The Wanderer

Hi Everyone! I will be creating an in-depth blog on how I was able to use the foundry's Mari, with substance painter, to make my textures for RIGB. The nice thing about this asset was that all of the UVS have been laid out perfectly to get a really nice mesh map resolution. After reviewing the model, I export the mesh and take it into substance painter. Once in, I go set up the mesh map area to have the udim maps ready to be imported into Mari. I went a little high in the resolution for the ambient occlusion and curvature (8K to be exact) to get crisp areas on the edges and crevices. After that the other map I grab is an ID layout so when RIGB goes into Mari, I have the selections needed for the material layout. 

Once I got all the maps I needed, I jumped over to Mari, got my file set up, and imported all of my maps to make custom procedural masks for it. For RIGB, a majority of the textures for it were in how the color was going to be laid out. The entirety of the robot has a raw steel material to show through where the painted metal is scratched or worn off. To make sure everything gets laid out correctly with the objects of the robot, I had a blueprint blue laid over to get the painted color set. With the blueprint blue, I was able to make a better material for the paint. Through this project, I used the PXR teapot as a general lookdev asset to see what my custom materials look like over an object. 

In Mari, I set up all of the object IDs to use with RIGB. Once that is completed, I save the nodes with a radio node, a node that is used to recall the saved textures, and put them anywhere in your graph.  Along with the IDs, I take the ambient occlusion and curvature and pair the maps with custom procedurals so I can have dusty areas, scratched surfaces, and worn-out painted areas. 

My pure Ref for this project was pretty simple. I had a good idea of what type of environment I wanted to have RIGB in, so I only had a couple of inspo pics. For the graffiti that I wanted to do on his feet, I wanted to see how general street art is done on box cars. I wanted to have a general overlay of tags on RIGB's feet to make it seem like, through its travels, graffiti starts to build up slowly over time.

With this next section, I want to go through the different areas of my Mari graph to break down my texturing process for laying out color, dirt, etc. By using radio nodes to make the graph connections easier, I can add a good amount of detail by only using a couple of nodes and merging each layer on top of the other. 

Once I decided on the painted metal layout, I went to the custom procedurals that I generated from the curvature and occlusion and began seeing how I could see how I could make the raw metal peer through the painted metal. 

At this point in the project, I liked how the color looked, but I felt that it was too dark. I went back through my reference to see if there were any other hues similar to what I wanted to go for. 

I was very happy with the updated color. I think that it was a good change and allowed more areas with dirt and wear to be visible. Once I made this change, I updated some of the raw metal areas so that there was a color change there as well. 

These slight tweaks made the rest of the project much easier from here. After this step, it's on to graffiti. I used quixel graffiti scans on RIGB to get a unique layout over its feet. The layering I  wanted to do was to have a big tag act as a base for an area, then slowly have differing colored tags layered on top with varying roughnesses. When applying the tags, it's the same process as doing the other parts of the robot. I import the materials needed, manually paint the areas where the graffiti will be, and merge it back into the rest of the color. 

This was my favorite part of the whole project! I always wanted to see how mega scan decals could be applied in Mari. It was something that wasn't a big area on the robot but helped tell its story of time and seeing different places and having unique things like graffiti affect the surface. At this point, I save my Mari file and bake out the detail so my Mari file doesn't get too big and try and calculate all of that data, so I export and bring it into Maya to do test renders in my stock lookdev scene. One thing one may notice going through the renders in this blog is that some of them are in different lighting scenarios. I wanted to keep my lookdev in neutral lighting but have a variety of different neutral lookdev HDRIs to see how the specular and metalness change. 

With the base color being done, I can use the radio nodes to connect to specific parts of my color and use them in the specular roughness channel. Most of the data from the color channel was already acting as a mask to particular areas, so I used the same data to alter the roughness slightly. I use the RIGB IDs I made in substance painter to make specific areas shinier than others. Within Mari, I am able to follow the same node process I did with the color, just work in value and merge each iteration on top of each other.

With this project, I wanted to do more material layering on RIGB to see how I could use different materials with each other to get better-looking displacements and roughnesses. I created a mud grime material that I wanted to place over RIGB to show more weathering on him and blend it into other shinier areas on the robot. I thought the material just placed over the PXR teapot looked so cool!

A big area I wanted this mud to be layered was around the graffiti. I combined procedurally generated masks with some custom painting I did in areas over the robot in general to create a mud grime pass. In the Mari graph, I was able to reuse almost all of my custom masks to create a pretty good mud pass that has subtle intensity over the whole robot. 

Once done with the feet, I went to the rest of the body to paint specific areas I wanted more custom grime. 

After this stage, I am able to do a final export of all of my texture maps and get ready for Maya!

Once in Maya, I wanted to make RIGB feel like it belonged in some open environment with a track going through it. With the level of detail, RIGB has in its model, pairing it with quixel mega scans seemed like a must! This was my first time using quixel mega scans to create a desert-like environment. While doing this project, I learned more about Arnold's powerful stand-ins and utilized MASH networks to mass scatter various rocks and plants. I kept the scatter close to the camera to help fill the lower half to draw your eye to RIGB. Having a filled environment allows the eye to travel to my desired area while having a natural setting around it. 

Shoutout to quixel mega scams, Arnold stand-ins, and MASH networks because my scene got over a million polygons really fast, LOL! The stand-ins allowed me to get creative with the environment layout and create something layered well in the camera. The final render above these ten progress renders would ultimately be the pass I render AOVs with and import into NukeX for a little compositing. 

Maya viewport to final multipass AOV render. I also added an atmosphere volume to help give the background that little level of depth needed before the comp. 

I only wanted to make a couple of additions to the overall render heading into nuke so it doesn't jump out of the rule requirements. For my Maya render, some of the AOVs I included to comp a little were a Z-depth pass, direct and indirect for diffuse and spec, and an N and P pass. The main thing that I wanted to add to this comp was to give the lights a little more life, along with the starry sky and the lights of RIGB's eyes. 

For the AOV graph, I utilized the pre-made AOV shuffle template that Nuke ships with, and then I added any other passes onto the B channel that I needed if it was getting tweaked. Once all of my AOVs were included, I made some minor additions to help elevate the render. I added a vignette using a copy rectangle node connected with a rotoscoped circle around the scene. Since I was going for a more nighttime look, the minor vignette was an excellent choice to add a slight focus to RIGB in the center of the frame. Other elements I added were taking the P pass and using it to control how much focus was going to go into the foreground areas so that the focus helps draw the viewer's eye up. The last few things I did were lens distorting the render a little so it feels like it was shot through an actual lens, along with adding some Kodak grain on top to split the RGB channels a little and help blend the environment more with the nighttime. Lastly, since Maya renders out in ACES, nuke has a colorspace node that can switch the final output to ACES if I want to. Now that I am done with the project, I finally added the Autodesk and Rookies logos to my final render.

This was my first ever Rookies challenge, and I am so thankful that I was able to get a finished product for the deadline. It was an amazing experience, and I definitely want to do more awesome challenges hosted by the rookies. I learned so much about utilizing references more and trying to get a good environment layout for general composition. I hope everyone likes it!!!

Thank you so much!