Create Alphas easily in Photoshop for use in Maya 2019

hey guys welcome back so today we're gonna be working in Photoshop and in Maya and I'm gonna show you guys how you can create alpha maps in a very easy way so you can create something like leaves for trees and whatnot in Maya right maybe this video has been impossible but Lux you know the creators of Keisha okay guys well we're in Photoshop as you can see and I loaded up a simple image of a leaf now the reason for doing that is because one show you guys how you can take an image like this take it into Maya get rid of that white background and have it look like an actual leaf on a tree now for that we need two things we need a PNG image which is basically this leaf without the white background and we need an alpha image to create the transparency or opacity in Maya right now there are many ways to do this I've seen every complicated ways to do this but in general a an alpha image is a black and white image so we're gonna do it in a very simple way right now let's get started with this layer right here it's locked right now so I'm just gonna go in here and I'm gonna double click on that and click OK there you go then we're gonna take the quick selection tool and we're gonna go in here already go we're gonna go in here and we're going to start to select everything that's white like so and of course you're gonna take your time and do it proper and get rid of these little shadow lines and all the kind of stuff but for the purpose of the video we're gonna do it like this right I'm going to queue on my keyboard to make sure I got everything as you can see I do not I need to select this little stem here so I'm gonna hold down alt and drag that in queue again to check in my selection and like I said we're just gonna say that it's okay right and maybe it's maybe going to get rid of a little bit of these shadows here but that's not what this video is about so we'll leave it at that right okay so now that we have this we're going to do is we're going to erase the white background so I'm going to take an eraser and I'm simply just going to brush that out now of course you got shortcuts and all that kind of stuff but again easy peasy all right there you go so that's gone so we're gonna do now is go up to select and deselect to get rid of the running ants and I'm gonna go up here to file save as and I'm gonna save this on my desktop as a simple PNG image make sure it's PNG and pear leaf P&G there you go and I've been doing some testing so I'm gonna override it but in your case you shouldn't have that alright so now that we have that fine we're gonna do next is we're going to go back so we're going to control Z to go back and it's fun to make sure that got my whole background and everything and I'm going to turn this into a black and white image which is fairly simple because I really got the selection going on here so I'm going to go up to image adjustments levels and we're gonna push this slider right here and let's make sure we got the right one selected the background so by pushing it all the way to the left we now have black and background we're gonna click OK let's go to select an inverse so we now have that leaf selected we're gonna go to image adjustments again levels once again this time we're gonna do the opposite we're gonna push it away to the right so it becomes completely white click OK now we don't need that selection anymore so we're gonna go to select and deselect and then we're gonna go to file we're gonna go to save as and let's save this as a JPEG image and I really did this as a test like I said so I'm gonna overwrite that but in your case you shouldn't have that and there we go so now that we have these two files we're gonna jump into Maya okay guys all right in Maya I'm gonna take a polygon plane and I'm just gonna hit fire to scale that out a little bit we don't need all that subdivisions so the control 8 open up the attribute editor let's go in here set subdivision levels to one by one which is fine and then I'm gonna close that out I'm gonna right click and go to assign new material let's do an Arnold the material and use a standard surface shader and we're gonna do first is we're gonna go in to our base so up here our base color hit a checkered box go to file hit this folder and we're gonna go and select our jpg which is this guy and bring it in and there I have it there's a leaf now like I said before we don't want that white part so we need to sort that out right so we're gonna do is we're gonna go up to render a viewport 2.0 and we're gonna go in here and we're gonna make sure that this is set to alpha transparency algorithm mine is but yours by default is probably not so alpha cut right select that close that alright then the second thing we need to do is we need to select our object and go into pauline shape one right and here it says opaque under Arnold we're gonna turn that off right that's gonna help so now that that is turned off we've got a couple of more things that we need to do but one of them is of course to load up our alpha so we're gonna select this guy we're gonna go up to our shader and we already plugged in the JPEG into the base color so now we're gonna go under let's see geometry and we're gonna click on the thin walls and next to the opacity color white we're gonna hit that checkered box we're gonna select file then we're gonna go and hit that folder we're gonna go in and we're gonna select our alpha and open that up now as soon as we do that you'll see that our leaf now looks like an actual leaf instead of a of a leaf on a white square and with that in in mind we're gonna put in a little light let's do I don't know let's do an area light we're gonna scale that up not that that has a lot of effect on the light but just so we can see it we're gonna W move it up let's hit T on a keyboard so we can kind of aim it alright so there you go looks about right okay and we're gonna hit seven on a keyboard so you can see that the light is actually projected on the leaf okay now I know for a fact that this is not gonna be enough light in Arnold to illuminate properly so I'm gonna take the intensity and I'm gonna move that way up right now it doesn't look good here but in Arnold and we'll be okay and let's see if we get what we want right now so we're gonna go into Arnold and we're gonna do a simple render well they have it guys so that is basically all there's to it right now there's not a lot of background going on here so the intensity of that light is quite high but that's not really the point the point is this is how you create something like that right so hopefully it was helpful for you guys if it was make sure you hit that subscribe button hit that the whole Bell thing so I'll get notified when the new videos thank you guys so much for watching and see you guys next time bye [Music] well thanks for watching and before you go please hit that MH button to subscribe ok see you guys next time bye [Music]

Channel: Mike Hermes

Views: 21,838

Rating: 4.8828125 out of 5

Keywords: https://www.amazon.com/shop/mikehermes, maya, blender, zbrush, keyshot, tutorial, mike, hermes, virtual, augmented, channel, youtube, photoshop cc tutorials 2019, maya 2019 tutorial, mike hermes, mh tutorials, how to become a better 3d artist in 2019, adobe cc 2019, opacity map, transparent map, map baking, rendering in arnold, texturing in arnold in maya, 3d texturing, transparent leaf, cutting out images in photoshop, create your own textures in photoshop, game development, game artist

Id: Ebhwz3-0K5Y

Length: 8min 6sec (486 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 24 2019