Transforming Robot Production Pipeline Volume 3: Truck Texturing

[MUSIC] In this lesson, we'll learn about the layered painting unproject and project workflow and how it was utilized on this project. All right, so we've got sort of this base coat of this photographic texture layered here onto our geometry. Now at this point, I'm going to go ahead and begin focusing on some of the graphics that the truck has. Now if we jump over here and refer to the reference image, you can see here that there are a number of graphics, most of which have type included in them, that appear in various places around the vehicle. In order for this vehicle to appear as realistic as possible, these are graphics that we need to think about recreating here inside MARI. Now because these graphics, a lot of these have type, you may think it would be easier to create these flat in a program like Photoshop. Well, this is actually a great opportunity to use a new feature in MARI 1.4, which is called the layered painting unproject and project workflow. So the first thing I'm going to go ahead and do is kind of pick one of these graphics. Let's go and start with this one here on the bed. And I'll go and just focus in on a sideview here and zoom in on that part of the geometry. Here we go. It'll go kind of right here inside this recessed area. Now the next thing we're going to want to do here is jump over to the channels palette and make sure that we have a decals channel created. And it's, again, piped into our shader as a diffuse shader module. Going to jump up here now to the camera drop down. And we're going to look at the layered painting projection settings. So now you'll see here inside this settings dialog there's representation of each channel we have created in our project. Now the ordering here doesn't really matter when it comes to MARI, but where it does matter is this is the order that the layers in Photoshop are going to be created in. So you can see here I have the decals and the images channels selected, but if I want to make sure that maybe the decals channel was on top and it was actually down here, all we would need to do is just click and drag it here in this dialogue. So we can reposition the channels and how they're created in our Photoshop layers just simply by clicking and dragging them. Now you can see here that I'm going to go ahead leave this at a 4K resolution. I want to make sure my type is nice and crisp. We have a path setting next here. Now this is something to pay attention to. I want to go ahead and title this file 789C_Bed1.psd. Now this is the file that MARI is going to create whenever we actually do this unprojection. Now you can see here I've already browsed to the executable for Photoshop, as it's going to be my default image editor and you want to make sure and set this path right here to your default image editor. Now the watch files option-- and you can see I have enabled. This means that MARI is going to monitor that file that it creates. And it's going to know if there's been any changes to that file. And it's going let us know when those changes have occurred. So the last setting here is the reset projection setting. And you can see that I have it turned on. What that means is that MARI is going to remember the exact position I have my camera in here and exactly the area I have zoomed in on here. Now, if orbit around, zoom in and out, and make some changes to this, whenever I do go back to reproject that information in, MARI is going to automatically remember and snap back to this view here. So with that said, let's go ahead and jump to camera. We'll do a layered painting unproject. And MARI is going to think about that for just a moment here. And it's going to jump over to Photoshop for me and open up that exact view through the paint buffer here in Photoshop. So essentially, a snapshot has been taken through the paint buffer. And you can see here that my decals and my images channel have been ported over to Photoshop in the form of layers. Now there's also a decals paint and images paint layer that have been created. And you can notice here that several of these layers are locked. So what this means here is that the locked layers are the layers the we don't want to make changes to. You can see that there's a wire frame and a lighting layer that come in by default, which the layers we want to make changes on are these ones that have paint at the end of them. The ones that are not locked. What happens is if we make changes on these layers and then save this file, what's going to happen is those changes will be baked into the decals and the images channel respectively here. So let's go ahead and shoot for the decals paint layer first since we're not really making changes to the images channel. I'm going to go ahead and zoom in here in Photoshop on that area and make sure I get it nice and tight here so I can see exactly what I'm doing. I'm going to go ahead and grab Photoshop's rectangle tool and make sure it's set to pixels. Just draw in basically pixels on this layer. I'm going to drag out a rectangle that is from corner to corner here based on the wire frames. So you can see here I've created a black rectangle. Now I want to make sure and modify that, so I'll do a control+t to freeze transform it. Hold control and shifted and drag this particular corner over. So we're essentially going to skew this shape. Let's go ahead and leave it right there and we'll do the same thing down here to the bottom left corner. All right. And I'll hit enter to confirm those changes. And at this point, if you remember in the reference photo there was this corner that was sort of clipped off of this decal. In order to do that I'll just grab my polygonal lasso tool. We'll just come over here and make a selection and just delete those pixels just like so. Now I want to make sure and get that red stripe on this corner as well. So I'll just come over and lock the transparent pixels temporarily for that layer. And I'm going to come over here and just make another selection. Sort of like that. Choose a nice red color here. Maybe right about there. And I'll just fill that selection by alt+backspace. And you can see here that we've made that red stripe there. So I'll make sure and unlock the transparent pixels. Now at this point we've got most the decal created. Everything except for the type. Now I've run into some issues when using this workflow and trying to actually incorporate type into this workflow. So I'll tell you what let's do. Let's go ahead and save this file as it is, and we'll jump back over to MARI. I'll hit control+s to save it. We'll go ahead and minimize that. You can see when we jump back to MARI, it's letting us know that some changes have been made to that file. So we can choose to project the image, ignore the changes, or just stop watching the file all together. I'm going to choose project image here. And you can see what happens here is those pixels we created here in Photoshop have actually been projected onto the decals channel here inside of MARI. If I jump over the default shader you can see they are on the decals channel here. So exactly where we wanted them to go. Now that's really only half of it for this particular decal. Remember we have a type yet to create. And we'll just jump back over here to Photoshop. And there's something important I want to point out to you here. We worked strictly on the layers that MARI gave us here in Photoshop. If we had created a new layer above that for our type-- like exactly what would have been done if we used our type tool to create some type, you can see it creates a text layer-- that would have presented some issues when actually reprojecting this data back into MARI. It may not have projected correctly. As a matter of fact, it probably would not have. So rather than do that, let me undo that here. The work around that I've sort of found for creating layered art work that needs to come into MARI through this unproject and project workflow is to-- let's just go ahead and save this as a copy of this file. I'll do a control+shift+s, and we'll call this Bed2. You can see I've already got a copy of it there. We'll just save over that. There we go. And now I'm going to come in here and create the type. We'll just go ahead and draw that text frame out. Set the type to white. Type in-- I believe it's 793C. And we'll just kind of position that here exactly where we want to be. Now remember this file is a copy of the file that we made in MARI. So I'm going to-- actual I'll go ahead and save that file, that Bed2 file. Now let's jump back over to MARI again. In MARI, I'm going to jump up here to camera layered painting unproject again. And what's going to happen here is MARI is going to use those exact same settings to create that Photoshop file all over again for us, that Bed1 file. And you can see here that now those red and black pixels we created, they're on the decals layer here. So we've got the decals paint layer freed up. So at this point, let me jump back over to my copy. Let's go ahead and rasterize the time. We'll need to do that if we want it to come over into MARI correctly. We'll hit control+a to select all and copy that with a control+c. Bounce back over to the file the that MARI created, the Bed1 file. And let's do edit, paste special, then you can see paste in place. It has the keyboard shortcut shift+control+v. So now that we've done that we've pasted pixels on to this decals paint layer again. So we'll go ahead and save that here. And now again we'll jump back over into MARI, which knows that there's been a change to that file. So we'll just say project image again. And you could see that our type has projected exactly where we want to go. So we've basically used the layered painting unproject and project workflow twice to create this layered graphic that included some type. Now I'm going to go ahead and do that exact same process for the rest of this vehicle and all of the graphics that it includes. But I'm not going to be able to include those unprojected psd files for you. Those are rather large files and they're really not going to match up to the exact position of your camera anyway. So what I'll do here is, if we jump over to the image manager, and let's go ahead and add a new image here. I've included this decals.psd file. If you want to go ahead and put that into your image manager as well, you'll see here that-- let me just go ahead and switch to my paint through tool. And I'll drag that onto my canvas. And we'll just shrink it down some here. It's rather large. So you can see here I've gone ahead and saved all of the graphics that I've created for this vehicle into this decas.psd file. So if you don't want to go through this layered painting unproject and project workflow for every single graphic, you can just go ahead and grab this decals.psd file and paint them in like it was an image here, by loading it into your image manager. Now on the other hand, if you do want to go ahead and experiment some with this layered painting unproject and project workflow, I highly recommend it. It's a really great workflow for working back and forth between MARI and a two-dimensional program like Photoshop. Now with that said, let's go ahead and move on. In the next lesson, I want to go ahead and move on to sort of the next step in this texturing process that I used for this dump truck. We're going to be talking about painting in dirt and scratches.