From the course: ZBrush: Tips & Tricks

Adjusting viewport brightness and contrast - ZBrush Tutorial

From the course: ZBrush: Tips & Tricks

Adjusting viewport brightness and contrast

- Depending on the colors and materials you're using in ZBrush, the model that you're working on might appear too light or dark. ZBrush has a quick adjustment feature that can tone the value and color balance of the viewport. Let's take a look at these options. In this scene, my model has the material skin shade four, which is a great material for painting color, but when everything is white, it tends to look a bit washed out and makes it kind of hard to see the details in the forms. Of course, you could just put a different material on it, but maybe you really want to keep this material on for painting purposes. In that case, a different option would be to use the render adjustments. So, in order to do that, let's go up to Render, and let's come all the way down to Adjustments. Let's turn on Adjust, and then, we've got some different sliders here. We can adjust the contrast up or down, block that back to zero. You can raise the brightness up or down. And then, you can change the gamma, and this can actually bring some more contrast and tonal range into the image. I'm going to go back up to Render and show you a few more settings here. Let's actually change gamma back to one, we're just going to type in one here. There's another setting I like to use, you could actually play with the curves like you might in Photoshop. So you can just click and drag and set these curves in different places in a way that makes sense or that makes the model look better. Okay, that's pretty good. I might want to leave it there, and if I want to toggle this on and off, I can just turn Adjust on and off, and it'll remember the settings that I had. If you want to reset everything, you can just hit Clear. Now, this can be really handy when you are presenting the model to somebody else, and one thing you want to keep in mind is if you're going to record a movie within ZBrush with the adjustments set, you'll want to make sure that you only export the movie with the adjustments off if you recorded the movie with the adjustments on. So let me show you what I mean. We've got some adjustments set here, and then, if I go to Movie and start recording a movie here, so it's recording, and if I start spinning the model around, it's recording it with those adjustments made. If I go back to Movie and hit Pause, and hit Play, you can see that the movie has those adjustments. However, if I go to Export, and we'll call this "test" and save it, what it does is it actually exports the movie with another application of those adjustments. So what you want to do before you export is actually go to your Adjustments and turn adjustments off before you go and export. Then, we can just go ahead and write over that. So, feel free to play around with those adjustment settings and see what kind of results you can get.

Contents