Transcript:
Hey, guys, Morgan Henning. From flipnormal’s here And in today’s video. We are showing you how to translate a 2d concept into 3d specifically, we’re doing sans from undertale. This is a really fun one, so let’s jump straight into it. All right, so let’s just jump straight into it so one thing. I want to mention just before we, uh, get too far ahead. Is that this concept just found it on Google. I was just googling sans. So if you do know the artist, please let us know in in the comments now starting out. I wanna emphasize that this is about speed, so this was supposed to be a quick project. I think it was a three or four hours for the sculpting in total and that’s not like a brag, but it was more like a restriction for myself. How far can I get within, like, uh, within like a specified time frame and I just wanted to focus on the overall shapes and try and not get too lost in the details that can often times happen if you allocate too much time or just infinite time to your projects that you just get stuck in in detail hell, when it comes to doing these kind of scopes don’t be too focused on the specifics of the software and doing it the right way. What matters is really the shape at this point. Yeah, and very early on. You can see that I start to break away. From the only thing that’s symmetrical is the torso and the face, but then right away, I jump into posing the the legs or sculpting the legs and the pants already posed. That’s because this concept is, there’s such an extreme pose in the concept that it’s a big part of what makes it. I guess cool. Stand out so I didn’t want to create something That was a t-pose first and then later having to pose it. There’s a huge difference between doing actual production modeling, even if it’s for games or film versus doing actual concept work. When you’re doing a production model that has to work, it’s kind of like it’s kind of like, a real car. It actually has to work when you’re doing concepting. You are presenting an idea you can always go in and adapt this into a production model later on, but at this point, it really is, Does this work in 3d or not and just as a tip for people, something that I’ve noticed speeds up my work quite a lot is that whenever I need to create a new sub tool or new element for a character, I’ll just duplicate whatever I have in the scene like for the the bones and the legs. I think I just duplicated the pants and then smooth them a little bit. Repurpose them. So don’t you go in and append the new sphere and scale it down and figure out all that stuff, especially when you have bones like these. Um, where, okay, they’re kind of similar. Just take one shape, smooth. It, smooth it down. Tweak the shape a little bit and you’re good to go. Yeah, if this was a less stylized character as well like I would have used straight up. Uh, human basement. If I was doing like Kratos or somebody like that, who is a human, I would have not done this from a sphere unless you know for for an exercise and you want to challenge yourself, But if my goal was to just translate something into 3d just use whatever tools you have available and like here as well, there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel, so just use the leg that I’ve already made reposition it. It’s it’s! Um, it’s a great challenge, this whole translating a 2d concept into 3d because it forces you to break down the 2d concept. You’ll start to learn the more you do that that there are a lot of things in 2d that. Just don’t fly when it comes to 3d and that’s where you really have to use that special, not special spatial part of your brain to figure out. How do you actually translate that? And then you get better with time? The more you do that, yeah? There are a lot of nasty surprises, which pop up such as can the character move at all. Can you rotate his head, can he? Can he do anything? Yeah, that’s one thing you’ll see with the way. His right arm is going to be positioned that it is semi-broken, but it works from the angle. Um, I think I managed to get it into somewhat of a position that could be feasible, but then again he’s also a skeleton, So who cares? Yeah, skeleton logic. Then just throw it out. Just whatever works. Um, here’s just a quick one for the slippers that he’s wearing. It’s just a sphere cut in half, drag out the foot part of the Slipper. And then, you know, we’re good to go. You really didn’t want to complicate things here, so it just start from something that’s close to the shape you’re after and then just go from there. Yeah, seaborg cowboy. This when it comes to concepting, particularly don’t worry about, does this a proper topology, and this this part here I think is actually really important to just quickly. Cover is the face of him because he’s so simple. I just started out with something super basic. You can see how how pixelated the poly paint is and how pixelated the details are, but from a distance that doesn’t really matter. I will, you know, operas this towards the end of the video, but for now, it just helps me get the character across pretty early on instead of just having a gray sphere for, you know, a placeholder head, so it’s so important to get the character to get across early on. That’s really what you’re doing when you’re doing a particular 3d concept, It’s not so much does this work? Technically, it really is. Does this read as the character and the earlier? You can get the character read in there. The better it is now. This part is pretty important for the overall silhouette, probably the most important part, which is, which is his jacket and again, so that’s just a standard sphere and then heavy heavy use of the dam standard brush just to really cut into the shape and very quickly get the silhouette that I’m after block in the main shapes early on. Get get everything Get all the elements to be there almost as quickly as you can. It’s it’s really hard to to read a concept. If you don’t have all the pieces and one thing that I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from Rafael Gracetti lately and one of the things I remember him talking about was the emphasis on color from a very early stage, and this is something I’ve started implementing in most of my sculpts as well and it really helps sell the character. It really helps like if I didn’t. Polly paint the face here. A lot of things would be missing, because so much of what makes sense sans is, you know, blue ring in his eye and that creepy, creepy smile. Yeah, but particularly if you’re translating something, something fairly stylized like this, I mean, this is incredibly stylish, the original one. Then you have to get colors and a really good. Um, I guess technique for elements like a jacket like this. Which is it’s sort of like in my mind. It’s an organic, hard surface-ish kind of shape because it combines a lot of different elements. So the main tools for that is is the Damien standard brush the clay brush and H Polish. Each polish is fantastic for making hard and and even straight surfaces. It’s interesting seeing how you’re solving the his his left sleeve How it just merges with his pocket? Where, like, you know, you wouldn’t do this for anything which is going to be used for anything, but it doesn’t matter here. The end goal with this one is to quickly like within a few hours and get this to read like sans. Yeah, and it would be a complete waste of time to model this properly up with the base mission. Then then just make it work when you can just kind of merge it together. Yeah, the trick to that when you have something. Let’s like specifically like the sleeve going into the pocket, right, you have two elements kind of coexisting in the same space. It’s just about getting the detail and the volume, especially the volume or surrounding it. I get that right, and then it’s gonna look convincing what I tend to do when I’m working with concepts, particularly if it’s a very specific one is, I overlay it a lot when it comes to when it comes to my own things, I wouldn’t necessarily do that, but with if this would be like client work, I’m working in a production and I’m doing concept art for it. They’re usually incredibly specific. Some art directors I work with are like every single line they’ve added into their into their concept. You have to adhere to so in that case. I I really tend to just overlay as much as I can, And that can be the tricky part, especially when translating a concept is something that you might just interpret as a brushstroke can be something really important for the content artist so frustrating. [MUSIC] Now see, you don’t really need a lot of detail there to make it convincing with the pocket. It’s just a little bit and that’s. The whole premise of this entire sculpt is trying to get away with minimal amounts of detail, but still sell the character and match the concept. You can just lazy stuff here. Just duplicating bones around stretching them again just to get that illusion of, okay. The silhouette is matching, it doesn’t have to be detailed. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It’s more about getting the character and the feeling of the concept. Across one thing. I tend to do, especially when I’m working on hard corners like this is combining the Damien standard brush with the H Polish so Damian Standard to really emphasize the corners and then go in with the H Polish brush to flatten everything down. Those two work, really. Well, um, together? It is interesting because this is only like I don’t know like an hour. Two hours into the scope and it reads really well as a character, it’s. I mean, even for if you go back half the video, it still reads as a character. Yeah, because the colors are there and the main shapes are there. You know, the end sculpt compared to this is not that much different. No, it’s just a shapes are just a little closer together. Yeah, and the folds and the fabrics are maybe just a tad more defined. Nothing more. The the zipper now. This is something we just. We just discussed off video before where it’s so easy to to think that you have to make the zippers through some kind of procedural system. Clever, curved brushes. I used to do this all the time into my arm. Take a bring out a curve, snap it to a surface and then duplicate it with some crazy path constraint. Or you can just make a cube and just duplicate it. Yeah, whatever works, it’s going to take you two minutes to make the cube and duplicate the cube, and it’s gonna take you two hours of Googling, and you’re gonna have to use three different software to do it in, like a fancy procedural way now at this stage we’re sort of done with blocking and now we’re just getting into both the refinement and and detail stage. So what you’ll see is some of the details that were created originally with the Damien Standard brush so to get filled in with volume to clean them up and then I go over it again with Damien Standard, But as a with a more precise stroke to really emphasize that shape also just operating everything. It’s really interesting when you’re doing this kind of work and you have some poly paint. I tend to go between the poly paint like with it being enabled and with being disabled. Yeah, it’s really easy that, like it’s important that it’s there when you’re doing the overall blocking just so you can see it with color, but then it’s it’s really easy that the two it’s really for easier details to get lost in the poly paint, and then it can be nice to disable it review the shape critically and then enable it again. I think that’s a really good point because you’re you shouldn’t be able to hide behind your poly. Paint sculpt should work as a sculpt. And that’s something you’ll see once you start rendering it. If if your model is only surviving because of the poly paint that’ll show up once you get more light and more shadow in there. I used to do this before where it was. It was like just kind of make it work by doing texture overlays in Photoshop. A crappy texturing. But you fix it a post and you don’t want to do that. This is when we keep on talking about this in our videos, but the stronger your model is the stronger everything becomes if you want to texture, a model which is really strong, it’s not that hard, but if you want to texture, a model which is crappy, you are over compensating for everything. It becomes very hard to do that just as a quick note as well. If you’re interested in sort of like the full version of this, this was streamed on Youtube and we’ll have a link to the full playlist. So you can go watch that there. If you want more in-depth commentary and and want to see every single brush stroke in detail now. This part is is fun. It’s like coloring in like you’ve laid down your lines. Everything is solid now. You just need to fill in all the details. That’s the that’s! The part where you really you feel like everything is really coming together, and now you can. You can start to imagine what this is going to look like once. It’s rendered what’s important to keep in mind when you’re watching this video. This is, you know, obviously heavily sped up and edited and it’s kind of its kind of showing the highlights. Yeah, but you’re you’re not seeing the in-between steps and the there’s always frustration about not doing anything with this where you’re just being like. Yeah, this goes from a good blocking to a good final result to a good render. No, there’s a lot of, you know, you have always the self-doubt, and you always have the issues with the model which you just aren’t seeing through a time lapse like this. Yeah, the time lapse inherently just has to be the good parts, obviously very important to nail those slippers. Oh, they’re big part of the character. Imagine a timeless with only the bad parts. That would be horrible, boring, time lapse. Um, but yeah, that’s that’s about it for the sculpt part. So just some really quick. Um, occlusion like texturing. Nothing, nothing serious. Most of it is just, you know, base colors, so I just go in and and just add a little bit of variation with a darker, a darker color, But I don’t. I really don’t want to overdo it because again. The concept is very, very simple, and I want to stick to that as much as possible. If you want to learn about how to so more the way we’re thinking about sculpting here, we did recent release, a whole series called introduction to sculpting, which covers a lot of what we’re thinking about. When you’re doing these kind of models and then just real quick here at the end, just em. We just exported everything out as an fbx from from C brush and imported it into blender that way it comes in with poly paint. I don’t have to worry about uvs or anything. Take it into blender and you just set up your your poly paint and you’re good to go. And then you can start lighting fairly fairly quickly I tend to do. I tend to work in EV, but for this specific character here. There was a lot of occlusion that needed to happen. In terms of the shadow, Evie doesn’t really deal so well with that. So I switched over to cycles, which is also super fast, depending on your hardware, of course, for for these kind of projects. This kind of constant work blender is my favorite tool ever made for this. It’s so quick to to see new to see a result. It’s really quick to work with changing textures and everything and the nice thing is. You can iterate so fast on the lights here. I am deviating a little bit from the concept and the fact that the background is dark and not white. That was something that I wanted to change just to give more focus more emphasis to the actual character and then highlighting a few things with RIM light that is slightly tinted blue instead of just white light. But that’s just, you know, that was my interpretation of what I want to do with this character at the end. [MUSIC] Here’s just a little spotlight just to create some rim right there on the on the skull. This is also where if you are following concept, you’re locking the camera on and the new light for this specific shot. You’re not doing some general turntable lighting for this. You’re lighting this shot, and that’s what you go with, and that it’ll work from that angle. It might work from a few degrees to either side that that usually is fine as you can see here, but once we get too far towards the back, it sort of starts to get overblown, and it doesn’t really work anymore, so you are lighting for this specific angle and sculpting from this angle. That’s also true, that’s also true, so there we are. It’s the final result of the translating sans from 2d to 3d really hope you enjoyed this and let us know if you would like to see more of this kind of content and we’ll be sure to provide.