[flow_default] Transcription: 01-Low Poly Material Setup.json

transcriptions/01-Low Poly Material Setup.json

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+{
+  "audio_file": "01-Low Poly Material Setup.wav",
+  "text": "Hi everyone and welcome to chapter one of UV mapping and baking. So the UV mapping and baking chapters are going to be numbered separately to the retopology chapters and to the texturing chapters that are going to come next. The reason why I've split things up like this is just so it's a little bit easier to find everything. Everything's in smaller chunks that you can sort through more easily. Now UV mapping is lumped in with baking because there is a little bit of back and forth between baking and maybe adjusting your UV map slightly according to what comes out of the bake. Now, you don't always have to do this. Sometimes you get it right the first time, but it's pretty common to go back and adjust your UV maps. You know, it's not entirely a linear process. Sometimes you just have to see what the results are of the bake and maybe adjust your UV map a little bit or your smoothing groups. It's all just part of the process. So I'm going to start this chapter off with a little bit of an overview of the low poly we have done already. So here it is. You'll notice that there is no hair because the reason why is hair is usually something I do last and firstly because you kind of want to get your textures in roughly so you can match up your hair a little bit with them that's not essential maybe that's just my personal preference but the main reason is you really need to set up your rendering scene when you're doing hair because you're going to be going back and forth between your 3d program and whatever you're rendering in because your 3d program will not be displaying the hair cards correctly at all. It's hair cards and hair is very shader dependent and the only way you're going to have an accurate view of what your final hair looks like is in whatever engine you're rendering in. So basically you need to have your scene pretty much roughly set up or at least somewhat of decent lighting setup done just so you can preview what your hair will look like. So that's why it's typically something I do last. The other reason is you need to make textures for your haircuts and well you only place your hair once you've already rendered and made textures for it. So it's really something that comes last, at least in my workflow. I like to do it last. And I'm going to just be using the mesh hair, the sculpted hair from ZBrush as a placeholder so I can still see what the character will look like with hair without having to make all of the haircuts just yet. The other thing you'll notice is no eyeballs. We didn't do any retopper for the eyeballs. Now we are going to have to do a little bit of topology work for the eyeballs. We are going to have to make a low poly of them. It won't really be much lower poly than the actual ones we got from ZBrush really. But the reason why I haven't done anything for the eyeballs as well is because there's a very specific setup you need to have your eyes look nice. You need to set up meshes for the tear lines and a little bit of a mesh for ambient occlusion over the eye. And that's something you can only really tell is working properly once you have at least a rough skin shader setup. So what I'm going to do the and the texturing of the eyes are going to be in their own little segment because all of those things are very much related. I feel like if I show you the modeling of the eyes separately in the retopology chapter and then, you know, a dozen chapters later, I show you how it's textured. You won't really get the connection between why we made those meshes and how we're texturing them because there's a few meshes that maybe if you're not familiar with making eyes that won't really make sense to you unless I show you the accompanying textures and shaders that go with them. Like the tealine that sort of goes around the boundary between the eyeball and the eyelid and the ambient occlusion sort of plane that will sort of help add a little bit of a shadow to the eyeball. If I just show you the models of those, it might just be really confusing why I'm doing that. So all of the eyeball stuff is going to be lumped in in one chunk together. But in the meantime, I will be using the placeholder for ZBrush. Just so you know, I can see the actual eyes with the shape and everything. So that's going to come once I have at least a rough texture pass on the face. Next up, you know, make sure you've done the retopo for everything. Make sure you don't collapse down any of the instanced meshes you have. So the way you can tell something is an instance is this little thing will be highlighted. If it's not an instance, it won't be highlighted at all. And you can click this button to make something unique. Also instances will stop being instances if you attach them to anything of course, so make sure you don't accidentally attach things to each other that are meant to be instances. So that means that you know this pouch needs to stay an instance and I need to make sure not to attach it to anything else and all these bolts I need to make sure not to touch. Take a good look at your topology. It has to be more or less done. You can make minor adjustments to your topology after you've done your UVs. It will affect the UVs. It might break them a little bit. So after you've changed something in your topology, you might have to go back into the UV modifier and make some adjustments. Maybe some vertices will be stuck to each other in the UV map. Maybe something will be in the wrong place after you've made a change to the topology. But usually minor changes to topology only cause minor changes in the UV map. And it's easy enough to just use a relax tool to fix them most of the time. So you don't have to be 100% sure on your topology, but it does have to basically be finished in your opinion at the time. If at a later point you decide that maybe it's not finished, then you can go back and change it, but it's not ideal. Ideally, everything is finished now, and you're pretty confident that all these measures are good, but do remember that you can change things if you really need to. So you've got all your messages re-topped. You've got your instances that you're making sure not to make unique or make sure you're keeping your instances as instances. And that's about it. So the first thing I'm going to start UV mapping, the UV mapping process with is splitting my model up into different material sets. So to quickly explain why we need to split this model up into different materials and what that does, I'll open up a different project of mine where I've got a few different materials set up and a little scene in Substance Painter to sort of show you how that's going to affect the workflow later on. So you can see this texture set list, basically every different material you have on your mesh when you export it and import it into Substance Painter or Marmoset will become a different texture set. So here I have a texture set for the cloth and for the curasse it takes a moment to load in and a bunch of other different things. So already that's one of the reasons why we split up objects into different materials and that is so we don't have to have all of our UVs in one giant UV set. This makes it a little bit easier to work. For example, in Substance Painter at least I can isolate things and see what I'm working on a little bit easier. And it means that you don't need such a large texture for every single object. For example, for a whole character these days, you would probably need a 4K texture to get all of the detail you need in Whereas if you split it up into smaller chunks you can more efficiently utilize that texture space So that's another reason but the main reason is so you can have different material other properties applied to different parts of your mesh and material properties basically stuff like subsurface scattering for skin and maybe some Fresnel for cloth and stuff like that, metalness, translucency. Basically you can pretty much only apply these effects to an entire material. And you can mask the effect in and out, for Translucency, you can use a mask to mask in some Translucency and mask some out. But some of these features or material properties are just incompatible with each other. For example, most of the time you can't have sub-surface scattering with Translucency or Metallic. It depends on the engine you're working in, of course. Each one will have a different way of handling shaders. but typically, you know, you can't just have all of the different materials you want, all the different materials you want in one giant texture set, and then mask in what you don't and do want. That's just not how it works. You pretty much just have to split up similar materials or similar surfaces into separate materials and then apply those properties to those materials separately instead of having everything in one big chunk. So that's basically how we need to split up our object into different materials. So I'll probably want a material for the parts that are skin and I'll probably want a material that is for parts that are cloth and then material for all these mechanical parts and then maybe a separate material for these accessories and stuff like that that's probably at the very least I might split off the boots into their own material or maybe the boots and the gloves into their own material. It really can depend. One thing I have to make sure is that I have enough resolution for every single material set. So basically you generally want to have the same textual density across your whole model. I will be showing how to set up a material that can easily illustrate textual density for you really soon. But in short, textual density is pixels per square area. Often it's measured in square meters. On a character, maybe square meters is a bit big. But basically, and what I mean by pixels is pixels on the texture sheet. But in short, it basically means you don't want areas to look low res compared to other areas. So if I give like this glove a 4k texture and the rest of the clothes only a 2048 texture, the rest of the clothes are going to be noticeably lower resolution than these really high resolution 4k gloves. So generally you just want to make sure that everything looks to be a similar resolution across your character. Of course for the face, sometimes you give it a little bit of a higher resolution just because it's a focal point and a blurry face looks really bad. A blurry face looks much worse than like a blurry shirt or something like that. So there are little exceptions like that, but in general, we want everything to be the same resolution visibly. And that's another thing to look out for when I'm splitting up objects into texture sets or materials. So if I have a material with a lot of surface area in the UVs, for example, if I put all of the cloth stuff into one material, then it will have a lot more surface area than just these mechanical parts. Now I can either give the cloth parts, the cloth material set twice as large of a resolution. So I can use maybe a 4k texture for all of the cloth stuff and then a 2048 texture for the mechanical stuff like these parts and maybe that will help even out the textual density or I can try splitting up all of the cloth stuff into two different parts and maybe that will help even out the textual density. So that's pretty case dependent, sometimes you want to have more materials, sometimes it's okay to just use a higher resolution. On a personal project, it doesn't really matter all that much because the performance isn't super important. Either way, you're going to be able to render one character on screen or not working on an actual video game, but it is something to keep in mind. So I'm going to start setting these materials up. Now we already have three here or rather four, so we can just use these. But you know, if maybe you only used one material for the whole time the way to make a new material is just to click on or drag a physical material out and these are the ones I'm gonna be using you can probably use the other ones it doesn't really matter the only thing that matters is applying a different material and that's enough to tell the you know software that that's a separate material on import, whether it's Substance Painter or Marmoset. So I'm going to shrink these down a bit so they don't take up as much space. There is a different material editor, I think this can be a little bit confusing for beginners even myself. I just haven't gotten used to using it, so I use the slate material editor. Even though for these purposes it's a little bit overkill, this is more for building out a more complex node based material. I just find this one easy to understand and easy to see everything. And I think especially beginners are going to find this easiest. So yeah, that's how you add an extra material. Now, when I was starting out, I was taught to plug all of my different materials into a multi-sub object material. And maybe this is something you've heard of as well. Essentially it just... you can apply this. Let me use maybe the pants as an example here. So instead of applying these materials individually, I have applied the multi-sub-object material. You can see that nothing's changed, but that's because I haven't assigned any material IDs to it. If you go down to the Polygon Material IDs tab, you can change the set ID. And you can see the material is changed on the selected polygon. So you can use this as well. I only use this when I need to make some sub-object material changes. In general, I don't really like the multi-sub object material because it doesn't work with undoes I found. If I apply a material and then undo, it just isn't held in the undo case at all. I find it annoying to work with. So wherever I can, I just like to plug in the materials I want outright. And if I don't need to use sub-object materials at all, then I just avoid using them entirely because I do find them a little bit annoying. And on export, it doesn't actually make any difference really. So it's best to color code your materials in such a way to make it easy to understand what you're looking at. So I'm going to make the wonderful skin pink and I'm going to name it appropriately. This name that you see here is what your material or texture set will be named when you import into Substance Painter. So for now the parts I want to be skin are already applied. the This is something I forgot to do. But it's basically probably a good idea to save a copy of your scene. So leave all of your Retopo files as they are. Probably name your Retopo file something that you will be able to understand because I like to save iterations. So I'll have Retopo 1, Retopo 2, just so I can go back and forth in case I've messed something up. Or maybe I remember that maybe I did something to running your UVs so you don't mess up your Retopo or that you can always go back to your original Retopo file. So I'm going to name this one UV Unwrap. Now when I was recording this, I did say to delete all of the high poly meshes because you wouldn't be needing them anymore. And then exactly like a few hours later, I ended up re-importing them because you do need to have this high poly mesh is there so you can reference a few things when you're marking your UV seams stuff like where the seams are on pieces of fabric you generally want your UV seams to follow that and while you do have edge loops following those seams on the fabric once you get rid of the high poly you can't really tell which the Don't do what I'm doing here, which is deleting all of your highpoly objects. You do need to keep at least the ones for the cloth parts. But in general, I would suggest keeping all of them just getting rid of any duplicates and cleaning up your file a little bit just so all the highpoly objects are in one layer or in one place so you can easily hide them or go back to them if you need them. So do a little bit of cleanup on your file but don't get rid of all of your highpoly objects like I did here because you do end up needing them a little bit later just so you can mark out your UV seams. Okay so that's my file cleaned up a bit. I can go back to applying my materials. So let me set up the mechanical material or I'll call it hard surface and I'll make it gray for metal. And I will make it metallic in the viewport. These aren't really PBR materials in the 3ds Max viewport. So they don't actually represent very correctly the metalness value. It doesn't do a whole lot. But still, it's better than nothing. So I'm going to apply this to all of the sort of mechanical parts that I have. And this is probably everything as far as I can see. Another thing is I have two of these cloth pieces and I'm pretty sure this is the old one because it doesn't have these eye loops, so I can get rid of it. Now if you're wondering why the wireframes are different on some of these objects, the wireframe color is a separate option if you click on the object and go over here you can change your object color which will change the color of its wireframe so you can use that to sort of better split up your different objects and make them easier to see in wireframe view even though they have the same material applied I don't really need to use this much in this case because I sort of know what's going on here. So these gloves definitely shouldn't have a skin material applied to them. Although, like I said, the way I'm probably going to want to split this up up and this is good practice. If you have a lot of cloth parts or in general lots of surfaces that don't have any metallic parts in them, you can try and have a texture set with no metalness map. In that case you save one texture sheet from that material and that's typically a good idea when it comes to game assets is if you can save one extra texture sheet, that's quite a good saving because textures are actually the heaviest part of a model in terms of storage space, in terms of video RAM usage. Any large texture is way bigger than even a hundred thousand triangle model and that's because if you imagine every single pixel of a texture is an RG and B value and Every single vertex of a model is you know also similarly a some sort of coordinate value of course there's more a single vertices weighs a little bit more than a pixel on a texture, or significantly more because it's not just an XYZ coordinate. When it comes to characters, it's also storing skin data. So it's storing data on which bones have influence over that specific vertex. It's also storing a vertex normal. Usually, and usually there's some other information in there as well, maybe vertex color, maybe something else completely different. Sometimes there's like a proprietary thing that's attached to a vertices specific to whatever engine or game the studio is working on. But even if you consider that a vertices is using way more bytes than a individual pixel. If you do some quick maths on how many pixels there are in a single texture, so if you have a 1024 by 1024 texture, that's 2000 and 24 times 2000 or 1000 and 24 times 1024, that's a big number. I don't know it off the top of my head. Let me check. So that's over a million pixels in a 1024 texture. 1024 is pretty small. You're not going to be using just 1024, a 1024 texture on a AAA character. It's closer to, you know, up to maybe 4K if you add up all of the different texture sets. And that's what I'm talking about in Engine. When you're doing your own personal renders, every single texture can pretty much be a 4k texture because you definitely don't want to be seeing any pixels in your renders. So when you're working on personal projects, just sort of cheat. Don't try and do things game resolution. Just use the highest resolution texture you have. When you're texturing in Substance Painter, also make all of your textures a higher resolution than you need, and then you can always downscale them. That's how studios work as well. That's why you can have a remaster after a few years, because usually the studio will still have the source files which are offered at a higher resolution. Just because you can always downscale something as needed, you can't upscale it if you realize that maybe something needs to be a higher resolution. So always work at the highest resolution possible and when you're making personal renders for something that's not an actual game, make them as high resolution as you can just so it looks good. So yeah, this is why saving a single texture, even if it's a single grayscale texture, can be pretty good. So if you can avoid needing a metalness mask or a metalness map in one of your materials, that's quite a good saving. So if I lump all of the cloth parts that definitely don't have any metallic details in them into one texture set, that means I can save an entire metalness map from the model. So if we take a look at some of our cloth details, you can see that these accessories, they have some metallic components to them. Now I could go ahead and split off all of these tiny metallic components off into their own material entirely, which in this case might work because I've modeled them as separate objects, but in some cases you might not have them model the separate objects. So if they're merged with the surface of the object, you'll want to take that entire object and put it in its own texture set. For example, these little eye rings for the hoodie here, they are modeled into the surface, so I can't realistically take them and put them in their own material. I have to take this entire object. So what I might do to split up all of these cloth details, because this is quite a large area, even a 4K texture might start to show a little bit of pixelation up close. And exporting out an 8K texture from Substance Painter is a really big hassle on, you know, just most people's regular old PCs, right? It'll take a little bit too long to be fun to work with. So 4k is basically the upper limit. I guess if you have a really new graphics card, exporting 8k textures won't really be a big deal. But in short, I'm going to be splitting off all of the cloth things into two separate textures. I'm going to try and keep one of them without any metalness or any metallic parts so I can avoid having a metalness map for that chunk. And then the other parts will have a metalness map with them for any metallic details that might be in there. So that's how I'm going to split up my cloth. So in that case, I will just call it accessories. And maybe I will make the cloth kind of blue. And the accessories, maybe just a lighter blue color, something like that. And I'll put them on top of each other just so they're easy to see. So let me start selecting my accessory objects. And earrings and all the other little metal parts I'm going to have as accessories as well as well as these pouches. Basically anything that's not on the main body is going to be an accessory and also anything that has a metallic component to it. I will put in the accessories as well as this belt because we already have a lot of belts in here. And these strings on the pants I'll put in there as well. And I'll put this in with the rest of the cloth. So this is a rough base of what my different textures are going to be. Again, this doesn't have to be final. I can't really be sure that this is going to be the final way these materials are split up until I see how get there. For now, this will do and I want to move on to making a quick test UV map. Basically, I'm going to use the UV map to make a quick test UV map, basically doing a very quick UV map, very quickly applying seams to our model, just and then doing an auto pack and not really trying to straighten out any of the UVs properly. So just something really quick so that I can get it into Mom's at Toolbag and just click bake and see what it looks like and then finally see this model in real time in our rendering engine. So it looks've done in this chapter really is cleaned up the file a little bit and split up the low poly into separate materials. And in the next chapter, what I'll be doing is a quick rough UV map just so I can get the model into MAMZetoolbag and do a quick test pick. So that's all for this one, thanks for watching!",
+  "language": "en",
+  "confidence": null,
+  "duration": 2075.93
+}