How I made an Orc like BLIZZARD

hey i'm jay and let's talk about how i made this work [Music] first off thank you guys for the comments and the questions in the last video that i posted the time lapse of this project uh this video is going to be about answering those most commonly asked questions try to get you know some of the things you guys wanted to know about and also share some details and things i learned along in making the project so we're just gonna like geek out for this time here on uh all things about this project and making big orky characters like this so the initial idea for this project when i started was to mash up lord of the rings orcs and warcraft orcs from like blizzard cinematics uh i always loved blizzard cinematics i mean i still do but they you know they have a special place because they were a big influence when i was in college in school you know learning how to do this stuff and i love me some warcraft and i played orcs so there you go and then uh lord of the rings because i'm a nerd and i love lord of the rings stuff so i thought let's mash it up rather than pick one it also makes it more interesting for me because i can't just you know pick a reference of something and like recreate it which i think would be a little bit less fun so i thought mashing them up would be cool where i'm using the designs of the lord of the rings i'm really drawing from the urukai and alerts in particular and then i'm doing it in the style of blizzard cinematics that's where the green skin comes from and the emphasized proportions and some of that grimy texturing and stuff obviously both of them are really cool so that was the idea for the project before we jump in i want to say this video is sponsored by skillshare first thousand people to click the link down in the description below we'll get a free trial of skillshare more on that later on in the video so without further ado let's talk about some orcs so i started this project the way i start a lot of projects and that is with my base mesh um you know just get up and running really quickly and the first order of business in this case obviously would be to make this guy look more orc shaped i am also working on a version of my base mesh for release so stay tuned for that if you are in the market for base meshes or you just want to use the same base meshes that i do but yeah the first thing to do in any kind of big character project is the block out and that's this first pass a first run at the whole character and you really try to scope out everything you need so you try to get all the meshes and elements you think you're gonna need to finish the character sketched out and laid out so that you can start to work on the whole character as a whole that's how i like to work and so i can start to iterate on the whole character at the same time just trying to do it real fast you can see i'm already in the expression so i have a clear idea of where i'm headed here okay so i thought i would show you my reference board that i made for this project and we can dive in here and i can show you you know some stuff but you can see here it like generally starts with this mashup you know a little bit of mood and then there's some actual specific reference so you can see this is an awesome cg orc that i've been a fan of for a long time got some skin reference over here so here are the warcraft orcs from the cinematics i think this one's really good lighting is great too and then uh this awesome uh life-size orc by steve wang and his company and then we got lurts yeah big ol alerts this is kind of near the scene where i was thinking of this grimace but anyways you can see how i have a bunch of different things some orc designs that i just think are great uh for one reason or another i love this work from the hobbit you know all cg and just love the beat up wonky metal here's some embarrassing images of me making the stupid face for reference but you know when you're doing faces i mean use what you got you know i mean i've got a camera here so i can actually even record video and make the expression so i can see the skin and the face move which is really important i've got some other references here to have this facial pose but it kind of does help me to like get in the character and do it and then i look at what my face did to try to get the right vibe you know but this is kind of the area of my reference board for that expression uh here's our first one i actually recaptured it um here's the first one with the chin out a lot really wanted that chin out kind of look you know but i guess i scooted it away because i didn't like it and this one kind of looks like i'm like in pain like i stubbed my toe maybe that's not the vibe i'm going for here's the aragorn from lord of the rings the actual costume it's the chain mail that i was really interested in seeing um so that's why i have this reference in here we'll talk more about chainmail uh yeah some more references of the actual pose i ended up going with so this is my reference board for the project uh i i kind of work on this as i go on too i start this is the first thing i'll do at the start of a project so i start in the center here kind of radiate out you can see like these islands kind of form later like here's the mouth here's the armor anatomy facial expression pose um so it just kind of organically happens that way but as i go through the project i'll i'll need more detailed reference like i don't get this reference of tongues in the beginning but then when i start working on the tongue i'm like oh yeah you know what's what's the tongue look like up close and i start adding that and this becomes you know an island of itself eventually so that's generally how it goes everyone's got their own way to do reference this is pure ref by the way uh i love this for doing for using it for reference so i always recommend that to everybody but yeah that's my reference board so now let's get back to making orcs all right back to our orc so i'm going to start making some meshes for the armor see i'm just drawing out a mask that's uh that's going to be used a lot to make all different kinds of pieces so just drawing a quick mask um extracting it and then making it one plane slicing it up using zebra mesh so you'll see i do that on many pieces for the belt i just used the insert curved strap brush in zbrush so that comes standard too and yeah then so i can just get up and running and something i'm going to be using a lot is the sub d preview workflow in zbrush so that's a way for me to see the meshes smoothed right here boom i just enabled it so now i can see the mesh while it's smoothed but i'm not actually dividing but here let's go through the process here we go i painted a mask made a rough shape sliced it up so it's clean mirrored it so now i can z-remesh it i did zeromesh several times to make it as simple as possible uh didn't get what i wanted so i sliced it to make more polygroups and i said hey keep these polygroups so that's a way for me to control the topology so that's how i went about making that mesh you know rather quickly which i can extrude and duplicate and turn into other stuff so this is all part of that block out phase i'm trying to get up and running really fast trying to get all of the meshes there and ready to go so i can work on the character as a whole so also you can see as a part of the blockout phase i actually just roughed in some hair um using the curve multi tube mesh you'll see me here go up to the picker and choose constant z so i can draw on the surface that's a little tip that people tend to forget so i can just draw right on the surface and then i'm just making strips deleting the curve split i'm splitting off the unmasked part leaving the curve so i'm just using this to generate tubular meshes fast that i can position so this is actually wasted work i'm not going to use this for anything but it was just helpful for me to get a rough model of the hair so i'm just putting it in there to help inform me of the overall character and personality while i'm working and then later i'm kind of using that when i do my fiber mesh guide so it's just there to help give me an impression while i work so also something i'm doing in the blockout stage here is with these armor pieces and leather pieces i'm trying to keep them one plane thin because it's best and easiest to adjust it i can always adjust the topology so what i do is i utilize the thickness in the subdiv preview so you can see right here i hit d on the keyboard to check it out and i go over to the thickness and i start adding thickness so this is somewhat of a new feature in zbrush but not only am i able now to preview the subdivision but i'm also able to preview it with thickness and so i have creased edges on all the parts that i want to stay sharp and you can see me doing it here on the neck guard piece too so i do this with all the armor pieces i do it with the leather pieces and it's just a way for me to you know be able to revise and iterate on the model without committing to subdivisions or anything like that all right so the gloves pretty easy i just used the actual hand topology and just ripped off the hands as duplicates and here i am starting to sculpt in some anatomy also you can see my little tiny baby hands now i scaled them down to uh not interfere with the glove so they look a little silly but roughing in the anatomy here with um maybe the damn standard brush or a standard brush to carve in some lines then you see i work on the volumes with the clay build up brush that's always been my brush of choice for doing sculpture work really like you know to try to control forms you can see how i lay strips sometimes i'll lay strips perpendicular to the form or along the form but this is uh my general workflow just kind of sketching in lines figuring out where things are going to go and then trying to refine the forms using clay buildup so i'm going to come back to these arms they're you know by no means going to be finished i'm just trying to get them to a level checking it with the rest of the character and just because they're going to be shown but i'm not trying to waste too much time so here i am back at the glove using the mask to like start this wrinkle so you know this kind of stuff is a mix of reference that i find and also um just trying to sell the material on my model so you know sometimes i'll just be trying to flow with what forms are there try to reinforce like where it would wrinkle and whatnot so again a lot of damn standard and then the standard brush with a little chisel but just drawn in the seams and everything so here is uh the leather waist piece i wanted to show that um you know sometimes i just got to go in there and do some modeling so to get a nice clean edge like a loop a ring that goes around the edge i'm actually just extruding out the edges and then with the modeler going in there and welding it deleting edges and moving it out so this is like kind of typical modeling not something that you would like normally do in zbrush but it's nice to just be able to do it in zbrush but this is a way for me to turn a z-remeshed mesh into you know a pretty good mesh that subdivides the way i want and can maintain those uh corners there so it's a relatively good flow and most of it was auto generated also using zmodeler quite a bit here on this piece to make this belt loop so i used the modeler to make these little poly groups i used inset to inset the rectangles in there extruded it out deleted the faces now i'm bridging these and then i'm going to insert some edge loops so heavily relied on z model to do that it's nice to be able to do this kind of thing in zbrush and that's how i made the belt loops so once the topology is good i can give it thickness i can extrude it and then in this case i'm gonna actually subdivide it so i can start sculpting so uh in my armor piece there's a little bit of like a wrinkle in the middle i use the masking tool to draw that out and then i start sculpting in the leather sculpting leather has always been really fun for me what's fun about making leather is the beating it up so you can see now i'm starting to use my skin brushes to just start adding these like fine wrinkles and creases i mean leather is skin so you know you can use any kind of brushes you want but these kind of like fine line brushes i used to just scatter stuff then now i'm coming over and reinforcing these wrinkles with the damn standard brush so if you put some of these details at lower subdivisions too they'll look more soft you know like it's thick leather that's getting kind of memory folds and then as you go up you make these sharp wrinkles um so these type of like fine lines plus like just beating it up uh it just looks cool you know i think the reason why um leather is fun is that it's really forgiving too i mean there's no wrong answer really you just if you just keep working on it it ends up beating up the mesh and and looking more and more organic so having things be soft sometimes having things be a little uneven it's good so you can see right now how i did these like leather skirt bits i started by saving a morph target and then i just with the skin fine wrinkles brush sprayed it everywhere add a couple different resolutions and now with the morph brush i can come back in here and like remove some uh and now you get this like really complicated you know detail in a pretty quick way and then here just dotnet some damage on the edges okay so another thing i do is i'll do the stitch detail using a brush lazy mouth nice to get this kind of tight stitching detail and then what's fun is going back over this with brushes and stuff to beat up you can see i'm even making it wonky like on purpose right and then putting more of those memory wrinkles in there and kind of reinforcing that it's being stitched and overall it's fun you can't really go wrong you're just beating up the surface and that's what i think is really cool about leather all right so for the armor what i did to start out with to break it up after i committed to subdivisions so this is not preview anymore this is actually subdivided and then i come into the surface tab and i started playing with different noise i saved a morph target before which i'm always trying to do and you should always be doing that and that'll let me remove it so i'm just playing around here with noise hitting it uh reapplying it so that it's even stronger and then just going over everything with my morph brush so i can knock it back here and there so now most of the time that i'm sculpting i'm just dinging things up here i have the trim dynamic brush i'm just going over the edges which is really fun to do after i apply the noise too it has like kind of different angles that the trim dynamic brush is going to flatten down so it helps me make things look chipped and dinged and that's what i'm going for i just want it to look you know like like it was handmade to begin with and then it's been through some battles so imperfection's the name of the game so i just want to keep working on it so it doesn't look like a perfect 3d model and it just looks more and more messed up i'm also using trim dynamic like on the surface as you see here and that kind of helps that like hammered look and also just variation you know trying to be mindful that i'm not leaning on procedurals which can look artificial i'm i'm layering procedurals and then with by hand i'm going in and like flattening some regions moving some other things so that's going to help me like break symmetry and and make the surface like you see you see here i'm just like inflating i'll use the move brush whatever so here what i just did is i just did a cavity mask again i stored a morph target uh beforehand and now i'm dinging in like pretty strong so this way i'm gonna get these like big kind of dings or chips or something a damage essentially and then with that morph brush i can come in here and take out all the things that i don't want so i get these like organic shapes and that this just happened naturally by picking up the cavity of the noise that i already made so when i'm done i'm left with just a few little organic spots you know i don't want it to be too much but i just want to help it look like it's been eroded maybe or maybe it's part of damage or something now i'm coming in and trying to actually carve out this little like hero dent here on the side bringing up the edge so making a sharp edge there now adding scratches this is super fun you know with the damn standard coming in here to make a sharp edge but also making like these metallic scratches there's a scratch along the front there we go trying some other scratches and then sometimes hitting on dude just seeing how they look um not trying to be too precious you know i mean it's you know if they've been in battle just damage is gonna happen where it happens you know so i'm trying not to get too crazy about it but definitely trying to distribute it in an organic way so it doesn't feel artificial so i added these little uh rivets to all over the costume i think this tiny little detail helps bring its scale and believability so that's always something to pay attention to same process here just going to speed through it but like the other armor pieces too once i got the process down i did the same thing morph target layering the noise starting to manipulate it now i'm just doing the chips on the edges so bigger dings and stuff again now with the orbs brush doing a scratch crack type stuff doing it along the front too so it's noticeable helps break symmetry again i don't know why but for some reason doing the scratches is like the most satisfying part i love making the edges look you know really irregular too that's helping the handmade hand beaten metal look you can see here how i had to make the other armor pieces um using z modeler and then i'm going to go i'm going to take it all the way through the same process that i did the original armor pieces so once i know the process that's generally you know something a part of my workflow is i'll figure out some sort of recipe that's working for the character i might experiment you know on an individual piece and then once i got something down a look then i'll start to repeat it on the rest of the character i use zmodeler to make these uh simple pieces that i extruded too to make these like bent um pieces of metal that are like knives so using age polish trim dynamic again i layered the noise and then just trying to add that organic randomness um this is something i'm doing too if you notice i have the snake hook where the spray and so i'm just jiggling the surface and that's to make it look like it's it bent and warped again adding so much imperfection and then i'm going to come in here with the trim dynamic brush maybe the h polish brush and just go over edges and like hit them to sharpen them that's something i think is going to be really important so you see here i'm zooming in starting to make this chiseled sharpened look because these should look like dangerous and like knives and stuff you know so once i have this really irregular metal surface then coming in here and like polishing and sharpening edges is gonna help give it contrast and make it look a lot more sharp and catch the light so that's how i made the armor all right so back to the face so like i said i kind of started with the expression i already knew it i had it in mind like what i was going to do so just refining the sculpt uh you see me bouncing around but now i'm starting to focus a little bit more on you know bringing it forward and resolving some of these forms and stuff once i'm happy generally with the face now like i think the character or personality is in a pretty good spot uh i'm going to move on to detail just adding his badass nose ring right here you know he's got to get that jewelry if he's going to be a warcraft work you know and i feel like this bull like septum piercing is uh makes a lot of sense i actually just stole that from his belt buckle to start with too but yeah once the sculpt is in a pretty good spot um and i'm you know fairly happy with my primary and secondary forms the general shape of them then i start with the detail so i did the hd geometry workflow here again so you see i actually divided it five times in the um you know standard subdivisions and then an additional three in hd to get it pretty big so you see when i hit a on the keyboard here to like enter hd it's a somewhat small window so rather than have a tiling pour map i'm actually just gonna place all the pores with my uh brushes i'm just gonna i'm just gonna place all the pores on there all the pores doing it this way takes time for sure um but you know i uh i like the quality i get more resolution this way the reason is uh the window is small is because of how many polygons there's like a limit how many polygons it can even display so i did do hd but you know i'm limited to this window so rather than like stitch together a bunch of tiling ones i thought i'll just do this by hand you know so you know ultimately it doesn't take like that much time it's just a little bit more manual labor but you know i like the results so i don't i don't mind doing it just listen to some tunes or whatever and just grind it out and that's the first thing is i lay down like a bed of pores after the pores are laid down then i can start adding these fine wrinkles you see me doing here above the brow this is a really satisfying part for me too because this is sort of the uh reinforcing what's physically happening in the face so this i think this helps the believability that i'm adding wrinkles um where the skin would be stretching or compressing in the expression and just the more i add breakup and variety to the surface of the skin it looks more and more organic and it really brings the character to life which informs me again to go back and and start manipulating it so i feel really good once i get to this spot and then i can just keep reworking it and once i get my first pass at doing the sculpt with the detail i like to just make a quick test scene in maya so i can see what it looks like in arnold with you know a subsurface shader so like here's some of my early test renders just seeing what it looks like it's kind of a sanity check and to break the ice you know because at this point i've been working for hours without seeing it in its final form so this helps me like realize uh what i need to do in zbrush to push the character more how i want it to feel in its final form i also wanted to just briefly touch on this notion of paying attention and modeling details uh something i try to do in my work when it makes sense and for this character you know he's a very simple design so the textures and materials are obviously going to be important in keeping interest on those big areas but also paying special attention to like this belt buckle we're seeing right here which i also thought was an opportunity to kind of mash up this lord of the rings and and blizzard kind of homages and uh things like the buckles on the shin guards those rivets that we saw all the way down to you know the textured detail but paying attention to some of these little parts that might become focal points in your final images something that might you know catch someone's interest or maybe you want to do a detail shot just dotting a few of those around at work kind of bring up the overall impression of the quality or the level of detail just to spend you know more time on a couple little pieces like this all right so the uv mapping uh here i am doing some boring uv mapping just doing it quick you know not caring too much i just need it to be flat uh this is very much like a cg render workflow you know and i'm not i'm not trying to care about it like it's production one of the big things i wanted to do with this project though was utilize the udem workflow in substance painter for those that don't know udim is the use of multiple uv tiled coordinates instead of just zero to one so it lets me use multiple textures for a material which simplifies the process and adds a lot more pixels and so since i'm a game artist and i'm limited you know normally for work i thought it'd be really fun to just throw a ton of pixels at something and be able to do you know kind of what i'm comfortable doing in substance painter but at a much higher resolution so here i am unwrapping this stuff in maya um i'm actually just using that fbx that i exported uh in my my sc now so i'm just gonna uv these and then i gonna have to re-import these models in zbrush to apply those uvs if i want to make changes so i'm i'm making sure i'm gonna do that to update my z tool with all this uv information i'm doing right now but yeah just making seams and flattening stuff pretty basic using unfold nothing too crazy so here you can see all my you dim tiles so far multiple tiles and the idea is that these will all be 4k so right now just arranging them in the different rows that way i can separate like which material is what just visually here you see me exporting the high poly version of the orc as an fbx i've named all my sub tools on the right as you can see they all have the name of the mesh plus the suffix high and this export's going to take forever so i'm going to cut that out but you know i'm exporting a ton of polygons right now and this will be my high poly source mesh in substance painter and then i'm exporting all the meshes that i just unwrapped from maya so now booting up substance painter starting a fresh new scene and then i'm selecting the metallic roughness preset to get going we can change that later and then i'm going to choose that bake fbx that we just exported and then i'll hook up the hi in the source meshes also at the start of the scene i have to be sure that i enable use uv tile workflow right here because that's what i want i want to use them fat sweet juicy udims all right so now i'm going to load up the high poly change the suffix names and then set it by mesh name that's why i named everything high and low so i can get a clean bake so i'm doing a quick test bake at a low resolution to make sure everything's good it looks good to me so then i'm gonna do a high quality bake at full res which is gonna take a while so now hitting the big button and showing it on turbo [Music] all right now taking a closer look at these crispy deets um the head normal map i'm gonna get from zebra so don't worry about that but scooch around finding a problem in the uvs unfortunately there with the buckle but everything else looks pretty good uh resolution wise so i'm going to fix that any kind of errors that i find and then move on to the texturing all right so like on a separate day i had made this orc armor smart material so i just spent time up front you know before i knew exactly what i wanted to do i i knew i wanted to make this sort of material to use in this project anytime i need some kind of beat up armor so you can see here in the layer stack like some of the stuff i did we could talk about substance painter tutorials and stuff but i just want to show you i did invest in making the smart material first and then in the project i started assigning that to the armor bits i can edit the smart material as i need be same thing with the leather i use some of the smart materials that come with substance and mixed in a little bit of my own but that's the first step is just applying these materials or really these folders full of layers onto the different parts of the mesh creating the masks and then once the whole scene is kind of built out then it's just like tons of time iterating and then and then some really satisfying part which is painting things by hand you know like fading the leather or adding and removing um damage or storytelling or whatever but actually like with a you know with a pen and sitting down and doing it with your hand which is cool but in the beginning you're really like setting up the scene um and making sure you have all the layers and the tools that you need so you can start painting speaking of painting something i thought was uh kind of cool eventually i was trying to figure out like something interesting to do with the skin and if you noticed in my references i had a couple of these orcs with this like um kind of noisy pattern on their skin so i ended up making this quote-unquote vertiglio uh folder with some stuff and you can see i have like warp and levels and all this like clouds and stuff and uh ultimately it let me have a paint layer so i could actually paint in and out and get these uh complex shapes so uh i was you know i thought that was a pretty successful little effect there and um i layered things on the skin to end up breaking up even more with color and then another thing i did on the skin that i like to do a lot is uh use some curvature to get the cavities a little bit darker a little bit rougher and then i added some super fine noise to the base color i think having a sharp detail subtle detail but lots of detail in your base color is a good way to bring life to character renders all right so continued on texturing for a while but then it's important to export and get set up in arnold is what i'm doing right but any renderer that you're using it's important to start making the exports and get the link going because i iterate i do exports like multiple times a day so what i did was i edited my own export settings just to give me what i wanted in terms of the naming and the right channels uh everything that i wanted and packed the way that i'd like for this particular character and then i hit export and we're doing that udem workflow so every time i click export it exports 70 4k textures spicy dude so that was pretty fun um you know that was that was one of the main objectives of this project was to be able to use this udem workflow and to use really high resolution textures so multiple multiple 4k textures so i could just kind of paint to my heart's content and that was pretty successful i have a pretty old machine if you guys didn't notice already i've got like a 2017 computer it's not the best in the world and uh it was still able to handle it pretty fine not blazing fast but pretty good so i i would recommend the substance workflow if you're interested in that i think they did a pretty good job so once i export i hooked up the materials in arnold i did that tutorial before on the kind of special things you got to do to make sure textures coming out of substance are hooked up correctly but once they are then i get the basic scene roughed out and now that it's set up i can check it in the actual renderer and then kind of figure out what i want to change what i want to update to make it better then i'll go back to substance i'll work on it some more re-export and update those textures and then see what my update looks like in arnold and like i say that's part of my it's always part of my process so that i can refine it in its final form so i do try to get that set up relatively soon once all the materials are blocked out before i do a lot of finishing and i'm exporting and updating you know i don't know 10 times at least um a night just you know going back and doing a bunch of work checking it um so there's really no limit to that and i think uh finally getting your your final setup for me anyways super important you know because the whole time you're kind of working with blinders on a little bit if you're not in your final renderer also don't neglect hand painting details um it's kind of uh easy to lean too much on all the procedural tools in substance painter so be sure to be painting to that just the just the nature of you doing things by hand is going to make things look more organic also added this little birth mark this is from lertz in lord of the rings and i kind of transplanted it here i might work i was kind of thinking of them like alerts you can see i did the white hands too here i am updating the tongue texture so this is kind of an example of i went pretty far along and realized hey i don't have enough work here i don't have enough detail on the tongue i'm going to need to do something there so you can see i already have the arnold scene set up i already have the substance scene set up but that doesn't mean it's too late for me to update a mesh if i feel like it's worth it so i just update that mesh replace the high poly do another bake and again that's kind of part of the process so i'm not trying to feel locked in but i am trying to move forward so here i am painting that white hand of saruman right here i went a couple different ways with this obviously i just hand paint the the hand right here what i ended up doing though to get it in um arnold to look a little bit more interesting a little bit more believable is i had this actually be a custom mask so when i'm exporting these textures it actually spits out uh an alpha mask essentially of this white hand that i painted and then in arnold i use that to drive a layered shader so that the actual white hand you see me setting it up right here the actual white hand is a different material so i don't make it a skin shader so it's like a dielectric shader it's like a plasticy you know i'm trying to make it look like paint essentially but because it's not subsurface and i give it a little bit of height you know i'm really trying to push that material contrast and make it look like it's a another material on top of the skin dialing in the tongue now i got my new updates that i did that i told you i ran through the process with but also i'm mixing it with that noise that i always like to mix on stuff that's how i got the crispy details on the tongue i used that alligator ai cell noise cranked it up to get some pads here you can go too far but end up making it look like a cat tongue or something but uh was happy to do that too i'm always satisfied to see tiny crispy details like that all right so i thought the tusk little jewelry ring thing could use a little bit of something i thought it was kind of boring and it was a good opportunity for maybe a little easter egg because i wanted to put an inscription on there so i went to a black speech of mordor translator website yeah i did that and i said that right now and i typed in blizzard and then what came up i put into this kirk high or the aka mordor runes table and i just used each letter and i did the corresponding rune now is that the right way to do it i don't know but it got these cool mordor runes and then i put them on the tusk so i just sketched it in with red ink first on a simple layer and then i used that to make a depression with the height channel and then i used an anchor to pick that up in the grime to uh you know finish texturing get some like gunk in there and stuff but ultimately i'm happy with how it came out you know is it readable by anybody no but i think it helps it look orcish and lord the rings you know using these symbols of mordor so ultimately i'm pretty happy how it came out and that's my little uh little easter egg if you've made it to this point in the video and you're still awake drop a pogo in the chat where my nerds at all right so let's talk about some hair uh so here i am starting off with fiber mesh i'm using a preset of mine that i made just for guides uh you can get that for free if you're interested in doing this sort of thing too um this is a question i got pretty common i always get questions about hair but because i was going fiber mesh to maya people wanted to know a little bit more about that i'll probably make a video specifically on that thing down the road but the gist here is that i use fiber mesh to style these curves that will become my guide curves in maya and the reason i do that is i find it easier to manipulate a bunch of curves at once using the zbrush groom tools i think it's one of the best ways to use fiber mesh honestly and this hairstyle i knew was going to be you know somewhat complicated in terms of like the direction everything the style so here i am about to export these curves um exporting the file and then i'm going to change the file format to ma and then name it whatever i want and this is going to make curves so in maya i'm now going to import that ma it'll bring in all my curves and then i can use xgen's tools to make those guide curves all right so here are all the curves in maya now you can see it brings in a group full of curves resolution is not great but that's okay i also am going to continue to style it once it's in here but i'm going to create a description now then select all my curves and you can see in the description now in the utilities there's a curves to guides function and you can also go guides to curves so you can do a lot of tricky stuff in here in terms of translating but here you see they're orange that means they're guide curves so there you go now i got a ton of guide curves and i started that with zbrush i also loaded one of my previous grooms i save all my grooms that i've been doing as presets just so i can get all of the you know all of the modifiers all the little things that i've done to start with so i'm not starting from scratch and uh and that's what i did to get going so that way i don't have to do it all again so that way i don't have to do it all again and it gives me some place to jump off from so here's the scalp i duplicate the head mesh and use it as a scalp then i move the uvs because i am using udims but a little tip you know x-gen can't use u-dim so i had to repack the scalp mesh so that it was all in zero to one then i painted that quick mask where the hair needs to be and then there you go uh pretty fast setup i mean you can see here it's got the modifiers um so i'll have to go in and and re-change some stuff i'm also going to use some custom noise and stuff to get some more complicated uh clumps and everything but all in all i think this is a good overall workflow for making hair quickly here you go you can see now it looks like an orc in a pantene commercial okay hear me uh here's me doing some clumping now you see all the hair going through the ear right there uh that's a problem and here i'm trying to fix it using uh what's called region maps you can see i keep trying and it's like i just can't get the hair to peel back and then i realize you know what i need to just make separate descriptions for all these pieces of hair so that's what i'm doing right now i'm actually splitting it up and that's kind of my big tip that's my one of my biggest takeaways from this project honestly is this idea of like when doing a hairstyle because it just dawned on me that it'd be simpler if i had a description for the top part like this and i then i made a description for the front parts that are in front of the ears and then i made a description for the the hair that goes behind the ear i made a description for the ponytail so i really broke it up uh i don't really have experience using xgen in productions like you know cinematics and film and stuff but i have a hunch that this is what they do too i don't see any downside of doing it it actually even kind of worked out that i built a single description and then what i did is i split it up right but what i did was i duplicated it um so the work that i had made in the groom uh carried over so that might even be a good workflow if not then maybe saving as a preset just so you don't have to do all the clumping and set up you know multiple times but so that's what i did i'm working on the top part right here again i did a little trick you know i made a ponytail like holder and i made sure it was like rock and roll you know freaking orc metal uh ponytail holder and then uh the ponytail itself is a separate description so gave me the most control let me make uh the hairstyle look exactly like i wanted and making separate descriptions it's the pro move so obviously i had to do some eyelashes too i opted to not do um eyebrows eventually i didn't do eyebrows the whole time when i found when i was looking at ork pictures there was eyebrows and no eyebrows i actually did a version with eyebrows which i'll show you right now but i i asked some people and like i just you know the lord of the rings works didn't have eyebrows so i was like you know what no eyebrows uh but i did the stubble and then i also did a groom for the shoulder pad so a lot of groom a lot of grooming i actually even added groom to the arms to make hairy arms because i felt that was pretty orcish too so yeah the most grooming of any of the projects i've done so far but i just couldn't resist making this free armor pad i thought would be cool and you can see here using some custom noise to make the clumps kind of irregular adding a lot of noise to it and then you see how it looks all evenly cut and then adding a cup modifier and like randomizing those lengths really help shear the tips and then just add more and more break up i added some kind of curves i looked at some references kind of like a yak hair or something like that you know what i mean it's just like matted and dirty and uh you know clumped and i wanted the clumps to be irregular one of the things i was struggling with honestly was it being confused with his hair on his head which still might be the case but i just didn't want to do anything but black for both so you know that's just kind of a byproduct but i tried to make it as different as possible uh in the groom and then also i made it very dry rather than his gross wet hair so yeah that's what i did for the armor pad hairy arms hairy arms were just placing and grooming guides and then uh you know making some wispy burly man arms that's kind of what i was going for all right let's talk about chainmail for a minute i got this question several times about how i did the chainmail and uh how you can do stuff like chainmail so it's it's with nanomesh so here i am using z modeler going over to a face and saying insert nanomesh at every polygon and then i'm just selecting this uh chainmail mesh this is like a free brush you can get online maybe at the art station marketplace i'm not sure but it wasn't giving me what i wanted so here you see me trying to edit that mesh um you know not everyone's a lord of the rings nerd like me but i'm trying to get that lord of the rings chainmail which was cut from plastic pipe and so that makes these like flat uh discs and i really like the look of the chain mail i'm trying to emulate that so i kind of just go down this crazy rabbit hole uh and it melts my brain so you see i'm just gonna show you some of the crazy configurations i was getting into i ended up you know having to model it from scratch instead of using that brush and i just tried um a bunch of different configurations and you can see here like it's already like pretty complicated and then i'm like yeah that'll work so i'd test it out come into zbrush run nanomesh again and use this new mesh in an insert brush i made so here i am aligning it scaling it i'm like wait that's weird you know i'm missing a ring uh so i'm like all right i can fix that i go back here and this goes on for hours probably here i am i updated the mesh re-exported it importing it again gonna try to assign this whoop doesn't look right it's not perfect so here is the final mesh looks pretty simple i don't know why this took me so long it took me so long multiple days like i tried and failed and finally this is the final mesh that ended up giving me what i wanted so anyways now that i have that brush i came in here the second uh important part was the orientation so you see here it's important that the mesh you're using for nanomesh is evenly distributed so that you can tell so you can't tell that it's stretched because it needs to it's putting a mesh at every face and then using zmodeler i click spin edges and i came in here and i actually spun them so you can use the nanomesh parameters here to automatically do an orientation so i did that until most of it was right but to really get what i wanted which was for the sleeve to all flow in one direction and the rest of it to flow in another so it really looks uh you know like it has like a seam around the shoulder and it doesn't look all random i had to go in here and click these faces uh one by one so i took a little bit it took me a while to even figure out that that's what i would do but once it was done and the orientations were all right then i can show you so if i scale them so that they interlink and then i divide the mesh boom then i uh i get all the details so that's how i did the the chain mail it was important to have the right mesh that tiled correctly and then the orientation was important and i ended up having to do that face by face um but that was it then i have a a lo this mesh is also live once you have nano mesh so you can like move the underlying mesh around so once it's done you can go down to the inventory and you're ready to like make this for real you click this button that says one to mesh and then it creates a sub tool where it's not live anymore it's actually just all geo and then so if i um hide the underlying mesh i'm left with just the chain mail and that's it i think i might have set this to divide once in arnold so that it's smooth i did have supporting edges but here i just threw on a metal material so you could see it but yeah that's how i did the chainmail and for texturing i used substance source again just browse the library try to find a metal with some breakup and some interest you can't uv something like this because it's just too many polygons and you know i tried it's just crazy so i just ended up doing tri-planer projecting in arnold so to just throw textures at it that way i could break it up make it look a little less perfect and all without having to do uvs so his sword our homie orc needed a sword um i had to squeeze that in i i knew he needed it and just didn't really pay too much attention to it so just one night i set aside and uh and knocked it out and went through the whole workflow or pipeline again so i made a high poly and then i auto-generated the topology and uvs because who cares and then i baked it and textured it used the same orc armor smart material to start with uh and then you know busted it up and everything and then added it to arnold made sure the materials were good and then i could put it in his hand do some renders so that's the sword all right so then it came time to pose this guy so i used transpose master in zbrush it's in the plugin menu and this is the way i use most of the time to post characters it just merges all of your sub tools together and it lets you position everything all at once it's very much the modeler's way of posing and it just lets you skip doing rigs so that's what i did i had an idea of where i was gonna or how i was gonna pose this you know for pretty much the length of the project obviously i knew the facial expression and you saw my reference board that i have a general idea of the pose that i wanted so i just saved a different z tool so i'm not overwriting it i took time to pose it in transpose master and then when it comes to updating the scene and maya i just had to re-export all these meshes and for the most part i would just delete the original mesh and then bring in this posed one and apply the same shader because it has the uvs you know i updated it and everything so i'm just swapping them except for the head now another question i got quite a bit was how did i update the groom on the pose like how did the hair stick to the mesh that's actually pretty easy because x-gen is made to work with animations so what i'm doing is i'm just using blend shapes in maya so if you remember there's two meshes there's a head mesh and then there's a scalp mesh that's what the x-gen is attached so i'm bringing in the new posed head and i'm applying that as a blend shape to both the head and the scalp and then i'm cranking that blend shape up so the vert positions all snap to the new posed position and the hair just sticks to the head it's made to stick with blend shapes obviously because it's made to do animations and stuff so that's how i update meshes that's for all projects that's how i update the head that has grooms on it or displacement any kind of mesh that has a lot of info on it that i don't have to reset up i just use blend shapes to update the model as i work on it over time all right so now that it's posed it was time to do the final setups and render out the final images so what i usually do is do multiple setups i definitely knew i was going to do a portrait you know sort of shot here and then i tried to get a little bit creative try some different angles if you see at the bottom here i have uh five keyframes so what i'll do is i'll set keyframes for the camera i'll put multiple lighting setups if i want different lighting setups like maybe i'll have uh folders groups and then i'll actually keyframe the visibility maybe i'll rotate the whole group whatever you got to do and i'll put it on on a keyframe and i do this so that i can just do a batch like render sequence and get those images out so i was experimenting with lighting color positioning framing obviously just making sure things looked nice and once i did i set the renders to render with enough sampling to get a low amount of noise and so after i made those final images i sent them over to nuke which we should get into right after we talk about this video sponsor skillshare so i got a lot of things going on in uh in my life trying to keep it together it's always a struggle my brain is just a table with drawers spilled out onto it i mean it's a mess up here so i'm just constantly writing stuff down trying to get better at things and you know what i think would help me uh is this class here on productivity okay by thomas frank so this guy's pretty cool he's another youtuber um i mean i say another like i'm in his league or whatever but you know i look up to a lot of youtubers he's one of them uh i've seen some of his videos on youtube and i'm taking his class on productivity right now on skillshare so this is something that might be useful to all kinds of people it's obviously not just catered to creative people this is for organizing your work and life using different apps and stuff he's kind of a productivity guru in a cool way learning how to be better at productivity and management is something that i'm you know been working on for years really managing yourself managing your projects i think is huge and being more productive and just less crazy honestly like before i started writing everything down i just ideas would come and go i would be stuck kind of you know running in place and so yeah just writing things down and being more productive i think you can never be too productive in terms of managing like there's so much stuff going on today so being able to utilize calendars and all these different apps and stuff to like give yourself a schedule and be more professional in a way that it works for you and doesn't feel like rigid uh is something that i'm always striving to be better at so someone like thomas frank i'm pretty excited to learn some of the tips for him because i think he's great at this he's got he runs a very clean tight ship it seems over there on his channel and everything that he does with his website so this is the perfect kind of thing for me uh for where i'm at it might be something you're interested in and there's a ton of classes here on skillshare that you can check out this is just one of them but not only creative arts but things like photography videography and even productivity so if you're interested in trying skillshare and you're not a member already click that link below to get a free trial and you can watch some of these classes right now just watch some classes and get better at stuff i mean what you know what are you doing all right cool now let's talk about putting together the final image here we are in nuke so nuke was new to me on this project uh i'll say the reason i got new in the first place was just to do focusing so if you see here everything is crisp and sharp right and then we show the focus bam out of focus so this depth of field effect right here doing it in arnold looks great looks perfect you know it does look a tiny bit better uh than when you do it in nuke but nukes great it's the best like 2d you know compositing version that i've seen that you can do depth of field like this this allows me to do a ton more renders because doing creamy bokeh or depth of field in arnold and doing it noise free takes maybe almost four times as long to do a render so it's serious stuff so i just finally convinced myself to invest in nuke uh so i can do lots of other fun things but really to save a bunch of time so we're gonna go through uh one of the comps you can see here i have this you know multiple comps in here i've got my square ones i got my super 4k ones uh and then over here i got my um clay renders i just did them all right here and so we're gonna go through one of the trees and show you you know all the little notes what i'm doing to make an image and that's pretty much what i'm doing for all the images all right so let's zoom in here so i got going on right here is the render straight out of arnold uh well this is it because i showed you the focus so here's the arnold render and when i rendered it out of arnold i had the z depth embedded in the exr and new can pick that up and that's the reason why we're using it so this just uh changes like the crop it's a little geeky stuff here and i'm transforming it but here you go this is the first big step uh it's positioning it it's cropping it and it's uh doing the focus so now we do a little bit of color correcting a little bit of sharpening uh here's the background let's let's maybe go over that open this a little bit so here's the background i just you know did some google searching of fiery forests the idea was i wanted to make the final composition of him like there's a scene in the hobbit that was maybe a little bit of an inspiration but i just wanted to be like in like a war zoney kind of you know burning fantasy forest i thought it'd be cool i'm using the warm light in the render so i'm kind of tying all that all together i even have a flame reflection in his eye so you know trying to make it look like he's surrounded in fire i thought it'd be very cool so yeah so here it is after the crop and here is the background i actually flipped it upside down for this one um this is just moving in position and then i'm obviously defocusing this too you can see the awesome bokeh that you get and this isn't even you can get a lot more nerdy with this i did make it a little bit oblong to help it look more photographic and not perfect but yeah really the bokeh that you get from just doing a 2d defocus is pretty awesome so i'm doing that to get some background separation doing a little color correction on that i did a color correction uh on the render you know really just to turn the yellows into oranges kind of to match the fire and so here's the foreground and the background blended together all right here we go now we're jumping down here um i got some foreground elements these embers again probably just googled i'm not sure just got some embers and then uh moved this one and then i did some roto painting which is just masking so you know i got this this is what i made and this gets composited in the foreground so we got a foreground middle ground background thing going on now then what i did is i added this little glow see that it's kind of cool right so if we come in here we can see what's going on so here's it before here's it after so i just think this is adding more photographic irregularities that's what i'm doing here i'm trying to punch it up um so along with the focus along with these little fiery embers i think things getting blown out uh is a cool effect yeah just trying to make it look like it just got overexposed because the fire is so bright and uh making it trying to make it look more hot and then i added some grain nucleus you just add grain it's got like green presets so i'll come in here show you before and after so here's before the glow and the grain and here's after and this is so big it's another reason why i'm adding grain because this is a super high resolution image so it helps things hold up it's not something you're going to see it helps like there is some noise in the hair things like that so i just again i think it helps make it look photographic so this is the grain set to screen mode so it's brightening it up a bit and then also it's making the grain a little bit um less contrasty so now it's pretty subtle and you can see the overall brightness of this image is getting brought up now looks a lot more exposed correctly i think brighter is better i think in this case because we have a lot of darks in here so i'm trying to get this full range here's a little uh interesting trick i looked this up this was to do some chromatic aberration so you'd split out these channels here's green here's red and blue and then you're transforming it so you're actually just moving it a little bit and i'll show you the merge so uh what i'm doing here is chromatic aberration for those that don't know it's shifting the channels the color channels it's another phenomenon that happens in photography uh you can actually see it here in the photographic element of an ember there's you see this green edge right so there it is shifting it you get some blue fringing so this is just some nerdy pixel peeping stuff but gotta say i was pretty stoked i always left some chromatic aberrations so yeah it's subtle maybe show you right here so yeah it's subtle this is before and this is after so it helps you see this fringing the colored fringing softens it up a bit too again looks more photographic so here you go here's the final composition we got this cool bokeh in the background this like looks like it's fire everywhere reflecting on them got some embers a little bit of chromatic aberration and some filmic noise and this is where we started so there you go and then you can see the scene here i've got my three big old renders here and then these are all of my renders i did some square renders of of everything else so as an example here's another one straight out of arnold and then here's our final so you see the final's got some color correction going on um again with same format pretty much we got the backgrounds we have the ember elements got the color fringing i'm doing different focus you can see how this is getting a little bit out of focus as it comes close to camera this one's a lot more in focus since it's more of like a wider shot but yeah still loving the bokeh here loving the separation so this was really cool in terms of like a first experience with nuke i'm more than happy um you know i was planning on just using it for the focusing and now i think i'm gonna use it in all my projects i mean now obviously i invested in it and uh it can do so much more than this too by the way i can do particles and you know animation and video all kinds of stuff so this is just how i used it for this project and that's how i made the final images so that's it that is how i made this orc uh it was a fun project i i know it's a lot of time 80 90 hours uh i don't know if that sounds like a lot to you sounds like a lot to me it felt like a lot i was working on this project in and around other projects too so it wasn't just a straight shot and uh the scope you know got out of hand like it does so this was this was a gargantuan project i think the next few projects i do i'll probably have a little bit of a smaller scope for a little time before i convince myself to jump into a huge one again but i don't regret it at all it was fun i learned lots of stuff actually um some things i'm going to be taking with me on my next projects nuke i think is another crucial part of a workflow that i'd like to do for fun and uh and i just like spending time in this kind of world the fantasy dark fantasy stuff lord of the rings so it was uh it was a cool way to spend time that is it for this video i appreciate you making it this far that's crazy uh thank you for the questions and comments you guys been leaving if you left a question on the last video i hope i got you an answer that you're happy with if you have any more questions ideas for future videos leave it in the comments below always like to hear good ideas and things you guys want to see in future videos so until then peace out you

Channel: J Hill

Views: 67,845

Rating: 4.9749479 out of 5

Keywords: blizzard entertainment, world of warcraft, video game (industry), zbrush, sculpting, cg character, character art, character modeling, character rendering, xgen, xgen groom, arnold rendering, rendering characters, sculpting character, orc, lord of the rings, lurtz, uruk hai, blizzard cinematics, hyper real, jhill, warcraft, warcraft 3, blizzard entertainment cinematics, the lord of the rings, character artist, character art timelapse, zbrush timelapse, how to, making of

Id: _2s847pb0ao

Length: 60min 43sec (3643 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 09 2021