Hello and welcome to this tutorial series on creating a realistic head in Blender 2.6!
This is a complete tutorial series explaining the creation of a realistic human portrait with Blender. The entire process will be covered from base mesh modeling, detail sculpting, texture painting, hair growing and styling, sub-surface scatter shading, and compositing. Some of the more time-consuming tasks will be time-lapses with commentary like modeling, sculpting, and texture painting; the other parts will be mostly real-time.
Part 7 is a shift of gears to modeling clothing for our bust. First, we will generate a stand-in mesh to represent the upper torso, which then allows us to retopologize on top of this geometry to better separate the artistic and technical portions of the process. We will also generate our base meshes for a shirt, jacket, and tie, then we’ll sculpt wrinkly cloth detail onto these base meshes. To finish the tutorial we will quickly lay out UVs to prepare for texturing.
DISCLAIMER: We cannot redistribute these references, due to the license, but we can use them under Fair Use laws for educational purposes. They’re not available for commercial use, though.
Music: “Summertime” by cdk (http://ccmixter.org/files/cdk/13112)
Pretty amazing stuff!
WOW…. Amazing Stuff. Thanks a lot
cool
Seriously thank you so much for making these.
I love it.
It seems I’ve been waiting for the next part for years!)))
Sorry about the delay..the series is almost done!
Thanks for your great work! I’ve been following your tutorial series for several weeks and my results pretty good))) Now I will never be afraid of human head sculpting) Many thanks for that)))
Great as always! Kent you are a natural born instructor. Thanks a lot!
Wow, thanks! Tremendously encouraging
You mentioned sculpt tools suddenly switching from add to subtract (or the other way around). I’ve had this issue and just recalculating the normals fixed it for me. Now you did mention doing it earlier while modeling the shirt so it might be an entirely different issue but if anyone’s struggling with inverted operations, it’s worth a shot.
I paused recording and recalculated the normals on the shirt to no avail, but you’re absolutely right, it has fixed the issue for me in the past. Great tip!
Thanks for this awesome tutorial.
btw. In my opinion the model looks a little bit like the G-man from Half-Life.
Great tutorial series,keep them coming,Kent!:)
how did you DO the “Lock” vertices? It’s hard to follow with timelapse. Please help, and do a “quick Tip” to explain the technique.
It’s in the “Options” drop-down in the sculpt tools panel. It says “Lock:” with X, Y, and Z buttons. Sorry that wasn’t clear.
Kent, there is already default hotkey to add subdivision surface modifier to mesh or adjust the levels if it exists already on the mesh.. it’s ctrl + 1 – 5 on the keyboard.
That’s brilliant – Thanks for the tip!
respect!
I’ll add another ‘Awesome job!’ to the list. Actually I can’t remember seeing a tut that mentioned that tip at the end about combining as UVs. Throw ‘em out there Kent! It’s not common to me. lol I’m always amazed by how much there is to learn and how many little tricks there are that just aren’t really that apparent. Man, that made it look easy…reminds me about what Andrew was talking about in his latest tut- Speeding it up makes you look awesome;) just poking at ya. That was nicely explained and action packed. It was the fastest hour I had today. Keep em coming!
Thank you John, I really appreciate the kind words
And I’m so glad to hear you’re learning new things! If that’s not happening then these videos are pointless…so I’m encouraged!
Hi,
that series of tutorial are great, IMHO one of the best, or the best I ever see on blender.
This tutorial convinced me to learn blender (I come from softimage/zbrush)
The only downside I found actually is the limitation of single object in edit time and a very poor viewport performance.
Respect for learning Blender! I came from maya and zbrush myself
I find myself joining objects (ctrl + J) all the time to edit their components at the same time. The poor viewport performance is odd to me though…are you working with a really dense scene or is it poor performance from the start?
Thanks for your reply.
I respect blender, but habits are very hard to cage
The main problem is with viewport, my machine is a phenom x6 with 16gb ram and gtx460 1gb. With Softimage can import and edit dense mesh from zbrush (sometime (few times) can be useful), no issue at all. With blender a dense mesh can be a big issue (I read an article on blender artists where explain how improve a it performance (VBO etc.etc.) but the performance remain weak)
With softimage I don’t care about dense meshes (I doing characters illustration), but with blender seems an issue.
Another issue is about move brush… seems not so reponsinve like zbrush one.
Again, thanks for your reply, I apprentice very much your courtesy. Hope to see many tutorial from you
Another “strange” for me: why raycast selection is a special operation and freeze viewport when activated? Seems very bad decision IMHO. Can I set raycast selection like softimage? Without it seems I need a lot of click every time I need to select more vertex.
For the rest I customized a bit input editor (left click, release confirm and some minor cage here and there) and now I’m comfortable with it
I think by “raycast selection” you mean the ability to select only the components facing the user and not the components on the backside (?) I usually use “Z” to turn on wireframe allowing me to select front and backside components. And the “limit selection to visible” toggle doesn’t crash for me..
It sounds like the problems you’ve mentioned are caused by what is probably a severely dense mesh. It’s surprising to me that Softimage handles zbrush-dense meshes (sounds like a big improvement from the last time I used it). The traditional 3D packages like Maya, Max, and Blender, aren’t designed to interactively handle millions of polygons…how many polys is your mesh and what exactly are you trying to do with it inside Softimage/Blender?
Hi, thanks again for your time Kent
Yes, softimage can handle dense meshes, his viewport technology, called gygapolygons, was improved three time and in release 2010 become very powerful, on my machine can handle mesh with 17.000.000 polygons (with this heavy scene or meshes the viewport lag but is acceptable), blender, with a mesh in subdivion (a female body I did studying blenderella tutorial)with 88226 faces and 2 point of subdivision (246209 faces) wieport lag and selection is very slow, the situation is better with subsurf at 2 (119624 faces) but selection and drag a single vertex is slow and viewport is poor reactive.
About raycast selection (I used softimage terminology) I mean the ability to click and drag mouse and select all the vertex/edge/faces under it mouse cursor. In blender I need to use C key in edit mode and can select like a brush (can enlarge size of the brush etc. etc.) but is very strange for me, because viewport freeze and it is intended like special operation. Hope you understood my bad english…
I like very much your tutorial and like you I frustrated by import/export (in a special way from zbrush), for these reason I follow your mini course, if blender can liberate me by the import/export curse and by autodesk mad subscription I will be very happy
For these reason my first idea was to take a look at modo, did you give a try? Can sculpt, modelling (great customization and can be very fast) and has a great simple rendering (with nice output just out of the box), and render preview window are great, ultrafst and smooth (like cycles viewport with a gtx570)
I’m happy to help! And your english is completely understandable
That’s an awesome feature of Softimage! Blender unfortunately doesn’t have that..yet
It sounds very odd to me that the paint selection tool (C key) crashes blender. I suppose the mesh you’re editing with a subsurf modifier is pushing the viewport/tools to its max…are you using the official build of Blender or a version from graphicall.org?
Indeed I have used Modo. If Blender didn’t exist, I might end up favoring Modo over the other apps. It seems like the next best option for avoiding import/export issues since like you said sculpting and rendering are done in the same program (the renderer is really great!). However, I work with several Modo enthusiasts and surprisingly, they never use the sculpting tools..also I prefer to be a generalist and Modo isn’t quite fully-featured yet. Ultimately though, as long as I can seriously compare Blender to Zbrush/Maya/Modo/Max/etc., it’s easy to save the money and stick with Blender (not to mention avoiding the pirated software temptation)
I hope you keep using/testing it! Switching to Blender is truly a worthwhile transition to make
No, sorry I was not so clear as I want. When press C viewport freeze (cannot rotate/pan) but when press again or drop it all turn back as usual. This sound strange to me, why cannot have this on my LMB constantly as softimage (or modo) and free rotate/pan/move viewport?
About modo, I discharge it for rigging and animation, blender is very more advanced in this fields, really close to softimage (great) animation and rigging tools. Also, is very unstable and in many task he need too many clicks, prefer the softimage/blender approach with less frills and few mouse clicks (but rendering and paint in modo are great, also new topology tool seems impressive)
About piracy and money, if a software permit me to develop the work more fast and better I’m more than happy to spend money on it, my issue with softimage is Autodesk: their upgrade policy is terrible and very expensive (about 800 € per year in my country) and I did subscription two time waiting some improve I really need (rendering first of all). In last release they sold me a Crowd simulation (nice, but who need?), an half baked, ugly preview viewport, and an improvement in modelling workflow (now can use 3dsm interaction mode…) plus a set of new, unknown before, bugs.
Blender seems to promise great things, cycles look really promising and I love work with a fast preview rendering window ala Modo (hope they will improve CPU performance)
So I follow with interest your work and hope to learn and cage my habits. Blender don’t convince me at 100% but want bet a little of my time on it. Also, hope to see many great work done in blender like you did, actually the best artists I know are prevalently on maya/max/softimage.
thanks again for your time
It appears like you have experience with many apps, so I respect that you see good things in Blender. Most professional artists I know are severely ignorant to it and pass it off immediately. I understand where you’re coming from about paying for a good tool. I also understand where you’re coming from about Autodesk upgrading. Not only is it expensive, but they add so little to the program in a year’s time. Literally, I can watch Blender add new features and evolve every day. But anyway, I’m not going to try and convice anymore – Do whatever you want to do to get a beautiful image!
As for the C key, you can make it “Right Click” on your mouse. Go to preferences > Input > search for “Circle Select” and change the hotkey to be whatever you want. As a warning though, like with all programs, changing the default hotkeys will break other hotkeys.
I’ve enjoyed our conversation
Thanks. I am still trying to get realistic results in cycles.
I managed to render it in cycles!
Please post your Cycles render here – I’m quite curious to see your results
I have been waiting for the next part for years
amazing way of using the knife tool
Hi there Kent,
This has been a truly informative tutorial series, I can’t begin to thank you enough for what I’ve learnt from watching these videos.
I have a question about the end of this video, you demonstrated something that appeared to be a method of transferring UV’s from a base mesh to a duplicate of the same mesh with modifiers in it’s stack, if I’m not mistaken?
I didn’t quite follow how you managed to accomplish this as everytime I try to recreate the effect with ctrl – j all I get is the two meshes joining (as per default key mappings). Did I perphaps hear the key combination you mentioned incorrectly? I’d be most grateful if anybody could offer some insight into this problem I’m expreriencing.
Once again thanks for this series, it’s exactly what I’ve been looking for!
I can’t even pay for a tutorial on Gnomon workshop to get something this good for 3ds max! nice.