Hey, welcome to video number four
in this tutorial series about the ZBrush Face Tools
Plugin and Character Creator 4. In this video, we're going to concentrate
on the textures or the albedo, and I want to show you how to create a very nice
and detailed texture within ZBrush using poly paint and send it to character creator 4
in the form of a high res map or a high res texture map that you can apply to your character. Let's go ahead and jump straight into it. All right. So a quick recap on where we left off
from the previous video. This is our character already with all the details
and everything else that we created as a normal map. So all of these details come from ZBrush.
And let me just show you the ZBrush version. So this is the detailed version of the model,
and I just went ahead and send that send those details into character
creator 4 and automatically created these normal map that is, you know, providing
all those crevices and all those nice bumps and force. Now, the next thing that I want to do is kind of
like stylized the texture or the base texture a little bit more, or in other words, just tweak it
a little bit so that it looks more intentional in a way. And he sort of like departs from that more generic
Kevin character that we started with. So I want to show you how to do that using poly paint,
but you can literally do anything that you want. So let's go ahead and jump back into ZBrush. And what I'm going to do is enable the diffuse.
So when I click on Diffuse and as you can see, what the diffuse switch does is literally enable the texture map
that comes with character creator 4 into our character. So what you see here is literally the same thing
that you see here, obviously with different lighting, different chaining. In fact,
let's go ahead and change the material, cause right now we have the base material, so I'm going to switch to
the skin shade 4 that comes with ZBrush. So you can visualize things a little bit better
and that's it. Like we now have a texture map. We can go ahead and check the texture map.
Sub palette here. And as you can see, that's pretty much it, right?
That's what these switch does. Like I've mentioned in previous videos,
this is a very convenient plug in. But ultimately what it's doing is turning on and off
different things that you can do manually in ZBrush. It’s the same thing as just doing that, right? So that's it. We have the texture now in ZBrush,
but if I start like painting or adding color right now, you won't be able to see it
because the texture map is on and that will basically overwrite
whatever poly paint you have. So if I turn this off, we don't have any poly paint
and the main thing that we need to do is transfer this texture as poly paint. So in this stage of the process where we're going
to concentrate just in the texture of our character is step number one in this part of the process
is to convert this map into poly paint and that's something very, very simple to do. So what I want to do is click on poly paint And by the way, if I open up my geometry palette,
you'll see I'm also in subdivision level number seven, so I have plenty of resolution to project,
let's say, all this color and this map into poly paint. So make sure that you are
in the seven subdivision level. And from the paint palette,
you see we have these poly paint from texture. So we will be able to transform this texture
into poly paint. Now, in order to do that,
if I just go ahead and click it right now, you'll get this pop up
saying that MRGB draw mode is off. So you need to adjust that and retract. So that just means that in the switch here at the top,
we have no RGB information or material and RGB information. So I want to click on MRGB just to enable it,
and that basically solves that issue. So without enabling these,
we we're basically projecting nothing. We're not projecting any color or material. And in this case that I have enabled the MRGB
or in other words, the material red, green and blue channels,
I will be able to project everything. So I'm going to click on project
or create poly paint from texture, which is kind of like
when I'm talking about the projection and you see we now have exactly the same thing,
but now the texture is not on. So this is literally poly paint. Now that we have the poly paint,
we can just go ahead and start working and concentrating on the on the texture
and the and the albedo. And one thing that I like to do
when I'm working with textures and poly paint is to switch between these shade mode
or material mode and a shadeless version. So let's go ahead and open up the render palette and I'm going to go ahead
and drop this to the right hand side and the only reason I want to have these on
the right hand side is to click on this flat view and I can switch between flat and preview. So previous what we have here by default and flat is
going to give you a shade less version of the model. So in other words, this is just pure color,
so there's no influence of the material. So this is pretty important
when you when you texturing the character. All right.
So the first thing I want to do is create some kind of like unification of the colors
a little bit and kind of like overwrite some of the details that came
with the original texture. So let's go ahead and go back to preview and let's
go ahead and modify some of the brushes that we can use or the tools that we can use to paint. So using the standard brush,
I'm going to go ahead and enable RGB. So it's only going to affect the color
and not the material. And I'm going to switch the stroke type to color spray
and I'm also going to change these alpha to alpha, right? So very simple stuff. Now let's go ahead and click on the color picker
and let's drag to select a color. This is how you can pick a color in the brush
or one of the ways of doing that. So I want to select something around there, which is kind of like a yellowish tone,
and I want to push it to something lighter. So I'm just going to go like this
and maybe slightly to the yellow color. And also I'm going to enable symmetry here and increase my brush size. And also if I just go ahead and start
painting is going to be pretty, pretty intense. So I want to make sure that the RGB intensity
is set down to 18. We're going to change things. You know, it's going to be very subtle.
So I think should be okay. Another thing I want to do is in the stroke palette,
I want to change the lacy miles, so I'm going to remove lacy Mouse
so that it's a little bit faster too to do this. And you might not see
the difference is actually very subtle. We can increase this tiny bit more and I'm going to go into flood mode
so that you can see really what I'm painting here. So it's really hard to see actually. Here we go. So this sort of like mole or this freckle that I have here, I'm going to go ahead and cover
it just by painting there we go. So you can see that
it's actually creating a lighter pattern. But because I'm using very low intensity in the RGB
and I'm also pressing softly on my tablet,
this is a very subtle change, right? And this is what I want to do. I want to target
the kind of like the bony areas of the head. So I'm just going to go around this sort
of schematic arc or around the eye, the cheekbones you see. It's a bit lighter in there. And actually I can just switch
to a different color around the, you know, the nose. So I'm going to select this darker color,
push it down a bit. And this is kind of like the first pass. I want to make the entire nose bit more reddish and I like to add a bit of darkening here around the ice
kind of like probably enhancing the eye bags or just making a little bit more darker in general. So all these changes that I'm doing are super subtle. I'm kind of like exaggerating now
just so that you can see the difference. Let's go ahead and darken up the lips a little bit. So select the color from the lips. Drop this color a tiny bit more and let's
go ahead and target kind of like the inside a bit more. There we go. So you see very subtle stuff. I'm not departing too much from the base texture. I also like to mix up
all the colors like desaturated blue or almost green. You know, almost like a gray color.
And I'm going to press very softly. We even less RGB around the eyes. Again,
that sort of idea of darkening these areas a bit more. All right. So hopefully you can see what I'm going with
is like in terms of the variation of color. But that's about it in terms of like setting up
or blocking out the texture. It's a it's a subtle process where a subtle effect
of the process, but hopefully you get the idea. It's just kind of like targeting those lighter areas
around the eyes, darker zones in the eyes and some reddish tones for the nose and maybe
a little bit more to the cheekbones, actually. Let's go ahead and select a reddish color
and I'm going to go for a larger brush size that would go something like that. We can even override some of the,
you know, the mustache and all these hair follicles
so that it's not as prominent in the final texture. All right. Another thing that you can do to speed up
this process is to change some of the alphas. So let's go ahead and change this to our farm. And we said Alpha 22, and I'm going to change the color
spray stroke for the drag rect. And the drag rect
is going to click and drag and produce kind of like the I'm going to increase the intensity
is going to produce the sort of like blood vessels. So I want to select something a little bit darker,
more to the towards the red tone. There we go. So these sort of like capillaries, so, you know, thing vessels, I'm going to reduce the intensity as well. All of these changes are going to be rather subtle. And when we switch from flat to preview,
they're actually not that easy to spot. But that is the essence of creating a more realistic texture,
the all the subtleties in the skin. If you read this from the distance, you see, okay, this is just pink, maybe with a slight variation
in yellow and pink and, you know, red tones. But in reality, there's so much variation
when you get closer. And this is what I'm trying to achieve with these,
you know, this color and having these sort of veins bursting. All right. This is another process,
just like what we did with the detailing. That can take a while. So I just kind of like want to show you the tools
and the general workflow and the general steps so you can follow along and spend as much time as you
need to building up the complexity around the texture. Another thing you can do as well is let's switch
back to color spray and let's switch to a simpler brush or a simpler alpha. Let's go for Alpha 47. So this is going to just give you a set of tiny bumps. So actually go for a smaller brush. Let's go for 40. And I want to select a lighter tone,
just a yellowish tone. And that is going to give you some nice bumps
all around increase the RGB, kind of like molting. Hopefully, you can see I'm going
to add them around here so you can see the difference. So this is another way to integrate that texture. Just adding some of these little pieces of dust, almost those particles in the,
that doesn't make much sense. But these very yeah, I think about them
as like dust particles of a different color. And all I'm trying to do here is to variate that transition between the say the red and the
and the yellow and we can just switch to another color and do the same thing. So it's all about generating that nice complexity
of the skin while maintaining the subtleties of it. Right. So that's the first step. Just go ahead and change the,
the stroke, the alpha and just play around with the RGB intensity as well to apply this color.
So this is the first pass, right? The second pass of this process is just to enhance
those details that we created with the normal or with the high frequency details,
and then we convert it into the normal. So I'm going to go ahead and scroll
down to the masking palette. So the masking subpalette, this one right here, and this is fantastic because it allows you to automate
the process of masking certain areas of your face, and that also allows you to create something very,
very complex in virtually no time. So the first thing that I want to do is mask my cavity. So let's click on mask by cavity. And when I click on Mask my Cavity,
so this is going to look at the cavity or all those tiny pores and details that we created,
as you can see, and is going to automatically mask out. Obviously, this is very, very sharp. I'll get closer.
You see, you know, it's very pixelated. So what I want to do is actually smooth out this
transition between the mask and the unmasked areas. So a simple way of doing
it is to go to the mask adjust. So when to press shift and click on Mask Adjust. And also let's expand this profile and you see this this profile, this line right here
is what is causing this to be so sharp. So is basically no mask and then boom, 100% mask. So I want to make this a bit more subtle. Let's go ahead and reset this this more a linear
profile and let's go ahead and apply it. Actually, before I apply, I'm going to get close. As you can see,
what is going to do attention to this area right here. And I want to apply it so you can see. So it kind of like blurs things up a little bit. Let's go ahead and apply it again.
You can applied multiple times. You can also blur the mask, but I think the Blur
is going to be a little bit too intense. Yeah, it's a little bit too intense. We can go ahead and keep applying these a few times. All right. So that looks a bit better. And now what I'm going to do
is I'm going to invert that mask. So right now I'm basically masking everything
but the crevices or the wrinkles and let's go ahead and turn off the mask
so that we don't see it. We still have the mask, but it's not visible.
So we just turning this off. And I want to use a different alpha. I want to go back to Alpha 8 and I'm
going to leave the RGB as it is and I'm going to target a dark color
and more like the full red with more saturated. All right. Something like that. And I'm going to apply it around this this area,
this region, so that you can see what it does. All right. So as you can see, what I'm painting is just
those areas that I automatically mask using the mask by cavity. And I'm just adding that extra redness to the crevices
and to the to the wrinkles. So this is what starts to create a very complex,
you know, a very complex texture just by enhancing or kind of like highlighting
some of the details even more. I'll do the same thing around the nose area
with those lines that I manually created. But as you can see, even though it takes time
and it is more of the same repetitive process, you can utilize those tools that I just show you like the mask by cavity and I'll show you
a couple more in just a second to speed up the workflow a bit more and, you know, get something
that looks pretty cool in relatively no time. And the idea with these redness is that it will
it will enhance the look if I just switch back actually so you can see it to preview when we have the material
and we have the speculators and all of that, it will sort of enhance
those details and make them a little bit more. You know, I can make them pop a bit more. Let's
go ahead and do another one or another masking tool. So I'm going to use let's go back to flat. I tend to use flat mode for the most part
when I'm building a complex texture like this so they can really see the difference
between the values and the hues. So let's go back in here
and I want to click on peaks and valleys, and I want to click on Mask by peaks and valleys. So this is going to look at the peaks
and valleys of the mesh right now because we have, you know, subdivision level seven. We have lots of different variations. But again, we can just go ahead with this simple thing
or this simple pattern that was generated. We can also applied the adjustment. We can also go down in subdivision level. So if you wanted to. And that allows us to blur this or apply
the adjustment even faster. So you see it is happening faster. This is one I'm going to blur quite a bit. There we go. And let's go back to the high subdivision level
so that we can apply those changes to the highest subdivision level and what I want to do
with this, as you can see, the peaks and valleys almost targeted to the areas that I want to maintain,
kind of like darker with a reddish tone. I'm going to go ahead and invert it like
so I want to hide the mask and instead of paint, which you can totally do,
you can just go ahead and start painting. And as you can see, I'm just adding a little bit
of redness to that area, so that might be cool. Instead of doing that, I'm just going to adjust the entire texture
and the entire hues or values of this texture. So to do that, let's go to the poly paint. This is another really cool trick let’s
go to not polygroup sorry, poly paint. Here we go and I want to click on Adjust color. So the adjust color is going to allow me
to bring in this new palette or this pop up window and I will be able to adjust.
All of these things on the fly. It’s kind of like your color balancing Photoshop
and your hue saturation. So I'm going to hide the mask by clicking on this icon
right here. So this is what I see. I can also hide the materials so that we have
pretty much what we have in the viewport right now. Like I said, instead of painting the whole thing,
I'm just going to change or alter the values of just this area
that I don't have or that I have unmask. So I'm going to take the RGB intensity
when I drop it down. So you see, I'm just changing the hues or the values
more than the hues, the actual values. And I'm going to add
a little bit of contrast with the red channel. It has too much red intensity or the RGB intensity. So I'm going to push the red colors a bit more, maybe add a bit of variation here with the Green
drop the Blues or maybe increase the blues. Actually, we can just go crazy with these things. All of the things that I'm showing you is just,
you know, it's about the subtleties, really. So you don't see much difference in here,
but that's kind of like the idea. We also going to turn the intensity down a bit
so it's darkening that whole region. And when I also increase the saturation so you can play around with all of these ideas. As you can see, it's a very subtle thing,
but it sort of has this nice pattern. If I turn these back on in these areas that I'm changing, it is a little bit
darker and a bit more saturated in terms of the color. So I'm going to click okay and now clear the mask and you see
we have those applied in there. So that's pretty cool. Now the other thing that you can do is use the mask
by smoothness. So I'm going to click on that one. This one might take a little while just because it sort of analyzes the entire mesh
for the areas that are smoother than others. They didn't take that long, but as you can see,
it is kind of like masking the smoother surface and you can change the range. So right now it is kind of like masking just almost the
crevices, kind of like the same thing as the cavity. So I want to increase the range to let's go for 78. Try it again. There we go.
I think I can push this even further to 129. All right. So I think that looks a little bit better.
I'm going to go ahead and also blur it. So with the let's go back in subdivision level so we can do this a little bit faster
and click on Apply a couple of times. There we go. Go back to the high subdivision level. All right. And I'm going to hide the mask
and let's do the same thing that I did before. We adjust colors aside that mask, hide the material,
and this time I'm just going to change the hue. So I'm going to go for a yellowish tone
that has a bit more of intensity, more desaturation,
and maybe add a bit of contrast as well. All right. So a lot more variation,
as you can see, is a still pretty subtle. Hopefully you can kind of see the difference click
okay and let’s clear the mask. There we go. So there's a lot more variation
and it looks a lot more interesting, I think. But you can totally do more specific things
and target set on areas with different colors and but in terms of the workflow, this is pretty much
what I would do to adjust a more realistic texture. I just want to show you that what I'm doing here
with this features, with the masking features, is just generating a nice variation in pattern. I'm not looking for something specific. That's why I just keep changing the range and playing
with the smoothness or the peaks and valleys. And all I'm trying to do is variegate those hues
very subtly, right? If you want to do kind of like an alien creature,
you can totally do that. We'd again, you can use the adjust color
and you can just go ahead and push this, make it more like a pale character, you know, they'll be cool as well. I think, you know, you can go for something like this
or you can just add a little bit of a tint with a green color or a blue color, and you can play around with these. In fact, I'm just going to show you something else, even though I'm going to stick with something similar
to what I have before, I'm just going to show you that if you do this,
this is kind of like a zombie type of character. You can totally do that and, you know, keep working with the different masking options
to varieties even further. But the cool thing about these is that as you can see,
this is very, very different in terms of the color from what I have in CC 4,
but the plugin is intelligent enough that is going to analyze the color
that we change in them in the head. We just using poly paint and it's going to apply that
to the rest of the body, which is awesome. So let's go ahead and wrap up this video
and I'm going to show you how to transfer these poly paint into CC 4. Again, very, very easy to do. So the last step of this process of adjusting the
texture and the color is simply to go to update to CC 4 and from the popup window. Unless you change something in the details or the base
mesh, all you need to do is select the poly paint. So I'm going to turn off details. So we're going to transfer the poly paint
into the diffuse texture of CC 4. You know, pretty straightforward.
I'm going to also send it as a 4K resolution. And another cool thing that you can do
is work on the poly paint for the tongue and the eyes and the teeth as well. And if you wanted to, if you add those colors or poly
paint within ZBrush you can totally tick these boxes and send them as well to CC 4. But I want to work with the defaults anyway.
So I want to click on update to character creator and the file has been successfully exported. Let's go ahead and switch to CC 4
and we have a little popup window which the most important thing is that we want to apply
to be hit color to the rest of the body. And that is in the case
that you are working on a full body character and you want to end up with, you know, a workable
full body character, even though we're just focusing on the on the face on the head for this tutorial series
when I click on Update and there we go. Once you finish updating everything,
you'll see we have a pretty cool update of the texture
all over the body of the character. Even though this is not what I'm going for,
it could be like a nice zombie character and all we've done
is just adjust the color and the saturation from the base texture and you see, you know, all the nice details
and subtle hints of the darker eyes. And all of that came through really nice, even though,
you know, it is just it's just a matter of texture. It sort of adds
another level of depth to the to the character. So that's pretty much it. Like if you want to, you know, summarize
this entire tutorial in just a couple of steps, it's just a matter of turning the diffuse switch
right here, which basically turns on the texture. Then from the paint palette, you click on poly paint from texture, making sure that you have RGB
or MRGB enabled and apply that. So that turns that texture into poly paint. Then you can go ahead and use any brush in ZBrush. You can even bring in, you know, photos and textures
to project them into the texture. All your character, a spot, the paint. You can use all the masking features in ZBrush
to create that texture. And once you're finished with your painting,
you can click on update to character Creator. Click on the poly paint to diffuse
and it will be updated. Now the reason why you see this now
it's back to the sort of like skin color is because once it's finishing, sending the poly
paint is switch back to the to the texture. I can turn this off again. This is because I have these diffuse enable on. So that's pretty much it.
But we have already the poly paint. Now, like I said, I'm going to,
you know, see with a more realistic texture, I think. So I'm just going to go ahead
and load the final tweaks. So the final project that I have for the texture,
just to show you, there we go. So here is my character with my final textures. Again, it's kind of like following the same principle of what I showed you in this video,
but I sort of maintain the more sort of like realistic skin, even though I'm pushing
this towards the stylization of the character. Let's go ahead and do a quick screenshot
and compare it with what we had before. So another one, another screenshot here to see in terms of the progress that we've made
since we started, actually, let's bring this guy here. So this was the very first iteration of the character. You can see the progression. So this is before we tweak things in in ZBrush,
then we tweak the shape. We got this kind of like stylized character. Then we added some of the,
you know, the normal details and all of that. And this is where we are at the moment.
So this is already the custom normals. Obviously, I spend a bit more time doing the details
and all these crevices. Again, just keep in mind that these are not expression
wrinkles. These are like the neutral face wrinkles. And the more wrinkles that you are, the more the older the skin will look like or the older
the person would look like. So I'm kind of like trying to do a middle age
sort of character here. And yeah,
this is what we have at the moment is a character that has all the high frequency details,
all the pores and all of that. And now we have a nice updated texture using the poly
painting that I just show you in this video. So I want to leave this video here
and in the next video in the series, we're going to finally start working on the expression
of our character using the ZBrush face tools. I'll see you there.
