Advanced 3D in MAYA - Creating a Simple Product Render with Arnold in Maya 2018

okay so the first video of the semester is going to be to create a product render here is the result that we're going for and here is one of the references and here is another one of the references I just did a Google search for mug or coffee mug I may have done a Creative Commons search I may not have I don't remember but they're just references and that's what we're going for so it's it's relatively simple but I think it's gonna be good practice to to work on getting clean finished feeling renders so we've got a new scene and the first thing that we want to do is practice good file management which I know is super exciting but very important so go to file and project window so we're gonna create a new project for this so you click new and name it we'll call it coffee mug yeah that'll be good and choose your save destination so for me I'm going to go up a level or two that's three to 2018 and this looks like a good spot hit select and accept okay so now we've created that project and as a reminder let's take a quick look at this the project hierarchy or the project structure that we just created so okay so here it is here's a project we just created and Maya automatically creates all of these subfolders we won't be using most of these subfolders but there's a couple of important ones we have source images which is where we will want to put the cement texture that we're going to use eventually source images is the default folder that Maya looks at anytime you say you know open a file texture or an image plane that's the default and then for renders it will automatically save to the images folder okay now we're not using render man you're not gonna have a separate render man folder that you have to deal with it'll be in the images folder and then your scenes will be in the scene folder again the advantage of working in these constraints and this this structure is that one you need to for instance submit a project for grading you just zip up the whole project folder send that to me and then I get all of your textures all of your renders everything contained you don't have to worry about missing links the fonts would be the exception so if you do have custom fonts you know send those along too but keeps things nice and tidy so we've got the product created we also need to save this Maya project so we'll call this coffee mug zero one and white because this is gonna be the whoops this is going to be the white mug and then if we have some time later we'll do the two-tone mug at the end so click Save and we can look back at a project and go to a scene folder and there it is here's the Maya file we just saved okay so now we're all set up and ready to work okay so now that we have our scene set let's start modeling and I'm gonna first create a simple ground plane so I'm just gonna go to the poly modeling shelf click on plane and then first thing we do is name it I'm just gonna name it ground you could also name it floor or anything that makes sense to you just name it something please and then in the inputs here of the channel box layer editor I'm going to set my width and height to 30 and that's it I've made a ground now let's make a mug so for a mug I think it's perhaps no surprise that we're gonna start with a cylinder so again poly modeling shelf click on the cylinder or you can go up to create polygon primitives and cylinder once you do that name it I'm gonna name it mug actually coffee mug not that there's gonna be multiple mugs but it's descriptive and then under inputs there's a couple things that we want to do here the first thing is the subdivisions on the axis usually don't need 20 but I'm I'm gonna bring it down to 16 and the reason I'm choosing 16 not only for something around like this I'd go 8 or if I was gonna have the camera close up to it in this instance 12 would probably be fine but I'm gonna go with 16 because we're gonna need to eventually extrude out this handle from the side of the mug because this is all one piece and with 16 this is it gives me a decent width to extrude out from there's still be a couple of adjustments to make but it's going to set set us up for that future extrusion quite nicely I'm also going to under translate why move it up one unit so that it's sitting on the floor and going back down to the inputs subdivision caps if we look at the top here I'm gonna set that to two oops not zero two okay and that's going to give us a really nice edge loop and face loop on both sides so that I can make those extrusions a little bit easier not have to add that myself and I think that's just about it for well okay so the radius is gonna be the last thing is going to be just establishing this general size in form so for the radius you can see it's just a little bit wider than it is tall and I've got the quad view up here I just tap spacebar alright to jump into quad view if that doesn't come up then you can just hit the quad view here on this on the left side if you got your your presets your layout presets and so I'm going to keep an eye on the on the front view as I do this and go back to my inputs and radius with radius selected I can middle click and drag and that will adjust the radius accordingly so and you can hold down control if you want finer tune adjustments and so I don't know something like that when I did this the first time I didn't I wasn't too specific about you know 1.4 3 or whatever it was just kind of by I getting a feel for what I wanted to look like and then I made adjustments as I went so we'll start here I'm at one point five six if you're somewhere in that ballpark you should be just fine okay so that's the the general shape of the mug I'm gonna jump into perspective here and realized I probably didn't need to make this ground plane because it's gonna make this next bit slightly tricky so I'm going to with the ground plane selected and click in the channel box layer editor let's see this button right here this last button the square and the in the circle it's going to create a new layer and assign the selected object to that layer and I'll just call this ground so you'll call it lair underscore ground quick save and then turn off the visibility so I can just focus on the mug okay so I'm gonna work in probably quad view for a bit because I want to be able to see the the orthographic while I work in perspective and what I want to focus on right now is this lower profile and if I go back to the original source image and not my render you can see that there's a little bit of a kind of a foot down here almost and that's that's what I want to keep in mind as I'm making this bottom curve so I'm gonna go into edge mode it's a right-click edge double click on that bottom edge okay you can see I just have that edge selected and I'm gonna move it up to about here okay so right here what I'm doing is I'm defining how long this the the perfectly vertical part of this mug is alright and that's about what looks to be probably 75 to 80% of the height of the mug is perfectly straight so that's kind of what I'm replicating here now you'll notice that that part of the bottom is still on the floor and that's because we have that extra subdivision when we made the cylinder okay so that is that's defined the vertical part of the mug now we need to get that that curve in there and we also need to get that little kind of foot here on them on the bottom so let's worry about that foot first and we need to select all of these faces and actually what I'm gonna do so when we run into vertex mode and just click and drag across those bottom vertices and it's gonna select all of them it's faster than selecting 16 individual faces so I'm gonna select all of them and I'm gonna move them up just a little bit okay just slightly off the ground because what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to extrude back down all right now something I don't remember if I showed last semester or not is how to change your selections so if you hold down command in right click you've got some selection options so we can go to faces and to contained faces and that's gonna select all of those bottom faces I'll show that again okay so we have all of these vertices at the bottom selected which I just did a click and drag across oops in in vertex mode click and drag across and you select all those all those vertices I make sure that's that's all you have selected you don't have anything else selected the the 3d manipulator the the widget here should be at the center vertex once you have that if you hold down the command button and hold down the right mouse button you're going to bring up this menu which is gonna be all of your kind of selection options so you've got growth selection a shrink selection and then you can also convert your selection to edges or to faces and what we want is to go to faces and then we want to go to contained faces so contained faces is all of the faces that these vertices are kind of outlining if we just did two faces then it would select all the faces that the vertices are touching and if we did to face perimeter that appears to just select those so I actually never use to face a perimeter I usually either just do two faces or two to contain faces so it's a as you get used to that workflow you know the the right-clicking it's faster than manually selecting sixteen phases okay so I have all those selected now what I want to do is extrude those down back down to the ground so I'm going to turn on grid snapping which is this first magnet icon up here with the grid all right when that's on you'll see the center of this manipulator turns to a circle that tells you that you have some form of snapping on and remember this is a new new functionality with Maya 2017 or 2018 I don't remember when it 18 I don't yeah so if you hold down shift and hover over the manipulator you can see that it says extrude so instead of having to shift right click and go to extrude faces or get to extrude any other way this is a very quick way to to extrude some faces so hold down shift you'll see extrude just click on the vertical okay it should be green it might be yellow if you've already selected it but normally it'll be green and then click and drag and with grid snapping on it's going to snap right down to the ground nice and perfect okay so we've got that and extruded I'm gonna turn off grid snapping because I don't want that on for now and it's gonna jump into quad hew and I think I want to scale this down just a little bit but I'll hold off on that we can make that adjustment once we get a better sense of the the curve of this so to add this kind of subtle curve into the bottom of the mug we need to add an edge loop so we're gonna go into edge mode and shift right click let's select an edge shift right click and insert edge loop tool click on the box next to that to bring up your options and just make sure that you have equal distance from edge relative would also work in this case because it is perfectly symmetrical you just don't want multiple edge loops just just want one edge loop right now okay and then I'm gonna add it right about here so pretty close to the top then I'm gonna click W to bring up my move tool double click on that new edge and bring it down a little bit okay you can see now we're starting to define that curve okay so we've got that and right about now is when I'm going to start occasionally hitting three on the number pad to check how this looks when it's smoothed and you can see when I smooth this out it loses all sorts of shapes it gets very mushy so we're going to need to add a couple of edge loops to control this and make make sure that we're retaining the form it just doesn't quite feel right yet I'm gonna select both of these edges and I'm gonna move them down that feels better yeah that feels better okay here's what it looks like in in quad view in case you're wondering so now let's add a couple of control loops here to make sure that this stays tight so I'm in edge mode so shift right-click insert edgeloop tool' I'm going to add an edge right here and I'm going to add another edge up here so this edge is gonna stop the when it's smooth is smooth it's going to stop it from traveling up the mug it's going to hold it right there and then this edge is going to keep that transition tight I'm going to add one more [Music] I select all these faces I'm going to extrude this in just a little bit so I'm gonna select them all shift right click extrude the face and then I just want to adjust the offset I don't want to adjust the thickness so I'm gonna hold down control to give it finer tune control and just a little bit and again that's just gonna keep that corner sharp so now when I hit to 3 on the number pad you can see that that keeps it holding its shape a little bit better I'm gonna bring this edge in a little bit so I'm gonna select it and just scale it in and it's a little high so I'll move it down just a smidge so something like that okay hit 3 on the number pad again you'll notice that I am I am checking the smoothed view but I am NOT modeling in the smooth view because this view lies to you all right in the when he hit nothing it 1 and set the display smoothness to to one of you just see you see the actual geometry that's there all right if you get three that's not worthy like this vertex is not actually here in space it's actually here ok you can see that difference you get two you can kind of see the comparison so you don't want to be be just worrying about this because this is not where your geometry is and that can get you in trouble also it seems as though I had a face selected when I did that last extrusion so I'm going to fix that real quick I wasn't paying attention to what I had selected so it's gonna select all of those delete them double-click on that edge shift right click and fill the hole and now we're fine okay so I've got the bottom of this more or less sorted now it's time to deal with the top of this so I'm gonna select this edge and I'm gonna scale it up leaving about the thickness of the mug that I want which is about yeah that looks about good and now I'm gonna do command right click again and I'm going to change my selection to faces to contain faces oops and it doesn't work awesome to contain traces No okay so instead let's just select the center vertex and command right click and two faces and that'll select all of them all right with those selected we can do a couple of extrusions so I'm just going to extrude this all the way down I'm gonna go as far as when we see this black line that means it's intersecting with the outside of the mug so I'm gonna pull it up just past that a little bit more okay and then I'm gonna hold down shift I'm gonna do I'm gonna extrude it one more time and that's just gonna give me a second edge loop to keep that tight and keep the inside of the mug from smoothing out towards the top of it all right and that's all I'm gonna do for the inside kind of bottom of the mug cuz we're never gonna see that this is the most of that we're gonna see of the mug okay see even even on the initial reference you see maybe a third of the way into the mug not that much so I've got that and I'm gonna add a couple more edge loops now so if I hit three on the number pad and smooth it out you can see that this the lip here gets really sharp and pointy and thin and I want to stop that from happening so go back to edge mode shift right click and insert edge loop and I'm gonna add probably three edge loops here and add one about here one on the inside it's at three see how that feels and that might actually be enough go back into object mode so I can get a better sense of what that looks like I'm gonna add one more go back into edge mode I've got my edge loop tool still there when it had one right in the center and then I'm just gonna move it up just a little bit give a little contour to that lip okay so now as I smooth it out it's just slightly more pleasing it's a it's a very minor detail but that's gonna help catch the light really nicely okay so we're pretty close on this mug though I mean the body of the mug itself is done but now we need to do the tricky part which is the handle okay let's take a look at this handle real quick and the way that I'm gonna do this now you can see that my handle is a little bit slightly more square than than the reference especially where it joins the mug but that's okay the way that we're gonna do this is going to add a couple more edge loops that are gonna define the bounds of the of the handle and then we're gonna extrude out from there bend them around and then merge them together okay so that's that's where we're going with this follow along and we'll all be okay now would be a good time to save just because that's a good habit to be in save early save often okay so the handles we wanted to find where where they're gonna be coming from so I'm gonna go and do this in front of you and I've got my reference here and I don't have to be exact it's an surgery or anything like that I've got my edge loop tool still active and I'm going to put one about here and then one if I look on this reference the bottom of the handle kind of starts where the curve starts so I can leave that one there and then I just need the Sun or two so the way that I'm going to do that to make sure that the the thicknesses are even is I'm gonna double click on my edge loop tool here to bring up the tool settings you can also get there if you shift right click insert a tube tool and click on the box it'll bring this up I want to click multiple edge loops and by default it's at 2 which is what I want and then I'm gonna add two edge loops in the center there hit R to bring up my scale tool and scale them vertically away from each other and right about there okay so this and this are gonna be where the handle is going to come from okay so I've got that defined and as I look at this I'm just thinking about this bottom curve here I want to bring that down a little bit more I think so I'm gonna go into vertex mode and this is kind of part of my process always as I'm always reading the the forum of what I'm modeling and making adjustments as I go we're select all of these vertices so I'm leaving this little base lip alone but everything else so just I just click and drag across here I'm just going to move it down just a little bit okay just make that little adjustment and this distance and this distance are still the same because I moved both edge loops at the same time okay so now when I hit three it's a it's a slightly slightly more squared-off version which I think I like if not I can always change it again later but yeah let's go with that so the handle the way that the handles gonna work I mean let me jump back to perspective view is the handle it's going to get extruded from basically these two faces but if I extrude them now you see that these two faces are not lined up with the world okay they're they're slightly off because I don't have a face that is perfectly along the x-axis I've got a vertex that is so what I'm going to do is rotate the entire object so I'm going to do this an object mode and I want to rotate around the y axis and I want to rotate 11.25 and I'll tell you why I chose that specific number here in a second but what that does is it move it rotates the cup so that now I have a face perfectly in line with the x-axis okay now how I came to that number eleven point two five when I created there we go when I created the the cup there are sixteen subdivisions there's a little bit of geometry involved here there's sixteen sides and I want to rotate it I wanted to rotate it so that I went from a vertex to the middle of a side so it's like half of half a section so what you do is you take 360 degrees because that's what a circle is 360 degrees divide that by your number of sides okay twenty two point five and then divide that by two because you want to go from half way across the face then you get eleven point two five does that make sense okay a little bit of geometry or try to stay away from math as much as possible but every once in a while he will creep in now if if you get yourself into some sort of a pickle and you just can't figure out what the math is something sometimes what I do is I will just select the whole thing and just kind of free rotate it around the axis until I get to where I think it's close and then just assume that the math is going to work out so that it's going to be a more specific number and then around from there sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't but if you can be exact it's going to make the rest of this a whole lot easier so eleven point two five is the magic number today so from there we get back into into face mode and grab our faces now you see that these faces are probably a little bit wide from the reference you know we could have initially started with more subdivisions and then this would be narrower I can also adjust the shape a little bit I'll just go back to edge mode Misskelley is closer to each other so it's gonna square those off a little bit and just make that initial extrusion a little bit cleaner okay so I've got my two faces and now I'm ready to start extruding actually let me make sure I'm in there I want the side you I've been rotating my view around so much I forgot which way it was front it's the positive x-axis is the side that I'm going to extrude from so if you check your side in your front view you can see where I have selected but I'm gonna extrude these out and first I'm going to start with just a little extrusion to get this lip then I'll extrude again to make this transition and then we'll continue around so what the face is selected and I hit W to bring up my move tool and again you can just hold down shift and then drag out along the x-axis and just gonna go about that much don't need to go any further than that for the first extrusion alright so if you hit three right now you just get a lumpy got a lumpy side but I think you can start to see how this is going to work and I'm going to extrude one more time and we'll go about two there and then I want to scale these down it's about there I think and I'm gonna scale them width wise as well okay now obviously this is not the shape that we want so we need to move them back up and I'm somebody that likes to work as precisely as possible whenever possible I know most most man-made things are not perfect and adding adding a little bit of imperfection is actually one of the steps to realism but in this particular case realism be damned we're gonna be precise so I'm gonna select this first face and what I want to do is I want to align this face with the top edge here okay and so what I'm gonna do I'm gonna turn on point snapping hold down the D key which is gonna adjust my pivot center I'm gonna move it up to snap along this edge let go of the D key and then I can snap my face up to there and now it's perfectly in line at the top of the handle okay although as you look at the reference it is actually slightly lower but let's keep it let's keep it exact for now because I just want you to know how to make these specific adjustments because this is something that can come in handy so produce on the bottom one as well so I have the face selected I have point snapping enabled okay so I've got the face selected point snapping and hold down the D key which is gonna allow me to move my pivot point and just vertically I'm gonna move it and I'm gonna hover over one of these bottom vertices of the face to snap it in line with that okay so now my pivot point is there one note is if you then deselect that face and go back to it that pivot point is gonna reset okay so changing these pivot points it's not like in object mode where it stays when you're just in component mode it's only while you have that selected so D key snap it to that point let go of the D key and then you can snap it down to one of these bottom vertices and now that's in line slight issue that I didn't realize until very recently if I look in front of you you can see that these faces are not aligned they should be flat I shouldn't be able to actually see that face so as I was undoing and figuring out where everything went wrong it was when I scaled them in and the reason for that is if we go to top view look at my scale manipulators they are not in line with the world they are in line with the object they are actually rotated 11.25 degrees because that's what the object is rotated so if you go to your scale tool settings you can just double click on the scale tool on the left side you've got access orientation you want to set that to world and now it'll be in line with the world and everything will be better so that was the problem we've now fixed it now I can go back in and scale them back in and I'm gonna be slightly sloppy here because in the reference they aren't perfectly aligned so I will keep them turn off snapping keep them a little bit lower suck that face and we'll bring it just shy of even trying to roughly match the angles here that now we can continue extruding out and around so I'm select both faces again I think I have an extra face selected yes I do just those two faces and let me get rid of the tool setting so I have some screen available looking at my reference I have my reference open on the other screen so I can constantly see it gonna extrude out so hold down whoops as I do you select the faces hold down shift click and drag out to about there which will be about the center of the handle and then I'm gonna do that one more time shift click and drag to about there okay so I kind of have even these are roughly even let me go a little bit more and then one more about two about there and then we need to bring these down and and connect them so this might get a little bit tricky because what I want to do is I want to continuous face loop around here and if I just extrude down and connect these two faces I won't have that it will be it just won't be a continuous face of and I want that so it's just easier to adjust and refine the shape later if we spend a little bit more time now so what I want to do is kind of do like a segmented turning of the corner so I'm gonna select this edge and this edge okay you can see what I have there I'm gonna bring them in a little bit think about this yeah all right yeah actually this doesn't have to be as complicated as I made it before it's gonna bring that in and then I'm going to select these two faces and shift right click extrude the face I'm gonna hit R to scale and scale them down towards each other okay why I scaled immediately after the extrude instead of just using the extrude manipulators is I mean as you saw me undo that far enough so that I make sure that I think I did okay so as I select these faces and hit extrude you can see the direction of the manipulator and I can't really get them to go just vertically okay see that's what the thickness does local translate Z does the same thing so if I hit R to go to the scale tool now I've got my world orientations and I can scale them down towards each other okay and so I'll leave it right about there okay that's good now what I want to do is delete those faces and then I can bridge the the remaining so I've got I'm just going to double click on both edge loops shift right click Bridge and I'm gonna add one division here it's gonna give me a line an edge loop right in the center we have the the bulk of our geometry made if I hit 3 on the number pad and smooth it out you can see we're close but not quite there so the rest of the modeling process here is just refining we've established all the main geometries now we just need to get it looking right so I'm gonna select this top edge loop and I'm gonna go to the slide edge tool and move it closer to the corner and it's just middle mouse button click and drag and I'll get that up there and this bottom one I will slide that down about there and then I want to even these out some skill let's closer together okay looking at my reference and looking at this mug this handle just in general feels a bit large so I'm gonna go to vertex mode select all of those move it in just like these move it in a little bit more okay next I want to kind of round out the corners so in edge mode I'm going to select this corner edge in this corner edge that Hoult the whole edge loop okay scale them down a little bit and I'm going to move them in and obviously I'm screwing up the geometry so now we have to fix that too so take these two edge loops move those in I'll move these in a little bit too these bottom edges we can do this from the side view oops there we go just trying to get a nice round form here okay I'm gonna select the center edge loop here and pull it out a little bit again just rounding off that form and I'll select into vertex mode now I'm gonna select these pull those down a little bit it's like these pull these up a little bit continuing just to round that out I'll hit three on the number pad see how we're doing doing okay so I'm gonna select these edges actually I'm gonna select all of this all of these vertices let's gonna move them and I want to ease that transition a little bit that feels that feels a lot better okay I've got that I'm gonna add another edge loop a couple more edge loops actually add one here oops go to my settings go back to equal distance from address I'm just adding one edge loop at a time add one there keep that a little bit sharp and one there and then I've got one two three four more edge loops to add well actually three so I'm gonna add this one and I want to keep this one in the center now this seems like a big long complicated actually but it kind of is but that's one of the reasons why I wanted to keep this edge flow around here is it now brings all of these together alright but I want to keep it I want this to be exactly in the center so I'm going to go to my edges of options go to multiple edge loops and set it to one but with the equal multiplier on when I had it it's gonna add it exactly in the center again that's my perfectionism sneaking out okay so that's in the center and then I want to add an edge of whoops that's up here that's interesting I don't know why put that there we go to relative just since from edge there we go they had one in the center there and I'm gonna had one in the center on the underside and these are gonna help me again round out this handle so what I want to do is want to take these corner faces or excuse me edges so I'm going to select all of these and all these okay and I'm gonna scale them in a little bit kind of round them out and then I'm gonna take these edge loops or these edges not the hole loops bring those in a little bit I'm going to take these and bring them up a little bit I'm just rounding out the whole thing okay take these two up here bring them down a little actually let's go yeah that'll be fine just those two in just a little bit I don't need doesn't need to be extreme just enough to help the routed form okay check that in smooth the preview that's looking pretty good this edge is will may be a little harsh so to fix that I'm going to select this edge right here and I believe it is under where is it I got my war it is in the menu average average vertices yeah that scales have done a little bit too much though how to slide it so shift right click slide edge tool middle click and drag just move that out a little bit again double check my smooth preview it's looking okay it's still not my favorite connection but suppose it's not too far off from from what we see in the reference so one last thing that I want to do and this is a very kind of subtle thing that you might not notice but when we added this edge loop right here okay it basically created a flat spot in the side of the mug that can be difficult to see but it is there might be easier to see an object mode you can kind of you can kind of see it there as you move around it okay it's it's subtle but it's there and especially when lights start shining on it it'll be more noticeable and so I just want to smooth that out a little bit just by taking this edge and I'm just gonna take that edge of this edge around to about there I'm just gonna pull them out a little bit just to keep that feeling around it and smooth and I think we can call that good on the mug as I take a step back these are feeling a little bit thick to me so I'm gonna go and select these four phases here and these four phases here and scale them away from each other just to kind of thin that out a little bit and then um adjust these edges as well so that they stay in the center and it doesn't feel pinched you know as simple as an object as this is you know you can spend quite a bit of time just doing the final tweaks and adjustments kind of getting the form it takes about 20% of the time and then refining it as the other 80% just rub that out a little bit more and then I just want to keep edges and faces feeling smooth and even so this is a little bit uneven so I'm just going to move that up in the center keep trying to keep the polygons the same size as much as possible just gonna help everything feeling even this one and about there okay that's better I'll stop adjusting now we can move on to turn the ground back on now we can move on to lights and materials and rendering with the exception of the back wall which I guess we could do real quick because it's just take the ground plane command D to duplicate move it back and then rotate it around the x-axis and 90 degrees and congratulations you've made a wall that's literally all I did that's all you need to do it's just something that that will have will give it a simple texture and will give throw some light at it and that's enough so before we actually start adding materials and lights and cameras let's take a moment to look at this reference where I'm switching from the two-tone mug reference to the Ember mug reference okay if you want to follow along with me pointing at pictures and I'm gonna keep a consistent tone I like the colors I like that it's light but it still has some contrast in this lesson drama so the the materials are gonna be fairly simple only only the ground is going to get a texture and a bump map everything else is just going to be a slightly adjusted base shader and camera is straight on just slightly above the mug so we can see into it a little bit but not enough to know if it's full or empty if you wanted to take the render after the fact and go into Photoshop and put some steam rising off of it you could or later in the semester when we hopefully finally get to physical simulations you could maybe even do it for real so that's that's camera also being up this is a close-up I'm assuming you know it looks to be a longer lens so we'll go with like an 85 millimeter lens and then the lighting I really like the lighting on this one we've got a strong left side key we've got a subtle right side fill and then we've got a strong back light that's given this nice dramatic shadow and a little bit of warmth and these really nice highlights on the rim and on the handle and then there's a fourth light here just hitting the back drop and giving a gradient on the backdrop so it's not just a flat color okay so that's where we're going the first thing that we need to do in our scene after we save it is to set up a camera so that we can see what the hell we're doing so first I'm gonna split the view in two so I'm going to click this to frame preset okay so now I've got a front in a perspective view I'm gonna go up to create cameras and I'm just gonna do a simple camera I don't need a name or a name in and up just a regular old camera okay and then on my left view viewport I'm gonna go to panels perspective and camera one so now I'm looking through that camera but I'm gonna make all of my adjustments in the perspective view I'm just gonna use that as reference so I'm gonna move the camera up and back but I'm not gonna move it left and right I'm gonna keep the translate X at zero because I want to keep it centered I'm just gonna move it up and back now I'm gonna go to my attribute editor and I've got all of my camera options by default the focal length which is the lens of the camera is set to 35 millimetres I'm gonna go to 85 which is really nice close-up lens it's also gonna its narrows the field of view so you don't have to worry about making a giant background to come all of the negative space I'm also going to let see film gate we'll leave it at user and then if we go down to display options I want to display the film gate and set my overscan I'm gonna set it to two which in the split view is gonna show me the full bounds of my view okay you can also adjust the gate mask color if you need it to stand out a little bit more and the opacity next I want to set my image size so I'm gonna go to my render options which is this clapboard with a little gear right up here and you want to be using Arnold renderer which is what we're switching to from now on if you don't have Arnold available its installed it's bundled with Maya 2018 but you might need to activate the plug-in to do that go to Windows settings preferences and plug-in manager windows settings preferences plugin manager and then I believe it's type it was at Mt you've got MTO a bundle ok and then you just want to make sure that these are set to load and auto load click refresh and it will pop up ok so that's if you don't have Arnold already available so set your render using Arnold renderer and we've got EXR is what we're gonna stick with you don't need to worry about filenames renderable camera is gonna be camera 1 and then presets we're gonna go with one case square I did a more traditional aspect ratio from my preview but if we look here there's not really anything on the sides that's terribly exciting so we don't need to spend the time rendering you know the outsides of the frame so I'm just gonna go with square 1024 by 1024 is fine and then in my Arnold renderer tab this is where we're gonna adjust the quality settings but not going to worry about that right now I just wanted to point out that that's where that is so let's see I want to display resolution yeah I actually wanted to sway resolution and not film gate because resolution is governed by what I just changed so I've got the square and now I want to set my composition so I'm going to move the camera back a little bit more and I'm gonna I want to go to my side view I'm gonna zoom out here make sure the camera is just a little bit above the mug and then I'm going to rotate it down something like that I think will be nice sure maybe a little a little more negative space I like negative space and then yeah okay we will leave it at that we can make adjustments later if necessary I can also adjust my overscan to like 1.8 I can even go closer yeah okay 1.4 I just want to make sure I can see the full bound so I know what the full frame is and here I'll go back to perspective and right so now if we go to our Arnold shelf up here this tab okay we've got some light options and then over here we've got some render options you can bring up the render view and you can actually just hit render so I'm gonna hit render and let's see what happens we get a big old black screen a whole lot of nothing and that's because we don't have any lights in the scene so let's add some lights we've already kind of gone through what lights are in the scene so we're gonna use Arnold lights for this and it's going to be actually exclusively with these area lights so it's this first option in the Arnold tab as the area lights so I'm just going to start with one and I'm gonna move it over bring it up and this one is going to be kind of our key light why are we not scaling gaile sorry started and now I can get the light the scale so I just want to go a little bit skinnier with this one and then I'm going to move it around the side of the of the mug somewhere around here and then we're going to rotate it so that it is pointing at the at the mug if you need to change views in in this perspective panel if you hold down shift alright not i'm sorry not shift of space you're going to bring up this menu and then if you hold down the right mouse button you've got your viewport options here so you got perspective left top back front bottom right new camera and then there's a hotbox tile option and so from here you can switch to like for instance top view and then you can make you know make your changes from here so I want to point it make sure it's pointing at the mug and then I want to go to front view so I'm gonna hold on space hold on right mouse button and go to front view now what's really nice about these context menus and especially for adjusting views is its gesture based so you don't have to wait for the menu to pop up if you know where you want to go so as you get used to this you know that perspective view is up you can just hit space right right mouse and move the mouse up and you can switch to it and then okay so if you if you know where you're going you can make these adjustments very quickly but in slo-mo its space right mouse button and then choose your angle so I do want to tilt this down a little bit just a little bit and move it up okay now I'm gonna hit render again and my Arnold run review and on the projector you can maybe barely so you see that there's something here but you can't really see it anywhere else so what we want to do I'm going to close that and just relaunch it is with the lights selected in the attribute editor under area light shape one which by the way I should name this I'm gonna name this key light okay electrum had to be editor so key lights shape so it's the shape tab we have intensity and exposure so I'm gonna set the intensity to 3 and the exposure to 5 and then this is what I get I'm just looking at the wrong angle so I want to go to view see not view brendor camera camera okay so now I'm rendering the camera okay so intensity and exposure are they make kind of the same adjustments to the light it's it's they're both about intensity I'm not sure exactly what the technical difference is and I haven't looked it up but from what I understand intensity is kind of a linear scale and then exposure is more of an exponential scale so as you go intensity from one to two to three it's it's one to two is doubling it and then 2 to 4 would be doubling it and then exposure every whole number is doubling it so one to two is doubling it two to three is doubling it but I'll just keep it at three and five because that's what I used before and it worked and that looks good now I can see things you also have this color temperature option which I am going to use so color temperature not all white light is created equal some of it is more amber so you got like if you go really low you're in like the fire range and then right about 3200 is tungsten light so think of like a traditional light light bulb on a on a desk lamp and then as we move up 5,600 is the Sun is daylight 6000 is like a cloudy day outside and then you can keep going more towards the blue side of the spectrum and actually I'm going to keep this I'm gonna go about 8,000 for this one and I'll dial it back in 7000 okay so just a very slight bit of blue okay so there's the key light feeling pretty good about that now let's add in the fill light fill light there's gonna be another just area light I'm gonna move it over here and this one is gonna be just straight over and I'm gonna rotate this let's just there we go I'm just gonna rotate it 90 degrees I'm gonna move it up so it's not halfway in the floor and I will scale it up just a little bit - okay and maybe I'll move it move it forward a little bit so it wraps just a little bit around okay now in the render view and keep an eye on this I'm gonna go to the attribute editor I'm gonna set the intensity again to three you can see it's starting to come up and then the exposure I'm gonna go to like 2.25 that might be too much let's go to just let's try 1.5 that looks better then I'm gonna use color temperature for this as well and I'm gonna go to 12000 want a nice blue fill on this okay obviously all these adjustments can be tweaked later especially once we get materials on there I just want to establish the lighting first so I've got that let's move on to the next light which is gonna be the backlight Oh before I do that I'm gonna name this light this is going to be fill light okay so another light name this one this one is gonna be back light and I'm gonna move it as you might expect behind the mug move it up I'm gonna scale this down because the smaller the source the harder the shadows and I want a relatively hard shadow here so you can see in the in previous render two relatively hard shadow does get a little bit soft but it's not a big soft light like the fill light is that we just did so you can actually see even on this render that the fill light that is there isn't really casting a shadow because it is so subtle it's just to bring up the dark the shadow so they're not quite so dark so so I've got the key light added you can see that by this little line right here that it's pointing backwards so I need to rotate this 180 degrees so it's pointing forward and rotate it down just a little bit now let's go to our attribute editor and adjust the intensity to three an exposure of five and we'll use color temperature again and we're just going to warm this up actually so as I'm looking at the render view something in the neighborhood of 4,800 looks pretty good okay and so as I'm looking at this and trying to just determine if this is where I want the light I'm looking at where the highlights are falling I'm looking at the shadow and that's looking pretty good to me okay so before I do the the background light that lights the the back wall let's get into the materials because that's going to be a lot of kind of rendering and if we don't need to calculate that back wall light it's just gonna save time a little bit also by now if you haven't noticed the Arnold render view is an IPR renderer in that it's always updating there isn't an on IP our version of Arnold of the Arnold render view so it's always updating which is great just but keep that in mind so you don't just leave this open forever and have it slowing down the computer in the background if you're not using it so it's time to do some materials and like I said these are gonna be relatively simple materials they are gonna be Arnold materials which is a little bit new so I'm gonna start with first let's go into this also I know we were working with render man last semester and when you hit like six or seven on the number pad nothing really happened because render man didn't integrate that well with Maya or with the viewport anyway Arnold however does so if I hit seven on the number pad you can actually see a proper lighting preview and you can see where the lights are and it looks pretty cool and you can do that in your camera view as well to get a sense of how that's going to look so just something to keep mind and when we add textures those will also you'll see a preview of that in the viewport as well which is really nice so shaders and materials and open up the hypershade because we're still using that and you see here we have this Arnold tab section we want to go to shaders and all the all the materials that we build all the shaders that we build are going to be using the standard surface AI standard surface so I'm click on that once I'm going to call this let's say mat underscore mug so match for material under square mug just to help help it stand out and then we're just going to really concern ourselves right now with the base and the specular so you can kind of think of base as the diffuse and then specular is still specular so we've got the weight which is how much of that is going to be applied to the mug and then we've got the color roughness and metalness so so in order to see these adjustments we need to apply this shader to the mug so let's select the mug right click on the material and assign material to selection and that's one way you can do it you can see it automatically updates and now it's shiny another way that you can do it is just right click on the mug in the viewport go down to assign existing material and choose material mug okay a couple ways to skin a cat so I'm gonna leave this open on the side let's see how I'm gonna figure out the best way to do this because there's a lot going on here just collapse that a little bit Oh actually and I can I'm just gonna close that for a minute because we can use the material viewer here so I've gotten my mug material and so the weight is kind of how much of the diffuse color is being used I'm going to crank that all the way up to one I don't see any reason not to have that at one the color is by default a pure white nothing is really ever pure white so we can maybe back that off a touch and if you wanted to add just a little bit of color to it you know maybe we do a little bit of a cream color you could do that just to give it a little bit of differentiation and then specular so if I turn the weight of specular all the way down you look at the preview and all the highlights go away and now it feels like a soft plastic kind of surface so we can bring that specular back in a little bit and maybe halfway now starting to see some highlights but it doesn't feel quite as high Sheen and high gloss as it did before you can also adjust the specular color so if you want these highlights to be a little bit different I can and then we've got roughness so watch this specular highlight as I increase the roughness see it's kind of kind of it's going to spread out and it's gonna lesson in intensity it's also going to take a little bit longer to render okay so now it's a lot more subtle there maybe I'll split the difference okay so that's a little bit of roughness Computers slowing down because I'm screen recording and trying to render but I know down a little bit lower now in the coming weeks we'll get more in depth in these shaders and all of the options but for now we'll just focus on these I will mention though that there are if you go back up to where you name the material there's a bunch of presets okay they can be good starting points for a lot of things you know this car paints and there's play and chrome and gold and milk rubber not as many presets as that were in render man but still a healthy number that that'll serve as a good starting point for most things so I've got the material roughly where I want it let's open up the render view again and check it here okay so I'm gonna give this a little bit a little time to render if I want to do just a region of rendering this button right up here this the blue square with the white outline so I can click that and then dragged across the mug and now it's just gonna refresh that section it's not going to worry about rendering all the other stuff and since I'm just worried about the material right now that will work great look at my preview again I am gonna increase the roughness of the specularity a little bit more so I bring this onto the screen so you can see it somewhere in there I want to be able to tell where the lights coming from on the mug but I don't want it to be super obvious so maybe like 0.3 and will point you five okay because I also want to make sure that I have a nice highlight on the rim here and on the handle so that's going to require adjusting the backlight so I'll move this over here's the light you can bring it in a little bit I'll bring it lower this is where I wish I had more screen real estate oh yeah so you can see if the light is pointing down in this hit and low so I bring this up I bring it closer rotate it down a little bit really want to make sure I'm getting a good highlight there and it looks kind of blotchy now but as this renders out it'll smooth out too so you can see that's looking better getting some nice highlight there I'm pretty happy with that not quite as happy with my mug shape I think it's feeling a little bit short but I'll ignore that for now great so that is the mug texture taken care of let's let's look at the ground texture and material so the ground I'm going to start in a similar spot so in the hypershade I'm at a noose AI standard surface I'm going to call this mat underscore ground and I'm going to turn the specular mostly off and bump the roughness a little bit okay and I'm gonna select the ground plane right click on it assign assign my ground material to it so you see how the 3d port a viewport responds I can also adjust my render area so that it's only on oh let's see there we go so it's only rendering the parts that I need it to and then I'll hit play again there we go ok so when I created this you can see that that the reference has a textured ground and that's what I wanted to recreate so without getting into image textures too much did not doing any UV unwrapping or anything like that I did find a relatively simple straightforward way to get a more interesting ground texture so the way that we're gonna do that is by applying two separate textures one for the color and one for the bump map so for the color we've select my ground material and right here under color to the to the right we have this checkerboard pattern okay that that whenever that is next to an attribute that means you can use a texture to control that attribute so I'm gonna click on that it's gonna open up a great render node window and I want to go to I believe it's just say I want to go to Arnold texture and noise okay so now that we have the noise I'm going to I'm gonna change my material viewer from shader ball just to a plane because I just want to look at and see what the color is doing I'm also gonna need to close my render view you can see it you could actually see it popping up a little bit there which you know what might be all I need oops 101 that actually looks better than however I did it before so that works for me what this is doing is it's it's called a procedural texture it's not an image texture it's mathematically generated which is great when you don't want to UV unwrap things even though a plane is pretty easy to do you've got some some options to control this so as I adjust for instance the octaves you'll see how the noise pattern adjusts itself I can adjust distortion I can get really weird with it if I want to you can also adjust the colors so I don't want it to go from black to white which is the default I can go from a kind of a muted dark bluish gray maybe something like that to a lighter muted blue something like that okay so we still getting some patterns but we're just adding a little bit more color to it I'm going to really desaturate it though I don't want that much color in there and I'm also going to lighten it I want to keep these kind of close together I want to be a pretty subtle difference like actually just use these sliders and bring that up a little bit okay so it's got texture but it's not really drawing attention to itself something like that will work just fine okay so that's really the only adjustments I'm going to make there I'm gonna go back to my ground texture I'm a shader and so that's it for color and specularity I'm gonna keep super subtle then if you scroll down to geometry this is where you can add a bump map so for those that don't know a bump map that's what I used here to give this kind of bumpy texture it's a way to kind of trick the renderer into thinking there's texture there it affects the way that light interacts with the surface without actually a derp adding more geometry so there's something called a displacement map which actually moves geometry around and you tend to need a lot of vertices very close together in order to get good displacement whereas a bump map keeps the surface flat but the light interacts with it in a way that makes it look like there's a texture there so it's just kind of a it's kind of a cheat but it's also very much a standard thing to do now for the bump map I'm gonna keep this open so I can see it and bump mapping and we've got another texture slot so I'm gonna click on that and if we go back to Arnold texture we've got a eye image click on that and I've got an error what does that saying invalid image file well I haven't given you an image file yet of course it's invalid we need to load the image so if we I'm gonna right click on this ground shader and go to graph Network you can see all of the nodes that are involved in this network and we can zoom in on them bump right here is the image node and here we've got image name okay I'll go through that again go do that a little fast we've got our ground material our shader Network which is becoming a network as we keep adding nodes and components to it if you right-click on that and graph Network you can see here's the noise texture that we just added to the color I'll zoom in here so you can actually see it on the recording or take we took the color of the noise and applied it to the color the base color of the ground shader alright and now we're taking where we are going to take an image texture and apply that to the bump and the normal value of the ground so I'm gonna click on the image node and we've got this image named field click on the folder and actually before I do that this is where that concrete texture is going to come into place so I'm going to open up a couple of windows here first I'm going to navigate to where I have my cement texture okay this is the texture it's just a rig a little close-up of cement super-exciting and then in my project structure coffee mug is my project I want to go to this source images folder and that's where I want to put the cement texture okay I do that now I can go to my image attributes click the folder and I don't know why this is going to scenes when I go to source images and choose a cement texture click load it's going to take a second and then there's the render view now as a general rule most of the time when you add a bump map it comes in way too strong way too strong as you can see by these all these weird black spots so we want to do is we want to go to this bump 2d node and this bump depth is what we want to adjust so you can go from negative 5 to positive 5 so you can kind of reverse the bump if you want but I just want to go even it like point zero three six is still a bit strong okay subtlety is key here with BA maps so I'm going to go to point zero zero eight and now we will look at that as it renders it's gonna take a second let's see it's super subtle but I think that's gonna work okay yeah I think I'm think I'm good at that again we can adjust that later if we need to so the last shader that we need to do we need to add a shader for the back wall and a light for so the shader is going to be super simple I'm going to add another standard surface I'm going to call this matte wall and I'm gonna go up to specular I'm going to turn that off all the way down to zero turn the weight all the way up to one and that's about it then I can go to my viewport select the back wall whoops object mode right click assign existing material and matte wall and then we just need to add into the light it's the way that I did this one is I just put this in a spot that would kind of cast a gradient across the back wall you can also adjust the intensity well so we'll go three and you can try five that might be too strong we'll start there look at her render view I'll turn off that okay excuse me so that's maybe a little bit strong and obvious and not very interesting so I'm going to rotate this a little bit more we'll move it down a little bit let's see move it away just want to try to get a scale it down a little bit just playing around with it to get something yeah that'll work okay so that is that's about it as far as setting up this render we've got a simple glossy material there now we can just kind of take a step back and look at any adjustments that we might want to make so I can think of a couple that I want to make real quick I'm gonna go to my mug hit f2 frame it up and I'm gonna just make it a little bit taller so from front view I'm gonna select this top chunk of vertices just move it up a little bit and I'm going to select this bottom edge loop here and I'm gonna move that up a little bit too just to maybe round that over a little bit more okay and I move the camera down a little bit too I think okay so I think that's about it as far as getting this clean look it's slightly different than the first time I did it but not much I do like having that that tighter specular highlight so maybe I'll go back to my hyper shade and grab the mug of material and I'm gonna bring their roughness actually I'm going to increase the the weight of the specular so we're going to just gonna get more of that in general and then I think what I need to do is just move that in closer so I've got a top view here I'll just move it in closer I'll just bring the exposure down a little bit and then I'll bring that roughness down a little bit too that's better okay so the last thing that we have to do is set our render quality settings so you can see samples for Arnold worked a bit different than render man or the internal render engine and again I've been working in my or in Arnold for two days so I don't have the most complete understanding but I do know a little bit and I'm gonna give you a little bit of knowledge I go to your render settings and go to Arnold renderer here's your sampling options now these are it's not you know if you if you set this to three passes it's not just doing three passes it's three times 64 or something so it's it's a multiples it's not just flat three but we'll set I'm gonna set the diffuse and the specular to five I don't have any transmission materials sss is subsurface scattering i don't have any of that going on I don't have any volume metrics so I don't have to worry about any of that camera bump to five as well so it'll take a little bit of time to render but it should get rid of all of the noise that we're seeing here and look pretty good by the end of it so I'm just gonna let this go you see it says rendering down in the corner when it's done instead of saying rendering it'll have the render time down there so I'm going to pause the recording and come back when that's done oh it's finished rendering it took 6 minutes and 33 seconds now to save it just have to go to file save image and we can choose what we want to save it as you can see by default it goes into the images folder which is great so I will call it coffee mug and I'll just name it zero one in case they do multiple versions click Save and then I can go into my finder and navigate to my coffee mug project go to my images folder and there is the JPEG that it saved out if you wanted to save out a multi-layer EXR instead of file saving to say save EXR you could also check the box to save final images which I believe I'm assuming would be an automatic thing but I don't know for sure because I've not done it yet again only two days in our old so far but here's the the finished image which you could being that this is a square image you can upload this right to Instagram if he so chose or Facebook or whatever else you wanted to show off your your three-dimensional mug certainly can go further and do additional lighting you could add in some depth of field you could change the materials on the mug change textures my second version of this let me save this real quick and then I will open up my second version of the mug wherein I did just that so I changed the lights around I changed the materials around the mug itself is now kind of a darker plastic up top and the bottom half is copper and that was just a preset so if you go into the hypershade and with an Arnold material and click on the presets you've got this is a copper preset and then I just changed the color a little bit because it was a little bit too light before and so that final product well you won't see the final product just yet because it's going to take a second to render but here's how that looks so it's it's certainly a much more dramatic look it's it's a lot lower key it's it's edge lighting very subtle even brought down the background set that to back to black made the ground more reflective to get again that kind of dramatic reflection in there but going from C going from this to this alright that was maybe 15 minutes I added an edge loop extruded it in to get this division and then gave them different materials and move some lights around it was a relatively quick process so you could do a third look you could change maybe the ground too well once we get into image textures properly you could add you know a wood texture make it look like it's maybe sitting on a kitchen counter or a coffee table or sitting outside somewhere you know you could do a Morning Sun light kind of effect you know really now that the mug is made at this point just playing around with different effects so I will let this finish rendering and just check in with the final render once it's done and that will be it thanks for watching ok so here's the finished render on on the alternate version certainly this is like the evil villains coffee mug and then this is like the good guys coffee mug but two looks relatively the same model yeah that's it

Channel: Tim Moore

Views: 101,567

Keywords: Maya, Arnold Render, modeling, materials, textures, lighting, 3d, product render

Id: nkDimvqhb-8

Length: 100min 39sec (6039 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 07 2018