Baking normals using Substance and Maya | Catmul Clark, crease sets and exploding the mesh

hi my name is Jordan moss I'm just doing a quick masterclass on capital Clark subdivision also exporting Maps out of substance painter for normal Maps cages and best baking practices to do from my cross platform into most other baking programs this is mainly focused towards game art it can be used for many other kind of areas in the industry but most likely us will be used within the game arts pipeline so I'm going to start with talking about Pat Moore Clark subdivision and the main reason I'm going to do this is because I know a lot of people that generally have been starting with subdivision they get kind of lost in why they're actually adding support loops and what it actually does when they add these support loops you're told to do it when you first start but a lot of people just don't know why so starting off from the beginning Pat Moore clock is a subdivision method in Maya that controls the way that mesh divides it was created by Catmull plumbers first name so I'm not going to mention epitarsis surname who was actually employed by Disney at the time when he came up with the camera-- clock subdivision method so the way this algorithm works is it takes original points so as you can see here if these blue points here are considered the original points it takes the original points that define the object it adds interpolation points and the average between point a and point B so if you imagine the original points being point a here point B here point a here again point B here it just puts it in the average of point one and two so point A and B on every single point so then once that's been done it moves the original points so the interpolation points stay the same and the original points that are aren't the poles so these are the poles like begin in the end so they're not attached to anything they move to the kind of Bezier shape that is between kind of where this is and where these two meets so in the middle and that causes a curve to happen so when the mesh is divided up it essentially does the same thing over and over again so this is the same as before just another kind of example you can see the interpolation points and the way that it divides when Catmull clock is applied to it this just continues so it gets smoother and smoother by there making the previous interpolation point the original points then and it makes more interpolation points between the two and just keeps smoothing and smoothing instruments again I shouldn't be smooth shape so by understanding this you can start to understand why edge loops are actually placed in a certain place on a mesh they are usually placed there in order to crease edges and the way that works is because of this interpolation so you can see here I've got exactly the same thing but I've added if you imagine this being control points so I'm going to quickly show you a Meyer in a minute as well just so in creation again this so you can see that the original points are also close to the the edge that I want to be smooth on every corner and then when the mesh is divided the black dots are interpolation points and you can see that it'll move the dots but not move these dots so move the dots between the curves rather than the parts that are on the straights areas and that causes a tight curve so if I just go into Maya and sorry it just hitting like for instant I just open and I go to scenes and open camera o'clock you can see this working in action here so it's kind of easier to visualize in 3d so I've got a plane here with three two divisions in it sorry if you look at vertex mode you can see it's exactly the same in 2d principle so if I look at of a side view you can see not very much because everything's in the way but looking from the top you can kind of see it's a very kind of 2d in that sense so you have the main points here exactly like before and when Catmull clock is applied to it it creates this shape because the original points stay the same so the beginning in the end it has a point between the interpolation point and then it moves the original ones that are in the middle so these ones here and keeps everything in the same place so you can see it creates a curve and if that's divided again it does the same thing again so it keeps adding more and more divisions so this can help because if you know where to crease things you can know where to add edge loops so this might seem basic and it's gonna kind of go a bit more advanced in a bit later but I thought I'd touch on this because there's so many people I've seen that just jumped straight into Maya not knowing exactly why they're dividing things so I'm just gonna cover this briefly so you can see this edge loop here in this edge loop here and what this does is it's telling me it's telling the subdivision algorithm that I want to start the crease to start from here and end here so if I smooth that you can see it starts here and ends here you might not be able to see this that's there and ends there if you look at the actual kind of sub D Y frame you can see that the mesh has moved that line down one thing to take in note though is if you don't keep things square so if I remove this loop and I make this very tall so you don't keep polygon square so you can see that's a very long rectangle not my square one on the side here that's smooth you can see that this side edge loop is moving down and the bigger this gap is between the more this moves down so it means the loop is no longer controlling this edge from the right distance and the way to fix that is simply to add a secondary support loop so try and make it kind of close to the original one and that'll hold it in place so we've got that example now this is kind of Catmull clock applied to it a second time one thing as well as cubes are really good for making spheres with good edge flow so you can see a is good sphere with good edge flow so all you do with that is you take a cube and you divide it so you smooth it by X amount of divisions the problem with this though you'll find is this isn't perfectly spherical so if I just grab little loop here and convert the loop to where to visit its polygon edges to curve and I select the curve and move it I look at it on the side you can see this isn't actually perfectly spherical the way you can fix that is by just going to deform and using a sculptor former on it and this will basically sculpt the shape of it to an actual sphere shape so everything will be a hundred percent of sphere and remember Sicily history after doing that otherwise what's going to happen is you won't be able to edit the mesh properly with it'll cause all kinds of errors I'm also sorry about steam notifications so this is a sphere as well the only problem with this is um you can't really make spherical kind of shapes on it so if I try and make a kind of sphere SH not sphere sorry I'm seeing the wrong words a kind of ring and I smooth that it's gonna make a square because of the kind of way that geometry works it would work on kind of this area a bit but not quite so using a normal sphere is actually sometimes a good idea but usually you kind of want this geometry and the reason why you would use this feel like this is because you can create ring shapes on it which is really good for certain shapes within sub D where this one wouldn't kind of work but this one would but this one's good for a lot of other things so kind of one thing is really good for is just got briefly go over this because I don't want to spend too much time on this he's making certain shapes so you make a shape like this and then you squish it you take kind of vertex on soft slapped mode wholesome stuff around it's good for making shapes like that so very kind of organic looking shapes because it keeps a good edge flow so moving on to crease sets I got to cover crew set crew sets because one thing that I've noticed is it's very beneficial to games probably even film to be honest in the way that it smoothes the mash but is more kind of to do with the normals than it is to do with the geometry so I'm going to briefly cover this as well so a crease set is essentially a type of way of creasing edges duh but not in that sense it creases the edge so the geometry when divided keeps a smooth curve and a nice kind of bevel this is demonstrated kind of on all these objects here so this is the original style off geometry this is a bad example of what not to do and this is what it can be it can achieve in very little time which is a lot quicker than adding loads of edge loops and kind of messing up Geo so same here the wake reset works is you can also go into the general relationship editors and open up presets from that and what this does is it gives you an editor window which you cannot add crew sets to so you have a kind of formatted value throughout all of your modeling instead of using multiple values all over the place because you can't keep track of them so starting with what not to do so you have this nice cylinder here and it's simply being duplicated here and I've added crease sets to all of the corners and sites and once moved with the optimal subdivision level which can be found underneath display you can see it gives you bad smoothing on the top and the reason for that is because these corners don't have enough support to get the right smoothing so just by inset in that edge and also maybe adding some support edges on the side you don't actually need these but they do help see it does still work without them but with them you'll see you get a bit of a tighter edge so let's just quickly do an example of how to use a preset so have an object it's really good for kind of floral designs and all that kind of stuff you want an edge though you want to have creased and we just turn our soft slapped and you create a new crease set you set your value for it so or maybe 1.5 and then you add the edge to it once this crease set is being done let me just change the optimal subdivision you can see what it's doing there it's kind of sharpen in that one edge what you can do also then is if you want to add other edges with the same value you can select multiple edges here and then just click Add and it'll add them with the same crease set value you see it looks horrible here and that's because I'm gonna fetch loops so I just add to support loops 3 actually let's move that you can see it's giving me a good kind of balance between curved side sharp side I'm gonna look good now but that's because if I smooth it a few times you get your good example you can see that it's a very nice kind of looking shape and organic slash hard surface looking shape and this is a really good advantage for making shapes really quickly using the crease sets in a problem with is it always leaves over high poly if you're smoothing if you use in preview smoothing you've got to make sure you add enough edge loops otherwise your preview could look horrible like so so that's briefly cover increased sex as well so now moving on from crease sets I'm going to go over how to get a good bake with in most programs like X normal substance painter designer pretty much anything that you want to use even Maya I wouldn't recommend using Maya though for baking it's not the greatest and it's pretty slow so let me just open this scene here and I'm just gonna briefly go over cages and all that kind of stuff all that good stuff within Maya so this is the high poly that we're going to be baking so as you can see it's a nice little gun model by me and what we're going to do is the first thing is if it's anything mechanical and stuff like this which is really close together and kind of a lot of intersecting parts and things that touching you generally want to make sure that you explode bake what an explode bake is is essentially when you take every part of the mesh you move it with the low-poly and then you bake all the parts so they're not touching together it's pretty generic thing to do with an industry and is used pretty much all over the place it's kind of a slow process sometimes but if it's for a narrow a set or a prop that's kind of really up close you generally want to do this because you don't have any artifacts left on your mesh so the first thing to do is have your low poly low poly should always follow the silhouette of your high poly so if I go to my high poly not be exploded once all right I've got to finish crashing or loading whichever it decides to do with Maya I can't be too sure whoops clipped again give it one second so if you look at any of these edges here anything that breaks the edge of the silhouette so it changes the actual shape of the object object with kind of looking around it is what you want to include on your low poly so stuff on this front you can see it doesn't really break the shape of the front of the silhouette when you turn the camera angle so this could be flapped same with that hole on top you might want to include it though because it's quite a deep hole so these kind of areas and saw the revolver they break the silhouette so you want to include them don't just round off a cylinder these kind of insects for the the hammer to push up on they don't really cut the silhouette at all so you can probably just get away with having a flat edge on that these parts up here they're not supposed to be smooth but it's fine it's just a model I'm not going to bake with they could probably be flat as well so just keep that in mind when you're going around making your low poly and make sure everything kind of matches up so this is the low poly I've got not the greatest but it will do and what you want to do to explode bake is you select parts of your low poly then you select parts you hide the layer that is on make the high poly layer visible shift select the high poly move it out this part is actually part of the high poly as well the same object so make sure you get all the parts of the high poly that are stuck together on that same piece and then you move them over then once again hide the high poly open the low poly layer select hide view select move you want to move them kind of like all the way from each other they can be pretty close not too close not enough room for cages and rinse and repeat until you have something that looks like this so this is our explode bake that we're going to be baking from and this is the high poly it's exactly the same matching in translations and the thing that I will say that you really should do is you should make cages because if you have floating geometry like this it can cause issues with a cage and I'll just quickly show you what that does now so on the right here we have a bake that was done with cages if I look close to the floating details ignore some of the artifacts and kind of anti-aliasing problems is because it's big doubt that's a low resolution most of this is front on you can't really see that these details don't look right and that's because of the cage and the way the cage works so all of these details here look kind of front on they look fine also on the hammer these shapes look whole front on and fine same with this not great anti-aliasing but still front on and there were this one this was baked with a no cage and also non exploded so you can see first of all what an ik what explode baked does and doesn't do when you don't do it so when you don't do it you get bleeding from the great casts of the way that it projects the normal data from the high poly to the low poly so the rare cast comes in goes through the object and what it's doing is hitting other parts of the object and projecting the normal on to it so you can see we've got like some of the knurling from this cylinder kind of thing projected onto the inside of this as well as that there's a lot of bleeding between the front barrel and the back of the gun also in here it's kind of crazy in here all this mess and all this mess back here so the way you solve that is with cages and explode baking so just an example of that and to show you what it looks like without the normal this is without a normal so see it makes hell of a lot of difference if you've got a good normal map so back to Maya where I've got my high poly and my low poly matching so you would export your low poly like this exploded you'd also explode export your high poly exploded also make sure if you're new to this kind of stuff that you smooth things you can't use smooth preview can't just press 3 and export like anything out with just pressing 3 it doesn't smooth it like that that's just smooth preview so it's only previewing what the smoothing algorithm is going to do you actually need to use mesh smooth which is up here select the object mesh and then smoothness elect your kind of your amount that you're going to smooth it by you see obviously Catmull clark open subdiv calc Clark open soda if it's just the newer algorithm that they've generated so when you've got those both exported out then we move on to the cage so a good thing as well I will say just kind of what you should do is make sure you duplicate your low poly I know this is kind of going a bit far ahead you should duplicate your low poly before you start moving stuff because you don't want stuff to be everywhere when you've got your final export you might also be together so what I suggest doing is taking your low poly like this exporting it out and then duplicate in it and do in the low pit a low poly and the high poly explode and export on both of them out as well so you've got three things exported which is your low poly which is together yeah low poly which is exploded your high poly which is exploded and then the last thing you need is a cage so you take your low poly explode you duplicate it then you create a new layer and you add your objects that layer so they're on that layer what you do then is you take the object you turn on your high poly and you go to vertex mode within vertex mode then you double click on the move tool appear change the axis orientation to normal select all the vertices and then you get a different gimbal this gimbal has an N au and a V which is normal vertex and I think that's something else that I don't know so I'm not going to touch that but I know that n is the normal so if you move on and it'll move on the normal of the object so this is really good for kind of making cages and maybe even making shells for objects so we pull it on the end and so it completely covers all of the high poly information so you can see it's no no no high poly information left on that move over to something else maybe put I probably baked on reference or template so it probably clicked and go through all doing this so select all vertices move tool it'll pop up with the N Paulette kind of this one's a bit tricky so you have to probably go a bit slower until it covers all of the high poly this back here over on normal you just go through them all doing this you can't do it all at once but I quite like to be quite thorough with doing all this because you can get problems you might not notice them I'll show you one now so just to cover all the floating objects and you can see down here some of the mesh is showing through so you'd have to come in and just adjust that as well as here don't pull it too far and you can move it with just general kind of object mode and world mode but I suggest you don't because if you're not putting out on the normal you're not going to get its normal baked down to the right edges so it might have a wavy kind of edge and then once you're done you'll end up with something like this which doesn't look very impressive and looks exactly the same as a little poly explode but if I show you the low poly explode and I should put this on the right one so you can see that the cage is covering all so you export that out as well as an exploded cage and that means you have multiple files the first file you have is you have a exploded cage you have a low poly object which is all together you have a high poly object which is exploded and you have a low poly object which is exploded now moving on to substance and X normal so the way you bake Maps in substance painter so it's really good for your workflow if you were using painter to make anything is you just simply file new put the mesh in the mesh slot which is your exploded low poly so magnum LP explode put it up to 2048 2k see everything's exploded in here exactly how we want it then we go to baked textures it can all my layout is a bit crazy and not like yours just look for texture set settings and in there you might have to scroll down a bit you find additional maps and baked textures is there switch the output size to your output size you want turn off all the maps you don't want to use it if you don't if you just want to use it for normals that is I suggest if you're going to use it for painting and everything select everything on and go to common settings add your high poly so be high poly explode I believe that was it let me just make sure ya Magnum high-poly explode then you add your cage file use cage so Michael an occasional or probably explode you probably want to put your max distance up a tiny bit not too high just enough and that's all setup so this should bake nicely if I just turn off a oh because that's gonna take a while all this should be fine what I will do is I'll quickly put this - I believe it's mesh ID and hue shift or actually playgroups up - ID I can't remember exactly and click bake so this should take a couple of seconds not long at all because of how fast painter is it's faster than X normal pretty much baking out all of it the same with designer it's a exactly the same speed as painter but it can kind of make more advanced maps so this is just hanging at the moment but usually it's pretty fast it's probably because I'm recording and this should be done anytime soon if it doesn't I can always abort so baking finished as you can see I supplied all the maps in the right way and all if the baked looks pretty nice so we've got all the right kind of edges on everything we don't have any overlapping edges down here all of the kind of these are all front on all the float floating geometries or front on so it's come out nicely and from that as well we've got an ID map and the ID map has basically taken everything this exploded and it's made IDs out of them so if I just quickly add mask color selection you can see the ID map here so it's given us the bolsa skimmers the outside of the bolts and the way it's done that is every object that is separate with the high poly it's made it a separate mesh mesh ID sorry so I just kind of briefly go over that now in big textures so the ID is color source mesh ID and the color generator is you shift and what that does is is taking every mesh ID which is the high poly I go back here and go to high poly to know off template so every object in here that's separate so this is a separate object as a separate object floating a separate object everything that's not connected will be its own ID and this is really great for just quickly get an ID maps as well so with that then you can kind of just throw out all these textures so I can pick the textures from here not big texture sorry am i doing export textures from here for other programs that is and I want to take I make a new configuration actually just so you can see what what you need from it so what I want from this is I want the normal map direct X and for that I need RGB so normal map Direct X into RGB this just being normals I want it to be the mesh name it's a normals mesh I also want a glossiness channel so gray-gray channel glossiness so gloss and mesh with that I also want what else do I want I want my ID which is an RGB map whoops RGB channels so ID map mesh just copy that for now so I can just use it quickly we want another RGB which is world space normal so world space dollar-sign mesh just copy dollar sign mesh for now I sent a copy to all the other ones don't really matter too much I might take out the it would have done the AO as well as well as the curvature the position you want all the maps that is got out basically and the reason for that is so that you can throw in the other mash but is fine so you probably don't need these maps to be exported out but it's good for kind of if you're working with other programs like quick sille you can throw them out and then put them into quick sauce sweet to work with if you don't want to use painter for a certain thing but i suggest working in-house within painter so if you've got these maps out and you want to change this mesh you don't have to actually export all the maps out for doing that you can come up to project configuration select the mesh and change it to the Magnum LP which you explored earlier which is together one and this will have all of the normals applied to it and as well as that I'll have a nice usually a nice ambient occlusion which doesn't affect the object because if you bake it with Yemen inclusion like this the bullets might have yeah me collusion baked down on to it which is kind of bad in a sense that he'll look good but when the cylinder is opened or the hammer is cocked it'll have the ambient occlusion still on it because it's not generated real time is generated per pixel baked kind of so with the new mesh in here then I can kind of use these maps that are nicely baked from the original occasionally explode mesh to start making certain kind of colors and IDs so I just for an example throw on some horrible looking smart materials like machinery or maybe and then using the color ID map with ad mass with color selection I can just start to pick colors so anyone on these areas I want on this as well I should know I want that bit maybe to be Chrome and you can see quite quickly just using kind of all that stuff together you can really quickly get how some good to kind of looking well this isn't good looking but you catch the drift it's you get some nice looking meshes pretty quickly so get a nice textures all over it and you can add all of your your smart materials with color selections pretty quickly as well so that's just kind of a quick insight I'm not going to really go into substance that much I just wanted to cover Catmull Clark crease sets normal Maps or map basics all that stuff I could go over baking IDs in Maya but I'm not going to do that because it's a pain and takes a long time one thing I will go will say before I kind of leave this is try not to bake normals in Maya cuz there's a lot of problems with banding and kind of the compression types and go for all these other programs so this also this same technique that is used for all these measures that are baked up here can be used in X normal X normal accepts caged files perfectly fine I might just quickly show you it's kind of running over time but I'm gonna quickly show you with an X normal so if I just reset this with restore default so if I add my high definition mesh in here if I go to projects and believe it's in here so I go I falls in here if I had my Magnum high poly explode in there a little definition mash some Magnum low poly explode then right-click the low poly and browse cage file Magnum occasionally explode and what else do we need I think that's it so high poly low poly poly cage yeah and then for the big options select the same you do you can obviously see why this is a bit slow because you want to click a lot of things educating eight because that was my daily dilation with on the packet that I used an Tila saying however much you want times once sometimes all right the output file wherever you want it so let's just put this in here so call it gun complicated and bake and it should do exactly what it did in painter but it didn't and the reason why it did that because external is quite funny with cage files so it's saying it's got more vertices than the other one but what you find is probably it doesn't and ones probably maybe triangle eight in a certain way or an edge isn't welded so you can have problems with X normal but generally if you kind of clamp your mesh prior this is quite a quick mesh that I made quickly just for this tutorial you won't have any problems with X normal but if everything is not triangle ade you can have problems because X normals not funny and not fun with anything there's not triangle aid so that's kind of just a brief tutorial and master class on all this stuff and thank you for watching

Channel: Jordan Moss

Views: 21,651

Keywords: Video Game (Industry), commentary, Game Art Design, maya, xnormal, substance, painter, Video Game Culture, Help, Tutorial, Tricks, Tips, games, art, Painting

Id: BvFcpSk6QvI

Length: 37min 6sec (2226 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 18 2015