Maya, Zbrush and Substance Painter Workflow Explained: Step By Step Tutorial

are you a beginner 3d artist that wants to create more polish portfolio worthy pieces and less time but unsure and which software to use in different parts of your 3d model creation pipeline unless you've been living under a 3d artists rock you have heard of texture and programs like substance painter and digital sculpting packages like ZBrush in addition to a 3d primary package such as Maya in this video I will break down my start to finish through the modeling texturing and digital sculpting pipeline that will take advantage of each of these packages strengths to create a set of 3d modeled and environment props all that in the video coming up what's going on you 3d modeling beasts wait talking about texturing in this video yeah that's not gonna work what's going on you digital sculpting daredevils yeah I talk about texturing and modeling that's not gonna work either what's going on you texturing Titans now I'm leaving out the other parts of the pipeline just play it safe what's going on YouTube this is AO muesli and today we are talking about how to create a finished portfolio worthy piece from start to finish with substance painter Maya and ZBrush a decade or so ago there weren't that many choices for creating 3d models for video games or film or personal works most 3d artists had a handful of primary software that they used and maybe occasionally they went to a 2d app like Photoshop to do some additional texturing work but boy has the game changed and now there's a plethora of dedicated software for 3d artists like ourselves to actually use and implement into our pipelines and while the emergence of software's like substance painter for texturing and ZBrush for digital sculpting and model creation have emerged and made 3d artists lives easier the more choices that we have sometimes leads to more confusion on how to use these tools and better surely put analysis paralysis so how this video came about is a couple of days ago I uploaded the speed modeling / workflow or video on YouTube and a lot of people were asking me about which softwares I use how do I use them and kind of those decision-making or rash which package to do what so that's pretty much the reasoning for the creation of this video that's gonna dive a little bit deeper and explain things a lot better so I'm gonna cover step by step the concept in digital sculpting 3d modeling UV layout texturing and the final rendering that went into this piece well this is a complete tutorial I will focus more on the pipeline versus step by step directions on how to do everything within these packages and you will need a basic understanding of Maya substance painter in ZBrush so really just follow along with the video along the way I will have links to external videos and resources that dive a little bit deeper into the specific of parts in case you need more understanding on those topics so without further ado let's get on with the video all right folks so let's go ahead and start pretty much at Ground Zero which I started this project in Maya but the very first thing that I had in mind was kind of the end product right sometimes we get stuck on just the specifics or the software but really if we know the end product that's gonna really dictate how we should go about creating that asset for that end product you know this this piece ultimately had a purpose right it was gonna be pretty much a pedestal to this character and ultimately I wanted to have the pedestal telling a back story on the character so I kind of wanted to give this kind of a collectible figure type of feel right and that's kind of I've been building my characters to have a pedestal that really complements the backstory of this character and this character right here is kind of this zombie right this post-apocalyptic zombie and I wanted that pedestal to just kind of reflect that and really just add story or a backstory to that character so let's go ahead and begin with the reference a gathering process which you know anytime that you are creating a project you will need to gather reference like I said I wanted to kind of give the end product just this collectible statue feel right along with the pedestal so I basically research those and just looked at design elements of pedestals you know kind of these cements with the rebar sticking out and I basically just dissected saw some of the design choices that you know they went with and right now I'm using this this app called PRF which is basically a reference app for artists and the cool thing about it is a it's completely free bead it's pretty dynamic so you can go in there you can switch images and I'll delete them you could send them to the back if you need them you could scale them you know you could rotate things you could auto arrange them so it has all these cool little tools that you can use get in there I'm really digging it I definitely recommend it for just kind of critic you know reference sheets and I will go ahead and link that in the description down below so I pretty much built everything kind of have I bit bill in the model which is a built for three mode which basically everything will still look pretty low res but I can actually hit three or apply level one smooth and then I can basically end up having you know just a real smooth model where I won't be limited on how close I can get in with the camera okay now there is kind of a caveat to that like some items like the rebar right here I just basically since there were just kind of a smaller item I just basically use more subdivisions on the initial modeling gave it a nice bevel but I didn't per se at holding edges right so here if I were to smooth this you see that it's not gonna look right but since it is one of the smaller pieces I did kind of make that decision right and it I could have basically built as 4:3 mode but I just felt that it was overkill for this piece right here alright so now I'm in ZBrush and I jumped over there to do some concept and work and some of this stuff could have been done in Maya but I actually just chose to do it in ZBrush because you know that's to me a where besides just digital sculpting you know ZBrush really shines is that it's really good for concept and work right because you have you can work with a lot of polygons and really just push and pull forms around in a way that you could kind of do it in Maya but it's really not ideal or it's not really remotely close right so that's why I like using ZBrush the concept thing so obviously for this project well you know shapes kind of had to fit around kind of this dirt that I was creating or some of these more rigid assets that I already modeled so I basically started with rectangles cubes right and then I used the clip brushes to basically just kind of slice them and kind of get the overall shapes once I basically started with the slabs I would use the clip curve brushes and then I would go ahead and dynamesh them and you know dynamesh just gives you that flexibility of being able to push pull and read ina mesh and just really just subdividing that geometry so you really have pretty much always great sculptable geometry to use right a similar process to the ground plane I just thought it was a sphere I clipped the bottom I dynamesh did and then I started plopping in the other assets and I started to kind of basically sculpt around it give that that illusion that you know these objects were really on the ground and the dirt was actually pretty much almost coming over some of the assets right so as far as brushes go I keep it pretty simple I use the clay build up a lot I use the trim dynamic to just kind of flatten some of those edges to kind of give it that that nice bevel that gives it a little bit of style and it just looks real good on rocks and concrete so I'm basically just using the trim dynamic and sometimes I'll use the polished brushes as well so as far as some of the texturing within ZBrush I did use some pre-made brush packs by the great artist Jonas and this is pretty much what I use here so you should so you'll probably recognize some of these this is the ultimate style alpha pack obviously you can create these brushes yourself it's just how much time do you want to spend on a particular project so for this project I knew I wanted to have some stylized elements to go with the character in the pedestal so it's a pretty large pack for like 9 bucks this is kind of what you get so I use a lot of these crack ones on the concrete some of these as well just to break things up and then I ended up using some of these rock ones here for the axle ground itself and you don't have to get the brushes if you want to you can just it could probably speed you up or you could either build them yourself or just find other ones to work with if you're interested in the pack I have linked it in the description down below and I'll also go ahead and link it right here in the YouTube card and what you could actually use substance painter to create some normalmap detail right or some height information I do prefer to ZBrush especially for concept or really just adding details that are gonna push from the silhouette right because you know in substance painter even though you have brushes it's actually not the form in the geometry and this one within ZBrush it actually is pushing and pulling affecting the silhouette and then once you go to either zremesh or duo retopo somewhat are those larger brush strokes or alphas right that you stamp on or actually gonna show in your silhouette and it's gonna give you just a better base form and not as flat if you were using just basically substance painter to stamp on details so for this part right here I'm just taking the steel beam and like I said before I'm just using the trim dynamic to just to break up some of the sharpness there and just give it some of that worn edge look and feel to the the actual piece itself right so that's gonna affect the silhouette a little bit that's why I prefer to do it in ZBrush it really is just gonna give it this nice wore down almost a stylized that's gonna fit well with the character and the rest of the pedestal pieces so from this point everything looks pretty finalized as far as the main of sculpted details right so from this point I will go ahead and decimate my pieces that need to be decimated so for things that were already done in my own there already you vide and they would just place here pretty much for setup purposes or for layout purposes so like the bricks the rebar 'b things like that I really don't need an export back into my ax since I'm just primarily using them for staging but things like the dirt the slabs everything that was pretty much built in ZBrush there I'll take those pieces I'll decimate them decimating is a process through the ZBrush plugins that you use to bring in the subdivision levels or should I say the polygon count down while still keeping all the details intact because you know if you have like a polygon piece that is you know ten million or 20 million and you have a couple of those in a Maya scene it could really bog down your scenes especially if you're doing routes apology and that's pretty much the reason that I am bringing those back into my anyways so you know you've run it through a process called decimation it's gonna bring down the overall poly count but it's gonna basically keep all the details so it's gonna give you a lighter mash to actually work with and then you can go ahead and use make it a live surface a Quadra on top of that and start the reach apology process in Maya so here I exported pretty much the slabs the dirt everything like I said that was built in ZBrush that really just doesn't have a clean base mesh and I exported them all now for the actual dirt I did run other zremesher the automatic you know topology a tool within ZBrush that worked out pretty well I try that with the slabs but it didn't give me the best results maybe I could have tweaked it blood the slabs that were simple enough that I could quickly just do it in Maya and really get the shapes that I wanted also do the same thing with the rocks that you see in this video right so with the slabs like I said I we decimated them quad rod on top of a live surface I created a clean match right a clean low poly that then I can go ahead and take in to substance painter and basically use the low res and the high res and I will use the high res mesh to basically just bake out a normal map to use within substance painter so right now I'm just finishing up the rete apology process cleaning everything up so this is pretty much what a decimated mess from ZBrush looks like so if we go ahead and just offset it a little bit we can see that you know what it's gonna do its best job to you know conserve the details where there are details and then just on the flatter areas where there's not much going on it's just gonna collapse that geometry and keep it fairly light right so that's pretty much the process mom and this is pretty much the route apologize mesh that I had so I did go ahead and just model a little bit of details more details write that recessed area where the rebar was gonna go ahead and interact with the actual cement slab I didn't really want to try to mess around with too much with displacement maps to push and pull the geometry at this point so I did want to have it in the low res and basically seemed like the rebar was just sticking out because you know features rely on normal Maps they still pretty much would've looked flat and now like it was coming out of a crack right but you see like the other stuff right or the other details the other cracks I didn't really account in the low res so let's go ahead and since we're actually looking at this let's go ahead and look at you v's and kind of my rationale on how I go about laying you these if you need more of a refresher on do you visa Maya you can go ahead and check this video out right there and that'll kind of you know walk you through just more of my complete you vieng pipeline so I got my UV editor open and I'm gonna show you kind of why I made the certain decisions that I did so basically I try to avoid seams as much as possible if you start you being long enough you know that it's kind of a balancing act between the seams that you have in getting distortion right so the less seems that you have theoretically is a good thing but when you want to fold you you will see more distortion right so seams alleviate distortion but there seems and sometimes they are visible when you start texturing right so here I try to have kind of that balance where I had enough scenes where I am much Distortion so if we look at our checkerboard pattern we really don't have that much Distortion okay so obviously that's not you know that big a deal here and basically if we look here let me turn this off right so where I put the seams I made sure that I tried to avoid some of these larger cracks right because I didn't want to have a seam when I took it in a substance and then you know have that seam shown up and sometimes I've had those issues in substance painter where I have a seam in the middle of kind of a big piece of detail it's very evident and it shows right so that's kind of my rationale for just the UV layout itself right so let's go ahead and talk about the other or UV decision that I made because this is how basically you vide most of the assets in that piece except for these guys right here this and the rocks and they pretty much have overlapping UVs so basically you overlapping you these or you V's that are stacked on top of each other I didn't really need a unique texture space for the rebar or the smaller rocks but everything that was covered in dirt I did end up basically figuring out that I did want unique texture detail because the dirt actually wrapped around those objects in unique ways right so if I would have had overlapping you've ease the dirt pattern would have been exactly the same but for these smaller pieces especially the rebar didn't really make much contact with the dirt so I could have got away with that and then just the small rocks that I'm gonna show you in a minute those were just too many to just have unique UV so I decided to optimize that the way I go about handling overlapping you these is that I will basically have just kind of a general one here so you see that this one if we look at the faces right this one's kind of in 0 to 1 and the rest of these guys if I select the faces here you see that they're shifting over one right there shifted over one basically UV set over okay and the rationale for that is that basically when I take this in the substance it's going to use this UV space which is 0 to 1 but it's gonna apply it to all the other ones right essentially what would happen is if all these were overlapped I would have baking issues because all these kind of have unique AO details that are gonna come through right because they're gonna be shoved in through the geometry so that's not really gonna work when you have just objects that are just interacting with each other and everything stacked so basically in a nutshell having these guys here in 0 to 1 is basically telling substance hey I want you to basically eat base all your Maps off of this one and then basically project them onto all these other ones and you'll get pretty much just just a default ambient occlusion without any weird penetration for a mother interacting geometry and maybe this will make more sense once I show you this substance painter part and before we jump over to substance I do want to talk a little bit about just kind of the baking process so but basically this mess like I said it was decimated it was used for reach apology but not only was they used for reach apology it was actually used to bake out the maps in substance right now you could actually bake out maps in a plethora of different software so you can't create the normal map from you know ZBrush itself which I had before you could actually do it through Maya as well or you could do it in substance really so that's really just neither here nor there whichever package is really just based on preference I like to do it basically in substance itself so how things in substance are actually linked they're not linked by different geometry right you're not going to be able to export or import a bunch of different OBJ's and kind of have a seen kind of hierarchy here right everything is done pretty much with one obj and how things are really just separated is via the actual materials and themselves that you apply in Maya right now if you want more information like it really just a step-by-step tutorial on going from Maya to substance painter I have linked that right here on this card right here so if you need a little bit deep a deeper dive into this I have created a tutorial just for that alright so I do want to show how I was placing the rocks this is a tool that some of you guys know about maybe you have heard about it but like an asset like this where you just kind of doing the same thing over and over it's pretty time-saving right so basically I was able to snap each rock to exactly where I wanted it then like tweak it slightly using this tool right here so they're modified and it's the snap together tool and if you watched my videos I do talk about this tool sometimes but basically what you want to do is make sure that you click the face that you want to go ahead and match and then on to the destination that you want to match it with you hit enter and there snaps one of the things though is that you know if you like to group things each of them has to be kind of on its own so if it's on a group the tool probably gonna work if you go into a flat surface it's not maybe a big deal right because you could probably mess with the transforms but you know if I want to snap to like this precise angle you know that could take a lot of finagling with the rotate tool but I could do it instantly right so from there you know I would go in there and then just go ahead and kind of scale and do my thing with the rocks the other part that I did is I did apply Bend a former to these the this rhubarb I took them and then I went to deform and I used a nonlinear at that abend the former but I'm just gonna show you kind of quickly what this does so here on the bend options you can go in here and you can play with the curvature right and then you could definitely bend it right but it helps if your object is either pretty much aligned in the world or your handle is aligned perfectly to the object all right so basically here I strip down all the maps right so under my texture set settings I killed all the maps except for the normal and then what I'll do here on layers I don't want anything materials to actually show through so I could delete them or I could just add a fill layer here right and that's basically kind of the first step let's just group this here right so there we go so I basically hit all the additional high detail and this is pretty much the baked the normal map baked from high res that I actually brought in usually the default settings work well so if I go back to mesh maps and we look at kind of these common usually the defaults work well for me if you need a little bit more explanation or you're not getting just the results that you want you can play with these distance Oh with the Max frontal distance or the max for distance I can try to explain this for you but algorithmic did an excellent video that really talks about the differences on these settings and how to truly down them down actually probably will do a better job at explaining them so I will go ahead and link that video right here so if you want a really deep dive into this or you're not really just getting the results that you want and you want to know exactly what to do check that video right but yeah so you just go in here and that's pretty much it with the default settings and then having pretty much the high definition mash if you are basically baking out of substance you know that will go ahead and generate your you know your map your normal map and then you can go back in here and then if you turn the normal map off then you can go ahead and generate the additional maps based off the normal map right so if you want take this right and then now we go ahead and bake these guys out again alright so substance baked out or the rest of the maps right including the almighty ambient occlusion and then the curvature map itself and the cool thing about it is that we're actually getting ambient occlusion from both sources right so we're getting in here from the actual ground itself right we see that line those contact shadows right we see with the rocks here but we also see it from the normal map as well all right so if I go here and I look at my ambient occlusion you see that it's actually getting it from the normal so here's my final or substance painter file right and here's some of the assets that I brought so all these ones that you see kind of here align in outer space those are the ones that pretty much have overlapping UVs and I didn't want it to have a unique or just overlapping AO information right so if we look here and we can go ahead and change the channels here in substance by going to the ambient occlusion right so if we look at these objects right here all these have different texture sets right does different different materials and unique UV sets because I wanted wherever there's an ambient occlusion map right that's actually linked to a generator right or a mask builder that's actually going to apply dirt to these crevasse areas so it really makes the texturing process a lot easier and I'm gonna show you pretty much um how it looks in the material in a second but just know that you know I didn't want unique information here right because I wanted the dirt to basically wrap around the areas or the ambient occlusion was right so um if I had overlapping you these for all this stuff it would just look pretty much off right and then obviously these guys here the rebar Brite I didn't really care that much and that's why this guy was baked up for this thus it kind of has just a general ambient occlusion pass but it's not gonna have any shadows right where it actually makes contact but I can live with that right it is kind of a give-and-take you at the end of the day you have to figure out well how much unique texture and information do you want versus how many texture sets you know and how many materials do you want so it's kind of a balancing act and kind of you know what price are you wanna pay for that uniqueness so as far as the materials go this is pretty much for every a material that you saw in Maya right so if I had em here we'll go back to materials right but all these right here for every this is each material that it has and the naming convention actually comes from the the group right the shading group network I'm not the actual material itself right focus on this guy right and you'll notice kind of this outline here right if we go back to the ambient occlusion it kind of matches that right and that's kind of the the good thing about having the unique the uniqueness obviously if you're working in a game pipeline and you know this this cinder block it's gonna be you know spread out through unreal unity a million times you're not going to probably have unique set or you you're not gonna have kind of a unique UV set for all this you you have to kind of work with what the end product is right but for me this is just you know one asset I really don't have any stringent requirements so I kind of have that added luxury right all right so let's dive into the mature a little bit and I'm not gonna go too deep into this but we're gonna go ahead and look at the mud here right so the mud and let's actually just kind of focus on just the mud itself right so I'll go ahead and get rid of this extra texture here and we'll go ahead and look at the mud and we'll take out this paint layer so basically once I take out that paint layer you see that the mud is pretty much overkill right so the paint layer just kind of acts as a corrective layer to just kind of tone down some of the effect that this generator is doing right so if we disable this mask or we remove the mask right now basically this of all's it is is just me applying this mud material to this right so from here I created a mask right so you could right-click you could add a white you could add a black mask basically mask work exactly like Photoshop or white will reveal and black will actually just delete everything right basically here I just added a generator you can just right click add generator and then on the drop-down you could just choose the generator that you want and really the generators are just gonna work off your existing Maps right and that's kind of where really just the magic of substance painter happens is we don't really have to mask this stuff by hand because the generators do the bulk of the work right so if we look at this generator here we see that I told it to work only off the ambient occlusion map right so essentially I'm feeding all this dirt have it be focused from the ambient occlusion right so added this and then this mass generated is really being affected by the ending occlusion so if we go here and play with the actual level you see that I can go ahead and increase or you know decrease the effect of that ambient occlusion right so if I turn it to one it's basically just gonna flood everything with the actual mud right and as I started to tone it down it finds that middle ground but it's basing that off the Ale so obviously when you do this if we go back and we kind of look at the ambient occlusion just by itself it's gonna give us a pretty sharp line and it's not gonna look natural right and that's why I went ahead and kind of use this paint layer to just really kind of work this back and kind of blend it in a little bit more and just break up that on that straight line that it originally had right so that's kind of what I used and I ended up doing pretty much this into every material that had the mud right which was the majority of the pieces for the final part of this it was time to render this in IRA I did play around with the environments you go here to environments you see the different ones and it really just depends on what lighting conditions you want to build your materials under I strongly suggest that you know you do kind of check it with one of these from time to time because these right here they're not gonna introduce any color right so you know if you're working with something that has like a strong tint like this one here everything's gonna have a strong tint and then maybe if you're gonna end up rendering this in Maya or not using the same HDR your colors are gonna be off so it's cool just to play around with these right here but you know when you are building your materials I do recommend that you probably use something like these studio lights that doesn't introduce a lot of color and then you know when you go to render maybe you can go ahead and drop some of these more stylized or you know something with just an environment to it for the final render for my array I did end up using these this guy right here okay that gave it kind of like a nice soft look so we'll go ahead and click this button here send it to Ira it's gonna just warm up right doesn't want to strain his back doesn't want to get into it too quick definitely always warm up whether you're doing rendering or squats or working out all right so right here we're an IRA and if you need to move your environment around I'm just doing shift right click unless you need very specific lighting you know this should pretty much do a pretty good quick dirty job of rendering and it's look it's gonna look good let me go ahead and cover some of the settings here so the samples here just can be tweaked obviously the more you bump these up the higher the quality same thing with the max time it'll just take longer to render but it'll give you just a better result under the display settings all right what I like doing is I like to basically click this clear color on right if not it'll show the the kind of the environment that's used to light it and I think it's pretty distracting it doesn't really look good keep in mind too that if you're creating a render and you have a bunch of noise in the background just aesthetically it's going to detract from you know your focal point that you're trying to attract right should be on clear color so you know you you probably don't want this to be the same exact color something neutral usually I think works best but you want to have a differentiation from your background you can do post effects you can play with the focal length here right so if we have a smaller focal length so if we bring this down it's gonna have more less distortion right so now if we zoom in if you want to have more of a dramatic you know this is pretty dramatic right but if you want to have more perspective on your render camera you know you can put this down and then obviously if you want more of a orthographic feel you can crank this up hit F on your keyboard it'll kind of like just frame back out and now we have a pretty flat view right now much respect you can go ahead and activate post-effects so you could color correct this here or you could export this into Photoshop and kind of really do a similar workflows so that's pretty much it for the breakdown hopefully I explained it well enough there's a lot of moving parts to this and hopefully that'll give you just kind of a better idea of what went into making this piece and the rationale and hopefully it'll help you in your own modeling and asset creation workflows thank you so much for tuning in folks and hopefully now you're a little bit better informed about your software packages out there for creating finished 3d pieces and also which packages to use in which instances in this video at the end of the day it's not a right or wrong way to do things video or this package is better than this other package it's just literally what works for me better and I'm just sharing that information with you but you know at the end of the day I do want you guys to be able to evaluate packages on your own figure out their strengths and weaknesses and what ultimately works better for you so please let me know what you thought of the video down below also comment on your favorite tools and software for your own 3d modeling pipeline as always please consider subscribing if you haven't done so already like the video and share it with any 3d artists that you think will find this information valuable until we meet again folks I will catch you next time [Music]

Channel: JL Mussi

Views: 41,703

Keywords: maya, substance painter, tutorial, render, uving, uv unwrap, uv unwrapping, allegorithmic substance painter, substance painter 2018, substance painter 2019, texturing, zbrush, zbrush to maya, maya to zbrush, substance to maya, maya to substance, substance painter tutorial, allegorithmic, physically based rendering, mari, materials, textures, 3d art, pixologic, sculpting, zbrush tutorial, zbrush sculpting, zbrush for beginners, 3d modeling, speed sculpt, stylized, learning zbrush

Id: VTh3g7SHqqo

Length: 37min 59sec (2279 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 03 2019

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[u/amenard]

Blender!

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I'll get my coat...

[u/snazzy_giraffe]

Step one to making better videos: shorter intros. Step two: lower background music.