Megascans + Bridge + Houdini: an in-depth look

hi guys nice to be here thank you for inviting us this is a ton of fun for us I guess I can give a little bit of background on who we are as a company we're run about a hundred people who spend every waking hour anning build the world's largest library for artists of scans and tools to make a world building as fun simple and creative as possible so we've been around for about eight years and our core mission has always been to to help push the 3d industry forth with the new tools to help save time and increase quality in general and so my name is Teddy Bergman I'm CEO and co-founder of I could simply girls with the kharazim and I spent the past 16 years or so chipping away at what eventually became magus gasps and of course together with my incredibly talented team and colleagues including none other than Adnan Shawmut and Richard Stevenson who I am proud proud to have with me today so before we move on I also want to give a massive shout out to Magnus Larsen who is the lead engineer behind the Houdini integration unfortunately can't be part of this webinar but he's here in spirit because he helped us prepare kind of all the examples work for this webinar so big shout out to you - so we will show you some fun videos mega skansen Houdini action and then we'll dive right into the integration and all of the exciting tools that come with it we will then end with some Q&A but first I'll let my colleagues Richard and Edna introduce themselves so Richard feel free to take the lead cool hey guys like sitting my name is Richard I'm one of the tool Dara pixel and I'll be running you guys through a few other demos we've prepared some sample contents that will hopefully help to explain some of the concepts and show why you should be using labelling tool today in production hey guys my name is Adnan I'm a technical artists at quick zone and I helped Magnus develop the mega scans live link and today I'll be assisting Teddy in answering all the questions you might have about mega scamp's I'd like to preface this by saying that we a whole lot of Houdini here quick so just about everything so we're quite excited to finally release our first official Houdini integration completely open source to the community to make photorealistic environment production with Houdini accessible to our users and beginners alike by combining simple procedural automation tools with a very powerful integration with the mega scans library I thought that we could have a look at a fun video showcasing a few projects using mega scans on Houdini actually by some of the talented artists here at quitzel so let me go and share my screen [Applause] [Music] [Applause] all right so the first two things that you saw were made by Owen O'Brien running in Unreal Engine 4 and the last scene the forest was made by richard stephenson who we are super excited to have with us in this call and so the integration includes quite a great deal of tools and which will give you an overview of a majority of these tools without going too much into detail because we only have so much time but we'll cover getting started with the Magus caster Houdini bridge the various supported renders the many exciting production tools that are included and how all of this can kind of be used for both the effects and game development so I thought I'd quickly share with you a brief video overview before we move on so let me go here [Music] [Music] [Music] you all right so without further ado I will give the floor to Richard so installation guide for this it's very very straightforward also launching bridging all you need to do is navigate the assets you would like to export click on the export settings icon to the top right so if you leave me as a target application and click on download plugin the soul download install everything you need to get up and running with the live link reading then program you teeny click on the new pixel make scans drop-down and select live link from here you can select the render engine and workflow it writes the meaning to choose from from your mantra on alt redshift and octane you can also pick between UV and try play nowhere close so once this is done in the point of rich and export the asset so if you give the seconds as you can see the live link will properly set up the material displacement settings scale and scene hierarchy all on the fly so jump straight into the coding part and this time performing tedious tasks like selling good materials over and over and you know it's Brenda and you're going to get a beautiful render straight off the bat so [Music] the next thing we're going to look at is you know how to actually use these tools to set up a diorama see so the first thing you always want to make sure that you do is launch the live link tool set the render engine that's one we're working with and from there you can just go into the bridge and you know export any asset of the choice depending on what you have selected in Houdini will determine it's sort of content-aware so the placement of that asset within kamini for instance that you had this plane selected when you export a material it'll sign that that material to that claim so we go back and explore the 3d assets still be the hero of our scene you'll notice that any 3d asset that you bring in to come in in a very nice self-contained subnets inside so all of the the data that you need to work with that 3d asset is very neatly contained within that subnet this makes no creating much large it seems very straightforward because you are guaranteed a very team working hierarchy has been reading so I guess the takeaway of this section is the fact that you can jump straight into things like composition and lighting and and you know overall look and feel of your shots without having to do tedious tasks so if we just jump back into bridge and search for one of these scatterer as it's here so when you bring in scatter assets the workflow is slightly different so the thing to automatically detect that it's a scatter asset and create a default scattering setup for you with the default grid that you can use to preview how your scatter density has been a lot so all I did there was change that to into the 3d rock that we want to scatter on top of and then you can start adjusting settings so one of the tools have come included with the lighting tool is this quick simple scattering node which allows you a huge amount of flexibility and a granular detail to allow you to adjust your skeletons exactly how you want them to be you have photos like slope curvature and noise as well as any attributes density attribute that happens to be on the mesh when it feeds into the scatter node you can use that to drive exactly where you want your scattering to occur and then obviously the fact that you can run all of these parameters through curse means that you have just a huge amount of control over the form of the distribution so that's that's kind of it for the scatter assets we'll look now at some 3d plants and bringing those in so if we just jump back to bridge now and look at some some of the 3d plants and how we can use those for the most part the workflow is very similar to the scatter assets they'll come in it'll generate the plane that it'll be distributed on top of all we need to do is dive in there change the source of that scattering in this case to the the ground plane because we just want to scatter some you know clovers and things on the ground and you know it's almost instantaneous sort of the feedback right so if we just jump in here and change the P scale down to to match the scene scale about seen we can ready just start diving into you know creating exactly the kind of the look in the feel that we're going for yeah and that's pretty much it if we were to launch a test render now you basically get all of your your materials are perfectly calibrated and set up for you here we're just tweaking some displacement settings and connecting up the bump map to the material which with a redshift is an optional step so it's disconnected by default but you you can hook that up if you want to and you know with a few more tweaks to displacement and tessellation you know scatter density and some shader setups you can very easily achieve like a very very nice result so if we just jump ahead to something we tweaked a little bit more we get something like that so yeah very very quick and easy to to get up and running with the tool and actually start using us so here just some other examples how this will can be used and we thought it was quite fun to put together this little looping animation so one thing I want to point out here is that 3d plants will come in with a wind attribute inherited so that attribute can be used to very easily generate wind effects for your skeletal age so in the cific this example it's very subtle but it adds a nice touch and here's just another example so slightly more complex a few more more 3d assets that we brought in but for the most part the workflow is pretty much identical that's just bringing in 3d assets saying if your scatter systems and you know painting density attributes tweaking things and so that's it for the basic introduction nobody's going to take a quick a closer look at materials as well as the mixer node inside if we digging so in this example we're just going to look at redshifts but I'll show you in a second that the the setup before other end engine is is very some them so what we're doing here is just setting up a sort of a ramp attribute at color attribute that ramps from top to bottom and we're just going to apply a quick comm stone material to that so again always have to make sure that you're the live link tool is just running I think in this example we're going to be using the Tri planar setup and looking at how that works so within just a few flicks you have your material fully setup we launch the IPR you can see how that's looking we just need to tweak the displacements a little bit to kind of suits what you're going for but you know for the most part it's all there so on the the red shift pixel triplane a node is another HDA that comes included with the tools on there it controls all of the texture outputs and so that's going to be reading everything from disk and for the triplane a node you have this blend amount parameter that you can tweak to get a smoother fall-off between each projection axis so the next thing we'll look at is actually using the quick so note a quick soul mr. no sorry to get very nice height blending between different surfaces so if we bring in say this mossy grass material and we want to lay that on top of the the cobblestone material this is kind of the other work for that so because we're using Ridge if it's there slight sort of workflow specific to that but if you're familiar with how to you know blend various different materials together in other end engine as the the process is you know quite relatable so all we're doing here is exposing some the blends and the the different layers we want to have access to and dropping down a quick soul mixer note and that's going to read the displacement channels from each of the the layers that you want to be blending and from here we just have to hook up the displacement blend into each from the the mix output and the displacements channels and as well as the surface channels and then the output of that just goes into your surface insular material okay so if we just do a quick test render of that you'll see we're getting some blending but it doesn't look amazing and it's not using that attribute we threaded earlier so all we need to do is reference that in and we can start making use of that so we're bringing that point attribute set to the named attribute that we traded earlier put that through like a set range and if we relaunch the IPR now you'll see that we're now making use of that attribute so this is a pretty straightforward explanation of how to get that blending to work but essentially whatever attribute you had here you could feed that in so if we go and modify some of these settings you can see it's looking okay but it's not great like you may want to actually go and swap out the grass material or the cobblestone material and that's possible by just selecting a new material from bridge and having a material selected in the in Houdini and all you have to do is hit export and it will overwrite whatever you have selected so it's a very quick workflow for doing locked if maybe you would just want to try out different examples you know maybe you want to try something completely radical but you're not sure if it'll work you don't have to stress about they're taking a lot time to set that up it's you know it's all done for you so here we have a radius parameter on the pixel mixer node which just allows you to get smoother or softer or sharper blends between the different layers another thing to point out is that these qixels mixer and nodes can be daisy chained together as you know as many times as you want so you can create very very complex materials of you know grass on top of cobble on top of you know mines and and some Sun so yeah that's that's kind of it from materials and if we go and look at some examples here so here we're just showing parity between the different render engines they all supports a rich of Mentor and Arnold or support triplane are displacements however octane does not but in terms of the triplane is set up it supports that workflow as well does not track line displacement and some examples if you want to use it for like a hard surface modeling or heart of texturing workflows if you want to quickly add surface detail to an asset without doing any sort of painting on this you can use these procedure workflows so every material here has been layered on so you have the base blue material for this method section you have the warm sections on the corners you have mud on top of that and the same thing for the the wooden handle you've got you know the wood and then the sort of flakey section on top of that another great example sort of other codes with sort of metallic chrome underneath and it's also incredibly useful for environment artists right where you have for instance you could have 20 columns all next to one another and you want to make sure that they don't all share the same texture what you can do is use my planner workflow so you have access aligned texturing and 3d aligned noise to drive your procedural blending right so in this way each of these pillars look more or less entirely unique which is very useful so next thing we'll look at is some of the scattering tools and so we touched on this briefly before but I just want to show the process just on a plant so when we bring in a scalar asset as mentioned previously it sets up a scattered grid right so one very useful workflow for this section is that if you had a very complex bit of geometry that you want to scatter at safe plants or weeds and some angle on top of but it was quite high poly and difficult to work with to get like quick responses whenever you tweak parameters yeah what you can do is set it up on a grid like we have here and once you're happy with the scatter of distribution scale and and so on all you have to do is change the source inputs to point to your high poly geo and your scatter on that instead so it's a and I set up and every time you bring in a plant it's going to set up this and also notice that it creates a very nice self-contained subnet so it keeps everything very neat and organized kathan example of using the scaler system where we can actually scatter other objects on top of your scatter system so we have a first scaler system which is scattering a bunch of plants on a on a grid and what we have access to is the ability to then quickly scatter these light-emitting spheres on top of the plants so you can create these sort of nested scatter systems and this example to show us how we can create very detailed sort of mid to far distance assets if you're not too worried about sort of intersections between different bits of geometry you can use a setup like this so all we're doing here is modulating the scale color rotation of these assets but it's actually one single rock that we're scanning scattering over the search so just by modulating those few parameters you can get very different results from this whole process yeah that's and then to some other examples of of how it's possible to get incredibly layered scatter systems using the tools so you know if you wanted to get a nice natural-looking clumping of your grasses or weeds on top of almost a layered effect of the rubble you can very easily do that as well okay so jumping the next example we'll look at the the physics painter okay so the physics painter is probably one of my favorite tools to play around with in Houdini it's a lot of fun to just you know scatter bits but the one of the biggest issues or downsides to it is the fact that when you're working with the tool you have to manually go in and fill in all fields to point to different scatter birds so in this example we're using this concrete barrier and we're going to show just how the live link tool speeds up this whole process so with the physics painter if you look here we have this paint meshes so normally you would have to go and populate this whole list and that can take some time so with the the physics painter tool selected if we make sure that the live link is running again so with the the physical painted know it's selected we jump back to bridge and export an LOD 5 of any scatter piece right the live link tool is smart enough to kind of see what's going on and figure out what you wanted to do and if you go back the physical painter node you'll see that the list gets properly populated for us so we can basically start painting it straightaway so you don't have any downtime in terms of your creative output in this process it's literally you click a couple buttons to to bring up the live link and export the assets that you want but from that point on you know it's you can just paint things and build up very very complex as from that and you know one of the the great things about the whole process is the fact that it allows you to just experiment with trying out new things because you may find that if you are you know inclined to be slightly lazy about you know going through the whole same process over and over because it is great tedious this allows you to bypass all that all of those tedious tasks and just jump into you know the creative outputs kind of side of things so with that done we're just gonna dry the tank there and I just want to have a quick tangent and show the so that's the output of the physics painter but I want to show the output of sort of a game-day of pipeline if you wanted to use an acid like this for a game for instance so what I'm going to do here is just re pass this two points there the CHEO note of the the physics factor and bring that in and just merge that in with the the concrete barrier there we go and so this process has been covered a lot by the game dev team I believe there's actually a note that kind of replaces this whole section but we'll just run through it step by step for now so what we're doing is just converting to a volume reshaping that I was less likely to retain the volume of that mesh a little bit more and converting to poly is fitting that I sit down running through a poly reduce and then creating UVs for that with the new UV or a UV tool in Houdini 17 so this gives us perfect you know launchpad if you will to start baking stuff down and getting this asset into a game you know very very quickly so if we just set a few parameters on this and just bake that down and show you the results so that's kind of what we get so top left we've got an asset that's you know you were traditionally used for like an effect shots or something like that whereas autumn riot we have a gamer's asset and if you look at the wireframe you know this the the gamedev asset is you know perfect for dropping into a game engine of your choice and the speaking of game side of things in real time the tool now works flawlessly with the mom as a tool bag rock which is probably the amazing game dev tool set so you know if you are using that it's just an amazing workflow because it all the game dev tool sets well sorry the mom is the tool that Rock know works perfectly with the the live link tools so you can get very very quick previews of your assets through there and you can just get is amazing you know real-time render this which is super cool but obviously if you're more FX or non real-time than the tool works just as well for you so the last example that we want to look at is actually how to merge a whole bunch of different assets from the the library into one single highly complex stretcher right so we're going to take all of these so the dead tree stump the branches and atlas and sort of a mossy texture and create this tree on the right so to start us off I'm just gonna diagnose or dig through a scene that we've created for this already and so if we jump into this you can see it's made up of three main parts right so you got your tree stump which is this section yeah if we died inside there to see what's going on and go inside this node here we need to create some attributes on here and so we're using the edge transport so to generate some curvature or gradient later going from the base to the tip of the plant and then from there we can just run it through a curve and that black and white value that we're seeing there is essentially saying where we want to scatter our branch geometry and the next steps next thing we're going to do is just measure the curvature and here we're just going to show that as a color so previously where we generated that gradient ramp from top to bottom and use that to drive the sort of the blending between two different channels that's essentially what we're gonna aim for here and so if we go and look inside them the material for this it's essentially exactly what we had set up previously right we just have a blending setup we are using redshift here again so it's the the exact same setup as before so in this case maybe we want to replace out the sort of the darker mas that we have in this crevice so we can just go back to the library go and find maybe a mosque that's we think is going to fit a little bit better maybe this one here making sure that the live link is is enabled or running we can just hit export and that's going to go through and replace that's at HD a so if we refresh that now we have a different sort of MAS material that's blending on top which is very nice okay so that's kind of the the main tree trunk section and next we can look at the branches so this is not specifically live link related but it's showing you know creative ways that you can use these tools to to build them up into something new so in this example basically all we're doing is taking each branch section and applying material and in that for loop what we're going to do is Center each one's that the base of each branch is at the origin and that just makes it very easy for us to scatter and know that they're going to be orientated correctly and again in this case we're just creating a color attribute that's you know linearly generated from the base to the tip of every branch then when we source the the base geometry in that we want to use to scatter the branches all we need to do is run it through a poly frame to generate new normals for us so that the branches don't stick out perpendicular to the the main brush but they kind of push in the direction and we're using that attributes created earlier which was using the edge transplant edge transport and that's basically it for the branches and from here we can look at the Atlas setup that we have so we haven't looked at emphases yet but let's do that now so with the atlases we have a way of dynamically splitting those up into separate chunks and kind of rotating them to like best fits so that we can plug and play an atlas like that it's straight into our model right so if you look in here we have the source subnet and in there we've got an Atlas splitter so if you check this out we've basically splitting each Atlas piece into its own with geometry applying bit of Bend and from there we we have the ability to to scatter that onto the branches so yeah the the setup for that is pretty straightforward we're just running through the same simple scattering node as before pointing it to the unpacked branch jump tree and yeah that's that's basically this entire assets kind of created and the amazing thing is that you can just modify a few seed values and you know you would have a completely unique bit of foliage so that's yeah that's kind of the examples that I have to show thank you so much for sure [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Quixel

Views: 28,481

Rating: 4.9220781 out of 5

Keywords: quixel, megascans, sidefx, houdini, webinar, bridge, livestream, stream, pbr, scans, gamedev, scan, photogrammetry, ue4, vfx, aaa, materials, textures, assets, 3D, 2D, library, livelink, live link

Id: sY0ie3_e0TM

Length: 33min 59sec (2039 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 21 2018