Production Character & Environment Workflows in ZBrush with Santa Monica Studio

welcome to the stage a couple of artists one of which I am familiar with and who know who I know for a number of years at this point I'm really happy it's from the acclaimed studio Santa Monica studio famous for some really great work on small titles these are small small things like God of War little you know my newly popular video games but we've got Gaga longi and Nate Stevens ladies gentlemen round of applause for loud wake it up please Santa Monica studio [Applause] right and you're okay with answering questions during right yeah so if something pops up or you have something interesting you'd like to ask please just well make it happen for you yeah we will be taking questions during the presentation and of course I would be speaking stuff more related to characters and Nate bound environments but if you guys have questions on how those two are related or whatever feel free to chime in so my name is glauco lady karriker character artist / Santa Monica studio I don't want this to be too much about my story and there's like a couple videos already online but so I put a lot of thought on what I wanted to show you guys today and I actually ended up changing the presentation quite some time quite a few times and I decided to showcase a model that I'm working on but slightly different so I want to kind of simulate a production environment where I don't have a fully concept already done by the device that group and it's more like a it's more like I have one little bit of the concept and I'm sketching something and I'm working back and forth with the concept team so how that kind of stuff would work so basically this is the motto I'm working on the head started based off on a Carlos wanted design and I have huge respect for Carlos so I don't want to talk about the design or discussing of that especially for the head but basically I started with the head and then I'm now going with the body imagining that I'm working with the VIS that group trying to figure out what this character is gonna look like or it's gonna be and I recorded the entire process so I'll be playing a time-lapse and explaining everything that I'm doing but just to show you guys a little bit of how I have this file set up if I erase everything I have one one sphere for the head where I did this quick sketch or more like a not very sketchy looking like and I have a couple sub tools for a couple of different things and I have the arms like the arms are like very rough compared to everything else so this sometimes happens in production as well we start from the head and then we might go to the body later so in this case I'm simulating that we have a head that we know what we want to look like and we are exploiting on everything else and also know the accessories so the head for example I'm it's much more refined compared to like these other shapes and these other shapes are just representative of what it can be so the concept team would be sketching on top of that when we will be going back and forth like I mentioned before one thing that I want to mention though we already had some really good presentations about very fine details like Chris for example he like heal it he pretty much went over like how to really do fine details the best looking way possible and for video games usually this type of very fine details and like pores and the kind of stuff we don't have the budget for because usually for this head for example you know in a game project it will have the maximum on one UV so I don't have textured support for having like a bunch of details so we will be relying a lot more on Tyler's and all that kind of stuff so the most important thing even Chris mentioned that as well like the most important things on any character is the primary forms and secondary forms and eventually the tertiary forms and in this case for the head my primary forms are very fine my secondary forms are starting to play some role and the tertiary forms are like very loose yet and for the body I have the primary forms in there the secondary forms are like very rough and I don't have any tertiary forms the arms I would consider just primary forms for now and that's because I don't know what what I really want to do with the body and of course the accessories are just like rough block outs so if you guys have any questions on any of that or what how I'm doing this feel free to join or to chime in but I'm gonna start playing a video of the time lapse and just to mention something real quickly if you guys spot me doing something kind of dumb or very old-school it's just because the way I learned like back in the day back in like ZBrush 2 or whatever and I honestly don't don't know a lot of like ZBrush fancy tools or the new techniques and stuff I kind of stopped on like on time a little bit on that and I've been using the same things over and over and whenever like ego for example is here he's like he has a lot of technical skills and he knows how to do a bunch of stuff so he always teach me some stuff too and I pick some of those from time to time but usually I work the very old-school way so this is me starting from just a very simple sphere did a quick mask I mix like China mashing everything and extruding a little bit of like the shoulder area or just like the trapezius and I'll write what I'm doing here I'm just trying to find the very rough forms and yeah thank you and this is a where I'm gonna be spending most of my time primary forms and secondary forms which I love doing this is usually where it's been like I would say maybe even like eighty percent of my time and since I was saying like we don't have we don't need a lot of fidelity on the very fine details for video games so I'm not saying that it's not important I'm saying that we don't have the budget for that so we usually I spend most of my time here so this is me again just trying to find like a couple shapes that will help me identify the original concept so I'm putting throw inning some marks just to kind of find some landmarks and find some areas that I can relate to the concept and compare like the size of the eyes and that kind of stuff but keeping everything loose and I will keep everything loose as much as possible I don't like to use this move brush a lot I read a lung Terry book like many years ago when I was doing like traditional sculpture and he describes is moving as you just keep working on the forms so you keep like going on smaller and smaller smaller forms how do I use this move like a huge guy just did what I had the concept that I have in mind is just like keep working on those forms and tightening those up as you go as you go on for sketching things like that I really enjoyed the snake hook brush it gives me like a very pencil on paper type of feel so I can really play with like action lines and the kind of stuff and yeah that's me just playing like with rough Anatomy trying to get the proportions right and I will be changing stuff later on too but there's I mean there's no secret on any of what I'm doing like it's very basic commands and very very basic tools the thing I focus my time most on is studying anatomy studying design that's why I really enjoyed doing what this is Michael hmm I was gonna say that it's quite inspiring because it actually showcases that no matter where you are and your ZBrush don't mind my touch it's a family show after all it's really about no matter where you are in your trajectory in ZBrush it's quite accessible wherever you're coming into it whether you're you're seasoned veteran or if you're a newcomer so seeing you do this and seeing the end result before this is actually quite powerful so it's nothing to be apologetic about so I go ahead does my mic work now is L sure like it doesn't do we hear I don't so being in an environment artists are you looking at Anatomy reference when you do this we just really know it all definitely like for the initial sketch for the body I didn't look on any Anatomy at all but whenever it comes to refining and kind of I need to do this right I will always have reference even if I'm doing like a torso I'm kind of known for doing like a lot of thought a lot of tutorials already and I love sculpting horses but on each one of them I always have references anything and here I'm just showing like some quick poly paint in the eyes just to kinda help me make this look slightly better just for myself why I'm like modeling like the eyes are very important on any character they are like the soul of the character some say but so just having a little bit of color in there kind of helps me out some people like to to work with a lot of with poly paint while they are sculpting and I tend to just don't do that at all maybe because of my background being a traditional artist - I really like very simple stuff like I'm using the basic material all day long and yeah I like to keep it simple pretty much what brush are using to do all the little lines so the lines are the damn standard I can actually show you guys how I approach some of that later but the lines or the big wrinkles are too damn standard with very low settings and I used the clay brush for overall build up forms and I used the standard brush quite a lot as well and the move of course that that's it like if ZBrush had only like these four brushes I would be fine and it's move a little bit too so you see like how this is slowly progressing and like I'm not trying to do like a I'm kind of working my way up like one step at a time so rotating the model at all times I work a little bit on the mouth and then I go a little bit on the brow and then I go a little bit on like the horns I'm keeping some stuff very very sketchy yet like the ears and the horns because I don't know what I'm gonna do with those yet and I I think just having the main shapes there they help me to see the whole picture just drawing like some very simple stuff in there too like some simple shapes but you see like how much I'm actually working on the zygomatic area like the jaw the mouth and the brown like I will keep working on these areas like forever and even all the proportions of the the entire head so this is the most important thing of any character pretty much also try to get the feeling of gravity on some of those very thick wrinkles on the Mac one thing that I like to mention like some people during this stage they already cut like very like huge lines very fast and very deep I like to keep everything soft and loose I think Luz is the the word that I like the most for that because yeah just keep it simple keep it soft and here I was just like taking some screenshots and doing some Photoshop stuff on top just to kind of have a different way of seeing that one trick that I do quite often it's take photographs on my monitor or at least seeing the model through my cell phone like Chris was describing to like he flips the model upside down it's just like another way of checking the model with a different set of different perspectives pretty much that kind of helps you see things that you couldn't see before even though I sculpt most of my stuff using like the basic material I go and check everything on with different materials from time to time as well again I play with the lights I go on Photoshop I think the more you you see different stuff it's better so here I'm going a little bit more on like finer shapes still still keeping everything loose but I see like how these secondary forms are building up on top of the primary forms if the primary forms are wrong these stuffs never gonna look right you can use so here I'm like testing some stuff out maybe I want to do some sort of like different type of bump so I'm testing that out I'm testing like some different type of wrinkles here they didn't work like at the end so I kind of erased those but it's more like a lot of like experimentation to do you use layers I only use layers whenever I'm doing either expressions or drawing in some pores or if I know that I want to change something drastically and I want to have like art direction on it or like the VC dev team do some concepts or want to experiment maybe like the horns gonna be simply completely different and I might do that on a different layer but other than that I keep I keep my stuff like very straightforward ikkaku a quick question for you this is probably some people are wondering maybe around the world and there's another one back there as well so I'll make my way while I ask you Mike what resolution are you working at with this head you mean like a poly count yeah I have no idea I can check so you good question this is let me just check us this is something that I think it's very important to I don't I only subdivide if I need to so I like to keep it as low as possible cool so let's see like at that time I was probably like around this guy well I was probably like around here where you guys saw and this is the 200 no two meanings is that correct I can't see that anymore I'm aging myself oh that's total like you see I don't even care about this thing I like that and usually like if this is a game project I would I mean there are like different cases of course if I'm doing like a head that's starting from a scan I have a totally different pipeline if there are facts or like any sort of like blend shapes or animations already being done why I'm sculpting usually that happens for like head and realistic characters that's a totally different approach but this sort of creature here I would just sketch everything and at a point that I'm near here and I'm at right now I would probably do like a topology a good-looking topology on top of everything open the mouth and sit with the rigging guys and see if everything works and everything is good to go I would do like my final sculpting pads on top of that so there's a lot of like back and forth with the with the rigging team in that aspect as well so huh on your personal work how far do you take a skull before you post it like secondary forms or how far I take before I pose it yeah it really depends what I'm trying to achieve this guy here I don't have any plans on posing right now I think I'm more concerned with just a study form but this is but if I want to pose I would probably just do as much as I can symmetrically if the pose is not crazy if the pose is crazy I would just do like a very rough came just to get like the proportions and just pose it justice cope without symmetry this is something funny though like the more the more I work in this industry and the more I sculpt the things that are interesting to me these days at least are very simple things and simple by by by simple I mean I'm very interested in learning forms like geo for example geo knack feel he's one of my favorite artists and he focused most of his time just the study forms and that's the type of stuff I really enjoy doing even when I'm traditionally sculpting as well this is just the face I met at this this moment in time so I would probably if I really like how things are going with this guy I would probably just do like a quick post just to keep exploring form I don't know I just whenever I'm doing personal work I I let it go like I have so much scheduled things at work that whenever I'm doing personal work I just want to have some fun and or pick a topic and study very nice one more over here in the middle yes hi you said that this was for videogames so is there like a specific polycount that you aim for towards the end of the image that year or the end of the year model I couldn't hear you sorry it was for video games it's safe it's for video games there a specific polycount that you're working within parameters for what's the what's the poly count parameter that whenever I'm sculpting that doesn't really matter much like the only thing that really matters is how many you v's I'm able to use on this character so for a character like this for example I would probably use one UV for the heads one UV for the torso one for the legs one for the arms and maybe one or two or maybe even three for the accessories that will dictate how much how much information we will be retained whenever I bake the textures so that's really important some people like to sculpt as much as they can some people depending on their own their own the production you are at to four I would say like around a hundred thousand tries for a character these are good numbers to follow some characters less than that some characters much more some characters have hairs that are just like a thousand tried like a hundred thousand just the hair themselves so it's really hard to say like a specific number but if you're doing personal work I would suggest make good flow topology make good use of tries and polygons but Joan don't limit yourself within a budget if you are trying to do like very triple way this sort of stuff I get a lot of like a lot of like portfolios or people like at the studio or leaving like a personal level saying like oh I'm doing these and I point out some things like oh like this doesn't look quite right oh it's just because I didn't have like topology for that like who are setting up these rules right unless you are trying to go mobile or within like a very specific budget I would just make things as good as possible keeping in mind that you definitely want to show a good use of topology that's very important here I'm walking in some accessories again this is like very loose and very sketchy I'm not paying too much attention on this is like not like a drapery study right so like even the wrinkles I'm just like throwing stuff in I just want to be able to see some forms some lines in there just trying to capture like nice shadows and give that to the concept folks or even myself on Photoshop just kind of sketch them think stuff out on top of that so we see I'm reusing like spheres and like very simple meshes just to kind of block out all of these accessories when you do final cloth do you guys usually do it in here do you do like Marvelous Designer like a Maya sim or depending on the type of cloth like a lot of people use marvellous for most of that stuff I think it's very useful whenever I'm doing personal work I tend to sculpt everything by hand just trying to make it the most difficult way so I get more out of that and it's you like the back is like very rough still yeah there's one more over here for you that was marvelous designer used for clothing right yeah go ahead yeah hi I have a question about well you have the high poly pomona over here and do you work with someone to make the low poly like game-ready acid or I know how do you work with the low poly topology someone else does it over your mother the paint is on the project like or on the acid some assets we all source amethyst with doing house whenever I'm doing that myself which I tend to do less and less just because of like other duties I have but I do that in Maya with like Maya topology tools and I find it very easy and so I just export like a very simple mesh from ZBrush for reference and I do that there and I get a lots of questions on the internet about symmetrical or a symmetrical pieces so and how do you apologize that too so this head will eventually get a symmetrical right and you don't want to do the topology as symmetrical too so you either do the symmetry on a layer break the symmetry on a layer and then you okay can export that tamiya or you can just even if it's a symmetrical we can still do just half of it merge the other half just collapse just like collapse everything merge and then bring back to ZBrush and then readjust stuff there is also something very important to be said on topology like even if I start from a clean topology let's say I go to Maya and I'm modern his head do like a very nice topology whenever I'm sculpting I will be shifting those verts in those edges it's just part of like the the sculpting process and then the flow will not be perfect anymore so you will have to regroup this topology so for stuff like that I rather just start without any topology do like a clean sketch whenever it looks good I do my final topology and go from there in the case of topology it's quite easy now especially with things like zmodeler and the functionality that's inside of there on top of like the zremesher and as you modeler together those two things if you're not thinking about them that way maybe it's a good time to start investigating it because it's quite robust er zmodeler the only thing I really use and this I pick up for meager as well or even just the zremesher thing I tend to use these tools not very often I know they are great and you can do amazing stuff with that but it's just like my personality I guess I tend to keep things very simple but I was doing that a little bit here so I would just mask extract select just like a simple shell and then I can zremesh that using some settings that I can show and then you're gonna have like a very clean topology strip and then you can use the zmodeler to just extrude and then insert some loops to retain the shapes and stuff like that whenever you subdivide so here I'm just showing like again very simple poly paint I never paint anything flat I always use like zigzag motions I used the spray brush a lot but again my final textures won't be these guys my finite textures will always come from most of the time will come from substance painter after after I'm baking stuff there's one more over here just a quick question how about the Ubese you you make the UV maps on on Mannie while you write apologize or you take it back to ZBrush and do it over there I'm sorry I he wants to know about the UVs well number one oh my UV UV s you have to do them after you have like a good apology right so after I do let's say this guy this is a proof before doing my final pass on texturing and a refining everything I'll send this to Maya do my final topology do my UVs and then since I already have the topology it's kind of up to me to really pay attention to you TVs here in the in in ZBrush or not I will just bring the obj do the final sculpt make it look good as possible and whenever I export I don't have to have a matching one one for this type of workflow so even if my use these are erased during the sculpting process I just have like a very high poly a very dense mesh where I'll be grabbing the details from and projecting to this obj which is the low poly mesh so in this case the specific case I don't need to retain that if I'm again if I'm doing like a head or something that already has a lot of connections outside of this workflow or like this project itself you need to pay attention on on that the other thing was that yesterday we saw if you update you have a whole new way to approach your v's inside of zero so you have a question here just a quick question how long do you think from start to this point it has taken you to get this fire in the model right now everything that I did here is around five hours to six hours imp like that because I was editing the the time lapse last night and I believe it's like five to six hours total so it's it's very rough it's kind of sketchy but I do like some of the shapes that I have in the head already so it's fun I can't wait to get back and kind of keep working on this yeah it's really cute I was going to say yeah if you didn't if you didn't catch yesterday's you didn't catch yesterday's presentations at the end Paul and Joseph were instrumental in showing some of the new features is the UV stitch and such you can check that out and I think it's going to change a lot of perspectives any other questions so this you see this is very rough I just want to show a little bit of how I approach sculpting these guys you see like this is very well still like what I will do if I was at home right now I would be cleaning of these shapes right so how I will do that you can either do use like this clay Buddha but I usually use the clay brush and I found out that if you change the focal shift to very low like minus 70 something like that and then you turn down the intensity you actually get like some matches after you do these strokes pretty similar to what you have in the in the clay buildup or the other clay brushes but I do like this one cuz doesn't leave a lot of marks but just a little bit around the edges so would go here and just try like exploring some of these shapes contouring like going around the forum and kind of emphasizing some of that that I really want and trying to keep everything as loose as possible again like not really committing to I I want to have something like this I want to have something like that just keep keep you loose look from all the different angles so you see like this from this angle is kind of flat you have like a really small indent in there but if you go up you start to see like a much more stuff going on and you need to understand this type of concepts whenever you are baking out these these textures and applying those to your models because sometimes we sculpt things here they look great in ZBrush but they look great under certain certain circumstances like top-down lighting that kind of stuff and you throw that in the game and looks completely different so having a lot of like experimentation even on early stages if you are still learning a lot of that stuff I would just bake out some of these maps put that in the engine and check like oh is this like ribcage being like is it too much is it to lose kind of I mean just just do the stuff right like if you want to make this look good as good as possible in game like utilize all the tools you have available to you don't be lazy and like oh I'm just gonna do that in the end because it takes a lot of time like even right now even if I don't have a final topology if I don't have a proper UVs I can duplicate this match I can do like a quick theory mash or even like a decimate whatever create like random movies put that in the games see the baking result okay this is looking good it takes like five minutes to do that and then you can you go from there like you build up some confidence that what you're doing is gonna look good can I just interject about that with the cuz I lose a lot of sleep tonight if I don't say this the Zee plug-in is peel UV and you can get that inside of the downloads Center inside of the pixologic website so that's if you're if you weren't here yesterday please take note of making note of that rather and then also a Z classroom right there's there's lots of resources like inside the website there's a question in the back so if your today we've learned why we've got the hashtag ask ZBrush we got Z classroom and we have a plug-in section on our website which is great I saw an arm hey how are you can you tell me about your baking process and maybe a little bit about how you do the do you dynamesh your through the project and then go through your details subdue it or the dynamesh fee I only use whenever like let's say I'm doing this and I need to extrude something I will dynamesh after I'm done with the overall forms I either do like a zremesh to have like a cleaner topology to work on but this guy here an example I didn't did I didn't do like a dynamic zremesh I just start subdividing the dynamesh mesh which kind of works after I'm done I would do like a clean topology afterwards like an external software like Maya for example and then the baking process I would export this from ZBrush hi Polly I would export my low poly and I would just do the baking like very straightforward and simple in this case I wouldn't be able to do in ZBrush because my low poly it's not here so there's no no reference to bake the low poly to like the normal maps too so I would do like in painter for example I've got another one back here just gonna get this gentleman here part of me hey Hey I was just wondering if you could you started a bit but describe a bit more your workflow with polypaint and its relationship to making out the forms if there is any I didn't understand sorry ask it again here if you if you can describe maybe in a bit more detail your workflow with poly paint and how it relates to your sculpting sure like I think there are two stages for me whenever I'm texturing I can be either just doing like quick sketches with callers just experimenting different designs or different patterns on the head this guy for example I don't want I'm not sure if I want the eyes to be white or like to have like this pattern around the eyes so it's really easy and really effective for me to come here we can actually play with different stuff right now so I'm gonna just swap that to RGB turn off my ziad I'm on the standard brush and I can just speak like I like let's say let's do something around the eyes here and then I can just experiment stuff like that like very quickly and you see like I never do this I always keep like things loose and kind of build up my sharpness as I go even when I'm sketching so I can come here do this do that alright so this looking good let's say this is approved and this color palette is the final one that we really want to use in the game so in that case I would definitely bake out this map as well so I export these high poly with the poly paint on which comes in in a vertex color information and I will export that as a map and then I will be my base for my texturing or like you can also do the final texture in here as Chris was describing that he's been doing that you can just poly paint everything right I just like to poly paint on on my final asset or just do my taxing on my final asset because I also take into consideration my normal Maps and how that's actually reacting to light and that's just my workflow Thank You there's another one over here hey hi I wanted to ask what program you bacon and also since your leave character artist do you have everyone baking the same way or is everyone free to do whatever they're comfortable with yeah what process to use for baking yeah and go ahead ask do you have everyone bake their stuff in the same way or is everyone free that work with you there are the artists to bake in whatever comfort program they're comfortable in oh yeah they can use anything like the only rule we have is it has to look good thank you like some people and of course we have standards right like whenever you are delivering the final asset we do have our internal standards for how are we going to keep the texturing files and how are we going to keep the source files because if another artist has to work on that it has to be able to so we have a couple of standards but usually it's like whatever you are comfortable with like it doesn't matter like we are very fortunate to have access to pretty much any software so excellent one more over here and I think I'm gonna switch to Nate so he's gonna jump oh one more question in here before you leave no no yeah okay okay you asked the question and then they'll do their business up there how about a round of applause person for almost forgot [Applause] Wow it's much louder when you're actually in the hello so I notice you keep your head separate from the body I I just want to know what's the thought process behind that and at what point do you merge them together so you keep your head separate from your body and your thought process behind that and one do you merge all together yeah like like I was explaining the reason for that one is because I started from a head so I work my way down and at the end I would probably just collapse everything merge everything and then using the clay brush I can smooth those two or I could dynamesh but it's not like a rule that I always start with the head but in this I just wanted to show you something different usually you guys see presentations like on video game stuff saying like everything is perfect so you have like a approved and finalized concept and then you do all your modeling and then you do but that happens most of the time but the other way around all also happens to like you have like you start something in ZBrush and you prototype stuff and like it's it's all over the place like sometime so which is pretty fun and pretty good that that's what I wanted to show you guys here as opposed to a very strict high you know I thought when he was gonna say the time lapse like three days or five hours anyway my name is Nate Stevens I'm the lead environment artist at Santa Monica studio as you guys know we shift got a war earlier in the year [Applause] I am also an instructor at the gnomon School here on Monday nights I teach the if you've been in my class you're praying not clapping anyways so looking at the schedule of speakers I think I'm the only environment guy definitely the only environment artist today and maybe for the whole thing just cure out of curiosity how many environment prop you know hard surface guys do we have here or that's a significant number right it's intimidating for me because I I if I just tried to do a character like that it would take me like a year no it's actually I tried one time and I showed it to the lead character I was the time we said so which is fine you know so environments in the class I teach a lot of the lot of the students are character artists which is cool and something that comes up quite often is they like being a character artists because they like being in ZBrush to which I say all environment art is in ZBrush all the time too in fact it is probably at least at most studios I know of and definitely at the Santa Monica studio it's our main modeling tool we use my f4 and maybe some brick topology but we are in ZBrush the majority of the time and what I want to show today is I'm actually gonna do a little live demo making like a a modular piece of geometry using only ZBrush so you know years ago we would kind of do this hybrid approach between ZBrush and my you know 3d studio max whatever now you can start and end most things in ZBrush so I'm gonna attempt to kind of demo some of that stuff live today so we'll be covering a lot of little things very very quickly first off is as an environment artist we get this all the time pictures like this they're like hey build this and if you were to hand sculpt all of this obviously that would take like five years so we have to be very tricky we have a lot of ground to cover in a thirty hour video game we try to keep the fidelity to at least try to compete with the the character art which it obviously cannot but you know we we try to get there so we have to do things in this this magic word of modularity meaning that in a building like this we will try to break it down to pieces that look like this pieces that can tile and you could turn these into column bases arches door frames whatever this kind of modular geometry like I was saying years ago you'd pretty much be in Maya to lock this stuff down because it has nice grid and and tools like that but as things changed especially with some of the newer additions to ZBrush we can just start right here so first thing I'm gonna do is load in a texture and this will be our piece of reference that we will try to match so I'm just gonna load in this guy and then grab it and send it to the spot light I'll just kind of scale this guy throw them up with a corner here it's good do always work from reference if you just do the stuff out of your head you're gonna mess it up that's just just kind of how it works so looking at this this has a nice profile and this would be a perfect candidate for something like a trim piece up here and modular piece as I've said so the starting point is we will make a cube and to make fun environment arts a lot of cubes they say uh cubes and tubes yes but you're gonna see we're gonna smoke as a family show me the family show we're gonna use tons of different tools at our disposal to make this happen pretty quickly because we like I said we have to cover a lot of ground so we got to work fast so I'm gonna switch I'm kind of like glauco I just like the basic basic material it will not lie to you but we will use other materials later so by default this thing is gridded up in a way that's not super helpful I'm gonna go ahead and turn this into a well we can actually go to the initialize button here and crank some of this stuff down to get a more simplified shape so I'm gonna start with something like this because this is kind of what you'd start with in Maya and also I'm gonna go here to the size and we'll just make this 25 by 25 and turn on the floor make sure that I have my orientation correct looks like I do so this is the bare-bones modular piece that we're going to make out of this I'm going to make this a polymesh3d and then one of the newer brushes that's really helping us a lot as environment guys is this zmodeler brush this thing's like magic for example we have the this cross pattern at the top which is not the greatest topology to start working from but I can quickly go to the points and go to stitch and I can just clean this up by stitching this to this and then going to the delete edge and just clean it up that way what I'm gonna do now is divide this up so one of the reasons people kind of start in a traditional 3d package is the grid and ZBrush although it doesn't really have a standard grid like you're used to in Maya or you know 3d studio max the default pieces that come in are snap to a certain unit so if you were to import this into my for example this is 2 centimeters wide or 2 meters wide depending on your your Maya settings so we can actually leverage that and that's what we're gonna leverage that under the hood fact that this thing is actually a grit it off piece we're gonna use that to our advantage we're gonna see how some of these ZBrush tools actually take advantage of that under the hood so first thing is I'm just gonna come in here to my edges and we'll just insert some multiple edge loops so I picked the multiple so as I click here it'll just divide this evenly it'll just go on right in the middle can you guys hear me okay there's an impedance issue what's impedance is happening to me if this is when a court is bending and you're not getting shifted your your approach to making these assets from the get-go that's my question the difference between this and what you might have done before this zmodeler magic was available well we would have done this in Maya for example and then had to kind of jump back and forth either using what is that Josie plug-in or something like a game show host feel like the Mickey of ZBrush yeah all right Jeff okay so if you couldn't hear me before sorry we sort of that out now and you don't like going back and forth right you like to just say here stick in here am I gonna touch him again on the pants this is weird Kyle can you hold this for one second this is getting more community quick take a picture Saturday night what's gonna happen in Hollywood that's that's true but you get you can hear me you hear me I can't talk louder let's give another night here's a good sport if you can't hear me just raise your hand and say put it put your hands to go here's a good sport I'm over here it's like the David Copperfield show anyway jump back in I used the insert to just kind of grid this off a little bit so that I can match the profile that we're seeing here in that's good see it there in the the reference picture alright so polygroups really important for grouping stuff I'm just gonna you'll see me do this a bunch of times I'm gonna group this by normals just so we can kind of see where the different phases are and then I'm gonna go back into the faces on the zmodeler brush and use this poly group button this is pretty cool because I can go in here it's actually turn off the floor so I'm pretty much trying to make this profile quickly which again is something we do in Maya before what I'm gonna do then is hold down alt and click these faces to give them different polygroups and then switch to queue mesh and just drag these out the same thing go back to polygroup make some new polygroups and then queue mesh to drag the ah so I have to I just need to save the target is now all the polygroups I just made and drag that out do a similar thing to the top here I kind of have to count down you know how far do we want to go it's probably we probably want this guy this guy this one and this one and you know known this is destructive if you don't like it we can we can fix this later and we'll go back to queue mesh and I'm dragging that out specifically to tackle that bottom edge here rinse and repeat drag this one out a little further and that's it we have a rough profile done very quickly and I don't have to jump jump between software so I do have one question though yep so if you are working on a specific asset and you don't have like a profile image do you guys ask the fee staff or do you guys do that yourself trying to figure out the program good question yeah visit F will feed us a lot of profiles and stuff where we will find it ourselves either way and then also Nate just to match if you wanted to match when you were making the extractor you just basically have clicked without making the move to match the last extraction you made that's a pro tip yeah that was a pro tip so if you want it if you wanted to make that extraction happen at the same level as the first one so they would snap you just click it without making any move okay that makes sense I'm putting on my remember last distance you used you just click on it it'll go the same distance as the last time until you make a change okay I was like a leather jacket tip I don't so I'm gonna refine this profile a little bit so I'm gonna do some stuff like stitch at this point at this point now let's be efficient here and if you always want to work the few as amount of clicks possible so if I turn on something like symmetry then we can weld that together like that now moving points around is a breeze as well so this has this kind of kinked action right here that's as simple as I can just mask these points for example invert the mask and then hit R to bring up the new move tool which I can promptly set to the center of what I masked and then just scale this down sometimes the scaling goes a little slow like that but no matter if we can just do a point-by-point and there we have a rough profile of this this probably has additional bevels and stuff so if I was in Maya now would be the time you'd put those in but the cool thing about being in ZBrush is we can get that done super fast later and we don't have to do additional low poly modeling so now we have this curve thing to deal with so the way we can handle this kind of stuff now which is new I'm gonna actually start using the live boolean feature which which is new and another reason to kind of stay in in ZBrush so I'm gonna go my sub tool here and just append let's see a cylinder which came in giant of course we'll just switch to this sub tool and scale away down and rotate hold shift to get that to snap and I'm gonna turn on where we got it transparency just to see you know how big this thing is scale it down this is very common environment art practice is just kind of combining primitives together to make more elegant shapes so we have this bottom kink right here and now I need to get this thing which is a combination of a sphere something like that and then it extrude it a little bit so to do that no problem I'm just going to my brush is huge don't be so big just grab the top modify its ball G delete hidden and then I can come in I still have my zmodeler brush active one of them is closed so we can just close this hole it gets a little bit messy so if you want to be super clean about it we can just delete complete edge loops like that or remember we want to be as fast as possible so I'm going to hold down X and we'll just symmetry delete all these guys right here if they're not needed why deal with it and then we'll close the close the hole and that's much cleaner second thing I'm gonna do is since this made me a nice new polygroup I can just go to the queue mesh and just know it's not wanting to obey me can I get a question asked out here Nate while you're doing that do you mind Holly group group by normals again and then it's in the zone okay go ahead I'll just read polygroup this guy yeah real quick a little bit ago when you were working on the bottom how do you how do you isolate the gizmo tool to a specific face how do you do that while you were in zmodeler you mean where I had grabbed like what are you centered it at first and then you grabbed the vert that's inside of the you go ahead and answer that I'm were you talking about where I hit this kind of readjust yeah I mean the the menu appears if you click around for a couple minutes it's pretty self-explanatory what it what it can do I'll be using this a little bit later too but if you rotate an object well where do I have to go and just for the record those things on the end they're not pizza boxes Joseph wherever you are okay inside anyways what I've tried to make here is a sort of a cutter object to get this this cut right here so you know something along those lines and we can push and pull the points later go ahead and scale this guy really big and then go to the sub tool and set it to this little subtractor button turn off transparency and we can click this button which is like heaven for us now is we can just subtract this piece out take away the polyframe we have a nice curved piece where we didn't have to you know do boolean's and some other program or creasing or anything like that super convenient you will notice though that it's quite faceted so again that's easy to fix we can just go solo this guy out again and I'm gonna use this magic button I keep loving the group by normals and then what I want to do is I want to add a crease where each poly group ends which there's a sweet button right here under crease which is crease poly group and now I can divide this up so it's it's perfectly smooth and if we jump back here and then go out of solo mode see now we have a nice clean clean edge okay and so this is super fast again because in Maya to do this we would have we would had to add creases and smooth it out and maybe save that mesh off and here we can just get right to it and I can be modular you know that's like the the rad word for environment artists watch I can now duplicate this guy flip it upside down yeah exactly so yeah the cool thing is I can come in here and move this around if I don't like what it's doing scale it we're actually gonna put this on steroids a little bit a little bit later and I'm just gonna duplicate this shut shape to get that curve up there move it into place something like that and we now have the base of our profile you know and if I hadn't been talking I could have done this and in just just a couple minutes now once I'm done this is none of this is official yet so this one is subtracting this one is adding on you got to go to this boolean button and then here's where you save so I'm actually gonna save call it demo because certain operations these computers are sure are great but if you're on kind of like a laptop or something they can just kick the bucket at times so I'm gonna go ahead and say make booing mesh which made this new mesh up here that's just one sub tool if we look at the poly frame you can see where it kind of stitched everything together which is it's pretty amazing how good at boolean's with how many polygons you can throw at it not to name other software's but you know doing this with lots of polygons is super convenient it's fair to say it's unique without naming any other stuff yet yes very unique very unique so let's go back to the original goal which was to make a tie lean piece of geometry something like this so this piece from left to right will tile you can pretend like this is UV zero and this is UV one and just for reference I'm gonna go ahead and append in the plain 3d and this was a good way to visualize your 0 to 1 you've ease and so what I'm gonna do is give myself a little bit of sculpting buffer here I'm gonna take this and just drag it off a little bit so I can sculpt up to this point and I don't have to worry about any deformation adding a crease in the normal map one once I need to bake it out so again none of the sculpting will be part of the UVs but it will tile based on on this so if you're familiar with the for example I'm gonna divide this up a bunch if we go to like the claybuildup brush and turn on rap mode you know this is the way to get something to thanks for the help see so now we can this line here is where the it will go from one side to the other so just mocking that up lets us know that this tiling geometry piece this is where if I'm painting something on this piece it'll continue on the other side and I'll just undo that so that it doesn't look all messy and let's further refine our piece I'm gonna now go to the brush section here and select my clip curve brush and use this to trim off an edge or better yet trim off both edges with symmetry on and then also trim off the top so I could probably get a little closer in like so and now we have our super rad profile and we know as we now move to the sculpting phase so the blockout phase is kind of done we're gonna sculpt on this and we can visualize where things are going to tile so now's a good time to kind of duplicate that sub tool in case we need to go back and then move in to good old ina meshing now dynamesh is based on your size this is another good reason to start in ZBrush because since we've started with a ZBrush primitive these numbers will play nicely together for example I can well just turn off blur Oh maybe have a little bit of blur and I'm gonna pump the resolution up to like say 1500 maybe 1700 what I'm after at this point so this is kind of where environment art and character art kind of look at things a little differently character art will like start kind of low res an add up will go we will a lot of times go right to the topology so I'm looking for about four million points in in this this thing so it's fully sculptable and I think somewhere around this this number should give it to us it's where we wait it's doing magic in the old days before dynamesh we would go in to Maya have to cut this stuff up manually so all the kids have it easy now on the days of yore right-oh in the days of yore yeah the old days not questions out there in the audience hey there's an arm that's sprung up how are you yes ask now while it's doing magic Katherine have a good memory what is the best way to handle scale in ZBrush handle scale scale like proportion of one element to another like in the different architectural program you would have numeric measurement and in zbrush you can do units in the transpose tool but it's okay so hopefully this is the financer that makes sense is for environments at least we want everything to be the real size that it is okay so we don't pretend things are little or even though my it is this word conversion where you work in centimeters and we pretend that they're meters that's a different technical kind of problem it's Canadian we want it to be real and that's also because we have very strict Texel density requirements and if you just make an asset excellence it means you never scale an asset you never scale you've ease you want every pixel to be the same size in the environment and that's one of things in got a war we're very strict on to make sure you know all the pixels are the same size so you don't have a blurry thing next to a sharp thing very important so I guess the answer is make it real size how do you do that so I just happen to know that the the default cube in ZBrush is a two meter cube I believe and two meters roughly is someone as tall as gecko like a big tall guy tall strong guy so a lot of times what we'll do is we'll go into my and we'll just make a two meter cube me like that's roughly the size of a person and then model accordingly to that to make sure we're at scale yeah plus you know being a video game engine we can always throw it in the engine and run up to it and then check the size too but size is super important to get quick and so this thing here I maybe I didn't explain I actually I know I didn't this is built to be the actual size that it that it would be in the game you can find me after although we're I think we're doing portfolio review after this stick around yeah yeah there's a way to get that I promise they get that taken care of for you you do the portfolio thing and I'll take care of that okay yeah deal yeah you owe me a deal good deal yeah all right in the back I saw an arm don't be shy welcome my friends to the show that never ends all the way over to the left I'm sure my arm stretches up high I was I was wondering what was the tick's of density used for akhada war so god of war is no different than most Triple A games right now and it's 512 pixels per meter so a meter by meter if we were to look at a meter by meter plane right now a 512 by 512 text would map to that now we start talking about like 4k and next-gen stuff that's different but currently 512 per meter is there any other questions or shall I go I'm gonna keep doing this cuz the magic finished it's now at 3.7 million and this is a question we get all the times like how many polygons is is enough for us you can't have too many never because once you bake it down to a texture the worst case scenarios you're losing some some detail you're better off not going to low is the error though if this was only 500,000 and I was to bake this at 512 per meter you'd probably see little squares from ZBrush poking in there so we tried to go high I was aiming for about four but I I could tell you something this big this is more than enough resolution so dinah missions is awesome because it added all these squares we can now hit the wrong button you know we can now sculpt on this no problem but some of these edges are a little bit rough and this is where we'll start abusing this polish feature here polish it's like the hot dog it's capital P right so so people wonder sometimes like hey how many assets go through ZBrush at like our studio the answer is all of them almost everything goes into ZBrush you know has to be some kind of strange exception and then you know even hard surface stuff goes into ZBrush to dent it up and this polish feature is one of those things that is really cool for example with the button off I'm gonna crank the polish up what it's gonna do is take the edges and kind of give them this pillowing effect which looks really nice for metals plastics hard surface stuff and here's where I you save against right so see how it gave that nice like pillowy look that's cool so if you're doing some kind of plastic some kind of mech armor I worked on a game called titanfall a while ago and we kind of took every decent threw it in here and and did this - it looks neat but for what I'm gonna do that's a little too manufactured looking so I'm just gonna check the Polish button and just Nick this up a little bit and this is what's gonna give us that free bevel I was talking about the Bellas that you would have to put in in Maya for example we can just get by cranking this polish up and letting it bevel our edges for us tada very nice very clean very realistic nothing in the real world has that perfect CG edge which is another sort of game environment art rule as we bevel everything we never leave edges too too sharp it's really pretty and so this I mean this looks quite nice cool so at this point if you just wanted a clean model we could send this out start baking this now you could do some work in in painter that's not as fun as wrecking it and this is what ZBrush excels at is just destroying stuff so we're gonna destroy this a little bit where my pen go so in the past so the workflows have changed especially in the last year or so since some new tools have come online you know the traditional way of dealing with this kind of stuff is you start with a brush like trim dynamic oh come on there we go you know and we'd use this to dent some edges something like that and then we'd probably proceed on to something like claybuildup at a sort of a lower Z sub level for more defined pieces and on something this large you know you could spend a day sculpting that still that's not that's not a bad use of time but with what we can do now some of the new tools I'm actually gonna flip this on its head so instead of working from low to high I'm actually gonna work from high to low I mean we're just gonna take out the big chunks right off the bat using now you're gonna don't laugh because this is like it's gonna look a little crazy at first so I'm gonna append actually in save and then we'll append in a sphere and go to solo mode and shrink that down turn transparency shank this thing down what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna make sort of a boolean's subtractor object something that we can use to just cut pieces out instead of having to do it by hand and the live cooling stuff makes that super easy and fast now and it looks better that's just the reality so let's see we'll go to solo mode check the topology throw a quick dynamesh on this great and I'll divide it up you know we'll go for some like sure even 500,000 points so we already have kind of a lumpy looking cigar here what I'm gonna do now is start abusing the surface noise so it's very cool for just kind of creating a you know procedural ISM is big using designer now Houdini we use a lot at work we're getting into that so just by adding the procedural noise zoom in here I'm just gonna up the scale and then mess around with this curve a little bit to get to be a little bit more extreme we can get this to bump out you know something like that's right pretty good say okay and that just made this little cigar type Rock and I can just go ahead and apply that to the mesh now that's a bit it's a bit bumpy so we'll just dial that back a little bit take the strength down yeah that's a little bit better you don't need a whole lot of bumpiness to it in fact if you have some of this is probably a little bit too much I'm just gonna one more time take it down a little bit more there we go okay great apply that to the mesh that's good for some areas that are bumped out I want to also push some areas in kinda looks like a piece of poop I know it's like this is my character art it's like mr. Hankey that guy from South Park looks good it's good right okay can I get it into the department okay so so ZBrush comes with these sweet noisemakers this one's pretty good you don't really see it I'm not sure why it tinted blue but that's just how you can undo that real quickly I'm gonna add that now and adjust the scale till we see that so this is adding some more negative space big chunks like that but this time I bet you if I hit apply to mesh it's gonna freak out so freaked out a little bit no worry instead of doing that we'll just mask that on so we have now a nice mask of this and I can grab a brush like claybuildup and we just push this in manually a little bit but can you try to want to go to extreme but other depends what you're making and I'll clear the mask and see what the floor is go back to the trustee move brush I I do like glauco don't use that many brushes just deform this a little bit there's my character let him ship it this would have to go to rigging too you know well played sir well played all right so now let's do the cool new new magic is I'm gonna take this to be a subtractor object and with live bullying on what's that what hey that's not illegal anymore turn off transparency and now we have this sort of subtractor object check this out whoa well just place this along the edge and look at that that's a nice beat-up edge beautiful it's really crisp doing this hand sculpting would it required me to make a mask a very sharp mask but now I can just do this kind of action to it rotate it around a little bit we have this nice broken up edge and it's non destructible that's the cool part all right and you know it's cool that it kept my transformations right there but you if I want to undo that and just alt click here and it pops it back into place so now what I want to do just to be efficient is I'm gonna duplicate this a bunch of times and just place it generally where I think we could have some good detail get some stuff down there there so remember this is going to be a tiling piece of geometry if I was to add some big feature some smashed out thing you'd see it tile so as environment artists this is where we kind of walk this tightrope of it's gotta look cool it's gotta look custom but not too custom so that you notice a tile so I'm kind of evenly spreading out some of this detail my little cigars and what I'm gonna do now is just go turn them all off and one-by-one turn them back on and set them to subtract I'd have to zoom in and just kind of rotate them around a little bit scale them rotate them like this move them up till I get some broken edges some kind of composition that I that I like if I had some reference it's a good time to be looking at the reference alright so this one here just rotate it this way you can even do this fast with the mouse nice little dent right there we have ten minutes okay ten minutes so if we have ten minutes I'm just gonna do this on the top edge I said it the whole thing but check this out you can use brushes like the move brush now I can go in here and you know really refine this and scale it down some and we're just gonna deal with this top edge since I think we're getting a little low on time but I mean look at that if I had sculpted that by hand that would have been I don't know I wouldn't what I wouldn't have looked as good it wouldn't been as flexible and this is very cool all right so two more things I wound up doing to this this model at the time we got is now this this is in here I got a lock it down so I'm gonna make another boolean mesh out of this there it is and ZBrush has some really cool ways of adding surface noise one thing you can do is go into this noise modifier here and hit recenter and frame and you see the little noise that's adding which you can mess with and make you know kind of custom curves or whatnot you can also import height information so if you've gone on a scanning trip recently you have some cool photogrammetry thing height map you can import that in so I'm just gonna grab something that's from the textures comm library you know you guys can all get to I'm gonna turn off this mix basic noise and we'll just crank this up some you know and this gave us some of that nice surface information and the cool thing is if you stick to real numbers up here this will skate this will tile as well with your geometry so I'm gonna go to the noise noise scale here no the I'm sorry the Alpha scale make this point 5 hit OK and look we have some cool detail here if you wanted to paint that by hand you could mask by noise and just paint it where you wanted or in this case I'm just gonna apply to the mesh and there it is there would be a little bit of stretching so if they were if I had time I'd reorient this and reproject it a couple times or create a morph target and paint it out but for the you know the purpose of this demo really quickly we have something is starting to look pretty realistic and we haven't done anything really you know this isn't straight photogrammetry on top of that we can use one of the noisemakers we'll go back to this one so it corresponds with the cigar and check this out there's that here's a lot of nice procedural type smashing that you wouldn't want to do by hand and we'll just scrub this down you know somewhere around 50 s probably a 5-0 hit okay mask by noise we have a nice mask of this and if I switch to for example the displace brush which is one of the brushes I use most we can just start painting in some some additional surface detail wherever we want it and we can do a little fishing here we can take an edge up here just kind of use this to break up that edge so I'll focus a little bit on this edge since this is the one we actually did some work on and I'll be hitting ctrl H a lot just to kind of back up see where my personality is back to ctrl H paint some stuff in you know until we get something that looks looks cool finally so like I said a little bit ago this was the stuff I'm doing now is typically what we do at the end of the process now since I have some some nice detail in it actually makes a lot more sense to now go to trim dynamic since I have these kind of landmarks made I can do stuff that makes a lot more sense clear my mask so I can kind of build around some of the stuff I've done and just add imperfection to all the edges and a little bit of hand sculpting around some of the stuff doesn't hurt and I would say in the ps3 days and even on early god of war we would probably spend a day or two sculpting a piece like this you know because it could be since it's modular can be reused in so many ways it's worth the time what I was able to pull off in this demo is this is a pretty final looking top edge just by using some of the new tools I do you Nate Stevens while colognian a scheming swell [Applause]

Channel: Pixologic ZBrush

Views: 51,571

Rating: 4.9607844 out of 5

Keywords: twitch, games, pixologic, sony, santa monica studio, god of war, zbrush, zbrushlive, zbrush summit, zbrush 2018, video games, tv, film, 3d printing, playstation, glauco longhi, nate stephens, digital sculpting, 3d modeling

Id: hvTg61ExNf8

Length: 84min 15sec (5055 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 02 2018