Creating Disney Fan Art Using Autodesk Maya

1. 00 Introdction: Hi everyone. In this walk through, we are creating Disney fan art using Autodesk Maya. This entire course is done in Ya, with the exception of using an auto rigger in Mixamo, but our textures, our controllers are all going to be done and placed within my. We're also going to be covering aspects like organic modeling, my sculpting, a little bit of hard surface modeling and also gen, we will wrap it up by keeping things as simple and as brisk as possible. This gives you the opportunity to add on your own artistic flare. Also mind you that these are just basics and the rest is up to you to augment and to even polish the work that is before you. I also look forward to seeing what you guys come up with and you can post them in the community tab. Let's get to it. 2. 01 Getting started Downloading PureRef: Before we begin, there's a few software that we are going to need. They are free, particularly this one. This will help us in terms of gathering our reference images. That way we don't have to keep scrubbing through our photos. The app is called pref and the website is up here. It's pref do com. This will enable us to download a canvas like app, which will enable us to pretty much drop all the images that we need. That way when we work, we can just look at this canvas and not shrinking and enlarging random images. Once you go to download, you will obviously come to the download page and then you can choose which version you want. Linear go for this one, you can choose either one. It's all good. I'm installing it in Windows. Just make sure that it's an installer 64 bit. Then you may contribute if you want to. If not, then you can just add a custom amount called. So just add a zero custom amount, then it becomes free, and then you can download it. Once you download it, you can just hit Install and just follow the steps, and then we can drop our images into the app. Now I got the app opened. You will notice it's just a blank canvas, right? This means that I can drag and drop these images onto my pureF canvas. This is what will happen. To zoom out, I will use my middle mouse wheel to move these images, or a set of images. I will left mouse button, sorry about that. And then to move the entire app, right, I will right mouse click. Okay. One more time. Right mouse moves the entire thing. Left mouse moves the selected images, middle mouse enables us to scroll. And what's nice is that we arrange, we can arrange these series of images either very neat, for those of OCD, they can just sit arbitrarily. Cool. I am going to drop one more image in here. They should have come with this video series. Just unzip the folder and drop the images into your th. One more thing that I did was I looked at real world or real life examples from the animals that could have possibly influenced stitches design. So we just don't do this. There we go. I found that he has bunny ears and he is referenced from A, A right. In terms of the Koalas nose is much more, it's much more cylindrical, right? But this here is much more rounded, right? In terms of scrutinizing the shapes even more. This year, which is on out, we have this little pattern here. I just found a rabbit that may have a similar design. But, you know, this is most likely because it was evading danger or it was in a fight or something. This is purely for static purposes. We might decide whether or not we will incorporate that. I think this is enough information for me to start plotting things out in Maya. And then the last thing that we are going to need during the texturing stages is an image editing software. So this could either be Sketchbook or Gim or Creta for the free versions, or you could use Photoshop as well. For those who have substance painter, you can use substance painter as well. But this walk through is not going to be covering that. We are going to be as simple as possible and we are being as efficient as possible. These types of characters require some level of detail. You will 100% get those details in programs like the brush or Nomad sculpt or might box even. But we are using Meyer because like I said, we are being as efficient as possible. So yes, let's hop to it. 3. 02 Basic shapes Block in: We have opened Maya, and we just have to make sure that we are in general layout. As you can see, Maya does a lot of things. Something like, this is fine. You can also do modeling standard as well. That's also cool. Looking at this, particularly this image, we can now pretty much decide how we're going to gauge our shapes or how further down we can even break them up. Normally we would go into zbrush or mudbox or whatever sculpting application and we will make the character. Then we will bring it into May and work it from there. But we are doing everything in Maya. I am going to kick it off with the head first. The first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to create a sphere. I'm going to just lift it up a bit. Area, about this height. There we go. Then looking at this, the next thing that I want to do is pretty much just cage the width of the body, right? This is a cube, a cylinder. We can throw in either one. I'm just going to use a cube and I'm going to lift it up. And in face mode I'm just do that. And then I'm going to drop it down like so. These can stand to be a bit bigger. These vertices then I select all of them. Oh, I think it's because I have symmetry on sines switched off. There we go, cool. If we want, we can even do an insert edge loop. Look at it from the right. I can go a like, okay, let me do this and repeat the actions. And this can be the body. I can also make these a bit wider as well, so I'm just going to spread them out to pick. So like so and last but not least, wait, let me just play with the edges. So something like this. Then here at the back we can push it out. Maybe add one more just so that something like this, this works. The other thing that we should look at as well is how the body tapers in. What I can do is this. And then I'm going to push it down that way, this little area here to generate the legs. What's nice about this is that I can go to the vertices and then go, well, I can make this a bit longer. Something like just making sure that we have a nicely balanced character. Because we are doing everything in Maya, it's much cooler because we can get the shapes as closely as possible from modeling like this. Then we can just push the chest in a bit more. There we go. Then I'm going to, I can even go about this in a lazy way. I'm just going to go center pivot that way this is nice and centered. And then I'm just going to duplicate this and rotate it and minimize it. Here we go. We know that the hands are a bit chunky. What I'm going to do is I'm going to interte this. Then I'm going to start making the bigger and bringing them in like. So let's look at this again. See it has this mass in the center. We can insert at loop two, and then we can scale it like so. And bring it down. And bring it in. All right, It doesn't have to be perfect because remember we are still blocking stuff in. So I'm just going to make Pcipit smaller. Again, I'm hitting three just to see if it has shaped the way that I would like to have it shaped this. There we go. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to hit four. And then I'm going to hit D for Dinosaur on the keyboard. And I'm going to move the pivot point here to the center. What I did was I just changed the axis in which it rotates. Now I'm going to modify forms, then I am going to go into my channel box editor. Let's delete history as well. It delete by type history the I'm going to duplicate. Then I'm going to mirror it by saying scale x. This is what we have so far. Once again, I'm going to duplicate this, bring it low, bring it to the side, then I'm going to scale it. Remember, you don't have to be accurate about this. You just need to block a character in it. That's pretty much it. Once again, modify, freeze transformations, And then let's move the pivot point to the center. There we go. So now I'm going to duplicate scale x negative one. There we go. Right now we start to look at the proportions. And what we realized is that these need to go a bit higher and they have to be slightly big. Are so something like that. We can tweak these as we carry on with the work. Right now what we realized is that the head is wide, right? Let's see if this is the same with most of the designs, right? So this one is a bit exaggerated, right? When we look at this one, we can then make the head a bit more oval or egg shaped, right? So I'm just going to bring it down like so and then pull it forward, then pull it to the side. So something like this. The ears and everything, we will just extract from this portion. All right. No, it doesn't look like much right now. But we have blocked in the main features of our characters. Right. And what we can do now is we can tweak these individual parts. And then later down the line, we can join them all together and make one cohesive character. In the tutorial in the next video series. In the next chapter of this, the shape is going to be a bit more refined. As you can see, things are fairly low is, so I can't get away with much. I think what we can do is that, that's fine. Let's move to the next chapter. 4. 03 Merging our shapes: So in this section we are going to combine these and merge the vertices. So I'm going to switch it to one, then let me just add a nasal H loop over here. Then I can do, oh boy wait, not yet. All right. I'm going to select these three parts, and I'm still working in this group to select these three parts. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to an option called mesh. Combine this makes everything one mesh, right? But one thing that it does not do is weld your vertices. So that's what we're going to do Now select your vertices. I'm going to go into number four and I'm just going to drag over way of merge, right And then I'm going to go Edit Mesh. And then I'm going to select Merge. There we go. I'm just going to select these. Wherever I joined the leg to the body. I'm just going to be repeating the same action by hitting G on the keyboard. If it's all gone successful, this is how it looks. Our meshes are now joined. Cool. So now let's do the hand, this is why it's ideal to have it at one because then you can see how far things have stretched. Also, these vertices have a tendency of meeting at a middle point. If I had a vertice here and a vertice here, and if I wanted to merge them, they would merge right in the middle. Right? Because Maya assumes that you want them to merge in the middle. So just make sure that wherever you are planning to join your vertices, you have snapped them together before merging them together. There we go. So when you get problem areas like this, then it most likely needs you to shape it some more. Ah, there's another reason our vertices here, we're not merged. So let's go edit. Mesh. Merge. Same here, merge. There we go. Now the next thing that I'm going to do with one those selected is switch the pivot point to the center by pressing and holding. So I'm just going to move it to the middle. You can also zoom in just to make sure you are nicely centered, where with the channel box editor opened, just delete history first edit. Delete by type history. There we go. And then I'm just going to duplicate this scale, x negative one. There we go. Now I have a body. Now what I'm going to do, let me just hide this head for now. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to merge these, but you just see what the issue is here. Inches, all around. There we go. This obviously has to be hello. There we go. Then the next thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to merge these two shapes, make sure everyone is in object mode. Then I'm going to select mesh, combine. There we go. Now once again switching to vertex mode and then mesh merge. We need to sing here, merger merge. When you select it selects both of the vertices. But I'm making sure that when I select I don't overlap over another one by accident because this is just going to mess things up. There we go. So you have essentially made your own base mesh. Right? If this was like a full scale production, this base mesh can be used to generate multiple other stitch variants or stitches. There we go. So this is what we have now switch. So now what I'm going to do is going to edit, delete the history, keep things nice and light. Also remember to save important. So now I'm going to look at this design, right, and pretty much just lean heavily on the shape choices. I'm now going to switch to my sculpt tool. In my sculpting mode, I am going to be playing around with these. Right? One more thing that we can do is stew an edge loop and make sure that you sort of have like a neck area. There we go. And this break can even make smaller, There we go, doesn't feel as organic, but as we proceed in the video series, you'll see that it's coming too light. 5. 04 Block in Hands: I was thinking about whether or not I want to have fingers or not. I think in the interest of learning and exploring. Let's see how it would fall off with fingers, all right? We just had to make sure that my symmetry was turned on. Now, according to this, this cause I'm trying to balance the sketch, the drawing, so let me go on face mode, and then I'll just scale these. Now something's happening here, so let's just attend to that quickly. And then I'm going to select my edges. There we go. This is one thing that we can do in the spirit of working non destructively, is we're going to have an edge loop. The for quick measure me just to, then I'm using the faces in the edges to, to give it life so to speak. So scared this straight first. Then we can move them in like same for these as well. Move them in like, so cool. So now I am going to see the palm area is not that big, so I'm going to go edit mesh. I'm going to see it extrude. Let me just do this first so as we proceed we can carry on shaping these into fingers. Emmy, let's keep this straight. Hands are a bit big now, so it's Uri is okay. So now to select face andgain. Co gonna go edit. Ish gonna select extrude the pragmaches. Who is? Now for the last one which would make it number four, I think what I will do is move this edge here and then take it down like so. And then just skate a little bit. Here we go. Now what I can do, select these two faces, Go to Edit, mesh, extrude, make this taller here, plenary, go there. So we have our four fingers coolness. So now what we can do is insert. He looks, so pop on here, here, and here, and here. So now we can do, there we go. It's just there. So not bad. And we can tweak this even more. Does a thumb behave like a th? These are things you should be asking yourself as you are making this creature. So something like this, cool enough for a block in Winkle Mountain. So let's push this back more. But then the same with this, we are keeping things as low as possible. That way when we have to do major things like change, maybe the size of the character, we can do so without worrying about, you know, the progress that has been made. Because the mesh is fairly lower, the insert edge globo, just going to scale this a bit, two faces. And then another nice thing that you can do is something like this towards the end. Because this is where you can have like the claws and stuff. This would be interesting to, is refining the shape a bit more. No. Hey so let me select funded these guys the thing, I made the fingers a bit too skinny. That's much better. Coolness. This wasn't supposed to be tapered at the end services service. For now we'll do. And also if we were considering this for animation rather than posing, then our mesh was going to have to be a little bit more defined. This pinky is bugging me, so let's try that then, this taste, see how nice it is to move things when they're low is because the second they get high, or we start adding a bit more detail, the things are going to become a bit congested, so to speak. Well, the same like it like that. Let's make this a bit longer, let's make sure that that's the selected. There we go. This works for me for what I would like to achieve just so there we go. Here's our little stitch hand. In the next one, what I'm going to do is I'm going to work on refining this a bit more using Maya's native sculpt tools. 6. 05 Sculpting Tool for refining: In this section, we are going to be using the sculpt tools to refine this character even more. This is what we have so far, we've mostly cubes to get where we've gotten so far, and this is where we begin to refine this. I love the silhouette of this, right? The first thing that I want to do is I'm going to switch to sculpt mode, right? But before I do that, I group this, then I'll Paul step three, duplicate this, me hide this, this becomes my step four. In my step four, what I'm going to do first is I'm going to go to my sculpting tab on the menu. Then just this, I will then go to Mesh and I will select the smooth option. These options are cool, but generally I tend to work with it better when it's at two. But this is fine at one because we are just doing the bulk of the shapes or the bulky shapes. Now I'm going to select my pull a single vertex along any direction. If it turns green, don't worry. Now we're going to double click on this. The size units are on world, My direction is screen. And also in terms of my fall off, this is what I'm using. If you used a program called Mudbox by Auto Desk, then you should be familiar with these gradients or curves. Then we have a wire frame display, so we can switch that off and on. I prefer it on so that I can see how my topology is reacting when I push and pull points. And then let's make sure that symmetry is on, and it's on object x. Now what I want to do, let me just make it 0.6 Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to start refining these shapes in order to make your brush bigger. You press and hold for butterfly, press, hold B, and then you left mouse button click and drag. What I said I want to work on first is this shape from the top. What I can do is I can smooth this so that the back is almost flat in a way. Then let me just flatten the side as well. Is going to push these points in the. I'm going to make the shoulders a bit more defined. This also helps in rigging because you know exactly where to add the joints. Also, in this stage of refinement, you can deviate a bit from the original plan, right? But don't deviate too much because we still want the essence of the character that we make. In. Also notice that he has a lot more flesh on him. He's a chunky little creature. Chunky creature, yeah. Here we go for the side profile, right? Especially for stylized characters, always go for the bean shape. The shape would be bulging at the front and then caving in at the back. The booty is a bit low so we can lift that up as well. This is what we have so far. It's shaping up rather beautifully as well. What I can do is can add some more cushioning this side as we define the knees. As we get to rigging and assigning points, there we go. Now we can work on the arms. Normally, if you had a program like brush or mudbox, then you wouldn't have started this the way we have started it. We started it because we want clean topology. Somewhere along this project will play around with posing character. Let me try lifting these up there, so now we can work on the hands a bit more. So if I can go bottom bottom, you can also alternate between your brushes as well, just using this one, because there's a lot of stuff that I can do with it. There you go. It takes a while and with minus sculpt tools A goes a long way. Just be mindful when you are pushing and pulling your points, right? Think about, think about, think about the animation process as well. Do you want to have the elbows defined? So something like, this is cool. I've deviated a bit more from this, but I'm planning to make the fingers a bit thicker if I can just find the inflate. There you go. But to me, just double click and make sure that we have proper string, so maybe 0.3 parts too much. Let's see, To build up to ten, I'm just going to put the silver here. There we go. That's much better. Now I can start defining things like the bumpy areas for the knuckles is a bit too much, but there we go. So I'm going to first make fingers a bit bulba se, at the end so that I know where to put my claws. So this should be bigger. There we go. I'm just going to run it here and here and not so much there. Okay. The other thing that I can do is as I'm sculpting, see what? Oh, so let's make this 0.6 There we are there also. We are not being super detailed, right? So do not get lost in the detailing of things because that's not the goal of this project. So now I can define the underside of the hand. There we go. Not bad. And not meant to be perfect, not meant to be detailed. This also now got me thinking, let me perhaps make these a bit smaller because I'm going to add the claws. Yeah. So I think this much is fine. We're not going to do the pads as well there. Cool. So I'm going to carry on refining this a bit more and let's hop onto the next Ch. 7. 06 Unwrapping The Body: In this section we are doing our UV's. Uvs are super important because if we want to pose or move the character in a way that doesn't destroy the mesh right, or doesn't do the work that we did so far, then a good UV base is a must have, especially if we're going to be painting within Maya, and we are also going to be doing fur using X as well. We got to have things simple and as efficient as possible. And then I open my UV editor and this is what my mesh looks like now. Right. I'm first going to go to Create and select my plan. All right. You will notice that what I'm seeing here, let me just make this a full window. Push this to the side. There we go. What I'm seeing on this UV Editor window is what is being projected by this area, right? So I'm just going to make it a proper size like so now let's say we want it the front, right, because the aim is to get a nice checker texture across the board. All right? And our check boxes need to look square. What we then can do is rotate this. We select this in my rotate right, I'm going to switch this to zero. That way my projection sweep is facing the front, right, just like our camera. Then this is fine. What we are going to do now is cut this thing up. I'm going to select these two arms first to middle part as well. No, that's cool. All right. And then back on my UV window, I am going to select Cut. There we go. Now what I did was I told my U editor that these two items Right, are rolling separately. All right, We will deal with the once we're done with the torso. So now looking at the torso, I just want the middle seam, right, Because we are simplifying these things as much as possible. And let me see, is this the one? There we go. So the seam runs across the entire character all the way to the back and over the fingers, right? Because I've already cut my hands because I already cut the arms off. I'm just going to select and make sure that I've only selected the body and then I'm going to select the cut option. So now I have more than one UV shell. There we go. We could take this even a step further and go like, okay, I do have parts that are overlapping in a way. Sorry about that. What I can do is though this doesn't always work depending on the Y you are using in UV mode. You're going to write, click over your shall select UV mode, and then you're going to go to modify and select Unfold. This is what we get then I'm just going to rotate this. Then I will do the same with this as well. I will select unfold. There we go. Now we have the front and the back. The reason they are not the same, remember, is because we don't ever seem running in the middle directly. We can do that, but we are keeping things as efficient as possible and the work that we want to do for this doesn't require a high end UV map. Now what I'm going to do is On these arms. I'm just going to select this here option that enables me to just isolate these selected objects. Then in edge mode, I'm just going to find the seam ons across like this all the way. Then I'm going to control drag select. There we go. Now I'm going to cut these. There we go. Now I can select the top part and I can select the bottom part. The last thing that we want to do is select these UV shells and do and unfold. There we go. Now we can just select everything and go modify layout and every one of our us is in the correct place. Now this is fine and all, but it does get problematic, especially when you want to control certain aspects, right? So the first thing that we want to do is let's keep the bottom ones at the bottom and the top ones at the top. Let me switch off my symmetry there. Another thing that you can do is you could also put them on top of each other like this. All right? But then this would mean that you have to rotate it properly and stuff. If you are up for the work then yeah, that's cool. Also, make sure that your UV's stay within one udum, don't overlap your UV islands, your UV Ums. So there you go. This is okay by me. I like this. So now we have a model. We have our UV's. Yeah. We can now maybe go over the model a bit, just check it, see if there's any form history on it, and just pretty much clean it up. Also, we can strive to make these themes match more as well, but if we are in a situation where the color is the same throughout, then we don't, we don't need to do extra stuff here. 8. 07 Sculpting the Head and Ears: In this part of the walk through, we are working on the head. Now the, it can be a bit tricky because it has quite a few parts and they all work together. But what we're going to do is essentially use this sphere as a base. If we check out this sketch in particular, we know which major shapes to hit, right? And if we also look at the concept art, we see that it is egg shaped in a way. And if we look at the other artwork as well, that oval egg shape is very prominent as well. That's what we are going to hook up. Now if I have to gauge first where, where the ears are going to sit, because as you can see with the design, the ears isn't over here. They are down there, right? Right above the shoulder, which we can change, right? We see that it is also prominent over here. And it is also prominent over here as well here. It is slightly different because you see it is slightly higher arguably. But these artworks were taken from different sources, so we are going to combine it and see what is the most three D practical or three D friendly way to execute this. So let's do it now. This is a sphere that I had from very early on when we were stacking our shapes. All right, so let me just move this to the side. I just simply duplicated this head. And if we want, we can just drop it onto, let's see here. All right, now I can close step two and step one as well. We can just focus on this head also. We can start calling this body this. For now we can just call it head base. Depending on how non destructive we would like to work, I'm going to go to mesh and then select the smooth option. This one subdivision is cool, I can work with that. Sometimes you need more than one, but this is a bit much so this one works. Then I'm going to select this object and go to my sculpting tab and select my tool. All right, let me just make sure that everything is as it should. This is still a bit too strong. Yeah, this is perfect. Cool. And then what's the one other thing that we can do? I pulled the artwork because I wanted to get the profile of the head. Also, if you feel like your scene is crowded, then you can hide the base, right? We can hide this alternate between having it off and on. Because I want to make sure that proportionally speaking, it's doing what I want. The first thing I'm going to do is to bring this head down like so then lift up the sides and then we lift the back of the head like so when you press and hold shift, you can smooth your object. The other thing that I would like to do is pretty much pull out the mesh for the ears. If the ears are situated around here, you can have them pulled out like so. So when you get deformations like this where your mesh is clipping against itself, it's easy to fix, we can use the inflate brush is too strong. My sculpt tools are a bit tricky to get into it first. The more you play around with them, the easier it is to do whatever it is you are intending to do. So I'm just going to carry on pulling the mesh like this. And then the next thing that I want to do is just remesh this. So this is cool, it's a bit dense now, but we can push and pull our points very nicely. It's going to move these parts back as well. These are also thick the base of the ear and just connect to this, so now we can make them even bigger. I always remember, aim for the best shape first and then you can come in and simplify your stuff. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to create the inside of this ear. If you are really gung hole on getting the shapes right, I would say choose one of these poses and then one of the reference images. And then just model it accordingly because I was looking at this based on the whole thing. We can alternate as well. Between the reference images. Right, All the concept art, I make these a bit thicker as well, and then I just can make this a bit concave. You can also look at the rabbit ears as well. I'm just imagining the type of detail because this is a fictional character. We do have some agency with how we would like shapes to turn out, unless you have an art director who will make sure that we follow the artwork specifically so it's let it taper in like so. So once again, you can, you know, do this to add character to your character or you can just leave them playing as well. Now I want to create a little gap that goes in the ear. So something like this. Also, I'm not using a wacom, by the way. I'm using a mouse, so you can use a mouse to do this. We are doing this in Maya and not in a sculpting program saying this is a bit much because I don't also want it to be super detailed as well. And also don't worry about the gaps that you have with your mesh here because we are still going to retople this. So now I'm going to pick on the surface build up is make sure k. And then now for the strength cool, they just make this 0.3 So like we said is more. So now I'm just going to draw the mouth area, so I make this a bit smaller. And then I'm going to hit shift also. We can stand to make the ears bigger, but because we made the torso slightly longer, making the ears bigger is it's going to cause issues. Our character is going to look unbalanced. Now I'm following this front view, particularly with the mouth area. I'm just going to bring it down. Then I'm going to bring it in and then just pull this chin area down as well. So we have something like this. In the next video, we are going to add the eyes and then start considering things like the nose as well. 9. 08 Working the eyes and Nose: When it comes to the eyes, we are going to create an first thing. I'm going to create a sphere for now, and I'm just going to rotate it nine meta degrees X. Then I'm going to assign a shader on this. So I'm going to assign a new material, make it standard surface. For now, let's just make it black. Now what I'm going to do is just position this to where my should just going to bring this in. And then I'm going to begin scaling it and bringing it outwards. This is still a bit too big. Then we can rotate it so we can bring it down again. This is still not working. Then what you can do is refine this a bit more. I'm just going to hide the eye. This often happens, right? We sometimes have to make room for the eyes. Let me just do this. Also going to lift this up for the cheek areas as well. And also notice that his face sort of like this doop, right now, they can position these lips. So you see that when we bring it down it's starting to form lips. So in this we can push back even more like so. So the other thing is that I'm not going to open this character's mouth. So I'm doing this with a closed mouth design in mind, make them a bit thinner. There we go. Then this gets more rounded as well, so something like this. And we did say we were going to do the eyes, but we are now busy with other things and it happens. So now what I want to do is I just want to flare this out a little bit more like. So there we go. So now I'm going to bring this. Back on. Our eye is still humondous. I'm going to scale it down again and then bring it forward. It's going to rotate. It was like if we want, we can also give it that stitches shape, something like this. This makes a nice stencil for when we are doing eyelids, so that's cool. Now remember in the early tutorials when we freeze transforms and then we delete history and then we shift the pivot point. I'm going to press and hold deep. And then I'm going to move the pivot point. Yeah, it can also hit four so that you can make sure that it's properly aligned. There we go. Then I'm going to go duplicate scale x negative one. There we go. This is what we have so far. Now we can also discuss whether or not this is either a color feature or an anatomical feature as well. Ideally, the color around the eye would change because of how the animal perceives the light. It would either intensify the light or de, intensify the light. My assumption is that because Stitch has large black pupils, he also functions nocturnally. This fur sort of lights things up. I don't know, it's in my weird creature designer head. But we will still have to come back and refine some of these features. Still on the grab tool, I want to see if there is an ideal type of nose. So from the side we have this much area for the nose. So from somewhere up here, I can push this forward too, too wide. So from here, there we go. I'm looking at this curvature of the nose. We first have the bridge, and then we have the nose curvature, which goes all the way to the mouth. There we go. So at this point, it's still a bit huge there. I think this size works perfectly. Now, another interesting thing, right? You notice that stitch has nostrils, right? So this would mean that we would have to look at this shape and then simplify it. It is gonna push the nose. Do you see that? The gap between the lip and the nose is very little. So there we go, it's getting there. So I'm going to carry on refining the nose, and we also realize that the nostrils start around here as well. So here, this makes a curve. Very important. Now for the nostril stitches, nostril appears to be different. So let's see, what can I get from the side you? So we can get an inflate and then we can reverse this inflate. Okay, wait, let me find a proper brush. I think this detail or we can model it in. Let me just, we'll lower the belt up. There we go. So let me pull these inward there. Now the wrist is just to refine the overall shape, make it look and feel around it. There we go, Lin, carry on refining this and then we are going to do the eyelids next. 10. 09 Refining the face: So I went and refined the nose a bit more and now we can do the eyes. For the eyes, we are once again going to choose, lift the surface, so we want to make a lid. So let me start at the bottom for something like this. So we just going to take this all around. Then here at the top, to me is a move as well, and then there should be a pinch or a sharp and soft edges that's not working on cut. I think when we do re topology we will have enough mesh to play around with this and actually get the ideal shape that we want because there's not a lot of mesh. If we subdivide this, the mesh could get super dense. I'm just going to do this now. As you can see, the face is quite because you have all these small moving parts based on your reference images. All these moving parts are resting in a certain way. We are not following the images to the T, but there is a lot of information that we are using from these images. So I'm going to get up of the high Ps Go scenario. Cool, I also want to move some more of the parts up here. So that the eye area is clearly mapped out. Calling this looking Cook. So far, this is where we now begin to explore and, and see what our choices mean for this character moving forward. Now we do need more definition around the eye area, but because of the mesh, there really isn't much that I can do because I need more density. I am going to first, first rem this and we just made it worse. So let's go to mesh. Let's reduce it. Wait, let's select this, mesh, reduce. We got the shapes there. We just need more information around the eyes. So that in the that's, I think when we do reypology, we will then be able to get some eyelids on first and then do some eyes on top of that. But let me just to a one because so that there is thickness for the eyelids. And also while working on the eyes, I realized something. It feels a bit gaunt. So you could also use an inflate brush as well, but then you'd have to tweak it something like this. So this makes it feel fleshy as well. You see that? Now I'm going to work the bottom part as well. And then once again I move this all the way back. And there we go, good. So now I'm going to reposition the ears and then we can move on to Re topology. 11. 10 Retopology Part 1: So now we're doing Re topology. And essentially what Re topology is, let me just minimize this, is during the modeling phase, our mesh tends to get really messy and really cluttered. For example, we have this, all right? We can use this mesh for like lighting and stuff like that, but in terms of texturing, in terms of rigging, in terms of X N, we might run into a few problems. We need to make sure that during our reto phase we have nice clean loops running across the face like so. All right, and this is if we decided at a later stage to reg but for now we just want to clean this mesh up and we want to make sure that the nose region is properly defined, the eyes are cleaned up and defined. And the mouth as well as the ears, right? So I'm going to start them. Generally when we do reto we work on half of the face. All right? This is so that when we do stuff like mesh combining and all that, we know that one side is nice and clean and has been tweaked. But we are going to go to our tool settings and we will make sure that symmetry is on. Now what I want to do is select these are the two eyes that I've named the eye left, eye right. And then we have the body, and then we have the head base. I'm going to hide the body. Then this I will make into a live surface. What this means is that I cannot touch or move this. But whatever surface that I manipulate, it is going to be attracted to the surface. Let me go to my Quadro tool. I'm first going to start with the smaller stuff, right? It would be the gap between here and here. What you do is you plot your points out. And once you are happy with the points, you press and hold shift. And you'll notice that a surface will appear when you click on the surface, you now have a piece of mesh. Let's carry on plotting these. If you want to add subdivisions, you press and hold control and an insert edge loop will appear. Or you can come to these tools as well because they function very similarly to your mesh tools. I'm just going to define the eye area quickly. Also, be careful not to make your eyes super detailed or super high because your eye mesh has to somehow correspond with the other geometry parts on the face. So the aim is to have nice, clean quads all around. Here we go. This is what we have. Now this is for the eye area. If we want to, we can also do some eyelids as well, but it's not going to look as nice. Coming to the, No, same story. I want that. You see a silver ridge that we made when we were sculpting. That's what I'm after. And then we can carry on positioning ease. And also because of the shape of the off the nose, it's not going to be exactly exactly circular. I'm just going to join these two points and then just subdivide it there. Then for the year part, once again we are trying to make this as low as possible and then after that, we can carry on adding our subdivisions. Start. Yeah. Yeah. There we go. Just like this, I have a loop and a loop and a loop, all right. Oh, wait. We have to do the mouth. Even with the mouth, it's the same. I want to make them match as often as I can. If they don't match up, it's fine, Don't worry about that. But we still have to combine our mesh. There we go. Remember that this now is going to turn like, so let me just see where the bottom of the B is. Okay, There we go. So there we go. So now in the next part, I am going to be joining these. 12. 11 Retopology Part 2: This reference is going to help us a great deal with regards to topology right now. I'm just picking up where we left off on the previous video. You can, if you want to, there we go. Let's make a if by accident you dissl something and you want to go back into quadra. Just make sure you are in object mode and whatever poly surface you're working on is selected. And then you go back to Q. Now what I want to do is just add an edge loop here and then begin to grow this out. Now I want to see how much space can my mesh occupy. Also, you will notice that as we do this, your mesh is going to get distorted. There is a way to sort that out. You just press and hold shift. Once you see relax, you just run it over the edges of your model and the edges will, or they will flow much nicer. Is it much more nicely? Once again, because we're not doing facial rigging on facial animation. We don't have to follow this to the right. We just want the machine order so that when we do our UV's or when we work in, things are much more manageable for us in terms of topology and our vertex information. Now onto the nose, remember what we said here? That we want to do something different, so we might need to have more subdivisions. So let me just do this. I'm also now anticipating how these are going to connect. There we go. So this is the top part. Also, if you want to delete your faces, you press control and shift. And then you hover over where you want to delete stuff. And then once you click on that, it will disappear. Let's try this one more time. There we go. Oh wait, let me do this there. So we can do the same for as well. And like I said earlier, if they don't join, it's cool. We can do mesh, combine, and then we can join the vertices altogether. So I'm just going to do this. Salva, a little gap. Co pined here, go here. Sometimes if a face doesn't want to get formed, you need to reposition your points. So now for the who knows, reaching can to this. So we bring us closer. So now we can combine our meshes. So this one and Do will travel all the way to this point. We can gominglyingly immediately me to Paul, Don. Also you are going to encounter situations where you have triangles. So don't worry about that. Now can start subdividing. If the doesn't work, just hit B on your keyboard. And then you will notice that you can scale the degree of the relaxiness you want to make. Now what I'm going to do is just combine these A, so there we go. And then over here we can choose whether or not we would like to continue this line. Because if we hit it like so also I think there are other people who are real masters at, and they probably have foster ways of doing this. There we go. And then for the ears it is the same story, right all the way around. So I'm going to carry on finishing this off and then in the next one we will do UV mapping. 13. 12 Refining the new Topology: Now that we have re, toppled our character. Right? And as you can see, there are parts where my mesh doesn't make sense, right? Because it's not running as cleanly as it should. And because of these odd shapes, they are affecting how my faces are getting placed. So I'm just going to hide the had base. And this is what we have now. All right. And this is a nice clean mesh, but I want to show you this little issue here. And you might have run into it as well. Normally ya tends to glitch right. Sometimes you'll realize that your symmetry tool right doesn't do on the left. What on the right? That is why I said we can then delete this half, right? Or we can just opt to work on the one half, and then after that we can duplicate the face, merge it, and then merge the vertices. Now what I'm going to do is on my tool settings once again, or my modeling tool kit, I'm going to switch my symmetry for then I'm going to finish making this nostril, then make an edge so that I have one continuous loop, right? I can even shape this just a little bit more as well. We have a much more rounded nostril thing that should do it. The selected, I'm going to either select here or come to Edit Mesh. True. The one thing that I want to do is make sure that this is nice and centered. Then I can just move this. In words like we just zoom in and this is what we have. Just going to make this all the way. Tiny, tiny. Then I'm going to insert an edge globe tool, throw it over here. He just want to make this a bit smaller and just mess around with the shape a bit. There we go. So this is what we have right now. I also want to tweak in the lips a bit more as well. Let me see if I insert an edge loop. Will it run all the way around the mouth? Nope, here it does. So that's, there we go. And then a push this out a bit forward, like this. And then I'm going to insert another edge loop. Yeah, I like it over here. We can move this over to see, or we can opt for a Sculpt tool as well. Now I am going to extrude this hurts, Try to swan on for size. The reason we would click on this right, is to make sure that our extrusion manner happens properly, right? Bec then we have situations like this, right? It's not extruding uniformly if we do this. And then we get on the inside of the mouth. So we're going to pull us here. Repeat the same action then. All right, let's try this. I'm not sure why it's scales like so like up is down and down is up. So if I try extruding upwards, it's only going to go upwards. This is interesting. Very, very interesting. Okay, so different plan. We are going to close the mouth. So something like, so this works the last thing that I'm going to do. Well, one of the last things that I'm going to do is also define this a bit more as well. Let me just see. Let me pull these inside. We could even dot as well. Just going to grab these vertices over here and then just bring them down. Not bad. And then over here. So these are just minor tweaks. So now I'm going to select the faces. Let me just pull them slightly like, so then let me see what it looks like, an edge loop inserted. Then I'm pressing and holding control while deselecting. And I just want to define the lower eyelid area. Then this area, I'm going to double click. And then halfway around it, I'm just going to control deselect here as well. And then I'm just going to call this forward and then I'm going to do the same first. Let me just do, even though I'm going to delete the one side and there, I think it's a bit exaggerated. Just pull it back. Oh, so slightly? Yeah, I think that's much better. One other thing that we can consider is eyelashes, right? Would this design benefit from eyelashes and eyebrows as well? All right, so this is where you decide in terms of the amount of detail you would like to have on this character. But I don't see any eyelashes on them. But I will expicuiment with it. Maybe we can have one variation with eyelashes, and then we can have another one without any. Now I'm going to drag select on the one half like so let me just make sure that everything is properly selected. And then I'm going to hit Delete. All right, so now we have one perfect half of the face, right? And this is where we fixed the nose. We made a nostril. We fixed the eye, and then we went on the inside of the mouth. And here we decided that, you know what, we are not going to get overly fancy with this, right? And this is what works for us. We can still do tweaks on this, but this is as far as we're going to push it, I'm going to go to edit and then delete the history on this. And then I'm also going to freeze transformations. Then I'm going to duplicate scale X native one. Not bad, not bad at all. Now what we're going to do is combine these. I'm going to go mesh, combine. Then this is one of the parts in this process. Our vertices are not merged, we have to merge them at the center. I'm going to press so that I'm able to see all my vertices and I'm just going to drag over both of them. Then go to Edit Mesh and then see right. And as a result, it has emerged, so I'm going to do the same. Hitting enables us to repeat the same action. There we go. If you are not sure about what's happening, then you can occasionally press five. As you can see, I have it at four and at an angle because if I have it straight ahead like this, then I'll accidentally select the vertices at the back. There we go, there we go, there we go, There we go, There we go. I'm not going to say that for every one of them. I'm going to end this video here, merge all the words, and then we're going to do, he's in the next video. 14. 13 UV Mapping the face: So now we can do some Erie mapping. What we are essentially telling Maya via UV mapping is that we would like textures to sit a certain way, and we would like our mesh to make sense in a toti representation, and that should translate nicely into three D. That's essentially what UV mapping is, just like the body in the previous videos, which now has a tail. We are going to do the face. This is how the face looks currently because we pretty much extruded the sphere. Yeah, we started with a sphere, and then after that we sculpted the sphere, made a face, and done summary topology on top of that, we haven't defined any EUV coordinates for this, that's why it looks like this. The first thing that I'm going to do is go to Create, then I'm going to select planar. Now planar gives me this side view of the character, which is cool. Depending on how your topology flows, you could literally cut this model in half. Or you could cut it halfway here and then just pelted. I think I missed something. Just isolate and check quickly. Let me close this. Yeah, this vertex is not stitched while the one that's coming after it is not stitched. Let's just fix that. I'm just going to track to Edit, Select Merge. Similar to the same here, to the one at the top, and then this one, because then it's easier to see. There we go, Save, remember, always, save. Now we can do our UV mapping. We have the side, we have the side view of our character. What we can do is in edge mode, we can cut the ears off. First I'm going to write click Select Edges and this locker, good place to start. We have one clean loop going around the character. It is not spiraling, so that's good. Then I'm going to select cut. Right? Now what would happen sometimes is that you would have a really dense mesh, right? Because I imagine in this project our characters look similar, but the topology is slightly different. Maybe yours has less triangles than mine, or maybe yours is much more low resolution than this one. And then maybe you have someone else higher resolution right now we want to make sure that whatever that we do on the left gets done on the right. In my modeling tool kit, I'm going to switch on Symmetry, the selected. I'm going to select this again. I'm just going to double click and make sure that the side happens as well. And then I'm going to select now in our I click and select my UV shell. I can just move this to the side. It's similar to what we did with the body. Another thing that we want to consider is when we are doing X N, we might want to define some surfaces where we want fur to be and where we want fur not to be. So that's why we decided to simplify this mesh as much as possible. So now I just double click on the middle scene sync. If the cut starts from here, that would be perfect. And it runs all the way down. Now I'm going to go cut, there we go. Then now I'm going to write click and select UV. And then I'm going to drag select this portion of the face. I'm going to go to modify and unfold. There we go. Now depending on your modeling, depending on your re topology, depending on how you line your things up, your mesh might not be as clean or it might not be as polished. Right? So that we have a neat, we have neat UV coordinates because we are going to paint textures. Right. And this is good enough. We can also sold these and go, So there we are. There we go. You can also take your time eating it up and stuff, but for me, this is good enough. For what we want to do, this is good enough. There we go. Now for the ears, we also want a middle scene as well in H mode. Select this. There we go. Then over here, once again, I'm going to press hold control and then select. Now it's only on the ears. Now we can decide whether we want to helt the ears or we just want to cut them and have one on top and one at the bottom. I'm just going to keep things simple. Cut in my UV. I'm just going to unfold them. Modify, unfold, There we go. We can even do this, everything, and then select Layout. Then I like to come in, let me switch my symmetry off. There you go. Now I can take these in, stack them on top of each other, or I can put them side by side, depending on which is the front and which is the back. Just rotate it like this. Just like the hands, you can also flip your UVs and rearrange them. This for me is cool because we are not making a high end character. There we go. Make sure there is no overlap with the remember to save, There we go. Now we have done our UVs for the head and for the body as well. All our UV's done. We have our character modeled, and our mesh looks nice and clean. The other thing that we want to consider maybe is claws, so that there may be some, maybe definition on the legs. But that's at your discretion as well because you can either paint them in or you can just model them. You can just like extrebe two or three and just redo some UV's. 15. 14 Painting Maps: Now we are going to texture our character. Right? There are still some minor tweaks we could do, but this is good enough for what we would like to achieve. I'm going to start with the face, because it is arguably more interesting than the rest of the body. I'm first going to assign a new material, a standard surface. I will call it face. There we go. This is where we call it face. There's a few things that I'm going to do. First, let me just throw in an arbitrary color, some like this. Then I will bump up the roughness and fiddle with anisotropy bit. There we go, I play a bit with the subsurface scatter settings as well. For now, we'll just make our subsurface scatter color reddish orange. And we could pump up the scale as well, cold. Now that I have this all set up, what I can then do is, let me first see if there isn't a preset that we can play with and not build or tweak from the start. Okay, this is fine. We will use this as it is. What happens when you don't have a sketch tablet and you don't have image editing apps like Photoshop and stuff. What we're going to do is rudimentary texture painting with Meyer. It's been around for as long as I can remember. In Render settings right. Or in your ender tab on your shelf. So I'm going to go to rendering. Pick the last icon. Right, the three D paint tool. Once this is selected with the character highlighted, I'm just going to double click on this and I'm going to scroll down and make sure that the attribute that I'm painting is base color. Once this is done, I'm going to click on assigned textures and a nice two texture is fine. You can go up to four K, it's okay. All right, so let's just do that. Yeah, and then we go assign edit textures. Now when we paint, we should get a result. Oh, wait, I think I ended okay, so let's do it from scratch. There we go. There we go. And it's in base color, cool. The color here at the top is the one that is getting painted, right. And we could switch between these brushes, right? We can also use stamps and stencils as well, but we are keeping it simple and we want to paint the eye. If our UV's were not up to readable standard, then we would have a lot of issues right now when it came to painting this character over here and really kick this egg shape once again. Once again, if you want to grow and shrink your cursor in prison, hold your keyboard. I see that. Does this, why? It's a bit something like this. Now, earlier on, remember that little ridge we made over here? It was. So that when we painted these textures, we sort of have a Stenzil'm. Just going to change the color once again. I think it's this one. There we go. I'm using a mouse. Uh, by the way, so it is a bit tedious. I spent close to 10 minutes painting the circles, so now I'm going to paint the bottom part, and according to the side view, it does this curve thing. You also notice that I haven't joined my measures yet. Well, I don't plan to. There looking cool. So now we can hook up a pink color for the ears. There we go. We can also change how much of the paint gets put on to the model. So get in here, generally you will get holes at the back of the head because of the back face issue, you either have to switch them on. This is not the ideal color turn up. Here we go. Blending it nicely, cool. I'm going to do the same for the body as well. Going to assign a texture, and then I'm going to start painting this texture. Once we are happy with this, we can then go Save Textures. There we go. Now it saves it as an IF, right? If we were going to be bouncing around softwares, then we were most definitely going to be using either ER or G, maybe even Jpeg. So yeah, let me do the body and then we will carry on in the next step. 16. 15 Autorigging using Mixamo and Human IK: In this part, we are going to discuss some of the implications when we decide to do rigging. For example, there's more than one way to rig a character in Maya, right? And there's also standalone plugins. There's also standalone scripts that will automatically rig your character, to be honest, if you are pursuing a career as a TD, or a technical director, or a technical artist who deals with scripts and plug ins and pretty much the programming side of three D, then it will be in your best interest to learn rigging because it's, in my opinion, it's much more technical than artistic. So we are not going to manually rig this. All right. We are going to put it on an online program called Mixamo. In Mixamo, we will be able to assign joints for this character, and then we can come back to Maya and then use human K to add controllers to the joints, right? This is the quickest way to do it without having to weight paint. So yeah, I'm avoiding weight painting at all costs and I'm showing you how to work efficiently, right, Without compromising quality as well. So the first thing we want to do is make sure that there's no history. There are no transforms on any of our models. They all have their own designated names. So me just freeze transform. There we go. So we're just going to delete the history. There we go. The last thing that we want to do is check for namespaces. So I'm going to go to my Windows General Editors namespace editors, right? If it does not look like this, then you click whatever that's underneath here and then you hit Delete. It will ask you if you want to delete or merge it with the root. You merge it with the root, right, until you just have root here. This means that your character doesn't have names from duplicates, doesn't have names from other groups as well, and is therefore recognized as a single object. And this won't give us problems when we are rigging. That's 12 is I'm going to select and highlight all my characters components. And also notice that I didn't merge anything, right, except for the body parts. And the facial parts. But I did not merge the face to the body. Simple reason being, if we do that, then we have to sew the vertices together again and then we will have to do UV's once again. So this gives us a little bit more control because if things fall apart, we know exactly where to target and how to address things. So now I'm going to go to file, and then I'm going to select Export Selection. In my Export Selection I will want to have these features on history. Your channels basically include options, take everything underneath here. The presets are defined, that's called the geometry, right? Smooth groups must be smooth, mesh must be on, and then we don't have any animation because we are going to throw this in an Auto Riga. And then the last thing that we want to check out is embed media, include children and input connections. I'm going to call this stitch rig and there we go. So now let's go to Mix. Am. This is Mix and this is the website, right? The Auto Riga is free to use so you don't have to pay anything. You just have to either create an Adobe ID. If you don't have one, you can just sign up with your Google account. And then, Right, this is very simple, straightforward stuff. So let's. Dive into it. So the first thing when we get here is select the upload character option. And then we get this pop up window. Now we could either scan, we could either navigate to where the file is or we could just drop it in. So I'm just going to drop it in now. It's currently uploading. I'm just going to pause this now. It's or processing our character. We wait for a moment. The next window that appears is your character uploaded, right? And as you can see, this is what we've been putting together since Maya, right? So this is what we have now when I go to next. I'm then going to start to add these areas for the chin. It's just adding markers for the chin, For the wrist as well, or the elbows. That's why we had this definition when we were modeling. And we could have used some definition here on the knees as well, but not least the growing area. You can decide now whether you want to use fingers or not in your pose. If you do, then you can add your three chain fingers or two chain fingers, right? Three chain fingers is essentially your knuckle, the mid part of your finger and then the, the part that's just the part that's just underneath the tip. It would make more sense if I could draw it out, but that's what a three chain finger is. So it has a base for the knuckle, it has a base for the middle part of the finger, and then it has a joint for the end finger, right? So we are not going to get into a lot of like rigging, nitty gritty, right? Because it is highly technical and there's a whole lot of trial and error that happens when you are rigging, especially stylized characters such as this one. So now it's all the ringing and it says that it's going to take about 2 minutes, which is okay. So I'm just going to oppose this, and there we go, here's our character, ready to go. You will notice right off the bat that this isn't a perfect ring job, right? Because we can clearly see some problem areas as well. So if you're happy with this, go next. Then the character has been uploaded. Proceed with this character in the previous one to not be safe. So if you were maybe fiddling around with this in the beginning and you've grown attached to the characters that you have here, or maybe there were some animations that really vibe with your character. Then just download them because now when bringing in the new character, the previous one will not be saved now and I hit next. Here's my character. All right, and we could test out the fidelity of the rig by just looking at a simple walk. Let's pick on this one call. I like it. Now what I want to do is download the pos, right? So I'm just going to delete this right here on your right hand side where it says walking. I'm just going to this and this is the pose that I want. I'm going to download and it's going to ask me in what format do I want this in? All right, so Binary, FPx is cool. Skfpx is cool as well, because we are playing around in Maya and we just make sure that it's at a Tpose. Then we just hit download generally. The downloads here, don't take a long time. There we go. It is done. Now let's go back to Maya. In Maya, what I'm going to do now is import this character. Now, the problem with importing characters in the scene is, number one, naming issues and joint issues, right? They will try to overwrite each other. So it is advisable that you work on a different scene. So I'm just going to create a different scene. Let me say that, there we go. So I can either now drop my character in or I can import it like going file import. So I just dropped my character in. And you'll notice in your outliner, right, you still have that step five folder, but now we have joins in here as well. Now, the other thing that we did in the earlier portions of the video, we said that we would like to embed media in this. And if we done this correctly, our textures should be visible. There we go to see if your textures are visible. Six, our character is technique red, finished, right? We can move around. And also, we are not going to do weight painting areas like this, right? We can just sort them out using the Sculpt tool if we are particular about things. Yeah, this is cool. Now the last part that I want to do is add controllers to this, because to go in and click on the joints, you already have all these incoming values. All right, I'm going to go to human K in my human K. With this selected, I'm going to go create a character definition. Now once again, click on the joint or any one of the joints and open this folder. There should be a human K option, right? So we click on that. Okay. And everything should be green because all your joints are aligning. And we used an auto ca, we didn't do this manually. Now one last thing to do is select this one and it enables us to create a control ring. There we go. Now our character is rigged. We can now begin to pose it and have fun. 17. 16 Xgen Facial Hair 1: So I took a screenshot of our character and we are about to add fur. Now the thing with adding fur, or ten, is that there's a certain low that we have to follow. So this is not an in depth walk through into Gen. We are just hitting the surface and we are not delving into a lot of settings, right, So the first thing that we're going to do is only work on half of the side of the character. All right, so this means that when we plot our guides for the hair, they're going to be flowing in a manner like so we're going to have something like this, even towards the foot. We can even begin to twist it inwards. And the reason we didn't make any claws because this was like a later addition, we might have these covered or the camera angle that we settle on would be something like this. All right, areas like the face, we have to once again look at the topology flow and pretty much work it like that, right? The same goes for the ears as well. With the ears, it's going to be almost curling upwards, like so we started from the bottom and then we carry on bringing it up like this. All right, Even on the fingers, we can have little guides as well. That's pretty much the flow that we are having for the body. It goes down for the arms, it goes left to right. And then for the face, it's circular, right? And then for the ears it's diagonal. So as long as we remember this, our fur, even though this is a three D stylized character, is going to feel believable or feel acceptable. In May, I need to make sure that I am first and foremost in pixtion, depending on what you were doing in your previous projects. Whatever windows that you have out are the ones that you will have. And as you can see, I cleaned out all the other steps and then I just left what we did in the last video. Now what I want to do is, let me close this for now. I'm going to go to X Gen and then I'm going to create a new description. All right, I first have to select my model. We're first going to start with the, let's see if we flip a coin. Facial body. Facial body. We last started with the body, then we did the face this time around. Let's do the face instead. I'm going to create a new description and then I'll face part a part of the stitch fan art collection. Fab. Nope, San. There we go. And then we are going to use Splindsait. There is. Okay. This is the one. And then, oh, yes, what confused me is the top part and the bottom part at the bottom, instead of using expressions, we are going to be placing and shaping our guides, right? And this option is fine as well, because we want them randomly across the surface. If it was to sit uniformly like this and we might get bald spots and like I said, this is just a touch on the surface walk through, right? So once we have these settings, then we hit Create, right? So there are certain things that we have to be, you know, familiar with or accustomed to. Let me just, I'll keep this for reference sake. So if I want to add a. Guide for my hair. Then I'll either add a move guide or a move guide. As you can see here, I still have the same tab, and these features are here as well. Once the guide is placed, I can then choose this to shape the guide just like this, right? But this is still a bit too big. Let's try one more time. And also, I would like to have this on if I start here and then I'm going to make it smaller, like that's core, then I'm going to shape it just like this. It's also very important to work on all sides of your model. This is fine. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to utilities and then I'm going to copy guides, and then I'm going to hit Copy. Now it's copied in order to create a new guide that's going to behave similar to this, I'm going to select a new guide option and then pop it there. And then hit Paste, right? So I'm going to do this for these areas all the way going to the back. They don't have to be in a role because remember, Stitch is a very wild and scraggly character. If your guides are getting bent out of shape some like this, then you can just reshape them, copy, create new guide, paste. So there we go. Now I'm going to do the same once again, but I'm going to space it a bit more, so I come here this time round and I'm just going to be arbitrarily placing these just like this. It's also important to keep checking on your model. Now remember what we said, according to this right over here, we will have fur going down and then we will have going in a diagonal direction. I'm just going to shape this as well. There we go. Now I want to do I, perhaps you're moving around your model and you realize that there are some guides that need to be like reshaped. You can just go to your select, either click on the model or just select on the model, on the models guides. And then this can be fixed. Something like this. The I think this one is a bit too close to the eye, but something like this. Then even these, we are going to shrink them down a little bit. So something like this. Here we go. So let me copy, let me copy it then here, head paste. And then shape it. The reason I copy paste is so that I don't scale it afterwards, So this is fine, and I go copy paste. There we go. There we go. So now we need to add one more and one more. Maybe one more here. Now for the ear, I'll scale this a bit and then I'm going to shape it so that it wraps around the ear like this. I'm going to copy is create a new guide. And there you go. So these feel like they're getting way too close to each other. So I'm going to go around the ear at the back like this and I'll make copy that there is there copy. We're almost done with the one side. I'm going to pause this and do the rest of the year. This is what I have so far, right? When you come to primitives, right, You have a density slider. And this is what we're going to be playing around with a lot. Primarily because what we want to see now is, does this work? And is the surface area being covered, just like we planned with how the fur should flow? We are getting that, which is cool. Which is really cool. Now what I want to do is let me just switch this off. So up here on the eye, you can preview your exchange hair offer and then this sort of clears it. All right? So if ever you are working on it and it doesn't update, it's most likely because this is not ticked on. So for example, if I switch the eye on and I do this, it automatically gets updated. But if I switch this off, then nothing happens. I constantly have to keep switching on the eye to update it. So it is a bit annoying, so I prefer having it on most of the time. Now what we're going to do is need clear this. I'm going to select faces, not my faces, my guides. And then in X N, I'm going to mirror them to the other side, right? So we're going to mirror selected guides just like. So there we have it now we can see which parts, which parts could be covered up. This is fine. The other here is also cool as well. This is what we have so far. Now I'm going to come to Wm, which controls how wide the hair strands are. We are going to tweak this a bit. We are also going to be making sure that areas that we don't want hair to be on will be even areas around the eyelid as well. Areas around the lips as well. 18. 17 Xgen Facial Hair 2: And the first thing that we want to tackle is the width of this. So the first thing that we're going to do is make sure that our guides are modified enough to handle the stuff that we want to have them do. All right, so the first thing that we're going to do is control the width of the hair. I'm going to take it down all the way to 15. At this point, you also have a choice to have your guides to show or hide your guides. Right? If you come here, I can hide them and now we can just focus on stitches face. The length is also important as well. So I'm just going to dial it down a little bit. Might come back to tweak it later on. Now we want to make sure that the width of the fur right is accurately presented because right now it feels like little bindy toothpaks. I'm just going to drop it down much so maybe we pull that out. Yeah, that's much better. So let me carry on with the density. You just gonna bump it up to five, bump it up to eight. And then what I want to happen is the nose area, right? We wanted to not have any fur on it, right? And if there is fur, it's like very, very little. I'm going to paint a mask, so I'm going to create a map. And there we go. So the areas that are paint black will not have any fur on it. And I say, you see that there's less fur now on the character. Also, we can tweak this even further, all right, by playing with the opacity. And then we can have areas that have pads. If I double click on this and I tone down the opacity to something like 0.3 and I paint around the eye, you'll see that it's a bit grayish now and not that full on black. Also, it would help if you have symmetry on when doing this because the face is more or less symmetrical. May it save a got me just change this tool like a gray. And then in my stroke settings, I'm going to select reflection and make sure that it's on X. This looks a bit more grayer. So let's see what happens when we hit Save. There we go. Now we're getting more fur back, so let's tweak this a bit more. Me up, the Opacity 2.5 And then also around the lips. And it doesn't even have to be straight. Just undo that. We're starting to get this, so this is how it's looking so far. We can also tweak the ears a bit 'cause it's a, it's a bit much over there. So once again, F Wild. Okay, there we go. Um, back 'cause it crashed. So let's paint this again. So now I want this to be almost dark, at 0.4% I only just couldn't paint the inside of the ears. So let's hit save silver here. We'll make it white 100% and just fix up whatever happened there. Cool, Let me see if I can push this any further with the eyes. It's a bit too much. A little bit too much. I want like a general little fade, so something like this. Wait, let me have symmetry on. So let's save that. Let's see what happens. Cool, I like that. So the other thing I'm going to do right now is add modifiers. But before I do that, I need to update this here number, change it to 20. Then when I hit rebuild, change to 20 as well. There we go. Now in my modifiers, I'm going to add a clumping modifier. I'm going to click on this little icon offer here where it says Add new modifier. And I'm going to select clumping. Now we're going to get this no clump guides found means that we have to create the mass. If I click on Set up Maps and if I generate right now, these little yellow lines are where the fur will clump itself around. Obviously, we need more points when I generate. Let me do it one more time and generate, that's fine. We can even crank it up a bit more, and then we hit Save. Now when we hit Save, the fur will automatically clump to those areas that we have created. You just switch off the texture. It's a bit distracting. You also notice we have fur in the mouth as well, right? There is a way to sort that out. In fact, we could have done this at the beginning when selecting which faces we want to work on via the UV editor, because we could switch our faces to the nose. So just, can I lift this slightly higher? So let's tweak these in the head clump volume. I'm also going to put this at 0.5 It feels somewhat matted. We can even take this to like two. There we go. And then I want to lower the, as well. 19. 18 Xgen Body Hair 1: This is the body example, right? Like I said, breezing through it, making sure that there is a connection, right? There are parts being covered and there are joining parts as well. And we did say that we might want to cover the feet, make space that still even at the back here he goes, I'm just gonna copy and stand across the board. So this is also how we are going to work on the fingers as well. Let me just copy one paste there. Trying to go for this messy, scraggly, wild look here. So this is how it looks so far, not bad. So if I go here, crank these up, this is what we have. So she looks cool. That feed covering is working. Let me just switch and carry on plotting this. There we go. I don't generally do the underside because then it would mean I have to come in and groom it. And this is just like a one pose project, there really is. Unless an involves really low angles and you're zooming into stitch, right? You really don't need all that information. So now I'm going to do the side, so from the bottom just someth it like. So looks, so there we go. There an air. So even for the tail we can have one at the top like, so let me just copy it out. And then paste haste. And then we're just going to make it look like it's a weaving in a sense, in here and here. And then can just tweak this to be like. So. Now we do the arms can with the sub like. So let me copy that Ally. Just paste. So remember what we did with the ear. This is very, very similar. Let me copy that, paste. This does take some time now for the fingers. So even at the fingers, you're just going to scale this and then just sculpt it. Dumb. That's like, let me just copy that. And then there we go. So the same goes for here as well. You see that my claws are like simple simple claws. Nothing, I'm not doing the underside of it. Just scale this. It is nice to have variations here and there. You just move it to the side. And then the last area, this is what we have. Now what I'm going to do is going to go to my outliner and this year description is going to call it body. And as you can see, it's already updated. I want to duplicate across the mirror, across like. So. There we go. 20. 20 Basic Fur Texturing: So we back and I did a few minor things because it kept crashing with the record on, but it's not a lot. And I can go over what I did when we last left. We were painting the mask. And then after that, what I did was I increased my density to 2,500 Then I came down and adjusted the length. I could adjust it again. I adjusted the width to 1.5 or 15, or 0.01 50, depending on what you're going for. Then, the width ramp, I decreased once again. Yeah, these are the two points that I decreased. Then when we go over to the modifier tab, I switched clumping off so that the fur looks much more, it looks much more relaxed on the face. Right? The two noise modifiers really do help with regards to making it not look straight. These are the settings for the noise. Two, the mask is 0.2 the frequency is 5.0 the magnitude is 1.0 Then the noise on the mask is 0.5 The frequency 1.0 the magnitude is 1.0 as well. And the magnitude scale, right from the left to the right, it is just a straight diagonal line. This enabled us to have this cool looking for, right? So let's do the same with the body as well. So let me just switch back to put 2.0 mode. There you go. Still got that little pose happening there, and as you can see, it's not a perfect mesh, right? This just to get us moving. So I'm going to switch from my face part description to the body then. So in my outliner, I think I should hide this and then show the body. There we go. So these are the guides for the body. And the maps have already been painted underneath so that the palms are not hairy. Now, as you can see, the fur looks fury, but the clumps are a bit too much. Because remember, we want to emulate what we did over at the face. What I'm going to do is I'm going to kill the clumping. And then let me just refresh that with my noise settings. This is fine. I'm just going to render this and see how it looks. If it's not showing like this, then there is likely a non computing issue. As you can see, this also causes the system to crash. So you could either restart your may or you can just take the very same settings that we had for the face and then we're just going to tweak them slightly. All right. We know that the length, the width of our Sir is rather thin, just like base. Then we also know that the length is cool as it is because it's on a different part of the body. The density is also fine as well. The width, however, is what I'm going to decrease over here, right at the end, maybe just slightly. This is what I have now now. When I have this right, I can increase the amount of fur, but this might make my machine crash, right? So let's keep this at 38. It's as cool as it is, so I'm just going to zip on back. Also, I want to duplicate this, those utilities, let me copy this. And I want to paste it right here because there is an annoying bald spot. May just shrink it a bit. And then here we go, slightly better. So I'm just going to hide my guides for now 'cause then they're going to appear in the Indo view. And then I'm just gonna hit Nda on the Arnold tab. We'll just switch to Arnold. Oh wait, I need to I need to convert this, select this and I'm going to go to generate, convert to interactive groom and there is no need for this. Just convert then I can hide this. Now in render, we should see something and there we go. Oh, I think the issue is the map that we painted, it could have somehow wound up right smushing on the side here. This looks really good. This looks really good. So I'm going to pause this and then just wait for the entire thing to render. It looks good. It looks good. Let me just stop that now. Go to Interactive Groom. There we go. All right. Now, because of the trial and error and crashing, you might have a lot of shaders that have duplicated themselves over. Just drag select over all of them. Then you go to Edit, Delete unused nodes and the ones that you aren't using will go then go to my body spline description over here on the he physical shader seven, we would change that to body for my cap slock is on. Then what I want to do is go to my textures and select file two. File two is going to go to the root color. Now when I hit 66, there we go. This is what we get. Let me just kill this quickly. We render this out. So I'm going to oppose this. So this is what we have so far, right. We can still see a bit of the texture that we painted underneath, but we want it to be prominent even on this here, fur, right? And somewhere along the lines this got ruined. So we can always go back and fix the texture and it will automatically update on this. And that's the beauty of this workflow, right further up the food chain and tweak stuff. And then we can go further down the food chain and tweak stuff and everything will still work fine. So let me attach the other other texture for the tip. There we go. Now this is what we have, right? We still have this weird. We pause it again so that you can see properly. This is what we have. Now I'm going to go to the secondary highlight color, and I want to change it to blue, right, or similar blue to this. Here's one over here. As you can see, it's going to that familiar blue that we like so much even the glint as well. Let's make it blue. There we go. Now let's see if this matches up with our face. I'm just going to switch to face on. Let me zoom out chilly. Let me pose this nicely. And then is, there we go. So let me pause this so that it renders okay, now I realize what happened. The primary and secondary are supposed to be this blue and the glint should just stay white. Let's rectify that. There we go. So let me pause this again. There we go. If we still don't like how the fur is looking, the areas which the fur is covering, right, We can just go back here because we have always been working non destructively. And we can tweak to our heart's content and then convert it to an interactive groom so that it picks up the textures underneath. If like on this model there were issues with the paint map, right? You can just come in, fix the paint map, and then everything else will be updated.