H.R. Giger Portrait: Behind The Work

hello everybody welcome back today as i promised we're going to be talking about the portrait of uh hr gigger so stay tuned i'm gonna have to uh put you on hold for a second because i have a surprise i just got sponsored can you believe this i'm brand new in this whole thing this whole youtubes and i already got a sponsor i cannot believe this i'm so thrilled with it i i believe this guy's gonna pay all my bills but i i i don't know it's the beginning you know it's the beginning of something big i suppose but i hope you enjoy this is their ad we have to play the ad because you know now i have a deal with those guys so here we go are you looking to push your digital portraits to a whole new level of realism and awesomeness question mark flyover studio is the place to go exclamation mark if you take chris costa's classes all your wildest dreams will come true thank you studios it's totally awesome oh my god was that incredible i can't believe they put this stuff together so fast i mean like that was amazing that song is super catchy i think i'm gonna be singing this in the shower today anyway let's talk about uh what is interesting here forget about the silliness and uh let's uh start by sharing my screen in here so uh we're gonna be talking about this portrait which is the portrait of hr gigger if you don't know who gigger was you're probably not from this world because he was the creator of alien uh it was the movie the first movie was directed by ridley scott and gigger was actually uh the the father of the creatures that we saw in the movie right so gigger is uh this uh swiss artist he was born in 1940 and uh he died in in 2014 at age of 74 and he was the guy who actually made popular this whole concept of biomechanical which is a combination of you know like the uh like a body parts in in in in machinery and uh gigger had this twisted sense uh uh he was uh his work was basically like he's was very hyper sexualized he had a lot of um you know it was like phalluses and and and and all kinds of weird stuff and dead babies and and like a female and male genitalia everywhere but undeniably like a genius and uh as i always do you know it's like i i try to portray the people who inspire me the most i try to stay away from uh you know pop art too much uh for example it would be easier for me to just like model the latest actor from the latest movie and and get all the followers on instagram or start doing like uh cute caricatures or realistic caricatures of cartoons or whatever it is you know to get like easy followers but i tried to keep my my work uh basically focus on the people that inspired me somehow or the people around me and that's my own gem you know it's like i'm not gonna judge anybody doing any differently than this but that's basically me the way that i i try to create my portraits so each one of my portraits is related to someone who inspired me somehow during my life and gigger inspired me back in the day as a teenager as inspired many many people he was an incredible artist and he used the airbrush mainly uh uh later in his life he switched and changed techniques and everything but for the most part of his career he used the airbrush and then there is this softness to the work which is very beautiful uh so uh talking about gigger he was a an incredible individual like uh as i i never met him in person but you know people who actually uh interacted with with him said that he was a very nice person you know uh very very weird in her way his place was incredibly dark he lived in this very dark dungeon with all the curtains closed and it was like a a little bit but that was his his thing and uh one thing that i think is interesting about geeker is that if you watch his interviews on youtube which you can find these days uh he was a sweetheart i mean like the way that he talks he had a very raspy creepy voice uh but the way that he he relates and the way that he talks about his own work you know it's like he talks about them as my babies you know has his deep [ __ ] my babies and uh it's it's quite sweet you know like in a very weird way um very interesting character so i decided to pay homage to to gigger for being one of the geniuses i think of the the century you know uh really incredible mind and ridley scott was incredibly lucky to get him because all that universe of alien was not something that was on demand that you know i was like oh please create those creatures basically he went to gigger and giger already had this whole thing figured out if you look at the gigger's concepts before the movie he already had this stuff going on you know it was part of his own universe and that was just like basically in my opinion just borrowed uh to be used in the movies uh and that's part of his genius you know i was like he already had this whole thing figured out and again like ridley scott was really lucky to score this guy to actually have uh you know the creatures being created which by the way he got the academy award for it in 1979 for uh the visual design of the alien so you know gigger so this is the portrait i posted on instagram on instagram and also on art station and we're going to be talking about all the steps that i i took to you know to create something like this there are many other pictures in here if you go to my art station you can check out and then there's a close-up in here you can look as well like this one uh of the eye we're going to be talking about those elements as well and uh again not like in super detail because we don't have the time but you know with the time that we have here which is kind of short let's say for how long let's see for how long this video is going to last but uh yeah i'm gonna try to you know to talk the most i can about this whole thing so the process starts like this so first thing let's talk about uh you know the five structure so i have this file structuring here as you can tell uh it's a folder i normally create a folder i have my personal projects and i create a brand new folder in there and then for the most part all those folders underneath it are created by maya when you set up a project inside of maya so uh the folder the folders are not created automatically are these uh movies uh i believe uh uh of course like the z project z tools and also uh the references so what i normally do when i creating something like this i start by creating a folder called references and then i try to find as many references like as i can about the subject i'm creating and the interesting thing about uh what i do is that i don't have like access to like super high resolution images at all i don't have access to actually scans i have a picture of a scan of a live cast in here which i can show you this one here so it's a picture of a live cast let me just bring this to the other screen because it's popping in my other screen here uh so you know things like that like as a reference but as you can tell it's not even the age i'm looking for and with age there's a lot that happens and also there's another thing that happens that those life casts they don't represent like a perfect likeness because what happens is that when you have all this material pressed against the the subject's uh skin there's a lot of compression and you end up like obviously you can rely on the on the bone landmarks you know it's like the zygomatic and in the the bridge of the nose things like that but you cannot rely on the skin itself in the soft areas because there's a compression you know so sometimes you look at this scan of of uh a life cast it doesn't even look like the person you know so but it's something that i i collect obviously i have to collect like all the pictures i can find of the subject so those are the pictures i found on the internet right nothing special i look for pictures like this you know have like a you know kind of like a candid kind of lighting uh to see the the you know it's like the forms a little bit better i have lighting like this which you know kind of like a flashlight and then i try to collect like everything i can you know anything i can find on internet and they are super low resolution for the most part and why is that well my throw is to actually create something that i believe it looks realistic at the end but we helped without having access to the full scoop you know it's like when you're working visual effects you know that you have access to all the scopes scans of pores and and everything you know it's like you have like super detailed models and you can just like extract that and then reproject your model and then you have like a replica of the person right looking can use like things like texture xyz to apply the materials and everything but in my personal work what i try to do is to actually idealize the likeness and what does that mean i mean like it means that i'm not using like scans of any kind uh and i'm reliant uh relying a lot in my own uh on my own imagination basically basically to create all those details so what i do i create you know some kind of like a generic skin i can use and all the details i can see in the images like this for example like moles and you know certain things about like the obviously his eyebrows have to be quite uh similar to what he has in here but nothing is a one-to-one translation of anything it's basically an exercise on likeness and and observation based on this very very crappy uh low resolution images that i can find and then on top of that i try to extrapolate that so i try to get the primary forms and the secondary forms in place and try to find an expression that actually talks to me and something that you know speaks about like his character so before i even start i'd look at all of those and then try to capture something like that see like this one here is more about the lighting itself you don't even see his eyes right but it's very interesting i use this one at some point just to track down like the the eyebrow uh volumes and and other things like that in his cheeks here as well and uh but you know it's it's a matter of like collecting everything you can find about the person because when you're talking about likeness it's about uh it's about a puzzle you have to find all the pieces for this puzzle if you don't have access to a scan every time you change the position of the face every time you change uh you know the facial expression the lighting everything changes so it becomes a puzzle because you keep chasing you know it's like you try to nail all those forms uh thinking about that the lighting here represents those forms correctly and then at some point you realize that certain forms that you believe to be concave are actually convex and vice versa and then you only realize that when you have uh the same forms exposed under different lighting setups so this is very uh interesting you know it's like this is a very long chase for the form so the model changes a lot in the in the course of you know like sculpting it and you have all those peers of his life obviously that he's older and he's more overweight you know uh and then all of that like plays into the final result and how are you going to explore that you know it's like what age you want to represent and uh yeah so a lot of those are very informative for example like profile pictures very informative to get like the shape of the nose and obviously uh with age a lot of stuff is going to happen it's going to change here the ear is going to keep growing you know it's like the nose going to change shape as well especially like around the tip in here some people get very very uh large uh noses uh over time and you have the sadness happening with uh with the eyelids and uh you know it's like the every everything you know changes with age as you can tell right so uh so i start with this collecting all the references i can find and i put everything in a folder called references and then uh i go to zbrush and i start sculpting based on those references i try not to use any blueprints and i try to freeform sculpt everything at first i can just like you know for the sake of it i can show you this one here which is a quick uh movie let's see let's see if this one is a no this one is the super uh slow version of it this is the fast version of it so it goes like this you know it's like a it all depends of the mall we're going to be working with sometimes i start with with the base mesh sometimes it's from one of those very generic uh uh planar faces from zbrush and sometimes it's completely free form like this you know it's like just like almost like a plane it was like almost like a kid playing with clay you know it's like it's kind of like exploring the forms without paying too much attention at first so i start with the sphere in this case here sometimes i start with the cube it doesn't matter it's just a matter of like really uh finding the expression at first you know it's like i try not to to do anything that's uh you know it's like a too related to the way that traditional art is done because as you can tell i mean like with the digital we you have access to multiple subdivision levels so i can go back and forth with the forms and uh and that gives you a lot of freedom to create things and move stuff around and change the forms even after you added a lot of um of the more detailed stuff you know so i start with this uh at the end here uh you have something like this i use like some uh clip brushes and planar brushes to actually just get like some of those planes in place and it's just a sketch trying to capture a little bit of the essence of the character it's not just like oh i'm just gonna do the primary forms and that's it and then from here i'm going to move to the secondary forms no i put together primary and secondary at the same time and i'll just lay down everything because all those forms are interdependent and like i said with the dish that we can actually do this without any concerns you know it's like if if the primary forms are not nailed just yet at any time you can go back to it and just adjust it and go back to back and forth between primary and secondary with no problem whatsoever and even sculpt both at the same time like i'm doing here so it's uh this is a fast sketch that's normally what i do like in my first day of of my classes online so i do a sketch like this just to start from and then you start building the whole the whole process of like sculpting the the model itself at the end of the day after weeks of work right because teaching and then going back and forth uh i ended up with something like this this is the by the way like uh my favorite material in zbrush you start always with this that cap here that's uh that's i hate this this red matte cap i never liked it so i only switched back to this basic material that's like from the old days of zbrush 2.5 d or something like this is like i'm talking about like 20 years ago uh so this is still my favorite material but i used some tweaks so if you go to your your material here you can actually go to your modifiers and you can crank your specular first so i'm going to crank this back in here something like this you can increase your diffuse as well get a little bit uh brighter not too much but something like this gonna get a little bit this the the specular curve you can actually tweak a little bit more as well make a little bit shinier and then uh let's do a little bit more spec so if you have something like this this is kind of like a little bit of looks a little bit like the blinn in maya not the new maya but i mean like my versions ago they had like the blind material the default that it looked a lot like this so this is my favorite material to to sculpt with because i can see all the forms and and i'm familiar with this type of shader from maya so it really makes sense to me and i was like and also you can see a lot of see a lot of detail with it so basically i start with that concept and then from that concept to get to this spot here i go through a process process of of reprojecting things the reprojection uh can be done with uh with uh external tools or can be done manually you know it's just like aligning things and just like selectively projecting things uh but uh there are some amazing plugins out there i don't have my oh i have here so i have z-wrap and c-rep is an incredible program because it's like magic to me i'm you know uh i recommend it to to my students as well they're super nice they actually you know it's like if you're a student you can just say i'm student they actually give you the the software for you to use for a while which is really nice of them and it works great it like saved me a ton of time to do that but then once i have everything reprojected obviously to reproject you're gonna have to have uh uh uh a base mesh so i have like a this base mesh here is pretty old it's not even it's probably like not even adjusted for this model correctly i have a a new base measure that i use in my newest models which is a little bit better distributed so you can see like those polygons in here uh they are much bigger than those polygons in here that means that when you subdivide the whole thing you're going to have more detail around this area not so much detail around here so it obviously if you plan this better you can get like the same amount of detail across the board at the same time in the ear i don't need all those polygons so i simplified my newest models are simplified in here and a little bit more complex around here and then when you simplify the whole thing obviously uh what i try to do i sculpt in the regular subdivision levels first in zbrush so if i go over here you're gonna see my subdivision levels are at four so that means i only have 1.1 million polygons at this subdivision level here but then on top of that i go to my geometry hd in here and i subdivided another three times at the end of the day this model went from 1.1 million polygons to about 72 million polygons just for this bust so it's just like the head and the the shoulder and the neck in here so 72 million polygons so obvious obviously with 72 million polygons i can get poor detail mostly of like in everywhere uh just for the sake of like showing you here how this works so if i isolate certain areas for example like i try to create my poly groups and which again we don't have the time to speak too much about it but you can learn from the zbrush website or their tutorials are quite amazing and informative you can look for that so if i have something like i created my polygroups so i can actually isolate things like that like this mask more easily so even if i want to do this for example and hide the back of his head and just have the face like this like hide that so now if i go to hd geometry which basically like uh just for you to understand the concept of hghd geometry is that uh instead of like the regular subdivision levels that you can get to a limit of probably like 40 50 pushing 60 million polygons maybe in a single uh tool with hd geometry you can actually reach in theories uh one billion polygons which is quite impressive i went all the way to 250 million polygons at some point and it's totally workable and since the uh since zbrush became 64 bits uh the entire thing is amazing now right like you can actually sculpt chunks of 40 to 50 million polygons no problem whatsoever but in this case here you're going to see like this entire face here in order for you to see the hd geometry once you subdivide in here you have to actually uh access that mode so if i rest my mouse right here around the nose and i press a from the profile i like to use the profile because it tries to capture everything in a cylindrical way kind of imagine like a cylinder that's been projected from the side so it captures much more stuff so at this point here this entire face and a piece of the neck have about 30.7 million polygons right so now if i go really close something like that you can see like you know it's like all his his uh you know uh blackheads in there have access to all this fine detail now that i can add oh i just sculpted something by mistake in there so you know it's like all those little things in here for example like you see like those little dots around here where the the hairs would be those are not by accident they are placed by hand and using the actual hair to guide that and how do i do that uh well i export the the little eyelashes that i have in in maya as uh as a geometry and i bring to zbrush and then here in zbrush i can go like to the to the you know to the root of each one of them and just sculpt them and i can get those little guys which don't seem like much but if you look at close-ups you know it's like you can actually uh see that there's something kind of interesting happening in there uh in terms of the the the the detail and how far you want to go with the detail it all depends of your objective you know it's like you don't need to go super high detail like this every time if you're not planning to render close-ups like this you know uh and this model here was kind of like i started from another model so some of the stuff was kind of like see like this area is a little bit more smooth and it's kind of like uh it's not one of the models that i use for my classes so those zones i normally try to do everything from scratch to show my students but this one was kind of like repurposing i believe i started with with my dick smith portrait and then sculpted a lot on top of that obviously it had to erase a lot of stuff but at least the base color for the skin was from that portrait right if i switch here to the flat color you can see this is the albedo color the way it was painted so i use a lot of custom brushes i don't use anything commercial and everything is either like from zbrush brushes or something i i created on my own those little blood vessels in here the micro veins i actually created by using a picture i found on the internet of lightning so like it was a night uh uh night sky you know i was like with some lightning happening and i captured that and i used the lightning actually as micro veins so we can actually be creative with that right this is one of the brushes i didn't create by hand i actually repurposed like pictures but with something completely unrelated to skin right so uh yeah i like this kind of stuff it's almost like the approach i have for everything i do digitally it's almost like out of my frustration not being a traditional uh sculptor and painter and then i try to emulate a lot of those steps uh doing during my process like sculpting things and painting things you know i try to do everything by hand not because i want to show off or anything it's just because it's it's my thrill you know it's my thing about like feeling more connected to traditional artists by doing things in the hard way you know instead of like the easy way but in terms of uh how much you learn with this it's incredible i mean like in the final result you know it's like when you see something fully rendered that looks realistic out of something that you created with your own hands you know it's like it's always there is always this reward that i believe it's interesting and also the style every time i sculpt anything it can be like a tiny little wrinkle or anything everything is controlled and it's based on my own bias i spoke about this in my previous video it's based on my own bias you know it's like there's style in there there's the way that i pressure uh the tablet to create the wrinkles you know it's like it's all pressure sensitive and everything so there's a lot to to talk about like style that's translated to each one of those strokes and they are not going to translate to anyone else it's going to be something that's very unique from me if another artist does that even though they're taking my classes or something like that they're going to come up with their own way of creating it because they have their own handwriting they have their own expression with their hands the the the gesture is different and the gesture is going to carry that style a lot of times as well and then the style is going to come from the type of lighting you prefer and all kinds of different things but you know so in general that's like the the approach i have with zbrush um i'm going to be talking about in detail all this stuff i i just show you guys but again i have to keep moving on to go to the next steps in here so once i have this completely sculpted and i have already a model with you you dims and everything i can show you in my what kind of view dims i have right now uh then i can export this to a maya for rendering so i start with the base mesh and then so a base mesh first then i sculpt free form in zebra start with a sphere or whatever object you want to start from and then once i have a sculpture that looks okayish it doesn't need to be finished or anything i project that to my to my topology and then from that point on i keep iterating on it and then so at that point i can just bring a base mesh it can be very bad actually just bring it to maya to do a few renders and then i use that a lot because if you do those renders uh in in uh in maya you can actually uh evaluate the forms better instead of like zebras you don't have actual lights in here so i've not evaluated the forms correctly i could use like a bpr render and stuff but i still trust maya better for this kind of stuff and then uh so goes back to maya and then from that point on it's just it ready over and over again uh let me just show you like the maps i'm using here so i paint my maps in here as well and then for the the albedo color everything is painted inside of hd mode so if i do a preview in here you're gonna see that there's a lot of resolution so that means i have 72 million polygons worth of resolution here to work with albedo color but then the other passes that i do you're going to see my shader network in maya soon the other passes are very simple so instead of like creating multiple hd geometry models in here i don't need to do that because the other maps are quite simple this one for example is a specular map that i'm not even using in this model right it's like it's kind of like a sprayed looking and i'm not using that all i'm using is just this roughness map here you can see it's very very simple and uh talking about the the roughness map what i try to do for every single model is to try to mimic what nature is doing and for example if you have like more roughness in the skin that means you have less specular so the areas you see here the darkest areas have the most specular so the specular is tighter so you're going to see the eyelids you're going to see a little bit in the lips not like super shiny or anything just a little bit more shiny side of the nose because you have like all the moisture in there and a little bit in the cheeks but then other areas they don't have a lot of specular uh so this map i can use to control both the amount of specular the model is going to have and also how uh the the roughness of the skin is gonna is gonna behave as well but instead of plugging this map straight to the roughness map what i try to do is to create a bump map and use this map to be the the depth of the of that bump so in this case for this mod i'm not using bump i'm using displacement map so it's a combination of the actual displacement map coming from the details plus uh this map here controlling uh uh another map that's just a procedure from maya just to create the micro uh uh you know micro detail it's based like the micro breakup of each one of the parts so there's another pass this is just this microstructure so it's just trying to to create something that uh behaves a little bit like real life right so you know just like my my way of seeing it obviously nothing is set in stone and a lot of people gonna do differently so uh for my settings to export out the zbrush i use this i use for my displacement uh let's expand this i normally use this i export at maximum resolution at eight k map border i normally don't change but if you want to be safe if you're you you dims are not you dims but your aisles are too close to each other you can increase this you know base like you know it's like if they're too close to each other obviously you have to adjust in your v's but you can use this one to actually expand the the borders to prevent like uh seams but normally if you use hd geometry you get seamless models and then there are a couple of other tricks i use here so i use switch morph target and then for the displacement stuff here there are a couple of things that i do i turn on adaptive and i crank the dp subpix this by the way would add a ton of time to export the displacements if you are not using hd geometry but with hd geometry doesn't matter it exports just as fast so i try to take full advantage of that and then for the mid in here what this this means is actually this is 0.5 means 50 gray that's the mid level so in that case you can go to like darker levels and then lighter levels to create like the the peaks and valleys but uh arnold uses zero for the base level that means it's black and then you're gonna ask yourself like how can you go below black well if you use 32 bits you can have negative numbers so normally i try to use exr to export as a format 32 bits and then made at zero because that's basically what arnold is expecting and then when i export this map i can plug it straight to to maya and the render is going to work just fine uh on the file names here one thing you have to do go to your uv tile format here and keep clicking on it until you reach udem which is the mari standard and then if you want to you know click over right here you can do that but i'm not even too concerned about this because i'm exporting my displacement map in the xr anyway but if i'm exporting textures from poly paint i can export obviously uh using tiff or any format if you keep clicking here you find the different formats in there but that's basically what i use udemy here overwrite files and then the last detail here is this i explained this in my zebra summit in 2018 you can check the video uh basically like if i have a model that's already subdivided like this i have all the dtm hd and everything before i export the displacement maps i try to go to the lowest actually two different things here i'm going to go to the lowest level first right lowest and going to go one subdivision level higher than this and i do this for the for this reason so the lowest resolution i only have 17 000 polygons the next resolution i have 69 000 right so i'm going to export this one for example let me pick uh see uh object here so i'm going to get gigger in here uh let's do bigger this one's going to be middle resolution so mr and let's put that random number here 99 i can delete later mr99 and then i'm going to go now to the lowest resolution and i'm going to export this to the same thing so i'm going to be obj but instead of mr is going to be lr for low resolution and i'm going to explain why i did this so now that i have both exported i'm going to keep my my uh file here at the lowest resolution i'm going to go to the morph target and i'm going to delete anything i have and i'm going to store switch so that's it so i'm going to do the steps again if you have any more targets you're gonna delete it gonna do store switch and then you're gonna go import and now you're gonna find oh i hate that's actually this new zbrush is actually not saving the the latest place you're working at so that's kind of i'm gonna actually copy and paste which you know so i it doesn't forget anymore so just copy this to memory here so you see i have my low resolution here so i'm gonna click this one i'm gonna import so the steps if i repeat all for you is going to be if you have any uh morph target you're going to delete start switch import those three steps store switch import that's it after you did this don't do anything else if you go one subdivision level higher again that means you're going to have to redo the the those three steps again keep it at the lowest resolution make sure you have your switch morph target in here and what the what you're telling zbrush to do is basically compare the base mesh and compare to itself so that means it's gonna force it to create a a difference between that and what's at the highest resolution so that way you can actually make sure you don't have like double transformation sometimes you have like some weird stuff that happens you know it's like you get the details much deeper than they're supposed to be and this way you basically make sure that zbrush behaves correctly okay don't ask me the logic behind it uh affair came up this with his idea he explained to me on the phone when i had this question and it made sense at the time and i i always use this since and i have always had like good results after that so that's good um another thing that i do here now that's the trick remember that i exported the mid resolution in the low resolution as well right so the low resolution i used to create the morph target i just created here but now i'm going to use the subdivision level 2 to export the displacement maps why am i doing this well because instead of rendering the model and bringing the model at the lowest resolution in maya i'm actually using the second resolution which is this one here is the subdivision level two which is the 69 000 polygons i mentioned before not the seventeen thousand sixty nine and i do that because since i'm going to be grooming i like to have more particles available so i can actually paint masks and create my grooming that way and also have the the hair to conform to the surface a little bit better without the need of using a displacement to deform the the hair which is supported by x-gen by the way so i do it this way so from now on if i export the maps in here you're going to export in relation to the second subdivision level so is it it's going to simulate as if this model was generating displacements starting from the second subdivision level so if you apply the subdivision this displacement maps in the subdivision level 0 which is this one you're seeing right there it's not going to look correct you have to apply those displacement maps they match the subdivision level too so that's what we're going to have to do so if i go down to maya and then here in maya let me just show you what i have so i have my model in here so that's uh you know using the i have like actually the textures turned on in there it looks weird right without the white hair in here but that's the the viewport viewing here but if i click the model itself and i look at the number of faces in here you get the 69 thousand polygons i mentioned before so that's the my my base mesh in maya is one subdivision level higher than the base mesh in zbrush and then i have to compensate for that by generating the the displacement map correctly right so the next step in here once i have a model in here i'm going to have to set up the model to receive displacement maps so the way you do this you're going to click the model going to press ctrl a or just attribute editor and then when you go to attribute editor you can go to your uh you know normally it's the second tab in here you're going to see there's an arnold tab and then if you click that one you're going to have access to a lot of information about arnold here and then the first thing i do i normally set the sss which is the subsurface scattering node in here i give a name i normally use shared sss and then this only works for a few types of algorithms for the skin uh it doesn't work for rental walk too for example but if i decide to switch to a different one it's going to work actually and what this does is if you have like multiple models under the same set uh it scatters basically uh it thinks that all objects are part of the same object so this gathering uh looks correct correct you know like the transitions between one object and the other one don't have those harsh dark lines you know it's because it's a much smoother transition and that's for the sub subdivision i normally use iterations i start with three to test things and i don't go further than four so i keep it four i use catmo clark uh i use rastering here or object in this case it's uh it's a a raster if for some other models i use the object i don't see a lot of difference but i might be you know not seeing as i should but i didn't notice a lot of the difference i normally use the object actually i don't know why this one is set to a raster but it works fine and then here it says like pin borders and it shouldn't be like this it should actually be the linear one i don't know what's going on because maybe this is an old file i'm not sure but the if you have this smoothing it linear that means that it's taking everything that's coming from zbrush and it's considered that zbrush is not smoothing the uvs so you know it's like it brings everything linear here and just works so i'm going to switch and just like keep like i normally use which is like this so catmo clark four iterations obviously if you have a model that your base mesh is much higher than this you're probably not gonna need to use like four iterations you probably can get it away with less than that and then for the displacement attributes here is the height you can actually tweak you can crank the displacement to a higher number i would recommend to do this under the shader instead of here but you can do here i did this before as well including my classes i i cranked to 1.1 for example to add like you know 10 percent more displacement if i if you look at it a bit too smooth at the end and then there is this other thing here that's called the auto bump in in arnold which is quite amazing and what this does is this uh it tries to recreate all the detail that comes from those beautiful hd geometry maps but you'll see bump maps and it's done on the fly you don't need to worry about anything you just turn this on and then as long as you have in your in your renders render settings in here if you have under your let's see adaptive clamping advanced so if you have use auto bump in s assassin here that means that that the bump map that's going to be calculated at render time it's going to scatter so basically you're going to get a ton of detail everything is scattered correctly this takes a long time to render so it says there see like enabling this checkbox triples shader evaluation in sss so you have to be careful with that but if it's a final image i would recommend using it for my settings since i'm here this is basically all i have for the model by the way in terms of displacement and these are going to have to set up for each one of the models that are receiving displacement maps uh in the scene so each one of them gonna have to have those those settings in here especially if it's coming from from zbrush all the displacements now for my settings for rendering uh this is kind of like my final render settings uh they render in a reasonable speed i mean like my machine suffers a little bit and is a very fast machine arnold's not very well known for being super fast and and unfortunately the gpu render i don't have enough uh gpu in my graphics card to handle those those scenes they're too too big over 25 gigabytes for sure with everything loaded so yeah the machine suffers a little bit but to render the scene i use those settings so like six and then the fuse i normally use between one and two so in this case i'm using two in here three uh basically i can only use one two three and four to make things easier but here i'm using two uh two three and four and uh i try to use four for subsurface scattering just to prevent noise you know but you can actually the noise that comes from the the subsurface scattering but you can do like lower than this there are all kinds of combinations you know like you can you can try in here but those are the settings i normally use and i i'm using some adaptive sampling here which is basically automatically can go all the way as high as 10 anti-alias subdivisions and i'm using the threshold it's slightly different from the original one so it kind of like you know it's like it finds the pixels uh in a slight more broad way instead of like being too picky about them and being too slow so this one speeds up things a little bit and then for the camera 10 right so another thing that i do for my filter if you try something like black black man harris or some other ones here cat rome you're going to get like sharper results so you're going to get like much sharper pores for example when you render but at the same time it's counterproductive because what happens with the pores the skin has this glow to it you know it's like you never see the skin super dry unless you're covering dirt right so you kill the scatter and then all of a sudden you can see it looks very rocky surface but when you're when you're talking about like a skin that's a clean skin it has this glow to it so if you crank the the you know it's like the the sharpness of the skin too much you end up with a result that looks very artificial and very rocky so uh what i what i do normally is to just use the the default gaussian and then just uh uh instead of like two that's the default uh size i reduce this the the lower you get uh the sharper you get the details but in this case here is about 1.8 so it's slightly sharper than the two that's the original one i'm using the auto bump for the raid depth you don't need to use those values i using here because you know i have you know the iris the the sclera and the eye and everything so i try to keep things a little bit higher but if uh obviously if arnold doesn't need them it's not going to trace as deep as as i'm putting those numbers in here it's just a guarantee that's going to trace deep enough if you reduce those numbers for example uh our armor is not going to be able to trace deeper into transparent surface so it's going to be blocked at some point so instead of like seeing the uh if you have this clara covering the iris all suddenly the iris disappears it becomes black because it's not tracing the light into that so you need like a little bit more rays to do that right but you don't need to follow exactly that for the textures by default you normally use the auto convert to tx and it use existing tx but i don't use that because my machine can handle all those maps and i want to see instant updates instead of like having to recreate those those uh textures you know and because those are actually more optimized textures they're smaller you can actually fit a lot of stuff in your gpu that way uh but in this case here i mean like for my models uh i've not used gpu render anyway it would not accommodate even if i had this would not fit um so i just keep it off you know but you know it's detailed we are not going to be talking too much uh for the common here i'm using you know it's like i tend to set things for example like a multiple angles i want to render so i create like things like this i put like different angles i would like to try to evaluate the form and then the way i do this i just spin around with my camera like this right and then when i'm happy with the position you know if i frame it here and just spin around like this i'm happy with the position i go to view select camera and then press s like sam and then it creates the uh keyframe in there right there are certain tools i use here for example for the camera tools if i want to do like a a roll tool just to create something more dramatic like that right so i sometimes do this to add a little bit more of movement uh what i do as well i try to use from time to time like in the camera settings in here you can actually activate let's say like uh the let's see film gate gate mask say faction save tile uh let's see gate mask so i have this one the fuel chart so the fuel charge here it just shows you the center of it but you can use this for composition purposes as well you know if i can use this diagonal in here going across for example to align this between like the corner of his eye in there and then the corner of the mouth in here and follow that line uh basically like his nasolabial folding here right something like this going in direction of his eye and then use that to frame the nose in here in this quadrant and then use that as basically like a a tool for for composition right so i select it again and then i keyframe this i can actually hide my fuse chart and then i have a shot like that that i can render right so i do this for all those those different you know camera angles i want to test and then when i render i can just like do like a batch render and then that's why i have a set like start frame to end framing here for the resolution i normally is for stuff i'm posting on instagram and and art station so i use like 1500 by 1500 and that takes care of it i'm using exre here i'm not using compression normally i don't use it i just keep it none but for some reason i think something got to be set in my maya because a lot of stuff was set differently before and then for the for the system in here i try to use like a bucket size that's different from the default i use auto detect all threads uh and that's about it all right so that's how things are set up inside of maya uh about the hair for example so let's let's talk about the the hair in here so let's expand all of those guys this video is gonna be long man but i you know i promise so i'm gonna do it so bear with me so now i have like let's see let's i think i expanded way too much let's just do like this and i expanded everything all this every single note of everything here so i'm just gonna collapse them again sorry for this let's do this okay let's start by hiding everything so let's hide just the the notes themselves here and i'm gonna just like bring it one by one so you can see and it was like the whole purpose of this video is to actually show you what it takes you know it's like all the things involved in the process not all the things but i mean like most of the things i suppose with the time that we have so the model comes like this plane without any hair and i create the descriptions by selecting faces so if i switch the face in here and i click this little guy here i can actually paint faces up if i press b here i get the soft selection so it was like let me just turn on and off that's that's where it's not turning off for some reason my soft selection but anyway so let's see face so are you going to paint your faces in there something like that and then uh it's actually quite weird that's it's doing this let me just double click this guy here and see if i have the soft selection on where is it the stroke style pressure display oh it's like that's the thing you know it's like i don't play with those things because it was all set before and all of a sudden i uh things got a little messed up i don't know what happened with this maya it seems like something got got uh yeah it's weird anyway so one thing you can do as well let me just switch back here very quickly let me go back to this guy here uh you can actually turn the symmetry on right so you have the symmetry off here if you're painting hair you want to create some masks you can actually create you can click this one here you have to make sure that your model is completely symmetrical in terms of topology obviously for this to work i can just click topology here and then i'm going to pick a a line that's in the center so if i click this one here now we found the symmetry so now if i select any you know face it's going to look for the face like in the in both sides at the same time this one not so much because okay so right now for example if i wanted to paint something around the hair line i would paint something like this right not very roughly here and then i would go to my create inside of like x-gen by the way uh this is like one of the many modes that maya has i normally use the workspace called x-gen interactive room that's the type of room i use because it's very free form for someone like me who likes sculpting less technical and much more artistic i suppose so once i have the faces selected instead of like using some people use like just a scalp a different mesh to do the grooming i groom everything in the same model so i i rather just like select faces like this and then when i'm ready to groom i just go to create interactive groom splines and then i can just like give a number in here make sure that i got a count that looks more visible uh in terms of the amount of hairs you have in your your scalp you can look for that information online by the way you can find like you know 150 000 polygons probably for the whole hair there is like numbers for for example eye eyelashes so you get like 150 at the top and then 75 in the bottom things like that you know you find this information online and then once you i create the the groom obviously gonna start to you know uh brushing things and and making sure that everything looks correct uh sculpting things in fact but uh again like it's gonna be hard to show this in the video so i'm just gonna show the result of each one of those passes let's start with the the suit in here is uh itself so if i just switch my my uh shader here you're going to be able to see for example i have some fuss in the shirt so i have all this fuzz in the shirt all done with x-gen i have the fuss and the suit as well right when you look at the the renders themselves like if i switch to this one here and you get something let's see let's get this one yeah even this one here so let's see if this one you can see any of that i mean it's so subtle let's try to zoom in here you see the hair in his neck in there but unless it's in focus yeah you see a little bit of the fuzz right here it's the kind of stuff that you know it's subtle enough but if it's not there it doesn't look quite real or as good as it could be so i ended up like you know i always end up like doing this kind of stuff so this is for the suit so very simple selected all the faces and just like added uh you know the the the fuzz in there like for you have to define obviously what's the width for the fuzz so in this case here is very small and um and then from here we can move on to the hair for some of the eyes let's go to the eyelids so i have like the eyelashes upper so i have groomed both sides at the same time right they are asymmetrical by the way but you know it's like in order to create them i select the edges around the eyelashes the the eyelids and then right at the edge i create them i hate the the kind of like a doll looking so i normally try to create the select multiple edges in there multiple faces or or lines of uh faces to or how you call like a you know loops multiple loops just to have a little bit more expanded so we have like the hairs going a little bit up and down instead of like just a simple line right and then i have the lower ones as well and again like using lots of different tools if i expand each one of those you're gonna see i have sculpt layers in here i have clump i have noise sometimes multiple layers of noise you know so it's a matter of like you know it's like observing reality and trying to copy and emulate some of that right so if i go to something like this page here it's the kind of stuff you find on google you know you can look at any of those eyes and close up if you type like i close up you find something like this and you're going to see like the type of clumping that happens if it has makeup you know that you're going to add the makeup and make them a little bit more crunchy not so transparent or or translucent should i say so yeah at the end of the day is about observing and trying to emulate what you're seeing right then i go to the face here i have the stubble so i have the stubble placed in here and the stubble actually uh the cool thing about x-gen like i said is that inter interactively you can grow things you can actually sculpt things uh paint uh the length and the thickness as well so let me switch to uh let me switch to the shader shaded mode here so in the shaded mode you can see the color in there you know and also the the profile of it so when i sculpt something like a work when i place something like this stubble i try to keep the the very edges of it the very tips of them square because uh you know you tend to look at something that you know is being trimmed and then if it's trimmed i mean it didn't doesn't develop into a little point so i keep it like kind of like a square at the very tips of those those little guys right uh and then so this is the first step and then i have like the cheeks hair so like i have those little guys here in his cheeks as you can see uh in the model when i go back to giggery here uh you see like very subtle as well so right around here in his cheeks you see those little hairs in there so that's what i'm trying to recreate you know it's like a kind of like a a little piece that he missed the shaving in there i kind of like missed those areas as well because i'm getting old now and uh now i'm getting old since i was born anyway so goatee enough with the goofness goofiness uh so i have the goatee here which i add a little bit more than the peach fuzz itself no or the not the peach fuzz but the stubble itself and then i have a pass here that's the peach fuzz so the peach fuzz covers the entire face and it's this tiny little hair that covers the entire face right like the super tiny hair and it's everywhere it goes around the eyes in here it has a little bit of a direction around here it goes like around the eye the eyebrows and then it goes all the way all the way around there and ends up like landing right here around his neck so you have some fuzz in there in the neck and then his chest right everywhere it's kind of like you know it's always a matter of finding the the right shader for them and the right profile as well you see like those ones are fully grown so instead of like keeping the the tip like square i actually make them into a little tip they're fully grown so they're going to have a little tip always try to observe things or try if even if you're not observing imagine how things would work in real life in the real world and then try to remember those things when you uh you know adding each one of those little details and then you have like the nose hair so you have the nose hair here which she had like some very long ones that this in this area here based on the reference i've seen so i added some long hairs in there so you get that right it's plenty of like his face is completely covered in in hair at this point right uh and then we go to the eyebrows the eyebrows have multiple layers as well uh i don't like just adding one layer because you don't have a lot of control so if i show you just like the main hair it looks like this let me go back to uh to another shader here so this is the may eyebrow right but it's not enough to represent what i wanted so i have those other ones here i have those fillers they are very thin like this they actually blend with uh with the peach fuzz and i have some thin hair which basically does a similar thing so they're right there let me switch again here so you can see them so they look like this like very very pale so those are fillers and very thin hair and then combined with the main hair it looks like this switching back here again so those are both combined and then i have some flyaways those guys see they are thicker and they are more rebel just like me such a rebel uh and then you know you have those other ones here they are white they are white flyaways so why do i have all of those guys well because it's very hard to control things if you have just a single uh description because you have to just imagine like to create all those variations in in in color you would have to if you want to have like absolute control you have to actually nail the root of each one of those to create the different color you want to give but if you place them by hand you know exactly where they start and where they end and what color they are so that's why i opted to do this way you know to have like more control over the whole thing if i want a white hair right here instead of like trying to paint a map to match that little specific hair i just add a white hair right there and that's it right so easy peasy uh so then i have obviously the the chest hair which is very fast to do it looks really good in the render but it looks quite bad in here but i i didn't spend more than maybe like five minutes doing this so i didn't care too much it looked good in the renders i just kept it and then i have this past year that's called hair blenders what the hair blenders are i just select the faces around this uh this mask and those are very very thin hairs like that and they actually help to blend with the longer hair with the with the the default hair so if i show you here i'm going to start with the sideburns so the sideburns actually another another thing that i do is just like i did with the eyebrows sometimes depending on the model i split the hair in multiple parts instead of having just one single groove for everything you're going to see i broke up everything i have like the sideburns separate from the left from the right from the top so the sideburns now i have this control and i know that i can actually brush them to go behind the ear here i start with guides first and then after the guides is just like hand sculpted and then i have everything much more controlled in there and then on top of that you're gonna have my left hair so you see like uh it's mostly on the on the left in here but at the same time let me switch again like through this shader here so you can see mostly on the the on the left side but i also capture a few of them in here just to go and and move over come over this way here you're going to see in the final hair how it looks like but you see like so i got like the sideburns separate from this left side then i have the right side if i switch to this one here i have the hair here on the right and everything here you can use like this brush here which is very useful which is the freeze tool and you can freeze a bunch of hairs and you can sculpt either just inside of the frozen part or outside of the frozen part and then you can have absolute control to you know it's like to curl anything you want exactly the way you want it's like it's amazing how powerful uh x-gen is for this it's very buggy as well but uh in my machine at least like it's less buggy the interactive is less buggy for me than the the old-school uh uh you know x-gen with the advantage that's much more artistic i can actually really sculpt the hair i can actually do any type of sculpting you know without relying on expressions or something like that and then the final layer here is the top hair which covers the entire thing so this one covers everything here uh and then again like those uh come over here they're just like going over you see some of them in there and then obviously like what makes things natural at the end of the day you see like cg hair normally if you keep things too straight you know without the enough noise it looks very very fake and if you don't have flyaways things that just like are messy like that because in real life things are messy right just look at my life is a mess and then uh so you have like all those fly aways right and those things actually add to the final render when you look at something like this you're not gonna see too perfect of hair you know it's like obviously he had like a thin um very very straight hair so i'm not gonna go crazy with the with the noise to the point that destroys it it doesn't look like it's a straight hair anymore but he has to have enough noise to break up things you know so i can have enough flyaways to break up the the silhouette as well so the same thing from the front in here you see those ones they look kind of like thin and straight right but you have plenty of noise going on around there and this is the same philosophy i use for everything uh things are basically fractals everything when you see form is fractal uh like in zbrush when you're looking at the forms in here that's why i even tell my students you know it's like it's hard to classify things and separate things into uh primary secondary and tertiary forms because uh when you look from a certain distance everything turns into something else because it's a fractal effect if you look at the model itself like this i can tell you that you know yeah the primary forms you're gonna be like the main forms you're seeing if you squeeze your eyes like if you squint you're gonna see the primary form is in there but then you're gonna have the secondary forms which were you know like those other overlaps that you have in here some folds and you know it's like some fat tissue and things like that and then you're going to have your tertiary forms they're the very very fine detail uh you know it's like the the poor detail and all that stuff but imagine that you go to a distance like this and now you're seeing just the eyelid right all of the sudden this eyelid here becomes a primary form and then you're gonna have the secondary forms which is gonna be the smaller you know details in here like smaller folds and then you're going to have the tertiary within it and if you keep sculpting closer and closer this formula at some point like if you get close enough might become like this small form here might become the new primary and then you're going to have in relation to that a new secondary new tertiary and it always evolves into a fractal right so that's why it's i'd rather refer to things as a hierarchy you know like it's a hierarchy of form and yeah i mentioned this to my students like almost every single class because that's how i see it you know but uh yeah so that's how i see uh when i try to recreate reality when i'm trying to do something that's to emulate what i'm seeing as reality but without actually relying on pictures and ready-made materials i'm trying to actually capture that uh essence of the form but without being a one-to-one translation but simply like an idealization of what i'm seeing you know a pore the way i sculpt the pore is not the real pore but uh when you put them all together and and to the point that they are breaking up the surface and then creating this effect of the specular to look more like a natural skin you know like there's this difference between the you know the the type of the specularity you're getting the lips in here they're not super shiny they're just enough to recreate the idea of the lips and same for the cheeks and and the nose you know it's like things are are just different specular levels in there and if you break up the surface correctly within zbrush and export the displacements and use the um you know it's like the break the micro break up of the surface as well things become very very interesting at some point you know the last thing i want to show you guys here because we already in for a long time here in this video it's just my shader network for the skin not into detail or anything like that but you know just for you to see how complex it is and you've seen that like in certain shaded networks when you saw online you know like for certain creatures for movies how gigantic those shadow networks are right and my philosophy is this i use as uh minimal as possible you know it's like the minimum amount of maps to create something that looks as real as possible and then if it's not good enough i keep adding more maps but at some point i've i got like this this little shader network here which is very simple there's not a lot of maps assigned to it and it works just fine you know it's like you at the end of the day is all about the final result right when you look at the final result it does it work if it works why you have to complicate things right so that's another thing i tried to explain in my classes you know is like try to keep things simple and just add on demand so basically what this is is just like the skin shader here using the uh i use random walk too uh for from arnold and then the roughness mapping here you see like it's applied in multiple places i use the roughness map for the for the roughness itself of the coat and i use the roughness map for the coating here and uh and then let's see for the let's just go back in here for the specular they even have in this case here in this model anything assigned to it it's just a regular specular and the way that the reason i'm doing this is because this is specular here you can see that the roughness is very high i'm just using this as uh as a pass of sweat it's a sweat pass basically so it's an overall path that goes across the entire model i could filter this and use different weights in different places but you know it worked just fine so i just kept this way again the spirit of keeping things simple and lazy and then for the code then in this case yes i'm filtering things and and and doing differently uh then i have my color map so i have my color mapping there but for the color map i'm using a a color correct node in between the color map the albedo and the subsurface color and this way i can actually control things you see my my gamma here originally was one so i brought it down because i thought that the skin was too bright and then the saturation i brought it down as well and you can play with those you know it's like you have a color correction right here in maya for you and then for the displacement map instead of like plugging the displacement map straight away i'm actually using a luminous map that's on my node and i'm using a plus minus average that way i can actually instead of like using the my displacement map as alpha plug this straight to the to the alpha of my displacement node in here i'm actually using the color so if i use the color itself uh the color is plugged into oops so it's it's called it's plugged right here into the color and then uh actually this one is the this is the roughness so this is the roughness plug-in the color but let's see where my displacement is so we have displacement map it's coming from here so this is my displacement map right here so this one plugs into this input 3d here number one and this other one here plugs into the 3d0 and i'm using a cell noise and all this is done doing is basically like why i'm using this whole thing here uh the philosophy is this i'm trying to combine different displacement maps this way you can actually combine multiple displacement maps you can even have more channels if you want to it just adds uh render time obviously but this in this case here instead of like in the past i would use the cell noise as a bump map now i'm actually combining with the actual displacement map and creating a final displacement map that has the displacement detail from hd plus the super fine detail that's coming from the the cell noise right and it works really good but you have to actually control it and the way i control it is by using this roughness map here plugged into the color of the cell noise so if i expand my cell noise it's plugged right here you see the color right there and then the amplitude of it like how dense is going to be how it's going to mix with the displacement map i control it the amplitude in here right and this is how many times it's going to uh it's funny because if you add scale so if you increase this number it gets smaller that means it's repeating this pattern more and more times the cell noise and the for the parameters i use something like this noise one uh number of octaves uh additive is actually uh uh off and then those are the parameters i'm using here and then plugged in here for the color it's basically the same roughness map is a copy of the roughness map that i'm using which is uh the intention is always to create this uh you saw how it looks like in zbrush right it looks like uh this let me turn on this so basically uh the principle here is this so if it's like a dark color like this it's going to have like a uh a shallower or a smaller bump and if it's like wider like this gonna have more bump so that way i can control how deep or not or or not the cell noise is gonna be affecting the displacement map itself and that way i can actually control the whole look of the skin so as you can tell like it's basically like this shader network if you simplify it i have the same map roughness map here applied once twice three times in here so that's the same map and then i have a color map so this is the second map right and then the same color map here is being applied to here as well right this is the the albedo based like the albedo is being used here and here so there's three maps and then the fourth map is the displacement map so with four maps that's all i'm using here uh you can create this entire shader network plus a little help of the you know from the from this cell noise which is a procedural from maya so very very simple stuff and uh and at the end of the day that's it you just you know like people used to think about the computer graphics you just put a bunch of stuff in the computer and then you press a bunch of buttons and voila you got like you got the realistic model in there but uh anyway guys i hope you i hope you enjoyed this you know sorry for being a goof sometimes but that's how i i keep myself entertained you know like life is hard enough the way it is um but i i hope you enjoyed this you know it's like i'm planning to do more of those like opening some other models and like i said like in the future maybe exploring uh deeper you know like each one of those steps you know going deeper into them uh before i go up let me just go back here very fast because i forgot to show you yeah i don't you know let's just do this um i forgot to show you the the way that my udems look like so like uh under modeling let's see uv editor so my udems right now they look like this very simple stuff i have like five udems and you see like the model is split right in the middle of the face and i don't give a you know i don't care because with hd geometry you you're not going to get seams anyway so you can split the model the way you want so i have the face split in half here my latest model i actually have it completely symmetrical which is easier to you know if i want to paint something in photoshop for example and flip around like i could but in this case it's just like five view dimms and uh those five few dimms are basically each one of them is is it's receiving a albedo map and a displacement map that's basically 8k so each one of those is an 8k map with that i can recreate like the 70 million polygons that i have in zbrush with a lot of polygons to spare at the end of the day you know all you have to do is to make sure that uh your your dims are sufficient to capture all the details you're getting from hd geometry otherwise it's going to be a waste if i had those maps in 4k probably i would not get everything that i would need you know but uh yeah that's the last thing i want to talk about so i hope you guys enjoyed this one and uh i hope to see you next time so as usual click subscribe you know it's like the whole thing that the youtubers do right like i'm i'm one of them now i'm such a youtuber clips click subscribe there is the little you know like a i don't know how you call that the the little bell down there so you can actually receive notifications if if i have a brand new video up and uh and keep following it you know it's like a show to your to your to your parents tell them there's a there's a new comedian in town and you know and he can do some cg so uh keep safe guys and see you next time thank you so much

Channel: TheAntropus

Views: 43,198

Keywords: zbrush, maya, kris costa, fly on the wall, sculpture, hyperrealism, realism, tutorial, antropus

Id: Z9NMz4BW1VU

Length: 73min 36sec (4416 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 12 2021