First of all, hello everyone. I’ve been using Zbrush for the past week and there are some things I already now and some things that I still have difficulties on.
One of the problem I’m having is that whenever I render (BPR), the hair looks really fake and some part of the hair are too thick and flat. I haven’t done anything to the hair except paint it and move it to certain direction. Somehow, some part of the hair are wider than other and that shouldn’t happen because I set the settings the same for the whole Fibermesh. The “hair” is too shiny when rendered and I can’t change the texture. If I try to the hair will turn to a flat color unlike the skin color texture.
Now the other problem is the skin. Whenever I render it looks like a cartoon and the lighting doesn’t reflect like real skin does that much. I’ve seen some zbrush sculturethat were rendered within the program and they look good. I tried to mess with the settings but nothing works.
The final problem I have is regarding the polycounts. Somehow I have over 11 MIL Total Points. I did do a lot of divide for the head sculpture, maybe that’s the problem (I wanted to have it really smooth so I can get better details). So, now when it autosaves or if I save it manually, it takes more than 4GB.
Hi Joe. There’s a lot to unpack here, so bear with me.
Some of those strands appear to have had their geometry stretched, possibly due to excessive grooming. Make sure to use the various “Groom” brushes for styling–they will respect the geometry of the strand much more than say, the “move” brush, which will definitely distort geometry when used.
In the meantime, try smoothing that problem area. It may relax those strands back into shape. You may want to reduce the intensity of your smooth brush for a lighter touch. To adjust the smooth brush settings, you hold down shift to activate smooth mode, then adjust the brush intensity like you would for any other brush.
The hair subtool can be filled with a color or material just like any other subtool. Select it and with the desired material and/or color selected, then Color > Fill Object. It will fill the object according to whatever the selected channel is ( M=material, RGB= Color, MRGB = color +material). If you fill it with color, this will overpaint any root/tip color assignments you had in the strands.
By default, if a subtool has no active polypaint, the currently selected material is previewed.
Rendering is a broad subject and an art in itself. I can give you no simple answers here. Realistic skin tones are usually the result of a bit of labor in any program, requiring a blend of attributes and flattering scene lighting.
That said, because Zbrush doesn’t feature a layered texture system like many traditional renderers, the best rendering results in Zbrush are often achieved with multi-pass rendering and compositing. Different maps can be applied to a model to highlight different aspects, and then composited together post render, allowing a high degree of control over the final image, without the burden of having to get everything perfect in a single render.
11 million points/polys isn’t really very high by Zbrush standards. If your file size is hitting 4GB, you have a lot of other stuff going on. Remember, a Zbrush Project file (.zpr) saves every tool and subtool loaded in the current session, and a lot of other stuff besides. So every loaded tool and their subtools will be contributing geometry to that files size. Saving Undo histories (not enabled by default) can also rapidly bloat a file size with multiple subtools.
If you want to only save the active tool, you can do that with Tool > Save As.
Hey, thank you for replying and giving me some tips. I appreciate your help. So, about some part of the hair being to flat and wide, I mentioned that I didn’t used any other brush to style it it except for the move tool. So, why is that specific part of the hair looks so bad?
As for texture for the hair, I already have ‘polypaint on’ and because of that whenever I try to add a new texture (using M=material and going to Color > Fill Object) it colors the whole hair flat. Like I said, if I do this to the skin (the head model), whenever I change the texture it works fine and doesn’t flat the color unlike the hair.
For the rendering part I do understand what you’re saying and it does makes sense that it’s done between different programs. I was hoping that maybe there was something wrong I did to correct it easily.
Finally, for the polycounts, there are millions of it. I mentioned polypoints (not sure if they are refereed the same), but when I hover the cursor on top of the hair or the head, it displays between 1-2 mill polycounts per subtools.
See my tip above about using the Groom brushes. Any brush that starts with the word “groom” is designed to be used with Fibermesh. They will respect the length of the fibermesh strands, and are much more forgiving in terms of distorting the hair mesh. The move brush has no such constraints, and will easily deform the underlying strands if care is not taken. Grooming brushes should also be accompanied by frequent smoothing, to relax the strands as you style.
The slenderness of hair strands can often cause the same material to look slightly darker on fibers than it would on a smooth flat surface due to the slight darkening at the edges with not a lot of surface area. Bear also in mind that some matcap materials already have color and lighting information baked in, which may conflict with a color you are assigning it. Other materials may be so reflective you will not be able to see the underlying mesh color.
Otherwise, If the hair is becoming “flat” in color, you are filling it with a flat material. Do exactly this:
Select any material you would like to assign to your hair subtool. Make it a distinctive material for the purpose of this test. Any visible subtool on screen that does not have active polypaint, will display this material now.
Make your hair subtool the active subtool in the subtool list. Clear any masking (ctrl drag in empty canvas space or tool > masking > clear) to avoid confusion.
Enter Solo Mode (Transform > Solo), to make ONLY the active subtool visible, and to avoid confusion with any other visible subtools.
Set the channel selector to “M” for material.
Color > Fill object.
This will fill the selected subtool with that material, but will not change the mesh’s underlying color. The chosen material may have its own color information though. Otherwise, it will only affect the surface properties. The actual color is governed by the color selector. Switch to a different active scene material to see the newly filled subtool hold its material.
A tool that has many subtools with polycounts in the millions is normal for Zbrush, and an 11 million poly mesh is well within normal use. This will not result in a file of the size you describe. If you have a file size in excess of 4GB, you must have quite a few dense tools/subtools accumulated in that file–perhaps in the form of trial fibermesh subtools that are just bloating the file.
I got the texture fixed. Thanks, the tips helped. However, I can’t fix the hair issue. I tried smoothing it multiple times and still some part are too wide. The Grooming brushes are not doing anything. They are just adding more hair and making it even faker. I tried every single grooming brush and it looks like they are doing the same thing which is add more hair. They are not doing what they are supposed to expect for the twist brush one.
As for the excessive memory consumption, I have around 10 subtools. Each of them have at least 1 Mil polycounts. Some have 2.
The Grooming brushes dont add hair, though they may make the hair seem fuller as a result of twisting the strands to catch more light. Just think of them as a “comb”. Most of the grooming brushes will not extend the hair, they will only comb it out.
If the Grooming brushes (with the exception of the extender) are not behaving like this, and are stretching and distorting strands with no limits, then at some point your hair subtool lost its “live” status and was converted to a pure mesh. Exporting and re-importing the hair subtool, or altering an individual strand’s topology with the zmodeler brush are examples of things that could cause this.
If your subtool is in this state and you dont have a backup from before it was converted, I’m not aware of anything that can be done at that point.
If the other strands besides those distorted ones are behaving correctly with the groom brushes, I can give you a couple of ideas, but It may be that your strand topology has become so mangled, there is no good easy fix for it at this point. If It won’t smooth out, I’m afraid I’m not enough of a Fibermesh expert to offer better advice than how to avoid ending up in this position, hence the Grooming brushes. If it were just a few strands, I’d probably zoom in, try to isolate and delete the problem ones. But the damage here seems significant, and that would require intermediate program expertise.
It’s important that you’re actually getting at the problem strands. Zoom in, and shift-ctrl draw a selection marquee around the problem area to highlight it in green, then release. This will hide all but the strands that fell under the selection box, making it easier to zoom in and improving performance.
Try enabling Brush> Automasking> Topological while holding Shift Down. This will make it so the smooth brush basically only affects the strand it first makes contact with, so reduce the brush radius and really try to get in there and find the vertices on the offending strand that needs smoothed. The polygons on those strands have become very stretched–you have to get the smooth brush on the points.
You also may get some use out of the pinch brush, also with topological masking enabled.
Re: File Size.
An 11 million poly mesh with 10 subtools at 1-2 million each will also not get you anywhere near a 4GB file size. That’s small potatoes in Zbrush world. You’re probably carrying a lot of resources in that file that you arent aware of–other tools in the tool list that were created or loaded at some point then saved in that session, or other scene data.
Thanks! Something weird is going on with the file size. I assume one of the reason is the fibermesh. I got two subtool for the hair and two subtool for the beard. I’ll see what I can do with fixing the flat hairs.
One last thing, do you know how or which texture makes the ‘skin’ of the model look better when render. I only see the one called matcap skin3 (something like that). I tried using others but it doesn’t give that real look. I’ve seen some models that even before they are rendered, they still look good. Mine just looks too cartoonish and plastic.
For example, this model isn’t render yet and it already looks good.
Off the top of my head as the most general critique, I would say your color is too saturated, the specular is too high and too uniform, and the surface skin detail is a bit off. Looks less like porous orange peel and more like stretched and wrinkly avacado skin in places like the cheekbones. All those things will detract from realism.
You can tweak the color and reduce the specular a bit on the material. The surface texture may be a result of distorted topology. Hard to say without wireframe, but evenly distributed quads as close to square shaped as possible are the ideal topology for quality sculpting and painting.
Beyond that, you would be better served looking for tutorials on multi pass rendering and compositing in Zbrush. It’s a much broader subject than I can cover here, and an art in itself.
