ZBrushCentral

"The Elder" Zbrush to Photoshop Workflow

Okay, so here is another sculpt (with polypaint this time) because it’s time to get reacquainted with painting the model again. I need to get the hang of polypainting since I am a 2D Photoshop artist. I chose a basic MatCap and just painted on it until I was happy enough, using some tutorials as a guide.

I was going for some depth and tranlucensy in the skin, but because I cannot seem to get a dynamic render in Zbrush yet (either zbrush is incapabale of giving me what I want…or I am-lol) I created three versions of color. 1) dermal, 2) subdermal 3) highlight/shadow.

Next I exported them all to Photoshop and placed them into the same document. Then after playing around with layer effects and levels I composited the three together for this final look. I also airbrushed some color into the eyes.

As you can see I didn’t spend much time sculpting or coloring this model, as I’m just trying to get a quick workflow that produces quality results for creating creature & characters for use in offset printing.

Well I hope you enjoy. Please feel free to C&C or offer some advice. Any help is welcome.

Thanks,

[attach=200060]ELDER.jpg[/attach]

Attachments

ELDER.jpg

Here are the different levels I spoke of, that I created the final composite image with.

I hope this is helpful to someone, and I encourage a slap in the head from anyone who can tell me a better way to do this.

[attach=200069]STEPS.jpg[/attach]

Attachments

STEPS.jpg

Here is a close-up comparison.

CLOSE-UP.jpg

honestly, it looks pretty bad, there si no reason to do a layer render if you dont have agood texture, and a lazy sculpt will make everything look bad ;f
I foind it that the simplier the render, the better it looks.
A basic shader render for forms without texture, and another shader for texture, meybe even flat shaded, and last for highlights or reflections is all you need, trying to fake sss in zbrush is pointless ;]

This was only a test, so no “real” time was put into it. I understand that a quality sculpt would help out a lot, but I am not being lazy, just trying-out some things to see what works. I don’t have zbrush at home and do all of my zbrush “learning” in-between “real” jobs at work. So the basis of my limited knowledge is constructed from the bits and pieces I’ve picked up over the course of time here and there. I don’t have the luxury of real “training” time and I haven’t found a good simple tutorial online that will take me through an entire zbrush workflow from sculpt to render.

yeah thats becouse zbrush sucks for rendering, so i doubt there are any serious tutorials for it ;D You really schould look into top row section, alot of those models are zbrush only with zrbush render, best of them use simple renders for composition with main good looking base material. There was one with horse i remember was good, you shcould check it out

You mentioned having a shader for four things in zbrush…

  1. form 2) texture 3) flat 4) highlights/reflections.

Are you saying I can make all four shaders in zbrush and later combine all four for my zbrush render? Like what I did in Photoshop, but all inside zbrush?

I’m confused…sorry

BTW, I have no access to a different render engine.

yeah there is the leyer system in zbrush but it sucks also ;D I menat you really dont need dermal and subderal and all tose bull**** fake sss leyers, its always beter to focus on color shapes and highlits only ;]

What does fake sss layers mean?

Can you walk me through a simple zbrush workflow? You know…after the sculpt and polypaint is done and the lights are set…and now you want to render. What do I do to make it look good now?? (WITHIN ZBRUSH)

[Oldies.jpg]

Fake SSS (Sub Surface Scattering)