Hey, what's up guys, Pablo Muñoz here, welcome back to another video tutorial. Today, I'm gonna show you how I achieved this comic style render this type of quality directly from ZBrush using a custom material that I built for this type of render, or this type of style. So this image that you can see here on the screen is one of my recent works and it's done 100% in ZBrush and just a little disclaimer to show you what is not part of ZBrush All that sort of like textures that you see here, that's kind of like a paper texture that I overlaid on top. But I just did that in Photoshop. The rest is 100% Z brush and also the background is kind of like painted after because I was focusing on just the character. But I'm gonna show you how I put this together and I'm going to share with you as well the resources. So you can basically do the same thing. So let's go ahead and jump straight into ZBrush and here is the model, right? As you can see, it's all in 3D all in ZBrush all of those kind of like tiny details, all the kind of like the hashed effects and all of that is sculpted directly in ZBrush so that you can basically see it with the comic material. Alright, so the comic material is this one right here that I have on my UI already, it's called the Pablander Super Comic 2022 just for lack of a better name and I just put the year 2022 because this is actually an updated version of the comic style render material that I shared a couple of years ago and it's just a new version that works a lot better with poly paint and a few other tweaks that I'm going to show you. So basically if I with this mesh if I go ahead and just click on this material and I switch back to it, it's basically what you can see on the render right? And the great thing about this is that obviously we're taking advantage of the 3DNess of the object. and then we can basically rotate the camera around and from every angle is going to look I think pretty cool in terms of the comic style. Now you can see that let's say if I select the visor yeah this or maybe the head of this weird sea horse type of thing, this is a little bit clearer or it's you know whiter than the other bits and pieces. That is just a I think that ZBrush is to help you identify which is the selected subtool. So when I hold the ALT key and click that basically select the active sub tool but this is kind of like the color. Now if I go ahead and enable poly paint is going to hold shift and click on this poly paint in this is a quick politician that I did as a reference for that image. And let's just go back to this one. Let's say you wanna blue background like this. I'm just gonna go to the color and let's select something roughly the same color as what I have in the final illustration. And I'm just going to click on, let's go back to document, I'm gonna click on this back once and see what is going to grab whatever color I had selected. So as you can see it's pretty similar and yet, so this is the color that I use or the politician that I use as reference and then obviously I polished it because as you can see it's pretty pretty rough the transition. So I just spend a bit more time. But I thought I'd just give you a reference of how this one works. Alright so basically that's about it and there's no there's no more to it. Like if you, you know, if you stop this tutorial at this point you can basically download that material and apply it to your model and it should look pretty decent. Now the cool thing about the material like I said is that it works with poly paint meaning that if I go ahead and do a screenshot, I'm just gonna do a screenshot and go here to Photoshop and let's go ahead and just paste it in there. Just a screenshot. There we go. and let's switch to the flat mode. The one that only shows you the poly paint in. So it's a shadeless version. Let's do the same thing. Just another screenshot and this is purely to show you the difference. I'm gonna basically cut there. And if I could close that you see that the poly paint in the quality of like the vibrance of the color and everything else it is maintained and that is the main update to this shader. Before it was kind of like overexposed. And it was mainly a shader to get the outlines from the model. But now it works with polypaint So you can basically create your entire graphic novel from ZBrush All right, so let's switch back to preview and yeah this is kind of like the example that I wanted to show you. Like I said all of these details that you see here. Those are directly sculpted in. So if I select let's say this top of the of the sea horse, I'm gonna use a custom brush like the H.R.Geiger Cutter. So this is part of my Gieger & Beksinski pack if you're interested. But you can also use something like the dam standard brush. And with this material already enabled. What I'll do is start doing this right? So you can just literally paint in the details and as you rotate around because these are literally sculpted into the mesh. They'll you know, they'll stay with whatever angle you choose. So that's how I achieved all those additional details all around the model. That I think looks pretty cool and sort of like help with the you know the quality of this comic style render. That is it's a particular style that I really enjoy and you know it's is something that I spend time doing manually but you can automate it with some other filters at render time. But anyway so that's the idea. Now I'm gonna show you how easy it is to set it up and kind of like breaking down a bit that material. So I'm gonna switch to something else. Right? So this is kind of like a miniature hard surface character that we've been working on the ZBrush live in case you want to you know have a look at how this is created. And I also use it in my latest tutorial where I show you some of the PBR workflow just to render and blend materials. So this guy here is basically to give you an example of what you can do once you download the comic material. So you download them the comic, the comic material. This one right here you load it into ZBrush. The way that you load materials is basically going to material load and just select the this one this is the Pablander super comic 2022 with whatever mesh you have you can just click on it and it automatically gives you a pretty decent results. Let's go ahead and do a quick render just to get all the, you know, the white color in all the areas like that. And if you want we can just also click on, I have this in my UI but it's the same thing that I just showed you in the document back. I'm going to select a white color so it looks nice like the inversion or the outlines and that's pretty much it. There's nothing else that you need to do. Of course you can tweak the material quite a bit but that's what that's kind of like the advanced next step that I'm going to show you. So let's go ahead and do that by the way, if you want to get rid of these gray kind of like deeming of the sub tools, you can go to preference then edit And if you scroll down this inactive subtool dimming is set to 0.75. Just set it to one and that way there's gonna be no dimming, it's kind of like an opacity or if you want to make it a bit more prominent the same way you just set it to something less. And that way you see when you switch between subtools which one is the one. But yeah, so for this particular case, I'm going to set it to one so that everything is the same. and if you want to see which one you have selected, you either have a look at the sub tool or press the S. Key which in my case I have mapped to the solo mode so I can just isolate them easily. Alright so if I get closer here, you see sometimes with these matcap things get a little bit noisy but that is depending on the model itself. Right? So you don't have to create something super, you know highly detailed in terms of the model because the more details you have, the more surface high frequency details you have, the more noisy the material is going to make the render looks. So even if I go to the lower subdivision level just to show you, let's go all low. Right? So we have pretty faceted polygons. And I switched to the material. This looks already pretty, pretty decent. Of course you have this jagged line. But you can, you know, you can fix that by going bit by bit to the higher of division level. So I just wanted to mention that you don't have to have like a super detailed mesh. Alright, so the reason I want to show you this other character, Let's go ahead and put the material on the right hand side or the left hand side. Yeah, so this is the material, it's made out of four kind of like shaders. And if I turn them on and off by clicking on this circle, you'll see what the material does. So the main one of the first one is this kind of like very subtle diffused material that has this shadow and this shadow is based on the lighting in ZBrush So you can move the lighting around. So let's go to the lighting, let's put that on the right hand side and you can just move that lighting and you see that, that first shader, it totally reacts to the light. So if you like these more subtle comic style with no additional outlines, you can totally just use that and move the lighting around, change how dramatic the shadow is. You can also turn on the last one just to get some nice outlines and that's pretty much it really the last one, the S4 is ultimately just a refinement of the outlet. So, if you turn that on, this is what you get and you still have, you know, you can make it react to the light and create something pretty cool looking right now, the second one, is the one that gives you all these intricate details, Right? And this is the one that you can tweak depending on how much details you have in your model. So, if you click on S2 you have this cavity transition and the cavity detection, right? The cavity detection is set to one, you can change that. But the one that deals with these details is the transition. So you can just change that and you see how much is changing maybe from the distance or you can switch it around and instead of targeting the cavity is going to target the inverted kind of like edges. So you can play around with this and get like some interesting looking results. So if you want to just maintain like the comic style, what I would recommend is just to change the cavity transition and then play with the detection so that it's kind of like an opacity of how much ZBrush is detecting those cavities. So that way I just, you know, achieve like a more subtle result just by changing the cavity detection and the transition. Right? So that's basically the S2 , that's what it does, the S3 gives you some fake shadows, but it really kind of like enhances the comical. So what that means is that the S3 is actually a matcap, it's the only shader of this material that is actually a matcap And for those of you who don't know a matcap is just a material capture. So it uses an image this one right here and you can see it's an image that already has those shadows apply to it. Now, the cool thing about this one, let's turn off the details, so you can clearly see by the way, if you turn off the first one, nothing will happen, it will just be a a silhouette, so make sure that the at least S one is enabled now, the S three, like I said, you can tweak it right, so you can change that image in for something else and that image is the one that is giving you those shadows. Now. What's cool about this combination of matcap and a standard shader and ZBrush Is that because the matcap has already the lighting embedded into it, if I change the lighting, that's not going to change. So you see in my thumbnail here on the top, right, the shadow on the left, that essentially is the one that ZBrush is using to produce the cast shadows from the light but the other one stays in there. So you can create like some weird looking matcaps or materials and renders right? So this is a combination of the standard shader in ZBrush that uses the light position to create those shadows and the matcap that has that shadow already embedded in an image. Now, the other cool thing about this matcap is that you can totally change the depth of this shadow. So if you go to the depth it's set to 0.60 point 5999, but you change that, you can change the depth A and depth B. And that is kind of like creating an inflate or a pinch to that image. So let me just show you what I mean, so set this 2.5 and .5 right? So now that image is kind of like pinch into the center so it creates like a pretty pretty strong shadow and you can do the same thing but the other way around, so let's go 4.20 point two and 0.2. So now it is kind of like push towards the edges so you can play around with the depth, right? So let's go for 0.4 and 0.4, that's probably a little bit more decent. And the other cool thing is that because you have the depth A and bi meaning two different colors, you can do Like a second shader or not a shader but kind of like a cell shading with two colors. So you can set these to .9 and this one .4 So you see that is like a nice gray gradient. So just by changing the depth A and B. So that they're not in the same value, you get this effect and this is still working on its own, you can still change the lighting for the most part. I would, you know, I would match the lighting with this matcap but anyway, is there in case you wanted to. Alright, so another cool thing is with the final shader let's go ahead and enable the details right? And the final shader S4 is the one that gives you that line that outline that I mentioned before. So this one, I don't I wouldn't recommend changing it too much, but in case you want to do a thicker outline, this is also a matcap, Sorry, I mentioned that the only matcap was this this is actually a matcap as well, so S4 is also based on this image that has the outline and you can change that, so by default is set to 0.5, but if you set it to point, let's go for .1 or actually let's go for one and one. Right, So I just basically change the depth of that image and now you have a thicker outline, right? In case you want to have that right? A thicker outline. If you want something a bit more subtle, Leave it at .5 or even .2 and you see it's pretty subtle, it's barely visible, so let's send it to the default one. I don't usually change this one, I think this is just a nice addition to wrap up this series of shaders, Right? Okay, so that is essentially what this material is, like, how it is being built and if I go ahead and enable poly paint for this guy and maybe let's change the background a little bit. You see that everything works nice with the colors, so I'm gonna turn this into the flat mode, so this is the poly paint pain that I did for this version of this character as a comic. And if I click on the preview, it is using its kind of like overlaying all those details and the outline of the material on top of the color, but that's pretty much it. Hopefully you have found this Reference video useful on how to use the comic shader. I'm gonna make sure I put the link in the description, so you can download this material loaded into ZBrush You need the latest version of ZBrush or at the time of this recording 2022.0.5, so that you can load this material with no issues. Alright, so I'm going to leave this video here, please let me know how you go and I would love to see what you make with this coming material. Cheers
