MtoA 206 | Snow and Ice | Material series using Arnold 5 with Maya 2018

hey what's up everyone and welcome back to my channel today I will be presenting a new material series episode and this time I will be showing you how to set up a realistic-looking snow shader and if you have not done so please make sure you are subscribed to my channel and also be sure to have the notifications and abled I cannot show on my channel but if you go to if I go to solid angle for instance you can see this notification but I make sure it is on like this is off and make sure it's on and then you get always a post notification if I update in your tutorial or if I post a message on the community on YouTube so be sure to enable that and let's jump right into it so this is the render I have posted and I tested it out so this is kind of what we will be recreating you can see it's you can see the detail here it's not it's more like a frosty compressed snowball or frost on a in the fridge is something it's not really like soft and fluffy snow but what I wanted to show you is how to set this up and you can see this the nice subsurface scattering working around the edges and especially on thinner parts also I have a few references here as you can see this is now a nice and fluffy snow shader I'll snow share a snowball it's pretty similar but you can see that there are these flakes on top and with a simple shader it's hard to achieve this kind of effect and you but you can see the subsurface scattering it's pretty close to this and even the color like the blue tint it's working pretty similar to there and then we have a more bluer one and you can see the nice a cleans everywhere which I'm getting on here as well like these pings of speck and this is more compressed one and diffused lighting but you can see them the scattering effect how the light transmits through the surface here so let's jump into my iron set things are so currently what we have is a gray sphere let's just stop this guy down here and move this over and change this to Rena come save I moved to I'm saving a zambie corner they just because of the speed yeah so if I would use em a file that takes a lot longer to save and now I can just press ctrl s and it's saving almost instantly right so let's just start the render and see what we get so that's what it is it's pretty small for now so I guess I will render the full res which is 1k and then I will be using regions to get faster feedback like this okay so the first thing what I want to do is create a surface surface normal or displacement right and to do that I need to create a some procedural which helps me create this nice bumpy or like snowy effect right because now has different layers as you can see there's like there's this overall shape and then there's smaller frequency noise and then there's really really fine frequency noise as well so here's a good example you can see it there the overall shape then you can see on here the smaller bumps and then you have the high frequency stuff and I'll be trying to recreate that and I did kind of the same here so you have a bigger bomb a smaller bump and then the high frequency stuff and this should work with all shades especially are pretty simple and I'm not sure how good it will hold up in simulations and stuff like that but for background renders or like even all you can see how it holds up it's it's actually pretty good so how I did it I created just a simple AI noise like this let's call this AI noise low frequency like this and make sure this is on depends how how your UVs are but for this I think they are not as good so I'm using object or world it doesn't matter if you use world and it's moving then it will slide through so be sure to have object or PRF and before we connect this to the displacement stuff I'll just want to connect it to the base color and hit render so this is what we currently have and I want to first create the lower low frequency stuff so to get this working obviously we will be changing the scale maybe try 0.1 okay you can see that there is no bigger things happening and if I go to isolate it's just a bit nicer to render there we go what did I do now do you select there we go okay just one more check if I actually have the save render frames I do okay so this is the current noise level I think we can go a bit higher actually or just reduce it a bit more let's try all five okay so this would be now my low frequency noise and you can see it's currently here I just wanna offset it a bit just to get a different result I'm not sure just something where you can see some bumps happening here okay so this is the low frequency for now and what I want to do now I just connected up to a displacement shader first so creating a displacement deleting this shading engine and connecting the red channel to the displacement and displacement to the displacement there and selecting the shape so I'm just clicking in the render view to select the shape node go up here Arnold checking if I have subdivisions currently not so I first need to see if I can actually subdivide it so let's just start the render and let's see what we get and if I go to basic it's just a simple representation and you can see something is happening it it seems to go a lot bigger if I go to wireframe this is what we have and it is pretty dense already let's just see if I can actually subdivide it it's not one subdivision yeah so that is subdivided one more time which is pretty dense now and because we have a high frequency we can't do that or we can just use the bump mode instead but for now let's just really do the displacement so both are now on one scepter with this model which is pretty dense okay let's head over to basic stop the render and because we have a noise map which ranges from 0 to 1 we need to make sure our 0 value is 0.5 so values go up and down of the surface so let's do a point 5 and for now just disable all two bump now let's render again updating so now as we are subdividing the mash it takes a bit and there we go so we can hardly see any big breakup in the geometry so I think it's all connected right so let's just increase the displacement effect let's go a bit crazy I think I need to update again this placement is a bit buggy with the IPR it doesn't always update okay and now you can see that it's actually really balaji now and it's not around anymore you can see what's happening here like this is totally thick now this is really thin it's all kind of broken now so I think the noise is a bit too low let's just try 0.18 yeah let's just go with 0.1 and just for now just that we have faster iterations I just disabled subdivisions on both shapes just a second and then for the bigger end every will re-enable them okay so now we can see with a higher higher frequency we can see it's definitely subdividing it and breaking it so I guess the height is now too much so let's bring it down to maybe half of that so 1.5 and re-render okay I kind of like this yeah this is actually pretty good so this is now the really low subdivision displacement so with this defines kind of the shape obviously you can model that if you if you have the capacity to do so but I'm a lazy guy so I like to mostly do them with procedurals so control D on the noise that's called this mid frequency and like so and now we need to combine them somehow so the easiest way is to use a mix mix shader' I think it was intended to mix shaders actually but it also works pretty good with floats or like texture or procedurals so let's do that mix shader' let's just call this AI mix and then low and mid and the mid goes in two and the logos in shaded one the red channel goes to displacement so this is now the setup so we've got two maps stacked up together now and for this let's change the frequency to maybe let's try let's try one let's see what we get both one and render okay so this is actually way too high frequency already and the noise is also like the value that makes us too too much on the mid value so we need to I guess go point one maybe just hit the play button let's see if we can see an update yeah so now you can see that you you get the big frequency and then you get a bit smaller detail which is pretty nice so but it's too too big I guess so let's try maybe 0.5 let's see what we get yes and this is now pretty uniform that's we can try to add a few more details but if you increase the update octaves to two and it definitely adds a lot more detail but I still think it's a bit too too small so let's maybe try 0.25 okay so now we get these dents here and there which is pretty cool I did not save the snapshot but I think you can see that you get these little dents and you also get the bigger ones so now let's play a round of the mix a bit just to get it working as we want it to okay you get the big shapes and you get the smaller ones which is actually pretty cool I still think that the that the large the low frequency can be a bit stronger so to do so what you can do you can just increase the values in here which should also have the same effect so that's this is no 11.5 and you can see it got bigger which is nice it's a bit bit more it's a bit breaking the effect a bit more the silhouette of the snowball or Shadow Ball in this case and you can see it's pretty close to the reference you actually let's see this and this is also pretty dented up like you can see we almost have this detail now and now the last thing is depending how much detail you want to add let's add another one which is high frequency alrighty and let's duplicate ctrl V this guy as well and call this one mid high and so the thing is now the out colour of the mix look makes low mid goes into shaded one and the out for high frequency goes into Shayla 2 and the red channel this time goes into this placement and it's still live and I keep saving all the because sometimes it just crashes when you play around with displacement maps like that so the high frequency let's try maybe a value of two okay see what we get here okay this is interesting so you can see that and I'm not sure if this is if the detail if the subdivision is enough to represent this detail so let's just check out if I play around with the mix a bit okay so we get the break up and then we get the middle break up and then we get the high frequency stuff and you can see I didn't touch a shader or like we did not render a beauty render now I'm still working in the basic mode and this is how you would approach yourself start really with the basics so we got fast iterations and in the end work on the on the good of the high render settings and the shaders and all that stuff okay so let's go a bit higher here okay this is kind of neat you can see that the geometries now kind of edits limits it's not doing much anymore it's like we definitely need to subdivide the mesh more you can see the wireframe that's yeah because it's also triangulated it's it's not really working as expected I guess so let's try to stop divided and if this does not work we can try to use a bump instead remember that I disabled the older bump here because if you enable this here it you get a pretty different result we're not is it the different I think it's more detailed which is actually pretty cool let's just toggle this play yeah so it adds more detail to this which is a pretty cool effect but I still think we need to add a bit more subdivisions I know it's pretty high already but let's just see if I own a ballista see what we get now takes a while to subdivide and I think we got yeah we got a bit more detail you can see these dots here and there and what I forgot to do is for this high frequency let's just add a few more detail steps let's try 8 here and we can actually go over the mid on 4 as well which should change also quite a bit then so let's just update this update full scene yeah so you can see what happened now because I added the way more octaves to my noise map you can see we got all this detail now which looks pretty cool and you can see it's getting thicker up these seams are a bit unfortunate it's because of the model it's not really modeled as nice it doesn't have very good edge loops so this is why it's happening but I think overall this works already pretty nice so let's jump over to the shaded version and see what it looks like here okay I remember this is just the simple simple great query shader with a high roughness I think yeah pretty high so you can see already that you get these nice glints now these pings everywhere so this is kind of the effect what you see here like perfectly angled little glass planes which you reflect the sunlight and this is kind of what's happening here as well and if you want to get this detail obviously you need to kind of model those little snowflakes or have a procedure which create them and stuff like that all righty okay so this is what we got at the bottom at the top so first let's disable the subdivision and the displacements okay let's stop this guy render Global's Diagnostics this able bump and display a subdivision and displacement so now we will go into tweaking a shader it's easier to do that for now just because you want to have the proper scale and all that stuff all right so let's just render this region here and bring in the detail which we want so we want to have a scattering shader because light is being scattered through snow you can see it pretty nicely here the Sun hits this side and then it lights up on the other side pretty nice and obviously there's a lot of bounce happening as well so we get we sort that all that out so because a shader is diffuse or subsurface we completely disable the diffuse color and for now also the specs and then we introduce subsurface and a naval this guy and because we can let's just change it more to random walk which adds more detail to thin areas and already now you can see the effects of scattering happening if if we get a clean render so there we go you can see this looks already very promising it's it's very noisy III agree but you can see how it's being scattered how you get scattering in these thinner parts and all that which is pretty neat so let's just play around with the scale and first let's also change the radius so for now I'll just change it to red and this now tells us where we're scattering happens the most i'm just rendering with this region here and you can see the effect it's pretty similar already to this obviously it's red not blue but now let's tweak the scale if I bring down the scale to maybe point to you can see that we it's it's getting thinner like the light does not spread into the surface as much but obviously for snow we want to have a higher number so let's first change this to a teal color and maybe desaturate it and let's go a bit more into the blue and then these saturate I guess a bit more okay so this is now our colored for the transmission and let's bring up the scale maybe two two okay so this I guess was too much and snow is not perfectly white it's I think the whitest material on earth is actually snow and I think it's ninety percent white if I am I might be wrong but that's what I think of what I remember so this is now 90 percent whites and let's just add a tinge of blue really subtle maybe 0.1 okay so this is now what we currently have and it's not really what I would expect I so we need to work on the scale for sure let's just write near this guy again and let's also increase our samples for the scattering currently on one so let's go up to three and also let's while we added introduce a few more bounces so let's add three diffuse bounces and for now the spec is we can't ignore the spec I think because it's currently anyways non specular and you can see now it's it's pretty wide but you can see the effect so that's pretty awesome so let's go down to one to the default and wait until it resolves okay and you can see the effect gets a bit stronger now and also let's try to make it a bit darker and then you see even more how it's being how it's being a more translucent I guess okay so let's try to work with the anisotropy so the higher you increase then is a trophy the thinner thin parts look I guess it's like a bias towards the thin side and if to the other direction you get a thicker result okay so let's just render the whole image for now and you can see that it's definitely the blue is to teal we need to change the color a bit but overall I'm pretty happy and the shadow sides you get the nice blue affecting the nice scattering actually it's it's kind of an Arctic blue which you would see on the poles so if you want to go for that that's totally fine but I think I will desaturate it a bit and change the hue a bit to it more in the purple side okay but this is for sure working so what I said like reduce the saturation and change to blue to a bit like this maybe yeah this is actually pretty cool so this is more like now blue purplish which looks I think a lot better right so this is now the translucency move just these settings here nothing special so now let's just store this guy a snapshot and move this a bit higher so what I like to do which might not be 100% physical but I want to introduce two lobes of spec so one will be the overall Sheen of the of the eyes of the snow which is like the overall reflection which is a bit broad and rough and then I want to introduce this really shiny clean T effect so I will have a coat and a regular specular so let's introduce spec again and you can see now it looks like almost melted ice of the nice subsurface effect on top so this is what now be the molten ice or whatever so obviously what we don't want to go for this effect so let's introduce roughness to this guy so let's just check the spec lobe respect direct and introduce roughness and obviously because it's water we want to use water as a preset which just changes the IOR to 0.3 okay so now I just want to go for kind of this rough I think when we have the displacement back on this will look pretty cool and on obviously when we have that enabled I need to I guess we we adjust those values and then I want to add the coat bring that in and because we're in a spec we don't see that right now so let's go to the spec coat direct change this again to mortar on ice it's O Isis is even lower interesting and I would never go below 0.05 so I think point 1 is pretty good we can try to go to here but I think that's just for now stop at 1 point 1 and this would now be my two coats and if I check the beauty it's hard to see it actually but there is obviously because that's what you can should be able to see this there you go I just reduced able to subsurface scattering for a bit and you can see now this effect we get it's kind of like a metal now but because it's a very low IR this it might just work so let's stop the render save the scene I'll introduce subdivision and displacement and start again so this is now if the displacement I've been able and you can already see that we get these little glimpse of ice which looks pretty cool I must say and it's it's very high frequency I think it's because of the bump the auto bump is enabled and but I I still wants we still need to do something I think about the bump or the displacement in general I think it's it looks a bit too compressed and as I said this stuff is unfortunate it's because of the model and it's it's extruding along these edges or displacing and then it breaks so just ignore that but you can see the overall effect is pretty neat so if I go to my direct code direct you can see this actually it's looking pretty cool already and let's check the spec direct and I guess this might be a bit too rough now so let's just render this region here and reduce this a bit let's just go a bit lower it's because there's surface roughness to it now we don't need a higher high roughness at 0.6 so this is pretty cool I think so let's just check the code now all together yeah it's hard to see let's just dial down the exposure and now you can see how it's looking and I think I need to increase the the overall the mid frequency noise a bit because I like this detail which we get here and I think it's from the mid level so to do that I just stopped the render and that's mix this up more so now if I increase the mix here we get more of the mid let's try point 3 and start the render again save there we go that's just hit play so now I should reset subdivide and then we should see more detail on the surface here and we see more bumps happening which is pretty cool right so for the frequency for the high one I think it's a bit too much so let's just go down maybe you to 1.5 and this is obviously at some point it's preference how you think it looks good but these are the three steps I did to set up the the final render for this year so you can see it's a bit more frosty you can see it has a higher bump map I get or higher displacement here but overall it's it's working and I'm pretty sure I this one I rendered with out Auto bump so that's something you might might consider as well to rather subdivide you mesh more and then use use the real displacement instead of the waterbomb stuff so now obviously what you can do now is if it's you change your um your depth for the scattering and all that kind of stuff to get the look you want to achieve for your render I guess so what I still want to do I just want to reduce the the whiteness I still think because the Sun I'm using in here is very bright you can see everything gets really hot I just wanna well I guess this is kind of what would happen in the Sun this is like I guess 4:00 p.m. so on 3 p.m. stone it's always it's already very skew and not as intense anymore and you can see it's actually a bit warmer in the Sun because the sunlight is pretty warm which we get on the left but then on the shadow side it's pretty blue so this is kind of pretty close to what we see in this guy okay but first let's reduce the whiteness a tiny bit and I think the blue was I still think it's a bit too much too saturated okay so that helps for sure and let's play around with the radius of it let's let's try 0.25 and then 4 oh that was there was too much you can see now his looks almost like ice now because I accidentally put the scale to 125 which is also very interesting as you can see it's it looks more like rough ice or like Sulley Connor stuff like that so I wanted to do that actually alright so and also what I did for the beauty render I introduced depth of field and I like to do it in the basic mode well that's before we do that let's try one more thing I'll try to subdivide it two times and let's see if I can actually do that sometimes it's uh it takes too long I save but let's see alright so this is now with the higher subdivision on a value of two let's check the wireframe you can see it's very dense now and it depends on the machine well it looks almost like a black shadow knows that's how dense it is but it adds it adds more detail to it now you can see we get nicer pings now because there's more detail on the surface and even if I got just to stop down you can see how nice it looks and if you want to have a stronger reflection you can also break physicality a bit by changing the ioi let's just go maybe 0.5 here and you should see a lot more shiny pings instead of on the 0.3 so this is kind of how you can tweak it for sure so yeah I think this is actually pretty neat now let's check the shadow side what we see here yeah I think this helped a lot we're gonna also just now that's not do it on this one okay so for the depth of field which I like to do actually as well I rendered in this in the basic mode and then I select my render camera and I go to the shape and then and an Arnold tab we have the depth of field enable this focal distance and then you need to define the distance as well as you find out the distance what I tend to do is go into the viewport look through the same camera create a locator and then you move the locator what you want it to be in focus so this is now the distance so this is three hundred seventy nine eight two so I go to the camera half about it already three hundred I think seventy nine eight two let's just confirm nine eight two three seventeen yeah okay so this would be the focus focal distance so let's head over to the hypershade again or just to this layout here update full scene and then we need to adjust the aperture size so currently it's on zero which means there is no depth of field happening so let's draw a value of five let's see what we get if you hit the play button and updates and now you can see that this region is in focus and the rest is blurry it's I think it's a bit too much so let's try maybe one two five that's about it just should be a subtle effect and you can see now this is a bit out of focus it's not as crazy but it is I think this one was a bit more out of focus yeah a lot more so let's just try maybe two and then I like to have aperture blades and aperture blades if it's if it's out of focus you would see like these blades on like a bouquet effect on them so you typically see them around five or six if you go up to eight it's almost circular again so let's just try eight and then let's change the mode to shade it again and now let's see how this looks if I so you can see that this is pretty much out of focus which is cool and let's see for render this region here we should have a shop render which we get it looks pretty cool for sure just for the fun of it maybe let's just change the focus point so I'm copying the value just to paste it in a second again so let's try 50 okay let's try a hundred fifty okay the thing is it's still focused to this point oh no it's actually on it's actually focused where is it focused - I guess it's out of camera now yeah it's I thought we would see the bouquet a bit better here I'm not sure why we don't see that interesting anyways let's just continue so this is what we want and for final render settings it depends if you render with motion blur or if not typically I render of motion blur so I have highest settings and again if you're running work with that fulfil you should have at least four AAA samples more than what your high settings are so for this render you can see it's pretty clean in the back there so I went a bit crazy and I think I had 10/10 here I think something like this and then four here so I'll just render that and be back in a second so after a bit of rendering you can see the result and honestly I must say it doesn't look like snow anymore it's more like ice now but obviously it's still an interesting effect and if you want to go for ice I guess just follow this exactly and you get these these almost this molten snow or compressed snow ball and I think the result looks pretty good so this is now what I wanted to show you and I guess it should help you guys to just understand how to set up solid scattering shaders or something like that yeah and feel free to leave send me any renders or leave me feedback if you have any more suggestions and if you want to get the this exact shader I will upload this to the patreon side and you if you have the access to the source files you will get the link on patreon if you have if you haven't subscribed yet please do so it's I would HIGHLY appreciate that especially if we can actually reach 20k subscribers which is a big milestone for me cool and we almost there at 40 minutes now so I think this is long enough for this and I'm actually creating the snow shader to use in a logic scene and I'm preparing a nice lighting nice lighting tutorial using a snowy environment I don't want to spoil too much but this will be I guess my next favorite tutorial so thanks again for tuning in and I hope to see you in the next tutorial bye

Channel: Arvid Schneider

Views: 41,921

Keywords: 3D, Tutorial, Maya, Learning, Arvid, Schneider, urs3d, training, mtoa, render, teacher, advanced, tutorial, arnold, solidangle, katana, series, ice, snow, frost, shading

Id: s8Bq5Ou_Plc

Length: 39min 3sec (2343 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 16 2017