How I Render my Sculpts with Arnold | Tutorial (Maya + Arnold)

hey what's going on guys so in today's video i want to talk about rendering your sculpts in arnold so i've been uh putting up some renders on my instagram and i've got this question a couple times like how do you do those kinds of renders and also there's been some interest from some of you guys about arnold in general you know just learning more about it some of the nodes that i'll use so i thought let's make a video tutorial of rendering a sculpt like this one in arnold with the goal of making images like the ones i've made like this one and this one and these ones so if you've made some quick sketchy poopy scopes like this one right here and you want to do some like fancy renders with it then we're going to do that right now and also i think this tutorial is going to be good for you if you just want to learn a little bit more about arnold if you want to just dive in i think there's a good place to start and uh there's some nodes and stuff at the end that i think could be you know good little nuggets to add to your game all right so let's talk about doing fancy renders of your sculpts so here's my sculpt right here i did this like three hour study from a sphere you know so we have kind of a messy geometry and the idea here is to create a render setup that makes an appealing image like a presentation quality image of this sculpt which is more or less a sketch so i just want to be able to do something without uvs without crazy topology if you take a look here it's just dynamesh so you know pretty uh you know triangles and gnarly it's like pixelated so not crazy right so that's the idea behind this kind of render setup we want to make a procedural material that looks nice so we can do this like big high quality crispy render and we can talk about saving it if you want to add it to like later sculpts and stuff but we're gonna build it from the ground up right now so let's go over to maya here we go in maya basic setup and i'm gonna switch it over don't freak out i'm gonna switch it over to just a little look dev like layout that i made okay it's just laggy okay don't die on me maya okay cool so don't freak out uh so this is the arnold render view that's just right cha and then this is the material hyper shade i closed the browser just to give us some space i'm just keeping it nice and all in one place so that we can do our look dev and our render all right so first step we're going to import this model i exported that scene as an fbx so i'm going to grab my head sculpt fbx and you'll see it populate over here in the outliner all right so here are my models beam boom boom so i'm just going to grab all these i'm going to ctrl g to group it and then maybe we'll just call this we just named it now because we're super organized like that get it above the floor here and i'm gonna scale it up a little bit you know zbrush i started from a sphere so zbrush makes things small so i'm gonna make this generally head sized i just totally guesstimated this i mean so my numbers are not gonna be your numbers but when things are really tiny you know arnold's a physical renderer so some of your numbers are going to get pretty weird if it's like super tiny so i'm just like eyeballing this as a general head size but we're being loosey-goosey okay all right so here's the model after moving and scaling your model make sure to freeze transformations cool step one complete now we're gonna make a backdrop so this is a cool thing that you can do for all kinds of different renders let's just grab a plane here i'm gonna scale this up i'm gonna go to edge mode why don't i just like full screen this we don't have to do this right now let's go modeling expert so you guys can see okay so we're gonna make this backdrop so i can just select these edges here and then if i hold b and then middle mouse and drag i can make a little soft selection here and then i'm gonna pull it up yeah i'm gonna rotate it down and oh my gosh we got a little backdrop cooking here so this is like to emulate like paper hanging you know what i mean you've seen you guys seen this right a million times so this is going to make a backdrop it's going to make a nice gradient as you'll see and it'll just be a nice overall um backdrop okay so i'm going to hit 3 on the keyboard that makes it a sub d preview in maya and there we go we got a backdrop spicy okay now we're gonna make the camera create cameras camera and we're gonna name it because we're so organized render cam booyah so we're gonna go over the render cam and then we're gonna position this uh might be a good time too let's go back to our look dev for a second or just go to standard for a second okay so i'm gonna go to my render properties and i'm going to set the resolution for the first time here so defaults to this we're just going to start with a 1k square all right here we go 1k square good that's it so now when i'm looking through my render camera i can hit this resolution gate and i can see so i can frame this all right another thing i'm going to do is i'm going to set the focal length right here you see it's set to 35 that's like a wide angle lens we're doing a portrait we're doing a face and most your models are going to look better like this if you have a higher focal length portraits are usually 85 to 100 let's go let's go 100 right now so that'll look nice and photogenic another thing we can do is kind of just rotate this model a little bit which is a little bit more off axis okay so now we got our framing uh we got our scene saved so we're good for now you can also hit this little lock button uh so you don't mess up the camera i'll often do that so i don't mess things up now we're gonna make a light for the first time so let us make our first light we're going to go to arnold lights and we're going to make a sky dome light so this first setup is going to be pretty straightforward we're just going to get cooking with making a nice arnold render which is really easy and we can talk about you know how like the basics work and then we'll get a little bit more complex okay so we're gonna do skydome light boom uh now if i take a look at the attributes i'm gonna load an hdri image into the color all right so i'm just gonna do that by going there and selecting a file load it up and i'm gonna choose i just have a bunch of hdris so you know if you have marmoset or if you have substance you can just use one from there i think the one i'm using actually tomoko is from substance if i'm not mistaken you need hdr images to be like real like have a lot of data so they should be exrs or hdrs can't just use like a jpeg or something okay so i loaded in this image uh and also like i chose an hdr that has reflections you know you can see it's like a studio environment and it has reflections so now i've got my light set up i've got my backdrop we need to create a couple materials and because it's arnold it needs to be an arnold shader so we're going to go i actually have it in my favorites ai standard surface i can show you like how you would get it from the default you go here arnold shaders ai standard surface can you read this uh there we go ai standard surface this is the one this is the only shader you need in arnold it's one of the really dope things about arnold like hair is here and then everything else is here standard surface you do skin metal plastic whatever so we created an ai material and i always keep ai in front of it just so i know what's up like i know what it is when i'm looking at the nodes so we're gonna just call this uh [Music] model yeah that's weird and then i'm gonna assign one to the backdrop standard surface ai backdrop all right so for this first one i want to do like something with color and reflections and really make it pop all right this one's going to be like more of a simple setup like i said right but we want to present our sculpt in like a flattering appealing way i think with this one it makes sense to be fun and bright and colorful and super shiny seems like rad and also a good way to show off arnold's like you know render capabilities because just really simple stuff looks great because it's so physically accurate all right so that's the backdrop why don't we just uh do the backdrop real quick i'm just going to make it kind of blue let's change this to this hue saturation value and then i'm going to make it like a bright blue and then i'm going to make it rough like this is like paper or something you know and then i'm gonna lower the speck weight okay so boom simple rough blue material right now i'm right clicking here i'm gonna go to material attributes over here to the ai model material that we got going oh by the way we should make the weight to one it is kind of annoying that it doesn't okay boom all right so now for this one i'm gonna choose something pretty crazy let's go like a bright pink okay let's see how that is cool and then for the spec weight we're going to keep it to one we'll just lower it a little bit so it's not going out of control and then the roughness we'll just take it to 0.5 ior we're going to leave at 1.5 okay so this should be really shiny okay now i want to add a coat layer so we'll come into coat and then we'll first set the weight to one roughness we're just going to go 0.15 so the coat is a second spec so i have this kind of basic spec that's just kind of rough still and then i'm gonna this is kind of simulating like a top surface of like water or something with skin you always use both specks but just because i'm doing something super glossy and i wanted to show off the coat this is just a way to use two specular lobes which is an awesome feature anyways it makes certain materials look a lot better so we're getting more reflections here that's good uh we got it at 1.5 good and the ior we can set to 1.33 or water and it's cool if you if you hit this little thing there's like presets so i'm kind of simulating like we put water on our model let's do a render and see what's up first i'm going to open my hypershade i'm going to assign my model material onto everything ai model assigned everything boom all right now we might as well switch to our look dev setup geez louise you okay over here buddy geez maya's crying open this a little bit yeah let's open this a lot a bit here's 1k square uh we can go ahead and set this to 50 test resolution we got the render cam set to render and we're going to hit a render and then see what this looks like what does that look like bam ah now it's looking and now it's looking better sick now we're getting reflections here so now i'm turning it around that's actually kind of cool all right i think it's a little bright let's see if we just half it 0.75 yeah i mean look look i mean look it's already looking good right i think so uh we're gonna add a couple things that make it look a little bit better a little bit more like presentation worthy you know already i think we've got something that's looking pretty good um you can also see that the like use of this backdrop check this out so like if i move it when it gets like closer to it it starts to influence the model more because arnold is so physical it's calculating all these light bounces so we're actually can use the gi like use it as a fill light so if i move this backdrop farther away i do think she's kind of off center though so we can check out another useful feature which is this grid check that out yeah so we'll unlock the camera we will deselect everything okay i kind of want to rotate her a little bit more too like all right cool so let's pop out let's go to the perspective mode and let's add some stuff we're gonna add a rim light rim lights make everything better so we're gonna go to arnold and then we're gonna load an area light this is the only light you need other than the sky dome which is for hdris but area light that's your light that's it all right i'm gonna stop this render just because it's slowing things down so let's do this now we're gonna make it pretty big the rule here is again very physical so it's very much like the real world the bigger the light the softer the shadows so if i make this big big like this it's kind of like a big soft box like actually the one that's lighting me right now so we're getting softer shadows if it was more of a pin light it would be harsher shadows which means like darker and the edge of the shadow would be sharper so by making it big it's soft and i'm also kind of faking in this case like the bounce light or or a fill light from the side from like the backdrop maybe but for rim lights you could do whatever because it's kind of a style thing you can actually make the light smaller and you'd get the sharper lines and it'd be a way to you know accentuate some of the details on the side like that alright so we got that set up we're gonna choose kind of a bluish color just so we have some more colors going on and again we're kind of faking the um backdrop light so now the exposure we'll just set it to 10 right now this is the brightness we'll hit a render and see what we got hey look at that kick another use of a rim light is to pop the subject off the background it just makes it look like it's coming forward we're also doing that by the color choices you know she's this bright bubblegum pink and the background is blue so because those colors are so different they contrast each other so much we're getting a pop you know so if i just look from here you know it's readable even from here but you can see the the rim light you know doing its thing already on the ear on the cheek so i think it'd be kind of nice if it came a little bit more in the cheek you can actually see the reflection which is awesome right you can see the light so you can change these area lights if you want you could make this a disc and that's going to change the highlight and i can make it real big and you see it's getting softer now so pretty cool right so i kind of want to get the light coming on the jaw let's see if we can get that i'm also um being mindful to have the light point down a little bit lights on faces in particular lights just look better when they're pointed down in my opinion depends on what you're going for if it's going if you're going for some kind of something that looks natural it always looks better if the planes of the face that are pointing up are uh brighter probably because we're used to seeing people lit up by the sun i would guess but i'm not a doctor all right i think that's pretty good at 10 to be honest i played with a couple well another thing you can do check this out so i'm gonna go to 11 right and that looks overexposed now it's too bright i think it's too bright right but i can back the light away now that's what's so cool about arnold i mean it's it's very much like like you're doing a photo shoot it's just so physically accurate uh so it's really cool you have those options like that so another thing we do is bring it really close really close like this big fill right and it's just like bam oh my god it's so big this is crazy right but then we can balance it out take it down you know and now we got this nice uh light right here cool so i think this is better we got some light on the on the cheek and everything maybe we can go more blue huh there we go cool now we're cooking all right so now we got this like super glossy look and we got a rim light one more thing to finish off this first image let's also take a look at mesh lights all right here's the next kind of cool light thing i actually use this in my cyberpunk girl so i did a sphere that's what we're gonna do right now so it's like an omni light this glowing orb so just because arnold's so physical you just get different reactions from the light like this so i'm going to use this to illuminate the backdrop and we're going to get a backlight let's let this resolve and we'll look at the before and after so here it is before i'm gonna save it and now i'm gonna make this a mesh light arnold lights mesh light i have the the sphere selected so now i just turned it into a mesh light and then i'm gonna make this exposure high and then i'm actually gonna darken the backdrop so that we can get more of a gradient so i'm going to darken the backdrop like this right so now we have a darker backdrop but because i have this light now i can make my own gradient with it right hit render oh light shape okay so we're at 10. what happens if we go crazy what if we go to 15. okay that's crazy don't be don't be crazy 12 is a little much how about 11. um yeah i mean it's still kind of a lot we can call that all right let's check this out we'll save this so here it is without it here it is with it you see we get this extra pop we get a gradient she's popping off the background even more now and then look at all these like extra little light interactions in the the rims of the details so pretty nice right so with the rim and then with the mesh light we've got a couple of things going on so now we have this nice colorful image uh and it's got all these reflections going on and we just use basic stuff so now let's do a crazier one so i'm gonna save this as a new scene and then we're gonna get we're gonna get jiggy with it for this now setup what we're gonna do is make a clay like material now i'm not personally into the make something that isn't real look real i kind of like it when it's a little bit surreal myself and also we're not gonna be able to make it look super good if you're into like making something look like a clay like it's a trick like oh my god i thought that was a photo that's not what we're doing what we're doing is we're going to use some textures to add a fidelity to the model a lot of like interest and a lot of like complex detail that's subtle so that it holds up at a high resolution so it's just little things for the light to do and uh it just covers the surface in something so that it's not blank doesn't really matter exactly you know how you're doing it again we're not trying to simulate if it was made with clay but we are using some of those surface qualities we're going to use some bump maps and we're going to use subsurface scattering so that we make a complex render that just looks a lot more physical looks a lot more interesting and it helps present our sculpts alright so i'm just going to use some images that i produced using substance alchemist and i started with a material on substance source so you can get textures like this in a lot of different places what you need is a diffuse or a base color map a height map would be nice you definitely need a normal map and a roughness map i got mine from substance source ultimately and then i edited it in alchemist but you can get it from polygon mega scans has some free stuff so you can get maps like this it's really kind of an organic grunge map and you'll see that you can edit a lot of the stuff so it doesn't really matter exactly what you're using all right so what i'm going to do is i'm going to edit this material i'm going to go this material we're going to call this ai clay now oh my god we're doing it so now we're going to do is we're going to load a file texture i hit tab on the keyboard and i'm going to file texture so here we go now we got a file texture got a file node boom now i'm gonna load up my base color so i'm gonna go to my folder that has it i actually edited the the map to add some little like tiny dots in here a little bit of color variation you can see here though right it's like an organic grungy map we're going to plug this into the subsurface color so having like these little tiny dots of detail if you can see it but it just helps give it a little bit more detail that's what i'm going to use you can see it automatically changes the color space srgb this is correct and then we're going to plug in the out color into subsurface color there we go we actually uh missed a step if you remember i just took this sculpt straight out of zbrush and i didn't do any uv mapping and stuff because i don't want to wasting my time doing that so that's part of this setup is we're going to make this agnostic of uvs we're going to make this 100 procedural so you can you can put it on any model so to do that we're going to leverage the tri-planar node now just like in other programs the tri-planar node it projects the texture like in space so this is going to work great in animations like if you were to move this model the texture would stay in place but we're just using it for like a fancy pants render so that's totally fine we have to first go from color to input and then out color to subsurface color we can actually put in base color first so i can show you so why don't we do that and then we'll hit render there so now you can see it it's actually on the model and there's no uvs pretty cool right so why don't i uh reduce the glossiness just a tad here let's take the uh gloss down we'll do the color uh why don't we just do this and then we'll turn off the coat for now and there so so here is our texture projected on there no uvs awesome now you might be able to notice some hard seams depending on your model so here's the thing about the triplaner node because it's projecting from multiple angles you want it to blend a little bit so i'm just going to set this blend to 0.5 so this is going to like feather the projected textures so you don't have it like visible seams now we're going to make this a subsurface material so i put this in base color just so we can check it out so i'm gonna cut that so now you see uh we're gonna plug this out color into subsurface color so there we go now here's our node so far our network so we'll go over here subsurface so what i can do now base color don't need it anymore we're at zero because we're going to do subsurface color we're going to make that 1 the weight and then the radius i'm just going to do a mid gray radius is how far the light spreads if you're doing skin this color is important but i'm just doing this middle gray because i don't care about color in this case i just want the light to spread but i don't want to spread too far so i'm doing a middle gray okay now for the scale i'm going to change this to i'm going to make this a lot smaller let's start at one point or 0.15 and then for the type we're gonna do random walk v2 which is awesome random walk is a great subsurface calculation blender has this now too but then arnold came out with v2 and it's even better it's so good it just makes everything good so there we go we got it at v2 and then this anesthetic anisotropy anise anisotropy anisotropy the end the anisotropy we're just going to set this a little bit this just adds a little bit of direction to the light you know again in this case we're being wishy-washy but i just like that it it adds a little bit of more imperfection again the goal here is to add detail and subtle nuance to the shader to make it look more physical to make it look more interesting so this is just a little bonus here you don't have to do this i just put that in there to make it more spicy all right so now we got the subsurface ready so now i need to duplicate this tri planar node because we're going to make more stuff so let's just duplicate this three times all right so i don't need this i just need this node so we got this node all right next up let's do roughness so i'm gonna do another file texture and we're gonna load the roughness from my texture set now you see it came in raw perfect that's what we want for roughness and we also want alpha is luminance for roughness and we need alpha is luminance so that it drives the value of the of the roughness so this is a feature you have to enable for roughness okay because technically we should be using out alpha we can't connect an al alpha so this is what we're going to do you know if i try to connect the alpha it doesn't let me write because again alpha is just a black and white it would go into one channel so what we're gonna do is we're gonna put the alpha into r and then we're gonna do the out color from r and we're gonna go to coat roughness we're actually gonna put this into the coat roughness which we'll see in a second again because we can control the two specs independently now so another way of thinking of it is like we have this general light re reflectivity from the surface and then we have this coat on top like again like if we spritz a clay model with water or something and there's going to be imperfections in that coat and that'll be what's interesting in the light reflection so it's the top layer so i think it's a good place to put it all right so let's go over to the roughness or the coat and let's set the coat we'll just do 0.5 for now and the ior will do 1.5 which is bright okay so let's see what we got now when you see that big window come up that's just arnold converting the texture to a tx file all right cool so here we go definitely light scattering right but i think uh too muchy also i think we're gonna have to up the subsurface samples because it's so noisy so let's do that go to the render settings let's turn ss to three and then let's turn the subsurface to 0.1 for right now and then we'll hit another render and see how this looks still we got some interest going on right a little bit better for this setup i think it's still it makes sense to darken this background again we're going to keep that color contrast but it's not going to be so much so we can go a little bit more blue and then we can go darker maybe a little bit less saturated all right there we go looking a little bit more tasteful this is our serious render okay we're being very serious now this is serious so we'll pause this one we'll save this one and we'll see some progression here all right next up let's do the normal map all right and we get to talk about how arnold is weird about normal maps let's load another file texture we're going to go to the normal map all right it changed it to raw that's correct and again we got to do alpha is luminance i know this sounds weird um but i've looked it up it checks out this is what we got to do other thing we got to do is we're going to use a bump 2d node so now what's weird is that the way you're supposed to connect a normal map is the out alpha of the normal map goes to bump value i really don't know why we're going to do al alpha to r and then r to bump value and there it is connected and then we're going to go out normal to normal camera that should make sense and then we're going to change this to tangent space normal map because that's what it is that's what those purple normal apps are those are tangent space normal maps all right so that should be good to go let's just do a little region here and double check i think we're also going to have to increase the resolution here so let's go test resolutions go to 100 now do a render see how it goes we might even need to increase the glossiness so let's say we want to increase the glossiness this is how you do that we would uh select our roughness map you can actually name this if you wanted to but anyways okay it's named now okay so we're in the roughness map so what we could do is we could play with some of these color balance features this is i use this in arnold all the time this is another great thing in arnold we can edit this stuff right live and we can like tweak it and iterate on it so this is roughness and i want right now i think it's too rough so let's make it uh glossier which would mean we need to make it darker boop so i just darkened it so now by darkening the map you see it got darker up here we're making it glossier because we're reducing the roughness it's a roughness map so pure white is pure rough i just want a little bit more interest in the reflections all right cool yeah so we got some shine here let's just take it to negative one and call it a day so here i'll let this render and then we can see what that looks like i can actually see the uh hotspot now so i think uh we want to go negative 0.5 yeah that's looking better so let's let this resolve and we'll take a look and then we'll add the next map wait let me let me pause it i forgot a step to get our normal map to be correct let's go through this again and let me show you this step all right let's name this again good so we got the out alpha going to the input r right so far so good out r to bump value so far so good in here uh it's connected to both value and we got tangent space normals there's one more thing because this map is coming from substance painter arnold does something a little bit weird and that's it flips these channels and flipping green is correct but flipping r is not correct and this is on by default so whoops so there you go now we should be good i'm going to render this and we're going to see what this looks like all right cool this is a good place to stop it so i'm going to stop it so i'll save this so we can see where we're going but now we can see things a little bit more clearly i'm going to come over here and i'm going to lower this two to get things going a little bit faster okay now we're going to add our last map that's going to be the height map and i'm going to use that as a displacement map so we're going to talk a little bit about displacement and some of the awesome features that arnold does with it but as a disclaimer again my maps are coming out of substance painter specifically they're coming out of alchemist so i don't know if it's different if i exported it from something else but i assume not it's a 16-bit displacement map and that's not great displacement maps should really be 32-bit to have the full info to get an actual like like model recreation but it's gonna serve us okay because what i want out of displacement anyways right the fundamental use of displacement is that it actually changes the model so it's going to change the silhouette and we can take a look here about what would happen if it was really strong but arnold has this auto bump feature which also uses the displacement as a bump map and all the shaders you know recognize that as model detail so even though the displacement of the mesh itself isn't that detailed it's kind of chunky it using it with auto bump ends up making it look really cool anyways so i'm going to add that now and that's going to give me that really crispy level of detail that i want and then we can take a look at lighting this thing to make it like really nice okay loading another file texture let's grab that height map boom all right good coming in raw good alpha is luminance good anytime you're using a black and white map just just enable alpha's luminance there's really no downside okay now we need this to go into our triplanar node again so input out alpha r and now we need to add this to the displacement so that needs to go right here now you could just click here uh right cha the shader group which is this little guy right here you could just you know connect it right here from the get go uh but i didn't do that because i already have my nodes set up right so i'm just gonna i'm just gonna make this node myself which is this node displacement shader so you can see it actually connected to this but i don't want that so i'm going to go out color r to displacement and then displacement goes to displacement shader alright so here we go maybe i can do this and just make it like really nice oh wow look at that so we got the displacement shader set up good uh now in here we'll go into arnold auto bumps already on good now scalar zero value this is the mid value or the actually it's the no displacement value okay it defaults to zero which is black if you export a 32-bit displacement map from zbrush that also defaults but you can change both and so the one coming out of substance gray is no displacement you can tell just by looking at the map here can we see the map all right so here's the displacement map you see it's gray if it was a black it would just literally be almost black you couldn't see anything but you can see like little details in here so there you go all right so we set i have to set this to 0.5 now i actually did a test and i know that to get minimal distortion i'm actually going to lower this a little bit i'm going to lower this like .48 uh 0.49 so i'm going a little bit under i just don't want to waste a render but you'll see like when you do it it'll distort it like i actually lost some volume so i changed it to 0.49 so i don't lose that much volume also we'll leave it to one just so we can go bananas here and you can see what's happening and then i'm going to show you how i'm going to use it actually in this case okay last step for displacement to work you have to set up your model settings itself the actual mesh settings so i just clicked my mesh here so in the head shape you can see here's an arnold tab here we go we drop down here subdivisions good so this is i want it to subdivide on render iterations will do three the more iterations the more detailed the actual displacement is this is the same thing as subdividing in zbrush we'll go to two for now maybe we'll do three when we do the final render but then also here we have to enable auto bump there we go these two settings right here and we're good to go so now when i hit render it's going to subdivide the mesh first and then it's going to use that auto bump calculation to derive a bump map for the remaining detail that the mesh can't do from the subdivision so you'll see the effect so we have this saved now i'm going to hit a render and then we'll see what it's like i'm actually going to pop this back up just so we can see even though it's going to take a little bit but i'll just do a region here like this all right so how do you think it's coming along is it pretty good is this pretty cool yeah you can see it working though right i mean it doesn't look it uh it uh it might not be what we're after but it's pretty cool right all right so a couple things i'm going to greatly reduce the intensity and then also i'm going to change the scale of everything and make it smaller make the detail smaller so that it's a little bit more fine-grained so another thing to a caveat i'm going to make things really subtle right now because of the type of sculpt that i'm showing it is a girl and i think the smoother surfaces and the more subtle detail is better whereas if you were doing like like i don't know an uglier guy or you know it got a lot of wrinkles or if it was a sketchier sculpt that just has more brush strokes in it then you could really lean into these type of effects because it just you know helps meld everything together and give it a lot more surface detail but in her case i i don't want this particular sculpt to have too much noisy surface detail because i think it distracts from like the actual sculpt itself okay so let's do those things first let's greatly reduce the strength so i'm gonna go that's one right we're gonna go point zero eight so that's pretty small right so we're gonna do this i'm gonna do this okay so now you can see the detail coming through right here on the glancing angle you can see right here's the depth so a lot shallower still there still interesting kind of looks like stone maybe you know or something like that okay so now let's make this detail smaller let's talk about tiling it now to me the easiest way to tile it would be just to grab one of these place texture nodes and then use it for all of the uv coordinates that way i only have to change it one time so you can see i'm actually it disconnects it automatically when i plug it in so this one is going to be going to all of them so you see here we have a repeat uv let's just try four all right cool so four is looking pretty good maybe we go five let's actually go to five and then we're gonna do a full render so we're gonna do repeat five and then we'll do a full render and see what the details look like now here's our image so far so you can see the amount that we're repeating that detail um looks okay maybe a little bit too strong so here's a couple dots i think i'm gonna reduce the glossiness make a little bit rougher i'm gonna make the displacement even more subtle and then i'm gonna place a new light we're gonna turn off this hdri and we're going to do purely area lights lighting this thing i want to show you how we can turn it into like a much more dramatic studio setup so here's our image now and let's make some edits for roughness we have it on let's go like that so now we just made it a little bit more rough than it was backdrop we're going to make it real dark and then for the hdri right now intensity we're gonna make it zero and we can always bring it back we're gonna make a new area light and scale it up again we can make it a disk and now i can go look through selected and then i can position my light like i'm aiming it so again i wanted to be a top down light i want to be able to see the teeth still i want to cast a little shadow on the nose and i want this light to end so hopefully we get a little bit of a shadow here so that the rim catches it on the other side but i want to like follow the contours of the face i want to really like show the contours of the cheek since we're doing the light positioning i'm going to drop this down on the quality and then we'll do a quick render all right so it looks like the intensity is a bit much is it because of how close it is yep so back it up maybe i can go a little bit more up into the side there we go now we can even fine tune this shadow edge so let's just render this region and we can take a look at the shadow edge real soft so like i said before you can actually just change this by scaling it down so i'm going to scale it down a little bit and that shadow is going to get a little bit sharper i think i already like it you can see the contours of the face here we go see these form changes right here the wrinkles pretty good cool sweet all right so now i'm going to do another render and let's see where we're at all right you can see the light coming through already see how there's the planes of the face are better defined because we're using this light setup you know we're really like sculpting the light around the face now by positioning it we have this kind of darker region we have this kick coming off we can actually take some saturation off of this rim too i think it's a little little saturated but you can see already right the difference between is what we had before and this is what we have now so it's really showing the model a lot better right and that's that top down light and that's the shadows right now i think the frequency of the detail is a little bit like scarring you know i don't want it to be confused with scarring so i think it needs to be a lot smaller or a lot bigger so i'm going to try to go really really small and then see if we like it and then i can always go really really big let's go 20. yeah it looks like we can actually see the repeat so that's no bueno so let's go so let's go two and two okay i think this might be better cool since we're here let's pull a little bit of color out of the rim here maybe we even lower the intensity we can always make the mesh light brighter still so we're still getting like illumination like around the edges of the hair and the um earrings but this way the rim or the fill on this other side here is not so much all right cool maybe it's a little much but i kind of like it for now so we could leave it for now last little bit i think the subsurface is a tiny bit much so i'm gonna reduce the scale just a bit all right this looks pretty good i think we could just render this right now and call it a day but let's like make it just a little bit spicier what i want to do is i want to use a curvature node so we can pop out all the little edge detail all right so this is another good little lesson for people into arnold we're going to use a couple more nodes now and we're going to get we're going to up the level okay we're going to we're going to turn this clay to 11 right now that's such an old reference dude nobody knows nobody knows what that's from okay so we're going to do ai curvature and we're gonna do an ai composite node okay so we got extra nodes coming on here so what i want to do here what i want to do is use the curvature node to make a small to pick up the small edge detail of not only our model but the surface detail that we've applied and i'm going to mix it together with the diffuse map itself and then because that's plugged into the subsurface color there's going to be some cool light interaction and really what we're going to get out of this is just more crispy details and we get to use some extra nodes here we go we got to get it after the tri-planar node so this is the diffuse and then we're going to go out color to a good so now we got the triplanar projected base color going into a and then we're gonna put the curvature into b which is like the second layer which you'll see that makes sense in a second and we're going to connect the composite node okay so now we've got this extra thing in here the composite node we can tell it its operation or its blend type and we can change that to screen so screen is just the lights same thing in photoshop right it's just the light values more white is more opaque and black is completely transparent so we're going to use the curvature to make a black and white input that's going to screen on top of the diffuse you know you see what i'm going to talk about in a second all right so i'm going to select the curvature and i'm going to hit this button right here which is isolate selected so now i'm going to hit render now i'm looking at the curvature and then we'll get to see what we're cooking with here so radius i'm going to put the 1 spread we're gonna drop to 0.9 threshold let's up this to 0.85 maybe kind of a bug either click try planer in back because there's kind of a bug updating but here you go now you can see it right here's the curvature and you can see it's picking up the details so i just want the edges though so i'm going to start playing with this stuff okay now we're getting somewhere uh bias will go five and we can up the multiply the multiply is like the value i'm going to dial that in once i get what i want but let's let's keep it at 2 right now so let's see if i drop it nope a5 no okay now we're getting some edges here now we're getting some edges here so i'm looking for white on the edges but then still a little bit of detail like hopefully some some sharp detail and let's just see what it looks like okay a little too muchy all right so now when we do the render you can see this edge getting brighter right kind of looks more chalky more waxy all right so now you can see by doing that we get some more extra like interest in the shader that's based on the model itself as well as the little texture details in the maps to mix it even better we could even darken the base color again by going into the file node itself and then we can lower the exposure just a tad getting a little extra chalky in here so we can go to the curvature we can take the multiplied down to like 0.7 so now we're still getting light edge detail but the contrast isn't as high cool that looks cool yeah so i think we're good here now the next step is to make this a final image right to make it full quality so a couple things we're gonna turn on the depth of field in the camera gotta have that doff dude gotta have the doff and then we're also going to up the samples of the lights and do the like we're just gonna do higher quality render settings so first things first let's go to the render cam let's turn off the grid here's a little trick on how i do my depth of field we're gonna create a locator when you create things it's automatically selected so i'm gonna hold v on the keyboard and then you can put this wherever you want it's so laggy i don't know why all right we're just gonna get this in the eye and i'm gonna scale this locator up and now we're gonna jump back in the render cam here we go i can just select this locator now whenever i want and i'll go display heads up display object details and this tells me how far it is from the camera 22.6 so that's my focal distance in the render cam shape come down here to the arnold tab and then enable the doff and then 22.6 and then aperture size let's start at point five all right now we're gonna come over here and we're just gonna do a strip so we can see the roll off of the focus here all right so we can already see we're super out of focus on the ear probably too much i want to be subtle in this case you can go as ham as you want with this but i'm going a lot more subtle for this image overall right so let's go point one five and then i'm just gonna go eye to ear here yeah that's nice so it's it's out of focus and the eye is in focus that's pretty good all right so aperture size i think we're good we got the depth of field going perfect now the last thing to do remember to do this too for your renders is the light samples actually you see here the samples in this light is one we gotta hit that to two so if you didn't do this step the light itself would have noise in it so even if you did a super high render settings which is what we're doing right now we come over here this is for the samples so this gets rid of noise right so we're going to go up in these we're also gonna go advanced use auto bump in sss so that's pretty cool too so now that's gonna again it's gonna take a longer longer to calculate so now this image is gonna take a while and also we can go uh test resolution 200 for a 1k 1k this is probably going to take a few minutes but now we're going to render we'll see it in its full quality and uh see what we got uh before we do that actually i feel like making the background even darker all right cool so this is what we had a moment ago let's let this resolve and see how it looks all right here is our render let's hit stop and let's save this bad boy because this took a while this took seven and a half minutes um you can see we can still resolve it even more this is also 1k so i'm going to render this with a little bit higher samples i'm going to go 6 right here probably let's talk about exporting this so say this is your final image and you're ready to export you need to come up here and go file save image you want to navigate to where you want to save these images and then you want to name it so i'm going to name it clay 02 in this case then you need to add dot exr you could also add jpeg you could add png so this is kind of a weird quark about saving stuff from the arnold renderer i'm not sure if all versions of maya and arnold are like this but it's just a strange thing that's pretty unconventional to know that you have to add the file extension to get the kind of file that you want now we want to do exr because that's the highest quality image that's going to be you know 32 bits it's going to be a big big image but then you can convert that to 16 bit in photoshop which still gets you plenty of room to play around with it like say we save it right now last little note i'll mention is something that you can do maybe you don't want the backdrop maybe you want it just for the bounce well you can come over here in the arnold settings of the mesh shape right here you can turn off primary visibility and then when you render it's going to be all black but when you save that exr it's going to come in you can make it come in as a transparency and then you can just do whatever you want for the background you can leave it black a lot of my images i just leave it as a black void but you could also just paint your own gradients or put any kind of background you want so that's another choice that you have too when you're making your final composition all right so i want to show you my settings for the final image that i made so in my render settings here if you come over to the common tab you see i changed the dimensions from 1k i just put in the portrait dimensions for instagram because i knew i was going to share it there and it takes up more space and it's a good resolution for you know the portrait and i can render this larger too for extra details so in the arnold render tab you can see what i put in for my samples i did six camera samples and i did three everywhere else except for volume and then in adaptive i enabled it and i set this to 12. so what adaptive sampling is is instead of changing this number to 12 which would take a really long time on my machine it would take hours we're setting this to 6 and then this adaptive sample is like using this threshold of pixels to figure out if it's noisy it needs to up the samples and this this is the maximum it would go to so kind of on a pixel by pixel basis you might want to think of it that way it can go to 12 if it deems it necessary so this is just a way where i can get a little bit of a shorter render time but get a smoother render and because i'm using depth of field that really comes in handy so let's pop over and check out the final image so here's the final image in photoshop i just wanted to show you how i make my final images i render it out with transparency so if i were to so when i open the image in photoshop i say to use transparency and you can see it just naturally does that as long as you don't have any objects in the background so you get this clean matte already then i get to build my background how i want i get to like choose colors if i want to do a little bit more color you know the value and then i make the gradient myself so this gives me the most control i get to experiment and then i did some color correcting a little bit you know if we pop in here we can take a look so i just did a little bit of texture sharpening added a little bit of warmth and color so there's some subtle blue in the background subtle warmth in the character just to give it some color so it's not desaturated and pop it off the background make it a little bit more interesting but this is how i do my final renders for presentation of my sculpts and now that i have this material you can save it so if you come over here uh i could click this ai clay right here and i could export selected network and then i would be able to load that material and it would come in with the textures too so that's what i do you could also just save this scene which i also do you could just bring in different models here and it's already set up for you and you can just assign this material and it's all procedural you don't need uvs so that's what's cool about this setup and this is how i do my renders for my quick sculpts and studies and stuff if i want to make them a little bit more presentable so i hope you learned some stuff i hope you give arnold a shot it is my favorite renderer right now and this is how i do my own stuff so if you do end up using this kind of method to make your own renders of your scopes i'd love to see them so definitely tag me on social media if you're going to post them there you can also come hang out in the discord ask questions and share work in progress there with some other people that like to do cg art so that is it for this video hit the like button if you did like it you learned something subscribe if you are into videos like this and until the next one peace out [Music] you

Channel: J Hill

Views: 33,126

Rating: 4.9869776 out of 5

Keywords: arnold render, how to, arnold render maya, arnold render tutorial, arnold render settings, arnold render settings in maya 2020, arnold render maya 2020, arnold render 6, digital art, digital sculpting, rendering in arnold maya, rendering in arnold maya 2019, photorealistic rendering in maya arnold, lighting and rendering in maya and arnold, rendering sculpts, render without uvs, jhill, cg art, presenting your sculpts, clay renders, rendering clay, zbrush to arnold

Id: ot0CS1JpbHk

Length: 51min 15sec (3075 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 19 2021