Construct an epic Robotic battle with Maya, USD, Bifrost and Arnold

[Music] hello everyone my name is john paul giancarlo and today i will guide you through the process of creating these epic battle scene from creating usd assets in maya to amazing rendered output in arnold with fast bias procedurals workflows and matches in between we're going to construct these epic robotic battle sequence from scratch and we're going to unleash the powerful maya use the bifrost and arnold workflow so without further ado let's get started in this very first section i would like to show you how quickly i can start assembling my scene with the help of qixel and quick source bridge as you might see i have quicksilver open on the right and i have maya on the left on my screen so i've downloaded a few assets uh which already in my local folder so you can see there's a few of them here in order to populate that desert all i need to do from bridge quixote is just go into here and click export as i have the bridge plugged installed inside of maya it will load it in automatically so let's go ahead and click export you can see the message exporting to maya once that asset is exported to maya you can see it populate right in the viewport the good thing about quickso is that i can see textures in the screen so because it brings all of the texture information and the shading information into maya it also gives me a proper naming convention and it tells me what type of lod i have so in this case i have a dense mesh also if you go to the attribute editor you might be able to see that it also constrained the surface information the material information already in it so you can see i have color information i have specular information and all the things that i need to make these look good now all i need to do is bring all the rest of my assets into maya and start doing my assembly as i would regularly do now i'm going to speed up the process and i'm going to bring the rest of my stuff and you're going to see me working very fast [Music] all right so welcome back i'm finished uh adding all of the geometries from qxel and i have something that i'm quite happy with so i put all this stuff into my manually and it's time for me to kind of automate some other processes like adding patches of grass to the terrain so what i want to do is want to take this piece of land and i want to populate it with this piece of grass so as simple as that so [Music] i'm going to make sure that it's at a ground level and i'm going to uh freeze transformations and i'm going to open now the biforce graph so i'm going to create a new bifos graph shape and i'm going to add my ground main into here and the grass patch into here so this is done by clicking and holding the middle mouse button so now what i want to do is to create a scatter points uh node and i want to connect the the ground main shape into the geometry as this is going to tell maya exactly where those points live and it's going to scatter whatever object i want around in the way that this node decides it is need to be done so now what i want to do elsewhere is to create a create instance node as we see i have it on the in the in the recent ones so maya will find it in by first we'll find it pretty quick so next is to connect the uh mesh one into the instance geometries and i also want to now then connect the points from the scatter noise to the points of the create instance final step in order to see here would be to connect to an output now as you might see i start to see a lot of grass patches here what i can do now is to take this and maybe add ten thousands of them a little bit more so next step now uh it could be to add some random rotations but i could instead of use the the scatter settings instead of the the scatter mode instead of using random i might want to use blue noise which gives me something a little bit nicer so next step will be to add for me a randomized point rotation so that's going to be connected between the scatter node and the create instance node now that i have this i need to go back into my point um rotations and i want to maybe change some of these parameters here [Music] i'm going to set them all back to zero same as here and same here okay so now i have my patches of grass look into different directions okay so now i have these patches of grass uh laid out in my ground uh in order for me to being able to export this as a usd file i need to convert this into maya into my geometry but in order for that to work i need to add an extra node here in between the instances and the output so i'm going to disconnect here and i'm going to create a bake instance geometry node now i'm going to connect the instances to the instances and the merg meshes into the instances output that i created before okay so that's stone now uh as you see now mayas is struggling a little bit to work with this but that's no problem we can go into the node editor now and we're gonna find the bifrost graph shape here in the outliner and we're going to source it into the node editor once i have that i want to expand by clicking alt plus left mouse click and you'll see i have the instances um no a output what i can do in order to find it a little bit better is to rename the port and i'm going to call them plants or grass or whatever so now i have this i see i can find him click quickly on top of the by first graph shape one i can then now type uh the click on tab on my keyboard and find a bifrost geo to maya node so now what i want to do is connect plants into the bifers geometry so next step will be to connect then a new node which would be a mesh node and this is what are going to give you this poly surface output as you might see here so what i want to do now is go to the maya mesh and connect the mesh 0 into the in mesh okay so now that i have compared all my um my grass into a maya surface now i can basically just rename this this grass gel and now i'm ready for it to start exporting this set into the usd file so let's get started with the usd part okay so before we start exporting this as usd data i wanted to bring just this one sample here and show you uh some of the limitations that we have the moment with usd so what i'm going to do is just going to take this particular stone and i'm going to do the typical which would be to export the selection as usd as you might see we have on usd and the usd export and if you go down to some of the options you will see by default you get it's a usd preview surface so first i'm going to do i'm going to export this as a usb view surface and i'm going to save it here my usd test area so i'm going to call that stone i'm going to call preview material go to that save that right now i'm going to export it again export the selection but this time i'm going to use the arnold shaders which makes sense that will tell you that you're going to export all the material shaders with dyno and it should probably render fine instead of maya so i'm going to do this and stump review instead of preview you're going to call these arnold material and export that finally i'm gonna export that again but this time around uh i'm gonna care about any of this stuff i'm just gonna change the file type to arnold usd so this is going to do this is going to take care of all the information that is needed to to render inside of maya and arnold so i'm going to explore that and i'm going to call this stone arnold stone usd arnold material i'm gonna explore that again all right so now that i exported these three objects what i want to do now is to bring it in there's two ways of importing them back you can import them directly from the import menu and basically whenever you do this it's going to import us the same hierarchy so that's not really what we want to do we want to do is to create a stage from file so this case i'm going to do stage from file and i'm going to go find my first preview material okay you see that loaded pretty quick and i'm gonna move it away and what that gives me is just a preview of that particular material over there uh next i'm gonna again stage from file and this time we're going to bring the arnold material the one that i sell the selected the animations you might see it does not bring any of the texture to the viewport does not show what it detects to the viewer so if i expand this you will see inside of the the usd file all the text information leaves here but somewhat if some reason it does not show in the viewport and it won't render either so just for for demonstration sake let me add a skyrim library quickly and i'm just going to hit render as you see here i see the geometry but i don't really get any texture information so what i want to do now and i'm going to bring in stage from file but this time the arnold usd export so i'm going to create this one does not have textures in it does not represent any of the textures unfortunately uh but if i hit render you will see i do get all the relevant texturing information that i was missing before to net an exact replica of the original maya file in arnold usd format so the reason for this is that the my usd menu exports the maya scene to usd including the whole x form hierarchy and the whole sequence but as now as now it won't export the arnold data yet so the team is planning to extend the maya usd express so that the arnold data is exported as well but when d when this will be done the maya usdx should have everything you need but for the meantime you will have to export in this way okay next step before we proceed now to start exporting every single piece of this environment as usd uh what i want to do is to optimize the scene a little better so what i've done is to basically group and separate all of the elements on the different groups so i have environment kind of grp which stands for group if i expand this and let me actually just expand like that um you'll see i have all all of the rocks and plants in one group large canyons in another group rocks in another group and i have lights in another group in the grounds and another group then i have lost what i want to do is a variant later on which is going to be this here standalone rock right so if i isolate that you see it's got a particular shape and then i have the variance second variant which is this one here okay so moving on in order for me to simplify the scene or the way i'm going to be loading this as a stage in usd i want to take first all the large canyons and i'm going to take all of them uh pieces of geometry and i'm going to combine them into just one because i know they're not going to be moving at any point in stage through or throughout the production so now that i have done that i can just go ahead and delete uh by type history and now i just left with nothing on the dark group so i'm gonna take the large and i'm gonna put it in there under the group which is pretty much just one shape so i'm gonna do the same with the rest of the objects all right now i have completed merging and grouping all of the objects i'm going to proceed to start exporting this as usd file and particularly arnold usd so i'm basically just going to grab the the main group so the top as you might see here and i'm going to go to arnold scene export export selection to usd this is going to be canyon on the score large canyons yes and we're going to export the selection so now we're gonna repeat steps with all of the groups as you might see and then we're gonna proceed uh to import all of them back into new scene as an as a usd stage so as i mentioned before there's uh two ways of importing arnold uc data into maya so we can either do through the standing so if i load and standing uh see i have a canyon environment stage usd uh one thing that i did before is that i took all of the groups and i exported them all at once as or just one usd file but i also have all of the other separated and different um groups so in case i want to do loop development i can always come back and bring it in do my arnold development and continue to work so when i load an arnold to arnold all i get is a bounding box i can also see shaded but you see the representation it's not it's not great at the moment in the viewport uh i can also adjust a little bit here the near click playing in the far clip plane to see a little bit better but the representation anyways it's not the best but if i go into the standing here that i've created i can go to the file content so you see that i have pretty much or the file comes in here which thing about this workflow is that then once i have um this stuff in memory so i can i can take any of the objects here and i can start assigning a different uh for example shaders or different operators uh like so so that that's the good thing about this so if you're working on loop development this is probably the best way and you want to do it as a per asset like build bring in separately all of the objects so now getting that out of the way uh best way uh to bring in this because i want to take advantage of the layer system instead of usd i'm gonna bring it in as a stage from file so that's what i'm going to do i'm going to bring the stage and you see that loads a lot quicker and the representation is much better in the in the viewport now please allow me to waste one minute of your time so i can demonstrate the difference between loading a maya file in the usd file so i'm just going to load this speed test or this scene that contains all the my information and see how how long it takes to load [Music] [Music] do [Music] okay that's a minute mine's still loading so now let's bring that usd stage boom voila that was that fast i didn't have a character loaded here in this particular scene so see how fast and responsive uh maya is kind of a preview of what is to come in future versions of maya usd in arnold usd so another thing that i want to do now um is to maybe expand this and have a look what i have here so i see i have all of my data their shading data i have a lot of information have all the groups that i had inside with different geometries like in this case ground for example or my hero rocks over here you see all that information is being grouped in same way it just looks a little bit different here but what i can do now uh is just pretty much just create uh just right click and go to the usd layer editor what you want to do at this point is to start adding layers so i want to edit the content of this file right so let's say we're going to do some changes or variations in this so first things first i'm going to create one layer and then i'm going to create a sub layer and this could have tons and tons of different things right so but in this case i'm just going to be doing a layout in this in this particular case uh this is what i'm gonna save so i'm not gonna create any more layers or any of that so just lay out um so good so what i want to do now i just want to save the layer edit so if i if i click on this icon over here it gives me the ability to save uh the stage right so to save the the this particular layer so what i want to do is i'm going to rename this very first one i'm going to call it sequence and the second one gonna call it layout i'm gonna save the stage so what happens here now it's now i can go into the layout layer into the sequence that could be any sequence and i'm gonna click on that particular icon so i'm gonna turn it on so what i can do now is now i can navigate so i can come here for example go into my outliner and right click here and say maybe i don't want this maybe i want to make it invisible right so that that's there so i won't maybe do the same with this guy um same story go find it and i want to make it invisible one last thing maybe that i want to do maybe i want to take that particular rock uh that hero rock and i want to move it around so let's go find uh the pivot is a little bit far away so that could not be my mistake so i'm going to move it i'm going to place it right there by holding the d key and moving the pivot so once that's there i can proceed say to uh maybe rotate the rock or maybe a little bit bigger i can make these type of changes right so now that i have this done my is telling me that i need to save those edits so that's exactly what i'm going to do now i'm just going to click save and it's going to tell me the save the stage once following system file will be overwritten sequence yes you want to do it yes save the stage please so so what i have done here so i haven't destroyed anything in fact all of the information still contains within the canon extension usb file so if i disable the layer i'll see all the edits are going back to the way they were as you may see so the very non-destructive way of creating scene edits and maybe having this scene to propagate across different uh shots like shot say procedure one to ten maybe i don't want to have this so i can then you know disable that particular layer or load a different layer with different edits next step for me is going to be to now get the animated character export it as usd data and bring it back in okay so i have opened uh the robot animation by the way this animation and this model was purchased in turbosquid i would put the credits here and basically what i have is very very nice uh articulated animation of these robots um but this very interesting case that i want to show uh case to you now is is the fact that the bone hierarchy is not your average uh where you have a main joint and then you have a hierarchy to follow this is not the case in this particular robot so if i wanted to export this usd and include that animation i would have to do a little bit of a work around so and let me demonstrate that so i'm going to take that robot okay so what i want to do now is just want to export this right and i want to export it as um again as arnold usd but if i scroll down uh it gives me the the the option to include sequence so now let's do that if i export this selection now uh as in as in arnold usd i'm going to create a folder here i'm going to call it robot underscore a n and i'm going to save this as robot underscore a m i'm going to sport the selection so you may see you first convert the the textures and then it's gonna export frame by frame and it's gonna generate a usd sequence files okay now that exporter does an arnold usd sequence um i want to show you what the result is as you might see i have loads and loads of usd files what i want to do now is i want to take the robot and i want to cache it as an alembic so i'm going to export that selection to alembic uh i'm going to make sure that i ub write uh the thing because it's going to lose all the shading information i'm going to export that selection so now i can go back to my webinar and let's look for cache data i'm going to save it here in data i'm going to create an abc folder and i'm going to save that as a robot on the score animation and export that selection now so i don't want to delete this guy because i still have some textures and things that i want to keep so next step for this guy is going to be to i'm going to go to the cache menu and i'm going to import that alembic file back so i'm going to go to data where i saved it before abc robot animation.abc okay so now i have it back into my file i can hide the original one what i want to do now i i just i just uh exported this alembic file and re-imported it or cache it as an olympic file i imported it back as an but why i've done this i'll explain in a minute i just need to now go to file export the selection and this time around i'm going to do a regular usd export and i'm gonna make sure that i have the selection range that they all automatically uh created so this skeleton and skin cluster are automatically created uh and for this um i don't i'm gonna bother about the arnold shaders i'm just gonna keep it as arnold shaders for the moment um even though they're not gonna comply with it we can reapply the shaders later so i'm just gonna export this uh i'm going to my usd back to my usd uh data i just gonna do this i'm gonna do as a copy just so you see how fast that goes [Music] cool finally i'm going to hide this guy and i'm going to unhide the original one and i'm going to again export this guy as a usd export same setting same story but this time i'm going to call it robot animation or original let's call it original okay that's all great so let's hide these two guys and now i can create a stage from file go outside and let's pick first the original okay the original doesn't seem to be there so let's see what happens if you swap to gl hydra you see now we start to see something but the main issue here is that i'm not getting all of my geometry because of all that problem that i mentioned before so the hierarchy wasn't wasn't good it wasn't something that maya or usd expo would not really understand it would know how to interpret so that's why we exported us an alembic and exported it back so that's what i want to do now i want to create again a stitch from file but this time around i'm going to choose the robot animation that was uh exported with the alembic data okay as you may see uh the viewport 2.0 won't pick it up but the gl hydra would so now that we have something that we can work as usd we can proceed now and import this data into our environment so back in my stage i want to go into my layer editor and what i want to do now is just go back to the top we want to create another layer and for that layer well in this case we're going to load a soup layer because i've already exported the animation of the robot with textures and everything i'm just going to load that particular layer that i exported so i'm going to just go and load these animation test textures that i have and i'm going to click load then i'm just going to click on load sub layers as you may see that guide appears over here this at this time this anonymous later only exists in memory so i need to actually save them so i'm going to click there and the for the very first anonymous layer i'm going to call that shot [Music] and i'm going to save stitch now i can start editing this particular layer robot2 because i have fixed the translations that cannot be moved but i can for certain do rotations [Music] so now that you have seen how to bring in a suit layer or how to load a soup layer for animation into the layer editor i'm just going to proceed now and create a whole bunch of usd uh robots and i'm gonna populate this using now mash in this case just to do something different we're gonna be using mash so without further ado let's go and create that battle of robots okay so finally in this section i'm going to show you how to populate this ground with tons and tons of robots so what i've done for this particular scene is just i just imported the canyon environment stage the usd stage and i created a ground shape here right so i just gonna have uh i'm just gonna have the robots to populate on this area i don't want it to collide or i don't want it to grow with where these stuff is so i'm just going to delete keep deleting some parts like this part the back example and these two okay so you see what i mean because they're going to be walking and i don't want them to basically walk through the walls so uh for that reason i'm just going to do it like this so anyways next step is going to be to bring in a narrow standing remember before we exported the animation as an arnold usd and it created a long very long sequence so we did that exporting the alembic file so now when we bring in this standing let's use the data now we can have uh the animation turned on using the file sequence here and we can also see the shaded model so now if we go into here you see we have the object and the animation is applied to it so that's all good and fine so what i want to do now or next step is maybe i want to you know make this a little bit smaller and doesn't really matter at this point where i place this particular robot so next step is going to be to go into the mash network and i'm going to create a mash network and i'm going to make sure that i use instances i'm going to apply and close and by default normally it would hide the original of the original standing right so this is the one here so i want to unhide that and you will see why so now i'm going to go back to mash and on the distribute node i want to take the distribution type and change that to mesh now i'm going to graph my ground proxy and i'm going to click on the middle mouse button hold and drag and release it on the input mesh so now you will see the start to populate on that particular area so now i can add more and more and more robots i can have maybe 200 of them or 300 of them and i can still preview that animation okay so next step is going to be the animate uh the node so what i can do is just to add a transform node and i can fix the position so they didn't cut through the ground i can also change the rotation of them so let's see in what direction they're walking okay so pretty much towards the front so something like so and finally it's just a case of animating all the robots in in this particular direction right so that's that's what you want to do this is a very simple setup you can also do this with bifrost and have to have the robots avoid certain areas you can also add in these particular things follows for example on the distributor node you can add falloff so it doesn't really distribute around certain areas uh but for time's sake i'm just going to leave it up to here and i'm just going to continue with the lining part okay so we have finally come to the last bit of the presentation and now we're gonna basically go through the lightning setup so what i've done for this is basically added a skyrim light so if you go to the arnold menu you know you can find the skyrim light so basically just create one uh then you can connect an hdr uh directly into that particular input so i just connected a one that i already have saved and i've adjusted some of the parameters like the exposure and things like that so so next stop render settings so if i go to the system tab you will see that i have the render device set to gpu and the arnold render settings and the camera aaa samples i only have two but i've uh have enabled i have bought i have enabled the adaptive sampling and i have the max camera aa sample set to four so and for the common parameters only um for the for the common parameters i've adjusted the the image size to 1280x720 so now let's have a look at the arnold renderview so this is the final result that i'm getting here so let me explain a little bit what i've done so i have if you click on this particular icon you will have access to post so basically this gives you access to images you can add different types so in this case i've added a color correct tone map exposure lens effects white balance another color correct another white balance and then the noise optics so that's that's what i did here uh so um the good thing about this setup is now that i can start adjusting things so if i hit play because i've already loaded this scene into memory all right so now that that is done i can start adjusting uh color correction uh for example so i'm gonna add a little bit of gamma so if you see i've tweaked this already before so i'm just going to add a little bit of gamma here and you see i get really quick respawns there i'm also getting the noise version of this so if i disable the denoise optics i have a much grainier image so i'm just going to enable it back up you see a much cleaner image so i can start now tweaking uh things like for example the tone map which i already have a gamma uh added there so i can add even more if i want pick this up a little bit more like so i also have the exposure i can a little bit more exposure over there you see start tweaking my scene a little bit more cinematic i also have a lens effect that i've tweaked that i added before which is added to the effect the white balance i have changed the mode to luminance and i've chosen overcast so see what happens if i choose shade for example or maybe song see light [Music] so that's quite cool so i kind of like sun because it adds a little bit of a bluish tone to it so i can start tweaking again on the color correct and i might want to add uh maybe a little bit of contrast or to to the shadows yeah i can adjust another white balance see i have set this one to temperature i can add a little bit more of um you know warm look or i contain it down to a much colder look like you see there that's a little bit too much too over the top but i can start adjusting you know and keep adding and keep adding until i'm happy with the result okay so a good thing now is that i can start to manipulate this here as you have as you might see i have 2d manipulation turned on so i can start manipulating my scene inside of this arnold render view and i can basically pretty fast change camera view so i can see a little bit of the sky [Music] maybe and boom so now i have a render image that i'm quite satisfied with and i can pretty much send to render so thank you very much and now it's time for q a [Music] you

Channel: Autodesk World

Views: 1,777

Rating: 4.96 out of 5

Keywords: Maya, Autodesk, USD, Maya USD, Arnold USD, Render, VFX Shot, Tutorial

Id: FwqS7f8Vb9k

Length: 43min 26sec (2606 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 16 2021