From the course: ZBrush: Tips & Tricks

Painting shadows on teeth - ZBrush Tutorial

From the course: ZBrush: Tips & Tricks

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Painting shadows on teeth

“

- As great as ZBrush is at providing a digital sculpting experience, there are still a few things that it has a hard time with. One of those is realistic light and shadow. When you're sculpting a portrait in clay, the light and shadow naturally falls on teeth the same way they would on people. But in ZBrush, light and shadow are not physically accurate, which can make faces look off even if they're sculpted correctly. In this video, I'll show you how to solve one particular issue. Okay, so we're sculpting this portrait and you can see I've applied a material that kinda makes it look like clay. And it's a very subtle thing but it might feel wrong and if somebody doesn't really have a lot of traditional art experience, they might think that there's something off about this portrait but they can't quite place their finger on it. And that's because the teeth, we're able to see all the teeth without them being, kind of disappearing in the shadow in the corners of the mouth where they would get a lot of shadow. And that can make it look like the mouth is really toothy. So to solve this, I'm going to paint a little extra shadow to simulate the way it would look in the real world. So let's switch to the teeth subtool. And I'm going to get my paintbrush out, so B, P and I got the paintbrush and let's switch the color to black so that black is here in the active color channel. I'll zoom in a little bit here. Let's drop our RGB intensity down so we get a softer effect. And let's see what happens when we start painting this in. Okay, so you can see I'm getting a little bit of a shadow effect there. And let's do the other side. Okay, so it's a very small, subtle thing but it actually improves the likeness and the realism quite a bit to have those teeth kind of falling away into shadow. You can use the same trick anywhere else that you're having an issue like this. For example, in the nostrils or in the pupils, or maybe even inside the ear. Anywhere that kinda feels like it's not getting enough shadow.

Contents