Look Development Setup for VFX - Maya Tutorial

[Applause] [Music] hi this is going to be a look development for vfx tutorial in maya i'm not sure how long the video will be so there'll be timestamps either in the comments or i'll just put it in the description um i will just say firstly that you know different companies do loot development process differently but this is just a method that i've used in a couple of mid-sized companies so i thought i would just share it with whoever wants to watch this so let's start um maybe before i continue i'll just quickly explain the purpose of look dev um so in photoshop let's say let's say you've got a play so let's say you've got a vfx film and this is your single shot and you want to add stuff to it well what you would do is you would take an hdr so this is the raw hdr for that plate and in my video called lighting for vfx part 1 hdri setup we looked at you know how to get our original so what you see here that is the raw hdr so this one that was shot using a canon and that's in maya so this little render and then these background images are actually cuts from a few seconds of footage that was taken using the filming camera so we want we wanted that like this raw hdr to look like the one used on plate so then we essentially graded it from that to this oh i zoomed in let's just zoom out so from that to that um so what you might want to do if you were in a similar circumstance you might want to follow that tutorial first and then use your hdr uh in your look dev scene so for this that's kind of what i've seen happen for sequences in films where there's a particular sequence that has a certain hdr that can be used then a lot of assets get looked aft for that but anyway let's jump back into maya and so in the scene i've got my asset which is battle axe that i made um so this was actually just a raw model scene so this is ready so if you're working on a larger project or short animation what you might want to do is have your asset modeled and in the origin and then just group the model so everything's named in fact i did just import this asset in here so you'll notice when i imported it it came with the namespace so if that's the same case um if that's what's happened with you like and your and your project or whatever you're doing then to remove the namespace you go to windows and render no general namespace editor you can select it go delete and merge with root so you notice it gets rid of that there is also some history on the screen and what i mean by that is the translates so i'm going to hold down spacebar go to modify freeze transformations okay it didn't work that time okay now it's zeroed out and just for good housekeeping i'm going to go to edit delete all by type and history so that should be fine i don't think there's a shader on it right now but okay now there's lambert okay i also created a camera so this will be our look dev camera so i'll just call it render cam and within there you'll see three objects and so let's look at them in the scene i'm going to press 6 on the keyboard to display textures so this is going to be our macbeth chart similarly to what you just saw in photoshop if i go back to the plate there is a macbeth chart and that's just see how the light is affecting different pure um sort of different uh colors so so with the grey ball and the chrome ball and the macbeth so we're trying to emulate that essentially in our scene so we have this sphere here and this is the chrome one so i'll just call it chrome ball underscore geo and this will be grey ball that just has a lambo on it grey ball underscore geo and this is a macbeth chart i just went to google got a macbeth chart um surface shader so right click sign favorite and surface and that's just a flat material and with the chrome ball i put on a ai standard so if you go to assign new favorite arnold ai standard surface go to there and when you create it you can go to preset go to chrome wherever it is and do replace and that will be your chrome and what i did was i parented them let's just rename that parented them underneath the camera so that means when i go to my render cam view let's just change so i can see what's going on actually i need to move these cool so means whenever i move around my camera they stay exactly in the same place it's pretty cool okay so the next step would be okay we've got a locator there um so this locator is going to be used for the turnaround for the asset so this battle axe so that's that's why it's good as well for everything to be zeroed out so the battle axe is in the middle of middle of the world this is so to create a locator go to spacebar create and locator and we're going to call this asset underscore locator and i'm going to press e on my keyboard to go to rotate i'm going to open up the channel box editor on the top right i'm going to hold down shift on my keyboard and press e or you could select these by clicking and drag right click key selected then i'm going to go to a few frames along so i'm going to go to six and i'm going to go to the y-axis and change that to 360. right-click go to key selected so that means that this locator i'm going to scale it up just so you can see over six frames it's going 360 degrees great okay so now i'm going to select that locator press control d to duplicate it and now this one has no keyframes but on frame six i'm going to hold shift and press e and go to another six frames long do the same sort of thing so put 360 in the y keyframe that because i scaled it up it's got some history there but i don't i'm not really bothered about that so i'm going to call this hdr unscrew locator so now i'm going to go back to frame one middle mouse drag and drop my battle axe into that asset locator so now you can see over six frames it rotates a few different degrees approximately 45 degrees for each frame um gonna do the same with an hdr so sorry an ibl i guess so we go to arnold tab at the top go to lights go to skydome rename this something like ibr image based lighting and middle mouse drag that into hdr locator so when we get to frame six it will start rotating it's hard to tell right now because it's it's got symmetrical cuts into it i'm going to change the timeline to be 12 frames and then what we can do is we can put an hdr in there so i'm going to go to the attribute editor and in the color area you're going to go find an hdr if you don't have one go to h somewhere like hdri hdrihaven.com uh if you've got some spare money as well i would say donate to them because that's like the best website ever and if they don't exist it's gonna be harder to find decent hdrs so i'm going to pick an hdr mine are properly taken so they've got multiple exposures put into photoshop that's essentially what you saw earlier in photoshop so this here in fact this image has been exposed up but normally it looks like this so when you take an hdr you're basically taking a range of different exposures and then you combine them in photoshop i always forget where it is but somewhere in photoshop there is an area called hdr pro or hdr shop something like that automate maybe merge to hdr pro it might be that i haven't used it for years because i'm not i normally always get given hdr so yeah you know it just means i could be lazy so let's name this file hdr or probably the name of it for the purpose of this tutorial it doesn't really matter so that's good color space is raw that's also fine and so the intensity don't change that's one the exposure because i know this is dark for me this is darker than what you would get on hdr haven.com or somewhere like that i'm gonna change the exposure to 10 because i know it will be pretty much black so on this battle axe right now is just a lambo so i'm going to go to arnold render see what happens this is default maya scene so i've not changed anything great cool and you can even see the people in the background because i'm going to save a snapshot of that and with this asset i'm just going to select the whole group and hold down right click and do assign new material go to arnold and assign standard surface i will just say that there are there are met there is metal on this and wood so if we look at this so it's a battle axe so this bit is meant to be wood and the rest of it is meant to be metal so if you're working on like a big feature film or something like that then there's a chance that you would be asked to or you or you would naturally apply metal like sorry one shader to the metals and one to the wood but i mean it's it's up to you really because i textured this i know that there is zero contribution to the metalness map sorry the metalness input to the wood so yeah i mean this is a background prop anyway so it doesn't really matter okay so i've assigned that shader there and i'm going to go to the shader area rename it just for neatness so i'll call it battlenet battleaxe underscore matte for material and before i put in any textures i'm just going to say that what you might consider doing first is if you're if there's a lot of textures you've got a lot of udems or something like that you might want to go to the arnold tab and then go to the tx manager because what will happen is if we put in the textures now when we hit render on arnold's going to try and convert all those texts by defa it does this by default otherwise you have to manually turn it off it's going to try and convert all these images from whatever jpegs tiffs into tx's so what you can do instead is go to the tx manager and go to use textures and folder and then pick your folder and uh just click select it'll do it there and then it will say created xero out of blah blah blah and you just click click create tx so it will do it first that also means you can load in the tx file straight away which is pretty good so a tx file is a mipmap file and it's basically just it'll be the same the result of the file will be the same but it will just have different iterations of the image built into it so when your asset is further away or like yeah it's really far away motion blurred whatever then it won't load that full resolution so the texture for this battlelax for example is at 4k but if we are really far away if you've got a tx it's not going to use as much processing power as if you were just using some sort of 4k jpeg for example anyway that's just my recommendation but so let's load in the base color before i do load in the file i can show you in the arnold tab it says auto generate tx so that was already turned on so that means that if i plugged in all my textures and hit render um you know if it's if it's a heavy asset then it could just kill my possibly has happened before but i think the last time that happened i was doing look dev on like something that was millions and millions of pollies um so anyway i've found the file my textures and i've already converted this folder to tx's that's why i didn't do it before so i'm going to load in the tx just rename everything so this is battlex underscore base color and score image and now i'm just going to do the same for everything else it's a roughness the reason i'm naming all of these even though this is just tutorials because people need to do that okay so i am putting a metalness in as i said before i did text texture this myself so i know that there will be no interference in the wood the color space for the metalness and the roughness should be raw my metalness and roughness are also 16-bit images so 16-bit image has a higher color spectrum it's got like 56 000 color values in comparison to 8-bit which is something like 256. it's probably wrong it's something like that but it's not something i ponder every night let's just put in the wrong image god damn it okay so here i was putting in the bump map it's called a height it's coming from substance painter so i'll rename this battle x underscore i guess i should call it bump even though it's it's height map the color space for that is also raw the only one that will differ is base color which uh did i oh it's raw there yeah so the base color needs to be srgb if you're coming from [Music] maori it probably needs to be aces cg because it'll be in linear um the difference between them is the gamma correction of 2.2 so there's 2.2 gamma correction applied to the srgp srgb is basically what you're watching on tv uh linear is basically just imagine like flat image ah this is this is not the video for that talking about this um okay so i've plugged everything in i'd also have a normal map i'm going to show you a trick in a second so plugged in all of this i'm just going to hit render and see what happens and then but first actually i'm going to up the res from half hd to 4. and put a few more symbols in okay cool so this is what it's looking like now um it's i know it's not displaying correctly but i was just loading in maps just as as you would but i know that by default in arnold they don't get put in right it would display correctly if they were all 32-bit images and i will try and explain right now so i'm loading up the hype shade so let's take a look the problem is so let's look at this one so the height so this for our bump so it's going out alpha but there's not actually an alpha there so they're not it's not really loading anything so what we can do because this this image i know is it's either 8-bit or 16 but i think this particular one is 16 bit um so it's just looking for like um a float information well firstly there's nothing in the alpha but it's just looking imagine having a black and white image we can essentially the same thing if you point into the color channels some float information so if we do the same for each of these black and white images essentially so the roughness we could do out color r for the metal nurse we could do the same you know the reason for picking 16 or 8 bit rather than 32 is purely just memory capacity i don't i feel like everyone should optimize as much as possible there was no point having everything like 8k 32-bit because no one no one cares like just just make stuff that looks good that's it like who who cares if like you've filled up 200 terabytes of space you know we just want we want to make stuff good and we want it to be able to run there's nothing worse than trying to work on assets you know or shots on tv shows films whatever that cannot run because then you can't do your job it doesn't matter if it's like 50 million polys and the textures are like two petabytes who cares does it look good not it won't look good if you can't if you can't open the scenes um okay so before and after so you can actually see now it's reading them properly so that looks way better right now here's the trick the magic um combining i've not actually not actually seen this elsewhere on youtube but i have seen a tutorial of someone saying that you can't do this but you know you can so what we want to do is we've got you whenever if you if you've textured in substance painter and then you view the material it will be a combination of normal map and height map combined and so we can actually do that here if we create so i hit tab to search and then search ai normal normal map and then i'm going to search file texture connected nothing that was good okay search file so we'll search for the normal map tx cool i'll rename that battle axe underscore normal image something like that and let's do the out color into the input so this will allow us to control the strength if we could use a bump 2d and then if we were to do that we'd have to change this to tangent space normals and if you um if you do decide to use a bump 2d note there is one thing about doing what i'm about to do you can't really control it it combines them both but then they're both controlled together so if your normal map is stronger than your height map then you won't be able to separately control it for some reason it doesn't sit i've never seen it working properly if you if you do want to plug in a normal map from substance into a bump 2d node you'd put it into the value and then change tangent space normals and then turn off flip r channel i believe that's the right the right method to do it it just changes the the way in which it's interpreted um but i've been using this ai normal map node for quite a while now so i can't 100 remember um so then what we would do is out value from that into our bump 2d node as you can see there's no inputs so you would think oh it doesn't want us to do anything however we can go to or is it show hidden and then we get these extra options so we want normal camera because if you look what's interesting is out of the bump 2d by default it's going out normal into the bump input which is displayed here as normal camera so essentially we're doing the same here so we go out out value into i think i'm missing a tab out value into normal camera cool so now that's all connected up and that should be fine now so let's just go back i predict that it will be darker quite a bit just because of what the normal map is doing yep so we're gonna save that we can actually now begin to add some aovs just so we can see what's going on so you go to the render sets avs press n so that's for the normal map we might as well add the specular wherever it is specular if you want to look at your raw texture you could do that um specular albe sorry diffuse albedo that's the flat texture diffuse that's the flat texture with light uh then indirect direct and indirect there's just uh different light contributions i don't i guess i can add one of these let's look at the raw texture don't really need to though because i textured this myself so i'll press play obviously we get the same result but we can look at the normal so that looks quite strong to me diffuse albedo you can look at my wonderful texturing and the specular it's uh darker than expected but it's fine okay so i think what we need to do is probably pull back on the battle axe but normal sorry the normal map i'm gonna do a quarter of what it was doing before and then see what happens so now we're beginning to do the look dev process essentially so it's a case of going between the hype shade and rendering and also color correcting things that's what i've found in all the all the jobs that i've done it's pretty much just that like you get the textures if you take street yourself you'll still end up doing this process but all you want to do is start to bang down so i hit tab search for color correct and you'll just want to basically just add these in betweens so you can basically alter your textures without going back into texturing that's pretty much what the process is so roughness goes into the input and then the out color will still just want one string of information um one color channel of information so there and we'd probably want to rename this something like roughness underscore color corrects just abbreviating that and you'll probably end up doing this for like each each of your your maps if you're look diving but it depends it depends what's needed really but it's always even if you're not sure you know whether it needs to be done it's always worth you know have just having a play around a lot of the time i would personally say that the one that makes the most difference is adding a color correct to the roughness because it it affects the um the metalness as well because the more you increase it so if i increase this let's say it's three or five i'll do something extreme so like five so you can see it's completely flat now that's not so good so okay so that's where we were so the words i know the it's mainly the word that i care about so i'm just going to highlight that area and in this second um i know that the metalness does not affect the wood so i'm actually just going to alter this roughness just for the wood well just whilst looking at the word it will obviously affect the rest of the model so the more i increase the gamma the more it will increase the white values basically so what what for all these inputs like the metalness um for the for all these scalar inputs i should say metalness roughness bump um pretty much all of them apart from the like subsurface and base color uh just imagine it's a black and white image with whites being on and black being off that's the easiest way to think about all this stuff so the more i increase the gamma of this roughness mentally in my head i'm just thinking this is whitening the image pretty much so you can see there's before so it's pretty wet wood now we're getting a bit more matte there we need to increase the contrast i'm going to jump all the way to two it's pretty extreme now maybe reduce the gamma cool that's pretty neat let's uh let's let it render the whole thing getting a fair bit of noise as well okay i think the wood's looking better now from that wet wet wood uh okay let's say we're happy with that um now it would be a case of looking at the metalness i think but i'm just doing this a little bit now just to give you an example of like the process i would take at least in fact this is the setup i'm doing now is exactly the same process i've been doing very recently you know on a on a like something for the tv so you know if you don't you know some companies will have massive pipelines but um principles are still the same principles like so that if you copy this method for whatever you're doing you know this you should hopefully get some good results because i'm kind of giving you a cheat code here because some of this stuff took me a long time to learn but you're being shown in it shown it within like 10 20 minutes okay so metal nurse underscore color correct so looking at the specular let's take a look at that so it's pretty shiny let's just see what happens when we increase the gamma okay not not too much not too much going on i might just have to look at the beauty because it is increasing the metalness but maybe not the actual specularity because i know that that the metalness is pretty shiny by default anyway i mean if i go back to the specular you can actually make out the areas which are pretty matted anyway i'm getting some noise there but i would say that's just from the low red settings but if you get noise like that and it doesn't disappear when you increase your render settings such as let's say let's put this specular up so that a sample is up to six let's just let that render okay it's getting quite slow now but you know i will just show you so it should disappear or reduce okay these anomalies in that case are probably coming from it could be the height height map or the metalness map from looking at this asset in the past it's not actually from the metal metalness but there's a chance it could be so if you diagnose everything else and you can't find a solution for that like in these white dots i would say add in an ai clamp and if you look at this node it says min and max zero to one so it's basically going to clamp the values so you don't have to go back to texturing but what it's going to do is just going to stop the color values from going over a certain range basically um so what you would do is you would just plug in after your color correct if you have one you would go out color actually maybe you would do it before you probably do it before the the uh color correct to clamp the colors first and then you color correct it or maybe after i don't know you'd have to test it but you could just put this in and that can basically stop because you get the white specks sometimes when the color values are too high too extreme and they can't be calculated properly let's just quickly reduce the bump i'm going to half it and see what happens see if it reduces some of this white noise i think that's pretty much done it ah let's take a look at the whole thing oh yeah the green i don't think i mentioned that the green is just coming from the the hdr it's coming from there if you had an hdr that was similar to this in fact this in in this circumstance this hdr what i did after grading it i took it into nuke and i was the name of the node i don't use nuke too much but it's like a color color spill something like no luminance luminance key node and then you can basically key out just do a crude key out because it's better that you don't have green screen because as you can see that's that's why we're getting that but unfortunately i couldn't find like i don't have nuke on this computer right now so i can't do that so anyway let's look at the before so that that's the very first import of all the textures not changing any of the color space or inputs and now we have that so that's pretty pretty shiny it'll probably do with a bit more work but you know this account is i mean it would need to some more work and i would probably continue working in that same pro um that same particular way uh in fact i would yeah i would probably add more more contrast into areas that should probably bring down the metalness because it's quite quite strong there's dark um darkening the whole whole thing um yeah anyway there's a lot of back and forward which you can you can end up spending hours doing this sort of thing um so just looking at the whole image i was gonna just quickly mention so we've got the macbeth chart which is the these are these are pure colors because this came from uh it's just google image on the surface shader but you can see our chrome ball there so that's exactly what's reflected and this is the grable or that's the lambo although i just remembered i don't think the lambert is 50 it is 50 gray i think the diffuse needs to be on 50 and 0.5 so technically what we see here should be similar to what we see here in theory so if we look at these i mean there's a they're rotated in a different way but it's very it's pretty close um but this is something just to keep in mind so i'm just sort of rambling a bit but now that we have those keys rotated for the locators that means that what we can do is we can we can actually render out a sort of turntable for our asset the first six keys would be your 360 for your prop oh god i hate the snapping in maya so incredibly annoying but you can see as i scroll through that i can get a 360 in six frames of this hdr as well so anyway i'm going to leave it there because this video has probably already gone on for long enough but i hope that helps um you know obviously any opinions i said in the video they're obviously all of my own and this is just a method that i've been using at some of the companies i've been working as well so i hope i found it useful the battlelax model as well will probably be on turbosquid so i'll put a link below as well if you wanted to invest in that but other than that i hope this video was useful cheers

Channel: Raycast

Views: 2,325

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: tutorial, animation, 3d, vfx, visual, effects, learning, substance, painter, maya, nuke, film, tv, painting, keyframe, raycast, fx, greenscreen, comp, render, arnold, autodesk, mantra, houdini, modeling, modelling, texturing, sculpt, sculpting, rendering, compositing, cgi, commercials, 3danimation, uv, unwrapping, boolean, bevel, gobo, edge, loop, extrude, effect, texture, games, design, graphics, making, after, motion, pftrack, 3de, equalizer, 2015, 2020, free, training, flipped, normals, pluralsight, digital, tutors, gnomon, legacy, camera, c4d, corridor

Id: vPHhVrxxThU

Length: 40min 18sec (2418 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 03 2020