ZBrushCentral

Space Girl and Pug

This is a project i’ve been working on as part of the Stylized Characters class from Zbrush Workshops. Still struggling with understanding the materials, lighting and rendering workflow, but slowly getting better! I think…

Attachments

spaceGirl.jpg

I really like playing with lighting in zbrush. Matcaps have lighting built in to them, so in order to get really cool lighting effects you have to use standard materials. Skinshade4 is a great one to use. Dock the light menu and turn off the main light by clicking it so its not lit up orange. That should make everything in your viewport look unshaded. Now go down to light caps. Click new light and now you can change the diffuse and specular values independently from each other for each new light you add. Diffuse obviously being diffused light and specular being highlights/rim lights. move the light around on the sphere to change where the light source is going to come from. Be careful to only have 1 or 2 lights casting heavy shadows. Turn shadow opacity to 0-10% on the rest of them. Also I like to sometimes only have diffuse or specular on each light. So I just turn the opacity of the diffuse down to 0 if i only want specular or vice versa. Add specular lights to the far edge of the little preview sphere to get cool rim lights. Use color in your lights too. No color is boring. Save your lights and after a while youll have a good collection of lights you can tryout and tweak.

I do all of this at the end of the sculpt btw.

Cool Erocked, thanks for the advice! So are there some things that you just shouldnt mix? Like the regular lighting with Mat Caps, or LightCaps with MatCaps? Can they all blend together or is it best to do one or the other? My basic understanding is that MatCaps have a sort of “fake” lighting built in? Does this mean they dont respond to LightCaps or the regular lights?
Thanks again!

Very nice model!
z brush workshops?
are they free like the tutorials?

Great work! I really like the characters and I look forward to seeing more. :+1:

For Rendering, lights & materials, here are some links that may help you:
http://pixologic.com/zclassroom/homeroom/#rendering-and-posing
http://docs.pixologic.com/user-guide/materials-lights-rendering/

And this tutorial at 3dtotal may be of interest:
BPR Rendering Workflow in ZBrush 4 R2 By Daniel Bystedt

HTH,

I must say, to me the lighting and renderingpart in zbrush is the most difficult to grasp and the worst documented.

I would appreciate some very basic starter tuts here for beginners.

@Jake- None of the 3 links provided by marcus in the post before yours shed any light on the processes at all?

well, they do partly. But it all seems a bit cluttered and spread here and there all over the different places.
I am missing a wellstructured step by step overview like in the excellent Helmet tutorials from Joseph Drust
to find a good start with it.
At the moment it seems to me to be almost easier to retopo and uv-map to go to a real 3d software for final images…

sorry don`t want to distract this thread here.

@ Jake Rupert
Thanks Jake. No, Zbrush workshop is not free but they do have some helpful sample lessons on their site.
http://www.zbrushworkshops.com/

@marcus_civis
Thanks for the encouragement and the links, i really appreciate the help! Hopefully i can understand the rendering process a little more!
Thnaks!

@Mangres - Im not sure exactly what the situation with the matcaps and light caps is, but if you try to light matcap materials with lightcaps they turn black and theres no way I know of to fix it besides shutting down zbrush completely and restarting it. Even “initializing” zbrush doesnt regenerate the matcaps lighting. I usually sculpt with matcaps and when ready to paint I switch to a standard material and adjust the modifiers for them in the Materials menu.