Create a Spider-verse Halftone Shader in Maya

1. Course Introduction: Hi, my name is Lucas Ridley and welcome to this class on how to create a spider vershader and Autodesk Maya. In this class, we're going to recreate this half-tone shader using Arnold in Maya. We're going to use half-tones and cross hatches to achieve this effect, that's inspired by the Spiderman movie into the spider verse. Hopefully you've taken some of my other Maya classes and have a little bit of experience in Autodesk Maya because this is a more advanced class. Well, you'll also have all the project files that I use in this course so you can follow along. Thanks for watching and I look forward to seeing you in class. 2. Highlight Mask: Welcome to the first lesson in this course. I wanted to give a brief overview of how we're going to create the shader really quickly. We're basically going to have three different networks that come together at the end. We're going to create the highlights, the midtones and then the shadows. Then we're going to pipe these in together into one shader. It'll be a lot of networks within here, and a lot of connections that'll get a little complicated but I'll walk you through step-by-step how to make it so you'll understand exactly why and how to do everything. But most importantly, why are we doing and using the nodes that we're using in this network in here? This is where the magic happens and how we will create the shader. Let's jump right in into a new scene in Maya. I'm going to open up this crab scan. It's from 3Dscans.com, which has a lot of scans that are good and have no copyright restrictions on them, so you can use them for whatever you want. We have this crab, I'm just going to lift it up off the ground a little bit and make a ground plane real quick. There might be some steps I skip through a little bit because this is a more advanced tutorial. Saying the poly modeling shelf is over here and click the plane and all that stuff, I might just not say it as much because hopefully you've taken my other classes by now and you are an intermediate or advanced user. I want that plane because I want to be able to see the shadows later and also show you how that line works on the toon shader, because if it's just black behind the object, you can't actually see the outline of that. But the outline itself is going to come at the very end. Even though we're using the toon shader, we're not going to see the outline until the very end of the shader network, because we need to put all that stuff together and then we'll put the edge on top of that. The first thing we need to do is to create a toon shader. I'm going to select the crab, right-click go to Assign New Material. Then I'm going to choose an Arnold aiToon. Then the first thing we're going to do is open up the hyper shade. What we're going to do is use the toon shader is basically a mask. We want to constrict. When we're doing the highlight, the midtone, the shadow, we're going to use a mask with a ramp to control each one of these, the highlight, the midtone, and the shadow are each going to have their own ramp that's going to control the mask of where those things should be shown on the model. For us to be able to show that we actually need a light. Let's create a light super quick, just so we can see this once we start testing the render, I'm just going to use a directional light and I can't emphasize enough. Lighting is incredibly important to this effect. You really want to know how this thing is built, because as soon as you get this in a new lighting situation, you're going to need to dig in and adjust some settings in the shader so it works in the halftones are showing up where you want them, because it's very light dependent. For right now I'm just going to use a directional light set at, intensity of one. But if I was to crank this up, it would totally change where those masks are going to be because the brighter it is, the bigger the highlight. Right now we're going to create the highlight with that aiToon shader that we just applied to the crap. The crap selected, I'm going to click this little button here to map the aiToon that we just assigned to. Then, the next thing I'm going to do is to add a ramp. I like to hit Tab on my keyboard while my mouse is over this window, to get the search box up. Then just type in ramp and we want the Texture version. We just want the normal, just the run-of-the-mill ramp. I'm going to click drag slide both of those and drag them over here. I'm going to try to keep this stuff big on the screen so you can see it. I'm going to get rid of this because I don't use that any way I like to hit the Tab in this Window. Let's just go ahead and name this stuff from the beginning to help keep this organized. We're going to be working on the highlights. I'm going to call this Highlight_, I'm going to call this Highlight_Mask_. If your lighting situation changes, you're going to need to dig in here and you really want this stuff organized and labeled right so, you can quickly see which node you want to get into to adjust. On this toon shader for the highlight, we're just going to skip the edge options up here at the top, the edge and silhouette. We want to map in this ramp by middle mouse, dragging it into the Tonemap. When we do an Arnold render view, and this is basically the effect we're going to have here in a second. I hit ''Play''. It doesn't look like that, but that's the effect we're going to go for. We have 3D manipulation on here. I'm just going to turn that off so I can reframe this a little bit. I'm going to turn 3D manipulation back on so I can have these side-by-side, I guess it makes it to fit the window, that is okay. We have our hyper shade and we have our render preview. It doesn't look like much is happening and it doesn't even look like a toon shader really, even though we have this toon shader applied. Like I said, this is going to be the mask. We want to use the ramp to control this masked area. As soon as we start dragging the positions of this, you can see we're constricting where the light is affecting it. We're effectively making a mask here. Let me just check something, that toon shader. I want the weight of this to be one. By default it's 0.8 and so, this is why this was looking a little bit gray. I want that to be at one, just to make sure that is getting the full effect of the base color. Right now we are controlling where do we want the halftone of the highlights to show up. If later on like I said, the lighting changes and I'll just show you real quick what I mean by that. We have the light here, and as soon as I start to crank up the intensity, you can see the ramp that we made just now gets jacked up and changed a lot just from barely changing the intensity of the light. You want to be careful with that and definitely understand how the shader is built so that later on, if you need to, you can adjust where the mask is, which we may need to do later on in the course as well. I'm going to try to get this in a good spot. I'll maybe take it down a little bit, the other direction here. I think that's looking pretty good. Of course highlights, shouldn't take up the whole thing, and so I'm trying to reduce it and we can deal with that later. But basically, this is the first step of the process. We've made the mask for the halftone of the highlight. What we're going to use this to do is drive where the halftones are, but also their size. That's why it's important to keep this interpolation between these two positions to be a gradual thing because we're basically going to take the position and color of these into a range node and remap it and we'll get into that in the next lesson. But just know that, you've succeeded, you've made the mask for this and we've created the first step in this network of shaders here, on this step here. We have a lot of steps here to go, to get to where we can combine all of them together. We're going to make the highlight first, in the next series of lessons. Then we'll move on to the midtones and repeat the same process, and same deal for the shadows, but these each are going to be slightly different where it will adjust them so they don't look exactly the same. The highlights and midtones are going to be halftone, and the shadow is going to be cross hatch. What I mean, halftone are the dots and cross hatch is the straight lines. When I talk about knowing how this is made to mess with it yourself, there's a lot of different ways to do cross hatch. One is just, having one directional of lines and the other is to do too. You could have a second network of shadows down here. Now that you know, by the end of this course you'll know how to make these and add them all together. So it's really up to your creative ideas to how you want to combine all this stuff after you learn how to do all of it. Look forward to seeing you in the next lesson where we will actually make the halftone for the highlights and do a little more complicated work in hybrid shade. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson. 3. Highlight Halftones: Welcome back to this lesson. It's going to be the meal of the course. So definitely pay attention, because this is really where we will get into the thick of it. So let me explain what we're going to do first. We're going to make the half tone of the highlights. To do that, we need to remap this color value into a zero to one range, and what that will do, is drive the size of the half-tones. So basically as it gets darker, the size of the half tone gets smaller, and I want to just show you this not a great drawing, but just to visualize it now. Because we're going to build the whole thing out and it's going to be hard to visualize it until we're done with it. So I want to understand what we're about to do, before we start. So you can easily fall along. So let's jump into Maya and then get rid of Photoshop here. So we have the last lesson, where we made the mask, So we have where we want the highlights to be. Now we need to make the actual half tone. So let's jump into the hyper shade and get started. The first thing we need is a range, and so I'm going to hit tab, and type in range, and then we're going to drag the color into the input. So this is the zero to one thing, is happening right here in this node. That's why we have this node. Is that we re-map the output here of this color information into a zero to one space, and the reason why it needs to be 0-1, which might be why 0-1. What's the big deal with that? Big deal of that is the fact that if you look at the selected position here as I move this black knob here to left and right, you can see it goes from 0-1, and that's what we want the 0-1 value to control is the selected position, and it's wanting a 0-1 value. So we needed to give it a 0-1 value and that's what the range will do. It's going to take the color turn into 0-1. So now we can talk to the ramp node, and because it's looking for one value here, we just need to take one of these RGB values, and because we're working in black and white, we can choose any of them because they're all going to be the same as far as the value. So, let's drop that down and then go chewed, I just choose R because it's the first one, and then when I put it on the top of the ramp here because it'll give me some more options. Someone choose other, and then it'll give me a new window, and I'm going to choose the color entry list. It's not named super well. This took me a little while to figure out, because it says select a position here, you would expect it to be called selected position. But that's color entry list controls selected position. So it doesn't really matter which one we choose because we can swap the color round later. If we figure out why we chose the wrong one. But if we look at the white one, you can see the selector position turns yellow, and what that means is that there is a connection now, and that's the connection that we just created. So right now the ramp is actually just the same ramp that we did. It's a linear ramp, we want to circular ramp. So you can see here, it's a circle in the preview, and we don't want it to be a gradual fall off. We want it to be very sharp. Because half-tones, remember this ramp is going to be the half-tones shape, and half-tones have very hard edge. It's very clearly defined edge. So we want to turn the interpolation from linear to none. So now it's a much harder edge. So I'm just going to put that back. So we've made the half tone, we made it circular. We've mapped into zero to one range. So now and again, the whole reason why we're doing the 0-1 thing, is that the size of the half-tones will get smaller as the highlights fade off. So the actual size of them will change. So now we need to take that ramp, and we need to put it into a projection node, and the reason we're doing this is because think about what a half tone is. It's a 2D image. It's based off of comic books and a print artifact, how you suppressed comic books. So we're trying to take this thing that happened on paper, and apply it to a 3D image, and to get that 2D look. We need to make it look like it's flat to the viewer, and to do that, we need to project the half-tones circles, from the view we're viewing from, which is the perspective camera. So we need to project those half-tones from our view, at all times. If we move the camera around, they should always be pointed right back at us. All those little circles should, shouldn't distort around the 3D image. They shouldn't get projected on there, and then as the crab shape model is curved, the circles curve with it. It should always be the half-tones should be perfect circles from the viewer viewing from. So we need to project from our view. So we have the half-tones here, now when he just seemed to project them onto the model. So we're going to take the out color and map it into the projection. Now we need to adjust the projection, because we didn't tell it you know what camera on where to do it. So we need to change the projection type to perspective, and then down here you can see camera projection attributes. So we can drop that down and then choose the camera that we want to protect from. If for some reason you wanted to do a different camera than the perspective, like maybe say you have a naming convention you create new cameras called render camera. However you organize that, that will be shown here. If you create a new camera, there'll be more than one option here. The last thing we need to do is a little wonky. That's this fitful thing. So if this is not set to horizontal, it will be wrong. alright, so the default is set to fill, so that will be wrong, and when I mean wrong, is it'll actually make it look like an oval instead of a circle. I think that just has to do with the aspect ratio of the camera and how it squeezes it to project it. So to fix that, make sure Fit Fill is horizontal. So now the projection is right, and still not applied our model yet. Let's go back to the ramp real quick because if you think about it. This ramp, this one circle, we're projecting just one, and so we need to repeat that. So let's go into the texture placed 2D texture, and just repeat the UV 150 times. So now it will be more than one, and then also think about half-tones. If you see them in comic books and you can look up reference, which is always good to do. I just don't have any offhand here just because I've seen enough comic books, I know what it looks like. But the half-tones are never in rows. So it's always tilted and each row is offset from the next. So to do that, we can rotate the UV is 45 degrees, and we can go back and change these. You actually visually see it here in a second. So the last thing we need to do is get a Mixshader, and we're not going to mix two shaders together, we're just going to use this, to have something to apply to. Because we can't apply the projection just by itself. We need an actual shader to apply to the model. This is considered basically a texture, It's not a shader. So can't really apply a texture to a model. You need a shader. But the texture can go into the shader, which is what we're using the Mixshader for. Now the last step is, and there'll be a few more steps. But the last step for this sequence is to remember, we want to mask out where are the half-tones happening? Because if we just applied that now, it would apply to the whole thing, and we want to mask it out based on the tune shader that we made in the last lesson, in the first lesson. So we can just pipe that into the mix of the shader, and that's why I chose the mixture because it has this nice little mixes. You could think of like an alpha channel basically. Like where's the alpha channel for this shader. So it's looking for one value. So we need to grab one value, and I'm just going to go ahead and tell you right now you need to reverse this. We can, Let's go ahead and reverse it. If you want to see whatnot reversing looks like, you can definitely do that. By having done this, I know we need to reverse this value because, basically, the colors are going to be flipped. We could have gotten around that by doing black instead of white. But in my mind, the highlight is white. When I'm making the masks, I like to see white. That doesn't help the mix later. I just reverse that here. Let's pipe that in there. There'll be a few more things we need to adjust here, but basically we've made the shader and now we can apply it to the model. I'm going to middle mouse drag it onto the model and let go. Check it out. We have the half-tones shader and let me just turn off the three manipulations so we can zoom into the image a little bit. It looks like something is reversed here. It looks like the negative of a photograph. To go in, I mentioned earlier, we could swap the colors here if we chose the wrong one. For selected color, I might change this to white and then I'll choose the other one and turn that to black. Now, we have the white Highlights Working. The other thing we can effect is, and you can also see the size is changing as it falls off. The circles themselves are smaller. The other thing we can do is, go back to the Highlight Mask and bring that out because this is a very narrow. Let me just click this to pull it out. This is a very narrow graduation from black to white. There's not a ton of room here. We're getting a little dirtiness here on the edges because there's not a ton of value and the Mask to express that change. If we took this Mask and we gave it more of a range, it will be a lot smoother transition here. That looks a lot better and we can see the effect better. I can also just move around the camera and you can see that the half-tones are always pointed towards the camera, which is what we wanted to do for the projection. Let me go back through the couple of things that were a little wonky that you might be like, well, why do we do that? The reverse node, if we don't reverse it, it's going to do the opposite of what we want it to do. I'm going to pipe in without reversing. You can see there's this kind of weird negative effect here and it's doing not what we want. It's masking it in the wrong way. If we use the reverse, it'll be how we want it to be. The other thing was the the Feet Fill thing down here and then Projection. If I leave it on the Default, you can see that it stretches the circles a little bit. The other thing that we can change, with this node, that's really columns can change this back to horizontal, so they're actual circles. The other thing we can change that's really cool is the range here. This is going to affect the size of the half-tones. Let's say we want the most highlighted areas to connect. We don't want to see dots, we only want to see dots where it falls off. We can select in the Range Node. Watch it update in real time as I change this. We have the Range Node selected. Remember, this is taking the color of the first tune shader we made and it's mapping it into 0-1. If we take the output mean and let's say 0.1, because what this is saying is, what's the most or I guess the least it'll go down to? Right now, we're saying zero. Actually, we want to say 0.1 because we don't want the circles to ever get down to zero. We want the Mask to do that work. We can also duplicate this Mask out. Because what's happening right now is, these are happening on top of each other at the same time. They're matching. We can duplicate this tune shader in a Duplicate Network. It's a little clunky in Maya, but I go to Edit, Duplicate, Shading Network. Sometimes it actually brings in more than just what you have selected, but this time it worked fine. What I'm referring to here is very minutiae stuff. But I never want to see the Highlights go super, super, tiny, small. I want to get them to be cut off sooner. We can actually use for the Mask this Duplicate here so that this top Mask is actually just driving the size of the half-tone. This gets a little more complicated. If you want to adjust things for lighting, you'll have to adjust two things now. I hesitate to show you this, but if you're curious, this is another advanced thing to add on top of it, is to separate out the Mask from the Mass that's affecting the Highlights. We could take the Duplicate here and use that into the Reverse. Now, we have this separate one. As we change that Mask, let's reduce it down. I bring this out the wrong way. But you can see the effect here. That it never actually gets to zero. That's what the range controlled here because we changed the output minimum from 0-0.1. If we change this to zero, you can see it gets rid of all those little ones. But again, I want the Mask to control where these fall off, not the size itself. I want them always to be on, except where the Mask tells it to be off. I can control that here with the Mask and bring that in a little closer. That's another way to do it. But for clarity sake, and from here on out, I'm not going to do that, but I just wanted to show you that as an option. You can separate those out. Let's take the color and put it back in the input. Now, we have our super cool halftone effect for the Highlights. In the next few lessons, we're going to go through this process again with the midtones and then the shadows. Then we're going to combine all of them together to work within one shader. Thanks for watching, and I will see you in the next lesson. 4. Midtones: Hi and welcome back and in this lesson, we're going to create the same effect, but for the mid tones. What we could do is just copy and duplicate this network we've already made for the highlights but for education purposes, let's recreate it from scratch. I'll work a little quicker just because this'll be a refresher of what we just did in the last lesson. But before we get started on that, let's just tidy this up a little bit and rename the shaders so later when we go in here to adjust things, we can identify the network a little bit better. I'm going to call that highlight, the main ones are, the ramp here. This is going to be the halftones size. I'm going to say the highlight, sorry, not the size but the halftone. The size is controlled by the range as we saw. The other part of that highlight size. The other thing that I didn't show was the, max. We looked at the min and let's take a look at the max, is really the one you probably going to use more than the min, because the min, you're probably going to leave at 0.1, but the max actually controls the size of these. You can see if we go 0.3, they're all pretty uniform. I'd like to try to find a place where there's a good range and the bigger the number, the more values there are to be expressed in that range. The smaller the number, there's less room to express that range. Then if it get too big, they all start to blend together. It depends on what the effect you want to go for, but that's how you control it, is through the range or what we just call it the highlight size, renamed it as. Let us start from scratch on the mid tones and then for that shadows in the next lesson, we will just duplicate that network and then make a few tweaks since I don't want to be repeating information three times, but yeah, if there's a few people who actually totally got that last lesson, then you could maybe even just skip this or duplicate this out and if you understand it super well, you'll know which things to change. But if you need a refresher and just, I'll go through this quicker. For the mid tones, let's jump right in. If my throw would hold up, I'm not used to at work, in animation, you're usually at a desk by yourself and having meetings every once in a while, but you're not talking for extended periods of time. I'm going to hit tab here and I'll choose AI tune and I'm going to just hit stop on that because sometimes when you're applying new shaders to stuff and also trying to catch up, sometimes it'll crash. Let's go ahead and rename this while before we get started here. Let's call this mid tones and let's apply that. Then let's restart this and we can see that again, it's back to normal, even though we have a toon shader, doesn't look very toony. You know we don't need the edge yet, so let me turn that off and then we know when you turn the weight and the base to one and we need to add a ramp to the tone map so I'm going to have that, that's how we're going to get the mask. I'm going select that one middle mouse, drag it into tone map. Now, I can change this to be where I want it. Now, I will say that the difference with, with the mid tones is that we need to clip either side, because in the middle we need something in them. We can't just have two colors, we need three because something needs to be in the middle. This we are trying to find where this white part is and we rotate around so you can actually see where mid tones would exist in the model. Would be obviously, you know, in the middle somewhere where the roll-off starts to occur. Here we go. Starting to get there. That looks to be in the mid tones to me. We don't want to include the highlighted area. Then which would stand to reason and can just clip that a little bit more before it gets into the shadow area here. Actually maybe bring that up just a touch and of course, these are things that you can change later if you find that it's not the right range for you, and the effect you're going for. All right. Remember you can just follow along with the, the top one here, the highlights but let's take that color into the input and then so now we've remapped it. Now we need to make the ramp for this, so remember we need a 150 or so and these numbers could change because we don't want to make them exactly, but 45, but we do want it to be on a 45 angle. You can maybe do a slight variation just to, so it's not perfectly the same, just a circle ramp, none. Let's take one of these and go in the yellow part here, choose, "Other", and then we really want to choose, "Color entry list", doesn't really matter because we can swap the colors of whichever one. Then we need a projection and we need to project it from the camera. We're going to take the color, put it in here, and change all this stuff to be prospective. We want our camera, we want it horizontal and then we want a mix shader. Take the color and the first one and then we need to reverse this tune for our mask. I'm going to take reverse and take the color and then I just need one of these for the mix. I'm going to choose the red put it in the mix. Now, we should have mid-tone half-tones there. If we apply this mix shader, drag and drop it and it looks like we need to swap the colors on this ramp again. I'll just make this one white and this one black and we have half tones and mid tones. The other thing we need to do is just clean this up from a naming wise and we can also try to think, well, yes, so let's take this min to 0.1, even more. Let's see if for the mid tones, curious about having them be a little more uniform and big. It's really whatever you want to do. This is how up to you, how you want to art direct your own and effect here. I do want to change it just a little bit. I don't want to be the exact same as the highlights, so I'm going to make those a little bit bigger and then rename this. We can just find this layer, mid-tone size, and then mid-tone ramp, mid-tone. What do we name the tuples that half, and we say half tone two, then half tone. Just like to keep it consistent, yeah, I might have to admit mid-tone half tone and then mid-tone. All right. That is how quick you can make the shader and you could probably make it even quicker if you're not having to talk at the same time. We've made the mid tones and again, if we find that this isn't how we want the ramp to look, we could always go back into the mask and change that, which I might do a little bit before we depart here. You can really tell the difference here, like we look at this, we can see the distance from here to here is a lot shorter from here to there. If we crank this out, we might be able to get more circles here. The only thing I'm not liking is how this looks good and the back doesn't look good, so I'm wondering if we bring this up more mechanic, give these a little more equidistant room here, helps a little bit. Now we're going to start to see the circles here and I think it also just has to do with this model, if we were to bring in a sphere, it would probably be fine but there is actually a lot of texture on this crab that's disturbing the surface. It's showing different faces, so it's like Highlight, Shadow mid-tone. It's dirty, right? There's a lot of texture there. That's another thing to keep in mind, depending on the model you are putting this on. This might not be the best one to estimate where and how that mid-tone is getting worked on something that's highly textured and if we go look at this model, the actual model, and there's a lot of bumps going on here, so that could actually be affecting it as well. Something to keep in mind but for now, don't see now. That's nice and have the half tone working even in that bumpy area but we had to zoom in quite a bit. Now we know how to make the mid tones and the next lesson we will make the shadows. Thanks for watching. 5. Shadows: Welcome back. Now that we've made the midtones and we've been through this process twice before, let me just going to stop that render. We can actually just duplicate this now, and I can show you which couple of things to change. Hopefully that'll actually maybe helped you understand a little bit better with the most important aspects as far as adjusting it. I've got everything selected that I want to duplicate the entire midtone network here. I'm going to go to Edit, Duplicate, and Shading Network, and so now we have that. We just need to change the names. Let's change all those, shadow size and there's a few tweaks again for the shadow. I want that to be a crosshatch. We're not going to do the halftone. Halftones are the circles, crosshatch are lines, and to do that is a pretty easy tweak. But the first thing we need to do, let's go ahead and apply this first mask here so we can estimate. Sometimes when you drag windows around it thinks you're trying to dock them. Let's apply this first tune shader over here, this one and this whole network. It's the first thing we did to create the mask. So let's apply that and it'll look the same as the midtones because we just copied it. So now we need to apply it to know what we need to change. Let's jump into the ramp, and I'm just going to close that. It looks like something bugged out here, has that selection window thing going on. Let me just close it down super quick and help it refresh. Let's open up the Arnold Render view again. We have this that looks exactly the same as the midtones. We can go into the ramp here, and I'm sure to pop it out by clicking that little arrow here. For the shadows, we don't need three, so we can just get rid of that. For some reason I wanted get rid of that whole thing. We can just flip this around. Let's find out where we want the shadows to be. There's quite a bit of shadows in this because there's only one light in our scene right now. We can change the angle of it. Try to figure out what the plan is, we can increase the intensity, but anyway, I don't want to change the intensity halfway through. I want to keep it consistent, so I'm not going to do that, but I do want to get this down. Let me see if I'm going to make one and do it again. Yeah. It closes that whole window, I don't know why it does that. That's a super buggy thing. Hopefully, doesn't do that for you, that's annoying. For this example, there's quite a bit of shadow because we only have one light. That's the only reason why a lot of this is white and you can't really affect it more than that because the shadow is a pretty definitive thing. I'm going to leave some wiggle room here so that we make sure we get a nice gradation from the thickness of the line. The next thing we need to do, let's go back and add this, the mix shader to the model. We're just going to move this, and middle mouse drag it. Again, you might get confused sometimes with this SG thing that's just the group of the shader and you need that to apply them to models. If you don't have one, it'll usually make one for you. We can see the halftones there. We don't want to halftones remember, we want the lines. So let's go into the shadow halftone and would actually call this crosshatch if we wanted. Let's just rename it to be accurate crosshatch. The thing we needed to change here is instead of circular, let's just go back to the v ramp. We can start to see some of the lines now instead of the circles, we get the straight lines, which works pretty well. Let's go into the AI range and tweak a few things and see if we can. Yeah, here we go. I'm basically just changing the size a little bit to make sure that it doesn't get so thick that it completely covers the shadow area. We want to make sure we see lines all the way through and the thickness of those lines just depends on your personal taste really. We can go back into the 2D texture and maybe point the crosshatch in a different direction than the 45 everything else is going in. I don't want to ride across, just ride 120. I go back to the right. It's pretty cool. Now, we have all three shaders done. Everything's named, so we can identify everything pretty well. In the next lesson, we're going to start to combine all of these together in a way that makes sense and it gives us more control as well over each aspect. But put them all together so we can actually apply them as one shader to an object. Thanks for watching, and I will see you in the next lesson. 6. Combining Everything: Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to tie everything together into one shader that we can apply. How we are going to do that is with a node called the aiR gba shader. The trick with this is you can't actually apply this thing by itself. This out color needs to be piped into another shader, but this is what will combine everything together. What we can do is also choose the colors here. Let's say choose colors as a way to help us remember that. Let's first choose the base color. Let's take a look at the attributes here on the right. We have layer 1, layer 2, layer 3, blah. But the only one that's enabled right now is the top layer. Let's rename that layer to the base color. For right now, let's just choose a red and the default is set to over, the mix is one, that's fine. Now, let's start to layer in our actual half-tones effects. Let's enable the next one. Let's call the Highlight. What we want to do is the highlights to be white. I'm going to change the input from black to white. Then what we need to do is actually use the mix shader out color as same thing we did back here with the mix. We're actually used one of these out colors. Link grab. We're doing the highlights. Let's go to the top here. We're going to use just the R because we just need one value for the mix here on the second input, which is we just call the Highlight. We're going to pipe it in the mix, which is basically going to be the Alpha. What we're going to get, let's just go ahead and apply this layer RGBA to a new shader. I'm going to make a standard surface. I take that back. Because we still need to do the outline, let's go ahead and assign it to a toon shader. We'll say our color is going to be the base color. I'm just going to drop those down and we're going to save that and then turn that back up to one. Now, we actually have something to apply to the model. We have this toon shader because like I said, you can't apply the layer RGBA to it. Let's open up the Arnold RenderView and just see what the first version of this is. We should have the highlights showing up. The reason why they're not is because of the layer RGBA settings here. If you look and if you're familiar with Photoshop very much, you'll understand these concepts a little bit better. But we have these operations, and over is basically going to be like, definitely show me. If you think about what we're showing here, we're taking black and white image and we want to actually screen it, meaning we don't want the black areas to show up. As soon as we hit screen we can see the highlights. How cool is that? We're going to actually start to see this half tone thing take shape. Yeah, just right away I think it looks pretty good. I think we could reduce the number of them. I think we're repeating it like a 150. Let's just go back to the highlight half tone map texture. Here we can see we had 150. Let's do a 100 and 100. You can see that increase the size of the half-tones quite a bit, because there's not as many of them to repeat so we go even more to like 50 and 50. They are way too big. Maybe somewhere in the middle. Let's keep it at 100 for now. But yeah it was the first thing I just noticed, because you start off, they're small you start to lose the effect. You want to be able to see them a little bit. Now, that we changed that, it's like I don't like how much they're bleeding into each other. Again, we know where to do that. Highlight size. Let's reduce the size here to 0.8. Now, we can actually start to see between them, which I feel like we could maybe even go just a touch smaller, 0.7. Yeah, that's a much more subtle, well, not subtle but we didn't notice that effect and it's not all bleeding together. There's the highlight and, it depends on the camera, how far away from camera you are as well. The more we zoom in here, it's projecting on that. It depends on where you're viewing it from as well. But I think that's a happy medium right here. Let's continue on with the mid tones and shadows. We have the base color. We need to enable the next one, which will be the mid tones. The same thing with mid tones, we know we're going to want to screen it. We don't want to see the black areas. Let's do a screen mode here. Then we want to take the R into the mix. You can see there's not one here that happens, that doesn't mean it's not there. We actually just need to pop this down actually. It won't show up. This is like a finicky thing with Maya. What we could do with this selected is just middle mouse, drag this in the mix while you undo that. Yeah, it's being goofy, so no mouse dragging then update. Now, we have mix 1. We just need one of those. Now, it's working. I think we'll probably just leave it as is if it's taking I don't know why it would take all if it's just one value, I guess, because you can pipe in textures there too. But at the end of the day it's going to take a black and white image, I would think, either way. That is set to screen, but where the problem is why we can't see the mid tones is the color's black. If you look at the Spider-Man movie reference, a lot of the mid tones actually have like a blue tint to them. We could just change it to that. Let's see to like a darker blue. Let me spin around here so we can see this. The other thing to keep in mind when we're doing these blend modes is when we're screening, that's going to affect how this gets registered. We may need to tweak things a little bit, especially when something's on red like this and you're screening over it, you're going to get a bit of a blend here. I think the main thing is we need to change some of the mid tone stuff here because it's bleeding in. Let's bring this back to blue. Let's see if we can change the mode here. I think overlay is going to be a little bit better. It might not always be screened depending on the color you choose. You may need to experiment here with all these different blend modes. There's a lot of them. It's hard for me to just tell you exactly what you need to do because I don't know what color you're choosing. You'll just have to experiment with those different operation modes. Back to this, what we did earlier. I think I want to adjust these mid tones and then as to the size as well. That was 1.2. Let's bring it to 1.8. That's looking better. Then the other thing we're going to do, because say we choose that blend mode. We like from but we're like I want to tone it down a little bit. How did we get that control? Let me introduce you to the color corrects node, because when I'm looking at this image, I'm like the color is okay but it's just too much. I want to see it bleed through a little bit so we can actually take the color information into the color correct node, and then pipe it into, you can just take the R, pipe it in here. Now, we have all these other controls. We have these Gamma controls. We can dial it back, the callback changes. Let's see. We want to maybe reduce the contrast that's going to affect it. Again, it depends on the blend mode. I keep saying blend mode, but Maya calls it operation. That you have, but you can change the color. For this instance, we want to dial back, multiply to have some of the red bleed through a little bit. I don't think your ad will just do the whole thing. But that gives an extra layer of control. If you like where it's going but you're running out of options, you have no other way to control it. Add a color correct node before the mix, and then you have more control. Let's do the final one that's going to be the shadows. That is going to end up being multiplied because we want the black to come through. Like I said for a screen, screen means don't show the black. That's the Alpha, but for shadows we want the black so we want to do multiply. Multiply is the opposite, so it doesn't show the highlights or the white parts. For the shadows that's what we want. So let's just pipe it in and see where we're at here. We might have to do the same thing here. There's a little workflow frustration things here with this. It'd be nice if it would show those mixes as soon as we enable it. It really matters where the camera is too, so what you could do if you wanted to get super fancy with this stuff, I don't know if I want to go down this road. But in theory, I think this is beyond this example, man, do I want to show this? It'll make it too complicated, I think for the purposes of this course. But in theory, what you could do is use arc length, constrain a curve, draw a curve from the point of the object and constraint to the object if it moves around. Then the camera, the distance to the camera and use the arc length, which is up here. So under measure tools, arc length tool. So you apply that to a curve, so you get the distance right, or actually you know what? You could use a distance tool too, either way use one of these two. This might be better because it'd be easier maybe to parent the locators from distance tool to the camera and to the object. Then you could use that number from a distance tool to drive the size and the UV repetition of the half-tones so they could, in theory, stay consistent through different camera moves. I'm literally just thinking this up on the fly. As I'm recording this class. I think it's beyond the scope of this class, but if you're an intermediate or advanced user, that should be enough to go off of and tackle that, so that's how I would do that. But for this class, this class is about making the half-tones shader, and that's what we're doing. So sometimes this stuff can snowball and I never get a classmate because it keeps snowballing so I've got to get this done guys. I can't keep adding stuff. So we have that, and so what we're doing is adding the shadows in. So we got those added to the mix, but it's set to over which we don't want, we want it to be multiply. Let's see if that's what we needed to do there. Again, I think the lights maybe not really helping us, but the cool thing is as we move the light around, you can see the shader actually does work. It's real time making adjustments and putting the highlights where they need to be in the mid tones. So that's pretty cool. We're just going to get these shadows figured out so we can actually see them here. I think the issue is the tune shader maybe, but if you zoom in here and how sharp this shadow is, there's not a ton of roll off, so you can see these lines here. Let's jump in to the the ramp of the mask, the original one. So look right here at this edge, the terminus of the shadow here and pop this out. I'm just going to extend this out. You can see the lines go further and further up the model. Again, this is a lighting issue. This could be different for you depending on the lighting conditions. Just for fun this lesson has gone on longer than all the other ones, but just for fun, let's hide the directional light and bring in an area light. Just to show you the big difference here, and to just the difference between a hard light and a soft light. An area light is a soft light so it's going to have different fall off, way different fall off. So let's get this thing as big as the crab because this will really help us see the shadows, I think. So in general, area lights usually need to crank the intensity up. So let's just crank those up. We can start to see it. Yeah. See, there you go. You can see the shadows with this area light a lot better. Check it out, and we got the cross hatch at the mid tones with the highlights. Like I said, with this new lighting situation, the highlights are crazy. So what would we do? We go back in here, we adjust. We take this ramp and add some midtones. We didn't name that ramp. Shame on us. Let's name these Shadow_ramp, Midtone_ramp, and we named the first one. That's the wrong direction. I want to go this way. I'm going to dial back the highlight. Now we have a different light. Pretty quickly we're going to adjust that stuff. I'm going to crank back up the UV repetitions to like 125. I want the circles, the density of them to be greater, so it'll force the overall them to be smaller. Let's do 150. So that's looking better. It's a lot of back and forth and so I'm going to leave that up to you to finish that because you could be working on a different model, different lighting situation. I don't know what you're doing. So I'm trying to give you as many tools as I can so that you can troubleshoot this for yourself. So let me just tweak the midtone super quick to get this in an okay spot for those who are trying to use the scene files that I'm providing with the course. Let's change the size to like the 0.7, and what I'm going for here in my aesthetic is I want the highlights to be smaller, the midtones to be bigger, and then the shadows are just a totally different thing. So that actually looks pretty decent. The last thing we'll do is just to make this lesson crazy long gone. I don't think I'm going to do it. I'm going to do this in the next lesson. This lesson's gotten way too long and out of hand here trying to rein it in. So pretty happy with this, the direction it's going, and hope you have got something similar. Thanks for watching and I will see you in the next lesson. 7. Add Spider Web And Outlines: Welcome back. Let's finish this up with a little Spider-Man touch. I have a image, in the project files, you can use. It's a little bit of a web and so we're going to plug that in into a new camera that we're in a project down on. Let's make that new camera first. New camera, it gives us that camera as a view. Zoom out here. I'm going to zero some of the stuff out so we're centered up on the middle here. Negative 90. Just want to put things in the 90-180 degree realms. Then we can go back to the perspective camera and then do the rest of the work from the Outliner. We're going to do something similar that we've already done, but we're going to use new projection. It's going to look cool. We have a new camera. We need to make a new projection for it. Projection. Then we need to set all this fun stuff, that we're familiar with now. We need to go perspective. Perspective two, and you can see now we have two options, now that we've made a new camera, and choose Fit-Fill to Horizontal. Then we need to pipe in an image here. Actually, yeah, the image and sorry it's getting a little late for me in the night. I start to slow down a little bit. We have this PNG texture. We can open that. What I do know, we can go ahead and do this but I'm pretty sure we have to reverse that for it to work. Reverse the file into the projection. Let's just see what we get out of the box. Again, another annoying little workflow thing here, is we don't have the mix one. One thing we can do is just pipe anything in. It's going to rearrange things a little bit, which is always fun. We can just delete that but what it got us is the mixed one to pop up. Now we can pipe in that projection into it. We can just choose one of those. This is what we're going for. Probably doesn't work because we need to reverse the image. You can see it's all black. Let's grab the projection over here. Just going to move all these over here so we have room for this one and this file. Let's reverse. Now it's not black, so we're making progress. Our file is reversed. We don't want to wrap the UVs. That did something. Yeah, I want to key that camera. Let's zoom this out now. Yeah, interesting. You can see where it's trying to project it onto the model but it's empty. The file you have is a PNG. You know what it is? I think we need the Alpha. That is it. Sorry guys. You can just pipe the Alpha into all three or just one, it doesn't matter. Because it's a PNG, we don't really need the Alpha. The color, yeah, that makes sense why it wasn't showing because we want the Alpha channel from that PNG. Now we have that and we have UVs on it and we can now just take the camera and we can position it wherever we want the spider web. I think something like that looks pretty cool. The last thing we need to do is to, I don't like that color though still, on the mid-tone, so I'm just going to change that super quick. Mid-tone. I think it has to do maybe with the color correction I've been doing. Let's just get rid of that color correction. I took that multiplier out the equation just to a dark blue and instead of from, let's do screen. That's what we had originally. Yeah, there we go. We don't see it as well, but I like that color and it's a little more subtle. The other thing that I would change here is the range, I think, so let me grab that and then just tweak that range. I want it coming up more. I don't want a huge gap from the highlights to the mid tones. It shouldn't be that big of a gap, so I'm just going to bring that up a little bit. Now I can see more of the half tone here. If you feel me here, that's the plan. Now we have a spider-crab, which I think is more funny than it should be probably, but I get a kick out of that. You know what? What's the point of this stuff if you're not having fun? Go out there, take what you've learned, have fun, enjoy it because now, together, we have built the spider-crab. Pardon the interruption to the course, but I just wanted to make sure that I did speak about the actual line work. It's really straightforward to apply it with the toon shader. Let's open up the Hypershade super quick and let's take a look at the main aiToon note and we're going to want to name this, 'Main Spider-Man Shader.' You can apply, if you don't want to do the toon shader, you can actually apply this AI layer RGBA to, like an AI standard surface, if you want more of have a realistic overlay of specular highlights and stuff but just, real quick, to apply the line work to this model, all we need to do is go into the toon shader and the edge is already selected here. You might be wondering why in the world if it's already enabled, is it not showing up? Well, there's this one little goofy thing we need to do that's a little bit buried in Arnold, and that is turn on filtering type to contour. Let's go to the Render Settings, here, and then let's make sure we're in Arnold Render, let's go over to Arnold Render tab, go to filter and then change the type from gaussian to contour. Like magic, we have contour edge lines now on our model. They're thin, so we can just increase that by typing in four here and you can see them get pretty thick. Then the only other main note about this is to control their display is to go down to the angle threshold, right now it's at a 180, so watch what happens when I dial it down. You can start to see it. It's trying to add a lot more line work and details to it, so depending on what you're going for, use the angle threshold to control the amount of line work that's happening internally and you can reach a happy medium that makes sense for your model. It'll be different for every model but yeah, for the most part that's how this works. Thanks for watching and I look forward to seeing you in my next classes. I teach a lot of other Maya classes, as well as things about animation and I'm going to be coming out with new courses about every other month for a while. I have a whole long list of things that includes, even, after effects and maybe even some Photoshop and basically how to become a one-person studio as I've had to do many times in my freelance career. Making things for a Lego, which I'm actually about to do again. I'm going to direct some short films for Lego. If you want to learn how to do that for yourself and become a one-person studio, make your own short films, work for clients, definitely stay tuned for more and I look forward to seeing you in my other classes. Thanks for watching. Bye.