How to make ice cubes with Maya and Redshift

[Music] hello awesome people this is june from awesome health cg today we are going to make this beautiful ice cube in maya and ritu first let's look at some real ice cubes and see what elements we have to make [Music] okay uh in real ice cubes there seems to be some kind of bubbles so we need bubbles and then there's there are like micro scratches in the middle which we're gonna create that as well then there is actual cracks on the ice cube itself so we are going to create those things as well let's create a cube in maya and scale it up a bit move it onto the grid and let's add some divisions nice let's select all the edges so we'll go to the edge mode and select all the edges in the cube and then we will convert the selection to vertices then we are going to average the vertices so it's create like a roundish shape yeah then we'll select all the vertices shift right click edit component you can move eno out whichever the texture like i like to move it in so we have a random looking cube now uh let's add some divisions to this so division is different from smoothing if you smooth this guy it's gonna look even rounder but we don't want that what we're gonna do is we're gonna add subdivisions on top of this so it's not gonna move it's just gonna add more divisions to it so let's go to edit mesh add divisions uh this looks like there's a there's a bit too much let's reduce it to one okay yeah this is good for me let's add a smooth as well yeah this is good before we get into texturing this we'll make a nice background to this guy and add some basic lights so we can see it properly now let's create a plane scale it up we want to have some kind of a ramp so we get like nice fallouts on the lights so let's make a bend deformer let's go to deformers non-liner blend if you hold j you can snap into 45 degree angles ah let's see what we're doing here um okay so it's rotating like that let's convert it to two ah yeah let's increase the curvature yeah that's good let's create a camera before we do any kind of lighting or texturing it's it's always good to have a camera set up uh we can always render from that and we can save the rendered renders like the renders rendered images then we can go back and see the progression and everything and all of them are in the same camera which is great when you want to showcase what you did no yeah that looks good to me let's uh ctrl a lock the camera so we don't move it by accident lock it okay that's our uh let's move it back a bit i don't know you can't do that because it's the deformer is still working on it so uh if you're happy with the removal let's delete the history so these are my buttons this is delete history this is freeze transform it is center pivot rather than going into this all these menus and spending time i'll just go like history face transform and center people see how easy it is um let's move this back so the band is uh for the back uh okay now we have a camera we have a background now we need some lights let's create a dome light first brick shift dome let's do a test render for fun okay so that's my test render from and it's rendering from the perspective let's switch to our camera and do another render it's looking okay it's too smooth okay now we need to assign uh hdr imap what i'm going to use is free hdr that i got from the internet so this is the hdr i'm going to use on the dome so in this one we have some nice yellow color lights coming from the side and blue light coming from the top which is uh really nice i like it so let's assign that we can we are going to see the reflections but it's not going to be that detailed so it doesn't really matter whether it's a low risk or a high risk let's render this guy okay i kind of want the yellow light to come from this side so we'll rotate the dome light i'm gonna use the same method that i used let's see oh yeah you can select a region and turn on the interactive so you can see when you do changes it changes it changes live which is nice okay now we have a good dome light coming in let's add a area light to get some strong specs and things like that later okay um you know what let's get rid of this oh yeah i want to have kind of a spot feeling to it so here the light area is going to be here and it's going to fade up out from that so what we're going to do is we're going to reduce the spread of the area light yeah let's move our background back a bit and scale it up a bit so we don't see any corners and stuff okay so when you scale i mean when you reduce the spread of the area light it's gonna make it brighter because it's sending the light in a smaller area but the same intensity so we are going to reduce the intensity yeah it looks good let's keep it a bit smaller like that you know i didn't want to say like yeah i don't want to see like a solid hard edge to it uh and i like it i like it i like it so let's offset it a bit so it's not right on the top yeah it's good let's place our cube properly on the no the cube is in the right place i think the background is yeah the background background is lower than the flow so let's bring the background out yeah that looks good now let's go into making the material for the eyes click on the object right click assign new material scroll down to red shift rigid material water is the place we're going to start from you know and then uh this text doesn't really matter because it's a reactive object we're going to bring the roughness we're going to have a map in here but we're going to change this to 1.5 iur to 1.5 on dispersion to 10 we want to have separate control over refractions we're going to put roughness on the point two now we're gonna bring up the samples to 64. we want good looking stuff i'm gonna use two textures on this guy one for the roughness reflective roughness and the other one for the overall bump i'll show you what i'm going to use i just got this off of google this is what i'm going to use on the roughness this on the reflective roughness let's connect that to our roughness file so that's roughness let's get the bump as well for the bump i'm gonna use this texture it's not it's not blurry it has a lot of smaller details and it has a lot of value but it you know it looks darker compared to the other one so that's what i'm gonna use for the bump because we need like smaller details on it let's get that on the bump we're not going to keep it point yeah let's keep it 0.05 yeah we can change all this stuff when we add the rest of the things i mean if we can't really see the stuff that's inside we need to add the new things right as we talk in the beginning of the video we need to have some bubbles in this guy so let's get the bubbles working for the bubbles i'm gonna use mesh maya mesh it's really easy to use and if you if you're really trying to manually make bubbles it's going to be painful so okay let's do some house cleaning let's rename these guys unless we're gonna get confused eyes cube this is the g-r-o-u and the ground these things we know what these are put them in a group called light first we need a spear create a polygon sphere let's hide the ice cube for a huge bubble we don't need bubble that big but things like that doesn't really matter because we can adjust the scale and everything once we get the bubbles uh instance around we're going to call it bubble bubble geo okay we're going to connect this geo to the mesh network so we go to modeling fx mesh create mesh network make sure you reset these mesh options because you may have changed some stuff reset apply so what we need is these cubes to fill into the cube that we created before control shift edge this guy so what we're gonna do is first of all we're gonna duplicate this cube and we're gonna hide the actual ice cube i'm gonna name this call bubble cube you'll see why i duplicate it so we have over here um okay so we select the mesh network and you get these controls we go to distribute right now it says linear that's why you're getting that let's go that's why you're getting that so we'll change that to mesh and scroll down to the mesh attributes and change the method to voxels and yeah it's asking for input mesh we are going to give the bubble cube as an input mesh so the thing is the minutes you select it you can the things are going to disappear so the trick to do this is select the mesh network middle mouse drag to right here okay see now all the bubbles are around it so the first thing the bubble sauce huge so let's scale them down a bit okay okay that's ah that's good bubbles so first of all let's go to voxel attributes so you select workshops here and in voxel settings maximum voxel count to 100 and you're gonna reduce the voxel size the problem is you stop you're gonna stop seeing whenever they go in so we're gonna change to x-ray oh yeah now you can see all the cube bubbles inside the cube let's bring this to something like 0.4 like yeah yeah something like that and we need these to be randomized let's randomize these guys for that we're going to go to our mesh network and we're going to create a random node click at random node it's sticking out of the uh the cube don't worry about that for now question random that's good scale random we need the scale to be random so we put one one one we turn on absolute scale so we get uh different random sizes like small and big and we turn on uniform scale to get rid of these like uh flat looking things see now you have randomized spheres let's bring up the rotation just for we did some directional things with our spear so it's better to keep it like that turn on our ice cube to shift edge so that's our ice cube and this is our bubble cube the one that i duplicated so now the spears are sticking out of the cube so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna scale my bubble cube still i still feel like the bubbles are too big let's scale down the bubbles more so let's go to mesh oh let's put 200 voxel size again [Music] yeah that's a good amount you still see some outside i'm not really sure how to control this but i can show you how to get rid of those so i'm not worrying about the stuff that's outside so i like the bubbles that are inside and they have a random shape and i like it uh let's try to scale up our bubbles you a bit so we have some random shapes you know like yeah see it's all elongated in in different angles once you create a mesh network it's going to create an automatic mesh repro mesh so that's all the geometry that's created by the mesh net when you're happy with the scale of the bubbles and the randomization you can control d there and delete the history freeze transform and center pivot delete the audio mesh geometry and the mesh node network now we should be able to move this without a problem scale it okay uh let's get rid of the bubble cube as well we don't need it anymore let's get rid of all the bubbles that are outside the cube just make sure you delete all the bubbles that are sticking out of the cube you can do a lot of things with this like as an example if you select those and go to animation deformation lattice we can see i mean it's very undirectable bubbles let's bring these guys down a bit oh yeah delicious history so we get rid of all the deformations that we just did let's do a render and say okay first save this guy most important thing you don't want to lose what you did let's render you're not seeing it much i think that's because of the bump and yeah let's let's first reduce the bumps just so we get the bubbles correct and then we'll go back and bump up the pump or let's reduce the bump a bit more let's put it zero for now let's see how it looks i'm gonna assign the same uh ice material to our bubbles did we name the material oh we did not let's let's name it ice nice cube shade let's select the bubbles and assign the ice cube material to them let's see how it can look ah what's going on they are disappearing okay i'm going to explain why this is happening so in in real life when you have bubbles the actual pockets of air inside of the ice cube so what's happening now is when you have two geometries interact intersecting each other you have bubble you have the main cube and then you have the bubbles inside so if you think about the shader you have an art of glass then inside there's a glass to glass because the bubbles are thinking like okay we have grass as well so glass inside glass and there's nothing there so the way to fix it is to invert the normals of the bubbles so we select the bubbles we go to modeling mesh display reverse then we render this oh yeah we're getting our bubbles if you don't understand this what you should look at is the rendering realistic glass the tube that i did before i explained this thing pretty extensively so yeah the bubbles are looking good let's bring in our bump okay like we talked before we need our ice cube to have cracks in it and there's a nice way to do this select the ice cube go to effects menu effects shadow first things first go to edit and reset the settings and then go to solid shutter and then change the shard count to 10 edge jaggedness 0.25 11 or something to it okay let's turn off triangulator triangulate surface let's turn off applyment interior material so let's let's can i scale this yeah so let's apply so we have the cube selected and we can apply it's gonna take a bit of time uh let's check it out so let's hide our original ice cube and this is our shattered ski let's see how it looks in the render thing's gonna look weird because it may not have the shadows inside so don't worry if you don't like the look of thing how things cracked you can just delete this guy and go for another one you can increase the shard count and you can increase the checking and then make sure you get the look you want but this is a tune so we'll just stick to this guy let's assign our ice cube material to all the geometry just to make sure we have it let's see what difference that makes save this guy and render so right now all these cracked interior pieces i'm talking about these pieces are are standing on top of each other but so that's going to be a huge problem when it's rendering it's going to create flickering and all this stuff so to get rid of that what i'm going to do is i'm going to select all those pieces i'm going to delete history on them freeze the transforms and send the pivot so what happens is when you send to the pivot you don't really see it here but when you send to the pivot each because i have selected multiple object each object is gonna select the middle of that object and it's going to change the pivot point to the middle of that object you know so yeah so now what i'm going to do is i'll center the pivot and i'm going to scale this down so right now it's one we're gonna put it to 0.999 it's a very small amount you don't really see a difference in here but it works for the render so the geometry is not standing on top of each other so it's not it's going to make sure that there's no flickering and weird stuff happening so let's render this guy if you render an animation you're gonna see the changes let's save this guy and render another one geometry so let's put the bubbles inside our shattered eyes we'll name it shattered shattered nice cubed shadowed ice cube now what we need is the white color correct look that's inside the ice cube so for that let's close this guy down and we're going to create a sphere scale it up let's switch to x-ray so we can see it actually okay let's get it right in here that's looking good uh let's delete some uh okay let's let's isolate the sphere and go out of the x-ray okay let's read the top and the bottom we're gonna use the same kind of methods that we used before on the ice skip to get this sphere a random shape we're going to shift right click transform component let's add another subdivision to this guy so it looks smooth yeah smooth okay delete the history so we don't have all this stuff okay uh okay let's render this guy okay now what we need to do is we have to put a transparency map on this guy and make sure it looks like streaky and white so we're gonna rename our deformed spear nice nice whites and we are going to assign a new material to the ice whites we're going to select the ice right right click assigning material red shift which in material uh we'll name the shader okay so this one is pretty simple okay let's turn on interactive rendering so we can see what's going on okay let's yeah that's 0.5 let's make it 0.75 okay we're gonna increase the translucency 0.2 and we're going to increase the color of that to 0.85 so it's whiter and we are going to bring up the roughness so it's not reflective you know it has some kind of a streaky feel to it so the way we are going to do it is use by using a transparency map so let's hide the ice cube for a while so we can see what we are working with so this is what we have the deformed sphere let's open the hypershader and get our ice white shader for the transparency map i'm gonna use the same grunge map which is this guy i'm gonna use this map all the black areas will be transparent and all the whites would be opaque so let's bring in him so in redshift there's a note called sprite redshift sprite so let's select that guy bring it in let's delete the shading group because we already have one so you have to click connect the grunge image to the image name right here so basically yeah you don't need a file node you can just connect it to this guy okay that's connected and the sprite node has to be connected between the shader and the shading group node so input this one here and output here yes that's what we want so right now it looks sporty and not very streaky so using this you can control how much it's visible i'm gonna go something like that but still we need these two is streaky rather than spotty so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna select the object i'm gonna go to windows modeling uv editor i'm gonna deform the uv so we get streaky see that's what i'm talking about oh yeah yep that's what i want so yeah that's what we want we have it now it's tricky let's unhide our shutter cube and that's it these areas looks a bit too bright so what i'm going to do is i'm going to change the light to get rid of that kind of issues let's see what's going on with the lights recording everybody um okay let's scale them down a bit yeah yeah that should work yeah like that that's good not that far though it's pretty close by here yeah i like it okay so you know what i'm going to reduce the intensity a bit more i'm going to put 10 yeah otherwise these things get too bright so as a bonus let's add some caustics in redshift there are three places that you need to turn on caustics first you need to add it to the object and because we have multiple oh yeah add the ice whites into our shutout cube as well so we want all these guys to have caustics i'm going to select the group and i'm going to go to red shift object properties create red sheet visible no visibility node for selection and i'm going to select that and i'm gonna turn on cast caustic photons okay and then you have to turn on the caustics on the light so i don't really want caustics from the dome because you're not gonna see it it's gonna be soft so we're gonna turn it on on the area light you go down and there should be something called photons emit caustic photons then you have to turn it on in the render settings you go to photons oh i have already enabled it so you have to enable it like that and uh let's do a test render the thing with this ice cube is it's refractive so that's why it looks very noisy in these areas so to get rid of those you have to hit the samples pretty hard so first let's add some samples to our light want to write let's go to our samples let's see the difference between having caustics and not having caustics so let's save our image with the caustics and turn off the caustics and render another version let's uh switch between little caustics without ghosting i hope you guys learned something from this and please like and subscribe to my videos so i can create more content like this and if you have any questions or you when you try to do the tutoring it didn't work out always comment so i can give you feedback and try to fix the problem thank you

Channel: TheAwesomeHell CG

Views: 4,782

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: maya, redshfit, 3d, cg, vfx, render, ice, glass, refraction, tut, tutorial, shading, making, good, awesome, looking, cube, caustics, realistic, photo-real, real

Id: yEcnF0AeWu0

Length: 27min 30sec (1650 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 31 2020