3D Modeling Pipeline: ZBrush, Substance Painter, and Maya

hey guys it's monica at academic phoenix plus and welcome to another zbrush tutorial but this time we are going to take our model that we created in the la in the previous tutorial which is this female armor piece and we are going to low res it uv map it and bring it into substance painter for the final textures if you are new to this channel i post 3d tutorials on a weekly basis tutorials include maya zbrush and substance painter if that is your sort of thing please consider subscribing so bring out your creativity open up your software and let's get started in how to low res this model so that we can use it in let's say a game engine or in your animation whatever software you would like to use this on so as i mentioned previously there are several reasons why we use zbrush you can either create a 3d model in zbrush and then we have to low res it so that we can bake it or we can create it in a different software like maya bring it to z brushes to detail it and then we can basically bake it as well so it's a two-prong process and you can see a previous tutorial where i bring in an axe and detail it and bake it and in this case i built the model in zbrush and i'm going to go ahead and bake it so the first thing we need to do is clean this up so i have this lady here that i use as reference so let's delete her and then i'm going to merge these two together because right now they're separate so i'm going to go ahead and in my sub tool i'm going to merge down click ok and my total points which is basically poly count is 4.2 million so it's very very very high so this is going to be my high poly object that means that this is where all the detail is going to be coming from now it doesn't make sense unless you're using i guess unreal 5 and you have a killer machine it doesn't make sense to have such a high poly object for something so small as just armor so we want to go ahead and export this so that we can use it to get the details so up here at the top in zbrush we're going to go to export and i'm going to call this my hp [Music] female armor so that means high poly and it's thinking up at the top you can see up the top it's actually doing its obj and it's thinking really hard because it is a lot of polygons and i can tell it's done when that little bar is that orange bar goes all the way to the right so it's almost done ah there it goes so it's up here so now i have a high poly object that i can use for baking next we want to low res this so lucky for us zbrush has remesher now i am using zbrush 2022. this also works in a zbrushcore so down here at the bottom i'm going to collapse the subtool let's open up geometry and we have this thing called zebra measure so if i click on zero measure what it's going to do it's going to and again it's going to have a bar up here at the top it's going to try to lower res this object as much as possible so it's actually going to merge them together to make them into one piece as best as they can and then it's going to try to get as much of the information as it can from the high poly and put it as a low poly as possible so right now as i mentioned before our high our active points are 4.2 million so and zbrush is actually really good at lowering it and now it's at 18 000 which is actually really good now let me change my material because i think it's a little distracting and now you can see the difference now i can go a little lower so let's click on zebra measure again and now it's down to 14. so that's another 4 000 that i saved if you want you can kind of tweak it a little bit i'm not a big fan of that little pucker right there but in general and i'm not really paying attention too much about what's going on in inside i'm just kind of focusing mostly on the outside but again this is actually fairly low it can go lower still i can bring it into my end going further but for the purpose of this exercise we're gonna move on but it's amazing it went from 4 million to 14. it's amazing it's amazing all right so next is uv mapping now i am using zbrush 2022 as i mentioned and zbrush does have a plug-in called uv master and what i can do is just click unwrap and it will do its best to unwrap my remodel you can see that it added these seams which i have active so i have here check seams um and if you want to see what it looks like you click on flatten you know zbrush does the best that it can and i'm going to click on unflatten and again the point of this exercise is to basically show you guys how what the pipeline is i'm not really here to show you how to make it look perfect for industry standards it's more like a theory i'm going to be showing you guys how it works so that you guys can spend the time uv mapping it properly and on and so on and so forth now unfortunately in zbrushcore does not have uv mapping so my recommendation would be to export this slow poly into maya or whatever program you want and and unwrap it there but for now in this case we have a low poly object and it is uv mapped so let's move on let's go to export i'm going to call this lp for low poly and now i am ready to go into substance painter all right substance painter let's go ahead and go up here to the top we're going to go to new uh pbr is fine let's select and i'm going to select my low poly so this is where all the cool information is going to end up on let me change this to 2048 because i want a higher document resolution and then click ok all right hit f to focus f to focus and we now have our object that is uv mapped and it's basically ready to be textured but before we do that we want to bake our stuff so anytime you import a model you want to bake it so let's go to texture set settings we're gonna scroll down to bake mesh maps and i'm gonna go to a 2048 map which is 2k and increase my dilation width and this is in the high definition meshes this is where we add our high poly model so let's click on this i'm going to grab my hp which is high poly and that's basically one of the that's basically where we're going to get our normal maps and also all the details let's go through and we don't really have id so we can turn that off ambient occlusion we can go ahead and change that to secondary rays and i alway i usually choose ignore backface always let's go to curvature and increase it let's go to position looks good thickness go ahead and increase that as well so i increase those just because i want to get the best bacon that i can let's go ahead and click on bake and now it's going to do its magic now the normal is going to take the longest because we are bringing in a four point million polygon object and there's a lot of details right now our object is actually pretty flat but you can see up there this you can see now that it's getting all the details actually that wasn't that long uh now it's working on occlusion which again it's got some really nice details in there so it's gonna try to see uh you know which one's rising and falling and then making a map out of it so you can see that it's already getting this nice subtle occlusion so pretty and fast we made this armor how long super fast oh you can see that there's an edge here that might cause us a problem that's a seam issue that's why you don't want to put your seam at the front of your object now it's working on curvature look how nice that looks very cool it's got really nice details again your curvature is the edges of your anything that's rising and falling that's position that's thickness so it's trying to figure out what it's basically almost like cavity it's trying to figure out what's deep what's out things like that so each of them can drive a texture which is the whole point of of baking almost done it's almost done with thickness some areas are thicker than others and voila we have our look it looks almost exactly like a high poly it's crazy but remember it's still all very low poly nice look at that and only that that seam that we had an issue with doesn't there's really no issue there so substance painter did a fantastic job beautiful all right uh let's texture let's gonna go to layers um we're gonna do something similar i'm gonna choose uh let's choose gold and you can just drag it in here there it is and we can add a black mask and then we can paint or we what we want so for example up here we had some gold for the sake of this exercise i am going to go fairly quickly so just uh bear with me if this was a profession like i was going to add this into my portfolio i would definitely take the time to make this as beautiful as possible so please take your time if this is going to go into your portfolio don't be as messy as what i'm doing this is more of an example of how it works more than anything else if you click on the letter x it will change it to the color white which means it will mask or black and it will mask it back so we don't see it so i can get a little bit of cleaner lines here oops x again and just kind of get rid of those gold edges remember you can also paint here so if you want to paint on the uvs itself you can if you feel like that's going to be faster all right let's grab some silver or maybe chrome and this one i'm going to drag below it right and it's super reflective so let's take a look at some of the material properties so let's scroll down here and i'm going to roughen it up a little bit and let's play around metallicness is okay [Music] it's pretty shiny you can also reduce change the color if you want to so maybe you want to go a darker color uh that being said let me grab this one i'm actually going to make this one darker it's kind of neat looking let's make it a little rougher something like that i'm going to add a black mask on this one and then i can paint in the sleeves white means you can see it black means you can't and i'm clicking the letter x on my keyboard to kind of switch back and forth so this is right now white and if you want to you can see it down here at the bottom you see it here if i click x it goes to black and white x x x x this is a fast way to paint if i want to go a little faster we can over here to the left we have something called polygon fill and i can grab this one which is the geometry and then i can drag it right so what it does is that it selects that polygon and and because they're separated they're actually not merge together uh they're not physically attached with vertices therefore i can make that make that selection really fast um i can do the same thing by clicking x changing this to black and selecting this polygon which will make it disappear so if i go back to the gold i can actually tell it to for the gold to go away just fast so substance painter there's a reason why it's like number one people use it like crazy let's make it a little rougher and you know because we're in substance painter i mean we can always add even more so if you wanted to you can add a little bit of gold into these details i was doing research on armor and how all this stuff works and it turns out that uh embedding real gold into armor was extremely toxic they had to use uh the blacksmith had to use lead oh no mercury i think it was mercury um and the way it worked is that they put the gold and mercury together and then they would evaporate the substance and the mercury would turn into vapor and disappear but the gold would stay behind on the armor but as you can imagine and this was very expensive so these guys were this blacksmith were like well off but the problem is that they died because they died early because of all the toxic because they were breathing all this uh all this toxic vapor so so it's pretty but at what cost now we can just use substance painter to make it pretty without you know breathing in toxic vapor let's just get some of these details make it small and just kind of again it's really rough i'm hoping you guys are getting the idea behind it but you can see that very quickly we can get these really nice results okay i'm just going to kind of quickly do the tiger or the lion lion i know what it is it's a lion all right and now we have a cool looking armor all right when you're ready you go to file export textures you want to tell it where to go so i'm going to just choose here right now we're using pbr uh roughness but if you're using maya like i am you can always choose the arnold ai standard surface let's go over here and 2048 this is what it's going to be called if you go to output templates and you go to ai this is the arnold standard surface it's going to be called mesh texture it's a it's a whole word right so if you go to list to export it's going to call it lp female armor default it's it's a long name so if you want to change it you can create a a different one so for example i made an ai standard surface that has opacity and occlusion and it's only called texture set base color so if i go back to my list export let me go back here go back up to the top and choose let's say opacity it's now just called default matte which doesn't make any sense so let me change this one to female armor then go back to file export textures and then you gotta do this all over again uh let's see [Music] opacity you can go back here and you can see that's called female armor base color now it's got all of these other things which i don't need so let's go here and i definitely need base color metalness roughness and normal don't really need opacity i don't have anything that's glowing and occlusion is fun we can keep it but it's not really necessary and then export all right we now have our textures which looks like this right it's beautiful actually this does this is the occlusion let me jump into maya let's import our low poly model there it is you know i could definitely reduce it and we can see that it's got its uvs i already have a substance painter tag um i have a video tutorial on how to do this but you just click on this object you tell it that it's an arnold select multiple maps and i'm going to select all my maps including occlusion click select and then double check you can see that metallic and occlusion don't for whatever reason don't get accepted so let's just grab it and really easy fix let's go ahead and grab occlusion i don't have height i don't have a mission and apply doesn't look like anything happen but let's go ahead and go to assign existing material and you can see that we now have an ai standard surface press the number six let's add in a light and there it is you can see that um there's a little bit of g up you can kind of see the geometry and unfortunately the preview is not very pretty but let me show lights not too bad let's take this and what we're going to do is go to mesh display and we're going to unlock the normals and then we're going to soften there it is pretty amazing results let me get a better angle here [Music] let me get this here and i always like to increase my increase my intensity of my light because i feel like it's kind of dark and by the way i'm rendering in maya 2022. let me make it bigger let's go to my render settings scroll down let's go to didn't do all this effort let's render it larger so the fun thing is is that this is a 3d model that looks like it's 4 million polygons but it's not it's only what was it 13 000 14 000 polygons so and i can actually reduce it even further if i went through maya and just kind of removed edges and things like that i could probably go way less and reduce the polygon count the big thing is that your low poly has to be uv mapped so that it can bake properly and that's basically the pipeline you model it in zbrush you can low res it in zbrush you can even uv map it in zbrush you're not stuck there you can always bring that high poly into maya and reduce it i have a video tutorial on how to do that culvert topologizing which gives you way more control over your poly count and also how you want the polygons to lay flat and once you do that then you bring into substance painter to bake and then you get all your textures ready and you bring it into whatever engine you want you can use this in 3ds max you can use this in maya you can use it in unreal you can use it in unity it's basically how the industry works so hopefully you guys found that helpful let me know by leaving a comment below i love this stuff i think it's really cool it's pretty amazing what you can do if you like this content and you want to see more please like and subscribe that is your message to me letting me know that you guys like this stuff and that you want to see more take a look at academicphoenixplus.com there you can find find free 3d models reference images and so much more if you want to support me a little bit more please take a look at my e-courses i show you a deep dive into maya including how to model how to texture and how to uv map plus more so if you can't please purchase an e-course that would be amazing that would really be great again thank you so much for watching i really appreciate it keep creating and i will see you next time

Channel: Academic Phoenix Plus

Views: 11,955

Keywords: 3d, cg, tutorial, how to, videos, basics, zbrush, zbrush 2022, maya, autodesk maya, maya 2023, Substance Painter, 3d painter, adobe painter, adobe, pixologic, maxom, bake, texture, retopologize, uv map, pipeline, 3d pipeline, modeling pipeline

Id: EJtHfkdYsBc

Length: 18min 47sec (1127 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 22 2022