Understanding UDIMS - Maya, Substance Painter and Mari

hello I'm Michael wilds and today we're going to be talking about you limbs they are a must when it comes to texturing and modeling inside of any 3d package these days if you're working in a VFX environment it's kind of your industry standard go-to for you ving I decided to do video on these because recently I've been doing quite a bit of freelance work with people that don't use Humes and they found them a bit scary and kind of intimidating also I've been going into some universities and the students weren't super comfortable with them and while they can see kind of intimidating they're a must if you want a job in the VFX industry because it's how you texture and it's how as a modeler you set up your UVs for the texture artists so I wanted to just go through them kind of demystify them because they're really not that difficult but they might seem a bit intimidating if you're just used to a one tile texturing modeling and shading setup so let's just go through them explain the benefits because they've really asked some and how you use them in three packages we're gonna go through Maya we're gonna go through substance painter I'm also gonna go through Mari and then inside of Maya will also look at setting them up in an Arnold shader so it's gonna be a video explaining all the basics explained in the theory and then just kind of going from there showing them the application cool so let's get started so I've got this model here this is a model of a camera I made years ago so please ignore the topology because they are not it's not the greatest but we're gonna look at the UVs because I set them up this was the first project I learned Mari with so I set them up with a u dem style texturing workflow so normally when you take foreign objects if you're not familiar with udemy's you would probably just texture it in the zero to one space which is here you didn't base achill e means that instead of using just this one grid like you might have done already you use the whole grid so when you open up the UV editor which in Maya is up here UV editor you will start with just seeing this but if you zoom out we've got this giant grid and you can see we've also got negative numbers past the grid lines so this is our zero to one here u V but to the right we've got another grid and we've got another great so u dims is basically just making use of all these other grids so why would we want to do that why would we not just put everything in one grid well it's because you didn't Spacek aliy give you a lot more flexibility it gives you optimization and it lets you play around with resolution on different tiles so let's go through the benefits one at a time first of all it's a flexibility instead of having to pick pack everything in here then I can spread it out I want everything to be a similar scale in this scene and but this piece here for example let's grab this show this show here won't fit into this part at the moment so I could scale these down sure but say for example I know I'm going to be using a fork a texture image or even 2k then if I scale this down this is going to get less text resolution but I want it to still have quite a lot of this image so I could scale them all down and make the texture bigger but let's say for example I was going with 8k as a default I wanted it this asset was gonna be seen really close up then the only way to get this with more resolution and make a image and get it to fit is to scale it down and make it a 16 K image now I'm not hugely technical with rendering or how images are loaded in at render time but I do know if you look at the games industry for example they often use just 2k images but they'll use a lot of 2k images because it's much more efficient than loading in one 4k image and I know that because I've learnt unreal previously and I was trying to load in 4k images in there and it was dying so instead she just made more 2k images and why is that that's because a 2k image if you go from 2k to 4k well the number is just doubling your actually because you're doing on two accesses you're it's four times as much information because it's 2 times this way it's 2 times that way 2 times 2 4 so you've got 4 times as much data in a 4k image versus a 2k image and that's as technical as I'm going to go in this video I swear yeah basically what I can do instead of trying to squeeze it in here I can just move it 1 grid over which I've done and I've done that for the whole thing and that way I don't have to scale them down another great benefit of younam's is you can group stuff so say for example you wanted all your parts that are a specific material like the top of this camera they're here in this one new demand I can just grab these now rather than having to search through a really clustered single tile and then in my software how I'm texturing it whether that substance painter or Mari I know that this tile or this you didn't patch whatever you want to call it is one specific material and that just means that I've got selection groups that I can use in the different pieces of software so that's a real kind of workflow time-saver also you Dems are just industry standard at this point I haven't worked a VFX to do that doesn't use them so if you want a job in VFX studio you need to learn this pipeline and the final thing is I can change the resolution of different youtubes so what is AUD I'm going to do it's going to give me multiple images so instead of just one texture image when I'm texturing I'm going to get one two three four five so on but this one say for example can be 4k and this one can be 2k this one could be 512 if I really don't need much resolution there and then this one could be 8k now usually in a production environment we wouldn't do this we'd keep everything consistent when we would scale just up and down the UVs but if you wanted to then that's completely possible with the union workflow which it wouldn't be with just a single tile so to recap because I've done a lot of waffling already so far what are the benefits of youtubes well they're more flexible as a workflow for texturing and modeling your UVs you can change the resolutions per tile they're an industry standard in the VFX studios you can use them for selection sets and they're better optimized for rendering because you don't have to use as large texture images you can use multiple smaller ones so let's talk about actually using mediums now so when I've started texturing this I've made sure that this square is filled and then I've moved on to the next one you need to make sure that nothing sits over the line because otherwise you these shells will be in multiple you names or patches both those words are kind of interchangeable depending on the software you use so I might refer to both but are you dim or UV tile or a patch is kind of the same thing so you need to make sure that they if they sit in close is the same as normal using they don't ever go over the line and that's kind of it really so you don't have their own naming conventions this instead of zero to one is 1001 this will be 1002 1003 4 5 so on until we get right to the end of this grid which is 1010 then if you need it anymore you go to 1000 11 12 14 7 1021 1022 so I actually didn't know why it started 1001 and after looking into it apparently it's just a convention from when they're invented but also because you're starting for 1,000 all your UV patches are only of gonna have four digits whereas if you started at one you'd start with one digit then as soon as you've got to ten you'd have two digits you would potentially have issues when taking into other pieces of software with the amount of digits changing this way you always have four digits and pieces of software like new can read it in as an image sequence and you can make edits to your YouTube's as if it was just a sequence of images one after another and it all works because only over four digits so software like Mari uses the same naming conventions 1,001 1,002 1,003 was substance painter because it's a predominantly from the games industry it doesn't use such a things there's a bit of a workaround to get you to this working in substance but we're gonna go through that in a minute so let's get a model with you dims load up in Mari and we'll just go through that really briefly so here at min side of Mari and I've loaded up a project that I worked on a while ago for the foundry which was the material workflow for them if you want to see that video that's on my channel as well um but what we've got here is we've got three units of this asset we can see we've got the strap on one we've got metal bits on another and finally we've just kind of got the watch face so if we look at Mari straight away we can see in the bottom left of the UV grid we've got these numbers here so you've got one thousand and one we've got one thousand and two and finally I've got one thousand and three and so just like I was saying that go all the way along to one thousand and ten and then up to one thousand eleven also you can see here it's saying that we've got 4k images so the numbers are the same at the moment but I could change one patch which is what Mari you calls them or one udimm to a different resolution if for example the strap needed to be slightly higher resolution and the others were holding up fine also you can see that I've kept the strap on one so we've got all this rubber strap on one so I can easily select all of that at once if I wanted to select all this metal to make a quick change on that I can select that really quickly by using the patch selection mode here and finally I can select all the watch face quickly by doing that not a must but it can help speed up your pipeline so really that's the basics of you Tim's inside when you load an object in with multiple you dims it will automatically pick them up and it's the same as painting on a single UV tile but you've got them across multiple and you can use this patch selection mode which you couldn't previously also inside the node graph if we load that up I can do some things if I type in udimm we've got some nodes that are purely for you dim so you've got this udimm mask for example which will mask off just a set number so I'm going to double click that bring the properties up and you can see I can make a mouse for just 1,001 1,002 1,003 I can do that if it was a single UV tile so just things like that helps make your day a little bit quicker so now let's pop over to substance and see how it controls you limbs so now inside a substance and what I've selected is that camera Geo from earlier inside of Maya and if you've never used idioms before this is exactly how you'll see this dialog when creating a new project and you can see here we've got this input settings create a texture set / uddham tile so if we're working with you names this is the way that substance works with them it's a bit of a hack at the moment hopefully get better one day but this you need to do so we're gonna click OK on this and now you'll see in our texture set settings up here we have ru dims so at the moment I'm only seeing I'm seeing the entire object but I've only got one you dim or patch here how do I view the others well all you do is you click down this texture set list and now you can paint on multiple substance is a bit annoying in the fact that you have a different layer stack per every single you dim so if I put material for example I'm going to put this copper on this first one and now you can see it's only assigned it to that you dim and then if I go to the next one there's nothing there in that layer stack to get around this and I'll go more on this on another video all I'm gonna do is I'm gonna drop this into a folder and then I'm going to instantiate this folder and we've got this one if you right-click you can go instantiate across texture sets then we can select all the others and now voila we've got that on everything so again it's because substance was made for games originally where you wouldn't have you Dems and now it's finally catching up because VFX is using a lot more and a lot more this is the workaround hopefully one day it'll be better than this but for now this is kind of usable and to be honest this is why I prefer Maori but you domes are usable in substance with this workflow so finally let's just have a look once we've got our textures how will we set that up in Arnold so we're back now in Maya and I've made a basic AI standard surface in the hypershade and all I'm going to do is I'm going to load some textures to use it now so let's just go with a color festival we're gonna go to the color we're going to click this checkbox and assign a file like we usually would if it was a non uddham workflow I'm going to turn the filtering off just because I do that by habit and I'm gonna find some images so for now I'm just going to find something that I've used previously these aren't gonna align to the camera but we're not going to say anyway this is just about the workflow so I'm gonna see here we've got my base color we've got base color Oh - and we've got 1,001 1,002 1,003 so I'm just gonna select the first 1001 click open on that so you can see here we've got 1001 but we know that we've got also goin thousand and two and 1003 and as well so all we're gonna do to get that working is you can see we've got the TV tiling mode so to begin with that's just got off so all that's gonna tell it is use that same texture on 1001 1002 and 1003 and so on so you'd have the same one image across all of your you didn't switch is wrong so what we're gonna do if you click down here we've got zero-based for ZBrush we've got mud box but we want to use you dip so although it says Mari even if you're using substance you want to use udimm and I click that and now when you render everything's gonna render correctly and all you need to do is do that on all of your files for the inputs on your Arnold shader and voila that's working with you domes so hopefully I've covered everything there fairly in-depth or enough at least to get you working with you Dems and understanding why they're used and how to use them so quickly to recap you've got benefits because they're more flexible than working with a single grid the resolution you can change per tile if you really want to they're an industry standard in VFX you can use them for selecting different materials or you can set up your UVs and special ways that can help your workflow and finally they're much better for optimization instead of using giant 16k images you can use smaller less 8k or even more 4k images to help you get the same resolution so that's it for this topic I hope that's helped this is a topic I found there's much confusion on so I really hope that this clears that up a bit I've been Michael Wilde this has been using yidams for texturing also set them up in modeling and in look dev if you need more on VFX then check out my youtube channel there's more on there or you can sign up to my newsletter on my website which is Michael Cote UK Cheers take it easy [Music]

Channel: Michael Wilde

Views: 41,382

Keywords: UDIMs, UVs, 3d, texturing, modelling, maya, c4d, modo, substance, substance painter, the foundry, mari

Id: i4ua3Tajatw

Length: 13min 45sec (825 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 16 2019