texturing

Detailing digi doubles using generic humans /  by Xuan Prada

This is probably the last video of the year, let's see about that.

This time is all about getting your concept sculpts into the pipeline. To do this, we are going to use a generic humanoid, usually provided by your visual effects studio. This generic humanoid would have perfect topology, great uv mapping, some standard skin shaders, isolation maps to control different areas, grooming templates, etc.

This workflow will speed drastically the way you approach digital doubles or any other humanoid character, like this zombie here.

In this video we will focus mainly on wrapping a generic character around any concep sculpt to get a model that can be used for rigging, animation, lookdev, cfx, etc. And once we have that, we will re-project back all the details from the sculpt and we will apply high resolution displacement maps to get all the fine details like skin pores, wrinkles, skin imperfections, etc.

The video is about 2 hours long and we can use this character in the future to do some other videos about character/creature work.

All the info on my Patreon site.

Thanks!

Xuan.

Houdini topo transfer - aka wrap3 /  by Xuan Prada

For a little while I have been using Houdini topo transfer tools instead of Wrap 3. Not saying that I can fully replace Wrap3 but for some common and easy tasks, like wrapping generic humans to scans for both modelling and texturing, I can definitely use Houdini now instead of Wrap 3.

Wrapping generic humans to scans

  • This technique will allow you to easily wrap a generic human to any actor’s scan to create digital doubles. This workflow can be used during modeling the digital double and also while texturing it. Commonly, a texture artist gets a digital double production model in t-pose or a similar pose that doesn’t necessary match the scan pose. It is a great idea to match both poses to easily transfer color details and surface details between the scan and the production model.

  • For both situations, modeling or texturing, this is a workflow that usually involves Wrap3 or other proprietary tools for Maya. Now it can also easily be done in Houdini.

  • First of all, open the ztool provided by the scanning vendor in Zbrush. These photogrammetry scans are usually something around 13 – 18 million of polygons. Too dense for the wrapping process. You can just decimate the model and export it as .obj

  • In Maya align roughly your generic human and the scan. If the pose is very different, use your generic rig to match (roughly) the pose of the scan. Also make sure both models have the same scale. Scaling issues can be fixed in Wrap3 or Houdini in this case, but I think it is better to fix it beforehand, in a vfx pipeline you will be publishing assets from Maya anyway. Then export both models as .obj

  • It is important to remove teeth, the interior of the mouth and other problematic parts from your generic human model. This is something you can do in Houdini as well, even after the wrapping, but again, better to do it beforehand.

  • Import the scan in Houdni.

  • Create a topo transfer node.

  • Connect the scan to the target input of the topo transfer.

  • Bring the base mesh and connect it to the source input of the topo transfer.

  • I had issues in the past using Maya units (decimeters) so better to scale by 0.1 just in case.

  • Enable the topo transfer, press enter to activate it. Now you can place landmarks on the base mesh.

  • Add a couple of landmarks, then ctrl+g to switch to the scan mesh, and align the same landmarks.

  • Repeat the process all around the body and click on solve.

  • Your generic human will be wrapped pretty much perfectly to the actor’s scan. Now you can continue with your traditional modeling pipeline, or in case you are using this technique for texturing, move into Zbrush, Mari and or Houdini for transferring textures and displacement maps. There are tutorials about these topics on this site.

Transferring texture data

  • Import the scan and the wrapped model into Houdini.

  • Assign a classic shader with the photogrammetry texture connected to its emission color to the scan. Disable the diffuse component.

  • Create a bakeTexture rop with the following settings.

    • Resolution = 4096 x 4096.

    • UV object = wrapped model.

    • High res object = scan.

    • Output picture = path_to_file.%(UDIM)d.exr

    • Format = EXR.

    • Surface emission color = On.

    • Baking tab = Tick off Disable lighting/emission and Add baking exports to shader layers.

    • If you get artifacts in the transferred textures, in the unwrapping tab change the unwrap method to trace closest surface. This is common with lidar, photogrammetry and other dirty geometry.

    • You can run the baking locally or on the farm.

  • Take a look at the generated textures.

Introduction to Redshift - little project /  by Xuan Prada

My Patreon series “Introduction to Redshift for VFX” is coming to an end. We have already discussed in depth the most basics features like global illumination and sampling. I shared with you my own “cheat sheets” to deal with GI and sampling. We also talked about Redshift lighting tools, built-in atmospheric effects, and cameras. In the third episode we talked about camera mapping, surface shaders, texturing, displacement maps from Mari and Zbrush, how to ingest Substance Painter textures and did a few surfacing exercises.
This should give you a pretty good base to start your projects in Houdini and Redshift, or whatever 3D app you want to use with Redshift.

The next couple of videos about this series are going to be dedicated to doing from scratch to finish a little project using Redshift. We are going to be able to cover more features of the render engine and also discover more broad techniques that hopefully you will find interesting. Let me explain to you what is all of this about.

We’ll be doing this simple shot below from start to finish, it is quite simple and graphic I know, but to get there I’m going to explain to you many things that you are going to be using quite a lot in visual effects shots, more than we actually end up using in the shot.

We are going to start by having a quick introduction to SpeedTree Cinema 8 to see how to create procedural trees. We will create from scratch a few trees that later will be used in Houdini. Once we have all the models ready, we will see how to deal with SpeedTree textures to use them in Redshift in an ACES pipeline.

These trees will be used in Houdini to create re-usable assets llibraries and later converted to Redshift proxies for memory efficiency and scattering, also to be easily picked up by lighting artists when working on shots.

With all these trees we will take a look at how to create procedural scattering systems in Houdini using Redshift proxies. We will create multiple configurations depending on our needs. We are also going to learn how to ingest Quixel Megascans assets, again preparing them to work with ACES and creating an additional asset for our library. We will also re-use the scatterers made for trees to scatter rocks and pebbles.

To scatter all of that will be used as a base Houdini’s height fields. For this particular shot, we are going a very simple ground made with height fields and Megascans, but I’m going to give you a pretty comprehensive introduction to height fields, way more than what you see in the final shot.

Once all the natural assets are created, we’ll be looking at the textures and look-dev of the character. Yes, there is a character in the shot, you don’t see much but hey, this is what happens in VFX all the time. You spend months working on something barely noticeable. We will look into speed texturing and how to use Substance Painter with Redshift.

suit.png

Now that we are dealing with characters, what if I show you how to “guerrilla” deal with motion capture? So you can grab some random motion capture from any source and apply it to your characters. Look at the clip below, nothing better than a character moving to see if the look actually works.

It looks better when moving, doesn’t it? There is no cloth simulation btw, it is a Redshift course, we are not going that far! Not yet.

Any environment work, of course, needs some kind of volumetrics. They create nice lighting effects, give a sense of scale, look good and make terrible render times. We need to know how to deal with different types of volumetrics in Redshift, so I’m going to show you how to create a couple of different atmospherics using Houdini’s volumes. Quite simple but effective.

Finally, we will combine everything together in a shot. I will show you how to organize everything properly using bundles and smart bundles to configure your render passes. We will take a look at how Redshift deals with AOVs, render settings, etc. Finally, we will put everything together in Nuke to output a nice render.

Just to summarize, this is what I’m planning to show you while working on this little project. My guess is that it will take me a couple of sessions to deliver all this video training.

  • Speed Tree introduction and tree creation

  • ACES texture conversion

  • ACES introduction in Houdini and Redshift

  • Creation of tree assets library in Houdini

  • Megascans ingestion

  • Character texturing and look-dev

  • Guerrilla techniques to apply mocap

  • Introduction to Houdini’s height fields

  • Redshift proxies

  • Scattering systems in Houdini

  • Volume creation in Houdini for atmospherics

  • Scene assembly

  • Redshift render settings

  • Compositing

  • Something that I probably forgot

All of this and much more training will be published on my Patreon. Please consider supporting me.

Thanks,
Xuan.

Wade Tillman - spec job /  by Xuan Prada

This is just a spec job for Wade Tillman’s character on HBO’s Watchmen. After watching the series I enjoyed the work done by Marz VFX on Tillman’s mask, that I wanted to do my own. Unfortunately, I don’t have much time so creating this asset seemed like something doable to do in a few hours over the weekend. It is just a simple test, it will require a lot more work to be a production-ready asset of course. I’m just playing here the role of a visual effects designer trying to come up with an idea of how to implement this mask into the VFX production pipeline.

I’m planning to do more work in the future with this asset, including mocap, cloth simulation, proper animated HDRI lighting, etc. I also changed the design that they did on the series. Instead of having the seams in the middle of the head from ear to ear I just place my seams in the middle of the face dividing the face in two. I believe the one they did for the real series works much better but I just wanted to try something different. I will definitely do another test mimicking the other design.

So far I just tried one design in two different stages. The mask covering the entire head and the mask pulled up to reveal the mouth and chin of the character, as seen many times in the series. I also tried a couple of looks, one more mirror-like with small imperfections in the reflections. And another one rougher. I believe they tried similar looks but in the end, the went with the one with more pristine reflections.

I think it would be interesting to see another test with different types of materials, introducing some iridescence would also be fun. I will try something else next time.

Capturing lighting and reflections to lit this asset properly has to be the most exciting part of this task. That is something that I haven’t done yet but I will try as soon as I can. It is pretty much like having a mirror ball in the shots. Capturing animated panoramic HDRIs is definitely the way to go or at least the more simple one. Let’s try it next time.

Finally, I did a couple of cloth simulation tests for both stages of the mask. Just playing a bit with vellum in Houdini.

References from the series.

Just trying different looks here for both stages of the mask.

Simple cloth simulation test. From t-pose to anim pose and walk cycle.

Introduction to Reality Capture /  by Xuan Prada

In this 3 hour tutorial I go through my photogrammetry workflow using Reality Capture in conjunction with Maya, Zbrush Mari and UV Layout.

I will guide you through the entire process, from capturing footage on-set until asset completion. I will explain the most basic settings needed to process your images in Reality Capture, to create point clouds, high resolution meshes and placeholder textures.
Then I will continue to develop the asset in order to make it suitable for any visual effects production.

This are the topics included in this tutorial.

- Camera gear.
- Camera settings.
- Shooting patterns.
- Footage preparation.
- Photogrammetry software.
- Photogrammetry process in Reality Capture.
- Model clean up.
- Retopology.
- UV mapping.
- Texture re-projection, displacement and color maps.
- High resolution texturing in Mari.
- Render tests.

Check it out on my Patreon feed.

Mari 4.6 new features and production template /  by Xuan Prada

Hello patrons,

I recorded a new video about the new features in Mari 4.6 released just a few weeks ago. I will also talk about some of the new features in the extension pack 5 and finally I will show you my production template that I've been using lately to do all the texturing and pre-lookDev on many assets for film and tv projects.

This is a big picture of the topics covered in this video. The video will be about 2.5 hours long, and it will be published on my Patreon site.

- Mari 4.6 new features
- New material system explained in depth
- Material ingestion tool
- Optimization settings
- How and where to use geo channels
- New camera projection tools
- Extension pack 5 new features (or my most used tools)
- Production template for texturing and pre-lookDev

All the information on my Patreon feed.

Thanks for your support!
Xuan.

Houdini as scene assembler part 03 /  by Xuan Prada

In this post I will talk about using texture bitmaps and subdivision surfaces.
I have a material network with a couple of shaders, one for the body of this character and another one for the rest. If using Arnold I would have a shop network.

To bring texture bitmaps I use texture nodes when working with Mantra and image nodes when working with Arnold. The principled shader has tabs with inputs for textures. I rarely use these, I always create nodes to take care of the texturing. At the end of the day I never use only one texture per channel. More of this in future posts.
In Mantra, textures are multiplied by the albedo color. Be careful with this.

With Mantra, this is the UDIM tag textureName.%(UDIM)d.exr with arnold textureName.<UDIM>.exr

There is a triplanar node that can be used with Arnold and a different one called UV triplanar projection for Mantra. I don’t usually work without UVs, but these nodes can be useful when working with terrains or other large surfaces.

To subdivide geometry, at object level you can just go to the Arnold tab and select the type of subdivision and the amount. If you need to subdivide only a few parts of you alembic asset, create an unpack node (transfer attributes and groups) and then a subdivide node. This works with both Mantra and Arnold, although there is a better way of doing this with Arnold. We will talk about it in the future.

Houdini as scene assembler, part 01 (of many) /  by Xuan Prada

It’s been a while since I used Houdini at work, the very first time I used Houdini on a show it was while working on Happy Feet 2, it was our main scene assembler for the show. Look-dev, lighting and rendering was all done in Houdini and 3Delight.

From there I never used Houdini again until I was working on Geostorm at Dneg. Most of the shots were managed with Houdini and PrMan. That is all my experience with Houdini in a professional environment. No need to say that I have only used Houdini for assembly tasks, look-dev, lighting and rendering, nothing like fx or other fancy stuff.

The common thing between the two shows where I used Houdini as assembler is that we had pretty neat tools to take care of most of the steps through the pipeline. Becasue of that I can’t barely use Houdini out of the box, so I’m going to try to learn how to use it and share it here for future reference.

During my time working at facilities like MPC, Dneg or Framestore, I have used different scene assemblers like Katana, Clarisse or other propietary tools. My goal is to extrapolate my knowledge and experience using those software to Houdini. I’m pretty sure that I’d be using tools and techniques in the wrong way just because Houdini has a different philosophy than other tools or just because my lack of knowledge in general about Houdini and proceduralism. But anyway, I’ll try to make it work, if you see anything that I’m doing terribly wrong, please let me know, I’ll be listening.

I’ll be posting about stuff that I’m dealing with in no particular order but always assembly oriented, do not expect to see here anything related with fx or more “traditional” use of Houdini. Most of the stuff is going to be very basic, specially at the beginning but please bare with me, it will get more interesting in the future.

If you are assembling a scene one of the first steps it would be to bring all your assets from other applications. You can of course generate content in Houdini but usually most of you assets will be created in other packages, being Maya the most common one. So I guess the very first thing you’d have to deal with is how to import alembic caches. If you are working in a vfx facility chances of having automated tools to setup your shots for you are pretty high. Launching Houdini from a context in a terminal will take care of everything. If you are at home or starting to use Houdini in a vfx boutique you will have to setup your shots manually. There are clever and easy ways to create Houdini templates for your show/shot but we will leave this topic for future posts.

To bring your assets as alembic caches just create a file node, step inside and replace the existing file for another file node pointing to your alembic cache, or just use the existing file node and change the path to read you alembic cache.

If you are look-deving a character lets say, it is completely fine to look at the full geometry in the viewport. If you are assembling a big scene like a city or a space ship you’d probably want to change your viewport settings to something like bounding boxes. There are better ways of dealing with bounding box without loading the geo, more to come soon.

Assets are usually complex and we try to keep everything tidy and organised by naming everything properly and structuring groups and hierarchies in a particular way that makes sense for our purposes. The unpack node will allow you to access to all the different parts and componentes of the alembic caches and to perform different operations later on. The groups can be selected based on the hierarchies created in Maya or based on wildcards. It is extremely important to use a clever naming and structuring groups following certain logic to make the assembly process easier and faster.

The blast node will help you also to access to the information contained in the alembic cache and remove whatever you don’t need to use for a particular operation. You can also invert the selection to keep the items that you wrote in the group field and get rid of the rest.

The group node is another very useful node to point to different groups in your alembic caches. Again based on Maya grouping and wildcards.

That is it for now in that sense, there are many ways to manipulate alembic caches but we don’t need to talk about that just yet. In these first posts I will be talking mostly about bringing assets, working with textures and look-dev. That is the first step for assembling a shot, we need assets ready to travel trough the pipeline.

Uv mapping is key for us, a lot of tasks performed in Houdini use procedural UVs or no UVs at all. This is not the case for us. Asset always have proper UV mapping. Generally speaking you will do all the UV related tasks in Maya, UV Layout or similar tools. In order to see the UVs in Houdini we need to unpack the alembic cache first, then we will be able to press “5” and look at the UVs.

Use a quick uv shade node to display a checkered texture in the viewport. You can easily change the size of the checker or use a different texture. There is also a group field that you can use for filtering.

Not ideal but if you are working on extremely simple assets like walls, grounds, maybe terrains, it is totally fine to create the UVs in Houdini. Houdini UV tools are not the best but you will find yourself using them at some point. The uv texture node crates basic projections like cylindrical, orthographic, etc.

The uv unwrap node create automatic UVs based on projection planes.

The uv layout node is a tools for packing your UVs. Using a fixed scale you can distribute the UVs in different UDIMs.

The auto uv node is actually pretty good. It is part of the game development tools shipped with Houdini. You need to activate this package first, just go the shelf, click on the plus button and look for game development tools. Then click on the icon update toolset to get the latest version.

The auto uv tools has different methods for UVing and for packing, it is worth trying them, it works really well specially with messy objects.

The uv transform node deals with anything related to moving, translating and rotating UVs. You don’t really want to do this here in Houdini, but if you have to, this is the tool. I use it a lot if I need to re-distribute UDIM tiles.

Attribute create node (with the following parameters) allos you to create a parameter to move UVs to a specific UDIM. Then add a uv layout node and set the packing method to UDIM attribute.

Mixing displacement and multiple bump maps /  by Xuan Prada

A very common situation when look-deving an asset is combining various displacement and bump maps. Having them in different texture maps gives you the possibility to play with them and making very fast changes without going back to Mari and Zbrush and waste a lot of time going back and forward until reaching the right look. You also want to keep busy your look-dev team, of course.

While ago I told you how to combine different displacement maps coming from different sources, today I want to show you how to combine multiple bump maps, with different scales and values. This is a very common situation in vfx, I would say every single asset has at least one displacement layer and one bump layer, but usually, you would have more than one. This is how you can combine multiple bump layers in Maya/Arnold.

  • The first thing I'm going to do is add a displacement layer. To make this post easy I'm using a single displacement layer. Refer back to the tutorial I mentioned previously on this post to mix more than one displacement layer.
  • Now connect your first bump map layer as usual. Connecting the red channel to the bump input of the shader.
  • in the hypershade create a file texture for your second bump layer. In this case a low frequency noise.
  • Create an avergage node and two multiply nodes.
  • Connect the red channel of the first bump layer to the input 1 of the multiply node. Control the intensity of this layer with the input 2 of the multiply node.
  • Repeat with previous step with the second bump layer.
  • Connect the outputs of both multiply nodes to the inputs 3D0 and 3D1 of the average node.
  • It is extremely important to leave the bump depth at 1 in order to make this work.

Clarisse shading layers: Crowd in 5 minutes /  by Xuan Prada

One feature that I really like in Clarisse are the shading layers. With them you can drive shaders based on naming convention or location of assets in the scene. With this method you can assign shaders to a very complex scene structure in no time. In this particular case I'll be showing you how to shade an entire army and create shading/texturing variations in just a few minutes.

I'll be using an alembic cache simulation exported from Maya using Golaem. Usually you will get thousand of objects with different naming convention, which makes the shading assignment task a bit laborious. With shading layer rules in Clarisse we can speed up a lot this tedious process

  • Import an alembic cache with the crowd simulation through file -> import -> scene
  • In this scene I have 1518 different objects.
  • I'm going to create an IBL rig with one of my HDRIs to get some decent lighting in the scene.
  • I created a new context called geometry where I placed the army and also created a ground plane.
  • I also created another context called shaders where I'm going to place all my shaders for the soldiers.
  • In the shaders context I created a new material called dummy, just a lambertian grey shader.
  • We are going to be using shading layers, to apply shaders globally based on context and naming convention. I created a shading layers called army (new -> shading layer).
  • With the pass (image) selected, select the 3D layer and apply the shading layer.
  • Using the shading layer editor, add a new rule to apply the dummy shader to everything in the scene.
  • I'm going to add a rule for everything called heavyArmor.
  • Then just configure the shader for the heavyArmour with metal properties and it's correspondent textures.
  • Create a new rule for the helmets and apply the shader that contains the proper textures for the helmets.
  • I keep adding rules and shaders for different parts of the sodliers.
  • If I want to create random variation, I can create shading layers for specific names of parts or even easier and faster, I can put a few items in a new context and create a new shading rule for them. For the bodies I want to use caucasian and black skin soldiers. I grabbed a few bodies and place them inside a new context called black. Then create a new shading rules where I apply a shader with different skin textures to all the bodies in that context.
  • I repeated the same process for the shields and other elements.
  • At the end of the process I can have a very populated army with a lot of random texture variations in just a few minutes.
  • This is how my shading layers look like at the end of the process.

UDIM workflow in Nuke /  by Xuan Prada

Texture artists, matte painters and environment artists often have to deal with UDIMs in Nuke. This is a very basic template that hopefully can illustrate how we usually handle this situation.

Cons

  • Slower than using Mari. Each UDIM is treated individually.
  • No virtual texturing, slower workflow. Yes, you can use Nuke's proxies but they are not as good as virtual texturing.

Pros

  • No paint buffer dependant. Always the best resolution available.
  • Non destructive workflow, nodes!
  • Save around £1,233 on Mari's license.

Workflow

  • I'll be using this simple footage as base for my matte.
  • We need to project this in Nuke and bake it on to different UDIMs to use it later in a 3D package.
  • As geometry support I'm using this plane with 5 UDIMs.
  • In Nuke, import the geometry support and the footage.
  • Create a camera.
  • Connect the camera and footage using a Project 3D node.
  • Disable the crop option of the Project 3D node. If not the proejctions wouldn't go any further than UV range 0-1.
  • Use a UV Tile node to point to the UDIM that you need to work on.
  • Connect the img input of the UV Tile node to the geometry support.
  • Use  a UV Project node to connect the camera and the geometry support.
  • Set projection to off.
  • Import the camera of the shot.
  • Look through the camera in the 3D view and the matte should be projected on to the geometry support.
  • Connect a Scanline Render to the UV Project.
  • Set the projection model to UV.
  • In the 2D view you should see the UDIM projection that we set previously.
  • If you need to work with a different UDIM just change the UV Tile.
  • So this is the basic setup. Do whatever you need in between like projections, painting and so on to finish your matte.
  • Then export all your UDIMs individually as texture maps to be used in the 3D software.
  • Here I just rendered the UDIMs extracted from Nuke in Maya/Arnold.

RAW lighting and albedo AOVs in Arnold /  by Xuan Prada

If you are new to Arnold you are probably looking for RAW lighting and albedo AOVs in the AOV editor. And yes you are right, they are not there. At least when using AiStandard shaders.
The easiest and fastest solution would be to use AlShaders, they include both, RAW lighting and albedo AOVs. But if you need to use AiStandard shaders, you will have to create your own AOVs quite easily).

  • In this capture you can see available AOVs for RAW lighting and albedo for the AlShaders.
  • If you are using AiStandard shaders you won't see those AOVs.
  • If you still want/need to use AiStandard shaders, you will have to render your beauty pass with the standard AOVs and utility passes and you will have to create the albedo pass by hand. You can easily do this replacing AiStandard shaders by Surface shaders.
  • if we have a look at them in Nuke they will look like these.
  • If we divide the beauty pass by the albedo pass we will get the RAW lighting.
  • We can now modify only the lighting without affecting the colour.
  • We can also modify the colour component without modifying the lighting.
  • In this case I'm color correcting and cloning some stuff in the color pass.
  • With a multiply operation I can combine both elements again to obtain the beauty render.
  • If I disable all the modification to both lighting and color, I should get exactly the same result as the original beauty pass.
  • Finally I'm adding a ground using my shadow catcher information.

Import UDIMs in Zbrush /  by Xuan Prada

One of the most common tasks once your colour textures are painted is going to Zbrush or Mudbox to sculpt some heavy details based on what you have painted in your colour textures.
We all use UDIMs of course, but importing UDIMs in Zbrush is not that easy. Let's see how this works.

  • Export all your colour UDIMs out of Mari.
  • Import your 3D asset in Zbrush and go to Polygroups -> UV Groups. This will create a polygroups based on UDIMs.
  • With ctrl+shift you can isolate UDIMs.
  • Now you have to import the texture that corresponds to the isolated UDIM.
  • Go to Texture -> Import. Do not forget to flip it vertically.
  • Go to Texture Map and activate the texture.
  • At this point you are only viewing the texture, not applying it.
  • Go to Polypaint, enable Colorize and click on Polypaint from texture.
  • This will apply the texture to the mesh. As it's based on polypaint, the resolution of the texture will be based on the resolution of the mesh. If it doesn't look right, just go and subdivide the mesh.
  • Repeat the same process for all the UDIMs and you'll be ready to start sculpting.

Export from Maya to Mari /  by Xuan Prada

Yes, I know that Mari 3.x supports OpenSubdiv, but I've had some bad experiences already where Mari creates artefacts on the meshes.
So for now, I will be using the traditional way of exporting subdivided meshes from Maya to Mari. These are the settings that I usually use to avoid distortions, stretching and other common issues.

Combining Zbrush and Mari displacements in Clarisse /  by Xuan Prada

We all have to work with displacement maps painted in both Zbrush and Mari.
Sometimes we use 32 bits floating point maps, sometimes 16 bits maps, etc. Combining different displacement depths and scales is a common task for a look-dev artist working in the film industry.

Let's see how to setup different displacement maps exported from Zbrush and Mari in Isotropix Clarisse.

  • First of all, have a look at all the individual displacement maps to be used.
  • The first one has been sculpted in Zbrush and exported as .exr 32 bits displacement map. The non-displacement value is zero.
  • The second one has been painted in Mari and exported also as .exr 32 bits displacement map. Technically this map is exactly the same as the Zbrush one, the only difference here is the scale.
  • The third displacement map in this exercise also comes from Mari, but in this case it's a .tif 16 bits displacement map, which means that the mid-point will be 0,5 instead of zero.
  • We need to combine all of them in Clarisse and get the expected result.
  • Start creating a displacement node and assigning it to the mesh.
  • We consider the Zbrush displacement as our main displacement layer. That said, the displacement node has to be setup like the image below. The offset or non-displacement value has to be zero, and the front value 1. This will give us exactly the same look that we have in Zbrush.
  • In the material editor I'm connecting a multiply node after every single displacement layer. The input 2 is 1.1.1 by default. Increasing or reducing this value will control the strength of each displacement layer. It is not necessary to control the intensity of the Zbrush layer unless you want to do it. But it is necessary to reduce the intensity of the Mari displacement layers as they are way off compared with the Zbrush intensity.
  • I also added an add node right after the 16 bits Mari displacement subtracting the value -0.5 in order to remap the value at the same level than the other 32 bits maps with non-displacement value of zero.
  • Finally I used add nodes to mix all the displacement layers.
  • It is a good idea to setup all the layers individually to find the right look.
  • No displacement at all.
  • Zbrush displacement.
  • Mari high frequency detail.
  • Mari low frequency detail.
  • All displacement layers combined.