MtoA 509 | Leaf Shading | Realistic foliage using Arnold5 and Maya

hey everyone and welcome back to my channel in today's video m2a 509 i will be showing you how to create realistic leaves and foliage shaders so I will be using quick so many scans library because they have really high res textures and acids and for this tutorial I will be using a leaf atlas so there is a library you can search for leaves and you've got several different types of leaves and I will be using something similar to this which is an atlas of textures which means they fit in one UV space and you have different geometry which are moved to that UV space so you can actually render them so I have downloaded something from you I'm not sure exactly which one and if you want to follow along this tutorial step by step you wouldn't need to sign up here and maybe they actually have something in the free section and you can just download a free leaf acid or something and follow along the technique is kind of the same right before we start I have a light shader toolbox which should help look they're lighting artists to work in Maya and also in you can katana currently there's not much in these ones but Maya is the strongest I also have a few OSL shaders in here which you can just install and then it shows up in Maya in your menu in your shelf when your menu boy actually also there is a select group and it would be nice if you would join because I'm starting a small community on slack which which has already a few members so you can pose questions you can ask for feedback whatever you want to do we whatever you want to do so we've got 170 members so far yeah so feel free to join us here this is not about me posting stuff this is more a community thing where we should wish information which can be very helpful for sure okay so into the tutorial so I have just modeled a plane it's really basic a plane with these subdivisions what I did be I don't want to do it and to show you because it's a bit of tedious work but what I did I moved each UV space for each object into the proper position for the leaves I will show you what I did but I won't do it per se okay so first what I do let's go to the hypershade like this I have I have to dock everything because I just have limited space here as you can see okay so that's the UV editor okay so and this is the viewport so the first thing what I want to do is I want to get the textures into Maya so I have my finder or Explorer window and what I want to do I just want to select all the maps which I downloaded from quick sell mega scans I'll just drop them into the hypershade and I arranged them and this is what I get bump albedo normal translucency displacement roughness and opacity and just to show you how I actually got them let's just do it rather quick I go to Atlas I scroll down to a leaf section and I chose the highest res and I chose the exhaust for all and I just hit download obviously you don't need all the maps but I just don't want them all now so I guess we will be using albedo which is diffuse color we will be using displacement we will be using translucency roughness and opacity so we might skip these two ones because we can generate a pretty good bump map from the displacement map alright so the first thing what I like to do is create a shader ai standard surface shader and let's move these guys over let's rename this guy to a I leave shader and now if you go to light shaders or you do it manually you can actually rename the shading engine selected and it just takes the name of the shader and updates the name some convenience things so let's connect the albedo color out color I can't see it out color to base color and let's just open the outliner select all the leaves and assign this guy okay so this is now what happens you can see it in the viewport that this plane has this texture assigned and I will show you it with one single plane how I did it and then you can imagine how I did the rest right so here's a plane I scale it up and scale it like this move it here just for the reference sake and I assign the same shader and you can see the default behaviors like this so you get all the textures spread out on the whole model so what I did I selected the UV Zaandam UV editor and I just scale them down and then move them to a single leaf and then I fit it so it's matching right so this is what I did for all the different 16 leaves and then it looks like this okay so to just show you the other leaves quickly I'll just be unhiding them for a second and you can see how they look and if you put right all of these are there so let's just undo so I have my selection back and save this guy okay so the next thing I just have the albedo that connected I don't need to show you the UV editor and okay so let's just do do it one by one so that we see what's going on so the first thing which which has a main impact is displacement so let's connect this up first that's the way I like to work I I do the big surface changes or model changes first and then I do those smaller things after like roughness or bump map of things like that okay so let's connect up the displacement I open it up and I want to connect the out color red the red channel of the displacement and connect that to a displacement shader so displacement shader you don't need the shading engines you can delete that and connect the red channel to displacement and the output of that goes into the displacement shader of the shading engine so this is now the basic set up and let's just save and render and then we see how this looks like okay so this is now the current let's just do 50% it is and let's just go to basic mode and you can see what's happening the geo is being displaced and there seems to be a normal map as well so in the shading engine actually you have the option to generate a normal map on the fly so if I disable auto bump you see that there is no displacement happening but you are known a normal map happening but you still see the displacement so let's see the wireframe this is now what it currently looks like so we don't have enough detail to see anything relevant here so what you can do now you can go to each shape and enable subdivisions which wishes by default off but I don't want to do it one by one for all the lease I'll use the attribute control in the light shader script library and in here I can actually go to mesh Oh subdivisions and an a whoa cat Clark and also add some iterations so let's just do three set and you can see what's going on right on the fly this is now the subdivisions for that leaf I think this is a cape let's increase the displacement amount and going into the shader displacement shader and I'm increasing the scale let's go up to five so you can see the whole leaf got shifted upwards and the problem is because the zero value is not adjusted and in the shader you can set this to zero point five which is a zero zero value and then you can see that it is working so if I now reduces displacement amount this is what's happening you can see that right okay so let's just go something like this I think this looks pretty cool as a displacement also it's it's good enough in detail so the biggest detail comes down from little microscopic details and you get that from the bump so I enable the bump now and you can see the nice effect we see on it so we actually have a maybe a bit too strong effect so let's just dial this one down a bit I'm not sure why the basic is responding so strong to to light this is now the lighting pass occlusion should be nothing yeah so this is what it looks like I think it's a pretty neat shading is not happening too much just yet okay so I guess the next thing would be to do the cut out and let's connect the shaders opacity to the opacity slot in the AI standard so our color goes to opacity and let's see how that one looks it's like a simple black and white map right but why does it work the thing is it doesn't work because Arnold has Opaques which which which defines deep transparent shadows and also will work with this cat out effect so let's select all the leaves you would do it one by one if you go to the shape and disable opaque so I'm just doing it for all the ones opening attribute control again and going to mesh and I will do it off and now you can see we get the cut out immediately this is the bottom this is the top and you can see it almost looks like a leaf now so the next thing would be to hook up the roughness let's do that so the red channel goes into the specular roughness slot and this is now the mapped roughness Channel so this is how it looks like and I think leaves are a bit more shiny than that so we can actually adjust it so to do that I will create an AI range which is a remap or a new grade node and I'll connect the out color of this guy to the input and then I from here take the red Channel and go to the spec roughness so this is kind of currently just a bridge but now we will do the adjustments right so I go in here and I like to bring in some black values which are super shiny now and then I also like to bring in more rough values so we actually just increase the contrast so now it should look a bit weird and way too strong but now we can actually increase the output min value so we bring in overall roughness but we still have these high pings let's see how the map looks you see we get these darker spots and we have the high pings and we can't get more dark spots if we can clamp to clamp it a bit more but obviously this is up to you how far you want to push it okay so this is now how the leaf looks like and behaves on grazing angles and leaves are pretty shiny to be honest so it might be different like more dust on the leaves or more I don't know right resin I think it's called tree resin so that different options and obviously you you can for sure play with these values to get a stronger or less strong effect and then you can change the overall clamp let's see what we got here yeah no I'm just messing it up again so let's just do this quickly again so this is the default some more pings let's see what we got okay and we just overall want to increase the roughness like this okay so we got these pings and we have roughness so this is pretty cool so and the next step would be to control the subsurface scattering or the backlighting so this is currently what it looks like so to test it properly what I like to do is I just like to create a sphere move it here and up so you can actually see it and then in the renderer you can see it's casting a shadow and from the bottom there is nothing going on so let's connect the translucency map to the subsurface color so currently nothing happening because on default is subsurface scattering is off so I just encourage the base color so to subsurface let's bring that in so now you can see that we can see the sphere shadow onto the backside of the leaf so this is not what's happening and I think it's a bit too too soft so you can't control it with the radius now so if you have a radius of zero very low when the Ray hits the surface the radio radius defines how much does it spread inside the material so this is that's why you get these hard shadows because there is almost no diffusion so if you increase the radius you can see that the edge gets softer and you see more diffusion happening so this is how you would control it and I think we can control the map a bit so let's just create a a I color correct in between so we connect the out color to the input and then the out color of that to the subsurface color oh and it was the wrong one color correct not convert so let's do this again okay so that's this is now the bridge and now let's just increase the exposure a bit just to make these SSS a bit stronger and maybe shift the colors a bit towards green okay so now this is now on the top and honestly I think this is looking too waxy so what I always do is especially for these Leafs leave things I'll just reduce you the effect of subsurface scattering to I don't point seven or something something around here just that it has some diffuse contribution as well as well as subsurface scattering so you can you get both worlds right and this would kind of be the leaf so let's see how the other leaves look like if I unhide those okay so this is now the outer leaves and I picked a pretty dark one so let's see how this one looks like and you can see you get these nice pings on it and it's working pretty neat so let's see if I move like one leaf above the other and you can see that it is actually behaving properly and if we do it the other way around you can see it's it's working very nice and if let's just copy this tail of a copy so it's floating and if I now select a sphere there we go and you can see it's actually also bouncing off it big sphere and I think the overall effect is pretty nice and if especially if you have lots of leaves on top of each other you get this nice effect of doubling of translucency and I also have this reference image which I took today if I can get this on top and you can see like on especially this leaf is like dark from the top and then it's actually back scattering this light green and you can see some shadowing happening here as well and you know this is pretty diffused lighting there was no direct sunlight so in this environment here we have actually pretty direct Sun you can see it on the sphere how how direct it is lit yeah so this would be the way to actually do shading of shading leaves using opacity maps sorry about that and yeah so I also have a final renderer which I did before let's see how that looks yeah so this is now this would be the fun if there might be a bit too shiny but that's up to you so you can control it and yeah so I hope you did enjoy this quick tutorial on how to create proper leaves using opacity maps and creating or using backlighting with subsurface scattering with Arnold 5 and actually the latest m2a which is version 2.0 to 2 and core version 5 1 4 if you like this video please give me a thumbs up I would really appreciate that and if you haven't done so share it on your social media just to get out the word so thank you guys for tuning in and see you in the next one

Channel: Arvid Schneider

Views: 51,492

Keywords: 3D, Tutorial, Maya, Learning, Arvid, Schneider, urs3d, training, mtoa, render, teacher, advanced, tutorial, arnold, solidangle, katana, series, leaf, foliage, opacity, tree, sss, backlighting

Id: syWsooD0eNM

Length: 20min 31sec (1231 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 29 2017