In 2009, the science fiction masterpiece "Avatar" came out and swept the world, how many teenagers fantasized about riding the Ikaran flying dragon in the sky?
As a film and television practitioner, the greater pleasure is to explore the production process of this film, and I believe that many friends are curious about how these cool shots are made.
Before I originally planned to write clearly one knowledge point after another, modeling technology, lighting principles, adding UV map coordinates, rendering knowledge, material knowledge, animation knowledge, etc. to write clearly, so that everyone knows the theory and then go to practice it will be better, but the day before yesterday's sharing of modeling methods, many people said that they look very confused, and a bit of a feeling in the clouds.
In view of this, another way of thinking, let everyone look at a "beautiful map", from the complete process of modeling, mapping, rendering, what preparations and work have the Maya masters done? Let everyone want to have a holistic concept, and when you go to learn the theory later, there will be a feeling of "sudden enlightenment": the original technique used before is the application of this theory!
Of course, this is only a preconceived assumption of mine, and it is not easy for me to judge whether this effect can be achieved. After all, everyone's foundation and starting point are different, and we should not be discouraged, knowing where our starting point is and what other places need to be improved, we can better improve.
Even if you don't have any foundation, as long as you want to learn, you can start from scratch, the gods are starting from scratch, but others start early, we have just started?
As long as you are on the road and moving forward, there will always be a day of "catching up".
Well, back to the point, let's share how Pandora's world was established, taking the "beauty" in Avatar as an example, the article will be relatively long, everyone should be mentally prepared, and be patient after reading Ha. Or collect it first and look at it slowly when you study.
Step 1: Model making process
1. Collection of materials
Material collection is a very important step, the more time you spend on material collection, the fewer mistakes you will make in the later stages, which is the so-called sharpening knife without cutting wood.
When making the Avatar model, I used the Internet to collect a large number of real materials and film and television references. This is a copying process, and after copying, you can create again.
So in the production, you can add some of your own understanding, and portray the look of the whole model, and later in the zbrush (engraving software) also tried different feeling brushes, and finally unified the entire character, so that it reached a complete feeling. The following is some of the materialS I collected, put together for everyone's reference.
2. Maya base model
Use a maya box as the basic model, and then adjust the general scale, according to the size of the volume, first start with the model parts of the large block surface, so that you can grasp the overall feeling of the character in a relatively short period of time, facilitate the modification of the proportion, try to be clean and average on the wiring, do not have to portray too many details, as long as you pay attention to the structural twist of the head, so that it is convenient for later carving.
If it is an object that needs to be copied a lot or needs to be symmetrically engraved in the later stage, it can be made in the center first, and then copied and adjusted to observe the position after a backup, and then the engraving can also use those models in the middle to facilitate symmetry and adjustment in zbrush.
Looking at this character, when I first saw Avatar, I felt like a combination of feline and man, the upper part of the face is a lion, the lower part is a human, but you can distinguish their differences and will not recognize the wrong person.
I feel that the main distinction is the lower part of the face, or because we are human, so seeing the human-like part will be more sensitive, if it is a lion looking at her, it may feel that the distinction between the upper half of the face will be larger, so I decided to put more effort into her lower half of the face, but also to try to understand the first half of the cat face, after analyzing these things, we can grasp these characteristics of her to start modeling.
After analyzing these, I made a simple mold, which has very few lines at this time, which is very convenient for you to adjust the big feeling. At this time, the proportion and position of the character's jawbone and facial features are fixed.
Add lines while adjusting, and process local details
Eye, brow arch, and cheekbones Low mode and final wiring diagram
3.zbrush details added
First of all, according to the previous large number of references to determine some details of the structure of this role, subdivide in zbrush, increase the number of faces of the model to add some details to the model. For example, pores, texture of the part of the lips, etc.
First, perform maya's cleanup to check if there are more faces than the four sides. Export the obj model after no problems.
Second, import zbrush for details. Use a few skin brushes. Make detail segmentation and detail additions.
The above is the production process of the model, the model is relatively lacking in color and layering, so we must continue to "work" to achieve the effect we want to achieve.
Step 2: Mapping process
As with the production of models, collecting is an important step. The more time you spend collecting material, the more efficient the textures will be and the better they will be.
When I made the texture of the Avatar model, I used the Internet to collect a lot of real material and film and television references. Especially texture footage. Because there are already film and television as a reference, the stickers are closer to the film and television content. The following is some of the materialS I collected, put together for everyone's reference.
2. Drawing of the map
Before drawing the map, you need to ensure that the UV (map coordinates) of the model are correct. What I'm using here is a split of the model by the UVLayout plugin. Pay attention to the position of the tangent line when splitting, and try to put it in a place where the audience can't see it, so as to avoid seam problems.
The texture here is drawn using a combination of Mari (texture mapping software) and ps. In order to be able to quickly grasp the process of drawing textures using mudbox here.
These are the use of plugins for UV splitting, it is worth noting that sometimes the split is not ideal and needs to be re-edited in the Maya UV editor.
The red part of the figure is overlapping and the part can be adjusted in the uv editor. The final effect is as follows.
After UV editing, you will draw the map here using the mudbox to draw.
First, subdivide the model and export obj.
The second is to open the mudbox and import the model. Select the brush.
Third, the material ball depends on personal habits, you can switch between similar highlights and no highlights to view the effect.
Fourth, select the brush on the model and click New Layer, select the texture size and format as needed. I'm here for clarity. Choose 4096*4096 size. And named the base color, in order to lay the base color on the model, to prevent the back of the map when wearing a gang.
Fifth, the new layer will be added to the pattern, when adding, you can adjust it with the layer blending mode to achieve the appropriate effect.
Sixth, make multiple adjustments to the effect after the production of the map and export.
And add texture to the ps. And root out the color layer to generate the corresponding 3s highlight and bump layer
After these steps are completed, they still need to be rendered through the renderer to achieve realistic results.
Step 3: Render the part
1. Collection of reference diagrams
There will be a lot of reference figures according to film and television materials, and it is probably a reference to find a feeling that the corresponding light is more reasonable and likes. Here you can choose according to your own feelings and needs. It is mainly to observe the light of the characters in the scene, the contrast of intensity and the contrast of cold and warm, etc., and adjust according to personal feelings and aesthetics. There are many reference diagrams that can be selected by yourself.
2. Setting of character lights
First look at the picture, we basically use the most basic three-point lighting principle to initially adjust the intensity of light to reach the required intensity. Note that the arnold renderer is used here, so the default light is lighted with light attenuation. The light test of advanced plastic film pays attention to the contrast between cold and warm light.
Three-point lighting is generally the main light source auxiliary light and contour light, pay attention to the main light source and contour light of the cold and warm contrast. There are also applications that work with skydemo light to simulate the surrounding environment.
3. Settings for the Shader
Since it is a biological character in order to better express its texture and some skin characteristics, we will use the corresponding skin material to better express the texture.
Since the texture has been drawn as needed before, the corresponding skin levels should also be adjusted according to the inherent color because the inherent color is blue. Connect all the maps to the corresponding properties of the shader and adjust the parameters.
Here are five stickers connected, namely three layers of highlights and normal maps of the skin. And carry out lighting adjustment and testing.
4. The output of the render pass
In order to achieve the desired effect in the later stages, the corresponding channels are rendered here. In order to be more convenient to adjust in the later stage.
They are id, normal, highlight, ao, sss, etc.
5. Synthesis of channels
The rendered layers are composited in ps, the ao channel is synthesized by the method of positive stacking, and the highlight channel is synthesized by the screen method. Normal channels can be re-adjusted in the nuke. It is possible to add eye eye adjustments to eyelashes and adjust and color contrast for background light effects directly in ps.
Adjust the desired effect with the final adjustment.
After the character effect is made, and then combined with the scene to do the final synthesis processing, you can present the most realistic and cool effect.
After reading all the above processes, we must learn to think about the summary. In fact, whether it is building a model, or pasting materials, or doing rendering; there are some common steps and processes, and we must learn to observe and learn to think.
For example, the collection of materials, we must learn to summarize their own material collection methods, major material websites, film clips, promotional posters, and even our own shooting, their own paintings, etc., can be, each designer, has its own exclusive material library, to learn to classify and collect well.
There is also the production of the general direction first, and then the details are engraved, and the detail processing needs to be combined with reality and great patience to perfectly achieve the effect we want.
We have to be clear, the tutorial is a tool for us to learn for reference, what we have to learn, is the idea and processing method behind it, the tutorial can never be learned, but the idea is almost the same back and forth, don't get confused, memorize a lot of tutorials, but still don't know how to create, to do original.
To be continued...
If you are interested in my story and interested in film and television, let's pay attention to the growth of Film White.