ZBrush to Arnold for Maya - 32 Bit Displacement UDIM Tutorial

you [Music] hey guys having important from flip normals here in this video we're gonna look at how you can export a displacement map from ZBrush and use this in Arnold for Maya we're using Maya 2018 here but this should also work for older versions of Arnold and Maya so this is probably one of the most seen text tutorials we've ever done like like if you search for see brush and displacement map on Google this probably would you you're gonna find yeah you're gonna find them one for a v-ray and for moto mm-hmm so it's time to do one for Arnold so this here is the final render which is what we're gonna get in the end here let's look at first we do this before V's in Maya so here we have the UVs for this cut so this is laid out over multiple genomes here so this is we know this is not the ideal way of putting it like you know the head is here and then the the teeth are all the way over here the reason here is simply because there was there was the rest of a body here and we just cut the head off but this is just showing you how you can do this with you tips as well yeah I mean there's not really a big difference there is just some small settings in terms of naming and yeah exampling a few settings here and there so so it's a fairly simple way to there is no more inside there's no difference between actually using Universal single tiles here so before we really get into this Wincy brush let's look at what I did our displace maps can look like the final map so this is what we're gonna get out this is a grayscale map where we have we have a concept of a mid value a mid value is this point here which is perfectly great or is if this is 0.5 nothing will happen if this is white it's gonna go out and if it's black is gonna go into the model this is essentially just telling the render engine should you displace these points in or out so that's that's the main concept of displacement you could totally paint a displacement map in something like Photoshop you don't have to do this in ZBrush anymore this is just what we're getting from ZBrush here is just a map created from the model the nice thing about having your midpoint be gray or 50 sangre is that it's easier to tweak in to the afterwards so you could also have a midpoint of zero yeah and if you're working with 32-bit displacement map that allows you to go to you know below zero yeah so but for these purposes we're using a midpoint of 0.5 yeah if it's such as to the zero is just gonna look firm is complete the black with some highlights here but now we can actually see what's going on you can see what the faces and the eyes and all that so with a said let's go into ZBrush we're using simmers for our eight two P two in this one and this is our model here which lets us change the madcap here to something a bit nicer the red one is kind of nasty is not good so this isn't here is the model with a couple of subdivision levels and it has sculpting on honors here so it has a lot of nice little details here and essentially you want to get all this stuff here into into Arnold and the reason we use a displacement map is simply because this here is too heavy like you can't deform this at all this is like 2 million Polly's if you were to the formulas and a regular is no way to do that well if you are using a low res mesh and a displace map you can deform this to your heart's content without any problems so let's look at the displacement settings here like I said this model also has UV so as well right straight from it which is important you do need u V's for this here yes it's pretty important so if you go under C plugin and here we have a tool called multi map exporter this is where all our displacement it's gonna be a bit done under your move of exporter we we have the initial setting here and just enable displacement this means that once you create your Maps you only gonna Express placement you can also export out your mesh as well which is quite handy which will export how to mesh from the lowest level or from sorry from whatever level you specify which is by default the lowest level here is create all Maps this is what you click to generate all maps in the end sub tools means that if this is enabled if you have multiple sub tools like we do here with the teeth these are going you can create maps for all of these this is extremely useful if you have like 30 sub tools yeah kind of sucks to have to go through every single one because you have to wait for the map Jian raishin to finish for every single subtool and you know maybe you just want to leave your computer overnight to do that kind of thing and then if you have merged Maps this is if different objects are sharing the same UV tile which simply means let's say the teeth here was in the same UV tile as the head these will now be merged on creation if these are if merged map is disabled you'll get two separate Maps you'll get like thousand and one underscore one and thousand one underscore two this is really useful as you now have to merge these together in something like nuke or simple which is quite annoying to do so generally we enable merge Maps for this if you know that you have you have you have objects which are sharing the same you atop are there any restrictions is there like a restriction with merge maps in terms of every thought you would ask so if you enable merged Maps you cannot enable EXR follows for some bizarre reason then it gets it out as a tiff file yes exactly so if you do use merge Maps you have to output this as a tiff file I prefer to use EXR files so we're gonna switch we must be switching to XR for now but then merged Maps will not work so moving on the map size here we're gonna be just using 2k here obviously the high resolution the more detail you get into your map and the longer it's gonna take to generate absolutely the map border here is is how many pixels outside the border is this gonna fill in this is quite useful as you can now blur your map in something like nukumori afterwards without getting displacement seems a little East as strong as you would if this set you one I believe it is it a four but folds just set this all the way up then we have flip maps vertically or flip thee this you have to enable this this is because ZBrush views the model upside down and you is upside down so unless your UVs are purposely flipped before coming in ZBrush yes then this must have said absolutely so definitely enable enable this one absolute must then we have a bunch of export options here so the first one we have to enable is file names the only thing we have to change here is UV tile ID format which is just a fancy are you using YouTube's or are you using like a different way of describing your the coordinates for your Maps and one thing you can do here you say that you can see the displacement map is set to - DM so let's say you have a bunch of maps that you want to get out and when you run your first export that was gonna come out with a with a weird name but if you add a dot in the DM one as well it'll automatically put the dot right before the number so you don't have to do any crazy renaming so that can be pretty useful would you sleep with a standard for now so just hit OK remember to change this to you them if you are using YouTube's which we highly recommend that you do yeah switch morph target doesn't actually do anything this is currently broken so we don't extend the test in this this does nothing there are a lot of people claiming that it works it doesn't yeah we've done yeah we've done the test yeah then what we're interested in here is from what subdivision level should it generate the map from what what this is currently doing now now it's gonna look at the difference between this level and this level and all and all the information we're seeing in here this is simply the difference between these two there are cases where you might want to export from let's say subdivision level to absolutely let's say maybe the subdivision level - is that's the one that's the the mesh that you have published yeah at estimate mesh you're working with yeah but most of the time it's probably the lowest level so let's say this is the lowest level ZBrush but this is actually level you're working within your rigger and you've seen one on then you want to set this to level two in this case we set this here to one yeah then we have adaptive essentially don't enable this one adaptive adds a lot of computing time to your Maps and the quality difference is so negligible this will simply adaptively subdivide your model where if there are super stretchy areas yeah but it takes crazy long here yeah we felt like we've had where we have to export an entire character 100 yidams you could do that in an hour or so now you turn on a depth if it takes 24 yeah it's already and there is no real difference in a team this one is well this is the biggest problem we displace map this is the reason why your Maps I'm taking a long time because if you see to look to the right here now if we hover over it it says higher values is better quality but slow generation technically I mean it's definitely slower generation is slow generation and guess technically higher quality essentially this is a subdivision slider so if you set this to zero nothing's gonna happen if you set this to 1 it's gonna subdivide your model once which means if we had 2 million now now it's gonna become to 8 million if you set this to two - you know it's gonna sub toy that once more said just before you're gonna get all the pulleys in the known universe in here it's just an unnecessary waste of time it's completely unnecessary this is something that let's say you would have faceting in your model and you can't have enough like if you're looking in this close here now and you see you have faceting you could maybe add this to one or something but I've never found a use case for this and then we have smooth you've ease this if if your v's are smooth in maya by default you should enable smooth UV sir if you are not swimming you used to sleep this off yeah so most of the time by default you will be working with smooth UV so mid value this is what we talked about beforehand this is usually set to zero or one from a pipeline point of view it's a bit easier to set to 1 because most software are made for that at least a few render engines are made for that but personally I prefer to keep this at 0.5 because this is what we're getting now now this will look we can actually see what's going on here and if you want to like if you want to add this on top of your texture map to get more details it's just a bit easier so I'm not actually sure if it's completely true with zebras right it says that you will be better results by setting it to zero with 32-bit but that shouldn't really make any difference because it's a floating point so 0.5 should give you the same because then you still just go down to 0 yeah exactly so the difference here between like the reason we want 32-bit on which we do want on you here definitely is because now we get data we just get a lot more data here essentially if this is enabled you will have a really hard time getting good map so always always always enable their two-bit NEX our for the most part yeah this like I said more like Martin was hinting at before hand merge map does not work with EXR so if we this is enabled disabled this I prefer to lay out my UV xeni so that no objects are overlapping in the same one so for instance the teeth here will always be in a different tile compared to this I very rarely have them overlap anyway so this is not a problem but if you haven't planned for this and you have like and you have like clawless in the same one as your head which you know might be fine just being just be where you need merged maps on yeah maybe have three channels three channels essentially means that you get a great map we actually cheat a little bit here if we can do this this is actually what the maps looks like which means is only in the red channel this keeps the map a bit lighter and there's not really a whole lot of point in that so we can now see if this is on this this is what we have here we only have this in a red channel here so this is perfectly fine there is no reason to have anything in the other channel so all it does it duplicates the same channel to the other channels it's no point so so Arnall but whatever render engine you think will read this perfectly it was something about some render engines back in the day that needed it operated for like there's something with ryu a in the beginning i think but you know not anymore no not anymore at least so just at this year two three channel not three check Northridge i'm sorry disabled yeah set it to not three child and all these settings here don't worry about them don't just leave this be so if you are interested in using displacement off this screenshot this just and just save it another safe place so it doesn't get lost yes because these settings here are gonna work most of the time perfectly fine for you and then we hit create old maps and just gonna put this here i knows it gonna only take a few seconds it depends on the complexity of your mesh how many sub tools you have all that kind of stuff yeah and I don't trust the timer on this this seems to be very variable this problem took around 10 seconds but I've seen this just be completely whack yeah so I think another important thing to notice especially when you're generating maps on windows not OSX is you don't want to disturb the window at map generation let's say you have a Windows Update screen popping up for example or maybe using not-so-legal copy of windows or something any pop-up that interferes with ZBrush will automatically give see brush lower CPU priority which will make the map generation take longer yeah so don't desert disturb the ZBrush yes work yes like a pair so this is disorder maps now so you can see here now that we have their called displacement essentially the name of the object we had and then are just a bunch of stuff here so I I don't like this if you watched our udin video you can tell that this is not a sequence I prefer to have this all as one sequence so I'll just prefer Torino this is this dot the name see this is where you can if you wait with renaming the last one there if you in your naming I'd you see said it says - DM if you add the - DM and a dot at the end of DM if you have a bulk renamer you could find everything before the dot and rename that right now we only have three maps so it doesn't matter but that's just a little extra tip I suppose this gets absolutely infuriating like more so if you do have multiple maps and you don't have that yeah because like right now three maps totally fine but we might have a hundred yeah and pretend it sucks that's not a particularly huge deal if you have only one object but if you have if you have a like a character made of like forty different rocks and every single rock is different name differently this becomes very non-trivial so the reason we're adding this we were making this as one sequence here is just now we just need one final note in my out for this which is quite useful yeah before you had to do all kinds of weird stuff with blending things together and exactly but now my is actually it actually support students yeah it does so then you can you could also export out your map just by enabling export map here but i commish xrs export master so but i prefer to do this just by hand because that will control it so i'm very first thing I do when exporting out this is disabled group this is terrible this will disable subgroups which in theory is good because if you have something like this where we have different polygroups in certain places it should preserve but in reality though it doesn't in reality just splits up your model like crazy yes so this is this is only an issue in mind yes but there is a fix now for it there is the obj importer like if you import and obj and set it to single mesh I think the option is you can get around that so let's just actually pour that this guy's here and it's here and we just call this head and then we do the same thing for that one's here and here you can see like this has multiple subgroup this is multiple polygroups here so you could disable merge or you could just hit ctrl W to create a single poly group mmm so Oh Brock very wrong so go in here and call his teeth and then we do it for the last one as well just call eyes make sure no polygroup ctrl W and this probably eyes so now let's jump in to Maya so in Maya here we've already set this up so this is this is already this is this is using the flip normal slighting seen which there is a free version as well in line for this it's just a super nice way to to just start your your lighting as we already have all the lights set up and all that so we are using the render or seven called a shadow moon here we have to find some names for because before it was just called render ten eleven shutter one was cool yeah pretty cool so we've essentially just put it put it in here put it on the character group this works would you know you don't have to use this setup here this you can just put this into an empty Maya scene and just render here this is just all the repeat mate a piece set up for you and then we take the entire thing here the entire group and we're just gonna have sine actually was only for the head and the teeth because is it only once with a map so we assign I've set this to favorite material this is the AI standard surface you can also just go to new material and go to Arnold and AI standard surface for this so I'm pretty I'm pretty strict when comes to naming more material so I'm gonna call this buddy the underscore shader this is just so you can identify all your shaders early on I'm also discrim cept the roughness a bit up because right now you can see here it's a bit sharp I want this to be a bit broader so something like this so the way we set up our displacement for this now is by going under click on this guy here and now we under the shading group we have we have a slaughter called the displacement material what you want to do here is you want to plug in a file node you just click it select a completely regular file node and under the displacement amount you just click on a little guy here and here you select your maps so this was new maps here and now we can we just select one of these so this is this is a sequence here but you can only you only have to select one which is incredibly handy like if you have a thousand maps here I'm still only select one here disable filtering because it's gonna smooth it smooth it little and then we set to UV tiling mode - you didn't this is the secret to dealing with you dance in maya this little guy here you can now see that this now has replaced this with them with udimm udimm tag here so now whatever coordinate was here which is like two thousand and one thousand two etc it's going to read perfectly fine so this is not gonna read all the youtubes without any issue whatsoever and then the second thing we have to do is we now currently plugged in a displacement map but we haven't really told the mesh what to do if we were to render to this right now you would just it would just still be an incredible low res result which would just be displaced so nothing would really happen what we have to do is we have to go to the shape node off this and under Arnold so shape node that's a second one here you have the transfer mode and a shape node and then we go to Arnold and then we go to all the way down here we have subdivision under type we don't have to set this to Catmull Clark AutoCAD Clark and now we set the subdivision here is how many times do you want this to be smooth so two one is gonna smooth once I set this to something like three that's going to give us enough for a solution for this ideally you want to have this as many times as have been subdivided in in zbrush but we're gonna use a feature here called all to bump which means they don't have to the autobahn feature is essentially going to put the stuff it can't displays into the bump map so you're gonna regret with crisp result that's super cool yeah it's very nice so set this set this to how many times you want to displace it this to how many times you want to smooth it set this to capital Clarke so just Auto bump and then we have to enable one more thing here so we remember how we set the mid value to 0.5 this means that we have to change the mid value here to 0.5 as well this is the bounds padding so if you're just exporting out your map at 0 then it'd be fine then you'll be fine so here we instead of setting 2.5 we gotta set it to minus 0.5 and we've got to do this for all the object which has which has a displacement map to it's 0.5 enabled water bump set this huge capital Clarke and then we set this here to 2 or 3 and then we are ready to render so this is what a current looks like this is where the displacement up set up with into the shader with the air standard material for it super nice super has displaced mesh yeah so um if you have any issues with this because they're always some issues where displacement Maps here make sure that the mat the mesh here is the same as your export from Maya make sure that your UV map is super clean that there is no overlapping or distortion or anything like that just make sure this here is super nice make sure that your iteration is up to 3 and make sure make sure that there aren't any issues in sea brush when it comes to bad geometry I found that most times you have you have issues with this place not that simply just caused by bad geometry in ZBrush like maybe you did a projection thing you projected from high-res to alura's and you now have tons of nasty issues in this just due to projection errors so that's probably the biggest issue I've seen with displacement maps but this is really it it's fairly straightforward if you if it if you check this video here and you feel a bit intimidated by all the steps just do it a few times this here becomes fairly simple to do yeah I guess the trickiest things has always been the sea brush settings yeah but over the years we've kind of found the solution that works 100% at the time yeah so yeah so just go back to those little screen that little screenshot you kept safe forever and just keep using that so if you want to see more content like this in the future make sure to LIKE comment and subscribe down below and thank you for watching thank you guys you

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 117,961

Rating: 4.9314117 out of 5

Keywords: 3d, sculpting, zbrush, concept, maya, tutorial, autodesk, film, vfx, animation, twitch, mjthehunter, flippednormals, henning, morten, creature, character

Id: -ThBTEc8L_M

Length: 22min 50sec (1370 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 02 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Fark_A_Nark]

That's cool, thanks. I did not know about the UDIMS feature, very helpful.