ZBrush Kaiju Creation for Pacific Rim: Uprising with DNEG - ZBrush Summit 2018

back to the action here Mattia Lucas it's your time to shine welcome again thank you everyone I'm Mattie Spencer and Lucas cuenca and we're from Deen egg London office and cooler and today we're gonna be talking about Pacific Rim uprising and the work that we did on the kaiju and the rippers it was a really great opportunity to do some really cool organic creature design and sculpting as well as exploit the ground breaking hard surface tools in ZBrush and use them to create an amazing series of mechanical characters directly inside of ZBrush rather than starting them in my Emoto or another program which is typically associated with hard surface modeling so I'd like to start by showing this video thank you starting the show this video of just an overview of some of the stuff that we did on the show how do you make the video play [Music] [Music] thank you so all the work that we did on this shows but you know a huge team effort and we just wanted beforehand just to acknowledge the fact that there were so many amazing artists that we work with that all had a hand and what we're gonna be showing you today and it's really awesome to be able to work with these folks and I wanted to make sure that they've got a shout out as well there we go so what we're gonna be talking about yeah I just missed it there we go so we're gonna be talking about the the creature brief what we were tasked to do at the beginning of the show when it was brought to us in a pre-production stage basically we designed several specialty kaiju and then further refined some of the bass kaiju and we've put together a real another video we'd like to show you just specifically the kaiju centric and Ripper centric things that we've done so how do you make that technical difficulties let's bring explain [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you so we'll start talking about the core kaiju so the core kaiju which are the first three that you see on screen right here these were supplied to us as base D tools at the beginning of the show the art department at D neg was tasked with further refining these into more completed designs working out locomotion working out the plating and just taking them and refining them into a single sort of unified world we had to think about movement articulations and then once they were completed and approved would be remesh in them and then passing them on to our build department we have a very permeable barrier between the build department in the art department at double- which really helps facilitate a really nice workflow where we've got artists that are straddling both worlds because you know they're so interlinked especially with ZBrush things are being designed in ZBrush and then exist as a model already so in addition to working on those core Kaiji we had these really awesome opportunities to do the jaegers which we're not going to be able to talk about today because ZBrush didn't really figure into them quite as much creature wise we had mega kaiju which was the ultimate guide you at the end composed of all the other kaiju we had the infected drones the rippers which Lucas did the design and a lot of the build on and he'll be talking about those and depth the breach kaiju rides into who was the unfortunate kaiju who didn't make it into the film and then spork head which is the the kaiju with the funny name so ZBrush rules right so as in most art departments you know ZBrush has become an integral aspect of the creature design pipeline and I've seen it develop since you know the the years that I've been in the film industries trying to say well can I design this in ZBrush and people being like hmm and now it being expected artists in an art department really it's something that you need to know the design process starts in ZBrush as well as in sketches and illustrations kind of whatever whatever artist feels comfortable doing especially at the very very beginning we flirt again a bunch of ideas brainstorm meet together throw them around tear each other's work apart in a friendly way and build it up in a friendly way it's an incredibly quick workflow to start in ZBrush it allows real-time edits which was huge for us cuz we had a very truncated timeline for this film so our art director could sit with us and workshop these things for example mega kaiju who we had to piece together from different parts he could sit down and talk with us and make changes on the fly and then that day we could put it in front of the art director excuse me the visual effects supervisor and then potentially the director so let's talk about mega kaijus kaiju development so we had a brief from mega kaiju at the beginning that he must be composed of the other kaiju he had to actually be put together from pieces that were recognizable from Shrike Thorin Haku Xia and Ryan he had to be a hexapod a six-legged creature that was really a solid line in the brief they wanted it to be six legs and of course we realized that he had to maintain a malicious intent throughout the shape language from the silhouette down to the tertiary forms and then lastly once we got to the color palette that color palette had to reflect the more tropical saturated colors that were being used in all the other kaiju so from many one how do we take these three separate creatures that are all living in a same world and then combine them together into another creature that feels like it's a viable actual being and not something that's just jigsaw together from a bunch of parts so we break out the most kinder and I'll start doing thumbnails these are some thumbnails that were done I think maybe the first or second day we found out that we had the show and since we had the cork hygiene models we were able to sort of color code those and lay them out on the wall and say alright we need to figure out what are the iconic parts of these which parts do we rip out and how do we recombine them we had a little bit of leeway with changing their shape and configuration but they really wanted the iconic elements to carry over so you could pick them out if you freeze framed and looked at the creature so luckily about this time insert mesh brushes had been released so we took those models cut apart what we decided were the most iconic pieces and made insert mesh brushes from them and those of us that like to sketch ideas do maquettes and ZBrush we were able to really quickly work up a bunch of different ideas just kick bashing all these parts and combining them and moving around and looking for pleasing shapes and effective shapes and we're able to bypass a lot of false false starts really easily that way so here we can see an initial model of mecha kaiju with those color-coded pieces so you've got four arm plates from right into you've got the jaw bones from hakucho which are a really iconic part of his face design and that brings us to the shape language so all throughout our art director Jonathan was very specific about the shape language and you know it's important to know what the shapes you're using are and why you're using them so we need to ask ourselves how we want the viewer to feel when they see the creature what's the nature of the shapes that we will use to create the silhouette and how other shapes inspire feelings I think all design is really graphic design if you're doing a costume you're doing a character or creature you're doing a logo it's all logo design essentially it is a iconic form an iconic shape that's memorable so if you were to picture your favorite monster in your head right now there's an iconic shape to that there's something that's clearly recognizable and that's a an established shape language and we need to figure out what that would be so we chose jagged pyramidal structures that are stat triangular form so staffing triangles kind of creates a sense of tension and anxiety and it helps create those 45-degree angles which just in instinctually we associate with with malice or danger while this is going on we're also had people using following different ideas this is a a design that didn't end up being used obviously but it was entirely based around a specialty attack this kaiju blue energy attack so there's all sorts of different ideas happening all in this very small timeframe it's a flurry of activity here's some ZBrush sketches so again you can go into ZBrush start sketching out working out shapes working out the the position of the limbs and how those limbs might change and then doing a little bit of paint over in Photoshop just to pick out key elements and make them pop and then present them that day or the next day it's just super fast and people are really responsive to seeing a ZBrush model as a design idea they're not they don't see the model like they used to and say oh no I'm not ready to model yet they see it they're like okay I feel like I can work with this and we can change this and this is still malleable this is still in progress also others is happening we've got other artists who are working up ideas on paper pulling elements from what we're doing in ZBrush and then we're feeding off each other so all these things are put together in this soup and we're pulling out the best ideas as they come and also while we're working clearly we're thinking about silhouette and in ZBrush something that I love to do is work in the flat color material especially early on I'll turn off turn on flat shade mode it strips out all the shading information and allows me to just think about the silhouette and you're gonna make ugly shapes inside once you turn your your basic material to back on because that's the best material in ZBrush and those can create happy accidents which are hard to get in digital media you get them in clay you get them in paint the happy accident is something that you kind of have to chase and I find that when I turn my shading back on I might have happy accidents I can start to say I'll pick that out I'll use that form I wouldn't have thought to do that again further ideas being just doodle out on sticky pads post-it notes are great having a pack of post-it notes you don't get married to an idea you just stick it over there draw another one stick it over there and you can lay them all out very easily and here's a view of the mega kaiju head in ZBrush this is a really early idea for the the head does and again we would just scope this up and then use the app link to pop over to zebra or to photoshop and then start just lining out things adding some details then popping back over Suzie app link masking based on that drawing and then itching in those things that we sketched in in Photoshop so here we've got the initial design of mecha kaiju this is the first approved design it changed a few times after this there you go that was yours wasn't yep and then again we're using the app link and Photoshop 2 and ZBrush to take pieces cut them apart reorganize them and just make sure that every possible idea is explored so something like this is just really quick to put together it gives an idea of scale and posture and helps us explore things that you know we might not have thought about before it's just very easy to cut and reorient and say oh that works or it doesn't throw it away and this is really neat so because he's a SAP hexapod has all of these different limbs and has really specific movement requirements we were able to use ZBrush and Photoshop together to create these sort of panels showing what the unfolding with the blooming of those plates might be and the last thing here we've got concept painting over the ZBrush model placing the creature Institute and you can see it really illustrates why the decision was made to use these triangular shapes because the creature is constantly passing through these rectilinear forms of a city so he's always going to be clearly visible through all the atmospheric perspective the dust the debris those jagged shapes are fundamentally alien in that environment and so it's definitely something that does not belong there here we've got the first production model yep bye bye the week's beautiful work where he's taken the work that was done in our department which by its nature is is relatively gestural because you're working so quickly and trying to create broad strokes and broad ideas then that same Z tool is passed on to build artist who's assigned that creature it may even be the same artist that sculpted the design in some cases and then they refine that down and start to get into the granular forms thinking about the plating thinking about how everything fits together so when you really sit there and look at it it all works it's not just the sort of gestural ideation this is a great shot of the head where you see that he's worked in the primary and secondary forms but there's no detail yet there's no fine detail it's all about just getting the plating the flesh that's over the plating getting these beautiful little wrinkles that you see in the in the jaw line they're just so you have a sense of it being a flesh-and-blood creature and believe this is the turntable here the initial designs so again just a Z brush turntable that could be put in our daily session and show our VFX soup and art director the direction and it's very quickly and easily lets us show the work and get an approval to move on to the next stage which in this case would be detailing so this is a detail shot of mega kgs head mega tied you there was a couple plot points where were really really close up on his face and of course all the kaiju had to have an enormous amount of detail but details a funny thing so I always think about the fact that like the greatest sculptures in the world really don't have detail on them the form is there like Michelangelo's David there's no detail it's pure form but then when you're putting detail on something we want to make sure that it supports the lines and the gestures and the shapes that we've already made so instead of taking some texture stamps and stamping things down or a spray brush and putting things down we try to be really considered in how the the plating and how the the wrinkles and how all those tertiary details help to support and and accentuate the forms that's underneath like if you you know we looked at a lot of reptiles and the and the scale patterns there and how they have a defined flow and a defined shape to them so we're also having to think about the texture so after the form of the creatures established we had to define a skin color pattern for mega kaiju and again that had to keep with the other kaiju so that led us for a four am fish market adventure at Billingsgate market so got up at 4 a.m. with a patrick the build supervisor and we took a cab out to Billingsgate which is the fish market in London where all the restaurants get their seafood so basically it's things coming right off the boat some of its still alive and it was it was a treat it was very slippery in there too so we're walking around and everyone's usually there buying in bulk and we're just buying individual pieces so we got these lobsters and a crab and this is fish roe here and this this texture has been so useful in so many things since then so what we wanted is we wanted to do a controlled photo shoot in the the basement of Dean egg which didn't stop smelling for like a week after this where we were doing polarized images so we could use these images for texture but also use them for design because designs still going on right now design and build and looked up are all kind of happening in these overlap time frames so we wanted to support as many departments as possible with these images and also just have them for later shows we're picking out things that were really saturated because like we'll talk about in a bit the color palette for this film was very very bright it's a marked departure from the first we were also looking at things like this um the shell down here in the lower right to see the type of secondary life forms that attach themselves to things that are living in the water and how things weather and look when they're plated and they've been underwater or they're from a water environment so we try and find the details in nature so by referencing nature we're achieving a level of interest in sort of veracity that you really don't pull from your imagination whole whole cloth there's just details and things when you got your reference up that's gonna be hugely helpful for you so we knew we were gonna draw heavily on crustaceans and cephalopods to create the right look and I haven't eaten seafood since this movie so we had to just develop color palates so after things were sculpted I took all the kaiju and put them together and started polypainting because in poly paints I can use layers I can isolate colored patterns and use them between different ideas and most importantly the color pattern it also has to exist in a 3d space so it's one thing to do a paint over in Photoshop but if I do a poly paint just from a you know maybe a 180 degree angle just for speed I can still see how those markings and how those stripes or dots are gonna follow the form so I don't want to do a paint over and then they say it looks great and then when I turn it and start to try and continue it it's like oh it falls apart and here you can see we're exploring some really vibrant color palettes and I think it's important as artists and as designers to sort of look at sort of trends are trending design things look outside of the work of our peers so we look at our peers work and that's fantastic and look at the work of our heroes and that's fantastic and look at the work of classical artists that's fantastic but I think it's really valuable to to look outside of our discipline look at graphic design look at hot Couture look at all sorts of design because I think everything happens in the gestalt it happens in a zeitgeist and it's interesting that we're moving out of this phase a very desaturated Terminator movie color and into these really vibrant very you know oversaturated colors if you think guardians of the galaxy and things like that and those always seem to be seated in the minds of clients and they're they're sort of looking for that sort of thing so here we have mega tae ji with his initial color pass and is this a turntable no that's not so we've got his initial color pass and a first-look dev render on there just to get an idea of what its gonna look like and we're using this light rig that just completely unforgiving because the movie takes place in a brightly lit City so there's nothing to hide behind you don't have shadows all you've got is maybe a little bit of environmental dust and that's it anyway we have mega kaiju is a paint over from one of the ZBrush models just showing in the city in the destruction and also certainly think about the rippers and the Chi G blue because the kaiju blue is that poisonous veining that's present in all the kaiju and it's an important plot point and the rippers as well which we started to think about that you can see very faintly in the the plating here and do you want to explain the Ripper yeah the Reapers say there are small creatures that will go into the different freaking shoes Stryker nakusha and retching and take pieces apart of them kind of Fanta staying magnetized so again the plot point of being really close-up on the eyes or on the face we had to work up different ideas for the eyes and here's some different variations just so we could see what that I might look like and what the character of it would be whether it should be a lateral people around people a slit people how much kaiju blue is in there and here's our full color I'll let you play it so you can see that we've started putting in the Chi G blue we've got those really nice sort of teals and oranges and all these colors working together so something really cool that was brought in by one of the look dev artists as the scatterers Tim worked this up it's small incidental objects like barnacle like forms spines seaweed all these things are created in ZBrush really quickly and then they were decimated and we'd export hundreds of these little obj models of just you know random sea life and random detritus so they could be propagated across the surface of the model to give a sense of scale so it's kind of like greebles in hard surface were there little mechanical shapes that create a sense of scale and use these are just little organic forms that could help make the object make the creature feel bigger and make it feel like it had been passing through the ocean to come and attack the the city and the things we would pick up and also maybe the things that it picks up in the alien tank where it's being bred like what kind of fungi is there what type of parasites are in that world that'll attach to the kaiju so here you can see just a few of these little they're relatively simple they didn't take very long to do we could tons and tons of them so they could script it and have a whole selection of these that they could select we would paint a gray shade mask and then distribute them on the creature based on where the the mask was painted here you can see the the barnacle forms on the plate of one of the creatures there and then back here their little spines down there which are all coming out of the the skin and the recesses it just helped add that extra little something and this was really cool we use timeline a lot especially because so much of the design of these creatures involved how they're gonna move and how they reconfigure themselves so having an artist who doesn't necessarily undo rigging being able to use timeline and being able to use layers to just reconfigure and create little proof-of-concept animations of how things might work was really useful plus while we're doing this this is still in design so this creature isn't finished yet so to take this rig it and then do animations would be a waste of resources so being able to do it in ZBrush and presents either multiple frames or present a movie was really really helpful so reijin 2 is the the pork I drew that couldn't he didn't end up in the movie but that happens and I think it's a kind of important also like as artists always not to get too attached to our stuff like to be passionate about it and do it but I've come to realize so many things just don't end up in the movie or change for what seems like no reason so pretty early on I was like I can't be so invested in that idea because it's gonna change so sort of rolling with the flow so Ryan's who is really cool he was being reconfigured by the rippers and he had these amazing sort of mechanical tentacles and these were all created inside of ZBrush using the techniques that Lucas is going to talk about and it just had this really cool sort of whipping organic mechanical hybrid shape but ultimately it didn't work in the in the structure of the film so they just decided to cut this kaiju here we can see again these are paint overs the ZBrush model just because it's it's really nice to take the model render out passes bring it into Photoshop and just give it a sense of what that scenes going to look like so talk about a bit about one particular kanji this was my favorite this is the breach kaiju in the movie he's being summoned by the infected drones out of a portal in the ocean and the plot point is that they're bringing him up and then the the drones malfunction and then slice him to bits so it's a sort of humorous anti-climactic moment where this amazing kaiju is coming out of the water and then he's destroyed which offered a really good opportunity to do something really crazy and really bizarre because it didn't have to function in the rest of the film it was just this sort of like key moment that was fun for the audience so we were gonna work at multiple ideas and I thought this is a good example of starting an idea way out on the fringe and letting yourself get pulled back rather than being asked to push something forward I think if you do something really elaborate and bizarre at the beginning it makes the director feel like they've got this enormous playground and then they can say oh let's let's pull back from that to something I'm more comfortable with which i think is probably a better thing to be asked then can you go further can you push it further so I tried to think about this in terms of Cthulhu so I thought since it's a giant aquatic monster coming out of the ocean it's gonna you know we should play off that Lovecraftian angle that sort of inspires all of this we also thought it would be cool since these are genetically engineered just to destroy humanity they don't have to have hands or opposable thumbs they don't have to be able to pick things up they just have to be able to destroy so what if its arms were nothing but giant sights what if its body was nothing but blades and teeth so it's pure function is to destroy I also thought it was really cool to have you know all these hundreds of teeth and changing the configuration of the mouth and not having it be just sort of a big reptilian mouth but changing the orientation and trying to play with shapes that might be frightening so when we're doing the the tentacles the art director called out and said well you know we bought these tentacles here but they're just tentacles why don't we go down a level and start thinking about what's at the tips so they're not just tentacles flapping around let's make them little grabby claws so here we you know in an afternoon we're working up what the tips are those tentacles might be so they could go in and rip the plates apart on on a Jaeger so again it's another thing that's engineered specifically for its function in the world and then so we brought that sort of toothy sort of crustacean belly like we saw on that lobster brought it down the entire length of the body so basically it would be pulling something towards it and then you know ripping the robot apart or whatnot so the director really responded to it was really liking it but then there's some inspiration one night we come back and he said well let's explore more of a rhinoceros sort of look oh there's the the painting of the the creature as it would have appeared in the scene so he says I kind of want to see a rhino horn we put a rhino horn on there so that afternoon just going in and ZBrush and changing the face taking the tentacles out putting the rhino horn on to meet that that note and that went over well he was really responded to that and so that he really wanted to kind of explore the rhinoceros aspect a little bit more and bring something and that's a little bit more of a traditional kaiju head with the alligator type mouth and the the horn and also adding the hands on there so then we our art director on the tube in the morning sketch this out on his iPad and came in and said well hey can you do this so I went ahead and changed the head and put a new head on there based on that sketch so we've just sort of evolved this thing through ZBrush very very quickly to meet the expectations and come to the final creature we also like putting that negative space inside the horn I love negative spaces because they're unexpected and unusual and you know just from a pure design standpoint negative space is really important and in the movie I really do like when he's emerging you can kind of see the ocean through that horn a little bit and it's just kind of a neat touch so that model goes to Lucas who worked up the production model here do you want to talk a little bit about well here we took a I took the design of MIDI and I start to refine the shapes start to explore a little bit more the face but pretty much keeping the first of the primary forms that Maddie did that's pretty much so I think it's an amazing job taking those broad forms this broad strokes and and refining them down into things that that fit together and look really really nice so it was so Wow Lucas is doing this then it's back to the the color palette so just painting over and trying to find what the color of this particular kaiju is going to look like so again Zi a blank Photoshop layers in Z a blank excuse me layers and poly paint just allowing us to really work up a bunch of different ideas and just having total freedom with them so here we've got the turntable of the the kaiju as under bright sunlight which is again the unforgiving IBL that we were using for everything luckily this IBL in the film was different I think it was actually taking place at night so like we were saying the color palette for the original Pacific room was very graded and the the kaiju were often appearing in the dark and in the rain so they wanted it to be very very bright and very vibrant here so we just went through and created a whole bunch of different variations and as you can see they go from being very very sad D saturated and a much much more saturated more bold more aquatic poisonous looking designs this is beautiful I love this one this was by Jonathan it just has this really lovely kind of contrast between the colors that's you can tell what's plating and you can tell what's flash and then strike thorne again also designing the kaiju blue and thinking how that kaiju blue is part of the the skin.look part of the design how do you there we go and then again we've got one of our our look dev turntables just showing the the textures with the initial look def passes before any of the scatterers any of the further work so that closes out the the kaiju and then so I'd like to pass on to Lucas to talk about the amazing work that he did with the rippers Reapers cool so the Reapers were these small creatures that were going to go into the three different guys shoes and cut pieces and almost get bashed the medication right so I have a small video here showing a bit of them [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] so when it started with the design of the rippers the first the only thing that I got as a reference was a mood board it wasn't any kind of real life kind of animal or creature that we can use as a reference we only have these kind of intricate patterns and kind of and with lots of repetition and Coover to designs so I start to do some designs until the director really like this one so in the beginning this was this guy was going to be a mix between organic and Hertz Rufus was going to be kind of a breed between the two between the two so you can see that the head here is a bit more soft and you will have a bit of the tentacle sarkar surface so I started to do some tests and see how do you look altogether you know they were we were able to differentiate each one of them by the shape using repetition was was kind of was very good because it kind of simplified the design in a way that instead of putting a Towson elephant elements in the rippers having repetition helps to get a much more clear image for each one of them so here is a spreadsheet showing the size of the Ripper's between a human being just a small guy there here one day I came to work and the directors say okay with my VFX no Jonathan the art director told me we need to put ice into the rivers so I like to start very simple so my first idea was okay we can put just kind of spider and spider eyes some spheres and with some colors inside but we'd present that idea and the director said no I want something very techy very complex so I start to do different eye designs until I did like ten but here I have six and tiki choose one and from there I did another free and he choose one again so that one's the final aye and here we are trying to see okay where we put the eyes we didn't have a clear idea we're going to put the day's they didn't want to they didn't want to have an actual structure for the eyes they wanted to kind of brute force the eyes in the Ripper's so I start to place eyes everywhere and I start to take them out and what's a lot of graphic design here until we we got the actual idea of where we can cut also we started to play with a color we start to play with a insect the insect kind of variation you get when you see the insects from different sides and you get this translucency and a little bit of differentiating so this is just key shot renders some color variations as well we start to say okay with the repress 1/2 cup color is going to be black it's going to be green so we start to do different tries until we've got to one the director really like and so this one's was kind of or favorite kind of version of the rippers but we present this to the director and say well I want to this rippers were done by the shadow company this company build the drones the drone the drunk I shoes the infected drones and so I wonder the - the Reaper and the drones be in the same universe you know it's been the being together so we wanted to do something like this and also he wanted a much more curved surface a creature so we start I start to sharp all the edges and also something very good I mean all the Reapers have done with our image everything here is our image all the replays built from four different pieces and each piece still had their image when I was designing it so that means that if I had to sharpen one object I was sharpening weapon so my main object for the Rhenish was this one so I was sharp in this one and I by default I got all all the objects are fix for me so that was very very good also I started to play with nanomesh because in one of the sets we have this kind of scale played see there that we can see here so we wanted to use it for cover some soft spots of the rippers where maybe cut his you know weak spots and uses some kind of shield right the same for the scales in the top this was all nanomesh and was the eyes was the kind of the soft spots okay we can put some kind of nanomachine there and was I'm coming up a blur right so here's a different handle so we present this idea to the director and he said well it's pretty cool I really like a robotic feels now how techie so and also we start we change we changed the position of the eyes right now we don't have more eyes here we only have eyes here so he said well but I want to introduce a bit more of the drones and again I like to start simple so I say okay let's start introducing only color and graphic and graphics so I start to add some graphics from the drones a little colors black and white and I did some some lights as well and I did different variations for this until we got to this point where we present this ones to the director and he say yeah super cool but actually I want to introduce pieces of the of the drone into the Ripper's say okay so I took the drunken shoe make an image and start to keep watch pieces of the of the drone and we can see here this was I think that this one was the shoulders and this is off from there from the legs this was part of the head I think so we start to introduce these pieces of the drone until we found something that he likes the same with the hooks at the beginning was simple tentacles and the Reapers need to go into the indications and break pieces and cut and Stitch so we say ok let's start to put some hooks you know we put hooks so here's some screenshots of the replay and see brush and here I kind of explain how I build it so for example I use collages for the tentacles of course but also this clinical tentacles are done with the right mesh nanomesh for the Cape luring body a right mesh for the if the food the main body decides the top and the tail and also insert mesh is for for the pieces from the drone I think that this one is one of the first good I done school actually I use every another all the other tools in ZBrush but I actually no schooling in it so it was it was very fun and was kind of a challenge so now I'm going to production process something very important you know I mean the design don't stop in in our department we were very lucky with MIDI because we were in the mini position of work from our department to build but this design still still happening in bill it's lots of its daily daily basis changes all the time so we try to keep our workflow as flexible as possible this model was done and this I design it but the model the Prussian model was done by Jan jinda he did a beautiful work with it production process so in production what we do in production in production what we do is take the concept art take the designs from our department I start to make a the with a polishing that's the first thing we project the stuff and we further detail the old models right we also bring the high frequency pumps from Mary into ZBrush we break that in different steps I talk more about later but I'm going to just start with rotor polishing this topology was done by Daniel axelsson and the model as well you can see here in the in the model that we try to keep the topology as clean as possible also we cut lots of requests from breeding so and we do blend shapes in in the models so we need to be able to have enough to polish in the face for make all the plane shapes and at the same time keep all the keep all the teachers that element all the edge loops that Rick needs for the movement of the caches a big challenge that we're having in this project was that we were delivering at the same time that we are working the production models and in the art in there in the working designer department we are we were delivering toys all at the same time so we had to work in modeling texturing and looked all at the same time and the models need to be approved all at the same time so it was very very difficult I'm very very challenging so with the center workflow in where we can work all these steps as fast as possible and keeping the as much quality as possible as well so the recuperation process for the models was pretty straightforward I mean the Polish is something that normally like to do by hand but I use a bit of we can use sometimes a bit of several measure and sometimes we take we do parts of super measure for certain time we can use a some part of the arms you know some part of the legs and after stitch all together trying to make it as fast as possible we don't we don't try to lose too much time to touch in settings but if we can use something we will the face is normally is all by hand because we need to make them work for brain shapes so this is again the topology so model division we knew that a we didn't want to split them because we are having this a lot of changes every day in proportions scale shape we decide to we didn't want to split the models in the beginning it was crazy if we split in the beginning so what we did was was we know that in series we can handle in your machines 50 million polygons per tool so with your mats and we knew that or random-ass need to have run 200k polygons that means that if we sue the ride-on model we will get around 50 Millions so that was the first step within the first pass of displacement we gave it to texture artist we got back the marriage displacement marry a bomb up and when we bring it back we decide ok now it's time to split the model was locked so we didn't have any chance with it we we can't touch the model anymore was locking production was taken by rigging was taken by effects by everyone so we can't change the model so we were able to just split the model and explore Maps so from there we decide to split our models and this a little bit of the process that we do first be the models we know that we need a an extra solution level right again all of this could be done by HD geometry I personally loved HTV Amma tree I really really like it it's just that in the depending of the project and how things change HD geometry can be a bit can block all the other with your work so in this case we decide to just split the model so how we do it we just a UV by tiles we select the pieces again we don't go to just one piece we start you from big to small right so we select until we get 12 millions and if we need a I mean if it's not enough we will do all scooped and we split again to get another 12 millions right if we get this this selected getting 12 millions that means that we can still divide the model one more time so when we switch the right this model we get 50 Millions oh and here's 49 it's good enough so what we do we don't want to get any seams as well right so that's the nightmare of splitting so what we do for this is just a we split the model we crease by polygroups which sport we exported and save it because later we're going to import it back just to export the match from that one because that's how the render mesh looks we divide weekend one extradition level we stir morph target in the highest Edition level that's it's like a fez SafeNet kind of you if you go through the LA go through the model and you don't you don't want to get any kind of artifact model you just can clean up a little bit you know it's just kind of kind of a safe so displacement and for this placement with the two passes as I say before in the first pass was primary and secondary firms in the second pass was tertiary forms detail the secondary pass was form from Murray displacement plus ZBrush and here's a little bit of what with what we recognize as primary secondary and tertiary forms so primary forms are the forms that define the main character the volume and mass secondary forms are difference that are the completely complexity to defer a primary forms and also defined the flow of the character this forms shown over overpower the primary tertiary forms are the fruits of forms that add complexity complexity again to the secondary ones but also defines the kind of quality that's going to how the character is all is young it's plastic it's metal it's very important that what what you see in Siraj what you have in your in your screen in ZBrush tell you which kind of material is and surface et al is all these high-frequency detail that helps to add realism in and subtleties to to the model so here's a bit of the process of how we bring this all these because each page you have 400 tiles right so how we bring this ties into ZBrush unfortunately ZBrush can't bring all of these it could it can do it with the plugin and we can bring it as a displace but we don't want to do that I I want to have control of it so I really like to do it by hand so what we did was take all the tiles this was a stripped down by Luis Elias he was the lead modeler in the show so we took these 400 tiles and we did an extra UV for each one of the cashews and project all that information just 60 kmac map this map we bring into ZBrush we mask it by alpha and with the displace brush not inflate because inflate brush to cut the tendency to collapse the geometry together underline the underline the geometry and that give you problems with displacements and can give you a small artifacts so we use the displace brush to bring the data lab you can see here that the underlined detail just a little bit and after you can use a little bit of inflate a little very inflate we use it with I mean it's pretty nice because it gives you a some kind of organic feeling but we used to be a little slow with them maybe intensity too and just going very broad in the brush and just going in top form soft is a very good brush from soft it's pretty good because you can keep the detail you can continue making new strokes and new shapes and you keep the detail in there in the model so that's that's very good use the move brush as well because we can make the mask and push push push the geometry and we have very low intensity we can give that feeling of gravity to the model it is very very good and also it is a custom brush this brush is kind of similar to maybe orbit cracks or something like that is very sharp and helps a lot to make dry skin or cuts into the model we use it a lot for this so here's the difference between the primary and the secondary pass primary pass secondary pass so in this movie this model was done by stefano Dubai and me so in the discussion have lots of close-ups lots of different angles so we couldn't work one angle in particular we need to work in all the angles and also at the same time with this process because we were delivering toys at same time so we say was a very very big challenge also as you know when you put the modern into into for example of random or render software is Clarisse do you lose you lose detail a little bit you know at least 10 10 to 20 percent of the data that you get in Siraj so we always always scooted we put all the detent to one layer and as you can we can dial how much we are going to export in our displacement so for this show we use spectral displacements we use vector displacements because at least single render the quality is much better it's much sharper don't realize that much in geometry we you can have small tweaks and realign the vector to do the deformation also works in kumki by faces what is great so actually for this show was a super good super good decision and I personally like in much more than normally 32 bits so here's a small example of what's the difference between a vector and a normal displacement so as you can see normal displacement only goes in why we're back ters goes in every direction that's super good it's just a small trick if you want to do vector displacements just try to unfold and relaxed UVs as much as possible that will you're going to get much less artifacts at least in the spikes if you get spikes just try to relax it a lot and you will get a nice deformation there so blend shapes so we did around 250 branches for each creature with the exception of a cushion that have three differential opens that means that we have 350 blend shapes for that one yeah was a lot of range work and so I have a small video here some of the blend shapes okay so I'm going to show us a couple of things in ZBrush very very very fast a little bit of the Reapers and a little bit to some small trick for the Blaine shapes go for day - no no no you Chris the Europe your your model so when you su di one extra you don't shrink so it's just it's just to keep the edges between the different pieces that you are splitting in the same position got a question here on the Twitter fee well I'm going to show very fast something for example if we want to do sliding the skin for the plain shapes right and I want to show in the model but first in the sphere because this is what you see so I'm gonna just run more target yeah I'm going to move my hotkeys no okay I'm going to move stir more target cool so I'm going to move a little bit right first target so we would take it with a guy right and when we morph use project morph and get back you can see now how it's moving so this with texture you can see how the skin is lining the guy's shoes when they are making some different different shapes like dimple for example you can see that for example this coat just like here actually this way with this guy these finishes were done by Daniel you have very good job with them so we can storm after it here yeah and just with a very small intensity when we're gonna start to move yeah so after that we can just project the morph like that and you can see that this is moving right so now you can make the two layers together and you can see how it's moving here I mean in the top you can see that it's broken but that's that's my phone just a bit of sliding skin so that was very easy to make in ZBrush and you can use you can use another so forth but here is super super simple we use a lot of see brush for make the plane shapes you see Russian maíam mostly you can see some different ones so this is a very nice process to do in ZBrush also we use within correct this as well so that Rick can give us they say a Joe open and we correct that shape and add it into the break so I'm going to show a bit of the rippers so so here is the deal the reaper design right so I want to show very fast a idea an example here we can see here of the body of the Reapers let's select only one piece so it's faster cool surely let's select that one so you can see all the body was done with one piece right the same with the tail the tail is one piece as well it's everything in suraíh mesh that's that's super cool because I was able to actually dynamesh this and still pulling shapes around and was all happening in real time see it's all happen in real time and was all done and was all done with our image I can show here a rhyme mesh that's super cool and to show also for the nanomesh stuff so all these nanomesh that you sit here all these small scales so you have there all of this is done with just applying nanomesh ramesh so let's say that you have this guy actually let's do it with this guy that is so it's not that heavy right also the same for the time if you go to the tail you can see this all saw one option and you can still and the nice thing is that you can dynamic this and let's say okay I'm going to push it more and continue dynamic and you still having the ability of changing the shape keeping the rise if it gets too heavy you can decimate it and you will continue that's how also the eye so we're done all the eyes are done with the right mesh as well so here take this guy and from make a mesh from these different pieces what I did was using just ramesh so that is in geometry [Music] searching for ramesh not simply measure our medicine so tools ah here we go missing subdued so if you just press remesh it will give you a version I mean here it applicated because I have turn on symmetry but you can delete this ah I'm not in there and when you get this you can just throw my times cool and you get something like this and you can create take the scales let's say that you take this scale here you go to create intermesh new you can create an Amish brush I'm from here come here this guy press shift I will put it everywhere in the model next thing about an Amish is that you can still editing this this is case right and you can give them alignment you can align by normals by short edge long edge near I think that use normal and you can also make them fit or just fill the place I eat what they do is normally just play with the size a little bit and make something that size like that also you can take care of the show placement so you got this kind of grid and you can just apply it you know you can watch mesh this one here and when you bring your model but you can do what I do is just pulling inside the model just for concept art just pulling what I don't need and bring it back what I need that's all so this is just an example of the ice as well it has a Ramesh you can see all the different pieces is all the same piece so that's pretty much yeah okay let's do a bit of steak here we can go to tentacles so that's of the tentacles they were done all the tank tackles come from a right mesh as well so if I go here - Ramesh very fast and I can see he's the repetition certain tacos is the same technique that I use for the eyes is exactly the same technique so you can see how kind of cool nice things that you can get so but in this case for the tentacles was just five pieces and if you look your position and you take the transpose move it this so they interconnected between each other and you make a mesh of these and you can just create rush great intermesh a new one here too plain make stroke care of commode just place it the nice thing about this is that it's very very very you can make lots of you can trick a lot of settings so let's try to make something that you can now one now you have the new menu options in ZBrush that are very nice you have elastic and liquid that that's that's super super nice you can start to recreate something uh before we tyndall but that's super super super awsome also you can if you choose brush and you go to curve here here sorry this is the curve resolution that's super that's super good as well because it will give you this take on this you will make the transition much nicer and also you can go to stroke and go to curve functions and chromatophores here and go to size and you here have the the curve so you can make a tentacle so that's how all of this how this card this creature was done a mostly no scripting at all but you seen a lot of tool since I see brush Siraj is awesome is super flexible it's a tool that we use every day and makes your life much much easier so that's it thank you very much thank you so we're going to we're gonna have a Q&A and then I brought a couple gifts but I think we wanted to do just thank a couple of people I'd really like to thank pixologic for having us here affair hi me Paul the whole crew thank you all for being here for a presentation I really appreciate that and thanks to a double- for letting us share this stuff because it was a big kind of production try and make sure that we had permissions to show everything and then personally I just want to say hi to somebody at home he's watching he's very special hi Hallie I wish you were here I would like to help also all the people that support us and family as well my fiancee Silvana that's lots of support with everyone we get all the time it's nice to say thank you to thank you to all of you as well very sweet put your hands together one more time okay now you know that you know the drill we have the but before we get to the where's the the pixologic zbrush where apparently we have these so the first thing we're gonna give away is a t-shirt right this is a Pacific Rim - crew t-shirt yeah it's a crew t-shirt pretty cool thanks so much for bringing these these items are so sweet okay so these tickets are in red of course yes it's just random you never know what you're gonna get this thing for the Pacific Rim t-shirt the number is nine two one seven eight six once again seven eight zero six ticket number seven eight zero six is that you put your arm up and scream it's a hoax yes a winner okay and next up Maddie what do we got we've got the art of Pacific Rim - whoa wait wait for it wait for it signed by the entire go oh here we go Saturday morning special brought to you by yours truly here we go okay you can't sell it anyway you can't sell it anyway you cannot sell it on eBay it's going to go down it's like right up there with Wonder Bread he-man did it happen lots of people remember number nine two one seven nine zero one seven nine zero one how about a shout if you're the winner give us a shout no I'm making out a new rule if you win you got to say yes like in the bingo okay there's some some intensity here yeah okay let's get a shot with that okay so anyway back to the business of it that's 92179 7901 7901 7901 gone nine two one seven nine four zero seven nine four zero it could be you seven nine four zero if ever there was a reason not to smoke this is probably one of them your paper I think it said what are you doing vaping they're giving away stuff seven nine four zero seven nine four zero seven nine four zero gone it's embarrassing it's building tension it's drama nine two one seven eight five seven seven eight five seven the groans that crunch somebody's a yes make some noise make some noise the people are going or watching here we go for the tour that's a signed copy right there awesome okay thank you so much well thank you so much again we really appreciate how about another warm round of applause they came bearing gifts [Applause] and now yes we can I guess we can open up for a few minutes to some questions because we were questions and answers anybody any questions oh boy here we go little capers in a cup here yes here I come it's hard to see beyond the lights yes hey given 52 million Polly's and 250 blend shapes what kind of file sizes did you guy at guys have per kaiju and were there any limitations we yeah we try to to keep the file size lower than for chigga bytes because in 0fr 7 if you were if we go further than 4 gigabytes your files could be corrupted at some point so for the when we split them for we know that for 50 millions we get around 50 abides right with morph target and a couple of layers so what we did was when we split the model we keep different files for the different parts that we split for example mega kaiju is a model that is splitting well I split the face and split the two shows right so each one of them was in a different file just to be safe now Suresh works much better with higher with larger files yeah and now you can have for GH us but we still trying to keep it low we don't see projects with cell C tools because also work is much lower yes I see you Hey yeah I was going I shall have a to small questions I won for the Ripper do you have to neutralize the model like make the technical tail straight seriously again do you have to neutralize the model for the Reaper I did neutralize the model in some point but in the I tried to keep it as much flexible as possible because was lots of changes so if I could keep it as a with a rhyme ish all the way all the way until some point I would do it so for the technical you just have to use the no present ago I mean identical coaching my era image and after create a color brush and that was kind of I mean was finalized right I mean I couldn't I couldn't make another image from that so for the tentacle what I did was awry mesh and rotate integrals and when it was a change of tentacle I got to do a new array michw so if they want to change the design I had to remake it unfortunetely okay and also the blend shape and the face also so rigging just like they just open the mouth and you get to the rest like for the point shapes for the fish sorry I can so the rigging they for the face say the rigger they open the mouth well that depends of the workflow that we have per project that's per project if we get from rigging a job and we call them a correctives right so Ricky will give us a job enough the cashew shows I you know decide and we make contract is from make them look good and after they will import a plane ships into the rig so when the new meters move it they could the blend ship there cool thanks the question videos yes I saw in there you had the zremesher guides to avoid spirals how do you do that on something so complex and bumpy that when I need to do that what I'll do is I will take the model smooth out the area that I want to get a proper loop in if I'm having a problem with it spiraling out I'll draw this guide curve and then I'll use the color control there's actually a way to paint for density under zremesher yeah use poly paint and so I'll use poly paint to make sure I'm getting enough detail in that area and usually if I smooth it out it'll remesh it cleanly and then I just reproject it just very gently start to reap reject it so those curves legs or there's edges lay exactly where I want them nobody else oh yes there you are way in the back I thought there was unarmed it give a holler way in the back here so for the production model you said you divided in order to make it more manageable like and you said in order to change the volumes or whatever how do you go about doing that once you cut it in into sub - I didn't catch the the questions okay so you cut do you split the model into sub tools to make it more manageable the production model how would you change volumes without like no we don't change the polish in that point that's that's the last step the model in when we split the model is because the model is locked it's already it's already in production we sell ready in rigging so we split the models just to get the displacement from there that's it and we don't we don't change the Polish independent transfer point position at that point what we do is it's very important that the model in ZBrush and the model in the model that our or render mesh is the same in that way your displacement is going to be perfect so what we do is when we speed the model we bring back the that's why we export the first solution of the model before we crease the model we have for the first division and before we export the new the new map with the extra detail will be imported in top so in that way we explore them up for the render mesh can explain myself yeah yes well that's it then a round of applause again [Applause]

Channel: Maxon ZBrush

Views: 48,188

Keywords: twitch, pacific rim, pixologic, zbrush, zbrushlive, zbrush summit, zbrush 2018, vfx, dneg, digital negative, tv, video games, movies, 3d printing, visual effects, kaiju, digital sculpting, 3d modeling, robots

Id: zmJWlibqNFE

Length: 79min 47sec (4787 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 02 2018