How to Create Realistic Microphone Textures in Maya/Arnold - Material Study

today we are back in maya and i'll be showing you guys how to create a holistic microphone material we'll be focusing on the front piece which is the foam and we're also working on the metallic which is mainly made out of a metal or like a hard plastic jonathan from twitter reached out to me and he was asking if i can create a tutorial about this so i was up for the challenge so i just jumped into maya modeled that microphone quite quickly and then started recording this tutorial for you guys and if you want to follow along to get the model and the scene files everything is uploaded to my patreon you will find the link in the description below um so without further ado let's just jump into maya and get this thing going all right so back in my you can see we have a very basic scene i modeled this microphone here quite basic stuff and you can get this scene on my patreon the link is in the description below if you want to follow along so you can see we have this metal plastic object here on the right and we have this bigger foam piece so i will be showing you how to create those materials the lighting for this is already set up so we don't need to bother it's just about shading today so uh let's just get started so i'm just placing a reference in the bottom corner here so this is the render which i created for testing and we'll i'll be showing you how to set everything up exactly like this so let's just close that and just create those shaders so i'm just creating a standard surface shader like that and then i'm just hitting shift d to duplicate it and if we now open the render view again and i hit render we have those materials assigned progressive refinement is on if i select the the curve or do a render region around the curve we can now see that the material is working and everything is assigned so for for the diffuse color for that it's quite basic it's just a black plastic cable all i want to do is reduce the the render color to maybe 0.05 which is essentially ultimate black and then you can adjust the roughness a little bit just to get something on it something like that should work just fine um and then let's just work already on the metal piece i just want to first make it dark so it's obvious that what we are dealing with here and maybe increase the roughness so we can already see what we're getting at and also for the front piece i'm just changing the color to be dark just that we are already in the same like similar bull park what we want to work with all right so let's focus on this section here you can see in the reference if i crop this and make this large there is some kind of bump map on it and it might also be flakiness so actually we'll be working with both so let's just select that and make sure we do our framing of this guy so we just have this and then i want to create my ai noise which will be for the bump mapping and then i'm creating an arrange as well to be able to control it and then i'm just hooking these two guys together and then the out goes into a ai bump map come to d and then finally from here on we can go into the shader like that so if i hit isolate selected on the noise this is our scale so we obviously want to go a lot smaller so increase the scale maybe to 18 um and then make sure it's actually that this is not in the same space so maybe we should go in world space and then everything is at the same scale obviously if you have your v's you need to have different use different settings in the range we now want to make sure that we really crush those values so we get these individual little flakes or bumps something like that and we want to have a lot more than that so the size is also a bit too large so too small so i want to make this even bigger so we get finer bumps like that but again we want more right so how would we get more without changing a scale we probably would need to create more of these noises um so how to do that is just duplicating this network here so we can just hit shift d to duplicate this hook it up again and we maybe want to do one more so we have three noises together and then we want to combine them using a max operation and that way we just add the brighter pieces together so ai composite like that and then you just cook these two guys together like one and two make sure the mode is set to max which always takes the the higher value and then we do one more shift d to create another copy of the composite and then hook these two guys up again like that and then finally go back to the bump make sure this one is also set to max um both are and then if we if we look at our connected piece they are still the same because they all live on top of each other so what we need to do we need to offset the noises in the you can use the offset here or you can use a different time and now you can see we're getting more noise together right so and i do this again with the other one we change the timing one more time and then you can see we get different pattern we can also offset them to actually move them i think maybe offsetting works a little bit better and then we should have way more pieces now let's disable the locking here at the bottom and disable isolate selected and now you can see we have this nice little bump all over the place um it might be too strong what i mean is um the bump is too intense so we can reduce that maybe to 0.02 just to get some kind of surface it does not need to be that apparent because you don't really see it in the reference so you can go really low on this just that there's some kind of modulation on the surface so next up is creating these this nice uh look to it so typically all we need to do is um just create a car paint shader or you can use the flakes as well so the car pane has this flake thing built in so if i hook that up directly to the normal camera you should see these flakiness happening so all you got to do now is change the size of these guys make sure you're also in world space and then if you create a really small number you see you get already this flaky look to it and it automatically outputs normal so you can plug that in directly and based on the normal randomize you can have it as if there's no bump but you can also bring it in very gently to get very close to the look you want and you can already see just by doing that we are very close to the reference i think our scale is maybe a bit small so maybe go 0.003 which is quite close i think and then we can play around with this randomize to get exactly the look we want maybe this is a bit too flaky so i'm just reducing the randomization to get it a bit softer and that's essentially that and then i i also want to combine these two guys now so so all you have to do then is use the ai flick and connect that to the bump normal slot and then you have these two things combined you can obviously increase our bump a little bit just to get a bit more um feedback on our bigger noise we created it might already be a bit strong so maybe just go to 0.01 just to have a very subtle effect of this just to break up the surface a tiny bit you can see it's very subtle it's not too aggressive but i think this is working quite nice you can see these little flakes here and there one thing which i like to do we can try to adding a coat because it is a bit dull and there could be a little bit of reflection so under the code tab we can try to bring that up this is now obviously coded but if you increase the roughness you just get a little bit more sheen on everything this is not maybe not needed but i thought it added a little nice touch to this material you don't see it as much in the ref but it is a bit more glossy but i think as it is right now we are pretty close already so now let's tackle this big chunk of material in the front which is a bit tricky like i tried a few versions and um yeah it's definitely not easy to create this kind of foam look and you can see i had have some iterations here which i tried previously and it looked like this first and then it got better and better and better so this is where we left off our first idea was to work on the displacement to make sure we actually displacing the foam so my initial thought was make sure that you have a high high enough subdivision to actually see any detail um so let's see the wireframe right now this is the wireframe so it's not very dense at all but it did actually work quite well with my latest approach because i was using the auto bump feature which actually saved my butt because i don't need to subdivide it as much so i was using the cell noise because it has this nice woolly feature so in a cell noise you have this pattern and there's this wall e1 which i use which looks like that and then again change your mode maybe to object or world space if you have your v's changes to uv and that's that will work if you move the object the pattern will stick and then obviously i was just changing the scale and what i did which is a good idea is to use the user data because there's not a node with just a constant value so i'm using the user data float to actually drive my scale so i can just have this one value to drive all three at once it's a nice little trick and then you have your default values and you just put in maybe 50 and then you have this fine fine noise and just go maybe 20 maybe even 15. this already seems all right maybe go 10 as a pattern right so this would be a basic idea you can use randomize you probably do want to randomize these things and again what we did previously as well we use different nodes and i want to do the same so i'm shifting this one and i'm hooking up this the same values to the scale so we have the same scale of the noise pattern but we're using a composite again to bring them both together probably using max or maybe at this time minimum we need to see i think probably minimum makes more sense and then we just hook this up quickly to our shader and then we do let's say minimum and then we can offset one uh like that and then you can see they are essentially added on top of each other with different values right so we get a bit more detailed pattern all over the place now let's connect this up to our displacement so all we got to do for this is just use the red channel to plug it directly into this placement and obviously want the shader still to be connected so now we have this if we go to basic view we see what the displacement is doing and you can select the shape and then on the shape arnold tab you have subdivision and you do have displacement so right now it's on point five zero values point five two so i'm just disabling the height so we have no displacement and then we could slightly increase this maybe 2.05 you can see we have something um i want to make sure auto bump is on and then we get already this finer detail which is good this is what we want but we the the pattern is weird it does not look like craters it's more like little overlays or something so i'm using the ai range to get more detail into this worldy pattern so i'm just hooking it up back up to the displacement and in the range enabling smooth stepping you can already see it changed the look and then i can slowly slide the values and you can now see the effect of the bump map or this pattern and this is essentially what i wanted to achieve is like this really strong cut out look um but you need to fine tune it a little bit otherwise it will get funky quite fast but i think this works already quite good and now if i go back to the shaded view this is now what it's looking like already so let's see it's super glossy but you we already getting closer to what we want to achieve if we go back to the shader of the foam the values of 0.003 so it's super black and the roughness at 0.892289 so if you increase the roughness you can see that everything gets smoother and you can really see those holes so i was not really able to achieve the look like the like the reference on the left with this approach so i thought why not try to use the same idea i used in the in the metal piece with that flake shader because essentially it looks like some cell noise is flaked together which create that optic so let's disconnect the displacement for now and connect this to the normal camera again make sure your density or your density is at one so you get more flakes or you can increase the depth so you get more flakes in that and then like a separate layer more layers are added so you can see it's way more broken up it's not that uniform um that uniform look to that flakes so make sure to play around with that to get exactly what you want to see and then again it's about scale so maybe go to 0.02 0.002 which is a bit small let's go 0.08 0.008 is what i mean maybe 0.01 it's better it's getting better maybe 15. so this is something which i think works it might be a little bit large but i think it is okay to test and then you have the flake normalize rectangle which gives you the the look of how much each flake is being angled towards the camera or away from the camera so in combination with the other one this is what i tried so now let's hook hook up the displacement map up again and this already got a little bit better so now we have these two things together but i think now the displacement is way too strong so let's reduce that let me go to 0.01 so this is now slowly getting more interesting we can see we have the flake pattern and we also see that we have this interesting effect of the displacement so we have these two things on top of each other maybe try to get a bit more uh reduce the scale a bit more got a bit finer maybe it's a bit too fine now and then for our wally let's maybe increase the displacement a little bit or no two that's getting better and now i like to add more subdivisions because even without subdivisions it still looks a bit low so let's maybe increase our subdivs to four to get a bit more detail and especially in the wireframe this is more detailed now and the basic mode looks good as well you can see we have these shapes i think though that our pattern for our displacement is too large so let's maybe increase this to 15 so we get a finer pattern all over we go 18. and you can already see now it looks a bit better let's go back to shaded mode and now we are getting really close to what i think works quite well i just think overall it's maybe a bit too intense of the displacement so let's bring that back down again maybe to 12 0.012 that's a little bit better and then with the flakes we can play around again with the normal eyes you can see this is with almost without any breakup of that normalize but with it you actually get this nice look to it and then again you can play around with the overall roughness if if it's not shiny enough you just reduce the roughness and it gets way more plasticky or reflective and this is already i think better than i had before i think it is actually better than i had before and this essentially is the idea of what i try to explain is that you can combine different techniques to get exactly the look that you want so before we had the only the displacement which looked okay but a lot of people stop there and think okay i tried everything but then the new idea was why don't you try the normalize of the flakes to bring that together and you can see my progression so this was i think just displacement and i really just couldn't get it to work and then i thought oh let's try the same idea we did on the metal and then we actually got a pretty good looking result so all we have to do to polish the render is obviously adding a few um like depth of field and a nicer render settings and then we're good to go so i'm just heading over to my to the render camera here make sure that um on the arnold tab i'm enabling the depth of field to get this nice out of focus region and render settings obviously we just cranked them up right now it's on two zero zero so it's very low we can go maybe up to eight for the aaa samples and then one one to get a clean render so let's just see how that looks all right so now you can see the final render with depth of field and high render settings i think it looks quite good very close to the reference i think the reflection is matched pretty good alright i hope you guys enjoyed this tutorial was a bit shorter than usual i just wanted to show you the techniques i used using the flakes and the combination with displacement map i think the results are quite good so please give me a thumbs up if you like what i do and i will see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Arvid Schneider

Views: 10,585

Keywords: arvid schneider, vfx, maya, autodesk maya, maya 2020, maya 2022, maya tutorial, arnold, arnold renderer, maya 3d, 3d, 3d modelling, 3d texturing, lookdev, rendering, 3d rendering, lighting, 3d lighting, cgi movies, visual effects, vfx artists, hollywood vfx, vfx tutorial, vfx effects, autodesk, 3d tutorial, simulation, fx, render, solidangle, surfacing, shading, 3dsmax, 3d render, denoiser, tutorial, texturing, texturing tutorial, physically based rendering

Id: 0fV6IV-wYBQ

Length: 18min 58sec (1138 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 30 2020