New Wips and Zbrush Shader&Light Test[shader download on page 1] (potential nudity)

[Julian_K]

Hi all,

I am fiddling around with a shader and light setup in Zbrush in order to achieve
"sharper" and possibly more dramatic shadows and light.
No matcap, since the light should really be adjustable on the fly.Basically a render setup in Zbrush which slightly mimics those of the other packages.
It's a bit of a pain to adjust all the various settings in Zbrush, since adjusting numeric values is tedious and slightly unpredictable, plus you can't copy and paste. Nevertheless it's fun and I just love trying to get all I can out of this wonderful software.
So here are a few test renders. When I am done with fiddling and my current piece, then I'll simply post the shader and lights here to download. I'll be glad if anyone else will find it useful and might benefit from my results.

to be continued...

[Ardox]

this a potential Top row for me!

[gordon-v]

very nice! this is going to be usefull stuff! Thanks for sharing!!

[Julian_K]

Thanks Ardox and Gordon. I'll be more than happy to share.

[VictorCS]

That's some real man boobs...

So this is straight from Zbrush? Looking good

[Julian_K]

yeah, straight from Zbrush. no composite renders, no Photoshop post work other than cropping, cutting and pasting the renders together.

[Etcher]

These tests look really good (as does the sculpt)! Looking forward to seeing this develop .

[Julian_K]

not done with my piece, but done messing around with the shader and light setup. At least I have to stop now or I get lost in tech stuff. there is only so much time..

Anyhow, here are the files as promised. I hope they can save someone else the time of endless tinkering around , or at least be a good starting base for more. Feel free to use as you wish.
A few guideline words:
It's a Tri-shader and it is ONLY for rendering. If you just look at it in your viewport it will look pretty horrible without rendering. Not useful for sculpting at all.

Furthermore it needs a texture or polypainting. Without that it looks way over-bright. I am sure you can tweak it to get it to work with a plain sculpt, but my goal was to do tweak it for a textured model.

There are actually 3 materials and a light setup in this file. 2 similar for the body of which one has a gentle specular and the other hasn't. 1 only for eyes and anything similar glossy and reflective. So if you want to render a human figure with eyeballs, then assign any of the 2 Trishaders-Flesh&shadow.ZMT to the body and the eyeball.ZMT to the eyes - obviously.
Finally load the Shadowlight.ZLI as a starting point, adjust your light position and render.
Feel free to use it for anything you like.
Enjoy

[Etcher]

WootWoot!!!! Thanks a bunch Julian ! I'll drop u a line when I get to use them.

[Julian_K]

WootWoot!!!! Thanks a bunch Julian ! I'll drop u a line when I get to use them.

very welcome
... and yeah, let me know how it works for you.

[branduarte]

Hey man, it´s really awesome.

I made a test here and it´s work perfect, thank you very much for sharing this.

[Julian_K]

you are welcome Branduarte

[SolidSnakexxx]

Awesome..very generous of you!

[Julian_K]

couldn't quite stop, so here's one more material&light setup for you to download. The shadows are softer. The material is a bit on the glossy side though.
this one actually also works quite well just in the viewport for sculpting if you turn the light intensity down a notch.
generally the advantage of this material when sculpting over a matcap material is that you can move your light around at any time and see your sculpting from any light&shadow angle. yet it has a bit more of the matcap feel compared to the old basic materials.

for rendering I suggest trying to play around with the OccludedAmbient silder in the material modifier in order to either get a lighter or darker render with higher contrast.
the eyeball mat has also been updated and is included in the file.

have fun

[Julian_K]

Awesome..very generous of you!

Not really, but thanks
Honestly I think doing such things as base meshes or a basic shader like this, isn't really the creative part of our work. It's more of a tedious technical labour which stand between the vision in my head and the actual creative process of bringing it to life by sculpting and painting. I'd be more than happy to have such things ready made by somebody else and didn't need to bother.nothing really artistically unique about it, but very time consuming and since I already spent time on it, why not share it and possibly save somebody else some time. I can't count the hours I spent working on base-meshes over and over again just to get the right balance between good egde loops and low poylcount.not really fun after a while.
I'd rather have someone else do it
right now I'm working with a new one and if it turns out to work well I'm gonna post it here.

cheers