Insomniac Games - 3D Modeling Spider-Man, Clothing Pipelines & More ! - ZBrush Summit 2018

so we get two nice big warm round of applause for the clothes from the Sun a little louder people a little louder but coming down the struts we're coming down the stretch right we're coming down the stretch take it away guys oh hey everyone so yeah I'm Lee watch and I'm from insomnia game and one of the Senior Care two artists who worked on the spider-man project yeah this guy right here [Applause] so since I'm one of the first person to kind of start on this project I've seen the development from the start to the finish and yeah it's an interesting process so I'm gonna kind of walk you guys a little bit through the development of spider-man just to kind of give you guys an ideas of how of the development kind of came to what what he is right now so the first problem that we have to face or the first big question that we have to answer is that how can we define a spider-man that's both iconic and also its unique enough that we can call our own spider-man especially when you consider there being a lot of spider-man out there through the years and he is one of the most beloved like hero superheroes out there so the pressure is on to kind of define a unique look for him but also he's still stick to what he is as a character so basically one of the first thing we know what oops I think that's missing a missing a slide right there so one of the first thing we hear I don't know why I disappeared one of the first thing we had to look at is defining the body type because he's the story at this very early stage we already anchored down that this is gonna be a older Peter Park pickup Peter Parker and he's just you know he's not a teenager anymore he's more experienced and you know he is gonna move differently and he's gonna you know approach things differently from you know what he was younger when he was younger so we consider if he's gonna be much more masculine is gonna be more athletic is he gonna be just more slim in terms of the shape so we have to kind of play around with different ideas when we're developing him and the early concept you can see he's a lot more bulkier but it's basically just kind of started defining the body type and the other thing is just figuring out the right elements and their functions on him and fairly early we decided to make the materials on hand to have a purpose so there's like a layers of more a flexible layers there's also a thicker layers and also protective layers which is gonna be concentrating on protecting his like vital organs and stuff so every piece on him needs to kind of serve a purpose so that's kind of a question that we have to answer fairly early on when it comes to like concept thing and designing and and and I have to keep in mind because this is the main character in the game so the narrative even though it's already anchored down it's still being developed changes and details are still being kind of add into the story so the working on a care too like this you kind of have to keep your process fluid and being able to adapt to changes so that's kind of a few things that key things when it comes to him so this is a very in game version of what we've done on the concept we just saw he's of course the body type is different and he's a lot more slim because you know spider-man just the just-just-just for him swinging around the city he just needs to be athletic and slim and you know it looks just better this way but already we're kind of identifying problems like you know the color combination seems to be a little bit it's a little harder to read him and in darker areas and you know he's not popping as much as we wanted and also the the leg design doesn't seem to fit a 20 year old 23 year old you know athletic Peter Parker would with wear you know it doesn't seem to jive well and the other interesting point is the if you look at the upper leg this will this one right here it's already demonstrating how if we need something like blend shapes extensive use of blend shape on this game because you know the tube to Venus of this video gaming you're looking look it's not acceptable for for next-gen Wofford for current gen title so this is the early demonstrations of how we identify problems already and then we set out to kind of solve them this is your closer look of via that this is the in-game version early in game version so you can kind of tell that it's a look it's quite noisy especially around this area just because the hexagon and also the webbing in the density they're just kind of fighting a little bit so for this is like all the design question that we have to answer when income when it comes to designing a character especially a Spider Man is he sweet he needs to be just right so the problem is like density readability and also a fairly early on animators already starting to pinpoint problems like how we need emotions in the characters and the eyes is just not emotive enough so there's another set of problem that we have to address when it comes to designing him so we we can't just always stretch the frames because it's just it doesn't really fit into our universe because you just make it look if you can do it a little bit but if it's like constantly doing that just for a free motion it's a little bit too much so that's another question that comes up so throw a few passes you can see now we sort of refine the leg a little bit it's a little a little closer to what we wanted but it's not quite there yet and the protective materials through the narrative development we decided to kind of give him sort of this carbon fiber futuristic carbon fiber material that's just gonna be put on you know the the viable area which is the chest in the back to kind of protect him from attacks and and later on after a few more passes we sort of unified it and we starting to put this protective materials on the gauntlet so all the protective harder material is one unified white and you know the cut lines and on the red part is the the material that's a little bit more flexible but still thicker and blue part is the the the the flexible material where four articulations and all that you know become come from so we decided to kind of this is the final design and the colors you know of course the the balance and toning and just kind of bring him to the world and for him to be read easily and identified easily during like different environments so this is a version we have right now yeah it took I think quite a while almost like two years I think forget this so now I'm just gonna dive into the process quickly since he's uh he's he's a lot of the items on him or the elements on him is very form-fitting so what we mostly do this is lay the detail mesh we have for him so you see a lot of piping's and even the webbing is floating the reason for that is because we need to make that easy for edits so we don't cut in anything like he's he's basically good canvas and whatever on him is the layers so we can easily take out anything that's not working so like I said during the process we have to be agile and adaptable so and that's quite a straightforward process for for this kind of skin tight suit because we have different suits but for a skin tight suit like this we usually just use poly paints to sketch out the webbings layouts because the most important thing is on him all these kind of characters are two things one is the panels yeah the one is the weapons and the webbing sometimes can be tricky because you have to find the right balance in the density all that because and a lot of time this is kind of interesting question problem we have to to answer as well address as well is that the density of the body the webbing is on the body when it flows into something like a head you kind of have to gradually reduce it so you have to know where to do it and there's actually kind of like a right way to do it to do this kind of thing but I'm just gonna quickly show so if I have weddings like this usually I have my Creator like it created a simple intermesh brush to just do tracing for something like this because the reason why I don't use was it call the things called the curve snap straps snap yeah it's because using this tool I have my own polygroup already kind of embedded in in the in the brush so when I draw the polygon out I say just like that like that I can just basically oops it's not letting me I can just basically quickly get the topology out the the strip out and start working with it split so yeah just like that because they already have poly groups on it this way I can select the parts I want and delete the part that I don't want to I don't need basically just kind of do this and because it's being inverted all this is just to get a simple strips that I can work with because I think working on the piping or the webbings it's easier when it's just simple strips that I can use the zmodeler tools to do modification so I don't have to work with like a cube because it's too many points so when you get to this point it's just simple snappings and stitching and extruding of course I can make it prettier but since this is this is a demonstration I'm not gonna go too much into making it pretty just get the idea across for you guys so once it's done they'll just use cue mesh to extrude it oops I think I should that's Pali good with it again so yeah you know at this stage you can just stop divide it if you want to but usually I would I'll just make sure the horizontal and the vertical is separate first hidden separately first and then this is all because I just want to get a cleaner subdivision just basically crease oh sorry I do a poly group by normal and I think 60 degrees and it works best for this kind of thing so yeah what's this like this I'll just crease the crease by polygon and just divide it this part is now clean but you know you can always fix that later but when I subdivide it a little bit into subdivision three I just usually just take out the crease again because I kind of want that softer look on the edges so she's kind of look at it there's kind of a quick piping for you to start working on for for the detailed mesh so yeah that's kind of the eye that the process that we do in ZBrush if it comes to getting the information out of poly paint and kind of just quickly use the mauler or custom brushes to to build out these these all these piping areas the other thing we kind of use ZBrush for a lot is for because a spider-man we have different body so sort of different body types on spider-man even though we can't really deviate too much from the the base proportion but we try to variant very very them a little bit so they're interesting enough you know they're not always the same suit that's kind of important for us so if you look at the $20.99 suits they're kind of the saint built but they look a little different and I think that's the the reason why is because we basically just pick different visual landmarks and we sort of bring them out a little bit so they look different but not being really that much different like something like the wrist you know you can see the soul of a lot more has a lot more powerful bends to it and also the oh you look at the thigh area it has a little bit more defined defined shape than the spider-man the advanced suit so this is kind of one way to sort of bring variations into what it what what's kind of restricted but there's also one I think one interesting suit is the velocity suits this is an early visualization that I did for velocity it's a sketch but it's a sketch of the suit without all the elements on top and I think for me it's important to figure out the form before I commit to anything and I know some people like to develop a part first and then you know try to focus on some one area but I think that's really not a very good way to do things is you you lose how the overall pictures of the design and velocity is interesting that it has a lot of like shapes built into his body and I think it's important to capture the form first then you go into the detail later so ZBrush is really good for even though it's a mechanical suit kind of ZBrush is really good to help me quickly figure out you know this is like the anchor point that I start from because I actually use this and just basically build off all the other details from this sketch it's a rather finished sketch to be honest but this is the final version yeah I think you can whatever you lay on top of it is basically just you know facing off the basic form that's already defined there so once you kind of get that form right you know things can just kind of lay on top and just you know they just hang on top of it so that's a kind of just a variations on how spider-man you know the process we have we're just doing different spider-man's suit this is this the the the detail mesh were velocity was actually done in Maya so it's not a ZBrush model but still ZBrush was a big part of that the development did I close my powerpoint oh just have to start on the beginning just sorry just a quick recap yes so I really went through the part of the pipeline in the process this is basically just outlining what I've done and this is like the lineup it's just kind of quick overview of how they how they stand on stay back stand by each other well the last thing is well not the last but on the spider-man is just I think it's one thing interesting to call is basically it's 130 K for the in-game mesh and we're cutting a lot of the little detail piping even though it seems a little excessive but when you consider there's like the the photo this is selfie view and then you know there's a lot of close-up there's a lot of cinematic of him being in front of camera we had to do this it's not easy but it takes actual time to do this but I think the effort of I'm putting putting it yeah all the effort kind of kind of was worth it so a last thing this thing is the plain shape I would just quickly touch up a touch opponent just kind of give you guys an idea so of course spider has a lot of blank shapes and the ZBrush was kind of cool but it's pretty critical when it comes to like doing the muscles and you know different flexing and different poses and also for a few key poses we actually have you know ZBrush detail sculpt and normal map baked baked out and do implants normal map blending to kind of make this illusion works you know how everything is working but on the lesser level which I when it doesn't require a normal map would still do a lot of playing shapes to just fix like what I was mentioning to you you know how the way it was being a little bit to be like things like that so he has a lot of extreme poses so he definitely requires a lot of blend shapes and this is not all of it but I think overall we have like 80 blend shapes for spider-man so pursuit to pursuits every student needs one one set of 88 shapes yeah it was quite a feat so yeah that's basically my quick brief presentation on spider-man the questions any questions we'll take questions for you yeah hi hi hey how was it it was all the webbing you makin see brush is does it get in the final model of the game the game model or is it just texture simulator though for the webbings we don't cut them because they're just kind of required so it's just so much work to to cut the actual webbing so wedding is basically on texture and we would bake the wedding's and they're really fine to use or if we cut it on the mesh it's just quite a headache yeah what do you take your experiment what what what what did you use today oh it's uh we use substance painter for for spider-man there's two questions by the way yeah just slipped it in there unscathed unnoticed hey how you doing hi so you're saying about with the the islands expressive enough so I was wondering which came first together so obviously like we work I'm Gavin by the way hello we work closely with Marvel from like day one and together we knew really early on that we wanted to emotes the movies definitely played a reference just like all comics multiple artists have different ways of showing emotion in their renderings and you know we we worked separately they just kind of came coincidentally and you know they they came out first but I would say that it was kind of around the same time first off thanks for the presentation it's pretty great thanks for sharing so I saw you guys have had the panels as a separate separate meshes floating meshes on the body and I was wondering have you handled that for the blend shape process and what was it like just sculpted on the body and the panels will follow or yeah yeah so basically if I couldn't go back I don't know how to operate powerpoints or anyways if basically we have a mesh version of spider-man without all the piping's cut in and that's actually the sort of the based mesh base mesh to do a lot of the blending of the shape that the posing and we use that mesh to do the corrective sculpting and then later on we transfer the higher version of the piping on to just basically like skin wrap kind of thing and just wrapping it onto the new pose and sometimes works sometimes you know there's some areas more areas you have to fix so depending on how extensive that is you know usually it's not too bad but there are actually a lot of different suits and they each of them has different problems that you encounter so requires sort of case-by-case sort of solution to fix it but yeah but that's kind of current general ideas just facing off with the mesh without all the piping's and no transfer later yeah way in the back to arms thrust forward at the same time yes hey guys do you guys use hmm sorry can you speak up do you guys use hello deep forest buy them a lousy LDL we have a Lodi it has a home near Lodi like five yeah I think five logs yeah so it's nice yeah the top lot wood was what is the one with the piping and then the the one without piping will be second and then gradually yeah you got a big thumbs up here yes sir thank you so there's two costume details that you guys came up with with your spider-man design that I particularly enjoy I wonder if you could discuss the decision to give him a shoe like tread on the bottom of his foot and those kind of knuckle guards and padding on the back of his hand it's kind of a cool detail okay yeah sure so we were creating our own suit I liked Leroy's mentioning it was really important that we show the guy under the suit right and tried to tell the story about this older Peter Parker and maybe things that he's learned along the way so through that we start looking at athletic gear parkour gear and stuff like that to better show that he's learned hey maybe when I'm swinging through the city and I slam into a building you know I need some protective you know padding on my hips or you know for his shoes like looking at you know athletic shoes for you know keeping keeping grip when he's like running around and stuff like that so really a lot of visitors trying to show that older more wise Peter Parker and reflecting that through you know references in the real world and trying to show his you know improve function in our world I personally like that he looks like he's on a massive quantity of HGH it's like 40 year old Peter Parker on a dose what else Hey yeah nice hat this question is mostly for concept art point of view in for spider-man you know his logos have been black but what light you had the decision to make that logo you know white like what's like what's the the art direction behind it hoody why make him stand out from the rest version of spider-man right so uh question yeah great question grew back here so there's a few reasons why we would do it if you've played the game you know there's a narrative reason behind it holistically it's also something that makes us stand out we wanted to back that up in a story and have reason you can't just say like that's white because it looks cool you write a man so we we had to have a reason that we're grounded in our world and make it make sense for you know it's existed it's kind of thing understanding that it's a departure for many many many suits and it is like the main thing that stands out that's different and that that's like the core reason for it but then also during gameplay it stands out it's this perfect white logo right there right and when you're fighting you know dozens of guys in the in the game it helps pop them out from all of our enemies as well yeah that's a good point there's nothing like fighting twelve people at one time asked me off-camera next stuff hey guys soup that I really liked was the the shadow suit I think they're the opposite negative man whatever I forget what it's called sorry but how different was in making that suit as opposed to the others because it's like there's so much glowing on it and everything do you guys use more like texturing did you guys model it differently or yeah so there's a few different custom suits that we have there's like negative vintage or say there's another special one that's slipping my mind right now anyway yeah yeah so these two are very custom and we have insanely talented tech our team that's Jada Watson and Chris Pirillo plots wrong applause they are they are infinitely smarter than I am slightly smarter than the rest of these guys and they can basically we're creating like custom shaders custom technology for them that's a custom lighting model so with like vintage it stands out with negative it stands out so while it's based on our unique soup there's a lot of technical work that I can't really explain because I'm a caveman and you know we basically made that you know as it's like a nod to the actual negative version in the in the comics but we wanted to show like the negative powers you know the things that we are already explaining within our demons as a negative verse and stuff like that so the the short answer is it's a lot of custom math heavy work that Jay has put together for us really cool put the hands together again maybe yeah yeah so be Dustin Dustin's gonna take it since the deeper realms of cloth spider dumb and the cloth that is the spider costume right clothing okay it's a type it's really great yeah what's it like for you to work on this property it's my question any one of you can take this what I'd like to work on a property like this for you it's very fun actually because we all like spider-man and we we get exposure from - from different sources in different time you know in our life but you know it's it's basically a dream come true to work on a property like this it's fantastic it's a great responsibility yeah no no no pressure Nick doesn't just get the syrup here yeah I'm just getting set up give you just a second air guitar where's all right where's our install okay hi guys I'm Dustin Brown I'm a character artist at insomniac games and I'm gonna be talking to you guys about the cloth pipeline we use for Marvel spider-man and how ZBrush is integral to that process specifically I'm gonna be using Aunt May as an example she's a great case study of character that was really important to it the story of our game and used the complete cloth pipeline for for the game from back to end just to quickly go over the the basics of what we're gonna be talking about I'm gonna go over my reference analysis process and what I look for in my reference is I'm going to talk a little bit about fold fundamentals and how to identify different types of folds base production mesh and how we source that and I'm gonna hop over into ZBrush do a little bit of demonstration work for you guys and I'll switch back over and talk about production geometry which gets a little bit more to the real-time side of things corrective blend shapes for cloth and how we use those on the rig and then hopefully that will be a little bit of time for Q&A at the end so it's a lot to cover so let's jump in every article of cloth represents its own unique challenges so in order to cover as much territory for you guys as they can in the short amount of time I'm gonna focus exclusively on Mays button-up shirt and in terms of art direction we knew that we wanted her button-up shirt to be casual and be made of breathable cotton we know we wanted it to fit her well and she needed to have rolled up sleeves to fit with her character in the game and the shirt needed to not only work on its own but also with two different types of sweaters and here you can see examples of that shirt and how it was used in game both on its own on the right and also with the two different types of sweaters on the left and so what I'm looking for references I really try to pare it down as much as possible I'll usually have maybe one primary reference source and a couple of secondary reference sources at most I usually find that if I have too many references that I'm looking at it can really start to muddy the results of what I'm trying to accomplish for example if I have 10 different shirts that I'm looking at and my reference board and each of them has folds in different configurations I can end up wasting a lot of time trying to reconcile the folds on each of those shirts as opposed to having a more narrow set of references that I can target more directly and accurately try to find references there is high resolution as possible so that I can see as much detail in those references as they can if I can find the same article of clothing in multiple angles like a turntable that's really ideal and if I can find detail shots of things like seams and stitching and the Pels things like that that's fantastic I'll make sure I get that as well find these shirts that are somewhere in the mid range tend to work best helps to identify secondary information like folds much more easily and usually try to avoid references that have a lot of noisy patterns in them I find that it makes it more difficult to read the forms you can see that even just something as basic as pen stripes are making it much more hard to read the folds as opposed to something that's a flat mid value gray on the right and so whether we're talking about Anatomy or material definition or types of folds or even something as small as stitching I'm a big proponent of taking the time to learn the names of these things as we encounter them over the course of our career even something as small as this exact stitch if you know that there are subcategories of zig-zag stitch and you're observing that in your references you can then do much more targeted searches and you can communicate much more effectively with your peers and once you've found those more specific references you can go on to do some really interesting things like you can model different weaves and stitches out you can bake those down for tiling textures that you that you can then feed into your real-time shader more and more Triple A games these days are starting to ship with photo modes which really enables consumers to get super close to your character models and so this level of detail just helps your work hold up to even more scrutiny which become really important so tools like Marvelous Designer and photogrammetry are wonderful tools is a starting point but at some point in your career as a character artist you're going to have to sculpt cloth there's just no getting around it and so to that end knowing and being able to identify the different types of folds that we observe in nature really becomes critical to that process and so I'm just gonna go over quickly some of the more common ones that we that we see on actual cloth starting from the left we have pipe folds and these occur with an array of anchor points that allow the cloth drop down freely and a vertical way that creates almost like an organ pipe like pattern of parallel pipes next over we have drop folds that are originated from a single anchor point and array out dropping freely down usually you'll see these on knees elbows shoulders areas like that next we have diaper folds that originate from two anchor points aligning the cloth to sag in the middle then we have a zigzag spiral and half lock folds I'm a zig zag usually this occurs on cylindrical cloth in this case a sleeve where you have a bend and in the crook of that bend you'll see lightning bolt or zig zag like patterns occurring similarly on a spiral fold you also see that on cylindrical cloth in this case the leg of a pair of pants only in this case you'll see it being caused by either compression and or twisting here we have boot pushing the leg up and the foot is also turned out causing both compression and twisting half log folds are kind of interesting I tend to think of them as a bit of a mix between diaper and spa and spiral folds and that you again have the two anchor points but in this case one is dominant over the other causing breaks or half locks wherever there's a change in direction in the fold and so knowing this sort of thing becomes really important when you actually get to use your brush work because you can replicate what you see in nature so in terms of sourcing our bass production mash you usually have one or two methods of doing that and so they're going to be photogrammetry or using cloth simulation like Marvelous Designer in the case of spider-man we used an exclusive Marvelous Designer pipeline but regardless of what you use usually you're going to end up with a triangulated mesh that's not really great to work with in ZBrush and so what I like to do to that end is I'll bring both my flat and my my 3d simulated mesh from Marvelous Designer into Maya I'll reach apologize that down to quads that I know are going to subdivide I'm gonna be able to work with well in ZBrush I'm gonna use the transfer attributes tool in Maya to essentially retarget that on to the simulated cloth using the UVs as a sample space I'll then subdivide that a couple of times and use the transfer attributes tool again just to make sure I'm capturing all the full data that I got from marvellous and then from there I can bring that into ZBrush and this is the same exact shirt that I had in the presentation you can see here if I go into frame mode it's still pretty high and because it's all quads what I can do is I can go down to geometry I can hit sub reconstruct sub div a couple times and I have a really nice base mation that I can use to grab say like my move tool and I can make really broad sweeping adjustments to my primary shapes very quickly and what I can do is I can use ctrl shift W that's going to give me a quick set of poly groups based on the panels that I have for marvelous and if I step back up and what I usually like to do is I'll go to my smooth brush turn my intensity down to something around 10 and then I'll use the Alt smooth tool which is basically you hold down shift start to smooth it and then if your release shift what that's going to do is it's going to start to smooth out a lot of that surface noise that you got from marvelous while maintaining the forms of the folds themselves that you got from marvelous then I might go in with with topological breath brush and I'll start to just make some broads true these sweeping adjustments maybe bringing in some of these seems a little bit tighter cleaning up the lapels a little bit just kind of scooting things around in a very general way maybe I'll step down and kind of work out some of the kinks on the bottom of this shirt here things like that and so if I step down to my next sub tool you can see an example where I've done just that I've gone through and I've smoothed out a lot of that noise you can see on the bottom of the shirt if I just toggle back and forth you can see where I've cleaned out the bottom of the shirt Bart a lot of the seams together so at this point I'm really just looking to evaluate what I've gotten from marvelous and look for any areas that I find visually distracting and just right off the bat what I'm noticing is some repeating fold patterns coming off the side here coming off of robust and general in general I feel like there's too much emphasis on our bust which is gonna be out of character for Aunt May and there's a little bit too much of an of an hourglass shape to her hips again which is out of character for Aunt May I also filled with sleeves they're a little bit too tight and I want to get those a little bit more loose and so what I've done here is I've basically gone in and I've diffused a lot of those folds that were distracting before I've D emphasized robust toned down that hourglass shape and I've redirected a lot of these folds coming off of her shoulder and if I turn on polygroups you can kind of see what I usually see in my mind's eye were visually identifying in red where my anchor points are and you can just going back to the fold types that we've talked about earlier you can see where we've got some drop bolts coming off of her bust off of her shoulders onto both the front and the backs of her sleeves I've got some half lock folds on her armpits where her sleeve is being pushed up I've got the beginnings of some spiral folds and then in the crook of her elbow we've got some zigzag folds where they would naturally occur and so here I've just continued we're finding that process starting to get into just defining the the corners of these folds a little bit more in some of the transition points for example here we have some drop folds that are transitioning into some spiral folds and I want to make sure I've got some nice aesthetically pleasing transition points for that am I even at this point start to add in some buttons just so I can visually see where they're going to be and I may want to have some tension folds that come off of come off of those and you can see that at this point I'm still only a subdivision for because I really don't need a lot of subdivisions to dial in a lot of the secondary information I really only want to subdivide once I'm starting to do things like sculpt in some stitching or seams and I can start to like book in some of these seams just with a basic standard brush that's not sculpting huh weird anyway anyway for the sake of moving along I'll just show you guys the finished ma shirt here it's really just a lot more the same it's just going through and referencing your right your visual references and refining the cloth and just taking the time to to go in and sculpt those folds and seams I know that there are a lot of like like alphas that you can use to to put it like all on a rolling brush for this type of waffling pattern I don't tend to use those I find that it produces a lot of repeating patterns that are pretty obvious and so it doesn't really take that much time to do it by hand I'll go in and do things like in the Pels I'll go ahead and break that up and add some add some character to it just so it looks broken in and worn little things like turning out the corners of the pockets can help add a lot of character to it as well just a little attention to detail like that and then if I load up her finished model I'll show you guys everything all put together so here's her full outfit with the jeans she has an undershirt some cuffs or shoes the jeans went through a few different iterations but you can see this is very loosely based on what I got out of Marvelous Designer but there's been a lot of artistic changes that were part of an internal conversation and just kind of referencing the concept art as well and so if you step down to your lowest subdivision level in ZBrush that's really going to give you a solid starting point for your real time mesh all you really need to do at that point is insert some extra edge loops in areas that you know are going to need to go through the most amount of deformation like the shoulders and elbows and then maybe making a few extra cuts to hold the shape of the folds that you've established in your high poly model now way you're getting the same interesting silhouette beats from your from your in-game model that you have on your sculpt and once we have all the clothing finished off we'll pass it to a rigging team and they'll test it on the rig taking it through a variety of poses looking for things like loss of volume clipping things of that nature and then will usually go through a corrective blend shape creation process and a lot of these blend shapes were created by our associate character artist who's sitting in the front there Marco Villa Ponyo yeah and so for those that don't know a Belen shape is essentially a linear interpolation animation between two meshes that have the same geometry but are different shapes for example if you have a cube and you subdivide the cube a couple times but you leave the edges and corners nice and sharp and Kuby and then you copy that cube and you smooth it down into a sphere the point order is the same the triangle count is exactly the same but just different shapes and so you can create a blend shape relationship between those two meshes so that you can morph back and forth between the cube in the sphere and so the principle is the same here we're just using what it's doing it on more complex shapes than primitives and here we have we have a video example of a blend shape being used on Mary Jane's jacket in a shoulder with an arm raised and we can see that once the blend shape gets turned off there we're getting a loss of volume and the shapes just not holding up we're also getting stretching on the stitch patterns and so turning that blend shape back on brings a lot of volume back gives the shape that we would expect to see that's all for me thank you for your time [Applause] any questions hey I have a question about micro wrinkles that she that was seen on the AMA shirt how did you go about applying that to use noise maker did you pretty much there's a BIOS those micro wrinkles using just alphas yeah a lot of the memory folds we have a couple of ways we can accomplish that we can actually do it as an overlay within the real time material but for what you saw in ZBrush there I usually do it on a layer so that I can turn that off if I need to and you could find alphas of something like crumpled up paper and you can just put that in like a drag rectangle brush at a really low intensity setting and just kind of pepper that along the surface of your of your cloth you want to keep things in mind like where it's going to naturally crease and Bend in the case of that particular piece of cloth I didn't want it to look starchy and iron so I was just kind of peppering it all over the article of clothing hey I'm on my way hello thank you for sharing with us I know I really appreciate it but I was wondering you know when it comes to you know when you transferring from marvelous to ZBrush is there like a reason or is it better to go through Maya than to use the quad convert to quads while you're already in marvellous I mean is there a benefit yeah yes so when you're exporting a mesh out of marvelous you have a couple of options you can you can have a triangulated mesh or you're right it does have a quad option but the issue with the quad option out of marvellous is that it's not in a clean grid-like pattern it's it's following the four of the folds that it is simulated and because of that you're going to have a lot of five-star polls in some really unfortunate places that you're going to be fighting the entire time you're trying to sculpt on it in ZBrush that's why I take the time to read to pologize it it's also really nice to get that low res that you can start for your game that's right because you get you get a free set of UVs at the end of that which is real nice free is good free is good this might be a question for a couple of you in tandem but could you speak about the physicality of Peter Parker versus spider-man and how that relates to you the costume on top of his his body like that kind of contained a strength that he has when he's trying to just be a normal guy walking around in a lab coat sounds like it Gavin sure uh so just so I understand the question are you talking about like a difference between the two or maybe when he when he puts on the costume maybe when he embodies spider-man as a character he might when he goes HGH as Lee says does does he carry himself differently and does that relate to how you think about folds and yeah and maybe clean lines versus a crumpled shirt that he has in a backpack when he needs to rush off to work yeah yeah so obviously they should have the same body type right so we we solve our clothing off of of spider-man we do shrink a few things in just so he's not like super ripped running around but it is the same body type in the end that does help inform any of our like landmarks or folds and stuff like Dustin saying yeah yeah it does yeah so we couldn't we kind of like a look at like any of the anatomy from there there are things that we do consider from like a story point of view like you know Pete I wouldn't say is the most fashionable guy or isn't as concerned about fashion and as you know would store things in backpacks stuck to a wall or you know it would be the kind of person that would you know just take it often ball in the corner right from our leg opening cinematic you also see like his suit is balled up and you know he's kind of like pulling that out and it doesn't smell so good so things like that we also consider for like fold work quality of fabric things like that so he's not gonna be I wouldn't know what a good shirt is but he's not only walking around like a silk shirt or anything like that it would be like a more crumpled thicker like flannel that he would have like available to him yes just making my way over there the beard is strong fellow yeah how much time are you guys spending in marvellous versus zbrush like what's the run time for the sculpting like re sculpting over Folds and stuff I think that's a really dependent upon the individual artists and their personal preference I know I personally I'll spend a certain amount of time and marvelous where you know I'm placing pens and I'm playing with fabric and simulation properties and I just kind of feel like I'm hitting a point of diminishing returns and I just feel like I can get my results a lot more quickly by sending it over into ZBrush and where I have like a move brush and a standard brush and I can just start kind of hammering away at it but we have other artists on the team that are able to get something approaching finished results just in Marvel's designer so there's really no hard and fast rule to it it just comes down to personal preference anybody else please swing forward okay round of applause again we got a place Oh Jason Jason ladies and gentlemen put your hands together there we go everybody I'm Jason Fitch character is insomniac games so today I'm gonna be talking a little bit about my ZBrush hard-surfaced pipeline specifically on Rhino and I spent a lot of time early on in Ryan's development sort of bashing my head against my ax and trying to get nice edge flow out of heart surface and it just really wasn't working for me and I needed something that was much more artist friendly and something sort of formulaic that I could continue to repeat so I wasn't getting stranded just trying to figure out different edge flow and essentially using a lot of methods from other artists furia Tedeschi Michael Pavlovich Andrew Chris da I was able to sort of cobble together something that really worked well for me and I was able to use on Rhino so this starts off with a dynamesh block out which is very rough let me go through a formulaic process essentially to get nice clean hard surface and then from there do a lot of the high-frequency texturing for the game in substance painter so this dynamesh block out is essentially proportions and placement for rigging animation and design we can start to go in and figure out where joints are going to be placed how different elements are deforming this is really critical while the narrative is being adjusted so funnily enough Rhyno actually started looking more like a gorilla and he would actually run on his fists and as the the design of the boss battle was adjusted and we sort of wanted him to be more of that man in the suit we had to bring his proportions to be more naturalistic and getting this off to design and rigging an animation as quickly as possible so that we could see how it was working in game was very important so having this quick dynamite sculpt that we could decimate was really great so we can design in 3d where the concept is vague Darryl Mandrake did an awesome job with this concept but I don't expect him to go in and just paint every little detail for me that's really where the fun comes in for me is I get to go in design all these elements and I can quickly do that in dynamesh without worrying about edge flow or topology or anything like that and again just quickly making changes addressing feedback very critical to get feedback from the other character artists in your team people who are playing the game and adjust hub is gonna look you can actually see I'll show you the final mesh in a minute but his neck is really kind of squashed in there and after getting this to rigging and seeing it in game we could tell that he just couldn't move his head we're just kind of a problem considering he likes to hit people with his horn so he needed to be able to go down and whack people and that just wasn't working so after making adjustments we can clean up the dynamesh to get the final meshes so like I said I was trying traditional poly modeling I was extruding stuff on the surface I was laying down my edge loops trying to figure out how things were gonna look and the big problem here was that I didn't have a final picture of what this was gonna look like right I could sort of see this end result in my head right but I started with this primitive and instead of doing that I wanted something that I could repeat consistently not worry about where these edges are being down and it's also confusing like you you start off with something like this rhinos head here his helmet what primitive really is going to be the best for that I had no idea I knew that I I wanted to get this looking perfect from the get-go so I needed to jump into dynamesh and just start moving stuff around so I could achieve this so essentially I can't with this sort of relief hard surface so we have the dynamesh we know exactly what we want it to look like and then we use zremesher to really quickly get topology alright just lay this down all over the surface trust in ZBrush is algorithm a little bit to to give us quick topology and then start deleting a lot of edges this is where the relief sort of mode comes in the more edges I delete the more the subdivision algorithm is going to take over when they finally smooth this thing so again that process I'm gonna dive into ZBrush in a minute here and get a little bit more detailed but you can see Rhino has a lot of sub tools a lot of sub tools so I needed to be able to repeat this process and all of these sub tools very quickly so essentially this is masking splitting off any components that it will actually be separate meshes using polished by features to polish up the rough dynamesh sculpt really smooth things out using zremesher to get that quick topology and zmodeler to then start removing it again that relief mode panel loops to get thickness where we need it and the dynamic subdivision and creasing to get a preview of our subdivision algorithm without actually applying it we're just gonna allow us to use a lot of the features in ZBrush that require you did not have any subdivisions so if you're using deformers if you want to just go in and use the modeler you can do that without having to freeze anything so you can somewhat script this through macros right so you can take a lot of that and condense it into a couple of button presses and if you've got a nice UI lay out ZBrush does a great job of letting us make our own UI you can have all that stuff nearby you get variable edge smoothing through crease level so if for some reason you needed this boot to be a lot denser or the material suddenly changed to be rubber we may not want it to be held up as well right so we can adjust the crease level and smooth this a little bit more again we don't have to free subdivision levels and you can see your end result from the beginning of the process a couple of drawbacks dynamic subdivisions a little bit processor-intensive so if you've got 73 subtools a slowdown the viewport a little bit it's a little bit more step heavy than traditional stuff but it kept me from getting lost in the weeds of just editing ver pivert the crease method of subdivision can actually create polls in your model and you can actually sort of see this here where the boot cuts in I know if you guys can see my mouse but there's a couple of ways around that you can design around it so instead of having this cut in you could just have this part to sit on top you could manually layin edges with a modeler or as recommended by Leroy Chen you could actually go in and make this sort of part of your design so you could take this whole edge loop increase it and you're getting a kind of an interesting planar effect after doing that and because rhino is so aggressive adding more planes in and as sort of angling them downward gives us sort of a nice a more aggressive filled with character and no end guns I'm a big fan of end guns and high poly stuff and you just can't do that ZBrush right now so you can see up here that this was an end gun that I sort of just stuck a triangle in oh well and through this process we get nice clean meshes is the final mesh you can actually see up here there was an area where we had one of those poles and actually put in a plane here it just gives it a little bit more of a nicer aggressive look some references Michael Pavlovich Mike Jensen Andrew Chris ta the it software character team inspired me to actually get better at Z modelers thank you all of these guys and everyone in sonmi I could help make Rhino hat and all awesome people so jump into ZBrush all huh interesting oh I've never seen that before that's not good all right all right so here we have our look at that red wax it's the best yeah so we have our final dynamesh sculpt right he's sitting around 4 million triangles which is pretty low for what I would expect for this guy he's roughly twice this twice the height of spider-man as you can see through most of the game he's actually bent over so he doesn't actually look white as large but we can go in and pick a piece here and convert this and first gonna duplicate the subtool so that I don't lose all this nice information and I'm gonna go ahead and mask off this piece here do this real quick doesn't have to be perfect just yet control w2 polygroup that and I'm going to solo it control-shift look at your on solo you see it by itself sorry guys I need to I don't know we're just don't rebut so we're gonna use the deformation tab polished by features which is really gonna start to clean up these jagged edges here we just run that a few times clean this up move this around straight a little bit we can even run polished by features with this sort of checkbox here unchecked and that's gonna smooth more of the inside and not just the border let me use H polish to actually make this a little bit more planar because it is a rather planar feature we don't necessarily need that curvature in and we can bring it back using deformers which is really nice who's gonna run this a few more times cool and then we're gonna use the zero measure and start getting that topology we want so I'm gonna run this around a thousand polygons keep it kind of low see what we get not sure what Oh sorry folks I forgot to delete hidden I'm gonna go to modify topology delete hidden just get rid of that stuff we don't need it and we'll see how much this great alright not the best but we're gonna sort of fool ZBrush and Zima zremesher algorithm into doing what we want so I'm gonna pull up these corners to make sure we get nice crisp edges for this and I'm gonna go through this process again right I can turn on dynamic subdivision now start to see what we're gonna get there's a lot of wobbles in here it's just too dense right now I'm gonna bring it down again and zremesh it again this is a little bit closer to what we want still too high poly right turn this on still wobbly this isn't maintaining its shape so what I'm gonna do now I'm going to run this one more time sweet all right so now zmodeler we can go in and start deleting these edges just a spacebar here go and hit delete over the edge edge look complete I'm just gonna start going through getting rid of them not really caring about the edge flow what I'm doing in this moment just trying to get this a lot lower that's not gonna be great yeah so this triangle down here is sort of causing problems so we can go ahead and fix it out we can use split here on this edge let's add in some more topology and then bridge two points you get just complete that loop so that it's not as bad and we can take get rid of these extra edges don't need them all right so we can you slide to sort of reorder things it's gonna be nice because it's just gonna move along those existing edges all right so we're getting something kind of close to what we want and again what we want is this piece here right so let's go ahead and add some thickness so we can use panel loops and our edge loop settings here and if we just do it now we can see that it's just gonna polish the hell out of it it's not what we want at all so we can reduce this polish it's a little bit better if you have this ticked it's gonna maintain it a little bit better so if you did have a little bit more geometry it would maintain that but I'm gonna turn it off entirely and I'm gonna set my elevation negative because I was working on the surface of rhinos mesh here and I won't actually push down in rather than coming out good don't wanna alter the volume of the character necessarily we can also edit the bevel profile here you guys want to get rid of these you can just play them off yeah awesome so we turned out a dynamic subdivision again we can see we're just losing those hard edges so like you've probably seen on this stage a few times we're gonna go down to poly groups which is not that all the groups and group by normals which is actually gonna look at the surface angle here and give us a new polygroup every time it's greater than currently 45 degrees and if I now go into my geometry tab I got a creasing like increase by polygroups and now when we do a generic subdivisions it's maintaining those edges right so there's still a lot harder than we want so we can drop this crease level from 15 to 2 so it's only gonna maintain those creases for two levels and right now our dynamic subdivision is at 2 so if we - bumped out to 3 you get to see some nice - softening of these edges we got a 4 get rid of some of the faceting awesome and then we can go in with zmodeler again and we can start creasing some of these edges that we did increase before or even moving creases where we want to sin the final mesh this is actually a little bit softer so we can go in and remove individual creasing pull that out just getting a little bit softer and then from there we can go in and detail this a little bit better we can use the ribs your modeler to bevel we just grab this whole edge and bevel it we can use our poly group by normal again so you can see I'm using these quite a bit right so these are features that will want to house into our own custom UI there's a lot of good tutorials out there for that I recommend you guys look into so yeah essentially through this process I was able to get the final mesh for Rhino and for me this was a lot faster than trying to use just Maya to achieve this and then we can go ahead and we can apply our dynamic subdivision so I actually have these as real subdivisions and we could subdivide further and if we wanted to we could start carving in some panel lines here which we could then go on to essentially repeat the process right break this off add some thickness separate this have our crease inks we can have this as a separate mesh as well for these details yeah so any questions any questions yes brave would you also have a strong beard alright so these are the question is why do you choose to use zremesher over and over versus just drawing the topology right on top it's a lot faster for me I don't have I guess in my mind I can't see exactly where I want that to apology to necessarily be from a gecko so just using zremesher to get it really fast works nicely for me and I can just start pulling those out and just my preference really way in the back hang on one sec make me work for it appreciate it hey so I'm wondering how much you end up using the topology that you make and see brush in game versus wreak apologizing certain pieces it looks like that face you probably have to go in and throw some new topology over but some of those hard surface pieces look really clean did you just drop those right in town real or something so some of them I did use the lowest subdivision level or the second subdivision level which actually worked really nicely but rhinos actually continuous mesh for the most part there are a few areas that are separate but just to get a cleaner baked rather than have everything as a separate piece you can see these pauldrons here a separate piece but like all of this stuff is all connected and I can set up my edge flow in such a way on the low poly that when I bake I can I can bake down a lot of these curves surfaces nicely into the normal map if they're actually combined if they're if they were separate if they're not high enough a resolution you can start to see where the different intersections are like up here here so just having him as more of a continuous mesh worked really nicely and it was a lot easier for rigging that way to you anybody else is that an iron okay I guess we clap we better make even more noise that's it [Applause]

Channel: Pixologic ZBrush

Views: 54,093

Keywords: zbrush, zbrush tutorial, zbrush hair, zbrush speed sculpt, zbrush hard surface, zbrush beginner tutorial, zbrush 2019, zbrush 2020, pixologic, zbrush free, z brush, sculptris, pixelogic, zbrush live, zbrush download, zbrush core, zbrush trial, zbrush brushes, blender, 3d coat, 3d modeling, digital sculpting, adobe live, zbrush student, etsy, insomniac games, insomniac games video games, insomniac games spider man 2, spiderman clothing, spiderman games

Id: 6hXiCnJjV7M

Length: 76min 26sec (4586 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 07 2018