ZBrushCentral

ZBrush 4R2 Beta Testing By: James Rumball

Hello everybody,

First time beta tester and very honoured to be among such great artists and to be getting to use these great new tools :smiley:

Here are some some pictures and a few words of what I have been doing with the new features and hopefully some videos in posts to come.

Toad Noir is an as yet un-named toad lawyer who lives under a sink. He works for a rat dective; ā€œrattus rattus PIā€ (among others), in a kind of Danger Mouse meets the Maltese Falcon meets the Rats of Nimh universeā€¦

ToadSetNoir02.jpg

I ended up using many of the new feautures to model and render a number images. My favourite behind this film noir/neo noir concept which captures the look I was after. 99% created in ZBrush using the new environment light caps and render filters. The only external additionā€¦ some film grain.

ToadNakedBWr.jpg

ToadNakedColour.jpg

The toad was created initially with zspheres then straight away I used dyna mesh to create a nice evenly distributed square topology for sculpting. I used dyna mesh whenever the topology became too stretched and I also used dyna mesh with an inserted sphere to give me the basic eye shape for the head. The above render is from a turntable rendered in zBrush using an environment with light cap, the wax material modifier and render filters.

ToadSoloBW.jpg

I used the new slice curve brush to create the basic clothing from the toad body. After duplicating the mesh I sliced in where I wanted the borders of the clothes to be and then extracted a base shape for the jacket and shirt. I sculpted this and then later re-topologised the clothes along with the toad body.

ToadWideColour.jpg

Almost all the environment that I needed was created using dynamesh and mesh insert brushes. The copper pipes and desk both started off as primitives and then I inserted other shapes. Once a mesh has been inserted, using polygroups and masking I moved and scaled them in to the correct place before using dyna mesh to create a single mesh. Some times I used clay polish to give interesting shapes at intersections and edges.

ToadSoloColour.jpg

For the lighting I used a spherical hdri environment image and using light cap this was sampled to create a lighting set up and a reflection map based on the intensities in the image. This gave a great result without much effort, but I also went in to the shaders on some objects to tweak them. One of the best ways to get a realistic result for your reflections is to use the new fresnel slider along with the environment reflections - I used this on almost everyting :slight_smile: Another tip is to to turn off or completely lower the intensity of the default light in the lighting palette so you are purely using light from lightcap and I also had some interesting results by turning specular very low so the only specular contribution I had was from the reflection map and not the lights. Oh and not forgetting the wax modifier for the toad skin, quick and great results.

Finally I used render filters to tweak the render. There are some great ways to mask how the filters are applied, I used depth to drive my blurring for depth of field, I experimented with using fresnel to drive things like orton and glow to give a cool bloom result and I ended up desaturating to give some film noir/neo noir vesions.

RoomHDR_squareBlack_LatLongFlipped.jpg

I created the environment image I used by photograping a chrome ball and converting this to a spherical image. Not as good as some hdri images out there, but if you want to capture the lighting in some specfic environments for use in zBrushā€¦ could be lots of possibilities:cool:. This can be used for lighting and also generating a nice background based on the colours.

Thanks for taking a look! Hopefully I will add some other little tests and vidoes in another post.

James

Nice lightning.

Nice lighting, texturing and shading. This new render features look very promissing indeed, thanks pixologic!

Love the frog!

Beautiful !! Thanks for sharing your workflow !!

Great sculpt and coloring! Beautiful renders :+1:

That frog is absolutely adorable, sorry if I am struggling to be intimidated by it. Fantastic work!! My favorite Zbrush model yet.

Thanks for sharing your photography process. Thatā€™s what makes this community great-people share ā€œsecretsā€ but it doesnā€™t make oneā€™s work any less unique. Wonderful frog!

WOWā€¦ really nice work - how many hours did it take from first zsphere to finished render?