Maya Blenshapes and Normal Blends with Maya and Zbrush Layers

foreign [Music] and welcome to another video in this Channel today I actually have a really really really cool um technique that I think it's a little bit more advanced but I think some of you are gonna really really like it so uh this is a character that I created several years ago for a demo that I did at a university over here I was doing some like constanting stuff it's one of my favorite Creations to be honest I really like this guy um I don't think I ever like give him a name or anything but uh it was just a cool guy some people tell me it looks a little bit like the uh like the one from Lilo and Stitch um and of course as we've mentioned before there's always a little bit of inspiration that we get there I wasn't thinking about that particular one but our Mentor library is made out of all of the things that we normally like see and do so um someone in the comments in the last couple of videos has been asking about layers and I want to show you how powerful layers can be to create something interesting here so the first thing I want to show you guys is this thing actually has a UV it's not a perfect UB but it's a UV um and what I'm going to do here is I'm gonna export this thing so I'm going to say C plugging um and well actually let's clone this because it's going to be the high poly so C plugin we're going to export that decimate this first let's try a just a 20 decimation because um we're going to use layers and I'm going to show you how we can create a a different like battle damage look to the character and then how we can blend those two things inside of Maya to create the transition so I was thinking about like of course teaching you the basics of layers but an actual like way in which you can implement this in a in a production right I was thinking well maybe we're doing an animation and there's a scene and the animation where this guy receives a super super strong hit on the head and he gets like a super ugly cut in the middle of the head and one of the eyes and it's like a like a weak phase you know how like boxers get all like inflammated and stuff so I was thinking something like that like can we do something like that and the answer is yes now how can we make that happen in a cinematic or in a commercial or something this is what I'm going to show you so as you can see we're designating here real quick there we go see plugin let's just decimate to 20 percent that's it we're going to export this and I actually already have a folder for this guy on my desktop you should really clean my desktops getting a little bit dirty so I'm going to call this alien lean HP because it's a is a clean High poly and then I'm going to go back here I'm going to go all the to the lowest subdivision this one right here and I'm going to export this this one I'm going to export is on fbx and I'm going to call this alien clean low poly there we go which again has a UVS I'm not going to do the eyes I'm not going to do the horns because it's going to be a little bit of extra time um so I hope you guys forgive me about this we are going to export them of course but I'm just gonna have them like decimated or something too to save a little bit of time so we're exporting this one right here shouldn't be taking this long but whatever um and once we have this exported we need to create the second layer and I'm going to do just two layers like this clean layer and the Damage layer but you guys can do as many as you want with the technique that I'm about to show you let's just wait for it's really weird usually an export like this doesn't take that long quick tip if you open your task manager and you check zbrush as long as the numbers are moving that means that you're doing it right so I'm just going to pause real quick and wait for this to finish oops like my shortcuts are not working oh I was about to pause there we go I was expecting I was waiting for a um for a little thing there we go so it's been exported cool now I'm going to go to the highest of the vision level and I'm gonna go to the layer sections layers are some really really strong things that we have here inside of sea brush but I'm just going to be very clear about them layers are um they don't work well with Dynamics so you usually want to use layers once the topology of your object is it's a set right so as you can see here we have our low poly mesh it's not a perfect read topology but it's good enough I think it was a series measure back then uh it's good enough to get something out working so on this one we can create layers because if the topology changes then the layers are pretty much gone so we're going to go to the highest of division I'm going to create a new layer and on this new layer what we can do is we can pretty much do whatever we want so I'm gonna break symmetry here and I'm going to imagine that the cuts coming from from this side from from left to right it's going to impact the big part right here so I'm going to grab my Damian standard actually I'm gonna go to uh lightbox and on the brushes there is one called the slash brush which is really aggressive there we go this is Slash and the slash one it's a really aggressive brush as you can see right there I'm gonna use this crisscross technique that I normally use to to create like a really really really really big cut a really ugly cut here on the on the character then I'm gonna go with my clay build up yes now I love the clay build up I'm just gonna keep damaging some of that stuff now I would expect if he gets this that the eyes here would close a little bit so with my mood brush I'm gonna start kind of like closing the eyes a little bit it's really hurt right now I'm not being super careful right now because I just want to show you the General thing and I really close this one up here there we go let's add a little bit of inflammation so with my clay build up very very Softly I'm gonna start like inflammating is that the proper word inflammating so that's why I'm saying inflammating um let me inflammating this thing right here I I haven't gotten used to like working with my tablet over here I don't know I feel like my monitor is a it's a little bit bigger but I should should give me a little bit more control there we go let's go where Damian standard and just add some more like bruises and stuff like this could be like again like a big hit that he received on this like left side his face you're gonna get a lot of texture so something like this we can even make his face like fall down a little bit like his lip really wanna ask again more like inflammation on this area let's have more wrinkles as well and this is one of the great things about layers you're going to see in just a second anytime you add something to a layer at any point if I stop recording by clicking that button right here I can just blend back to the original one see so we go if we go to zero it's back to the original and if we go all the way up we're gonna go to this like damaged look of the character so that's that's one of the big advantages if you want to keep adding to these layers you just click the little button to go back into recording mode and then we dim in standard for instance let's let's say uh it was not just one hit it was Wolverine that uh got his face and he got like three three big scars right here like this I think that looks interesting and uh again just for the sake of uh for example I'm gonna add some more damage over here on the side of his face Let's uh let's move the eye like this eye right here it's gonna be really really angry so we can start sculpting like the expression increasing some of the intensity of the wrinkles here make him look really really angry we can maybe move this part of the mouth up that's pretty much posing and some of you might already know where I'm going with this we're going to create something inside of Maya called a blend shape and the blend shape will allow us as the name implies to blend between one uh like form of a character and another which again is super super handy they they used to like back in the in the day blend shapes were really like heavily used in animation nowadays thanks to facial rigging and mocap and all that stuff I I've seen it less and less uh but you can still find some Productions that use blend ships they're still really really powerful especially for things like this like a monster where we're blending or rigging the face might be a little bit difficult blend ships can prove quite quite useful um I've also seen them used in like a kids show for for like simpler Rigs of characters and stuff where when you don't have a lot of time to to work on everything uh doing blend shapes is a really easy way to have like a collection of different Expressions that you can just blend between and it saves a lot of time in animation so there we go this is our layer again if we stop the recording and and we bring this back we're going to go back to the to the origin so I'm going to go all the way up to this one right here and I'm going to clone this and as you can see this is the damage clone and I'm going to export this well actually I need to decimate this one as well because one thing that's going to be like an extra that I'm going to do here is we're actually going to be blending in normal Maps as well so I'm going to show you how to uh how to blend normal Mass so that you can do this I'm going to bake the layers this is like a new high poly right this is we're going to have to do two bakes to get the two different uh blend shapes so this is going to be the first one just wait for the pre-process to end so yeah what I want to do is I want to be able to because normally when you use blend shapes it's just for the expression so a lot of the wrinkles and the details and stuff like that it's not really kept you can of course do the blend shapes only with a normal map but uh it's not as efficient I think this method is going to work a little bit better as I mentioned before it is a little bit more of an advanced method it's not a method that we use that much because it requires like very specific things but it's a really really cool one I think you guys are going to enjoy it so now we that we have this C plugin let's decimate the current one uh there we go we're gonna export this and uh let's go all the way to our desktop alien and this is going to be alien so you know this is going to be alien call this damage and this is high poly there we go okay we go back to our original one just wait for this it's 800 polygons so that's like over a million polish 800 000 points remember anytime you see this number it's the double the number on the on the export thing um for the amount of like polygons here we go let's go back here and now I'm gonna press shift d to go to the lowest subdivision level because this lowest subdivision level this is the blendship that we want to capture so I'm going to export this again it's going to be clean we're actually going to be damaged damage low poly there we go hit OK we're gonna grab the horns let's go here to the horns the horns are quite heavy but not that heavy so I'm just going to export them um I'm actually going to designate it let's clone them let's go to this one see plugin I'm just going to do a basic like 35k decimation again I'm not going to do this process but you could do it if you want to add like damage to the horns different than the one that has the normal one you can use the same technique to do so let's export this it's going to be horns go again to our desktop alien there we go okay and finally the eyes export nice perfect I'm gonna move my tablet to the site and uh let's go into my well actually before Maya I actually want to do a substance to get the map so I'm going to go to substance painter there we go and we need to do two base this is the the like the I would say it's not difficult but It's Tricky right because we need to do two different uh Maps one for the clean shape and one for the a not uh like the damage shape so I'm gonna create a new one here uh 4K is fine let's go select let's go to our alien folder here and we have the alien clean low poly that's the one that we want hit OK and this is what we should get text reset settings we go to big mesh Maps you could by the way bake the maps inside of zbrush I don't like the biggest instead of super so that's why I'm going here we're gonna go alien clean High Pawn there we go okay and uh you can pick all the maps uh but we only need the normal map to be honest so if you want to save a little bit of time we can just go to the to the normal map I am going to uh actually no not the ambiglation ah should we no that thing's fine because we have the decimation so that's why so I'll just do the normal map so what we should get here is a very clean like detail of all of the different like features of our character over the pores the wrinkles everything there's a little bit of an ugly line there due to the UVS not much we can do about it but look at that not bad right uh so file uh well uh instead of exporting uh everything I'm just gonna go down here and you can right click this guy and then uh or look it up over here if we look for a normal map instead of our textures we should have it's called a mesh alien so if we look for alien there we go so right click and you can just uh export resource now I'm going to call this a normal map clean and there we go oh sorry just perfect so if we navigate real quick to our folder over here you're gonna see that that's not the one that was the one from seabrush this is the one that we want okay so a very clean normal map from our clean object now since the name is going to be very simple I'm going to call this clean normal there we go now we're going to start a new file select and now we're going to select the alien damage low poly discard this we don't need it anymore as you can see the face is slightly different We're Gonna Bake again to 4K and then we're gonna bake the alien damage High poly and again we don't need anything here we just need the normal map and we bake that's gonna use the magic of computers and it's going to transfer all of those details into this very cool looking map great go here right click export resource same place select folder now we check the folder there we go we're going to have or soon as it finishes exporting we are going to have the normal map as you can see here are the cuts the three cuts that we did right so so the damage is here let's call this normal perfect now we don't need substance anymore we're not you could by the way texture you could create a different texture for the character I'm not gonna do it right now because I want to focus on the blind shapes and on the normal Maps uh but if you wanted to you could create two different colors one with blood and damage that also Blends when this happens and you're going to be applying if you want to do this you're going to be applying the exact same thing then that I'm about to show you so let's jump right into Maya and inside of Maya we have two main like things that we have to do we have to do the geometry uh like a process and we have to do the texture process for the geometry process we're going to using be using a blend shapes and again it's fairly easy to do so we're just gonna go here inside of Maya and we're going to bring in both low polys we don't need the high polish anymore so I'm going to bring that clean low poly and the Damage low poly like this now as you can see they're both here this is the clean load poly and this is the damaged low poly we can rename this let's call this damage and let's call this alien clean perfect so what I'm going to do is I'm going to select the damage first and then I'm going to select the clean like that and I'm going to go to Windows animation editors and there's this new editor called shape editor well it's not new but it's new that like the process that a lot of people know a lot of people go to the modeling and animation tab this is like the new way to do it so just select again the damage first and then the clean one and you're gonna say create blend shape deformer and as you can see we get this automatically so now if I hide the damage one and I'm just left with a clean one I'm gonna have this slider right here and if I move the slider you can see how the geometry shapes like shifts it shifts and we get this thing right here look at that we go from our normal from a zero so no blend shape to blend shape which is pretty much like the layers there's actually a plugin for blind shapes instead of sebrush where you can create a bunch of different layers and it brings them and it creates all of the blank shapes that you need automatically very very handy if you want me to cover that let me know and I'll uh I'll do a video about it uh but yeah there we go we have the blankship but now this is the first part super simple right that's all we need to do and it's working perfectly fine let's throw in a light real quick because we're gonna need to do some renders so I'm going to create a light I'm going to create a file and let's grab our Brown photo studio we've been using quite a bit I love this one it's I don't know it's it's super cool because it has some some interesting colors and we can create some uh cool little things by the way scale of the object doesn't really matter we should be able to make this thing bigger like this and again if we go to uh mesh or sorry windows uh animation editors shape editor it should still work okay so it's a scale rotation everything independent it should be working as is so now we need to think about the material so I'm going to right click assign a new material Arnold AI standard surface and we're going to go for this really greenish interesting material that I like to use kind of like clay material kind of like this a little bit less Hatchery there we go and I am going to use uh subsurface let's use some surface so let's bring this a source in grab that like green color right there and there we go so um let's uh create a camera rendering camera panels looks are selected I wish Maya had like the shot cam like uh like blender does it's quite handy but anyway so so this is what we have right here right so this is our original mesh uh I'm gonna select this thing I don't want to see it so I'm going to bring the camera visibility down on the on the options right here and let's bring in file import or just literally drag and drop the horns and the ice there we go of course the horns and the ice are going to be really small this thing we need we can copy this so let's set the scale to 10 and let's set the translation to 18. and then we can grab these things right here set the scale to 10 and set the translation to 18 and it should match perfectly let's assign um a new material it's going to be a new material for this one so for the eyes for instance let's add a black material to Arnold a standard surface let's do like a like a black glossy material and for this guys signing material Arnold AI standard surface let's go for like a like a beige or like material like that that's going to be rougher so let's go a little bit rougher and that that one's not going to have surface let's keep it like this so let's say real quick before anything happens let's call this alien there we go and now if we render uh we should get this now as you can see the subsurface is looking quite nice but it's a little bit too intense that's why it looks like a gummy bear so we're gonna go to the options here and on the um up the surface let's bring the scale down to like a 0.1 so we do get a little bit of the stresses well to the surface but we also get a nice color I definitely want to make this thing darker it looks like Yoda now this Joe that color there we go and I do want to make the skin a little bit rougher I don't want this to be as shiny so we can appreciate the normal map a little bit better and that's it like as you can see this is already looking quite nice and we don't even have like the um what's the word the um the plant ships are the normal Maps I'm going to change it to GPU to get some faster renders first render is always a little bit uh slow but then the second one should be better we do need to increase the sample so I'm going to go here to Adaptive sampling and let's set this to like 10. there we go that should give us a nice clean render so uh here I can again show you real quick how the um the blend shapes work because I can just go to animation editors go back to the shape editor skip this one over here and right now as you can see we're at zero but if I push this to one and I render now the post is on like we are actually seeing the post right and it looks interesting so you can imagine how we can animate this value at any point you can right click and key this uh frame keyframe it um you can create a rig where you have like a little curve that controls this thing so there's a lot of things that you can do with this and at any point you can stop this and it's going to be like halfway through you can see how I can move this and we can go to close I and open eye okay so that's just the geometry side of things let's go now to the texture I'm gonna go into my uh hyper shade and on the hypership on the material of the character this one right here the green subsurface that we're using let me just make sure this is the one yep we need to build the the blend that we're gonna do between normal Maps so uh normally we use a traditional bump to dmap but here we're going to use an AI AI normal map so I'm going to write AI normal map and this is the node that we're going to be using uh to the normal camera and here we could just go for a file texture and then this file texture we can just grab the um the normal the clean normal map that we have this one right here hit open very important this is a normal map so it should be set to a utility raw so that we're not like doing any sort of like color Transformations and then the color goes into the input of the of the normal map uh that should be it let's give it a go so let's go to our render and render and technically that should give us it's of course going to transform this two into a texture uh file but once it's done it should give us all of the detail am I seeing it or am I not seeing it I'm gonna go to the SF surface maybe it's a little bit too much to strike point zero two really want to see it and I'm not seeing it uh geometry AI normal map that's there is it too soft too shiny maybe let's go to the roughness let's increase the roughness a little bit more let me change this back to srgb I mean it shouldn't be that the case but uh let's just give it a shot that's weird I'm not seeing the normal map now I'm not sure if it's the color or what let's go all the way I'm gonna turn off the color here maybe the the diffuse color was affecting the they're shading a little bit it shouldn't again but maybe it was can you guys see it I know you can't answer right now because it's a recording but uh I'm not seeing it let me let me let me pause real quick and and figure out what it is it should be fairly easy there we go so uh it is working as you can see it's right there there's two things uh making it difficult to see first of all the exposure of the environment it's a little bit too high so I'm gonna bring it to -2 and the other thing is the surface was too strong so right now I actually like deleted the subsurface and went back to just like a diffuse color if I bring the color down and they bring the subsurface in you're gonna see that um it's really it really softens things up right so we're probably gonna have to go to like a point zero zero one or something like super super small subsurface so that we can see the the bump map there a little bit more but in this case since it's not really working as I'm expecting uh I'm actually gonna turn it off let's go let's go traditional color there we go so there we can see the um the effect of the of the elements now I can show you the the second part which is the blending of two normal Maps so um the normal map again is set to raw and Alpha phase luminance that's very important that we're going to bring in a second map which is the normal damage right here I can just drag and drop it there we go this one should also be set to utility raw and Alpha is luminance that's important now we have the two normal Maps again this is the normal and the clean and what we're gonna do is we're going to use a node called AI RGB or AI a layer rgba so this will allow me to input two different textures into a single node and output a mix between those two and as you can see we're gonna enable both of this enable layer 1 and enable layer 2. it's just going to be over which one one of them to be over the other one no special like multiplication or anything because most of it's pretty much the same thing right so if we blend between one and the other the only things that are going to change or should change are the things that we are modifying I'm gonna bring this to the side you guys are not going to be able to see it but uh or actually let me see if I can get this there we go let's bring the render we need a lot of Windows right now to make this uh magic trick work there we go so right now if I render um of course it's going to convert the other textures that's going to be using the the damage normal map but once we're um once we're ready what the hell is going on with that shadow it's a weird Shadow right there what changed nothing should have changed this thing oh it's the alpha it's limited okay I'm gonna turn it off there we go so no Alpha elements there we go so clean Base clean normal map we can make this thing damage we can push the blend shape up and now if we go to this node right here to the EI layer RGV we can bring the mix down and by doing this as you can see we're gonna get the other normal map and that's pretty much it we get the other normal map and we can blend from one to the other if we bring this down like this what's going to happen is we're going to have the basic head with the injuries which maybe if you want to continue the animation this is what you want you want to keep the injuries now because the animation is just going to keep going so this is the the back and forth that you can do with model and texture to create something interesting let's go back here to the point and let's say we're like halfway through we're halfway right there in the in the transition of the of the hit we can also go here to the mix and go halfway through on the mix and you're gonna see that pretty much all of the things that are the same are gonna remain the same but we're gonna start seeing a little bit of vesting going there again as soon as I start lowering this you can kind of see how the how the damage is starting to appear and if we go all the way to the bottom here that's where the where the full damage is going to appear like that all of the cuts right here now imagine how by combining this we could get a texture um like a different events of surface effects like there's so many things that we can combine by playing playing around with blend shapes with um with layers here with the AI layer RGV this thing right here you can use this for color you can use this for um for roughness you can use this for any any map that has like a like a color input and if you want to you could also like multiply this thing I don't think we're like gonna really need it because if we multiply what might happen is we're gonna get both of them at the same time as you can see right here and these guys might look a little bit more intense than usual so even though we're at one we're seeing the the scars because we're multiplying so again usually over is what we want just over this is either one or the other so it's Uber or this one right here with the angry and damaged face and uh that's it guys I hope you guys like this video I know this was a little bit more technical but I think this is a trick that could be useful for some of you uh if you're a character artist and you want to create variations for your characters this is another great great way to do it and it's production ready so uh make sure to use this trick make sure to use layers instead of zebrush blend shapes they're amazing uh make sure to leave a like a share a subscribe if you haven't subscribed it really helps the Channel with just past past 31 000 subscribers and um we're gonna have our winners tomorrow tomorrow is at December the 1st so we're gonna be announcing the winners of um for this month at the fan of the month remember we're gonna pick three lucky winners from all of the videos throughout the month and a lot can lucky commenter will get a free course of their choice so if you didn't pick the courses on our extra extra big sale that we had this last couple days then you might be the lucky winner of one course and this one all of the courses apply so yeah that's it guys thank you very much I'll see you back tomorrow bye

Channel: Nexttut

Views: 2,309

Keywords: maya 2018, zbrush tutorial, maya tutorial, nalini kanta jena, character sculpting, zbrush sculpting, zbrush turorial, beginner zbrush tutorial, human anatomy zbrush, modeling tutorial

Id: 5QRfKNfM5pk

Length: 29min 26sec (1766 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 30 2022