Maya and ZBrush Together: An Intro Guide for Indie Artists

MARCIO GONCALVES: Hello, everyone. My name is Marcio Goncalves I'm Assistant Professor of Emerging Media Animation at University of Central Florida. Today I'm going to teach you how to have a very simple workflow between ZBrush and Maya.

Autodesk Maya is the standard software for 3D animation in most of the world. And ZBrush is pretty much the standard for 3D sculpting. What I learned in my years teaching 3D animation is that a lot of students are not very sure of how to integrate ZBrush into Maya.

There's a lot of different ways of doing this. But I'm going to show a very quick way to get a 3D sculpt that you create in ZBrush and simplify the model, create a new base mesh, a new retopology, how to export all the maps you need, normal map, displacement map, and other maps, and how you can bring back to Maya plug detectors and the renderer you want to use, either Arnold, which comes with Maya, or something like Redshift, which is a third party plugin, and how you can create a beautiful render in Maya that started with a very complex sculpt in ZBrush.

It's not super complex workflow. This is a very quick one. But I think it's going to give you a good grasp of how you can use both programs together. So I hope you will enjoy my tutorial here.

So we are here in ZBrush. And I have this model here, which is the dragon head I created. It's a dense mesh, about two million. And this is going to serve us well to understand the workflow here between ZBrush and Maya.

So, basically, the workflow is going to be like this. You finish your sculpt, your high dense mesh. Something is going to be the million polygons area between two to 10, 15 million polygons. And then, you're going to Polypaint your textures. Then you're going to have to create a simplified version with better topology before you can export.

So let's take a look here in the geometry. You're going to notice, I have five subdivisions. And if I go down here, I have a very simple one here, a subdivision one. And if I click here the polyframe, we can see, we have a very nice laid out topology of the model.

If you remember my module where I created this, I did not have a very good topology. I was using DynaMesh in the end to get more and more dense mesh so I could create more details. And I had to delete the lower division.

So I had to use ZRemesher, which is something that we're going to learn in this module, to recreate a subdivision level, a lower subdivision level, with much simpler topology but a good topology that follows the form of the shape of the creature. And then I had to project the details of the high dense mesh, the one I have, [? E5. ?]

So I would have two versions. I have this, the relevant ones for our export, the subdivision file, that's going to be the high poly. And the subdivision one, that's going to be the low poly. So as we have this subdivision and the low poly and the high pol.

The last thing we need is a UV map. We can see the UV map I have here. I click here in [INAUDIBLE] UV. We can see the UVs of my character here, of my dragon head. Those UVs were created inside ZBrush using the UV Master plugin. And we're going to learn about this. We have the plugin here in this area here. So we can put this here. Take a look.

We use the-- let me click here-- the UV Master to create this kind of texture. And you can come here on the right on the UV palette to see the UVs. And after you created this, you then, finally, you export some relevant maps that are going to be using in a external software. And we do this using the mini-map exporter zip plugin.

And the relevant maps you need is the displacement-- the displacement, not the vector, the displacement-- the normal, the texture from Polypaint, that's the base color, the ambient occlusion if you want, cavity can be good. Ambient occlusion and cavity are a little bit more useful if you're going to be using an external painting software like Substance Painter, or Maya, Cinema 4D, not so much, but it's good to export all of them. And then you create all the maps.

When you do this, what you're going to get is-- let me go here to my texture file here. We are going to have those textures here. So I have my ambient occlusion here. I have my curvature. I have my displacement. I have my color base, the main texture. And I have a normal map.

So we're going to use all of those maps inside Maya, Cinema 4D, or any other software. And the end result is going to be something like this. This is Maya. And I'm using OctaneRender here. I'm using Octane just because it's a little bit faster to show the displacement map with good lighting.

You can see all the details that I create in ZBrush are here in Maya. But if you actually select the model, you're going to see it's actually the low poly model, not the high poly model. You can see this a little bit better if I turn off the Octane Viewport and I go to Viewport two.

And you can see this is a very, very, very simple low poly version. So it's the subdivision one in ZBrush. But then I plugged out the model, all the maps on an Octane material, so I can get this high resolution model through the displacement map.

The displacement map, it's kind of similar to the normal, but it actually subdivides the model during rendering. So it's like you're sculpting everything back that you created in ZBrush in real time during the rendering. So you get all the details here but with a very low poly mesh, which is really good for animation because you can rig the simplified poly mesh much easier. But you keep all the details for all your high poly mesh.

So that's the main workflow. If you're using ZBrush to create characters for animation, you're going to mostly export the low poly version, and then you're going to use the different materials to create-- recreate the details on Maya or Cinema 4D et cetera.

The high poly model, which is going to be the subdivision-- would be the subdivision five here, the one with actually two millions-- let's compare here. Subdivision five, I have two million points. The low poly version that I actually-- I'm working in Maya is very low poly. It's only 8,000.

The only time you're going to-- not the only time, there are some cases where you are actually going to use the high poly. The first one, if you want to just export this to a 3D printer, you are going to use the high poly model, not the low poly. So that's one obvious use for the high poly.

If you're using a 3D texture painting tool, like Substance Painter, 3DCoat, or Quixel Mixer, or Marmoset Toolbag, you actually export both, because then you can use the high poly to rebake some extra textures with more details. Basically, what we're doing here on the left, the creation of the displacement map, which is the map with information about the sculpting, can be done in some external programs if you have the high poly and the low poly.

That's a little bit beyond the scope of this course. We're going to focus on the workflow of using the low poly version in Maya et cetera.

So having said that, we have to learn a lot of things before we do that. As I said, we need to learn about ZRemesher. We need to learn about UV Master, and we need to learn about the multi-map exporter. So let's start.

So let's retopologize my dragon head using ZRemesher here. So let's analyze this a little bit. This is the model I have. You guys know from the module in our second week. And if I click here in the frame, I'm going to see what have. I have a very dense mesh around 2.4 million. I have three polygroups here. And I have three subdivision levels.

So let's go to the lower subdivision level and see what I get. So even in the lower, it's not super lower, it's 150,000 points. So it's not really low poly. And even then, as a typical dynamesh mesh, well, it's not really respecting the flow. So this is something that needs, really, needs to be retopologize with the remesher.

So what I'm going to do, I'm going to go to the subtool here. And I'm going to duplicate this so we can compare. The first one is going to be the original one. And this one here, I'm going to call dragon and ZRemesher. So I have this selected. The other one is invisible.

And let's go to geometry. And let's go to ZRemesher. So let's talk about the settings we have here. We have the big ZRemesher button. That's where you click to actually have your ZRemeshed mesh done.

We have this legacy button. And you see 2018. That's because in 2019, they introduced a new algorithm for ZRemesher, which is much better, respects a lot the decreases, the hard edges of hard surface models, and also avoid some bad loops that, instead of connecting both sides, would going around the character, almost like in an infinite loop.

So the only reason to use the legacy is, I don't know, if you're really good with that, and maybe the normal one wasn't working. But 99.9% of the time, you're not going to be using the legacy. So just ignore this.

Freeze groups and freeze border is when you want to-- either one of those, the border or the group, to not be influenced by ZRemesher. This is just a very specific use case. Do not worry about that much. Keep groups, it's very important. If you want to keep the groups, and, for example, here, I have some groups defined, and I want to keep them. I have to click this, and I'm going to get keep groups.

And then I have these move groups. One is good. And it means that one is going to be remeshing, is going to move the borders. So it's going to flow with the rest of ZRemeshed mesh a little bit better. If you have this at zero, it will keep what you have right now. And that's not going to be really good. So most of the time you want to this at one.

We have the keep creases and detect edges. Those are mostly for hard surface models. They're not very applicable to the dragon head. But, basically, if you remember the creases, you can create creases with the ZModeler. They are just a duplicated edge that is really close to another one. So when you subdivide, you get a more defined edge.

This will keep that crease even after ZRemesher did his magic. So this is really-- it can be really important for a hard surface. Detect edge is similar, but it's different. It works on any hard surface edge, very defined edge, that does not have a crease because it's going to detect even if you do not have crease if you click this, and it's going to respect that edge. Again, this is a very organic model. We're not going to be using this right now.

Then we have the most important part here, the target polygon count. We use units here. Each unit is a-- represents 1,000 polygons. So the default five, it means it's going to target a 5,000 polygon object.

When I say it's a target, because this is just approximation. It's not going to be precisely 5,000. And how much closer or not it depends if you have this here, then that's on or off. If you have this off, ZRemesher will be much more flexible in how much he's going to use in terms of polygon budget. And so, you could get something instead of five, you have five, but you're going to get 8,000, because that's what was needed to get the details.

And you have the slider here. The adaptive size by default, it's at 50. That means you're going to use this 50% of the target you use to more or less to get the details or not. Then you get the curves strength. That's how much powerful or not the curves will be in influencing the topology of ZRemesher.

Curves can be created with this brush here, the ZRemesher guide. We can draw some curves here. And this will allow us to tell ZRemesher, OK, I want a loop in this direction here. And this strength here reflects how much ZRemesher will respect that or not.

You can also use Polypaint to paint influences on the mesh to tell ZBrush to keep more or less polygons in one region of the model or not. Most of the time, I do not use the Polypaint because I think the guides with adapt are enough to get very, very good and clean model. So those are going to be the main settings. So let's see how that works in practice.

So I have five here, and I'm going to click ZRemesher. It's going to read a little bit, look at the top. Takes a while to calculate everything. And then, boom, I get my new model here.

Looks it's respecting my groups. I have three different groups here. And so, group-- I have the groups in the horn, the front horn, the mouth, this little hole here, and the hole in the nose and the eyes, and then the main body, they are all different polygroups.

And if you notice, even though it's, I had my polycount at five, my final result is actually three times more. It's 14,000 polygons. That's because ZRemesher analyzed the model and decide, OK, to get the details, we need, especially the eye, et cetera, I need more. So he gave us more. If I undo this and I click adapt off, and I click this again, you're going to see the result's going to be a little bit different.

So now, with adapt off, it's much closer to the five. Now it's 9,000. And we you are going to see the size of the polygons tend to be a little bit more uniform. Not everything uniform, but a little bit more. But you lose some details here on the eye. So I'm going to undo this. And I'm going to go back to using the adapt. And I'm going to click the ZRemesher again.

That's what I got. One other alternative you have, instead of actually putting a number here, you can click some of those here. They have some same and double. Basically, same is going to try to ZRemesher keeping the same number of polygons you have. Double is going to try to ZRemesher with the double points. And half is going to try to ZRemesher with half. And, again, this is just approximation because of the adapt.

But let's take a look what do I have. This is kind of good. 40, it's a lot. Maybe we could get even smaller. But the most important thing we have to check here is this. Even though ZRemesher is really good in following the shape around here, here, in most, like in the horns, pretty good. It's not really good in some parts here.

If you notice, I have a loop that comes here and comes here. But then, it kind of loses here in this part. I don't have a well-defined loop in this part. Let's see what else. Here's kind of good, kind of good. Most of it did a pretty darn good job. Let's see, here's another area that could be improved. I wanted a more defined loop around here.

So this is where the guides come in. I can undo what I had and can come here, turn this off. And I'm going to click the ZRemesher guide. You can get that pressing V, the Z, ZRemesher guide. And this is just a curved brush like other curved brushes. So I'm going to draw some curves following what I want here. So I want something really following this. [INAUDIBLE]

And, also, we could maybe some more definition this part here. And, finally, here, there I wanted this to have some well-defined loops. And now that I have those guides, I can go back and click ZRemesher again. I'm actually going to make this a little bit smaller, maybe 0.3, and then ZRemesher.

So let's click the wireframe and let's see what we got. So I think now we see the result. It got much well-defined forms here. So, remember, we didn't have a loop here. Now I actually have a loop going throughout the whole form of the eye here. Same thing, here is a well-defined loop here. And as well here, I have a whole loop coming here.

Maybe it could work a little bit better. I don't like this part, the way he ended here. But most of it, I had what I wanted. So if I go here to my ZModeler, for example. And I want to extrude this loop here, it's actually a proper loop because I have a proper loop here.

So, basically, this is what you're going to be doing with ZRemesher. Playing with those settings, playing with the guide until you got something that's going to be good as a base mesh. I still think this is maybe a little bit too dense for my base mesh. Maybe I could work a little bit, get to 8,000, depends what I want to do.

So let's-- after you got the low poly version, then now we need to reproject the details of the high poly model to the low poly. And that's what we're going to be doing now.

So let's reproject the details here. If you look here in the top, you're going to notice I actually ZRemeshed one more time. I decided to try to get even cleaner models as our low poly. So it's now 5,000 instead of 9,000. It's really, really low poly, which would be great for animation or for games, this. But we need to recover all the details we have in the original one.

So if you compare here, this is what we have. And let me get out of here. This is what I have. And this is the original one, way more detailed. And we have to project this here.

So I'm going to take this out, click this. Be sure we are selecting the one, the lower poly, where we want to the details to be baked on. This is really important. You need to be selecting the correct one. Now that I'm selecting the correct one, and let's go to the geometry. And, notice, I have no subdivisions. This is going to be my subdivision one.

And I'm going to go here to subtools. And I'm going to click the-- where is that? Let's go to project. We have to set-- we have geometry and we have color. We want to project the both. So it's going to project both the geometry of all the tools we have in our selected subtool, and also is going to project the color.

Now that I have everything selected, you've got to make this visible. I'm going to click that again. And I'm going to click Project All. It's going to say, one of the more visible tools contains Polypaint. Do I want the Polypaint? Yes, I do. And click, yes.

Now if I turn off this, you're going to see my low poly change a little bit of the form and got the color. This is going to be my-- and not just the color, I got my groups back, which is great.

And now I need to create the high poly version of that. So let's click the high poly version here, my high poly version here. And I need to go to my subdivision five-- three, actually. Subdivision three is the highest subdivision of the my [INAUDIBLE]. So I'm going to go to the highest subdivision here. And we see, we have two millions and 400,000 points.

So I need to get my low poly version and subdivide until I get around that number. So let's go to the geometry. And I'm going to subdivide it once, two, three, four, five, keep an eye there. So this, not exactly, it's a little bit more than I wanted.

And what I could do now is to maybe go back to earlier versions. This one, we're going to-- this is closer to medium than five. So I'm, actually, I'm going to delete the higher one. So this subdivision five is going to be our high poly.

And now I'm going to do the same process. I'm going to be sure I'm selecting this, and this is visible. And I'm going to make the other one visible too. And I'm going to be sure they are both in the last subdivisions.

So this, the high poly is a subdivision five. The low poly is a subdivision-- I mean, the low poly subdivision five, the high poly is in subdivision three. Make sure you're selecting the low poly. And then, we're going to go to Project, Project All.

Going to read a little bit, look in the talk, projecting mesh details. It takes a while. Every time you are projecting to the high poly, it's going to take a while. It's not super fast. So bear with me. And so, let's see what we got now. And I'm going to turn up this, turn on this.

And there we go. We have the new high poly is one million, or 1,400 million. And I got all my details. But the important thing, everything is in a more correct topology following the model as it should be. So it looks a little bit more obvious if we go back to one. This is our subdivision one. And is this our subdivision five.

So now we have everything we need to start preparing this to export. Now we need to-- we have the final low poly and high poly. That's the base that we need to do the rest.

Now we need to create some UVs here. And the way you create UVs in ZBrush is way different than the way we create in Maya. So let's open here my last tab. And I'm going to go to my Z plugins. Be sure you get Z plugin put here.

And we're going to be using the UV Master. UV Master will let us creative UVs and unwrap them in a very organic way. We have some settings here. The unwrap is the button that you need to click to unwrap the [INAUDIBLE] you're selecting. If you click Unwrap All, it's going to unwrap all the subtools.

We have some options. Work with symmetry tries to make the [INAUDIBLE] symmetrical. That's good. Polygroups UV master will respect the polygroups you have, and they are going to be separate UV islands. And that's very good. And you can actually use that in your favor. If you want a part of your model to be a separate UV island, you just define a separate polygroup.

And what we need to do before we create UV here is to define some parts of the model that we want to protect. I mean, we want them to be close and to not have a cut and some parts of the model where we are OK with cuts. We're telling ZBrush, OK, you can cut here, but do not cut here.

So we are going to do that with poly painting. And we're going to click this enable control painting. And click here. And we're going to get a warning. We're going to say that requires a model with no subdivision levels. And you have to use work on clone feature. And that's going to be what the case most of the time. Because, usually, you're going to have subdivision levels. So you cannot delete them.

So the way you do is, actually, you come here in this button and you click work on clone. When you click this, ZBrush will automatically clone the subdivision level you work. In my case, that was in the lower subdivision. And it created a clone of that. That's just one subtool with just that level. And you know it's a clone because you have the name here. CL, it means a clone.

And now we can use this to define the cuts. So now I can click here, enable control painting. And I have three options. I have protect, attract, and erase. Attract is going to attract the seams. So attract is like you're defining the areas you want to cut. Protect is the areas you're sure you don't want to cut. Anything that's white, it's up to ZBrush to decide.

So let's first define my cuts here. So I think a good cut could be here, down here. So anything that's going to be blue it's fair as a cut. So I think it could cut here. Anything that's following this edge here I think would be OK. If we cut here too.

And, again, those are more like suggestions to ZBrush. It doesn't mean it's going to follow that. And I think I could suggest the division of the mouth. I'm going to make my brush really smaller and then simply gonna just paint around the mouth here.

And now I'm going to paint some parts that I want to protect. I want to-- anything here in the face to be protected. I don't want any cut here. So [INAUDIBLE].

We want to protect this part. Also, I think it's important that that part here, because I don't want to cut across in the parts where we get the horns out. I think it's important they are together. And maybe this could be connected here. And looks good. Good.

So far, so good. I think that's enough. So I'm going to click my unwrap button here. And so, OK. [INAUDIBLE] And if we want to see the result, we can click flatten.

And this is what we got. It looks kind of weird in comparison to what you would do in Maya. It's a little bit more organized. The packing is not really good, a lot of free space around here. You actually could move, but we're going to try to use what we have here, so unflatten.

And here's the very important part. We are going to copy the UVs. Click Copy UVs. Now I can go to my dragon head, which is my actual dragon head. And I'm selecting here the low poly. And I'm going to click Paste UVs. So it's going to take a while. And now I have UVs.

If I click flatten-- OK, we cannot see here because it has subdivision. So in this case, to see, I have to go here on the right on the UV map. And I can click morph UVs. And it looks really weird.

But then, if I look here, you see, this is the face with the rest of the body. Those are the horns, the internal part of the face. So now we have the UVs, very important. Now we can export the textures. Let's uncheck the morph UV, get back to my model.

So now, let's export the texture here. We are going to be using another plugin. And this time, we're going to be using the multi-map exporter. And here, in the multi-map exporter, we have some selection of maps we can use. Let's turn off all of them.

I want to use the displacement. The displacement map, it's a grayscale map that basically lets you reproduce all the details of the high sculpting model inside Maya, Cinema 4D, 3ds Max, using displacement.

Basically, you will have a low poly model. And this low poly model is going to be subdivided in real time during rendering. And all the details from the sculpt will be recreated in real time. That's the point of the displacement. It is probably the most important one you get from ZBrush.

Then we have the vector displacement, which is a more advanced form of displacement. But it does not work well in a more standard way in every software. So we're not going to use this one. And, frankly, in the industry, most people will still use displacement map way more than vector displacement.

Normal map, you guys know, it's a more advanced form of bump mapping, lets you recreate the details of the character but without actually having to recreate the geometry in render time.

So in a very crude simplified way, you get the details inside of the shape in terms of how light reflects. But it does not change the silhouette of the character. Normal map is also a very important one that you can create from ZBrush. And we're definitely going to use this.

Texture from Polypaint, that's the, well, the colors we created painting with Polypaint with spotlight. So, basically, that's going to be your base color. Ambient occlusion is that shadows you have around freezes and where two parts of the model get close and you get a little shadow.

We can export this as a model. And this is very useful when you're sending the model to something like Substance Painter to create models later on. Cavity, same thing. It's similar to ambient occlusion, but instead of just the shadows of the contact, it really gets out the little shadows of even the details, like those scales, for example.

Anything that is a cavity you're going to have registered in this texture here. Again, this is useful for Substance Painter to create extra details. It's not as much of use in Maya for the general 3D software. But we're going to export in a way because it's good to have it.

And, if you want, you can export the mesh together here. But I'm going to export my mesh later. So the create all maps, if you click here, it's going to create all maps. But let's take a look in the settings first.

You have subtools. And export maps for visible subtools, you have to check which one you have visible. For me, it's OK. I want to export just this subtool. But that's the only one that is visible. So that, it's OK to have this on. We can change the map size. We have some defaults here, like 1k, 2k, 4k. My k is the one 4k.

This flipped D is super important. You should never turn this off. For some reason, ZBrush by default creates the UVs in the opposite direction of every other 3D software. So if you want to use in any normal 3D software, you need to have this flipped.

And we have some export options. First, the file names. You have the file options. You have one options for 16-bit and one format for 8-bit. Why those different ones here? That's because the displacement map is actually a 16-bit. So you have one format for that. But, for example, the texture is just 8-bit.

In this case, I'm going to have the-- if you click here, you change the type of the file. You have a lot of different ones for the 8-bit. You have TIFF, you have PSD, BMP, TGA, JPEG. I'm just going to use JPEG with a quality of 100. And for 60, we have PSD or TIFF. I'm going to leave TIFF. That's fine.

We have the type suffix. Suffix, that's going to be-- the suffix is going to be after the name. So we have the name of the file, you're going to have-- you're going to be able to identify the texture because it's going to have this suffix here. And that's OK.

And we have some more technical specific controls. You have the types of normal map, you always want tangents, placement. But, mostly, do not mess with this. Just let work what we have here. Now I'm happy with everything. I can click Create all maps. It's going to ask me where I want to save this. I can create a folder. Make sure it's recording. And this is the name. I've just going to call this dragon head low poly. And save.

You're going to see here in the top, it is trying to create each one of those. And you're going to see it's working here on the viewport. At the same time, you're going to see in real time the creation of each of those textures. And until you get this message, all maps created and exported.

And now, if I check on my folder, I should have all of them. Let's see, preview pane. I have my ambient occlusion. I have my curvature. I have my displacement. I have my normal. And I had my texture, my colored texture here.

So now I just need to export the actual low poly version and then the high poly if I want. So let's do that now. So let's export the models here. First, be sure you're saving whatever you want with a different name. This case here, I already saved this with a different name.

So what I can do here is just keep the one that is my reprojected and ZRemeshed one, and which is the one with the good topology five subdivisions-- I can check this here. Five subdivisions, that's one that I want to keep. And I'm going to delete the top one that I don't need anymore. So I'm going to delete this. I have just this one here. And I'm going to export.

I'm going to export twice. I'm going to first export the low poly version. So I'm going to go to geometry. And I'm going to go down to subdivision one. So we can see here, we are in the low poly. We have just 5,000. And I'm going to click Export.

We have two main formats that we can use here, the OBJ format or the FBX. Both work fine. FBX can be a little bit better if you want to keep the polygroups. So let's try FBX. So I'm going to call this-- I already have the low poly I did during rehearsal, but let's go here recording low poly.

And I'm going to press Save. And I'm going to have some options. You can select the type of FBX. It's always good practice to not use the last ones. Usually you get some conflicts. If you want to be safe, try to use like, [INAUDIBLE] earlier versions, like 2016 is good.

We want to Maya Y up because we're going to be using Maya. Embed maps as normal. The default are kind of good. We are going to export this moving levels. That means we're not going to-- the faces are going to be smooth. They're not going to be harsh.

We could export the polygroups as materials or as selection set. I'm going to put as materials. Or we could select no. If you have no, everything is going to be just one material here. So I'm going to-- actually, I'm going to select this without material because I think, in Maya, I just need two different selections here. So OK. And file exported.

Now we have the low poly. We need the high poly. And, again, the high poly, you're not going to use as much. More if you want to 3D printing this later on. But here we have subdivision five, 1,000,400. And same process. Export, and we're going to select FBX. And it's going to be the high poly.

And off. So we have a new project here in Maya. And now I'm going to import my low poly, the original one, that I created in ZBrush. So just be sure, we are OBJ, single object, import. And I'm going to look for my file here. And low poly. And there we go. Super fast because, well, it's the low poly version here.

And the first thing you're going to notice, we see a lot of-- the faces are really harsh. That's because the OBJ does not have the same [INAUDIBLE] information that we have in Maya. So you can just go here to the face, select off faces. Then we can go to edit mesh. Actually, mesh display, soften edge. And now, we correct that. So if you look now, everything is-- it is smooth.

And but it's still the very low poly version that we created with ZRemesher. So really good one. What do we want to create is we're going to create a scenario with Redshift, a Redshift material, plugged all the materials that we created, all the textures, and we're going to reproduce all the details using the displacement map and the normal map. So let's start.

I'm going to use the Redshift render, not Arnold. That's because Arnold is really, really slow with displacement. So let's change to Redshift here on the render settings. And let's go to basic. And we're going to-- be sure you're in production.

We have two modes in Redshift. You have production and RT, which means real time. The real time is really fast, really good for a lot of stuff. But you cannot do displacement in RT. So it needs to be in production.

We're going to change quality from medium to low. We don't need super high quality. And everything else, we're going to leave at that for now. So let's close this.

And if we go here in the Redshift shelf-- by the way, if you don't see Redshift here and you don't see Redshift here, it means you have to go to Windows, Settings, Preferences, Plugin Manager. And then you just type here Redshift. And you're going to click Auto Load and load it. And they are going to appear.

Keep in mind, we do have Redshift in our labs. So you're going to have to do this exercise in our lab. Because you're not going to have at home because Redshift does not come with Maya. Redshift, it's actually a product by Maxim, the owner of Cinema 4D. It's actually created by the main competitor of Autodesk.

So we have here Redshift. First thing I'm going to create is a dome light with a sky. Here is a sun. Sun in the sky, you see, we have a sun. We have some clouds here. Just click here. This is going to create a nice Redshift sky. And if we want to see what we-- the result, let's click this IPR here. The IPR will bring us the Redshift render view. We can put this here. For now, let's put this here.

So we see we have a nice sky with a sun and everything. But we don't have any materials. That's because we're using a standard Maya material. And Redshift does not recognize this. So let's open Hypershade. You can click here to open. In my home setup here, I have a little button here just to open.

So we're going to create some materials here for our character here, for our dragon. I'm going to right-click on the node editor, and I'm going to click Create Node. And I'm going to go down here on the-- I'm going to look for the Redshift options. I'm going to go to Shader. And Surface, I have some options here. I'm going to select the Redshift standard material.

And OK, I have the standard material. For first thing I'm going to click here is the main node, the RS, standard material. And I'm going to go here to my Attribute Editor. If you are using the standard Maya, you're going to have this on the node on the Hypershade. But I take that out because the information is the same information that I can get here.

So in color, I'm going to click the checkerboard. And then I can just pick a file. So it's going to be in Maya to the textures, file. And then I'm going to put my color texture here. So just go [INAUDIBLE]

Texture, then you can see a preview here. Just to be sure we are selecting the correct one. So this is the color one. So open. And I'm going to change the name here of my texture. I'm going to call this RS-- that means Redshift-- dragon head. And it's good.

So selecting the RS dragon head, I'm going to select my dragon here on the viewport in object mode. Be sure you are in object mode. Then I'm going to hover to RS dragon and click and drag assign material to selection. And now I'm going to see the texture here.

Doesn't look so good so far because we don't have the normal, we don't have the other things. But we're going to get there. So I can actually make this-- let me put that a little bit bigger. Put this here.

And first thing, I want to-- I'm going to create the normals here. So I'm going to go here in Redshift. And I have a bunch of stuff here. I'm going to look for utility. And we should have a Redshift normal map. So I'm going to click this Redshift normal. And let's see.

So Redshift normal map. So click here. Let's select the map and go back to my folder here, and the normal map, this one here. And I'm going to get the out node here. And I'm going to put this on my bump input.

And you see here the result we have. We start seeing the-- we see more details here of the-- created by the normal map. But it's still not-- we get some nice details here.

But we still have a very simple-- if you look in the silhouette here, you don't have much detail. Even though we can see the detail here in the other part, it's not really affecting a lot of the silhouette. So to affect with more details, we're going to need the displacement map.

So now we're going to go, and we're going to create a displacement map. So let's go here. And displacement maps are a little bit different, because instead of connecting to the main material node, we're going to click, and we're going to connect to the displacement shader here in the last node. This isn't the node that-- it is the connection between the material and the actual object.

So I'm going to go here to shader utility. And I'm going to look for Redshift displacement. And I'm going to have this displacement here. And now I can just look for the texture to put. So I'm going to go back to Maya to the texture file I have in my favorites here. But you can find it in Maya 3D textures and file. Again, have the file here. And now I can select my-- doo, doo, doo, doo, doo.

So it is going to be the displacement map. You know which one, if you're not sure, by the little letters here. So AO means ambient occlusion, CV curvature, DM displacement map, T texture map, and NM normal map. So it's going to be the displacement map, the DM. Open.

And now, I'm going to get the Alt color. And I'm going to connect the Alt color to the texture map of my display-- Redshift placement. And I'm going to get Alt. And I'm going to connect here to displacement. Let me move this so you can see a little bit clearer.

So we have the displacement here, but we are not seeing an effect. It's exactly the same thing we had before just with a normal map. The reason for that is because you have to change some settings on the object. So I'm going to click the object.