Make Your Animation Look GREAT - Maya to Blender Render Workflow

welcome back i'm sir wade and this is luna and today we're going to take animation from whatever software this works in most softwares but specifically we're going to take it from maya for example this thor shot that we did as a demo on twitch at some point we're going to export that data and bring it into blender to do some rendering in cycles or eevee i've got some fun comparisons about how long it takes to render different sequences with different settings we have some good stuff today and if you find this video helpful and want to see more like it don't forget to hit subscribe down below if you haven't already and hit that notification bell so you don't miss new uploads and of course if you have any questions feel free to jump into my twitch streams i'm live twice a week and obviously you could just render inside of maya but while arnold is a very good renderer and don't laugh i know you're laughing it is a good renderer arnold is one of the most accurate most beautiful renderers it's just not the fastest and also it's just frankly not the most intuitive render out there it's not the easiest thing to use but pretty soon we're gonna have to tackle redshift and octane because those chef's kiss beautiful wow that is delicious finally it's most the time animators don't even have to worry about this if you are trying to animate on movies or games you're usually never rendering your work you're maybe putting it into a game engine or you're passing it to another department and then it gets rendered eventually usually play blasts are fine for demo rows and stuff but if you're going for that presentation value or you're making your own shorts or youtube videos or whatever well then this is gonna be really helpful but anyways grab the geometry of your character and i wanna make sure i grab his hammer over here you may be tempted to go to file and then try to export it from this main menu there's a bunch of options there to send it to a game engine and other useful things but in this case you don't want it because this little drop down where you try to export the selection there's nothing in here that we want what we want is an alembic cache which is actually what we used at dreamworks olympic files are nice high quality vials where every frame of your animation is stored within the one file so you don't need like an image sequence or like an obj sequence for example and unlike an fbx file where it keeps information about joints and some of the rigging data it doesn't do any of that it just takes the actual deformations of your models and pulls that over for other software to use this is how at dreamworks we would take animation data and send it to houdini for effects or you know wherever else it was actually just the alembic data that got sent down the pipeline and rendered ultimately but to get that working you may need to go to windows settings and preferences plugin manager and then just look for the abc or alembic export and import when you load one it'll probably load both of them you won't be able to do the next step until you've done this and i don't know if it's default so so first thing to do is select the geometry that you need now if you are going to take the entire scene my recommendation is not to just grab everything all at once or export all take it in chunks take your character take the props that they interact with directly do one of just your camera that way if you need to make changes down the line to your camera for example you're only replacing that one part of the export you're not trying to re-export all the data in your scene same with the character if you make some kind of an animation change you just do that one part swap it in and it's really easy once that's done in most of the menu context in maya up at the very top you'll find a cash drop down drop that down you go into alembic cash and then you can hit export selection to alembic go ahead and hit that option box it'll pull up this little pop-out menu this is where you can customize the export to be the entire time slider or you can just set a specific number of frames that way you don't get a bunch of extra data whatever you also have the ability to include a pre-roll which is for simulation stuff which we're not going to worry about today and for step size you just leave it at one it just gets every frame but if you wanted to only have every five to ten frames being cached you could change that number that's done for lighting and things like that usually to get like the key poses of a shot or to be able to see as a character moves through the scene without needing all the data how that's looking the only thing to make sure is that you scroll down to the advanced settings and turn on uv right for me this was not on by default this is important if your character has textures if they're using files to put stuff on the character if it's just basic materials of just like oh lambert and a blend and a color you may not need to worry about this but if you don't do this it won't preserve the uv wrapping stuff that's in your model i'll show you an example of what that looks like later but with that you're good to go export the selection and put it somewhere that you're going to remember how to find it if you carelessly just hit the save button then it's going to go to your default maya directory or wherever you have your project set to which by default is an annoying place so make sure you watch some of my other my tips videos so you know how to deal with all that once we get to blender there's only four main steps we need to deal with import the stuff texture the stuff light the stuff and render the stuff that's basically what we're going to be doing here so we're going to go to file import alembic and then bring in the data you've got i have a version with and without the uvs i'm going to show you how those work differently how they look you may want to pay attention when you're in the import alembic menu to the scale watch that scale number these may be giant meshes and that's kind of a pain in my case i'm just going to hit point one for the scale to bring it down to something more manageable there's also an option for it to set the frame range that'll just default your blender scene to be the same amount of frames as whatever you're bringing in next up hopefully you've watched a few other blender tutorials because i'm not like the blender guru that's someone else's channel blender has different context so we're just going to go up to the very top and hit the shading context to change our workspace to something more suited for the next task retexturing the object which doesn't have to be nearly as scary as it might sound if you've never done any kind of texturing stuff before it's actually very easy basically pick a part of the body that you want to put a texture on which you're going to do this for all the different pieces hit that plus button which is the create new texture button it will create a general principled bsdf shader which you're going to want to plug stuff into so to do that we're going to mouse over here shift a to bring up this click the search and type in image texture you could also just drag and drop from like a finder or explorer window if you have the files handy just drop them in that's probably way faster i'll do that for the next couple of examples now depending on the complexity of your model you may or may not have a bunch of different options base color albedo what else is there it's a fuse ambient occlusion subsurface scattering i'm forgetting things i don't know specular roughness metalness there's all kinds of different things that you could have and who knows what you have in your current rate but hopefully they're labeled well that's the most important thing you may not need all of them you might want to use some in different ways than they were intended whatever usually the most important ones you're going to want to worry about are base color because that's the actual color of your object specular and roughness together metalness if your object is metal and normal can also be very helpful to get things pointing in the right direction we won't worry about it in blender you can easily plug these into different inputs and outputs so you can just figure out where you want them and you can use some of these images as maps for other effects so if you have a black and white grayscale map you can use that to drive where something is or isn't happening which i'll invert or use a color ramp to mess with it's i don't want to dive too deep into all of that here the point is you're picking parts of the body and you're just reassigning the files that go with it that's all you really have to deal with just make sure you name your materials when you're done your future self will thank you if you have to reopen this file or just as you work on this project it makes things a lot easier but try to have some fun with this part because it can actually be a really nice part to make your scene look really good if you haven't seen your character in a rendered set before this is a good opportunity to make it your own and and add a little bit of flair now if you didn't follow the instructions to do the proper output with uv's option out of whatever software you're working with you're going to see with these two characters how the one on the left has not the right color information and the on the right looks accurate the colors match the geometry we can even go into uv mode and confirm that the uvs line up with the images like it all came over properly and for the other one it just doesn't work which for the the shirt in this case isn't like that big of a deal it's missing all the cool stuff but it's not looking like bad it's just looking boring but you can see if i take for example the legs or the hair and we apply it to the other character things start to look really weird you get these weird seams colors are wrapping all over the place it just looks off and in the hair it looks glitchy it looks like there's parts of hair his eyes have his hair texture and it's just it's just bad so if you don't have the uvs it's worth going back and re-exporting or if you haven't actually done the uvs for your character you're probably going to want to or just don't use the textures if you don't need all the specific like painting you know whatever the color information is per part of the character and you can just deal with the base like red shirt blue pants brown shoes that's fine you don't have to use the textures if you don't want to and if you want a little bit of extra realism when you're doing the skin of the character add a little bit of subsurface scattering in whatever undertone color you want to use for your character in thor's case he'd probably have more of a pink undertone so i use this reddish color and bump that up a bit to give kind of a inner glow it almost makes it feel like the light well what it's simulating is the light entering a surface bouncing around inside before you get to see that so it it shows kind of the the blood flow within the flesh that's kind of what subsurface scattering is is giving us here but the easiest way to move through this is just to copy all of the nodes that you have been working with once you have a set up you like and just when you make a new texture for the next body part paste it in swap things out change the files and just keep moving through it and depending on the model you may have to have for example the head and shoulders on this character are the skin texture but his hands and his fingernails weren't connected so i have to just click on those i just click this little material button it drops it down to show me everything i've got in the scene and you just pick the material you want to assign there and it's very quick and easy and if you want to just duplicate the texture that you're working with and then like not have to copy paste into a different like if you just want to duplicate the graph that you're working on just hit this little double paper button and it'll create a clone of this and make it a new thing that you can rename and work from now one more cool thing this is actually pretty unique to blender unless you're talking about like software renders in maya which no one's talking about software rangers maya but something that's really cool is this character has part of his texture is blue eyes just painted blue just like the rest of his body just got a texture but rather than using the actual file for it what you could do is you can actually just delete the principal bsdf shader which is a regular shader that gives you all the normal properties and i'm just going to hit shift a search for an emission node give it that whatever color you want and pop it into surface crank up the strength to see the effect and if you're not seeing it do anything it's probably because we're defaulted to eevee the real-time renderer so i'm actually gonna well and we might just be set to material view so if you wanna render what we're gonna do is turn on cycles i'm gonna turn on gpu because you know 30 90. why not and then when you hit rendered view you can see what this actually looks like it's going to use that color as almost like a light and a mission and it's going to blow out light of that color from that spot which in thor's case is kind of perfect and awesome and that's way cooler than just using the blue texture we had before think about things like this as you are texturing your character what little opportunities do you have to add some flair to your character again have fun with this now once you have your character surface textured and you're feeling good about it it's time to add some lighting this is where you can make this shot really shine so the easiest thing to get started is to put an hdr and hd hdri and hdr image into your scene as an indirect light basically what you need to do is just click the link below for hdri haven you can download a bunch of free hdris because you don't want to have to make them yourself they're a pain so back in your shader editor you're going to change this little top left thing from object which has been whatever you've selected so far to world this is the overall scene you may already have a background and then the output stuff shift a search for environment texture and it's the same process as the image thing but this time it's going to automatically wrap it into a sphere to light our scene so go ahead and grab the hdr that you've got here i picked this kind of night starry scene felt like something that would work if he's got lightning you'd have a good opportunity to have that light kind of happen and right off the bat you're gonna see that the scene already looks pretty cool in this case specifically you're even gonna have directional light because if it's a proper hdr if it's a good dynamic range image that it can see where the bright spots are where the dark spots are it can actually do directional lighting with shadows on the character and on the environment around if you're rendering in cycles this will look fantastic and you may not even need to add other lights but i'll show you what it looks like in ev in a little bit but cycles is more expensive meaning it's slower it's more accurate it looks better but it's slower for now though remember that eye texture with the emission you can assign that to anything so if i put it on thor you can just have him glow blue which might give you some fun ideas for actually customizing your animation or animating stuff with the knowledge that it's going to be lit in a cool way for example super saiyan thor technically he's super saiyan god blue thor so let's just bring him back to regular super saiyan there you go now if we switch over to the eevee renderer you will notice a significant difference in the overall visual style a lot of that directional light not that it's gone but it's much less pronounced it's still got a highlight on the side with the bright and darker shadows on the other side like it still knows the direction but it's much more of an indirect light source now before it was actually using kind of it was using it as a direct light source now it's not so if you want to get those nice defined shadows back and really show some definition to your character which i would recommend depending on the scene you're going to want to add in other lights so in this case shift a in the viewport go down to light and we'll add an area light we'll scale it up rotate it and just kind of blast it with some full power just to show how that looks and you can move this around the scene this is a pretty fast setup so if you want to move it and rotate it in real time you can get a pretty good idea of how this is going to look this will be your final render if you are rendering an ev like this is what you see is what you get which is pretty fantastic just be careful with area lights because if you intersect the geometry you'll see there's a very harsh cutoff line and that might be fine on the one frame where you're previewing but that's why you want to check over multiple frames just in case your character like moves suddenly or their hand goes out and it goes through the the area light and then you have to re-render and in eevee you won't have that like super cool eye glowing thing they'll just be blue but you can fake it with bloom so if you want to just dial back into the render settings go into the bloom twirl down and you can adjust the intensity and you can kind of bring some of that back it'll also do the background lights and any other like glow and highlight stuff around the character so that's pretty cool that's not in cycles by default that nice kind of edge glow you can add it in compositing but we're not going to deal with that so anyway bloom is a super useful thing and you can render with motion blur if you turn on motion blur you can do that in cycles or in ev you will not see it in the viewport for either of them but when you actually render it will happen so if you turn on motion blur and you don't see motion blur don't panic you're not supposed to it's once you render that it'll it'll add that in but that's a new feature in 2.2.9 291 we did a video on it in case you haven't seen it once you've picked your renderer you can also adjust the samples so if you want uh you know more detail a crisper image a more refined render you can adjust the amount of render samples that you're checking out you have a viewport one and a render one one that you've been previewing this whole time and one that you're actually going to be rendering at bumping this up gives you more quality takes longer and i'll show you a few examples as well and if you have that hdr background and you don't want it you can go down to the film tab drop that down and look for the transparent check box that will get rid of that hcr box and then your character will render over a transparent background as long as you have the file format set properly which we're going to cover next but adjust your resolution your start and end frames make sure your frame rate matches what you animated it at by the way i didn't mention the camera once you get to rendering you need to have a camera selected to do all this stuff so you can either make a camera from scratch just shift a create your camera move it around the scene and just go from there or if you have a camera that you were animating to which you probably do you can just export that and bring that in if for some reason alembic isn't working for your camera you can try that as an fbx which by the way you can also turn on depth of field in blender it's way faster to render with depth of field on than you may have experienced with arnold and maya it's kind of a pain over there because just it's just kind of a pain in after effects and in maya i'm not a huge fan of how depth of field the user experience but in blender it's nice you can like tell it to track a certain object and just say hey keep this in focus the rest can be blurry it's really nice anyways you're going to want to adjust your output settings and actually pick a directory because right now it's just going to go to a temp folder and you'll never find it because that's a pain if you're super confident then you can render as like a movie file but my recommendation is that you render as an image sequence if something happens you can pick right up where you left off i'm going to use pngs they are not super compressed and nicely high quality they're also bigger because of that and i'm going to change this to rgb a for the alpha channel because i am rendering on a transparent background once you feel good about your render save just in case always save you're going to go up to render render animation and then it's going to basically just take all those settings you did and execute that operation but i did three different renders in cycles and then three renders in eevee so that you can see the difference and the time difference taken to render on my computer which again is not going to be the same results you'll have but you can use this proportionately to approximate this first option had motion blur looks like this it's very quick it's not polished like beautiful animation it was literally again just from the twitch stream where we're doing live animation so don't judge me too much in the animation but there it is we also have a non-motion blur version which looks like this so literally the same exact settings for everything just with and without motion blur if you're putting this on like an animation demo reel don't do motion blur putting in a motion blur hides a lot of the detail and the cool stuff you might add now this is the mp4 video felt like a lot longer to me and then jumping over to the eevee renders these were rendered at 64 samples because it defaulted to a much lower value i did do a 256 just for comparison sake so the first one motion blur 64 samples was really fast i like it was so fast uh no motion blur otherwise same settings png and all that and then this was the mp4 so this took was the full video where it created the video file and you don't have to stitch it from images into a video now just to make sure i did get everything i did do one render with 256 samples and motion blur to compare it to the cycles so we have a direct comparison of how long that took but in general ev is always going to be faster than cycles and it's probably going to be just fine especially now that has motion blur you probably don't need to render in cycles unless you need it to look a certain way if this is for a demo reel or a student shot or something for school type stuff you shouldn't be spending hours and hours on this entire process because the entire point is to just make your work presentable if this takes you eight hours well then this should you need to find a way to make this only take you one hour and spend those other seven hours on the animation because chances are you could probably use the extra time that's kind of how it is for all of us right if you want to do animation then do animation and just make your stuff nice enough to show it to people you don't have to do any of this you could just play blast out of maya or whatever software use eevee if you must render it or just do a play blast and move on thank you for watching this video i hope it was helpful if you make anything cool send it to me on twitter make sure you're following me on twitter instagram all those different places and send me your stuff i'd love to check it out thanks for watching and uh i'll see in the next video she says bye [Music] you

Channel: Sir Wade Neistadt

Views: 59,614

Keywords: maya to blender, render in blender, cycles vs eevee, blender rtx, maya animation, blender animation, maya, blender, animation, rendering, cycles, eevee, rtx, 3090, blender 3090, comparison, maya alembic, alembic, blender animation tutorial, render animation, arnold vs cycles, maya vs blender, rendering samples, motion blur, blender benchmark, optix vs cuda, cycles rtx, gpu rendering, rtx render, render comparison, nvidia rtx, maya render, 3090 comparison, 3090 for 3d, tutorial, 3d

Id: sCqE6W94jks

Length: 18min 45sec (1125 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 12 2021