From the course: ZBrush 2020 Essential Training

Applying materials - ZBrush Tutorial

From the course: ZBrush 2020 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

Applying materials

“

- [Instructor] Many 3D softwares are moving towards physically-based materials and real-time rendering. However, ZBrush is sticking with its core functionality of sculpting and modeling while leaving high-quality rendering to other programs. So, in order to create the appearance of real world materials, ZBrush has its own type of material. So, let's take a look. Now, by default, ZBrush uses this material called MatCap Red Wax. So let's go ahead and click on that. When we click on the material swatch, we get a pop-up of all the different materials that we have to choose from in ZBrush. Now, some people love the Red Wax material, other people hate it. If you want something that feels a little bit more normal like something you might see in Maya or 3ds Max, you can try to click on BasicMaterial for example. And it looks like a simple Lambert or a Blend Material you might see in some other software. Alternatively, there are other materials that have more special effects. You can kind of simulate the appearance of metals and plastics and reflective materials. Now, there is one material in particular that I use all the time especially when working with textures and color, and that is Skin Shade. The great thing about Skin Shade is that it's a pretty light white material, and so any colors or textures that you apply to a model won't receive any interference from the shading or the highlights or any sort of color built in to this material. So it's a very neutral blank canvas. So, you'll notice that anytime I switch the material, it's updating instantaneously on the model here in ZBrush. Now, if you don't want to do that, you can lock in a material so that it always stays on regardless of whether you've switched to a different material. So, let's say we want to lock this material on to the body. In order to do that, we would switch to material load, go to Color, and Fill Object. Now, it might not look like anything has changed, but if we switch this to the Skin Shade for example, now, you'll notice that the other color is locked on just the SubTool that we had active when we filled it. So you could switch to any other object. So Alt + click on the pedestal, we could change this to something like this MatCap metal. Go to Color, Fill Object, and now you can see if we switch to any others, now the material is locked on to that SubTool. You can even paint with materials. So, let's zoom in on that pedestal, and let's go up to our brush settings here. And I want to turn off ZAdd, so now this brush won't do any sculpting, now, it's only going to operate on materials. So, if we paint with this brush, you can see that it is applying that material to just the polygons that I'm brushing over. Now, this is pretty low poly object, so you're going to get a very coarse, very faceted effect here. But if you're doing this on a more high resolution model, for example, the dress, I'm going to Alt + click on that. Let's switch to some other material, and let's fill with this material, so Color, Fill Object, and now we can switch to a new material here and just paint with this material. So still, you're noticing that sort of picks the lady in the effect because this is not a super-high-resolution object, but you can kind of get the sense that you can paint with materials. Now, there's not any way to have a soft falloff or smooth transition between materials. It's always going to be 100% one material or another. Now, if you want to restore this to one single material, you can always go to Color and Fill Object. We can also fill every visible SubTool at once if we go up to ZPlugin, SubTool Master and Fill. So from here we can pick if we want to fill with the color or a material or both at the same time. Let's just fill with material for now. So you can see it's going through all the SubTools and filling them with the same material. Now, all of these materials are very much a superficial effect. You can't do anything like transparency or semitransparency. You can't do any true reflective material. So there's materials that sort of simulate reflectivity but nothing that actually is going to reflect object and you're seeing in a realistic way. However, for sculpting purposes, these options are sufficient.

Contents