Photorealistic Texture Workflow in Foundry's Mari

hello everyone sing web for realistic texture workflow and Mari with Paulina my name is Elise here to introduce Paul and my colleague Rory Watford who is the mari product manager to start the webinar we have a quick boundary update please note that for quality purposes Paul's presentation is pre-recorded but as you can see he is here live to chat and answer questions at the end Paul is joining from New Zealand Rory is in London and I'm here in Austin Texas the three of us are excited to connect with you from across the world the three people from five continents registered for this webinar and know we miss being with you in person these virtual events are special because it's allowed us to connect our global community with that being said pop into our chat and let us know where you're watching from also familiarize yourself with other your tags if you have questions that you would like Paul or Rory to answer please add it into the question section under the pull tab there are a couple questions for you to answer as well so please be sure to check those out today is our fifth virtual event this month and we have ten more scheduled from now until the end of May in June we will logged Foundry live which is an online conference featuring a series of customer and product presentations focused on project pipelines and tools check out our website found recom backslash events to see what is coming up and if you have any feedback please send it to virtual events at Boundary calm I'd also like to just mention that this is a great time to check out other foundry products we've reset all of our trials in 30 days and for katana it's been reset to 90 days um furthermore I just want to mention our resources available we have some great Maori resources on our insight hub our learning portal and our education page on our education page students and educators are able to access the education collective which includes Mari modo nuke studio and katana I'm either free for their first year or at a highly discounted price also on social media if you are part of the Instagram community and you post your work be sure tag it with native Mari all of your creations are truly beautiful and we love to see your work here we just like to let you know where you will be able to find us we have our insights hub on our website found recom or a post about VFX industry trends we recently did an artist spotlight on rain Anderson from ILM where he talks about using Mars it's a great article to check out we'll be sure to post that and try chat for you guys to read and also we're available on the following social media channels and finally foundry is a supporter of the following organizations if you're interested in becoming a mentor access VFX is a great community to be to be involved in also the a SWF ACM SIGGRAPH in the visual effects society are always looking for new members check out their website if you're interested in getting involved so with that being said thank you again for joining us today we'll roll a quick video on Mario's material systems and then Rory will give us a mari product update [Music] [Music] [Music] hi everyone yeah I'm Rory the apartment from Ari I just wanted to give you guys an update and what Mari is doing at the moment back in foundry so we're currently working on extending feather extending a material system like the video we just saw there so 2019 was a great year and the feedback we got from you guys about our four six release was that it was one of the best releases for Mari ever oh she's fantastic and our plans are for our feature next feature release in 2020 is to carry on the pace that we set with 4.6 and here I'd like to show you a few stuff it's and designs of features that we're looking to bring into our next feature release so first things on the left is the design for the new shelf so we're giving Mari shelf a complete overhaul preview icon icons can add scale to your preference you can search for shelf items across all of your shelves by type by name and by organizational tag which can be added to materials and imperial tooltips who will now also show that the artist for more information about material including cheer models built against organizational tags that will come out you can now add to materials as well as all gia channel aliases the material has authored against on the right hand side is the design lookup preview mock-up of the our feature which will be procedural layer masks and custom seed rolls so essentially the no goth gizmo is kind of been given upgrade and you'll be able to export it as a custom procedural package on disk which will then be include all the reference images like grunge maps that you use in your business and they'll when you exploit this little generator preview sign they're like the materials and stay that in the shelf these will then be able to be shared with other artists and used in the layer stack as a layer or directly as a procedural mask authoring these of Geo channels will allow our artists in your team should generate masks bastes masks masks based on your object features like curvature and immune occlusion and finally just update Marv is gonna be joining the USD conversation very soon so Pixar given us their mesh and Porter plugin to further develop and share so so far the plugin can import use the mesh layout and animation into maari's project into mari project and the the next plugin will be available in the open source repository online near future and we in the fan take the the plugin a lot further and do more than just mesh importing so keep an eye for updates on that without further do you Lamia in CC to our speaker Paul and have them introduce himself fall over to you Thank You Rory hello everyone I think you all for being here today this is any Portuguese as well because we have a lot of Brazil fala Galera BV new webinar with presenter versus a huge so yeah so I just want to thank you guys and I hope you're all safe now with this craziness this you know I apologize for my moustache slash goatee that's all I had and one thing for about presentation I put a few Chiara coats in representations so keep your phone ready so you can just scan them very presentation and then I'm gonna link you to a different website okay so yeah so let's let's start and again thank you hello everyone welcome to this webinar today I'm going to be talking about my textual workflow in Mari I'm gonna be discussing my Leviathan since you know project before we begin I just want to thank a few people first of all I just want to thank David that's one's work he was the guy responsible for the model of Leviathan so he provided the model and I was responsible for these textures and look tough I also want to thank think think so this project was created for my Advanced section course and think think online a couple years ago and if you want to know more about cool in the course it can access this website down here and I also want to thank foundry for inviting me to to do this presentation this webinar today and you know I'm really happy to be here and sharing with you this this workflow so let's jump right into it before we begin with the workflow per se I just want to talk a little bit about the role of a texture artist and I feel like as a sector artists we we have the great opportunity in our hands when we have an asset i doesn't matter if you're working in your own project or if you're working in a production I feel like we have the opportunity to tell a story through our textures any detail that you add any scratch that you add to your hovercraft to your robot or any scar that you add to your character it's a it's a story that is telling right and that's something that I keep telling my students and I keep telling people that ask question asking questions online is like don't worry too much about it technical aspect the things and try to focus a bit more on on the fundamentals you know like how can you look at real life materials and textures and how can you tell a story with that you know and that's something that I think can help you a lot with any project to have you know think about storytelling and - sell a good story so this presentation I broke down this presentation into two parts the first thing I'm going to do is I'm gonna show you an overview of this project like all the steps that I went through to finish Leviathan for my course that's pretty much what I would do you know with any personal project that I have and and then after this presentation all the slides that I'm going to show you I'm gonna go to Mari and then show you the file and I'm going to show you two different workflows I want to show you the lair workflow that I used and then I also gonna show how can you how I translated the lair workflow into a Noah based workflow okay so this is just a timeline it doesn't necessarily follow this exactly you know like actually I would say that this first stage here is pretty accurate that's pretty much what happens how it goes but then this area here it's a bit mixed up like you can you don't need to develop this masks before this it depends a lot on the project but we're gonna discuss this a bit more later on so this is the final render of Leviathan this is a few close-ups and let's talk about a prep stage the prep stage is when I like to start searching for references and I think about the textures in my library this is a very important step and you've probably heard this already if you're working on any project doesn't matter if it's texturing if it's sculpting or modeling you know references are essential for a good realistic if you want to achieve a realistic project and that's the first step to me especially for this asset because I didn't have a concept art so I kind of had to design the look of it from scratch so I used the PRF app it's on an app it's a it's a software I can download on this website PRF is great because it's like a mud board and you can drag all this images and you can add this you know lettering here and yeah it should definitely use it if you if you want to you know create mood boards and things like that so I added a few real life references these are some suits that I found online my main reference was the Pacific Rim when I'm sorry Pacific Rim whites you so this suit was my main inspiration for Leviathan I loved the scratches and I found so many good references online for like the different damaged states I also had some different ones here for different materials you know like one thing with with references is you have to be careful to not have way too much because sometimes you can get lost why don't you do I have like one which is like my main reference and then I have some secondary ones and I also like to have a CG render as my inspiration for the level of detail that I want to achieve in this case I had chappie here chappie it's a it's it's a movie and and and the robot in this movie was super realistic and it was done by my mentor and friend Justin hoped and I really liked the level of detail that he achieved with his textures on this asset so I just put it here as a inspiration for me so after I ate search I found all my references it's time to unwrap your I unwrapped a Leviathan and this is just like a little graph that I put together because it's fun because a lot of people when I when we talk about V's when when they're making movies for an asset that has you know I like five-year dibs or last they say oh no it's super relaxing but as soon as they work on an asset that have like 50 or more you DIMMs they know how how how annoying and it's a nightmare like it if you if you do the proper layout of of an asset that has all the idioms it's gonna be a headache but you these are one of those things that it's it can be really annoying but it's also like one of the most important things to keep in mind because if you make if you spend some time here are you gonna save a lot of time later on and here on the side I put a few Kyoko's along this presentation so in this case I have a I wrote a few articles and tutorials in the past buddy of these so if you scan this code here with your phone you're just gonna link you to my website so you can take a look on those articles later on if you want but I go more in depth about movies and and how you know - too late in now and think about resolution and how it to optimize them but again really important this is this is just a breakdown of my UV set maybe my idioms for anivia that that's how I broke down into materials a lot of people ask me like if if this is like the final layout if I ever change this I mean especially in production this this changes a lot and in this case I changed a lot of like the look in this case like if you look at the final render I had this brass pieces this golden pieces here that I I didn't think about them in the beginning when I was making my UVs so they're not even here so what I had to do I had to manually select them those pieces and then make them like that so I had to create some some isolation masks later on which is fine like but as long as you have organized yidams it's easy enough for you to select select them because if you have automatic you these layouts it's couldn't be it would be a nightmare for me to select them so this is something that especially if you're working in a company it's really considerate for you to organize DVDs properly and make sure that the texture are does have a good layout to work with so after we we have our V's we're gonna start baking our maps this is another important thing like having a TVs will also help you having good baked Maps because it would depend a lot on the UVs and the resolution you have so keep that in mind and this is just a few maps that are used for Leviathan I just put it you know I have characters from ZBrush from the extension pack in Mari from from the demidov illusion built in in Mari and maps from substance I just you know use whatever having hands to bake this maps and they're really Borden because they're gonna help me drive a lot of the the masks like the wear masks that we have on the edges and if you want to add the student crevices so this maps are extremely important so so after I have all this together I have my ABS ready I have my maps baked it's time to assemble my scene and if you know if you know me if you know my work if you've seen my videos before you probably know how obsessive I am with with organization and this is something that a lot of people say like oh but I'm not organized you know like I'm not I don't have OCD like you do how do you want me to organize my things like that and honestly it it doesn't have to be like crazy organized like you don't have to color code everything but just by having just by keeping naming conventions and things consistent it's gonna help you a lot down the road and there's one method that I talk about a lot is the museum floss method that I I mean I didn't create a method I just put a fence name into it it's just a matter of like organizing everything before I start texting and I talked extensively about this workflow in in a video so I just put this QR code here so if you want to watch later I just show a bit of my workflow in organizing my layers and the same method can be applied with nodes and this is what I want to talk about here in the past even when it created this project a few a couple years ago I used layers and for the longest time since I started my career I was using layers quite a lot but in de la for glass for the past year or so I've been using notes quite a lot didn't those graph you Mari and I just fell in love with it it's something that this is like a big debate nowadays in Mari like people that he is Mari it's like oh they use layers or use notes to me it's like you should use whatever you feel comfortable you know if you can you know work and deliver a good work it doesn't really matter what you use but I would highly recommend you to take a look at the middle graph and see your f---ing get used to it because it's extremely powerful and it's super modular if you're working in a team on a team like it's super easy for you to share with other artists and but one thing I would say is as soon when you start assembling your touching scene in Mari I would choose your workflow if you start working with layers stick with it until the end because if you try to switch to notes in the middle of the project it's gonna you gonna have crazy headache and simply with nose if you start working with nodes keep using those into the end and this is an example here if a file that I start with with nodes you can keep it quite tidy and organized especially now with the Geo channels in mario 4.6 it's it's super nice and and it's easy for it to keep organized but if you this is a case where I started with layers and then I looked at my ward graph this is how it looks like it's gonna be a nightmare so choose the workflow that it won before before it's too late I mean you can still recognize this but trust me it's gonna be a nightmare but later I'm gonna talk a little bit about the two workflows in the end of this presentation and then you can understand a bit better okay so after we assemble the file we're ready to start working there's a stage where I started developing my map in this case again this this is gonna been a lot of the project but for Leviathan I started developing my my damage masks and dust and dirt and etc I have here like two you should talk to you look they have artists in this case I was my own look their verges so I talked to myself and he said hey what's up what do you need and my girl I may need some you know damage aware edge wear mask and and some dust and dirt and and to me that's with this masks I had the opportunity to start telling story with the details that's what we talked about right story telling and so again by going back to my references I I tried to mimic that the main details that I saw on that suit that I talked about and one thing that I failed a lot in the beginning when I started creating this mask was that I was relying too much on my edge my curvature masks that I had the curvature that gave me access to all this edges and I was like oh man this looks awesome look at all this edges I'm gonna you know make them all you know wanna have wear on every single edge it's gonna look super cool but then I got some feedback from from Justin who was helping me at a time and he's like dude like just look at the reference and when you look at the reference when you actually look at it you see that it's not every edge that has that it that is worn you know like it is just a few areas you have some main areas of interest and then the rest I have some relief and that's something really important that I even put it here so you have to make to be careful and make sure to break away for procedural ISM nowadays we have many tools that that make it easier for us to create this masks and this damage masks but the most important thing is for you to attain to realism and and and make sure that you create something that that feels real instead of just like that looks cool you know so that's something that it really took me some time to develop that I in the end you can see here I don't have every single edge war anymore I only have like some main areas of interest and then some edges they're broken and yeah so it's this map was the one that took me the longest to add it and to paint and I kept at it seeing on TDM that's another thing like he doesn't mean it doesn't nothing that you have to finish it and be done with it yeah you can always go back and adjust as you go as you go along and this saw the two masks were a bit simpler but they're also like helped a lot to bring the look in the end yes but here are some processes this is just like early on and like I said I have pretty much all the edges ward out but I cleaned that out quite a bit again so after I'm done with my masks I finally started to develop my main channels my name maps so I'm talking about my diffuse or color spec maps gloss bump again it would have been a lot on the asset that you're working on but for Leviathan I started with broad strokes keep being a simple as much as possible I had you know for thinking about collar break up and heading break up to every single map so he doesn't look flat and adding some X or projections you know like some some extra scratches and things like that so this is how they look that they look like in the end if you spec glossiness and bump and so I spend I spend more time on my masks for this asset specifically because because most of it was most of the Lord came from that throne from his back and glossed maps because you know was mainly metals and I also had some extra maps in the end this maps they helped a lot to look they have are in this case you know myself to adjust a few things in in in the shader side if needed so this is an example of two types of masks you can have some isolation masks that isolates some specific areas of your model this you know isolate some people might might have a material ID that have different colors for each material or like black and white maps such as this one you would depend a lot on you know your preference or the preference of the shade artist and there's also RGB masks that it can create the good thing about RGB masks is that it can store three three types of maps into one single Channel if you scan this guy code there's an article that I wrote about RGB masks and how to create them but it's pretty useful and okay so after creating all this maps it's time to start testing i start testing my maps in in in in v-ray and it's time for some feedback and last ten percent and in this case i was my own you know supervisor and lead because it was working by myself and but i did ask my friends for some critiques and I asked Justin for some notes and in the end during the project he was telling me like oh maybe you can clean that up a little bit more and I also asked David he was a guy who mauled the robot so he he gave me a lot of good input about you know how he should look like so this is a paint over then he did as you can see here he threw he painted the the golden color in some areas and then we had a conversation about where we should put some of this brass areas and it was it was really cool to to talk with him about AB and and get his input like as you can see he he also suggested to the light and that the ring lights in there that we I added later on so it was really important to bring this guy to life and another important thing is did you archive your file make sure you are kind of odd because I've lost many projects the past years just because I forgot to archive and yeah just make sure you have got your file and thank you so this is again this is the first part and now I'm gonna jump into Mari and show you two different workflows the layer based workflow and the node graph workflow if I put us this slide here if you want to you know follow me on social media this is the carrot code I just add a lot of key our codes this one is so cool she had this little thing but cool I'll see you guys in the other video I'll be there soon okay so now we are here in Mari and the first project I want to show you is the layered version of Leviathan so this is the version that I actually worked on when I completed rely on I worked completely in layers at a time and and again it worked fine it's it's it's pretty efficient especially when you work with shed layers this again one of the most important thing is to keep things organized as much as you can with names so you know where things are going because here as you can see I have a channel they call resources so let's open this down here and then I have all my all my baked curvatures and if we impressing I right now so I can change and look through the current paint target you can see all the different curvatures that I baked and they imported in and so before I started painting anything I just brought in all of my resources all this occlusions all this curvatures the thickness I just added into this channel so whenever I needed that I could just bring that in that's part of the mizzen blast method that I talked about in a previous presentation and if we go to our diffuse channel you can see that I also used some ISO masks so these are again the isolation masks that I talked about I created this masks isolated each material before even again before I even started painting this is like preparing for the painting process and then later on when I let's say if I wanted to work on my white metal might diffuse like here for example anything I dropped into this folder it would be completely isolated by this mask is so white metal so let me just turn off this other ones I'm just gonna keep the white metal on right now and let's say if you want to add some let's say you want this one to be white now if you update that mask now by feeling it white look at that that's part of the white matter now look how easy that is if I wanna okay I want this to be white narrow as well so let's feel that mask with white both white the only thing you have to you the other thing you have to keep in mind is previously I had this patches into a different mask ISO so you just have to make sure to go back and find where you had that and then make it black so it blocks in there so when you turn everything on it's not overriding it yeah so this setup work super well for me so but I think the main key the main thing was keeping it there like super organized and consistent same thing with the names again I have a bit of OCD when it comes to names but you don't have to go that crazy with this but at least put in some basic names like oh this is basic all this is a breakup that's gonna help a lot of people especially if you're working on on a project and yeah so here you can see I just developed each material no I don't know if you guys know but there's this history view which is extremely useful that he just goes back if you do something that it were not expecting UK of just click here and then it returns and it even goes back to two camera selections that have that's pretty cool turn that off and turn this guy off and yeah so here I just gonna show you my thought process of the white matter which is I think is the one that was quite interesting so so just started with a base collar and then I had a set up title to add some breakup just have this I'm just pressing out right now to access this image viewer so I just added one you know one of this dis textures is really it's music it's really good to have a library like this one with black and white stencils I can create yourself from texture static download or download the package there's a lot of good packages online with overlays and things like that so I just added up to like some color variation again looking at your reference right here you can barely see the variation but it's just good to not have a flat color right and it's just good to keep that in mind so after I did my breakup I had a broad variation which is basically a I had my occlusion and some levels and a break-up texture on top of it just to add some variation of those included areas and then I had a second broad variation with my thickness and just using in HSV which uses the the color below and then you just adjust just adjusted the hue and saturation of it but as you can see the color by itself it's pretty plain and pretty basic but as soon as you go and you add damage this is I have the damage on top of the earth everything that's when you bring that to life right again it's quite it's super simple it's not there's not a lot of complexity but when you put things together you just it just makes sense and that's why I spend a lot of time developing the the mask wear with some stencils here are some stencils that I used to add that kind of detail some unpainted metal you know just project to them in those areas in some specific places and again if we look at other parts again they're pretty much the same like especially things like the brass just added some some brunch break up to it but most of the detail came from this back got some collaboration aspect collar there and scenting with the gloss when we would put all this maps together and as you can see here on the side there's not a lot on each material like a four is this the complexity will depend a lot but I only have a title Bowl and a layer of with some broad variation and some painted stuff but for this asset and specifically most of the detail came from like my damaged masks that added the complexity that I wanted on if I had done so yeah so this is no review of layered layer system and again there's nothing wrong with with layers and again I use layers for many years and it was pretty again I was happy with layers until I I fell in love with nodes and it's actually funny because I I neglected notes for the longest time I had friends telling me to go try nodes and I always said no layers is the way to go and and note it's never gonna you know catch on oh but it's gonna use it and now I'm here talking about nodes and that's what I'm gonna do next I'm going to open my gonna close this guy Oh before I close I just show you how my node graph looks right now so if I open here my new graph is down there embrace you brace yourselves look at that it's just a mess because every time you created a layer here this layer is also being created in your node graph so that's how Mari always worked like they always had the node graph in the background that's this way sometimes it's it's not a good idea to work with both systems are the same I would rather choose one of the other okay but let's jump right see the note system okay everyone so I have my note of Leviathan here and just when I start showing this mock-up workflow did I create it so it just imported the maps that I had obviously I didn't work with the note the notes on this project like I said but I just imported the maps here so you would see how it would work on this project if I had started with knows a set of layers before we look at the node graph down here I just want to talk a little bit about this new feature that is in the new mario 4.6 which is the at the geo channel your channels just pretty awesome so if you open your objects tab clicking up here go into objects or fighting here on the side if you'll open your objects tab and you go down there's an option here called geo channel properties and down here is if you have all this Maps already and all of that is our maps that I imported into Mari and I transform them into geo chomps and a cool thing about that is so if I imported this maps into this area here they have all this names I kick I can access them at any time I'm gonna create a new geo channel so if you create a new node just tap and search for geo channel here you're gonna see that I have my node properties here I have all the same Giacchino's that I have up there the reason why this is so cool is that whenever you want to access those maps you can just create a Jew channel geo channel and this is also available in the layers and the layer system now so you it's also pretty useful for layers but but the way the way they work with my my nose I think this is this is extra helpful because it makes it less clunky so you don't have to import everything and you have it everywhere unifier and and I can have all that spaghetti everywhere down here so you can either let's say if you want to import something you keep create a new channel by clicking on this plus button and then you see gioachino one down here and so if you want to add a new curvature curvature theme you can just click on this button it's going to open this dialog and then it can search your curvature and you port and then you're gonna have it ready for you another way you can do it is by opening your channel stab you can see it here so if you click in your channel let's say I want this this is my ISO mask brass for example I want to turn this this ISO mask brass into a Geo Channel you can easily right click there go to export flatten and then export flatten to geo channel so that's gonna allow you to add this channel into your list and then it can access it anytime you want right so that's the first thing that we'll do just like create all the maps that are my need like all my occlusions my curvatures and then just add them to my Geo channels and down here you can see that these are all the channels that I created this is are all my ISO masks and you can create backdrops to isolate and organize your notes accordingly this is what I have here so I have all my isolation masks ready and on the side I also have some some of my activity maps and they're also here so if I want to access this thickness somewhere else I can just create a dual channel double click and then search for thickness so if you press one and view through that you're gonna see that is the same one that's this one this layer there so that's the first thing it will do before I even started this the main channels and masks down there I would just create a backdrop and isolate all the axillary maps that I might need the baked maps and the isolation masks put it on the side and then I would start creating my masks of course in this case I only have one layer because I just imported that into a paint layer down here but in an actual project you would see a lot of a lot of layers here some of you might be thinking but might be asking like why the nose and mari did look like nuke because some people might be maybe see people might might be used to the mari de mars nose in Maori being horizontal and the reason is I just think I feel more comfortable with this with this look but if you want you can press the shift s and then it can turn this nodes into the Mauri Mauri version which is horizontal and it depends on like on your taste you know like if you want to work like this is fine but I prefer working on vertically the thing is if I create a new channel now your node it would still look like a nuke so if you want to change that if you go to preferences then no graph and then change it to shortlist but again this is this is something minimally depends on your own taste and here I just created a quick mock-up on how how I would develop my my channel and say my diffuse like I just created a quick fuse here so I started from the top down here I have my my channel node you can see I've just created this channel node and it starts from the top I notice this this is this myself super confusing for those who never use nodes in Mari we're never seeing nodes before but don't worry I'm planning on creating a set of tutorials for those who are transitioning from layers to nodes so keep tuned on my on my social media I'll let you guys know as soon as I finish developing something because I I know how hard it was for me when I started looking in nodes and he didn't make any sense to me but yeah just just try to to take a quick look and and just and just hang on for a bit cuz you can be overwhelming but there are a lot of cool things here that can be extremely useful so ok back to it I just started with a again just like with my layers I started with a base color and then I added an HSV no enough color and then here this is my mask just plug that into this which is pretty much my a geo channel with my thickness map and then I use some levels in it to e vert I'm just going to my node properties here and then I just have a set cloud and some levels and it just changed my blending mode to overlay okay I'm using that as a mask and when you put it together it's just just a little bit of variation here if you change the HSV it's just like a subtle variation with that thickness and then down here just added might wear with a darker color as you can see it just use a Geo channel again to access that mask where that I imported there and I use this just to isolate my white metal and then I will keep going down going down with the other materials okay but again this this might seem super confusing for a lot of you guys and I'm more than happy to ask and answer to your questions you know our Q&A but again I'm planning on creating a set of tutorials to help you transition from the layer workflow into the nodes and another thing that is pretty awesome about this node system workflow is that it's if you're working in a in a project with a team it's super easy for you to explore let's say you created this awesome mask dust and you want to share with your friends you can either share a material you can create a material and store all that into you into let's hear but I'm not gonna get into materials here because it's it's way too much but if you just want to share this with with a friend it's as easy as you can imagine so if you just select that right click file export nodes and you export this some we're just gonna split this test so I just exported that and then now we're gonna go to file import notes and I'm gonna bring that in boom so your friend have if you created a procedural template like that your friend can import that and have the same mask dust that you have so it's great for modular workflows and as you can see it's super clean and it's easy to see where things are going and it would highly recommend you adopt this workflow as soon as you can and again it doesn't matter that the layers manat saying of the layer system is bad I'm just saying that I learned that the node graph can be extremely useful and can make you extra productive in your production workflow ok so yes I think now we're gonna jump into our Q&A and if you have any questions please let me know and thank you for joining me today alrighty thanks very much for that pull and sunsets in the in London so I've got my jacket on very very chilly let's get some Q&A let's start start with this one Paul what's what yes can he find me right yeah scene that was a bit noisy is it all great okay yeah let's get in this end Paul how do you use thickness map correctly feels very artist focus question so it was pretty interesting because on the vibe the thickness mouth wide useful to create some sort of call of variation I just pretty much plugged in in into an HHS V node and it just worked perfectly because it added like a nice gradation it's a it just looked pretty cool and then I just added some breakups on top of it because the main thing about absolute amounts they were talking about a Oh thickness curvature it's all about giving you a head start in having access to the object properties right so if your object is it's complex like the violence pretty complex it will give you all the information you need right so if you bake all this Maps is just awesome to have access to it to the curvature and the thickness of the object awesome good question here one for me will there be a random integration tomorrow so the Pixar Enderman team actually often distributed random and Maury plug not radiate chips with render man and they're actually working on this alongside the rest there in meant like and so before check out pixel art guys and see what they're doing there and question about coach maps in Mari so essentially in Mari as I've been mentioned in the chat window here and the poll deaths we we use modo to do our baking since I found you we really have a render engine in house and it's the motor engine so that's why we don't have a Mori specific one so you can use the motor render in the palette to bake out your coach Maps or if you want something a little bit more quick and dirty in my four point six we introduced the curvature procedural which is essentially a OpenGL procedural texture which is faceted but can be really handy to do let's do quick quick masking and there's also in Mari you can use feature called generate Gaussian blur where you would you can take any paint map paint node or layer so you could convert a curvature procedural to a paint layer and then do a blurriness and that can - you soften those fast edges which could also be a way you get a curvature yeah it was a question are here for you poor point at you is if you're a first-time user in the open up mari what would you suggest you do first well i would say the first thing would be trial in the beginning because it might be daunting because you know you might be like oh what i'm going to do now but i think the first thing you have to do in mine is plan you must have a project in mind and that's why i like to tell people to start with a very simple object because if you think about starting with robot like a python or a see you're gonna have a lot of problems so my tip would be start with a very simple object that you have created a project and then try to understand we we talked about a few a youtube channels in chat that can be useful for you to start in am also plenty on creating tutorial about that about how to start with a simple problem and from there you can start first Prezi enough to do is to choose choose your ear system should work with layers or nose and to be honest some people are asking like should you use layers and then jump into those in the middle of the project don't do that don't know it's fiddling yeah yeah like not now you know i love now and i would definitely start with it but if you prefer the layers stick with it don't try to switch in the middle of the project so yeah so choose your system and then start small start with you know like with one channel try to understand how it works and then go from there yeah start with a single product project and then build up your knowledge and saw cool so there's one question here which case would be better using two key maps instead of four key ones based on Tiki maps and more udemy's or 4k maps and less idioms so this is the interesting bit of information about the technology behind Mari so essentially maari's all of maari's paint data is kind of broken down to two five six but you have six tiles so actually for they say to do the math right for 2k patches would be the same as one - is that right so that math right essentially it's all broken down to these small tiles so it's as far as performance and Mario's concerned it shouldn't be too much differences the detection Maps distributes the same way in the way the official texture build it for you boy you're sweating pretty but if he's asking more in that you know production environment I would say I would always prefer to work with more tiles in the lower resolution rather than smaller tiles with high resolution but high I mean a k4k still like quite doable from most computers but if you have like I don't know 50 tiles and I rather work with 52k rather than I don't know 10 8k most know through my perspective for me standpoint there's also always the challenges if you have a very large surface like as far as a large area surface in your more you have a title math burqa yeah UV resolution work for that area it's always if it's if it's saying that he'll like just throwing a couple of power lines and break that so you can spread those panels across more UV patches yeah yes that cool questions oh there's question in the chat here introducing patch resizing for no graph workflow I think there was a bug we had with something to do with patches and no graph it potentially was doing the flipping of patches definitely look into things like that in the future so yeah if you guys have any any feature requests please always send to support at foundry accom this we're always happy to hear what you guys have feedback wise so we can feedback in case you haven't seen it ready there's a polls tab in life storm the crater here all your guys all the things that you guys use versions of Mari etc radio here's ones you all when working with so much data to explain how often do you use baking oh you mean like debating cashing man friends are awesome like yeah I can't yeah you should use them as as much as you can and that's one of the things that I always talk about its organization and keeping your scene tidy I'm obsessed with organization and that's something that actually helped me a lot in my career like working with other professionals especially leads and things like that they always praised my organization skills and that's something that I always like to spread and tell people all the time is like you think that's something like that would be small and nobody would notice but they will if I get a funnel from someone and it's all over the place I'm judging the person right away and let me tell you everyone would judge it because it's a question of respect right like you respect your coworker buddy I'm not talking about like mean Amy every single every single file every single layer because hope you're like over I mean I do that but you don't have to be like that what ain't what we need is like back to Britain Tidy yeah just use the big points fake your your-your-your if you have like a large node tree just fake that out if you need to rebate you can always go back you me Baker especially now with the geo channels it's a great way to access your stuff later on so yeah I used big fake points a lot so it's good yeah just a note on bait points Oh Mari basically runs everything in your projects gift come put into its kind shader color if you look at the render engine you have all your shading those feeding into your shader the more complexity having your shading graph the longer your render is going to take if you're using render man or or three delightful Arnold so same thing applies mari's is kind of it's kind of a game engine where you all the nodes you build are adding a little piece to this kind giant shading shader which then gets put on the gas card and the more of these nodes you have they have the more you asking a graphic card to do and I can hit your frame rate so bake points kind of flatten up all that all those autograph off-screen graph nodes into a single kind of paintable almost like paint no but still lives fall has a connection to upstream and that drastically reduces complexity and makes the the framework are much higher in your microphone so bay points always a win so what's Paul what's important as fundamentals of texturing some would be better texturing but all textures look Jerry ain't tips ok that's a good question because that's it comes down to something that I'm actually doing right now is for the longest time so before I start my career as a touch artist I was developing my knowledge in painting and drawing and that was essential to me to develop my eye to see things and and shapes see color see all the sort of things and then when I started to learn the technical side of things more you know structure I realized that I could translate what I've learned from those fundamentals of art and for many years I kind of dropped I stopped like practicing fundamentals of art and it was fine I kept you know developing my skills but now I feel like I needed to go back to it a bit more so I'm back to study to study painting and drawing and I think that's something that would help you a lot in country it's just like go outside take photos draw paint because that's gonna that's gonna make you look at something you understand what it's real and what it's not because I probably see nowadays the textures from students that there's a lot of procedures stuff I'm all I'm all for procedures like it makes our lives you know so easy but you have to be able to look at something and and and tell if it's real or not right and you do that by breaking the procedural ISM and knowing where it is this details are gonna go so simplicity is key and it also comes back without being a talk and webinar which is storytelling how can you tell a story with their assets like you I have an asset on my demo on my portfolio issues it's a gumball machine it's a very simple aster but yeah and that's it like that you can just put like a sticker in the tell me story you totally sorry about a kid maybe you ripped that sticker at some point so you adding something to it so that's another thing you just think about the story behind each asset and Justin hope might might my former mentor he told me that once Paul like every single asset that he worked just do your best do you better like think about that asset as if it's your last asset that doesn't mean that you have to spend two years on it because a lot of people think that oh I couldn't spend all the time I have which you don't but yeah so just think about fundamentals and use that a weber yeah no that sounds good that's reading some of these questions here so on about bait points just to clarify bait points so you don't have using a big point doesn't destroy anything upstream if you change upstream big points will go read to say that they they're they're still showing you the old cache but it's it's out of date so it needs to be a bit so you can basically go into the big point and do a big bake or there's some various options in the right menu to say updates out of it bakes you can do this even from the bottom of your graph to do a people upstream from this point it'll go and do all those in order right then this is a question sorry worried by a bell a bell is actually a good friend of mine he's a lighter and I think Congress he's an amazing artist he's working at Sony right now and he asked a pretty interesting question about with so much looked up being driven by textures can you extend on your relationship with the looked up department this is a very interesting question because I can't stress enough how important it is a relationship you looked at to me look the texture you looked up it's like it's a type of marriage or for a friendship I don't know where you have to build that relationship especially through working on a huge asset I had experiences like that in the past where I worked on a huge creature on Godzilla for example and then I had to work with the same work that artists for eight months so if you don't build that relationship by talking to your like them the first thing they do when I get assigned a task it doesn't matter how small it is I go to the looked up artist and I present myself and I say hi unball on detector arts artist working on this task how can I help you right because just by doing that you're just creating a bridge like you creating a connection with that person and I mean I'm not saying I have to become best friends with that person luckily to me it have like all that we look those that are working I'm still great friends with all of them but it helps that you know what they need because it's not just about ok I have a task and then I'm gonna create what I think it's right because maybe you're gonna go to the basics that you think like defuse bombs back glass and you think that that's it no I think you have to go and talk to the person responsible for the shader and say how can I help you to achieve the look that we're going for because every company is different right like some companies they what masks other ones they work with baked Maps so I think it's really important to to I also understand the shader Department like I also do look that so it's really important for you to you not to master it unless you want to become looked at for this as well but have a good understanding so you can you can create a connection and move forward as a team and not just a guy who thinks but you know what's right right yeah I just asked the question the poles there because we're trying to see a trend of some some series we're texture artists are the victor of artists essentially the same person almost like a surfacing artist and be interesting to ask all the all the attendees in the way you work is that the same person that was a two separate people as well just great sometimes but at the same time when you work in something way more complex it might be a problem right so it's just it just depends a lot and then I think have to be prepared for both scenarios that's very we had a question here from Martin about what's the best way to start understanding how to break down your textures and the procedural noises and into the basic components and post the image of the camera yeah yeah how do you how do you approach that that's a good question because what I would say the way I start any project is why look at the reference that you have in hands in that case with my camera I have the actual reference so I took the photos from my own camera so I was able to extract high-level from that that's great but most of the time you might not have that so I would say I always like to start with broad strokes any asset that I started with I started with broad strokes as procedure as I can weed out painting anything and then I see how it looks and then I might even since it looked up and say hey what do you think if he likes what the route that I'm taking then I go back and then I polished my maps that's when you started being more creative and and quoting like specific details we'd Leviathan it was like that I just started curvatures breaking that up the edges and then when I got a look that was working for me I went back in baby because I think it's it's a bad idea to start with hero words in the beginning because you're just looking at one little thank you know looking at a context right yeah so yeah it depends like but if you have a reference in ends like I had with a camera and it created a tileable high-resolution threadable if you have that go for it but it's still like the procedural aspect when I seen procedure not only talking about clouds and talking about using carnivals and Trek banners things like that yeah I'll definitely add sue so that one example the very micro micro surface bump sometimes you may not actually have enough Texel density in your texture maps to cover that so the situation like that's probably best to use Mari to paint a mask of where you're then in your render engine so say in Maya Donna you get a tileable make it really high tiled like I'm a sub pixels tolerable size and then use your Mari mask to mask that into your look their shader so they can get the render engine to can't get that sub pixel mac Preston's surface but you - you use procedural in your render engine rather than trying to make crazy 8 16 K maps just to get that done Z's ability in that texture yeah it's perfect yeah introduction how much time do you spend on the assets how long you take the texture and asset in production I think yeah this is gonna vary a lot lots of links I can yeah I can't express how how long you know it depends a lot of if it's 0 asset which we if hero acid is an asset that it's it's gonna be you know pre-close in the screen so it takes more time like I said I worked on on Mothra I'm the larva walking library larva on Godzilla and it took us like eight months to work on the same asset so yeah but it depends a lot today all the quick one here about importing neato maps and geo gels directly or necessary to create channels for the Strix the maps and then connect to G so G channels new feature in four four six there are a variety of ways you can get mapped into them you can import them directly into the into the dialog you can convert a channel into a geo channel you can use the moto render bake palace to bake a mesh map into geo channel and my personal favorites you can use a big point in the node graph to essentially bake the upstream graph to a texture map and then sink that to AG a channel so essentially you can use bake points almost as a transmitter to geo channels to feed a custom mask you have one part of your project to the rest of your project all the geo channel receivers I think that's about all the time we have today so like to thank everybody for all the questions you asked and I think you could call for your fantastic presentation thank you guys and yeah I just want to say like if you guys have any questions you can just send me a message usually I use Instagram more often holidays but it can also send me an email I just put my email there send something yeah Ksenia question and like I said I I'm gonna stop you know slacking off and create a proper content about you know Mari in the middle graph and I think that's coming at some point so yeah so thank you all and I appreciate you know Sondra for for opportunity and yeah it was awesome guys thank you and sorry for my broken English my moustache yeah and Cosette I trust in the foundry forums and community yeah cool thank you everybody thank you very much thank you you

Channel: Foundry

Views: 8,959

Keywords: texturing in mari, character creation, weta vfx, vfx, visual effects, 3d painting, 3d texturing, mari tutorial, substance painter, map baking, udim

Id: DSyvSH16YLM

Length: 76min 44sec (4604 seconds)

Published: Thu May 21 2020