Into the Ocean: Explore Character Illustration in Blender 3D

1. Introduction: Whether it's for animation or illustration, creating appealing looking characters is one of the hardest things to achieve. But when everything comes together, the final result can be extremely satisfied. In this class, I share my process for transforming a two D character design into a final three D character illustration using Blender. Hello. My name is John owls. I've been lucky enough to spend over 15 years working as a character animator and animation director for children's television. But one of the things that I enjoy doing the most is designing and creating some of my own characters and bringing them to life. I've divided this class up into two key sections. The first part of the class focuses on the character sculpting process. Working from the design, we'll start by building a base mesh which will form the foundation of our sculpt. From there, we'll gradually start adding detail and refining our character with a constant eye on creating an appealing end result. In the second part of the class, we'll be focusing on presentation. We'll build a simple environment before moving on to shade our character with blenders procedural shaders. If you're new to procedural shading, the networks of nodes can initially look daunting, but we'll start out simply before gradually building towards more complex shaders, incorporating techniques such as subsurface scattering to give our character a more believable looking feel. With the shading complete, we'll turn our attention to lighting. I'll demonstrate not only how to light your character in an appealing way, but also how to use lighting to add an element of storytelling to the illustration. Okay. Finally, we'll bring the whole image together within blender's composite. But we'll color balance the image and add some final effects to transform our render from something which looks like this into this. This class is designed for those who already have some experience with blender and are ready to take their work to the next level. If you new to sculpting and blender, I'd highly recommend starting out with my character sculpting essentials class, which will teach you everything you need to know to get started. As always, while I'm walking you through my process, I constantly take the time to not just explain how I'm doing things, but why I'm making the choices that I do. This means that by the end of the class, you'll have a far greater understanding of what it takes to make an appealing three D character illustration and the skills to bring some of your own designs to life. So if you're ready, let's get started. The 2. Class Overview: Hello, and welcome to the class. When creating characters for animation, there are a number of key steps which we typically go through. Obviously, everything starts out with a design. With a simple character, this may be modeled using a process known as box modeling. But for anything more complex, it's common to start out with three D sculpting. Sculpting gives us the flexibility to focus on the forms of the character, pushing and pulling things around without worrying about the underlying geometry. Once we're happy with the sculpt, we then go through a process called topology. This involves rebuilding the mesh in a way which reduces its complexity and enables it to deform smoothly in animation. With the re topology complete, we can then define the U V coordinates, which remap our three D geometry into a two D space. This is an essential part of the process before we can start texture painting. These textures can then be combined with other shaders to create the final surface detail of our characters. With the character complete, we would next add a rig or armature in order to be able to pose the character, either for a single illustration or for animation. Finally, we can add an environment and some lighting to bring the scene to life. All of these steps are typically required for animation, we can greatly simplify the process when working on a character illustration, and that's exactly what we're going to do in this class. In this case, we'll take the output of the sculpting stage and directly add shaders to it in order to define the look of the surface before adding an environment and lighting our scene. By taking this class, you'll be learning the process of character illustration. But all of the skills that you develop can be applied to creating animated characters as well. When you're learning or developing skills, there's a lot to be gained by trying to replicate someone else's work. But there's even more to learn by trying to apply those skills and create something unique of your own. For your class project, I'd love to see either your version of the illustration which I demonstrated in class, or if you're up for the challenge, a unique character illustration of your own. Once you're ready, upload your work to the class project gallery to seek feedback and share it with the other students. Also, if you'd like feedback along the way, feel free to upload work in progress to the class project gallery. Or alternatively, you can ask questions in the class discussion section. Now, if you're ready to get started, let's jump into the first lesson. 3. Class Updates: In past versions of Blender, all of the sculpting brushes were listed on the left hand side of the interface alongside the other tools. Blender 4.3 made a significant interface change with the introduction of the asset shelf, which was designed to allow for the easy addition of custom brushes. This asset shelf moves all of the sculpting brushes to the bottom of the interface whilst leaving the other tools in their original location. The size of the asset shelf can be adjusted by dragging on its boundary. And the size of the thumbnails can be adjusted in the display settings menu. Tool tips, providing the name of the brushes, appear when you hover over the thumbnails, and you can also enable the display of names within the shelf, although this is only really useful with larger thumbnail sizes. Tabs at the top of the asset shelf enable the filtering of the brush selection, and it's also possible to search for specific brushes. Whilst these changes make the interface appear different to that shown in the following lessons, functionally, everything remains the same, and all shortcuts continue to work as usual. 4. Scene Setup: Before we get started, I want to make some quick changes to the unit system within Blender. The default cube within any new blender seam file, as dimensions of 2 meters squared. If I change that instead to 5 centimeters, which is roughly the size of a turtle hatchling. You'll see that our cube has become extremely small. While I could zoom in and start working at that scale, it can introduce some issues later on down the line. Instead, I'm going to undo that and we're going to go into the scene settings. Under this unit section here, we can make some changes. First of all, I'm going to change the length here from meters to 2 centimeters. You can see we're now showing our default cubers 200 centimeters in size. The other thing I'm going to do is change this unit scale from one to 0.1. Doing that means that our dimensions of the cube are now 20 centimeters, and nothing else has changed here in the scene. If I now change this down to 5 centimeters. You can see that this is a far more manageable size to start working with. The other thing that I'm going to do is change the grid here, because in changing the unit scale, we've now lost the smaller subdivisions in the grid. We can do that if we go up to the overlays and change the scale here of the grid to 0.1 as well. Now, when you're changing this unit scale value, I'd recommend making changes with a factor of ten. That way, if you're working on separate objects in separate seam files, if you ever work with different unit scales and have to bring those objects together, you can simply scale an object up or down by a factor of ten to make the scales match within the new seam file. So with the unit scales setup, our next job is to import our reference files. What I'll do to start with is just press the three key on my numpad to jump into the right view. Let's just frame this up by hitting the period key. If you navigate to wherever you've saved the resources, you should be able to drag and drop the design into Blender. Now I'm going to zoom out a little bit, so I can see all of this, and what we want to do is match up the size of this right view with our cube, which has already been scaled to size. I'm just going to scale this down and start moving into place. We can see we've got a problem here in that we can't properly see our reference image. So I'm just going to hop over here into the property panel, and on the data tab, we can change a couple of settings. First of all, I'm going to change this depth to front, which brings the image back in front of our cube. But in order to see both at the same time, I also want to adjust the opacity here. So I'm just going to bring that down. To something around about 0.3. The other thing I'm going to do is uncheck this perspective option. At the moment, if I move around in the perspective view, I'll still see this reference. I'm going to check that off so that we actually don't see it and it doesn't interfere with our perspective view. But once I jump back into any of the orthographic views, we'll still see the reference there. Now I can go ahead and scale this back down and position it to match up as closely as possible with my cube. For now, I'm just centering this up on the world axis. I think that should do for the side view. Let's just rename this so I can just with the object selected. Here I have two. And we'll call this rough side. And I'm going to create a new instance of this by hitting D and just right click to cancel the move. So we want to go into the front view here and I'm going to rotate this object around the Z axis by 90 degrees, and I'm just going to hit the minus key as well. So it rotates -90 degrees and hit Enter. Then I can move this in the x axis across it until I'm centered up on this center line here. Let's rename that as well. So let's call that front. We need to do that one more time. So I'm going to jump into the top view, D, and cancel the move. And let's rotate this this time around the x axis by 90 degrees. What I'm going to do is scale this negatively on the y axis. So just by rolling over the y axis here, I can press the minus key, and that will flip it. Now again, I can move this into place. Going to move this on the y axis until I'm lined up with my cube again here. Let's rename this to rough top. Now I'm going to select all of these three reference objects here. Mm, create a new collection. Let's call this reference. And under the filters here, I'm going to enable selection and just disable selection for the whole reference collection here. That way, we can see it, but we can't select it accidentally. If I jump into my three views, you can see that we're all lined up and ready to go. The final thing that we need to do is to save our file, save as. And if you navigate to wherever you want to save your seam file, I'm just going to call this hatching. Okay. Zero one. Now in the next lesson, we can start to work on our base mesh. 5. Base Mesh: So the next thing that we want to do is start roughing in the basic shapes of our character. So I'm going to start by selecting this cube here, and then I'm going to scale it down until it's roughly the size of the head. And just move it on the y axis here, again, until it's roughly in the right place. What then want to do is add a subdivision modified to this. So I can just hold down control and hit the two key, and then we'll add two levels of subdivision. Now, I want to make sure that this is matched in all of my different views here. And to help with that, what we can actually do is hold down control, t and Q. And that will give us this quad view here. Once we've done that, I can actually hit the GK to move this in any of the views and see the effect in all three of them together. What I'm going to do is just roughly scale this until it matches as best as possible with this overall head shape. That will do. Now I'm going to just hit F two and call that head. Let's duplicate this, shift to duplicate and move it back for the torso. Again, let's just scale this until it's the right sort of shape and size. Again, this doesn't have to be exact. That will do it for now. Let's just rename that to Torso. Now, whilst the basic shape of the head should be fine, I want to add a little more detail to the shape of the shell here. For that, I'm just going to hit tab to go into edit mode. Control R to add an edge loop, and I'm going to position that at this high point within the shell. I can now hit zed to enable x ray mode, or just check it on up at the top here. Select through and scale these points down a bit. And I'm going to do the same at the front here. Scale those down. I can move them back a touch as well. Let's move this up a little bit. And just keep making tweaks to the overall form here. I'm not going to worry about these ridges up at the top here. I'm just trying to get the basic shape of the shell initially. If you ever want to exit out of this quad view, again, just a short cut control and Q, and then you can pick which view you want to go into. Let's just scales points out a little bit. So we're better matching this shape. That will probably do us for now on that base shape of the torso. I also want to rough in the flippers. So let's go into the top view here and add in another cube. Initially, this is way too big, let's hit to scale and 0.1, scale it down a little bit, and I'm just going to take that bit further and move that out to the start point of these flippers, and I'm going to rotate it as well so that it's roughly aligning with this part of the flipper. So I'm going to go back to my quad view and scale this on the Zod axis and just move it down as well. So it's rough aligned with this flipper here. And we can move into the perspective view up at the top here. And I want to go into edit mode, face selection, select this front face here, we're going to extrude that out. So to extrude. I'm going to rotate and scale this up, and we're just roughly trying to match the overall shape of this flipper without having to be too exact at the moment. And let's extrude that out again, position around the middle here. And continue on down the flipper. Okay. Before we go any further with this, I'm just going to go back to object mode and add a subdivision modifier. So again, hit Control two. And you can see, because of the limited resolution in the mesh, we've lost a lot of our volume here. I'm going to tab to go back into edit mode. I'm actually going to add in a couple of loop cuts here. Control to add one in here. Rotate that and scale it up a bit. Let's add another in here. And then I'm going to slick that edge loop and scale it out. And now we're going to want this to move up and into the rest of the body here. So what I'm actually going to do is just going to face selection. Grab this end face here. Let's just move that up on the z axis. I can actually rotate that a bit as well. So that we're getting closer to the body there. I think what I'm going to do is just extrude out one more time, and scale it up a bit as well. So I'll form a better connection with the rest of the body. Okay, looking back down here, I think we can afford to add in one more edge loop there just to better match that overall shape. And that will probably do us back in object mode, I'm just going to rename this to flip a front. Then we can add a mirror modifier to this as well. So just add a modifier, start typing mirror. And we need to select an object here to mirror this around, so just select the picker and click on the torso. I still think that we can afford to go into edit mode and adjust the scale of the slightly more. So just holding down Alt and clicking to select one of these loops, and I'm just going to scale it out a bit more to better match that reference. So I think that should do. Things are quite thick though at the side here. So that's going to vertex selection, and I'm going to select. All of these vertices here. Let's check from this view. Select these ones as well. And let's just scale these on the Z axis until we've got a better match. Okay. So that's working a lot better? So, let's add one more cub in here. Again, I scale 2.1 and scale it down, move it to the back and rotate it to roughly match with the orientation of that flipper. So to do is just my axes to local, so I can scale it out. It's local x axis scale it and move it down. And to play here. And once again, we can select. Then you face at the back here and extrude it out. Scaling and rotating as we go to form a basic shape. And as before, I'm going to add a subdivision modifier. So we'll get a better idea of our form there. I think I can just scale this up slightly. Reposition attached to match. Again, let's go back into edit mode and refine things. And as we did before as well, I want to make sure that this joins into the body. So let's go to face selection. Select this face on the end here. And say two extrude that one more time and scale it up a bit. And I'm going to move that up a little bit two for where it attaches into the torso, which we're going to adjust a little bit later. So tab to head back into object mode, have two flip a rear. Again, let's add a mirror modifier. Shift A over the modified panel here, and start typing mirror, and we can drop that in. Once again, we'll need to pick a torso object to mirror around. You can see that things aren't aligning exactly here. That's fine since it is simply a drawn reference as long as we're getting roughly in the right ballpark, then that's all we need the reference for. Okay. So I'm just going to shift Alt Q to exit out of my quad view, d to remove x ray. And you can see we have our base mesh here, which should form a good starting point to work from. And don't forget to save your scene. 6. Defining the Forms: One thing that I like to do as I'm working on a scene is to periodically save incremental versions of it. This means that I'll always have an older version of the seam file to go back to if anything ever goes wrong. Since we have our base mesh defined here, we can go ahead and save a new version, so we can go under the file menu and we can hit save incremental or use the shortcut Control S. As you can see, our version number has now increased to version two. We're now almost ready to start sculpting. But before we do that, we have to make sure that we've removed any scale values from our objects and also removed this subdivision modifier. So I'm first going to roll it over the subdivision modifier and hit Control A to apply it. That means that we no longer, if I go into edit mode, have simply a cube to edit. We have all of these points live as well. I'll do the same for the torso back here. Control A to apply the modifier. Then with both of them selected, I can hit control A and apply the scale. So you see we now have a scale of one for both of the objects. For the time being, I'm going to leave the flippers as they are. With our head selected, we can now jump over into the sculpting tab and let's frame things up a bit. And we can start to work on the overall shape of this head. For that, I'm going to use the grab brush, G for grab and F to adjust the size of that. But I also want to make sure that I've got symmetry enabled, which we can do up at the top here. I'm going to x, and you can now see that we're going to start editing both sides at once. Now, in the scalp mode here, I can jump into my front view and we can start to adjust the overall shape of our head here to better match the reference. Going to jump to the side and start to move things around here as well. We're just looking at this overall silhouette at the moment, and we'll better edit the rest of the form in a while. So here, I'm just pushing back some of these points where I know things are going to need to pull back for this eye whilst keeping the central points running along the silhouette here. Just jump into the top you as well. See how things are looking there. Start to pull back a little bit for where we want our neck to be. And again to make sure this overall for I look correct. So let's pull things back a bit there, but keep it forward there. If the reference is interfering a bit too much, we can go ahead and adjust that. Hit control tab, switch to object mode. We can go and select one of our reference objects here. And go to the data properties. I'm going to take this opacity down a little bit further so that we can still see the reference, but it's not overpowering the appearance of what we're sculpting here. Let's take that right down. You can see here that we also need to do the same in the other views. I'm going to select each of these Agis them as well. Now, if I orbit around my form, you can see that we're starting to get a better shape for our head. I think I'm happy with that for now until we add in a little bit more detail. I want to do the same for my torso. When it comes to switching between objects that we're sculpting on, we can obviously come back into object mode as we are here and select an object and then control tab and go into sculpt mode. If I wanted to switch back to my head here, I can either go up to the outliner, and I can click on these little dots here to switch between the object that I'm sculpting on or alternatively, within the viewport, I can roll over an object and hit. You'll see that's briefly highlighted to show that we've now selected our torso. I Q for the head. O Q, and back to our torso once more. So again, I'm just going to jump into the side view here. And I have to remember to re enable symmetry because each of the objects has its own settings. So if I select that head again, you'll see we have our symmetry on, but the torso does not, so I need to enable that before we start to make any edits. So back in the side view here, I'm going to start pulling this down to better define the shape. And what I'm going to do is ignore the shell at the moment, but just try to create this shape for the bottom of the torso. Okay. And we'll come back to the shell shortly. I'm going to pull those points forward a little bit, where we're going to join in with our neck. I'll go into the top view, and I'm actually going to pull this in a bit inside the shape of the shell. Because what we're really defining here is the lower part of the body. I leave the sticking out a little bit at the back here, where we're going to add in a bit of a tail, pull it in around the flippers. Again, I'm dipping that down where there's this tail here. So I think that should do for the torso shape. It going to pull that down a little bit in the center there. I'm going to pull those points out at the front. That looks all right. Then in the next lesson, we're going to define a shape for the shell as well. Don't forget to save. 7. Adding the Shell: So what I now like to do is create another object to act as our shell, and I'm going to use this torso as a starting point. I'll first jump back into object mode, I hit in control tab, switch to object mode, and then I'm going to duplicate this object. So shift D, I'm going to cancel and move on it, but I'm going to scale it up a little bit. Control A and apply that scale. And let's have two and rename this to shell. And what I really want is just the top part of this mesh with the shell object selected here, that's a tab and go into edit mode. I go to my side view. It's one select vertices and tzd so that we can see through the mesh by enabling X ray mode. And I'm going to select these lower points here. You can see we've selected all of these bottom points here on the mesh. So I can now hit the x key and delete vertices and tapto exit. I'm going to hit said to get back out of x ray mode. So you can see, we now have just the top part of the shell. So I'm going to hit control tab, I can go back into scot mode and we can start forming the shape of the top part of the shell and then we'll add some thickness to it afterwards. So I'm going to go into my top d to start with. And because we duplicated our object, we already have our ymmetry on. So I can start pulling these points back out. To match the overall shape of that shell, and we'll pull these points on the end back a little bit here as well. Let's check from the side. Again, I'm not going to worry too much about the bumps on the top. Those ridges will be added in later. But we'll get close to the overall form of it. And I want to bring this up at the back here, so it's matching as best as possible this line. I bring these sides back down a bit lower here as well. If you need to just go back into perspective mode, move around, so that we're creating a nice shape to the form here. Put those vertices up around the flipper here. The end things come a bit higher again. Okay. And you see as we orbit around that now we're starting to see through our shell a bit. We can always switch back to this torso heading Q, and we can then move down some of the points here if we need to. We can always hide our shell to give us a better view of what's underneath. Just push these vertices down a little bit, so there's no risk of them poking through. Q reselect our shell. I think we've got the basic form looking okay there. So now what I'd like to do is add some thickness to this. Okay. So to do that, I'm just going to go back to the layout tab. So we're back in object mode, and we're going to add a modifier to this. Under the modifiers, we can search for solidify. You can see straightaway, that's given us some thickness here to the shell. In fact, I'm fairly happy with what we've got there already. We can maybe that a little bit just by holding down the Shift key, we can that in smaller increments. Until it's a thickness that we're happy with. And once we're done with that, we can actually apply this modifier to turn it into geometry. Roll over the modifier and hit control A, we'll apply that. Now you can see that we have vertices defining that mesh. Okay. Finally, just to help separate our objects here visually, what I'm going to do is add a couple of materials. So I'm going to let my head here. We already have a material defined here. So let's call that skin. I'm just going to change the base color here. Let's jump into material preview so that we can actually see what we're doing. I'm just going to create a sort olive green color here. I'm going to increase the roughness on this as well. So we've got more of a map finish. You can see it's already been applied to a couple of the other objects that we duplicated from this head. What I want to do is apply that same material here to the flippers. I'm just going to select the material here from this dropdown on each of these objects. But for our torso, we want something new, so what I'm actually going to do is click where it says number five here to create a copy of this, and we're just going to rename that to shell. Okay. And I'm going to change this base color and move it round to more of a brown color. Slightly lighter there. That should do. That makes it a lot easier to see what we're doing when we're working in this region between the body and the shell. So when you're happy with that, don't forget to save. 8. Defining the Face: With all of our main body parts to define now, we can start to add some detail to our head. So I'm just going to select my head mesh here and head back into your sculpting mode. Now, the resolution that we have here is still quite low, so I want to add a little bit of detail. To do that, we're going to remesh the head. If you hit the ark, just as we move left to right, that will define how much we're going to subdivide the mesh. So for now, I'll go with something like 1.15 and hit Control R, and you can see that that's subdivided mesh here. It's still very low resolution, but we can start to add in a bit more detail and we'll further refine it as we go on. Initially, I'm just going to jump to my side view here. You can see where it's remeshed it. We've got a bit of a rough finish there. So I'm going to smooth this off. But if I hold down the Shift key, and start to smooth, we lose volume very quickly. So I'm going to go up to my smooth tool here and just change the strength. Let's bring it down like 0.3, and that's a bit more manageable. So I'll just head back to my grab brush again. Let's bring some of these bits out, but also do some smoothing. Bring that brush size down a bit. And again, just looking at this silhouette at the moment. Start to bring things in under the chin here. Bring that down a bit further. What you need to be careful of is spending too long, working just on the silhouette here and not looking at the form from all angles. I'm just going to bring these edges out a little bit, pull this down at the back. To give us a starting point. And if I jump to the front view, I've got similar issues here, just do a bit of smoothing and the large brushes. Pull the shape out again. We have these cheeks down here to define. I'm just going to pull that volume out a little bit on the side. Smoothing a little bit as I go. Now, let's look at it in three dimensions. It's not looking too bad. I'm going to push back these eye sockets a little bit here, now we're going to want to create some space for the eyeballs. Let's just recess them a bit. Bring that in. Let's bring that out a little bit again. Cheek volume I want to make sure that that is a nice rounded cheek. Come back a little bit. Forwards perhaps push back there. Keep that pointed beak shape that Hawks bills are known for. Let's just jump into our side views. Yeah, I'm using a bit of volume again there. It's just a bit of a constant back and forth between the reference and adjusting things and the perspective view. So that's looking a lot better. They're already getting more of a sense of the main forms of the head here. Pull down a little bit where we're going to need that eye to show through. And again, here as well. I think we need that to be a bit lower. I'm going to see where the corners of the mouth are. So I'm going to pull that up a bit. I start find that shape there for the smile. Okay. I'm looking at the shape, of these eye sockets a bit more. Back again from the side. And on the top, it's like that's cheeks pulled in a bit too far. Okay. There we can adjust our overall form with a low resolution mesh, the smoother end result is going to be. It's much easier to adjust the overall form when it's got less detail. We'll add the details as we go on. Okay, that's looking good. So I'm going to save that there, and then we can add some eyeballs in the next lesson. 9. Eyes: So before we go too far with the sculpting, I want to bring some eyeballs in so that we know what we're sculpting around. To do that, I'm just going to head back into my layout tab, and hit Shift A, and we're going to add in a UV spear. Then I'm going to hit S to scale 0.1 to bring it down in size a bit. And I think that's still too big. Let's try 1 centimeter. That looks a bit better. So just going to go to my top view and move this roughly into place. What I'm aiming for here is to get this eyeball as large as it can be on the one half of the mesh without poking out the sides. The bigger we can get it, the flatter the front of the eyeball is going to appear. If we went with a much smaller size, we'd have a much more bulging eye. We can actually reduce the bulge here by having as large as possible. Let's have a look from front. Let's move this up into place. So go something like that for now. And what I want to also do is rotate this around the x axis. So I'm going to hit R x 90, and that will ensure that our pole on the front is pointing forwards. And the reason I'm doing that is so that we can easily define a pupil. So I'm just going to in the materials tab here, hit new? Type an eye white here. I'm going to increase the roughness a bit. And then we're going to add another material slot here with a new material, which we'll call pupil. In this case, I want to take this right down to for Black. I'm going to increase the roughness and we hit the tab key to go into edit mode here. Deselect everything and select this front vertice. Then by holding down the control key and the plus on the numb pad, I can actually increase our selection minus will decrease it till I've selected these front sets of vertices. Now with the pupil material selected, I can just hit this a sign button and that has defined our pupil. And I'll tap back out. Now, I think this eyeball is probably a bit too far forward. Let's jump into the top of you here. And let's just move this back a little bit. Sitting further back within the head. That looks a bit better. And then what I'm also going to do is to mirror this eye. So under the modifiers, let's just add a modifier, start typing mirror. Drop that, and we can use our head as our mirror object. And already our little turtle hatch starts to have a little bit more life. Finally, I'm going to select those eyes. Let's say F two and rename that object to eyes. Let select our head again, and then we'll further refine our sculpt in the next lesson. Don't forget to save. Okay. 10. Refining: Head: So with our heads still selected, let's head into sculpting mode once more. And we're going to remesh this head once again to give us a little more detail to work with. So let's hit the R key and pick a new resolution to work with. For now, maybe we go around 0.6 and hit Control R. It's given us a good bit of extra detail to work with. We can smooth out some of these rougher edges here, just by holding down the Shift key. Just be aware as you do, you can start to lose a little bit volume, we have to pull some shapes back out a little bit as we go. I'm just going to smooth out some of these shapes here. I'll start refining things a little bit more. Okay. So we now have a bit more geometry to work with so we can start to define this area around the mouth a bit better. I'm just pulling back these corners here, touch. So just going to quickly jump into my side view. Let's define exactly where that line should run into the corner here. I think we're going to increase some volume up at the top here B. Let's jump to the front so we can see what we're doing. Pull those corners in a touch as well. That's good. And we can still make some oval tweaks to the volumes here. If we need to make sure those cheeks are nice and full. Keep those corners. To up nicely. And we can also start to better define that shape around the eyes. Pulled in a little bit too far. So good. And I think we need to push back some of this geometry here, which we can do a little bit with the grab brush. But what can be easier is to actually switch to the clay strips brush. So if we hit the sky, we'll switch to play strips here. I'm going to reduce my size down and hold down control. And that just less carve away at the geometry here inside the eye, inside the eye socket. Same around the side here a bit. Smooth some of that out. Now I'm still wondering if those eyes are a little bit far forwards. So I'm just going to control tab, go back to object mode. Se my eyes. Let's just bring them back a bit here. Okay. Okay. And let's head back into scoped again. And we can use that clay strips brush if we want to add in a little bit of geometry around the cheeks here. Just smooth that out again. I think I want to pull some of this geometry back a bit as well. Smooth that out. And if we hit Shift C, we can get our crease brush. Take that down in size and just define this shape for the mouth a little bit better. Jump to the side. Yeah. I think this has all got pulled back a little bit too far. Let's bring that forward. To make sure we still got that chin shape. Okay. If it's starting to get hard to actually see that reference underneath, then we can always go in and adjust it and we just need to change back to object mode first, select our reference and we can adjust this capacity again. I can bring that up a bit. So we can better see what we're doing. L at the sew here as well. Bring that up. I'm going to do the same at the top as well. Let me go. So again, from the front view. Let's head again back into scalp mode. Let see we pull those corners in way too far. Okay. That's good. And I can also see now the shape of this a lot better. So we're trying to as best as possible match up to that oval shape that we have in the reference. And we need to add in a bit volume from the side here. Let's pull forward a see this really back. What I'm going to do. Let's make this a bit bigger. Let's around from the side. Okay. I need to do the same. Down at the bottom here, put some of this volume up. That's better matching that line that we have there in the reference. That out of touch. Let's make sure too much volume from the front. A better defining that shape for the eye now. That's looking pretty good from the top. Pues corners in a bit. It's just a process of constant refinement tweaks here and there, and as always, checking from all angles. Smooth anything's bit too lumpy. Think again, I'm going to just push that geometry back a little bit here just with the clotrip brush, holding down control, push some of that back. Difficult because resolution here is not that great, we're losing some volume on the outside here as well, which is something that can happen a bit. I'm just going to smooth that over. Then add back in. When things get a bit too thin, you can sometimes get this issue. Sculpting on one side will pull the other side th. So I'm just going to my grab brush. Just pull it out a little bit. Let's read that. There we go. I'm just adding a touch of volume back in there. If you need to, you can also hit the key to go to the inflate tool, which can let you add a bit of volume in there quickly and easily. Okay, that's now. I think at the front here, though, I want to pull that down a little bit in between the brows. It's hard to see when you're in the side view because we're really seeing sort of top of the brows here, so I'm going to pull that up from the side. And the front, you can see we need to create this brow shape here. Soften it out slightly. I don't want that to be too harsh. Pull that down a bit at the top and better define this brow shape. Here as well. Me was not going too bumpy. Eve that out. I think we also need to better define this chin. I'm pulling this down in the middle. I pull back at the sides there, so we start and create this chin shape. Let's pull that back in at the sides as well. Let's some of that out. So these are the things that you can only really do in the perspective view. Try to identify how the forms should wrap around, which you can't see once you're in the orthographic views. They'll only show you the overall silhouette. Let's check what we've got here now. I'm sure I've not pulled it too far away from the silhouette as well. It's pretty good. And same here from the front. Happy with that overall shape. But we have a better defined chin at the front there now. And while we're here, let's just pull that neck back a little bit here as well. Let's start defining that shape. Where it needs to join with the rest of the body. I shall I keep a rounded form to it. And looking at how this skull shape might be defined. I always can jump into the orthographic views just to get that oval shape right. Smoothing that out a bit. Make sure that we're pulling down the sides, not just the middle. Okay. I think that will do for now. I may add a bit. 40 minute a bit. There we go. As always, don't forget to save. Okay. 11. Refining: Torso: Now that our head sculpts in a reasonable place, I think it's time to start bringing up the rest of the body to a similar level. So I'm just going to Q to select the torso here, and we can increase the resolution there, so we have some more detail to work with. So let's let's go to somewhere around 1.6 there and control R. So, I just want to define this tail a little bit more at the back here. I just want a little short stubby tail sticking out at the back underneath the shell there. Make sure that we've got enough volume around it. Let's pull back a little bit. Yeah. And then where each of the flippers attaches, we want to define an area around them. So I'm going to start out with the crease brush, take the size of that down a bit. And I'm going to start marking out this area around. Each of the flippers. And in fact, I'm going to go back to the clay strips brush. Increase my size a bit and just holding down control. Let's push this area back in. Just to touch sort of recess around the flip of that. The same at the back. Let's recess this area in. I think we're going to need a bit more geometry to work with here, again, remesh this and let's go something like 0.6 again. Control. So that gives us a bit more to play with there. I think I'm going to reduce the size of these flippers at the back here where they attach to the body. So I'm not going to worry about that wrapping around exactly at the moment. Make sure there's some volume underneath here. Again, we can go back to the crease brush and tighten up the edges around here a bit. It's the same at the front here? All right, so I think I should adjust these flippers. Now, so let's just go back into object mode. Select that and tab to enter edit mode. These boss are already selected, so I'm going to scale them down. And we can move them a bit more into the position that we want them to be. Take them down a little bit. Okay. And I want to make sure that these flippers are fully tucked inside that mesh. So going to go into X ray mode, slip that end face. Let's extrude that out slightly. Let's go up a touch. Let make sure it feels like it's properly attaching. Let's just remove that out a little bit as well. So the two flippers don't feel like they're bashing into each other too much. There we are. It feels like they're joining with the body a little bit better now. I'm going to select the torso again and head back into scot mode. I just want to make sure close strips brush again. Just adding a bit of that volume back in under here. C bit away. So we have this nice recess here. At the front, I think we can pull all of this back a bit. So it's a bit closer to our flippers. Okay. I'm also going to pull the front of the torso back a little bit here. I want to figure out where it's going to attach into the neck here. But just recess that back a little bit. And we'll refine exactly how these two parts join later on. Okay. Once you're happy with that save your scene, and we'll move on to the shell in the next lesson. 12. Refining: Shell: So we can roll over the shell here and hit Q to select it. And once again, we need to increase the resolution so we've got something to work with. So I'm going to hit the R key, and let's go something like that and control R. So initially, I'm just going to hold down the Shift key and smooth out basic shape here. Some of those bumpy details. We're losing a bit of volume around the edge here, but not to worry about that too much. We'll pull that back again later. Better starting point. So again, with the grab brushes, jump to the side and make sure that we're defining that silhouette correctly still. Now, I'm going to start bringing this up over the neck back there. From there. I see we need to bring this up in the middle. Come up too high on the edges. You need to obviously wrap around the neck there. Again, putting up those edges too much to pull up in the perspective view. Push things down a bit more on the sides. A larger brush. I'm just going to pull these sides in a bit better shape to the shell. I'm not worrying about the fact that we're poking through the torso for now. It's in a minute. Okay So I'm just starting to create a bit of a ridge around the side here. We can do that a bit better with the crease brush. So first of all, I'm just going to over the torso. And let's just push in some of that volume a bit. So it's not sticking out through the shell. Switch back to our shell, and I'm going to switch to the crease brush size down a bit. And just define a bit of a edge around the shell. She wants to cut through at the top there. So I can actually put a bit more volume in here. Let that out. Switch to grab brush and pull that back up. Okay. I'm trying to make sure it wraps around that neck, correctly. It's a bit high putting this bit down. There are so that gives us our basic rim to the shell. I might hit the inflate brush, pull back some of the volume there around those edges. And smooth some bits out. Okay. And because this is being pulled around a little bit, getting a bit jagged at the bottom here. I'm going to remesh this again and just take this down a little bit further. Control. There we are. Now, so smooth this out on the edge. Actually more able to smooth it nicely. Again, I've got the torso's again push back some of those points. Okay. And again, put that toss in. Just checking how the shell wraps around. Fairly good. And we'll add all of the details in a little bit later. So we can save that there for now. 13. Eyelids: What I'd like to do next is to jump back over to the head. Let's let that with Q. And I want to start creating the eyelid shape. So if I jump into the front view here, we have this shape around here that I want to define a bit more clearly. So first of all, I'm going to just pull things back a little bit around the eye, give myself a little bit more space to work with. Before we start to increase the resolution of this mesh. So let's to re mesh, and let's go to something like 0.25 control. Give us a good bit more detail to work with. So now, I'm going to switch to the clotps rush. Go with a smaller brush size here. I'm going to start actually adding in some geometry here where we want this to be. And just smoothing a little bit as well. And Okay. Adding that geometry back in. And I want to create a flatter surface from this angle. Let's just get a bit more volume in there to start with. Now I'm going to switch to the crease brush. Push that back in. I don't want to create really sharp eyelids, but this will help define the oval shape to start with. We can smooth things out after. Okay. No, I think that's getting pulled in over the eye a bit too much. So with my grab brush, I'm just going to pull back out. I think this needs to come forward a bit. Just trying to create a shape that nicely wraps around the eye, and some decent volume to it. So I think it's brows. Push it out a bit too much. I'm just going to squeeze that in a little bit there as well. S that off. I want to check this now from the front view to see where we're going. So we're losing a bit of this shape. So back this up a bit. So you can see this inner edge here, trying to keep inside that line. Now we're going to try and define the outer edge. So just smooth that bit. The let's go back to our crease brush and I'm just going to crease roughly top line there. Okay. Okay. Okay. That's a good starting point. This is obviously getting a little bit rough to work with here. I smoother, I'm just going to lose that volume again, so I'm going to remesh again. So I think I'm just going to take this ever so slightly smaller control to remesh I think what I'm going to do is take the scrape brush here. And with that we can sort of flatten off this angle a little bit. Okay. Does it keep rotating around. You can see that's creating a nice sharp smooth finish. Check again from the front, make sure we're not getting too far away from our shape, which we are a little bit, back to the grab brush to just the overall shape. Again, I see part of it is the angle that this lid sits at as well will help define the shape of that eyelid. I want to put up the top part of that. Ms we keep the inner edge of the same around the white of the eye. Okay, so that's helping. And what I don't want is this sharp edge in around here, so I want to smooth that out a little bit as well. I'm just going to focus on the overall form still. So when we look from different angles, we don't want this sort of wavy line that we're getting here. Make sure we've got a nice smooth shape. Looking at the thickness of the lid from all angles. This area is going to be painted black on the inside which will give us a nice graphic eye lid shape. So to go to the crease brush. Just by holding control, I can actually sharpen up this edge a little bit. Yeah, no. Can do. Let's just smooth over this area a little bit. It's not too harsh. A plane there? 14. Detailing: Head: Smoothing some of this out around the sides. We've got a lot more resolution here in the mesh. I can get a far more smooth result without really losing any volume. I'll just do a quick pass over everything. Just smoothing things out. Obviously, if we went to this level too quickly, it would be hard to remove any of the bigger lumps and bumps. This is really just polishing up the surface rather than smoothing out big lumps and bumps. We do still have some lumps and bumps in the mesh. So when you see them, just a little tweaks with the grab brush, check in from all angles, but it's smoothing will help resolve those issues. Okay. Get back into the front view check that shape of that top lip. There we are. Can start refining the shape of the eye when necessary. I think that needs pulling back across a bit. Yeah. And again, I don't want this really harsh crease in here. Redefining that crease around the edge there. That's better. But this here, I think, to switch to the close strips brush. Let's see if I can just carve into there a little bit. Smooth that out. To give us a better transition up into the brow? I'm just putting a few straightes into the brow there as well to again, better define that shape. Screw that up. Anyway, I'm seeing little lumps and bumps working to make sure that we've got a smooth silhouette. Let's see little eye bags under the eyes here, which we don't want. Again, just carving into that a little bit and smoothing over. That can help. A checking from all angles. Try and get as smooth a result as we can. As we read it around. I might go back to my scrape brush again. And just flatten out this area once more. Okay. That I really want to create a really nice smooth shape around here. Since this is going to be a very graphic shape in the final piece. And I need to again, case this up. This can take a little bit of tweaking to get just right as you're wrapping around the eye. Make sure nice smooth shapes, both around the eye and the lid itself. Okay. What I'd like to do is to rotate view over so slightly so you can see here, we've got a wider shape and narrower shape and a wider shape, which you want to avoid. So you know, again, try to even that out by adjusting that top edge. So we have a nice flowing edge there regardless of how we look at this. Say, that's a look better now. Smoothing out another few lumps and bumps that I'm seeing. And I think we can afford to add a little volume in here and take a out here. Smooth that out again to get a nicer smoother transition. Around that eyelid. Okay. Fairly happy with how that's looking now around the eyelids can help to check from both sides. Sometimes you see things from one angle that you don't from another. I think we can probably leave that there and move on to the shell and the next lesson. Don't forget safe. 15. Detailing: Shell: So the next thing that I'd like to do is add small detail into the shell. If we take a quick look at our reference here, you'll see that we have these ridges that run along the length of the shell. So I'm going to add those in before we get into any of the smaller details. Okay. So first of all, I need to select my shell here, so I'm going to press Q to make sure that's the active object, and then I'm going to hit the V key to enable my draw tool. So make that bit smaller to start with. And I'm going to just start roughing in a ridge down the center here. And then we also want ridges at the side round about here. Looks all right. So we can smooth things out a little bit. Particularly towards the back on this to taper off. Okay. Shove that center line a bit. And I'm going to have a look from the side view so you can see here that we're starting to increase the height around that ridge area there. So we can afford to put a bit more in at the front here. Just but that. And we'll refine this further as we go. Okay. So with the main ridges defined there on the back, we can now start to add in the extra detail. So there are five main plates or scoots that run down the center of the back here. So what I'm going to do is switch to the crease tool, so ships and start to define where they should lie. So we want four main creases in here, relatively evenly spaced. And once those are defined, take those lines out a little bit further. Once those are defined, we're going to add in some cuts that run in the center of these. So you can see we're splitting in between each of these lines. This way, we should end up with four sections running down the side here. Once that's done, we can then join these lines up. At the bottom here. We'll just run a line down to the edge. And with the crease brush, I'm going to go around the edge here as well, just to sharpen up. This line here. I want to bring these cuts all the way down to the edge. B up and round and at the top here. I'm going to bring this line out to the edge. And then I'm going to cut like that. There we are. And I'm just going to start sharpening up the edge of this ridge a little bit as well. We're going to do the same in the center here. I'm sort of slightly favoring the front edge of this, so we're getting a slightly more triangular look. There we are. And now we have a lot more detail in our shell. But we're still working with quite a low resolution mesh here. So I'm just going to remesh this and we can smooth things out a little bit more. And take this down a bit and control to me. I'm just going to increase my brush size a little bit and just smooth things out. And then go back in again with this crease brush and just redefine some of those grooves, a little bit more. Again, holding down the control key. I just can take a bit smaller and just recuse grooves. And I think, in fact, I'm going to take the resolution of the remesh a bit lower still. So let's take down to 2.25, something like that. Get little bit of smoothing. Before we go in and refine any of those edges. I'm going to use the grab brush here and just tweak that edge of the shell was looking a bit lumpy. Le bit better. I'm going to pull this down a little bit as well, so I've got a more even thickness to this edge that runs around here. Okay. There we are. So again, let's go back to the crease brush here and go to go in and redefine these creases that to be too sharp. I'm just going to work my way around. Some of those sides a little bit. Obviously, it looks like we've got the torso showing three from underneath again. A few places we'll fix that later on. Now, I'm just going around and getting these main creases redefined. Not too worried about being super sharp at this point because we will be remeshing again before we're finished and we'll need to go through and refine this. Once more before we're finished. But I want to hold onto as much detail as possible. So adding these creases in will help us to do that. Okay. Okay, I can see I've lost a bit of volume on the top there, so I can see use my drawer brush to add a little bit more. That's better. I the same at the front here even the upper bet Okay. I think I'm going to use the grab brush here as well. So where this is high on the front edge, I'm going to pull it down a little bit. So again, each of these, it's like a little ridge. It's coming up. I'm going to do the same back here. Just pull up the back a little have it at the front edge. Let's do the same on the side. It's going to pull up the back, push down the front. Okay. I don't want to be too high at the back there. That should be right. I just want to even up the edge here a bit. There we are. Those are the main features defined. Then in the next lesson, we'll c in some extra details around the edges and sort out those problems with the torso. Don't forget safe. Okay. 16. Detailing: Shell Edges: All right, so we now want to divide this edge up as well. So again, let's have a quick look at our reference. So you can see we have these divisions on the edges here, and we can actually work in the top view here to just roughly define where they're going to be. So I'm just going to go back to my crease brush. Take the size of that down. And I can start just roughing in where each of those divisions is. And I now rotate around the mesh. We've got a good starting point to go from. So I can now start to refine each of these creases a bit more. And I want to make sure that they obviously run underneath the shell as well here. Just working my way around. I'm just going to add a bit more detail to that crease there. And this main crease that runs around the edge. What I also want to do now is just switch my grab brush with each of these sections, I'm going to just push in the front edge a little bit and maybe you pull back the edge bit. Again, we're trying to create these serrated teeth that run around the edge of the shell. You can see we don't have much geometry here, so we're getting a bit of pinching. So we can always remesh things to clean that up. So if I just hit control, you'll just make use of the previously defined resolution. Obviously, we've lost some of our sharper creases here, but we've gained resolution in at the bottom here, which gives us more to work with. Okay. I was going to work my way around, doing the same thing for each of these. Put at one edge, push in the next. I can smooth things out a little bit as we go as well. Okay. Now, the front, we have less serration. It's more as we get further back, so I'm not going to worry too much at the front here, they should be a bit more even. We need to pull down a bit more volume in there. So that basic shape is looking pretty good. We have all of these teeth coming back. So again, I'm just going to switch to the crease brush and just sharpen up some of those edges again to retain that shape as best as possible. Quick pass around. And cut back in to each of these. As I say, we will do a smoothing, pass on everything, refine things a lot more before we're finished. So don't worry about being too precise just yet. Okay. I want to fix these issues as well here. So what I'm going to do is to switch to the let's just switch to the grab brush and again just push these parts inside a little bit. Okay. Looks okay. Now, I'm just going to check from my side view. So you can see here, we've lost a little bit of volume over the top. So I think I'm going to just again with the grab brush just switch back to my shell, e the shell. Just if I'm going to lift some of this up a little bit in the center here. Push it down a bit. You can see are not quite aligned so well. Okay. That doesn't totally matter. I'm going to bring this forward a bit here. We've lost some of this shape at the front down a touch. Pull that back a bit there. Let's take that down. Let's look around the rest of it. Again, just making these global changes, I think we can pull that forward a little bit, even up the size of these. And so going to pull the parts in juste slightly. Gray more even shape. That's how I look from the side again. And from the top, let's see. Quite matching the reference. So pose sides back out a bit. Okay. Okay, I'm happy where that is now. Again, it's just switch back to our torso and push in those parts that's sticking through. I think what I'm actually going to do is just disable my shell for a second. Just smooth over the surface. Just generally push it in a bit. It's less likely to keep poking through. Enable our shell. Check how it's connecting up at the bottom. We can pull that out a little bit. You know, we've lost a bit too much volume in there. Pull that tail up and out. Okay, I'm happy enough with that shell for now until we start polishing it up any further. So what we'll do in the next lesson is move back to the head, and we're going to start working on the mouth. Okay. 17. Mouth: Up until now, we've been sculpting the head with the mouth closed. But if we ever want to animate it, we're going to need to sculpt the interior. To do that, let's switch back to our head. Q. The first thing I'm going to do is mask out the area of the jaw that we want to open. So I'm going to switch to the mask tool. Let's make that a bit smaller, and I'm going to increase the strength here up to one. The first thing I want to do is just paint in along this line on top of the jaw, where p will B. Make brush a little larger and start to spread this out. Now, I want that to be 100% at the top there. As we get further down, I want to fade this out. I'm going to take my strength down a little bit. And just gently start painting in a little more influence underneath the jaw moving backwards. So this area at the edge here as well. Okay. There are smooth that back a bit. We can go a bit further on the sites. There we are something like that. Then we need to invert the mask because at the moment, this is the area that we can't effect. So we'll control to invert that Okay. And then what we're going to do is try to rotate this area down. I think that area looks a little bit harsh. So mast to selected. We're just going to do soften that edge up at the top there into the corner of the mouth. There we are. And just sort out that edge a little bit. So we're not pulling down anything that we don't want to. Strength back up to one. I'm sure we have a nice crisp edge there. Okay. If you go a bit too far, you can just hold down the control key and paint out an area. I'm happy with that. We can actually under the tools, go down to this rotation tool. If I jump into the side view, you can see where we're going to be pivoting around. I think I'm going to move that a little bit, so just hold down the Shift key and right click and we can move the point of rotation around. Something like that shod do. Let's just rotate that down a little bit. And move into perspective, I think I can afford to actually push that draw forwards a touch as well. But the move tool to move that on the y axis. Shovel it forward a little bit. It looks convincingly as if it's rotated open here. Switch back to rotation. I think we can afford to go a little bit. I think that should do. That should give us a good starting point. Okay. Now you can see also this area here that we've pulled open just has the stretched polygons, and we're not going to be able to carve into that area as it stands. The next thing that we need to do is just remesh this. I'm just going to hit control. And that will give us more detail to work with here. But it's also smoothed out this mask and pulled it down into the area that we want to carve into. Hitting to switch back to my mask tool here with the strength of one, we can hold down control and paint out this area here to make sure we're going to be able to actually carve into it nicely. What you do? Then I'm going to switch to my draw tool. The beak and holding down control. I can start to carve away at this area. We can smooth things out a little bit as we go. Don't control. Push things back. I want to make sure I'm pushing down a little bit as well, so we're defining where that lips going to sit. I'm pushing back in under these corners. Brush and push it underneath here as well. And obviously, we're getting to a point now where again, these polygons are getting quite stretched out. So it's probably worth doing another remesh. So just control because there's a lot more detail to work with. So I just smooth that out initially, holding down the Shift key. And again with the draw brush, down control. Start to carve away at that again. Down shift. Make sure it's nice and smooth. Okay, that's giving us a good starting point. It's just push up a bit in the middle. And I can smooth that out. So carve in Elizabeth at the edge. I think that's in a pretty good place for now. Under that lip. So now I want to adjust the edges here. And I think we can get rid of our mask at this point, so. I'm going to hit the ak and just let clear mask. So that will allow us to just smooth off this edge a little bit here. Clean that up. Smooth out some of these other lumps and bumps. And also this area back here, we can smooth that out too. So we've got a nice transition as the jaw moves backwards. Okay. All right. So this is looking too wide to me now, so I'm just going to go the grab tool. I want to do is just push these edges in. I actually want this to tuck underneath the rest of the beak a little bit. Okay. Smooth that out. And I also want a bit more volume in here around the lip. So what I'm going to do is switch the inflate tool with the key and just run that along edge. Just to give me a bit more volume in there. Smooth that out too. Okay. So I think let's pull down that corner of that cheek a little bit, losing some volume in there. Wanted to be pinched in at the top and not lose the volume lower down. So I think I'm going to push this back up a little bit here by the cheek. So again, keep those cheeks nicely defined. I think everything's been pulled down a bit too much here. I count for those lumps and bumps that start to creep in. We don't want. Nudging them in with the grab brush and smoothing the areas out as well. Okay. That keeps our chin quite well defined as well as our cheeks. For the lip itself, I'm going to shift t to go to my scrape brush. Make it a bit smaller. I want to flatten out the front of this lip a bit. It's not quite surrounded more defined. Looks a bit er Do you mean that slightly? Just making sure that we're doing that from the right angle so that we're not flatting out too much in the wrong plane. There we go. Again, just making some of these smaller tweaks to the overall silhouette of things. That mouth looking as nice as possible from all angles. Obviously, we need to smooth that area out there. I really want to pull this up a bit, so it really feels like it's pinched in under that cheek. Pull that mouth is a little bit wide. Pull that in attach. And making sure. I've got a nice smooth transition from that lip into the rest of the face. And just switch back to the draw brush finally, just going to push that a little bit more in the middle. A bit more even inside. Particulate that corner there so that we can actually see into the mouth right up into the crease. Looks very good. It looks like Italy done something on the front there, and it doesn't look symmetrical either. So what I'm actually going to do is re similarze this head. So what we'll do is take the negative x and switch it over to the positive side. So we can do that under the symmetry options here. So we want negative x to positive x. If I hit symmetrized, you can see it's evened everything up. Sometimes this happens as you're remeshing, the mesh doesn't get created evenly across both sides. Resymzing every now and again can be helpful. And you saw quite a few elements of the mesh were changed at that point. So I think that's looking fairly good now. I really out the odd extra lumps and bumps. I think that's reasonable. And in the next lesson, we'll create a tongue so that we can finish off our mouth. Don't forget to save. Okay. 18. Tongue: So to build the tongue, we're going to head back into the layout tab here and we're going to create a new mesh to work from. Shift A, and let's add in a cube. Scale that 2.1. And just going to jump into the top view here. Let's scale this down a bit further. And move it roughly into place and jump to the side here as well. Let's scale on the Z axis. That should give us a reasonable starting point. Just going to hit control A and apply that scale and tap into edit mode. Let's just Z to enable x ray. I'm going to add some subdivisions to this. I'm actually going to add three subdivisions. So just control R and scroll your mouse will I'll add three subdivisions in there and I'm going to right click to leave them in place. Just going to tap back to object mode for a second and add a subdivision modifier. I'm going to hit control two s to head back to edit mode. Now to better see what we're doing. What I'm also going to do is hit the forward slash key, what that will do is take us into local view where we can only see the one object that's selected. So I'm going to go to vertex selection, sect all of these front verses and just scale them along the x axis. And I'm going to start roughly defining the shape of the tongue here. The reason I added those subdivisions in was so that we could slip. These points here, just move them up to better create the shape of a tongue here. You can move these points in the middle down a little bit more. I think I'm actually going to select those and scale them inwards on the x axis. It's better to find that crease down the middle here. Take all of these front points. I'm just going to move them back a little bit as well just round out that front. Pointed. Move that as well. Again I think another edge leap in the middle, that we can then scale out on the x axis. Move it forward and that gives us a reasonable tongue shape here. Scale all of that on the axis. That gives us a good starting point to work from. So what I'm going to do as well, is just quickly add a shader to that. Pull that tongue and define a rough color for it as well. Can I get up that roughness a bit. Now if we hit the forward slash key again, we'll jump back into our normal view. So inside view here, let's just rotate that time to roughly match up with the jaw and move it into place. It's already looking fury good. It's cutting into a little bit there at the front, and it's just nudged back a little bit. And I think that will do us for now. I do feel this jaw is a little bit thick though. I'm just going to select the head and let's just refine that sculpt a little bit further. Let's jump into sculpting mode, grab tool. I just want to start pushing this up and down a little bit. Keeping the chin more or as where it is. It's just this area behind it. I just want to lift up a little bit. Smooth that out. Okay. I also want to thicken up that lip still further. So let's try the inflate brush. I can get a bit more volume in there. It's looking a little bit too thin. Smooth off this edge. The grab brush. Let's pull this back when it's been pulled forward a bit too much. Okay. And let's go back to my scrape brush that's try. Flatten out that top edge again a little bit. And just moving up into the corner of it hair. So again, always looking at that silhouete from different angles. Make sure it's flowing icy. Regardless of where we look from. That's pretty good. Just smooth out that little lump in there. Okay. Still think that jaw is a little bit too big. So pull the whole thing up a little bit. And this is just part of sculpting, you always moving around, checking things from different angles. Gradually moving towards pleasing end result. Okay. I'm a bit happier with that jaw from the side. I sure about this corner here the tweak that a little bit. I always want to keep checking around and make sure everything looks good from all angles. I think that should do for the mouth let's just check that tongue position. I'm just going to again switch back to layout. Let's maybe sitting a little bit low now. Let's just remove that touch. I think that looks a bit better. So we can save that there. Then the next lesson, we'll start to join our body parts together. 19. Merging the Body: What we're going to do now is start joining our body parts together into a single mesh. But before we do that, there's a couple of things that we need to sort out first. First of all, these flippers have some modifiers on them, which we need to apply. I'm just going to enter the modifier tab and hit control A over the top of each of these to apply them to the mesh. The same with the rear flippers there as well. So these are ready to be joined into a mesh. What we're not going to join in is the shell here, so I'm just going to disable the visibility of that for now. And our flippers are nicely intersecting this torso mesh here, but our head currently isn't. I'm just going to select that head, jump into the sculpting tab. What I want to do is just pull this edge back into the torso and it will give us a cleaner result when we combine things. Just with my grab brush, I'm just going to start pulling this neck back a bit, same at the bottom here. Just nicely intersects with the mesh of the torso. That's a little bit better. There we are. And what we can do now, and I can see these bumps, I'm just going to switch to the torso, and just move that out slightly there before we cobine things. Right, so I'm just going to head back to the tab here and I'm going to select my flippers and holding down shift, select the others, s the head, and finally, select the torso. Now we can hit Control J to join them into a single mesh. You'll notice at the front here that one of our eyes has disappeared. That's because of the mirror modify that we had on it. So because we've joined these meshes, our head is no longer an object. Everything has been merged into this single torso object. So we need to define that as our mirror object. Once we do that, our eyes are back to normal again. It's on going to reselect my torso object here. And we can head over into the sculpting tab. So at the moment, we have very different resolutions on each of these different parts. What we want to do is remesh everything and bring it to a consistent level of detail. So to do that, we want to use our remesh tool, but different parts have these different voxle sizes. We can check what voxal size things have with this iroper icon. If I select that and click down here, you'll see that our size is 0.7. If I select on the head, it's 0.013. We want to go with the resolution of the head. That's where the most details are defined. We don't want to lose those details by remeshing with a lower resolution. With that defined, I can now just hit control R, and that has now remeshed everything into a single mesh. So you can see here around the joins. If I just smooth that, we are now neatly combining these different body parts together. So I can go around smoothing out all of these joints here because we have a lot more detailed than we had originally, we're going to need to do a pass on smoothing each of these other body parts. So just going to hold down my shift key, and just quickly smooth over each of these. To get rid of those. Obviously faceted edges. I do the same over the body. Smooth out a bit and at the back here. We might lose a little bit of volume here. But because of the extra resolution, we're not going to lose too much overall volume as we smooth. So that's looking a lot better already? Now the parts are integrated as one mesh here. I'm going to go in and clean up some of these areas at the bottom here. So there's a little bit of dent in that clean that up, smooth out. But what I want to do is switch my crease tool and working round the edges here. So we keep a nice edge to where that flipper attaches. I also want to define the edge here as well. Okay. Push it back. Switch my drawer brush just so I can push them with that back in touch. Over the top there, smooth that out. I just want to round out the top of that flipper a little bit where it touches as well. There we go, now, it's a little bit better. I just pushing some of this back in here over the top and smoothing out the result. That's looking a bit better. It's to do the same around the back here as well. So again, take my crease brush. Shopping up those edges. I'm trying getting under here a little bit as well. Just going to pull this edge back a little bit closer to the flipper. Do you need it to be quite so far away? Now we can always check by re enabling our shell that everything's looking okay. We're not intersecting at all. And the different body parts sit together nicely. I think we can define that tale a little bit more again with the Chris brush. There we are. What's that stand out nicely? Push those parts in a little bit. Just tweak the shape of that tail, too. It's not quite as boxy. I'm just going to check from the side view and I want to pull that neck down a little bit. The rest of that is looking pretty good. Smooth that out. And from the top, things will also looking fairly good. Just tweak that syilau again slightly. Shaped to our neck. I think we are starting to cut into that shell, I think. I'll actually pull that down a bit. Just putting that back to create a little crease in there. I think I might sharpen that up a bit as well. There we go. All right. I think I'm happy with how that's all come together now. So let's save that there. 20. Polishing: Shell: So in this lesson, we're going to work on the shell, and we're going to increase its resolution to match the rest of the mesh, and then we can refine the details on it. So first of all, we need to select our shell, Q, under the remesh options, we can select our eye dropper and click on the head there, just to set our voxal size to match. And now we can control to increase the resolution of that mesh. Okay, once again, we can just start out by smoothing things out a little bit. Just give a general polish over the surface to get rid of some of those really faceted edges. So obvious lumps and bumps. We don't want to lose too much detail, but we are going to obviously tighten everything up as we go. Okay. To do. And obviously, as before any lumps and bumps that we see, we can just as we go. Just create a nice overall shape. So now what I'm going to do start refining these edges, so I'm just going to switch to my crease brush, and reduce that size. Start working into these creases here. Let me see. Here's a smooth option every now and again, where we end up bumpy edges. Just work our way around the mesh now. Just tighten up all of these creases. Don't forget to rotate around carbon underneath as well. Do I polishing out any obvious lamps and bumps as we go. And then I'm going to work my way these edges here as well. Just to nicely define each of these ridges. The same on the sides here. We're going around to the back. Now, I think I'm also going to switch the grab tool here. You can see if we look at these from the side, we've got this slightly wobbly line here. I'm just going to push some of these points down, lift up a little. So that's a bit more rounded as it moves. So some of that out. Just tweak the shapes of some of the others as well. So from here, put it down at the front, lift it up as we move back. It's just this attention to detail just going around looking at everything from different angles, constantly refining that will create a more polished end result. It takes time, but the extra little bit of detail is worth it in the end. Okay. So that's looking pretty good now? Just checking everything from different angles. So if there's anything we can just smooth out a bit sharpen up anymore? Okay. I think we're almost there with the show now? Okay. Okay. There we are. I think that will do us. Let's save that there and then we'll do a polishing pass on the head. 21. Polishing: Head: I'm going to start up by just to reselect our head and torso. What I want to do here is just go around, check for any little lumps and bumps that we can remove, clean up. And then we're going to sharpen up some of the edges just to help polish up the end result. Having that contrast between some sharper areas and softer areas starts to make everything look a bit more finished. Okay. I really at this stage, want to move around carefully around the sculpt. Looking for areas where the shadowing is showing that bits are not as smooth as they could be, making minor changes and smoothing over the surface. We don't have to have a super polished end result, but trying to get it as smooth as I can. Out that neck a little bit more. So the heads, obviously, the area that people are going to look at the most. So spending a bit more time around. The face makes sense because that's where people's eyes will be. Okay. So took a bit too much volume in that raw, I'm just putting a little bit back in. Trying to make sure it looks nice and smooth from all angles. Okay. Okay. Okay. I'm fairly happy with the overall shape of the head now. So what I want to do is just start to add in some sharp lines here and there. I think to do that, I'm going to switch the pinch to. So the key. And if I run over this edge of this brow, see we start to define more of a sharper edge there. I can smooth. The areas around that a little bit. It starts to pull things together a little bit. Bring that around. Just sharp at the top here, and then smoothing out as we move down into the rest of the nose. Smoothing out the rest of that brow. We can also try just heading a little bit over the top of that brow as well. Okay. See how that looks. Smoothing again over the surface. So we're not too sharp. But a bit more definition in there than we had before. I do the same d around the edges here around the mouth. Sharpen up this edge. Smoothing out the areas around it. Adding a bit more definition in there. Okay. I moved down to the mouth. That's same around here. It trying to find that edge a bit more. Same on the inside. Okay. Okay. Do we can slightly if things like a little bit too bumpy. Put that corner of the mouth up and in. I feel the inside of this needs just push in a little bit as well. Okay. Smooth thing it's okay. Let's get a little too sharp at the top, so I'm smoothing out that edge. So we've got a sharp bit here and let's smoother transition as it comes up, looks at. P in a little bit. Okay. And then I want to sharpen up just around the d as well. So again, let's use the pinch brush size down a bit. Just redefine this crease here. So mixing these nice sharp edges here and here with a softer transition. Check in that eyelid looks good all the way around, g brush just pull back a bit. So again, we've got a nice curve from all angles. So I'm not losing that shape. I'm going to just taper that crees off a little bit again there. Since we want this to be a younger character, we have to balance smoothness of the features with those slightly sharper edges in places, but not get too sharp all over the place. I think that's looking fairly good for the head there now. I just want that brow line to mirror the line of the eye on the inside. It's nice shapes, regardless of which angle we're looking at things. Okay. And one thing I think I'll also do just with that pinch brush. I'm just going to create a crease down the center here. Obviously, the Hawks Bill has this sort of pointed beak. So that will help to find that a bit more clearly. But I'm just smoothing out the transition as we go away from that. I'm also going to crease the inside of this a little bit more as well. I've got more of an obvious transition there between the two sections, the inside and the lap. I think I'm happy with the head there, and then we'll just polish up the rest of the body in the next lesson. Okay. Okay. 22. Polishing: Torso: So now, just want to. Just sharpen up some of these other creases that we have here on the rest of the body. So again, I'm going to go to my crease brush and just further define these edges here. But that up under the shell. Sharpen up this crease and the edge of the flipper itself. I want to leave that soft on the top, but sharp around the bottom here. Then I'm going to use the pinch brush again and just pinch together that area there, so we're going a nice sharp line. I can do the same a little bit around here. Creating these little areas of detail. Make things look a bit more finished. It's all right for the front. Let's move to the back here. The same thing. Pinch brush. Find this top edge? In the crece brush on the inside. Okay. It's going with the quire brush. Just make again slight tweaks to the shape. Always refining. We see something that can be improved. Okay. At that transition into the tail? Looks a bit better. And it extra definition around that tail as well. To on the top edge, softer transition at the bottom. So I got pulled up a little bit too much. Push back. Grease to find those edges. Okay. Okay, and I think that looks a lot better. Smooth that again there. What might do. It's just, again, a tiny bit of extra detail, but with the pinch brush, can it quite a bit of an edge in here. Smooth that out. It feels like it's coming wrapping around over here. Okay feels a bit more defined. I think I need to do the same wrapping round. Here, since the tail is peeking out from an area of shell. I'm going to with push that are slightly. Okay. That out. I know. Okay. Perhaps. Smooth that and pinch this area too. So we're creating another edge. Yeah. That's a bit better smooth that touch. Okay, I think I'm happy with that. And just around the front, I think I've gone a bit too far with that crease around the nose. So I'm just smoothing that offer touch so it's not too pinched. We can still see it, but it's not too h line. Okay. Okay. I think that is it for our sculpt, if we switch over to the layout tab here, right click and shade smooth, both on the body. Shell tongue and the eyes. And I think we've got a fairly good result there. So don't forget to save your scene. 23. Scene Layout: Now that our character sculpt is complete, we can start to create a simple environment to present it nicely in our final render. Before we get started on that, though, I just want to do a little bit of admin and tidy up our outliner. So first of all, we've got an item named as cube here, so I want to rename that F two. Type in tongue. This light isn't required at all, so I'm just going to delete that. I want to take all of the different objects that make up our turtle, and I'm going to add them underneath the object so that we can move everything around together. I'm just going to hit Shift A, and I'm going to add in an empty. Now we can select all of these objects just by holding down shift, and I'm going to drag and drop them again, holding down shift onto the empty, which will parent them underneath it. So I'm just going to rename this to turtle control. Then all of these objects, I'm going to select. Let's add a new collection. That will allow us to keep everything nicely organized and we can show or hide the turtle whenever we choose. I'm going to re select this base collection here so that anything new we add will be placed within it. I want to make it look as though a little hatching is crawling across a beach and heading for the sea at sunrise. The first thing we're going to need is something to define the sand. So I'm just going to shift A, and let's add in a plane. We're going to need to make this bit bigger. I'm just going to enter in 100 centimeters there. That should do us. And then I'm going to control A and apply that scale. That's two and re names to sand. Now, I want to adjust this surface so it's not a perfectly flat smooth surface. To do that, we're going to need some extra geometry in here. First of all, I'm going to tap into edit mode. And we're going to add a few subdivisions. I'm just going to right click, subdivide, and we'll just do that a few times until we've got a little bit more geometry to work with. That should do for now. So back to object mode. In the modified tab, we're going to add a displacement modifier. I'm just going to start typing in displace and add that in. Now, under this texture input here, I'm just going to hit new. And then we need to go down to the texture tab at the bottom. In here where it says type, I'm going to change that from image or movie to clouds. You can see we've already got some displacement. But it's a bit extreme at the moment. I think I'm going to adjust the scale of this, where it says size here. I'm just going to adjust this to one. So each of these bumps is a little bit larger. It's still quite extreme. So if we head back to the actual modifies tab here, we can adjust this strength value and something like that. Should to start with 0.7. Then what I also want to do is add a subdivision modifier to smooth all of this out. So with the plane selected, it can hit control too. And that has given us a nice bumpy surface to work with. So the next thing that we need to do is to place our camera. So for that. I'm just going to hit zero to jump into my camera view here, and then we want to lock it to our view. So we can use this icon up here, change that to the lock symbol, which now means that as we orbit around, we can frame up our camera as we want. So obviously, we're going to move our turtle a bit. I'm just going to roughly frame this up to start with something like this. And now I'm going to jump out of that camera view. I just want to move this surface a little bit, see if we can find a better place for our little turtle. I'm just going to translate this a bit. And there's this mound here which looks good to have the turtle climbing up over. So, move it somewhere like that. And I'm just going to move it down a little bit as well. That looks good. Then if we select our turtle control here, we can just start rotating and translating this into place. So if we can get something that looks natural as if the turtle is climbing up this little bank of sand here. You can always look underneath to see how we're interacting with the ground plane. And that looks fairly good for now. I'm just going to jump back into my camera view here and let's see if we can frame this up a little bit better. Again, check that icon there so that we can frame this up. And I think something like that looks pretty good. So again, I'm going to uncheck this so that we don't risk moving our camera accidentally. We can always reframe this. Now in the next lesson, I want to add some basic lighting to better define our forms and give us a good starting point before we start adding the shaders to our surfaces. Don't forget to save. 24. Sky Texture: In order to get the maximum quality in our final render, I'm going to make use of the cycles rendering engine. First of all, we're going to head over to the property panel here and change our render engine to cycles. If you have a GPU, also change that from CPU to GPU compute, which should greatly speed up your renders. Now, the default samples are extremely high, so I'm going to take them down. So I'm just going to enter 100 for our viewport samples and enable de noising. And we can drop our render samples down to 200. We can always increase these later if we need to, but it's a better starting point. The higher the number of samples, the longer our renders will take. So it's better to start low and only increase those samples if required. All of the other settings can be left at their defaults, but I just want to note that under coolor management here are making use of the AGX view transform, which gives a more natural look to our final render. But that is now the default view transform within blender. So if we switch our display to rendered, obviously, without any lights, we don't have a lot to look at. So I'm actually going to head over to the shading tab here. And up at the top, I'm going to hit zero to enter my camera view, hold down d and switch that to rendered so that we can see what's going on. I'm also going to select my camera and under the camera settings and viewport display. Let's just increase this to one so that we don't see anything outside of our camera view. Now, the shader editor here and I'm going to change to the world. And it shift and start typing in sky. I'm going to add in the sky texture. If I connect this into the color here, we've instantly got some light. Now, the sky texture, the way it works, we can control the sun elevation and rotation, and it will change the color of the lighting to more accurately represent the different times of day. So as I drop this down to a lower elevation, we've got a lot more yellow in the sky and things get far more intense as we increase our elevation. Since I want to create more of a sunrise feel. I'm going to drop this down a bit. So something like that looks good. But also at the moment, you can see the sun is coming in from the left hand side here. I want to rotate it around so it's hitting this far side of the face. So we have a rim light like this but over on the far side. So under the rotation, I'm just going to start pulling this round until we've got something that looks good. Something like that. So we actually have the light hitting this far side of the face here. You pull that back a little bit. Something like that. I'm just going to select this ground plane, right click, shade smooth. Now, the intensity is quite strong at the moment. I'm going to drop that down and go with something a bit lower. Maybe just 0.2 for now, and that looks like a better starting point for us. Then in the next lesson, we can start to find the shader for the sand here. Don't forget to save. 25. Procedural Shaders: Sand: Grate our sand shader. We need to switch from world back to object. With our sand selected here, let's add a new material. We can just call that sand. I want to have far more map finished. I'm just going to pull this roughness right the way up. We're going to make use of a procedural noise texture to create the effect of some sand on the surface. I'm just going to hit shift A and search for noise. And drop that in. And we want to take the output of this noise texture into a color ramp. I'm also going to hit shift A. Stop typing in ramp and drop that in. So we're going to take our color output into the factor here and the color into the base color. Now, at the moment, we're not seeing an awful lot going on here. And that's because of our scale factors here. So you want to increase this scale quite a bit. So let's do that for now, and then we can also increase this detail. And the roughness setting as well. Once we do that I zoom in here, we start to get more of a sandy looking finish. I want to change my color here in the color ramp. So if I click on this sort of white input here, we can go in and set a new color for our sand. So something like that. Just bring this down a bit as well. It's a darker color. And bring it a little bit further around. Somewhere around there should do. Now what we also want to do is add in a bump node. So I'm just going to search for a bump. Drop that in and we're going to take our color ramp output into the height of this bump and drop that into the normal on the principal BSDF node. As soon as we do that, obviously, we have the effect of that bump, which gives us a far more believable look to the sand. I jump back into the camera view, that's looking already a lot better. I'm just going to save that there and we're going to start working on shades for the turtle in the next lesson. 26. Procedural Shaders: Shell: The next thing that I'd like to work on is the shell of the turtle. I'm just going to select that. What we're going to do is make use of a feature within cycles, which allows us to look at the geometry and use attributes from that to define the shading. So what I'm going to do is hit Shift A, and we're going to search for geometry. If we drop that in. Now we can actually look at a number of different elements of the geometry itself. But what I'm interested in is this pointiness value. That looks at the surface and how smooth or sharp the creases are, and we can use that to define the shading. I'm also going to create a color ramp. And drop that in, and we'll take this pointinos value into the factor and take the color into our base color. Now, at the moment, it doesn't look like an awful lot is happening here. But we can adjust this color ramp. You see as I bring up the black and pull this white back. We're actually able to put some color into these creases here. So what I'm going to do. I'm just going to pull that back a little bit. I'm going to leave some black here just subtly within all of these cracks. I'm going to change the color for the rest of the shell here. I'll pull that back a bit. And we're going to go in and define a color for the shell. I want to bring my value right the way down here. And that redder color? Something like that should be. I'll get a little bit darker. Okay. Now what I'm also going to do is so I'm going to add in another color tab here. We'll just pull it along a little bit. I'm going to use this to define some lighter spots as well. So I'm going to take my value up a bit. And you can see we're starting to get some highlights in here. I think we can just pick a slightly lighter color. Something like that, which we'll just pick out some of these high spots on the meso. There we go. Now to finish this off, I want to also add some subsurface scattering. That creates the effect that light is actually coming in, passing through the surface of the shell and bouncing out again. It can give us a much more believable result. So we can enable subsurface just down here and I'm just going to increase the weight of that. You can see straightaway we're getting this light passing through the shell. If we go too high, we get a sort waxy finish. I'm just going to dial that back a little bit. Then this radius allows us to set the color that shows up in the subsurface. So rather than trying to adjust this with numbers here, I'm going to hit Shift A and add in an RGB node, which we can just drop into this radius here. This will allow us to set a color that shines through the shell there. So just going to go with this lighter color here, so we don't have too intense an effect. Let's just jump around. But that just gives us a subtle effect. So I'm happy with that as a starting point for our shell. Then we can have a look at the body in the next lesson. Don't forget to save. Okay. 27. Procedural Shaders: Skin - Part 1: Okay. So for the body of the turtle, I want to make use of procedural shading in order to create similar variety to the skin. I want to have light and dark regions and also create the effect of scales on the surface. So I'm going to select the body mesh here. And what we're going to do initially is just start to define the main light and dark regions of the mesh. To do that, I'm going to add in a color up. And I'm going to leave this set to black and white for now. And I also want to add in a gradient texture. We'll take our color into the factor here and take this color into the base color. Moment, you can see we have a gradient running from left to right, black to white. With the gradient texture selected, I can control T to enable my texture coordinate and mapping nodes. If that doesn't work for you, just make sure that you have the node wrangler add on enabled, which you can do under the preferences. Just edit preferences, add ons and search here for node wrangler and check that on. So what I want to make use of here is rather than the generated coordinates. I'm going to make use of the normal. I'm going to drag that into the vector. If I rotate this 90 degrees, we've now adjusted our gradient, the upward facing surfaces are now all in white, and any downward facing surfaces are in black. You can see that particularly here. Underneath the eyebrow is here, whereas below the eye is white, where the surfaces are facing upwards. I want to make use of this to darken the upper faces and to lighten those underneath. So initially, I'm just going to adjust these settings a little. I think what I want to do we adjust this x value here, we can adjust exactly where that gradient sits on our mesh. What I'm trying to do is get a darker portion at the bottom here underneath the flipper and a lighter patch on top. But I also want to make sure I'm nice and dark underneath. That is why I'm bringing this value up here. And to get smoother gradient here, I'm just going to switch this from linear to best blind, and that will give us a smoother fall off. I'm just adjusting my scale factor here as well. That's allowed me to flip this, so we've got dark on the top and light on the bottom. I'm just going to tweet these values until I'm generally happy. So we have this nice dark color here, dark on the top of the head. But we've got a lighter color underneath. And you can see it's giving us a lot more interest in around the body here. Something like that looks fairly good. But I don't really want these dark areas underneath the eyes here. I'd like a much lighter front to our character darker on the top of the head. But I'm happy with what we've got on the rest of the body. What I'm going to do is I'm going to combine this effect here with another color ramp which will affect the front of the face. Okay. So, I'm just going to add in another gradient and another color ramp. And again, with my gradient selected, I'm going to hit control T. Now, for now, we can drop this color into our base color, so we can again see the effect of that. I'm going to rotate this -90 degrees on the z axis here because we're going from white to black, this case, I'm going to just my color ramp. So we have our white over on the left here, and our black point here on the right. And I'm going to change this to s which gives a softer fall off here, but isn't as extreme as B blind. So let me pull this back a bit. Now what I really want to do is rotate this as well. I'm going to rotate it a bit so that we're just isolating the front part of the face. Highlighting this region here. And if we pull this too far back, you can see we're introducing white onto the front of our flippers here. I'm just going to pull that back until the flippers are all still black, but we still got this white area on the front of the face. Okay. With that done, we're going to combine the effects of these two together. I want to search for a mixed color and drop black in here. I'm going to take the two colors, connect them up together here. I'm going to change my mode from mix here to add up, you can see now that we have our black on the top, got a white on the front here and the white on the underside. That's given us a good mask for our basic colors, which we can now pass into a color ramp. So I'm going to search for another ramp and drop it in between the ad node and our pnc node. Then we can start to define the actual colors that we want to appear here. I want to increase this value a bit. I'm going to try to create a nice dark olive greenish color, something like that. Then for the lighter color, bring that value down a bit. But we want a saturated color here. Something around there. So you can see we have this darker color blending through into the lighter color on the face and here underneath the body. So I'm going to save things there. And then next lesson, we can start to add some more complexity to this shader. 28. Procedural Shaders: Skin - Part 2: What I now want to do is to create the effect of the scales on the surface of the skin here. To do that, we're going to make use of a node called the Voronoi texture. Let's drop that in. And what can do is just hold down Shift Control and click on that and that preview what that looks like. I also want to do is hit Control T to add in my mapping node and texture coordinates. In this case, instead of the generated coordinates, I'm going to switch that to the object coordinates, and I want to adjust the scale quite a bit. Something like that. We see this is getting a more interesting scale type pattern on it. Take the roughness back down. So I think just adjusting that scale, and leaving the detail on roughness, zero looks pretty good. What we're going to do is put this into a color ramp. And that will give us a bit more control over how this effects. So what I actually want are darker lines here and lighter portions in the middle. So I'm actually going to flip this ramp around. Okay. And we can also change this from a linear ramp to let's try as. That gives us a nicer softer feeling on the edge of each of these cells. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to add this on top of our existing color here. I'm just going to shift control click back on the principled node here, so that reconnects that back to the material output. And I'm going to add in a mixed color node. Okay. So if we drop this color into B slot there, what we want to do is change this from mix to multiply. So that will now darken the color that we had there before. Increase that factor. You can see that we have these dark cells over the top. Now, I'm happy with how that looks on the greener areas of the skin here, but I don't want that effect at all on the front of the face. We're going to need to mask that out. Obviously, we already have a mask which defines that, so we can make use of that. To affect this factor here. If I take the factor all the way down to zero, we have none of the effect and all the way up to one, we'll bring those cells back in. So what I want to do is take the output from this node here, if I just go down to shift control and click on it. That was our mask, our black and white mask, and we're going to bring that into the factor. So what I want is another color ramp here. So I can actually just duplicate this. If I hold down shift control and D, it will stay connected to the note before it. And I'm going to just change this to a black and white ramp here. Okay. And we can drop that into our factor, and shift control click back on the principle B SDF. But you can see at the moment, this is just brought in on the light parts, the underside, and we want the opposite effect. So we want our ramp to run from white to black. You can see just by adjusting this value here, we can adjust where that effect sits. We're going to change this to a softer fall off. Let's Baseline. So we don't want a harsh edge on this here. And there you can see we now have this effect nicely on the dark portions, but not on any of the light parts. Now, to add some extra detail into the surface, what I'd also like to do is add in some bump. So I'm just going to add in a bump node here. And for this, what we want to do is take the output from our Varanoi texture into our bump. Okay. Initially, we'll take our color output here from the color wrap into our height and the normal into the normal here. As you can see this again, applies this to the entire mesh and the effect is quite harsh at the moment. I want to drop this strength right the way down. We hold down shift to control that effect. That we really go for something quite subtle. Also, if we zoom in, you'll see that the edges here are very sharp. We want to get rid of that. What we can actually do is go back to our Voronoi texture here, and I'm just going to hold down shift control and D to duplicate that we can change this here from this one type to a smooth f one. If I duplicate this color amp, the distance back into the factor. If I just hold shift control and click, you'll see this is a much softer version of the effect that we had before. We now have the smoothness slideer here. If I dual that all the way back, the effect should actually be the same as the effect from this color ramp. But now we have the ability to blur that out a bit. I'm going to leave the smoothness set up to one, what we're going to do is take that color and put that into the height. That way, our bump should be less severe. So if I hold down shift control and click, here, you can see that now we still have our original color effect there unchanged, but we've got rid of those harsh sharp creases. Okay. But we still have to remove the effect from the lighter portions of the face here. So to do that, I'm going to use this strength value here. I dial that down to zero, that again gets rid of the bump. All the way up to one gives us the extreme effect. So once again, we're going to make use of our original mask that defined the light and dark areas, and we're going to use that to mask out where this bump effect takes place. Obviously, if I shift control click on this colorp here, That was masking out the effect of a varni texture. So we can make use of that again and pipe that into the bump here. What I want to do is take the output of our color and drop that into the strength. Again, that's got rid of that completely on the front of the face, but we have a bump here on the rest of the body. Now, I still think that bump is quite extreme here. I'd like to really reduce this strength value. To do that, what we can actually do is add in another node here to control the output of this color ramp as it goes into the bump. That's called the map range node. Shift A search for map, we can find our map range. Just drop that in there. Now, this will take an input and output value and change them to new input and output values. We have our black and white values here are zero to one, but we don't want a strength that goes 0-1. We want our strength to go from zero to a lower number. I can change the maximum output here so that where we're at one coming out the color amp, we can be at something more like 0.5 to reduce the effect. If I change that down to 0.5, then that will reduce the effect of our bump. If I just slide this up and down, you can see the effect that's having. So I think 0.5 should be fine there. So that's giving us a bump on the surface here, wherever we've got those scales defined. But as we go round into the front of the face, that all disappears. So now that we've got that effect defined in the next lesson, we're going to go in and further refine this skin surface. So don't forget to save. 29. Procedural Shaders: Skin - Part 3: So I'm quite happy with how the skin is looking at the moment on the main part of the body here. On the face, I feel this lighter color is getting a bit too far up over the top of the eyes here. I'd like to darken up the top of the head a bit. Now, we can go back and have a look at our masks here. And obviously, I can adjust this a little bit here and pull this back. But you can see it's darkening up this region, but not this area here under the eyes. If I were to adjust this ramp here, this would darken up the area under the eyes, but because it's pulling back that lighter color, it spoils everything that's going on at the bottom here. If I under that, what I'm actually going to do is combine one more ramp to just darken the upper part of the head here. Again, let's add a gradient texture and a color ramp. Okay. Draw those together, and again, control T with the gradient texture selected to add in our coordinates and mapping node. Now I'm going to help shift control and click on the color ramp so we can see its effect. Again, we want to rotate this around, so I'm going to go -90 on our Z axis. Then going to rotate this here on the x axis. I'm going to need to bring this up a bit as well. So if I just my x value here. So you can see we're starting to define a darker patch on the top of the head. So I think I'll bring that up a bit, but we want to adjust our color ramp. I want to make sure it's fully white down below. Change that to ease so we get a softer fall off here. And I want to rotate this a little bit, so it's tilted. I don't want it to creep in at the back there, but I just want to have an angled effect on the front of the head here. Lift that up a little bit higher. So that we can angle it a little bit more. Then just adjust this fall off. Okay. I'll go with that for now. But what we want to do is to combine this with these other ramps here. I'm going to add in a mixed color node here. What we actually want to do is take the effect of this ad node here and mix that in. Let see if I just go with this mix option, that's not giving us what we want. I increase the fact here. Here. Okay. That's better. I'm just going to try multiply. There we are. That's given us a much darker fall off on the top of the head here. We still got the white on the front and the rest of our body is looking good. Now, I'm just going to slit all of these nodes and move them across a little bit. So where this original ad node is going into these color ramps, we're going to take instead this multiply node and drop that into both of those instead. Now if I do to shift and control and click on the principal BSDF node. You can see we now have a much darker area over the top of the eyes here. We don't have that light patch around the top of the eyes. I think I'm happy with that effect. And the rest of the body is looking good. With that defined, I do also want to add again, some subsurface scattering to the skin. I'm going to roll out this subsurface section here. Again, we'll increase the weight, but not go too far because we don't want a really waxy effect. So somewhere around 0.5 should do. And again, I'm going to use that RGB node. And drop that into the radius. That will affect the color. You can see a little bit of the color showing up on the side here. We can increase the scale value, that really lets us boost how much color is showing through. If we take that too far, obviously, the effect again is very waxy and artificial. I'm going to take that down quite a bit. To we just have it shown through at the sides here. Something like that. Just gives us a bit more of a glow to our skin. Go a bit more orange. And I'm going to take that down a bit further just so it's a bit more subtle. Okay. So as you can see, we now have a fairly complex shader defined here. I'm just going to organize a little bit, so things are clearer. If we have to come back in here, it's easier to see the different parts of the shader and break down the effects that they have. Now in the next lesson, I think we'll go ahead and start to work on the lighting of our scene. Don't forget to save. Okay. 30. Lighting: We're now ready to refine our lighting. The first thing that I'm going to do is jump into my camera view here. Now, if we go to our world settings. Obviously, at the moment, all of our lighting is coming from the sky texture. Having the sun at a low angle creates all of these shadows, which gives a good sense of form, and also helps to tell the story that this is an early morning scene. Now, before we fine tune the lighting, I just want to check exactly how my turtle here is sitting on the ground because I can see this gap here at the back, and that's because at the moment, our flippers are not sat down into the sand properly. So I'm just going to rotate things a little bit. Talk that down back is touching. Maybe rotate things around a little bit this way. Make sure it feels solid. Obviously, we've got this one back flipper, pretty much completely under the stand at moment, but that shouldn't be seen from the camera. Let's just check back in our camera view here. I think I'm just going to rotate the camera round again a little bit. Now that we've adjusted Turtle's position. I think I'm happy with that. Then I'm just going to have a look again at this rotation of the sun. I want to make sure that we're getting this rim light on the side here. But you can see also as I rotate, it changes the look of these shadows here, so I want to create an interesting look. But if I bring it too far, you can see we're getting these little patches of light all over, which starts to create a busy effect, which I don't really like. Okay. So I'm just pulling that back. I like the fact that we're introducing a little bit of light on the side of the lip here. It helps to define that edge. But I want to pull that back a little bit up at the top. So I think we'll go with that for now. Let's see. You got a little bit of light spill on the side here, which is kind of interesting. I like the way the shadow is curving around here. Now, while we're at it, I can see that that subsurface effect is really quite harsh there on the face. So let's just switch back to the object and have a look at our subsurface. So I want to adjust that color so it's not quite so red. So yellowy green. Okay. Let's just zoom in on that a little so we can see. That's already a little bit better. It blends in far better with the face color. And we can adjust that scale. I got something that we're happy with. I think, also, I'm going to have a look at that shell because that subsurface really isn't showing up there. I'm just going to hit home key to frame that up. So I think in this case, I'm going to increase subsurface effect. So you can see now that it's really glowing nicely through the top of the shell there without affecting the rest of it too much, that's an effect that I quite like. So now we've got this strong light from the side here, I want to smooth the transition as it goes into the shadow side of the face. So I'm going to start introducing some additional lights. For that, I'm going to head back over into the layout tab and I'm going to vertical split here. In this view, go back to our nove hide those side panels, and let's hide the overlays as well, so they're not distracting. Now over here, we can exit our camera. And we can start adding our lights. What I'm going to do is add in an area light. Let's just move that up and rotate it in initially. Because our light is coming from the side here, what I want is a light to come a little bit more three quarter angle. It's coming from the same direction as the sun, which will make it feel motivated. But I want to use it to help soften out the face here. I open the light settings. That bit. Somewhere around there, it's good to start with. Now I want to change this from a square shape to a disc, who give us hopefully a softer fall off on the shadows, more natural. Look, and I'm going to increase the power of this. I think I'm going to go up to 200. So you can see that that's brightening the face. We can turn that on and off. I'm going to change this color here as well. I just want to make this so slightly more saturated pinkish color. So you can see we're brightening things up and softening the transition between the brighter and darker parts of the face. So now what I'd also like to do is introduce more light from the top here as if it's coming in from the sky. So I'm going to again add another area light. Let's just move this up. In this case, again, we want to change it to a disc and make this a bit bigger. Okay. And we want a bit more of a blue tint to this one. So we're somewhere like that. If we turn that off, we can see the effect of it. I think let's just move that down a little bit. So you can see it's giving us quite a bit of spit on the back there as well as on the top of the head. We can afford to rotate that just slightly. And I'm just going to change the name there. Sky file. And the original one will be Keight. So both of these lights are going to select Create new collection, which we call lights. And at the moment, everything is a bit more flatly lit because we've got the strong light. We've added in our key light, but I actually want to darken this side a little bit to increase our shadows. Now at the moment, they're being lit by the sky. So what we can do is introduce an object here to block that light. So what I'm going to do, create a new plane, and we'll rotate that 90 degrees on the y axis. And I'm just going to move that back a little bit. So it's just outside of our camera view. And I'm going to add a new material. I'll make this dark. And we're going to call this egg fell. So you can see now if I turn this on and off, that when it's on, you've got far darker shadows on the side here than we have here, which is a bit flatter more even lighting. So it's giving us a bit more contrast between the and lighter side of the face and darker shadows here. Which just creates a more interesting. I'm just going to rename that to neck and we'll drop that into our lights collection as well, since it's related to our lighting. I'm happy now with the general lighting on the character, but I want to do something about this background in order to set our character apart from it a little bit better, and we'll deal with that in the next lesson. I don't forget to save. 31. Depth of Field: I. We now want to start creating more interesting background for our scene. Now one of the first things that we can do to try and separate our character from the background is to adjust the depth of field of the camera. If I select my camera here underneath the camera properties, we have this section for depth of field. We can enable that and you can see already everything's blurred out. That's because we have this distance set here. And we can adjust this to a much lower number, something like ten. You can see now a character's face is in focus, but the background is out of focus. And rather than setting this manually, we can also pick an object to focus on. So with this eye dropper icon, we can click, for example, on the head, and the focus will be on the head. But because we have a fairly shallow depth of field here, it can still end up looking like the eyes are out of focus when we select the head, because it's connected to the rest of the torso, we're actually focusing on the center part of the body here. Now, if I were instead to pick the eyes, we still have a problem here because the eyes, if I select them, because of the mirror modifier, they're part of one mesh, and the center point is here within the rear eye. So we're actually focusing back there rather than on this eye that's closest to us. So what I'm going to do is under the modifiers. I'm actually going to remove this mirror modifier. If we were to apply this, I just hit Control A, these two s would become a single mesh, and we still have the same problem. If I undo that, instead, I'm going to remove the mirror modifier, and we're just going to duplicate this. I press shift D, right click to cancel the move. And then under the location here, I'm just going to roll over the x axis and hit the minus key. And that will move it the same distance across the center of the face, which drops it into the correct place. So we can rename this. I'm going to call that right eye or the other one to left eye. This point, we can go back to our camera. Under the camera properties, we can make sure that we are actually selecting the right eye. Here, and that means our focal point will be just here. The F stop on the camera will affect the depth of field. If I were to increase this to a larger number, for example, both our background and our foreground will be in focus. But if we drop this to a much lower number, we get a shallower depth of field, meaning only the point around our focal point is in focus. Now this is obviously a bit extreme here. I'm going to set this to 1.4, which should give us a really nice, shallow depth of field, but we can still see our character with just a bit of fall off in the focus of the back there. This helps to give the impression that our total hatching here is quite small, because when you're photographing small objects, you actually have a narrow depth of field to work with. By blurring the background here, it also helps to separate our character from whatever's behind it. Now, one thing I like about the lighting here is that it introduces these shadows across the ground. We can make use of this to better separate our character from the background. You can see here this part of the face, which is quite light in color is sitting over a lightly colored background. If we were to introduce some shadow there, it would help give us some more contrast. We can do that by introducing an object just out of frame. So what I'm going to do is just create a UV can scale this down a little bit for now, and let's just move it off to the side. And now, I just play over the scale of this. You can see we're introducing a shadow here. So we can just where this is placed and drop in a shadow at the back. Move that down because what I really want is just to drop in some shadow into this area here. I think I can scale it out a little bit more. You can see we're getting a nice bit of shadow here, which helps to separate the character from that background. For now, I'm just going to keep it in this region and not have it spill over behind the character. You can see the difference if I turn that sphere off. We have this light background, turn it back on. Just gives us that bit more separation there. It still appears believable because it blends with everything else that's going on in the background. Whilst our character is now separated nicely from the background here, I think that we can do a little bit more to create some more interest in the background around the character and improve the composition. So in the next lesson, we'll go ahead and add some grass strands here in the background. Don't forget to save. Okay. 32. Creating the Grass: So in order to create our grass, what I'm going to do is start out with a cube. So just add in a cube, scale it down 2.1, and I need to go a bit further, so let's just scale that until it's quite small, something like that. And then I'm just going to go into the top view here. Move this off to one side. I think we can disable our reference now. I'm just going to turn off that collection. And I'm going to rename this cube to gross Okay. Just frame that cube up again. And we can just drag that down until it's inspecting the sand here. I'm going to scale this a little bit on the x axis, and let's head into edit mode, and I'm going to select the top face there and extrude that upwards. And I'm just going to move it a little bit to one side, scale it down to touch. Let's have another extrusion. Again. Move and scale a bit. Let's go on time and scale that right down and move that again. Let's just this edge loop here. And go to move that. We've got a very rough basic low poly blade of grass here. I go back into object mode and control two to add a subdivision modifier to it. Right click and shade smooth. So next I'm going to jump into the shading tab here. Add a new material, which we'll call grass. I just change this base color. We want really quite a dark green here. Something like that to start with. Maybe a bit more. I'm going to add in an RGB node. We'll go to the subsurface, and I'm going to plug that into the radius. And we're going to make this quite saturated green here, maybe yellowish green. Increase the weight a bit and just the scale touch as well. I just going to. Frame up this blade of grass so I can see it more Let's see what we're doing. In fact, I need to do is make sure I apply that scale. Let's select the object, control A and apply the scale as well. Now to reduce our subsurface, and you can see top of the blade here. It's glowing a bit more where it's. We can maybe even a t's slightly on the y axis. So it's slightly thinner. There we go. So I'm going to take this base color and drop that down a bit more still. So we get a bit more contrast between the darker areas and the lighter color that is showing through with the subsurface. Okay, we'll do for now. Now that we've got that one piece of grass defined. Let's just jump back into our camera view, and I'm going to head over to the layout tab. So here we can see both our camera view and we can place things within the scene. I'm just going to place that one bot of grass off to one side for a moment. I'm going to instance it. We can just hit Opt to create an instance of it and now start rotating. And we're going to do this a few times. We can with each instance, just translate it, rotate it a bit, scale it, and we're just going to keep doing this until we create a more interesting looking effect at the back here. Rotating in all angles. And then we can select a few of them at once. D. Rotate them. Okay. Okay. And move them around to creating something that looks interesting, make sure they don't stick up out of the sand. These are coming out. Let's push them back in a bit better. Again, all of these to remove them and rotate them around the other way a little bit. I think we're going to scale them down more. Do until we're creating a nice sort of believable clump of grass here. Obviously, with the depth of field, it's blurring that out nicely. Is that close, I'm going to move a little bit further away. And even though we've got a single strand of grass here, I think it's believable enough. Once we scale a number of them around. You can always go in and model a few different plates of grass if you want to. Okay. And just keep duplicating them, rotating them until you're happy with the end result, something that looks believable. And you can see they're getting a bit close to back of the turtle here. So those strands of grass that are overlapping a little bit. Let's move them back. I grate this bit of separation between the character and the background. Move those a bit further away in space as well. And I think I'm happy enough with that. Maybe. Put some of these plates forwards letter. You can see as we adjust each blade, they catch the sunlight differently. So we can have some highlights here and also some darker blades as well. So where these are quite saturated on the edge here and just taking some of them and rotating them a little bit, and it helps to darken them up, which just compositionally helps a little bit. I'd like to draw too much attention to that area like the darker blades without too much saturation. Okay. I can also just go in to the shading tab and we can just things a little bit here as well. Pull back on that scale a little bit on the subsurface. That's a little bit more of a natural result. There we are. And now, with all of these blades of grass here, we're going to do select all of them, create a new collection. We'll call this grass. Okay. I haven't missed on that. So let's just move that and drop that on the grass collection. So we can turn it on and off if we want to. Then I'm going to select all of these blades again. I'm going to the and create another set, which we're going to bring over to the other side of the character. And going to top you here. I'm going to rotate these round a bit create another cluster of grass that will look a little bit different to the other, by rotating. But we'll help to frame up the character nicely here with the grass growing up to either side. Obviously, we can go in and further tweak these blades as we like. Okay. Okay. And some of these that maybe a bit more out of shot move them back across. And you can see by doing this, I'm also introducing some extra shadows here behind the character is quite nice. So we now have this large light patch here in front of the character and the brighter face. We've got some more shadow here behind so that draws our eye over here to the character's face, and these darker areas in the background here are helping to frame everything up a bit. Few more little tweaks to the grass here in the background. Let's go that down a bit, I think. Let's move it back. Again, I'm looking at these shadows in the background here that are being created as I move these plates of grass around. There we are. When you're happy with how that's looking, save your scene and we'll start to add some finishing touches in the next lesson. 33. Final Adjustments: Lighting: While the writing that we've set up is doing a fairly good job of illuminating the image nicely. I do want to see if I can push things a little bit further. The idea of this image is that we have a newborn hatchling heading out to see at sunrise. W the writing that we've set up already is giving a fairly good impression of that. I want to see if I can push things a little bit further. So what I'm going to do is first of all, select my key light. Let's just frame that up, and I'm going to duplicate it. Now, what I want to do is bring this round a little bit more to the side and rotate it in. And we can lower this down a bit. So we want to do is really match this up with the direction that the main sunlight is coming in from. And I'm going to make this a bit smaller as well. So what I'm trying to do is just light up this area at the front here. I'm going to really push the saturation of this light so that we can push in some really strong orange light here, which will help create this warm patch at the front. If I just disable that, we can see the original. Turning that on just gives us a warmer glow at the front and it helps to draw our eye to the front of the image. Experiment with moving that a little bit closer. I think that's looking fairly good, just that size a little bit. And that should do us. The other thing I'd like to do is just increase the amount of light that we're getting from the sky here on the back and the top of the head. Again, what I'm going to do is just duplicate this sky fill light, and I'm going to make this a lot smaller and bring it in closer to the character. Okay. And you can see how much light we're getting on the top here at the moment. That's too much, but help with positioning things. So I want to have some light spill onto the top of the head and onto the back here, but I'm going to take this right down. Maybe just down to ten. And what we can do positioning this closer to the character. You can see we have some light on the back here and on the top of the head. I disable that Renable it. We can see the difference, particularly the amount of light that spelling on the back here and that bit on the top of the head as well. Just adjust its position slightly. We get something that we're happy with. By keeping the light nice and small, we're really focusing the effect on the top of the turtle here rather than having it spill out into the environment. So just by adding those two lights in, I think I'm happier with how that's looking. The other thing I think I'm going to try is just tweaking this camera angle ever so slightly. So I love that to view. I want to see if we can look down on the turtle slightly more. Just a subtle adjustment to help give the impression that turtle is a small character, so we're having to look down on it, rather than being at high level with it. I think I'm happy enough with that. Then one other thing that I'm noticing is this blade of grass at the back here looks very vertical, which gives it an unnatural feel. I just want to rotate that a bit, push it backwards through these others and already that's looking a lot better. So I'm happy with the lighting in the overall composition. But I think there are also a couple of tweaks that we can make to the shaders before we're ready to move into the compositing phase. So we'll start to tackle that in the next lesson. Don't forget to save. 34. Final Adjustments: Shaders: One thing that's really been standing out to me are the pupils of the eyes here. They're catching a lot of light, which is giving them a bit of a washed out feel. So I'm going to select the eyes and jump over into the shading tab. So you can see that we've got the roughness set all the way up to one here, but they're still catching a lot of this light and washing out, and we're going to adjust the IOR value, the index of refraction in order to help reduce that. So I'm just going to take this value and just move it down a little bit. I don't need to go all the way down to one, which would be pure black. But I think maybe just dropping to 1.3. Will be enough. We've got much darker eye here. We're still catching a little bit of light on that side, but I'm happier with the deeper blacks that we're getting. I also want to take a look at this tongue because the saturation of that is quite strong at the moment. So I'm going to dar that back a little bit. Maybe. Bring it all the way back down to something like 0.7. I think we can also just tweak the roughness of it. So we're catching a little bit more light on that tongue. And that better integrates it with the rest of the image there, I think. Then looking at the skin, it's like that. The texture that we've added here, I feel it's getting a bit too soft. So I want to try and sharpen things up a little bit. So we want to go down to the Voronoi texture here. And I think rather than the texture itself, it's the bump that's having the effect. So where we up the smoothing of the bump all the way up to one here, I'm going to bring that back down. See if I bring that all the way down, these sharper creases really help to make that effect stand out a lot better. I want to bring it up a bit. Maybe we'll go with 0.2. So that we have a little bit of softness so that those creases aren't really razor sharp, but we've got a little bit more definition in there. So I'm happy with that. And I also think that we could afford to add in a bit more detail to the shell here too. So for that, just going to hit the home key down here to frame everything up. Then I think we can add in a noise texture. Start typing in noise and bring that in. With that selected, I'm going to hit Control T to add in my texture coordinates and mapping, and I'm going to hold down shift control and click on that node to see exactly what it looks like. I want to increase this scale quite a bit. Okay. So somewhere around 30. That's all right. That's giving these bumps, but I want to stretch these out so we have a little lines. So I'm going to make use of the mapping node for that and we can adjust this scale value. And so adjust that, you can see that we're stretching things out. And you can see that this is wrapping around the forms that we have here quite nicely. So I want to take this noise texture now. Let's put it into a ramp that we have control over it? Okay. And then what I'm going to do is just multiply it with the color that we've got here already. That way, these darker patches will darken down the existing color. So I'm going to add in a mixed color node. Change this to multiply, and we'll bring in the output from that color ramp. Shift control, click on the principle BSDF we can see the effect there. So that's giving us a nice little bit of color variation here on the back. I'm happy with. I think what we can also do is a a bump node. And I'm going to take the output from this color ramp into the height of the bump and put the normal into the normal. Obviously, that's far too extreme at the moment, it's bring strength down. Maybe something like that. From the camera view. So I think that's just giving us some nice break up there on the surface and some subtle color variation. Adding this multiply is darkening everything down though. So I'll leave that factor at 0.5. I think I'm going to go in and just adjust this color here. Let's increase the saturation a little bit on the brightness. There, I think it works a bit better. Now with all of those small adjustments done, I think we're in a good place to move ahead into the compositing stage in the next lesson. Don't forget to save. 35. Compositing: Compositing is a stage where we can really start to add a lot of polish to our final image. But before we can do that, we need to render out what we've got. So you can head up to render and render image, or simply hit F 12. Once your image is rendered out, you can head over into the compositing tab. Now, the first thing that we need to do is check this used nodes checkbox up at the top here. You can see that's brought in our render the image here under the render layers, and we have this composite node, which is our output node. Everything we drop in between will affect the image that we're ultimately going to be outputting. First of all, what I want to do is hit Shift A, and we're going to search for viewer. By adding in this viewer node, we can instead take our image output, drop it into the viewer and we can see it here in the background in order to work on it. I'm just going to move this don't shoot down a little bit, just to give us a bit more space here. And we can navigate around within the viewport and you can see how it moves our nodes around. If we want to move this background, you can use the V key to zoom out Alt V will zoom back in again. And we can also hold down the t key with middle mouse to move that image around. I'm just going to move it up a bit, give us a bit of space and we can work just beneath it. Here. The first thing that I want to do is introduce a color balance node shift A. Start searching for balance and bring that in. You can see we've got these two different paths here, which is not ideal. For now, I'm just going to drop this on top of one of them. But you can see this effect will come out to the viewer, but it wouldn't come to our final output. Instead, what we can do is hold down the Shift key and the right button and drag through this connection here. You can see added this extra little node here that I can now drag from to connect these nodes together. So with that done, we can start to work on our color balance. So within this node here, we have three sections, lift, gamma, and gain, and that broadly relates to our shadows, mid tones, and highlights. We can make overall adjustments to them here, and we can also adjust the color of them. So the first thing I want to do is start to make some general adjustments. I want to lift up here my highlights, and drop my shadows just a little bit as well. Now within my shadows, I'm just going to start to introduce a bit of blue. You can see only subtle adjustments are needed. If I go too far, we're going to make massive changes to our image. But certainly dragging this into the blues. We just give this a little bit of a shift in color in that area. As we're going to warm up my mid tones here, introducing a bit of red. I want to counter that I'm going to put up my highlights just a little bit. To try and make sure that the overall image still feels natural. Just keep making subtle adjustments. Again, just pulling in some of this blue back here in the shadows to counterbalance what we're doing here with the warmer mid tones. And you can always click on these little color swatches here, and that will give you finer control over what you're doing. So if you want to compare the effect of a node, we can enable and disable it with the key. So this is the before and the after. So the next thing that I'd like to do is to bring the focus really over to this part of the image. So we're seeing the character's face and the foreground lit up as much as possible, and yet we're darkening this area behind the character. So in order to do that, I'm first going to create a mask to mask out this particular area. So I'm going to hit Shift A. And under the masks here, we have the ellipse mask. Drop that node in here for a minute and hold down shift control and click and we can see the effect of that mask. So what I want to do is bring this over to the side of the image. If we hold down shift as we're dragging, we get far better control over it. And I'll leave it. Roughly in the middle, I think for now, and I'm going to increase the size increase the width quite a bit and also the height. So the next thing I want to do is blur the edge of this so I can add in a blur node. Just drop that in there. And I want to increase both the x blur here and the y. We're getting some nice soft edges. So this will be the lighter part of the image and the darker part over here. So I'm just going to reposition these notes for a moment and reconnect things here. What I want to do is to create two variants of this image. So I'm going to add in a hue saturation node. Here I'm going to increase the saturation of the image a bit. Don't have to go too far before we're having quite an effect, but I also want to increase the value of this quite a bit. We're really brightening things up on the one side of the image. So that's looking pretty good. Now I can hold down shift control and D to duplicate that, keeping it connected. Then we're going to create a darker version, so we'll save this as our lighter version, and we want a darker version here as well. So in this case, I'm going to take the value right the way down. But I also want to drop this saturation down as well. A little bit too dark, something like that. The difference between these obviously looking quite extreme. We can toggle between them. But we're now going to blend things together. For this, I'm going to use an Alpha over node. And we can drop that in here. Refers to one side, and we're going to connect these two images together. And we have a factor that allows us to blend between the two, and we're going to make use of our mask here, which we're going to drop into this factor connection. Now at the moment, we're getting the opposite effect to what we want, so we can just swap over these two connections here. Now we have a lighter side to the image here and a darker side over there. Just reposition these. Okay. Now, if I select these three nodes and Mm to mute them, you can see the effect of just our color balance. And if I re enable them, you can see how much we're brightening the one side and darkening down the other. Before and the after. The aim is to make it feel as if we've got the strong sunlight, picking out the front of the character and motivating it to head out to see. Just going to feather that back just a little bit. Just to. Better balance the two sides of the image, but I'm happy with that. The next thing that I'm going to do is to add in a glare node. If we drop that in. Just here, you can see obviously at the moment, the effect is quite extreme. So we're going to change this from the streaks to the fog glow, and we still have a very extreme effect, but we can adjust our threshold. If we pull that up a bit. This will allow us to get a little bit of extra glow around these areas with strong highlights. So again, just mute that for a second. You can see the effect that it's having. And finally, I want to add in one more effect. So I'm going to add in a lens distortion. If we drop that after the glare. Okay. Now, this will help to replicate the effect of a real lens, and this allows us to do two different things. We can distort the whole image in very extreme ways, but that's not why I'm after, but we also have this dispersion effect. Now, if I dial this up to a large number, you'll be able to see the effect. So towards the edges of the image, things are getting blurrier, and we're having this color separation, this chromatic aberration effect. Now, this can get very over used very quickly. So I don't want anything like this sort of number. I want to take this right the way down. Something like 0.1. And that will just give us a far more subtle effect on the edges, and you start to see the color fringing in these brightly lit areas towards the edge of the image. If I mute that, you can see there's a difference turning that on and off, but it's very subtle. But now, finally, if I select all of these nodes here, and mute them. We can see the before here and reenling it how much our image has changed through just this simple collection of nodes here. It gives more focus to our character here, defocusing the background, where it's darker and just adds a little bit of extra polish over the top as well. So once you're happy with that, we just head over to the rendering tab, you can see here we have the effect of our composite here. You can see the original change it back to composite, we'll see the effects with those compositing nodes applied. If you're happy, just head up to image, save us. Give you an image name and save it out wherever you like. And as always, don't forget to save your scene. Then if you join me in the final lesson, we'll recap some key points, and I'll share my final thoughts with you. 36. Final Thoughts: Creating appealing characters for either animation or illustration is hard. But there are a number of things which, if we keep them in mind, can greatly improve our chances of success. First of all, start simple, your initial focus should always be on creating good balanced proportions first and then gradually building complexity. It's far easier to adjust proportions and control the overall form with a low resolution mesh. Save the details for later on in the process. Small changes can make a huge difference to the overall appeal of a character. Again, taking the time to refine the overall forms before moving to details will really help. But even when you're in the detailing phase, it's important not to rush. Take the time to rotate the model slowly checking the form from all angles and tweaking things as required. Even in a simple image, lighting and cameraplacement can help to tell a story. For the purpose of the class, we've intentionally been working on an illustration where the focus is very tightly on the character. But by keeping the camera looking down on the character and using a shallow depth of field, we can tell that they're small, by setting up our lighting in a specific way, we can tell the time of day and bring a clear focus to the character's face and their goal of reaching the sea. We can push this story telling even further by simply reframing our scene. Doing this makes the character look far smaller and also implies the scale of the journey ahead of them. This brings me to the next point, experiment. Don't be afraid to either rejist the came replacement or the lighting setup. If you will make your story clearer or help you to create more unique image. The ease with which this can be done is one of the key benefits of working within three D. You may need to adjust your background or lighting a bit to match a new camera. But the effort will be worth it if you end up with a stronger image. Sharing your work and seeking feedback is really helpful when it comes to improving your skills. A fresh pair of eyes can often spot things that we've missed ourselves. If you've been following along with the class, upload your work to the project gallery. I love to see what you've created. If you've enjoyed the class, then do also consider leaving a review. Not only does it help other students to know what to expect, but each review also helps me to know if the classes I'm making are having a positive impact. Finally, you may want to check out my profile page, where you'll be able to find my other classes and learn a bit more about me. If you'd like to, you can also follow me to be notified of every new class that I publish. Thank you so much for joining me in this class. I really hope that you've enjoyed it, and I've also taken away some new skills, which you can apply to projects of your own. Thanks again, and I hope to see you again soon.