3D Art Creation Full Workflow Process Using Maya, Zbrush and Substance Painter

hello everyone welcome back to my channel my name is chun chen and on this channel we talk about creating photorealistic 3d assets so for today's video i want to show you um the process of me making this i wouldn't call it a character but maybe just this kind of random design idea that i had if any of you watched my previous video i mentioned that i was working on a viking character and i published some video of working on her costume and also sculpting her face so this is the face that i sculpted that i repurposed for this project in case any of you wondering if i'm still making the viking character to be honest at this point i'm not so sure originally the idea was to make a fellow realistic character but i kind of got bored while i was working on it pretty much during the day at my job is to make something feel realistic then i was trying to force myself to also do that after work and i just couldn't do it i'd rather do something maybe a little bit more design related something a little bit more fun for me otherwise it's going to feel like a job again i hope you can still get a lot out of this video i will show you some of the key techniques i used to create this asset so the whole idea of this project is that on pinterest i happen to see this kind of ribcage shaped decoration on this mannequin and i thought it was super cool and all of a sudden i had this image of something very golden shiny on something that's black so i repurpose my character and first i'm going to try to create that kind of cage shape decoration on her so the main technique i'm using here is curves i'm just creating new curves and laying out around her body according to kind of the structure i use before this step though i did a quick paint over that maybe you saw in the beginning of the video just to see how those curves are laying out on top of a shoulder would look good i find that using paint over to make design decisions like that is always better than doing it straight in 3d just because it's so much faster and you really don't have to be a great drawer to be able to do that after big main curves are created i'm starting to create smaller shapes which i'm going to use it to extrude along the curve um after observing the reference i realize the shape itself looks some kind of folded cloth type of shape so i'm creating this very basic geometry that even after i extrude along the curve i definitely would need a lot of sculpting and adjustments to make it work but at least this basic shape will help with the final look that i'm going for after i'm giving this shape a little bit of thickness i'm going to move it into position and i'm going to select the faces on the side and extrude it along the curve the first shape i get is pretty geometric i will have to sculpt on it and adjust it quite a bit to get the actual look that i want i'm going to go ahead and do the same thing with all the curves i have in the scene right now and i'm going to show you what i have in the end so this is what it looks like after i created all the curves and i also connected some of them and now i'm going to use the sculpting tool inside of maya which is one of my new favorite tools uh to kind of nudge things into place and maybe start to combine this thing into one object after move everything into place a little bit and combine the geometry i extruded the edge so it starts to look like it has a little bit of a thickness and i'm just gonna keep moving it around maybe kind of adjust all the different curves into a little bit more complementary position at this point i feel like i should go into zbrush now just so i can subdivide the geometry and start to create a little bit more complex shape inside the curves right now everything look pretty uniform but from the reference it actually looks extremely organic i'm also starting to use a little bit of a standard brush try to create some folds from the reference it looks like um in general the shape kind of looks like rib cage but every one of those curves looks a little bit like cloth actually so in terms of sculpting actually i'm sculpting it as if i'm sculpting a piece of clothing the reference i chose is definitely a very fantasy sort of style object and that's exactly why i chose it um just feel like i want to do something that doesn't necessarily have to make sense i just want to kind of explore the material and the design this is what it looks like after i've done some sculpting um right now they kind of look like seaweed but i think the goal is to make them look like cloth folds i just stopped using symmetry on the reference the two sides is very asymmetrical and it looks more complex because of it so right now everything looks completely symmetrical which makes it look extremely odd and not organic enough so i just stopped using symmetry and started to kind of nudge the shapes around and try to make two sides look very different after i'm happy with the asymmetry that's going on on the main shape i'm going to start to model the decoration on top and one of the main things i can see is those flower decorations so a small tip of modeling something that's duplicated around the center when you use duplicate special uh duplicate it as instance instead of copies so that when you adjusting one petal you will be adjusting all the petals at the same time after creating the initial petal shape i wouldn't know what the entire flower would look like until i duplicate them around the center so it will be very beneficial that afterwards i can still adjust each petal to get the flower shape closer to what i have in mind here i'm not only using the instance to create the entire shape of flower i'm also going to create a curve on each petal here i'm using the sculpting tool again just to sculpt out how curved i want the petal to be once i'm happy with the shape of the petal i moved it into the brush on the reference it looks like there are some very decorative hole inside of the petal so what i'm going to do is to move this shape into z brush i'm going to use live boolean inside the z brush to create those holes and then i'm going to re-topple the shape so for this to work you have to click the live boolean button on the top and append another shape underneath your original shape and set it to subtract to see the hose and then you can just sculpt the shape as you wish to create the sort of decoration that you need so this is what it looks like by the end i think that will work for what i need i'm going to decimate this object to bring it back to maya and re-topple the shape inside of maya i'm going to make this object live and i'm going to use quadro to create proper typology for the petal while i'm doing it i'm actually having symmetry on if you see on top in the center of the screen it says object x so when i'm working on the right side the left side is gonna be worked down at the same time after everything is re-toppled i'm duplicating it again around the center as instances so i can adjust the shape one more time before i finally combine them into one geometry once all the petals are combined into one geometry i'm going to merge the vertices and extrude the shape to give it some thickness this is what it looks like after i give it some thickness in general i'm pretty happy with it but there is a giant hole in the middle and i was looking at the reference it seems like there's some kind of smaller petal in the center of this so i'm going to create another version of the petal put in the center to add some detail and at the same time i can cover up that hole after i finish the main flower i duplicated around the shape as decoration another type of decoration that i need to create for this main object is it looks like there are some ornamented shapes that wraps around those curves so my solution for that is to create a part like one a quarter of an ornamental shape and i'm going to make the main object live so i can snap this shape on top of the curves and then i'm going to do that three more times just to make sure everything is wrapped around the shape after that i'm going to combine all the shapes and extrude to give it a little bit of a thickness so it looks like there is like ornaments that's wrapped completely around the shape of the curve this is what the ornaments looks like after it was extruded i'm going to subdivide it a couple times inside the zbrush and i give it a little bit of a thickness because right now after the extrusion everything is looking super flat after the sculpting i added a couple more things i have those kind of cross kind of decoration on it i added the center ornament on it and i think at this point it should have all the decoration that it needs just a side note anything that was duplicated was uv'd before the duplication now all the modeling is ready we are getting into the rendering and the texturing part of this so before i even put on any textures i would like to use some hdr maybe just test out the lighting and test out if my concept even works i think the basic idea works i like this whole black object against the black background look but the only thing that's bothering me is the surface of her body it's super smooth right now so my plan is to get some uh good looking ornament stencils and start to draw out some ornaments on her face the goal is not to change the structure of the face at all but to give it a little bit more detail where i can possibly apply some different material against the places that have a very sharp edge and when i was doing this i was thinking that for the edges of those ornaments i can also use sort of a golden material just to tie these two objects together this is what it looks like after applied all the patterns a certain area is a little bit too strong so i'm going to store a morph target of the version without pattern and i'm going to create a new layer and i'm going to turn on the pattern and using a morph brush to reduce certain areas that i think the pattern is a little bit too strong again just looking at the pattern on her doesn't make too much sense but in the end i know that not everything is going to show through only a certain area and edges are going to get applied to different material and you will see those once that's done i'm going to prepare the geometry for substance painter so first i'm going to display all the lowest level of the geometry and i'm going to merge everything together you have to remember to turn the ue on when you merge everything and i'm going to export that version as the version i'm going to texture instead of substance painter i will also need to export a high resolution version of this geometry for the baking inside the substance painter for that version i'm going to decimate all the geometry uh to a lower poly count because right now i think i have almost 80 million and to export that it's going to take forever and also i think it's too much for substance painters so normally i would decimate everything to roughly maybe 1.5 million polygon and use that version for the baking now i have both geometry ready i'm going to bake my maps inside a painter i'm going to choose 4k resolution and navigate to my high-res geometry and normally i just leave everything at default unless something came out looking really wrong this is what it looks like after everything is baked and i think i'm happy with all the detail i see i always like to throw one of my old smart material on top just to see how the edges gonna look and how the cavities are gonna look if everything looks okay in this one material then i will move on to actual texturing so first thing i want to do is to set up basic material masks inside a painter i have mostly just two materials so first i'm using a basic gold shader inside a painter and i'm going to exclude all on the material assign area and i'm going to select all the tiles that has gold in it when i was organizing my uv i intentionally put all the same material into one row and the second row is a different material so when i choose material masks it's pretty easy to select everything all at once once that's done i'm going to set up my second material for this guy when i was using the test material i see a lot of things that i can actually use so i'm actually reusing one of my old smart materials because it's mostly a black material for the body but at the same time it does have golden edges around it so it's very much what i had in mind the only thing that's different from what i imagine is for the black metal material i want it to be a little bit less specky because the gold itself is very shiny already i don't want something underneath that's black and super shiny as well so i want to make it a little bit less specky but still has those golden edges that's specky just to tie everything together but at the same time have some sort of material differences so here i'm going into this smart material i have and going to the basic material setting and go into roughness and i'm going to brighten the roughness to lower this back i think that's a really big advantage after using substance painter for a while is that you will have created a lot of smart material that you can reuse for later this is what it looks like after all the basic materials are assigned uh i think we're pretty much like 80 there i do want to refine the gold a little bit more and maybe adjust the existing smart material a little bit more but we're not too far off from what i'm thinking i'm going to work on this black material first so i turned off all the effects i have on top of the black material i have some silver edge effects and i have some golden effects and also under the cavity i have some grunge effects i'm just going to turn them on one by one and adjust them i want a little bit more silver than i have by default so i'm going to turn them on and probably increase the balance a little bit i want the silver and the gold details to add some variation to the black but not too much to the point where it overpowers the look now i'm going to work on the gold material i have a very basic gold material set up right now and the first thing i want to add on top is to have some darker uh maybe color variation maybe the roughness is going to be a little bit different in like the cavity or maybe more flat surface area just to add some variation so for this color i want something a little bit darker maybe a little bit more towards a warm tone to create this new layer of material i basically just duplicate my old gold material and using some filters to change the color and saturation and also change the roughness a little bit for the mask itself for this material i'm using a basic mask generator just to make sure i focus on all the cavity area and to get rid of the edge mask detail in the beginning i couldn't see it very well when i look at material so i had to crank up the mask quite a bit to be able to see it right now i'm pretty happy with where the mask is but to me um this new layer of material is a little too simple right now the color is a little bit flat so i'm just going to swap out the diffuse part of this new material and maybe try to add a little bit more variation to it i will have to adjust my hsv filter to get to a color i like the next thing i want to do is to add a little bit of variation to this object in terms of color my main idea is in general golden material for the whole thing but at the same time we don't want everything to look exactly the same it would be nice to have a little bit more of a color difference even within the same material visually it's always just going to look a little bit more interesting so i'm going to create one golden material it's basic duplication of the old one and give it a little bit of a darker warmer tone and i'm going to create another one that's a little bit brighter maybe shift a little bit more towards yellowish and i'm going to randomly assign some of the objects um to be one warmer tone and randomly assign some of the objects to the colder tones so when you look at the whole thing together you might not realize that there's a little bit of variation out there because they're very subtle it's not super obvious but i feel like in general you will look at it and feel like there's a lot more interesting things to look at after the color variation is done i'm going to start to work on the edges i'm going to create an edge mask actually in this case i had to create two because um how the curvature was captured is very different from the individual flower versus the main structure the main structure has much thicker curvature and the individual flowers have much smaller ones so i actually have to create two to get a good edge mask out of this object and then i'm duplicating the gold material again and this time i'm really increasing the brightness of the color and also really increase the spec level of the color and assign the edge mask to everything so this is what the final edge mask looks like it's a combination of two different ones after it's assigned to the material this is what it looks like again it's a very subtle difference but i think it makes the material looks a little bit more interesting i think everything for this material is pretty much there but i'm still not super happy with the kind of like darker orange grunge on top i feel like it's still a little too simple so my plan is to duplicate that material again and this time i'm going to make it much darker and also i'm actually going to change the color quite a bit to something even towards a little bit blueish color we use a mask that has a smaller coverage to layer it on top of the orange just to create some color variation i think i like the mask i've created for it but it's a little too solid and i want this mask to be a little bit more broken up so i'm looking for a good grunge filter within substance painter to break it up a little bit by applying it on top using multiply i can see this new material i just applied but it's not super obvious this is when i think i'm gonna really adjust the color to shift it way away from orange into blue which is a complimentary color to stand out so the very last thing i did for this was that i thought the black material was a little bit too uniform it was just sort of a black everywhere so i created a new material and shifted the color a little bit and tried to blend those two together with a very generic cloud mask again this is another very very subtle change but i think it makes a difference in the end that is pretty much everything i did for this design concept experiment i had a lot of fun making this and i hope it was an entertaining video for you if you enjoy content like this please like the video and subscribe to my channel and i will see you in the next one

Channel: Artruism Digital

Views: 34,923

Keywords: autodesk maya tutorial, autodesk maya, autodesk maya 2021, substance painter, substance painter tutorial, substance painter tutorial beginner, substance painter 2021, zbrush, zbrush tutorial, zbrush 2021.6, zbrush beginner tutorial, zbrush timelapse, 3d video, 3d vr, nft, zbrush character modeling, substance painter character, substance painter character texturing, substance painter stylized, maya 3d modeling, substance painter blender, substance painter realistic skin

Id: jihCRX8wJWk

Length: 20min 14sec (1214 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 30 2021