Leather: Final digital sculpting - Maya Tutorial

- [Instructor] Here in our start file in Mudbox, and we need to finish up our bump map. So what does that mean? Well, we do need to add a few more just large cracks and we also can add a little bit more digital sculpting using bump maps. Let's take a look at how we can do that. Let's first create a new bump layer. I'm actually just going to then hide my other layers. The other two that we created was the high frequency leather grain and the medium size cracks that we have. Now, in here what we would like to do is if we zoom in to our image plane here, especially along our armrest, you can see how that leather is cracking more than we were able to get into the sculpt with the resolution of the model. So, let's take this particular paint layer with bump mapping, grab our brush, and we'll do a black color with about that size, that'll work. Make sure there's no stamp and I'm also gonna make sure my stamp spacing is at zero. If I just come in here and start drawing on this layer, you can see I can actually cut into the material. Now you're not actually changing the surface properties. You're only going in and adding very minute kind of highlights and shadows, so we'll undo that. We will come in and grab our strength and turn this way down. If you come in here, you can see you can easily start adding these little fine details in the leather grain just by coming in with a really, really kind of a light brush and turn that forward. Now, if you want them to come out instead of being pushed in 'cause right now we have a black color, if you hold down the Control key, I'm gonna actually bring up my strength a little bit here. We'll draw one line in, move our camera here. Hold Control, it'll actually draw it the other way, so it'll actually look like it's coming towards us, so you can real quickly come in with an object like this and start adding in some of this detail of where leather would start to pull and have this tensity on the surface material or the surface of that leather. It's a really good way to kind of come in and add that extra little bit of detail. You're not just gonna be able to get necessarily with a straight sculpt, those resolution constraints that you have sometimes with how many polygons you can actually have can become problematic with that. This is a great way to come in and just add a little bit more of that detail right across that surface. If we bring our other two cracks back on, you can see it's gonna go right over these. If we come in and start pulling the leather right along this edge here, you can see what we're getting and we can add in a little bit more cracking right here where that leather is pulling on the edge. The nice part about this is even if you go a little heavy handed with it like I did right there, you can just come right back in here with a layer mask and paint that out, so you don't actually ever lose any of that information. We just come in and kinda tone those areas back just a little bit and then start pulling that out. What you're gonna wanna do here is come in and look at the reference image, especially along this edge right here and you can see how that is not just a straight line and how we can come in with our paint layer with a nice sized brush here and kinda start pulling some bumpiness out. You can also come in and start adding a little bit more in terms of surface along here, so you can see how there's a couple little dents back here in the leather, so we'll go with a little bit of a larger brush and just kind of push those in. A lot of times with these bumps, you do wanna make sure you see the highlights of them as you're going through. We can just real quickly add all of this extra detail that you just didn't have maybe in the original sculpt. That's the first layer that we're gonna go through and add. This does take a lot of time, this will be the majority of your time when you're painting the bump map. So this first couple of layers are very, very quick, just getting that base high frequency detail. Each one of these little cracks here, we're actually gonna turn these other ones off. It's easier to paint these in without all that other detail knowing that they're gonna show up when we turn them back on. Come in here with just a really light brush, bring down out brush size significantly so we can start getting more of a crack or a tighter pull from the tensity of the leather being pulled into these button holes. And again, every once in a while, just hold down Control and have that bump map switch on you so it looks like it's being pulled out instead of being pushed in. We'll just go around each one of these. Again, takes quite a bit of time to get through this for the whole model, so you are gonna wanna just take your time, go through each one of these, and start adding in these extra little details to your bump map. The other thing that you're gonna wanna add are possible larger cracks, so let's add one more paint layer here. Let's go stencil, and this time, I'm gonna bring in another stencil and just bring this one called crack. It's very similar to the one we had before, but it's just one large crack instead of lots of little ones. Again, you're gonna hold down S and we're gonna make that a little bit bigger so you can see it. I'm just gonna selectively come in and put this crack where I want it and paint that on. Let's turn the tiles off here. I'm gonna hold down S and use the left mouse button and you can see how you can rotate it to match up what you're looking for. Again, the way this is gonna work is it's going to paint in the white areas. So if I come in here with a paintbrush of black like we've got and start painting that into that new layer, you'll see that it kind of gives us an odd result up front. With the stencils you do wanna be careful. This is pulling forwards instead of pushing in. Let's undo that with Control + Z, bring that crack back over here and take a look at what we can do. We could take it into Photoshop and invert it, but you can also come over here to the stencils and just invert the values and paint the same thing. Now when we come in, we get a nice thick crack right there which we have hand placed. We can come over here, tilt it a little bit more, see maybe we want that one going along, right along in here. And again, just kinda painting that right there. Again, just kind of offsetting these is really all you have to do so we don't see that repeating pattern and we can get away with using just one image for this. I'm gonna take, again, the next few minutes to go through and start looking for these areas that really need that extra detail. A majority of them are gonna be right here in the armrest, right through here on our reference image. Let me go over here real quick and hide our objects so I can just talk about those real fast. We'll turn off our chair back, hit Q to hide that as well, and take a look, so you can see there's lots of information in these cracks and distortions along that surface property right there on the armrest. Right in here where the leather is pulling. We can also see some down here where the leather is being wrapped under and then stapled on. There's some random surface distortion that's going around here, little bit of a fold right in there. And then you could come up and take a look and see around each one of these leather flaps and how they're tucked under where they're at. Just go through and start adding that kind of detail to your particular model. I'm gonna stop here and when we come back, I'll show you what I've got. Okay, so back in Mudbox here, we have finished up all of our bump mapping. I'm just gonna walk you real quickly through what I've got and it is literally just the same process over and over and over again. We're just gonna build each layer of this bump displacement up and just put it on top of each other. Let's go through and turn all of these layers off and then just talk about each one of them. The very first layer down here at the very bottom is just a base gray. I literally just flood the entire object here with this base gray so that all the other layers will go on top of it because we're going to play with their strengths and in the end, when we export it, we need that in there. Next we went through and we did our leather grain. We put that on really, really heavy early on and went through, and if we turn that back up, you can see it looks terrible at its regular strength level but again, it's very, very simple to come in with the strength value and pull these back down. Next with that one we have our layer mask, which is going to isolate it in certain areas and allow us to have that fine nit control that we need on our base leather grain. The next was those medium cracks. So we went through with that and added those medium cracks across our surface using a stencil that we found online that was actually just cracks of mud, but the pattern was exactly what I was looking for. We'll turn that back down to the number six here in its strength and we also have that layer mask. These layer masks make this process very, very simple when you can just go heavy handed on whatever it is you're painting just to get it down onto the object and then being able to isolate that back in. The next layer here was our sculpting bumps. Going through and adding the extra cracks and pulls in the leather. Those are actually much easier to do if you isolate them down to their base layer here so you can actually see when this isolates in what is being added to that. And so just some bumps in the leather itself, going through each one of these kind of divot holes and adding a little bit more pull and tension on that leather is really what we were looking for with that. The next layer here was just actually some extra cracks along this front part here, right along the base here. If we go down into our reference image, you can see these longer, thinner cracks running right along there. And then the last one I added was just some vertical cracks. If we look at the reference image in the back, you can see these vertical lines coming down through all of the leather. As I turn that on and off, you'll actually start to be able to see this kind of vertical line bump mapping that we have on there. Honestly, how I did that was I used this stencil right here inside of Mudbox and just lined it up and tiled it, and then just painted it right into this vertical cracks area or layer, as I went through. We can turn that up and you can see how intense it was at the base level and then honestly, I just brought it down to find that right strength. In this particular model, starting with the bump map is really advantageous. The reason for that is the leather grain is more important than the color, that dye that they use to get the leather to look its certain way and the wear and tear is all gonna be based off of these patterns that we just created with the high frequency leather and all of the cracks. Now that we have all of this completed, we'll be able to move into painting that color and really start bringing this chair to life.