Baking Opacity Maps | Substance + Maya Tutorial

hi guys welcome back to another video in this channel today i'm very happy to announce that the daily videos are going to be back however they're not going to be daily anymore as you guys know there's been a lot of work over here at the studio so i'm unable to do a video every single day as we used to do last year but that doesn't mean that we're not that we're gonna just like leave them behind or anything i'm actually gonna try to do at least at least every other day so i'm gonna try to do like four or five videos every week we're still gonna have our live streams we're still going to have our portfolio reviews at the middle of the month which by the way it's this weekend so if you want to submit your portfolio make sure to check the link down here below and uh yeah this is going to give me a couple of other options we saw that the courses that we were doing the monday courses like the mini premium courses they were doing okay but not not as good as we expected we had like a really really good hit and then things were just like kind of like lukewarm um and and we definitely felt like the community was missing right like these daily interactions that you guys have with me uh just just know about stuff and things like that i don't know it kind of felt like a like a little family right so uh we're gonna go back to that unless the only thing is it's not gonna be as frequent might be like again every other day or something uh but someone in the comments uh yesterday or the day before i think suggested a tutorial about baking opacity which is a really really interesting concept so let's go to it before that remember that we have a really cool promotion with skillshare check this out hey guys abraham here i just want to remind you guys that we upload all of our courses to skillshare skillshare is this amazing site where you can access a ton of different content to learn improve and grow as an artist we have all of our courses available to watch and learn from right now in skillshare you can check the description down here and skillshare is offering one free month trial to their premium membership with this membership you're going to be able to access all of our courses and watch and learn all of the amazing things that we cover with all of the softwares so what are you waiting for check skillshare down here below there we go also before we start guys a couple of announcements as i mentioned we have the portfolio review this weekend so make sure to submit on the link down here the link has been active for the last couple of weeks by the way if you saw one of the early earlier videos from this month you probably saw that the link was active it's going to be active all the way until the end of the week so friday is the last day that you can submit because i'm going to be recording that day for the weekend so um uh oh yes also i am really really happy to announce that i've been working on the next course uh from uh myself which is gonna be a complete guide to maya 2023 this is going to be like a basic maya course uh for those of you that have been wanting to learn like all of the basics about maya but even for those that are already familiar with maya this is the first time that i'm doing a full production course so while teaching the basics of maya we're going to be producing a small little scene i don't want to spoil anything just yet i do have a couple of renders but i think that they're really really special so i'm going to wait a couple of days and i'm going to show you uh some of these renders at the end of the week uh it's it's really fun i think you guys are going to love it there's uh there's animation just rigging there's uh like even a little bit of action modeling texturing lightning cinematic lighting i know someone has been asking about that one post-production even a little bit of after effect and substance major it's just a lot of stuff it's just like like a full production course on how to create something from your mind and get it out there and create a little short so um yeah i think you guys are gonna like it let me know once it hits what you think about that one and um don't worry we're still working behind the scenes there's a lot of other instructors who are working on more stuff really really exciting stuff as well we'll let you guys know as soon as we have that stuff uh ready to be shown so some of you guys might remember this guy from a couple of months ago we did this a stylized sculpt and i thought it would be a great idea to show you how to create this sort of uh opacity mask because usually you see bakes when there's just like a plane there's like a like a gate or or some sort of a grill or something we're going to do something cool here and i'm actually going to be using a little bit of mash over here so i'm going to open the mesh editor over here and as you can see well actually let's go back there we go let's delete that one we're going to be using let's call this skull uh it's relatively big i think let me create a sphere yeah it's quite big that's fine so what i'm going to do is i want to create this call but i want to make this sort of like chain links call where everything is made out of chain links right and it follows the surface in a very cool way so i'm going to create a link right here just a simple ring let's make it a little bit bigger and a little bit like thicker something like that there we go i'm gonna grab uh the link actually and i'm gonna go into the mesh options right here mash for those of you that are not aware it's an instancing like thing that we have here inside of a maya uh it's it's being slowly replaced by bifrost because wi-fi can do something like very similar uh but still very powerful i'm gonna open the match editor right here and on the mesh distribute node which is this one right here what this thing is doing right now is it took the original ring and it distributed ten times so we have ten copies of that ring ten instances of that ring what i can do though is i can change the distribution to something called a mesh and then if i drag and drop the skull into the input mesh what's going to happen there we go the rings are now going to be distributed along the um like the mesh i can change the method from scatter to something like uh face face center and the more uh like points that we get like the more rings that we get the more we're going to be able to to get this in there now of course i'm going to go to the original ring i'm going to make it smaller because it's a little bit too much so something like that looks cool and uh let's just go back here and lo go really really crazy i'm actually not sure how many faces we have we have two one fourteen hundred two faces fourteen hundred and two so if we go here to the match distribute we can actually say hey i want this to be 1402 and that should be every single face so as you can see we get this very very cool thing where we pretty much created a skull made out of rings uh let's go back to again to the original torus and since all of these are instances at any point i can change things about the elements so for instance i'm going to change the radius so it's a little bit thinner let's change the section radius as well there we go so we have all of that opacity so let's say we want to have this sort of like skull and we want all of this information to be baked down but we want to see the holes right like eventually what i would like to see on a geometry would be something like this right that would be pretty cool so let's do it let's make it happen i'm going to grab the mash network or all of these guys and we're going to hit ctrl d to duplicate them that way i can hide the mesh network hide this ones right here and these rings that i have right here are going to be the high quality so i'm just going to select file export selection i'm going to go to my desktop i already have a little folder here i'm going to save this as rings and um it's a lot of geometry of course it's uh like more than a million polygons that's fine and we're getting the same now this one already has a ubis for for the elements so as you can see right here we already have some like proper uvs so i'm going to export this as well export selection and this is going to be let's call this skull now i'm going to show you two methods of doing this the first one is the most like like the newest method so uh very recently i would say like maybe like one month or two months ago at the time of this recording they introduced this new tool instead of substance painter which literally allows you to uh do the opacity but i'm going to show you how to do it in case you don't have the tool enabled so first of all we need to create a new element let's go here let's select this call 4k is fine let's go let's go crazy there we go and we're going to go textures at settings first of all we're going to add the channel so we're going to add an opacity channel right here or or actually let's go to the materials first and we're going to change this material to the pvr metallic with alpha blending which is this one right here and now that we have the material selected we can go into channels and we can add an opacity channel now we have the opacity channel and we go into bake mesh maps we can of course introduce the rings right here and over here you can see that now we have this option in the baker which is going to bake the opacity just like this i don't know why it took them so long to get this thing inside of substance because substance designer has had this option for years like i remember using this like seven years ago so yeah let's just pick selected as you can see that's a normal map that's the world space normal map that's the id map there goes the ambient occlusion map curvature position thickness and opacity now of course right now we don't have this properly set up to see the opacity but you can see the the all of the the stretch textures where the opacity is not supposed to be so what i can do now i can go to layers i'm going to use a fill layer and i'm going to turn everything off except for the opacity and on the opacity i'm just going to look for the opacity map that we just baked and when we get it here look at this now we have the opacity everything's working as expected there's a couple of points there that are not baking properly and that's because of the height distance so we can go back here let's do bake match maps again and what i can do is i can increase the max frontal distance just a little bit and that should solve those issues as you can see there it's the race when you do a bake and the rates don't go as far as they should to catch the geometry of the high poly you get those sort of errors but yeah look at this so now what i can do with this uh let's let's texture it a little bit right so let's do a very basic like bronze uh effect i'm gonna add this a gold pure and then let's make this a little bit more into like a bronze color let's increase the roughness a little bit just a little bit and then there's a very this very cool smart material over here which is literally bronze um rust and the cool thing is all of the information from like the crevices of the high polish like where each ring intersects all of that information is um what's the word it's there like it's uh it's safe on the map so we can just do a black mask and say generator and let's just add a generator there we go so look at that beautiful right we're going to have more rust where there are more rings like on all of this like bottom part and this could be like uh i don't know like some sort of like jewel from an enemy or something we can even get i'll probably do it you probably saw it on the thumbnail we can get like a light inside of this thing and it will literally use this as a mask so shadows should be projecting like properly um overall it's just a really really powerful tool to be able to bake the uh the opacity so what's the other option like let's say for whatever reason we don't have this option to do an opacity bake using the substance painter elements what would be the other option the other option would be to use an id mask okay so just use an id mask to mask this rings out and then manually paint a black and white mask inside of a substance export that mask and then be the way to do it so very easily i can go here to mesh display i'm going to say to apply color on vertex colors or mesh display apply color and let's do like uh like a pink color hit apply so now the high poly as you can see has this id information on all of the vertices file export selection let's export the rings again and again let's say for whatever reason we don't have access instead of substance to opacity so let's turn this off and this is what we're seeing right now when you do the bake in the id map you're gonna change from material color to vertex color so that it gets that information out and now if i do a big selected textures it's going to do the same thing but now on the id map you're going to see here on the third one we're going to get a black and a well in this case a just a purple rings like every single ring has been masked out there so what you can do then is just go to the layers just do a normal like traditional fill layer white is fine and there actually i would say i will actually make this black black yeah black and i'm gonna have a black mask on top of this thing and i'm gonna right click i'm gonna add a color selection i'm gonna pick a color and the id mask should be that one ah weird i thought we did get the proper selection there it seems like we didn't huh either it baked the whole thing out or um for some reason it didn't catch it well what we can do then is uh well that's gonna cause some issues i was gonna say we could export this thing and just bake it out as well but i don't think that's gonna work let me think real quick let me i'm gonna pause just to think real quick guys give me just one second yeah so um sorry about that i don't think it's gonna be possible uh not for this particular object right here because we are expecting to have like we would need to have like a high poly element from this element from this skull to be able to do that back but let me show you with another example what i meant or what i was trying to convey if this is let's say you're high poly right and then ctrl d this is your low poly right and then you have all of the like uh like a grid or something like think about like a street something like a street uh something like this right we should be able to very easily mask or select all of these elements and say mesh tools or mesh display apply a color to those and then apply a color to the other plane mesh tools and uh [Music] a color and we would make this like a yellow color for instance and that way once we're inside of substance it will be very easy to use the the selection tool that i show you the the color select to select this thing and mask it out or just like fill it with black and then fill everything else with white and then that texture that you get you export that and that would be an opacity mask because you're pretty much selecting what's empty uh in between the elements unfortunately it didn't work with the skull because i think it's because of uh it's a more complex model but uh yeah that's uh that's pretty much it i mean that's um like thank goodness that we now have a proper proper materials right that we can do this sort of stuff so let's export this real quick i'm gonna export the textures let's export this i'm going to do it on the on the desktop for now where it bakes and let's export this as an arnold ai standard png very important that we do png because we do want to have the um well actually actually let's check real quick here on the output templates because this is very important and we need to export that opacity mask if we're not exporting then it's not really working right so if we check the arnold a standard i'm going to see if we have the opacity and it seems like we don't have oh what do we have there no we don't so yeah here are the this is the the channel like section of substance painter this is what gets exported out when you export something and as you can see um the arnold ai standard does not have an opacity mask it has a normal to hide the emissive but it doesn't have the opacity this is the opacity you would see like a little symbol right here now the opacity mask at the end of the day is just a black and white mask right so technically we could um inject this into some some other element i'm gonna go into this one right here i'm gonna add a a great can we do rgba yeah okay so i'm gonna grab this rgba and i'm gonna copy the color map here and then as you can see this base color is gonna go into the rgb there you go and the opacity is gonna go there so alpha channel and that way we're going to be exporting a a base color map with the same name and everything but it has the information on the alpha channel okay so we go back here and we just export again technically it should work let's give it a real a quick check right here so if we go to the base color i'm not sure i can check it right here but i do have photoshop open yep so let's bring photoshop up real quick and if we grab this png and we go to the layers oh it doesn't have it okay let's do targets then let's go over here and let's change it to target there we go and let's export open the output directory there we go and where is it color let's go into photoshop that's really weird now wait not my bad i i didn't actually open photoshop by let's go there yeah no it's not including it it's really really weird okay let's go back here file export textures and let's go back to the output templates arnold a standard i am using this one let me erase the textures just in case yeah i mean we do have this opacity mask that's really weird it is here let me try that again i'm not sure if it's let's grab a different one and let's use aa standard again that's really weird because the map is there so shader parameters let's try that let's bring the color again into photoshop update huh that's really weird it's not working um i mean one thing that you can do is you can just go to the baked maps and just export it but that's that's redundant let me let me figure out why that's happening and i'll get back to you guys it's just gonna be a quick jump so i wasn't really able to solve the issue like why it's not exporting it on the alpha channel of the of the color but one thing we can do is i just added another gray channel over here and connected the opacity and this should work i'm just going to rename this opacity and uh yeah let's let's give it a go so let's export open and technically now we have this opacity which is yeah the black and white so it is working there but i'm i'm really not sure why it wasn't working on the on the other one anyway let's go back to maya we don't need a high poly anymore and i'm just gonna grab this guy assign a new material or actually let's use the plug-in so substance plug-in select multiple maps we're gonna select all of this guys most of them should find the the proper element uh so it's the base color normal reference metalness there we hit apply and then we go over here one of the great things about that little plug-in is that all of the connections have now been manually created so as you can see everything's properly connected even the height map we really don't need a height map though so i'm gonna get rid of the those ones and we do need to include the um the opacity so i'm gonna create a new file texture right here and we're gonna go into the folder and we're going to use the opacity now the color of the opacity is going to go into the opacity tab just like that and just make sure that this one is set to raw utility raw there we go let's go to arnold lights and skydome let's get some cool lights over here just a basic hdr i think it's gonna be more than enough yeah that's fine i like that one and uh let's assign the material to this guy if we press number six we should see the thing we might not see the opacity but it should be there let's go to the options here quickly change this to gpu and we're going to say arnold and renderer and technically if we've done everything correctly even after those couple of bumps right there throughout the way the opacity should be baked and we can use that channel as at any point no gpu matching requirements what do you mean i have my gpu that's really weird there we go cool so for some reason it was not working like automatically but there we go that's the that's the gpu and uh yeah that's the the skull working so as i've mentioned uh let's create a an infinite background real quick you guys know i love having this sort of stuff in this case i think i'm just going to do like a backdrop let's do a shotgun panel so protect it let's duplicate this guy uh center the postpoint let's make this a little bit smaller mirror this across positive x there we go and now if we were to like say create a small sphere and get the sphere on the inside of the first skull we can select arnold lights mesh light so the sphere emits light it's like 15 visible use color temperature let's make it warm and let's shot this camera right here and hit render oh yeah we need to update the scene so let's cancel that real quick and we're going to go into render update whole scene and then render unless it crashes of course wow yeah this last couple of weeks guys have been crazy crazy crazy a lot of work a lot of work there we go that looks nice okay so let's say render update full scene and now we render there you go [Laughter] to get this very interesting shadows and this this very interesting composition so yeah i think i think that works now let's make this thing a little bit better like i like that uh thing let's make it just like slightly less shiny i'm gonna grab the main hdr let's say minus four so it's really dark and then i'm gonna create a traditional like area light it's gonna be a small because i want a harsh shadows projected on the on the back of the wall like this and i'm gonna bring the spread in let's do like i would say five exposure let's try that let's again render update full scene maybe a little bit more light with this guy it's really still i'm gonna stop the video i am uh i think i'm gonna because i really like the sphere but i'm not sure if it's helping or not let's delete it for now and let's see remember for to get like proper shadows we need to make the light really small so it's more like like a spotlight right like going down there shadow you can see that they have the or the soft maybe this a little bit kinda the best lightning that looks okayish at least we can see a little bit of the shadows back there let's bring this guys down just for for composition's sake now we can bring the the sphere in i think it was looking quite nice and now we have a little bit of the shadow so let's bring this like sphere again arnold lights mesh light i'm actually going to make this like a creepy green light let's bring this up that looks cool let's make the light this week the sphere let's do like so yeah that's it guys um cool little uh explanation here sorry if it went a little bit longer than than usual but i think it looks pretty cool and as you can see baking um what's the word baking opacity is no longer a problem if you're using the most recent version of substance painter so thank you very much remember that this weekend we have our portfolio review i'll probably see you guys on friday friday for like another little tip video and then we're gonna have the portfolio on the weekend make sure to leave a like share subscribe comment i miss you guys i want to hear about you how how what what have you guys been up to and what else do you guys want me to cover thank you very much i'll see you back on the next one bye

Channel: Nexttut

Views: 9,583

Keywords: maya 2018, zbrush tutorial, maya tutorial, nalini kanta jena, character sculpting, zbrush sculpting, zbrush turorial, beginner zbrush tutorial, human anatomy zbrush, modeling tutorial

Id: tgt7l2JMDJc

Length: 26min 0sec (1560 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 15 2022