Create Alphas to Use in Zbrush (Photoshop Tut)

what's going on everybody my name is ian and welcome to another video iron sculpt today i'm going to show you how you can create alphas using programs like photoshop to detail your models in zbrush let's go okay everybody so in today's video we're walking through how to create an alpha in programs such as photoshop you can use affinity or even if you do not have access to photoshop the process is relatively about the same so what we're going to do is really do a glance over of how i did this and then i'm going to actually show you and you can follow along i have resources that i tend to use a lot like pixels.com they're not a sponsor but anytime i need a texture of any type i usually come here and then i'll type in like metal texture and then when i hit enter i come up with a lot of decent resources and so you just kind of find a a photo that works best for you and then you bring that into photoshop but we'll go over that in just one second so the really quick overview is that we have brought our photo in and then i've generated a uh black and white filter that we put over that because we don't want any color to uh basically affect our texture and then we do a quick level adjustment and then we also do a little gradient with a black background so we're going to go ahead and walk you through that and then from there i'll show you how to import it into zbrush okay so now we did an overview of how your alpha should look we're going to go ahead and walk you through a step by step in the description down below there will be a link to the files for resources if you would like to follow along or if you just have any old photo that you would like to test this out on just go ahead and grab that photo and then follow along from here so what we're going to do is we're going to start off by creating a new file so come up to file and new and what we want is a square format for zbrush resolution as long as it's about 500 pixels wide and tall that should be perfect and the resolution we're going to have that at about 150 again that's a great resolution to have for an alpha it's not too high where it's a large file size but it's also not too low where you'll see any type of uh diffracting or any type of anti-aliasing or any type of tearing of the image so if it's at 72 that's what i mean that's pretty low i would stick that to about 150 and then under background contents we want to stick this to black if you have it set to transparent that's fine too because we could just go ahead and add a solar solid color but for here we can go ahead and click black for the background contents and then if you like go ahead and save that once you've done that go ahead and hit create and now you'll see here that we started with a black background and we can move forward with our image okay now that we're set up in photoshop we're ready to start creating our alpha from here what we're going to do is wherever you downloaded your photo go ahead and drag and drop that into photoshop now notice that the photo does not come in at the resolution that is desired from here we're able to scale this up because we are working with the decent resolution within photoshop we'll be able to scale this up without too much issue just go ahead and drag this up and rotate that to however you see fit just something that you think looks nice from there that looks pretty good i'm going to go ahead and hit enter now right now our photo is color what we want to do is make it black and white all alphas are black and white it's because of that contrast that will actually give us the resolution of the details within the file when we work on our models basically the way you kind of want to think of alphas is anything that is white will generally be a positive additive of that alpha and anything that is black will be negative which means it will cut in so what we want to do is get rid of the color which can also add in artifacts that we don't want get rid of the color and then from there we'll go ahead and make our image really contrasty so that it gives us the best image possible when we're using it as an alpha so from here we're going to go down to filters and we're going to pick black and white now i like to work with filters because generally it's non-destructive meaning that i can come back and make a change at any time and my original image is still untouched which is nice but we're going to go ahead and turn on the black and white filter and we want to make some adjustments again we're going for a really contrasty image so heavy on the whites and basically crushing the blacks so we're going to adjust there was blue in this image we're really going to pop up this blue really just going to make this white stand out like that i'm going to drop the reds down a little bit and also the yellows see if that affects anything if the greens doesn't seem to be doing too too much which is fine next thing we're going to do is come down to filters i'm going to grab a levels adjustment and the levels adjustment is really going to make sure that we punch those uh punch those levels so we're gonna go ahead hold alt on the keyboard and we're gonna grab the slider and crush those blacks if we let go of alt you can see here that is just giving us a preview of what it is doing specifically to the blacks and that looks pretty good right there and we're going to hold alt and do the same thing on the white and really make sure that those pops so now as you can see before and after this looks kind of flat we're here this is really punchy now the last step we're going to want to do is actually make a gradient for the black background so that the alpha can fade so when we go into zbrush and we use it it will actually drag out and you can kind of stack your alphas so we're going to go ahead and group everything and we're going to hit ctrl g which then will group everything into a folder and you can name this if you want we'll call this rocks if i can spell which i can't and then we're going to go ahead down here at the bottom and add a ask we're going to hit control i which will then invert that mask from here we'll hit b and we want a capacity of 100 and then flow of 100 as well and then we're just going to create a big soft brush so we're just going to basically hold alt right click just the size of that brush and then from here you can even bring some guides down if you would like so we can get a better idea of the center line let that snap and then we're just going to go ahead and start painting whites right in the middle one two clicks should be fine and that will actually allow the image to then gradient out okay so now that we have our alpha built in photoshop we're going to go ahead and save this out and then we're going to open it up in zbrush so i'm going to go up to file and we're going to go to save as and then just find wherever you would like to save your alpha and then save it as a psd you can save it as a jpeg or a tiff or a png but at this point it i find it easier to use a psd file because i can always come back and change it and then i won't have multiple files of the same alpha zbrush will recognize pc just fine so might as well use that once you've done that go ahead and hit save yep now let's go ahead and open up zebra now that zbrush is opened up what we're going to do is i just have the default sphere here and the one thing i wanted to cover real quick before we import the alpha is that alphas generally need a high resolution model something that's been subdivided up a few times the more poly points you have or vertices that you have the easier it is for that alpha to be recognized and show that detail much like poly painting so with the default sphere we have the active points is 8 000 that's nowhere near enough you are going to be using this alpha generally and a higher resolution of like 2 million plus depending on your model so we're going to go ahead and subdivide this up a few times and i'll even show you what it looks like on the lower res from here just use the standard brush it's the perfect brush for using alphas also you can change the stroke to drag rect which is again a perfect stroke for using your alpha and then come here to alpha click on this and come to import and then find your new photoshop file and click open now if we were to uh go ahead and drop the subdivision down to its face point of 8000 and i drag this out you can see here that it doesn't really look like anything it's just kind of a mess so what we want to do is again we'll subdivide that up to about 2 million and then make sure your settings are you know whatever intensity you'd like to work at i usually go around 10 to 20 depending on what it is and then i keep that as the add which is fine and then we're just going to go ahead and drag this out and you can see there is our rock texture if i hold alt i can cut into it and the reason for the gradient is when i drag this out you can see as it starts to stack on itself it almost blends into into the rest of the resolution making it really easy to get a seamless texture whereas if we would have left it square then it actually would have generated a square border making it much harder to clean up so that was the reason for the gradient okay everybody that is it for today's video hopefully you enjoyed it and found it useful if you did please don't forget to subscribe hit that notification bell like this video and comment down below your thoughts and also too if you have other ways you create alphas i would love to hear them so comment those down in the comment section below again guys thank you so much and as always have a great day and happy school you guys later

Channel: IR Sculpts

Views: 2,874

Rating: 4.9496856 out of 5

Keywords: 3D printing, zbrush, live stream, sculpting, digital art, character design, twitch tv, pixologic, toys, collectibles, graphic design, clay sculpting

Id: 7A0J-7pHZZk

Length: 9min 19sec (559 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 21 2020