Transforming Robot Production Pipeline Volume 9: Lighting and Rendering

In this lesson we'll go through the steps of connecting our MARI textures into our geometry. We're pretty much finished up with the lighting in our scene. So now we just need to come in and begin the process of connecting textures to our truck and to the robot. So let's jump over into the Hyper Shade and let's start this process. This is going to be a fairly tedious process, just as a heads up. So let's start by dropping in a 2D file node. Let's go into image name. And inside the Source Images directory, let's start with the Truck Maps. Let's go in here. We have a bump and a diffuse. We'll start with diffuse. And let's start by bringing in this truck diffuse 001. We can start by bringing that in. Now when it comes to connecting in all these different MARI textures, that's really going to be, again, just kind of a long process from here on out. And the reason for that is because of the way that we have our UVs laid out on both the truck and on the robot. So looking at this, you can start to see the UVs for the truck. Now, in this case you can see that our UVs are occupying much more than just the typical 0 to 1 space that we would normally want. In MARI, we can come in and actually texture up all these different squares as well. So the way that we have these laid out, we really need to make sure that our textures fit on the proper square. Normally, if we were to simply connect in a texture and drop it on, that texture would repeat pretty much through infinity. And that same texture would appear on all of these different squares. Now what we have to do is, basically, not only have that texture be visible on one tile, but we also need to set exactly which tile that texture is going to be visible on. So that way, each one of these tiles is receiving their corresponding texture. So whenever these maps are exported from MARI they come in with a very specific name, or they're exported with a specific name. So in my case-- if I go back to this File 3-- you can see where we have this extension, this .1001. That's really, really important. Because this signifies which one of these squares the texture is supposed to occupy. So as far as MARI is concerned, number 1001 is this first square right in here. So this is 1001. This next one next to it will be 1002. This will be 03, 04, 05, and so on and so forth, until we reach 10. At that point, MARI then starts counting above into 2's. So this next one up here will be 1011. This will be 12, 13, 14, and so on and so forth. So if you pay attention to the numbering, then you can see exactly where this text is supposed to go. And we actually discuss this in quite a bit more detail in several of our MARI texturing courses. So if you're new to MARI or would like to learn a little bit more about this process, we do have a number of courses that will explain MARI's workflow for texturing and laying these out. So what I want to really point out what this is the fact that this numbering becomes really, really important. Because without this number it is going to be almost impossible for us to know exactly which square the texture is supposed to occupy. So what I like to do is, rather than just being left with File 3, and place 2D Texture 3-- which at the end of the day really means nothing to me-- what I like to do is take this Truck Diffuse 001, copy that, and paste that into the name. And now I can take that copy and paste that into the place 2D Texture. There we are. Because that is going to be very, very important. Because by looking at this, I can tell, again, where the texture needs to be. And this is the node, this Place 2D Texture node, where I'm going to have to make all those changes. So being able to identify that and the settings I need to use right here is going to be incredibly useful. So it's a matter of going through and doing this pretty much for all of the different textures. Moving on to the next one, 1002, and again, I'll come in here and name that 1002, come in here to my Place 2D Texture, and again, 1002. There we are. And again, just keep going through this process until we have pretty much all of our textures loaded up. So 1003, copy that and put that into this as well. So I've gone ahead and just paused this while I finish connecting the rest of these, or finish bringing in the rest of these. Now there's a few really important things we need to do. First off, we need to come in to all of our different Place 2D Texture nodes. And we're going to set the placement of all these textures properly. I'm going to do this through the Attributes spreadsheet, so that way I can do all of these at the same time rather than trying to go in and do these one by one. So with these Place 2D Texture nodes selected I'll go up to Window, General Editor, and down to the Attribute spreadsheet. So go over here into this All tab. And there's a few really important things we need to do. First off, we need to scroll over here to the side, and we're going to look for this Wrap U and Wrap V. We need to make absolutely certain that both of those are turned off. That way there's no wrapping or repeating of our textures. And now what we need to do is come into this translate frame. Let's start with this 1001. That'll sort of be the easiest thing to begin with. So if you recall, 1001 is this original 0 to 1 space. So that means it's Translate U and Translate V will remain at 0. We don't want this to move at all. Now for number 1002-- again, 02 means it's going to be on this first row, but now it's going to be offset by 1. So we need to take the Translate Frame U set that to 1. That way it'll be offset by one unit. 1003-- again, that's going to be two units offset. So at Translate U, we need to make sure that's set to 2, and so on and so forth. So 1004, again, going to be in the first row, offset three places from the original. So really, you just need to look at this last number and essentially just subtract 1 from this Translate U. So 005 will be an offset of 4, 07 will be offset of 6, 08 will be offset of 7, and so on and so forth. Once we start to get into some of these higher numbers we start to need to pay a little bit more attention. So 1011, that's going to be in this same area. But now it's going to be vertical. So that's going to be this little square right up here. So we need a vertical offset of 1, but we don't want it to be offset horizontally at all. So 1011 would translate 1. Again, that'll move it right up here. 012, again, this one we want to be offset by 1 vertically and 1 horizontally. So we need this to be 1 and 1. Oops, make sure I'm actually setting the right ones here. And it looks like we have one more to do, which is 21. And again, that means it's going to be on this third row. So 01 and then 2 will be up here. So for this one, number 2, we need to make sure its Translate Frame V is set to 3-- or rather, it's going to be set to 2. So that way it offsets 2 from the original, which will put it right up here on this third row. So that should be all that we have to do on the Place 2D Textures. Now unfortunately, there's still a little bit more work to be done. What we need to do now is essentially take all of these different textures, and we're going to layer these together. Now before we do that we need to come in, grab all of these texture nodes. Let's go to our Attributes spreadsheet once again. And what I'm looking for is this Default Color. There it is. Default Color RG and B. Right now it's set to 0.5, which is giving us this 50% gray in all of these areas where the texture's not visible. So all these places where the texture's been shifted over, it gets left with this 50% gray. What we want to do is set that to black. So let's set that to 0, which will give us this nice black color. And now we need to layer all of these together. So to do that we're going to use our layered texture. There we are. So essentially we just take our different textures, Middle Click, drag these over, and start to layer these in. Now the order in which we drag these in really doesn't matter at all. So we can drop these in any order that we want. We just need to make sure that we are not missing anything. We don't want any textures to get left behind on this. OK. So I'll take just a moment and finish doing this. OK. Now once this is done, we should get something that looks like this. Now the last thing we need to do is to come into each one of these different textures that we plugged in, and make sure that its blend mode is set to Lighten. Now with this set to Lighten, what that will do is essentially make all of these black areas transparent. And that will give us the effect of all of these different textures being layered together in their proper squares. Again, unfortunately, there's really not a quick and easy way of going about this. So you can start to see where this becomes a little bit tedious. But fortunately, if you are careful you really shouldn't run into any problems. So now all of these have been set to Lighten. And you can see where this is actually functioning in the way that it should. And so now we just need to plug this into our material. So for this one, because I actually want to be able to render this out in different layers and different passes, I'm going to render this with an MIA, Material X Passes. So I'll take this layer texture, plug that into my diffuse color, and for now I'm going to go ahead and just take the reflectivity set that to Highlights Only, and start to bump this down so that way we get a little softer reflection in the highlight. With the highlights only we won't actually get any true reflections, just a simple specular highlight. So let's get back to our materials up here. Actually, just take this and expand that. Extend that. And we need to come in here and just make sure that we name this appropriately-- Truck Material. Now we can come in here and start to grab the different parts of our truck and assignment this. So Truck Interior, let's Right Click, select Objects with Material, Right Click, and assign our MIA material passes to that. So essentially, like I said, just going through here, grabbing these different pieces of the truck, select objects with material, and assign that truck material to that. OK. Now once we come in here and re-render this, you can see that all of our textures are being brought together, so they are layering together correctly. But there is one problem. If you look, you'll see that these textures look really, really washed out. Really, really washed out and blown out. And the problem is, if we go back to our Textures tab, if you recall from our earlier lesson, it's really, really important that any time we're using something like a JPEG, TIFF, or TARGA with our color management, then we always want to make sure that we have our Color Profile set to be an SRGB. So that way it doesn't overly brighten those textures. So let's pull this back. I'll grab all of these different textures the make up my truck, and once again just go to the Attributes spreadsheet so I can set this on all of these at the same time. I'll go over this All node and look for this Color Profile. So what I should be able to do is-- right now this is set to 0, which means I just use default profile. We can come in and set different values, so 1, 2, 3, and so on. Now you may notice, as you start to type in these values you may not notice that anything changes. But as soon as you click on one of these textures you should see the proper change here. So let's come in and we'll set the Color Profile to 3 on all of these. There we go. And 3 is the flag to change these to an SRGB. And so now what we should see the next time we render is, now our textures looking much, much better compared to what they did before. Now if you have anything like specular maps, bump maps, anything like that, it's really just a matter of going through this exact same process for all of your different maps and things like that. Now to save you a little bit of time, I've actually taken the liberty of going ahead and connecting these for you for the robot. So if you go to File and Import, you can go ahead and, just in the root of your project-- I have the robot body material, and I have the truck material, which is essentially exactly what we just set up, if you don't necessarily want to go through these steps on your own. So the robot body material, if we import that, there we are. So that's going to be this node right up here. Nope, that's actually going to be the one right next to it. There we are. Now you can see on this one a few more textures that make up the robot, because the robot actually occupies more of these different UV squares. Now when you import these they may look sort of black. But they should hook up just fine, provided that you have this set as your current project. So once you open this file you will want to make sure that you actually have this exact directory set as your project, otherwise these textures may not connect correctly. So it's just a matter of going through pretty much this exact same process. So we can come through here and find all the pieces for the robot. We can Right-Click select Objects with Material, and then Right-Click Assign to Selection. So the robot's eyes, we'll go and leave those red. We won't mess with those. Right-Click Select with Material and Assign to Selection. And it really should be just that simple. So if we scrub through here and find all of our different pieces, that should be everything that we need. Now with these, again, I've gone ahead and taken the liberty of setting everything up for you. So there really shouldn't be anything that you have to do on these materials that you import. So textures should all be set properly. Once you drop those on everything should be fine. There we are. So you can see now the Diffuse Map that we have connected in here again through all of these different texture layers. So back into the UV texture editor, you can see this robot has quite a few of these individual little UV squares. And for this one we have a diffuse map. And then we also have a speculator map that's being put in here to control the reflectivity. So what that is doing is giving us some slightly stronger reflections in certain areas like this area like the yellow body. But in some of these other areas, like the scratches, we really won't get much of a strong speculative highlight or reflection at all. So looking at this, you can see that there is one little area where these lights are currently active. So that is going to be this lights material, this surface shader. Now on this one, even though they are currently visible on the robot, these lights are also present on the truck as well. So for these lights, we're actually going to give it that truck material. So Right-Click, assign to Selection, and that way these will actually sort of behave and look like the headlights from the dump truck. Now, as I mentioned in one of these earlier lessons, once you start to connect in all of these different textures it is very possible if you are using a 32-bit system, that you will not be able to render this scene. Because the geometry, and especially the textures, are going to be pretty resource intensive. So again, apologies if you're using a 32-bit system and are unable to follow along from this point forward. Unfortunately, like I said, that's just sort of the nature of the beast when you start to work with these little bit more complex projects with much, much higher quality requirements. OK. So that's going to wrap us up for this lesson. In our next lesson, we'll begin the process of setting up some of our different passes and render layers.