Rendering the standard surface material - Maya Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this chapter, we'll take a first look at the Autodesk standard surface material. It's an all purpose physically based material that is designed to be renderer agnostic, meaning that it should look pretty much the same when rendered in any physically based renderer. Before we start working with the standard surface material, we need to set up the scene for material design and testing, also known as look development. A good practice is to illuminate the scene with a high dynamic range image. And I've done that using an image from a website called hdrihaven.com. I'm using an Arnold Skydome light here in the scene. To learn how to set that up, you can see my other course, Maya rendering with Arnold 6. I just wanted to show you the setup that I'm using with that Skydome, so that you can reproduce it. I don't want the Skydome to show a background in the test rendering, that's distracting. I only want to see the lighting, not the backdrop. And to do that, I've positioned the Skydome light where it will not be visible in the viewport. If I zoom in on my figure of a dancer here, I won't see that distracting image in the viewport. And that's because we actually cannot turn off the shading of this Skydome. The only way we can get rid of that shading is to set the viewport to wireframe. At least in Maya 2020 an Arnold Skydome can never be displayed as wireframe in a shaded viewport. The usual methods of template reference and drawing overrides don't work. And if we don't want to see the environment backdrop in the viewport, the only option is to push the light objects somewhere off screen. Let's go into the Skydome attributes, I'll select it and open the Attribute Editor control + a. Scrolling down in the attributes, I just want to point out a few things. In the viewport section, I've set the sky radius to only 20 centimeters, it will not affect the lighting or the backdrop To avoid rendering that backdrop, up here in the visibility section, I've set the camera visibility to zero, we'll still get the lighting, we just won't get the backdrop in Arnold. Going up a little bit further, I've set the number of samples to three. And that's to improve the quality of the rendering and reduce grain without increasing the global sampling settings in the renderer. And finally, I've knocked the exposure down by three quarters of a stop to negative 0.75 just so that the object will not be overexposed. Okay, that's a typical setup for a high dynamic range environment where we don't want to see the backdrop, either in the viewport or in the rendering. Let's assign the standard surface material to the sculpture. In the perspective viewport, select the sculpture object and frame that selection with the keyboard shortcut, which is F for frame selected, assign the new material by right clicking in the viewport. From the marking menu, choose Assign new material. In the Assign new material dialogue, at the very top we see standard surface, a standard surface material has been promoted to the top of the list of favorites in order to promote its use. It really is the way forward for physically based Rendering in Maya, in many other Autodesk applications, and really across the whole CGI industry. In the near future, we'll see more and more standardization of material parameters, allowing us to transfer materials between different applications more easily. And the standard surface in Maya is a first step towards that universal compatibility among applications. So click on Standard Surface to assign it. And in the Attribute Editor, we see that node is selected. Let's rename it, we'll call it sculpture_stsf for standard surface and press Enter. We also want to rename the associated shading group, select that string of characters and copy it with Ctrl + C. In the Attribute Editor tabs, select the standard surface three SG node, which is the shading group and rename it, just paste in that string and add an underscore SG at the end and press Enter. Okay, I'll go back to the material shading node. And let's do a rendering of this perspective view. I'll get in a little bit closer in that perspective view with alt and right mouse button and navigate with alt and middle mouse button, just track around, getting closer. And with focus on that perspective, you go into the main Maya menus and choose Arnold render. The Arnold render view pops up and automatically renders that perspective viewport. Let's just make sure that interactive production rendering is enabled. Click on the Start button, which is currently a triangle in my case. And when we see that it turns to a red square, that actually means that interactive production rendering is running because this is now a Stop button. We can verify that it's running just by manipulating the viewport with alt and middle mouse, and we see that IPR is running in the Arnold render view. Going over to the standard surface attributes, we see the base attributes, weight and color. I strongly recommend that the base weight should be at a value of one, at least as a starting point. The default is 0.8. Let's increase that base weight or the strength of the base color to its maximum of one. And there are a lot of reasons why I recommend this. The most primary is that this color swatch here will only closely represent the final rendering if the base weight is set to one. So for example, if I click on that color swatch and set it to a bright red, we can see that with the base weight of one, this red and this fully illuminated red look similar. If I bring that base weight down, then these don't match anymore. And the more bring that down, the greater the differences. Okay, so I'll set that base weight back up to a value of one. And by the way, ignore the material swatch in the Attribute Editor. The lighting on that samples sphere is very dim, and it does not represent the color of a fully illuminated object in the scene. Moving on to the specular section, those are the shiny highlights. In order to see those more clearly, I'm going to temporarily reduce the base weight down to zero and we see the default specular way to 0.2. I recommend bringing that up to its maximum of one at least as a starting point. And that's physically accurate. With the specular weight of one, the shininess of the material is controlled by the roughness attribute here. So if I increase that roughness all the way up to a maximum of one, I don't get any shiny highlights. The specular weight does come in handy if you want to create certain special effects or if you want to just simply dim down the highlights. I do recommend starting out with the specular weight at a value of one. Okay, we'll finish this up by creating an ideal diffuse material in which all of the incident light upon that object is reflected and scattered. I'll bring the base weight back up to one and set the base color to pure white, with a saturation of zero and a value of one. And now we've got an ideal diffused material in which all of the light hitting the object is reflected and scattered, those are the most basic primary attributes of the Autodesk standard surface.