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New To ZBrush - Tips And Opinions

Hello! As the title explains I’m new to Zbrush (and these forums!). I’ve recently worked on an assignment concerning materials in ZBrush. Mostly the human skin. I’d like some opinions about the rendering I’ve done below. Which one works better as a picture? Which one seems more “realistic”? And well, opinions and feedback is very much appreciated! :slight_smile: I have to make some kind of poll though… Like, “how many prefers the second over the first?” and such.

I keep getting the feeling the first render is very grey and dark, but at the same time the second one seems too glossy and shiny… D:
All tips are appreciated!

Attachments

Face Render.jpg

Yes, the first render is too grey and dark, but it also has the better specular. The trickiest aspect of any skin material is the SSS property. In other words, the translucent nature of flesh. When there’s not enough of it, the image will seem off and unconvincing. If there’s too much, that’s also problematic. Now, are you just looking in to designing the material within Zbrush alone, or are you looking to also achieve results in a Mental Ray / Vray environment? In any case, you should take a gander at the globulous SSS tutorial. It’s geared toward Maya using Mental Ray, but the information is fairly exhaustive and offers much to getting a grasp of the concept of believable skin.

For your convenience: http://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/sss-skin-shader-tutorial.pdf

Good luck!

As for now, I only planned on using ZBrush as it’s the only 3D program (except maybe Blender) that I can use, and the assignment is due to next week ^^’. I will definitely learn more about SSS and it seems really good judging by the link!
I noticed there’s an SSS button in the ZBrush render tab. Could that be of any help in some way?

Just for the sake of the study, should I count your feedback as a vote for the first render? :slight_smile:
Thank you so much for your time and advice!

Oh, and I rendered the torso in the same way. Noticed the second render really took a turn to the worse when I looked at the body… :3

Zbrush’s SSS effect takes a little work to set up. First, you need it enabled in the BPR render options, Then you need at least one light with SSS enabled (I believe the 8th light has it enabled by default. The light itself does not need to be turned on if I remember correctly), then you need the material to at least be a double shader material with one of the material channels set to a fresnel overlay and the mixer settings for that channel given a SSS value other than 0. The SSS itself is done with fresnels and special color blends and is not very accurate. With plenty of tinkering, you can get some nice results, though.

Personally, for a quicker skin quality, I like to start with the included SkinShade4 material and use the Wax Modifiers. By setting the temperature to about 100 and the strength somewhere between 40-50, you can get a pretty nice soft skin effect. Make sure Waxpreview is enabled in BPR if you want to get a feel for how it looks in preview mode.

With everything, fiddle fiddle fiddle til it feels right.

Tried applying the wax modifiers! This is the result! :slight_smile:

Untitled-1.jpg
It’s still grey though :wink:
Not sure if I’ll be able to get the grey away with Zbrush… >:[

The greyness doesn’t appear to have anything to do with your materials. Try applying the flat color material. If the greyness is still there, it’s the polypaint/texture. If not, then I would start looking into your shadow settings.