Create easy alpha maps in Zbrush

hello and welcome in this video i will go over the process of making your own alpha textures in zbrush and i will also be discussing some possible issues that you might have if you are doing this for the first time so um alpha textures can be very useful uh if you need to or if you want to add details to a certain mesh that are very repetitive and that would otherwise take a lot of time if you want to if you have to sculpt them manually one by one so for instance i have this fish model and i would like to have some scale patterns but i don't feel like sculpting them manually one by one so i will be creating an alpha texture for this now the first thing i need is some geometry to create this alpha texture on so i will be creating a new z tool and instead of a sphere i will choose a plane 3d this could be a cube could also be a plane doesn't really matter the important thing is that you do it on a flat surface because it's all about the detail that we are going to be sculpting on this and before we start sculpting our scales we first need to make sure that this is set to polymesh 3d then you'll see that it disappears for a while but we can simply go out of edit mode by hitting t and draw it again don't forget to hit t again because we need to be in edit mode obviously if we want to sculpt and currently we can see that the active points are set to 1.089 and i think we will need a lot more uh geometry if we want to make some crisp details that we can then afterwards reuse on a different model so i'll be going to geometry and hitting divide a couple times but you'll see that the um corners of my plane are rounded off right now which in the end will be an issue because if we want to convert this into a texture we want our plane to have the exact same shape of the texture being a square so i'll be going back to a fresh plane over here of course make polymatch 3d first there we go and before i subdivide i will turn off the subdivide smooth modifier and now you'll see if i divide my mesh and add some geometry the corners stay nice and sharp there we go we can do this a few times until we feel like we have a sufficient amount of triangles or quads to start sculpting on and now let's see let's hit p to go into perspective mode and if we start sculpting on this i can see that my details are nice and crisp so we can start sculpting our details we want to sculpt some scales and i will do this of course the workflow and how you want to sculpt your own details that you require for your specific mesh that's all up to you i will be sculpting scales and i'll do this by masking a circle starting by masking a nice circle some imperfections are perfectly okay that's what nature looks like and then i will go over to the move brush and slightly pull this out we can pull out stuff using the move tool by using the alt key if i use the press the alt key and drag i will drag the geometry towards my camera as you can see right here which can be very handy from time to time okay and i will repeat this process a couple times i'll want a second scale over here maybe sculpt out some in some detail left over from the previous scale go back to my move tool and by using alt and a big enough brush size i can just pull that detail out of there there we go nice and sharp and repeat this process let's say two more times you'll notice that i've been inverting the mask and i can do this by hitting ctrl and clicking the background okay hit m pull this out again there we go and now i for some typical scale feel i want some overlap as well so i'll make sure that my fourth scale just slightly ever so slightly overlaps with my previous ones first start by smoothing out all that detail you can use the smooth brush uh by hitting the shift key of course and then just repeat the pattern one more time just pull that out and there we go some nice scales i'll maybe just use the h polish brush to smooth out some imperfections in the scales but like i said that's totally up to you and there we go all done and before i turn this into a texture i'm going to create a second plane and create a second type of detail sculpted detail but this time i will make sure that the detail goes inward instead of outward because you can see that right now it goes outward so we're talking about additive details and now i want a subtractive uh detail so i'll go over to a fresh plane there we go again uh subdivide this turn off smooth divide it a couple times there we go just repeat that process and now i'll just create a very simple inward shape there we go a couple of holes doesn't really matter i'll smooth them a little bit there we go i just want to make sure that they are deep enough in order for zbrush to nicely capture all the detail okay so now we have our scales in one z tool and our holes that are going inward in a different z tool okay perfect so next thing i want to do is capture this into a texture so for this i need to resize my document and we can do this by going over to document and change the width and the height but currently um constraint proportions is activated so if we want to change the width and the height separately we need to turn this off and then choose our width and height for this i'll choose a 5 12 to 5 12 size because this is an ideal size for an alpha texture we want game sizes so we want a power of 2 for this and 5 12 or 1k maybe 2k 2k is maybe a bit big but 512 should do the trick perfectly so i'm going to hit resize zbrush is going to double check if we truly want to resize and then we hit yes we'll see that our image gets a little bit squished and again we can just hit ctrl n to clean this up and draw our plane once again after which we hit t to enter edit mode and then if we by using shift and dragging our plane just a little bit we can make sure that it's aligned perfectly with our canvas then finally we had we hit f which makes sure that my plane is perfectly aligned with the size and shape of my canvas so now everything is set up nicely for zebras to capture this into a texture this is a very easy process we just show the texture that we want to capture go over to alpha and hit grab document okay and we'll see that our alpha our height information appears in the alpha slot over here i'm going to do this a second time for my inward details well let's go over to alpha and grab document there we go and we can immediately spot two differences between the additive one and the subtractive one the additive one has a dark background and the subtractive one has a white background which makes sense if you think about it because if we have a range from 0 to 1 0 being black and one being white we need to be able to differentiate with height values to represent different heights in our geometry as well so for this one we add values so we have brighter values on top of a darker background and for the second one we do it the other way around bear in mind that if you are happy with the details that you just sculpted it might be a good idea to hit export and export our texture to whatever file type you like allowing you to even add or change things around in photoshop afterwards okay so let's get back to our initial mesh to our fish over here and the the size of our document is still set to 5 12 times 5 12 so i want to change that back to something slightly bigger there we go hit resize hit ctrl n to clean up our scene draw the mesh and hit t to enter edit mode all right so we have our fish right here and now i want to test out my alpha texture so i'm gonna hit the z tool on which i want to add my detail i'm going to grab the scale one make sure that i use a brush for this i'm just going to use the standard brush z grab one and currently it is set to dot meaning that we can just sculpt like this which might be nice in some cases if you want to add details like this if you want to add a lot of details really really fast but if we want to take a more specific approach it might be nice to change dots to drag rect okay and then we can just drag our detail on there and really specifically position it exactly where we want that way i can ensure some variety in size and rotation which is always nice okay and you'll see that i can quickly add a lot of this repetitive detail and cover my entire z tool with it if if that is what you want of course now um on the other side i will be testing out my second z-graph there we go and we will notice that this also works perfectly we will also notice that the detail is a little bit less intense so if we amp up the intensity and drag this again we'll see that zbrush automatically creates a circular sort of vignette around our brush alpha over here and in order to counter this problem no 100 might be a little bit intense so i'm going to set this back to a normal but still pretty intense value let's say 50 for now 51 should do the trick and i'm going to go over to alpha and change my mid value which if we remember represents black i'm going to change my mid value to 100 meaning white so that means that the value from which it starts to interpret is the same as the white in our alpha is the same as the serp the surface on which we want to project this detail and we will see that right now the intensity is nicely represented on our mesh now keep in mind that it's always a possibility to change the brush that we're using so in this case the standard brush change this from add to sub meaning instead of add detail subtract detail and then we can use this to add detail instead of subtracted okay that was it thank you all for watching

Channel: FastTrack Tutorials

Views: 1,197

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Id: 6McC52rLSXc

Length: 12min 38sec (758 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 10 2021