LookdevX in Maya Part 1 - Introduction

[Music] hello and welcome to the how I made it and Maya series my name is Arvid Schneider and I'm a lighting supervisor at image engine in Vancouver Canada in the how I made it and Maya series I'll be showing you the details of the new features of look devx we will go into details of production workflows how to create custom materials custom shaders and overall working in the look devx graphs as you can see we are in my and today's Focus will be about look devx look devx is a production agnostic material editor that resolves USD materials in this video I'll be going into a lot more details on the introduction of look devx how you can assign materials how you can use it and in the following videos I'll be focusing more on production workflows how to structure USD files how to work with sub layers how to work with the graph so there will be a lot more to come but as I said this video will be about the introduction and without further Ado let's just dive in and get going so as you can see in my outliner I have my Lighting Group which just houses the HDI and then I have my regular geometry hierarchy so that is pretty standard stuff as I said in the introduction look devx requires a USD stage to work with so in the first thing what we want to do is go to uh windows open up the US layer editor and at the bottom here you can see we have a create option from file or stage with new layer I want to focus on the new layer which will create me a stage one and it's currently empty U so now we need to kind of get the geometry from our my environment into the USD stage environment and a quick easy way is you can just rightclick your root folder duplicate as USD data and pipe it into your stage so now you can see the data is being duplicated in this new stage environment you can hide the default Maya geometry so now we are already in a USD setup so what what can we do with this so the cool thing is now you are working in USD which means it's a universal scene description and this applies to any other DCC that supports USD so it's really nice to collaborate now let me show you a couple of ways how we can assign and create shaders so the first thing what is quite naturally to you you can click on your geometry right click it and say assign new material material X and then you can pick the standard surface Shader you can see it automatically created me this material scope which is essentially a library or a location which houses all your shaders and within here I've got my standard surface Shader right there so I can quite easily go into the default atted editor change my colors and they are represented in the viewport maybe pick something cooler something maybe a little bit more dinosaur skin something like that maybe um and and that that is now represented in the viewport and I can also play with my roughness value you can see they are represented as well uh what I can do as well if I render Now using the GPU you can see that the results are pretty much the same um there's no discrepancy in viewport to the actual rendered result so that is pretty awesome and so this was now right clicking it from the viewport you can also do a similar thing from the outliner you can maybe pick the body right click it here assign EX existing material like that so now we just assign it like this you can the same way as we assign them in the viewport you can also uh let me just find it in here maybe for the jaw you can right click it and um assign a new material material X standard surface and you can see it automatically created a new Shader on the left same as before we can pick a color maybe we just hu shift it slightly so it's obvious that it's something different maybe a little bit brownish and now we have a new Shader so it's pretty straightforward like I think this is a typical workfl you you used to know as well one caveat now there's also the Arnold standard oface Shader it renders exactly as you know but the only caveat is it does not represent in the viewport at this moment so I can show you how that would look like so if I select my geometry in the left I can right click assign new material arnal standard surface you can see it just keeps uh white but if I change my color maybe um we go a little bit more reddish you can see it's not in a viewport but if I render it will pop up the same way as we know so that's just one minor thing that you just need to be aware of so by default it creates this MTL scope you can create your own material Scopes you for instance you can just right click the stage shape add new Prim create a new scope group them into more fitting names let's say we want to do legs MTL this is now my leg material scope um you can right click this and assign a new material material X and send the surface you can now right click the leg MTL assign add new material material EXT standed surface and now you can see it will just pop up in this area and same way as before I can let's say I want to pick the hands and as sign existing I can then see the both of the Scopes so it's quite nice and straightforward and I can just assign it and change my shaders as I need them to be all right so that is how you would assign materials and you how you can edit them in the default editor so now let's dive into look Dev X and see how that looks so at the top here you have this this Shader ball of that X that means that is the look Dev X editor you can click on that to open up look devx or you can go to Windows look devx graph editor and you can see this pops up nicely on the left hand side here and if I want to view a Shader I can now click it get in the viewport click the goo right click and show and look thex I can create a new tab or pop it into the existing one I can also rename this if I need to um let's just say main or whatever it's always good to name things so you know what's going on and now viewing this and look of X you can already see we've got the standard surface one orange thing if I double click this and then we're diving in so what this top level no is it's essentially a container that houses the Shader this is a little bit different than the hypers shap because there was no container context but in this sense essentially we can do a very cool things on the containers we can promote parameters and make this really straightforward and intuitive uh but this will not be covered in this video I just want to let you know that this standard surface here is just the material container and within we've got the Shader so if I click on the Shad you can see we get the parameters panel that means we can hide the attribute editor and technically we can now just work within here if I change my colors you can see they are represented in the viewport everything is nice and fluid and obviously everything else works the same way you can connect bump Maps texture maps all of that we will cover that in in a different video though and so what if you want to create a new material you can now hit tab to create a new material so I could go material X and dive in here standard surface andd and this is now let's call this maybe um leg MTL container and now you can see also on the left that created this on the left hand side the container has been named and the Shader is just our default name let's just call this maybe legs and then it's nicely structured same way as before I can select my geog group for the legs right click assign existing and then MTL leg MTL container and now they are assigned so it's very intuitive I really like this new workflow you can see now everything is a little bit bluish and what else can can we do so imagine we have a separate stage another stage right by default it will create the material U wherever the stage is selected so if I create a new stage like this we got now stage two let's just say stage two creature b or whatever and if I now open this up and if I create a material now so this can be a little bit confusing but we are currently looking into the main tab here and if I now go to the top level container I can create another standard surface here and now it says the scene contains multiple stages pick a stage by selecting it in the outliner so I will just select the stage in the outliner and I do the same create the Shader and now you can see it will actually populated in my stage two in the creature B stage if I now select my other stage again and I create another s and surface Shader we are back into the uh creating them in in this stage so that's just something you have to be aware of um where you are creating the shaders um and where your sages are selected you can copy and paste materials or move them into different material scope so imagine now we want to move this leg MTL container into our leg scope here so I can just middle Mouse click and drag it into the leg MTL and you can see now that PO right in here but what you will notice is first of all you get a notification or a warning below that something has changed and you can also see that in the viewport my legs are not this blue color and anymore and the reason for that is as soon as you move things the material bindings are broken so you have to rebind them or reassign the materials to your geometries so if I select my legs here and assign to selection you can then see again okay they are back to Blue so that's something that you need to be aware of as well you can also copy and paste things into different Scopes so I could just paste this in here and then the material hops into this so it's very nice another cool thing is if you hop into like a material like this you can quite EAS easily copy and paste your materials like that so you can see that will also be populated on the left here under the same material container you get now different standard surface shaders so it's a very nice uh way to easily copy and paste things so I'm cutting things now if I paste them they go in here so you can quite flexibly work and copy and paste your shaders and materials and if we render now we can see that our little dinosaur looks exactly the same in the render as in the viewpoint so it's a very good representation you can quickly work in the viewport real time do your things and then render and see how that works for the r Tracer so this concludes the introduction video next videos will be more in depth in production structures in stage sub layering and very interesting things are coming so stay tuned

Channel: Autodesk Media & Entertainment

Views: 9,161

Keywords: lookdevx, maya, autodesk maya, autodesk, openusd, open source, animation, vfx

Id: nHLaPjpYHR0

Length: 10min 57sec (657 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 27 2023