From the course: Sculpting a Creature with ZBrush and Photoshop

Adding basic shadowing

From the course: Sculpting a Creature with ZBrush and Photoshop

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Adding basic shadowing

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- Our monster's looking great, but we need to accentuate the forms to really sell the focal point of our creation. Here I'll show you how some well-placed shadows can make your character really pop. Okay, so as you can see, when I hit the View Mask button, we still have our mask selected, I want to make sure that I clear this before this next step. And what we want to do is we can still choose the color spray. We can still choose some of the alpha break-up there. And I want to select using the C button, some of those darker tones that I put in the cavity. And I might even want to darken them a little bit more. And what I'm going to do is just start brushing in some of these shaded areas. Underneath the cheekbones, underneath the jaw a little bit. You can do this little figure 8 pattern with your brush or your pen, and just kind of create this real random grouping of shapes. I'm going to darken it a little bit more. We were staying quite subtle on the last video, but this one we can get a little bit more direct with how much color we're putting in there. Because we really want to create that color-zoning where you have, you know, this color in the back might be much deeper, and then it might soften and lighten as it gets towards the face, which is really good to maintain our focal point on the face. So don't be afraid to go pretty deep here. Watch out for really bright, vivid, overly-saturated colors. You know, try to keep it something a little more desaturated. If we look over at the color box over here, we really do have a nice choice as far as a desaturated color. But it's still dark enough to really pop out and emphasize some of those areas. So we're going to continue to add some more texture. And you can see even just that little bit is really starting to pop out the focal point of the face a little bit more. Another brush we can use is we switch over to free hand, and select this air brush alpha. Be able to go in a little bit tighter, and just kind of focus in on emphasizing some of these shadow areas. Okay, we're just kind of helping ourselves blend the cavity masking into the rest of the forms. So it's a little bit smoother transition in between the two. We still want to have a good contrast, but we just want to give ourselves a little bit more a breakup of skin there, and a little bit more of a blend from one color to another. So areas like the nose, you'll come in and darken up a little bit, kind of feather that out, kind of follow in some of these little creases. You know, you might throw, push a little bit harder on the edges of the lip, let you help pop that out, and bring some focal attention to that area. As you can see, it just adds a little bit more depth to it and makes it more believable. And don't be afraid to go bold with some of these shadows. Really nice contrast and really nice color-zoning can really help sell a character. So, hit around the eye a little bit more, maybe around the cheekbone. And what you want to do is treat your entire sculpture with this, and just really focus on the areas you want to pop out and some of the areas you want to kind of hide from the viewer. And it's just kind of a back-and-forth, a delicate dance of shadows and making sure they're doing what you want them to do. So our creature's really coming together now, but there's still much more realistic detail to be added.

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