Megascans Workflow in RenderMan 23 for Maya Part 1

hey everyone Jeremy here hey I'm back with another video and this time we're going to cover how to set up mega scans assets for use with render man now I've been using mega scans assets extensively over the past I would say year 18 months and it's completely changed the way I approach my work in my shots there's an extensive collection of assets available at your fingertips so you can spend less time creating these things and more time building scenes and telling stories and doing the fun stuff in my opinion so I thought it'd be beneficial to jump in and set up a few different assets a few different ways and then in a subsequent video I am going to take some assets and actually build a scene from scratch so this video we're going to set up a few assets and the first one will be coming from the qixels client application and the second asset I'll just pull straight from the web so we can kind of take both approaches even though they're they're about the same so with that let's get started alright so I have quick sbrick open on my desktop and the reason why I prefer quick so bridge over the normal web application is you can actually link assets to your DCC applications such as Maya now render man isn't a supported renderer at the current moment so the only benefit of doing using bridge right now is to automatically port over the geometry into your scene now for a single asset that doesn't seem like a time saver but for things like grasses and plants where there are many varieties or in variations it is actually a time saver so that's why I take the bridge approach for most of what I do so the first thing I'm going to do is open up bridge it's a free download for qixels subscribers so open that up and from here you can search directly and find what you're looking for they have several collections that kind of group similar assets together or you can search just their whole library so for this demo I'm gonna go to some assets they already have and I'm gonna look for a grass so the scene I want to do is is like a grassy field so I'm going to take the swamp grass for example we'll set this one up and in this example I have already downloaded it so that's why I says redownload or export for something that I have not downloaded locally to my hard drive you'll get this you'll get this the download button here so for the swamp grass if we look the asset info gives you a little blurb about it the download settings is where you're going to set which maps you want and which resolutions Sophie typically I go for k f bx lote level of detail 0 so the reason why they have multiple LOD ziz packages such as unreal can automatically change the level of detail geometry based on the distance from the camera and so forth so that's what these are really geared toward real time applications but for something like render man I really just want a high resolution model that I can set up and using my scenes so I'm going to download the level of detail 0 which is the high res the highest res available for this particular asset if we go down to the maps I'm what I have selected is what I typically download to set up the albedo displacement the normal roughness translucency Amrita clusion cavity opacity and specular I don't eat gloss because I'm downloading the roughness and I don't typically use the bump because the normal and the combination of normal and displacement suit my needs so with that I'm actually going to you can just click redownload or in a case where you down like a new asset just click download and you'll get a progress bar it's with a redownload it probably didn't show but it's downloaded locally now then once you have it downloaded you'll actually have options to export so to export to your application in my instance I'm going to be using Maya you actually have to have a Maya plug-in running and then my instance running as well so to do that so right out of the gate if I were to click export right now I'm gonna get an error because it could not send data over port yada yada I don't have that plug-in running in Maya right now so that's I'm just doing this as an example on how to get this working so you go over to export settings export - and you can select your application of choice for me it's Maya and they have a little script here that you need to run so I'm gonna copy it to my clipboard when I go over to Maya and in this little line or in the script editor usually it's defaulted to Mel I'm gonna click that to switch it to Python paste that in and hit enter now that's gonna launch the plug-in and a custom shelf for the bridge to use so with that running if I were to now again verify my maps and click export I should get exported successfully well I actually you'll come over here you know you'll notice your current render engine is not supported well I'm not using or like I mentioned before render man isn't a supported renderer for bridge so what we have to do is load Arnold which is built into Maya to export the geometry and then we can switch back over to render man so to find the Arnold to plug-in it I believe it's called m2a yep and it's already loaded in my case you'll just want to click that to load Arnold and then in your render settings change it over to the Arnold renderer so now we're using Arnold I'm going to open the bridge back up and click export exporting to Maya successfully and we can actually see Maya's doing stuff now which is a bit just a good sign so sure it loads up you can see that we have our all of our variations for a swamp grass there are actually 12 different variations and now this is where I prefer using the bridge over the web application because otherwise I would be manually importing 12 different FBX files which takes time so it's a time-saver even though the shaders aren't set up for my use it still saves me some time so I want to switch the renderer back over to render man and I'm going to start setting this up so I'm going to open up the hypershade I'm going to select all of these and I'm just going to assign the default shader to it and delete all the Arnold shaders that were initially set up maybe one day the bridge will support riding around and that would be a huge huge huge time-saver so in my scene now I've got 12 different variations of this swamp grass well when you click download' in the bridge application it downloads the assets with all these maps to a location and for my location it is down a path CG quick slow bridge downloaded so I'm gonna go find the the grass that I've just downloaded it's got kind of code names that use can be hard to decipher but it's this is the one it's got 12 variations in it there's gonna be a textures folder Atlas and here are here are the textures that I had selected over in the bridge so I like to leave them in a central location now this isn't this is definitely pipeline specific if you're sharing projects you want to take all these textures package them up in your project but for this purpose I'm gonna leave them down the bridge path and then I'm going to link all my pxr textures to there so the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna be working in the hypershade for a bit so I'm just gonna maximize this window I'm gonna start with a px er surface the base of all of the magic here so I'm going to name this actually I'm not going to name this yet I'll run the script later that renames them all I'm gonna start pulling in all the textures that I need a px our texture I'm going to go to download it 3d plant textures and list I'm just gonna load these up one at a time albedo it's gonna be our diffuse so we want to linearize that i'll plug that into the color i'm going to have another px our texture I'm just gonna work through this I kind of have a force of you know a method to this I just kind of step through the roughness I'm not going to linearize that because it's the data texture result our specular roughness and you'll notice I'm duplicating these I have a hot key set up to duplicate them so I'll be using that quite a bit so after the roughness I'm gonna plug in the specular to the specular face color when I take the edge color to white and since this is a color note i am going to linearize that one stepping down the line here let's go opacity so the Alpha cutouts do not want to linearize that I'm going to take that plug that into the presence take another px our texture there should be a translucency so that is going to be linearized so under the Advanced tab under diffuse we're gonna enable double sided because these plants are single sided phases we want textures to be visible on both sides of those phases so I'm going to plug in the the translucency into the transmitted color and typically the transmit gain I'm going to stick around point three point four this is shot specific you can fine-tune this later but for that I'll leave that there now keep rocking down these so we have a few so we have the ambient occlusion the cavity and displacement and the normal left actually so I'm going to go the ambient occlusion and what I typically do with the ambient occlusion is multiply this over the diffuse or the albedo so I'm gonna do a Pixar blend I'm going to plug in the albedo into the bottom the ambi occlusion into the top and we do not want to linearize the ambient occlusion we're gonna set the operation to multiply and I'll plug that in additive color so I could have saved some time and done that now same concept for the cavity map cavity maps are typically used in real time to fake some of the occluded areas and the specular so I'm going to load in the cavity map again not linearized and I'm going to multiply this over the specular amount the same way that I did the ambient occlusion multiplied and that's gonna be my specular face color so I've got a lot of excellent maps full 4k maps that comes straight from quick so which is awesome so next one I'm gonna do a Peaks our normal map that takes a different node Peaks our normal map node I'm gonna load anything normal for this and that's gonna be at the bottom the Global's the bump slot here and now the only remaining item is going to be the displacement so I'm gonna take a peak sour texture nonlinear eyes I'm going to take the EXR now the download settings that downloads a JPEG as well in case you want to use it or at least reference it just to look at I'm gonna load up the EXR now anytime you do a displacement let's setup otherwise specifically we're gonna be using a displacement transform node and the reason for this note is to actually Center the displacement the grayscale that way it takes the incoming map 50% gray value and that sets the surface the mid of the surface so anything above 50% gray is going to displace upward anything below 50% gray in the image is going to displace downward and that's what this remapping mode does so I'm going to take the result are plug it into the displacement scalar of the displace transform and then their result float from the displace transform and plug it into a px are displace node into the dist scalar slot now to hook this up there are a few ways to do this in my render man preferences I have it set up to use the Maya plugs if you have it set up to use the render mount plugs this will be set up differently for you if you're using the Maya plugs you take the output color and plug it into the displacement shader of the shading rule like so if you're using render man plugs you take the out color and plug it into the other slot the arm and displacement that's what you do but I'm using the Maya plugs I'm just used to this setup that's what I have stuck with so with that this shader should be set up I'm going to go back here select all my geometry and assign it now you might have noticed about some of my previous videos I'm pretty crazy about naming these things and having all these pxr textures kind of makes me a little crazy well I have a script that kind of goes through and can rename stuff so I don't I don't typically worry about it as I'm creating things I go back and clean it up later that's just kind of how if I've grown to to work so I have this shader assigned to all of these variations I'm going to just take these I'm gonna space these out just so I can get a good feel for how they're looking there's probably a script to do this as well but I'm just gonna drag them out I'm big into scripting saves them saves me a lot of time in most tasks all right so we have that we need to add some lights so my render man is loaded right around 23 one is what I'm using here I'm just gonna add a dome light and I'm just let's throw in just the luck so outdoor shot and I'm going to turn off primary visibility so I can get a better look at these things blades of grass so I'm gonna save this in my assets this is gonna be swamp grass so I'm just gonna save the scene typically in my shots I set up my assets in a separate scene and then import them into my master scene after they're all set up just keeps things cleaner that way so from this I if you this is a fresh new asset you've never rendered all of your textures need to be converted to the dot text format render man proprietary format so I would go in and do a batch preview render and that will run through and do a TX make on all of your textures now I've already run through this so my textures are there so I'm just gonna kick off an IPR to start things off [Music] so this will load up and actually apparently my all my textures weren't converted they're converting them in real time right now you'll see the the blue and gray render man logo textures to indicate that those textures are being converted so I'm just going to pause just for a minute while these textures convert all right so my textures are converted sorry about that I thought they had I had already previously converted them but it just takes a moment the higher the resolution the longer it's going to take to convert so keep that in mind so here we are running an IPR things are looking pretty decent there's a few things on the geometry I like to do to set these up a little further so as the IPR is running I'll see with the resolution it's hard going to a single monitor working I want to grab all the geometry I'm gonna open up the attribute spreadsheet which windows general editors attributes spreadsheet I have a hotkey I'm gonna go over to the render man tab and I'm going to apply a subdivision scheme to these guys capital Clark so we go review this I hit the T key that should the it window should stay on top so now it's going to subdivide these I've noticed in some assets these ones actually look pretty good but some assets that you can kind of see the faceting on them so I do tend to subdivide these assets it is going to take them on at moment as they subdivide looking good and also for one more thing I like to do is that I see some areas where there could potentially be some issues with the displacement and the displacement bound so I'm going to come back over here into the attributes spreadsheet I still have my all my geometry selected scroll over to the displacement boundary I just want to look at some areas here maybe in here if they fill out if the bound isn't big enough and you're displacing beyond that you'll get clipping of the geometry so that's what the displacement bound is is there to set [Music] all right and yet it does look like some of these areas have been filled in which means there was some clipping I want to go up to 0.4 on the displacement bound to play it safe I like to go just a little high just so there's no additional clipping that goes on and that's looking good so one thing I like to do now these look these look actually really good just right out of the gate one thing I like to do I'm gonna kill this IPR session I want to set up a few a Ovie's just so I can check some of the levels the specular and the translucency and you can't add those all the IP r's running so I killed the IPR I'm gonna go into my render settings which are hidden going to the a Ovie's I'm going to add direct diffuse direct specular and subsurface and launch another IPR so the direct diffuse and direct specular are self-explanatory you'll see that the albedo and the specular contribution of the texture that we apply and the subsurface is where we'll see the double sided transmitted amount so if we come here now we have some channels if I just hit the down arrow in my it window you can see here's the diffuse there's the specular and there's the subsurface which is subtle and I've found that if if that gets driven too high they start looking fluorescent and unnatural so we can kind of play with that if I go back over here into my hypershade actually switch the side that this is on if I go into my shader and say drive this up to one you should see that this gets boosted quite a bit and there we go it looks like I said a little translucent or not translucent a little fluorescent so I'm gonna just tone that back down to 0.3 point for range and again all this stuff can be tweets on a per shot basis and I fully expect to do so but I like to have a good base shader setup before exporting so now we're looking good all right so that that in a nutshell is how I would set up some of these variations assets such as plants and grasses this kind of a setup now I mentioned I do have a script to rename I it's a pretty hack up script but I'm going to open the script editor and if you're interested I could paste it in there or I could put it in the description it's just a find replace on the file names so I'm gonna just take out all the px ours and replace them with swamp and brass underscore I have all my stuff highlighted I'm just going to run that so it's running PI Melkor takes a bit to load and try to avoid it when I can't I probably don't need it in this script but it does take a sec for a PI ml to to load and run but you'll see after it's done all my Peaks are textures have been renamed to swamp grass underscore whatever they were so I'm sure so keeps things clean I like to do that keep my stuff organized so from here I'm going to prepare these for export I'm going to group these swamp grass and I'm going to take them back to the origin so I'm gonna again open up that tribute spreadsheet go over to translate and zero these out so now they're stacked and ready for say a mash Network or or something like that so I hit save I'm going to do a file export selected and I'm going to export these as a Maya binary grass export export selection so with that when I import that scene that I just exported I'm going to get this group of swamp grass and I'm going to get the shader which is perfect so from here I'm going to then jump over into the web application and we'll set up an asset that a high poly asset like a rock or a boulder and show you how to set those up so here I have the mega scans website up it's basically the same interface as the the bridge application but in case you don't have bridge or you just prefer to go off the web I'm going to go down this route for this asset so for this I again I'm going to go to ones that I've already purchased but you can find one that you'd like and I'm gonna find something I'm looking for a rock specifically or a boulder that kind of goes along with this grassy field that I'm gonna be setting up now I think I like this one mossy rock I like the kind of the directionality of the moss that is coming off the sides here so I'm gonna select this guy and the download settings here is a little different it's this link right here so for this asset you can go up to 8k which I'm going to take you have specific presets that they've set up for you and then again FBX is the as the file type I'd like now for this particular asset we're not dealing with a lot several variations of the same asset we're dealing with one high poly asset so for my purposes again I don't need these level of details I'm not using this in real time applications and for this there's actually a high poly source this is the the scan data so for an asset that you would like to have close to the camera very high detailed hero asset I would use the high poly source if it's gonna be somewhat in the background or blurred out with depth of field you could go down to the level of detail 0 or 1 but for this case I want to take the high poly source and you can actually get the Z tool from ZBrush as well if you're actually interested I'm gonna go and then for the Maps albedo bump I don't need the cavity displacement the fuzz this particular asset has a fuzz map which is there to indicate things like Moss that have kind of a fuzzy reflection and specularity to them don't need the gloss and then for the high poly source I'm going to take the normal bump and I don't need the normal the normal map would be specific to the level of detail the normal bump is gonna be more high-frequency detail that is applicable to the high poly source the roughness map and specularity now if you're confused or ever curious on what some of these maps are crucial has a good question in their Q&A area that kind of outlines the specific purposes of these maps so if you just search on their website you can get a breakdown of all these different stuff so for like for example for the normal Bluff if you didn't know what it was it has a good description of that so I can leave a link to this page in the bottom of the the video as well so with that I have all of my stuff set up here my download settings and I'm gonna click download you know download as a zip you'll notice as I hover over you can download assets up to four times faster using bridge so I guess that's another perk of using the bridge you get quicker downloads so my Boulder has been downloaded I'm going to open it up here and it's just a zip file so now it's up to you to organize this as well so I kind of provided a few perks of using the bridge the bridge has a central location where it downloads all of the files to and you can keep them there here now you just have a an archive that you need a place or organize how you see fit so for my example I'm just gonna take this whole folder I'm going to take it over to the assets directory of my project and paste it in there and then reference all the textures from there so in here we can see we have all the maps plus a an FBX file and that's what we're going to be importing and setting up so in my I'm going to create a new scene fresh scene here and we don't need to worry about Arnold this time around because we are not using the bridge to link the asset so I'm going to go directly to import this and I'm going to import my FBX file and this is a high poly asset it's going to take a moment to import alright so it came in and we are just under a million faces so it is very dense but that's great for close-up shots or something where you need that super high detail you can see very very high detail scanned so we're gonna set it up very similar to how we did the grass we're going to just kind of step through the textures and assign them to the peaks our surface one at a time so I just assigned the base Lambert and deleted the default material that came with the FBX and we're gonna step through the process now this is very similar that some of the maps are gonna be a little different this time around so it'll be kind of a good learning experience to walk through this one as well so we're gonna go to this I'm gonna step through now these are 8k maps even just loading them in the in the preview takes a half second or so so forgive me as it as we chug through this so that's something I want to do so I'm gonna plug this in and I can't remember if there was an ambient occlusion with this guy or not I don't see I see a cavity fuzz bump I don't see em be in occlusion just double check there is not so on the plants I multiplied the ami occlusion over the diffuse this doesn't have it so I'm just going to plug this straight in to the color slot and I'm going to linearize that okay I'm gonna step through next one I'm going to do the roughness not linearized into the specular roughness I'm gonna take the specular linearise that because it's a color and I noticed there is a cavity map as well so I'm going to just take this and do this all at the same time I'm gonna do what I did previously I'm gonna multiply them together and there's no reason top or bottom that multiplies a multiplier just your G getting of the result multiplied from the two i just have a tendency to plug them in a specific order so this is going to be this specular face the edge color i'm going to take the white let's see what else do we have we have a fuzz map so this is going to be white areas or where say for example moss is going to be on this rock and you're gonna get some of that spas specularity so i'm going to load this up and it's a data map so we're not going to linearize it and i don't think it's on the high level so we're going to take the result R and plug it into the fuzz gain and we have I think we've knocked them all out so we don't one thing - no actually and I didn't need to download this is we do not need displacement on the high poly source the displacement is going to be taken based off of the high poly for the 11th level of detail geometry so I'm not going to be displacing this mesh so for that we actually are done with those maps we have a normal map though so we're gonna plug in the normal bump and it's got a bug here it's loading an old cached texture into the slot let's see if I can get it to refresh plug this in [Music] and a little bug there I'm gonna pause this alright so I actually had to restart Maya to get this to populate correctly I've seen this before the normal map node sometimes gets buggy so anyway I just loaded in that the normal map for this I'm gonna plug this in and this is actually all we need we don't need displacement like I mentioned before so I'm gonna sign this to that and what I'm gonna do now is do a batch preview render that's going to convert the textures some of them have already been converted so I'm going to pause this while they convert all right so my textures have converted and it's going to go on and do a render I actually don't want it to I just wanted to convert the texture so I'm going to delete that so at this point I'm going to send up set up a few a Ovie's just to check all the textures are looking I'm gonna go diffuse spec I don't need subsurface here but I'm gonna go the fuzz because there was a fuzz map I'm gonna plug that in as well and then I also need a light source so let's just plug in the luxo dome light turnoff primary visibility set this up for frame this little better here and I'm gonna kick off an IPR also something to note here is we don't need to subdivide this mesh either because it's so high poly you'd be doing more harm than good so right away where we look pretty good so let's step through here's our diffuse specular just looking about right and then here's our fuzz most of the specular is coming from the fuzz as we can tell here's our spec and the fuzz which is what we'd expect so the fuzz is gonna get this for now specularity from areas such as the moss that that's kind of fuzzy so we can kind of orbit either the object or the light around just to kind of preview what this looks like I think it looks good the great thing about mega scans is these maps come from scan data so there shouldn't be a whole lot of tweaking involved when setting up something basic like this when it comes to translucency and subsurface that stuff is more subjective and shot specific but stuff like albedo and specular is usually pretty spot-on so I'm going to cancel the or the stop the IPR and in my case this is a heavy asset when I entered into my main scene I don't want and I might have a few copies of this and I don't want several million faces just from copying this around so I'm gonna export this as a rib a rib archive and then import the rib archive into my scene so the rib is gonna have the texture baked into it which is fine because I don't see myself tweaking the shader for this specific asset so to do that I want to highlight it render man archive and we're gonna export selected to rib now one thing before I do that I'll want to make sure in my plugin manager that I have ABC export Olympic cash export plug-in loaded otherwise you're not gonna get a little bit cash exported with the rib which is what you use to visualize the geometry when you import the archive so it is loaded so I'm going to archive exports selected to rib Rock rib export selection so that should be all we need to do from there so now when we for example have a fresh scene and I want to import that and go tools or archive rather import Wregget rib archive and we can import this rib and it's gonna you notice there's an Olympic cache file alongside the rib so when we load that you'll notice I'm getting the rib file and what I'm actually seeing is that cache that was exported the the rib itself is just a reference so that's how that is so if I were to rendered in this blank scene I'm going to get the same results from the rib so I'm just gonna do a quick dome light setup I'm gonna frame this and I'm going to just run an IPR and you'll see I get the same exact setup as I did with the real geometry even though this is just a rip off [Music] so cool we went through two separate ways to set up some mega scans assets one with quick sabrage and one straight from the web now in the next video I'd like to take this a step further and produce a shot something like this using these assets that we've set up so these are just a handful of different grasses that I took from the quick celeb rarey here's the rock I just set up there's a couple of copies of that in there and then a kind of this ground surface as well as is is also a mega scans surface asset as well so in the next video we'll go and set this up we'll kind of step through the scene and and build it from scratch so anyway thank you if you have any comments or questions post them below and I'll get back to you or any other suggestions for videos I'd appreciate it anyway thanks

Channel: Jeremy Heintz

Views: 4,429

Keywords: maya, renderman, 3d, rendering, quixel, megascans, lighting

Id: -eRATH28pno

Length: 43min 6sec (2586 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 21 2020