How to Make Realistic Characters in ZBrush and Maya(2)

In this post, the best render farm Fox Renderfarm will share with you a tutorial about how to make realistic characters in ZBrush and Maya from 3D artist Yi Chen. Yi Chen showed us the workflow of his latest realistic female character. Software used includes ZBrush, Maya, Mari, Substance Painter, Xgen, Arnold, etc. This is part one of the tutorial, part two will be continued. Introduction I am a 3D artist. Today I will share the production process on how to create realistic characters. The model is made using Zbrush and Maya; Mari and Substance Painter are used to make textures; Xgen is used to make hairs, and Arnold is used for rendering. A Male character： Gathering references Before starting to make the model, I will analyze the concept map and collect a lot of pictures of women. Because this work does not refer to a specific picture, I could combine and match many of your favorite elements, including clothing, hairstyles, makeup, jewelry, etc. Then starting with simple sketching and compositing in Photoshop, it is better to have a concept map at least before production. Modeling I’m used to determining the size and scale of the model before making the model. According to Anatomy, the vertical length of the head of an adult is between 22-24cm, and the diameter of the eyeball is generally between 2.4-2.5cm. And when making a model in Zbrush, we need to set the focal length of the Zbrush view camera in advance according to the picture material. The most commonly used portrait focal lengths are 85mm, 100mm, 135mm, and 200mm. Some original photographs usually include the specific focal length value of the picture. If it is a reference picture, we can roughly determine the focal length range by observing the leakage range of the front person’s ears. The gif below can be used as a reference basis. Of course, this is only a reference for the focal length of a portrait. If it is half-length or full-length, the focal length will be different. To create the model based on the reference material, I directly used Zbrush to sculpt Blocking, and the number of subdivided faces was kept at about 50 million, level 7 so that the flow model used for rendering at the lowest subdivision level can be controlled at about 12,000. After the model was modified, I continued to use the UV split tool that comes with Zbrush to make the UV, and then manually adjusted it to the appropriate position. Then I used XYZ pore material + Zwrap plane to project the pores, and then projected some undesirable areas in Mari. Next, it was time to output the grayscale images of the three channels of R, G, and B in Mari and extrude the bumps on the surface of the model through Zbrush to get fine pores. In this step, the model used a 16-bit 8K precision texture map.

Fox Renderfarm is known as a powerful but affordable render farm in the CG industry. Fox Renderfarm supports most mainstream software, Renderers, and Plugins, including Maya and Arnold. This article is about the knowledge of ice cube material in the basic material related learning in the Arnold tutorial. I hope it can be helpful for your learning of Arnold. In all kinds of texture making, ice cubes are a special kind. The overall texture of the ice cube is transparent, and has high specularity and refraction, as well as a certain caustics. Although the ice cubes are smooth, fine particles can still be seen at a certain angle. These particles are actually some small white bubbles generated during the ice-making process. There are many ways to achieve this effect. Today we will share a method of making ice cubes. Production First create a block to serve as the main body of ice. Then create an Arnold base shader and modify some of the settings. Because the ice cube material is transparent. There is no color, so there is no surface color. In Diffuse, set Color to black. Increase the Weight value in Specular. Because the surface of ice has no roughness and is very smooth, you need to open Fresnel to simulate this effect. Set the refraction, the value of Weight also needs to be adjusted up, the value of IOR is set to 1.33, and then check Fresnel, also need to check Caustics. Now the basic texture of the ice cube has been set. Now you need to add a small bubble effect to the ice cube. First create an Arnold 3D texture material, give the model, the following dialog box appears, just close it. After jumping out of the Aibump3d1sg node, you just need to drag the created Arnold texture to the Surface Shader in Arnold of Aibump3d1sg, then the model will appear small bubbles of bump effect. Next, place the ice texture made in the Shader of Aibump3d1 in the texture. Next, you need to add a Stucco texture map to the Bump Map in the 3D node, and then change the Bump Height to 0.5. Now that the material part is complete, the rest needs to add an HDRI. Open the material editor, create an aiSky environment ball map in Arnold, and paste an HDR environment map in Color. Change the value of Intensity to 2. Some settings are required before rendering. Click the Background link in the Environment to create the aiSky texture that was just created, so that the lights in the scene are set up. The sampling value of Cameraca is increased to 5 (the higher the value, the slower the rendering speed). Refraction value is set to 4. Set the Refraction value to 4 in Ray depth. Create a sphere as an environment and check Visibe in Refiections in Render Stats. Then conduct a rendering test. Rendering In 3D texture mapping, Maya's own 3D texture mapping can achieve many different effects (turn off the highlighter and refraction of the shader, and the following effects appear, The highlight and refraction of the shader are turned on, rendering:

Yesterday, I found that the Arnold of Maya 2018 has a directional error for the motion vector blur method made in the AOV channel. The motion blur method I wrote earlier applies to Maya 2016 and earlier versions, so I spent a little time studying it today. The problem has been solved now, and cloud rendering will use a small case to explain the production steps. Step 1: Creating the ball as a simple animated scene. Step 2: Turn on motion blur: Render a reference to motion blur. Step 3: Follow the method given in the official Arnold documentation: Change the camera's Shutter Start and Shutter End to 0.5 (why changed to 0.5 because my motion blur type is Center On Frame). Step 4: Create a channel for AOV motion blur: Here I will create two motion blur channels: The first is the motionvector channel that comes with Arnold. The second is to use the custom motion vector AOV of motion vector shader (giving the aiMotionVector material in the AOV channel). Cloud rendering note: MBlur is named according to your preference. The setting of aiMotionVector was wrote in the previous article. Step 5: Render this image to see two motion blur conditions. It can be seen that both the motionvector and MBlur motion blur channels in our AOV channel are in the wrong direction. Step 6: Next I will officially explain how to solve this problem: From the beginning. A: Turn on the Motion Blur button in the render settings: I chose the Center On Frame mode here. B: Change the Shutter Start and Shutter End in the camera Arnold attribute to 0.5, respectively, corresponding to the Center On Frame mode. (Note: When rendering the motion vector AOV, the camera Shutter Start and Shutter End should be the same value.) C: Create a new MBlur_2 channel in AOV (to compare with the previous MBlur.) D: Open the material editor and find the two nodes aiMotionVector and aiVectorMap under Arnold's material panel. 1) Connect the outColor of the aiMotionVector node to the input of the aiVectorMap node. 2) Then connect the outValue in the aiVectorMap node to the DefaultValue in the Shader property of the MBlur channel in AOV. Change the XYZ mode of the Order in the aiVectorMap node to YZX mode and remove the hook of the tangentSpace. 4) In the aiMotionVector node, enable Encoding Raw Vector. E. After the above steps are completed, start rendering the image and view it in Nuke. As shown in the figure: Maya's default motion blur is basically the same as the MBlur_2 channel we made in AOV, and the motion blur adjusted by Nuke is basically the same. Of course, I also found a bug in the Arnold renderer, its motion blur channel does not solve the shadow of motion blur, there can be seen in a big picture that cloud rendering attached below.