Arnold's aiUtility Node to Create Procedural Dust in Maya 2018

hey guys this is Monica and academic Phoenix plus and today we are gonna go over another Arnold node and it's called the AI utility node this is a very special node prevent provided by Arnold so that we can actually get direction when we apply shaders so this is the final result this is a jade dragon and notice that it has a little bit of dust on the top almost like sand I'm gonna show you how to create that procedurally by the way you can download this file at academic Phoenix plus.com and also don't forget you can also sub why you're there you might as well sign up for my newsletter which we you will receive pre-release content in a bunch of other perks so again you can download this and other things at academic Phoenix plus com alright so let's go ahead and get started let's start off with a fresh scene okay so here is our dragon it just has a very basic Lambert right now and it only has a directional light so we are going to add a dome later on so right now let's just go ahead and stick with the default which is a Lambert and I added a directional light okay so when we're looking at this particular render you can see that there's a little bit of dust at the top and also we have a we have two shaders driving this we have the Jade and we also have the dust so we're gonna go ahead and tackle those two first so let's open up the hypershade and I'm actually gonna go up here to the top right and use the texturing node and I'm gonna close this one because I don't need it but I'm gonna leave this up because I may need it also notice that I have two tabs I'm gonna be using the untitled top first I'm gonna go ahead and press tab and type in AI standard there it is press ENTER so that's my first one interesting it's acting crazy I'm gonna grab this one and right click graph Network that was really strange all right let's depress the number four so we can see what's going on this is gonna be our Jade so let's go ahead two presets go to Jade and replace and I'm gonna middle mouse and drag this to my scene and let's take a look what it looks like so far so this is our Jade dragon right now now it is notice that it's a little bit it faceted so I'm gonna stop that render let's go to mesh display and I'm gonna go soft and whoops it might be a good idea to select that mess mesh display and then go to softn so what it's gonna do it's gonna help soften those sharp edges I didn't really like it I prefer this look it's up to you which one you want to use cool so that's our first one the second one and let's label this I'm going to call this Jade's hey eye surface the second one is going to be the same thing again I'm going to click on tab and type in AI standard there it is and this one is going to be AI standard this is going to be the dust so the dust is a tendency to be a little bit warmer a little bit yellowish or ng so go ahead and select a color that is appropriate for you so now we have two shaders we have the dust and we have the Jade now the dust if we go ahead and middle mouse and drag it to work our object and we render it out it is gonna have specularity so we don't want the specularity we want that roughness so I'm gonna increase my roughness and my specularity and I'm also going to increase the diffuse roughness as well lights supposed to hit it and then scatter it which is base which is what I want and I'm also going to increase my weight to one so I can see it a hundred percent okay so now that I have that go ahead and stop this now the trick is in a pressing one by the way now what we're looking for is we want to use the AI utility know to be able to drive this so I'm going to type in AI again I hit tab AI utility select and press ENTER on your keyboard and notice that it's got an S G note that s G mode node means that we can render it so I'm gonna middle mouse and drag it on to here and let's take a look at what it looks like right now nothing special right so the default shader is pretty simple so what I want to use is called flat and if I right now it looks like a very flat shader but the trick is to change this to normal when I changed it to normal we now have a shader that is driven by the normal direction so notice that at the top we have a little bit of green at the bottom we have a little bit of purple there's a mix of blues and there's all sorts of stuff so what we want is green because being driven by RGB and the green is the is the y direction so notice over here in the corner you see how it's Y and it's green well that's not a coincidence the reason why is because the normals are basically Y means that it's going up and down so we're gonna be driving this to be able to capture that that color so I'm gonna press stop here now the issue though is that we need to be able to capture that green so I'm going to hit tab and we're gonna use an AI multiply node so AI multiply now it doesn't have an SG node so that means that it can't be rendered but we're gonna grab this and drag it into our inputs so again grab the out color and go to the input 1 and notice over here in to write that input 1 is now connected so we're gonna take this and go to the green now right now it's using the hue saturation values we really want to go as to RGB and to get the green it's going to go all the way to the left here so 0 on the R and the B but we want to use the G to be a hundred percent so in this case it's 255 make sure that's all the way to the right what it's gonna you do is use the color capture that green so let me show you what that looks like so it's a little bit more easier to understand if we see it visually I mean I'm a visual person and so are you I'm assuming since you're in the 3d arts so I just grabbed a regular Arnold shader and this is what it looks like right now I'm gonna grab the multiply node and I'm gonna drag this out color to our base color okay so this is what it looks like so far this is the utility now by the way this means that it's isolated select so that means that whatever node I select it's gonna show me this is your utility node this is the multiplied node and this is what it looks like if I put it in that AI standard so the trick that though is that we need something that really pushes the colors we really just want to get the green to be at the top so we're gonna use AI range so AI range make that selection and by the way if anybody knows anybody and solve an angle it would be Fanta or Maya it'll be fantastic if I can just take this node and drag it over here because then I would be connected automatically connected that'd be amazing if you guys could do that so let's go ahead and connect it I went to the out color connected it to the input then the out color of the AI range and connected it to the base so it's not gonna look like much of right now but that's because we have to really push range so here we are again I have the selected and just in case I'm gonna file 16s because I get really nervous so we have our utility node we have our multiplied node now we have the range and the range is gonna give us what we're looking for which is just having green at the top I'm gonna take this and start dragging it to the left and I'm also gonna clamp the colors a little bit more like so it's gonna take a little fan again invert the color so just be careful with that and bring into my input in notice that I'm juicy how it's always only at the top ignoring the bottom so up too far this is kind of like what I'm looking for a little bit let me get a little bit less bring that step in just clamping those colors in and we would take a look at the IEEE standard we're gonna get an interesting effect we have all the green at the top notice that it just affects the top but we also getting some crazy purples so it's a I range needs to be basically clamped so we're gonna select smooth step which changes the color but at least now everything's basically green going back to AI range now that we have that we can always tweak this with some more so again it takes a little bit of tweaking and finessing and what I'm looking for is I still want a little bit of that gradient color I don't want it to be completely solid but I just want to just want to be able to see that green just at the top and of course if I go further to the right the green gets a little brighter so whoops dunk of that direction so this looks about right then I go over here and I see that okay this is looking nice this is just affecting that top that's exactly what I want okay great so we've captured the green we know exactly where it's gonna be but well how can we use this well we are going to use the AI mix because now that we have this and then we're going to use this as an alpha so let's go ahead and create our AI mix layer make shader ai mix shader' we want to do is move things around it's getting a little crowded I'm gonna zoom in so you can see what's going on I'm gonna press 1 so this collapses so this is the Jade and the Jade needs to be connected whoops let me open this up a little bit here's the out color I'm going to drag it to shader 1 I'm gonna grab the dust and I select and drag it to shader - so I'm gonna grab the mix and drag it to the dragon and this is what it looks like now what you may be wondering what is going on if you've watched my previous tutorials which I highly recommend it's a mix of the Jade and the dust right now so if I drag this all the way to zero you'll see that the Jade is predominant and if I drag this all the way to 1 the dust is predominant so when it's 50% it just means it's a mix of both now what do we need this well because I'm gonna grab these guys and delete we need the AI range to drive the mix which is what's going to drive these 2 shaders so I'm gonna grab the out color and you're gonna notice that it does not like it and that's because mix is driven by black and white so we don't need the R we don't need the B because we both we already know that the orange to be have been completely removed we just need the G which is the green I'm going to select it and then drag it to the mix notice that it accepted it and just like that we have the dust is exactly where the green is and then everything else is revealed by the by the Jade now that we have that let's go ahead and stop this and let's light this a little bit better I'm gonna go back to my a classic I mean in my saw this delete that because it's gonna cause problems I'm gonna go to let's see let's go to Arnold lights SkyDome we have a color click on the little color going to the file click on that little folder and I have two of them for you I have the one that I always use but I also found one that's really cool called the studio small so I'm going to open this up and I'm gonna take a look at what it looks like right now turn this off press play and it looks crazy right and the reason why is because it's it's not raw so going back to the image here change their scholars color space to raw that means that this should be defined by the color itself and not by srgb and voila we immediately have a really nice looking lighting and the zoom in well I'm not a big fan of having lights all the way on the right so I'm gonna select this dome and I am going to rotate it just a little bit and see what that looks like I prefer that the shadows are a little bit more behind it to the left so I can see this a little clearer maybe a little bit more to the left might be better something like that cool so it's starting to look really nice I do want to push the dust a little bit further dust is surprisingly more complicated it's not always flat it actually has a little bit of speckles in it and I really want to try to push that a little bit further just to make it look a little bit more realistic it's gonna press stop go back to the hypershade I'm gonna graph the network for the dust so this is the dust here and I have the color of the specular so I'm gonna click on this go to the file click on the little folder and in your source images you're gonna find a texture map that looks like this which is basically dust anything bright or light is gonna show up a little bit more than dark so I'm gonna attach that you're not gonna see too much of a difference I might want to decrease their roughness just a little bit so I can see the texture more let's see what that looks like so this is what it looks before and you can just see a little bit of light spotty nest that changes to spec the dust so it looks a little bit more realistic it's kind of hard to see but the effect is basically there let's see if I decrease this a little bit more you might see it more cool so it's a little bit of noise in there so I might need to do a little bit of tweaking when it comes to my render settings there's one more thing I wanted to do let's right-click on the AI mix shader' and graph so we have our dusts been affected by the dust AI standard as a texture we have the utility node and I really wanted to show you what's really interesting about this utility node is that it's based on the direction of a normal so as I mentioned before when you click on this you're gonna get the direction let's turn that off okay now what's fun is that we're using RGB here so if you want to play around you can change this to let's say blue now again I recommend that you go to RGB just to make sure that is zero zero and the B is driven all right so if you take a look at this you can see that the blue is a little bit around the edges and so on so forth so let's go to the AI range and it almost looks like all the blue is actually all the way at the front so when I look at the mix shader' you're gonna notice that it's all disappeared and the reason why is because our AI range is being driven by the G so for us we're gonna have to grab the B and drag it into the mix and just like that it looks like this thing got hit by dust coming on one direction so that's another effect just to play around let's take a look at the R so again I've got this selected let's change this to R which is the red again you can see that grab the R and bring it into the mix and then press play so notice that it's just gonna have a little bit on the side and if you take a look at it it's a little hard to see but you can see the dust just around the edges so if you want to push this a little bit more we have to go to the AI range and kind of play around with the attributes a little bit more so for example let's say I want to see more of that red so now that that's a little bit more obvious I can go here and this won't look like it's working so I'm gonna press stop I have a feeling it's gonna crash usually you have to update the scene maybe I just need to press play take this off close restart oh that's because I'm sure somebody already noticed this and it's like banging their head on the table but here's the R and I need to drag to R which is the red onto here and now we have the effect so sorry about that that's a little troubleshooting for you though let's see for noise noise you probably want to go to your render settings there's a couple of things that you can do you might want to increase your camera a a and you can also increase your diffuse your specular your transmission and we are using a jade so it does have subsurface SSS another thing you might want to also do is select your dome and increase their resolution and you might also want to increase your samples now this is going to slow down your render times but the quality is gonna be a lot nicer stop this and change this back to RGB so let me change this back to this out of the way change this back to green and I'm gonna see how the range looks like it's a little over the top let me go back to my range it just kind of decrease this a little bit all right let's see what that looks like grab the green drag it in here let's do the whole thing and actually let me make my render settings just a little bit bigger just because now it's the final render I'm really happy with it let's go ahead and pop make this a lot bigger HD 1080 now the render times gonna be a lot longer but hopefully you'll sit with me as we admire the amazing cool stuff that Arnold shader has for us I really was a little hesitant about using Arnold but now I am falling madly in love with its capacity this stuff would have taken forever using mental ray and now it's it has so many really fantastic tools and it's so fast and efficient that I am totally in love with Maya's new Arnold's shaders so thank you solid angle there's a couple of weird things I guess my cache is all I'm out but the stuff that were I can now produce as pretty awesome so thank you very much solid angle hopefully this tutorial was helpful it's just a quick tutorial on how to create dust on your objects so for example if you have a museum and you want to cover it in dust you do not need to shade everything you can just create a procedural shader and you will have something very quickly being covered by whatever you likes and you can change this to snow snow it's a little bit more complicated but you can to do a lot of really fantastic things with the Arnold shader so that is the AI utility node thank you so much for listening i truly appreciate it i hopefully you found this as fascinating as i find these things fascinating it's a mix of a couple of things we're using the shader we're using the AI range the mix shader' we're also using utility node and of course the AI range and so many other crazy things so again thank you so much for listening I truly appreciate your support by the way you can't download this awesome dragon at academic Phoenix plus com so you can follow along and you can make a beautiful amazing things so I don't know I don't think it's done rendering but have fun this stuff is awesome we could be doing other things like I don't know I have a friend was a nurse and she always talks about fluids so I'm like we could be doing something gross like dealing with fluids but instead we're getting create we're creating beautiful art so hopefully my tutorials are helping you become a stronger artist and you get to produce some gorgeous work so thank you so much for sitting here with me as we render this out it's taken a little bit longer but I think at the end you just see the nice gorgeous details that we're getting along here it's just so pretty if you have any comments please share down below any suggestions please also if you find this helpful by all means please share with your friends your peers your family just share away I would always appreciate you sharing my stuff and this is still going it's high-quality so that's that's okay the weight is worth it but I'm really getting to love the way these things kind of fall over here and it's just so nice and pretty I'm gonna pause the recording for now and then when this is rendered I'll show you the complete thing so thank you for sitting around with me and listening and I will be right back alright here is the results it only took a little bit of time about seven minutes not too bad for something that's complicated I mean it's got some surface it's got reflections using HDR dumb back in the day guys when I was your probably your age maybe younger this thing would take forever so this is for me seven minutes is not too bad just open up a bottle of wine and you are good to wait or read a good book alright so there's still a little bit noise so I can definitely pump up the the valleys a little bit more when it comes to the light to them as well as the settings but overall this is the final results so it's a beautiful effect let me know if you guys have any questions at all thank you again so much we really appreciate all your support and I will see you next time

Channel: Academic Phoenix Plus

Views: 13,225

Keywords: maya 2018 arnold shaders, maya 2018 arnold 5, maya 2018 arnold, maya 2018 arnold lighting, maya 2018 arnold tutorial, maya arnold lighting, maya arnold render, maya arnold texture, maya arnold 2018, arnold aiutility node, aiutility, utility, create, procedural dust, procedural, dust, normals, maya 2018, autodesk maya, maya basics, texture basics, shader, aistandard, lighting, cg texture, cg artist, cg design, 3d design, 3d texture

Id: JisFcvY0Lug

Length: 21min 59sec (1319 seconds)

Published: Mon May 07 2018