Love this video? Then check out my latest short film BLACK CURTAIN: The Fear. Out now! BLACK CURTAIN: The Fear ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Hl8EpIU3iRI.html
i decided to play a drinking game every time he says "up and running", i died of alcohol poisoning, totally worth it tho, best blender tutorial ever made, after years of sorrow and frustrations i finally know how to use that damn program like a pro, sadly now i have the knowledge but not a corporeal body to apply it. you win some you lose some
I’m still floored that this tutorial exists. I feel like skilled modelers either don’t want to make videos or want to keep these concepts industry secret. You are opening a world of opportunity to the public and I think that’s incredible.
Thanks for the kind words! Most industry pros are too busy to spend their remaining free time creating educational content. Nature of the job unfortunately. If you're wondering why I have time, it's because I avoid those jobs like the plague haha.
It was jaw dropping when i finally made a character. I tried and failed lots of times because i was not on the right path. For anyone trying to make a character this is the best course available on internet for free!!
A useful tip: Do not use the Smooth brush to even out the mesh. Select the Slide Relax brush and hold down shift, just as you would use the smooth brush while using most other brushes while doing this.
Note: if it's frustrating to have the retopo mesh "in Front" instead change your shrinkwrap to targeted normals, above surface. and Click the offset to .083. This is making it a lot easier for me to see whats going on.
Note: I found that if I smooth the Mesh out too much it would start to distort in the wrong direction. If you going into the Tool ( push N ), Brush Settings, Deformation, and change it from Laplacian to Surface it wouldn't distort anymore.
I've watched quite a few tutorials on retopologising, and this one not only gives the best breakdown of loops and poles, but is the first time I've seen anyone start by placing a pentagon over the eyes and cutting out the centre to create that initial ring. This explained so much in an amazingly short amount of time. Incidentally, I was modelling a monkey early today and spent ages on the damned ear, so I could relate to that part very easily.
Your tutorials are ones of the most simple and easy to follow and your funny way of explaining that shit is so captivating that, despite these videos are almost all about an hour long, time really flies while watching these.
So glad I stumbled onto your channel. Been wanting to learn a direct retopology that wasn't a long-winded video. Your tutorials have helped me so much. Keep up the great work!
Is there a retopologising video for the body? I did it in reverse and sculpted the face and body first. I used this video to retopologise the face now I'm wondering how I can do it for the body. Using shrinkwrap and getting the right workflow.
Of you check out my latest series on poly modelling you can pretty much follow the same steps but Use your body sculpt as the base in the same way this video does it for the face
@@Dikko So I will use the Poly Modeling Bodies NO SCULPT REQUIRED video and add a shrinkwrap modifier like in this video with the head or no shrinkwrap modifier? Also, does the poly modeling body video have the same amount of verts/faces as the Modeling For Animation 02 video to combine the head to the body as shown in 46:20?
@@kat74809 yep that’s the one. it won’t have have same polys since it’s a completely different model, but attaching it to the head shouldn’t be a problem regardless. Same methods apply here.
I already had a base mesh sculpted when following this series but eventually decided to do a full-body and clothing sculpt to practice anatomy. Now I'm wondering if I should follow the guide on poly modelling bodies or just go back to the first part of this tutorial series to remind myself where I was so I can quickly retopologise or adapt my base mesh to the new specifications.
@@Dikko Also if anyone is reading this and also put their shrinkwrap after the mirror modifier, an alternative method to applying, sculpt smooth and reapplying is to highlight the slightly squiggly loops and then use the smooth tool in edit mode. It's a bit more time consuming but better than starting over and works pretty well.
just curious how i should approach reducing geometry (@27:00 minutes) for a character who is bald. if theres no deformation on the top of the head, and the game engine converts to tri's anyway, would this technique still be viable in that situation?
if the character that I am sculpting has animal ears which I want to make with the hair, does it make sense to keep a grid structure at 22:26 instead of a circular one? Also as a referemce for future models, do you suggest doing things like animal ears or horns as part of the hair, of the head or of a different object?
It depends on the circumstances regarding the horns. You can either integrate it into the skull or keep them seperate. Seperate is easier if you want to make changes faster. For the ears, you can approach them any way you like. Whatever you do won't significantly affect the face itself which is the main thing
Please, another noob question: after finishing the retopology of the head, I can´t see the eyeballs, eyelashes etc because I see the INSIDE part of the head.... The objects are there, if I turn off the layer of the mesh of the head, I see everything... I couldn't find it anywhere, how to see only the front faces of the mesh? Thank you so much :)
I don't know if anyone is willing to help or even knows what I'm talking about but I ran into 2 problems, well at least 1 problem and one might just be a natural consequence. First of all I sadly went for a more realistic ear as the style I was aiming for is closer to Overwatch's art direction. I managed to get a somewhat decent topology going I feel but I have some topology loops going around. They seem to sorta naturally spiral around the ear once and don't loop more than once so I guess it might be necessary in this instance, the loops go from the top lip and get redirected from the ear towards the jaw and from the eye around the ear towards all sorts of places, some go towards the back after a loop around the ear, some towards the scalp and some towards the jaw again. As I said this might just be how it ends up with detailed ears, but I'd like to get a second opinion. They Don't loop more than once, btw. And my second weird issue is when I'm moving vertices inside the head, it just glitches out and I can't properly position them at all. It's like as soon as I am inside the head volume it doesn't want to position the vertex there.
Note: Before you ask, yes I turned off the Shrink wrap modifier, even though it seems to be behaving this way. Also I tried to turn off the sculpt etc. Does't seem to do much.
Would you apply the same techniques in cartoon characters that have more of a spherical face and body to them? I'm assuming that's correct, but you just have to apply the same techniques in a different way.
Yeah pretty much but depends how stylised you go. Like for example If you have raisin eyes, you likely wouldn't have to worry about eye loops because they're basically gonna be plonked on top of the face with no eyelids
1:15 Is there a genral rule of thumb where to put these 5-star pols? You showed us the common places on a human face, but what about non humanoid modells? Thank you
Wherever there’s a major change in direction in the musculature, structure or deformation of the character. However if the character is not humanoid but still has relatively similar traits -two eyes, nose, mouth- then the structure of where to put the piles is largely the same
I'm having troubles making the animation thing to work in mixamo, it usually take a heccin long ass time to start rigging, but I might have found an issue about it I think its because you can only add one object mash, so basically no eyes, brows, lashes only the main model, how can I add everything together and still make the animation to work?.
No you can add a mesh with multiple elements. Maybe you exported your model with a large subdivision level? Or perhaps some of your model as some non-uniform scale?
Im on the scalp part when my models main face got messed up by smoothing in sculpting. just wtf... and my undos are on the default limit. i cant back it up.
Just the basic smooth brush settings with a low strength. Also worth noting im using a graphics tablet here, so that helps a lot in controlling the brush
@@Dikko Always frustrating when a student thinks they know better, if they knew better there's no reason for them to be in the classroom. Also thank you Dikko for these tutorials, you may have saved me thousands of pounds on a college or university course learning this stuff.
@@Dikko wow, I've never seen that much detail in a custom rig before! So I assumed it was rigify's rig. OK, now, I can't wait to see a video where you do the rig.
Small tip for everyone trying this, instead of applying the shrinkwrap modifier and then making a new one, first copy it, and apply it. That way you don't have to re select all your previous settings
3d scanned my face and retopologized it with this method. was using a different tutorial when a friend of mine recommended me this one. damn its 999 times better
Wow, I can't believe this is free. I thought your claim must be all ego but you weren't kidding, I've watched about a dozen character modeling tutorials and this is the best one, hands down. Where to put stars, important edge loops, this is stuff I never ever learned after years. And using the ears to continue loops, whoa. My ears are where edge loops go to die and spiral into hell. Also I am such an idiot, I never thought to turn off mirror while making a mouth bag, and just struggled to keep the view inside. FML Thanks for putting this content out there, and I hope the channel blows up eventually so everyone can learn this shit and I don't have to cringe while rigging terrible models, ha
You are the Patron saint of all 3d Modeling tutors. I have spent the past several weeks looking for an explanation of retopology theory anywhere on the internet that made any sense to me at all. I am making my first 3d Indi game title and this is the last thing I needed to get under my belt to finish my character creation Thank you.
9 months later...came back to this to retop a character I am making. Went through a lot of life changes over the last year and dropped blender for a while. This is still hands down the best retopo guide I've found. Thanks again Dikko.
I almost cried today because I took the whole weekend to retopo my first character alone just looking at reference and the result was very bad. This course is a godsend. Thank you so much for sharing!
For any other maniacs who are also trying to do a more realistic nose and ears, these two videos helped me out: Nose: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-I0y-CEyQvHY.html Ears: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-kmBqDursfgQ.html Only masochists hardier than me can tackle the ears. I quit... and am now giving my character earmuffs! Problem solved.
see..... this was some what helpful....... but u just used keybinds and didnt really explain it, i didnt even know that you could make the fill tool just create multiple polys in a line without selecting the verts and creating a new side first 16:38 super lost at 17:02 like...... is it middle mouse??? its really confusing
you don't seem to use it, but there is a new tool that was developped in the last version : in sculpt mode, you have a tool that ressembles a wireframe sphere (relax/slide tool), it allows you to move verticies along the geometry without changing it. And if you hold shift, it smoothes out the topology without changing the geometry, in other words, it does this "evening out of the quad structure" that you talk about at 17:13. the developper demonstrated the tool in this video code.blender.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/topology_slide_relax.mp4
I think this was actually the first Dikko video I saw, and I saw it out of context. I was thinking "This looks like way too much effort! He spends a whole hour retopologizing a head, and he probably spent an hour or two sculpting that head alone. How many more hours would it take him to sculpt and retop the rest of the body?" But, when I realized that he didn't sculpt anything other than the head, and the rest was blocked out, with good topology from the beginning, I realized this guy was more efficient than I thought, so I decided to start the tutorial series from the start. So far, I've been incredibly glad that I did. Before this, I was having a rather difficult time sculpting a whole character, and the thought of re-topologizing them from head to toe was quite demoralizing. Dikko's method has honestly been quite empowering, and I'm also grateful that it's so efficient.
Better to focus energy on what's most important imo :). Why sculpt a body that will be covered in clothes, or even deleted in the future? Glad you're finding it useful!
Thank you so much! I’ve been trying to get into 3D modeling for years but always got frustrated and gave up when it got to the retopo stage. I love sculpting and i’m not bad at it, but i’m awful at everything after the sculpting. Ive retopologized one head six or seven times now in the last week using tons of different guides and slowly its getting better. Thank you so much for explaining WHY things are done. I didn’t realize that the symmetry of edge cuts was for ease of rigging :)
im going to make a model following this tutorial, BUT, i will take a shot every time u say "up and running" im kidding ofc, these videos are saving my life
@@Dikko On average, how long does it take for you to get retopology done on a human head in real time? It seems like a long, boring process but I'm willing to go through all that if it means I can animate my sculpts!
@@sunnysunshine8897 It's gets faster with practice. And I will say once you get the hang of it, its super relaxing. Put on some good tunes, and just start building. Takes me about an hour or 2 depending on the face. But once you get one face done, you can remould it into other faces!
I'm working for almost 4 years with Blender and these tutorial series made my life SO much easier. This is lika an all-in-one tutorial, if you know the basics you'll learn everything else alongside :D And oops! Suddenly you made a great character, usable for literally everything! And it's for free?! The first character you make might look off, but if you rewatch and redo this tutorial a few times your stuff is going to be perfect! I just want to say thank you for making such AMAZING tutorials. I wish I could like this video twice :D
Took me 2.5 weeks working every night to get through this video alone, but I'm super happy with the results so far! I strayed from pausing and following every single movement somewhere along the way and had to do a lot of problem solving later, but I learned a lot and am happy with the current results. Thank you for such an in-depth tutorial, looking forward to working on the next vid! :D Also, to whom it may help, CTRL + L selects all linked vertices in edit mode. Probably something I should've known, but took me a little bit to dig up how to do it.
what boggles me the most in this part is, even though i've done this twice already, i cant let go of your instructions and have to do it step by step along with the video. i cant do it on my own...
This is awesome! No matter how many times I tried to copy models with clean topo I never got the loops right! By following you I finally understood how the loops are constructed and how to build them! I retopologized a dog head and all loops are perfectly in place! Thank you so much for this tutorials!!
How do you extrude a vertice into filling a new poly at 15:59? I tried doing just what you did, but to no avail. Does it require some add-on or am I just being dumb?
Thanks so much for this tutorial. It is amazing. Just a quick side note for anyone who is following this tutorial exactly. Be careful about adding in the edge loop at 32:32 as this doesnt create a clean loop. It will circle back and go around the eye. In the next clip this edge loop is disapeared so I'm guessing Dikko fixed it and forgot to edit it out.
I originally followed what Shonzo did since he makes a lot of VTuber avatars that have an 'anime' style to them but couldn't finish making a body. I tried to make a body, but that shit looked like a fucking car accident victim. This tutorial is hella based and chad-pilled, fr fr, no cap. Sorry for the bad English.
where were you?? why didn't youtube suggested your channel earlier?? 😭😭😭😭..... I instatntly subscribed your channel by watching first 30 seconds.... But now i have to do retopo again for my game character. BTW thank you so much for this video 🙏😭😭!!!
just a noob question, but how do you manage to paint marks on the mesh? I tried using the Draw brush as you do, with a color, and Blend "MIX" mode just as I can see from your settings, in Vertex Paint mode, just as you are.. but nothing stays marked on the mesh..
Hey, Dikko, help me! I'm drand new in character creation. I did everything by your tutorial. I'm stuck at 46:20, because i think made changes and forgot to add to video. I have a little bit another topology, which doesn't suit with yours. How can I make my topology like your? It's been 3 days since I've beentrying to solvet this. Please help me ,Thank you!
Hi, I am modeling with Blender since a little while now but I can't figure how to use this modifier "Shrinkwrap" correctly. I mean I selected the surface I'm working on, but while smoothing my overlaying model goes through the original one. It doesn't fits to the shape underneath. Anybody faced such situation? Anyway I'm almost done with this tutorial, that will help me through to follow another one!
I can't apply my shrinkwrap, it keeps giving this message "modifier disabled, skipping apply." I applied the first two or three successfully and I don't know what went wrong. Please help.
I just wanted to say Thank you for your knowledge and time! Theses series helped me to overcome frustration with character creation and for the first time I feel excited to create them!
I must commend you for putting this, and the entire series, together. I searched quite a while before landing on your presentations. Your breakdown at the beginning was everything I have missed when looking at confusing face map after face map on the internet. Like it makes sense, but I can't just follow a map if I don't know where it's going. ANd you've provided that quite nicely, without a lot of fluff and bullshit around it. Thank you!
Noob here - so you're doing this because when you animate, you actually animate vertex positions, so if you don't have circular loops around things that move a lot, the stretching could look wacky, is that right?
Yeah - just apply the same principles used for the other two ;). Its actually a pretty simple solution. Just grab the region of quads used for the 3rd eye, delete it so theres a hole, edge select the hole, then extrude a circular edge loop inward. Then match the edgeloops to the design of the 3rd eye.
This is the best tutorial on character modeling I have ever seen. Your explanation of how the topology should follow on the face has helped me like no other has.
