How to Render zBrush Sculpts in Maya without UVs or Textures

hey guys in this video let's go ahead and see if we can take something from zbrush and bring it into Maya for some beautiful uh renders using Arnold so in zbrush we're not going to do UVS we're not going to change our topology we're not going to set up create any textures you know in substance painter we're just going to take a zbrush model with some poly paint and bring it into Maya for some beautiful cinematic render so this is a really great technique if you want to just focus on your sculpting and then add some beautiful shots to your portfolio and you don't really have time nor do you want to set up all the extra stuff in between all right so let's take a look and see how it works all right so let's uh jump right into this so for this example specifically I would like to use just a model that already exists in zbrush and you can find the same model by going to lightbox and go into demo projects and let's get this uh famous uh guy right here so I'm just going to double click on him if you use the brush for a while I'm sure you've seen him many times and he is going to be pretty much perfect for this example so here he is this is what he looks like in zbrush and um you can tell that all the poly paint is turned on right these brushes are turned on so he doesn't have textures he just has um old all these uh colors that are just painted on so let's let's use him as our example so how do we bring this Beast into uh Maya for some uh you know for some fun uh test uh rendering right well to uh do this what I'm gonna do is I'm going to combine all these subtools into one so I'm going to go to merge and I'm going to say merge visible as soon as I press merge visible you can see another sub tool was created called merged um uh earthquake that's his name earthquake so I'm gonna click on him and now you can see that the subtles went away and I just have one layer uh and it's all merged right the other thing that I need to pay attention to is the fact that this guy is 3.5 million points right active points now I could go to geometry and I could dial down the subdivision but I don't want to do that I'm actually going to delete the lower uh subdivision instead what I'm going to do is I'm going to use decimation Master to bring this number down because uh the last thing you want to do obviously is bring such a heavy model into uh Maya right so Maya's not going to be happy about that all right so let's go to uh decimation master and let's go ahead and click on this button called pre-process current and before we press this one thing that we do need to make sure is that we have use and keep poly paint on right so we want to maintain his tattoos and his colors for the skin and the shirt right so I'm gonna turn that on and I'm gonna say pre-process current all right very well so once that's finished the next thing you want to do is you want to decimate it based on a certain percentage So currently by default it's set to 20 I'm going to dial this down even more I'm going to say 10 and I'm going to say decimate current and as I do this I'm going to watch this number here so I said currently at 3.1 million as soon as I press decimate current you can see that I just went from uh 3.1 million to 315 000. now that's a that's a big difference but at the same time you can't really see any difference in quality as far as the this zbrush sculpt goes right we can also turn on our poly frame and we can see how zbrush decimated the model and what it looks like right so that is pretty much perfect for what I'm shooting for to do the rendering so the next thing is going to be exporting this out so let's go ahead and export I'm just gonna put it in my test folder and I don't want it to be obj I need it to be fbx so I'm going to switch this to fbx to preserve all that uh poly paint right vertex colors and I'm going to say save so make sure you set set it to fbx and stay safe all right so let's take a look at some of these options that come up for our fbx export so I do want to say visible because that doesn't really matter select or visible because I just have one uh layer and I do need to switch this to uh this mode and I want to also make sure that my normals are set to 100 and I'm just going to say okay all right so then once it's uh finishes exporting let's go ahead and jump into Maya and obviously the next step is going to be importing the fbx so I'm going to do that file import all right so uh he comes in a little bit small I can always grab my scale tool and just make them a little bit larger and this is what it looks like right so currently obviously you can't see the color information right the uh very first step I want to do is I want to right click and let's go ahead and go to material attributes and take a look by default you can see that it came into Maya by assigning this phone material so I don't want that I would like to assign uh Arnold material so I'm going to go to my favorites and click on a uh AI standard surface or I can say assign new material and then go to let me reset this go to Arnold and just click on AI standard surface so it's the same same thing right so once we have the AI standard material we can even name it if we want we can call it a i earthquake right so that's step one step two is going to be uh let's go ahead and click out of this and then click on our mesh just one time and by default in the attribute editor you can see under your shape tab right you can see that there are a few options uh the one that we're looking for is under Arnold so go ahead and open that up and under export make sure that you have something checked called export vertex colors so I'm going to go ahead and click on that and the only other thing you want to do is go to your mesh controls and under current color set just go ahead and select this and copy this color set zero right so you're going to need that so that's going to be pretty much step two once you've done that the next step that we want to do is setting up some lights because by default if I turn my lights on and this is set to Arnold right there's no lights in the scene so let's go ahead and do uh Arnold let's do lights let's add a sky sky dome light and in the color I can change I can bring in an HDR image and you can download one from the web just type in freehgri or HDR and just download a environment map that you like so I'm gonna select one for myself I kind of like this one I'm going to say open all right very nice the uh next thing is let's go ahead and render this and see how it's looking so I'm gonna go to my render settings here and let's just switch this to something really small like a one k score image and if we wanted to we could maybe pump this up a little bit for a better quality I'm going to set it to four and three the other thing I could do is I can select my Scott uh sky dome light and change my samples maybe I want to do four and four just so uh the image comes out a little bit um you know not so noisy uh the other thing that I need to do is I need to right click on my material attribute and under color I'm going to turn this all the way up uh I need to set I need to tell Maya that the collar needs to be driven from the vertex color or the poly paint so how do we do that well what we need to do is we need to click on this little uh box next to the color so let's let's click on that and in here let's go ahead and type in something AI user and we want to go to Arnold and let's uh select something called AI user data color so I'm going to select that and obviously for the attribute I'm going to do Ctrl V to bring in that thing that we copied before which is color set zero right I'm going to press enter and now if we wanted to we could do a quick uh test for our rendering all right so initially this is what our rendering looks like you can see the poly pane is being brought in and it's great but he's way too shiny so how do we fix this let's go ahead and press play so we can have this update in real time the other thing that I need to do is I'm going to select on my sky dome and I'm going to bring my camera uh this slider down so I because I don't want to see the environment image as I'm testing this so that's something I could do another thing I could do is let's go ahead and again right click go to material attributes and let's change our roughness maybe we don't want them to be so shiny right so that's really nice and uh the other thing that I can do to make this better is we can actually change the gamma of this image right now he seems a little uh washed out how can we pump up the colors uh of our character so to do this I'm going to go to hypershade and in hypershade what I want to do is I want to find the name of the material which is in my case it's going to be AI earthquake so I'm going to select that right so let's go ahead and click on this button here called add selected notes to graph and the other thing is in my case I need to press on this button here to see the input connections right so now I have this input connection that is our AI user data color and that's plugged in into the color right so what we need to do is let's add gamma correction right into here so to do this I'm going to right click and go to create nodes and I'm just going to type in the word gamma uh and it's two M's and I'm going to select gamma correct so now I have uh this little node here and what I'm going to do next is let's go ahead and unplug it from the color so to do this I can just press delete and I can wire this into the gamma and then the out value is going to go into the color so essentially nothing has happened yet but now what we can do is we can select our gamma correct and we can change these values so watch this this uh render you can see that the characters currently kind of washed out but let's go ahead and adjust this so I'm going to say 0.5 and let's do a point uh 0.5 here and we'll do another one here press enter and voila you can see that the collar using the demo correction is much closer to what it was in zbrush so at this point you can do lots of cool stuff you can add more lights you can do let's add a fun Rim light I'm gonna go to Arnold lights let's do add another area light maybe grab our scale tool make the the uh our room light a little larger and what I'm going to do is I'm going to position it on the back of the character and of course I need to make sure that it's facing the character so I'm going to rotate my light something like this maybe move it a little bit to the side at this point it's just a matter of preference right so now let's go ahead and turn this light on so while it's selected I can go to my attribute editor and I can pump this up so uh let's dramatically increase the intensity so I'm gonna go something like uh nine hundred thousand that should do it I'm going to press enter and you can see how right away it's adding let me zoom in a little closer where you can see that there's a rim light coming off the character which is really cool I can of course change the rotation I can even add more exposure if I want it to be even more dramatic I can also add a color temperature and I can make it you know warm maybe he's you know enjoying Sunset somewhere or maybe it's kind of cool so I'm gonna go with the uh let's go with the cool uh option all right another thing I could do is of course I can also increase the samples uh let's go ahead and pump this up to four so we have a nice rendering and there you go so that's how easy uh it is to pretty much create epic uh cinematic renders uh from zbrush to Maya with characters just simply holding that vertex color or the poly paint without any UVS or textures all right so I hope you find this uh helpful and have fun adding uh amazing images to your portfolio and thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next video foreign

Channel: Alan Balodi - 3D Tutorials

Views: 752

Keywords:

Id: B7fj9ISd7VY

Length: 14min 33sec (873 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 30 2023