How to bring Real Life Objects into Cinema 4D: Photogrammetry Start to Finish.

[Music] hey everybody cush mitt with rocket lasso with the first official big tutorial I'm super excited because we've got Aaron Cove Rhett hanging out man what's going ok it's going really well thank you so much for having me I'm so excited that you're here I'm so excited you're gonna be here on the first tutorial your work is incredible but even if you don't know his name you've probably seen his work the main one that jumps to mind is you are the one who created and posted the harvest render which I'm the pumpkin guy it's beautiful like old timey painting like it's fabric and it's just such a beautiful still life so everybody knows that one because it's like what that's see that's amazing well thank you very much yeah it was it was a really exciting personal project that I worked on last year and I really got to dive in and try out a lot of new techniques and new processes some of which made it into my NAB presentation in Vegas this year which i think is partially why I'm here so that's very exciting is 100% why you're here because I watched your presentation and became obsessed with some of this photogrammetry stuff and then you and I started chatting back and forth and getting into a lot of detail is like dude we've got to record this we got shared that's such a such a great kind of workflow in technique and it's just so there's something incredibly satisfying about holding a physical object and then putting in the computer and then making a thousand clones of it like it's so much fun yes exactly especially like someone like me who I had really haven't dived into like ZBrush yet so being able to like quickly translate that into until I can actual 3d object is really cool so having said all that why don't we get into what we're officially doing here so Aaron what is photogrammetry photogrammetry is a really really cool process where we can actually take a bunch of photos a huge sequence of images of our actual physical objects such as in this case a little garden gnome and what we can do with that is we can actually take again about like 90 to 100 image sequences and we can feed that into an image processing tool in this case such as a tool called mushroom that we'll be using today and what that will essentially do is complete a series of tasks to reconstruct like a a three point cloud of that asset from there we can mesh that and actually have a 3d object of our skin that yeah exactly now we're gonna get into the specifics of some of the software in a second but before we get into that let's talk a little bit about what makes for a good candidate for this type of workflow because first of all there's a lot of objects that this isn't the right way to go about doing it if you're going to model something very kind of a mechanical you know like an example if I just hold up this cup like this cup is really straightforward that's a couple of circle splines and a loft it's really quick to make they'll be silly to try and do photogrammetry on something like that so you just held up the gnome which is what it was the primary inspiration for this I'm the one who actually went and did the photo sequence here so I had to go and buy a different gnome this cute little guy now one of the problems is is that the only gnome I could find was significantly smaller than yours which introduced some extra challenges here and I was a little hesitant about that but it's like you know what it's almost like the worse the scenario is that we're dealing with and the more it should be helpful for people for ways to get around that but that's what we're actually using but I want to do a couple quick examples of things that would be not such a good candidate not such a good candidate would be very geometric shapes the very mechanical like if you have like a computer circuit board like you wouldn't do that because it's gonna be rough and organic and blobby and then another bad example would be something very shiny clear glass this will not work at all first of all it's transparent the camera's gonna see right through it it's not gonna have any idea what to do with it so that's a dead end right there and then another bad example would be something very shiny so another example here I've just got this nice copper Cup which is holding all of my pens so I love this Cup and I love how shiny it is but that almost makes it instantly invalid and then even along those lines you can see if we were to look inside the cup say oh whoa you can scan all the pens and pencils and everything is like well once again those are very geometric and it's gonna be really hard the camera can't get inside to get the detail of the individual objects so you really want something that's maybe a little bit bigger very flat or mats rather not flat but a matte type of color right yeah and there are you know if you are like maybe a client is delivering something that is like a specular or or very reflective surface the you know one of the workarounds potentially if you're willing to sort of tamper with that asset a little bit is to actually buy like matte spray paint and you can actually spray these assets to get a little bit more friendly of a surface to be scanning of course then you'd be you knew you'd be tampering with the physical object so you kind of have to it's circumstantial if you can do that or not buy doom but yeah that is a that is a factor and if you hey if you want to go and destroy that said object okay exactly we'll get into some more details here because I found some extra limitations even with this little gnome and we'll get into that but some examples of objects that totally do work is the first object I scanned and was a potato the potato is it's nice and round it's very matte there's a lot of variation and texture and that wouldn't be terribly hard to model this but this texture is like really great so this turned out to be a really good candidate for that I've also got this dog bone which I think go to the dog after being scanned and so very flat matte things I think are the best example here exactly well that harkens back to even like what I did with like that harvest piece for example like in that asset I'm sorry in that piece a lot of the assets that I'm scanning are very organic shapes that tend to be a little bit more flexible when you're actually scanning a blobby you know 3d model and so like the pumpkins the gourds stuff like that well there's so much like nature built in there's imperfections and it's a little lighter on this end a little darker on this end just the variations you wouldn't necessarily think about when you're just creating an object from scratch but then that brings us to our actual objects we went with which is this gnome and I actually found when I was doing a bunch of tests on them I did seven individual photo shoots with him and scans until I got one that I thought we could work with and one challenge I was having is that it was there's a lot of flat areas of color so that his entire hat was like this very kind of scarlet color that wasn't it couldn't detect the shape very well I think because there's a very even color so that actually makes me wonder if you were to spray paint in something like a matte gray it might lose its too finition it might have a lot more trouble figuring out the form so actually what I end up doing was slicing a whole bunch of pieces of blue like painters tape really thin and essentially almost outlining almost some polygons on him so it would define the form and actually did a really good job of popping it out and I wonder if this had a little bit more variation in the color if the Hat had more of a you know if it if it went from a darker color to a lighter color maybe it would give more definition to it these are some of the interesting limitations that come along with this let's take a little bit of time and talk about the actual taking of the photos and what works and what doesn't and kind of little things that we found that were helpful and things that did not work at all so what was your original process for starting this yeah you know it's been really interesting because I'm coming very much from the viewpoint of really not having that much experience with photography definitely not with photogrammetry or anything like that and so the approach that I've had is very much in the mindset of a beginner and trying to be as accessible as possible and so really what I mean by that is you know I've made a lot of mistakes I'm sure I'm not lighting things properly and that I'm just taking photos with my phone actually I'm not even using like a DSLR or anything but what I found through that process is that even by you know having a very beginner sort of mindset I am still actually able to achieve a really nice level of fidelity in the overall results that I can pull from mushroom yeah and like I said I got inspired by the way you're doing it and I kind of dove in really deep and I started becoming kind of obsessed with understanding what works what doesn't so when I did my potato scans I probably I probably did a series of photo shoots with the potato trying all these different circumstances and like I did I did this entire part of the process where I built this cage so I could suspend things up in the air and then hold it in front of a green screen so I could go around it and every time I try to get fancier and fancier it the results were worse and worse and worse and ultimately what turned out to work well is like get some decently even lighting the best you can get like a little bit of daylight bouncing around the room is great no harsh shadows if you can avoid it and like you would think you don't put this on the green screen or something so so it can capture it but the software actually works way better if it can see the environment around it because it makes it so that it can find where the camera is supposed to be if you just have your little gnome sitting in the middle it doesn't know where to put the camera but if in the background it can see a chair and the wall and the window it's like oh the windows over there I know where to put the camera and so that became a really really important detail sorry oh good no so much of this is about spatial awareness because it's using all that data to reconstruct the the mesh so as much context I think is you can establish in what you're recording ultimately feeding that into mesh room it'll have more to sort of chew on if that makes sense yeah exactly something another technique that I started doing as I learned was you know kind of doing a whole photo shoot really close with let's say the know I'm going to take a picture like around and around and around and around and then going up a little bit and going around and around and around do you do that but something else I was incredibly helpful was taking a few steps away and just taking a context photo and then maybe moving around you know moving 45 degrees to the side and taking another context photo and even taking one where I step way back and it's like what ends up happening especially in this room is it tries to place all the cameras and if one camera if it doesn't know where it is in relationship to the other ones it just won't use it but these context photos will actually make it so that photos that previously didn't work will suddenly be like oh I know where I am now and it has another photo to work from exactly one other little thing I like doing is I was trying all these different rigs to prop it up like I said but then one that actually ends up being pretty useful was I have this thing and it's just like a giant roll of tape that I used for laser cutting but in a big cardboard tube and I did this so I could like take the potato and place it up on top and it was a lot easier for me to go on a lower angle and then shoot up at the underside and capture or the information and I'll say it's just a little bit easier on your back when it's a little bit higher up in the air so that was another additional detail that I found to be pretty helpful okay a couple thoughts about taking the actual photos of your object first of all both Aaron and I were both using iPhones I actually tried using my Sony 6000 to take some photos and I actually got worse results and I got just from a phone so that doesn't really seem to be a limiting factor here now when you actually go to take your photos especially here on the iPhone I wouldn't I held down somewhere on the screen to get the focal point and that just makes it so you have the same focus on lighting as I do one pass around the important thing that I was doing is every like 15 degrees I would stop and take another photo another photo another photo and walk all the way around the entire object so I'd travel all 360 degrees around on a single level and then once that single level was done I would raise the phone up maybe 45 degrees and go around again at an additional height and then I'd go really low and take a bunch of photos at the lower angle and that way you've got a lot of coverage and you can see here kind of the final layout of one of Aaron's walkthroughs on one of the gourds now after you've taken all your photos go ahead if you're on Windows we're gonna pop it open I just search for photos it pops open the photo app it's gonna load it right up go ahead and I click import it's gonna yell at me that the phone hasn't given permission yet so I'm gonna click iPhone it's gonna say it doesn't work on your phone you want to say go ahead and allow access so that windows can go and download all these so go ahead and click allow pop back in here try again and then it's gonna find it find your iPhone or whatever phone you're using go ahead let it find the photos and I'm going to deselect all of them and then go and make a folder to go find them in particular so hearing a pop it open just go to a particular folder and make a location just dump them all in there not super important where you put those and let's go ahead and say done and now select the photos I'm gonna click on one hold down shift scroll all the way down to the final location of all the photos there's like 170 of them here I went crazy on this hold down shift it'll take a second to select all of them go ahead and hit import and then boom it's gonna pop them all into the computer you go ahead and right-click on any one of your photos here and then say open up in the Explorer and then it's gonna pop open a window for you and now you can find it directly in here so let's get into the actual software here now we're going to be using mesh room and mess room of course is free but only works for PC and I think Linux but it doesn't work on the Mac no mushroom is just one particular piece of photogrammetry software I'm gonna go ahead and jump on over here on all 3d p.com they've got this really great article on 16 different photogrammetry software's and a bunch of these do work on the Mac a couple of them are free some of them don't cost too much so if the messroom part of this process isn't working for you then there might be other ones to check out but then the rest of what we're gonna talk about will be applicable no matter what piece of software you use don't let the fact that using mushrooms stop you go and check out this article which I will link below then you can continue from there but specifically let's go ahead and jump onto this browser and let's just google mesh room and the very first link is going to be mushroom which is gonna link us over to Alice vision dot and github and I just want to mention that mushroom is a free piece of software developed over in Europe actually by the Imagine group and it was kind of like this government-funded European thing there's a bunch of different groups involved and they just want to use it to like capture different architectural things and historical things and they kept on make it they've been working on this for years and years and years so I just wanna do a quick shout out there let's go ahead and click on mushroom and immediately we see we have our download button here I can click on that it'll jump over to this screen immediately you wants to save it so I could go ahead and hit OK download it you pop it open click on the executable and you will be ready to rock so having said that Aaron why don't you go ahead and take over and explain a little bit about mushroom yeah so here we go if we can open this up right away you'll see this is actually the interface for mushroom and it's a really cool know days to workflow so you see all these nodes down here and the first thing we can do let's just bring in those images that Chris just mentioned and so right away if I just click on these you can see this is actually the image sequence that Chris shot of the gnome and so I can just grab all of these we'll do a batch import you can see here there's actually a 178 and so mushrooms going to process all of these and there we go so now I can actually click around and you'll see all of these images are being fed in and processed here and what we can do now if we dive into these nodes so essentially what our objective here is that mushrooms going to process all of these images and it's gonna use them to reconstruct a 3d point cloud and from there that's sort of getting back to the positional tracking and and spatial awareness that we had talked about earlier and we can use that data to actually extract a 3d mesh from the tool and so what we can actually do here we don't have to messes a lot of these now there are a lot of different nodes that we can click on and there's various settings that we can actually be experimenting with I found I don't know about you Chris but I found really you don't have to really mess with much of this here yeah when I was playing around I clicked through us looking at all the different settings I watch different videos and tutorials and honestly I did not find a single setting that changing it made any impact in a positive way to it the defaults were amazing exactly I think this last note is the only thing probably worth mentioning Justin in terms of your output settings so specifically since this actually exports out a diffuse map of our texture of the asset you shouldn't necessarily need to change any of this but if you wanted to you can define the output size here so in this case it defaults to 8k but you can actually crank this up as high as 16 K as well as some other settings okay that's it I think we can actually just go ahead and start the process and so to do this let's just click on the start button here and right away you'll see mushrooms actually asking us to define an output for this so let's just go ahead I'm going to put this on my desktop even and we'll just do a gnome test and so now with that defined you'll see mushrooms actually gonna start the process and it'll actually bring up this terminal that we can view to track our progress and so what you're seeing happen here is that we essentially just have to progress through each of these nodes and so we're currently in the feature extraction out of this entire process here it does tend to be quite time intensive how long did you find in your test Chris that these were taking I find it's really dependent on the object that you're scanning and how many photos you took because the gnome I end up having was so small I found I had to take a lot more photos in some of my original scans of like the potato I took like 40 foot and it worked completely fine on this one I end up taking and you on the one you're processing right now there's a hundred and seventy eight photos which is a pretty intense that's a lot of something that are out there is a great feature with mushroom is once you run the entire scan once you've done the entire scenario you can look at the mesh and be like ooh it did not capture like like under his arm it looks terrible it didn't work at all and if you still have the your setup going you still have the lights you still get everything there you can turn it back on again you can go back over with your camera and just take additional photos go back and make sure you take a whole bunch of photos there and then maybe there wasn't quite enough resolution somewhere in the face so you take some extra photos from along those lines and you could actually run the entire process over again from scratch but you can also as it works through two different nodes there's the like capture from motion or something that that's the node where actually places the cameras I think it'll actually jump to that step and continue from there forward with all the extra new photos that you have so it doesn't save you that much time but you can actually do kind of a sloppy job find out where you needed to do more work and then do more work so this 178 photos is actually the result of seeing not such a great result going back taking more photos and adding them to the collection probably going overboard by a lot but once again dependent on the object the lighting conditions and probably a lot of other variables as well right well in the really cool thing about that as well is that when you take that second pass and you're feeding in new images that's updating and changing the context of what you're capturing and so maybe some of those images that are actually sort of not working and reading is sort of like a dead source in the computations because you've given new context with the new images some of those old ones that weren't working before might actually update and become active again in the comp in the process exactly and one of my potato scans early on I took like 45 and then like 18 of them 18 of them did not work and I wouldn't took more photos and then when that one processed it still had the bad 18 but this time 16 of those 18 worked so new photos actually made old photos work better which was crazy and practically magic it's so cool yeah yeah it is really cool another big time variable here of course is how many photos you put in so when I've run quicker ones this is taken maybe 20 minutes to do the entire process but with these big long ones where I took the biggest one I ever did was 225 photos that took like three hours to process it looked great when it finished but it took that long to do it here we are back over on my machine I actually already processed this but literally the exact same process of what Aaron was beginning over there and we've got a complete so let's take a look you see all the images were complete the entire bar has completed across the top you can see every single one of the nodes is green across the board it's succeeded all the way across now there is a small chance if you don't have enough photos that it might just fail it might just fail at structure for motion and if that happens you have to go take more or better photos and try again but now that this is completed you see that we've got a whole bunch of cameras and we've got a 3d point cloud so we'll talk about this a little bit but I just want to scroll in here and take a look the navigation is a little wonky cuz we're so far zoomed in but you can see every single camera that I took a picture from and when I scroll out you can see some of the context cameras I'd been talking about I moved way far away from it if I scroll even more you see there's even more photos trying to give that some context but if we go and zoom way up we see our gnomes looking pretty good we got our 3d point cloud and depending on how many photos you took you can actually see areas that might be missing some detail I already know for a fact that this one is working pretty well so I think we're good to continue now once that process completed all the way we have the option to click the load model button so let's go ahead and try and scroll this guy to the front the angle is pretty arbitrary so it's gonna be at this very strange angle but let's go in that load model it's gonna take a second but it's currently loading in an obj the final mesh from what was calculated that's gonna pop in here it's gonna be overlaid on top of everything but if I go and turn off our structure from motion button right here the little eyeball we just see the final model and you can see that he's looking pretty good look at her cute little gnome he's got a little snail you see all the piece of the tape sketched on there I've got this little wooden coaster so I had something that wasn't reflective that he could sit on now everything else if I scroll out a little bit you see that there's the context here I put some rubber ducks on my little table here to make sure that I had some features to identify a little bit I don't know how important those are but I didn't focus on those areas so the mesh over there is pretty low it's pretty terrible now you can actually click on the wireframe mode here and you can see exactly I'm a polygons I made and the actual gnome is a very dense mesh we know so click on our solid mode scan actually see kind of see the final here of exactly what we're getting now there are a couple problems here it's not perfect and I kind of like the fact that this one's not coming out perfect this we were saying because this gnome was small there's not that much detail on them it was having some trouble so we've got some areas to clean up and I thought I'd actually be pretty useful for this tutorial but just for an example if we were to scroll down here you see the rubber duck there's like almost no detail on it you see on the wire mesh that is looking pretty rough with that why don't we go ahead and track down the model and bring this into cinema4d now in my folder structure I've been saving everything into this mushroom folder you see all these different scans I was doing I did all these different tests until we finally got to this final one that was working pretty well and something's kind of neat is mushroom just dumps all the files it creates into this giant folder so here's my photos I took I just kept them trapped in there but inside of the mushroom cache go inside there we got all these different folders of everything it was it was creating so it's all the information so if we actually go into the very final folder there's a texturing folder and inside our texturing folder we got this crazy name but go inside of that and now you can see we've got our final texture maps and we've got a textured mesh obj so let's go ahead and drag our textured mesh into cinema 4d I'm gonna pop open cinema let's give that folder back and I'm just gonna drag it right on over so the first thing we're gonna see is we have a scale parameter we got a whole bunch of different settings most of them I just completely ignore but I just know for a fact that the models from mushroom come in really small so I have found out I was just adding with Aaron about it that a good scale tends to be about 100 so I'm gonna go scale 100 centimeters instead of 1 and that way it's gonna come a little bit bigger and the basic idea behind that let's go ahead and hit OK the basic idea behind that is you want objects of cinema 4d to be about the size of a cube it's a good kind of default scale it's not too big it's not too small but there we go the model has popped open and let's go and zoom around until we find our little gnome guy and there he is you can see my camera is all wonky because it came in a really strange angle let's go and do some really quick cleanup here one thing to note is this time it didn't but often times when I pop open my materials or in a pop open scene there's a transparency layer turned on and makes really funky so you can go and open your materials here and turn off transparency turn off alpha and then it should look more solid like what I have here so we've got so many different polygons here I want to clean it up so I can work on this a little bit easier I'm gonna go ahead and go to point mode here and let's go ahead and grab our lasso tool and let's make sure our tolerance selection and visible elements are both turned off because I just wanna make a big old circle that I'm sure I'm capturing everything with our gnome I can rotate around a little bit yes indeed I didn't hit you I four invert selection hit delete and now hopefully we've got something a little bit cleaner that I can work from now with the actual cleaning up of this mesh there are so many points it's going to take a while to clean it up depending on how we're doing the selection this is actually an easier object to do it from but something I bumped into actually last night that made this a lot easier was if I select all my points it's just a big giant foggy cloud of points but if I turn on SSAO which I think came in and was that r19 yeah if I turn that on it actually shows the shadow on top of the points so I can see he's on this nice little base here so it's really easy now for me to go and make a pretty sloppy selection here of all the unnecessary points because the shadow is actually on top of the points that I was selecting which is pretty cool so I'm gonna do a pretty dang sloppy job selecting all of these points around him but it's going to do a lot of work for getting this ready for the next step so let's go ahead and do a nice big old selection there delete that and there we go now we've got our final little selection of the entire guy now I I really want to flatten this out right now it's at the strange angle let's go ahead make a cube you can see there's a cube but that's the orientation that the scene wants to be is like this so our gnome is at this very strange angle but at least you see it scales pretty big imagine if you use one one hundredth the size be really tiny so I want to zero this out but before we do that I want to talk about one other file that mushroom made for us that is pretty useful if we go up to folders so go away from the texturing into the cache and we go into the structure from motion folder we go inside of there and we will actually find somewhere in the structure is an SF M ABC and that is our Olympic file it's an Olympic file that's actually captured all of the different cameras so if I go and I drag that into cinema 4d and you see my scale is still set to 100 very important let's say okay don't change anything else it is actually brought in our point cloud but even more importantly that it brought in all of our cameras and not only do we have our cameras but all the cameras have the exact name of the image that they were driving so if we were inclined to I could copy all of these cameras let's go ahead and select every single camera at alt G and group them now it actually these are like Olympic files their Olympic cameras we could actually select all of them and just hit the letter C and it's going to make them into just generic cinema one so they're not remotely linked anymore but I can copy this let's rename this null cameras and I can copy that close the file don't need that anymore and because we haven't moved this around yet if I have pasted it's exactly matching our object so something that's cool we're not gonna do this here because it's not needed but let's go ahead and hide all our cameras but if I were to unhide one of them let's say this one that's actually a really far away camera so it's not to that I wouldn't scroll down there's a closer one I couldn't find this one camera and be like oh nice here's this camera I can look at the POV of it and this is the angle it is so in theory I could reproject the material from that camera onto the object and we could maybe extract additional texture information if we wanted to so I just want to throw out there that out there about being able to control your extra cameras but what might be useful now is those cameras could become a child of the textured mesh and if we move this around the cameras will move with it and we haven't lost that data now I'll leave a lot of the work here to Aaron for cleaning things up but hints that you taught me on the on your NAB presentation was the right now the texture looks like a mess like this is terrifying like this didn't come through well at all but if we go and we pop open whenever our materials and select more of them I select all of them rather if we go into our editor and click texture preview size and set that to no scaling we're going to get the final resolution of the mesh and you can see the materials look a lot better now we don't have all those really add edges showing up but let's continue flattening our character out now there's a lot of techniques where we might flatten this out but I'm just gonna eyeball this we're gonna need to close the hole on him down there so I'm going to go ahead and make a disk shape because that's pretty around and I'm just gonna hit shift s so it's gonna snap to any point I'm gonna click the move tool and just start moving this and you see it's going to be snapping the different points so if I just snap it to one of the points right at the base then that's giving us a good initial position to work from I'm gonna turn off snapping shift s is the shortcut turn that off you know so click the button here now you get just an R for rotating I'm just gonna eyeball it and spin this there's a couple techniques that maybe we'll talk about a little bit later for getting this to be a little bit more precisely placed but this is such a simple thing because of the this character he's really you know he sits on a flat base so this is really easy to kind of match here I get a T for scale scale it down and if we want to be really meticulous we can go and model this to match that position perfectly and actually yeah I guess we should do it okay so now that that is positioned I'm gonna totally steal this part from Aaron but let's go ahead and make this editable and go to polygon mode and a actually point mode I'll select all the points and let's go to sculpt and go to brushes and grab the grab and if I hold down shift as I click my middle mouse button as a button I can drag to the right make it a little bit bigger and I can start dragging these points in and trying to match our mesh a little bit better now I do want to be careful if I go too far inside I'll mess it up so I want to make sure it's a little bit bigger than our model but that's looking pretty good there we go just a little bit of that so that was really simple really clean to set that up maybe pull this one out just a hair and that's actually working pretty well I'm pretty happy with that it's not quite flat perhaps but I will take it for now and this should be good enough actually from where we initially placed our disc to zero out our character we're gonna go ahead and grab our textured mesh make it a child of the disc and I just remembered that I'm still linked to this camera so let's go ahead back in here and unlink from that camera so you see I'm just in this crazy point of view and let's go back up and grab our disc and hit shift C PSR and let's go ahead and click reset PSR and that should go ahead and zero out our position scale and rotation so now he is perfectly on the ground if I were to make a brand new plane object you see he's sitting right on top of it it is working awesome so let's go ahead and yank our cameras out and we've got our final little gnome character here this guy looks like he's pretty much ready to rock to get ready to start our cleanup and retype ography but I want Aaron to take that part over so I'm going to save this file on Dropbox and he is going to take over alright let's go ahead and open cinema and so if I bring this up you can see this is actually Chris's file that he just sent over we can go ahead and load this in and right away here is that Nome is looking great but I do want to point out a few quick things so if we actually turn off the textures for a second and we zoom in here you can see there are a lot of small issues happening on this mesh and this is coming through just errors in the scans maybe there was shadows or highlights sort of interfering with what we were capturing look at this over here this is a really good example and so what we can discuss today is how to clean all of these issues up as well as have a much better topology that we could be working with because you can see here just how dense and sort of messy and triangulated this scan actually is and so to do this we're actually gonna take advantage of some of our 20s new features let's go ahead and load in a valium builder okay so one thing I want to point out really quickly here this file that Chris sent over you can see right now the disk is actually set as the parent member this is what Chris used to help orient the know mesh and we don't really want this set as the parent right now so I can just go ahead and drag out our known mesh now let's actually grab this and we'll apply this to this valium builder and so right away you'll see an update we're actually converting that polygon mesh into a V DB so this is essentially a value metric representation in fact I can turn on the wireframe here and you'll see there are no polygons actually in the scene now I do want to point out as well this isn't a very accurate representation of our gnome and that's because by default this voxel size comes in at 10 centimeters so what we can do is actually go ahead and lower this and what we're doing is essentially increasing the resolution of these volumes and I want to point out this is sort of an arbitrary number it depends entirely on the scene size that you're working in as well as the size of the object so we kind of have to just eye this until we find something that we like I'm gonna go ahead and go a little bit lower let's drop it even down to 0.5 centimeters this looks like something we can actually use it's a pretty good accurate representation of our gnome now I do want to point out again there's no polygons but what we can do here is actually just bring in a value measure and right away when I drag this in you'll see most of our asset actually goes away and that's because there's there's this one setting that we need to address there is voxel range threshold and so by default this comes in at 50% and what we can do is actually to start to increase this and you'll see we just have to I this until we find a setting that we like that looks pretty good and I want to point out here if I hide the disc really quickly and we jump under here you'll see we have this opening at the bottom here and what I want to point out is this isn't a volume you know this isn't a filled object we have these sort of edges happening and that's because if I turn off the measure force again these VD bees are essentially an infinitely thin wall it's almost like if we had draped a cloth over this asset and so by applying the measure and in changing this voxel range threshold we're actually essentially adding thickness to those walls I'm going to leave this around 70% looks pretty good now what we can do to actually close off this hole though is actually bring back in our disk and one of the really cool things happening here is that by feeding it into this volume tree that we've built you can see here we're actually sort of adding in this disk mesh before the meshing and so what we're left with is actually a single uniform mesh and yet it's flexible enough that we can still reposition the disk and you can see this happening in real time the other thing I want to point out here I don't really think we need this sort of extra polygons around the base you know there's this lip here I don't think we really need this and so what we can do let's just grab a cube let's scale this down a little bit and I'm gonna lower this actually we'll put it right below for now and what I can do is actually feed this into the volume tree as well but what I want to do is go into the volume builder and here you can see is the cube that we've just added let's change the mode from Union to subtract now you see it disappears and that's because there's no overlap yet but if I grab the cube again and I start to let's just bump this up a little bit and what you'll see happen is as these two start to intersect this cube is actually going to be the driving force for where we're subtracting there we go now we can see it happening and so I can use this just as a very quick way to cap off any of those unnecessary polygons in our lip there we go I think that's pretty good now this whole is back and that's because our cube is currently set one step higher in the hierarchy of our trees so if I just come in here let's grab the disk it will increase this one step and now we can actually just reposition whoops let's grab the disk itself and we can just use this to help find there we go that's perfect so now we've actually cleaned up that any of those unnecessary polygons and still managed to cap off this hole okay before I move on I want to do one quick pass let's make sure we don't have any open holes in this mesh Oh actually looks like there is right here so what you can see happening here is that the disk that we have actually isn't quite closing off this entire thing so I can zoom in here and you'll see we're actually peeking inside the gnome now we don't want this we actually want this to be an entirely closed off mesh so let's just bump this up a little bit there you go I think we can see we've closed that off let's make sure there's no other holes okay it looks good now what I want to talk about next is how we can go about sort of cleaning up any of these small little areas that still manage to carry over in our processing this is a good example here this is an area that we should be cleaning up before our next steps and so to do this let's go ahead I'm gonna copy this so that we can keep a backup just in case and let's go ahead and make this editable so I'm gonna right-click go down to select children so we're selecting everything here in the hierarchy do that again go to connect objects and delete now you can see here we're looking at a single flat mesh and one thing I want to point out now before we actually go in and clean up the surface a little bit if we go into our polygon mode here and I zoom in if I select all of these so that we're seeing the all of the polygons selected and I zoom in let's go actually inside of this mesh and one thing you're gonna see here there's actually a secondary mesh happening inside and that's because of that sorry voxel race threshold setting that we were messing with before remember we were adding thickness to those infinitely thin walls and by doing that we actually created sort of a double sided polygon here so we have this this inner match that we need to get rid of before we move forward and so to do this let's just grab our value mesh and I'm gonna grab a single polygon here let's hit UW to do a group selection and so what we're doing here we're grabbing all of the polygons in this inside mesh remember not the outside one just what's happening inside you can go ahead and delete this and so now when I do a group selection you can see now we're looking at proper inverted normals on the inside and then proper facing normals on the outside okay now from here let's go ahead and discuss how we can actually clean up some of these errors that are still on our mash and to do this let's just jump over into the sculpting viewport let's grab our mesh and all I want I just want to grab a few different tools here so the first thing let's just grab the smooth tool and all we have to do let's just brush in some Corrections here on this mesh I would actually make quite a bit of this smoother you can actually see here even a little it's subtle but little bumps like this is actually coming in I'm gonna guess tress from the tape that you had placed on this asset exactly and it's even you're seeing the curvature get introduced because of the tape but where the tape isn't actually you see it smooth it out a little bit so he's got a real flat butt yes but man isn't the smoothing tool satisfying like look at it just erase out those little errors and mistakes yes it's doing a really good job actually I'm just gonna keep doing this a little bit clean up any of these little areas of a snail seem to get a little bumpy alright that's looking pretty good here maybe just a little bit on the hand hope this arm actually oh yeah there's a few areas down here as well keep going just a little bit can't tell if this for me no that's just a missing Johanna it should be smoothed out yeah and yeah and the Hat end up becoming a little there's definitely some bumps in there from the tape but when we add it you can really see it there yeah so yeah the tape has really appeared there so yeah you're racing all this out it's actually really satisfying how how nice this tool is for doing this and it's actually pretty forgiving I like that these problems happened on our example here to show how much flexibility we have to go and fix the problems exactly can even see action if I have the wireframe on might be even a better look at how we're doing things okay maybe a little bit in those mustache there yeah that's a good right there yeah it's looking pretty good much better it's do one last little rotation here what do you think looks pretty good yeah maybe right around the back of his coat there does like a little bump that's actually pretty smooth in the model down all right there mark right there yeah that's in the in the actual mesh that's pretty smooth and you can see it's a little geometric there but yeah that's looking good okay and so I also want to point out here as well as cinemas doing actually with you know handling this in the viewport I do think we can actually be getting a much lower polygon count with this mesh as well as more proper edge flow in fact if i zoom in here you can see here you know we managed to convert this into quads with the the VDB processing which is great but there is less than ideal edge flow and that's gonna be quite a headache if we want to do something like UV unwrap this and maybe some of the additional processing steps that we have in mind so what we can do actually from here is well actually export this out and bring this into some other third-party tools to actually clean this up even more okay so let's go ahead and copy this into a new scene file and what we want to do now is actually export this as an FBX to bring into we're gonna try two different remeasuring software's today to give you guys a better idea of how to clean this topology now I want to point out of course cinema 4d has its own workflows for this and that's actually very capable and in handy but what I want to show you guys is some really cool third-party tools that help speed up the process by actually offering more auto reach apology algorithms so let's just go ahead and go to file export we'll do an FBX and let's just name this Nome to read topo and override the last one so one of the tools we'll actually be taking a look at is called 3d code let's take a look at the website really quickly and so here you can see 3d code is actually a really cool tool that does a lot of different things everything from sculpting modeling texturing UV unwrapping as well as reat apology and so one of the things we'll use that for today is some of its auto reach apology algorithms now I do want to point out as well you can see here you can actually download this and you get a free 30 days trial so this is an excellent tool to try out if you guys are interested in this process alright let's go ahead and load this in and so right away we won't dive too deep into the UI but there's this button right here called perform reat apology and so let's click this and you'll see here there's this new settings now there's a bunch of different options here I just want to select perform auto reach apology let's go ahead and load in this mesh this is the Nome to retype all that we just saved out and what we can do now there are a lot of different settings here we can actually just go ahead and let's try out iterating on different variations of this I do want to point out there's this Auto route apology guide here and if we click on this will actually bring this up really quickly and you can see here a 3d code actually provides really nice documentation sort of helping explain what all of these different settings do and so this is to help give you a better idea of how you should be approaching using this tool and the results that you can ultimately get of course we're gonna be diving into this ourselves but if you guys want to dive in even deeper take a look at this okay so coming back I think we can actually decrease the required polygon count this is actually gonna help drive the overall polygon count at the end of what we're exporting let's go ahead and lower this down to something like five thousand I'm gonna leave capture details at fifty percent let's actually disable voxel eyes before Quadra what is that Quadron there you go quadrangular thank you got it okay and we can actually keep hard-surface tree topology disabled as well let's go ahead and hit OK and we're gonna actually ignore this step for now but really what we can do here is if we have a mesh that has a lot of contrast in the mesh density or the polygon density we can actually use this to paint in areas where we want 3d code to be really focusing more on now because we actually fed this into the VDB processing tools inside of our 20 which they don't have to worry about that because we have a very even polygon distribution on this mesh it's going to hit next and we're gonna try to advance without having to do this but if you're having problems with your edge flow if it's getting really confused this tool is an excellent way that we can actually draw on the directional flow that we want this mesh to have now that said let's go ahead and see what it looks like without oh it looks like the the little quirk happened since I don't know I don't understand why it does this but sometimes during that process sort of hiccups and gets frozen right here so what we can do it actually fix this let's just right click on our value mesh we're gonna try this again we're gonna go to Auto retopo and we're going to click this again now we're bringing up all these settings but we don't have to change any of these because it's saved everything that we just did we'll try this again very quickly I actually found that hitting Enter instead of clicking on next does tend to help quite a bit so we're gonna hit enter a few times and now you can see now it's processing this properly so you didn't even change anything you just again in last time you didn't like it and this time it did it happens to me too it's just like hey run again yeah I don't know I don't know what causes it but you're right sometimes that you just need to rerun it through that process and it'll it'll grab on to it this time okay and we did it that actually looks really good I'm gonna zoom around it let's do a quick check to see how things are looking I can actually hide this original mesh now so we can see uninterrupted the new mesh that we've created you know it actually looks pretty good the edge flow is not perfect but it does look significantly better this is definitely something we can work with if we want to do something like UV unwrapping or maybe some of the other processing steps that we have in mind but what do you think Chris I think it's looking pretty good it's about half the density I did on some tests but I really like the way that looks so I'd be super happy continuing that cool now again I want to point out what we can do actually is just export this out to export retopo object we'll save this out one thing I'll point out so let's do Nome and we'll do LOD zero one and if you wanted to you know take this back we could we could do this again we can we can say you know new mesh we can bring in that mesh again and if we wanted to do a few different variations of this to test out you know the level of fidelity Christy mentioned that was about half of some of your earlier tests so what we could hypothetically do is you know come in here and let's let's increase this a little bit maybe not quite that let's do like seven seven thousand five hundred and if we just ran through this again let me do this let's see if we can get one step higher just so that we have two options in case you want to move forward okay now we can see if we zoom in here you know the the edge flow is actually looking maybe even a little bit better here we're definitely capturing some more details obviously more polygons on the mesh but maybe this is a good option to have as well let's go ahead and save this out as well and I'ma name this one LED - okay and so from here let's actually go ahead and take a look at the other tool so say maybe you're bringing a mesh into 3d coat and for whatever reason it's just not working or maybe you just want an absolutely free alternative to this tool that tool is actually called instant meshes I'm gonna pull up a website for that as well so here you can see this is actually a really cool sort of more experimental tool I actually think it started off as more of an academic paper that was built into this tool and I want to give a quick shout out to the creator Wenzel Jacob or is it Jacob lens L let's see here probably ones the ones L Jacob and you can see here we're on github so it looks a little complicated but actually downloading this all you have to do is go to this precompiled binaries and we click on this Microsoft Windows version and so this is sort of a prepackaged version ready to run straight on Windows 10 I do want to point out it's also supported on Mac so you have options here as well as Linux and if we load this in you can see here I've got this so right away this comes up I do want to point out one thing that we forgot to do actually so earlier with our mesh we had saved this out as an FBX file for bringing into 3d coat unfortunately though instant meshes actually only works with OBJ's and so let's jump back really quickly we're gonna do the same thing but this time I want to save this out as an obj and let's do gnome 2 instance ok now let's jump back into instant meshes and this is a very you're gonna see a lot of similarities in these workflows let's go ahead and hit open mesh and here's that gnome to instant so you can see we're bringing the mesh in now there are a few very small differences in this mesh one thing I want to bar in this this tool one thing I want to point out so we can define here if you want to be exporting out quads there's different algorithms for how those quads are calculated as well as triangles and there are a few other settings here in terms of defining if you're working with like hard surface meshes you might get better results or have a better chance at getting a clean mesh if you're using a line to boundaries as well sharp creases for this mesh I don't think you have to worry about that again we're defining our polygon count output size just like we were in 3d coat with a target vertex count here and where this tool actually functions a little bit differently is when we could solve you can see we're actually getting a preview here of how instant meshes is understanding the edge flow so you can almost imagine once this is actually applied polygons to you we can see if we click the next step this is actually sort of the the edge flow that we'll be getting now it's not perfect in fact because we can preview this we actually have the advantage of maybe correcting some of this before we actually have our polygon mesh if we look at here you can see there here's a good example on the hat you know ideally I'd have sort of a much more vertical straight orientation for these polygons currently they're sort of wrapping and winding around and we can fix this now inside of instant meshes by enabling this brush tool and simply brushing on the orientation that we want these two file you can see right away as I brush that in the estimation is actually updating and giving us more feedback now based on that line that it plays and we can do this everywhere so I can zoom back around let's look for some more areas okay on the back you can see it's kind of doing this as well we can do another straight one and I do want to point out as you're adding these lines you have to be careful because this is adding more complexities more rules essentially that instant meshes has to take into consideration when it's actually meshing this so you want to be careful you don't want to have any overlapping lines or lines placed too closely together you just really want to use this conservatively in areas where it needs it the most this is actually a good area right here where we can place this there you go that's looking quite a bit better I think this is good for now and so what we can do from here is actually click export' mesh and click extract mesh so you'll see we're actually able to extract a polygon mesh from this and one of the really cool things here is there's actually this smoothing iterations tool as well and so if we want to smoothen this out we can actually increase these and click extract again and you'll see we're actually increasing the overall smoothens it's almost like applying a subdivision surface to this but without actually adding more polygons that said let's go ahead and decrease this back and let's say maybe we actually went too far maybe this is not enough polygons for our mesh we can actually just go ahead and increase our target vertex count again and click yes and we can just click solve and we can click we can go through all these again and it's actually saving all of those Oh normally it saves all the brushes that's a bummer that it didn't this time so you know we could go through the whole process again we could kind of really quickly place them just in areas where it matters whoops let's not use that one you know it's actually doing pretty well maybe we don't have to place all of them this time and now when we click extract again you'll see we're actually applying we're baking in more polygons this this looks maybe a little bit better now both of these tools are completely valid options actually before I do that let's go ahead and save this out as well and we'll do Noam LOD zero one and I'll save this with an instant tag just so we are able to keep track oh one thing to point out this tool works a little bit differently let's bring this back instant you do actually have to type in the obj at the end otherwise it gets confused about how it should be formatting everything so now we've saved out two different versions let's go ahead and we'll jump back into cinema and I want to merge and I'm gonna hit ctrl shift o to actually bring up a merge action and let's grab the gnome LOD one that we've built or you know what which one did it be like more I think you like the side one more real quick question what's your little preview going on here oh you know I don't think I installed anything special I think this is what probably the latest Windows 10 date I believe added added an obj preview for when you have an app an asset selected I think I might be in a special yeah so there's this extra panel button up here in Windows 10 that you can click no that's cool yeah it's a good way to preview I guess what we're doing in fact you can see here actually this is an interesting difference oh wait no that's sorry this is gnome to Winston so this was the source mesh that we brought into instant and then this is what we're actually exporting out of 3d coat let's go ahead and load this one in Oh going on it's tucked away alright we'll jump back into the startup and so it looks like the material that we had applied actually has transparency enabled so we can just disable this no see but we actually don't even need this material so we'll just go ahead and delete this and I think by default it comes in with normals settings I like to delete this and then just change our Phong tag to 180 degrees and so now you can see if we turn on our wireframe mode you can see look at how much cleaner the topology is now on this mesh remember if we jump over to our previous file let's actually bring this in really quickly and you can see if we do a quick side-by-side comparison look at how much cleaner and and lighter this new mesh is all while not really giving up too much details of course there is you know a much smoother surface but we'll discuss in some of the next steps how we can be bringing some of those details back okay so we've done a great job of cleaning up this mesh but the next thing I want to talk to you guys about is UVs so what we want to be doing now is actually properly UV unwrapping this asset for some of the next steps like texturing as well as transferring over some of those details that we might have lost in this processing and to do this I'm actually gonna go ahead and let's delete the original one I want to save this out so that we can send this to Chris because he's gonna show us how to UV unwrap this inside of cinema 4d but I also then want to show you guys how we can use some third-party tools such as rhizome UV which has an excellent cinema 4d bridge to actually be unwrapping this in other ways okay here we are back on my machine the file from aaron has synced up so i can go and grab this unwrapped gnome or to be unwrapped gnome and here we go got this nice clean mesh everything's looking good and here we want to use the built-in tools inside of cinema 4d to do the unwrapping now this might not be the most like technically like perfect one but I've done lots of tests with us so far and it's always worked like it's pretty well liked well enough for our purposes here so we want to do is find a couple places to cut this apart so that we can unwrap it and I think one of the basic ideas is we want to hide a seam somewhere and the back of the gnome seems like a pretty good place so I'm going to just go to edge mode here and start drawing a path of where it should be cut kind of picture that we're like they have a teddy bear and we're going to like open it up and lay it flat like it's a pattern that we're going to cut out so I'm gonna hit um which is a shortcut for path selection what that means is I can just start drawing out a path and drawing this wherever I want to go there's a couple nice features with this tool and we'll just wait until I naturally make a mistake that part went fine I see as I sure as I traced out it's actually going a little bit far off to the leg I'd kind of like it to be a little bit more centered but maybe we'll just go right there and then travel along the side of the coat and then go more towards the middle and this is all pretty arbitrary I'm just trying to go through areas that are slightly less detailed so let's maybe travel a little bit more towards the middle there and down in an ideal world maybe I would have traveled up that one actually why don't we do that if I hold down control I can rewind or you race out to that one that I had so now here let's start with where we know we want to go which is right down the middle between the pants there and we'll travel up and connect here we could also travel over there and over there whatever path we want to take so we'll just do that that's fine and then let's continue traveling down we just got to pick our path so maybe we will travel along the side of the boot here a little bit right here I like this angle and then from there we will travel down to the edge so that's kind of the cut down the back now if we wanted to if this one is a little messy for us we could say nope not that one and then we could travel up this one but you'll see that this starts traveling us down that edge which could be fine we go up here to around the area where the Hat is beginning and then that could become a separate cut that we'd travel up and actually all in those lines that's what I want to do next is maybe cut along the edge of where the Hat will be so we've got his hair here they'll travel down and around here I just know that's approximately where the Hat is so we can clean this up by traveling there that it's not worth overthinking this I think we'll be running at enough of a resolution where the particulars aren't going to matter of that much but let's go ahead and trace over here let's continue this path around where his hair is and then finish that connection so this entire hat you see we've got to cut completely around the entire thing so that will completely separate that out and the last thing I do is probably just do a loop around the bottom here let's see if we got a nice edge loop I can work from unfortunately none of these quite seem to be working you see the path gets really weird but I'm actually kind of free to go a little bit further in like right there and we could just use that one as our path it does a pretty good cut around house it um again and make sure you complete this cut so this entire thing will be cut out and then this outer part can just get unwrapped around to the rest of the object and actually I think that'd be okay because it'll just make it so we're curving around that nicely and the seam will be hidden underneath the entire object and honestly I think that's all I want to do actually that's not entirely true but we will do it wrong right now and then do it right in a second so we've got our cuts that we think we want let's go ahead to our body paint UV edit layout here it's kind of behind my picture but if you click on layout you go to UV edit and it's going to pop open and now we want to go ahead and make sure we add a UV mesh on here then you say there's a button that make it right away Aaron I don't remember where you had that I created a material apply the material you should have to have like a standard white material applied to it and then you can do I think tags generate uvw tag ah yes oh yeah I can right click on that material and say generate uvw tag so it actually makes a tag form because we need this tag the other way I used to do it would be to create some sort of object of course that menu is the spirit but I'd like create a cube make it edible and steal the tag from it but anyway you can get this UV tag now we've got it it automatically appeared in this viewport in our unwrapping over here but if you don't see it make sure you drag your mesh over or the tag over and it will appear here so you see right now it's a giant mess we actually are getting something somewhat reasonable but this is definitely not what we want to work from so what I want to do is go to our UV polygon tool right here so this is actually how we select our polygons when we're in UV and we want to set some sort of projection the easy workflow here is just to go to the projection menu down here and say frontal and it's just really a projection of the entire gnome from the current point of view so it just makes a nice new clean mesh and everything's connected the way it's supposed to be now we can go to relaxed UV and we just have our to smoothing algorithms here are relaxing algorithms which is a B F and L SCM they're just two different algorithms I usually just try both and see if I like the way they look so right now we've got a cut selected edges checkbox turned on and we already know we have those edges selected so all I have to do is hit apply and it's gonna process and boom it is now going to create a mesh for us now the part I was saying we're gonna do wrong we're gonna see here you can see that we've got all these overlapping polygons the reason that this has happened is there's actually a hole inside of this character behind his cane there's a hole that travels right through here and it doesn't know what to do with that hole it's a very confusing for the unwrapping so let's go back to our standard or our start up layout and let's make an additional cut there so if I go back to edge mode you see my cuts are still there let's go ahead and make two well three additional cuts so I'm gonna try a loop selection I'll see if there's a nice loop right there perfect we get a loop right there and let's also do a cut loop here see if one is gonna be cooperative that one is and I just want to do one extra slice to connect the two of these together so I'm gonna hit um and let's go ahead and make a cut someplace where our camera is not gonna see it very clearly let's scoot over to this side a little hard to see where that is I'm gonna have to get way inside here there we go it's right there travel this across until it is indeed connected to this side so we've made a couple extra cuts let's go back to our UV edit menu pop it open and let's just go ahead and run the algorithm again I'm gonna hit apply and there we go now you see it actually did a really nice job of unwrapping because it wasn't trying to bridge these two holes and now we get two holes in there and that separate object has become I think this unwrapped piece actually that's the bottom so I'm not sure where that last piece went it's hiding somewhere oh it's really tiny there it is this is what we cut out so you see the scale is way off on all of these now let's go ahead and try the other algorithm I don't know if we can just switch to it and hit apply I think it might just relax it now it seems to have completely recut it so you see it's a very different kind of layout in this particular instance I happen to like the way a BF was looking a little bit better so let's go ahead and run that one again and you see this is pretty dang even I'm actually pretty impressed with that the scaling is all out of whack you can see this is the Hat so the Hat shouldn't be anywhere near this big so I'm gonna go back to our UV polygon tool let's go ahead and click on I got spacebar to go to selection let's just grab one of these hit u W to grab all of them t for scale and I'm gonna scale these way down because that should not be taking up a majority of our menu of our UV lay up let's go and grab this little guy hit u W and I'm just gonna move it off to the side for now and let's hit C for scale because it is pretty tiny I just don't to lose it so make that bigger let's grab this one which is the underside of the gnome hit UW I'm gonna scoot that off to the side and now it's just an even let's grab this one and hit UW I'm just gonna pull all of these completely off the UV layout here our grid and I just want to grab our main chunk which is where it's the majority of the gnome you can even see all these polygons selected this is where we need the detail so let's go ahead and let this take up the lion's share of our entire layout here I'm gonna T for scale and let's just scale this up nice and big and I'm gonna scoot this anywhere I need to to kind of have it fill up as much area as possible T for scale there we go it's eating up lots of space so now we can just grab the other ones and put them wherever they fits to eat up kind of an equivalent amount of area all the polygons are pretty even so if I hit T for scale I want scale this up until these polygons are about the same size as the rest of it scoot it in and I want the entire thing in the map so let's hit our for rotate we're gonna spin that around a little bit efore move scoot it there there we go now they're looking together grab the hat UW let's move this one e4 move scoot it down here it's already almost fitting our four rotate and we'll spin it around like that I think that's gonna be our best bet polygons are already pretty good for the scale that T for scale make you make it a little bit bigger and let's see that seems a little a pretty well and now we can grab the bottom panel II will scoot this in you'll see that these are pretty tiny so we hit the-- for scale scale up pretty much just eat up as much room as we can down here because it would just be wasted space otherwise and actually this is this is better than they usually get this is a pretty good layout you'll see all of our polygons are pretty even unfortunately areas like this where I think this is kind of his hand or actually this right here is probably the snail you see here's the side there's the top of the snail and here's kind of his head that's these polygons are little smaller so there's less detail there I would love to scale those up a little bit to give them more detail we actually can do that here in the UVs it's just a little bit of a pain actually there are some scaling tools if we were to go hit u w and select all those i could go to the magnet tool right here and if i were to click and start dragging you could see that it will drag out and there's no scaling tool but I could start kind of grabbing the edges around here and squishing everything around to the point we see those will start getting becoming kind of relatively a little bit bigger than the neighbors it just stretches them out so those get more loved when it comes to the the final pixel so we could kind of push and pull these around but honestly this is pretty good I'm pretty happy with that so I'm gonna go ahead and go back to our start up layout pop it back up here and I'm going to give this another quick save put into the file into our shared folder here as I'll just do unwrapped and hit save and then pass this back to air and again to do the other layout in the other software okay and so I also want to show you guys a really cool alternative tool to use for UV unwrapping called rhizome UV it's actually take a look at their website very quickly so rhizome is actually a third-party tool it's a standalone application that's entirely dedicated just to UV unwrapping and the really cool thing here when I point out they have a very very generous subscription model and so there are actually two different versions we want to be using the virtual spaces because this is also actually an application used for real space you know like package design stuff but we want to be working in the virtual spaces and they have a 30-day demo it's for Mac and Windows and then they actually have an India licensing that is actually very very cool and so there's this rent-to-own model where you're paying at 15 euro which is basically 1820 dollars per month - to have access to the application but it's also a rent-to-own model and so that means over time you're actually building up those credits to where you can actually acquire a perpetual even through the subscription model okay that said let's jump in okay so there's actually a lot of really cool features that rise on ewv offers and I want to get to as many of them as I can today but the number one thing I want to show first is that it actually has a excellent cinema4d bridge and so inside of cinema 4d I can actually have my mesh selected go into the plugins section here and you see I have this rise muv exporter loaded in there's a bunch of settings here we want to click this export to UV option but I actually have this pre Doctorate here so we can just go ahead and click this and you'll see right away Rhys is actually opening up taking that object that we had selected inside of cinema 4d and we've successfully imported it here now I do want to show off as much of this as I can there's a lot of different UI stuff we won't dive into today but there's a few different things I'll discuss so on the left here is this viewport we're actually seeing a 3d representation of the asset so we can you know rotate around we can zoom in we can select specific edges or polygons and then on the right is this 2d flat view where we'll actually be previewing the UV layout now right now we're seeing this sort of weird flat perspective view of the mesh and that's just because we haven't actually given rise on any edges as a as a guide for how it's unwrapping and so let's go ahead and do that the first thing I want to show off just by or the first thing want to do to show off one of these new tools is actually if I click f3 on my keyboard I can switch into polygon mode so you can see here I'm actually selecting polygons rather than edges and I have this already selected but with this magic wand tool here on the right I can enable deviation and what this is going to do is just sort of look at the normals orientation on these polygons and use that as a guide for how it should be selecting the polygons and we can use this very quickly to make a selection here on our bottom cap and so you know of course I could spend time really cleaning up these these edges but let's just keep moving kind of quickly and so with these polygons selected you can see right now we haven't actually applied any cuts and so there's no updates happening here on the right and to do this with these edge with these polygons selected let's just click the C key on our keyboard you could also click this cut tool right up here and so right when I do this you'll see we actually have an orange outline now on these polygons that we had selected in fact if I click off you'll see so this is actually where we placed our first cut on the asset from here let's go ahead and click f2 to swap into a polygon or AB sorry an edge selection mode so I can be selecting specific edges we're gonna zoom out a little bit here and let's find a loop that we can grab that's pretty clean here on the gnome itself that one's pretty good so we're actually going all the way down to the bottom connecting here with this bottom cap that we've created the island and it actually looks like it goes straight up to the hat and it stops here so this is perfect I'm gonna hit C as well to place a cut here and now I want to actually apply these cuts because you can see here we're actually still looking at this weird sort of flat perspective view and to do this I needed to unfold this asset so I can click this button here or I could just hit you on my keyboard and so now you can see we actually saw a change if I click F we're gonna frame everything that we just did and so now you can see this asset or the the cuts that we placed here are actually unfolding into this flat shape I do want to point out Rison does this unique thing that where it actually has this color grid and what this is telling me is that any sort of neutral gray values are perfectly balanced Texel density so we're not looking at any distortion issues here and wherever we see blue and red you can see they are on opposite ends of the spectrum so we're looking at either stretching or really compress compressing these these islands in fact we can actually see this much more apparently if I turn on my grid here in a preview and we zoom in so you can see it actually what's happening is in these areas of red and blue we're looking at pretty significant UV Distortion and to fix this actually you know crisp address this area here and I think this is actually good point of reference that we can we can we can clean up on but actually you know what before we do that I want to point out one of I think my favorite feature inside of Ryze mu V which is that if I click f4 on the keyboard and I have this island selected here f4 switches you into island selection mode you can see on this big main island we're actually looking at a lot of overlap on our UVs this is definitely not ideal for you sort of texturing or maybe some of these next steps so what we can do from here is having this island selected I can go up and I can click this optimized button or again I can use the hotkey that it's applied to which is oh I'm gonna hold down oh and what you'll see is rhizome actually does a series of optimization passes so it's sort of iterating its figuring out how to be best balancing and distributing these these these polygons while also clearing up any sort of overlapping this is actually kind of a very fun and relaxing process to watch happen okay so now it looks like it's slowing down I think that means that we've done all of the optimization passes that we can on this if I click off I want to repack this because you can see now by doing that we actually sort of shifted things around quite a bit so if I hit the P key or come up here click this pack button I can repack these so it's actually repositioning everything trying to take advantage of as much of this UV grid space as possible and now if i zoom in here there's this space that Chris had talked about earlier and all we need to do is the same exact thing let's just place another loop right around here I know he did actually a few extra cuts but I think we can get away with just doing one loop right here let's click C again to do a cut and now if i zoom out you can see we've got this here it's not being applied and it's because we have to unwrap this asset again I'm just gonna hit you and now you can see we're actually remember we're overlapping a little bit that's because we have to pack this one last time and now we can see when i zoom out its you know it's not perfect there's definitely some little areas of distortion and maybe I'd spend some extra time adding some additional cuts to clean up these areas but you know what I kind of like the fact that there's not a lot of seams that we have to worry about there's only this main seam here on the back that's going to be visible and that's gonna be great for when we ultimately texture this asset so from here I think we're good I'm gonna go ahead and save this out now the really cool thing with rhizome and this bridge is that I don't actually have to export out an FBX or an obj to get this back in the cinema all I have to do is hit ctrl s to save this and as soon as I do Rison closes it actually reinforce that mesh that we were just working with and it actually hides the originals member this is the mesh that we originally had and sent over you can see it's actually hidden that in the viewport we've got our new mesh here if I select this and I go into body paint UV edit mode here you can see those UVs are coming in properly and so we've successfully processed this mesh okay now we are to the exciting part this is the part where I knew we had to record a tutorial because this is just the magical part where when you told me about this bit of the technique and this is where you just just did not have time to talk about this at your NAB presentation and when when you mentioned it to me you didn't even explained very far and you told me the basic idea is like oh my god that's so amazing that's so cool so let's jump right on in so people can see my favorite part okay so from here let's go ahead and jump back into the startup layout and here's this mesh that we've fully processed at this point so we've got proper low poly edge flow and in topology we've also got a new UV unwrap and you can see here here's the UV tags for that let's go ahead and copy this and I want to bring this back into the original file that Chris had actually sent me with the scan data so let's let's go ahead and paste this in and you can see here remember if I turn on the wireframe so this is actually the messy topology scan actually coming in directly from mesh room and there's a few things I want to point out here so of course we've got messy topology and if I you know we'd like to drag this out of the disks we don't need that anymore and if I had this mesh selected and jump back into the body paint UV edit mode you can see here look at how messy the UVs were coming in from measurements because mushrooms applying sort of an auto unwrapping algorithm and it works I mean we've got you know the textures coming in but it's definitely not ideal and the problem actually is that they're so drastically different from our new mesh look how clean and organized and really the problem with that is that if I jump in here to our folder here are the actual texture files that are actually being exported out of mushroom and so you can see these are embedded and referencing the messy UV layout from our scan and so the problem is if I wanted to drag in and apply this to our new cleaned up UVs they're actually not going to correlate there's gonna be no connection between what you're seeing on those textures and what we see here and so essentially what we need to do is a UV transfer almost where we're actually transferring the data that's being mapped from the messy you v's onto these new clean ones and to do this it's actually a really cool technique it's a little hacky but it's actually really fun so all we're gonna do lets to keep things straight let's rename our low poly mesh as low we'll name the old raw scan as just raw and the first thing let's grab our low poly mesh I want to go into the polygon selection and let's select all of the polygons you see here I want to right click go to nor normal move and we can actually just start to scale this up and so what we want to do here is eliminate any of these areas where our low poly mesh is sort of clipping and intersecting with the underlying raw scan so if I start to scan this up a little bit I think that looks pretty good there let's see if there's any other areas dip down here on the shoe on the butt a little bit and looks like a little bit here let's see that should be pretty good yep okay so we're not clipping through anywhere now and with all of these polygons selected let's go ahead and hit you are on our keyboard and this is to invert the actual normal selection so or orientation so now all of our normals are actually facing inward in fact if i zoom in and actually clip through this for a second you can see exactly what's happening so all of our normals are actually facing inward towards that underlying raus from here the next thing I want to do is actually double-click on our shelf down here to create just a very standard cinema 4d material let's disable the color and in the reflectance I want to remove what we currently have let's add a ggx material and I want to disable or turn down all of the roughness so we're essentially looking at a pure almost like a mirror material being applied to our low poly version of this gnome now from here I want to show you one less thing so if you disable this low poly mesh for a second what I want to do is add a light into the scene and let's actually enable ambient illumination and so when I do this you can see we're actually removing any sort of environmental effects on this mesh so we're getting rid of any sort of default shadows or highlights any sort of lighting we're looking basically at the pure albedo or diffuse map of our textures and the next step from here is actually to let's bring back our low poly mesh I want to right-click on this go to cinema 4d tags and apply a baked texture tag now there's a bunch of settings here for jump into the tag but the first thing I want to do is actually set a directory for where we'll be saving out our image let's go ahead and set this set this here I'm going to name this UV transfer and I want to make sure I'm working it in 16-bit for the depth and that's important just because I don't want to be compressing any of the data that we'll be gathering it's going to increase the output size a little bit you know I'm gonna go as high as like 4k I think for this so we can really get some nice details I want to increase the super sampling and really all this is doing is just adding a little bit of anti-aliasing onto the edges of the UVs that we'll be transferring so really it's just about adding a little bit more quality to it and for the pixel border let's go ahead and extend this a little bit from one to something like 10 and this is just gonna add a little bit of padding onto the UVs that we've making I'll show you exactly what I mean by that here in a second alright let's jump into the options tab now there's a bunch of different settings but again all we have to worry about is just one option let's enable reflection and so now when I hit preview you'll see cinema's actually baking out sort of a very quick low resolution thumbnail now this is not a final representation of what will actually be baking but this is simply a way for me to double-check and confirm that there is information being captured and really what's happening here is you can see we're actually targeting the reflections channel of our ggx material and because this is essentially a mirror and our normals on this mesh are actually facing inward what we're baking out is the reflection happening from inside of this mesh being applied through or sorry that's being applied on the actual scanned mesh so from here let's go ahead and actually click bake it's gonna take a little bit longer but you'll see happening is that since I was actually baking out what appears to be a proper map we're gonna give us a little bit I know right this is the big magic moment you said just they're all baked on there and a inverse normal reflection I was like oh my god yeah yes it's the magic moment so if I bring if I bring in now let's see here we can target let's see if I can find this really quickly it might have gotten messed up in our destination so actually it's baking out as a Photoshop file might have forgot to enable or sits at it as yeah I had it as a PSD normally I like to work in peonies but yeah that's fine that's great and so actually I'll do I'll hand it off here and I'll let Chris handle this but what we need to do from here is actually clean up and sort of shrink this mesh back down because you've actually inflated it a little bit in that process and then Chris you actually have some really cool ideas for how to clean up a little bit of that texture that we just baked out okay so here we are back on my machine what I'm going to do is pop open the UV transfer which is right before Aaron had kind of inflated it out so now we're kind of back to the good unwrapped mesh that we had I'm gonna hide our original one when we go ahead and rename it raw and low just to match what Aaron was doing and let's go ahead and make a new material and try and apply the one that he just baked out directly to our mesh I'm going to turn off the reflectance layer let's go into color let's go ahead and open up a file here we are in the folder here's the file Aaron saved out let's create that and just apply it directly it defaults to UV W of course and look at that directly applied and the material is work fine on the uninflated low poly mesh of our gnome let's go ahead and immediately tell it to show the high-rez version so I'm gonna go to editor inside of the material and change check texture preview size to a no scaling so we're gonna be seeing the 4k directly in our viewport and a so that we don't see our polygons and as you see we've got everything transferred to our low poly mesh which is right there automatically amazing like that trick is so cool so let's go ahead and spend a little bit of time in Photoshop sewing up up Photoshop open let's get our folder open I'm gonna drag in our file and let's start playing around with this the first thing I always do is duplicate my layer I'm gonna do ctrl or command J I'm gonna hide the one underneath it and I think I might even mask this out immediately so I'm going to just go ahead and do a wand magic wand selection select all of the white on the edge and i've already got contiguous turned off so it does select in between all the holes and everything and i'm just going to hit control x delete all of that so now I've kind of got on a transparent layer so now I can start manipulating this however I like and not worry about the original being affected so something that I found I was kind of shocked and hid the layer F so we zoo can navigate more easily here in Photoshop a tool I never use is the Healing Brush we've got the Spot Healing Brush tool the shortcut there is a letter J and this tool is kind of like the clone stamp tool except it's automatically trying to figure out what to put in its place so while we've got that tool selected let's go ahead and make sure that the brush is pretty soft so here's the hardness it's already pretty good I'm gonna do about 50% it's a little big keep in mind you can just use your brackets the bracket keys on your keyboard and I can shrink that's just to about the size now we can see we've got all of these little layers of tape that I had taped onto it in order to scan it better but we need to get rid of those but I figured it'd be pretty easy to get rid of them but I was shocked that we can just use this brush tool and paint over one of them and it actually does a really good job of erasing it out now if this was like a proper photograph this might be a lot tougher because you know you'd need really good continuity but the resolution on this image isn't like in amazing you can see we've it's not pixelated it's more like we're seeing individual little polygons so I we've got a lot of tolerance here a lot of leeway and the way we're going to apply it so we're just going to meticulously go through here and start erasing these out you see I'm not quite going to the edge because I want spend extra care on those now we're the spot tool where this Healing Brush is working really well is as I erase these parts out it's doing a really great job of matching the color underneath it I'm actually gonna undo that one and if we were to use the the normal stamp tool which would be kind of our normal go to if I hold down alt or option click the corner here and I start covering this up what's gonna happen really quickly is it's not going to be matching the color terribly well it's not bad we see especially down here the color isn't matching that well but our Spot Healing Brush as I paint over here is automatically finding areas that look very similar in color and this isn't limited to us just erasing out those up these bits of tape if I go to these areas where they're kind of the polygons are in particularly kind of big I can just kind of go over them and you see it's doing a good job of replacing them with something a little bit better you see over here pretty low res looking let's just paint over at that and yet just kind of keep cleaning these up so we'll probably do a quick little time-lapse here as I go through and erase out all these bits of tape so I'll see you on the other end [Music] okay so I just got rid of most of the tape except for the edges I want to give that a little bit of special attention also we've got these different spots and I didn't want to skip over those it is kind of important to go and these parts I had a lot more trouble figuring out what to do with them and I think we can I think I feel safe just going and painting over these where the holes are but those would just immediately reconnect with each other so I'm fairly confident than that I'm also finding little areas that jump out a little bit like a little a little chunkier area as I'm letting those just get a little bit more fixed so we'll keep finding those as we go the underside of this hand did not do terribly well but we'll just let that fill in there a little cleaner we always give a little bit more love to our snail here he's looking pretty good there's a little bit of bleed here on the face that bugs me so I'm going to actually do a stamp tool because I don't think the I don't think the other one the healing brush would do a very good job of cleaning that but we'll do that and then even here a little paint here you see that's where the colored stuff doesn't match up I don't think that's any worse than what we were seeing in other spots and I'll just use the healing brush now to clean that up a little little patchy here and even here you start looking a little scraped up although I mean some of those imperfections could be detail like those could be good but I just like this transition being a little bit better these get a little spotty so yeah that's pretty good let's get a little bit of a better transition there a little little Ligon old there this over here is very polygonal I'm not gonna worry too much about it maybe we'll run like a nobler over this entire thing but when there's when you're zoomed out from the gnome on the actual final I don't think those stand out that much but let's go ahead and get the the ones that stand out to us cleaned up so that's going really that's it's really this is kind of very Zen it's very simple clean method you know the stress out over this part so the one thing that we do have to stress out is trying to clean up these edges where the tape is on the edge so I'm going to do is actually do a another one selection around the entire outside and then I'm going to hold down control shift I to invert that selection so that it's not looking outside of that and let's see if the spot tool works and it does the trick is that where this is meeting the seam on the opposite side it could actually show some difference so we want to be careful and you see this one's actually not working so I'm going to use the clone stamp tool to clean this one up a little bit and yeah and we'll just keep kind of alternating between those two tools and seeing how well it fixes it like that did okay but it's not quite the right color so I'll just clone stamp that one in [Music] honestly I don't to stress out over these individual details too much in fact what I could do right now is just hit save and it's asking for compatibility I'm saying go ahead and let's tab back over to cinema 4d and if I jump back into our material I can just go into our color channel click in the material and say reload texture and your scene is going to update we're gonna start seeing it in the viewport I can make sure that everything is working pretty well now we know our scene was traveling right up the back here and we are indeed seeing that there's a little bit of a seam there honestly it's not something I'm terribly worried about it's hiding on the back of the gnome here the little places where the table is actually you can see right here there's a tiny seam there Photoshop is not super well equipped to deal with that like if we're in body paint we're actually painting here we might be a clone onto that but in this instance it's just going to sort of break that [Music] now there is one thing I'm going to to do here and it's kind of a risky thing we have to see if it's going to work or not and I'm not entirely sure that it will give you the quicksave and what I'm going to do is duplicate our entire layer and I'm going to go to our filter and I'm gonna say blur and I'm gonna blur this quite a bit and what I want to do is see if I can extract out a little bit of the lighting because while I tried to light this somewhat evenly and I didn't necessarily light it perfectly well so by blurring this out we might be able to start seeing some differences in the the color you can see darker areas and lighter areas depending on the way the light was hitting it so as I blur that up a little bit it's not perfect so we're just to see if it looks good and we might use a small percentage of this to counter at the lighting not something I super worried about but I want to kind of fill this in even more there might be other techniques for this but I'm actually gonna just duplicate my layer command or ctrl J and then collapse my layer duplicate my layer collapse my layer and by duplicating it and then merging it so it's command or control J command or control II and I'm just repeating essentially I'm bringing I'm blurring it all right I'm duplicating the blur and then re overlaying it at top of itself so we get this really solid mass of it on you know so it's blurring on the edges so let's go ahead and pull back on the saturation all the way so we end up with just a black and white image and then we can go to our levels and I'm going to kind of set I'm gonna erase out essentially everything that's not giving us any information and if we wanted to we could also throw in another quick blur if I hold down alt eruption I'll get the menu again blur this a little bit but not so much that we lose it butts gonna get rid of any pixelation we got from the levels and now I invert the layer and now it's going to darken or lighten certain areas depending on the lighting now the problem is is we get these really extreme areas primarily the beard and the beard is really dark because it with the beard was really light now ultimately what I want to do is set this to overlay and you see it actually is going to even out the overall lighting quite a bit but what I want to do is erase out the beard so if we want to be non-destructively we can increase of course create a mask I get B for brush so we got the brush tool let's go ahead and start increasing our brush quite a bit I'm on black so as I paint in black it's going to start masking out those areas and as long as I'm in the middle here and I don't get too near the edge I don't have to be super accurate as long as it just kind of looks good to my eye so I'm gonna erase out everything is kind of doing to the beard and now say I'm going to remove a lot out from these flesh tones just so that's that stays a little bit more even let's go ahead and start scooting out to the edge a little bit and as we get to the very back once again if I'm being careful like if we really erase out just to the edge of this and we do the same on the opposite side then I think it could work all right it's a little trickier because this island is interfering with what I want to do there so I'm gonna do a Wan selection here and I'm gonna do a I'm gonna hit I'm gonna go to the lasso tool actually and hold down alt option which is gonna start your racing I'm gonna eat very carefully you race out that Island oops I should have been hitting Plus because I inverted it so we get it to that again here we go I'm doing this with a mouse there okay cool so now I that's on the edge so now I should be able to go back to my brush tool and erase this out I have to invert my selection ctrl shift I and now I can go and erase out this beard edge a little bit I think I was decently careful there and once again we're just lightening that all up again shrink it a little bit let's get this tuft of hair a little bit lighter now the basic idea is that this has all gotten rebrand up but everything else has the the lighting has gotten more even everything got a little bit brighter the dark areas got lighter the light areas got a little bit darker just flattens it out a little bit more so now when we introduce our own lighting inside of 3d it should be a little bit more even now this might end up being a little heavy-handed so of course we have control over our opacity so I can pull this to any level that I want I do think it ends up getting a little bit bright so I'm only going to introduce some of this it's good even have some of the lighting but I'm actually pretty happy with that I think that looks pretty good but the only way to know for sure is to hit save and let's jump back into a cinema 4d and reload our material and we should see the overall look of the entire thing actually Photoshop right it didn't save quite yet let me make sure it did I think so and I hit reload again there and out Photoshop save and you see the entire thing lightens up a little bit everything looks a little bit more even and it doesn't look like we introduced any extra horrible seams down the back like it's all just what we had before the beard is still nice and bright everything's a little bit more evenly lit pretty happy with that overall I like the way this is looking sure I think there's any other tricks I want to do there's a little patchiness and the beard here that's jumping out at me but really for the most of it I'm pretty happy with it so let's jump into Photoshop do the last couple of tweaks head and yeah let's do a quick bit of patching here so back to the Healing Brush tool zoom up on this part of the beard here's that patchiness I didn't like the look of shrink up the Healing Brush boom-boom-boom-boom any place is kind of jumping out and I mean we could spend you could spend all day introducing like cleaning things up manually painting things it would be a never-ending process and now stylistically I think this is where I'm going to end it I'm even gonna save it right there but stylistically if you wanted to you could do things like I would probably duplicate this layer because I don't want to lose it but I could blur layers I could go to our let's see go to our blurb menu and we could do something like a smart blur is actually he activated there maybe smart player doesn't work on 16-bit but yeah things like you know I well in that case I if I was just to do a Gaussian blur like we could potentially blur these things and you see everything gets a lot more even and that we could erase out if I had a we could potentially erase out our seams here so those become a little bit more crisp if we wanted to and you could kind of even things out stylistically you could start running filters on it and kind of do whatever you want I don't know what filters are available but yeah I think that's pretty much going to wrap up what I want to do with this cleanup and I think we are now ready to pass this back over to Erin to jump into substance that is saved I'm gonna go jump into cinema 4d and let's save this as another new file I'm just gonna save it as that's UV transfer I'm gonna just save it as textured Photoshop and that's the file that Erin can pop open and continue working from I just wanna say and all those all of the photogrametry stuff that I've done that this is where I stop I don't go any further maybe I had a little bit of noise inside a Photoshop I do some noise overlays inside of cinema but this is where I'd stop so he's about to jump into the substance and if you don't have substance then you could stop here or do other techniques inside a Photoshop to overlay some textures but let's go ahead and just add on that extra little bit at the end and head it over to Erin okay let's go ahead and grab that file that Chris just sent over and before we take this into substance painter I want to show you guys a few quick staging things that we could be doing to cleaning to be cleaning this file up a little bit more so the first thing let's do let's just get rid of any of these unnecessary meshes at this point because now all we need is this final lovely-looking known mesh that we have and I want to get rid of any of these unnecessary materials as well let's actually keep this one material that we have applied on but I want to change the name from matte to gnome and this is actually important because this is how our naming structure will be set in place when we import this mesh into substance painter and from here I like to export out FBX files for substance but you can also do an obj if you're not working with materials let's say no to substance and I want to make sure the textures and materials is enabled because you want to be embedding that material so that the name that we've placed here will actually carry through okay let's go ahead an open substance painter now and if for those of you don't know substance painters are really really exciting tool it's actually very similar to photoshop but for 3d models essentially in fact the maker of substance algorithmic which actually have their website here was just recently acquired from Adobe and so this is actually a very cool program there's a bunch of actually tools in there in their library and if we click on get substance here to want to see really quickly now you can see it actually it's a very very accessible subscription model so I think it's $20 a month I believe there's a free 30-day trial so feel free to pick this up if you guys are trying for the first time but then yeah we're looking at about $20 a month for access to their entire program suite okay so we jump back oh and I also want to point out it is available for Windows and Mac so now if we bring open substance painter this is the the starting page of substance painter again with all of these tools I won't dive too deep into the UI stuff but we will kind of discuss some of the features so it's going to file new and the first thing I want to do is in this file tab here let's go ahead and select that mesh that we just created so if I navigate really quickly here to my folder let's see here oops it's inside here we got we had Nome - substance let's go ahead and grab this and let's change the document resolution size from 1 K - 2 K now one of the greatest things about substance is that most of the actions you're working in our procedural so we can actually be changing this document resolution at any given point in all of the workflows that we'll be doing will automatically update that said I like to start off at 2k let's go ahead hit OK now you can see we're actually bringing in the mesh right away and so we can zoom in here I can hold down shift and right click the mouse - drat and and drag to actually rotate the environment lighting in the scene and the very first thing you have to do is substance again there's a lot of UI stuff that we won't dive into today but the very first step that you should do after you've imported a mesh and just double check to make sure that everything is coming in okay yep there's no weird topology issues the first thing we want to do is click on one of these toolbars here let's see which one it is yep it's this one says texture set settings oh and one of the first things I want to point out actually if we click on our texture set list you can see that the the set here is named gnome and that's coming in from the material that we named earlier so when we export our textures at the end here they'll actually use this as their naming structure okay so back to what I was saying if we jump into the texture set settings here here we could be targeting all of the different maps and channels that we'll be painting on so everything from base color height roughness whatever it may be but the very first thing you should do after you've imported and and confirm that the mesh is working is we need to bake out our mesh maps and that's important you can see here the normal Maps world space ID ambient occlusion so on so forth this is important because most of substance painters smart generators and different functions that it has rely on these maps here to calculate what's happening and so the first thing we need to do is actually provide substance with these maps and to do this let's click this bake map mesh maps button there's a few final things we have to do so this wouldn't increase our output size again I'll work in 2k for the time being and we can actually disable the ID map because we don't want to worry about exporting out an ID Channel we're not gonna be needing that for any any sort of purpose in this example and the rest of it we can actually ignore all I wanted to do is just set the resolution size for what we'll be baking and let's go ahead and click bake and so now you'll see it takes a little while but substance is essentially baking out and calculating ambient occlusion curvature world positioning so it's figuring out you know which way where the mesh is oriented which way is the bottom versus the top part of the mesh and now it's actually a very quick process in this case so you can see here now we've got all of these maps that we successfully baked and we're ready to get rolling with this now so the first thing I want to show you guys currently we don't have a material being applied or texture to this this known now of course you know substance ships with a bunch of default materials and and stuff that we could be loading in and we could do something really weird here like I've got some pre imported in that I think I've I've had and downloaded from other places but you know we could we could make this Chrome if we wanted but I really chrome-dome I really liked all of the work that Chris just did cleaning up that texture that we baked out from mushrooms so let's go ahead and import that first before we do anything else and I can do this by hitting this button down here which is the resources importer manager and so what I can do is actually click add resources let's navigate and find that Photoshop document that Chris just had is it this one right here Chris or did you have a thing so I just saved over the original oh great okay I'm gonna go ahead and import this and right now it says undefined what we want to do is define what sort of properties this is and so you could be loading an alpha map so you could be loading in you know lots or different HDRI environments to be lighting the scene but in this case we know that this is going to be loaded in as a texture file and in this case I'll import this into the project and let's click import and now you'll see down here and my shelf if I bring this up a little bit it's taking a second but here you can see is actually that PSD document being imported in in fact if I click on this project we can isolate just these are the only maps B that are relevant to the project we're working on right now and so here is that Photoshop document and let's go ahead and apply this to our mesh so I'm actually gonna go ahead and delete both of these layers and one of the things you'll notice is actually that substance painter works pretty similarly to photoshop and so what we can do here we can add layers we can add fill layers you can be you know having folders as well as adding like masks if you want to look at a clipping mask essentially to a layer and the number one important thing that I like to stress when you're working with substance painter is that you want to be working with a non-destructive workflow and what I mean by that is so currently if I take just this empty layer that I had and I take a brush tool let's go ahead and change our color to something like red and so if I'm painting on this empty layer you can see here I can actually paint on the actual 3d asset and really what's happening here if I change my viewport mode for a second you can actually see we can see both the 2d and the 3d viewport similar to Rise on when we were in earlier and so you can see here in real time I can actually go back and forth and do either/or and I'm actually painting on to this onto this mesh which is really cool the problem though is that I can't undo any of these changes very easily of course I can undo but it's hard for me to target maybe the specific stroke stroke that I did before and disabled this is a very destructive workflow and so what I like to do instead of painting directly onto a layer like this is actually take a fill layer instead so here I got the fill layer let's change the color to red so you can see it's being applied to the entire thing right now and rather than painting on this specific layer where the red is what I can do is actually throw this into a folder let's delete this we'll try this from scratch I can actually throw this into a folder and mask apply a black mask to this folder and so what you have to think of is essentially we've we've applied an alpha mask to this folder and because it's all black in fact I can actually go in here and I can actually target the mask Channel you can see because it's all black we're not actually feeding any of that red through to the actual mesh and so what we can do from here is go ahead and apply a paint layer and now you can see because I'm actually working on this black mask I don't have any colors anymore I just I'm and grayscale value so I can either be painting black or white values and when I paint white values we're actually painting back through our masks see we're actually painting our alpha masks essentially and what this is doing is then in real time feeding through everything exposing the material that we have tucked underneath of this folder and so I've actually dragged this red material out you can see if I were to go in and grab maybe a different material again let's grab this this brass and we'll come back into the material you can see now instead of the red we're masking whatever is embedded inside of this folder whether it's the brass whether it's what's the red color and the advantage to doing it this way is that this layer is still entirely procedural so I can go in and I can change the color values something like blue I can target different channels you know here is height information so I can actually if i zoom in here and I lower my height like you can see we're actually adding either positive or negative values into like a displacement or a height map that we could be loading into our textures yeah it's really good everything from roughness we could be targeting we're isolating just you know very matte roughness values just to whatever's being exposed through this mask and I bring all this up because it's really important like I said to be working non-destructively so that we could be flexible in how we're setting everything up okay that said it scared of all that and very quickly here let's jump into just three days so I can just see this mesh let's go ahead and add a fill layer again and if I hold down the Alt key and click so here you can see our all the different channels that were enabled so you can see with it with color enabled we have this base color channel or anything that we do here is being applied if I dis if I click on this I'm actually disabling it you can see it looks different now and so we've actually removed we're not accessing the color channel in any way and so in this case all I want to do is hold down alt and click on the color Channel that's just isolating so we're turning off all of these other channels just so that we only are focusing on the base color right now what I want to do instead of apply a color value here what we can do is actually go into our projects tab again grab this PSD that Chris had worked on and dragged this in on top of the base color so take a second to update but now you can see because we're set to UV projection just as you would be in cinema and the scaling is set to one we're actually mapping that PSD document exactly onto our mesh and so now essentially all we've done up until this point is just create a one-to-one environment matching what we had already inside of cinema but the advantage now is that I want to show you guys how I tend to use substance painter in this case as a pipeline tool to add extra details that you know what maybe weren't even on the original mesh that we were scanning but really as a sort of control over my artistic direction and ideas that I have maybe I want to go in and actually paint very specific height information to break up some of these highlights maybe more roughness values we could be doing all of this more procedurally and non-destructively inside of substance painter to do this let's go ahead and I'm gonna show you guys a few different things so what we can do let's go ahead now we'll keep this let's rename this as our base and now on top of this let's go ahead and add another fill layer and for an example again I'm going to hold down alt just targeting the color channel and what I can do is let's you know again we'll apply red just that it's very easy to understand what's going on we will throw this into another folder because remember we want to work not destructively here and we'll apply a black mask and then I want to apply a paint layer to this and so remember we're painting black and white values when I grab the white and you can see we're doing this but the other really cool thing here because remember we baked out all of these maps at the beginning of our import phase what I can do now is actually use some of substance painters native smart masks which are really really cool essentially presets that comes shipped entirely with substance painter for different effects and so like you know let's see here what do we want look at like okay cavity rest so what what we can derive from that from the name even is that we're gonna be targeting sort of like the the cavities the the deep pockets of this mesh and so what I can do because this is a smart mask is just drag this right onto our folder layer if say it comes in as a mask editor and when I click on this layer already you can see it almost looks like we're targeting like the AO that we had baked out but but again the really cool thing about substance painter is that all of this is procedural and so I have all of these parameters on the right here where I could be targeting you know I could be lowering the balance so we're effectively turning this down a little bit let's actually change because we're working non-destructively we can actually come back into the embedded material here let's change this from red to something maybe maybe we want to add a little dirt maybe this is actually a dirty no maybe it's been outside in in in the mulch and we can you know set more of like a dirty color let's bring back the roughness channel by clicking on it and will increase the roughness so now we're breaking up some of these highlights by bringing in more roughness values let's jump back into our mask editor that we're working on and we can continue to refine some of this so there's this global contrast and if I don't turn this down you can see we're actually smoothening out some of these values and one of the things I like to do to really help see exactly what I'm doing here you can change from the material to mask again and you can see exactly what we're targeting so you can see in real time we're actually building our alpha Channel I like smoothening this out quite a bit okay let's jump back okay maybe that's a little strong and so what I can do actually from here on my master folder so if I close everything you can see I've got my folder here is the opacity level of this folder and so if I tone this down you know I can be kind of like finessing this maybe I liked all those valleys we had before but it's just simply a little too strong so we can tone this down a little bit something like this maybe it might be enough you know so we're adding just a little bit of extra detail that wasn't even there before but I think it's helping to add a little bit to the realism the next thing I want to do is add just a little bit of height data to this because you can see this very much feels like a smooth asset especially with the the highlights and so I'm gonna repeat this whole thing again I can just copy the folder this time though and let's rename this to height so we can keep track of what we're doing and we'll rename the old one dirt and this time let's get rid of all of those maps that we just built and let's jump back in here to our embedded layer that we're working with inside of this height folder let's turn off both of these and I just want to be targeting the height channel this time we'll come back in let's add a generator this time this time instead of using these smart filters will build our smart generators we'll build our own and so we can do this just by clicking on the generator click here and let's do mask editor so we're gonna build our own very quickly and then this texture I want to go ahead and you can see there's a lot of like procedural textures let's just type in noise and we'll see what we can get black and white spots and let's see here oh you know what I'm doing this wrong sorry we can just actually just to feed it in rather than a generator we can actually just feed in a fill my apologies and we can just feed this in here and so now what's happening because we actually haven't applied any values here that's what's going on so we need to change our height values right now they're set to zero so we're not actually adding or decreasing any height values so as soon as I turn this down now you can see what's happening so we're using this black and white map to actually feed in as our mask where the height information is coming and so from here I'm just going to tone this down just a little bit and we'll do this by tweaking the opacity and let's actually increase the scaling so that we can make these a little bit finer details there we go now we can start to see obviously this is a little too much but now I'm getting some of that nice pop that we are missing before this really feels like it has a nice grit to the the surface tone the sound just a little bit okay and the last thing I want to do is let's add a little bit of dust maybe maybe there's some dust on top so we've added dirt that's in these crevices but I also want to add a little bit of dust where it's just focused on the top of the mesh and to do this let's create another folder another fill layer just want the color and the roughness well add a little bit of like a tannish color to this this time and increase the roughness and this time I want to add a black mass to the folder again add a generator this time and let's do a mask editor I know there's a lot of stuff oh no I like the procedural nature I didn't I always thought substance designer was like the procedural ones but the way this is layering up generators and creating masks is not at all the way I thought the workflow on this tool win ya know it's it's great a substance designer you can build a lot of like the tools like these smart tools that I'm using you can be using substance designer so like actually be building your own but yeah there there is a lot of similarities in both both applications and so the last thing I want to do really quickly here because I again we baked out all of these maps from before I just want to target this world space normal and so when I start to drag this and you know what actually I think it's the position gradient which one is it let's tone this down what are we doing around here okay I just needed to tone it down a little bit so you can start to see so this is working it was just set to strong so by having the world space norm will turn up all the way what we're saying is only look for like the top surface areas that are seeing at the top of the the world and what we can do from here is just dragging the balance a little bit more and so you can see I'm building essentially like a a dust position you can use this for snow you could use it for dust whatever it may be and then again I'm just gonna tone this down just a little bit and of course you can continue adding your own effects and stuff but really what we've done is just adding in a little bit of you know extra extra information here and the really cool thing I mentioned that everything that we done so far has been procedural and the advantage to that if I jump into my texture set settings this whole time we've been working in 2k but the really cool thing is that I can go ahead and change this and uh present even this late stage in the game to 4k and everything all of these maps will be recomputed really quickly to 4k all of these noises and everything and the generators will be recomputed in 4k and so we're actually able to get even more details being applied to this mesh than before and I can really show you what I mean if let's jump down loaded like 1k and so you can see here we're actually able to very quickly determine our output resolution size and then the final thing here before I hand this back over to Chris if you want to do any sort of final staging areas maybe back inside of cinema 14 is we need to export out these channels you know we've been working with base color height roughness all of these but we need to bring these out as bitmaps that we can load back into cinema 4d and your render engine of choice and I think in this case today we'll probably be using redshift so what we can do is actually go ahead and go to file export textures and one of the really cool things is that substance painter actually ships with a lot of different presets for whatever render engine you might have so if you're working in real time interactive stuff you have all these different Unity presets unreal see there's v-ray Arnold so on so forth Corona and we can't you just go ahead and click redshift and so what this is going to do is take all of the information that we've been painting and automatically convert them into the types of maps that redshifts works with so that we can have a seamless integration plugging that all back inside cinema4d I can set my my output file type here as well as my bitmaps I want to work in 16 let's go ahead and set an output I'll make a new folder and name is texture exports and we'll go ahead and select this and click exports now you'll see our substance painter is exporting out all of these different maps that red shift will take which we will then feed into cinema 4d okay here we are back on my machine I don't have to do is import the materials from substance painter into cinema4d so I opened up our most recent file which is just the low poly gnome this currently has the older material but let's go ahead and copy in Aaron's new material so let's jump up a level or two here's our new textured exports so I'm going to copy that entire folder let's go into our actual final one in here I'm going to paste it into there and let's go ahead and just rename the folder into the TE X the text folder and now we should be able to see all these with this file right now now we could render this in cinema 4d but hey max on just acquired redshift so let's do some redshift in here we'll keep it real basic so we don't need that material because we're gonna make the brand-new a redshift material boom let's apply that immediately let's pop it open and take a look we're going to be feeding in our materials the different channels and to do that we have go into our shader graph so let's go ahead and pop a bat open right here here's our redshift material I need to feed the all the different textures in via the texture node so let's go ahead and search for texture drag that in here's our texture node let's immediately load in our different material so here we can see let's make sure we're in the right folder we are not I'm glad I checked go in here and we can find our different material so here's our diffuse material let's pop that open and our diffuse material is real straightforward let's drag it into the redshift node and feed it into the diffuse layer so we'll just do diffuse color boom that one's done let's go ahead and copy this node to save ourselves a split second and let's go track down the next map on this one we're going to be importing I think the gloss layer so the gloss layer is a little funky here what we're going to do is actually drag that into our redshift material node we're going to be dragging that into our reflection roughness a gloss is kind of the inverse of roughness and thank you a Billy for giving us a heads up on this so it's kind of the opposite of what we want we can fix it automatically by going into our redshift material going from basic to advanced and telling it to convert the glossiness to Roughness so it's actually gonna invert the map and that should now look correct and we got one more node that we need let's go and make one more copy and we're going to load in we could use either the normal or the bump we did a test and they both seem to be pretty much identical for our purposes so to keep it simple we're gonna load in the height map which is the bump it's the black and white image and we need to convert that into something that the redshift material can deal with so let's go ahead and search for the word bump and then we can pull in bump map and we feed this into the redshift bump into the input and now it's determining how big the height is going to be and now we can just take that and feed it also into a redshift material into overall into our bump input and there we go that's some basic stuff set up let's go ahead and close both of those down let's set up a tiny quick environment in here let's just make a disk to be a floor we'll make another redshift material I'll even just leave that generic we'll apply that directly and let's go ahead and set up some sort of basic lights we'll go red shift and we will add a red shift light will add 8 and we should feed in HDR I've already got one prepared load that right in give it a second to load and that should be pretty much ready to render so let's go ahead and open up our redshift a render view and we'll hit play it's going to load the scene in its processing all the textures and the materials and boom we are now loaded in so if we go and we zoom up when I no musi we're getting really awesome feedback immediately in the viewport and immediately we should be able to see that we've got this nice little subtle bump our kind of our 4k bump in here and we've got different glossiness where the dust is and we've actually got the dust layer applying overall to the entire shape so that's all looking really good of course we can go into the different layers and tweak the amount that things are being blurred go into the redshift material tab we could change the amount of overall reflection that there is we could change we could add subsurface scattering we could shift hues around there's so many additional things we could do and if anybody's interested we could do some follow up tutorials about that type of stuff but I think for the most part that is where we are going to wrap this one up we have brought our little guy this tiny little gnome from the real world into cinema 4d ready to render ready to make a bunch of clones ready to have a whole gnome party going okay so that actually wraps up rocket lassos a very first tutorial and oh man that was a doozy that was a tutorial and I'm so excited to have done this tutorial with you not only was there a million cool techniques and there and fun things but I just really love these combo tutorials where you have somebody to bounce ideas off of different techniques like somebody who can fill in the gaps on one side and the other person is learning while we're recording it even though we just did like a six hour marathon to record this entire thing so thank you so much man of course No thank you so much for thinking of me I'm honored to have led you down this rabbit hole a little bit but you definitely surpassed most of the knowledge that I had gathered in my own process so it's always fun and exciting and inspiring to see where you took it and to be along for the ride so Aaron where can people find you on social media you can find me on Twitter and on Instagram both at aaron cove rets aaro n COV r ett and there will be a link to that in the description below and you want to be sure to follow him because he just does amazing incredible work I've seen some of the projects that he's currently working on and you're not gonna want to miss those for sure thanks man appreciate that so if you enjoy this kind of content be sure that you subscribe to this YouTube channel we'll be doing more of this we do a bunch of live streams every single week I've got a lot more tutorials planned like way too many tutorials playing I've got Allah s lined up and we'll be seeing Aaron again for sure so if you want to support rocket lasso there's actually a patreon set up all this content is going to be free for everybody always but if you want to help keep this going and make it so I'm available to do more live streams and answer questions for people and make more tutorials head on over to patreon it's super appreciated but not necessary at all so thank everybody so much and I'll see you in the next video bye bye everybody [Music]

Channel: RocketLasso

Views: 66,249

Rating: 4.9420009 out of 5

Keywords: cinema 4d tutorial, cinema 4d modeling, cinema 4d uv mapping, cinema 4d redshift, cinema 4d photorealistic, c4d tutorial, c4d photorealistic rendering, c4d modeling tutorial, photogrammetry tutorial, cinema 4D photogrammetry tutorial, cinema 4D meshroom, 3d modeling from images, 3d photoscan cinema 4d, rizomuv cinema 4d, 3d coat cinema 4d, instant mesh tutorial, 3dcoat retopo, 3d coat auto retopology, cinema 4d volume modeling, Rocket Lasso, Aaron Coverett

Id: VRfytVKkNQw

Length: 127min 36sec (7656 seconds)

Published: Thu May 23 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/umtksa]

btw I dont know any other solution for this