Zbrush Arnold Displacement Workflow

hey guys welcome back to another video in this channel today i have a very very uh cool technique tip trick or workflow however you want to call it for anyone that's been exploring our superscores and you guys have been creating some amazing stuff in there well now i'm gonna show you how to properly set everything up so that we can create this right here so what you're seeing right here is a displacement map inside of arnold we've talked about displacement map before if you've never heard about them check out our video recommendations and you're probably gonna find some displacement reviews that we've done in the past uh but we know that displacements are um a map that we sometimes use that will create more well it won't create more geometry it will push the geometry at render time instead of arnold to really really really get those details in here so one of the main things one of the issues that a lot of people uh struggle with is i have a really cool sculpture in zebras like this guy right here and i wanna showcase him in the best possible way right like i wanna showcase every single like pour and wrinkle and detail i want to make sure that the render has every single piece uh intact right and and the problem is well we can't take it right like this guy right here on cbrush he has almost 5 million points which is about 10 million geometries i mean we could take it but it's going to be really really heavy for maya and if we wanted to like animate it or rig it or whatever it just doesn't work right so what we need to do is we need to go through a process called a displacement process where we will bake out maps here from zbrush that will get the information of where the points should be once the object is um like subdivided to this point so let me try to make that a little bit clearer because i think it's a lot of like very technical words and it's uh it's a little bit complicated so imagine you have like a little circle and this circle is your level one subdivision and let's say it has an like 100 points right and then you multiply or super divide this guy and then on like a really high level you create like a little shape let's say like a plus sign your carbine like a plus sign here on the element and this is going to be level five okay and let's say we have like a million polygons okay so six zeros there we go so what we need to do is we need to bake this information into a map into like a texture map that tells the object hey when you have a million polygons you need to push these polygons up in order to create the or in this case down in order to create the little like plus sign and and render it exactly as you have it here in zbrush most of you guys uh already know the process when we do this for games which is called the normal maps right um however for film for commercials you sometimes are going to be using this method which is displacement map it's a little bit different okay so the way this works is very very simple you're going to go into your object and first of all you need to have two main things happening here you need to be working on subdivision levels so as you can see this is my subdivision level one and this is my subdivision level i believe this is a five or something six subdivision level six so we have six levels of solutions thor come on man what's your problem he's very anxious oh my god give me just one second guys let me get this guy out i don't know what that was he's usually not that like uh axey anyway so you have your subdivision level one and you have your subdivision level six another thing that's very important is for my soft division level one this one right here i need to make sure to have uvs you can get this automatic uvs here from c rush or you can export this uh element and get the ubis in maya i actually did this ubc in maya and uh these are my my ubs right my head uv is very traditional uv mapping technique now that we have this we're going to be using a plugin that is here instead of zbrush which is called let me like talk this over here it's called the multi-map exporter this one right here and uh there's a couple of things that we need to export so i'm gonna select displacement because we're gonna be using a displacement and i'm gonna be selecting export mesh because i do wanna have the mesh just in case i did any like sort of like tweak like if i move anything here i wanna make sure that i have like the the latest um mesh selected here inside of zipper so displacement and export mesh some people like to export the mesh like manually i i haven't had issues by exporting it here so you can you can try either way now on the options right here there's a couple of things that we need to check on the displacement map of course as you can see there's a lot of other different maps that we can export we can export a normal map we can export cavity map ambient evolution we don't need any of this because normal map is a fake way to get the detail if we are actually going to have the detail you really don't need to have the normal map right because the detail is going to be there you don't have to fake it so we're going to go here to this placement and here's the very very very important piece so first you need to go to the highest level of subdivision or the subdivision level from where you're going to be baking from so in this case i'm in subdivision level 6. and here on the subdivision level i'm going to select which is going to be my low sub division level a level inside of maya right so in this case subdivision level 1 is going to be the one that i'm going to have in maya so this one right here okay so low subdivision level so once i have that i need to turn on smooth ubs because if i want to i can go in maya and press number three to smooth the guide and that's gonna smooth the uvs uh you're gonna leave this at 0.5.5 displacement mid value tells the object that any value above 0.5 like from from gray to white is gonna push the vertices up and any value from 0.5 down to like blacks is going to push the vertices down some people and in some production pipelines you might find people change this number for my personal work and for like the clients i've worked with we've always left this at 0.5 and it works just fine 32 bit and exr super super important do not forget to check this out 32 bit and exr because this is going to make sure that the image that you're exporting is super high fidelity and that way uh everything is going to work exactly as you would expect and scale we're going to leave as one everything else just leave it like that and we just hit create all maps it's going to give you this let's jump to our uh to like our our project here so let's go to next to live let's go to source images and let's create a new folder called displacement test there we go so i'm going to call this his this character's name is morkan he's one of my characters from dnd we're going to say more can export as you can see it's going to do its process it's going to do the bake and we're going to get the image there we go in my computer it says it took 26 seconds i don't think that was 26 seconds but that's what it says and just to show you that this is actually working let's go to photoshop so here in photoshop if we go to our project right here source images and we take a look at the displacement this one right here the exr you're going to see that the exr like you you won't see anything and it's a really like like a weird right to see an image with like no information in it but it's actually here on the red channel and i know it's very very difficult to see but as you can see there's there's values there there's there's colors if i hit ctrl l to go into my levels i can actually push this things like this like crunch the values and you're gonna see that we start getting the actual like information let me see like we can't cross that line of course and there it's a little bit easier to visualize right like all of the information is there for our eyes it's going to be a little bit difficult to see but for the computer it knows like every every single pixel has a value that's important for us so don't modify anything here i just want to show you here let's jump into maya i already have this like a scene test which is the the render that that i did but i'm going to show you from scratch how to do this let me just save this image because this is the thumbnail you've probably already seen it so let's call this displacement render i'm not going to talk about lighting right here it's just like two lights i'll show you real quick so it's just as you can see it's just one top light right here one side light right here there's two head at different skills i want to show you this the displacement if you do this process you're going to be able to scale your meshes with your rigs and everything and and they shouldn't break like you should have the displacement working every single time so it's just two lights in a single hdr so let's create a new scene don't say i should have saved actually i did say before don't worry there's like another another version that i saved so let's go here and if we navigate to our next to live and we go to our source images to the displacement test we're going to have this so this is the obj this is the exr and this is the mtl we don't need the mtl and i'm just going to drag and drop the obj here i know that it's black it's a bug here on my computer but this is the the head right here first thing i need to do mesh display soften edge very important there we go let's move this up again you can move it you can scale it i'm not going to scale it just yet because i want to show you that it works at this scale first and then we'll scale it let's go arnold lights area light another area light arnold lights skydome light and let's just add a very quick hdr like yeah that one's fine just like a very flat image there we go and now the material right uh we've talked about this before again if you haven't seen the videos go check them out pretty cool especially when you're doing like ground and mountains and stuff it works very nice for like tileable textures but for characters as you can see it's a little bit different so i'm going to press tab key and i'm going to uh type in ai standard surface and this is my basic material so i'm going to call this character mtl material and uh we are going to type or press tab key again and just write this placement and this will create a displacement shader so we know or you should know that the displacement is another part of the main like shading group every object can be shaded on its surface on its volume and on its displacement so this right here is going to go on the displacement tab right here so it's just a matter of connecting this there and this one we don't need anymore now to the displacement shader we're going to connect of course the little image that we just created this which is this one right here and if you remember from photoshop the only channel that has the information is the red channel we don't need any other information because it's a black and white image now by exporting this as an exr it automatically will recognize that this is supposed to be a raw color space just make sure that that's set to raw and connect the r to the displacement and there we go so i'm going to go here i'm going to increase the roughness because i don't want this and i'm going to lower the the white color so that we can see a little bit more of the of the detail on the character select the character right click assign existing material and we assign the character material and um again from our displacement lessons we know that we need to go into this object right here go into arnold subdivision and select cat mode clark subdivision this will tell the object to subdivide to to smooth out to have more polygons at render time and ideally you want to have the same amount of uh like levels that you have in sievers so in zebras you remember we had six divisions so i'm gonna have this at six divisions as well so all of the detail is there so we can see every single piece of the of the detail so there we go now we hit render and we wait i'm gonna pause real quick while this renders and ta-da this is the displacement and it sucks it's not looking the way it should be looking and i remember when i was learning a displacement map this was a an issue that i ran into like quite a bit a couple of years ago or not a couple like several years ago doing this placement was like a nightmare a nightmare the renders were not like really really prepared and i it was really difficult that's why everyone did like bump a normal map because it just was easier uh but now it's it's a lot easier you just need to know what's what's going on here so what's happening here is something very very uh simple but at the same time something that uh it's not as obvious so when we were in zbrush if you remember we set this thing so that the gray values started at 0.5 and then up and down right depending on the color well we need to set that up here as well and um a couple of versions ago you you would find this on the mesh itself but nowadays on the at least on the most recent version this is 2022 you're gonna find this on the shader okay so on the displacement shader on the arnold tab you need to change the scalar zero value to 0.5 super important that's it that's just it it might seem like again something really simple really stupid but you need to make sure that it knows that your meat values are your mid values right so now when we render as you're gonna you're about to see right here come on arnold are you rendering render there you go now it works now it is actually rendering and it knows now that we have said that properly it knows exactly where every single point should be and again as i mentioned one of the great things about displacement map especially if you do it this way is that if you scale your object either up or down it should respect that same displacement information so for instance here we have three different sizes this is the original these are scaled i have not frozen the transformations or force and freeze the transformations like it should be exactly the same and if we render let's stop this right here let's close this arnold and render if we render uh we should be able to see the detail on all of them so let's just give this a second should be rendering now should be loaded remember we're subdividing these things like several million times so so we're gonna have a lot of polygons at render time that's why it's taking a little bit longer and should be working why is it not working there we go there we go so now as you can see all of them the medium size one the big size one right here and the small size one all of them are sharing they're a displacement up at the height or at the size that they that they know right like the size that they should be using and look at the detail there look at the amazing detail again this is real detail these are real polygons that are being pushed in and out of the scene and um this is what we would eventually use for like a rig i'm going to show you this real quick as well so just so you guys believe me i know you guys believe me right you know you know i'm not telling any lies but let's say we were to rig this guy and i'm going to do a very simple rig right here it's not going to be like a like an actual rig i'm going to use a lattice and lattices deform the position of the vertices so let's say we're doing like this sort of like weird effect where we rotate the character around sort of like spiral form like this let's do something like this i know this is super crazy i know i know it's super crazy it looks ridiculous but uh believe me it's a it's a it's a really good idea because this could potentially be like you could see this as a skiing cluster right forming the character so let's go here and render and again let's just give it a couple of seconds and we should see this thing like completely deformed completely like broken but with all of the proper displacement endpoints so let's see if it works and yeah it works perfectly look at that we can see the scar we can see the wrinkles we can see every single thing so if you extrapolate this like super weird example into an actual rig like a functioning rig with like facial stuff and everything all of the points all of the displacement that you're using you're using would be projected onto the character so yeah this is it guys if you want to create amazing renders like the one that we're using on the thumbnail this one right here uh and you want to use displacement then this trick is for you hopefully you guys like this video we're going to continue with more stuff make sure to recommend or suggest more topics on the comments and i'm always happy to to take them into consideration for the for the next videos and uh yeah i'm preparing the next course as well we just released a new scores by the way i forgot to mention this at the beginning of the video we just released a new course on substance designer which is a really really powerful software check the video on our links as well uh check the descriptions down here for all of that information and i'm also preparing my next course which is going to be coming really really soon and i'll keep you guys updated for that one so yeah hang on tight i'll see you back tomorrow for don't forget to like share subscribe and that's it bye

Channel: Nexttut

Views: 13,286

Keywords: maya 2018, zbrush tutorial, maya tutorial, nalini kanta jena, character sculpting, zbrush sculpting, zbrush turorial, beginner zbrush tutorial, human anatomy zbrush, modeling tutorial

Id: fnaxnCCaML0

Length: 16min 11sec (971 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 23 2022