How to Use VFace and Make Effects in Arnold?

In this article, Fox Renderfarm, the CG industry's leading cloud rendering service provider and render farm, will share with you how to use VFace and how to restore effects in the Arnold renderer. The author is CaoJiajun.

Firstly I purchased some VFace materials from the official website to get the following files.

We will mainly use the above files for this sharing, they are our main materials to make high quality details of the face. VFace provides 2 types of facial models, one for the head with open eyes and one for the head with closed eyes, choose one of them according to your needs. If you are doing a model that needs to be animated with expressions in post, I would recommend choosing the model with closed eyes, as the open eyes model will cause the eyelids to stretch when you do the blink animation. You don't need to worry about this for still-frame work.

Let's start with the production process. It's actually very simple, wrap your own model with a VFace model through Wrap or Zwrap, then pass the map and finally render it in Maya or other 3D software. The process is simple but there will be a lot of things that need to be taken care of in there otherwise the facial details will not be rendered correctly.

1 Model Cleaning

First we need to load the model provided by VFace into ZBrush and match it to our sculpted model.

Then you can head into Zwrap or Wrap for wrapping.

Lastly, the wrapped model is imported into ZBrush to replace the VFace model.

In ZBrush we use the Project brush to match the face of the wrapped model more precisely to our own sculpted model, once matched you will have a model that matches your sculpted model perfectly, at this point we can go into Mari for the map transfer.

2 Using Mari to Transfer the Map

In Mari we first set up the project, import our own sculpted model or the wrapped and matched XYZ model, then remove the other channels in the Channels and keep only the Basecolor channel, and we can customize the channels as we wish.

What we see now is how the model looks when imported into Mari. At this point we need to set the custom channels DIFF\DISP\UNITY\ to import the VFace map.

Firstly, the DIFF channel is set at the original size of 16k and the Depth is set at 16bit (later on there can be more color depth control and of course it can be set to 8bit). The key point is that when the color depth is set to 16bit or 32bit, the color space needs to be set to linear and 8bit to srgb.

Keep the size of displacement map at 16k. I recommend setting the Depth to 32bit, as you will get more detail of displacement, and keep the color space linear, with Scalar Data ticked (as the displacement map is a color map with 3 channels of RGB, you need to keep the greyscale data).

The blend map settings are the same as the color map, but Scalar Data also needs to be ticked (this map is used as a color mask for toning or as a weighting mask).

Next we can use the object panel to append our own model in preparation for the transfer of the map.

Right-click on any channel and select the Transfer command in the pop-up menu to bring up the menu for transferring the map.

In the transfer menu select the channel which needs to be transferred in the first step, set the transfer object in the second step, click on the arrow in the third step, set the size in the fourth step and finally click on the ok button.

I generally recommend passing one channel at a time as it is very slow and takes a long time to wait. For size I usually choose 4k for color, 8k for displacement and 4k for mixing channels. This step requires a lot of patience!

VFace original effect

The effect after transfer

After the transfer we can export the map. The export map settings are shown in the figure. We need to pay attention to the color space setting (in the red box). The color space of the color channel is set to linear and should also be set to linear when exporting. The export of displacement and hybrid maps is a bit more unusual, as we set the color space to linear when creating the channel, but the export needs to be set to srgb, as both the displacement and hybrid maps are a combination of the 3 channels R,G,B to form a color map. Finally click the export button and it's done.

VFace original color effect

Color effects after exporting

VFace original displacement

Effect after export

In short, your output map needs to be the same color as the map provided by VFace, either too bright or too dark is an error.

3 Arnold Rendering

Default settings

At this point we can go to Maya and render the VFace map we have created (we won't go into the lighting environment and materials here, we will focus on the link to the replacement map). First we import the passed VFace map and render it by default to see what we get. Obviously we get an ugly result, so how to set it to get it right?

Here we add an aisubtract node (which you can interpret as a subtraction or exclusion node), because the default median value of VFace is 0.5 and arnold prefers a replacement map with a median value of 0. So we enter the VFace color into input1 and change the color of input2 to a luminance value of 0.5. This is equivalent to subtracting the 0.5 luminance info from the default 0.5 median luminance of VFace, and we get a displacement with a median value of 0.

Median value 0.5

Median value 0

After setting the median we can add an aimultply node. This node can be interpreted as a multiplyDivide node, which has the same function as Maya's own multiplyDivide node and controls the overall strength of the VFace displacement. We can output the color of the aisubract node to the input1 node of aimultply and adjust the overall strength of the detail displacement of VFace by using the black, grey and white of input2 (any value multiplied by 1 equals 1, any value multiplied by 0 equals 0, all the colors we can see in the computer are actually numbers to the computer. We can change the value and thus the strength of the map by simple mathematical calculations, once we know this we can see why we use the multiplyDivide node to control the strength of the displacement).

Next we add an ailayerRgba node. The R, G and B channels of the aimultipy are connected to the R channels of input1, 2 and 3 of ailayerRgba, and through the mix attribute of this node we can control the intensity of the displacement of each of the three VFace channels (R, G and B), and after a series of settings we can get a correct and controlled rendering of the VFace displacement.

VFace-disp

ZBrush-disp

VFace+ZBrush disp

ZBrush Export Displacement Settings

Although we have a correct and controlled VFace displacement result, it does not combine with the displacement we sculpted in Zbrush and we need to find a way to combine the two to get our final displacement effect.

Here I used the aiAdd node to add the two displacement maps together to get our VFace displacement + ZBrush displacement effect (of course you can also use Maya's plusMinus node).

It doesn't matter how many displacement map elements you have (such as the scar on the face, etc.), you can structure them through the aiAdd node to get a composite displacement effect. The advantage of making it this way is that you can adjust the strength and weakness of each displacement channel at any time, without having to import and export them in different software. It is a very standard linear process approach.

Default effect

After color correction

Finally we apply the passed color to the subsurface color, and by default we get a very dark color mapping, which is not wrong. The VFace default model will be the same color. We can correct the skin color by using the hue, saturation and lightness of the colourCorrect node. This is why I choose 16bit colors to bake with, so I can get more control over the colors and get a correct result after color correction (of course the current result is just a rough mapping, we can still do deeper work on the map to get a better result).

As a powerful render farm offering arnold cloud rendering services, Fox Renderfarm hopes this article can give you some help.

Source: Thepoly