Maya 2017 MASH Tutorial - Scatter balloons and vertex color in Arnold

hey guys and welcome back to at CGI and in this tutorial we are going to create the experiencing news in Maya and mash we'll also create a simple light setup as well as a simple shader using the latest Arnold as a quick disclaimer of this tutorial is using my 2017 so the mash is a FET the mash plug-in is a fairly new addition in fact it was added in Maya 2016 point five so if you're using a Maya before that you won't be able to follow along also if you're using my 2016 point five you didn't have things like this mash mash editor window you had something that's very similar to this and you should still be able to follow along so it shouldn't be a problem now if I just go to my preferences make sure that you have Arnold loaded my Arnold now ships with Maya I think since 2017 so you should be able to follow along but you can also use any other renderer like red shift or V rate and so on the principles are going to be exactly the same and as you can see I'm running Arnold 2.1 so before we get started I'll quickly run you through the setup so you can see what we'll be making so traditionally you should be able to create something like this or you would create something like this using and particles probably so you would run a particle simulation or scatter some particles and then instance some geometry on top of that but now it's extremely quick to do the same thing using mash so that's probably using it and if you can't see that mash menu just make sure you go into your plugins and it's gonna be mash right here so make sure they loaded and then you can find the menu on the animation mash or if you're in a different tab if you hold down spacebar you can find a mesh editor here as well so to create this scene we're going to need a couple of things first we'll create a balloon similar to this and then basically we're going to create a container that we then scatter this balloon inside and we're gonna we're gonna fill this shape of it all these balloons and then we gonna add some random offsets rotations and so on and we'll also use mash to drive the random color of the balloon so instead of having loads of different shaders you can throw off the whole thing with just one shader so let's jump straight in I'll start a new scene okay so now that we have our new scene the first thing to do is create but in geometry and I already have these made as I didn't want to waste your time watching me create a sphere basically so this is actually just from a sphere and then I just pulled in some edges to turn into an egg shape and then to create the container shape it's pretty much the same thing so I first made a hiss fear and then using the sculpt tools so if you shift the right-click you can go to the sculpt tool or if you go to the shelf sculpting you can use things like the move tool so if you hold down B and drag you can change the brush size and then you can move this shape around okay so again I just started with a sphere and then start shaping our container geometry so once you have something that you're happy with we can start using mash to scatter this geometry inside so the first thing you need to do is open the mash menu and if you're a beginner and you don't know how to open this menus just holding down space all right and then when you find a menu just let go space and it will open up the window cool so now that we have our mash menu select your balloon geometry and go under create correct mash Network and you can see that it's already going to you start this Tribune or instance in as you can see it's using a my instance to instance that button in geometry and at the moment you can see 10 of them in a very because if you go into the mash distribute tab you can see that it's set to linear distribution type and the number of points is 10 so if I increase this you can see how it's changing the instance and you can do some really cool stuff with this but for now we're just going to cover how to fill this other object without balloons so what we need to do is go under the mesh settings if you drag your object so if I want my container G into the mesh option you can see how it's gonna start putting our geometry onto that mesh and in fact we can just hide this one for now so you can see what's happening you can hide things with control hedge I'll go back to my setting you can see that you can scatter things onto other geometry really easily now the problem is is that we don't really want to scatter inside we on the mesh we want to scatter inside it so if you change the mesh method to voxel you can see how fills up our shape with loads of little balloons which is really cool now the next thing to do is under the voxel setting we need to change the size because at the moment they're a bit too close to each other so if you just go to the voxel settings and then increase the size you can see how there will be a bit more so just go it's something like 2.7 and that looks pretty good so as you can see we already have a cluster of balloons but everything is a bit too uniform right now so what we need to do is we need to add some random rotation scale and some random positions so if we go back to our mesh mash settings you can see how there are things there are loads of extra nodes that you can add onto this stack so for example if I wanted to add random of rotation or random position to this I can go under the random node and just add it so now you can see if you have a mash mash distribute and a random over here it will also show up in here sometimes the editor does an update and what you can do is just close it and reopen and as you can see we have a random node right here and now you can see how old our positions are getting randomized so at a moment the Year random is only randomizing the position x y&z and I also want to do some rotations so I'll start dragging these sliders up and now it's going to randomize between 0 and 20 degrees and X 0 and 16 degrees in a Y and so on so I'll just drag these up depending on how turbulent you want these balloons to be but I don't want them to rotate too much I just want a little bit of break up so that looks about right that's also add the random scale to this just so they're not all the same size and I only want it a little bit most of these buildings are going to be roughly the same size maybe that's a bit too much so let's just go back to about not point two okay so something like that looks pretty good now the problem that we have is they're super dense so they're still there's there's loads of them everywhere so to stop this from looking so dense we can add an extra node called a random visibility so if you go on the visibility and visibility and again you can see how next one node gets added to a stack and it has a random strength that we can drag down and you can see how it's a bit more natural-looking now as they are not so dense so I'll just go with something like not point seven all right so that's looking nice looking something like what we need now maybe I'll go back to my distribute or under my random and I'll just change the position a bit more because there are still a bit too clustered together that's it's not natural enough okay so something like that it looks pretty cool so can work with that okay so you can't mess around with loads more of these you can also animate these so you can make them move around randomly and so on there are loads of mesh tutorials on the official Autodesk web site on the YouTube channel so you can mess around with this a bit more in your own time now let's get to the lighting and rendering part so first I'm going to create our render camera and the first thing I'm going to do is rename this to render cam okay cool let's change the lens to something like a 200 mil so the reason why I'm picking 200 mil lens is because if we were on the ground and we are taking picture of this balloon would probably use a pretty long lens to see it otherwise it would be really small on our screen so it's a bit more realistic put my resolution gate on and make sure under my render settings I have Auto render I set my render camera is set and I'll just set this to HD 1080p for now will be a render in half res anyway so now that I have my camera I'm gonna turn off my grid whoops that's the wrong one turn off the grid zoom in let's just go who is something like this for now and I'm just going to try to find a rotation where I find balloons most appealing or more most natural maybe something along this looks pretty cool okay so for now I would just go with something like this and let's go to that's also a sinus shader to these so at the moment we have Lambert one and let's go ahead and hold our right-click and go and assign the new material Arnold and AI standard surface now if you're using an older version of Arnold you'll have something called AI surface and you'll have slightly different options but it's going to be fairly similar or you might have Al shaders installed so you might have something like a L surface which will be very similar to a high-standard surface so let's just assign the AI standard surface and I'm going to rename this to balloon underscore material awesome so the first thing I'm going to do is assign a diffuse color of 18% gray and I'm not going to go into too much detail into in this tutorial why 18% gray or the technicals of breakdowns or for these attributes if you want to learn more about a rendering or physically based rendering and so on there are many tutorials online and I'll put some links in the description where you can learn more about this okay so for now you can just follow along and plug in similar numbers and play around with these values but I'm not going for time sake I'm not going to go into too much detail about all of these okay so I'll also put the roughness to like no point for IO 4.52 is fine and let's open our Arnold render view okay I'm just gonna position this somewhere it's a bit more convenient for us cool and let's hit IPR so if you hit IPO you can see that nothing is going to show up but if you use this button it will display that alpha and you can see that there is something there so definitely rendering from the correct camera and I will turn on progressive refinement as well but the problem is is that we haven't got a light yet obviously so let's pause the IPR and go to you Arnold lights and create a sky dome light and a sky dome light lets you pick a chair i as your lighting which is super is it's very realistic if you have a high quality high CRI and you can download one from a CGI's website for free so if you just pick file and pick this little folder and go into your source images and downloaded one of these heads arise from the a CGI website for free you can just there's a TX or a har I plug that in and make sure that your color space is set to roll and you'll be able to tell in this little sample image you can see how everything is super high contrast and it looks incorrect as soon as you set it to roll you can see that the green grass comes back and everything just looks a bit nicer and I'm also going to rename this file to HDR i/f alright so let's type ER again and you can see we have these trees in the background from the HDI and they have some nice light on these balloons so I don't really want to see this HDI rise so if you select your dome light and turn down the camera Ray's everything's going to go black and now we just see our balloons which is great okay cool so before we tweak the lighting another thing I like to do is I just like to make a sphere so I can see that the lighting is coming from somewhere over here but if you create a sphere and just move it in the top left corner what sir ideally you want it around the same depth as these balloons but for now I'll just leave it where it is and I was just assigned a new material and they are surface again and I'll just make sure that this one is 18% gray and I'll have roughness off around not play five mile over it maybe a little bit glossy okay so now if I hold down control shift and drag you can see there's specular highlight from the Sun so maybe I will increase this to lighten up one four five so we can still see what's going on okay cool so now if you wanted to change the light direction you can just go to your dome light now make sure we're on the shape and you can just rotate it and the Y so for example something like 45 degrees okay now it's full on so that might not be ideal I just leave a zero for now so again some nice light from the left and if I shift drag yeah I can see my balloons okay great so the next thing we need to do not a light thing is set up is some shaders so first thing to do is that we can set the colors read mash so that's super helpful but first as these are instances we can't really pass the color values so if you open mash again okay the first thing we are going to do is add a mash color mode right here and you can see that it's it's not going to let us add the color node so if you go to this icon here and go to switch mash geometry type or if you're using my 2016 point 5 I think it's under modify and there'll be a little mash menu where it will let you switch the geometry type so for now I'm going to create switch mesh geometry type and you'll notice that our instance had disappeared and now we have this mash you reap Romesh and basically that's now converted to geometry instead of instances and this allows us to pass vertex color from the instances to this geometry and once we have vertex color assigned to these random with expose by a mash you can then pass those values from the geometry to the shader and this might sound a bit complicated at first if you never done this before but trust me it's super simple it allows us to basically add an attribute on the geometry so you can visualize that age for example this geometry but have an idea of 0 1 0 which would be green because red green blue right so each of these geometry would have a random color ID that we can access with a node inside Arnold or right shift or the array so most of these renders will all have a attribute lookup node that we can use to access this vertex color ok so now that we have a mesh converted to a mesh you can see if we go back to the mash options we now can add random color okay so now that we have a random color I'll just pick that's a start off for the value of 9.5 full saturation because I want this to be such saturated and we can add a random XI so you want the here to go all the way around the wheel so I want a full of random hue saturation maybe around not pointy because I don't want the saturated balloons and the value of may be randomized by 0.2 because I don't want any super dark ones and I don't want any super bright ones and we can always remap these later on okay so this is going to create random color as I explained on each of these balloons via vertex color and if you go on the your mesh node you'll see that if you I think it's under there every promotion actually yeah so if you select your mash repro node you can see that you have color per vertex enabled and you can double check if you have color per vertex enabled on the geometry by going to mesh this play and go to color set editor you can see that now it created this attribute called color set and basically this is what this is the attribute that Myers using to store these values in the shader now if you render again it's still going to be great obviously because the Arnall that doesn't know how to access this color okay so if you go back to our shader if you right click here and go to your material attributes you can see they're still putting in this constant yet so if I go to general editors and I think they've moved actually know that today here we go and if you never use the node editor this might look a bit daunting at first but if you select your balloon material and hit this arrow it's going to come up with the shader and we need to create a node called a I use a data color okay and this is the node that will allow us to you plug in that vertex color attribute and drive our shade of it now in redshift they'll have a separate node and invigorate they'll have a separate note as well but most renderers will have a node that allows you to access geometry vertex color or attributes so if you used a I use a data color it will ask us for an attribute and we can set this to be color set and you know 100% that it's called a color set because if you checked it and that's what it is and now we just need to connect this to our color now before we do that I like to remap this so if you make sorry a remap HSV this will allow us to instead of constantly adjusting this value in mash we can adjust it with every map which is a bit faster as it doesn't have to constantly update the geometry so if you plug this into the color and then we plug the remap HSV into the color and I'm just middle Mouse dragging this on to color it's just the diffuse way to one as well if I've rendered now you will notice that it still doesn't render but now it's rendering black the reason why it's rendering back is because the default value here is set to black but I can change it to pink and you can see that it's set to pink now this means that it's it sees this node being plugged in but it still can't find the attribute and the reason why is because in on order we need to set to export the vertex color on the geometry shape so if we go back to repro mesh and this time make sure you go under there mesh shape node not the geometry node and see here there's an O Lord menu and if you pull that down you'll see that there's an option called export or vertex colors okay so now our Lord will know that we want to explore the vertex color from this geometry so now if you render again and are not sometimes doesn't update the cache properly so just make sure that you set update full scene and here we go so now you can see that what are billions have their unique colors being pulled in from the mesh options getting remap by the remap registry and the reason why the remap hedges feels super handy is because we can't drive the value interactively so if everything's a bit too bright can bring it down if things are a bit too saturated I can desaturate them and so on whereas if you wanted to do the same thing with mash we can but notice how Arnold is a lot more sluggish because if I want to change some for now so let's say value run them not point five okay so yeah although locks up and basically will update your scene every time because it needs to reload this geometry so if you have a lot of these it will be a lot slower than using a remap okay awesome so now we have our random colors I was just ctrl shift click to update my full scene and this is the gist of the tutorial at this point on I just spent some more time doing the dev so the other thing I did is if I just zoom in here the balloon is just a bit too was a bit too diffuse so you don't get that nice transparency coming through that you see with some balloons sometimes so what I wanted to do is I just add its transmission - which is basically refraction so you can just pull this weight up a little bit and as you can see it will start again see three a little bit but ideally you want to see some color coming through so a great trick to see what's going on is an Arnold you can add things called a Ovie's and I'm sure most if you already heard about these but if you haven't they are super useful and I'm not going to go too much in to detail but if you just add diffuse specular and let's just add transmission okay add and now you can see if you have free x-ray of is created and I just gonna start IPR again and now if you go to diffuse you can see your diffuse color specular will be your specular and transmission will be the refraction okay and it's super useful because now if you want to tweak just a specular part of your render you can just have this open and you're not gonna not going to be distracted by the diffuse and so on if you have loads of things going on so if you want to tweak just a specular you can just look at the specular now we want to tweak transmission so I just wanna look at the transmission and not be all confused by all the things that are going on in my shadow so next for thing that I like to do here to plug into your refraction is I just grab another remap HSV node okay and plug in the user data color and what I like to do is I like to bring the value up okay and I like to desaturate it and now I'm going to drive the transmission color by this and that will give a more natural fill so if you're looking to transmission now you can see our balloon refracting through and you can tweak all these settings like the the roughness of the refraction so for example if I wanted it to be not so smooth and I can increase the roughness so we get more of a probably refill so I just said it strike not point two or something but I haven't got time to mess around with these settings too much so feel free in your own time to mess around with these settings and do some more look they've in your own time in the thumbnail image you can see that I added a blue background and I added a little cloud in a foreground and all those things were done in comps so in CG or in Maya this is what I pretty much rendered as a final image I just tweaked the shader a little bit more and then in nuke or Photoshop or you choose chose or after-effects whatever program you like to do your compositing with bring this render in add a cool blue background to it maybe add a little bit of noise or something to break it up a little bit and a nice little cloud and a foreground slide of the focus will get you to the same image that I had okay so thanks for watching this tutorial guys make sure that you subscribe for more tutorials and don't forget to let us know in the comments what did tours you would like to see next thanks for watching see you next time

Channel: Edge-CGI 3D Tutorials and more!

Views: 47,686

Keywords: maya, 2017, 2016, 2016.5, MASH, tutorial, scatter, voxel, balloon, balloons, UP, vertex, vertex color, colour, arnold, 2.1, arnold 2.1, 2.0, arnold 2, light, lighting, dome light, hdri, shade, shading, lookdev, maya tutorial, beginner, intermediate, advanced, maya mash tutorial, maya scatter, download, random color, random, edge, edgecgi

Id: S9T4y4nviKE

Length: 30min 36sec (1836 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 21 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/smb3d]

nice! Always love seeing MASH stuff, it's come a long way.

The new dynamics node in 2018 would work great to keep them from interpenetrating! I've been using it quite a bit for stuff like this. just add it and play forwards a frame and they all separate like magic.