3D Tutorial: How to Make an Old-growth Forest in Maya(2)

Introduction This tutorial shared by your TPN-Accredited cloud rendering service provider, Fox Renderfarm. It tells us how to make an old-growth Forest in Maya, including the entire process of modifying mountains and stones and making trees. Modeling Because this tutorial is mainly for creating trees, the mountain and stone part uses a scene made in the previous project. In this scene, you can see the river in the middle and mountains on both sides. Before production, it’s important to observe the range of mountains in the scene, determine which mountains need to be planted, and remove unnecessary hidden surfaces, where do not require tree planting. In order to improve production efficiency, it is usually necessary to merge the mountain and the stone into a whole. Use the polygon merge command as shown. The mountain and rock model formed a whole. Delete the model of the excess stone underwater, try to clean up the surface of the model, and avoid other errors in the production. Clean up the interspersed surfaces inside the model, especially those outside the scenes, where they cannot be seen outside the scenes. After cleaning the model, use Maya's UV tool Automatic Mapping for UV mapping. The purpose of redistributing UV is to avoid the problem of texture overlap when generating color texture on the model later. The UV distribution is as shown below. Firstly, it is important to add snow material to the model and adjust the Threshold value in the attribute to control the position of the snow line, so that the steep area does not have the effect of being covered by snow. The next step is simulating the position of snow for the emission of tree planting particles. Select the shader of the model and snow material, and execute the texture conversion command. Set the resolution of the generated texture. If the scene is large and the accuracy is high, please set a high texture resolution. The effect of the texture setting is as shown in the figure below, but there is a problem, the texture is not mapped according to the layout of the procedural texture. Why? Part two will be continued.

Modeling Part of the role modeling is basically done in ZBrush. But before ZBrush, a low-poly model is made. Most of the scene props are done in Maya. In terms of characters, I decided to exaggerate at the beginning, so I can’t make the character too realistic. If it is too realistic, the expressive power of the picture will be greatly reduced. Therefore, in the production of the character, I will exaggerate its characteristics abnormally, but I cannot. If it is too much, it will become too cute which is not what I want, so I positioned the picture as a cartoonish realistic style. The prototype of the fans referenced Paul Bell, the greatest manager in WWE history, and then made some modifications on his basis. The clothes are basic models made in Maya, then imported into ZBrush and sculpted using ZRemesher. Hamburg still uses the previous brushes, but with an extra Alpha. The drink is carved with InsertSphere and Dynamesh. The body still uses those brushes, and finally puts them together. The role of the player is based on the French team’s Ribery. In order to be similar to him, I collected a lot of his information and added more exaggerations when carving the model. The method of making player roles is the same as that of fans. The shoes are done in Maya. the football referee-Colina is a reference to the role of the referee, I believe everyone who likes football knows him. Since he is far from the lens in the picture, the carving is not very detailed. Those fans who are farther away are even more omitted because they are too small and there is no need to make them too detailed. The scene is made in reference to the Maracanã Stadium in Brazil, and the style is also a bit more cartoonish. The fans first made a set of very low-poly models, and then shuffled, copied, and copied them. Don't place them too neatly and randomly. The clouds in the sky are made using materials in Photoshop and then pasted on a flat surface. The airship is first modeled, and then rendered(Fox Renderfarm suppports Maya cloud rendering) separately for later compositing. Lighting After the model is finished, start testing the lights. The time is daytime, so the light first uses a surface light to simulate the sunlight source, then turn on GI, turn on the physical skylight of VRay, and control the light intensity. Texturing Photoshop and Mudbox are used in this part of texture making. Before casting, it is best to choose those with few highlights and shadows or trim off the highlights and shadows. Continue to modify and adjust until you are satisfied. Make bump highlights by color, plus the normal map baked before, and use these for basic textures. There is no difficulty in making clothes and props. The main thing is to control the highlights of different materials, and the texture will be different. Grooming The system is mainly produced by Hairtrix. There are many ways to make hair, but I am more accustomed to using Hairtrix, and personally feel that this is pretty easy to use. Layered rendering Compositing & Post-production The main thing in the post-production is to control the atmosphere. Just look at the excellent works of art, movies, magazines, photography, etc., to enrich your control of the atmosphere of the picture and the feeling of color. This also requires long-term accumulation.

Armor modelling When making the armor model, it needs to pay attention to some places. Adding two more lines at the edge, especially the corner, so that after smoothing, it will achieve a better final effect. The heads of the characters are all done in ZBrush, which can sculpt out tiny details. Its delicate brush can easily shape skin details such as wrinkles, hair strands, pimples, freckles, etc., including the bump models and textures of these tiny details. ZBrush can not only easily model the shapes and textures of various creatures, but also export these complex details into Displacement and normal maps. There is a principle to follow when carving objects: from simple to complex, from whole to part. When drawing with a brush, I use move brushes, standard brushes and clay brushes. The move brush is used to adjust the overall head shape, the standard brush is used to adjust the shape of the facial muscles, and the clay brush is used to shape large areas. I prefer to use the Layers function in ZBrush when drawing the model. It can record the details of the painting very well. When you change the details of a certain layer of skin, it will not affect the details of other layers. Strength of each layer can also be adjusted according to the final effect of the model. Three brushes When sculpting a character's face, you can first sculpt it in ZBRUSH, draw the texture and then perform the rendering test. If there is any problem, you can directly adjust it in ZBRUSH. Note that when making this adjustment, you can't make too many changes, otherwise the texture may change. Because this is just a personal project, there are no restrictions on the use of textures, so in order to show more details of the skin surface, I try to use 4K textures. UV I usually use Unfold3D to make the UV of the model. Its UV splitting function is easy to use and the speed is fast. However, the character models of this project are all split UVS among Maya. The face of the model uses Maya's Cylindrical Mapping tool. Cylindrical Mapping is convenient for creating UVs on the faces of the characters. Texturing and rendering In terms of the texture of Batman's armor, I want to be more modern, so I didn't make the pictures very old, and there was almost no hand-painted texture. The main reason was to modify some realistic materials. The hair is made using Maya’s Shave plug-in. In order to make the hair fuller, I added several layers of hair, because a layer of hair is difficult to cover everything, like a hairdresser, slowly comb until you are satisfied with the effect. The lighting is a combination of global light and three-point light source The three-point light sources include the main light, auxiliary light, and backlight. I mostly use area light and parallel light for lighting. The basic method is that the brightness of the main light is 3 to 5 times that of the auxiliary light, and it slowly transitions from warm light to cold light. The rendered image was completed in Photoshop. The visual effects of the snow were done with Maya particles, and the motion blur was turned on for more realism. Final effect: