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Painting Skin Video Demo

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#101

Hey Scott, this is a great technique, however I have a question.

I am using the skin 04 material with the opacity set to around 75%. I have painted the entire body on this material and have it looking pretty good. However, if I switch the material to a fast shader, the texture looks horrible. Is this normal or should it still pretty much look the same, maybe just slightly darker? The reason I ask is because you mentioned in this thread that the head you use for the cover of your book, only has the color map applied and no other maps, but you have a very similar result. So I guess another question is, what type of shader are you using for it in that image? Is it a blinn, lambert, miss_fast, etc…?

Thanks,
Scott

#102

Hi Skdzines,

The shader I used on the cover is a Fast Skin shader in Mental Ray for Maya.
IF you switch to the fast shader in ZBrush the texture shouldn’t look terrible, you can continue to paint on it under this fast shade adding “washes” of the base color. There is no reason why it cant look good under both shading models but I find the translucency inherent in the skin shaders combined with the painting technique creates a nice effect. You could even say the demo as you are seeing it is tailored to creating maps for sad4rs with some level of translucency built in.
You can also get the same effect in Maya by adjusting the multiplier on each map layer controlling the “depth” into the skin (I applied the same color map in a couple of the SSS map slots.)

Alternately if you are further painting in Photoshop you can add overlay layers to help reinforce the sense of translucence.
In any case if it looks too much like a technicolor splatter painting then you need to add more layers of mottling combined with “washes” of the base color built up at low opacities. Try selecting the base color in ZBrush, setting RGB Intensity to 5 and pressing fill object with RGB on a few times, you will see the colors start to recede into the skin.

I hope this helps : )

S

#103

Hey Scott,

Thanks for the quick response. I’ll keep messing around with it and see if I can get it looking fairly the same with the different shaders. How far down do you set the opacity of the skin material? Maybe I don’t have it down far enough so that when painting my base color over the reds, blues and yellows, it is getting muted and looks good on this shader because it already has a pink/beige hue to it. Then switching to the fast shader, it is loosing that hue.

Not sure if that makes sense or not.

Thanks again,
Scott

#104

Thanks for spending time posting this. When is next one?

koozies online

#105

Scott, it’s thanks to you and Paul that I am beginning to understand how to achieve my goals with Zbrush!

#106

Thank you Cordycep! It means a lot to hear that these tuts, books, etc help artists. Its the point of it all.

Thanks for taking the time I’m sure Paul appreciates it as well :slight_smile:

Scott

#107

I think they are really expressive and well done. I did notice that on a few of them they seem a little sparse on paint, however I dont know enough about painting techniques and stylistic choices in painting to say if thats bad or not. My favorite is “everything is true 75 of the time”

#108

sorry wrong thread

#109

Nice paint, I LOVED it!

As a new user of ZBrush, I would like to ask some questions:

How can I start painting the model?
How can I change the base color of the model?
What brush did you use to paint? (seems like a spray, I don’t know D:)
What is this shader that you were talking about? Was the shader that ‘‘erased’’ the color?

Thanks and awesome model and painting!