Very Basic Modelling in Maya and ZBrush!

okay i'm going to start modeling the mask of this cute reaper character they created and if you might have some time i would um do the body as well i'm doing it both in maya just entirely in maya and then um in zbrush and maya again you need my at the end anyway big anyhow because you have to do your uv mapping inside maya so it's good you always analyze our brushes okay cool it's good always if you analyze your um your your model before modeling your reference so here i've got like a flat um kind of squished as square if you want if you like and then like there are two um two combs that are shaped this way and then two squares have been subtracted from the face so that could be that could be like kind of our way of approaching it inside maya so as you may see i'm using a graphic tablet for modeling you can borrow one from loan central or buy a cheap one um so this is how i set up my graphic templates um just in case you know i use a graphic tablet even for editing or doing like very crazy stuff like being within so it's it's totally replaces my mouse the reason is so your the movement of your wrist so the movement for your mouse is always your wrist so there's always this like after years of working it's very unhealthy so but like the tablet is all your shoulder well muscles are here much larger so i set up some my my pen usually for everybody this is the middle click and this is done you know this is right click and this is um double click this is like a default for everybody as you can see but that's not what i like i like the the tip one to be middle and the top one to be right so it's like that that one right this one middle the reason is we are 3d artists and we use middle click very much not like a illustration artist that middle click doesn't work for them that much for us it's like so that's why middle click works i i put it there just in case um so inside let's say maya environments middle click panning zooming and tumbling around okay so i start by creating so inside maya as you will see i will use a lot of shortcuts and that's how i i can speed up modeling process and any 3d creation process um whatever i use i keep saying verbalizing it so you you don't miss it out so everything in maya is can be done by by holding shift or control and shift so like i hold shift and i create a plane for now because i want to project the image that i just have shown you this image within the maya um environment so i just rush shift right click or you can click on that little icon over there polygon plane so you just create a plane and then so why i i use shortcut sometimes you press ctrl spacebar everything goes away that's a nice and neat environment to work in and then you start to use like shortcuts so all hotkeys or huts and menus as it says so shift right click and then adding a plane so this plane gonna be one by one i don't need any detail in it i just make it larger i i go to the rendering menu i apply a surface shader to it this lit this very black thing and then when when i apply that in the last tab it it as the surface shader is there it asks for the color out color you click on that and you click on the checker one which means i'm gonna texture it and then click on file and then point to where your texture is my texture is in pictures folder which is this one so when i press 6 on keyboard i should see it in the scene but this is stretched i just want to make sure that it's in this right size so i'm going to rotate that in maya you know that w is for moving it around r for scaling and e4 rotating okay so i just hold so you can rotate it like that or just hold j on your keyboard and it snaps rotate so it just snaps to different degrees or if you want to move things you can hold j as well and it snaps to just incremental movements so it's more accurate so i hold j oops what happened j and snap it up okay so that's enough i have it there as a reference there it's within the environment that i'm working so it helps me out so i start with a side so you might say i'm gonna add a sphere to start with but let's let's add a sphere you you you see if i can work with the sphere so the sphere if i add a sphere here like start to shaping it to look like the head of the reaper you see that the flow of the polygons is not what i want the flow of the polygon on on this so how i zoomed in like that i hold ctrl alt and drag to the area i want so the flow of the polygon here is i see that the polygon should flow like that and then like that and it's not like this here i pressed f on the keyboard to make to frame the selected which was a sphere so it's not that the the flow is not like the one the light the one i want but you may never know that a cube is a sphere as well if you shift right click and cube and you press three you see that it it looks like a sphere so it could be a good start so like sphere and then maybe let me just have a look at that so i'm gonna subdivide this sphere shift right click or this cube that has turned into a sphere shift right click so you see that like a lot of things is with shift right click i keep pressing shift right click and then smooth so it adds some detail here which is don't go to the very detail at the beginning we are in the process of blocking blocking means like you know assembling the basic primitives so here i just like say um i can i can share so you see that the polygons are better shaped here so i can right click and say edge so grab these two edges and and then this time i hold ctrl shift right click or double click on this tool like move tool and the here i'm gonna you can turn on symmetry here which is like i want to work symmetrical okay but like easily you can hold ctrl shift and right click and go to the symmetry activate your symmetry and then you see that it moves in in this symmetrical way so the top part looks like this um the bottom part could be i hold these edges and like shape it like that um this go to the vertices this middle verses could get inside okay it could be the shape of that mask so it has two um or it might be even thinner so it has i'm going to i'm going to turn off the grid show the grid is off and i'm gonna [Music] i'm gonna uh turn on the wireframe on surface shaded which is this little button okay so uh let's assume that this is like the shape of actually actually i'm happier to move these two slightly like that as well and maybe shorten that part let's assume that so whatever i do when i'm happy i right click and then object mode back to object mode again so let's say i'm happy with the basic primitive shape so i just want to work on the horns so shift right click add a cone so you see that this is a cone that doesn't look like a horn at all but i go to the channel box and first of all i don't need that many access so i just go like maybe at eight because if you press three that would do the job for you and but but you might need multiple um the you know height polygons uh i like it to be taller and maybe yeah for this one is enough so what i can do is to position it in place and rotate it okay maybe make it a little bit thicker so how i i'm doing it you see that it happens in these two not that one i hold ctrl and and press on that one so it doesn't work on that axis but it works on the combination of the other two axes so i can start going to the edges and then double click on the edge i want i turn off the symmetry hold hold ctrl shift right click symmetry symmetry off because i'm not working on symmetry now um maybe we oops i'm go you just saw that i accidentally selected the back place you can add it to a layer here and call it reference and then lock it with with this so um make it r which means reference so it doesn't get selected accidentally anymore i'm going to save my scene before moving forward um so let's deal with um the shapes of the horn actually that one is like that that one is like that both of them are like that this particles like this a little bit and all of that has like a slight angle in this way and it's definitely larger you see that it's gonna be tricky to fit in but that's okay don't worry because we're gonna merge everything in so i duplicate that one and you can mirror it by so see like which direction needs to be mirrored it needs to be mirrored in that red direction red is x so just whatever is it uh add a minus to it and then it gets mirror um maybe it needs a little bit of adjustment on that uh there's a much neater way of mirroring it it's so you if you freeze your transformation by modify freeze transformation and also if you snap your your pivot point the point that is right in the middle is if i hold d you can change the pivot point if you hold x you can snap the pivot point to the to the greek grid so you can uh snap it to the grid like like that d and snap it to the grid okay and then here you just go to the mesh and mirror mirror two um to x direction done so you see that it it's a it's a neater way but it's just you see that it took a while to do that so that's why maybe just like sometimes just duplicate and you know turn make the transformation minus would be okay so you see that they have the the reaper has this little nice curve here i just would like to make it maybe i just grab this let it curve it up okay and i add two like another cube press three make it larger i'm going to use that as eye socket subdivide it or smooth it let's say so we the reaper has two eye sockets and they are not 100 round they're like this and like this and put it back where it should be one is here one is here okay um so i hold uh i select so these ones should be subtracted from the main objects so select your main object make sure that the history is deleted how to delete the history so the history is the history of the stuff that you've done [Music] you've done on on the subject on the object before so this is how you delete it um edit delete by type history or as it says alt shift d so alt shift d the history is deleted it's going to be deleted for these two as well so i select i select the one that needs to be subtracted from so or the main object then the select this one and then the objects that is that are going to be subtracted again shift right click boolean difference and you get this ugly shape you just press three if if this one is problematic for you because the reason is we don't have enough um resolution on your object so just like shift right click and smooth up your object maybe one more division here and do the same thing on these ones so how the same command has been applied on those two by pressing g which is the repeating of the last command so alt shift d delete the history for all of that and then maybe shift right click boolean difference so you see this one is is neater so um what what i have there is is much nicer than what i got here he is very coarse okay so how can get there so i select all of that shift right click boolean and union so they become one object look at here if i press 4 we can see that at that point the middle part the intersection part has been removed and they have been unioned so then you have to re-apologize it um i press 6 on keyboard to make it so the flow of polygons let me see if i can open okay we have a concept called polygon flow so if if you have a surface like like this and a polygon moves so you see that this is what you see is looks um structurally right to your eye because the polygon is is moving uh to the right direction in every angle and you you always have a square or quadra a quad a square or a quad angle um polygon so this is called like this is a proper right topology but look at this this is just a mess so if this polygon travels this polygon flow comes and here suddenly is interrupted with lots of like th this is four corners this one is one two three four five six so that's not that's not right okay here also you see that um the flow the polygon doesn't flow well there's a way around it and and it's called retopologize topology so like the the mathematics of making a proper um surface 3d surface is called topology so to so re-topologize means like make the topology right again so so you saw that how high um got to there shift right click re-apologize but instead of clicking on it i click on the little square next to it which means to load the setting before applying it you might want like if so that the resulting polygon would be a thousand the resulting object would have less than a thousand polygons or 2000 or whatever so i i'm going to keep it as a thousand so i press uh let's apologize and you see that like now i get like a much better polygon flow look at this plot the flow comes and just travels through all of them are quad quadrangle or quad and and here the to the to the horns it just travels right if i turn that off i you see that that shape has a lot of details that that works better than what i've have here so here comes the time to do the sculpting so if you're happy with what you've achieved so far you can start sculpting it so if you go to the sculpting menu the first brush that you will use is a move brush or you can achieve like when you are in full mode you can achieve a scalp mode with shift right click sculpt tool that's it and then hold u not u what was that for changing i don't know uh move two uh so you see that there's the brush is very large now so hold b to make it hold b and drag on your keyboard to make it smaller okay we don't want it so small at the beginning because at the beginning you just want to make like the shape right okay so we might make it hold it like keep it as large enough as well at the beginning [Music] also this brush also has a symmetry that you can double click on it and turn that on here so i'm gonna so i'm gonna make it it's symmetry on the x direction the red one so object x so it works on both sides so let's work and make it more closer actually you can bring a little bit of character to it so this part looks like z brushing i don't like that bump here so whatev whatever your brush is when you hold shift it's for a smoothing so i'm gonna smooth that part out and maybe i i make the brush smaller and you see that part on the tip is just like so messy i smooth it to get a nice shape for that sections i'd undo that you've got another brush better than a small thing which like it just kind of makes all the polygons relax next to each other because you see that they are entangled here so that one is the relaxed polygon tool so when you add it you see that they they reorganize themselves next to each other and and then when combined with shift or smooth it gives a nice arrangement of polygons i go back to move and i smooth this area and i smooth a little bit of here okay um make it bigger that ones needs to get inside okay i don't know what's going to happen in the back but i assume that it's going to like be like this like this i don't know or you can use a flattened brush and just like make it um hold alt or control no um shift no and like kind of flatten it and then like move those parts inside or whatever cool um i press w q or or w so i got up to here and this is a little bit too many polygons and you see i have a long history of stuff that i've done so you can press alt shift d to delete your history to make it your scene and nice and nitty need as you go if you don't need that history repair mask always keep a nice and neat naming uh in outliner all the objects so that one's gonna friends plate okay uh i just want to say something um and that's like if you want to like create wrinkles like this you can create a shift right click edge loops um before adding edge loop i'm gonna turn this into a much lower resolution but before doing that i duplicate the original and hold keep it because i don't want to lose that one so i'm going to re-topologize it to a much less amount of polygons like only 400 polygons re-topologize you see that i get a a very neat object which is very manageable to work with as well so if i press one it looks like this if i press three so this is a much more efficient object to be sent to the game engines and if i want to let's say create a crease here so if i press 3 and i go to the insert edge loop you can see that i can add an edge loop right next to here before adding edge loop the reason that you saw it thinking too much is because of this three topology node being there so i alt shift d delete the history inside is look i add one edge loop here and one edge loop on top of it and i move them towards together but don't kind of let them land on each other so now you will see that like kind of a it's better seen from this angle there's a crease here actually we can if i double click on the edge and then move them together and here move them together oh yeah you started to see that so that's how you can change the size of them that's how you create a kind of a crease around the area by by edge loops you can do the same for the rest of that i undo that let's say your your procedure your working procedure is is to do the blocking in maya and to add the kind of sculpting in in zbrush because sculpting in maya is very limited is what you just saw so how you do that you just export what you got like export selection i'm going to export it in on documents let's say easier to access and call it reaper mask but i'm going to export it as obj export it and then in zbrush so this is zbrush hello and um how you start working in zbrush easy um i just want to make sure that okay so this is the zbrush environment everything is so weird and a little bit tricky to work around but once we find our head around it it's easy easy to work with so first so you got these two um zbrush calls all the objects what you call in maya objects zbrush calls them tools why nobody knows so go to the tool import and bring the the reaper where's the reaper it's there sitting there so you have to add it to the scene you add it to the scene and you want to start working and then suddenly you see like you know you cannot work around it so what you have to do is to turn on the edit mode so you add it to the scene make a poly mesh and come on what's going on i think i missed it okay draw it and press edit or press or t on your keyboard and then now it's ready to work with okay so zbrush navigation is also weird so uh so you don't need to hold alt or anything so you just like if you add if you are on top of the object and you start dragging you start sculpting it but if you are outside the object you are gonna navigate tumble around it if you hold alt and right click you're gonna pan and if you let go of alt you will zoom and wherever you are if you hold shift you will snap to that angle so you saw that like i snapped to top now i snap to the front if i'm to the side i snap to the side so it's a bit tricky at the beginning but you will get used to it very quickly um so i go and assign a very commonly used material which is called skin shade 4 and everybody likes it it's a white material and i'm going to start sculpting but this is a very low resolution object so you just go to the geometry and you divide it so how many polygons so the first amount of polymers were about 400 you remember that one dividing is 1600 um six thousand twenty-five thousand you see that like it's easily can get to like a million and it's still working fine so one way of working in zbrush is when you are in so you saw that like all the divisions is still kept if i go back to the low subdivision and if i press s hold s on my keyboard which is size and size up my brush and starts let's say i'm going to grab click on the brush and i'm going to grab a sculpting brush like a move brush and i so this is pretty much like maya move so you might see oh where's my symmetry so just press x on keyboard and you will have your symmetry activate set so let's say whatever you do on a low some you see that i'm doing adjustments on the geometry in low poly which is easier and when i go to the high subdivision the adjustments are applied okay so let's say you're gonna you're planning to have those uh cracks on the surface okay you're gonna do some go to the brush let's say you're gonna do like some chiseling on the surface you can start that's horrible because the brush was very um large you can chisel your object might not be seen very well here but the brush actually i just want is called dam standard which is i press d and press s after that so so this is how you can find your brushes um again a long way of finding them like let's say i'm gonna i want my move brush i press b for opening the brush press m for opening the move and press v for reaching it so move brush is there b d s is damp standard which is a nice brush for creating you know creases i don't want the crease the the cracks would be symmetrical uh so i press x to turn that off so there's one crack coming from the top to the eye and to the bottom so at the beginning it looks not that interesting because we're gonna use another brush to complement it but we're just gonna find the shape of it and then we use a brush called trim border which is not here so sometimes you may hear the name of different brushes but you cannot find it click on the light box this is the first thing you see when zbrush opens you can open you know open and close it here go to the brushes and go to the trim and stream smooth border is there double click on it it gets added to your project so now you can uh so this one just kind of like smoothes the borders but like we don't want it like that why it's too bright actually i might yeah that might help me better i use an alpha like a square alpha and then and i kind of like i hold alt and drag oh that's too much alt and drag towards the edges it kind of creates this cracky feeling uh but then i have to soften the soften it so hold shift pretty much like in maya and soften the edges maybe soften that part a little bit more it's too deep i wish i would have used a smaller dam brush but that's okay i will make this one larger another trick and hold alt oh why this one is okay hold alt and move it towards each other kind of like cracks creates this sharp and then make it smaller and then i smooth you've got plenty of different alpha based brushes um so let's say you've got let's say let's open the light box in the brushes you want to add oh come on sorry i changed color accidentally it's okay we'll fix it later so you want um i know different tracks or different textures like like like uh stitch like marks so these are like alpha based brushes you can add and then you can this is too big but what i can do is make it tiny and then stitch around but you know what the details doesn't matter at all but it matters but at the end to me what matters what is important is the overall shape of our object so as i said so i i like to create this within zbrush um as well from scratch so here we add just added details in zbrush but i like to start it from scratch as well okay so let's let's imagine that we start everything again in zbrush i start with adding a sphere simple sphere okay you can find it in again in tools i'm gonna close this color okay you're in tools click on the tool and just add a basic sphere 3d and then make sure it's poly mesh 3d it means that you can start sculpting on it um let's have a look at i'm not gonna use it so other stuff that will help you a lot in zbrush is turning on the perspective and the floor floor like is kind of like a grid in maya and z towards us means that the depth is towards us [Music] what you see let's let's go over a reference um there's a tiny little app called pure ref which i'm gonna just download it now it's called pureref it's it helps to keep the references on on screen when we are working i'm going to download the portable version of it so then i share it with everyone so without installing you can use it so i start with again a basic move brush if you remember b m v move tool and a very big move brush and twist and also turning on symmetry by pressing x then i can start like kind of shaping it to what i like to the shape of kind of the mask holding shift some time to smooth smooth things up and if you remember there was a nice curvature here and it looks like kind of like this but not that much in bottom if we i don't like this part we look like that and i soften it in general soft on the back too holding shift let's say this is the initial shape of it i send this pure ref file for you on your part i just copied in your support material so anyone else who might want to use it would use it uh give it to the third year actually as well they might need it okay so how you just open it and run it it's easy unzip it uh you see that i'm just like run pure ref done okay so how this one works it's just a simple plate and it moves with right click and it kind of like if you press so ctrl h for additional help if you press [Music] so when i press ctrl shift a you see that it says it's always on top so whatever i do it's always there where you want it okay so i go grab that reference photo of us drag and drop it here middle click move it around this way resize it you can have multiple images here drag and drop multiple images have a collage of different images and work with them it's very useful it's help you to work efficiently okay i keep that one here so let's work on the head i think i've got stuff to do it has like a little bit of nice cheek here smooth side area i give it a little bit of nice curve here smooth that area okay so so i'm we're going to add some horn um how like there is a brush a series of brushes called imm these brushes like imm um boolean basic gun i don't know machine parts spaceship these are like tiny so i have chosen a spaceship because i just wanna why not uh let's say you're gonna add parts let's just quickly populate a surface with like you know different parts and different things like kind of and make it like kind of you know you are creating a three things here so this is like these are just a series of like different let's call it additive objects objects that are gonna added on top of your um you know your shape and just create um you know work as added as an additive objects but like one of them com most commonly used ones are these ones i m primitives or like additive primitives so you got like so this this is very useful for um for blocking so you have your head added then you want to add a sphere here maybe and then um and then select move tool these move and msr or move scale and rotate are pretty much like my tools um you can scale it if you don't see it properly positioned in the middle you can hold alt and move it to the the pivot point to where you want it's okay i hold alt and move it and bring it back in place okay rotate it a bit scale it up okay a little bit okay nice let's grab move tool and start playing around with that when i hold shift it just smoothes up and it's smaller than this so i select scale and scale it slightly down move it back in place okay sometimes you see that like the the main face has been grayed out why so let's let's go back to the draw this is this has been automatically masked out so if i hold ctrl and drag outside the mask gets deleted so the mask is is is an area that you don't want to be touched so let's say you just um you hold ctrl and mask this area and now you start scaling so you see that everything is is touched except the mask or when you hold ctrl and click outside the mask is getting inverted so now just the area within the mask is is controlled if you want to soften the edge of the mask hold ctrl and click on that area so it just softens the mask if you want to control the visibility if you hold ctrl and shift and click and an object that objects becomes visible and everything else gets hidden or if you call ctrl shift and click outside it gets reverse back or if you hold ctrl and shift and drag the only part that you have box dragged will be visible okay so ah let's do a little bit of boolean here as well i can create let's say we're going to add we're gonna add two objects so i'm gonna actually i just wanted to add to another layer or another sub tool but i'm adding it to this software so you will [Music] learn one extra object extra command let's say uh let's grab that primitive brushes and we're gonna add sphere where the eyes should be move them closer to each other and and inside okay um so i'm gonna separate these two spheres from the main body so there's one way of getting around it actually this one could come here easier because there's a lot of like um tools that been you know commands that we need to use and they are on this right hand bar so if i go back to the draw or press q on my keyboard you see that like you can say that um so under the top tools this splits um so i we can split the let's say mask points so you see that the eyes are in a separate layer now i just move them down so we have a layer for for the for the head and a layer for the eyes so there's one live boolean um kind of tool here so you can activate it and here you've got boolean commands on them like um this is subtract this is union this is uh intersection so we just use subtract but what does it mean why it says live boolean it means that if you grab that one and move it around it just kind of like interactively responds you you know tells you what's going to happen what is happening so let's say this one is not 100 percent round so it's kind of like it has this kind of like oval it's shape and it's rotated inside so we can use this live boolean to to achieve that so let's say you are happy with that so in the boolean and say that make boolean mesh so then it adds the mesh here which you can click on it and then suddenly get it within your your viewport so this is just a terrible blocking so how we can start sculpting and smoothing and working on it so there's a tool there's a way of going moving forward and like blending things together and it's called dynamesh so dynamesh is on the geometry dynamesh and you you know you can go with the resolution that you have or you can choose like a higher resolution maybe um 400 is nice i click on dynamesh um you didn't see anything happens because i'm going to go use a lower resolution so you see what's happening so look at this edge here and press dynamesh you see like it just suddenly kind of converted things into a blended meshes together so and if the resolution would be high like 400 then the dynamesh that that edges will kind of be preserved so once you convert it so these objects this separated objects as they all get blended together now you can start kind of i start with a actually i would like to to to still use move to very large move too and smooth some smooth around the eyes move things i see a little bit of nice curvature here which i missed i can retain it somehow smooth okay so once you're happy um you can smooth the brush once you are happy you can um start sculpting it like let's say creating a very commonly used sculpt tool is clay belt it's b c b no is that the y clay yes clay buildup b yes it's this one clay buildup yeah pcb so this is this works like a i'm gonna go to skin four this works like a a a clay buildup brush that you if any one of you might have done sculpting very similar to that sometimes you want to like um create just like bring a lot of masses at parts of your objects use this brush and like add masses where you want so let's say we want to create some mass here around the eye or eyebrows let's say clay build is a squarish brush that but you can change the alpha you can make it like kind of more roundish i like score because it's rough and it's rugged and it's it just quickly gives me like kind of a nice shape so once you're happy easy hold shift and smooth things up okay um you can use um no bds damn standard to create creases it must be tiny uh and as you saw like for crack let's say let's do these two crackers i am going to use actually that you can keep using them standard multiple times okay and then then that trim smooth borders where are you with a off with a alpha brush and holding alt or not alt if you want to deepen the area alt kind of adds to it make it cracky uh if that's too much smooth it out easy oops so it's it's just fun like is it usable now like can i just send this into maya no it's about 500 000 polygons so it's not usable at as it is now but there's a process of turning it into a low poly and yet preserving all the details which i'm gonna go through it okay so um we don't need um let's say we are happy with the result well of course i'm not happy because that one needs a lot of better refinement uh and this is not supposed to mean you know have that terrible name i call it reaper mask that's a better name i can hold ctrl shift a and that one the always on top gets turned off so we don't see it because we don't need it now um this is the trick for that you can you can um so the the pipeline is this what i'm doing now is to create polygroups and then create out of polygroups creates a zeri measure which is er topology within so rich topology as i have explained is creating a nice and neat flow of polygons within of around your model so if i press this little uh poly um frame you will see that it has millions well not millions thousands and thousands of polygons it's not usable so you need something low poly so i i duplicate that one so i so let's hide the original one let's work on this one i renamed that one remesh okay before remeshing so if let me just remesh it and then i create polygroups and then remission some people just like jump onto the remeshing it right away that's why they don't get good results out of that so zero measure um polycon count five it should be around five thousand let's see what what it does i press the zero mesh you see that it starts working okay so you see that it has generated a low poly version of what we had it's about 5 000 polygons and it's much neater it's much use much more usable but what happened i lost the detail did i so this is what we do like even i we can go lower than that actually we can go like three thousand so and then zero mesh again so this is like you see that it's much neater but like um the first problem is the flow of polygons is not as neat as what you expect so that's why we just go i'm gonna keep this i'm gonna create another duplicate of the original one and i call it remesh group so this one has both this one's going to have both remeshing and poly groups for poly groups uh you just like so at the moment um the reason that actually i was just surprised why this one looked good because um the reason that this one looks okay the polygon is that the original one had already polygroups look at these groups so you see that it's been categorized but if for any reason you lose your polygroups let's say i'm going to press ctrl w so when you press ctrl w your polygroups gets lost or or the selected thing becomes a a polygroup so then you start so if if you don't have any polygroups you just like start creating one easy by just masking [Music] paint sorry hold ctrl and mask around an area that is supposed to be one polygroup so this area so like how you realize that an area should have a polygroup just study the flow of the muscles human face muscles let's say it's gross i know but let's have a look at it so if i'm going to create a polygroup for a for a humanoid or a human-like creature or any creature that has muscles underneath put underneath their skin i look at the flow of the muscles underneath so here you can see that around the eye there's a round muscle group around the mouth is a round muscle group nose has such a so this is kind of a guide for a human face poly groups the the same polygroups that you want to create um so you see that like a nice and neat polygroup for the human face looks like a flow of a flow of muscles around us so this the reason that we do that because at the end we're gonna like create um deformation let's say a human face smiles when the mouth smiles and opens or eyes gets closed or opens and this deformation should follow the the flow of muscles so so that's why we create polygroups so i assume that like that part let's hold ctrl and add that to a polygroup ctrl w you might not see it but when you go to the poly f you see that they are added in one group inside eyes i'm not going to come outside because okay control w you see that that one is also a group you can hide a polygroup by holding ctrl and shift and click on it and click outside to reverse it actually i just want to hide that one too the reason i have hidden them because it helps me to um so because i want to put all the eyebrows in one polygroup because they have their own nice and neat deformation so them in one polygroup control w oops underneath the eye also another pull it group yeah you see that that one has that one has i can hold ctrl shift and click click outside so i have a better arrangement of polygroups here one big polygroup could be for the just back of it let's do that ctrl w uh holding alt for panning uh yep now if i actually i'm gonna delete this if i turn this using zeromesh which is a retopology tool like let's say three thousand polygons we want three thousand polygons and press zero mesh it just does a little bit of work okay so this is a very nice arrangement of polygons for my character okay um so that's how i i create a retopologized version here actually i could go even lower than that lower than three thousand um let me let me do it i can go for like a thousand yep that's what i want um okay okay so now how we transfer the so this is a very high poly mesh here which has details it looks nicer this is what we want this is a low poly mesh that has a better uh is user is usable but doesn't like it lacks the the details what we should do we should create a proper uv for this and then project the details from high poly to the low poly so we export we click on the remeshed version export it back to maya i'm gonna use the same naming [Music] and we go to maya i'm gonna hide this i'm gonna import that one from a folder it's there okay so what is uv mapping so skinned cow pulka so this is this is a car and this is when you uh take the skin off that's why everyone hates uv map uv map uv mapping is unwrapping so you've got like a so you're going to paint over the skin of it of a creature or anything you have to unwrap the skin of it you have to kill it on a skin it and then like paint over it it's it's pretty much like that terrible um so how so like when i when i i'm going to so i'm going to go to go to the uv editor uv uv editor and you see that there's nothing here okay and i'm going to say that the texture use the uv texture map okay when i click on that it's shows zero the first step for 99 percent well not 90 percent but like for 50 percent of the objects that you have like let's say you've got a plane here and you want to have a texture on it so you just go to the right shift right click and go to the mapping and do a planar projection mapping from the direction that you want so here let's say we want to project a texture from z direction shift right click mapping planar map z suddenly you see it gets a uv mapping assigned on it let me open the so you see that the uv mapping is there but that's not the right uv mapping because it has a weird deformation here on the edges so if we assume that we think of this oh come on why i get i'm going to move this here so if we we think that this is that poor cow and we're gonna unskin it so how what is the process of that so i would say that the the horns will be a separate part and then they will be unskinned from like a seam like a cut the front part would be one around the eyes would be okay so let's let's create these cuts okay so the first step for a uv mapping is finding where to cut where to start cutting so i would i would suggest we cut around the horn so shift right click but first right click and select the edge loop by double clicking shift right click and then you will see nothing here because we are not in the uv mapping setup but when you go to your uv mapping [Music] window you will see when you oh you see that i have this one has rotated around and traveled through the back and we didn't see that i'm glad that we didn't click on it so let's let's select another edge loop maybe this one yeah but that one not properly down enough so i start with this i like that one i get that one but i know that the it just kind of like goes away f here that part so we hold ctrl and unselect that whatever is selected wrongly we just don't okay i'm gonna start from here like let's go through the cut from here see the cuts and we don't need that one we don't need that one we don't need these ones and also that okay that's kind of a loop around the horn and so i shift right click here and i say cut now we have to select a so like this is kind of this looks like a closed cone but i have to find a way to cut that closed cone as well so you can select like a seam or something usually you select something from back so you can select first and double click and double click and go high up and double click and that one and the last part shift right click here and cut so you get a cut over there as well so why we did all of this cut and cut see you will see the magic just now i right click on that face double click on those ones and i'm gonna move them up you see that they're not getting separated from the object but the uv layout gets separated you can shift right click on them unfold unfold and you get suddenly a nice on you know unskinned or unwrapped version or like flattened version of of those horns so let's do that for um for the body actually i would like to cut from here just go down so let me just double click here see where it goes it goes all around the body and top we don't need those areas but if i press 4 you can see that it has traveled through all up to here and on top which is what we want so we shift right click cut here maybe around the eyes as well uh what about this okay that was nice but there's this problem here that it goes way there but but we want it to be stopping here so she's right click cut here as well so let's double click on the faces so i have this different pieces as well which i can unfold them select these one press g which is the last repeated command and then select all of them press ctrl l to lay out them i've done the uv layout in few minutes which is like very efficient and nice so this geo is ready for sending back to if i if i turn on the texture on a texture mapper you see that like these boxes are kind of nicely actually this one has to move slightly down here we have good spots so this one has a nice uv mapping all around it okay i'm gonna turn off the texture so this is ready to be sent back to zbrush so uv mapping is done on the same um model that has been zero meshed or topology has been applied on export selection and the rebecch uv has been applied back in zbrush we're gonna insert it to our project okay i'm gonna import it first and i'm gonna insert it that's the one so you see that it is there added now i'm going to delete this one because we don't need it because that one doesn't have any uv but this one has a uv on it so we want to project so you see that how nice the detail will be going so i'm gonna i'm gonna go um this is how we do it we we make level you know detailed levels and then keep projecting it from high poly to low poly so um yeah i'm gonna call this high poly maybe high and that one low just in case you know the difference what's going the low one has a proper uv but it doesn't have the the detail the high one um doesn't have uv but has the details so you just select both of them and you go to projection and you project all so what you will get is that oh hang on oh sorry i've done it the other way around so i should select this high poly and then the low poly and then they both should be on visibility high poly and then low poly and then project yeah that's how so then okay cool so what we do next is we start adding details like we should you go to the geometry divide it so your low poly now has one level of divisions which is 9000 polygons from high to low project now you go to geometry adds another divisions you've got 37 000 polygons you go to the high poly to low poly and project select your low poly make sure it's selected go to the geometry add another division you've got 150 000 polygons now back to the sub tools high polish to low poly project then again one last maybe we do one last division we got 60 600 000 so this should give me a very uh close approximation of high poly projection cool so if i turn okay that one was gonna take a while done okay if i turn this off so look at this this is a low poly mesh this is the low poly mesh but it has the detail in higher divisions so when i go to geometry so when i travel from this is like division one which was two thousand polygons up to six hundred thousand polygons now okay now we're gonna create a displacement map for our object so you got this displacement map part so this geometry it has high resolution and low resolution as well so when you want to create a displacement map make sure that you are on the highest resolution so the reason that we've gone through all this pain was because the the geometry that we have sculpted and painted had no um uv so we we could have generated uv send it there so without like going through this process but sometimes you just start from scratch within uh zbrush so zbrush doesn't do a proper uv for you so you send it to maya to do the uv so that's why this object which we call it this tool or object that has multiple geometry levels you make sure that you are on the highest geometry because this is the highest detail and then here you create a displacement map which i'm going to create it now okay oh sorry we have to switch to the lowest subdivision i was i just said it the other way around so we just go to the lowest go to the displacement map and create the displacement map it just got generated can you see it like kind of like this this is a very low poly geo actually you can um kind of simulate a smooth version of that but you got this like low poly subdivision let me turn the displacement on and off so you got this low poly object with this displacement texture added on so you can export the displacement map i'm going to export it just now as a psd maybe [Music] displacement um and then you can use that displacement map for rendering back in maya so like this is your geo when i press 3 it looks smooth but it doesn't have details but when we i'm gonna where did we save the displacement displacement is here this is the displacement map it has generated you can see nicely that it has all the details that you want you can save it as a jpeg for now which is more than enough for us and in maya you can add a i'm going to just quickly add a very basically i'm going to load a file window plug-in manager redshift and do a quick rendering using redshift i'm adding a basic [Music] dome light press render let's save the project that is bad okay maybe i use arnold doesn't matter i use a arnold dome light and i use a let's see if just basically renders it out and i'm gonna add a basic basic light here as well and then you just assign a shader a basic shader i'm just starting with that i just assigned like a very basic shader like let's say a lambert and then inside the lambert um you just click on the hyper shade grab the shader actually the surface oh no grab the shader with that so this one if we load the shader from it has this lambert one so you see that it has a displacement shader input that you can so this is where you bring the displacement and assign it so we save the displacement here and i'm gonna take it to my scene and so okay so we have to look at our uv because sometimes sometimes zbrush has a like kind of a different uv so our uv like the head is up there but in z brush the head is down here so things has been flipped you see so what i have to do is rotate the frame like 180 degrees so make sure that it matches with oh actually it's more than rotation it's flipping hmm so it's gonna okay i'm gonna i'm not gonna rotate it i'm gonna mirror it now okay we can fix it here ctrl t unlock it ctrl t right click flip vertical that's it that's what we want save it as uh jpeg again actually i can overwrite on the jpeg we had so it suddenly updates inside maya automatically so it's gonna get the new jpeg which will be yeah you see it just quickly got updated so that's that's how it should be then you just assign the displacement to displacement and if you use redshift you have to add a redshift displacement node in the middle and then assign it so this is not going to show the displacement now well it shows and it's very severe so like how we can control displacements you just select your object and you ctrl a and go to the arnold displacement attribute and the height would be way less well so you see that starts to show those like details and cracks in it i have to have a better lighting so i'm gonna go grab like just a quick um so for our assignment we're gonna create our own hdr i don't work don't forget that we're gonna generate our hdri but at the moment for this i just download one ready one so these hdris are free so i'm gonna grab one like let's say 2k version here and assign it so you saw that me using a redshift a and an arnold dome light which was that one so it means i should assign a hdr here to there the hdr that we just downloaded which is this one sorry and render it again okay so you see that like this is a well actually the the details is a little bit too much the that one could go slightly less so this is a very low poly go this one just has not not a very low poly but it's a local it has about 2 000 polygons it doesn't have um 600 000 so it doesn't need to have so you see that if i go to the high detail in my geometry to be able to see the details so i need uh i need 600 000 polygons to be able to see the details however with that trick by exporting the displacement map i am able to use like use the efficiency of a kind of a low poly geometry yet having the the detail added on top in the moment of rendering great so that was from like two two techniques of um two basic techniques of modeling in maya and zbrush and like all the stuff that happens around them

Channel: Hossein Najafi

Views: 26

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: EeW-1j8fv_g

Length: 103min 33sec (6213 seconds)

Published: Wed May 05 2021