Procedural Texturing in Maya and V-Ray

In this lesson, we will finalize the shot. So as I said, I went around and duplicated the cell and arranged them just to get the look that I'm going for. So as you see, I added a couple of them that are smaller, a couple of them that are really, really huge, just to use them as a foreground element. And now, for the next stage, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and add some blur to some of these guys, just to get that look of Z depth. But for this one, I'm going to go ahead and just fake it. So first, I'm going to start with the background. So go ahead and just click on the background, the stars. I'm going to name this Milky Way. Milky Way, all right. And go into Filter, Blur, Gaussian Blur. And I think something around these lines look good. All right, Just to make these small, really small cells, which are really back in the background, these are floating on top. Now for the main one, the one that is in the foreground, again, I'm going to add some motion, some blur to it. Again, Filter, Blur, Gaussian Blur, just to make it like it's out of focus. That's because it's really close to the camera. And again, I'm going to add some opacity to it or maybe play around with the fill. All right, a bit. Not too much, just so we can see the one behind it. One other thing we can do, this is why we use the Smart Object. The Smart object is, I think, one of the most powerful tools that Photoshop, when the Photoshop CS started, one of the most powerful tools. And I really love using it. So one other thing you can see is-- let's go ahead and select this guy here and have Command T. And here, let's go ahead and just select. And this switches between to get this Wrap-up transform. And what this will let us do is we'll go ahead and tweak the shape of this, just so we can get some other looking shape for the cells, all right? And again, we'll do the same thing for this guy. And this is non-destructive. And I'll let you know exactly what I mean by that, because now, in any of these, you can go ahead and double-click on it. And it will open up the, "you have to commit the changes." It wants to open up the Smart Object. It will open up exactly the cell file when we started this lesson. So here, we have the specular, the reflection. So let's see how much powerful this is. I'm going to go ahead and add another adjustment layer to all of it. And I'm going to go ahead and add hue and saturation for all, so I'm not going to clip it. And I'm going to change the color of this, something really green. Let's go Hulk cell, all right? And let's save this. So now, if we go back into the new image, this is what we get. So you see? Because each of one of these are the duplicate of the same one, we don't have to go in and change each one of those. If we change one of the Smart Objects, it will change across all the others. If you want to create an original Smart Object-- by that, I mean one that stands on its own, so it's a duplicate and not a Preference Duplicate, or how we call it in Maya-- so what you can do is right-click. And you'll get new Smart Object via Copy. So what this will do is it will create a new one. So what I mean is, if we take this one and move it, double-click on this one and, for this one, I'm going to remove the hue and saturation and save it, you see this one will affect only this Smart Object and not the others. All right? So I will leave this and go back to one of these guys. And let's do some tweaks. I'm going to go ahead and just leave the hue saturation and just save it, all right? Now I'm going to close this again. Let's do this to the other ones as well, just add a uniform look to it, just so these guys don't look all the same. All right, feel free to go crazy with this. I can move these guys, make it shape, something like that, all right? Now what do you think you can see is when I added the Gaussian blur on these guys, especially for the guy in the cell in the front, you'll see that it added something that's called a Smart Filter. And you can turn this off. And you can even go back in and tweak it. So you can double-click on this. And you can add more Gaussian blur to this. And this is because this is a Smart Object. And this is the beauty of the Smart Object. Even a Gaussian blur is not destructive. So you can go back and tweak it. So if you're working for a client and the client comes back and says, you know what? I don't really like the foreground blur of the foreground element. And I really want to tone that down. You don't have to create that to get that image in as a PNG and just blur it again, and try to fit the look. No. You can go into it, just double-clicking on the Smart Filter, checking the Gaussian Blue, and just tweak it down or tweak it up, depending on the look that you're going for or the change that you're going for. Again, I'm going to go ahead and tweak this, add more Gaussian blurs to them, just to make them more interesting, so we get the different looks of focus. This one, this is the only one that will stay fully focused, maybe this one as well. Just so it's like this, this center, as I said, this would be like the center piece for our shot. Maybe I'm going to duplicate this again, move one underneath it. I'll turn around here and I'm going to tone down the opacity of that. That's really far away. Again, you can tweak down the opacity, add some blur, some Gaussian blur to this one. And you can make it as blurry or as-- maybe a bit blurry. And for the small guy, I'm going to add some Gaussian blur to this guy as well and make it really blurry. Because this is really far, it's really small. All right, I'm going to add some Gaussian blur to this guy as well. All right, not that strong. Something around this. All right, some opacity to this. Again, the same thing for this one. Maybe I'll make it a bit bigger. All right, Filter, Blur, Gaussian Blur, again, make this really blurry. All right. All right, and make the opacity down, so we can see the one in the back clearer again. So we'll go back and forth and just add a couple of Gaussian blurs to this one, just to get some nice depth to the scene, all right? Next, I'm going to add some vignette to the image. Again, I'm going to blur this one as well. All right, again, Gaussian Blur, I'm going to give this a lot and maybe even rescale it more. All right, I again turn down the opacity, so we can see behind it. Now let's add some more effects to this one. Again, you can tweak this and add as many of these or as less, maybe, if you want more or less of them and so on. So now what I'm going to do, I'm going to add a new layer on this one, so New Layer. Fill this with white. Go under Filter where you have Lens Correction. And we'll go ahead and add-- just a sec, so we can resize this-- under Auto Correction, Custom, and Vignette, just add the amount you want. All right, this is the amount. And this is the midpoint. Just tweak this to the look that you're going for. I'm going for the full. And then I can tweak that with Opacity. And then a blending. I'm going to name this Vignette. And blending to multiply. And then just tweak this as dark or as you want it. Again, make a new layer. With this one, I'm going to add some noise. So we go and Add Noise. All right, the layer's empty, so just add some color. Go to Filter, Noise, Add Noise. And I want to add some-- not a monochromatic. I want this color, just get that noise, that movies noise, all right? And then I'm going to add this to multiply as well. And just tweak it down a bit. Now I'm going to go with Screen, I think, and just take our Soft Light. Yeah, Soft Light. So maybe something around 10. If you barely can see it, if you zoom in, you see that it add a nice noise to the scene. You can play ahead with these guys to see the look that you're going for. You can go with Lighter. And you can try Multiply, if you want. I think all the layers of light is the way to go. It just adds something subtle, nothing crazy. All right. OK, now I'm going to go ahead and select all the layers, even with a [INAUDIBLE] background. And I'm going to go ahead into Layer, and duplicate these, Duplicate Layers, all right? And I'm going to merge them all by hitting Command E or Control E. And this is the new layer. And I'm going to go and call this Merged, because I want to add one effect, this one. And I'm going to go to Filter, Lens Correction again, under Custom. I'm going to add some chromatic aberration. OK, this is what we get. This is because the image is really, really big. To fix that, just select the image and add-- we select it, then add the mask to it, and just go Apply Layer Mask. And if we go to Lens Correction now, we should get this look, all right? I want to add some chromatic aberration to this one. And I'm not going to go that crazy, maybe. Again something subtle. Just add some more effect to it. You see it's subtle, but it is there. See? It adds a bit of blur to it and some nice aberration, especially, you can see it on the edges. All right. Now, for the final touch, I'm going to go in to add the lens flare on top of this. I already went ahead and created a simple lens flare. I used Video Copilot's lens flare to create this one. But you can create this one in Photoshop, just with a couple of brush strokes. So Control A, Copy, and just drop this on top of the layer. And just go in and select Linear Dodge, Add. And see it will add a nice look to the-- and you can tweak this opacity down just to go to deal with the look that you're going for. One thing I want to change is the background, the Milky Way background. What I don't like about it is I want to add a more bluish look to it, more colder look to it. So I should have done that before merging it. But to add that, I'm going to just hide this a bit. To add that, just go to the Milky Way. And under Adjustments, select Color Filter. This would be around here, Photo Filter. And I'm going to select a cooling filter. As you can see, immediately, if you hide this, you can see this adds a cool look to the final image. Now I'm going to save this. And I'm going to open up an image that I already created. And I'm going to go over some tips, just when you create your own image. All right, so here it is. So it's called "It all starts with a cell." All right? I'm going to go ahead and just hide the text. And I'm just go to go over some stuff that it's different from the scene that we did. So the first thing you will notice is I added a lens flare in the middle. And I also have another one with the lens flare off screen. And I think this looks more interesting, because it adds more mystery to this scene. But the other main thing you'll see is that we have different cells. So you'll see that we don't have any of them different. I mean, I think this is the same as this one. This is the same, I think. A couple of them are duplicated, maybe, twice or three times. What I did is I went back and created a couple of cells, because, if you start looking at this, you're going to see that this is repeating too much. And what you do is you just go back into the Maya file and just do some tweaks to the vines, to the leather, and a couple of tweaks to the bump map. This is the beauty of procedural mapping because, with only a few tweaks and a few noise maps and noise maps on the ramp changes, it will change the look that you want to have for the cell. And again, don't forget that you can always add some tweaks to each individual cell by selecting, get in Photoshop, and just adding some tweak to it. Because even if you have this duplicated twice, it doesn't mean that it does have to look the same. You can always go back in Photoshop and just tweak it, so it doesn't look the same as the other one, all right? I really hope you found this tutorial helpful. And you--