The Best Way of Detailing Characters - Mari - Part 1

hey guys Henry Morton from flip normals here this is a video I've wanted to do for a long time now as detailing your characters up is really a super important part of any kind of character creation and after working in filmer for a few years and really having done a lot of detailing like we weren't so much with details I think we really just found the optimum way of of detailing your characters and it's not in ZBrush it's surprisingly in Mari so there are a couple of advantages to actually doing your fine details like pores and scales animals can stuff in Mari compared to ZBrush the first one is that you are not you're not dependent on poly count instead you are relying on texture resolution which is so you get so much more in here let's say you have a character which is like 20 you Dems and 8k like you have like 64 million potential pixels depending how you optimize your space instead of this like per udin depending OCO compared to like a 16 million poly version and sivir's for the entire model which is the entire model is 600 yeah you get like the resolution is not even comparable also you don't have to extract displacement maps from it you just extract NECA straight the black and white map from it in Mari so bunch of advantages to it and we hope that in this video you can also just see the real advantage of it here I think it's a lot it's also it's just a lot faster because it's kind of like a kind of procedural workflow yeah because you're using Mari you have the ability that you know you have it on layers I mean yeah you can do there's an C brush but you have real layers three layers actual layers and hint hint hint it just makes it a lot faster to work with yeah I feel like it's it's really the optimal way to do high resolution stuff for your characters and creatures so here is a quick teaser we're going to talk a bit more but like check this out oh yeah so before we go into all the sexy stuff here we're gonna talk about the main resource here because you can't just you're not gonna paint this by hand you do rely heavily on predefined and pre-made texture maps here so the main resource we have for this is texturing xyc you can find her up here textured xyc we're also including a link to this let's just say that we are not affiliated with text rings we'll see it's just a really fantastic resource here they gave us of some for a couple of maps for this video here but we have no we have no affiliation with no apart from that so this here is really the resource you want to use if you are doing any kind of high-end realistic characters particularly if you're doing humans they have a lot of really good maps for animals but they really really shine when it comes to humans they have like properly polarized photos of people they have they also have this like incredibly high frequency skin details and all that yeah it comes with everything you know it's diffuse you have your your displacement maps your bump maps yeah so this being used by pretty much all the major studio like UCR frame store uses for Harry Potter amazing personal project and of course these could have been done by hand but the amount of time it takes to do something like this define frequency here using using XY tech strikes or see compared to doing it by hand like it's not even comparable I mean it takes real life like nine months to make a baby so we can just do this so fast now using this method here so if you are interested in in detailing detailing humans for detailing creatures highly highly recommend tech strikes I see like I can't say enough good things about it so they have like all these insane insane the stands of human faces where I think they've taken out like some kind of some kind of material on the face and they're scan the material yeah it's crazy stuff so this is also useful if you are using severs as well this is not only for Mari we just prefer to use Mart for this yeah they've come with with the ZBrush file or super kind of helpers including I don't know if all maps do that but the packages that we have do yeah and it's just quickly you also just throw it in the ZBrush if you want to stay in ZBrush and just do everything in there like if you want to a male chest nipple that's a very specific yeah so let's just look at what we actually got here we got a couple of different animal packs here like some frog packs I think and some some mount and some packs from like pigskin so there are some alphas here you can use an see brush so if you are using see brush don't panic you can totally use this but we are also using these ones so they have you have the albedo the bump map cavity - map on mat and the roughness map so these can just be used right away super high res as well they're also like 300 megabytes 400 megabytes here so really really high quality stuff so without that out of the way say nice things about section XYZ fantastic resource let's look at how we can actually set this up in in Mari we're using Mari 4 here but this we're going to work with any other version of Mari so let's just quickly look at our channels here we have bring this up here so we have a base color and we have bump base color is like 256 by 256 against tiny we'll only want one color in here and then for the bump map with this is 4k and it's 16-bit this is important that a 16-bit otherwise you loosing you will get a lot of banding and your dispute loosing a lot of information you know that's the issue that you often run into with with doing detailing in ZBrush once you export your maps out because it's resolution dependent if you actually zoom in on your maps you're gonna see sort of faceting where you know you see the edges of the actual polygons yeah we also have to go onto our paint buffer and change our color depth to 16-bit this is the diversity the whole point and having a 16-bit if you're just painting regular maps but these are not regular Maps these are amazing Maps so they have a lot more resolution I think some they were actually 32-bit but we don't need that so we can just dictate stick to the 16-bit I also changed the lighting a bit here for this video we assume that you know the basics of Mari if not check out our introduction tomorrow which is gonna be linked in description and in here I've just disabled all the lights apart from one i know set this to fixed to camera so this now is actually fixed to camera and not the scene and I'll just change it so that it's fairly high contrast as well you don't want to paint something on this because then you can't actually see anything going on so make it fairly high contrast then in the shader this last thing we really have to set up you plug your base color into into that and you plug your bump into the bump and then we go all the way down here and we set bump set the bump weight to one and a bump mode to accurate if you want strike the faster set it too fast and this might be if you're on how all the hardware or something exactly so fairly simple setup here change your lighting change your on your paint buffer to 16-bit make sure your channel is a 16-bit and just at the bump weight to one and now we can start to actually set up some of the stuff here so let's just set up our image manager here and we just dragged in some of these images here fairly fairly straightforward stuff and so let's first look at some of these dropped some tiled ones included in some of these and these are amazing if you add a tab key it's not so the search button here it's tiled and now we're gonna get a little procedural tile here now we can just drag and drop any one of these in here give it a second and now you can see it's just tile this all across here really powerful stuff and then if you want to tile this more you can set this in note 5 and now you see you have this like super nice skin all across the model yeah good luck doing that and see what yeah good luck doing that so now we're gonna get some people who's gonna say that you the holy title stuff and see by using like the noise maker but this is it's not even comparable how how much more powerful this is because you guys you have to apply it to your mash I mean you can do is preview but yeah yeah it's just this better the resolution you're getting here is like is really not comparable here no because like we're looking into like one spot of the back here and it's still looking fine that looks like a male nipple in there so this also this is also depending on how good your model it's like if you were to actually look at the map here it wouldn't really look particularly but since we are in system model is it's fairly refined it holds up pretty well so make sure your model is as nice as you can don't over compensate for bad modeling and texturing this here is after the model is done so that's one procedure we have another one here as well so let's just go in here and to the tiled and just put in another one here as well that looked oddly yeah okay so this is distributor front yeah so this different so what you can do now you can have a couple different layers of these so you can do let's say you want this here to be like lower low frequency we can tile there's something like sort of like twice oh that's not twice that is 21 so we can do like this which is slower frequency and then we can do duplicate it control C control V and call it high and now we can set this to something like seven so now this is a lot higher frequency here so now we can simply just mask out areas where we don't want we can blend these two together so we can right click on this and we can do layer mask add mask and we can do hide all that's gonna hide all of the high frequency stuff here so just give it a second so now if we are in here now we can go into the paint tool and just paint now here with black and now you can just see that we're just getting also painted white and now you're gonna see that we're just blending these two together here so you can just really just get in here and just blend it nice whenever I do this I try to make sure the patterns are kind of like following on what you start doing a big broad thank you I'm actually trying to blend the two patterns together so hit the B key to bake it down or on if you set the baking baking behavior to auto baking clear you can do that as well so we're just getting these fine frequency things here to show up and this is something that you really can't do in ZBrush to the same extent so that's why we just we just really prefer to do this in mine yeah and all this is procedural now I'd like the only thing which is not proceed on is just a painted mask so if you want to change this later on you can just change the mask I mean some people might make an argument for HD sculpting but well you know it's HD sculpting yeah yeah so it's we we don't really prefer a sculpting those acids it's not super production friendly and and also when you're doing H is sculpting this while you're sculpting on such a fine level that you might as well just do in here with with regular pixels like you lose the overview really quickly with HD sculpting because then you are doing this kind of fine detailing there and I mean look at that you know if that's the kind of detailing you were doing in it with HT sculpting like what's the point yeah what's the point of doing that with polygons when you can just do it with a map and I will then displace the model afterwards yeah this is what we're also advocating something we talked about this well in the self-taught how drivers have to a successor for self self taught artist is you know bases are generalist first because then you know all these kind of things then you're not gonna become like this crazy see brush cowboy who can do one skill but you understand how this kind of stuff is tied together for certain things see bridges a lot better for a lot of things Mari is a lot better yeah and it's not about having the best tool and only learning that learn to learn about them yeah it's like if you're doing the low-frequency details here you totally do dude and ZBrush you know get a really good base yeah and have it push your model as far as it can go with the resolution you have available yeah and then get in tomorrow the tools complement each other yeah are not competitors here like it in no way is Mario competitors to see brush which is a texturing tool you're dealing here with maps well see bridges just dealing with polygons nobody would concept like a character in in Mari and they'll be insane impressive yeah so you can see you're like the level of detail we're just getting in here now you know we're a few minutes into this and you're gonna see the level we're getting in here if you're if you spend like a week or so on this yeah like you getting some really really nice stuff go out of this and this is this is how we have been doing it in film you can't talk too much specifics here but then giant monsters have been sculpted with this a lot of characters for recent movies have which we've been working on have been made we using this method here and the thing is like it's just it's just so fast it's almost like a no-brainer to do it more now because also like the production hardware that you have available to you in a production it's just fast super expensive graphics art if you are in production totally use it yeah but I feel like even if you have more low-end stuff like I wouldn't consider with the GPU we're using the GTX 970 Ti I think it's not a low end GPU not by no means but compared to a Quadro it's still pretty low yeah the ones from you know see in there like five nine thousand pounds yes pretty ridiculous stuff like see it is a little slow once you have to you know once you put in your tileable it's fairly big resolution that's 4k and stuff it just take a little while to tile it across but that's the powerful thing about this yeah you can use tileable for the base here yeah kidding is doing then you'd go in with some some more bespoke textures and and apply them less you know if the knee or you have your male nipple and I monster or whatever you know that's probably gonna be faster than the Tyler Bowles I would imagine and yeah exactly and the cool thing is that you cannot change this as well listen you want this to be higher to be 10 and 10 you can do that you want this to be to be like one and once you want is actually low frequency you can do that change too you can totally change this at any point yeah and you can also apply something like it overall here you can do hit the tab key and hit contrast just you get a contrast up run and now we can just change the contrast for everything here again it takes a bit time to load this sometimes so now we can just make everything stronger or everything weaker this is a great way of doing again just it's not it's not to destroy people who want to only do this right but just the power of Mario when it comes to specifically things like this like okay now you've done it across your entire mesh let's imagine you did it with HD sculpting and okay good luck with that okay you get your maps out somehow yeah then you'd have to get your maps into nuke in order to adjust them and now you're already doing kind of a texturing thing so why not just do it in Mari yeah not exactly I'm all for about and also you can see the stuff we're doing here is very simple Mari can be fairly complicated but this here is is very simple you know we we load her in our model and we applied a tile here and and that's it for that I had I can't remember if we talked about this in another video I think we did but on Kingsman the new Kingsman movie I I had to do like this quick like the diamond tile metal flooring for like a ski ski thing and I was trying to do it in ZBrush to begin with it like I made a little tileable thing for the diamond pattern I tried to apply it in C brush as a tileable map with noise maker and it was fine but I needed like was in a ridiculous amount like almost I was pushing it to like up to the 80 million mark just to get enough resolution lower for a floor right did achieve like five seconds yeah I threw it in Mari did the tile a boy in there just messed out the edges and exported my map done yeah you know that's it so it's so much faster so once we're done with the tile bolts over the up with actual tile balls here you should go to you should convert into a paintable so that is rightfully converted paintable because this gets fairly slow after a while so we're not gonna do that now because that's just gonna take time and then have to editor out a video you don't do that anymore not anymore so now we have a base here which is a fairly decent procedural base let's actually do some proper painting here so this is where we're looking into something like him like the roll files you can see before here so this is where you have like I think this is from a crocodile and this is where you can really just go in and and just paint stuff here let's say you want some crocodile stuff around here you can just go in and you can just really just nicely paint this in here it's kind of a service sculptural really get this nice crocodile patterns in here you can use the eraser hit e key just your erase away from here another advantage of doing it Amaury like this is you know yeah the the crocodile is completely stretched out like it's flat but what at what point is the creature you're doing gonna be completely flat like this right you could warps and you can start warping it in Mario sort of like have it conform to the muscles that's always doing a lot here yeah you can use to warping tools here and again we're not covering too many tools video here because that would we know we done that in our long video so you can do that you can also use like the slurp tool and you can just like which is just like liquify essentially and just really like working with saying just really conform a to the muscle hit the B key to pick it down like this is also why I really preferred to bake behavior such a manual because I can real this control I can really just control this so we can do some more of this stuff actually it's just some given proper crocodile scales here on the back oh yeah so you can see here now that they're fairly flat so we like we're saying before that this is not a competition between see brush and Mari for these kind of things we would know this warped them into place a bit but you see still in volume for them yeah so and there isn't really a good way of doing this in ZBrush just because you're in Mari because you know we're dealing with fine frequency so what we'll do for this will just I will just export out this uddham here I'll lose expertise yidams and I'll just put them into ZBrush and just scope them up it's very much back in forth yeah so like the thing is like because I want to clarify something here with with the whole texturing workflow it's you have to figure out you know if you're in a production if you're doing personal project whatever you have to figure out what you consider if it the resolution of your creature human whatever what do you consider low mid and high frequency detail you know I think for something like the crocodile ones there with with the size being like the way they are you know just I would probably do it in ZBrush but the workflow where you go from Mari to C which is super powerful because it allows you to really quickly lay it out yeah and then you know get it onto your model or or use the SI brochure alphas that are included I'm sure that's also really quick yeah hey we aren't saying Morton senior don't do this only Ammar only super figure out what's needed for these kind of things what I think is super valuable is that if you were to sculpt this by hand in ZBrush like it's so hard to really get the organic nosov it's really easy just to make it so it feels like mechanical or boring yeah what would you do here you can project this on as a base and then you technically I think a really good work but also if you're working with let's say you're working with texturing artist and you're just a modeler or sculptor right then figure out like we just talked about like what is the resolution that you want for certain things maybe they have have the texture artists do some of them more organic low-frequency detail and then let have them give you a map yeah when they give you a map that's sort of like it's a blueprint how it should feel then you can add volume to it in ZBrush yeah so they really they really complement each other as as tools for they really don't work for like this the reason we wanted to do this video as well of course we just haven't really seen anyone talk about it has always been you know your ears high-frequency brush can you do color here no Omar is pretty powerful mari is pretty powerful you can even sculpt them more yeah that is a topic for another video just a little teaser yeah so we have a bunch of these maps here super cool stuff so let's look at some of the other ones we have here we go with your side I think this is pig skin which is fairly similar to human skin actually so I'm not male nipple skin not me so you because you just did obviously in this video here would not think about art direction I were just throwing some stuff together just to show you the power of it and again to get in here and just warp it up using the warp tool nice I think the nice thing about this I mean I'm not a texturing artist by any means but like even I can do this yeah I've done this so it's this is easy so even think one of the things I really like them the most about this is just how responsive it is yeah like if I were to sculpt this in ZBrush I could do that part of the arm in a few hours and you've just done it in two seconds and I probably wouldn't even look at know exactly because like if you're gonna replicate real life that's hard that is hard and and yeah that's that's exactly pointed this is literally real life this is from real world reference so it's super cool stuff like just this amazing texture we're getting in here now and you can just totally blend this in as well you shall just try to just again have lower opacity for it and just lower pressure and just blending these things here too it's like you wanna you wanna use the maps that you think makes sense for the part of your creature like right now you have that classic quadrupeds stretchy fabric yeah skin thing there right that probably wouldn't be covered in crocodile skin oh so using them like the pig skin more flexible exactly using some like the pig skin male nipple skin whatever that that makes sense we have the top parts that are more rigid you know use the crocodile thing for that what we also want to briefly talk about here sucker there is some high Ricky to this like roll visa when werster's painting now we don't really care but like I said about our action what I would highly recommend is having areas which are bigger and areas which are smaller like for instance on the shoulder here let's say we're gonna do this properly you could do this like you can do this big big shapes you're really lower frequency and then you can do certain areas like maybe here you want to do like way more high frequency just so just so your eye doesn't get tired now's it's really easy to just make the same frequency everywhere and that's just boring I've seen that in production a fair few times yeah where it's have some guy and it's just like ZBrush the crap out of a model or whatever and it's just it's it just hurts your eyes because it's just one or two alphas maybe it's a hundred outfits doesn't matter but it's just the same level of detail everywhere there's no rest for your eye like let's say you have those smooth smooth bony protrusions on the head there you know maybe you'd have less detail because the skin would be stretched across some bone or something then you have some areas of rest so your eye doesn't get it's like oh where should I look yeah so it's I think it's it's both like it's a mix of trying to replicate how things would look in real life but then also thinking about how would it make sense for the human eye like when you look at it because they're everything here is this it's art direction it yeah somewhere it really is and also when this here is super easy I like you don't like I'm not spending any effort in this which you might be able to see but like it's yeah it's not art erecting but it's still really impressive details you can get in here so again it's the whole thing great power comes great responsibility you know don't just because you have a cool tool don't overdo it it's kind of like the lens flare in the 90s everything now headlines focus on it yeah or lens flares after Video Copilot yeah at least two things under Cramer yeah that got crazy I remember watching some soup or terrible film but like aliens or some something like that Oh a battleship battleship that was super terrible alien movie lens flares yeah I remember because we stopped at of one point during the film because there's so many limbs lives in it I think I counted 11 or 14 lens flares in one shot it didn't make any sense but important that's how you fix a bad script oh yeah this you don't pay your script writers so you just buy a plugin after fights I think Vienna was in that film or something why yeah exactly the Linux lady so I actually what Warren was starring but here before lines fair and Orion is it's the whole like balancing your stuff here so what I often do I just throw tons of on the model like this and and it gets really messy so we'll do a pass on it where we do we do a color and we set this here to now everything nothing is gonna happen because now it's gonna it's gonna put away everything your piss is perfectly white so give it a second here but if we set this her to 50% gray said you can do this value and this attitude down to like half so if 50% gray is that means nothing is gonna happen to the model if what's essentially happening here is super simple something is black he goes down something is white it goes up something is tiptoes on gray nothing happens so what we could do we can do the same thing I said before with the mask so we can right-click on it and we can do layer mask add mask and we can do hide all this here will just be like a balancing pass for it so now we can go in here and we this paint set there are three set of colors and I often prefer to use like a super soft brush fingers they had this one it's called super because it is super soft and now we can just go in and just balance this out here like Morgan was saying before area is like maybe the horns here you don't want more you want to be maybe softer or maybe there has been there has been he's been hammered with like other is in battle or whatnot maybe these cheekbones here are way way softer so we can just go in here and now just soft and stuff up here and this here is gonna make a huge difference it's really like a case of less is more if everything has details then you go crazy yeah then your eyes just get epilepsy and ya die only your eye stuff oh yeah so really really make sure you go in and soft and stuff up we haven't done too much working on the face but already here you can see that you know we can just it just reads way better so what I often do is I do it on areas with high curvature so we can do here and we can just start to it's kind of like a curve trim up and it's real nice blend this time stuff in here and the cool thing is again you're dealing here with an actual an actual mask I'm actually actual pixels so it's very easy to to blend this together tablets pretty noisy probably changing nibs to something super soft so highly recommend that you go in and use soft and stuff up here again some quick stuff but it just reads it just reads more address reads and a second more comfortable matter yet so I mean we can just keep detailing this and at some point in future as well I really want to do like a proper premium course where we were talking about this as well you know really taking this creature here and not just doing this the shittiest paper job in the world will you go properly doing the little creature texture really a real creature texture I'm talking about a little thing here what briefly mentioned it's well like balancing maps out here as well you have a displacement map you have and then but then you have the bump here you know really balanced and oldest kind of stuff together tons of texturing stuff we haven't started in this tutorial yet haven't really plan it out but it's something L really like to do in the future I'm sure it's coming sure it's coming at some point so um let us know if you want to see see something like that it's like a proper hardcore Mari so I see bursty and again just before we before we leave here really seriously check out texture neck so I see here they have such amazing stuff here super users will have a lot of tutorials and using as well they have like this crocodile skin here if you are doing creatures you know you you need you need this kind of stuff at least if you're doing high super high frequency oh yeah so I really hope there is this here has been has been useful and we that we can back up while we're saying that this here is the best way of doing of doing details for creatures so yeah we hope you liked the video mmm and if you want to see more content like this in the future consider subscribing like comment down below and like the other youtubers say smash that Bell button is that we're saying you know I think we'll never never been a I'm never gonna go there [Laughter] you

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 40,666

Rating: 4.9497585 out of 5

Keywords: 3d, sculpting, zbrush, concept, maya, tutorial, autodesk, film, vfx, animation, twitch, mjthehunter, flippednormals, henning, morten, creature, character, texturing, sanden, jaeger, substance, painter, designer, education, foundry, pixologic, nuke, cinema4d, art, fundamentals, art fundamentals, art school, art tutorials, drawing tutorials, texturing.xyz, alphas, mari, texture tutorial

Id: u7DwaYsb9JY

Length: 29min 56sec (1796 seconds)

Published: Thu May 24 2018