Use EEVEE for your MAYA shots [Blender 2.8 for Animators]

In today's episode, I'm going to show you how to bring your animation from Maya and light it in Blender's real-time engine Eevee. I'm Luciano and welcome to the Adventures of Loliwood Man. So step one, animate your character, finish it all. Don't do this early. You can, but it's better to just wait. Just finish your animation, then you go through this process. I have a record, which is an object. There's the character, which has her geometry hidden. And the background, which I created by mixing a lot of assets from Blender and whatever, which is under layers. So I can right click and select that layer, which selects all of them. And you can see that they're in a group. Then I can just go and find the geometry of the girl. But if I just select the main group of the girl, it's not the best idea, because it will come with bones and constraints. And we just want the minimum stuff. So what I usually do, I just find the geometry itself. And then you can see that this group contains all the geometry for her. So I'm just going to pick that up. Also, if the character has a proxy and you grab the main node, then it will bring all of those stuff as well. So what I do, particularly because I'm using AniBot, I create a selection shell with it. So if you can see, I'm going to press and select, find my AniBot. And I named it export. As you can see, it only has the camera, the environment, the environment group, with the lights even. The lights are just going to transfer as points in space. Then the record, the group of the record. And then the node that contains the geometry of the character. Super easy. Then we're going to go to cache, Alembic cache, export selection to Alembic. As you can see, I'm exporting from minus 30 to 2015. I intended to do some cloth simulation on the character. But I really don't know how to do cloth. So I'm going to export my entire animation from that frame to 2015. Then I'll go down, down, down, down. And I'll make sure that the creases are there, the UVs are there. I'm not sure exactly which one. The color set and the face set. So for instance, if an eye has three colors in the same geometry, like the pupil, the iris, and the white of the eye, then those will appear in Blender as three different materials. Even though they can be all the same color, it doesn't matter. Because then we'll be able to change them easy without having to recreate those selections again. And so we're going to export this. So now we get a thing. So we're going to export it. We're going to call it test. As you can see, now Maya is going through my pre-roll. Goes to the geometry there. Really, the arms didn't really matter for that pre-roll because it was actually meant for the dress, which is the lower part. It should be fine. We're going to fire up Blender. We have a new scene. It's empty. I already killed the pool cube. And I'm going to go to File, Import, ABC. Alembic file. I'm going to go to the Alembic folder where I put my test. And I'm just going to leave it like it is. It's probably going to be too big, which indicates that if you want to do stuff like cloth simulation or use proper subsurface scattering, you might want to try to figure out what's the right size. Let's just import it. There we go. We got our scene. Got our scene. Our frame range has been set already from minus 30 to zero. If your frame range can't go to minus 30, by default, there's a preference here in animation that allows negative frames. By default, this comes off. And so you cannot get the cursor past zero. So you can just allow negative frames if you want to be able to just do this. I also had hidden some geometry to kind of get an idea of where the other character should be. But you can just delete it. It's okay. And so now what I'm going to do, I'm going to start my frame from zero. Or from one, actually. Because we know that I started the actual animation from there. You can see those little glitches. That's because of the clipping point. We're going to open up with N. So I'm just going to go here. I'm going to make it 0.1. Because our scene is kind of massive. So it really changes a bit. And so now I can select my camera and make it here in the scene tab. I can make it the actual camera. So if I press tilde next to the number one in your keyboard. I can just go to camera. And I can see my camera. There is a slight difference between the camera in Maya and the camera in Blender. And as you can see, the focal length is the same. But the framing is slightly different. You can see a little bit here in the bottom. These edges. And here in my scene, you can see only the edges of the albums. Not the edges of the thing. But it's not too bad. Since it's a fixed camera, you can just grab the Y transform. Just push it back a little bit. I really honestly don't know exactly what it is the issue. But it shouldn't be too big of a deal. So we're going to go to the overlays. Blender has the scene called the overlays. Which is very similar to what you'd find here in show. It's kind of like a mix between show and shading and view. And so basically in overlays, when you turn them off. You turn off everything that doesn't really render. And so I'm going to turn them on. But I'm just going to turn off the relationship lines. Maybe the extras you can turn off if you want. Really, all I need is the geometry that comes already. I'm going to change my viewport shading here to matcap. I'm going to call random color. Random color gives every single object a different color. So I can know which one is which. Also know when they're connected to each other and whatever. Stuff like that. I only do it by heart. What kind of feels okay. Materials, I keep it simple. Usually a base color. And then just deciding if it needs more reflections or less reflections. In my animation, nothing is really realistic. It just looks good enough. Let's see how that goes. We can just go one by one and start adding materials. As you can see, the body of Michelle already has assigned materials. Which is great. I just need to change the color. If I want to preview the material that I'm working on. I just go to the material preview. And... Oh, yeah. My colors are white. Like I have no colors. I have materials, just not colors. So I'm just going to zoom in a little bit. Select one of those colors and just start coloring. Oh, there we go. That's the skin. So we'll just go through this one by one. Pick a nice tone for the skin. This is something that we don't know what it is. Let's just leave it white for now. There you go. Lips. So this could be white again. And so at this point, it's just a matter of just identifying and coloring each object. If you come across an object that doesn't have anything there. It means that in Maya, it only had like one material. So we just can create a new one and it will get you a principled shader. And that's a really nice shader where you can do most of the stuff that you need with it. So just go to the base color and change that base color to whatever you prefer. So I'm just going to make it like very simple. You can change the specular so you get more kind of like reflections. And the roughness of the specular will make sure that those reflections are more defined or less defined. So the more rough, the less defined they are. So as you can see here, we have that kind of like specular reflection. And if it's more rough, it becomes more subtle. And if it's less rough, it starts becoming more like a piece of plastic or something like that. And you can change that type of specular to the metallic one, which will make it look more like metal, which in this case doesn't really work. So we just go back to this and make it very, very soft. In any case, it doesn't really matter what I say here. I'm not an expert in materials, but you can rely on using a reference. So you get like a grounded render, but that's it. After you go through every single object that you are interested in a material, you should end up with something like this. After that, I want to add a texture to, for instance, this particular object, which needs to have a texture. And so I'm going to click on that object. When you have a principle shader, if you don't have a principle shader by default, and you get this kind of interface, just click use nodes. And then you can go into the base color and click the little yellow button and choose an image texture. Go to your open, find the file that you need. Put it in my source images. Bam! If you have the UVs already in Maya, they'll stick here and that will work. Good stuff. Now we don't need to do much to it. I'm just going to keep that specular amount and the roughness. So it's kind of shiny because it's kind of like, you know, it's covered in plastic or whatever. Boom! What else do I need from this scene? Now we need to light it. So we have the basic coloring, as I said, that we created, but now we need to start adding lights. We are in the material preview mode where we can switch to the render mode. The render mode, it's basically the same as the material preview. If you have selected Eevee in your render engine, the good thing is that you can preview easily the materials with some kind of like base lighting. Like in this case, these HDRIs that come by default in your scene, and that could be enough for you. If this is something that you like already and you say, Hey, I just need this. You can turn off your overlays and go to view, viewport render animation. And that will render out exactly as you're seeing it right now. But what we'll do is we'll add some lights to make it a little bit more interesting. Because as you can see, there's no shadows anywhere. So I'm just going to turn on scene lights and scene world. As you can see, the world has a black or very dark gray, which I can see here. And if I just turn this down to black, then my scene is black. So basically what we were seeing is just the color of the world reflected amongst the objects. We can just go to the general view and add light. And we're going to add an area light. That's an object there. We can click dark gizmo and just move it up just like you do in any other place. So I wanted to go to something like, like a nice hipster environment. So the lighting is washed out. It's not like a creepy record store. It's kind of like a nice place. I still have my area light selected here. And I'm just going to augment the power. Also, I'm going to make sure it's big enough. If I click this, I can see the size. I can scale it with S or I can use the scaling gizmo, which I'm not very fond of. So I'm just going to use S. Or you can click these little corners here and that works too. So the bigger the area light is, the softer the shadows are going to be as well. And so that actually helps. Right. By default, like I haven't done anything. I just created a light and the lights are already casting the shadows. I'm also going to put a light in the side to make an idea that the there's light coming from like an out or something like that. So I'm just going to shift D to duplicate. And then I haven't clicked anything. So the light is kind of stuck to my mouse. Just going to place it somewhere else. And then I can just look at it from the side or the front with the tilde key again and rotate with R, which will make it easier to handle again. Yeah, that kind of works and go back to my camera. I ended up adding a few more lights just to soften it in one side and the other one. But this could be enough. As you can see, the render engine is really fast with a decent graphics card that you, if you're working on CG, you might have. Or if you play games, you may also have. This will work as fast as it works for me. If you go to the scene tab, we can turn on ambient occlusion. And you will see that there's a slight difference now in the shadowing. But because our scene is so big, we just need to change the, that 0.2 to something according to your scene. You're going to see the difference at some point. So turn on and off, we can actually probably turn off those lights and you can see now the difference with the ambient occlusion. So maybe this is too much. Let's go to something like two. Yeah, two does look maybe, maybe one. Okay. So point to something that sounds more accurate. Yeah, something like so. And now we can turn our lights on again. Yeah, it adds a tiny bit to the overall feeling of the scene. Then also something that you can add is the bloom. You should add only a little bit. It grabs any very bright colors and it adds a little bit of glow onto them. So if I lower the threshold, you're going to see that everything starts lighting up a little bit. So it might be too much. Right. Something like, something like that. Very, very tiny, very, very tiny, very subtle. So let's talk about depth of field. You're going to see that if you go to the camera, select the camera and go up here to the camera tab, you can turn on depth of field and right away we start getting something. And so you can see that you can probably get that same value that I am. I'm not sure. But if you press E on that value, you get an eyedropper and you can just click on where you want the focus to be. Let's click on her eyes. And there you go. So the rest is slightly out of focus, but she is completely focused. And so we can change the aperture here. And by default, this number should be very high. You probably will find it at something like 128. Just lower it at something normal that you use with a camera. 2.8, 5.6, 1.8. So let's go 1.8. And you can see everything gets more blurry outside of her. So that helps you focus the eyes of the audience on where you want it to be focused. If you turn on the Passpartout, you can just focus on what your camera is seeing. That's only for you, obviously. And this should be fine. And so I think at this point, we're ready to render. You could just easily go back to the first tab, to the scene tab. Make sure under sampling, it says 64 or something more than that. And then make sure that the render engines is Eevee. Then just go to the lower one, where the scene tab, and check your resolution. By default, it should be something like 1080p or something like that. The frame rate, and then your output settings. And this is really important. So the output settings, you can either render image sequence. You can directly not care about anything, and just render a video. Because the render is so fast. And let's face it, we're animators. We're not going to do anything with this. Just publish it online. You can just go here. Choose FFmpeg. Make sure it says RGB. And go encoding. Quick time. Choose a video coding of your liking. I would recommend, if you're just going to post this on internet, just render it mp4. If you want something high quality to make, to edit it into your reel or something like that. Go QT animation. And you can just go here and say, perception lossless. So basically, the compression would be very, very minimal. And if you want to render with audio. Make sure that you put here, something like AAC. But we haven't imported the audio. We just imported the scene. So let's do that very quickly. I'm going to slide this panel up. Create a video editor, video sequencer. And here we are. And now, I'm going to press add, and go to sound. I'm going to look for my sound. Source image is not clearly. Sound. Springsteen. And so, in my case, I had shifted the audio 24 frames. Because starting at the beginning wasn't good. But since I've already started my scene from frame 31st. I need to put it there. And just add 24 frames to that. So I'm going to press G to move. And then 24, which will shift it 24 frames. Press enter. And now, the audio is starting there. And now, when you export with audio. If you go here, click the folder there. Just go to your renders. Where am I rendering this out to? Render scenes. And you just name it, render test 001. Accept. And you're ready to render. So now, I'm just going to render it all. So you can more or less get an idea of how long it should take. I'm just going to cut these first frames. And I'm going to start from frame 31st. And I can just copy, paste that on top. And we should be good to go. Yeah, let's do that. Render animation. So as you can see now, here at the top. It's going to tell you how long it's taking per frame. So in average, it's taking 2.67 seconds per frame. We started at frame 31. And look how fast we're going. It's 20.57 right now, according to my clock. And we're going to see how long this takes. Our render is done. It didn't take that long. But it was a magic hour here. So lighting came down a little bit. And I'm a little bit darker. Let's just continue on. As you can see, let's make some calculations. Calculator. So we rendered something like 250 frames minus 30. 220 frames times 3 seconds divided by 60. So it took us 11 minutes to render the entire piece. We can go here to render and view animation. Or you can just go and open your animation in your favorite player. And there you go. So now you have no excuses to present your ugly play blasts. You're putting this out to the world. You don't necessarily need a super supervisor to look at your work. Hey, maybe you want to get into advertising. Or maybe you want to do some other types of freelance. Where not everybody is super trained in animation. And if they look that you have decent taste, there you go. Also, remember that your reel is your presentation. So the more love you add to your reel in every single area of its presentation. It does talk about you as a person. Maybe not as an animator particularly. But it shows that you care. So on that note, show that you care by putting your thumbs up. Remember to subscribe. Hit the bell button so you get notifications. And see me next time.