Hi all, I’m really enjoying Zbrush, and have found the level of help and tutorials fantastic. However, I do feel that the whole area of how to use materials and shaders, and what they each actually do has been glossed over a bit. I come from a games modeling background, where I’m used to thwacking on a lambert shader with a texture map, and maybe a spec map or bump map if I’m lucky. I do have a basic understanding of what the various attributes of a simple shader do, but when it comes to the more complex ones I’m clueless. Any chance of some better documentation or improving the online help in a future update? Like what the hell does the colourize shader do? When used in a Quad or trishader with other basic materials, what’s its effect? I noticed the skin materials made have several different shaders used, by the looks of it to control crest shadow colour, ambient shade etc. I can see what’s being achieved, but I don’t know what’s going on “under the hood”. I realise that you need to do a lot of experimenting to get what you want, but I could do with a bit more actual knowhow first 
Thanks in advance guys and girls.
I’m having the same trouble. I’m a n00b when it comes to shaders/materials. I play around with the values pretty randomly trying to get something to look good, but I dont’ know enough about it to be able to control it to make it do exactly as I want. It’s all trial and error for me and this is frustrating.
I didn’t find any tutorials on this subject anywhere, are there any?
These are some of the questions I have in trying to understand all this:
-What’s the difference between trishaders and colorizer trishaders? When would you use one over the other?
-How exactly are the shader channels combined? Is it like multiplying 2 channels in photoshop or something?
-When I first put a material on my model, I can move the color picker around and the model changes color…why isn’t this color overruled by the 100%diffuse/ambient/spec/etc color blocks that you put into the shader channels?
-What’s the difference between all the fastshader materials? They all look the same and have the same modifiers as far as I can tell.
Totally with you, ElCheese. For what I’ve seen, trial and error is the most common aproach to getting what you actually want, but definetly not the most efficient. I haven’t used ZBrush a lot, but Materials/shaders seem to be pretty important, and in my opinion they haven’t been as adecuately covered as they should, so some better documentation would be great. 
While it may not have all the information you’re looking for, there is some solid documentation to be found at http://www.zbrush.info/docs/index.php/Materials
There’s also a lot of specific information to be found at http://www.zbrush.info/zbrush2_wiki/index.php/Material_Palette
Thank you Aurick 
The first link you posted was what I had already read. The second really helps a lot more to understand the ideas behind the shaders.
I think it would be nice if a lot of that info was carried over into the Z3 wiki…it seems compatible.
Also would be great if more “special shaders” such as the tri, quad, colorizers etc, were explained better. I still haven’t found info on them…are there any other links out there that do explain them?
You know what would be great? An organized material library like you can find in MaxwellRender or V-ray. Some ZMaterial contests and have a huge library organized online. The Wiki should be able to do that. Just release a standard ztool, say, a material sphere where it can be used to demo the material and have the tumbnails arranged by material basis on the wiki so everyone can contribute and download. That’d be awesome.
I mean, in this forum alone, there are already perhaps thousands of material uploaded by many enthusiasts. The problem is, if you miss the thread, you’re probably will never knew about such awesome material as anthro’s skin shader or the OC material.
An online material library on the wiki would be great!
Does anyone know the answers to any of these questions?
-How exactly are the shader channels combined? Is it like multiplying 2 channels in photoshop or something?
-What’s the difference between all the fastshader materials? They all look the same and have the same modifiers as far as I can tell.
There isn’t a hard and fast rule for how shaders combine. It depends upon the particular shader involved. For example, the Fibers shader can ONLY go in the S1 channel to have any effect, and it doesn’t combine with the other channels at all.
As for your other question, the various Fast Shader materials are just copies of the same material. There’s a very good reason for this, having to do with the nature of the Fast Shader along with how ZBrush handles materials on the canvas:
The Fast Shader is named that because it’s a very basic material that renders quite quickly. As such, it has very little impact upon ZBrush’s performance. This is especially useful when dealing with complex models with lots of polygons. (The more polys you’re pushing, the less other stuff you want to be taking up processing power.)
Having multiple Fast Shader materials allows you to simply assign a different one to each part of your model (or element of your scene) while you’re working. Basically, the material is used as a “stand in” while you work. Later, when you’re ready to actually start dealing with materials you can simply select each of the Fast Shader materials that’s been used and load a new material over top of it. The new material replaces the Fast Shader and immediately updates the canvas.
Of course, with the optimizations that have been made to the rendering and sculpting engines in Z3 and the greater power of computers today the Fast Shaders don’t play quite as important of a role as they used to. Heck, we’ve even got real-time shadows now! But they still can be quite handy – especially with really poly-dense models – and so they continue to live on with multiple copies. Just in case you DO want them.
So far I haven’t figured this one out - why do only some of the materials react to lighting changes and others seem “frozen” ?
Ok thanks for the response
Angela, That’s probably because the matcap materials(ones at the top of the material palette), will not react to light at all. They have a fixed lighting.
The other normal materials will react to the light.
Thanks for letting me know:) Now I can stop pulling my hair out! LOL
there´s the main fountain of life and creativity. :idea: :idea: :idea: