I'm James Taylor, back with our bodybuilder character model
last time, we constructed the bodybuilder on top of photo reference
now we can use that same photo reference
to create textures in Mudbox. I'm starting with my mesh
imported into Mudbox, and I've subdivided it one Subdivision level
Mudbox works better when the mesh is subdivided
and then we go to this stencil tab on the bottom here,
and click that little button to 'add stencil'. I'll just load up the same reference I used
to model on top of in Maya,
and we'll see it's added to this stencil menu. And when I click on it,
I see that it pops up in the viewport. I want to line my stencil up with my
character mesh as closely as possible.
this can be easier in the front view, because there's no perspective
so I'll right click in the viewport, switch view, and then go to front view
and bring the stencil up again, and I match my stencil
in my viewport camera, so that the character and this stencil line up
and now I'm going to use my projection brush to apply the stencil as a texture
so I select the projection brush from my paint tools rollout, and then click on the mesh
and I'll get a create new layer option box. For right now I'm just gonna choose 4096
and 16-bit TIFF
so I'll use the projection brush to paint on the surface of my mesh
and we'll see that it does what it says it does: it projects the stencil
on to my character. Now I'm getting photo realistic detail
on the surface of my character, with very little effort
in fact, most of our effort will be spent
trying to get the stencil and the model to line up
you can see I'm moving and rotating the stencil to fill in the blank areas where
the initial projection
missed some detail, so that I can go back and fill it in
while the front is projected well, we get errors all over the other places
so we're not going to be able to get away with one projection.
We have to do more. So I'll create a new layer
and this will be for my side projection
and every new projection gets it own texture layer
we'll see why in a minute. I switch to my orthographic side view same way I did
with my front view camera
and again I'll position my reference
and my character to match each other as closely as I can
when I switch back to perspective, and I tumble around
I see that I have those same projection issues that I had on the front view
we see that the side view actually covers up some
of the front view, and we need to use our eraser
to reveal the parts of the front view we want to keep
this is why we project every projection on its own layer!
one quick note about the eraser - it's extremely strong
so we're usually gonna stick with very low values for the eraser
I'll just get rid of everything that I don't need, and I repeat the process for
my front view layer
okay let's do another projection. I switch back to the front
orthographic view, and I will project the head
from the front as it own projection. Matching all the fine details on the head
and face is extremely important for capturing the likeness of the character
but when we're projecting, we note that the ears don't match up
and we need to edit our stencil so that they do
I go to the edit menu and choose edit stencil
edit stencil is a powerful tool that allows us to change our stenciled images
by either painting or sculpting them, so that we don't have to go back
into Photoshop to make changes. In this case
I'll switch to my sculpt tools, and use the grab brush
to push and pull my stencil into shape
so that the ears match up better. When I'm done making changes, I hit done
and I switch back to the projection brush, and now I'll see the projection
of the ears works a lot better
on to the side view of the head - I do another projection here
and again, we are creating new texture layer. Every new projection
gets a new texture layer! I have the same problem here, where
I can project most of the head, but the ears still don't match up
so I use my grab brush on my mesh
to adjust the position at the ear, to match my reference
once I'm happy with the projection, then I turn my eraser on again
and I work on blending between the front
and the side view. Now adding all these layers WILL have performance ramifications
it's gonna slow down Mudbox, so we need to optimize
with only my head layers visible, I right click and choose merge visible
and I'm collapsing those to paint layers into a single paint layer
I'll turn the body layers back on, and I
merge those down too, and by merging visible, I'm reducing the number of textures
that are applied to our surface
so our video card and Mudbox are going to run a little bit better
now onto the back. I'll turn my back projection on, I'll tumble my character around
and just try and match it up the way that I did with the previous projections
again, it gets its own texture layer - every projection gets its own layer
and then it's a matter of wrestling with it to get it to match my mesh as closely as possible
I can use my edit stencil again to pull that leg
into place. I use my grab brush again, and just move the leg over so that it matches
once and I'm done projecting, I tumble around to the front
and I see the back projection ended up on the front. I'll use my erase brush
to take care that
but if I use too big of an erase brush, the exact same problem happens
the back part is erased, even though I'm erasing on the front
so when erasing this kind of projection, I use a smaller brush,
it takes a little bit longer, but it's the only way to do it. When I'm done there,
I create a new layer and start to project the back three-quarters
and this is the basic process that we follow for every part of the character
will take as much texture reference as we can get our hands on,
and we project it from as many different angles as we possibly can
the overall workflow is to create a new layer for
each projection, then blend it into the rest of the layers
in this way, we end up with a character that is covered from all
angles, and we'll get nice high resolution texture detail
at this point, we have pretty good coverage, but I want to fill in some of the gaps,
so I turn off all my textures and make a new layer, and it's gonna be a base color layer.
I can fill it with a background flash color
so with the paintbrush selected, I can scroll down to the bottom in the brush palette
on the far right of our screen, and just hit Flood Paint Layer,
and that'll fill my paint layer with whatever base color I've chosen
my goal here is to give something that blends down to
a pretty basic flesh tone, and now that I have this brown base coat,
I can edit my layers individually, so I go through
and cleanup all the rough edges: deleting the white background
is a lot easier now, because it's a lot more visible
against that new base color
and once I'm done cleaning up all the edges on my texture
I have a mesh that's completely covered in texture detail
and now I need to worry about blending my textures together. We can see various areas
aren't matching up, like the side in the front of the arm, so I select the side
arm layer, right click, and choose Adjust Color
by dialing down value, that'll
darken the layer, and we see that it matches a little bit more closely
but when I darken, it it tends to grey things,
so I add saturation to it, to intensify the color just a little bit
but I also have adjustment brushes that let you make more localized
changes. Here I'm using the Dodge brush, and affecting Midtones
and the Dodge brush just brightens shadowed
areas, and works the same way as it does in Photoshop
now this is a good start to the blending process. Another technique I like to use
is to create a new overlay layer. It can be
a relatively low resolution, because it's just gonna be a color layer
and we use a paint brush to sample one of the average colors on the body
I'll paint this color into areas where the blending could be better
we'll see that there's a lot of different hues across the body
we'll unify that by using this as an overlay layer, so I'll paint that in,
and then adjust the layer blending. I'll try hue mode,
however when we do that we'll see that it doesn't really make much difference.
So I try overlay, but overlay is too much of a change
so I switch to Soft Light, and soft light gives me a good mix,
matching the color without changing the value too much
as another example you'll see that started to paint in with really strong,
bold colors
and this ends up looking incorrect
so we use another feature - layer masking
I'll right click on my layer to add a layer mask to it
and now I can use a black and white paint brush to mask off
areas so I can get much more subtle effects
what we're not gonna do is take a single color and brush it over the entire model
because skin tone changes in color
across the entire body - keep this in mind when you're blending your textures together
ok at this point you'll see I've got an awful lot of layers
in my scene, and its gonna cause performance problems
it's time to start consolidating by using merge visible
I'll turn layers on one by one or two or three at a time
and my goal is to reduce the number of texture layers
while preserving all possible detail. Okay, let's switch tracks to a different technique
I have a lot of seams like this that I want to fix. I'll use
Flatten to UV Space under the UVs & Maps menu
and that'll basically reduce my mesh to a 2D shape, it's UVs
which means I can paint on it as if it's a flat surface
and to paint out these seams, I'm going to use a new brush
the clone brush
and the clone brush works basically the same way that it does
in Photoshop. I'm gonna hit control to sample an area
and then when I paint, it'll copy the paint from that area
and paint in whatever area I'm painting on top of.
I can also use stencil projections in this mode
so that I can take detail from various areas on my stencils
and project that and to help cover up whatever seams I have
so here I am using the front view to add some nice
pixel detail from the high-resolution reference in that area
I wanna make sure that I maintain detail like skin texture and moles
it's tiny little details that create really nice looking high resolution texture
once I'm done editing in this 2d mode, all I have to do is go back to the
UVs and Maps menu
and choose Unflatten from UV space
and then my character will switch back to normal. Now I'll clean up the
seams in the 3d mode
so again I hide my arms and I'm looking at the side seam
and now I wanna fix that so I'll use my clone brush again
to sample detail from the surrounding areas to
overwrite that seams so we get a nice smooth blend
I can also use my stencils to paint this detail and again
on human pretty close on the stencil to make sure they're getting high
resolution pixel detail
now I'll look at fixing the shoulder and neck seam and
we've got the seam at the shoulder, and the neck is on it own entirely different set of UVs
the only way we can blend this together is by using texture projection
you'll see that I've got my front view reference and I'm zoomed in really close
to capture that pixel detail
the texture on the neck is really distinctive, so I use my clone brushed
to propagate that throughout the area, and then rely on my stencil
to cover up the major textures seams that we can see
also run into the exact same problem in the back
when I had it seems between the neck and shoulders and the arms
and then I was like to deal once over to just double check that their
aren't any scenes showing basically every time we run across the UV seem
this is how we're going to use projection painting to fix it
now let's look at using the same techniques to project
another difficult area which is the inside the owner
to use my select faces tool to select my body and
hide it the just the arms are visible in all-star
with the projections and a half so I have some three-quarters images at the
arms
and I can use this to selectively re projects and high-resolution detail
in this case for the forearms will see that it doesn't cover anything
up above the forearms so then we have to improvise
what I'll do is only used the outside in the arm
project that on the inside the arm to fill in a lot of missing texture detail
and we can get away with this because the textures are generally similar
but also because the inside the arm is an area that is you are is not going to
have a chance to scrutinize an awful lot
you're using the mirror tool to project the outside back portion of the
forearm
to give it a little bit extra detail on both sides, but in general
I don't use mirroring when projecting, we want to use as many unique pixels from
image references as we possibly can. so we'll see here
instead of mirroring the texture detail from one side to the other
I'm actually painting in an entirely new texture
on the inside of my other arm
and with that work done we finally have a completely textured character covered
head to toe
With nice high-resolution detail
So how do we get it out of Mudbox?
well I'm merge visible on all my layers and then I select the resulting layer
call it whatever I want and then I can right click and export selected
however the is an easier way I don't have to delete all my layers
I can just export channel merged
and that'll save me a step I won't have to merge visible not to say they doubt
has a tip format wherever I want
and now I'm gonna bring it in to Maya. so back in Maya, I have my character with his
two separate materials
And if I look where I saved my files, we'll see that
Mudbox saved two separate files out and that's because it saves one file
per UV set- so the head and body
are saved as separate files because they're a different UV tiles
this means that I can plug in my textures to make different materials
I select my head material: and on navigate TV
had tile that Mudbox exported employed at an
and now I get ahead assigned and I can do the same thing
for the torso because the way my druthers viewport things look a little
gray
so I mean add to stop little bit of a red today
Inc and essence channel on both my materials
this all live in things that make it a look a little bit more like skin tone
is a total old-school fake now definitely don't do this before you
render
strictly for the poor and with that we are finally done we get textures on our
character
character looks a lot more like the photos at the person that they're based
on
we can see that we're missing a few things namely anatomical structures
muscles
on stuff like that that comes next in this
sculpting pass when we add more detail
on James Taylor thanks for watching