Making a Stylized Palm Tree with Maya, Zbrush, and Substance Painter

[Music] hello everyone this is 3dx and in today's video i'm going to be creating a palm tree prop here using my then later zbrush and then also i'm going to be using substance painter for it and uh for the creation of trees usually you can use many different techniques to do it in this case i'm going to be using one which is to use an alpha for the actual leaves and a high poly model that it's baked on that alpha and i'm going to be using zbrush for that but i'm also going to model the high poly base bottle in maya and then for the actual 3 shape i'm going to use a curve and then just extrude that along using a nurbs circle and what i'm going to do is i'm going to make the top so that it's a lot skinnier than the bottom and that's going to be my low poly model [Music] like i said there are different ways to make trees and in this case i decided to use the mash system in maya to pretty much extrude a shape along a curve i did have to create a new curve uh because the one that i initially created i was not working because i created it i believe from the top to bottom but for what i needed here in this case i actually needed it to be created from bottom to top so i made a new curve and then i matched i made sure that it matched the other one and then that shape which i uh pretty much duplicated along the curve is what i'm going to use for the high poly model so i'm just going to sculpt that a little bit in z brush like i said typically for trees you can create you can go the route of creating a tileable texture for the for the wood parts and then you could also create the leaves in something like substance designer for example which is how a lot of people do it sometimes and even i have done that in the past as well but in this case i wanted to show just one of the ways in which you can do this which is by poly modeling it and assigning pretty much unique uvs to it without going with the route of using a tileable texture or anything like that which is a perfectly a perfectly valid way to do it of course but in this case i just wanted to be somewhat unique i also want the base of the tree to be slightly darker than the top which is why i decided not to go with a tileable texture you could still do that with a tileable texture but you will have to do um some things in like a game engine using vertex colors or something like that to get the bass to be darker then for the uvs it's pretty much mostly planar maps and unfolds [Music] and i'm going to use a tool for renaming if you guys are interested in that tool there's a link in the video description pretty much use it for renaming objects it just makes it really easy obviously you can still do that within maya as well [Music] and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to place all the individual leaves on top of the tree um just so that when i bake in substance painter i can actually see what it's actually going to look like on the model and not just have the exploded mesh where i won't be able to really tell what it's really looking like as a final model and all these pieces that i place manually i just combine them and i offset the uvs as well just so that it bakes better or that it bakes because sometimes when you have overlapping uvs it doesn't really bake in substance painter that doesn't happen all the time but i always do it just in case then for the high poly i'm just going to duplicate some of the pieces and i'm also going to make sure that the low poly models share the same names as the high poly and then in zebras i'm just going to just quickly do a little bit of sculpting i'm not going to go too overboard with it i'm just going to add just a little bit of sculpt to the leaves so that there's something there and they're not just completely flat and for that i'm going to use mainly the dam standard and then just kind of soften it up a little bit as well [Music] and like i said you could make leaves in something like substance designer just gonna procedurally make them or i think for stylized it usually looks pretty good when you sculpt them and then for everything else i'm just going to use the trim dynamic tool just to soften up the edges so that they're not too sharp because if they're too sharp they're not going to read very well and when i bake the normal map so i want to have just a little bit of flatness to them otherwise when i bake in normal map it's just going to look like a line on it if it even shows up so something to keep in mind this is going to be baked onto a relatively flat surface and for the top part we're just going to use an alpha for it this is not going to be too noticeable since it's going to be covered by the coconuts and the leaves then i'm going to use a special tool for adding id maps again if you're interested in that tool there's a link in the video description but i use it for id maps mainly and the reason i'm going to use an id map here is because i want to use an alpha on the leaves so i don't want them to be not fully opaque and i want them i want some parts of it to be transparent [Music] and for the texturing substance painter i'm going to use uh the 3dx stylized material once again that's also in the video description but mainly i'm just going to apply a few colors to this [Music] and i'm also going to add a few more layers to make this more interesting and i'll just use the material right away and then call it a day the material itself is pretty good for getting you started but i always think i also think that you have to add a few more layers just to bring it to what you really want so for the alpha the the id map was not as close as i was hoping so i kind of manually painted away some of the um some of the edges on the leaves because i didn't want to i did not want them to look too thick so just kind of painted those away and that's mainly because the the alpha id map was not completely tight and then i'm just going to add a bit of a gradient to the base of the tree so the bottom it's just slightly darker i think that helps to ground it a little bit and i'm going to do the same thing with the leaves but i'm going to mix it so that the interior of the leaves is just slightly darker than the um rest this is also just to give it more visual interest and so that it doesn't look completely flat [Music] so i'm going to keep doing that and also going to add some edge highlight as well for the leaves once again just to make them look a little bit more interesting this is something that you have to kind of just play around with until you get something that looks good so there's a lot of trial and error obviously i think always there always is with the texturing something and mainly because every model is different obviously so you always have to try different things for different models i also added a layer for the curvature just to make it a little bit sharper or so that the curves come out a little bit more [Music] but anyway here's what it looks like in marmoset tool back with the render and if you liked the video make sure you hit the like button if you're new make sure you sub to the channel and i'll hopefully see you in a future video would you like to learn how to transform this cube into something cool like a character or this room i recently put together an intro to 3d modeling course which shows you all the steps needed to do just that this is a very short video so i don't have enough time to cover everything so click the link below now to get more details just want to let you know this course is for total beginners so you don't need any prior experience i cover all the steps from getting started with the software to creating cool props like i said earlier this is a short video so click the link below now to get more info about the course and get started today

Channel: 3dEx

Views: 68,827

Keywords: Autodesk Maya 2020, Maya 2018, Maya 2017, how to, tutorial, learn to, step by step, instructions, simple, beginner, techniques, Blender 3D, normals, fix, perfect, bake, PBR, physically based, rendering, pipeline, workflow, Substance Painter, Substance Designer, Stylized, hand painted, cartoony, Marmoset Toolbag, UV, mapping, unwrapping, model, 3D, technical, settings, how to texture, game dev, game art, game ready, low poly, high poly, how to make a tree, making a game tree, make a 3d palm tree

Id: TtpV-RsEJvI

Length: 10min 18sec (618 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 13 2020