Overwatch Style Character - Making The Hair

Hey guys more than hanging from flip normals here and in this video, we are looking at part two of sculpting, an overwatch styled inspired face, and here we're sort of tweaking the shapes during retopology and also, more importantly, i guess doing some stylized hair. So everything is coming together, so let's jump into c brush. So here is the finished, render from the sculpt that we'll be creating in this two part series and if you want more content like this, make sure to subscribe, so you get notified every time we put out a new video, so this first part is purely focused On shape fixing so the first part of the video you know sculpting and doing everything in one session. What i like to do is leave my scalps leave my projects for a little bit then come back to it. You know with fresh eyes, maybe the next day the next evening, whatever it is because then you have a fresh pair of eyes. You have a fresh mind, you're, not tired anymore and then you're better able to critically evaluate what you've been doing. So i realized there were some proportional things that i wanted to fix, especially to get closer to that stylized and overwatch. Like look now keep in mind, what i'm doing right now is basically sacrilegious. I'M only only tweaking the profile, ignoring every other angle and you'll, see why this is going to turn out horrible in a second. But there's you know, there's there's some method to the madness. The worst is when you, you think you have a relative sculpt, go to bed wake up next morning, like, oh god, it happened. So often the worst. Oh there you go there, you go yeah, i l from oblivion. Yeah, you see so the issue here. Just to give you some context, the issue here is that, because i basically only tried to fix something in one dimension, this was intentional. You fix something in one dimension which looks okay, then it looks fine from there, but then every other angle hasn't been touched at all. So it's lacking it's lacking volume everywhere else. It'S not a problem as long as you're aware of what you're doing - and you know we will fix this. Don'T worry, oh boy, the eyes yeah it's getting pretty rough when you start when you're between the stages, yeah and that's where you just got ta. You know rely on your previous experience of doing more and more sculpts to know that you can get to the final result that you're after and if this is one of your first calls. You just have to go on adventure and trust that it's not about the final result, but it's about the journey and the friends you make along the way. Yeah. One thing that i've done here as well is actually merged the eyes, the brows, the lashes and the face. This allows you to move everything together, so, if you're tweaking the shape of the eyes that moves the brows and the lashes with it. So, if you're doing something like this, where it's more stylized and everything is sort of connected this way, i feel, like that's, a very efficient way to work. Obviously, you will have to go in and fix things. So just keep that in mind. It'S so frustrating when it comes from one design version to to another revision and the in-between stages, where it looks like absolute crap and you're. Like trust me, i know i know how to do this yeah, because if you remember we'll take a look at the undo history in a bit again. So to give you a refresher, but it was uh, it was a different look. You know right off the bat we started off with something like we mentioned a little more realistic that we would then sort of try to stylize and then went through some stages of where the character would looks one way and then the start of this chapter, where We just completely demolished the profile to tweak it that just takes it into another dimensions. Now we're definitely going for something that is different and is going to be closer to to our reference. I also recommend that you shouldn't be too afraid of destroying your work. I do this a lot where i have some hair and maybe some clothing, eyebrows eyelashes and i want to change the overall proportion. But it's a bit scary, because then then i have to move all those different pieces as well, but you just you just have to do it. You just have to you have to do what whatever is best for your project. Yeah. One of my biggest weaknesses is actually committing to to those big changes. It'S very easy for me to get lost in the tiny movements of the face, just changing the mouth a little bit the nose a little bit but making those bolder decisions, especially once you notice that you're, not following your reference as closely as you could have and You'Re not getting to the character that you wanted it's very important to try and stay critical and not emotionally attached to your work at this point and then be able to make those changes, and you can see we're still suffering from the profile change. We'Ve added a little bit of volume to the side. Just you know, with the move brush just moving things out a little bit to give the cheeks more volume, the nose, the mouth a little more volume, but she still has a very pointy mousy face. I am wondering how many times you gon na remake the pupils, the iris - i think it's about three times in total, so here we're doing what we talked about in chapter, one, we're bringing all the elements of the front of the face closer together. You know we're bringing them down towards the lower half of the face in an effort to make it appear younger and a little more cute, and it's always this back and forth back and forth. You tweak a little bit, you evaluate it. You tweak it some more because at this stage, even even small changes can actually have a big impact on on what it looks like. Does it look good? Is it off? Has the character changed in any way from the changes that you've just done and trying to strike this balance between part realism, part stylized, because that's sort of how i interpreted overwatch? It'S not it's, not something like kenny mentioned in the previous video, something like it's, not anime style. You know it's not super stylized. There is still room for realistic shapes in there. Some more volumetric shapes, especially because of how the shading is in in overwatch as well. You also have to remember to ask a feedback as you go along with this as well like and we're not just saying this morgan was asking for feedback along the way. Yes and that's why there are some design changes actually happening is because of that feedback would improve the art. You can see now right at this point now we're actually getting in to the territory where we've kind of figured out the character from here on out. It'S pretty much done. There will be, of course, subtle tweaks to it, but the profile change that we did in the beginning, along with how we've now widened the face softened some of the like the nose of the mouth made it less like, i said, mousy less pointy added that volume Has really has really changed the character into where she is sort of like now she's on the path to becoming the character that we want her to be one. One thing that can be tricky, especially when you're working in this kind of dynamesh kind of workflow, is that everything gets. You know scaled to the same resolution, so a method that i like to use is using the sculptures pro brush to go in and target specific elements that i want to up breasts or or down rest. You know the ears require a lot more resolution, because they are just a more complex shape compared to everything else. You see the same thing with with the eyes and in some cases, the mouth, the back of the head, the neck, for example. They don't really need that much resolution, so we can always go in with a larger brush there to reduce the detail level. I love working with sculptors pro, it's so cool how you can add dynamic resolution different areas. I think that was one of those things that they added to zbrush, where it was like. Okay. Finally, here's a actually like a revolutionary feature that will change the way that i work doesn't happen, a lot predictable concepting. It is it's an actual game. Changer yeah, and here you can see how that sort of changed the resolution of the ear, and you can always change your brush size just to even to rest it up even more like i said, don't really need detail back here, we're going to be covering that In hair anyway and re-topologizing it, so then it's back to going through the history again just evaluating. What'S going on, it's always interesting to see right here, we're still in the realistic territory getting into something more stylized. A little baby, like almost like greek statue and a big change into this high elf territory, messing up the profile and then finally, adding that back in the volumes to balance everything out at this stage. It'S just tweaking all the forms that we have adding the resolution. We need to wherever we want it. Like i mentioned. Not a lot will change in terms of the shape of her. That'S pretty much been decided on now. It'S just going in figuring out which parts need to be simplified like the ear here, which is creating some planes and just creating some some rough secondary shapes to pull pull back some of the realism a little bit so satisfying to watch this. It does not anything to the skull per se, but just seeing those wireframes get dense, yeah and there you can very clearly see the difference in resolution right. We don't really need that resolution on the brow area, because it's just a very soft shape, but we do need it to separate the the lids from the brows and especially making that plain that sort of that lip of of the eyelids. If you will and we're also about to start the retopology process now, this is something you'll hear henning, and i talk about a lot on this channel how you should never do read topology in c brush, because it's absolute garbage now uh. It was brought to my attention that there was a way to do some retopology and zbrush, so i thought i'd give it a try for this um for this tutorial, where basically you're doing a combination of poly painting, combined with sculptures pro so right now, this brush Is set to dynamic it's adding resolution to the mesh at the same time as it's painting with black. This is to create contours for where we want our polygroups to be, and that'll all make a lot more sense once we actually start to create the polygroups. Now this is a very specific, very picky way of creating re-topology, because any change will drastically change the outcome of your of your topology, but basically we draw all that up. We polygroup it from from polypaint that creates those polygroups and then the sculptures pro allowed us to create resolution in between the polygroups we go in with polish by feature or groups, either of them work to straighten out the lines in between the different polygroups, then you Can crease those polygroups to have edges on either side? You see remesh that with keep groups and everything enabled, and that then allows you to create this seemingly good topology for your mesh. There'S this secondary stage that i've done where i go in mask out some parts that are completely jumbled and polished by groups and polish by feature again and then i'll go in and i'll actually re-c remesh it again at a lower resolution. This time. After all, the shapes have been cleaned up to achieve a somewhat usable topology. I would say now. I would never recommend anyone do this. It'S it's a lot of work and it's a lot of work to figure out how it actually works. You know in order to get something that is usable, you'll, never have production quality topology, it just doesn't work that way. There'S too many things that can go wrong. I spent many days figuring out the optimal way to draw shapes and the optimal settings for this particular face, and it's not it's just not worth it. It'S it's definitely an interesting experiment and i think you can use it for some things. Maybe there's some hard surface things you can use it for or if you just want something, quick and dirty. You could experiment with this for a little bit and get really good at it and then start to use like utilize, that for your sculpt, but in reality, just hitting cereal mesh is probably going to be the better option for most people. Yeah look readable, you just isn't that hard. It doesn't take it's not that hard and does take that much time and what you can do to even eliminate that can be to use something like c-wrap or wrap threes. Basically, the same thing and use a pre-made base mesh for that yeah and before i used to sort of think about well what, if you don't have access to other 3d software? Well, blender is at a stage now, where you know it's always been free, but it's. It'S decent every topology, it's way better than it's. Okay, it's! Okay, it's better than zbrush, but that doesn't you know mean a lot, but at least there is access to free software that lets you read to apologize and if you wanted to read topology, if you want to create clean meshes, especially if you're doing stylized work get Into the habit of doing properly topology outside of zbrush, i mean you could do manual, retopology and zbrush as well with c spheres and all that kind of jazz. But i wouldn't recommend it and i think my preferred method is doing it with quadro and maya yeah. But don't don't do what we're showing you right now. This is the sort of secondary phase of the retopology, after we're done with all the crazy steps. What you want to do, if you really want to pursue this right, is you have to tweak the topology? So i'm going in and manually deleting stars or, if there's any kind of crazy directional change that i don't want i'll, go and delete that and remake it. However, c modeler is just god awful when it comes to this kind of work, because you can't extract edges correctly and you can't have more than four sides in your polygon, then it becomes a try. So it makes it kind of hard to work with. Another part. Is also reducing topology, where you don't need it like you're, seeing here it's there's a lot of added stuff that you would never add by hand, but that you know serial measure has to try and add something to have consistent flow everywhere. So it does take some time you could probably get pretty fast at this kind of workflow and and get something decent, but again, if you're looking to actually get good and and do properly topology. That needs to be done outside of zbrush yeah. This doesn't really solve a problem for me. No exactly it's like a showcase. More than anything else, i would say it looks really cool in this video. If you hadn't told me that how much of a penny nurse this was, i would have been like damn. This was pretty cool, but then it's like it took like four days to do it yeah i was. It was four days of just experimenting. You know in the evenings. I would experiment with different kinds of resolutions: uh different kinds of paths, especially when creating the polygroups in the beginning, um that that can make it pretty pretty tricky to do. I think so we were debating if whether we should show this at all, since we are basically raging about it. But i think i still think it's worth to have it in here, just as a discussion for how you can effectively do topology and how you cannot effectively to follow yeah yeah and if you want to get more in depth about it. Francis xavier martens on art station, he was actually the guy that i sort of picked this up from. He has a tutorial on it, like a full tutorial on how to do everything and we'll link that down below. So you can check it out. I think he also has a tool to optimize it in c brush, so it's definitely worth checking out if you're interested. However, i would not recommend that path, because it's a it's a path of pain and now that we have our read topology, it's like all the standard stuff. You know you take your retopologized version and your sculpt, you reproject it and then you go in because now you have clean topology. That'S really that's really a thing with clean topology when you're doing stylized stuff, it's so much easier to get the shapes exactly how you want, because you can accentuate just on the edges that go along your your flow. It'S not like going across edges, which sometimes happens, especially when you're dynameshing it can be kind of rough, but even with zebra mesh straight up serum. As you know, you'll have weird topological flow that makes sculpting look kind of odd, sometimes once again trying to figure out how to strike that balance between something very stylized and and also realistic at the same time figuring out. How much detail should you actually add in and then more topology in and now here's another thing i wouldn't recommend you do so. Obviously i wanted to clean up the brows and the lashes because they're kind of soft you could totally do that with pure sculpting. If your mesh was higher high-res enough - and you had enough time, but just good old, you know box modeling just get it in there again. This is probably something i would choose to do in a real 3d package. You do this in my or or blender. It takes like five minutes. This probably takes 20 in in zbrush, just because it's c modeler and the way navigation, works and and transformation with gizmos in zbrush just makes it horribly unintuitive and not worth your time. But you know we uh. I thought we wanted to stick to zbrush 100 for this tutorial to show you how it could be done. So maybe you could pick up a few tricks um. One thing i definitely learned from doing the brows and - and the lashes like this - was that you can mask individual vertices or or edges. If you mask around an edge and then you can just you know, invert, the mask use your transform tools to just move that part um. So if you do want to stick to zbrush - and this is what uh the way you've chosen - uh the pain of the way of pain - i guess this is definitely achievable, because you know i've, as you can see, we've done it, but it's not what i would Recommend that that you do especially not if you want to be efficient about it, sounds a little bit like you have just left, like the cult of sea wish cowboys it's a cold. I'Ve never actually been in, but we just make fun of them. So much do you get clean geometry from this, though yeah, which is really nice like it works, it's just not effective. No, like dragging these things out, and especially also here in the edit we've tried to spare you from a lot of the pain. It'S not very intuitive to move these things around and get them correctly positioned, not as intuitive as it is in something like maya and max or blend, or whatever a real 3d package. Yeah i mean it's. It'S just they're, just different tools for for poly modeling see brush just isn't very good, no same as you wouldn't sculpt in maya. It'S like people back back in the day, but when they added c modeler people were like losing their. They were like, oh my god. This is the end of modeling as we know it and it's not it really isn't. I know improvements are have been done to see modeler now yeah, but still it's it's not going to replace poly modeling. No, it's an i use it when i have to add additional loops to it or maybe have to extrude something here and there i really just don't want to go out, but uh yeah. I re. I don't use it as a serious modeling toolbox whatsoever. It'S great for adding a loop here and there definitely it's nice having that ability now, because before you had to export it out of zbrush here we're making a bike helmet and that's it and we're done no. So this is going to be the base for her hair. Now the hair is being done in sort of two stages. One is adding a general shape for hair. So that's going to be this helmet type structure with a little bit of texture, but not a lot, because this isn't like the most important part of the hair, we'll add the sort of bangs to the front as well. We'Ll do that based on on the mesh where we extract it and then we're actually going to be jumping in and using one of danny mac's hair brushes there's you know i i just like that was one of the one one of the brushes i picked up. I think it's a couple bucks in gumroad or something like that you can make those hair brushes yourself, um, there's nothing revolutionary in them. I was just too lazy to make my own, so that's why i picked it up, but yeah you just start out with simple shapes like this. Obviously, i've also gone for a hairstyle. That'S not super advanced uh hitting can attest to the pains of sculpting fur and hair yeah, because it's very simple guys for some reason. He he does that a lot, even though he really doesn't enjoy it. I don't know why i do that. It'S like. Why did you do re-topology yeah? Sometimes you just got ta so again. You know i use the clay buildup just to add the rough details, and then i actually go in and destroy it with the smooth brush damien standard, just to get a little bit of structure and i'll actually go over it with the trim dynamic brush to remove Most of my details, just so i have the slight peaks and valleys in here. I think it was also just me fighting against the whole idea of actually doing hair i was like, should i just sculpt it like? Ah, no it'll be better this way. So here we're adding an ice cream shape to her face, or maybe it's like a little hitler bang or something oh yeah, yeah, but again this is just to get the rough shape in place. So when these these lines, the indication of hair is also to help me once we actually start using the hair brushes just to give you some direction again, we'll go in with trim, dynamic and just nuke all this detail, but it's just to get a rough idea. It'S always easier to add details and then remove them. Yeah we'll just duplicate that, because the next shape is kind of similar, so there's no reason to remake it from scratch, don't be afraid to just reuse stuff. Also, if you have something from a previous project, i didn't want to do that for this, because i wanted you guys to actually hopefully learn something from it, but if you're doing something like a personal piece or especially something for clients, reuse, whatever you have in your Library, if you've done something in the past, definitely reuse it, it doesn't have to be unique. There'S no pride in it to like make everything you unique and bespoke for the project you're doing in the end, you just really care about getting a cool looking result and obviously the more beginner you are. You always also care about learning right, so you have to strike a balance between reuse and and making something new from scratch. Yeah. If this was client work, i would have googled anime girl, 3d model yeah. I wouldn't modify that and i would have used generic bass mesh and i would have used c wrap to conform it to it. Then it's whatever gets you the results fastest. If you think hinny - and i sound a little sleepy, it's because there's currently a heat wave and we're just sitting here sweating while we're looking at well past me sculpting, hair, watching anime girls, while we're being scorched, so i really hope you're. You know learning something from this: if not all this zero meshing and heat pain has been for nothing. I'D be curious to hear you guys comments on other types of sculpts. What you would like to see, if you, especially if you like this format as well, what you're actually more into, if you're, more into more quick time-lapse stuff, if you want more narration, you know, leave your thoughts down below and we'll definitely try to be accommodating. As be as accommodating as we can yeah - and here you see me just taking away all the detail - i mean luckily, this is like five or ten minutes worth of work. Just adding these things in there is again just to get the rough shape just so we have something to go by and then we jump into the hairbrush. So it's not a hair brush the way that i think a lot of people think about it. It'S not you don't drag out hair on your your mesh, it's actually adding geometry. On top with these, with these brushes - and i tend to stick to dynamic here - to make it consistent so that the size of it is fairly consistent, no matter what my zoom level is in in c rush, just tweaking the the stroke curve a little bit here, Because we don't want to taper, you can always go and experiment that, especially if you make your own brush as well seeing what kind of taper you want in your in your hair. But here we just want some straight shapes that go up and down into the into the ponytail and another trick when you're working with these kinds of brushes is that you use you have that little curve on your on your mesh. If you're making changes say to the brush size, if you want to have a thicker strand of hair, you don't need to recreate the strand. You simply just change your brush size, while you're not hovering over the hair or over the curve, and then you click the curve again and it resizes the hair. I like magic, a nice little fundamental for you when it comes to doing hair, is to you can do hair in layers. It'S not just like you have one strand and that's it. You can have multiple layers of hair yeah. That'S one of the things i like about danny's hair brushes is that it's a it's a collection of five or six strands within one, and that allows you to both change the layering uh horizontally, but also vertically right. You can pull it up and down hide some of it in the other parts of the hair have like straight pieces of hair, fly out a little bit just to create some more. I guess a more exciting silhouette, especially when it comes to hair, i'm guessing you're, using move topological for this yeah. The nice thing with this hair brush in particular, is that every piece is actually separate geometry, so using the move, topological brush just allows you to only target one specific strand right here, we're using the move brush. You know you target you target everything. Another way to do it is also you could auto groups all the poly groups and then turn on masking by poly groups. That way, when you use the regular move brush whatever poly group, it it picks. First, that's the one it'll be moving. It'S essentially the same thing, but i just find it easier to use the move topological brush. So nothing really. I guess mind-bending or super innovative in this process. I'Ve been i've. I'Ve done this a few times now, so i've sort of worked out a way that i think is kind of fast and and works well for me, i just i lay out the basic strands first, so i kind of get an idea of the volume that i Want to create, and then i just go into each one of them and and tweak it a little bit with the move. Topological. Another thing: that's nice is, if you turn on dynamic, subdivision dynamic subdivision can be on while you're moving things. So you get a. I get a more accurate representation of what the hair actually looks like then, like henning mentioned with the layering, it can be nice to go in and add different size strands to your hair. So not everything is the same size and not everything is you know, made in exactly the same way here we just chose a different kind of hair brush and also lower the the size of the brush. This just allows us to make some some more stray hairs and let them poke out a little bit kind of break up the sort of linear way that the hairs bundle up towards the ponytail also do hair with asymmetry. You really really don't want symmetrical hair unless you're going for extremely specific art style where that's needed. Yeah symmetries, like it's, both your best friend and your worst enemy when you're doing characters. It helps you speed up the entire process, but until a certain point - and if you don't get away from that, your character just ends up looking weird, and here we have some 70s inspired bangs uh. This is obviously because one of the main references is always also sierra suit samus, and you know that's the kind of hairstyle that she sort of has. I was sort of referencing the figurine for this part, and i thought that'd be cool to to add that and you're just noticing here, the more consuming they're referencing a lot and that's because we're actually using reference when working yeah for a lot of things. Even though this is fairly stylized, you you'd still use references for this. Stylized does not mean not good, it doesn't make it easy or anything. No, no stylist is not easy. Far from it and then once you start layering all these clumps together, you know you start to actually get something that resembles hair, and this was maybe up until this point, like maybe 20 minutes of just quickly, throwing in the hair there. Just so we have some shapes and that allows us to have something that we can then tweak. So you can obviously spend way more time on it and make it a lot nicer. But i thought this was enough to sort of get the point across again. We'Re just making a what this is a sausage shape this time, so we've done bike, helmet ice cream and now sausage all the three components of hair. As we all know, um i'm trying to sort of distribute the weight a little bit on this ponytail. So it's kind of fat at the bottom and sort of droops down a little bit just to give it a nice heavy feel to it, and it's also important that you don't make it too. You know your sausage shape too big because you're adding the hair volume on top. Unless you know you want really really thick hair, but just keep in mind that this actually changes what it looks like and a quick tip if you're sort of moving the tips tip for moving the tips, the ends of your hair. It doesn't matter if it's hair or whatever it is, if you're moving something like this and you're using the regular move brush you've probably experienced that it it moves it not in an intuitive way when you're moving it. But if you go under under brush, you can actually turn on accu curve. Accu curve, just changes the way sort of moving interpolates. I guess, and it makes it a lot easier to move tips and ends of meshes. I didn't know that one. Thank you. It'S pretty cool thanks, danny yeah, so again, just emphasizing the bottom of the ponytail here, just to make it a little bit thicker when it comes to grooming as well, whether you're doing proper grooms with actual hair or you're doing more stylized. You really want to think about your clumps here. You can see it's very stylized because there are really big clumps yeah, but you can like you really want to make sure that you're thinking about clumping it's one of the key things you want to do whenever you're doing anything when it comes to hair. Another thing when you're using curves like this is that, if you're, making a strand of hair, for example - and you decide to make another one and the brush size is too large, so it interacts with the other curve. It'Ll actually do it based on the existing curve. But if you just tap anywhere on your mesh before you create the second curve, the first curve is just deleted and it's like it never existed in the first place. That makes it a lot easier to work with these kind of curved brushes there you go. You just saw me turn on accu-curve and again that just makes it a lot easier to tweak the ends of the ends of the hair here and there we go just added a little bit of last piece of hair just to integrate it a little better and Then we have a overwatch and style overwatch inspired zero suit samus face complete with hair, as you can see, there's a body below which i'm not showing you, but that's, i guess for another time, maybe this part of a bigger project, but we really wanted to share A more in-depth long-form tutorial with you, where we actually show you start to finish how to create something like this. So i really hope you enjoyed it and - and you learned something if you have any questions about it, make sure to leave a comment down below and if you want to see more like this in the future. If you have suggestions for what you want to see. Also be sure to jump down there and subscribe, so you don't miss out on any future videos.