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MAA 4435: Advanced 3d Modeling and Texturing

The Purpose of this course is to introduce advance concepts for modeling and rendering through the combination of Maya, Photoshop and Zbrush. Focusing on various pipelines, this course covers concepts such as displacement mapping, normal mapping, Zspheres and their skinning processes, and 2.5 illustration.

 

  
     
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Week 2: Projection Master, Zbrush Pipeline Basics


Project 2: Create your own tomstone
using the hard surface features of Zbrush, create a color map based on displacement crop and fills. Create a normal map. Render in Maya.



CHOOSE 1 OF THE FOLLOWING:
Due in Week 6

Project 3a: Modeling and Texturing a realistic head
Character Modelers will have the option to create a Portrait Head in Maya using THEIR OWN reference photos (NO WEB PHOTOS ALLOWED). Projection Painting techniques will be used to create the color texture, then inflating techniques will be used to sculpt from that photo. You will be allowed ONE 2048 Map for each channel on the head, and ONE 512 Map for each channel for the hair.

 

CLICK ON IMAGE FOR A LARGER VIEW:

 




Project 3b: Creating Enviornment Props
Environment Modelers will have a cooresponding option to create a "set" made from 7-10 objects with a poly limit of 8,000 tris. These objects will each be made ready with color, normal and specular maps for each asset. All projects must be rendered in Maya or exported to a game engine for screenshots. TWO 1024 Maps (or equivalent smaller) must be used for each channel for ALL PROPS COMBINED.

 

Demo: Sculpt a Hard Surface, Low Poly Object in Zbrush:
zbrush 3point5

Video from Linh Nguyen:

New in Zbrush 3.5r3 is the ability to Layout your UVs in Zbrush with UV Master:


Watch these videos to learn how:


PreservingHardEdgesInZBrush from Nick Zuccarello on Vimeo.



Watch ZBrush Using Primitives in Animation  

 




 

 

CREATING YOUR OWN MATERIAL:



Heres how a few of those look on my model:



We can even make our own using the MatCap Tool (located in the tool palette):


This tool allows us to sample normals off a background image, and define a material from that photo's properties.
Here is an example. The photo in the lower corner is the source, and you can see how the matcap material works for this model:


If you would like to download some already created materials, follow the link below:



Baking that Material to Texture (video) ---- click below:




  1. you can also create your own matap materials ---click below:



    With this vespa model, I wanted to put materials that I used in Maya into Zbrush so that I could have both versions look similar (in this case, it was for my submission to the Pixologic Turntable Gallery). Getting the materials out was tricky. I created a sphere and framed it in the center of the camera in Maya, and set my render size to 1024sq.I applied each material in my scene, 1 by 1, and rendered them on this sphere.


    Then I brought those images into zbrush using the texture palette and created a set of new materials with them under the Materials Palette by modifying the sample of a cloned MATCAP white material. Then I finished by saving out these materials and applied them 1 by 1 to each subtool.

Render Zbrush MatCaps in Mental Ray from CG Bootcamp on Vimeo.

 

You can download the production shaders here: http://www.pixelcg.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/Production_Shaders.rar
Then you need to place “mentalrayCustomNodeClass.mel” and the other files into this folder:
C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2009\scripts\others
(or on a Mac: Users/*yourname*/library/preferences/autodesk/maya/2009/scripts/ )

Or you can expose them typing the following in the script editor: optionVar -iv “MIP_SHD_EXPOSE” 1;

 

Once you have created your Materials, Render Your Model in Zbrush using BPR:


USING Zbrush to GENERATE Tiling Textures, CLICK ON THE IMAGE BELOW:



 

USING CRAZYBUMP to GENERATE NORMAL MAPS, CLICK ON THE IMAGE BELOW:

 

Creating Tileable Normal Maps with Zbrush and Crazybump:

So the side of this couch has a texture that could easiy be replicated with a small tiling texture, rather than a unique one, to save space under a VRam texure budget.


To do this, instead of detailing the object, I will export a polyplane from Maya and detail that, making sure that my Y and Z symmetry is active. I will turn off the Smt button in the tool-geometry palette which is the subdivide smooth modifier. Doing this will allow me to divide without contracting the plane. I will leave this off for the firt 3-5 divisions, then I can turn it back on.


And I will do a basic sculpt:

Export out a Displacement Map, which I then take into Photoshop, and offset. In Photoshop, I will dodge and paint white in the new center of the image, which as was the corners before I used the offest filter. This is because, as you can see in my image above, the center of each "pillowy" area wasn't uniform in my quick sculpt.
Before Offset...................................After Offset and dodging

Then I bring this into crazybump and set my settings:


Using the mixer, I can combine it with an already made leather heightmap:


Giving me this final result:


If instead of tiling a texture, you are stacking UVshells, you can do a roughly similar task as well, on the zbrush end HereI have the main section of the couch which has a unique texture, but has many stacked shells to save space:



When detailing, I simply export from Maya only the faces which are unique. So for example, only 1 side of this 4 sided peice gets detailed:



And when a normal map is created, it goes to all sides:

 

Examples of Student work from the Tombstone Project:


Image by Efren Flores
Image by David Blank
Image by Dylan Dunbar

Image by Jesse Fisher
Image by Willie Cooley		  
   

image by Jeff Bodden
Image by Adam Rickert
Image by Alex Bosserman



 

 

 

 

 

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