Create & Animate Your Own 3D Character | Blender

1. Welcome To The Course: Hello there and welcome to my complete character course where I'm going to be showing you the complete process from concepting all the way through to final rendered animation. How to make this adorable character in blender, which is a free and open source software. Now if you're not familiar with Blender or Friday, you can watch some videos on Skillshare that address it from an absolute beginners perspective. But if you already know some of the basics of Blender, like the user interface, navigation, and just some basic things you should be able to follow along with this course quite well. And I wouldn't be including all of the different resources and blend files. So you can see all of the different stages, opened them up, see how I did things if you get stuck. So if all of that in mind, I hope you guys are going to enjoy this character production workflow. Like I said, I'm going to include all of the different processes, everything from modelling particles, shape keys, animation, and final rendering will be in this course and I really look forward to seeing what you guys can do. So let's get right into it. 2. Model Sheet Overview: I'm just gonna do a quick overview of my model sheet. If you don't want to draw a model sheet and he just 20 years to one that I'm going to be providing in the resources. Go ahead and do that. If you want to watch, go ahead and watch. I'll just do a quick overview and then we'll get into the next part. The model sheets are quite simple and you don't have to go overboard with it, just keep it really simple. There are a few ways I like to do with personally and that's using either GIMP or Photoshop. Those image manipulation programs are awesome. If you don't have auto want to dozer, you don't have a stylus or digital pen or anything like that, even just drawing out a simple idea and in taking a photo of it and sending it to a computer, that is also fine. Don't over complicate it, just keep it simple. So I was going to quickly show you just an overview of what I did for this particular project. I just went and opened up. So I've got that on the internet. It's a free program and I just had a simple background that I added in with a bluish color. And then I added my first layer, which are essentially I just drew a front on simple 2D image of my character concept. Essentially, if you really look at this guy, He's just a bowl, pretty much just a circle of thing. We have a little bit of check some detail there. Really basic math, two teeth and just two eyeballs. I mean, you really can't get simpler than that. It's just like grade school level drawing, very simple. And then I just added these two little legs now just to help with symmetry. And this is not something you have to do, but I simply just do 1.5 of it. And then I just duplicated over deobda slide. So you don't even have the oldest, longest you have half of a character because we're working with a mirror modifier, you only really have to draw half of whatever character you're working on. So that is the front one. And then simply, I drew some reference lines and reference lines or what you can draw after you've drawn your first image. Essentially, you're going to find points of reference. In this case, I just took Ahead the bottom of the body and just somewhere into math, let's talk what a mouth, some basic points where the eyelids might be or the eyebrows. We had a nice maybe to bottom of the feet. So just basic points of reference, whatever you feel you need. I just drew two lines out and then that gave me some reference of where I should draw my second side image. I've just created a new layer and I just drew the image from the side. And once again, I tried to just keep things in line. So where do your eyes would roughly sit? That's where half the eyes and where I have to browse. That's what a browse set. And you can see the mouth, same kind of thing. You don't have to be perfectionist about it. You don't have to get it exactly right. This is just a really simple way to do it and I'm not even a 2D artists. So if I can do something this simple, You guys can too. So what I'm gonna do, I'm going to provide to this file for you guys and you can edit it, maybe erase some things, draw things a little bit differently. So it's going to be in the resources folder. And I'll also include the exported version of this as well said, a PNG that you guys can use as wealth. So just a quick overview of model sheets and how I approach it for this simple character. And we'll get into the next part. 3. Scene Setup: So in the next few minutes I'm going to quickly show you guys how to set blender up for reference images and how you can make things a little bit simpler. So I'm using Blender free point O to point of recording this tutorial. And like I said, this is not an absolute beginner tutorial, but a real quickly cover a few things. And we're going to be going to our front or for graphic view by hitting one on a number pad. If you don't have a number pad, you can simply go to Edit Preferences. And then you can go to Input. And under keyboard you can emulate number pad. And then just a default one to 0 case it's hitting the top of your keyboard will act like a numpad. So it's just important that you are in your frontal graphic view. And what you can do is you can simply find the provided model sheets that I have included with this project. So it's just model sheet dot PNG and you can grab it and just drag it into the viewport. Make sure they're not drag it on top of a cube, just drag it somewhere in the viewport and little place that in there. Now what we don't want when you drag in a model sheet is for it to be really small compared to the default cube or really large. So what we're going to try and do here is just have it around about here. So if you move the image showing us select the image here and hit G to move it and just move it behind a cube and it's almost about the same size. So if the image now inside of the view port here, well, we're gonna do is we're gonna go G to move it. And what I like to do is take my character and have the fate of the reference image sitting on the floor. So you can see this red line here and a front view, that's our red axis line. And it kind of gives you an idea of where the floor sitting. So we don't want our character over modelling it to be sitting the loaded, though it doesn't really matter, it's just a personal preference because eventually you can just move the whole model up. But I like to just get a roughly on that spot there. And you can follow your red reference, your reference line if you drew one underneath your feet and just kind of see if it all matches up. So if you following along with mine, yours should look pretty much the same if you're using the same model sheet. Now one thing you don't want to have a model sheet is an intersecting with your cubed that you couldn't be modeling with. In this case, we are going to be doing box polling, so we'll be using the default cube. So with that plane active, we're gonna go, gee, why and move it back in the scene just as long as it's out of the way of our cube here. We're also going to go gi X and a front view again and just move the model shoot over till our character sits in the middle of our scene here, once again, you can look at the axis line. So you can see here's the z axis line right in the front of graphic view. And on your character is make a middle reference line. Don't be too fussy about that. As long as you have it roughly in the middle, then you know, you have symmetry and just gonna make modelling a little bit easier. So you should now have your model sheets set-up for the front view. What you can also do is go to your top view by hitting seven on your number pad. And you can go Shift D with that plane active G, and then move it or just shift the and just move your mouse, it should move it and then just left-click about here just to place it. And then what you're gonna do is you can go our Z 900 and you're gonna hit Enter. So we've just rotated it on the z-axis by 90 degrees. You can also hit N on your property panels. Go to Item and with this plane active, you should see here under dizzy it is set to 90 degrees. So now what you can do is you can hit afraid to your right off of graphic view. So free on your numpad and the feet should be the same because it's the same model sheet. We don't have to adjust the height of the side image, but we are gonna go g of y and just move it forward till outside reference is sitting roughly where our default cube is in the middle here. So we don't want it too much back or too much at the front. But if we also don't want it to be right in the middle of ALC cubed that we're going to be modeling with. So just keeping it out there, you should have a nice side reference image and a nice front reference image. Now one thing I like to do just to keep things a little bit organized is I like to select my reference images. And within both active, I'm going to hit M. The M and N Go new collection. Didn't just call that collection ref for reference and then hit. Okay. And you should see under your scene collections, there should now be a collection called href and you can always hide that if you need it. I just can make things really handy. So you can just drop that down to minimize it. And this is just the default collection that still has to cube the camera and the light and that. So you can just minimize that as well. So that's how you set up a scene in blender with model sheets. Now if this was a little bit complicated and you don't want to set this up, uh, we'll be providing this startup while so you guys can follow along exactly the way I'm doing it. And this is going to make things simpler for you as well. So just check that out in a Resources and we'll get to the next part where we start doing some of the modelling. 4. Model The Body Part 1: So if you haven't already set up your own scene in a blender from the previous part, what you can do is just get the starter file that's going to be available in the resources folder. So just go ahead, download that and open that up and you can follow along. So I have my screencast keys enabled here on the bottom corner. So you guys should be able to see the keys that I am pressing, which should be quite helpful. So what we're gonna do is we're going to start to move out default cube. So if the default cube active, so by left clicking on it, make sure your front orthographic view, once again by hitting on one on your number pad. And just to get started, we're going to hit Z on our keyboard and then go into wire-frame by clicking on it. And if the cube active actually come to your collections and just come to the drop-down. You should see that the cube is active. You're gonna go G, z and restricted to the z-axis. And you're gonna move to cube up tails in the middle of the character. You're then going to go S to scale it down. So let's scale it down about that much, just getting it roughly about the size of the reference. We're going to go Control a or Command a and just apply any scale if we've scaled it in our viewport and we're just going to hit Tab to go into edit mode with that cube active. Or you can just come up here to this option here and change it from object to edit. So inside of edit mode, what we're gonna do is we're gonna go Control R or Command R. And we're just gonna see if we hover over a face here, a yellow line appears, just left-click twice. And then what you can do, just going to click and drag and just select the left side of vertices. And you're gonna go x and just delete dice. So in your front view, you should just see half of a Q. Now the reason for this is quite important. We're going to go to a Modifiers tab Add Modifier, and let's give it a mirror modifier. Essentially anything we do now on decide to gets mirrored on the x-axis on the outside, which saves us a lot of time. Now one issue you're gonna run into, if you don't enable clipping over here, if you were to move to mesh, it'll just pull apart. So what we're gonna do is when an able clipping and of clipping enabled, it should all stay together, which is really important. So we're just currently have a cube, right? It's not really a character. So what are we gonna do to fix that? So in wireframe mode, so z wireframe, I'm going to click and drag and just select the bottom parts. So these ones here, I'm gonna go G, z and at least, and at least take them up to the bottom of the body here. We're then going to grab these birds here. So you left-click and drag just, just like these two in a corner. And I want to go G and just move them up a little bit about there. And we're going to do the same thing with these ones here. Click and drag, select those to bring them down. But still we don't have enough geometry to work with here. So what we're gonna do is control R or Command R and add in another loop, cut, double-click, click, drag, and then select these verts G, and then move them out. Click and drag, select these bottom parts and then G, and move them down. So now I can see we fill that out quite nicely. Then worry about the side. It will get to that. We're going to now come over here, hovering over one of these edges control R or Command R again to have the Loop tool. So you can see the yellow line double-click. And this time what we're gonna do speck in a front view, we're going to click drag and just select these two verts and end. And we're gonna go G and just fill that out or bring it out a little bit. Select these in the middle, bring them down to where it amorphous just above the mouth. Select days to bring him there. And you can see we're filling in the space. So we're gonna come over here, Control R again. And now we're going to add a loop cut here. So just double-click and then double G and just slide it down to the bottom of the mouth. Click and drag to select these vertices outside and then go G and then just move them out. So just starting to form the rough shape from the front. And then let's come over here where the eyes are control are, you should see a yellow line appearing in double-click. And then we've added that in when it come here. Now control are over here and Control R over this edge. Double-click against. Now we've added in all of those loops. So from the front, it's starting to look at k. You can say it's sun to fill out, but from the side it's not looking at anything like it should. So we're going to hit freight to going to a right orthographic view. So free on a number pad. And I'm going to click and drag and select all of these adverts. And we're gonna go, gee, why? And we're going to move them back to about where the nose and the lips would be. And then what we're gonna do is we're gonna select the top one, just these top ones we're gonna go G and just move them back. More. Double-tap are just a slightly rotate them. So double tapping are just rotate them a little bit like that. Then select these ones G and move him back. Select these ones G and just moving back, we don't want to move up and down which one to move him back. Saying with these ones, just move them back. And then the same at the bottom here, describe some of these ones. Gee, why moving back a little bit, double-tap are or just hit R by itself and the right view and just rotate it a bit. So it's not looking that good at the moment, but we're getting, it's getting too, is getting the basic shape established. So what we're gonna do is back into wireframe and decide we're going to add some more geometry is going to go Control R. You see a loop appears, double-click, double genius of slides. We're going to slide it up a bit. And then now what you're gonna do, we're gonna select all of these verts. I'm going to do the same thing, g, y, and move him to the back a little bit more. Then just select these top ones so you can rotate them. G, moved them in a bit, select the top ones here. G to move him forward are two of our tide of it. And you guys can get the idea here. So we're going to select these bottom ones are R to rotate him a bit, G to move men, select the very bottom one's G, move them are hidden. And you can see we're just filling in that space now if we hit seven to go to a top orthographic view, and we're gonna see it looks two cube, so it's a bit too boxy. So what we're gonna do, if we come to one of these corners here, these edges, we can go Shift Alt. And it doesn't matter if you're in Vertex, Vertex like Marge's going to go shift all told him in and then left-click on an edge and that'll edge select that whole edge, go to a top view again by hitting seven and then enable your proportional editing. Come to Georgetown and make it connected only. Now what we're gonna do is we're gonna go G and a top view. And it can roll the middle mouse button to increase or decrease the full off. So we're going to roll it down, some rolling to middle mouse button while I'm moving my mouse. And we're just going to bring that corner in. So it's not a sharp and let's do the same thing at the back. I'm just going to de-select everything by hitting a twice. Then we've got Shift Alt and just left-click on an edge to loop, select it. Once again in your top view, hit seven to go to a typographer graphic back into wireframe. And then with proportional editing still enabled, you can go G rolling middle mouse button if you have to, but also move your mouse and just bring that corner in a little bit just to round that out. And you can see we're starting to develop that shape. So we need a little bit more geometry in here. So we're gonna go Control R over this edge here, but we're going to roll it two times. So we're just going to roll down middle mouse button. So Control R and enroll and middle mouse button just once to add in two and then double-click. And now we've added that. And so what we're going to do to smooth things out a little bit. So we're going to just find out this table f proportional editing. We're going to hit a to select everything and we're gonna go over to this tool here called Smooth Tool. By the way, if you don't see the tools that you can just simply just hit T on your keyboard. And it'll bring that up. So just click on the smooth tool, then come here and click on the little gizmo and just drag it. I left-click and drag and hold a smooth things out, then smooth it too much, but just a little bit. And now you can see we have a much better looking shape. It's a little bit off. But what we're gonna do now is we're gonna go back to off proportional editing. Just go back to the move tool and go into wire-frame and from a front view again, so one on a number pad to kinds of your front view. We're just going to select these vertices over here. We're gonna go G, rolled and middle mouse button to control the fall off. And we're just going to bring to checks out and anywhere where it's not quite right, just select dice verts, G to move it, roll the middle mouse button, proportional editing enabled and just adjust accordingly until it fits the reference. You can do the same thing and the right view. So hit Frage going to write or for graphic. And you can select verts g, y, move them forward until you fill in DEI spaces. Gy and maybe move these verts thing with these ones. Just filling in those spaces, if anything is a little bit too sharp. So in this case you can see that doesn't look quite right. You can just select this vertex G and just move that whole vertex forward. And just make things look nice and pretty. So you don't have to do it exactly like undoing. We're just moving things out. And at the back here it's not looking too smooth, so we can just left-click and drag to select all of these verts at the back, go to S Move tool again and just lightly smooth them out. Then just select verts again and just move them out. So just selecting these, selecting d's move mouth. And that's how we can very quickly make the basic shape of our character. Now, we haven't made them yet, w i's, but just having the basic shape established is already a big part of it. So make sure, especially here at the front, did you select these verts here? Make sure to kind of match, but don't worry too much. We're going to, we're going to work now on the mouth and add a few more details. 5. Model The Body Part 2: So in this part we're going to continue modelling the body. So previously we just made domain shape. Now we're going to finish off by adding in the mouth and the eyes and a few things like that. So just follow along with me and if anything is confusing, just look at the provided example. Blend files that come in the resources folder. They're going to be a really big helps you guys. Once again, I do have my screencast keys enabled and that should be a big help. So you can see what keys I'm pressing. So while we're in edit mode, we're going to make sure for now that our proportional editing as disabled up here. And also just make sure you have the Move tool here just in case there's some times when you have some of these tools here are enabled, you can accidentally do something and that is not what you wanna do. For example, online, make a cut or a bevel when I'm trying to move something. So just having it on the move to learn just makes things a little bit safer. So let's hit Z and let's go to wireframe. And let's start by making the eyes actually before we did a mouth. So we can see here that we don't really have enough geometry. So if I just go z, go wireframe, you can see it's not really enough here. So what we're gonna do over here, what I should be able to go Control R or Command R. And once again going to add in and not a loop, and it would come up here, control are adding another loop here, double-click. And now if we got to have front view and we hit C and we've got a wireframe. We can see we have a little bit more geometry to work with. So one simple way you can get started with DI is to roughly see where it is. So in this case it's there and a closest vertex is going to be just one over here. So if I select that vertex and hit Z and I go into wireframe and able to proportional editing now. And if that vertex active hit G and then move it so G to move a role the middle mouse button and just move all of the geometry and get that the vertex is roughly or VDI. Like say, okay, I know it doesn't make too much sense at the moment. We're just trying to get a vertex. What do I do it like that. Now, don't worry if the geometry has moved a little bit, but just like that. So we've one in the middle of the day, you can go Control plus or Command plus. And what that's gonna do, it's gonna grow to selection. So the command plus or control plus, now you're going to turn off proportional editing. And now if all of that activity you can go Shift Alt S, the Shift Alt S. And if you move your mouse now, you'll round that out. So we're gonna round it out just a little bit. And then we're gonna go eat to extrude and S to scale. So E and an S, I'm going to scale it down a bit. Hit Z to go to wireframe. And in your front view, hit S to scale and just scale it down G to move it and roughly place it over DI. And what you can do now is just individually select these verts and just round it out like that. And now we've made the eye there. It looks like K from the front, but from the side, it's not where it needs to be. So if we got to decide by hitting free and a number pad and we're going to wireframe. You can see the eye is the bird needs to be. So what we're gonna do is just select that middle vertex and the eye control plus to grow to selection once. Then in your right orthographic view in wireframe enabled proportional editing. Then go gee, why? And move it back till it's where that eye is. Bullying middle mouse button to control a full off if you need to, and just bring it over there. Now what you're gonna do is you're gonna select this vertex in the corner of the eye. Just this one are right there. And you're right view you're gonna go G and you're just going to move it back. And you can also select the furthest down here. Just move this cheek back just a little bit. And then you can select the corner and inside of the eye. So this one right here. And then your right view, you're just going to hit G and H zone forward a bit. So we're just trying to get the eye socket to line up with our reference here. And then we're also just going to select this vertex here and a forehead. We're going to move it forward a little bit. And in anything that has kind of gotten lost in the details, we can just correct that. So select these verts here where I tell them a bit, just bring it in and we're just correcting anything that doesn't look quite right. Grab the nose here, just bring it forward a little bit. Maybe bring these verts up on the mouth just a bit. And you can see we already have that working out quite well. You can now select the middle verte here and just hit X and delete that part. So now we have that sun to form. We don't have enough geometry, foot and mouth either its environment. So I'm gonna come here. Control are adding the loop that will click. Control R, add an edge, double-click. And now and you're right, few. Save what that looks like a guy. So we might move to this corner here. Just select that vert and just move it in there. Okay, that looks better. And now my front view, what we're gonna do, we're gonna go back to our front. We're going to hit Z, got to wireframe. And now we're going to select a few faces. So what we're gonna do is go to Face Select option up here, disable proportional editing. And we're gonna select this face here holding Shift, select this one, this one, and this one. So to select multiples, we're just holding Shift. And then worry if it's not exact same shape as the math, but we're gonna go E to extrude. So hit E and then S and just scale it down a bit. And then what you're gonna do is you're going to hit X and just delete faces. And at the moment it doesn't look quite right. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna go to our vertex select, select these two vertex verts in the corner, go to a right view in wireframe and enable proportional editing. Then go gee, really middle mouse button to control a fall off and just move that corner back. And you can select these verts here as well just to move down back. And then select this vertex in the corner of the mouth. So these two down here, and you're gonna go G and you're going to move them up into right view. And then the front view, you can go G and you can move them in. Like say, okay, you're going to select these ones here. Are you going to move them in? And I'm just going into Wireframe when I need to do is I can see. And I'm gonna move these ones out a bit and then move these ones here. And you don't have to be exact bowling, precisely the modal shape. But just having something around about here looks right, so if you wanted to kinda mouth shape here, it's quite open. That's quite deliberate. We want that sort of shape. It really works, but his character, but you should see, if you go into the side view, it's not looking quite right. So what we're gonna do here is if the top lip verts selected there which can go, Gee, and how? Side view. And we're just gonna move him back a little bit. Maybe move it just up like that. So all we're trying to do is we're going back and forth between these two views. And we're just trying to make the math work. Now remember our model sheet is just a rough drawing so we don't have to try and match it up exactly on both sides. But once we haven't roughly in place, we're going to come here to the chin. I'm going to go Control R or Command R. Double-click to add in and not a loop. Then an aside view, we're just going to hit C stood, bring it up to see Select tool and just going to left-click and drag. And just like these birds here on a chin and we're gonna go G and which kind of move them out while we rolled a middle mouse button to control it pull off. So you can see now, we've very easily made the harder parts of this model, which is to mouth and the eyes. And like I said, you can still adjust it. So you can Shift Alt loops like the eyes here, for example. Just adjust them if they've moved a little bit. So anything that's moved, just adjust it. So now we have that I made and we have the math nights. And what we're gonna do now is just refine things a little bit. So if the I here, listen, I disable proportional editing. We're going to go control are adding a loop here. And now what we're gonna do is we're going to go Alt S, the Alt S, I'm going to scale it in on a normal, so Alt S and scale it in on an OLS, just like that and we need an eyeball for reference. So let's really hit Tab to go into object mode again. So we want to go back into object mode. And while we have the model here, active, which can go right-click and just go Shade Smooth for now as well. So let's go Shift a, go to Mesh Primitives and add a UV sphere. And if this UV sphere we're going to go right-click Shade Smooth S to scale it, and then G. We're going to move it up to the eye here. So just place it so it matches our reference. So just hitting G and moving it and then going into the right view and then go, gee, why and move it forward so it matches to reference. So you can see it there. Now we can select our model again, having to edit mode. Now let's make some simple changes. So Shift Alt, click on an edge here to loops like the inner thigh and into front view we're gonna go S to scale it up just a bit, move it up. So we want it just to be around the eye like that. If any of them are sticking in, you can just enable proportional editing. Select those verts and then move them out a little bit more. So it's very simple to correct those little issues with proportional editing. By the way, you can also hit O on your keyboard as a shortcut for proportional editing. Let's for now to keep it simple, let's just keep working like this. We're now going to go Shift Alt. Click on this edge shift loops selected, disable proportional editing, and then just S to scale it just a little bit. Then A2 extrude S to scale, just like that. And then we're gonna go to a side view slightly, okay, to wireframe. And then E, and we're going to extrude it in an S to scale it a little bit. So now we have our eyelid around it. You can also just select the corner of the eyelid over here, these two verts enabled proportional editing G and just move it back in a little bit. And in the corner of the eyelid here as well, G and move that in a bit. And that's this kind of gives us this cute little cartoony eye to work with. So I select the vertex at the top, one at the bottom hit G to move. So all I'm doing is some just hitting G to move with proportional editing as I select verts. And this is the kind of shape are going for. Very simple. And if we now got to a modifiers, we can also give it a subdivision surface modifier. And that's going to smooth things out. So let's quickly tap back into object mode by hitting tab. Select the I. Go to Modifiers, add modifier, give it a mirror. And in this case we're gonna hit the eyedropper and select the body for a reference. And we don't have to enable clipping. So now just like the eyeball g, y, move it back just a little bit and you can adjust it as much as you want. But now you can see we have that eyeball in place. You can select a character tab into edit mode and make any adjustments if you move the eye. Very simple to do so just something like this is all you need to do if the eyes, and if you get stuck, just look at my example file that I'm going to provide and that should help us out a lot. Like I say, I really was the hardest part. Let's quickly get to the mouth. That is really simple to do. So let's just bring this down just a little bit more. And what are we gonna do this is we're gonna make sure to disable proportional editing, Shift Alt, and then left-click on a loop inside of here to edge loops selected. The edges hit free to go. You're right orthographic view. And then you're gonna go E to extrude. And you can extrude to add just a little bit and S, just a skeletal little bit. And anything i e to extrude again, you're going to get to back like this. And then what you're gonna do is you're gonna go to your edge select option here and have this be a little bit tricky. So what we're gonna do is we're just gonna go to a mirror modifier, just disable it into viewport, go back to Solid View. And what we're gonna do is just select this top edge holding Shift, select the bottom edge. They're both active and we're going to hit F and S is going to create a face between her. Then we'll select this edge holding down Shift, select this edge. They're both active. I'm going to hit F to fill it. And then Shift Alt, click on this edge and it'll loop select this little triangular shape. And when go F and it's going to fill that, then Control R. And you can see a loop here. So just hover over this edge, control our double-click. And now if I added an edge there, and now we can come over here, control are adding a loop here, roll once with the middle mouse button, double-click and add in a loop like that. Now, we can enable our mirror again. And the way we make it hollow and inside here it's very simple. It's got a face like option. This disabled our subdivision surface modifier into view port just for now. And we're just going to select the top faces in the mouth. So holding shift, just select any of the top faces e to extrude and in Z and just extrude it up on the Z a little bit. And then do the same thing with these and the bottom of so I'm just holding Shift and selecting these six e to Extrude, extrude it down S to scale it just a little bit. And then we're gonna come in here and just select any of these at the side. You can also just hit C to bring up the C Select tool and just select them. And in a front view, go into wire-frame which can go eat to extrude and extrude to decide as to scale a little bit. And now we have that. Pretty simple. You can select two faces at the back here, but holding Shift Control Plus to grow to selection just a few times. So about that much. And then you can get to your smooth tool and just gives it a light smooth. And that's it. That's the inside of the math done. We can also just come here to the lip control are adding a loop, double-click Alt S, and just scale out along the normals, just a tiny bit. And there we have to map so we can now bring back the subdivision surface modifier. And there we have it. That is how to model a character set at this point, if you guys don't have it exactly right, you can just come in here anytime you want and just make little adjustments, correct things. But really, it doesn't have to be absolutely perfect to model sheet. It's just there as a rough guides. I want you guys to keep that in mind as you're doing this tutorial. Once again, this blend file will be available, so make sure to check it out in the resources. So what we're gonna do in the next part is I'm essentially just going to show you guys how to model those legs real quick. And within that little part, we're willing to take a few minutes. I'll quickly show you guys how to add the teeth as well along with that. So I hope you guys have enjoyed this part. It's been fun. I'm looking forward to seeing you guys in the next one. 6. Model The Legs: So in the last part we finished off somewhat a modelling with the actual head slash buddy. What we're gonna do now is we're going to do the legs and they're quite simple. So let's start by adding in a Mesh primitive. So we're gonna go shift a. Let's go to Mesh options, and let's add in a cube. And we have this cubelets S to scale it down. So just hitting S and scale it down about that much. And then you can just hit G and move it to the right, the leg. In this case, it would actually be the left leg, rhonda character's perspective. But from your right on the screen. Once you've done that, control a or Command a to apply the scale for that cube. And we have an active, we're going to tab into edit mode. And the modelling here is really straightforward. So make sure proportional editing is disabled and go into wire-frame. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna select these top verts and we're going to go S and just scale them a little bit. Then just select the bottom verts and S and scale down. But we're gonna go G and just bring those down to about here. So that's roughly where our knees going to be when they're going to hit free on a number pad that go into it, right? Or for graphic view. And we're gonna go G and just move it forward. And environment, it's not quite right, but we'll get there. We're now going to select these verts at the front and at the top. Just moving forward and in select these and move them back a bit. Now we need a little bit of extra geometry, so we're gonna go control are adding the loop here, grab these verts here and hit G and moving toward, then select these ones at the back and move them forward a bits which is creating a bit of a bend. Then we're just gonna select these verts here, R to rotate. Once again, we're no rights or for graphic. And an E to extrude. Grab these verts here, G and moving forward, select these ones, G and move in here, Control R to add in a loop over here, select these verts and hit G to move them. And move these ones just there. Okay, so let's see what it looks like at the front. So now we're going to hit one to go into a frontal for graphic. Then we'll select these ones here. We're gonna go S, x and scale down when the x, we're going to move up one row. I'm going to go S, x and skeletal little bit along the X, just to create a little bit of thickness. Let's go back to my right or for graphic view and a foots, really easy. So we're gonna select the bottom verts. We're gonna go E, z and extruded down and dizzy to where the floor is. And it was simply just going to select these frontwards here or the front face. And a right view, we're just gonna go E to extrude. And we're going to move its board. And I'm going to select these top verts. Once again, we are in wireframe, we're going to go G and just move them down like so. And before we go any further, let's go to our front view by hitting one on the number pad. Select all of these bottom verts like so just these ones. And then we're going to go S, x and just scale it on the X to make it a little bit wider. We can correct a few things, but coming in here, Control R or Command R, adding a loop here at the foot. And it went to come here, Control R or Command R. And just add in a cut in the middle. And then Control R or Command R over here, adding a loop here. And then Command R or Control R and added a cut along here. Not a little thing that can do is just select these two vertices here, but holding Shift while you do it. And then we're gonna enable proportional editing s x and just scale it a little bit on the X like that. That's just going to make it look a little bit nicer. We can also select this vertex at the front here, wouldn't go S, x and just scale that in the x just a little bit. With proportional editing, say, make sure it has a little bit of influence. You can maybe select these two as well, just scale it just to round that out a bit. And then if you hit 7 or control 7 or Command seven to go to your bottom. Or for graphically, you can just select these verts like this. And in our rotate them a little bit. And then just like these middle bit verts here, and just move them out a tiny bit just to create some shape to that foot. So what we're gonna do now is we're going to hit a, just like everything. Make sure to click on the smooth tool and just lightly smooth it out, but not too much. And let's just select these top faces. Hit X and distillate spices. And then just like there's top verts and move them up a bit as to scale, just make sure to tucked up into the body there. And now let's give this a subdivision surface Modifier. Tab out into object mode, right-click and then go, shades move. And let's go, give it a mirror modifier. Click on the eyedropper and then select a body as a reference. And now we can see the legs are mirrored. So if you want it to match the reference little bit better, just go back into edit mode and just move the vertices around with the proportional editing is very simple. It's all the same techniques we've already been using. And if you feel you need a bit more geometry in certain places, feel free to add it in. But I really liked the look of this. It's cartoony. It's easy to do and it will work for what we're doing. So for now that's our legs done. And now let's quickly add in a T if they're really easy to do. So we're going to go Shift a to add in a simple cube, S to scale down, and S to scale and a Z a little bit. And we're going to get SY and flatten it on to why a little bit. Control a and apply the scale and then go G and move it up into the mouth. Country right orthographic view by hitting free and then move it forward by hitting G, R to rotate it a little bit. And you can do this however you want to. You don't have to follow the way I'm doing it, but just place it in there, our Z to rotate it, just place it right about there. Then give it a subdivision surface modifier. Haven't edit mode and then go control our double-click double G and just slide in an edge loop and do it again. Control our double-click that well, gee, light one up. And you can shape the tooth however you want. It's completely up to you, but that's how simple it is. You can also bump the levels up over here in the subdivision in. Once you back in object mode, right-click and negotiates, move it as well. You have a tooth if you want to duplicate it, instead of coming in here and giving it a mirror, what I'm gonna do, I'm just going to simply custom scale it. So I'm just going to scale it in a view port, command a or Control. I apply the scale and then I'm just gonna do it by hands. I'm looking in a mirror because I don't want it to be perfectly symmetrical. So I'm gonna go Shift D to duplicate, move on over R to rotate it. And then I'm going to go our z and rotate it on the Z a little bit and then G to move it in. So we're just placing it there and you can make these look a little bit different. You don't want them to be exactly the same. Make them a little bit unique, a little bit different. And that's really going to help with the design. So go to your right view, make sure it'll make sense. You can spend as much time as you want and don't overdo it, just for now, place it somewhere. But I'm happy with that. I think it's a nice cool design. It looks really cute. And that's pretty much the modelling for a character Don. We may add a tongue in lighter, but in the next part we're going to add in a simple little rig and it's going to be a lot of fun. I'm going to go through it step-by-step. And this rig will enable us to manipulate and animate our character. Once again, just keep in mind all of these blend files are provided into different stages in the resources section. So make sure to check that out if he gets stuck on anything. 7. Preparing The Model: So I know I said in the previous part we will do our reading next, but I thought we'll quickly just prepare the character before we actually get into the rigging stage. So that's what we're going to quickly do in this part, but just try and keep up on once again, all of the blend files are provided in the resources. So if anything is confusing, especially with the rigging, feel free to check it out and see half set things up. So what we're gonna do to make things a little bit easier for us. Our reference images, they sit in their own scene collection, so we're gonna go to that other Ref collection and just on ticket or even just click the little eye there to hide it to whichever one, as long as we don't see it in every port and it's gonna make things a little bit easier for us. We're now going to select the character itself. And what we're gonna do is we're going to apply the mirror now when we plan a mirror becomes destructive. So what I mean by that, we can no longer then go in and like extrude something and it'll happen on the other side. So once we apply that mirror, it's kind of set in stone, so to speak, and less wheat delete half the mesh and apply it again, which we don't want it there. So make sure any little corrections you want to make waves at topology now is the time to do it. So with me, I'm just going to grab the cheek here and just bring that in just a little bit. So this is completely not something you guys have to follow. I mean, at this point, you can make it however you want to. Any little details or corrections you want to make, you can do it. You don't have to follow exactly the way I'm doing it. So make it look the way you want it to look, clean things up, touch it up, look from the top, see if there's anything that looks a little bit up to you. But at this point, really, as long as it looks roughly like this, you guys are into in the right area where Thanks, You don't have to do too much more slowly as it looks like this, you're pretty cool. So what we're gonna do is we're going to tab out and we have just a body selected. We're going to go to a mirror and go to a drop down and go Apply. And now it's all one piece of geometry. What we're going to also do is we're going to come to as sub-divide and just minimize it, but we don't want to apply that. That's very important. And we have the eyes here. What we're gonna do is we're going to also just come to the jump down here and apply to mirror for that when a tab into edit mode if those eyes selected, and then we're going to select one of the eyes. So select the geometry inside. I'm going to hit P and you're gonna go separate by selection, tab, back out into object mode and make sure while you're holding shift to select both of these. So both the eyes and then type f free or hit F for you and a keyboard. And then you can type in set origin and then that origin to geometry and add an origin point for both of these are in the center. Because originally when we apply to the origin point for this was sitting over here somewhere. Okay, so now that is all done. Let's select a tape. The tape you can just holding and shifts like both of them, sort of both active, then go Control J or Command J to join them into one object. And actually just come up here to this collection and just double-click on that wall. They're active and just call it tape. And at this point you can decide if the body's select the body and instead of having a cube, let's call it body up here. And even the eyes, you can select both of them, just call them I thought l. And this one you can just call it i dot r. And you don't have to do this, but it's just good practice to be organized like that. And I want to select the legs and the legs once you're happy with them as well. So make sure any corrections you want to make before you apply the mirror that you make them now, any way you want it to look. Instead, at this point, we do it for you, apply things. Okay, so I'm happy with that. So I'm going to go to my mirror, not the sub div, and I'm going to go and apply it. And that's now one object we tab into edit mode as you can see. Okay, so one quick thing as well we're going to do. We're just gonna quickly add some placeholder materials, which is not our materials. This is simply our view port materials. We're not gonna do any sort of material editing at the moment. So just like the body and just go over to your materials tab down here, just click New. You're gonna see material, let's just call it skin. And all we're gonna do is just minimize the surface here and the settings. Just go to Viewport Display and just give it a color, any color you want. I'm just gonna go to blue, and that is simply just a viewport display. So it's good nothing to do about rendering. It's just the way you're going to see it in the viewport just makes things a little bit nicer. I'm also just going to select one of the eyes. I'm going to go New, I'm going to call it iss. And I'm gonna select the other eye. And I'm going to come here to the drop-down under the materials tab, and I'm going to select I. And under the viewport display, I'm going to give them a black color. Now bring the roughness down just a bit. Once again, it's nothing but a display color. I'm gonna select a TIF on a go, new teeth. I'm going to leave to Viewport, Display us what obviously. And then I'm going to select the legs. I'm going to go new credit any material and cold legs. And you can make it something you want. I'm just gonna go a darkish, kind of bluish purple for now and not to saturate it. And it's kinda roughly going to be the colors that we work with eventually, but it's just place holder materials for our viewport. And just with the head selected, you can also just quickly tab into edit mode. And with your vertex like option and able to select a vertex in the middle at the back there. Control plus or Command plus, and just keep doing that until you grow your selection. Select all of the inside geometry of the mouth. And while you're in edit mode, come here and click on create a new material. In coal. Click on Assign net new materials. Now SON inside the mouth. Just double-click on it and call it mouth. And then come to the viewport display and just make it a bit darker and give it some reddish color. So now everything has a place holder material and we can now get into our rigging out character is prepped. Well, you had just switch the legs as well. What you wanna do is you just want to select them and you want to hit F3 and you want to type in set origin, and you wanna go set origin to geometry. That's all we want to do there. I guess now everything is ready to go. 8. Create The Rig Part 1: So in the previous part, we did our scene preparation and now we're going to finally make our rig. So try to follow along and I hope you guys like ours. So what we're gonna do is we're going to go Shift a and we're going to add in an armature. So click on armature and make sure the armature is sitting in the middle of a character, so your origins should be in the center of your world. You can check that by going Shift S and just going cursor to rural origins. So that's sitting there in the middle is the cursor. Then with that barn active, you're going to tab into edit mode. So now you can edit the button, but go over to your bone tab by clicking the little green man. And you're gonna go to your viewport display. I'm going to change it from octahedral to be bone, which is bendy been. And in edit mode, we're just going to select this top knob up here, where do your g, z and move that down. And this bone here is going to be our root bone. So we're going to click on it and we're gonna come over here to this little bone at the bottom. And up here we're going to change the name to route. And if this route by an active, we're gonna go Shift D to duplicate and in z and we're going to restrict it to the z-axis and we're going to move it up to here. Then when it's like that top nub and we're gonna go G, z and move it down. And let's just quickly select a root bone again. We've had active when ago, Control Alt S. So Control Alt S or Command Alt S will allow you to make the bone a little bit skinnier, just helps with its display in the view port. And the same with this one, Control Alt S, and just do that, then select top nub and then you're gonna go to Extrude and in Z and just restrict it to disease. And there's an extruded all the way up to the top of the head. And then you're gonna go E one more time to extrude and hit C to restrict it to the Z and bring it up and not a little bone. Click and select that bone and then go Control Alt S and just scale it a little bit. Okay, So this bone down here at the very bottom, select that control alt S, make it a little bit bigger just so you can see the difference. And what we wanna do is we actually want to select the barn at the top. Wanna go OLTP and we want to go disconnect B9 and Alt P and clear parent. All that means is this bone is not going to be connected to the spine, nor is it going to have any parents relationships with this bone anymore. When we get into the constraints, I'll explain that a little bit more. But what we're gonna do is we're gonna select this bottom bone here. We're going to make sure under our bones tab here to come up and its environment we want to call that hip. And I'm going to click on this middle bone and we're just gonna call that the body. And I'm going to click on the top bone and we're going to call it body IK, say body IK, body and inhibit. And then this one here is our root. Now, if we quickly go over here into pose mode and we select the hip and we go G to move it, and just right-click to let go once you've done it, so it just goes back, it just moves, but this bind doesn't go along. But if we select the root binding guy J and we move it, nothing goes along with this needs to be bounded controls everything. So let's just hit Tab to go back into edit mode. And this is select the hip bone holding Shift, select the root button, control P and then go keep offsets. And now this hipbone is parented to this one which is two root barn and that has to overall control. Now later on when it comes to deforming things, we don't want this bone at the top to be deforming. And we don't want this bone at the bottom to be deforming because they are controlled bumps. We only use them to control out of bones and move them around, but they're not actually deforming the mesh of the character. So what we need to do in pose mode is make sure just like this root button and on the bones tap here, just guard down and untick to form and then select the button at the top and then untick to form for that as well. That isn't going to be deforming, but this one is going to deform. The body to hip is going to deform that these two have no deform. So let's go back into edit mode. Add in a few more bones. So let's quickly make the leg bonds. So we're gonna go Shift a and it's going to add in a whole new bunch and select that bone and move it over to the side S to scale it down, Control Alt S and just make it a bit skinnier. And then G to move it down here. But what we're gonna do is we're gonna select the top nub. I'm going to hit G and F front of you and just move that down so it's pointing down and then go to your right view and then G, move it forward. And we want that to be where our knee is going to be. And you can select the top of that bone and just place it there. Okay. So from the front we should see this and from derived, we should see that. We're now going to select the bottom nub of that. And we're going to go E to extrude and extruded down to our ankle band here. And then we're gonna go to Extrude and extruded that little nub further down into the foot and that's half foot button. Now we're going to select this knob at the back here in the middle. And we're gonna go E to extrude and in Y and restrict it to the y. And that's going to be a control bind. But what we need to do, we can just let this control button alt P and we need to go clear parent and old PE disconnect button and let's quickly name that barn. Well, we have an active, so under our buttons tab, Let's name that. What capital I, k dot capital L. Now, the naming of the foot two dot IK doesn't matter so much, but the dot capital L is extremely important. It can't be comma dot capital L, It can't be little l, it has to be exactly dot capital L because it's going to look at naming convention when we mirrored disk setup over to the other side. So what we're gonna do now is we're gonna select the foot here when you're going to call it foot dot capital L, once again makes sure it's dot capital L. Select this lower bone and this call it lower leg dot capital L. Then select this top bone over here on the leg. Let's call it upper leg dot capital L. It's very important. And then what we're gonna do, well, we have that upper leg bone selected. We're going to hold down Shift and then select the hip and we're going to go Control P, make parent, it wouldn't go keep offsets. And now this bone is parented to the hip. We're now going to take the IK bone down here, the foot IK dot capital L and holding shift we're going to select, while we have that active, select the ringbone Control P and then go keep offset. So now if we quickly go into pose mode, what we should have is this bone down here to root bone. If we click it and go, Gee, everything should move along. If we select the hip and we go, Gee, that should happen. And if we grab this, nothing's going to happen because we still need to add some constraints. So let's quickly do that. We wanted this leg to move around when we move this IK bone. And the way we do that is select the IK. And while you're holding and shift, select the lower leg bone, then you're going to go Shift Control C. So Shift Control C and you're going to go inverse kinematic. And then what you can do is you can select that layer button. And now you can go over here to your bound constraints properties and see this chain length. You can bump that to two. And all that means now is that this bone which is the foot IK bone, which has to control if we click on it and we go G to move it, It's now going to have influence of two bones up the chain. So it's going to control those two bones. Pretty cool. So by the way, if you move anything, she's hit a to select everything, then go alt Z to undo the moving old are and Alt S just in case you've rotated, scaled as well. But now let's get back to our edit mode. And inside of edit mode, what we're gonna do is we're going to select this foot. So this footer.html and holding shift, we're gonna select the foot IPA. I'm going to go Control P and when it got to keep offset. And now if we go back into pose mode and we select that foot IK and we go g. And we also rotate that foot goes along, which is really good. So just hit a to select everything, all G, hold Alt S and that sets it back. Once again, this is an IK, which is a control button. So what we wanna do is we wanna go over to our bones properties and just untick to form. So the foot that can have it to form the lower leg and upper leg, they can have two forms, but not the IK that cannot have a deformed. So each one of these bonds here should have a dot capital L extension at the back, so we can eventually mirror them over automatically to the other side. And it also has good benefits when we get into animation, which we'll touch later on. But there's just a few more bonds we're going to add in. So back in edit mode, which you can go Shift a and add an another bone, select this bone and then G to move it, move it up to the eye. And this got S and scale it down quite a bit. Zhe Xie, move it down and we just want the bottom of that bone to be in the middle of the eye. Here. Go to your right off of graphic view by hitting fray and then go, gee, why? And then move it forward. And there are other ways you can snap this precisely to the middle, but at the moment it doesn't really matter. We're not being too precise, that should be more than enough. Then go Control Alt S and just make the bone a little bit skinnier. And in fact they are and just rotate it in our right view like this. So R and rotate to top towards the front of our. And once it's almost flat, just go s, z is 0. Now flatten that for you. Then go G and then move it down to here, sort of. Nope, at the bottom, over here is in the middle. Like that. Now again, your front view in entropy, mostly in the middle, don't be too precise. And that's more than enough. So if that bone active, Let's just go to your bones. Tap, untick to form. Doesn't need to deform. And let's call that I dot capital L. And once again, the dot capital L is important. And with it still active holding Shift and select the body bone, Control P and then go keep offset. The. Now what we can do is add just one more bone that can help us later with animation. So just select this little knob in the middle of the knee. Then go to extrude in y and just extruded Ford. Select that bone and then go OK, OLTP and go disconnect been OLTP, clear parent and then go, gee, why? And just move it forward, Control Alt S and just make it a bit skinnier. And let's just call that bone. Leg are get dot capital L. And we want to come here and untick to form because it's a controlled bone. We have it active hold Shift and just select the IK bone, this 1 first, then that's one Control P and N go keep offset. So now that IK and out pose mode will control that bone. And what we can do now is we can select our lower leg bone. We can go to our constraints, and we can click on this little eyedropper, just select any bone in our rig and then just come to the bone, pull targets. It is bound on here, that's going to be a target. So just type in leg target and they can see leg target dot capital L, That's what we named it. And the role is going to be messed up because the axes are not quite right when we flip that around. So what we're gonna do is we're just gonna come to the pole angle and just set it to negative 90. And that should fix that. So you shouldn't see it bending out anywhere. So if we now select the foot IK and we go G and we move it up. Look what happens. And only can we do that, we can select this pole target and we can move that to control the swing if the knees, which gives us a lot of control, which if you've moved anything, hit a to select it all g of R or S and just set it back. So this video is getting a little bit lengthy. So what I'm gonna do, I'm probably going to break this into two parts. So in the next part, we'll continue a little bit more with the rigging and just finalize it just a little bit. 9. Create The Rig Part 2: This is now part 2 of creating our rig. So in part 1 we got a little bit lengthy, getting close to 20 minutes. So what we're gonna do now is just finalize a few things without having to rush. So back in edit mode, Let's go back into edit mode now. And in edit mode, we should now have our eyeball over here, which if you go click on a bone tab, should be called IAB dot capital L. And all of the other bones we've given the dot capital L extension. So the first name doesn't really matter as much. So foot, you can call it whatever you want, as long as you know what you're talking about. But the main thing is that any of the bones that are going to be mirrored. So that does not include the middle bonds because they're in the middle. They don't need to be mirrored, right? But anything that is this side of the x-axis needs to be mirrored onto the negative side of the x axis. So what we need to do is just make sure all of these bones have that dot capital L extension. That's really important. Then once that's done, you're gonna just like those bones. And you can now go to armature up here. And you can go to symmetrized. Now it's automatically created all those bones over on the other side, and they should all be automatically named dot capital R. So it's done that automatically. So if this bone was called upper leg dot capital L is automatically named that exact same thing. Well, if that dot capital R, If any of these bones are missing, it means you didn't name something correctly. So make sure to do that. Once again, check out my example files of anything is tricky. So what we're gonna do is quickly go into pose mode, and let's quickly test a few things. So if we grab our hip, here we go, gee, we should see it bending like that, which is correct. And now if we select this button at the top, we're not gonna see anything happen. So we need to add a constraint to debt as well. So what we'll do is we'll select this top bone, which is a control bone. Once again, click on this little bones tab you should have deform on ticked. So if it act if you're gonna hold down shift and select the body bone, Control Shift and see. So Control Shift C. And then we're going to make that a stretch too. So if we now select that controlled bone at the top, which is a body IK, and we go G and pose mode. We should see that happen if we select the hip, we're going to see that happens, but we don't want it to be exactly like that. So this is tab back into edit mode. Select this bone at the top, which is our body IK holding Shift, select the hip and then go Control P or Command P and then keep offsets who have now parented to disband. So now we have a hierarchical system. So if we go to pose mode, This is our root bone which we selected and we go, Jay should move everything. This is a hipbone. When we move it should only bend out legs and the rest of the body. So you can see what goes along. That's correct. And this, these bonds here are our IK bones for the foot. So we should be able to select them and go G and move him R to rotate the foot. And we should also just be able to select these target bonds and rotate the role of the knees, which is really important when we're doing animation. So that's pretty much as you can see. We now have a powerful little rig, hit a to select everything, all the G, Alt, R, or S. And by the way, you can only post things in pose mode. You can't do that in edit mode and then go old, old, old S. Okay, so just keep that in mind. So let's go back to pose mode. All of this is now calls. Let's do a little bit of parenting. In fact, that's what we're gonna do in the next video. We're going to actually get into white painting and parenting. We're going to add our character and all the different components to our reg. And that's pretty cool because that's when you can actually start controlling and animating your character. 10. Weights: Okay, So in the last part, we finished off our rig and now we're gonna get into parenting our character to the rig and doing some white adjustments. So what we're gonna do is we're going to actually start with the body itself. So select the body of our character. And you can see here some of the things we've already named and some of the previous parts. But what we're gonna do is we're gonna make sure to select a buddy and with it active and just in case you haven't done it already. In the previous part, we applied some of the modifiers, like the mirror modifier we applied to make it all one object. So once you've done that, what you're gonna do with the body, you're going to hold, shift after you've selected the body and select the armature. So you can see the armature is also now selected or active. And with that done, you're going to go Control P and you're going to go down to this option here. And that is called with automatic whites. So it'll automatically add a value to this geometry based on bread of bones a placed and it'll automatically add into different barn groups. So just go ahead and click Automatic whites and I'll quickly explain that a little bit more. So if you now select the rig first and then holding shifts like the character or the body in this case. And you go to your object mode here and you change it to white paint, what you can do is you can hold in control or command and then left-click on a bone. So let's click on the body bone here. What you're seeing now here is called whites. So essentially the warmer colors or more it is towards red on the color scale, it is going to have more influence. In other words, the bone is going to control it more and then where it starts getting yellower or green or a little bit orange, that's kind of in the middle. And as it starts getting to the lighter values, like light green or blue or even dark blue. It has little to no influence at all. So if I now holding Control and just select the top control bone, in this case you're not gonna see anything. It's just blank because that's one. Remember we turned off deformation and that's the reason because that's just a control bind to tell the body burn what to do. But if we hold down control and left-click on that bone and we hit G. You can see here what I mean, see the influence there. It's only influencing the tuple lot but barely the bottom. Now that could maybe be what you want. So in this case, if we hit G to move it, you can see it kind of looks okay, and that's a little bit cartoony, can give a little bit of squash and stretch. But if you want it to have more influence was bottom here, hold on, Control. Left-click on this bone here. And then you can just simply go up here to your brush, make sure it's active. Make sure to set it to add over here and you can hit F and that'll grow to brush. And simply hitting Shift F will allow you to adjust to strength. So Shift F and then move your mouse, because let's make it about point free and make it a little bit bigger. So f, just acquire it. And before you start painting, just come over here to this option called x symmetry. So now if I move that burn active, I paint on the side here a little bit. You can see it does it on the other side as well, so we don't have to do twice the amount of work. So what I'm gonna do, I'm just going slightly paint just a little bit more at the top here just to give it a bit more value. In fact, Shift F and just decrease the strength even more. Let's make it 0.1, just so we have just a slight bit of influence. Okay, so I've made beaches and around the cheeks here instead of the mouth. We can always adjust it later, but now, hold on Control and then left-click on the top button, hit G. And now you can see it has a bit more influenced towards the middle. Let's quickly do a few more things. I'm going to go back up here into object mode. And what we're gonna do, it quickly select our legs. So left-click on the legs and they're, they're on separate objects. And then we have them act of holding Shift and select the armature control P again and once again, I'm going to go with automatic whites. And now if we select the armature, then holding Shift, select the leg. So armature first holding Shift and the leg, go back up here to object mode and then change it to white paint. And now what you can do is just hit Z going to wireframe. And you can actually see the bonds at the moment. But if you, you can't actually enabled them to see them with the x-rays. Let's just going to go back into object mode. If that bothers you, you can just simply select the armature. And you can just go here to the armature properties here, and you can go under the viewport display and just go in front and you should see the bones for like an x-ray. So now select the armature again holding Shift and select the legs. And let's just go back into white paint. And let's holding Control and select the foot. The foot over here to the left foot, I believe. So you can see here footer.html is selected. And make sure you have your brush here. Make sure you have to add brush like before. And what you can do here, if you see this, it's not looking quite right. You can paint in a little bit more value. At the moment it looks kind of a keto diet is, but just check the outer side as well. So holding control and left-click on the other side. And you can see that looks about right as well. You can also enable x mirror for this just to make sure as you're painting it copies over to the other side, but I'm going to hold down control and select the lower leg bone, see what that looks like. And it seems to be doing a pretty good job with that as well as have a look at that. Once I'm holding a control selecting the top leg, you can hit Z and then go into wire-frame if that helps. So everything looks like it's automatically right at quite well. So let's hold down control and just select the IK here. And once again, you're not gonna see anything. It just turns pink because it has no influence. We turned off deformation because that was a controller. So if you now hit G and you move it, you can see that this happens. Pretty cool. I got at the moment, obviously there's some issues going on here. Something is having too much influence here, which is probably the upper bone for the legs. So to fix that, we need to go back into object and then select the reg again holding Shift, select a body and this go back into white paint. And then let's just holding Control and select the upper leg bone. And you can see that's the thing that's causing a problem. So what we're gonna do is we're just gonna go over here to our subtract. So go to the brush, change it to subtract, and then you can just paint it away. So just get rid of it and make it dark blue. So I wanted to just get rid of all of those values and make sure that bone at the top has no influence. And because we have x mirrored and able, enabled, if we hold in control command and we click on the other side, the top leg bone. We can see that that has no influence as well. So now if we hold down control and select Auto one of these foot IN case and we go G to move it. We shouldn't see the body moving around like that. Okay, So that should be the correct way. And let's hold the Control and select the hip and then go G and move it down. That's pretty cool. So you guys can now see what's happening here. So let's make the eyes work along with this as well. We're just going to go into object mode again. Analysts select the eye and remember from the earlier part we made the eyes their own objects after we applied it to mirror. So let's select the first II, which is the left eye holding and shift select the armature. And then let's go in to pose mode. And then what we're gonna do is you're going to left-click on that I barn dot L and we're gonna go Control P. And this time we're not going to go with automatic whites, we're just gonna go barn. So it's just directly parented to that Boehner. Now let's get back into object mode and do the same thing with the otherwise the resistive, right? I holding Shift and select your armature, go up here into pose mode and then left-click on that i, and now go Control P and then go barn. So now if we click on this top controller and go, Gee, look at as we get out, scratch, squash and stretch with our eyes. I also follow along. We could also just click on this I bones and move the eyes a little bit or double-tap R to rotate if we needed to. But you guys get the idea. So that's a very simple little rig to, especially for beginners. And all we have to do now is just go back into object mode and just select your teeth. So I click on the teeth and then holding Shift, select your armature current into pose mode and then click on the body bone and go Control P. And then with bone as well. Now, fix select the top controller and you go G to move it. You can see the teeth go along. And in fact, if we now select our root button down here, when you hit G to move it, everything should go along. The hip, should take everything on the body down of it. And you can see how that's all working. Pretty cool. Ha, and that's pretty much it. I mean, we could do some refinement, but this is pretty much a little character rick done. And we've got the majority of how white painting out of the way. So if we need to do a little bit of refinement, we will, but this is pretty much the white painting done. So what we're gonna do in the next part is we're going to actually get in to some shape case. So we can make the eyes to blink and maybe even close the mouth, which can be really handy when we're doing animation. And it gives us a way to kind of express emotion a little bit. And it adds a little bit more life to our character. 11. Shapekeys: So in the previous part, we finished off our white painting and parenting owl character to the RIG. We're not going to get into our Shape Keys and they're really simple. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna go back into object mode mixture. We're in object mode. And so far I've been teaching you guys to keep an organized workspace. So since we are going to be working directly with the regular, select it and make it active. And we're going to hit M on your keyboard, so the M key, and I'm going to click on New Collection. And let's type in REG, endless go. Okay, and we should now see over here in our scene collections a new collection called Rake. You can right-click on it if you wish, and you can change the color to whatever reason if you felt like it. Let's go with purple and then you can just on ticket, you don't have to see if we want to bring your rig back, just go ahead and bring it back. We haven't deleted it. It's just on another layer, if you will. Okay, so we have our character active here. We're gonna select the character because that's the thing that is going to have the shape keys, in this case a blink. And we're gonna go over to this panel here. So just square root vertex groups it, this is our object data property, but the thing we're interested in is this thing here called the Shape case. I'm going to real quickly explain that just in case you don't understand. So when you click the plus here, it's going to add what you call a basis to this mesh. And essentially that is just a version of this. So the thing of shape keys, it's not modeling in the sense of creating new topology were not extruding or adding edges of points or decimating the mesh. We're just taking the pre-existing mesh and we're saying we're adding a shape key and it's going to exist in this state. So all of these vertices on the basis are going to be existing in 3D space exactly where they are now over here. So if we now click on the plus, that creates our first shape k. So if we now take that shape key and make it active and we tab into edit mode. And this is, for example, just turn off as a start the X-Men or we don't want X-Men because any move we make here, we don't want it to happen on the other side. So it's going to undo that. Okay, So you should only be seeing that's if you move avert here, nothing should be moving there. So for example, I'll quickly explain it. If i now in this key one, move, this vert, and I'm just demonstrating here, you guys don't have to follow along. And if I happen to object mode, and I select this key one, and I grab this value and I drag it. Look what happens. So it's now differentiating between our basis, which is just 1 and the key one. So what we don't want to do when we make Shape Keys is extrude anything, right? We don't wanna do that. We don't want to add in any new topology like loops. We only manipulate existing topology in 3D space. So that is some of the key principles here. So I'm just gonna get rid of that key one by undoing it, I'm gonna go minus over there and let's create a fresh shape k. So we've got a K1 and now that key one active tab into edit mode, make sure x mirrors off. And then what you're gonna do is you're gonna click on proportional editing. It's going to be handy here. And you just select this top vertex on the island and holding and ships like the bottom one. And then we're gonna do is you're gonna go s, z to scale down on the z. And what you can do is going to roll your middle mouse button and you don't want too much fall off, or you also don't want too little amount of fall off. So just about that much of rolling a middle mouse button for the proportional fall off s, z, so SC and just shrink it down like that. Then got your right buh-bye. Thank free on your number pad. And those verts still active and you're gonna go G and just move them forward a bit. And in any vertices that are stuck in the eye, you just can select them individually. An easy way to see them as just to go to your modifiers and just for now, just hide the subdivision surface modifier if that helps, by clicking on that little window. And then you're gonna go G and just move any verts out of the way that are embedded into the eye. So this is going to be a little bit different for you depending on how exactly you modeled. But it's just the same principle. Just bent all of these together and just make it look essentially just model an islet in a closed position, if that makes sense. So I'm just gonna close this now and we're gonna do this very feminist because I'm just doing it the Torah, but I would encourage you guys to spend as much time as you want getting it exactly the way that works for you. That once you like it, you can just enable the little window there again on the subdivision. And now we're just going to simply tap out. And let's go back to Object Data Properties. And now we've got this Q1, which we just edited. So if you grab that value and you slide it, we've got a blink. How cute is that? So drag it down to 0, double-click on it and it's just called a blink. Dot L. It doesn't have to be capital L. It's not case sensitive in this case. But what we are gonna do is we're gonna take that blink 10, so we don't have to do it again on the other side. We're simply just going to take that value and drag it all the way up one, come to this little drop-down here and we're gonna go new shape from mix. And it's just key to now active. We're gonna click on the little drop down again and we're going to go mirror shaped key topology. And once you've done that, if you now grab the C02 and you drag that value, it happens on the other side. Now that's only going to happen assuming that both sides are topologically even. And because we use a modifier, that is the case. So we use the mirror modifier and then applied it. So now we can double-click on this one and just call it Blinkx dot R because that's the right side. Okay. So I called it clink. I wish I knew how to spell. I'm gonna go blink. There we go. And now we have the left and the right. And if you want to undo them, don't click Minus or you have to do is either click on them and just drag back. Or you can just come to this little cross down here and it'll just reset everything, but don't confuse it with these ones here. So now we have a way to blink our eyes and animate them later on if we want to. So let's say you wanna do to mouth, it's the exact same thing. Click on the little plus keyframe. Let's just call it mouth. And let's tab into edit mode of that new shape key. And let's do the same thing. So Shift Alt, click on an edge here on the mouth. And in this case we will enable x mirror because we want it to be even on both sides. And we're gonna go s, z. We have proportional editing enabled and we're just going to scale that down and roll and middle mouse button to control the full off, but we don't want it affecting the eyelids. So just about that much. Then select these verts here, g, z and just bring them down little bit. And just close the mouth. So this is kind of something you guys can definitely figure it out yourself. You don't have to do it step for step where I'm doing it. Just closed a mouth in a way that you like. If you don't want it to be mirrored, you can do maybe a smile on one side of a frown on the other side. And be as creative as you want to create as many different kinds of mouth shapes and emotions as you want. But I'm just showing you guys the general principle. And the sky really is the limit. You guys can make it as unique, as interesting and to your design idea as you wish. So I'm just gonna make it like that. Now I'm going to tab back out to object mode. And now I have a control here called mouth that I can do so I can close and open the mouth and I can blink the eyes. And that is how you can very easily create these sort of things or emotions for your characters. So that's shape keys out of the way. Definitely not as hard as you guys might afford, it would be. So what we're gonna do in the next part is we're probably going to get into some basic materials and a for systems to give them some hair. And then we'll probably get into the fun stuff like sitting up a stage and some lighting. And I think we might finish off with the animation as the last video and even render out a little animation. So looking really forward to that, and I'm glad you guys have followed along so far. 12. Materials: So in the previous part, we created our Shape Keys and we're now going to quickly just add a few basic materials to our character. Now, in the earlier parts of this course, we created some placeholder materials. And these are the ones you see here that a blue to black. So those are nothing more than placeholder materials. Say if we actually were to render this, you wouldn't see anything. It just blank white because we didn't actually create the materials, we didn't set them up. So what we're gonna do now is we're gonna go and select the body. And to be able to see our materials a little bit, we're just going to quickly add in a lot and set up our render or even her later on we'll do lighting and staging as a separate video, but just real quick, just so we can see 4-bit, we do have a life here in a scene. You can just delete that just quickly go to your render setting first. So go to your Render Settings and we're just going to change the render engine two cycles. Yeah, you can't work in EV if you want. But cycles is just a better way to go for the, for this particular project. We're gonna go to the device. If you have a GPU, I'd recommend you enable it. If you have a CPU, it'll take a little bit longer to render, but it's fine. You can still do that. So I'm just gonna go if GPU, since I have one. And under the sampling, if you go and enable adaptive sampling and you can, that'll, that'll help lot and other denoising you can enable denoising if you wish to and changed to optics of that's available. But don't worry too much about that. I'm going to go Shift a and just temporarily add in a quick airline. Once again, this is not our lighting part of this tutorial, so just rotate it G to move it and got your light settings here and just give us strength of a 90. Like I said, I'm not even it's just so we can see it. So now we're going to hit Z and we're gonna go rendered. So hit C and incur rendered and you shouldn't Halsey you a character. Okay, so we're not too worried about the lighting. Just going to go written down to our shading workspace up here. Make sure to hit Z again, go rendered. We just want to see our character and then get you a little materials tab here. And now we're just going to add something to this place holder materials. So the first one is skin, which you've already had it. And let's go for blue. I'm going to make that a bluish color and that's all you have to do really foot out. But what I like to do, because later on it's going to make things look a little bit. When we add our hair is I'm going to add a generator like a noise texture. So I'm going to shift a click on the search bar here and n-type noise and just get a noise texture. And they can take the color and just place it into the base color of your principled shader. Now, I'm not quite happy with the colors that it has by default. So I'm just going to take the noise, move it over a bit, and I'm gonna go Shift a, and I click on Search, and I'm just going to type in color and then click on a color ramp and in place it on this cable. And now if we take these two values, sliders where drag them in and we get more contrast. So you can click on the white one and then click on a bar down here and change it into a blue, and click on this bottom one and then change that one into a blue. So changed the values and you don't have to use the same colors as me. Just what I personally choose to use. It's now the skin looks a little bit more interesting. I'm just going to take the roughness and drag it up just a little bit so it's not as reflective. And that's all I wanted to do there. And we're not going to click on the mouth material. And this is simply make that red and bring that value down a bit. You guys can go for whatever you want. Just honestly, the inside the math doesn't matter as much just to get something that you feel works with your color palette, then select the teeth and we credit a place holder material earlier. We're going to leave it as white but just make it a little bit off, just a little bit yellowish. And then bring that roughness standards to make them a bit more reflective, to give the idea of wetness, then select legs and they have their place on the material. And if these, I just like drawing with a darker kind of color, I'm, it can be something more into brown, maybe even a darker purple. Whatever you feel works. There is no right or wrong. But I would definitely recommend making them a bit darker. It's really just helps with the feel of the character gets a bit of contrast to the body and the legs. And then lastly, just select the eyes and we already gave them a place holder material earlier. So we're just gonna make them completely black. And we're going to bring out roughness almost all the way down. And reflective, the reflective property of eyes or is really important because it gives them an idea of being alive. If we make those really rough, this just a dead feeling and kind of glossed over. So that's very important. It's not just for 3D. And 2D artist will tell you about reflections and the eyes. There are actually a very important design choice when it comes to making a character and making it feel alive and relatable to the audience. So there's awesome simple color ideas, There's some simple materials, and we're in cycles now. So if you don't want to see it like this, just hit Z. You can also go to material viewport here to down here. It's not going to look quite as nice, but it gives you an idea as well. If you're getting a bit of lag rift are rendered, That's one option, but I'm just going to hit Z and go into solid. So that's a materials go ahead to make sure to save as you go and go back to the land over here. And in next part we're going to add some real simple hair or fur, if you will, to the character. That is something you can skip. It's not, it's optional. You don't have to have it to go on to the animation in something like that. And it is going to be a little bit more processor intensive with your rendering. But I definitely recommend you watch it anyway and learn about particles and how simple it is to add some for your character. So that's the next part. 13. Hair: So previously and a part prior to this, we created some quick materials, very simple ones. But the thing that's really going to make this stand out is the hair particles. So that's really simple to place. We want to apply them obviously is the body, not the wrist. So just select the body mesh and simply go over to this property here, that is where our particles lives. So just click on that and simply click Plus with the character active. And now you have a particle system. Now by default, it's an emitter. So if you hit the spacebar, had animation, you can see that, which is pretty cool. And there has deaf, There's definitely applications for that. But the thing we want with particles is just a hair distribution. Now, just in case you were doing this with the mirror modifier because you can still have a technically when you're doing the rigging, you can go to source and just use, click on Use modifier stack. But in this case, we're not too worried about that. So what we're gonna do here is when it comes to this thing here called the number. Now, I need to tell you if you're new to particle so quickly explain this. This number up here under the emission is not the amount of hair status, just what we call the parent particle. And essentially that means that for each one of those, so there's one hundred, ten hundred parents. Each one will generate a certain amount of children, which we can specify. And the reason for that is instead of having to edit, for example, like a million hairs, which can be really hard. You might only have to edit a thousand hairs that each have one hundred, ten hundred children. And so that is why to parent to child relationship is very important with particles. So what we're gonna do if disk, in this case, it's just set it way down to 300. And we're all going to come here to the length and all meters is crazy. So let's make it 0.1 as a start. And we can always adjust it later, but 0.1.2 is appropriate in this case. And what we're also going to do is we're gonna go down now to our children. So that's the children. These are referencing the parents. And we're gonna make it interpolate it. And I can say each one of those is generating a whole bunch of children. And over here, under the children you're going to see display amount. So to display amount is ten. So currently for each of the 300 children, each one has 10 children generated, which means we have a total of 40 thousand hairs at the moment to render amount That's the mantle actually render in a final render. So that will be 30000 and each of those free, a 100 will be making a 100. So what we're gonna do is leave the render amount where it is for now, but we're gonna take to display amount and take it up to 40. If you start experiencing lag when you do this, please make sure to bring HDR display amount down. So you get a better view port performance. But I'm going to set it to 30 and I think that works quite well. Now one of the first things you're gonna notice before you even get into making the hair look cool. The first Michigan notice it's a problem, is that the hair is distributed everywhere within the eyelids, inside the mouth. So we need to create a group for that to tell it where it's going to be applied in a simple way to do that, if it's a character active is to go to our object data properties. And at the moment, you can see here under our vertex groups, we have quite a lot of groups here because that is what the bone system is using. Say don't want to tamper with that or delete it. But what you can do is you can hit the plus here and create a new group and just call it hair, even call it hair distribution, hair density, whatever you can even just leave it as group. The naming is not important, but I do encourage organization. And then what you're gonna do, you're gonna go back to your particles and you're just going to scroll down under the particle settings to the vertex groups. And then under density, you can click here and just make sure to choose hair if you choose any of the others, it's going to look weird. So just make sure to choose hair like that. And at the moment, you're not gonna see anything because we haven't told that group which verts to use. So just go back to your object data properties. Make sure to scroll back up to your vertex groups over here and click on hair and then simply tab into edit mode. You can also go in to your white painting mode and do it that way. I wouldn't recommend that it's unnecessary to just go into edit mode and then hit a to select everything and also make sure to scroll down and select the basis. Because at the moment we're just seeing it in the mouth. Key shapes and click on the basis. So that's the original. And then we're gonna do is we're going to scroll up to our hair and the vertexes that are active, we're just going to hit Assign. So now if we go Alt a to deselect over here in the viewport and we click on that hair. When we go Select, you can see it selects everything, but that's a problem. We don't want everything to be selected. So what we're gonna do is we're going to de-select, and then we're going to click on a vertex and the back of the mouth and go Control plus or Command plus. And you should grow dot selection. So however you do it, just make sure it is to select all of the, sorry, geometry, the geometry in side of the character's mouth. And then click on that hair system and then go remove. So now and those are no longer part of that group. And you can do the same thing with the eyes. So de-select that and then go Shift Alt. In fact hit Z and go wireframe and then go Shift Alt and then click on an edge at the back of the eye here to loop select it, and then scroll over to this side as well. Shift Alt again, left-click there to loops like that, then go Control Plus and just grow to selection. So whatever you now have selected, if you go over here to the hair group, just hit Remove and then the select everything. Now if you click on, you have that group active and you click select, you should see only the things that are going to have to hares distributed on them are going to have the active display there so you can see anything that's orange here is active. Anything that's not, is not going to be active or have hair. So now if we go back into object mode, look at, at under particles again, if we go up there, roll down, scroll down of emails, go to Act 2. Vertex groups. You can see here it's using that. So you can also flip it the other way around. But it's not need to do that. It's kinda looks weird. So that's it. So now we have that sorted and that's kind of a tricky part. The rest is just going back to our hair settings and going back to our children. And we can now come over here to these things like the roughness, for example. And under roughness we can randomize. So we can go to Uniform and we can on uniform or can drag that up a little bit. We could also go to size and that's gonna make the size a little bit random. So play around with that. You don't have to do any sort of settings like me, just try some stuff that works for you. You can go to endpoint a little bit that gives you some randomness and shape. Okay? But another thing that's gonna make the hair look a bit nicer if you go up to render, you can go over here to B-spline. And then if you set these steps up, it's essentially just going to give the hairs more segments and it's gonna make it look a little bit nicer. You can also just go to your viewport display here and make sure under the strand steps you can bump that up as well. So it looks nicer in the viewport. Keep in mind that is coming at a cost of view port performance. So I wouldn't recommend going over free or four. So now if we scroll down again, all of these settings here is what's going to make your hair look the way you want. It's, for example, the clumping allows you to clump so the hairs kind of stick to each other a little bit. And the shape here as well makes them stick together a little bit. But the randomness scales here as well. You can mess around with them. All those sort of things just gives you more control of your character. But you can also just scroll up to your emission again. And then you can go to the hair length if you feel things are a little bit too long our role and just bring that down. But yeah, that's pretty much it. Let's quickly hit Z and then go rendered and see what it looks like. It looks absolutely dreadful because we need to actually control the thickness of the hair. So that's really simple. Simply just scroll down to the hair shape under the particles. And then you can come here to the root diameter at the moment it's set to one meter which has crises. Let's make the point 1 and the end value. We can make it 0.01, like that. Now the hairs are a lot finer. Obviously we're not seeing them as much because if you think about it, There's not a lot of them. We obviously have to scroll back up to our children and under the viewport display bump that up to something crazy to see it in the viewport, which is a little bit render intensive, and we don't really want to do that at the moment. So just leave your viewport display at 30. But you can also set your render amounts to something like 150. So it'll render a lot denser. But there's one more thing you can do. This can really make this look cool, and that is to comb your hair. Just like you do in real life. You can comb the hair of the character. So with the character active, just make sure to save as you go. Particles tend to be the finger can crash blender and then go over here to your object. And this time we're going to go to something called particle edit. And that's really fun. If you want to see you, uh, hairs and not just the parents, you can hit M to bring up your properties panel. And I believe you can go to View actually tools. If you go to Tools, you can go to Option. And in under the Options here you can go to under the viewport display abled children, and you should now see the children. So now if you go to your comb over here and you hit F, You can grow to brush Shift. F also controls the strength. And now you can just comb your hair's. So comb, comb, I'm just left clicking and combing, just like he can do sculpting or editing or painting, is the exact same thing with the hair. So you can just come in here and comb your hair. So this is something that I don't really have to spend a lot of time showing you guys. It's pretty straightforward. I mean, you guys can come up with whatever style you like. Whatever you feel works for your design. And yeah, it's really fun actually, this is what's also known in the industry as grooming because you're dreaming to character, but that is one cool way to do it. And this is quickly go back into object mode. And I feel like it's a bit sparse here around the lips. So I'm going to tab into edit mode real quick. Shift alt. Left-click on this edge here to ellipse like that around the mouth. Object data properties, backup to the vertex groups. I'm going to click on hair and just assign that. So we get a bit more density with the hairs there. But that's pretty much it if we now hit Z and we got rendered, I could add, let's quickly actually give a test render. So we should have a camera and the scene. So hit 0, they are going to camera view and move your camera by hitting G and then G middle mouse button to zoom in. Doesn't really matter. Just a quick tests and pseudo go render an image and just see what it looks like. And here you can see it's already rendering quite quickly. And it's a little bit noisy because it's still rendering, but you kind of get the idea. So a 150 here as probably not enough. So I'm just gonna quickly cancel that by hitting Escape. And let's just go over to our particles again. And what I'm gonna do is I'm actually going to take this amount and bump it up to free a 100. And I'm also just going to go to the hair shape. So I'm going to scroll down to the hair shape and I'm going to make it point to on the root diameter. And now I'm gonna give that a quick render. Make sure to save before you do any sort of rendering. So just save and then go render, render and see what it looks like. And already that is looking quite cool. We have a nice fluffy character here. Now, obviously we haven't done too much with the lighting and the staging site. You know, it's going to look a lot better eventually when we have some rim lighting and stuff. But you guys can see this is already looking really cool. So you now have a cool animatable character with VR and materials. So what we're going to be doing in the next part is we're gonna create a nice stage with some proper lighting. And then we can pretty much get into a little animation and wrap this whole thing up. It's going to be really fun. Once again, all of the blend file and the stages are included in the resources folder. So make sure to get a look at that. If you guys get stuck on anything. 14. Lights & Stage: Okay, so in the previous part, we finished off our hair. So we're gonna do now is we're just going to add some stage. So by what I mean by stage is like just a backdrop or something like that and then some nicer lighting. Now we did add in a temporary line just so when we're doing our materials and hair. So you can just select that and just delete it by hitting X and delete. So let's add in our stage, we're going to go Shift a really good at mesh options, add in a plane, and I'm going to go S to scale a plane up. About that much doesn't have to be any specific amount, but just roughly that big Control a or Command a and make sure it apply to scale when we scale in the viewport. But I'm going to hit Tab to go into edit mode. And you can disable proportional editing at this point. And then you'd go to your edge select option. And just like the back edge over here. And you can go to Extrude and in z and restrict it to disease. I can extrude it up and in g, y and move it back a bit. You can ask select this edge over here. And there's a nice key can press called controlled BY. So Control D or Command B will get you to bevel option and you can move the mouse and rolled and middle mouse button to add in segments. And let's make about that much. Hit eight is like everything, S, x and skeletal and exhibit. And then tap back into object mode, right-click and shades move. And that's your plane. That's all there is to it. That's pretty much the stage. Now, what's the camera here? Let's add in a new one. So I'm just gonna select the camera, hit X and a late. And let's go to our front orthographic view by hitting one on down number pad. And we're going to go Shift a. We're going to go to camera options, adding a camera g, y and move it back and then g, z and move it up. Now let's go over to our camera settings. I like to make the focal length quite high, so 130 in this case, let's go to our Output Settings and I'm going to go with a square resolution. So I'm going to do 1080 at the top. And I'm going to leave the y as 1080 under the dimensions, were working at 24 frames a second. And that's how many frames we're working with, 250, we may change that later on, but as long as we have just a camera setup like that, the camera active, he can hit 0 to kind of camera view. And if you feel like you're too close in, what you can do is watch the cameras still active and it should be active. You can hit G middle mouse button, just click it once and then move your mouse to zoom out. Or you can just, you know, select the camera had g, y and move it. That's why so whichever one you prefer and whichever is easier for you, but just select the camera and move it down as well. We just want something that looks like this now you don't have to follow my posing with the camera. You can do whatever you want. So try out different creative things. But what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go over to my pivot, pivot transforms, and you can do this to set it to 3D cursor, make sure that cameras still active and as long as you're free to cursor is in the center there, you can go our Z and just rotate around that pivot. So that'll be really handy for rotating around a character. So I'm gonna go something like that. Just a nice side view looks really cool. And then I'm going to change that to transform pivot back to median point. I said that's just while we were attending a campus. Now if we hit our, It's not going to rotate around that but just around the camera. So now we have a stage, we have a camera, a nice pose. We can also, while we're in a camera view, hit Control B. And Control B will allow you to click and drag it when you're in your camera view to make a border. So Control be in your camera view allows you to make a border. So when you hit Z and then go rendered, it just restricts the rendering to the viewport, which is optional, but it's something I prefer to do. So now that we're in rendered mode, so z rendered, we can't see anything because we need to add some lights. And so we're gonna go Shift a and just cut our lights at an area light g, z and move this one up because your light settings and make the power 120, and let's make the size two meters. The bigger you make that size, the software, the lighting, just keep that in mind. So we're gonna go G, Z and just move it up a bit higher so that we get some lighting from the top. We're also going to go to our front view by hitting one that every life active we're going to go Shift D to duplicate and move it over to the side, R to rotate it in and then hit seven to go to a top view and in R to rotate in towards the stage. And I'm just gonna move it forward in the scene a bit more almost towards camera. And now we have some nice lighting from the side. But what I like to do is I'd like to add some rim lighting in the back just to make the character pop so it doesn't stand filling of blends into the background. It gives us a nice visual depth. A simple way to do that is with some point lights, I go shift a cardio light options add in the point lot that point lie to you. You can go G and just move it over to decide, let's give that a strength of 50 and let's increase that radius a little bit. So if you now hit Z and the care rendered with this one, we want to just move it just to the side of the character, but almost back from the camera's perspective. So just about there and just move it up a bit. So what you should see as kind of lights as a rim light catching the side there. And you can just Shift D to duplicate it. And just duplicate and maybe two more. And what we're trying to do is just break that blending there. We don't want it to blend into the background. You can select these lights and up the strength if you need to. But don't overdo it with the rim lights. Just keep it nice and basic. And it's just a really good way to make your character break from the background. So, yeah, so I'm just duplicating a few and that's what EPA just duplicating them. And now that looks really cool. What we're gonna do now is we're just going to select out stage, which we haven't given them materials. We're just going to quickly go to Materials tab with that stage active, Let's just click on New and there's no need to go into the shading workspace will quickly just come over here and just work with the base color. Let's make that orange. I just feel like orange is a very good compliment, complementary color to blue. I may change that later for the thumbnail, but I just feel like something like this works. Okay, so maybe that's sort of orange. And you can go to your world settings and you can get to the color and just take that value and drag it up to make your world a little bit brighter. Alternatively, you can click on the little color tab here and your world settings and give it the built-in sky texture. And it just come to the strength and bump the way down to something like point free. So it's not too intense. Maybe even 0.2. Okay? And that's how I like to set up my lighting. Now. While we're going to do is maybe just grab the every light here and just go and go to the light settings, bring the size down just a bit, and just bump that strength up a little bit. Make it a little bit sharper. K. And let's just select somebody's bottom line. So I'm just gonna move up a little bit. I don't feel like they need to be that low. So this is one of those things where It's really up to you to mess around with it a little bit. But I'm, I'm just trying to make my character really pop from the background that we will see it better when the final render. But we have to defeat here I feel like they're not blending in very well to bottom. So I'm just going to select the legs tap in here. And what you can do is just select all of these bottom verts on the fate and make sure that you just de-select these middle ones here, like Udacity, these birds on the edge of the feet and you can go Shift a and then just create a bevel, just sharpen them up, and that'll just make them a little bit flatter. That's not something you have to do. That's just my personal choice there. And I think that just looks a little bit better there. So that is S stage. Let's quickly give that a test render. So make sure to save and let's go render, render. And this is not a final rendering, but just singing what a stage looks like. And already you can see this is looking a lot better. It's looking on the lighting is lot better and a character really compliments the background, LFTR orange. So what we're gonna do in the next part is just a little bit of animation with a simple walk cycle. And then the last video after That's just going to be us just fine tuning things a little bit and then doing a final render for this animation. So I'll see you guys in the next part. 15. Animation: Now that our staging is out of the way in this part, we're going to get in to doing our little animation. It's going to be a simple walking animation. So what we're gonna do is also making it a Looper bull. So you could technically looped little video and it should all be seamless. Another thing ultimately mentioned, I'm not gonna be getting into any of the advanced principles of animation, would it be keeping this as simple as possible? So just a walk animation. So not any anticipation or exaggeration, just very, very simple, which is really all you need for this sort of beginner thing at characters. This is not like I said, an absolute beginners tutorial, but more of a beginner. Two characters for those who already know a thing or two about blenders are just trying to follow along with the animation. It's not too hard. And once again, the blend files are provided to guess, boys checkout how I've set things up. So let's jump right into it. The first thing I'm going to do, and I always encouraged this is to just organize the same. You can see we've added a lot of things during the last few sessions, so I'll just clean things up a little bit. So we're going to select the backdrop and the lights. And you can hold down shift and click on multiple objects. We're just selecting all of the stage objects like the light camera, background, that sort of things. And then once we have them active, we're going to hit M on my keyboard, create a new collection, and let's just call it stage. And then click, Okay, and now everything is in a stage collections, so just come up here to the scene collections, just minimize it. And then you can hide it if you need to. So now it's nice and organized and we're going to bring back our collection from earlier, which is our rig. So this is take the rig and you can actually left-click on it and just drag it above the reference if you want. Don't have to. I just like to organize it like that. So we have our collection here with the character. And in our rig over here, which we will now bring back by clicking the tick. And then we have our reference, which we had from the very first one. And then it's obviously our stage which we can pump. And so just having that ability to bring things in and out of the scene is very good way to work. It just helps you with organization and it makes the whole process a lot easier as well. So the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna come over here to our timeline, and this is hover over it and just click and drag it up a little bit. And you can middle mouse button click on a timeline to move it. So we're going to come to frame one and on frame one. And what we're gonna do is we select the armature and when it go into pose mode, we're going to go Control F3 and that's going to take us into our left orthographic view. So control and a number pad free. You can also just go to View, view port and then go to your left orthographic view. So the thing we're gonna do is we're going to, in a left orthographic view, select the armature. And we're gonna make sure we're on frame one. And the first bone we're going to work with is probably the foot bone. So we actually want our right foot to be backs if we're going to click on the right foot controller over their spectra. So right foot back into your left or for graphic. We're gonna go G to move that on frame one and we're going to move it back in our scene and then we're going to rotate it. So it will move it back by hitting G and an artwork that I want to place that one about there. And then select the hip bone marrow gi and just move that up a little bit. We're then going to take the outer controller for the left foot so that one there. Go back into your left orthographic view. Um, you don't have to go in and out of the views like that. I'm just doing it to show you guys, but we're going to take that controller and we're gonna hit G and move it. We're going to move it forward and an R to rotate and just move it about there and if you don't want to stretch it, so what we're gonna do is just move the hip a little bit down and forward just till we get that foot down there. So just like that. Okay. It's not a hard thing to make. So just like that you can see that's always done. So now on our left or for graphic here, just hit a to select all of the bones. And on frame 1 we're going to hit I. And that's gonna bring our keyframe options and we're just going to go to location and rotation. So now if you look over here, you should see it. If you don't see it, just middle mouse button, click on here and just move up to see your keyframe. You can now see this little orange keyframe. And we're now going to drag a slider to frame 5. And on frame 5, what we're gonna do is we're going to grab this left IK foot, a foot. And we're going to rotate it a little bit more and we're gonna go G to move it up, move it about there. And then we're going to take the other foot IPA for the right foot, we're gonna go G and move it back a little bit. And in R to rotate it, J to move it down to about there. And we can move that hip just a little bit back like that. And now when we have that position, we're going to hit a to select it all. And on frame 5 we're going to hit I and insert a location and rotation. So now if we drag this slider back, you can see that's what's happening. Okay, so now let's move up to frame 10. And on frame 10, we're going to drag the right foot IK back a bit. So we're going to select the IK and go, gee, why? And move it back like this. Then select the left foot IK, which is death one there. And we're going to go G and just move it up and forward like that. So right about there. And just let the hip and go G and just move it up and back a little bit like that. Then I'm going to hit a to select everything and unframed ten. We're gonna go i and insert a location and rotation keyframe. So now we have that first step in like that. And now we're just going to move one more time to frame 15. And from here it will be easier after this one because we'll just duplicate the rest of them. But when it comes to frame 15, and it's at this point we want to take our left foot, which is just one here. I left foot IK and in our right and our left orthographic view on and go G and just move it forward and then rotate it. So bring it about there. And then we're going to take this other foot, which is our left foot control. And we're going to take that one and we're gonna go G and move it back. And in R to rotate it. If I've accidentally called them the wrong thing like left, right and right-left. I'm sorry about that. That's why I'm just giving it like that just so you guys can see. Yeah. So I'm going in and out of my left view, left orthographic view, and in back into that view just so you guys can see what I mean. So we're gonna take that left foot IK and move it about there. And then we can grab the hip and just go G and move it up a bit. So just something like that. Maybe move this one and just a little bit. And R to rotate it down. Say once you have something that looks like that on frame 50, you can hit a just like everything and then hit I and insert a location and rotation keyframe on frame 15. So now if you go to frame one and we drag a slider fruit, we can see that now from here it's easy because all we have to do is duplicate these keyframes, but just in the reverse. And if you can remember back to our bone setup when we were doing the naming conventions, remember that dot capital L dot capital R. This is one of the very important reasons why we want to set it up so we can do what we're about to do if you didn't set it up like that, this will not work. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna make sure that all of the bones are active. So make sure you hit a, just like everything, we're going to drag the slider to frame 1 and frame one. We have all of these bones active. We're going to go Control C. So that's gonna copy to pose. And when it come up to frame 20, been framed 20, we're going to go Control Shift and V. So now it's pasted it, but the way it's pasted, the post here on 20 is in the reverse. So with that all active on 520 hit I and make sure to insert a location and rotation key for that reverse. So now this one essentially just the opposite if this one, okay? And what we're gonna do now is we're going to go over to frame five, which is one up from that one. And again, we're gonna go Control C with all of those bones active. Make sure they're active. Drag the slider to frame 25 and now go Control Shift V. And now we've just paste it the reverse of frame 5. Make sure on frame 25 to go i and insert our location and rotation. And now you can see we have the opposite of number 5. And now we're gonna move up to frame 10 and one more time, make sure all the bonds are active. Hit Control C or Command C to copy that pose on frame 10. Then drag the slider over to 30 and go Control Shift V to paste the inverse and then go i and insert location and rotation. So now we should see this. And lastly we're going to get a frame 35. But in this one, what we're going to do differently, this instead of grabbing the last one and inverting it, which is actually gonna come to frame 1. Make sure all of this is active. Okay, So a little bunch active and engaged Control C, drag the slider to frame 35 and then just go Control V, but not control Shift V. We just did we just want it to be the exact same parts. Okay? And then we're gonna go i and insert a location and rotation. And now it should be complete loop. And the only thing we have to do is come to the end frame value here. Click on it and drag it all the way down to frame 35. And then we're gonna go minus one extra frame. And the reason we get rid of one extra frame is because the frame 35 pose is the exact same as the frame one post. And we'll have a duplicate which will give it a little bit of a stutter. So just dropping it over one frame is all you need to. Now what should happen if we go to frame one and we hit the spacebar? Is this a loop bubble animation? Pretty cool. Now you can see the hip is doing a little bit of a funny finger. The wall we're going to do is just go back into our left orthographic view by hitting Control F3. And let's just come over to frame 10. And frame 10, we're just going to go G and move forward a bit and then go, I insert location rotation just so it's not sliding back so much. And then 15, we can also just clean that up just a little bit. So you can just go in and just adjust that just a tiny bit till the hip feels right. So all I'm doing is if the one barn active, I'm just going through the middle frames and just making sure it looks a little bit better. But what we don't want to do is change the end ones because they have to be exact, exactly the same. So now if we hit Spacebar, I guess a little bit better. So one of the things that's missing here, that's really making this look not as good as it could be. Is the head here just as perfectly still? It's got no movement too. It's a simple thing to do is just to actually select the top Control button. And if that active just go Control I or command I and that'll inverse the selection. Then just hit H to hide those bones. And now I only have this controller here. So all we're gonna do with that active is click and drag and select all of the middle keyframes. Then hit X and delete keyframes. And all we have is these end keyframes, right? If the end keyframes go to your first frame and then go ahead one-to-one different orthographic. So what we're gonna do on frame one is going to grab this keyframe. We're gonna go G and we would have their side and squish it down a bit. And we're gonna go i and insert a location rotation. And we're going to just grab it and they're Shift D to duplicate that keyframe and drag it all the way to 45 because it needs to be an exact duplicate. And all we have to do is come here to frame 15 and then go G with that active and move it over to the side and stretch it up a bit and go I and insert a location rotation. And now we have a little bit of side movement like that and a little bit of squash and stretch. And look at that. That already adds a lot of life to it. In fact, you can really exaggerate it a little bit, and it really depends on the speed of your walk cycle. But yeah, up to you how you want to do that. Maybe I'll do a little bit more squash, not stretch. Yeah, but that's how you do it. You can also go to your other side view like you're right orthographic. And then just tilt the head forward a little bit and then insert a keyframe that way. Try it out a little bit. But anything you can do to add a little bit of extra life to it is really handy. So now one more thing we're gonna do is just go Alt H to unhide your bones and now go back to object mode. And this is something that's really fun. So this is for now hide our rig. Select the character mesh. And remember earlier we created these key frames or key shapes. We're simply just going to go to the blink and we're going to come to frame one. And with both of these blinks, we're just gonna select blink L. And we're going to go give it a keyframe. And then the right one, give that a keyframe. Then we are going to go up by two frames. So just go to frame to drag both of those up to one. So the first one and give it a keyframe. Then the second blink, drag it up to one and give it a keyframe, and then move up to frame 4. And then both of them give them a value of 0 and click on this little keyframe here and blink Tatar, drag it down to 0, give it a little keyframe here. And now we have a blink. I can't, but I think it's a bit too fast, so I'm just gonna go to frame 1, select all of those keyframes and we're gonna go S, and it should scale it like that. And now look at that blank. Pretty cool. So you can now just select all of these keyframes and hit G to move them and put them wherever you want. So now you have a little blink to your character. And what you could do is just duplicate these and select them and go Shift D to duplicate them. And you can scale these one's a little bit differently. So you have two little blinks. And you can offset the little keyframe halves here just to make him look just a little bit different in their speed and in their movements. So they're not exactly the same. So both blinks are a little bit different and that's just one little white to add a bit of extra life. And if you guys wanted to, you can take the mouth and find a creative way to use that in your shape keys. However, because this is just a walk cycle, I'm not really going to use that. So we don't need to do any sort of complex emotions with the mouth, but that math is there for you guys use and now you guys know how to do shape key so you guys can figure it out yourself. How to simply make different mouth shapes, different expressions, and then incorporate that into your little animation. In fact, that is one of the challenges I want to give you guys. For this course. We actually make something, not just copy something. So that is our animation part done. I hope you guys have enjoyed it. If anything was confusing, please check out the provided resources. And what I'm gonna do is just bring back that stage. Don't a camera view. And yeah, that's pretty much it. So the next video is pretty much just going to be finalizing things and rendering this app as a final animation. Make sure to save, and I'll see you guys in the next video. 16. Final Rendering: Okay, So we're now in the final video where we're going to do a little bit of rendering. So what I've done is I've gone ahead and just add a few little things that were just minor things. So nothing that I needed to make a tutorial about this. A little bit of a change of the animation. And there's a lot more you can do with this animation. It feels a little bit kind of like stumpy, like, like lean in, lean out like it just kind of a little bit shaky, almost like not a normal walk, but it's just so cute and I kind of like it. So I'm just going to stick with it and keep it really simple, like we've done if the animation, a few things I do want to change Doe as just make sure with the hair over here that if you go to your particle settings, you scroll down. And if you are struggling a little bit with your render, if it lags a little, say for example, it's a little bit slow. You can just bump this steps down here. It's one thing you can do and also just do in the viewport display. And that'll be more to do with just real time performance. But if you want to bump that down as well, just to help the view port performance, that's something you can keep in mind, but just keep that in mind because I know that can sometimes be an issue for people who don't have very powerful computers. And also just under the children once again, adjusting the render amount here will really help with your render time as well. So you can bring that number down a little bit. And then if you need to bring it down, seems a little bit fin. You can always just come down to the shape and just bring that root diameter up a little bit to cheat a little bit, but you need to be careful with that as well. There's a bit of a balance, so I'm going to leave it the way it is for now. And yeah. So if you're happy with your scene and how you've got your whole situation set-up. And the other thing I'll just quickly change as well. I just made the blue a little bit lighter blue. So not a lot, not a lot of differences. I mean, this is pretty much the exact same animation you guys just made. So once again, this blend fall is available as well if you want to check my example out. So the final blend follow will be there if anything has been confusing. But the way we render this out as a final animation is quite simple. We're simply just going to go over here to this tab cold output properties. And this is something here called the output. And you can click on this folder and just select somewhere. So I'm gonna select my desktop as an example. Now what you can do is you can leave the file format as PNG and it'll render out a sequence of PNGs and you can compile it in something like Adobe Premiere or After Effects. But because it's such a short little loophole animation, we're just gonna go with the FFmpeg video format here. And under the encoding, just make the container type an MP4, which it works really well. Now these are the standard quality settings here. You can change them to high-quality, so that's just your bits right? Output and things like that. I'm going to leave them at the default, that's all fine. But one more thing you can do before we actually render this out that I think really add something to this, but it is going to really increase render times just to add some depth of field. So let's quickly go Shift a, go to our empty options and add in a cube and just move it in front of the character S to scale it down. Now you don't have to do this if it's slows things down a lot, but I'm going to select my camera. I got to my camera settings and we're going to enable depth of field. Click on the little eyedropper and then select that empty is now active and bring the f-stop down to 0.5. And now if we hit Z and we got rendered, we're going to have that kind of soft focus at depth of field. Quickly turned it off. You can see what the difference is. Now that does make it really nice. In fact, if I drag it down all the way to one, you can see that's way too much. But just having that little bit of soft focus just makes it look a little bit cuter in my opinion, because it makes it look like it's something that really small that the camera's looking at. But yeah, and I just, it's just something to me that's visually pleasing, but feel free not to do that if you guys don't want. So before we actually render just as a final animation, tweak all your little settings. Position your camera to why you want, tweak your animation, your materials, whatever your lighting, even you can definitely grab the whole thing and always adjust that if you want. Just simply duplicating a lot of shift day, rotating it, and trying to come up with something that works for what you're trying to do. I'm not gonna do anything more than that. I'm pretty happy with it. Just going back to the Output Settings. Once you have a destination file format type, we have to do is make sure to save your work and you go to render. And in Render Animation, it'll render this out as an animation for you. Now, I'm going to go and do it that way. And it'll show you guys what it all looks like. And there we have the final rendered animation. I hope you guys have enjoyed putting this little guy to get her. And I know this wasn't so much about advanced animation. The main thing here was definitely developing the character. But if you guys have made it this far and you've made your little character, I hope you have enjoyed it. And you can see here differ probably doesn't look that great. And that's simply because what's happened here is I have the optics didn't noisy. But if you wanted to get rid of the denoise or and put the samples up a lot higher, you can always get a much nicer result, but I still think it looks pretty good and I'm really happy with how it came out. So once again, check out the resources folder. Older blend files are in there so you guys can check it out yourself, open everything up and see exactly how I've done it. So yeah, if there's any questions, feel free to ask and I'll do a little outro video after this. Well, I'll just thank you guys and mention a few things, including a challenge that I have for you guys and some things you guys can consider doing with your own projects. 17. Thank You: Thank you guys so much for taking the time to watch my Skillshare course. I really hope it has been interactive and educational. And I hope you don't feel like you were just copying something. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to give you guys a little challenge. I want you guys to make this character, but I want you to take the model shape and make it your own and try and go for this type of idea, but customize it and make it a little different due to proportions and the shapes a little different. Tried different colors. See what you can do with your hair settings like the clumping, the different details in the hair to combing, and then see how you can change your animation up a little bit, try different things, try a little jumpy. Look at some references on the Internet. So that's just one of my little challenges. You guys definitely try and take the concepts and principles from this course and make it into your own. And I really look forward to seeing some of the projects that come out of this course. I've really enjoyed putting it together for the community and have an awesome time, guys. Thank you.