MtoA 521 | Crystal Series | Ep01

hello everyone and welcome back to the channel in today's video m2a 521 i will be talking about crystal or glass shaders that can get very complex if you want to add all the little details and structures to it so in this video in episode 1 I will be trying to show you how I can set it up and how you can use some of my techniques to create really amazing looking gemstones or ice blocks or something like that so this is kind of the reference I'm going for I always do that beforehand look for references compile them together and always have them visible while I work so I really enjoy the the transition of this white stuff at the bottom which goes up and cracks up the gemstone and you can see there's some our ID essence going on here some broken up bump maps and all that so I'm kind of trying to achieve something similar to this obviously it will not be exactly like that because I won't be doing any texture work it will all be procedurally done but before we jump into the whole endeavor of creating this fancy stuff there will be a short promotion section going on so I'm starting with my patreon channel as always and I know you can get all the source files and scene files of the tutorials actually since m2a 2:05 I have been uploading all the scene files so if you want to get access to that be sure to sign up for the source materials Tiye and you get always access to all the tutorials and whenever a published new stuff you were automatic you will automatically get the access for that and obviously if you want other things like support or promotion some help on your on your portfolio's I'll be happy to help you out if you subscribe to the proper tier and then as always I'm on Instagram I pushed my stuff out there so we can be part of the journey of creating new stuff so it's there you can see my tag up here if you want to join me right there and then I have also the light shader library which is a plugin for Maya for new focus Hana and it would look like many we have helper tools attribute control light control some fancy things to help you out in your day-to-day work and as a last promotional thing I have my first app in the App Store which is called surface 2.0 well you can actually visualize all your materials in your environment using AR kit which is kind of a real-time augmented reality and you always get measured RGB values for any type of metal material you can think of and as I said you can place some objects in the scene and look at them in real time so that was the kind of promotional face so let's dig into Maya and try setting up some nice-looking gemstones right so the first thing let's bring up the that the reference files again so first the first thing as you can see on the left the gemstone looks pretty clean really hard edges everywhere so the first thing what I try to do is add some BOM some break up to the whole thing and to do so I will create some some edge break ups using occlusion and also I will use the curvature shader so let's jump into that but before we start I just want to show you the Arnold version I'm using so you can follow along it's m2 a three point zero one with the core five one one zero so they gave Arnold or solid angle keeps pushing update so I just want to make sure that we're on the same page here and I'm using progressive render steps on a random bucket order so it's a bit more snappy ax as as before I have a doc and render region which you can toggle in toggle in your window doc and out of out of region so I have that enabled and I have to have to field enable just to get a bit more beautiful renders going on they should not impact render times at all it just should be a bit more noise in the back anyways okay so I have the crystal shader assigned you can see if I change this it adjusts the first thing which I want to do is work with the edges right so to get that going I will be using a curvature occlusion shader you might think why not curvature I'll show you in a bit there's like a slight difference between those two nodes let me just render a smaller portion so whenever I create a node the render doesn't really update so I have the AI occlusion and I have the AI curvature node and the bigger difference is or the one which I find very interesting for the occlusion is it has a built-in normal slot and I don't think the curvature does have it there is no normal camera for this guy so that's why I prefer using occlusion you can get the same results if you change some settings in the occlusion node to to get this curvature effect so I'm just plugging the out color to my ID slot which is just a temp slot which it can work with it doesn't affect the shader it's mostly used for writing out a Ovie's but I won't be using that so enabling isolate selected and selecting the occlusion this is what the default occlusion looks like and that's something I would expect as well but I want to invert the normal sort just takes the inside faces and I want to invert the black and white so whatever is white should be my my output mask and then obviously you need to change the scale so let's go really small value of 2 maybe and you can see that I'm kind of getting the same effect as a curvature node and I can prove you that if I connect the curvature and I do select for isolate selected for the curvature you kind of get the same thing if I would increase the radius so very similar results there just make sure you have self only for occlusion so it does not affect if similar objects get closer to it so that's the one thing and now comes already the first level kind of advanced hidden feature within the occlusion node which is a very nice feature you can directly as I said plug in a normal map in there to get some really interesting edge breakups so I'm creating a eye noise and let's try to connect this to the out color and see if it helps I don't think it will work directly that's just I don't because normally I what I need to do is create a normal map so I always use an AI bump 2d which connects to the noise of where the noise connects to and then it connects to the normal camera and now the occlusion looks a bit different which is more or less what I want to get going so we just need to adjust the height and we should be good and you can see what's going on now so I'm using the bump to create a breakup in the occlusion it's a very interesting effect and it can really get some good details out of your shaders so before we continue we would need to increase the detail so let's just increase the octaves to maybe five and you can really see now what that did like there's a really amazing breakup going on and then you should actually you can play around with all these values you can use a vector instead and then you can use an AI 3d bum 3d which is not a 2d 2-dimensional bump it's a three dimensional bump which is more interesting let's see if there's actually a big difference we need to increase the height again like that and let's see if there's a difference there should be a slight difference in the z-axis because that's the only component which gets added to this but all in all I think this disc will work and now we can play around with the epsilon values which is kind of like a detail adjustment you can see it's more cloudy now and it adds slowly more details to everything so small value keeps all the details from the map and it's kind of like a blur of the detail I guess and then you have the height which is just an overall contribution to the strength of it and you can see now this is a way more interesting result than the previous one so we can then in and after setting up this break up we can just plug this back into a bumm to denote so let's just create an album to DV so the result from the occlusion will directly plug into the BOM slot for the shader so if I would connect this to the normal camera we should get some bump effects going on here and then obviously you can change the height and you see what's going on you get this breakup obviously too strong but you get the idea you can also go into negative space so if you want to have an inverted one you can just go in the negative side and I think this is where we want to go maybe not as much but something similar so this would kind of resembled similar something like this where is that maybe something like that and then again you can combine different different bump maps together create interesting more interesting results let's see and we can for sure add some distortion to it so it's even more swirly scratch like bumps you can see that pattern now happening which is a lot nicer and we can now try to actually break up the displacement or the edges more for displacement we can see if that works with a curvature better so just creating a eye curvature node and oh we actually have this right here which is fine isolate select it on and let's do that okay so now let's try to get a nicer edge without the black spots in the middle so you can play around with the bias and increase the multiplier to kind of get rid of this bad edge and the more samples you put in the more accurate your result will be and the cleaner for sure so we can just try to actually use this either for a roughness map because most of the edges of the crystals are pretty worn out and rough so like something like this you can see the edge is pretty rough and dented so we can use this directly as a roughness map and we I think we should do it and combine it as well with this to get a very interesting more in a detailed roughness map as well so this would be we can try to plug it into displacement I don't think the shader works like that because the shading points are calculated before the Oh after the displacement the geometry displacement is happening so let's we can try it but I don't think really it will work maybe I'm wrong so if I connect the red channel I just need any float you can use RGB or any float value let's just stop the render because it happens to crash a lot if I play a run of displacements and bombs and all that so displacement goes into here and we want to have a we want to extrude a thing we want to extrude these edges so my zero value should be black which is zero and then one is the the edge which gets X extruded so this is kind of what we said have setup I think just update the render and see what we get no not much just yet as I said I saved right before so if we'll get a crash we should be fine yeah I just tried it again and it just didn't work so you I can't really plug in curvature to displacement and then hope for a runner so what I did in in the in my preview renders I actually sent this geometry to ZBrush and broken up the edges and I think I will do this now just to show you what I did and then we can work on the high res gr instead so let me just export the geometry quickly and then I'm back in ZBrush alright so we're back in Z and so the first thing which I want to do is I I want to use dynamesh I don't want to export a displacement map for now because this would be another tutorial for itself so I will be just using dynamesh and export the high res geometry I know all L can handle that just for the tutorials sake I think this will be more than enough so let's just go to geometry tap hit go to dynamesh disable blurring zero and maybe go on a resolution of maybe 600 let's try what we get shift F so yeah it's pretty dense but that's exactly what we're going for which is nice so now you can I all I will just kind of do this rather quickly oops what did I do now I just want to hit L actually just able lazy Mouse okay and I want to go to trim dynamics like that and now we can do this so we can actually do some nice edge breakup and I will bring back the reference as well maybe just place it somewhere here just so that we can see some edge breakups as well so I like really this guy and maybe that one but let's just work with this so you can just use a trim dynamic brush to clean up the edges and break out all these guys some more but I will be using a alpha brush as well with the scratches so I can kind of really quickly add some detail to all these edges and just by doing that we will get an a lot nicer looking gemstone and especially with dispersion and all these little shader effects the more detail you add to it the nice set will look so just some scratches inverted scratches I'm going really fast you just obviously you should spend a lot more time on this to get some nicer details but for tutorial 6 as I said I'll just kind of try to rush it and don't waste your time on this whole thing and these deep gouges they really help to sell cracks and and rocks because everything you can see is really choppy and broken up and I'm just trying to kind of recreate that and we will also do some some others brushing techniques and also just that you know I'm not a really a ZBrush guy I don't really know what I'm doing here I'm just scratching the surface as you literally actually so yeah I'm just getting my hands around it there's so many options in ZBrush it's very powerful yeah so I like to use the Damien as well where's that guy oh we can actually just move them as well whoops hitting F I just because these edges are so perfect I like to just kind of move them just to break it up some more so it's not a hundred percent accurate yeah let's just do some more trim dynamics just a few more things like this one is very clean so we can just do some stuff we can also add some noise patterns these things are a bit too clean so let's just remove the of them and just clean this up make it flatter something like that and just even just by doing these like kind of flat parts just these little things help to break up the edges to make it more interesting and this is all what it is great interesting edge is soft and smooth add some more details no masking not sure what that was but we can't just leave-- it it's it's something different not always the same repetition so if you'd be and you had nothing d for damn standard they're selected think I did yeah you can just add some like deeper gorget colleges or something which is very interesting something like that well sure what it is but man we were just under this step this is weird and as you can see I'm trying to raise you to no waste of time so I'm kind of rushing things a bit but as I said spend some more time on this to create interesting edges and you can also export displacement webs instead if you have nice UV this is definitely something you can do if you don't have them obviously go to the procedural way which I'm trying to show you but yeah so this is one definitely one way of adding detail pretty quick more edges doing this on the top is very clean ok I think we're almost done here on the ZBrush end they're different still lots of different brushes which you can use to add some more detail ok but I think if you if you check it before and after I think I think this will be good enough so I guess we have pretty a pretty high poly count now for thousands actually not too bad so let's just say export and we just go to 2m to Maya and then we say just to them is fine I guess okay so I'm just exported that exported done let's head over here and see if everything worked as expected so if I hit file import we should find 2m right there it's 26 megabytes and it should fit right on top of the low low res version over there yet there it is so we got some messy things because it assigns a share I just need to clean this up quickly does it render still going no ok that's a clue Jean this guy it's a bit slow I can just sort this out quickly all right so I just hit the low poly geometry and I assigned the same shader so this is now the high-res version of it so you can see all the nice edge breakups so this is kind of something I tend to do as well but it shouldn't be too crazy and obviously the poly count is a bit higher now we've got now 400 K but it's all will easily handle that so that's not a problem at all so let's just kick off the renter and see how this looks now with the higher geometry okay so it's cooking it's cooking and you can see now we get more interesting edges here definitely a more interesting result than before and we still have a pretty wide shader so normally I would light stuff in 0.8 gray which is a default for the industry which is 18 18 % gray and a roughness value of maybe 0.55 for typical gray Lambert sphere what you would see on set and you can see we got these nice edge details now very interesting I think so the bump is a bit too strong but this would be the first thing I would work with so I think this is something to to set up for a glass or crystal shader I just which should just work a bit more on the bumps so there is one little trick which I tend to use and especially if you have a procedural setup what I tend to work with is a world position pass and you can't really access the shade the other stuff from the shader so there's a hidden or a not so views known which is called a eye state vector which is pretty cool because you can access lots of things directly from the objects or shading points will position the derivatives I'm actually not sure what all this stuff is it's pretty fancy things so I will be using po4 will position pass and I will be converting this to a I think it's float there's an AI flow to RGB which is you can also just use a ramp actually but I like to do this so I want to use the Y Channel Y is the up Vector so Y connects to RGB and the out color for now just goes to the ID slot and if I'd save and I look through selected you should be it should be clear what we see I think well not clear as as black and white but you can see the values here in the bottom if you check them so at the bottom it's kind of around around one and then the higher I go the bigger the value so this is kind of a Y ramp and all I do after that is connect a rain shader I arranged which is just it has different different words in different DC C's so I think there is levels as one of them a few so anyways I just use arrange for Arnold and what it's doing you can just define a value range what you want to work in so if I save again on I enable smooth steps which is kind of a clamp between a different range and I want to clamp it from I check the highest point what's kind of 15 so I want to go from maybe 1 to 15 so we already get the ramp like so from the bottom is 0 and it goes up to kind of a white and then for sure you can play around with the values to clamp them some more and what I want to do is I want to have a strong a bump in the bottom of the gemstone and then a less strong bump value at the top right so this is kind of what I'm doing so just in the end we'll drive the bump height so and then you can just play around of the fall off if you need to and you see currently this is pretty uniform the cutoff rate and I want to have a kind of a noise pattern so it's not a uniform cut so again I will be using AI noise here and this one will connect let's just see so what I do I just slide the value here and I can see what's happening and if i play with the men i can actually move it up and down and i want to have it in a range of maybe three up to 6.5 so this is always how i do it to to know the values and then i just plug the red channel or any other flow channel into that and put min and then in the in the noise pattern I just changed my values from three to what did I have six point five I think it was so like that and now the noise is hardly visible at all but you can see there's still some something going on and in the range you see directly what I am what I'm trying to achieve and so I felt luck the eyesight selected using a little lock in the corner it's locking it to that node so I can easily change the values so you can see you know what I'm doing here I can move it up move it down [Music] let's see what we want to do actually and obviously you can add more detail if you want to do the noise and more Distortion just for an interesting effect like that and then you can also invert the map if you if you need to because in the end this should drive the the bump height and we want to have a strong evaluate the bottom and a less strong value at the top so what we want to do is I think we can just invert these guys and we have an inverted map so I want to have a base so currently we have a bump value of negative 200 which is interesting which is horribly hard to achieve now I think because the range doesn't go negative so we would need to either disable the smooth stepping which we can see what we get then but I rather just invert the map like so anyway so let's just do a range of 200 like that and maybe a really soft value of 0.1 or a zero point ten so we have point end at the top and we have a value of two at point two hundred so let's plug this guy directly into my bump height hit save and just see what we get now and you can see we have a stronger bump at the bottom and then it kind of fades out for the top part and now we can just easily play around with mine and with the arranged shader and introduce some more stuff at the top we can make the bottom stronger if need be so now we have a really strong base bump and it's really fading off towards the top which is exactly what I was going for okay that's a wireframe alright so now we just need to invert it so we can either do a multiplier or we can swap the black and whites I think that's the easiest way to do if I just swap them out right here so I think if I just rearrange again I'm not sure if this will work with contest it out so let's just connect this here and then we just use this ramp as an inverter so currently this is what it looks like and if I just swap these two out we should have an inverted map it is inverted obviously the ranges are now different huh I think we know it's not that easy actually because we're just changing the valleys we're not going into negative values so let me think of something quickly all right so just a little a little multiply divide node in between so I'm plugging in the range color into the multiply divide input 1 and then I'm just multiplying everything by negative 1 and we get an inverted map and this will this one drives now our bump map so I think this is pretty cool and we can also play around with the roughness but I think because the roughness is so tied into the glass this should be in the next next step so let's just clean this up a bit and see what else we can do in terms of creating more edge detail so we have a pretty basic one so kind of like that and so forth I think we should now for the next episode we should concentrate on the glass shader so the first part was to creating some interesting details on it and then for the next one we will be jumping into the gemstone material so thank you guys for tuning in for episode one and as always if you want to follow along be sure to become a patreon to get access to the source source scene files and follow along in a tutorial and yeah thanks for tuning in and I see you then

Channel: Arvid Schneider

Views: 44,883

Keywords: training, tutorial, learning, lesson, beginner, advanced, lookdev, lighting, shading, maya, arnold, rendering, procedural, crystal, ice, arvid schneider, autodesk maya 2018, arvid, mtoa

Id: 9Lji0C8bQZQ

Length: 28min 58sec (1738 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 04 2018