From the course: ZBrush: Tips & Tricks

Painting materials

- You probably already know how you can paint color in ZBrush, and assigning materials is easy enough too. But did you know that you can paint different materials onto different parts of a model as well? It's not hard to do, but it does come with some limitations. So let's see how it's best used. All right, we've got this model of Athena here, and currently it's got this material on it that kind of makes it look like stone perhaps. And let's say that this model was once coated in gold leaf but that the gold leaf has sort of warn off in a lot of places. So let's see how we can simulate that look. Okay, let's go ahead and pick a gold material, and let's fill everything with this material. So I want to go into Zplugin, SubTool Master, Fill, and let's fill everything with the same material. Okay, great. So now that everything is filled with the gold material, we can actually go through and paint everything with that stone material again. Doesn't matter exactly which one, just something that's kind of dull, maybe the MatCap Green here. So we've got the Standard brush active right now. What I want to do is turn off Z Add and just turn on the Material Channel. And let's just zoom in and see what happens. I'm going to go ahead and start on maybe this piece of clothing here. I'll get a smaller Draw Size, and I'll just start painting on. So you might want to go and attack areas that are most likely to get their gold leaf rubbed off. So I'm just kind of hitting the areas where the surface is more convex and then leaving the gold leaf on areas that are kind of concave. And of course, you want it to be a little bit organic and messy too, so, just kind of keeping everything kind of rough and organic, making it look like the sculpture has seen many centuries of wear and maybe just a little bit of that gold is remaining on it. Okay, let's do some of the same thing on the body. So I'm going to Alt + click on the body to make that the active SubTool. And one thing you might notice if you try to paint this is that the material is dependent on the resolution of the model. So let's hit D to go up in the subdivision levels a little bit, and you can see that we're getting sharper resolution on this the higher up in subdivision levels we go. So now we get a much smoother effect if we do this on a higher subdivision level. So I just want to kind of simulate the effect of years of people touching this and rubbing off the gold. Course, this could be kind of tedious and time-consuming. I'm not going to go through and do the entire thing like this. But you can kind of see the effect that you would get if you really spent your time to do it right. Okay, so we're getting an interesting effect here. Obviously, it's not the most robust or accurate material painting solution. But for something quick and dirty, it gets the job done.

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