Blender vs Maya vs Cinema 4D, Which One Is The Best 3D Software？

Fox Renderfarm, a leading cloud rendering service provider in the CG industry, will share with you the game props model produced by Maya. In this Maya tutorial, we will introduce how to create a game-style 3D model based on conceptual design drawings, from ZBrush carving to high poly and low poly UV texture production. The following is a brief description of the process of making 3D models of games. I hope that you can have some understanding of the models used in games. Concept Before making a model, there are usually some conceptual drawings as reference for making. In this case, you can directly put the reference drawing in the production software Maya as a reference. Modeling Before importing into ZBrush for sculpting, you can first do some preparation work in Maya. If the model is relatively simple, such as stone, tree trunk, floor tiles, etc., they are relatively simple. You can use ZBrush to sculpt High Poly directly without making a Low Poly model. If the model is more complex, such as a biological model (animal or the like), you can make a Low Poly export OBJ file in Maya and sculpt it in ZBrush. ZBrush Import the low poly model into ZBrush for sculpting. From Blocking, make sure that the scale is appropriate. The most important thing is that the model does not deviate from the conceptual diagram. It is necessary to determine the overall ratio first, and then it is the part of some accessories, and finally the detail part. This process only uses the basic brush. Retopo The number of model faces sculpted by ZBrush is very high, which may be as high as hundreds of thousands of faces, or even millions. Such models cannot be used in-game engines. Therefore, the high poly model sculpted by ZBrush needs to be topologically a low poly before it can be used in the game engine. The topology process uses a topology software TopoGun, TopoGun can help the model Resurfacing and Maps baking, and the details of the model will not be lost. If you are making a single static map, then the model does not need to rig bones, it is not necessary to make low-poly and Normal map. UVS After the topology is completed, it is the job of the UV. Normal maps can be baked after the UV is split. The UV can be organized using some plug-ins included in Maya, or can be produced using other software. You just need to expand them and adjust as needed. Try to be as reasonable as possible. Schematic diagram of UV deployment and placement Normal map Before bringing the model to Substance Painter, you need to bake the details of high poly onto the developed UV to make the texture. Baking and texture can be made using Substance Painter or Toolbag, especially Substance Painter has many tools and functions, which is very suitable for realistic and cartoon-like texture production. These textures represent different information such as Normal map, Specula, Hight, and Gloss. The higher the accuracy of the texture, the better the final display effect of the model. Import the baked texture into the most commonly used Substance Painter software to create PBR textures. Some parts can be adjusted using some preset textures, and then output different textures according to different needs.

Scene refinement Three main buildings were built according to the position in the original painting, and then the entire background was spliced out with these three buildings. This step is relatively simple. Then put the objects made at this stage into the main scene, adjust a few materials, such as metal, leather, SSS materials, give the corresponding model, add an HDR skylight, and test the entire scene. Biological refinement Now it's time to break the symmetry between the character's head and the monster's head model. This step needs to enrich the details on the skin, such as adding some wounds or something. At this time, you need to split the head UV. Use ZBrush to export the displacement map to view the effect in Maya. The ZBrush export displacement method is as shown above: first connect the displacement map exported by ZBrush in Maya. You need to open the subdivision level in the object properties. In this way, the object can restore the display effect in ZBrush. Lighting When the model with refined objects is put into the scene, you can start to adjust the lights. Decrease the intensity of HDR light and use it as a secondary light source, with a film light source as the main light source, and adjust the effect of the light and dark boundary line in the sun with parallel light. The effects at this stage are as follows. Use of character XYZ Here you can start to try the smallest level of detail processing on all objects, such as the XYZ replacement texture of the skin, the metal texture and damage traces of the equipment itself, and the skin after the XYZ replacement, as shown below: Equipment refinement The effect of making detailed equipment: UV The model is almost finished. Now it ’s time to split the UV. Here, UDIM is used to facilitate textures, a set of UDIM, a set of background, a set of skin, and then the cumbersome UV process. SP texture production After splitting the UV, the textures are created. All textures are made in the substance painter. A set of UDIM models are directly imported into the Substance Painter. As long as the options shown in the figure above are checked, they will be automatically recognized. When making textures, it is mainly due to color changes. The color changes should be rich but they cannot cover his original main color. Of course, the roughness changes are also very important. The following picture is the effect of Substance Painter. The skin needs to be color maps, roughness maps, and rough range maps in the Substance Painter. The color maps are obtained by mapping the real face skin (the same method as XYZ). The roughness can be converted using the previous XYZ three-channel conversion then overlay some random ALPHA textures. The rough range is to control the position of the highlight, and it is hand-drawn. Generally, the forehead, the tip of the nose, and the highlights on the cheeks are more obvious. Maya texture connection After the three pictures are drawn, you can add the rough range in Maya, and paste the roughness below: The color map is attached to the arrow in the figure below, and then radius gives a red color (light transmission effect). We also need to apply the XYZ displacement and ZBrush-derived displacement that we created earlier to the displacement channel, After the first pass of the texture, you can test the rendering, and then you need to adjust it according to the picture effect. Then the monster's head also needs to draw a map. Just like the human head, it needs three pictures of color, roughness and rough range. The next step is to replace the wings. The method of wings uses patch stitching. First, make a single feather map in three or four different positions, and then stitch it. What it looks like at this stage, Xgen hair production Let's start adding hair, XGEN for hair, each part should be separated into different Maya files when making hair, and then integrated into the main scene. Mainly how to import into the main scene, first clean the Maya file of the Xgen hair that is made separately, leaving only the growth bodies and the grown hair, and then directly import the cleaned Maya hair file in the main scene, and the imported file will be prefixed with a name. The prefix cannot be deleted, otherwise an error will occur. Rendering When rendering, you need to add AOV channel as a later auxiliary layer. The entire scene is divided into the foreground and the background for rendering separately, and the later scenes are stacked together to facilitate the final effect adjustment. Finally, the final picture is rendered, White mold, And the detail,

Fox Renderfarm, a powerful but affordable maya render farm, brings you a sharing of behind-the-scenes of Sagittarius made by Maya from 3D artist Zihao Zhou. This article introduces how to use the animation CG model production process to restore a 2D original painting Sagittarius, and tells the whole creative process, especially sharing some special places' processing methods and skills. This artwork contains many elements in the early stage, so it is necessary to consider clearly in the planning of the early stage of production, otherwise it will affect the later model production. Zhou divides the whole work into several parts, 1. Character skin: human head, body, horse and monster head. 2. Equipment: protagonist equipment, wings and soldier equipment. 3. Building Scene construction Construct the entire scene with simple geometric objects, and make some adjustments after determining the position of the camera lens, and try to place all the objects as well as possible. The location of the light can also be tested to find the most suitable place. It is necessary to make some model objects in ZBrush and put them into the scene as soon as possible to enrich the scene. Don't pay too much attention to the lights and details. When everything is there, you can start making more accurate models to replace things in the scene. During the construction process, gradually adjust the shape or the position of the wrong part. In the production of this scene, I used to separate the equipment into separate Maya and ZBrush for production. There are two main reasons for this. 1. There are many symmetrical objects in the equipment (although it will definitely break the symmetry later), but the previous symmetry can be improved efficiency (making high-precision models directly in the scene will be inconvenient) . 2. Do it separately in each Maya file. It can save some time for testing the material effect later, you can put the main scene lights into a single Maya equipment in the file, you can increase the speed of rendering. Of course, in the end, the scene effect in the lens shall prevail. Sculpture In this step, you can sculpt the protagonist's face, muscles and monster head (except for the symmetrical sculpture of muscle, human face and monster face, which is convenient for making the overall effect, and then break the symmetry later), the muscle part uses an existing body. Use the mask and move tool in ZBrush to adjust the desired appearance, and put it in the scene to match the position of the body. The head of the protagonist and the head of the monster are also placed in the placeholder model before the scene is replaced. The horse's body also needs to be sculpted with muscles, but it will be covered with a large area of hair in the later period, so the sculpting need not be too detailed. Refine equipment Equipment is produced separately. When this large piece of equipment is determined, the next important thing is the pattern on the body, and there have been many versions of this pattern. In the production process, depends on the topology pattern of the equipment. Here I use Maya's own topology tool to first select the model to be adsorbed, click the magnetite, and then click quad draw to draw on the model. Then add a line in the middle of the drawn shape, and put the added line in the direction of the normal (to turn off the suction command) so that the pattern is there, then only need to extrude the thickness, pay attention to the corners wiring. In addition to a larger pattern, some small patterns attached to the surface of the equipment are needed to enrich it. This level is actually to find some suitable black and white pictures of the pattern on the Internet for stitching to make a continuous square picture, and then expand the equipment. UV, stick the pattern to the position corresponding to UV. Then paste the black and white pattern into the ZBrush replacement channel (need to flip the V direction), adjust the extrusion height, and take a look at the effect. Of course, the patterns on the equipment can be stitched using some online pattern materials. The production of the armor part is more troublesome, because the shoulder armor looks like a broken metal effect, so first make the shoulder armor large, and then use the ZBrush grouping to divide the shoulder armor into multiple groups, and rewire the regrouped part. The effect of broken metal can appear. Of course, it is still necessary to manually adjust the gap between each piece of metal. By default, the gap size is the same, which is not good-looking. Wings can first find a wing and place it to see the effect, and then replace it with your own wings.