BACKDROP: Recently, I upgraded my substance designer license on one of my older computers. Everything seemed to go smoothly, until I realized that nearly all of my old graphs were loading in with "Ghost Nodes" . " Ghost nodes are placeholders for whatever node that substance can't find. They don't seem like that big of a deal but when you have a ghost node in your graph, it can seriously screw up your output results. For the most part, replacing Ghost nodes in Substance is a breeze, you open up your graph  and get a prompt from Substance telling you that it could not find "the" node and asking you if you'd like to pull it from a new location. When you have a realtively small graph and only a few Ghost nodes, this method works well enough. For larger graphs however, this task can become quite repetitive, because you have to load in the reference graph for every individual ghosted node, even if you fixed the reference to the same exact node ea...

This "little" tutorial will go through the process of creating fins and fin shapes using curves and surfaces in Maya. I found this method to be the most "accurate"while building out the spiny shapes of fins in my current project, and thought I'd share my process. The tutorial below is broken down into three parts and will cover the basics of working with Curves in Maya. A. Building the Main Shape B. Creating the Spines C. Lofting Fin Shapes I will be diving into detail about certain tools in Maya. In this tutorial, I will go over using Live surfaces, converting edges to curves, lofting surfaces, converting nurbs to polygons, extrusions and moving constraints like snap to curve and snap to vertex. A. Building The Main Shape. Create a base curve . The base curve should match the center line of your mesh. This will define where the fin shape will start. If you have a mesh that is already topologized with a clean center line, extracting a curve f...

When Using Mental-ray, your materials could disappear from your imported assets. Thankfully, just deleting namespaces can fix this issue This addresses an issue that I started noticing in Maya when using Mental ray . I noticed that when importing geo files with materials assigned to them ( .fbx or . ma) I was loosing access to my shading groups through the attribute editor. which meant I couldn't directly select my material in the Attribute Editor after grabbing my object in the Viewport. I knew the materials were still assigned. When I rendered the scene , the information was still there. When I went to the hypershade, I was was able to right-click on a material and choose " Select Objects with Material" and the objects with the Material would light up in my view-port. The material was still attached so why could't I edit it in my attribute editor?! It turns out that there is a very simple solution to this. While I can't give a definitive explanati...

This tutorial goes over how you can connect your new tile-able texture into a vray mtl and play with the settings to create a material that acts like fish scales.  1.) Setting up your Material.  Scales are more complex than we think. They have a level of iridescence , subsurface scattering and micro- specular detail to them that is hard for our eyes to see. These three attributes make all the difference when trying to pull off an interesting and believable scale material. Lets call them cornerstone attributes.  Exploring cornerstone attributes of scales:  This section will go over the definitions of the cornerstone attributes of fish scales. It will brush a little on the biology of fish and how we can use this information when building our material, Feel free to skip this section if biology isn't you thing. :)  Iridescence :  Iridescence basically occurs when the hue shifts with the angle of observation (...

Today, I wanted to share my process for creating a seamless, scale-able material that can either be projected onto Zbrush models or applied as materials to UV'd models inside of programs like Maya and 3Ds Max. I used this when creating my unique stylized scale surfaces. You can find breakdowns for them here : Stylized Scale Materials This is a tutorial that will be split into four parts. Below is an outline on what we will cover.  This post will be addressing part 1.            Part 1:  Approaching Scales and Creating a Pattern.           Part 2:  Refining your pattern in Zbrush.           Part 3: Creating a compelling and believable scale Material inside of Maya I will be using the following programs to create my Scale material : Adobe Photoshop (optional) , Adobe Illustrator (optional), Zbrush , Vray and Maya.  Part 1: Approaching and Creating A Pattern ...

In part I of this tutorial, I went over my process for creating a tile- able texture mask using photoshop and illustrator. We ended with how different applied effects done in photoshop could alter the basic outcome a sculpted tile inside of Zbrush. In this lesson, I want to go over how to apply that texture in Zbrush and then further refine it using Zbrush's robust sculpting tools and a combination of masking techniques. While I will personally be working with a mask that I did indeed create in photoshop, this process can be easily applied and used without having a mask at all.  We will go over some helpful tips and hints that can help us keep our texture seamless and furthermore, expedite the sculpting process so that we can get great results with less effort.  For this tutorial, you will need the following programs : Zbrush. If you created a seamless pattern from the first part of this document, then be sure to have that file as well!  Setting up y...