Stylized Environment Texturing in Mixer

[Music] [Music] hey everyone my name is galen and i'm an evangelist here for quick solid epic games so we've gotten a lot of requests from artists specifically about making stylized environments using qixel mixer and unreal engine and so we're going to take a deep dive today and actually breaking down some of these acids in mixer we're going to start by looking at an original sculpt of a rock and we're going to texture it all the way through and then actually take a mega scans asset and stylize it completely we're super excited to be making this tutorial series for you guys so without any further delay let's jump in [Music] so i want to start by actually looking at some of the reference that was pulled for this specific environment as it's going to inform a lot of the decisions that we're going to be making be it textually speaking or sculpt based as you can see we're going for something that's definitely stylized in nature really saturated and has a lot of exaggerated shapes i'm even going to go in and start to try to get this brushstroke effect on a lot of these different assets that we're gonna be working with so some of the standout characteristics of what we'll be working with here are a lot of the color decisions a lot of the textural decisions but also trying to find something that's completely new and unique for our scene but i'll be referencing this specific call-out sheet a couple times in the tutorial and this sheet was super important in order to help make a lot of the decisions in making this environment and i also want to give major credit to jack mckelvey for actually making this environment we'll be taking a look at some of the different assets that make up this environment and really diving deep into quixote mixer to look at some intermediate level techniques so we're going to start today's tutorial by actually looking at one of the main subjects of the environment in the floating rocks that you're seeing in the front of the environment so i'm not going to show my entire sculpting process but i figured i'd talk a little bit about some of the principles about what it is that we'll be doing with this asset so it literally started just from a sphere and from there just started to extend some of the shapes and i'm just trying to very quickly discover the composition of this element as you can see i'm working at an incredibly low resolution and i'm dynameshing very frequently so that i can continue to maintain an even topology across the entire surface just in looking at the reference that i pulled for this environment specifically i really want everything to be kept incredibly angular so i'm using a planar cut shallow brush with a square alpha and what this is going to allow me to do is really kind of cut into this mesh a lot and like i mentioned i'm using the smooth brush a lot and dynameshing very frequently and just pushing and pulling on the surface a little bit to try to find exactly what it is that i'm going for i didn't have a very detailed concept for this specific object so as you can see i'm very much winging it here just by cutting off some large shapes pushing and pulling and some of the elements and just trying to find something that's compelling in the frame i'd say especially early on in this stage you definitely want to be keeping your resolution very low so that you don't commit yourself to any really high resolution detail too quickly and even though i'm using a very sharp and intense brush in order to achieve this specific look i'm actually going to be smoothing this whole object out later so that i get a very very clean bake and just kind of nice rounded edges that i think play nicely with the aesthetic that we've chosen for the scene and like i mentioned we're going to be looking at mega scans assets here as well and using those as a jumping off point for creating the stylized environment now i really like this japanese wall here and what i'm gonna do is actually download the ztl that's actually included as part of the package here and from there i'm able just to open that directly up in zbrush and start sculpting it's important to note that you could bring in a lower resolution version of this mesh but what i like to do is actually pull the highest resolution here so that i can actually smooth it myself and then make some creative decisions afterwards artists ask us all the time about whether or not photorealistic assets can actually be turned into stylized elements now the answer to this question isn't necessarily a straightforward one but what i will say is that most artists are always pulling from photoreference even if they are trying to mimic a stylized example for instance you would draw on the reference of the real world to inform a lot of your lighting decisions that you would make an environment like this one in a similar way using scans here i'm using this rock wall to inform the way in which these stones would actually lay on top of each other now while i could have created this asset from scratch i really want to save myself a lot of time by just letting the scan actually be my jumping off point here and i'm not reinventing the wheel by having to go in and decide what each exact shape should look like how the boulder should be stacked on top of each other or anything they're in and from there i'm just importing my style on top of it now a lot of the stylization is obviously informed by the textural detail that goes along with these assets but it's really important to be able to have a solid foundation in a clean sculpt and an absolutely flawless bake so i like to spend a lot of time on my sculpts and make sure that everything is just exactly the way i want it for when i project all that information down to my low poly and again really keeping the edges in mind for this as well because the edges are going to be one of the defining characteristics of how we actually get the curvature elements and the edge highlight to come through in our stylized texturing workflow so as you can see i'm using a very similar workflow to what we were employing on the first rock i'm zooming in and out changing the size of my brush and affecting the focal shift as well in order to get a very specific result and just a fair warning we're not going to be spending any time here going over the process of actually extracting a low poly or baking so we're going to jump ahead into qixel mixer and go ahead and bring all the new elements we've created into our scene what i'll do to start is just bring in my low poly obj and i'm going to bring in now all the associated maps that go with this element now to set up a really effective mixer scene for what we're doing here the only inputs that i'm really going to need here are the normal map the ambient occlusion and the curvature to get started these basic elements will really inform a lot of the decisions that we're going to be making textually so it's important that these maps are as clean as we possibly can make them and once again as you're working with these types of assets having really clean inputs will really make the texturing process go so much easier so spend a lot of time on your bakes don't rush it and let's go ahead and start texturing though and what i'm going to start here is actually just lay down a solid foundation and i like to think of this base as the canvas for everything that we're going to be layering on top so the main asset type that we're going to be working with today is actually the solid layer and the solid layer is a really awesome element to be working with inside of mixer because it can do so many different things for us all the work that we're going to be doing from here out is going to be building on top of this base layer so just keep that in mind as you start to layer on these new effects as we keep going the next thing i'm going to do is actually add in a simple gradient and what i'll do start here is actually add in another solid layer and i'm going to disable all the associated maps that i don't need in this example primarily we're just going to be working in the albedo channel and as you can see i picked something that's just a little bit darker than our base and i'm going to use a position gradient element here to start now before we go any further i want to point out that we'll be linking specific videos that call out specific features inside of mixer on a per component basis as you go so there's any element here that you're unfamiliar with definitely feel free to check out the video where josh powers does an awesome deep dive into each of these different elements and as you can see here with the position gradient i've just added this into my stack and i'm inverting it so that i actually get the effect to go from bottom to top and now i'm just feathering the range a little bit in order to find the exact effect that i'm going for now while i think this looks pretty good i actually want to break up this effect as it just seems a little bit too flat for me a very overlooked element in the library is actually our imperfections section and what i'm going to do is actually bring in a map component and use one of our imperfection maps in order to break up this gradient that we've added in on this layer i really like this leakage element here so i'm going to bring that in and what i'm going to do now is actually just simply add in a projection modifier on top because what we want is for this specific leakage to actually be completely tiling on the mesh so if you're running into issues with the texture not tiling use the projection modifier in order to dial in the specific result and then i'm just playing with these sliders a little bit in order to get exactly the look that i'm going for and as you can see i've just appended the projection modifier directly to the map set it to box projection so that we get our hexaplanar projection and with the blend mode set to overlay we've really got a nice breakup of what was otherwise a very simple effect [Music] so in the same vein of actually getting a really nice gradient from top to bottom we're going to add in some really awesome color variation to the surface so that we can actually break it up even more i've brought in this purple and i think this purple is actually going to be a really really nice addition to the gradient itself but what i want to do is actually not use the position gradient in this specific example the normal component is a really powerful element here that you can use the radial slider in order to affect where it affects the asset and in this case we want it again to be coming from bottom to the top and once i dial in the range here as you can see if i hit nine on the keyboard i'm getting this awesome preview of what the mask is actually doing and again i want to point out here that as we're looking at the individual maps i can actually set the albedo even here to a specific blend mode until i get it exactly where i want it this really just allows you to be incredibly creative as you're working if you have specific roughness values you're trying to multiply on top of each other or if you're really just trying to do something simple like this the mask stack and blend modes really allow for just a lot of creative opportunities [Music] and the next thing i want to do here is actually bring in some cool tones right into the crevices of this asset and as you can see with just a simple curvature component if i dial in the levels here slightly what i'm able to get is actually a really nice result of getting this blue to kind of fall in the cracks and crevices of the element and just to make things a little bit more soft for the effect here i'm going to just add in a simple gaussian blur and affect the strength until i get it exactly dialed in for where i want this just adds in some nice separation to the asset and again falls in line with a lot of the reference that i've pulled for this specific example i never want to pull in anything that's completely desaturated or way too dark here so as you can see i'm bringing in a lot of different colors in order to really get some exaggerated results and the next element that i'm going to create here is actually a little bit more complicated as i want to almost create a brush stroke effect on the surface now while you can paint in quixote mixer directly onto a mesh here i actually want to add in some procedural components that i think would be really really nice in order to non-destructively paint this asset up so what i'll do to start here is actually bring in this really nice dark blue and i'm going to add in a map component to my stack if i browse through the library i can actually isolate individual channels that make up specific assets like this tile rubble patch now at first glance this definitely seems like a strange choice to be making but we're going to be making some manipulations to this specific asset so that we can get it to almost be like a brush stroke on the surface as i have this asset downloaded you can see i can isolate specific maps that make up this element in this case what we want is to actually use the opacity channel so in its standard use this is actually just a simple tile that's scattered on the ground and then made tiling but we're actually going to be using it for something completely different so to start what i'm going to do is add in a scatter modifier and as you can see here if i just affect the density and some of the sliders here i'm able to get a really interesting effect on the surface and this effect almost looks like word is spattering a little bit of blue onto the surface which is really neat now if i add in a noise component to the top of the stack i can go to the distort blend mode and actually affect the intensity of the distortion of this element so i'll start to play around with some of these sliders here i'm just going to be messing around here in the viewport as you can see but what i'm going to be doing is mess around with blending modes affecting the distortion and really trying to find a scatter pattern that i think works really well and as you can see we're creating some really awesome shapes from this the distort modifier does so many cool things for us and we're just affecting the noise in such a way to where it's completely breaking up what was otherwise just squares on the surface and i really encourage you to go in and seed some of the different frequencies change maybe the octaves and definitely play with some blending modes with this and i think he'll land on some pretty happy accidents that will give you a pretty cool result at the end now i really like what we've created here with this bass but what i'm going to do now is actually create a warm version of this and actually just change some of the parameters that we've created with this scatter effect and all this is really doing is just breaking up the surface even more and i've been looking at a lot of reference specifically for this environment where i'm looking at creating just a very painterly look and all these elements combined actually would give us a very specific result for our stylized scene the next thing we want to do is actually add in some moss to this and so i'm going to add in just one more solid layer here and go and find a green that i think works really well for our scene and once again i want to create a tiling element here so we're going to use the exact same workflow that we did before in creating this brush stroke look but we're going to be pulling in a specific acid here that almost looks like grass that's tiling on the surface so once again i've just isolated the opacity layer and we're going to scatter this effect directly on the surface now as you can see as we really bump up the density of this specific effect we're getting a really unique look here and what i can do here once again is just change maybe the brightness jitter maybe affect the way the angles are falling on the asset and obviously playing with the scale exactly here to where we get the exact frequency of detail that we're looking for and obviously what's really cool about working in this specific workflow is that every single thing we're doing here is completely non-destructive in the viewport so at any time we can go sub in a different asset maybe change the scale of the element really anything you can imagine and once again i'm going to be using a normal modifier here in order to make it so that the grass only affects the top elements here that are exposed and using specific blend modes in this case will limit that effect to exactly what it is that we're going for and i want to employ a very similar technique to what we did even on the brush stroked elements as well here where i'm going to duplicate the asset altogether and then just change some of the sliders here in order to break up some of the surfaces even more so i've changed my blending modes here to maybe get the green to pop a little bit more and we're just changing some of the seed values here in order to get just more grass scattered in a different hue all right and the last thing that we definitely need to do here is pop the edges a little bit so i'm going to add in one more solid component and find something that's a little bit more desaturated from what we were going for in our base and actually just limit this effect using a curvature modifier on top now out of the box this looks pretty good but why don't we go ahead and start messing around with the levels here a little bit and try to get something a little bit more in line with our reference all right and once i've got that dialed in let's go ahead and duplicate this layer specifically and we're going to start to blend this in a different way as we're going to blur it a little bit so where we get that effect to play with the element below and as you're working like this it's important to start to play with maybe some of the opacity sliders maybe look at some different blend modes if something isn't working but i think we've got something that looks pretty compelling here so why don't we go ahead and save this now as a smart material i want to duplicate this exact same texturing workflow on a couple different assets so what i'm going to do is actually save this now as a smart material so that we can save ourselves a lot of work down the road one important note when you're working with smart materials is that you cannot bring in anything that has paint layers associated with it the reason for that being that it's going to be working in different uv space as it's a different asset so if you've gone in and painted anything specifically for your mesh you're going to have to delete it for this specific operation but we can obviously go back in later on a per mesh basis and start to work out whatever it is that we want to carry over all right so i've loaded up the wall that we're working with before inside of zbrush and i'm just going to go up now and actually load in the smart material that we just saved out for the rock as you can see we have a fully textured asset here just in seconds now one really important note to make when you're working with smart materials is that you might have to go back in later and actually affect some of the sliders or some of the attributes of that smart material to fit whatever new mesh you're working with in this specific case i want to actually dial in maybe the curvature a little bit more and affect the way that the moss is actually sitting on the surface of the rocks so while i've already saved myself a ton of time here i'm just going in and customizing it even more so i get exactly the look that i'm going for in this asset specifically and as you can see we've taken a mega scan's asset repurposed it re-sculpted it and found a completely different look for it and we've done exactly that same thing on a couple different assets for the scene that you're looking at now i really hope this tutorial was helpful for everyone and i cannot wait to see what y'all come up with using qixel mixer in the library if you haven't already be sure to subscribe to our channel where we're going to be doing a lot more of this type of content going forward and if you have specific requests or ideas for different types of content definitely leave us a comment in the section below [Music] alright and that's it for this one thanks so much for watching and we'll catch you in the next one you

Channel: Quixel

Views: 186,463

Keywords: Quixel, Mixer, Free, Megascans, PBR, Texture, Textures, Texturing, Stylized, Stylised, Materials, 3D, Sculpt, create, 3D art, ArchViz, Games, VFX, Decal, Quick, Fun, Time saving, Speed, Scans, Scan, Photogrammetry, Tutorial, Minutes, Beginner, Guide, Procedural, New, UE4, Unreal engine, games, cinematic, Xbox One, hard surface, modeling, hard-surface, hs, model, modeling 3d, polycount, artstation, quixel megascans, epic games, epic, fantasy

Id: kg4YFS6b0ek

Length: 18min 1sec (1081 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 16 2020