bit and that's kind of, that's squishy, cute look we're going for, so just scaling the whole thing on the x little bits of Sx. And then what we're gonna do is when it comes to modify, this is bumped the levels up here in the viewport to two. Now we have a little bit more geometry and that's looking at K. Let's go to our right orthographic view by hitting three on a number pad. And what we're gonna do here is we can select all of these birds at the back, but let's just go over and click on the X-ray toggle up here. That way, if we left-click and drag to select these vertices over here, it selects everything. Whereas if we didn't have an outright or for graphic viewed at x-ray mode on and we just clicked and dragged, it would only select these ones here, makes sure that you enable that x-ray when necessary, right, orthographic view selecting all of these for to the back. I'm going to go and just flatten them just a little bit. Again, that's the main shapes are far less tab back into object mode, pressing tab under the modifiers. Let's just come to the drop-down and applied at the modifier. Now press Tab to go back into edit mode. And I'm just going to disable the x-ray over here at the top. Now go and press one to go into your front orthographic view. And while this is a perfectly symmetrical object, Let's come up here and just click on Enable mesh symmetry. And we're going to click on the X. So if we were to grab a vertex on either side and I found orthographic view and press G to move it. You can see it happens on the other side as well. We're also going to enable our proportional editing up here by clicking on it. That'll give us a little bit of falloff. So if we select a vertex and move it over a certain range, depending on how much we roll our middle mouse button, it will control how many verts go with it. And that can give us a little bit more organic manipulation of the mesh there one thing we're gonna do is select this bottom part here we're going to go G, z and move it up on a little bit. We're going to select a top verte here. I'm gonna go G is z and move that up a little bit ruling to middle mouse button to control the falloff. And you can see what we're doing here. We're just making that shape there. There's no need to drag this into your scene, but if you wanted to, you could also just split your screen I completely up to you, but you see what we're doing here. Just trying to make that shape. It's pretty easy. I mean, that's about it. Maybe bring just Some efforts down here, just a little bit at the bottom just to squish it out. But there's really not much to this shape. It's not that complex, but a thing we have to focus on is to write off or graphically. So if you hit free to go into the right orthographic view, you can have a look at this guy here. We want to kind of make that elongated shapes. Let's select some versa, clicking and dragging some further to the back, we're gonna go, gee, why? And we're going to move it out and we're going to roll our middle mouse button and just move it out a little bit like that. If you just come up here and you roll your middle mouse button, you can scroll over to your toggle x-ray. So just click on X-ray and then just click and drag to select somebody's verts and the right orthographic view. And you can go S, flattened it and I'm rolling my middle mouse button to control that fall-off. We're just flattening that face. That's going to be important when it comes to putting features on our face later on. But you get the idea here. But let's just toggle that x-ray off again. And I'm just going to make it fullscreen for myself. While we still have proportional editing enabled, what we're gonna do is just select a bottom vertex here. You can hold and shift if you need to, and actually select to, maybe just select vertices down here and go to your front orthographic view. Just for now, just press Z and then go into wireframe. Wireframe. But what we're gonna do is with those two verts, we're going to go G, Z and we're just going to lift them up and we're gonna roll the proportional editing so middle mouse button to make that full up a little bit smaller. I'm going to go about that much for now. And then what we're gonna do is we're gonna go Control plus or Command Plus on a Mac just to grow to selection. And we don't want this part here selected. So if you go Shift Alt and you just left-click on this edge, it'll de-select all longer edge. We just want this middle part active. They wouldn't get e to extrude and then S to scale. So E and an S. And we're going to extrude that. And then we're gonna go 12, go into a front orthographic view, hit Z, go back into wireframe. We're gonna go to Extrude and extrude it up a little bit and an S to scale but roll your proportional editing or your middle mouse button just to shrink that fall off a little bit. Well that's also active. You can go Control plus or Command plus about three times just to get a selection over here in your tools panel and decide if you don't see that, just press T. That'll toggle it on and off. But what you're gonna do is we're going to come here to this tool which is called the smooth tool. Click on it and it's drag this little gizmo here just to smooth things out ever so slightly. And that's pretty much what we need here for that little indents. Or you can just select maybe a vert here on the side. We still have that x mirror enabled and just bring these down just a little bit. But that little detail there, that little cavity in there, it's kind of important. That's where our little dangling bit is going to come out of. I was just quickly guardian modifier as well. You'll modifiers and just give it a subdivision surface modifier just so we can see what it's gonna look like later. We've got modifier on it, but that's pretty much that. Let's just model the next part. We're going to just tap back out into object mode. To do that, let's just add in a new object shift a, and we can get a mesh options. We're going to add in a UV sphere, and we're gonna come here to our add UV sphere settings. Let's just make the segments 12 at the top, and let's just make the rings like so. And we're going to drop that down. So now I have a low poly sphere here, but we're gonna go G is Z and just bring it down to about here. Once again, this is hit Z going to wireframe and an S to scale that. And let's just place it starts right up in there like that. Kind of not halfway but almost less than halfway down like that. Don't worry that it has low geometry, it doesn't really matter. Now, move, it's still active. You're just going to tab into edit mode and you're going to go with all of that geometry active. Press a to select everything you can go s, z and just flattened onto z a little bit. And then you're going to click and drag and just select these bottom verts, disable proportional editing. You're going to go to Extrude and then S to scale e to extrude and it should extrude on the z. But if it doesn't, let's say it goes to the side, just press Z to constrain it to dizzy. And we're going to bring it down just a little bit S to scale and to extrude, S to scale, e to extrude, and then S to scale it up a bit. All we're trying to do is just make a little Bowlby part of the bottom like that. I'm scaling it and I noticed this and this better ways you could do this, but this can be as rough as you need it to be. Just all gonna be kind of like flapping around anyway, so it doesn't have to be absolutely perfect. Just trying to make like a little poll. So I'm going to eat to extrude Z, to restrict to the Z and an S to scale and engines moving that up. So you kind of get the idea, then you can go Control plus with that seal active, just grab a selection and move that smooth tool steel, just smooth things out a little bit. But you can perfect that as much as you want. Grab this geometry and proportional editing, you can go S to scale control your fall off by rolling and middle mouse button. And we're just making this little dangling part here. Once you're happy with the white it looks you can just select the top bits. So at the top here, we'd not gonna see them. So we can just go x and just delete those faces. All we have is this little thing down here, and we can give that a subdivision surface modifier. And then we're gonna go into a write-off or graphically by hitting three on a number pad. And in a wireframe we're just going to select this once again, you can also just go into your x-ray mode as well if that helps. So clicking up here while in solid, whichever way you prefer board just going to select some verts and using proportional editing, which is going to pull them back a little bit. And same over here. Just make it look however you want. It doesn't have to be exactly like I've done it. It's just a cool little dangling feature that we're going to dynamically animate later on anyway. But you get the idea. That's it. I'm going to just toggle back into solid and yeah, maybe in front view, I'll just select these and I'm filling a little bit, but yeah, but this is where I encourage you guys to spend as much time as you want and really make it your own. But you get the idea. We're just making this little dangling thing here, back into object mode. Just select everything and then right-click and then just go Shade Smooth. Now we see some nice smooth shading into view port, but I hope this part hasn't been too confusing. This is where we're gonna be ending at right now before we go onto the next part. But if anything is confusing and you don't really understand why I did that or how I did that, then you probably see only to learn a little bit more about Blender. So you can go to my page on Skillshare, just look at some of my other tutorials. I've got one there that's for absolute beginners and it'll take you for every little detail that you need to know to follow this course. And a lot of the stuff will make a lot more sense to you as well. So make sure to check that out if this was tricky. And I'm also supplying the blend files for all of these different stages. If anything has been confusing, just check that out in the resources, open up the blend file and see how I set things up. I'll look forward to seeing you guys in the next part. It's going to be a lot of fun. 4. Facial Features: In the previous part, we were able to make the head and the body. So what we're gonna do now is make the mouth and just two eyes. So the thing we're going to be selecting to start off with is our heads. So select the head, make sure you're in edit mode. So pressing Tab to edit mode. Once again, just keep in mind, I do have my screencast keys down here so you can see the keys I'm pressing. But what you're going to want to do is make sure that proportional editing is disabled. And the selection mode we want to have is the face Alexa. Currently it's set to vertex. Let's change it to face luck. And we're gonna select this face here and holding and shift. We can select the face over here. So this, these two faces and you can see that's roughly where our mouth is gonna be. But one of the things we want to do at the moment is we want to turn off the X mirror. It, turn it off up here, and then we're gonna go to extrude. So pressing a and then S right after scaling it down to about there. Then we're gonna go s, z with those two seal selected and skeleton on the z like that, you're then going to go Control R or Command R while you hover over this edge over here. And you can see a yellow line up here. That's just a loop tool. You're just going to left-click once and then you can move the mouse to slide it, but I'm just going to leave it in the middle. So I'm going to left-click one more time. And now it's set over there. Now one of the issues is because we turned off x mirror. If we now select one side and move it, it's not updating on the other side. So what we're gonna do to get around that is we're gonna go to our vertex left option it real quick. And we're going to press Z and go into wire-frame and then click and drag on this side and just drag and select all of these parts, hit X and deletes. Now we only have half of it. When you go to a modifiers and give that a mirror modifier, you're going to drag the mirror modifier above the subdivision modifier and enable clipping. If you don't enable clipping, the whole thing will just come apart when you're trying to move the mesh. So that's really important to clipping is enabled. So now we have a mirrored side and we'll continue working with our mouth over here, I guess before we go any further with the mouth, we're gonna have to add in some additional topology. What are you gonna do? You're gonna go control are hovering over this edge and then click left twice and then come over to this edge control our CDL line and click twice by left clicking. And now we have some more topology here for the mouth. But we also have these two additional loops going all the way around, which is a bit more topology. Now we'll even just out in a little bit, but for now let's just continue working on the mouth here. So what we're gonna do is we're going to select this vertex in a corner of the mouth here. And the vertex select option is active. But what you can do is you can go G and move it in a bit. And let's just for now so we can see what we're doing. Let's just disabled the subdivision surface and then grab this vertex down here. And what we're trying to do is just even them out a little bit. So it dragging these verts out like that, bringing these ones. And so you get the whole idea here, what we're doing if to mouth, just dragging them in, rounding it out, grabbing this one here, running it out. And it's pretty self-explanatory. Just evening out the topology for the mouth. And then we're gonna do is you're gonna select this vertex here and holding Shift, select this vertex, these two innermost vertices that you see in the inside of this loop. And you can go x and Leighton always should have now is this opening here, and if you go Shift Alt and you click on an edge, it'll loop, select that edge. And then what you can do, you can go into right orthographic view by hitting free on your number pad, press Z and go into wire-frame. And then we can do is go S, Y and flatten this onto why a little bit. Then you're gonna go E to extrude an extruded in about this much and didn't get to go SY and flatten it completely under y. And then you're going to go E to extrude to pad here. I know it doesn't make any sense at the moment, but if you go to a mirror and you disabled a mirror for a second and you press Z and go into solid. You're gonna see we have this inner part. Go to your face like now, and then select this face in here. Holding. Shift, select this face and then go E to extrude a little bit. To create some volume upwards. You're going to select these two faces. So select them both and go to Extrude, extrude it up, and then select this face holding Shift, select this face and then E to extrude it down a bit. Now we've created some double faces, so we're going to select this face here and go x and delete face. And also want to grab this face here and press X and then delete face. Now if we enable our mirror again, you can see there is a bit of a gap. All we have to do is go to our edge select option up here, Shift Alt, and then click on an edge here in the middle. And then we can just go S, z and press enter. And then we can just press G and an x and just move it down to x and make sure it's all clipped together. Because remember we have clipping enabled for our mirror. So if we now go, gee, nothing should be able to move away, should all be clipped together nicely. Now we have some volume to the inside of our mouth. It's just disabled the mirror again. And this is good back here and inside. And let's just select this edge and holding Shift, select this edge and press F to fill it. And then you can deselect and then go Shift Alt and then just click on this edge and it'll loops like this whole edge in here. And you can go F and that's going to fill the whole thing. You can come in here, Control R to add in a loop in the middle of the mouth and an S, Z and scale it up only on the z-axis like that. And then Control R at another loop here. And control are adding a lot of loop here. You can see what we've done there and that's enable L mirror again, if you want to smooth out the inside of the mouth, just go to your face, select, select this back part of the math, a face and then go Control plus or Command plus. And keep doing that till the whole inside of the mouth is selected. So up to about there. If you've gone to March, you can go Control minus to shrink the selection. Once you have that, you can just go down here to the smooth tool, click on it, and then just drag this little gizmo to smooth it all out. Like so now you have a nice inward cavity to the mouth. And let's work on the shape of the lips a little bit. We're going to go over here to vertex select option. Make sure proportional editing is enabled. Then we're going to select this vertex up here holding Shift, select the vertex behind it. Then in our front orthographic view, we're gonna go G, z and we're going to move it down. Now if it's moving, diverts below it, you can just go over here to proportional editing. And you should come to the drop-down and change the type to connect it only. Now you'll still have to influence, but it won't be influencing these ones at the bottom. So we're gonna go, gee, if those still active and we're going to move them down a bit and it would have grabbed the bottom one. We've set up a bit and we'll just going to keep working around like that. There's electing the virtual want to shape and we're gonna go G and bring them down. You can see what we're doing here. We're just trying to bring the inside of the mouth in a little bit or to upper side of the lips, creating a little bit more of a natural shape to it. So it's pretty simple. You can style yours however you want. It doesn't have to be exactly the same way on doing it. At this point, you can select different verts in the outside as well, and you can just even them out a little bit. So I'm just grabbing them and just drag them out. So they're all a little bit more even so just making sure that the squares are roughly the same size. And you can see it's looking a lot neater. To make a little bit of a cute look here. You can just like these verts down here and just go G and move them back in a little bit just to create a bit of a divot. And the same here. If the cheek, you can select a vertex here and just move it in a little bit, like so. Now at this point, you can also go to these verts here. Here. You can see this a bit of a uneven thighs here for the faces. This one is two rectangular wood. This one is a nice square. So what are we gonna do is we're going to hold down Shift and just go around all the way to the back, selecting all of these to there. This can go double G and that's gonna slide. So double G allows you to slide. I'm going to do the same thing over here, just going around. I'm holding shift in double G. I'm just going to slide those down and just trying to even things out a little bit. Same with this over here anywhere where it needs to be slided around a little bit, just make sure to do so. While we don't want is faces that are really like long or skewed, for example, like this. We're trying to keep everything nice squares that are more or less the same size. Now around the mouth here you can notice that d squares here are quite a lot smaller than these ones. But that's something that's to be expected because we have a little bit more detail here and things are looped a little bit more, but you get where we're going with this. We've just made a really simple mouth here. We have an inward cavity and this was probably the hardest part of this course. She's modelling the mouth. The rest is a lot easier. So let's just enabled our subdivision surface modifier again. Let's just tap out and keep in mind that all of these blends stages are available as we're continuing so you can check out mine and see how I set things up. But in object mode again, we're going to select the body, right-click and then go Shade Smooth. You can see that's what we have so far. Now am noticing that I could probably changed the shape here just a little bit. So I'm gonna go back into edit mode and just select averts in the corner of the mouth here. And I'm going to go into the right graphic view. And I'm just gonna go G and just move it back. So we want a little bit of a indent there around the mouth, which is going to look a little bit cuter, a little bit more natural, so that looks a lot better. So what we're gonna do now is we're just going to make some simple eyes. It's gonna be a lot easier than the mouth. So make sure you're inside of optic mode and you're gonna go shift a, you're going to add in a mesh object. So you're gonna go to plain tab into edit mode and make sure all of that geometry is active and you're gonna go are IX and in 90 and press Enter. So we've rotated all of this 90 degrees on this x-axis, which is this red line here. And you can disable proportional editing at the moment. What do you going to do is you're going to right-click with that also active and click sub-divide. And then what you're gonna do is you're gonna go to the sub-divide tab here and just bump it up to free for now. And if you press Z and you go wireframe, you can see that a bit better. Now, what you can do as well is make sure you have to smooth tool enabled down here, and then just click on the gizmo and just drag it to smooth things out. Then select the bottom vertex by itself, enabled proportional editing again and then go S to scale and roll the middle mouse button up if you have to increase the falloff. We're just trying to round this out. You get the idea here. If it's easier to work in wireframe, didn't do it. But we're gonna go s z and flattened it a little bit as well. So just like that. And then once we have this sort of like almost square but rounded out oval shape, we're going to go right-click and sub-divide one more time. And then once more smooth tool, we're just going to go smooth. Now probably doesn't make much sense why this is an AI at the moment, but it will later on. So we're going to tab out that we have this object and we're going to go, gee, why? And we're going to move it forward. And to make things easier, we're gonna mirror disguised. We would have got to add modifier under our Modifiers tab. And we're just going to mirror this time. We don't have to enable clipping and we're just gonna go G and move it over to the side S to scale it down. What you're gonna do is I'm going to click on this little mirror object and click on the eyedropper and then select the body as a reference. Now the eye is mirrored and the body is at targets. We're gonna go G, move them in and an S to scale them down a little bit and just place them somewhere. Now at this point you can look at your original image and you can see it's a little bit different, but it is long that idea I decided to go a little bit more squared eyes, you can always change that later when we add shaped keys to them. But you guys get the idea here. So at this point you can move these wherever you want to. Whatever it helps your character feel a little bit more the way you want it. But you can also make sure you get to the top view by pressing Seven on the number pad and move them in a little bit closer and then rotate them. So we're gonna go r, z, z, and just move them in close. Now you don't have to be touching, just get them roughly into place. They're gonna be. And roughly the scale that you think work. What I might do is rotate this a little bit differently. So I'm just gonna go our double y. So press Y twice after you've press R, and then just write it on his local y-axis. So let's rotate it like that. And I think having them up like that a little bit stretched up is a lot cuter. So you can see here, this is what we've made and this is where I'd like to see you guys come in and be a little bit more creative. You can select the body. You can change the shape of the face a little bit. If you want to make different facial features, Everything is customizable and nothing is set in stone. This is completely your character at this point. Come up with some cool styles of cool ideas for your eyes. Work on the shape of your mouth a little bit, I'm going to make mine and maybe a little bit smaller. But you guys overall get the idea of what we're going for here. A very cute little character with some basic features. Now, eventually it'll look a lot cooler ones. We rig it up and we're gonna do more things with the eyes later. But this is more or less modeling done for this character. I hope you guys have enjoyed this part. It's getting a little bit long now, but if anything has been confusing and make sure to check out the blend files that I have provided. 5. Rigging: What we're gonna be doing now is making our rig. So with this scene here opened up and we're in object mode, that's important. When we created this character, we created it right in the center of the world. So we have our origin point here in the middle, or actually a 3D cursor. And that's where it plays the origin point of our object that we started with, which was a cube. If you recall back to the earlier parts now, if that didn't make any sense to you, probably completely new to blend or stolen. You don't know the fundamental. So definitely check out some of my other videos on Skillshare. But as you guys probably already know, if we're gonna be adding a rig or an arbitrary to a character and that character is symmetrical. We want to make sure too, that rig or armatures perfectly in the middle as well, so it's nicely symmetrical. So in this case, we can see to that 3D cursor is still in the center of our world here, right in the middle of a character. If whatever reason you clicked here accidentally and you place it somewhere else, just go Shift S and then go cursor too large and make sure that's in the center there, just as a character is. Once you have that sorted, Makes sure you do. You can go Shift a, you can go down to your armature options. Just click on armature and it's going to add in a barn. Now, if you press Z and you can wireframe, you can see that bone again, you can go into solid and rather just come up here and click on an X-ray. If you want to do that completely up to you, what you want to do, whatever works for you. You can also dead bone selected and I'll quickly just show you. I'm not gonna spend too much time on this, but you could also have said bone selected. Just go over here to your barn settings and then go to the viewport display. And you can go down to in front. And that means you'll always see this at the front. It'll always be projected to fund of any object and it'll be like extra, essentially. What you're also going to do is come here and change the display as also to be bone, and that's gonna be important. So make sure you do that. It's not just a display thing visually, it's going to matter because we're gonna be setting up something called a bendy bones, I guess now we have that placed, make sure that bone is active and you're gonna go Control I or command lie, that just flips the selection I us now everything else is selected and you're gonna go g, z, g, z, and just move your little character up till it's sitting on the floor here, at the bottom of the character's head is sitting right here on your floor and you can see that the red axis line there. And then select the armature again. With that armature selected, if you want to do any sort of editing, you can press tab with it selected, you're going to go into edit mode for the bone. And you can also just disable portional editing if it's enabled. And what are you going to do is select that top knob. So just little knob here at the top. You're gonna select it and you can go G, Z and bring it to the top of the head like that, then you're gonna go to Extrude in z, to restrain it to the Z and extrude up a little knob. That's gonna be our control handle. And then you can click on this bone over here, the first one, and you can go Control Alt S or Command Alt S if you're a Mac user. And that's just going to scale the thickness of the bone so you can kind of tell the difference. It's just a visual thing, but I like to do that. So Control Alt S. And then this knob here, we want to separate that. So we're gonna go Alt P and we're gonna go clear parents, and we're also going to go Alt P and wouldn't go disconnect button. Now if we go G to move his bone, you can see it. Nothing goes along with it. And that's really important. Let's keep naming things as we go as well because it's gonna be important later. It's going to help us a lot to go down here to this little bone, It's called bone properties. Make sure not to click on any of these others. That has to be to bind properties and then come here and named the bonds. So the top one here, this is called at Khan Control underscore head. They went to click on the bone underneath it, the first original bone. Let's click on that. Let's just call that body and that his press Enter. So what we're gonna do, clicking on this Kanban here, we're gonna come over still another barn properties. We're just going to untick deform because this bone isn't actually going to be deforming any of this geometry on a character. It's just a control button to tell us the deforming barn underneath it what it has to do. So you need to go up here to where it says Edit mode and just change that the pose mode, instead of postmodern can actually move anything. He can go a to select it and just go Alt G to undo a movie. Once again, that's basic blender stuff and you should already know it watching this course. But what you're gonna do is click on the Control button first holding Shift, select a body bone, then you can go Control shift C, or Control shift C or Command Shift C to bring up these commands. And you're going to make this a stretch to right. Now if you click on this bone here and you press G, you can see that stretches along, which is pretty cool. But another thing we want to do is click on the body to forming bone. Go over here to the bone properties, come to the bendy by an options and then increase the segment count here a few times. And now I can click on the headphone and then go G. And you can see we have more segments, but it's not really meaning anything or doing anything that is telling us what we actually want to happen here as well as when we rotate this, we actually want it to influence this as well, not just with the Move, select the body bone, and then go to your settings. Here are buying properties and just scroll down and you're going to see under here these handles. And the one we want to affect is the n handle. Set that to absolute, and then come to the custom here and just select that Khan head. Now if you select it and you go G to move it, you can see it as an influence on the band as well. And if you can move it somewhere, you can go R to rotate it. And that's going to be really important with what we're gonna be doing later with the animation. If you've moved anything, just select everything, all G, Alt, R and ALT tests just to make sure we set any of the transforms, Let's go back into edit mode and just do a few more things. Inside of edit mode, we're going to go Shift a to add an another bone. By default, death knob here at the top should be selected. You're gonna go G, Z and just bring it down to about here. And then what you're gonna do is you can select both of these bones at a top holding and shift, select the first one and then this one. Then lastly you're gonna click on the very bottom barn. Shift, click, click, click. And then you're going to go Control P. And you're going to make it apparent and go keep offsets. Now, if we could go back into pose mode, we can select this bone and everything goes along. But we can still select this bone and rotate it separately and move it around. Really cool. So that is about the hardest part of the rigging. Let's go back into edit mode. And let's add in a few more bonds. We're going to go Shift a, added another bond and click on it bone G to move it over to the side. Press F3 to go into right orthographic view. And then you're going to rotate, press R to rotate and you're going to rotate it this way. So move your mouse up your right side like that and then just roughly get a flat and then you can go s, z and they'll flatten it on the Z. It didn't go S to scale it a little bit and then Control Alt S to make it skinnier. It doesn't have to be any specific size. Then go G and just move it to where the eye is here. Then press one to go to your front orthographic view and just roughly from the front, move it with your eyes. It doesn't have to be perfect at all. Make sure to come to your bone properties for that bone will still active. Name it I dot capital L. Now, I can't stress this if you do not use the extension here, dot capital L, not coma dot capital L, It has to be capital L with no spaces in-between. This will not work later on what we're going to try and do. So it's extremely important that you make it a dot capital L towards the end. And then what we're gonna do if that bone is still selected in front view, we're gonna go Shift D to duplicate it and move it here to the top of the mouth. And we're gonna call this one upper mouth. And we're gonna go dot capital L, very important, Shift D to duplicate it, move it to the corner of the mouth. We're gonna call it corner mouth dot capital L. Very important that a name of it isn't that important as the extension, but this name is something that will remind you what it does. We're going to go Shift D to duplicate it one more time. Bring it down to the bottom here, and we're gonna go bottom, mouth, adopt capital L. Now these bones here are all named and we're going to select them. So these four bonds, and because they have had dot capital L extension, we can go to armature and then we can go to symmetries. And now it's automatically symmetrized these bones on the outer side, as you can see. And that's also given them their own naming convention with a capital R automatically, which is really good. What you can do is go to your right orthographic view and select all of these bones here on the side. And you can go, gee, why? And just move these ones back a little bit like that. You said are embedded in there. It doesn't have to be perfect but just roundabout there. Andy eyes should be sitting just right about there as well. You can move them maybe a little bit back, but make sure you select both at the same time. Instead of both selected, you can go G and just move them back a bit. It's very important that you don't just move one and then not move the other one there has to be mirrored. You can always turn on X mirror. And because they had at naming convention, it'll all update on the other side, but I'm not going to do that right now. So just make sure now to select these bones here at the front, all of them holding Shift, select the body bone. That's very important. Then go Control P and then go keep offset. Now we can go over to our post mode. And now if we select this main bone down here, by the way, which we should steal name. So just like the bottom bone and then come up here onto your bones tab and just call it base. I guess that's a base bone, so that'll control everything. The Head Con, the Kanban will control our body. And then this will be how we can move our eye if we needed to or scale it. And these ones here will control the mouth. We can do like a little smile or open up your mouth. And this is an extremely simple rig, really, if I was doing this professionally or doing it for a client, I would really make this a lot more complicated, add a lot more controls. But this is about making something simple for people who want to just get started and trying to have a bit of fun. This is as simple as we can make it, and there's not much more to that. This is the reading part of this tutorial done. And if you've gotten so far with this, congratulations, I will be providing this blend fall. You guys can check it out and I look forward to seeing you in the next part where we're now going to combine this rig with our character so we can eventually animate it. 6. Parenting: In the previous video, we were looking at making our rig. What we're gonna do now is we're gonna take our rig and sort of attach it to our character. And this is called parenting AND rule is going to be addressing a white painting a little bit. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna actually quickly select a rig. And we're just going to quickly press Tab to go into the Edit mode. You can see up here, and I recall that in the previous part I just missed one little steps. So all you're going to do is quickly just select the eye bones and just under your bone settings just go down and untick deform because these bones are not going to be deforming any geometry. They're just going to have a direct parent relationship with the eyes. And I'll explain that a little bit later and then select the other one as well and just make sure to form this turned off for that as well, and that is it. So you can now go back to object mode. And what we're gonna do is we can select the head of a character holding in shift. We're gonna select the rig itself, body first, holding and shifts like the head. I know I'm repeating things but I just want to be sure you understand. And then once you have that selection arrangement, you can go Control P or Command P if you're a Mac user and you're gonna go down to this option here called with automatic whites. And what that's done, your blender is given that it's best shot to automatically white paint this way. And I'll quickly show you what I mean. If you go up here with debt rig selected and you go to your pose mode, it can now select the top head controller, and this is press G and move it. You can see, see how that's all going along there. And now you guys kind of get an idea of what I meant by that. You can now control things. Let's just quickly select somebody's mouth controls here. Give that a shot. Did see it's a little bit messy. It's still a little bit jaggedy and fall off isn't quite exactly where it needs to be, but it's this roughly put things in place and we can definitely refine it then we will. But you get the idea in any eyes, if we select your eyes, nothing moves along because we're actually going to directly parent the eyes to those bones. But we'll be addressing that in another video where we tackled the shape case. It's not really that important right now. So let's just go back into object mode. And what we need to do is we need to select the head itself. Go over to your Modifiers tab. And it's important that we change the arrangement here. Let's make sure that the mirrors at the top, I'm just pressing these little tabs to fold them down so it's a little bit more compact, but we need to take this armature and drag it above the subdivision surface modifier. It's very important that the mirror is at the top, then the armature, and then a subdivision surface modifier. Whatever you do, do not make the armature be at the very top. That'll be a really big problem. So keep it underneath the mirror as long as you have it in that arrangement, things are gonna be a lot better. There. Select the armature and in holding and shift, click on the body. And then you can go to object and you're gonna go into the white paint mode. Now what you can do is you can hold down Control or Command and then click on a bone. So let's click on a body bone. And now you can see what that bone is affecting. Anything that has a warmer color has a lot of influence and anything that has a cooler color has less influence. At the moment, the default way that it did this fall off is a little bit messy. So we're just gonna go over here to our tools, make sure it's set to draw and then bring this strength down to about halfway. And if you press F, you can increase the size of your brush. So press F and make it a bit bigger. Then go to your right orthographic view and you're just gonna start painting. You're just going to make the top have a lot more influence. The body here like that. So you can see what I'm doing, just painting, like say, you can come here and enable the X-ray mode as well, and then just paint. Again. It doesn't seem to be doing anything in this case, but if you press Z and you go wireframe, uh, you may be able to have a little bit more control there. So just painting over making sure that has full influence on these areas like the mouth over there as well. Just coming in here and you only have to do it on one side, it'll be mirrored because we have that mirror modifier. But what we're doing here, maybe increase the strength for a bit. It's just warming up. All of the places are adding more value where we want this body bone to have influence it towards the bottom parts, we don't have to have quite as much influence as you think. So Something like that should be fine. And then we can click on the corner of math here. So holding and control click on the corner mouth bone here. And let's now go to a brush and go subtract and it's having too much influence. We don't want that bone to affect the head, so we're just going to paint areas where we don't want it to have influence. So we want it to be completely dark blue on the areas where we don't want to influence and we're just painting down to about here and we just want that corner of the mouth. Do we have influenced while you still have to bone selected if he could go G and you just move it, you can see what I mean by influence, right? So just right-click to let go, set it back in place. But wherever there is one more values, that bone is going to have influence. If you hold down Control and click on the other bone, you can see it's mirrored that white value exactly on the other side. And that's what's also important to have a really good mirroring. So the bones are perfectly symmetrical and to have that naming convention that I mentioned in the previous video. So that's why it's really important to you. So you guys understand that. Let's keep cleaning up. We're gonna holding Control and click on this bone up here and the upper mouth. And the same thing, we're just going to decrease the falloff. We don't want us anywhere in the body. Just like that. Not too much to do here. It's done a pretty okay job. And in holding a control-click and the other one, you can see it's mirrored perfectly. And you can also just test that click on it bone while holding a Control G to move it. And you can see the falloff looks quite nice. And now the last one, control click on this bottom bind here and just paint away with the Subtract brush areas that don't need influence. And this is pretty common sense. I mean, you guys know what part of a math should move and shoot and just try it out a little bit. Press G to move it, and then right-click just to set it back into its place. And then just paint accordingly. If you've taken a little bit too much way, just click on Add brush and add a little bit back. It's really not a big deal and it's a lot easier than it looks. But essentially you can now try it out. I'm gonna hold down Control and clicking the top bond here. And you can see if we select the top control, but everything is pink because remember we turned off the form for that bone because it doesn't need to deform. It's only a control bone for the body. So if we click on that and we go G, you can see that all moves around. We can also hold Control and click on this bottom body bone and we can go G and everything else should move around. You can also, you know, I've already shown you, but you can select these different parts on the body, on the mouth and move them around. And that just gives you character. You can add emotions and things like that too, when you're animating. That's pretty much it. So let's just press Z, go back to solid. And I think that's all the white painting we need to do for now. If you need to refine anything, go ahead and do that. But I'm going to go back into object mode. And at this point we can also just select this little jiggly thing at the bottom. And holding in shift, we're going to select our armature. And then what we're gonna do is we're going to go Control P and we're just going to go set parent to object. In this case, we don't want to do automatic weights just to object. Now if we select the armature by itself when we go G to move it, you can see that bottom part goes along with it. Now don't worry about the eye. So you can see the eyes are kind of being left behind and everything else goes with the armature. But we're gonna be addressing that in the upcoming parts. So that has been how to white paint al simple little rig to our character. And honestly we're really getting past a lot of complicated things. I mean, if you're following along so far, the animation should be even easier than this. So I will be providing the blend files. Keep an eye out for them and I'll see you guys in the next part. 7. Shapekeys: Okay, so what we're gonna be doing now is turning our eyes and just something we can animate later on, we're gonna be using shape case to do that so you can actually select the eyes and before we can actually get into adding shape keys, which I'll explain in a minute. We need to currently go over to our Modifiers tab here you can see we have a mirror modifier. So currently, I mean, if you just press Tab to go into edit mode of design, you can see we only technically have one I hear the other one is just being mirrored at the moment and we can't really access it or do anything to it. It's just existing as a modifier or an operation, if you will. In object mode of that I selected, you actually had to come to the drop-down here and apply that. Now if you tab into edit mode, you can see these are individual pieces of a mesh or we have one over here, and we have one over here, and they can all be individually edited. Once you have that done, make sure you are an object mode and you can go and press F ray does is actually important. We need to change this origin point which is currently on this. I hear that he press R to rotate. You can see where it's rotating. So we wanted to write in the middle of this geometry, and it's actually something we can use in Blender to automatically do it as if you press F free while you have those eyes selects it, you're going to come up with the search bar here. And what you can do is type inside of their origin. And it didn't go down to origin to geometry. Now let's place that origin point right in the middle there for us, which is exactly what we want. Now that you have that done, you can go over to your object out of properties and you're going to see something here called Shape Keys. And it's a shape keys that we really want to be using for doing little blinks and things like that. So when you click on this plus it's going to add a basis. Basis is going to be essentially the original state of your geometry. So that's the one that I'm once you no longer using your shape key safe exempt you set the values of U-shaped keystone to 0. It will revert back to your basis. So your basis is the one you don't want to edit. So make sure that any sort of topology that has been added has already been added before you go on with this. And then you can add your basis and then you press Plus again. And now that's when you get your case. So essentially, if you select a key, in this case we have key one, select that and you go into edit mode, any changes you make now to the geometry so you don't have to follow this. I'm just explaining this stuff example. I just move a point and I tap out and now I have to shape key. I can actually increase the value. And now it's going to look at a difference between the bases and a key. So it's automatically doing that all for us. Now the thing is instead, but we don't want to do is add in topology. So if we can move topology, but we don't want to extrude or we don't want to add in new loops or edges only existing to poll j can be moved around in the edit mode. So I'm going to quickly just get rid of that key and add it again. So what we're gonna do if our first shape key is we're just going to be adding a blink to the I over here on our right or the left side of the character. So just always keep that in mind, the actual side of the character and the view that we're seeing on our screens are not the same. So if I say our right side, what I mean is to the left side of the character. So we're gonna be working on the left eye here. We're in edit mode. We have that key one selected, and let's create a cute little blink. So we're going to just select all of this, make sure it's not the other side. And we're gonna go s, z and we're going to shrink it on the Z, like so. And then we're gonna go NSX because that volume doesn't just disappear. It has to be displaced somewhere. So that's gonna be to the side so we can create a little bit of stretch. And then we're going to enable our proportional editing. And we're just going to select somebody's verts here in the middle. And we're gonna go G, Z and just bring them down a little bit like that. And there we have it. So you can select all of it if you want, you can go to the smooth tool and just smooth things out a little bit. Scale a little bit if you want. But this is where you can make a shape or blink shape that you like. Look at some cartoony references, whatever inspiration you can find online. There's a lot of cool stuff out there. But essentially this is gonna be to shape that our eye is going to morph into when we're doing a poll link. So clean that up as much as she went from now. I'm just going to leave it at that. If you now tab back into object mode, you can now get this key one and you can take this value here, and you can slide it and look at that. Now we have away. Later on we can animate this blink and it looks pretty cool. So you got to just make sure that it will look for it at the moment. Maybe that ion looks just a little bit too big. So what I might do is just go into edit mode, select the whole thing and just go S and scale it down just a bit. So now I'm gonna try it at an object mode. A cat looks cool, so make sure that value is set back to 0 there. Once you're happy, you have to blink. How do you get it exactly on the other side? And that's what I'm gonna be showing you before we can do anything with the mirroring while we're in our object mode and we have the eyes selected, we need to press N on your keyboard. It'll bring up the properties panel. This thing here is a Properties panel and you've got to click on item, make sure the eyes are selected. And you should see over here under the rotation vectors that there are some values here. And this will absolutely not work at all if we don't set those back to 0. Because remember in one of the earlier part through rotated the eye in object mode TO in fact, if I just quickly rotate it, you can see these vectors move here. Well, we need to do is we need to go Control a or Command a. And it's going to bring up these apply options. We're going to apply to rotation. And all of these rotation vectors have to be set back to 0 once you have that done. Now we have a clean reference point for this to mirror over onto the other side. Make sure that's done very important. So now what we're gonna do is we're gonna make sure we have that blink ones selected when I increase the value to one. When simply come to this little drop-down error, we want to go new shape from mix. And if that key to now selected come to the drop down arrow again. And go mirror shaped key. And now if we take that K2 and you drag that value up, you can see we have it on the other side and you can double-click on that one and let's call it Blinkx dot star. We've got linked dot L, which we can take back to 0 or take back to a value of one or in-between. And we can get exact same thing to the right one. That's all pretty cool. I really liked that, but we want to individually take these two eyes and also parent them to these I bones that we added to our rig earlier. But at the moment it's just one object. So how are we going to get around that? So let's quickly come and click on this little x down here not to minus this little x. It'll just reset all of these values back to 0. The Blinkx dot L and the Blinkx dot are not at any sort of value except 0. And we're going to separate them into two measures in a second. But let's just quickly go to and modifiers. And what we're gonna do is we're going to add a modifier now, and that's gonna be the shrink wrap modifier. Click on the shrink wrap modifier. And the reason we want to use delta P1, this geometry to stick to the surface of the character because that's going to be deforming a lot. And we don't want this clipping in and out of the mesh of our character. So when you click on this little eyedropper and you select a character mesh, now you can see it's stuck right on there. And if we even move the eyes, you can see it's continually on that surface. But what we need to do is come here to the offset and just bring it out a little bit. Or some value that works for you. Then what do we need to do is give it some thickness. So we're gonna go to the solidify at a solidify. And let's give that a little bit of thickness. So I'm gonna go maybe out like that. You can still mess around with that offset. Like I said, That looks okay. And then let's also give that a smooth. So we're gonna go and give that a smooth. This is going to help smooth things out a little bit. You can increase that factor but don't overdo it. Then you can add a subdivision surface modifier on top of that. But for now, just come to the levels here and drop it all the way down to 0 because we don't want it to be slowed down when we do animating. But eventually when it renders it will have a subdivision level of two, so it'll be nice and smooth. So also just minimize that with these I selected, you can also go right-click and go shade smooth. Now, they look pretty cool. Let's go back to our shape keys. You can see it all still works. We can still do it a little blinks. But now we want to separate these into two separate objects. So we're gonna tab into edit mode and make sure you have the basis selected and you're just going to select the eye. It doesn't matter which one. Just select all the geometry of either one of them and then go pee, and then you can go separate by election here. And you're going to tap back out into object mode. And now both of these, this one is its own object and this one here. Now the origin point is still in the middle for both of them and we don't want that. So we're gonna hold down shift and select both 50s eyes. Make sure it's only two eyes that are selected. And then you're going to press F3 and you're going to come here and you're going to go origin. So type in origin. And then you're gonna go origin, who? Geometry over here. And now let's place the origin points for each one of these in the middle. So what we're going to quickly do is just add these two outrigger. Select either via, doesn't matter, holding and shift select the rig, den go over into pose mode. In this case we have left, I select it so we're gonna click on the left thigh bone. You can see it's blue and then you're gonna go Control P or Command P. And you're going to parent it directly to that bone. Now you can go back into object mode and select the other I holding and shift select the rig again, and then go back into pose mode. And now click on the right, I hear Control P and then go set parent to bone. Now, not only can we use a shape, Qi Bu can also move these bones around here and even scale and rotate for each individual ion. So now if you actually select the top head bone as well, the controller and you press G to move it, you can see those eyes go along as well. So death is a very simple way to add these little eyes Did you can do all sorts of cool things we've bought away. If you go back into object mode, you select either eye. This option here is there. So you can actually select the left eye first and then just get rid of that right blinks. I'm going to just click on a little minus to get rid of it. And then you can select the right eye, which is the right side of the character, and you can get rid of the left blank like that. So now both of these have their little blink that we can use later on. That is how we do shaped keys. And by the way, you can add a lot more different shape keys. I only made a blink. You can easily exact same method and technique to make different eyes. And that's what I challenge you guys to do. I always want you guys to not just copy the tutorial or lecture. I want you to learn something from it. Use two techniques, incorporate them into your character in a unique way. I would really like to see what you guys do. I'm going to be including this blend file, if anything, was a little bit tricky, which would maybe for some people, just look at it provided stages and you can see how I set things up. But in the next part, we'll be getting into actually what are we doing in the next part. Let me quickly look. In the next part we're gonna be doing D animation that looks like what's on my list. So I'm looking forward to that. That's gonna be a lot of fun. I'll see you guys then. 8. Animation: We're now ready to get started with our animation. What we need to do first of all, is select our armature over here. And that's what we're going to be animating. A character is already parented to our rig. We already did that in the previous part, but the thing we also want to consider is our frame, right? So the amount of frames we have, I should say, you can say that n value here on our timeline is 250 frames. Now our animation by default and blender runs at 24 frames a second, so 250 frames, it's gonna give you the battle 11 seconds or so of animation, which is a bit too much. We wanted us to be a short little loop and it's also going to take longer to render if we had a bigger one and it's going to be more simulations, let's double-click here or just click on it and you're going to make this 75 frames. Now note that seems like quite a short animation, especially at 24 frames per second. It's not that long, it's like free seconds long. But the thing is because it's lovable, you can, it'll almost look like it's just going endlessly and it will also take less time to render luck I mentioned. So let's come over to frame one and make sure you have this rig selected and you're going to go over here to object. And then you can go to pose mode instead of pose mode where we can move these bones and add keyframes. Now to simplify things, we're going to select only two bones we need to get started with bodies. The main thing we're going to be animating. So let's just come over here, select the head control bond and holding and Shifts selected by span, and then go Control I or Command I to inverse the selection. So now everything else is selected and then just press H to hide it. So we only have these two bones in the pose. My palette, I don't want to not delete it. They're just hidden. If we go old age, they come right back. So everyone went Alt H, they come right back. Okay, So don't worry about that. And if we were to actually move this base bone here, you can see that the body down here doesn't go along. And let's, I'm just gonna quickly show you guys this. Let us quickly go back into object mode. Now if we select a rig itself in object mode, you can see it goes along because we've directly parented this bottom part of the body to the armature. One thing we should actually do, we'd probably be a better way to work is to select this bottom part holding and shift, select the armature, and then go into pose mode and then just select this bottom baseline. So make sure you click on it and then go Control P. And then just go direct parenthood a bone. So it's just a bone option here. Now, in our postmodern we move this, we'll see that bottom body part go along as well. And that's gonna be a lot more accurate in what we're actually trying to do. So, so just stay in postmodern. In fact, I'm just gonna quickly go back into object mode. Just click somewhere to de-select that bottom part, select the rig again, and then describe pose mode. So these two bones are going to be all we need to get started with the body, but don't have to worry about the facial expressions yet in the eyes. But when it come to frame one, which is quite obvious because that's where it starts and we're just going to use this default position. So make sure to both selected and then press I. And that's going to bring up a whole bunch of key frame options. But the one we want to go with is location and rotation. And essentially that just means on frame one, these two bones are set to be at a certain rotation and a certain location in our 3D space. And if it comes to the part where our animation is running on a timeline, when it comes to a friend one, That's where those bones will be positioned. Essentially, we're going to layer up a whole bunch of these. And over time, it will interpolate between these different keyframes and that will give us the appearance of motion or an animation. Now if that all sounded a little bit confusing, don't worry about it. You'll understand as we get into it. Let's come up here to about frame seven. Let's just save from frame seven. There we go. This is safe from frame 0 to frame seven. We want this guy to kind of jump up a little bit. While we're going to do on frame seven, we're going to just grab this bottom base bone and we're gonna go G and we're just gonna move it up a little bit like that. But then what we're gonna do is we're going to rotate it as well, just slightly. And then select the top Control button for the head and then bring it down because as he's accelerating up, it's going to squish them down a little bit because there's forces acting on it. If we didn't give it that little squish, then it'll just look too stiff and robotic. Once you squish it down a bit, R to rotate it just slightly and then G just move it over to the side. So it's kind of just squishing up and to the side a little bit more. Just select both of dishes, bring it up just a bit more. Then once you've done that, press I and then insert a location and rotation frame again. But on frame seven this time, frame seven, it's going to be in that position. And frame one is going to be in deposition in Blender automatically for a process called interpolation will automatically fill in all the in-betweens for us, this is what makes it different to 2D animation where we have to go in and draw all of the information frame by frame. We've Friday. The advantage we have is that through like vector maps and stuff, it can fill that all in for us, which is pretty cool. Now if we press the space bar, we can see that set, but you can see it just still a lot of information to add here. So let's give it a little bit more movement. We're gonna come up too bad, frame 11. And we want to think about soft bodies when something that is soft and squishy suddenly accelerates and it gets squished down and then suddenly stops that mass of squishing. It doesn't just stay squash, it has to stretch out. It's almost like taking a bottle of water and really quickly moving it. It's not just going to stand still immediately. You'll still see the water sloshing back and forth and down. You can actually feel it moving if you've ever done something like that and it's going to be the exact same thing with a squishy character like this. That's very jellyfish and that's what we're trying to achieve. So on frame 11, we're gonna grab the top control bone and we're gonna go G, and we're just going to stretch it out a little bit. Almost at a bit of an angle to before. We're going to select both of these bones and we're gonna go, I insert a location and rotation on frame 11. Okay? We might also just want to grab this bottom bone here on the base and on frame 11 again, I forgot to do it is just go G and just maybe move it up a little bit as well. Then once again, just select them both go and insert a location and rotation on 11. Now if we go to frame 0 and I press the space-bar, you can see there's a little bit of a stretch like that. Now it might be a little bit too extreme just like that. So let's just back in frame 11, just bring it down, maybe just a bit. And I insert location and rotation again. And sometimes this is just one of those things where you have to just tweak it a little bit. It's not always going to be just right up front. Okay, so at the moment, That's looking a little bit better, but it also needs to come back to its place. So what we're gonna do is select both of these bones and we're going to actually click and drag over to one on frame seven here. So you can see it's now yellow. And if you go Shift D, you can drag and duplicate that keyframe. And this time you're going to drag it to frame 18, which is about here. Up to frame 18. And now what you should see if you've got a frame on it, hit the space bar or something like that. It's just this little jolt going up in a suspicious back. Now you may have to come in here, make sure you always have to bone selected and just slide these keyframes around just a little bit. So you're going to get this nice organic looking squishy motion. That's looking better. We can always fine tune it later, but for now we have them going up to the side and squishing down again. Then we want to kind of bring them back into the default position a little bit. While we're gonna do is we're going to come to about frame 27, so come up to 2027. And we're gonna select both of these bones. We're going to go Alt G and Alt R to reset the transforms, but we're just gonna go G, Z and just move them both up a little bit like that. And we're gonna go i and insert a location and rotation. Now if we go to frame 0 and we hit the space bar, we can see it kind of goes back like that. And it's from this point here in the middle, we kind of returns to its original position. We don't want them just immediately launching off. We went a little bit of anticipation. So what I mean by that, we're gonna make them squished down a little bit and then kind of spring out. So let's come to about frame 35 and we're gonna go bring both of these bones down just a little bit and we're gonna grab the top bone, rotated a little bit and in g to squish it down like so. Select both of these bones and then go i and insert a location and rotation on 35, what you should see some kind of squishing down again, giving a little bit of anticipation. It's just a little thing like that. Adds a little bit of extra detail and then you can quickly shoot up to the left. So what we're gonna do on frame in 40 to come to about frame 42, we're going to select both of these bones and we're gonna just go R to rotate it a bit and then G and move it over here to the side so it's shooting off. And once again, he has forces acting on a menace very jelly-like. So it's going to be squished in quite a bit. We want to think about the physics here, so something like that. And then we're going to select both of these. We're going to go I and insert a location and rotation for that squish over on 42. So let's go to 27 and played out. And he shoots off. It might not look the best yet. We still have to add in more information. So let's come to about 47. And once again, we're going to bring them up even more like so. And now stretch out the top bone a little bit more like so. Select both of these bones and then go, I insert a location orientation. And what we're trying to do is just get that kind of stretch up like that. So ducks down quickly and stretches up and you see that little bit of displacement there is shooting up, it squishes down. That's just something we really want to emphasize. You can always come back to frame 42, squishy down even more for that bone and then go I inserted location and rotation. Let's see that. Okay, That's looking a lot more natural. Then he's gonna yank back a little bit. So let's come to about 52, frame 52. What we're gonna do is we're gonna grab this head here, the Head Control button and bring it down this way, a little bit rotated this way, and bring the body in and down a little bit like so. And we're going to select both of these bones on unframed 52, we're going to go I and insert a location and rotation. So let's look at that. Because up looked at, kind of talks back a little bit. Now that might be a little bit too aggressive, but we can always slide that frame 52 over to the side a little bit later. But for now, let's just go up to frame 59 or 60 about here. And then what we're gonna do is with both of these bones selected, we're going to come to the frame one over here and just select the keyframe and then go Shift D and duplicate it and drag it all the way to frame 60. And now we're using that post. So what we should see is I'm kind of going back to where it originally was like that. And you can see how even though it doesn't look that good at first, you can see how they're also into add to get a little bit. Now one of the things that's making just look really dead is the lack of the jiggle on the body here. But later we're going to fix that. We have a simulation. It's going to make this look 1000 times better and more natural. And we're also going to add some little things to the eyes and things, but you can see how we're getting here. And what I mean by these little stretches, stretches and squashes. Animation is just a matter of patients working away through and making little adjustments. But what we could also do here in frame field, what we need to do is just bring the body up maybe just a little bit and just tilt the head over here because what's happening is coming from the side. Rushing over back to your original position, but he's going to tilt over a little bit because he has a lot of mass moving to the right side again, which is not just going to stop. So he needs a little bit of a tilt over seven frames 60, moving that bond here we're going to go, I insert the location of rotation. So let's have a look at that site for a little bit better. But we're now going to come to frame 68. And then with both of these bones active, we're going to go Alt G and Alt R to reset the transforms and we're gonna go i and insert a location and rotation keyframe. What you're gonna notice is that the very first frame and the very last frame here for the body animations are exactly the same and it needs to be that way so that it's lovable. And if you just press the space bar, it should look loopy, like you shouldn't see a little glitch. It should just look like one seamless animation that's looping over and over again while we're still in pose mode of our bones. Remember earlier we press H to hide some of our bonds who are not going to go Alt H or Alt H to unhide the bones. And now let's get rid of somebody's ADA Brian, so we can get rid of the body bonds. We're going to select them and then we're just going to press H to hide them. And now we only have the eye bones and the facial bones, and they're the ones we're gonna be working with. So let's come over to frame one, and this is going to be quite easy. So on frame one, with all of these bones selected, we're just going to press I and we're going to insert IT location and rotation keyframe. And then what we're gonna do is when it come over to frame 12 or 14, either one. And we're just going to slightly open the mouth here a little bit and give them a little bit of a smile like that. Now you can bring maybe this one in here. And this is where you can have a ton of fun and really make it your own. But I'm going to go just a little kid, little smile, select all of these bones. I'm going to go, I want to insert a location, location and rotation on frame 14. I'm going to go up to about frame 2828. I'm going to drop this bone down here a little bit. Select it and press G, and maybe bring this one up here and bring to smile down a little bit. Bringing just went out. So just making the math a little bit more hose. That is a little thing like that. Select them all and then go I insert a location and rotation and then up to frame 40. And in frame 40 we're going to bring the mouth even down a little bit more or maybe up a little bit fat and open it just a bit. So we want to open their mouth and bring the smile over here off a little bit more, whatever you want to just making a little expressions like that, something like that. Maybe I got that looks smart kid that every guy. And then once you're happy with it, you can just select everything and then go, I insert a location and rotations that it's in frame 40. And let's keep a few extra finances. We don't want it to be too like consistent. Let's give it a little bit more of a gap. Let's come to about 60 or so and frame 60, Let's just select somebody's mouth bones. Let's just go Alt, G, ALT are just to reset the transforms. Let's go i and insert a location and rotation on frame 16. And then towards the end here, while we still have all of these bones selected, Let's just go to the first frame here and select it by dragging over it. And they go Shift D to duplicate and just drag it all the way to the end like that. And maybe here on frame six acres currently we have a hold. These two frames are exactly the same subframe 60, you can just customize it just a little bit, maybe a bit more of a smile here, like that for the mouth. Select it all and then go, I insert location and rotation, as long as the beginning and the end. Barn poses are exactly the same, it should all be nice and capable so you can see what we're having here. Try whatever you want. Maybe what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna come here to frame 40. And I'm just going to for me personally, I'm just going to reset those transforms there and close them off just for a better thing, that's a bit too much, but you guys can do whatever you want, okay, so completely up to you how you want to approach this, but just experiment, try out some different smiles or whatever frowns. As long as the beginning and the end frame are the same for this, it should be fine with the eyes here. You can also dude, exact same thing. You can move them around a little bit. What work could actually do, and this is what I'd recommend you go into object mode and then just select whichever I want to select. And didn't remember earlier we created the shape case. I go to Object Data Properties and let's just start with the left eye. So we're gonna select the left eye when it go to frame one. Frame one with the left eye of a character selected. We're going to go over to our Shape Keys under the Object Data Properties. And it'll just blink here with a value of 0. We're just going to click on this little button here to add in a shape key. And we're gonna select the other one and do the exact same things that Blinkx dot R with a value of 0. Here we are going to give it a shape key. Now let's come up to about frame for attain in frame 14. With both of them, we're going to still keep the value at 0, give it a key frame for the blink. So click on the other eye and give that value there, a value of 0, and also give it a keyframe. But then what we're gonna do is gonna move up maybe to about frame 16. And then what we're gonna do is increase that value to one. Click on this little button next to it to give it a keyframe. Select Exact same other one on frame 16, give it a value of one and click on the little key frame. And then we can move up to about frame 20 and then bring for both of them that value down to 0. And click on the little keyframe button here on frame 20 And exact same 40 out of one, bring that value to 0. Click on the little keyframe. And what should now have if you've got a frame one and you hit the spacebar, is a little blink like that, which is really cute. So let's create a whole. So between 20 and about 50, we're going to, with both of those eyes with a value of 0, we're going to click on the little keyframe again to make sure it's 0 and that's in fact 50. And then instead of having to go for all of that again, if you hold down shift and select both of these eyes, you can just come over here on the timeline, drag over these keyframes here, disease-free. They should all be yellow and then go Shift D to duplicate them and just drag them all the way till the very end one is sitting right in front of 50. That way you should have duplicated those blinks like that. And what you can do is as long as you have both of those eyes selected now, you can come in here with the keyframes and you can slide them around, adjust the timing a little bit, and see what you like. It's completely up to you. And this is where it really is the way you want it to be. But you can see we can just cute little blinks. You can offset the timing is a little bit. See what works, but you can see how simple it is only having those two little blinks already adding a lot of life to a character here. And just a little smile that happens here into math is really cute. So that is our animation and you guys can fine tune that as much as you want. But in the next part, we're gonna just add a quick little simulation to this, hanging apart at the bottom. So it's gonna be dynamically animated with the simulation. And then from there we're getting really close to just doing our materials, lighting, and rendering out a final animation. So if anything has been tricky, I will be providing the blend file as I do revolve two different stages. 9. Simulation: In the previous part, we were able to do our animation. Now, we did hide some of the bones. So if you still have the armature selected and you're in pose mode, you can just go Alt H to bring back the other bones were pretty much now done with the animation, but you can go into object mode and in object mode to make things a little bit more organized, what we're gonna do is select that rig, make sure it's active. And then you going to press M and then go new collection and then call that new collection and rake. And then press. Okay. Now you have collection here which you can click on the little tick and that'll bring it in or bring it out. So at the moment we don't need to see our armature anymore, so just hide it and we can come to the main collection here and just click the little drop down. And now things are just a little bit more organized. Come to a little drop-down here as well. Now we just have these two layers, if you will, or collections. So think of them kind of like layers in Photoshop. We can just take them on and off, which is really handy, but we don't need to be seeing our rig. But we're gonna take this bottom part now here. And we're going to be adding a cloth simulation to. The simplest way to do that is just a selected, the actual backfiring that hangs there, whatever you want to call it, and go over here to the physics properties. Then just click on this one here, fold cloth. Now obviously it's just going to disappear because thinks it's in the middle of a simulation. But if you go to frame one and you press the spacebar, you're gonna see it falling. And the reason it's fooling is because it's acting like a real cloth is actually gravity and the same. And because it's not technically attached to anything as far as the simulation is concerned, it's just fooling for empty space. Now, we're going to solve that by pinning the cloths and come back to frame one while you're at it. And you're gonna come over here to your object data properties. Now above the shape keys, which we've already dealt with, is something called the vertex groups. And these vertex groups are essentially just values that are assigned to the mesh, just like when we were in the previous parts, white painting, our mesh to our rig is the same kind of thing here. So what we're gonna do is we're going to come here and click on the little Plus to create a new group. And we have this part, active dangling part. We're going to come over here to an object and change it to white paint. What are you going to do is I'm gonna come here to your brushes and you can make sure it's ad because we want to be adding a value and essentially anything that has a warmer value here. So if you recall earlier we were doing our white painting where we had our rig and we were parenting it to the body. We were using the sort of whites. What you're gonna do is you're going to come here and make sure you have to add brush. And anything that has a warmer value is going to have more influence. So we want these things at a top topology at the top to be more influenced. Let's paint it. We're just going to come in here and give it a bit of a warmer value. Like say, in anything that has this kind of lesser warm values to lighter blue and stuff and the dark blue, it's going to have less influence. So we're going to use this group essentially to tell a cloth simulation to kind of pin onto these warmer values a little bit more, but have less influence on these bluer values. Essentially more cloth simulation. So just with that brush, just painting a little bit of the top here to give it some warmer colors and that's all we have to do. Let's go back up here into an object mode. We now have that vertex group information and work we're gonna do is we're gonna go back to your physics tab. We already added a cloth, but all you need to do now is scroll down all the way to the shape down here. There's gonna be something called Pin group and you're going to click on it. And then just select that group that we've now created. Now if you go to frame one and you press the spacebar, you're gonna see that it's dangling. So it's now actually following along because those values at the top there are telling that topology that sits there to stay pinned to the character. And the rest of it that is the lighter value would have bluer value is going to be less influenced. Now we only have to do is just fix up the simulation values a little bit and then we can cache it out. Dangling parts selected and in a Physics tab under our cloth, or you're gonna do is go down to the stiffness here under the physics properties. And currently the bending is set to 0.5. What you're gonna do is click on that and set it to five. That means it's going to essentially been less if we now go to frame one and we press the spacebar, you're going to notice it's a little bit more, little bit more stiff. It has a little bit more stiffness. But On top of that, if you go to your modifiers and it's very important that you actually drag the cloth above the subdivision surface modifier for that. Then go to frame one. Now, press the space bar and you can see it has a lot less like cloth, coffee, coffee is to it if you want to call it at. So we wanted to be more like jelly in a sense, a little bit almost like a soft body. Sometimes these things are really weird to describe them, really sorry, but you guys see now what it looks like. That's pretty much all we had to set now, there are a lot of settings here under the cloth, physics and stuff, and I'm definitely not going to be covering it. The only thing you need to know about now it's just a bending and adding the cloth and the arrangement of the modifier here. This is not a clef or physics tutorial, but all, but this simple little technique here of just using cloth with a bit of stiffness. I use it all the time for all sorts of characters in a really works well. And it's super simple to do even for people who are absolute beginners. And like I said, I'll quickly just mentioned caching. Now what caching is essentially when we bake our cloth simulation of the data behind that into a file somewhere like a blend file. The thing we can do is just make sure obviously that engulfing is selected. And under your cloth settings you just going to scroll down to your cash over here. So just go to the drop-down. Currently it's set to 250 frames because that was the default number of frames, but we changed hours to 75. So let's just change it to 75 here as well. So it means over 75 frames, it's gonna cation that information and make sure you file is saved somewhere. I know that's obvious, but just make sure it is. And then once you have that done, you can just press bake. And that happened really quick. It just took a few seconds there because it's such a short thing. But essentially it's now baked into our blend file, which means if you were to go now and look at your settings here for your cloth, a lot of them are grayed out. You won't be able to change anything. You would have to actually come here and delete the bake In, changed something and then bake it in again. Now it's really important that you bake when you're all done. So eventually when we render this out, it'll render because if you don't bake it out when you render it, you won't see the cloth simulation. So just make sure to do that whenever you're dealing with physics. But yeah, that's it. I will be providing the blend file and I keep mentioning that, but all of the different stages are provided for you guys to look at just in case you're stuck. I look forward to seeing you in the next few parts where we wrap this up. 10. Materials & Lights: Now we finally have our modelling animation, physics simulations. All that stuff's out of the way and we're going to add in some lighting and materials now, generally, I tend to make my materials before I add the lighting. That's a bit unconventional, makes more sense to add the lining first so you could actually see the results of your materials as you're working on them. So we'll do that first. But obviously we also need to think about our render engines. So if we go over here, if you go to the top, as you can see, a little camera, camera properties or render properties. Actually, the engine that's rendering, this is the EV engine, but it'll still give us a pretty good results. We're gonna make sure we set that to EV. But the thing is if EV, you need to enable a few things here like ambient occlusion, number one. And also you need to come down here and enable screen space reflections. So that's just going to make it look realistic, a bit more realistic. Because if you don't do that, what's going to happen when you add the lighting and the materials? It's just going to look really flattened dead. So make sure to enable these things here. If you don't know a lot about the materials, definitely watch some of my other tutorials or courses on Skillshare to go and introduce things from a more beginner's perspective. But that's all you have to worry about for now. And then you're going to go Shift a and you're seeing here, and you're going to go to your lights. And a very simple way to add in is just an area light. If that area light added in and just go G and move it above your character, then go do a little lights have here. So to see a live properties. And just to take the power up the 30, increase the size a little bit. Now bigger you make the size, the more software that's gonna be in, the smaller you make that science to sharper light you're going to get. So if we press Z, so press C and then go rendered and you'll see what I mean. Let's make that smolder and you can see sharp the bigger the softer that light is. So that's really handy and you guys can just set however you want. But I'm going to make mine about 1.4 meters and I'm gonna move it up a little bit more. And then I'm going to go Shift D to duplicate it and move it over to the side. And then R to rotate it in. And then again Shift D to duplicate it, move it over to this side R to rotate it in. And this is just giving my character a little bit of a rim lighting like that, which looks pretty cool. So just free lights like this for now we'll do for the rim lighting. And then I'm going to go Shift D from the top legato, top view, and then Shift D to duplicate the lights and then rotate it into words, the character a little bit. But at this one, we're gonna give it a power of 50 instead. And we're going to go once again to top Shift D, to duplicate it again and write it in towards the character like that. And there you can see we have some lighting on a character. Now obviously it looks really wide it out because we haven't added any materials. But even before we do that, let's just add a camera as well. So in your front view, we're just going to go Shift a and just add in a camera and then go, Gee, y, and move it back onto why we have that camera activity can just press 0 on your keyboard or the number pad. And that's gonna take you into the camera view. And then you're gonna go G, z and move it up like so. So the cameras now moved up and you can come here to your camera settings and change the focal length. Now I like to personally work with a focal length of 95. So I've typed in 95. Now if I go into my camera view and you guys can do that too, you can see it's got a lot more of a focal length happening there. So you can just go G and then press the middle mouse button on your mouse and move back just to move it back a little bit like that, which looks a lot better in my opinion. And it's just going to help with when we add the objects to the background. So it fills in more of the background space. It's just the focal length I prefer to work with. So move it back a little bit like this. And you can also just go G and move the camera as well. You don't have to go, gee, middle mouse button like I'm doing inside of the camera view. But as long as you have that camera setup pointing towards a character, if something like this looks pretty good as far as framing goes. But on top of the lighting we have here, I will select it, just go to my world settings, go to the Color tab here, click on it, and then just change that to a Sky texture. And then you can come here. And if we want to change the method it's using here to brief them, That's one of the supported for EV. And then you're gonna come down here to the strength and just make it 0.3 like side. Now we've got some nice lighting there as well, that complements our area lights here, but we also want to add a background. So we're going to go Shift a go to Mesh options, add an a plane, and if that plane added in, we're gonna go our X9 0 and we're going to hit Enter. And then we're gonna go S to scale it up. And then S, x and skeleton dx like psychosis, almost like the cameras dimension. Then go, gee, why and move it back and then got your camera view again. Move that still selected. You can just go G and move it in an S to scale in the background till that just kind of fills in that space. It doesn't have to be perfect, but just something like that. And then once you've done that, go Control a and just apply to scale foot up. Later on, we're going to add a material to that as well for our background. In fact, make it even bigger because we're going to be animating the camera a little bit. So we want some margin there to half movement. So something like that should be fine. And now we're still inside of our render, rendered view here we can go into shading workspace, go to camera view by pressing 0. Once again, just make sure you're on rendered, so z and then go rendered. And now we can add some materials. So let's just start with the background for now. I know it's kind of weird, but I just want that out of the way. We're going to click on the background plane here. It go and use to create a new material. Let's just call it BG for background. And we want this to be emissive so we don't want to principled shader here. So we're gonna click on a principled shader and press X to delete it. Then over here we're going to go Shift a and we're going to click on Search and we're going to type an e, m n is going to come up with the emission here. So click on emission, plug it into the surface here. Now it's glowing, but the thing here is, it's not that bright, so we can change the value to fray. And on top of that, it's just a white color, which isn't that cool. So let's add something to it like a gradient texture. So we're going to go Shift a and we are search and type in G, R. And then click on gradient texture, plug it in to the color here. And at the moment you can see it's making a gradient. But we want it to be like, kind of like a circular gradient. So we're going to come here and change it from linear to spherical, and we need to change its position as well. So let's add in some coordinates and a mapping night. So we're gonna go shift a, we're going to go search and type in MAP. So we're going to go and click on the mapping here, plug the vector into the vector of the gradient, and let's tell it how we wanted to distribute. So it needs to be an object. So we're gonna go shift a click on Search and let's get a texture coordinates so we can type in texture space and then CEO texture coordinate. Put it over here and let's take that object and plugged it in to the vector where I'm mapping. So at the very top there, now you can see its place, it in the middle here. And all we have to do is come to our scale here and just mess around with it. So this is take the x and this could be a little bit different for you depending on how you have things set up. But all we're trying to do is just use to x and a y here to increase or decrease the scale on those two axes or dimensions or whatever. So to x and a y. And then to soften that out a little bit, what we can do is we can go shift a search and get a color ramp now to type in color, get a color ramp and then place it next to the texture, the gradient texture. It put it on that cable so it's now connected. And to make it softer, Let's just change it from linear to B-spline, and let's add some colors. I'm going to drag this value in here a little bit and then grab this end lighter value, drag it in and I'm gonna make that a nice yellowish orange color. And then I'm going to click on the little plus here to add in another controller or little color slider. And with that one, I'm going to click on it. I'm just going to change it to a bit of an orangey color like that and move it more in the middle. And I'm just going to adjust these accordingly. Just trying it out, seeing what works and what doesn't. This color here is too dark, so I'm gonna select it. And I'm going to increase the value a little bit to make it lighter. And then kind of make like an orangey, dark orangey brown color like that. Now we've got something that looks pretty cool here. You can make those colors whatever you want. So if I hit 0 to kind of camera view, you can see that's what it looks like in the background. Pretty cool. That makes a character really pop out as well. Some very basic notes here. Once again, if you don't understand nodes very well, definitely check out some of my outer courses on Skillshare, like my beginner courses. Go into that in a lot more detail. But now let's click on the little character and let's just select the head. And by default that's going to have a material already cold material because we made it out of the default cube, which comes with a default materials. Let's just click on it and call it skin and the base color here, let's just make that a bluish color, but you can make whatever you want and you can come down here to the roughness and just increase it. So it's not as reflective. And that's pretty much all you have to do with your skin. You can now select the bottom dangling part and then come to the Color drop-down here and give it that skin. And then you can click on the eyes and go new. Let's just call that eyes. And all you have to do is come here to the base color and make that black bring down the value. And if the eyes you can bring down two roughness to make them more reflective. So once you have that done, just click on the auto, I come to the drop-down and give it that I'm material. That's pretty much it, That's how simple it is. But one more thing that's gonna make this look cool to add a material to the inside of the mouth. So select the head again, it's a press Tab to go into edit mode. And all we have to do here, in fact, let's just go to a modifier so it'll make it more simple. Come to the mirror here and just disable it for a second. And then what you're gonna do is you're going to just select a vertex or two at the back here and go Control plus or Command plus. And just keep doing that till the selection grows. We're just going to select the inside of the mouth like that. So everything is selected. If it goes a little bit out, you can just press C and then click the middle mouse button and just paint away that selection. Only want to inside of the mouth, select it. And then we're gonna come over here to the materials tab. And you can see there's the skin. We're just going to click on the Plus again, go new. This is cool, this mouth, space enter. This is assign. So we're assigning it. And currently by default it's set to white. So let's just change that to a mouth color, something like a pinkish color. And that's it. Now we can go back to our modifier and just enable it again over here to mirror. And this is tab back out. And we can see we've added that mouth and inside the mouth material now I can see here it's not quite right. I missed the face here. So if you do something like that, just come back in here. If it's easier, just got to face left and just click on that face. And then just go to Material tab, click on the material and just go assign any parts you want to assign that math material two, That's how you can do it. Very simple stuff. And DEXA our materials. So let's go into our camera view again, and now let's go back into our layout. We have our materials, we have a lighting, and let's just hit the space bar and see what it looks like. Pretty cool now, we don't have any movement in the camera, which we'll do in the next part when we're rendering this out. But you can see how this will look like. It's pretty cool. Another cool thing you can do is select the character and go to your materials tab. And currently these are things we're going to see in your renders. If you're going to render it, we see the materials. But if you wanted to say something in a viewport, you can just click on the material, scroll down to the bottom, and you're gonna see something cool to Viewport Display. And here you can change the color so you just see it in the viewport as well. So just in case you wanted that, it's really optional, but it's something I like to do. Just roughly emulate the color in the viewport, just so you can see it when it's not being rendered, which is yeah, just something I personally prefer Signet exact same thing to the eye material, but definitely not optional. It's not going to change anything in the render. It's purely just for the display in the view port. It's really just an aesthetic thing. But yeah, that is how to add the materials and lighting. And we're really going to make things look a lot cooler in the next part. But there's also another thing you can do is see how the character is moving like that. If we were to render this out, it would be perfectly crisp and we want a little bit of motion blur. So all you have to do is go over to your render settings and just go over here and enable motion blur. But let's just drag from here till this apart with a character moves really quickly. In this case here like 47, he's really moved up really quick bath there. And let's just go back into solid view. And let's just test that motion for us. They're going to go to render and go render image. And you can see we have a little bit of motion blur there. And that looks really cool. So in the next part, we're going to add a little bit of animation to the camera. And we're going to render this out as a final animation. And that'll be it getting really close to finishing this off. Once again, the blend files are provided if you get stuck on anything and they should help you out a lot. 11. Final rendering: Finally, we're able to start doing the very final steps to get to our final product. So what we're gonna do is we're going to quickly add a little bit of animation to the camera. So make sure you select your camera. Cameras now selected and you're going to come here to your timeline. And just like we added shape keys to our bones earlier, what are you going to do is come to frame one with the camera active, you can press I and insert a location key. You're going to go to the end frame, frame 75 and you get a press I. Once again insert a location key. So the last frame and the first frame we need to be identical so that we don't have a clipping issue. So we wanted to look seamless when the animation plays because it's a really short little looping animation. Frames in-between. You can make whatever you want. What do I like to do is I'd like to move my camera up a little bit to where the character is moved out of frame. And then if a camera active, I wouldn't go G and move it up a little bit. And then press I and insert allocation keyframe. The other gonna keep going. And over here I can see he's gone down a bit. I'm gonna go G and move it down. I insert a location keyframe and so on. Here he shoots up a little bit. I'm going to go up. Instead of location. He comes down here and move it down just a bit. So the idea here is just adding a bit of random camera movements that looks like he's being followed now, you could also add a little bit of noise to this in the animation curves. So if those of you who are familiar with animation curves and how to add generators, that is an option you can do because this is more for people who are a little bit more new to Blender, less experience. Maybe we have characters. I don't want to keep this a little bit more simple. This will do just fine. So today we have a little bit of camera animation and it looks pretty cool. Now how do we render this out? What you have to do is go over to this option here called output properties. Didn't want to go down to this output folder. It's got a little destination. Click on it. You can select anywhere in your computer if you're gonna be doing sequences, makes sure to select a folder. I'm just going to select my desktop. Now here are a few things you need to consider. If you are somebody who wants to compile all of the image sequences in something like Adobe After Effects. So Adobe Premiere, maybe you want to do some ambient occlusion passes or reflection passes, whatever. You can go and leave this as a PNG format. So it'll render out a whole bunch of sequences and you just compile them together. Now because there is such a short animation or using EV, I'm gonna directly render this out as a video format. So I'm gonna go to this over here, click on it and change it to FFmpeg video. And then all you have to do is go to your encoding and change the container to mp4 or any other format that you prefer. But I definitely recommend MP4. So I click on that. And now did you have a video format selected and you have your destination selected. You can now go to render and go Render Animation. Remember earlier we did a render image. Now you can do Render Animation, which works pretty good. It'll render it out to that selected destination. Now, I'm gonna go ahead and do that and I'm going to show you guys what it looks like an O. And just before we render, I'll just quickly mention that we've already done the lighting and the materials, but you can always adjust them a little bit. If you're in your rendered workspace, you can just select a lot. You can try different powers and strengths. Maybe add in some environmental lighting is really up to you how you want to do this. You can try out different color palettes. By no means do you have to follow this exactly to why I did this. A lot of fury, a lot of ideas out there. And I really encourage creativity and customization. I want to see what you guys can do with this, but that said, let's go render and render animation. Here we have the finished result. This is what it looks like. I really hope you guys have enjoyed this course and we've had a lot of fun what I'm gonna do in the next video. So I'm just going to quickly explain a few things I'd like to see you guys improve on or customize. I'm just doing an introduction here, but I want to teach a method, an idea, and I look forward to seeing what you guys can do with your own creativity. So the whole idea of this class, It's not just to get you to make something. Did I showed you how to make where to learn something and build upon it, make it your own. And I really loved saying that from the community. I've already seen a lot of really cool stuff out there from some of my other courses that people have been doing. So that's really awesome. And I'll see you guys then. 12. Thank You: This is the official outro for this little character course we've been doing. I really hope you guys have enjoyed it and learned something. Once again, makes sure to look at those provided references and the folders that I've put into resources showing all the different stages and the different blend files, all that. And I've also put in some hotkeys in there like I've mentioned now, I really hope you guys, like I said, I have enjoyed it, customize it and make it your own and shared with the community, shared with friends. Some of the things that you can focus on customizing could be things like the actual character itself. So I start with a concept that's unique to your, your flavor, your ideas, and then you can flush it out and model it a little bit and make a rig that suits that. And then try doing your own unique little animation. You own little moves, ideas. Try experimenting with the eyes. Add a few more shape keys. Just so much stuff that could be said, a color palette, the material's reflectivity, what sort of lighting you use, how you set it up. That's all stuff. I encourage you guys to make it your own. And once again, thank you so much for watching.