Creating Low Poly Assets in ZBrush

hello and welcome everybody to the pixologic zbrush livestream I'm opening up my chat so feel free to type hello or whatever you wanna say in chat maybe shout out where you're from my name is Ben or you can call me folly GaN it doesn't really matter to me and welcome welcome to the pixologic zbrush live stream here if you're new here click that subscribe or follow button and if you want to check out more of my stuff check out my youtube channel youtube.com slash polygon or check out my Gumroad for courses brushes materials blah blah blah blah blah check it all out we are going to be doing a demonstration tonight on actually creating some low poly assets in ZBrush which is something that I've been playing around with recently and I've done a lot of stuff with it in the past as well but as of recent I have created this low poly foliage package which you might have seen me post on any of my social media platforms specifically for some like I said foliage so trees grass some rocks just some really simple stuff that we are going to be looking at creating in ZBrush so these are renders that actually did in a different software it doesn't really matter what software you render in but I will be talking a little bit about some simple lighting setups that you can play around with if you guys want to get this just gonna calm slash polygons or you can stick around tonight and maybe follow along and learn how to do some of this stuff yourself so you can see that I played around with some different like spherical trees some square tree is some different styles of pine trees snow caps stuff as well as maybe some like ash or I don't even remember what type of tree this was but just kind of playing around with color and some different stuff there so a lot of fun we'll probably be aiming somewhere similar to this style tonight but obviously once you kind of get the workflow down you can go any direction you want let me move this little chat window off to the side so I can see everybody here Chris what's going on welcome back man is they eat from Egypt hello Egypt Wow it's out there opposite side planet for me Anubis what's up man welcome back finally catch you at a time where I am available glad to have you and good morning well for me it's the sun's about to go down in just a couple hours that's why I got my big light on because I know as I'm streaming here I forget about it and then it starts to like slowly get darker and darker as the stream goes on which is always fun all right we'll give like a minute more here to let some people join in then go ahead get started on the demonstration so we can make sure that we have enough people here in the beginning for those that want to follow along from Wellington New Zealand we got some Weda friends maybe uh raga what's up hello hello and Francisco Fred how you doing Fred Marky welcome back man from Quebec so you're I don't know which was longitude or latitude mm-hmm you're close to one of those lines with me now I'm doing great thank you for asking man I am doing fantastic so as some more people are popping in here again we're gonna be doing some low poly assets similar to this oh and if we hopefully have some time at the end we'll try to do some like cute little character I'm thinking like a little sasquatch thing walking through the trees it'll be cool but we'll be playing around with if you are familiar or unfamiliar maybe and you've wanted to learn these tools we'll be playing around with decimation master tonight we'll be playing around also with the zmodeler brush which is the poly modeling tool in ZBrush and then just a bunch of other stuff as we go through it so hopefully you'll pick up some new tips new tricks etc etc tonight if you guys want to grab this Gumroad slash polygon but let's go ahead and get started here working on a spider-gwen that sounds awesome when you add suit details before or after the pose I guess it kind of depends on what the character looks like is it high poly low poly is it a texture I would probably add it before it depends on how much it's going to deform though so if it's deforming like a ton and a crazy pose might cause some stretching so that's probably something to consider you wish you lived close to a wetter so do I so do i yeah the the zmodeler brush you guys are familiar it's a B Z M on your keyboard I have it down here on my little hotkey ro or whatever you want to call it my custom UI anything that I point out in the UI in my UI I'll show you guys where it is in the standard UI as well all right let's go ahead and start so the first thing you need to do is just grab any old 3d object doesn't matter what it is and just click on make polymesh3d so that it is actually able to be manipulated that's pretty easy that's kind of the first step I'll go ahead and press it just so you can see where that button is up there at the top if you're brand new to ZBrush and have never done this before scroll on down this is the tool menu over here tool pallet whatever you want to call it doesn't really matter to initialize and in the initialized pallet we are going to set all of those sliders to one and click on the QQ button which stands for a quick cube I have that down here in my custom palette so that is where that is tool initialize QQ I will be using it down here in the future if I need it again feel free to ask any questions along the way though if I point out something that you don't know where it is so we got a cube very simple cube right and if we grab that zmodeler brush bzm right on our keyboard and you try to play around with the zmodeler brush by default you'll see that it'll start pulling out all these phases of geometry similar to an extrude if you are familiar with poly modeling if not there's actually an extrusion method that we'll look at as well but for now that's kind of a good way to look at it it's called cue mesh you can not only pull polygons up you can also push them back in and kind of I delete them a little bit if you do it on something like this well you might end up getting rid of the center of it so there are a lot of cool applications for the the cue mesh operation with the zmodeler brush to change the operation of the zmodeler brush all you have to do is hover over a face an edge or a vertice and hold the spacebar and we'll give you this different context-sensitive menu I typically only interact with faces and edges you can see kind of the difference in menus there very rarely do I interact with points unless I am trying to do maybe like a split operation it's it's pretty rare here while I'm doing a quick little poly modeling stuff in ZBrush but before we use the zmodeler brush we are actually going to start manipulating our geometry without it so one of the cool things about ZBrush and being able to poly model with the zmodeler brush is not only do you have the zmodeler brush to do that but you also have all your other brushes that you can interact with and other tools I should say that you can interact with in ZBrush for instance if you use the 3d gizmo if we have any fans of that here it's a great tool to play around with I actually like the Transpo's line a little bit more so I'll be using that tonight it's pretty much exactly the same as the 3d gizmo there are some differences in functionality it's not really important if there is a difference or something that we need from one that the other can't do I will specifically point it out so I think the first thing we're going to do is make one of our trees one of our low poly trees here and I think we're gonna start with this style because it's really simple and then we'll look at doing something a little bit more complex like this style here after so let's go ahead and do that so the first thing we want to do and before I actually start manipulating let me make sure I didn't miss any questions gizmo for life we've got one gizmo for life and the transpose line you got used to the transpose line so you actually prefer that as well Wow it's very rare that I find someone else that prefers to the transpose line but let's go ahead and manipulate our little cube here so this is a pretty simple shape that we're looking at one of these trees here it's pretty much a pyramid right a prison so to create a shape like this what do we need to do to our cube we need to stretch it and we need to taper it in so to do that what I like to use is masking and we are going to be using that in conjunction with the transpose line or 3d gizmo like I said so I am going to turn off symmetry if you have symmetry on just hit the X key on your keyboard to turn that off and hold the ctrl key and I'm going to turn off my transpose line so I can actually use masking so if you hold the ctrl key by default you will have the mask pen active which you can use to draw masks on objects like so pretty neat very useful a mask is just something that allows you to manipulate geometry without I'm going to be leaving other parts that are masks you can invert your mask by ctrl tapping bunch of cool stuff you can do with masks what we are going to be using though tonight is the mask lasso so hold the control key tap up here and select the mask lasso and I am just going to go ahead and unmask the top of my object if for some reason your mask is acting a little bit strangely make sure that your RGB intensity up here is set to 100 when you are holding down the ctrl key to activate your mask so let's go ahead and just mask off what we don't want and use our little transpose line here to shift our face up very simple I know but I want to go through the easy stuff here in the beginning and then we can kind of skip over it like after we do it multiple times so that's great this little white circle centers our Transpo's line and we can swap over to scale instead of move to start tapering that shape in and just like that we have our basic prism starting we want to get that to be a little bit smaller we can kind of taper that in a little bit more so that's one way that we can do that with just a simple cube let's also get some color on this while we are here so I'm gonna switch to an RGB up here swamp on over to my paint material if you guys don't have the zebra paint material I recommend using the skin shade for material so I'll grab the skin shade for material here instead and let's just select kind of a D saturated orange color maybe a little bit darker something like like that cool we'll just click on fill object which should all be over here by default it's not you're not seeing any of this stuff it's up here in your color menu from here we're gonna go over to our tool menu and just duplicate this object and slide it down so now you can kind of see where we are getting to a place where we can start to get some I don't know what you would call that what's the word stair-stepping maybe I don't know it doesn't matter and all I'm going to do is use moving scale to go ahead and slide some of these down scale them up and duplicate again and just kind of repeat this process and I'll just do this a few times and I'll show you how we can get some variation out of these so we got that and if you guys remember we had that cube earlier I kind of want that cube again so let's duplicate an object and initialize it so that we can get a cube back and we are gonna make that cube using the same tools and techniques into a little tree trunk and we can maybe play with proportions and scale this up and down and get that into place and I'll turn on perspective and we kind of already have the beginnings of a pretty simple tree just like that oh and you know what maybe let's go for that uh we'll go for that same look that I had for the kind of like a sheet tree so I can maybe show you guys how I created these little stripes you could do that with a texture I ended up doing it with geometry actually which is very very very easy to do and I'll go ahead and show you how to do that real quick as well so we can kind of get something in a pretty much similar style so we can go back to our zmodeler brush and we looked at the cue mesh operation which was the default operation right but this time we are going to be looking at an edge loop function in ZBrush this is called a poly loop so if you hover over a face and hold the spacebar choose insert poly loop and down here just click on poly loop so insert poly loop poly loop while hovering over a face I'm going to press ctrl W because that polygroups everything as a single single poly group here it's just ctrl W on your keyboard compress it as many times as you want and yeah we'll just go ahead and tap on our face to insert a nice little poly loop from here we can do that a couple more times to get some you know different variations on that so we got a few different edge loops and if we want to move these we can do that very simply by hovering over an edge holding spacebar and choosing a move infinite radius move infinite radius is something that will grab an edge loop and allow you to kind of move it wherever you want but that's not exactly what we want we don't want our tree to kind of look like that maybe you do I don't know but for me I want just grab it and slide it perfectly along the tree the tree here so hold the shift key and instead that edge loop will slide perfectly and I'll just grab a few of these edge loops and kind of maybe just pull them around and get some different variations of spacing next up we just want to bevel that shape which is hovering over an edge and selecting bevel with the spacebar held down of course and we'll just bevel that out you can probably already see where this is going as we start to get closer towards that shape what's awesome about ZBrush when using the zmodeler brush one feature that I really love is that when you do something like bevel or extrude or really any operation and the future will remember how you did that or how and maybe how far you extruded an object or how much you beveled an object in this case all you have to do is tap again and it will bevel it the exact same width so for instance if I pull it out this far the next time I do it and just tap it will do it the exact same distance so pretty cool just kind of eyeball it and get it pretty close there we go we got our nice and simple little angelarts there and we've doubled them to create some variation and what's really nice here is that everything is set up with some different polygroups which can be very nice for selecting different shapes here which we will do in just a moment yes a happy little tree absolutely alright so again what we're going for here is this pattern at the bottom of the tree to give some variation to the bark the balk of the tree and to select these there's a lot of different ways we can do it the way that I'll be doing it is by using a selection brush I prefer using the selection lasso a lot of the time so if you hold ctrl and shift and come up here by default it should be the select rectangle there's a lot of different selection brushes that you can choose from though as well some slicing and cutting brushes and all sorts of cool stuff I'll just be using the Select lasso which is right here by holding ctrl and shift you can make a selection which is pretty nifty so it hides part of your geometry and by holding ctrl shift and alt you can deselect geometry from being visible the operation that I just did there to show backside polygons is called double that is down in your tool display properties double right thing and I pretty much always keep that on if I can so ctrl + shift selects visible ctrl shift alt hides it's maybe another better way to phrase that so I'm just going to hide and show certain geometry here and go ahead and make some quick selections so that I just have well you gotta get this one to high view oh let me you know what here let's I'm being silly let's just use the the selection tool that we already have which is just holding ctrl and shift and clicking which will select a poly group you can see it's being a little bit finicky here about its selection but it can be I'm not sure exactly why it's selecting that poly group as well but ctrl shift click it will select the polygroup that you want I am going to use it to select few different polygroups here it's being a little bit odd with my selections which i think is why i was probably doing that to begin with all right we'll get it I'm just gonna set up some different polygroups for these all right I think I'm gonna go back to what I was doing because I think that's probably why I was doing that I probably just engrained in myself why I do it and forgot exactly why I do that every time hopefully I can just click here doesn't want to do it doesn't that want to be my friend which is okay we'll make it work yeah if I can probably go back to my select class all right so this is what I want to do I'm gonna set up individual polygroups for all of these and I'm actually going to start splitting these off because this is eventually what we are going to do is we are going to split these polygons off to make them as separate mesh so to do that go down in your tool split menu and choose split hidden so that will split that into two separate poly groups or I'm sorry two separate tools you can see now and I'll see there we go we're starting to get the selection I want I don't know why I was being weird there but we got it figured out so we'll split that off again tool split split hidden you can go ahead and set those up now these are separated I want them to be merged into one so we'll just select merge and click on merge down cool so we got that we got that and now I'll just very easily do the same thing that we did on the orange part of our tree and the bark of a tree and fill this in with a different color something that feels maybe a little bit more similar to what we had before so something like that so that's a little bit uniform we could sit here and split this up a little bit more but for the sake of our demonstration we'll kind of continue on here it's really easy to make variations on the tree that we're looking at right now for instance we could turn off certain parts of our tree I'll go ahead and merge some of these down just so we can like organ a little bit more so we could hide certain parts and stretch them and all of a sudden now we have a second tree that we can start to use this variation so that's nice really simple to make variations from they're good and turn on perspective very simple low poly tree modeled with the zmodeler brush very quickly and yeah like I said very easy to make more variations from there just testing your patience is a feature which they update with every version the selection the selection is actually the same it was just being a little finicky with selecting so as a quick explanation the select rectangle selects polygroups or at least it should so if I click on this no matter where I click this blue polygroup it should just display this poly group same thing with the yellow one but if you're using the Select Lassa which I was originally I will select edge loops as well and display those so you can see how it kind of hid part of that geometry there it was doing that a little bit Finnick finically was being finicky with both of the selection tools for some reason I do not know why but that doesn't really matter too much so now that we got to figure it out I'll just merge all of these objects into one nice little tool because guess what we have poly groups set up and hopefully they should work okay so now they're working now it's oh okay that's only that's just blending - that's fine that's fine we'll make it work and it does I guess it is being a little bit weird with these hopefully now that they're all the same it will not be okay now it's working so for some reason that was being a little bit weird okay let's let's go on so we got this kind of basic tree setup very easy to set up a few different variations one second here while I check checking something on check go ahead and make one more tree here and then start setting up some of our other scene elements you don't see the finicky alright so from here instead of using our good pal the cube we're gonna use our good friend the the cylinder instead so if you scroll down in that initialize pallet instead of doing a one one one quick cube do a two one two quick cylinder why so that will take whatever geometry you have selected nice nice beautiful artifacts get rid of those and turn that into a cylinder much like what I have on screen right now if you scroll down under tool geometry crease and click on crease with the default of 45 and then press the D key on your keyboard to smooth out the object with a smooth subdiv or a dynamic sub div is what they're called it will crease the caps of the cylinder very nicely automatically for you and we are going to do the exact same thing that we did to our tree to the cubes of that tree but this time we're gonna be doing it with the cylinder so again using masks to stretch out our object and then scale it in up top now we will be doing something a little bit different this time but before we do that let's go ahead and just duplicate this a couple times to get the our you know what here let's let's do this instead I think I'll start subdividing this object by pressing ctrl D on my keyboard the objective is just to get something that's a little bit smooth it doesn't have to be super clean or anything like that I'll go ahead and change the color as well and what I'm going to be doing is using really any sculpting brush it doesn't matter what sculpting brush you use here but you just want to get a little bit of variation on your object so I'm just using my personal clay brush but if you guys want to use another clay brush or the standard brush or like I said literally whatever it doesn't matter we're just trying to get a little bit of surface noise on here really quick and that is pretty good because the edge down here is really sharp what I'm gonna do is hold the shift key for my smooth brush and start to soften that edge if it is not smoothing out as much as you need and that edge is still really sharp just press shift D on your keyboard or step down in your subdivision levels and it'll smooth a lot faster a lot more a lot more easily alright so there is our basic shape and before we do the low-poly kind of exercise trick on this with decimation master which I'm sure some of you are familiar with I am going to duplicate our object do the exact same thing and slide it down get some variation here nice and quick another cool thing that you can do with the transpose line in 3d gizmo is instead of duplicating the object as long as the object doesn't have any subdivision levels you can hold the ctrl key and then slide it down and it will duplicate it for you which is pretty cool alright now with this all set up and duplicated I am going to run what's called Auto groups there are a lot of different automatic groups or automatic grouping functions in ZBrush with the polygroup menu Auto groups will just give every separate object every polygon I'll and its own group here so auto group's tool polygroups and then from there I'm just going to mask off a few of these add a little bit more variation with my sculpting brush and then we'll kind of look at the cool little trick here decimation I'm gonna set that up get a little messy looks good well maybe use our move brush to create some variation here something like that I think that's probably fine there so there's our kind of top portion of our tree for the base I think we should probably reuse a cylinder to kind of stick within the same shape language with this tree we're very squared off with this one we're starting to be a bit more round so let's duplicate everything and again use that quick cylinder Y button to create a tree trunk and we'll just do the same thing that we did on our last tree and gotta get that into place for the fast just kind of scale that real quick if you guys remember we clicked on crease and add that creased up for us automatically which is very nice and I think we'll just grab kind of an off darker brown color there alright so it doesn't look like the low-poly tree that we expected and that's because we need to do a little bit of a decimation to this object which is very easy to accomplish so for that all I'm going to do is make sure that I have this tree color sampled so hover over any object in a 3d object or UI element in the entire ZBrush user interface and press the C key see like cat to sample the color so I could sample my background color you can see that changing I could sample anything on here I could sample this sphere I'm gonna sample the tree though and then from there we are going to open up the Z plug-in menu I have that docked over on the left side of my menu if you're unaware of how to dock palettes you can click on them click that icon and drag it over flop it over there and we are looking for decimation master right here so we're going to open that up and just click on pre process current so this typically goes pretty fast it obviously depends on how many polygons you have in the object here 200,000 Poly's you saw it went in just like a couple seconds later so we've pre-processed current pre-processed the current selected sub tool and now we're going to click on decimate current it doesn't really look like anything happened other than our object turned white but if I turn on poly frame with shift F you'll see that if I step back and forth between those the polygon distribution is a lot smaller it has done what is called decimation it has decimated our object essentially what that means is it tries to retain the shape of the object by while still reducing the poly count so for instance if you had a flat plane and you decimated that object well it could accomplish a plane with just a single polygon so that's not super hard for it to do so anywhere that there is less detail there will be less polygons than anywhere that there is more detail there will be more polygons but this is still not the low poly look that we are going for so let's lower this a lot more I'm thinking like 1% of what we just did click on decimate and there we go now we're starting to get somewhere really cool we can maybe fill in our color I'm thinking even lower let's try point 1 and decimate there we go now we're starting to get somewhere pretty cool we're starting to get some low poly shapes in here you can play around with this for as long as you want to try to get the desired effect that you want maybe you could play around with your actual polygon slider here if you want to go for a very specific number of polygons or something like that here's another example here and we can continue actually where's Auto groups artist to manipulate this object even more from here so if you like the look of the the shape but maybe it's starting to like not fade into the other objects quite as nicely as you would like well with a little bit of tweaking and adjusting with your move brush you can start to get then a little bit of a better place that's starting to look pretty cool got a nice low poly tree pretty simple as well and I think I'll scale this down because it seems like it's a bit thick awesome so let's merge everything together there and take a look at our two trees so we have this kind of pine tree here and we have our square kind of like ash maybe a style treat here so we've created two low poly trees the second one went a lot faster because we spent a lot of time talking about the pools from here on out I will not be talking about a lot of the tools that were reusing but there we have it two really quick simple trees so now we want to start setting up our scene and maybe adding a few extra objects like grass or rocks and do a character so I'm hoping that in the next 30 minutes we can maybe get our environment pretty much set up and then for the last hour we can work on a cool low poly character so hopefully we have enough time I've never done a demonstration like this so I haven't really timed it but we'll play it by ear figure it out lúcia welcome welcome to the stream hope you're having a great night yes decimation master it is an awesome little application little little plug in here we'll probably be using it more later so I'll just keep it open over there on the little sidebar but let's go ahead and start setting up our scene what I like to do are you know what I am going to close it because I can't see my UI completely what I like to do is set up a ground plane so that I can begin placing some of my trees and if you guys remember if you just initialize a quick cube you can start manipulating that object pretty quickly using your transpose line or 3d gizmo in this case I'm using it to manipulate a simple ground plane you can actually use a plane but I want to use a cube something with thickness because I would like to get a similar effect to what I've done here with with these so it's like a little tile and maybe you could imagine a situation where you had a bunch of these tiles you can like piece them together I think that would be pretty cool that would be something that I'd like to experiment with in the future and maybe 3d print some of these grass would be a little bit tough to print but depending on the scale you can get some trees out for sure so yeah we can set up our little ground plane I like the idea of doing I don't know maybe like a snowy landscape I've already done that once and maybe we'll do something different let's just set up a few different colors here grab like a dirt a dirt color and then maybe like a grass color as well what I'm going to do is just duplicate these objects and slide them over top of each other so we can fill them with some quick color just like that so it looks like you're kind of taking a slice of the ground there and of course you can duplicate and do as many of these as you want and it's probably a good idea to get some variation you know in scale so that they don't all look exactly the same because that's pretty boring starting to look a little um minecraft II I honestly could not remember the name of Minecraft there for a moment um a fun little trick that you can't do with the 3d gizmo to my knowledge is a clip and that didn't do it accurately so that's unfortunate there is a way to make this perfect but I don't want to spend the time to do it right now I'd rather just kind of line it up by eye and continue on well maybe talk about that later if we have time alright so we got our tree we got our basic little square environment if we need we can start to scale the tree up or down depending on the scale of our environment I think this is probably pretty good in terms of scale for what I'm looking for here for just like a little slice of slice of life so to speak so we can start placing our tree and duplicating it but that would be pretty boring because our tree is going to end up looking very repetitive and similar so what I would normally do is make a bunch of different you know maybe like three to five different tree variations and then by rotating them scaling them and just having them at different angles it will look a lot more varied but with one tree that's kind of tough to do so let's duplicate our tree and try to get just a little bit more variation out of what we have so far so as a little trick for something like this we'll go ahead and split that off and I am just going to subdivide this object so it starts to get a little bit more smooth here and essentially what I'm going to do is I'm going to subdivide it and read estimating that we get some different form it seems backwards and weird and that's because it is but it it works it works for getting some quick different variation for something like this and of course you still got your move brush and all your other sculptural brushes if you want to make some more changes but I think we'll just stick with what we got here go back free process current and give that a little decimate again so as you can see there should be some differences between the two so a little bit of different shape going on in some parts polygon distribution is different pretty different and then of course we could make this smaller taller fatter whatever you want to do to it to make it even more varied or even something like deleting one of the caps so maybe it's a little bit smaller something like that which honestly is something that I'm gonna do right now so I will whoops there we go I'll just stretch that up so you know I kind of like the the shorter just dumpy your look I'll keep that and I'll just merge those uh trees tree pieces I don't know what I'm trying to say three parts marriage all the tree parts together beautiful alright so they're all overlapping so I'll just kind of move these out of the way so we can see our three different trees so not a huge bit of variation between these two although the shaping is different but a little bit more between these so there's a lot of different ways we can get some more variation between these but we're gonna call this good and go ahead and start placing these in our scene so what I like to do first those kind of move these down to make sure that they are on the ground plane or intersecting the ground plane I'm gonna start to move these around engine whoo I don't know what just happened to my throat in genetics welcome man welcome back it's been a minute since I've seen you around hope you were doing well yes it does give good triangle use it for lazy enema hair never thought of using it for anime hair but that would be interesting I'm trying to think how that would work like what that would look like I guess like really low like spiky hair like low poly spiky hair maybe I don't know it's probably like a few different variations and ideas you can play around with it but yeah let's just go ahead and start placing our trees here I'm just gonna put a few of them back here now if you guys remember a little bit ago I said I wanted to maybe do like a little scene with like a sasquatch walking if I can so we'll we'll try to play around with that but what we want to do is start getting some duplication for our tree so we could sit here and duplicate these trees one at a time but that's going to end up being a lot of work so instead what we are going to do is a can all of our trees and then duplicate all of them at once so we'll just merge all those together and I have set up some quick polygroups here between the tops and bottoms of our trees so that we can just select here we got the bark on the bottom and the branches up top and it's pretty easy to just select those and swap between the two awesome so let's go ahead and duplicate these click on duplicate and what I'm going to do is just rotate them all around like 180 degrees place them a little bit in front here and then start to move my trees around using masking and my transpose line or 3d gizmo to start getting some more variation so it's pretty easy to get a lot of these very quickly but what you don't want to do is end up having everything look exactly the same so even though you're rotating and moving stuff around little things like scale making things a lot larger or smaller can really have a big big difference here even though it's nice and easy to do a lot of little things can make a big difference let's go ahead and move these into place just like that and then what I'm going to do is grab these again merge everything together again and duplicate one more time here and we'll just go ahead and rotate that around maybe something like this and we'll try to get that into position there and essentially what I'm trying to do here is create a U of trees with us kind of being facing the clearing of it and that is where I want to have like a little Bigfoot character or Sasquatch character walking so duplicate that will duplicate one more time and pull all that over here very symmetrical that is not what we want so let's add some more variation go ahead and get some grouping between these typically when grouping objects it is a bad idea to just have everything be even that ends up looking really awkward very kind of done by done by human hands so what I find works really well and giving a nice kind of random look but also giving some some periods of rest and visual interest to the eye is to try to group like two or three together for something like this and then have maybe like one off by itself or like one larger one and then like a smaller one next to it you just don't want to have everything be perfectly even because then it just starts to feel weird go ahead and do something like this and I want to get some more trees in the back as well we just got to make sure we check this from time to time we'll also get some variation in color here because these are all feeling very similar as well so let's go ahead and merge and we got a nice little scene starting to come together pretty quickly I would like to get a couple more trees in here and then we can maybe look at creating some grass and rocks and other simple little things like that yeah I get some Sasquatch going absolutely van van Veen what's up welcome all right we'll do a couple more trees like I said kind of like a little stumpy tree so we'll get maybe like one or two more came in here for sure I think there's a too much too much kind of negative space there I want it to feel more dense specifically in this middle section I think the sides feel fine from that angle because that will be our viewing angle so let's get let's get this guy here you got to be careful with your masking too because as you can see there it's kind of grabbed that tree a little bit even though I didn't select it my mask wasn't on it I'd be careful so it looks like it's good now tends to be a little bit finicky there and I should mention the way that I am hiding things so quickly hiding and showing things so quickly like this I have a hot key setup for what's called solo mode if you're unfamiliar with it it's an awesome tool it's down here it's just a solo button it will only display your selected sub tool and you can turn that on and off down there or set up a hotkey like what I've done here which is doing this all right let's uh let's stick with that for now I might might do some like small variations to a couple different things here but I would say for the most part that's probably pretty close to what we want so let's get some rocks and tree around trees already got trees rocks and uh some like little blades of grass or something like that rocks are really easy because we've already looked at all the techniques for how to do them so yeah let's let's do it super quick what we want to do is grab a sphere so I'll just append a sphere object here we can even set up our color for our rock really quick some kind of maybe lightly bluish color something a little bit different so kind of like a grayish blueish very desaturated blue and from here I think we'll probably look at the exact same technique that we looked for for the pine trees here so instead of just sculpting directly on it at first I'm gonna use my move brush and just start to give this some some shape real quick and I'm just kind of doing this randomly it doesn't have to be super specific and maybe taking a clay brush to it to give it a little bit of texture and then we can go ahead and decimate this but before I do that there might be a problem with the caps of this fear we'll test it let's see if it works let's see pre-process current decimate current way too low in the poly count there there we go so something like that let's go a little bit lower though let's go like that's the third of that awesome so we have the beginnings of our low poly rock in just a minute or so very easy quick and simple so we can rotate this to get some more variation out of it it's really easy to make more of these as you've just seen I kind of like the idea of having one larger rock in the scene maybe central to the scene there and then we'll dish out like a few more smaller rocks so like I said we can just duplicate this and maybe move it around a little of course it's nice when you're doing something like this to kind of plan out the angle that you want to set up your final shot for or from I should say so that you can kind of get an idea of where everything's going to be and if there's any weird like overlapping or gaps that you need to take care of so for this for setting up your shot what's really nice is you can go into your movie menu and set up a camera angle I like to use the timeline to do this there's actually a way that you can set up a camera now which I believe is just in your draw menu under your camera settings if you see down here you can store your current camera view and then kind of swap between those really quickly I don't this menu doctor though so another way that you can do this an older way that that I like to use from time to time I'm not going to be exporting a camera I just want to turn on my timeline in my movie menu so I can set that up kind of get a nice angle here will probably be probably be like a 3/4 ish angle and maybe maybe a little bit less maybe like more from the front so maybe something like this here if you just click up here it stores your little point on your timeline and then if you move stuff around you can get it back by dragging that red line all right so that means that this rock is definitely not visible from our and a basic view so we'll kind of adjust that and maybe scale it down and let's make like one more rock variation to place around and then we'll make some grass bus Tony what's up man welcome hey doing candy face what am I making so tonight we're doing a low poly demonstration if you guys are joining us a little bit later in the stream no worries everything gets uploaded to YouTube after this you guys want to check out more of my stuff it's just youtube.com slash polygon we are working on something that you guys can find on my Gumroad which is my low poly foliage package which I released just just within the last like day or so so there are a ton of different variations on trees and low poly assets that we can create in ZBrush that I've been playing around and experimenting with recently so we are going to continue I should say going through the process here setting up one of these scenes and that I'll be talking about rendering in some stuff a little bit later too so let's very quickly do one more little rock a little bit too well on the polycount get an idea of where we can maybe put one of these so that it's visible play around with like scale or depth even like rotation angle there's so much that we can do to this stuff to just like very quickly get some variation that's like really really easy to do which is nice so we don't have to do quite as much work for for no reason honestly like a few roxas is probably enough we'll just like throw one back here or something real quick a little bit too much visual interest right there what I'm trying to do is get the visual interest to be a little bit more where a sasquatch is going to stand and I think he's going to be like about right here so the rocks kind of pointing in towards that point from a visual or what's the word from a can't think of it it's just we're aiming the visual interest at the character hopefully once we get him in there all right let's organize a little bit here and then create some grass just driving in and say love your work well thank you Katie that's that's very nice of you appreciate that no worries if if you gotta go or if you guys want to check out the stream later it gets uploaded like I said on YouTube but thank you that's very kind of you well thank you candy face yeah low poly stuff is really fun really simple to do in here all right grass now grass is a little bit more complicated than creating rocks because we have to go back to using the zmodeler brush and actually you know what I'll show you guys something really cool that's a little bit different than what we did before so we were using the zmodeler brush earlier to create Polly loops in our geometry to create this kind of effect on the bark down here but let me show you guys a little bit of a different technique using a slice brush to get some Polly loops so we can just kind of stretch our squash that's the opposite of stretching I guess I squash I own the steps again and stretch our shape into a basic kind of blade of grass you know just something really simple like that and you know what let's do let's do something even more interesting that show off some more stuff so I'll select only the front side of this so that it's like a single plane of geometry just like that and we will edit that a little bit more here by using the slice curve brush which you can find by holding ctrl + shift and clicking up on your brush and selecting the slice curve make sure that it you are using the slice curve and not the clip curve or the trim curve has to be the slice curve and then again by just holding ctrl and trick you can click and drag that out and just like that you create some edge loops or poly loops in your geometry I'm just going to draw out a couple of those like so and it's a little bit tough to see my geometry because it is flat and one-sided so I'm going to cheat a little bit and just rotate it ever so slightly and then just start masking off some points of geometry and rotating them so essentially what I'm doing is slowly giving our grass a little bit of curve so there's our blade of grass very simple and rudimentary but if we want to give this some thickness we can do that with the zmodeler brush and we could sit here and try to queue mesh each polygon or extrude each polygon but the zmodeler brush has a lot of functions that make this a lot easier so hover over a face hold the spacebar extrude all polygons and we'll just extrude on that like so or as deep or shallow as we want I'll say about right there so that looks pretty good to me I just want to make sure that my polygons are facing the right way flip that if if your polygons are reversed if your normals are reversed and your geometry looks like it is inverted like mine does right now you can fix that down in the tool menu under display properties flip you know flip your normals if you don't want if you don't know what a normal is it doesn't really matter it's but if you see that just click on flip you'll be good you'll be ready to go sorry our blade of grass is a little bit big we probably want to scale that down and start spreading that out and getting that set up I love your memes all the yeah all these all the memes that's what I'm known for on Twitter all my CG means all right so our grass very boring and duplicating a blade of grass a million times sounds like a pain so let's make this a lot easier on ourselves by duplicating the blade of grass a few times and then being able to duplicate that kind of like what we did with the trees but just on a larger scale so we'll set this up get some scale some variation and rotation the more variation the better and there we have a simple three-pronged patch of grass now we can duplicate this more times and do some other stuff with it to kind of adjust it make some more more variation because having this shape everywhere it's going to become very very obvious if we just kind of repeat this over and over so what I'll do is I'll just duplicate my blade of grass and get some more variation here with a few different ideas so like one idea I had was that we can just duplicate it and maybe rotate a few of the shapes here something like that and even scale some of that up or down so there's like another little thicker patch of grass we could make one that is more thin so we could just have like a two chunk there pretty easy like I said once you have one of these it's pretty easy to set up just like a bunch of variations of it cool so let's use those to duplicate and set up our grass so like I said this could take a while if you don't if you don't do it correctly so what I like to do for something like this is I will work in one quadrant of my little cube environment and just add some different patches of grass through duplication really quick duplication rotation it's all about just getting as much kind of Quaker variation as we can we don't have to be super specific and honestly probably the more or I'm sorry the less less in this case would be more I would think because most of the focus is going to be here in the middle of our scene anyway so we'll kind of do that a few times and just merge all our grass together and then what we can do is actually just duplicate that into our other quadrants and anywhere where it's maybe penetrating a rock or a tree or anything like that we can just get rid of it so really easy to do like I said now that we have that set up let's clear our mask you know what I think I'll make let me see here I think this grass is just a little bit too big compared to our trees so let's scale that down quite a bit and as you can see whoops we need to spread that out a little bit more now so I'll just do what I did exactly the same as before but now we just have more stuff to duplicate right so you kind of use that as like a little stamp or stencil duplicating rotating and adjusting as you go so we'll just get like a few different patches of grass here and there and what we can clear our mask and then duplicate all of that and wow it's just like all sorts of grass real quick like I said very very easy and simple to like set up but what I recommend doing after you kind of start to set up some of the stuff is that you go back through and clean it up make sure that there's not like a ton of repeating texture to the grass there's not stuff that is interpenetrating your trees or or anything like that I think I'll do like a quick little check to make sure that that's not happening too much but just for the sake of time here for our demo we will carry on let me get rid of all of the extra garbage from my quick lazy duplication and voila we have got ass beautiful I know so complicated hopefully I'm not going too fast hearing you guys are able to follow along with some of this stuff or maybe at least pick up on a couple things along the way all right simple grass simple seeing I would say that is probably good for our quick little scene setup here I'll do some more stuff to clean it up but we are half way in so I say we swap on over to creating our character which if you didn't hear me say earlier it's going to be some kind of like little Sasquatch type of type of character that we're going to get like walking through these trees maybe looking at the camera dude doing that goofy face or something I don't know we'll figure it out so we can save this out and start a new tool but because it's in the same scene I'm just going to append it here to my sub tool list we can maybe create a folder what's awesome about the newest version of ZBrush 20:19 is that we have folders that we can set up and you can sit here and name these if you want I am for the sake of speed just going to create a couple untitled folders real quick and get all our objects in there we can close that up and turn on and off visibility for all of that but yeah let's go ahead and append a sphere and get started on a Squatch a squatchy character and we already got a nice kind of brown here so let's maybe stick with something like that all right now the fun creating characters right and we're gonna be playing around with creating some low poly effects with this as well I think because we're not going to make them super complicated I think the more simple here we can get them the better we'll still make them we'll still make them fun and probably probably a little derpy along the way too okay so we got our sphere I have an idea a little bit in my head what I want to do here it's kind of create like a big bowl of a character with some minimalistic hair and like a beard let's go ahead and just set up some of the primary shapes by creating the overall ball of the character I'm using the insert multi mesh primitive brush - what are we facing their own way ah we are all right I'm facing their own axis that's a good fix my scene there and now we'll use the insert multi much primitive there we go that's what I wanted alright so I'm going to start creating some arm there's some basic shapes for some arms here we want them to be a bit more visually interesting so we'll add like a little bit of taper to this shape oops turn on local sim local symmetry allows you to scale in on an object even if you're doing it across a symmetrical axis and he's gonna have some some big alarms big big droopy arms again we're just trying to get those really simple shapes yeah in the beginning I'll be using dynamesh along the way as well if you guys are unfamiliar with dynamesh it is something that dynamically Ramesh's I know dynamesh crazy dynamically remesh is your geometry the slider affects your resolution but I have it down here in my hotkey menu salt or down here in my custom UI so I'll be using it down there we can go ahead and continue adding in a few shapes if you guys have any questions about dynamesh maybe like when to use it or how to use it even I have an awesome video over on my youtube channel talking about the difference between dynamesh zremesher and I think sculptors Pro maybe maybe just dynamesh and zremesh talk about the difference between those and like when to use them so if you're interested in that youtube.com slash polygon you can actually search on my channel but I think if you just type in dynamesh versus zremesher I think it's titled something like that it's probably like the the second video jay-j he'll beat me to it but yes is your measure or dynamic quite a lot check it out all right let's get some leggings on this guy and start playing around with some of the extra extra shape so I want him to be very stubby a little bit like like I said very rounded kind of egg-shaped probably a bit more Deborah Phaedra what's going on welcome welcome to the stream how you doing man I think I want to kind of get an idea for blocking out the face here I'm thinking how do I want to do this let's it duplicate our sphere and just continue to insert some more geometry so I just want to insert something that could be like a little tuft of hair on top of his head something like that and the important thing when blocking out a character is not to get too focused on you know everything being perfect at this stage really is just about getting everything in and then from there you start to worry a little bit more about proportions and setting things up correctly and all that now he is a Squatch so I want his arms to be like I said pretty long a little bit knuckle dragger kind of and yeah let's figure out what we want to do for the the face here so I think he's probably pretty much going to be like one solid color now we're gonna be using dynamesh on this arm sorry decimation master on this to make things have that kind of low poly feel much like what we did with our trees so having the shape be super clean and perfect really isn't going to matter too much once we do that but we do want like I said with those main parts in pretty quick so what I'm going to do is duplicate my body that I have right now and it turn on transparent and scale it in ever so slightly and set this up as like kind of a just a rough skin tone really quick in the middle there and then on the front I'm just going to use my clay brush or move brush and start pushing in on that top object there so I just want to create like so I want him to be he's like covered in fur right he's a sasquatch but then his face is like still still going to be visible in here so we'll just do something like that and I think it's a little bit easier to do this with your move brush honestly people always ask me what brushes I use and 99% of everything I do is with the move brush so there you have it let's maybe go a bit larger I think bigger eyes get a little bit more expressive and something like that for where our mouth can go and again we'll play with this shape here a little bit let's just get some quick eyes on here and then we'll continue on my sphere looks a little bit stretched I'll actually squash it and then line it up and I'm going to set up the toy plastic material with my eyes for now toy plastic is great for creating just a quick reflective material in ZBrush it's good for eyes it's good for kind of like a metallic II feel anything that might be reflective alright make those guys nation big and then I will also get those a little bit more face and let's see let's go ahead and stick with that for now so like I said very simple very rudimentary but we have all the parts and pieces in there and now we can start manipulating them to work on proportions so what I'm going to do is activate something in the Z plugin menu called transpose master if you're unfamiliar with this tool Z plug-in transpose master click on T pose mesh it'll take all of your sub tools and put them in one single sub tool that you can manipulate everything at once so this is an extremely powerful tool I use it all the time for posing characters or adjusting proportions like what I'm about to do right now or for making just you know quick changes quick fixes to you know multiple sub tools at once it's great for a lot of different things so let's go ahead and adjust a lot of this so we got a lot of the stuff in what we want to switch it up so let's start doing exactly that they're definitely going to round I'm gonna adjust that shape it's something [Music] something here I think I'm probably gonna make his arms a little bit noodley and I don't know if I want to do like super stubby legs or maybe a little bit noodley as well right now everything's just kind of like a sphere that I've squashed and stretched so it's not super complicated or anything it's not like we've gotten too complex here or our own good so that's nice let's go I think what I'm going to do is just scale this here do something like that and then actually create a little bit of a separation there between his body and his head just to kind of play with that a little bit I wanted to make him like really round but it was starting to feel a bit awkward so I think making the whole thing as one shape kind of seems maybe like a bad idea but hey that's the part all right that's the point of doing something like this you just start really simple and then you don't really get caught up with you know wasting a ton of time in the beginning it can be quick and experimental I'm gonna go back into Transpo's master I think here in just a moment so we can now adjust with that new object alright so we've got our head very simple spherical body like I said I don't want to make them perfectly spherical though so we'll scale this up I'll choose my move brush and kind of squash and stretch and digest that and there we go we're starting to get a little bit more unique here something like this I think this'll make a bit more visual sense once we start combining some more stuff so we can still make them very round but at least this way he's not just a ball all right awesome and I think maybe I'll give him like a little bit of taper in the body so that he's not quite so boring taper is just kind of one of those fundamentals that makes things a little bit more visually interesting and there we go with the magic of transpose master we've manipulated a lot of stuff really quick and we can continue on with our weird little dude here now I wanted to do rounded shape so I'm gonna stick with the same shape language for this guy and I'm going to start combining stuff now so that doesn't mean that I'm going to start going high poly or anything like that I'm gonna still keep things like really really low and simple and honestly I'm gonna keep things a bit messy because we are going to be using decimation master again here in just a moment to continue working with this guy so what can we do to make the face a bit more visually interesting I think I kind of work the eye a little bit there what do we think some big guys some small eyes sasquatches are probably not that smart so maybe maybe a bit smaller it's kind of mean to the sasquatches but I think it's true I don't know um let's see we'll just add in a few more shapes here and then we'll start looking at doing some decimating so if you weren't around for the ooh symmetry was not on there for sure if you were not around for the decimation part earlier this will be pretty fun for the mouth what is he doing with his mouth I think he's probably like surprised to see us I think that would be fun so I'm going to use a curved tube snap brush which is just a default brush in ZBrush and draw out like a little mouth run a mirror and well function on that which you can find under tool modify topology mirror and well so he's you know hold therapy but that's okay like I said will probably end up being a little Derby but still very low poly that's for sure all right looking a little Batman II and then let's start combining and adjusting some of the rest of our geometry here one thing that I'm going to do here with the arms is kind of chop these off and give them some simple hands something super super simple like I said it'll all come together once we decimate it that's kind of the point of doing it alright let's combine like you know what let's wait to combine I'm gonna do the same thing with the feet down here Bogg what's going on welcome I'll probably add some more variation there alright and as long as we have enough time here we'll talk about some lighting hopefully we can make it I'm trying to go quick on this just get something out and we'll look at lighting so I'm doing some quick shortcuts to cheese some stuff a little bit let me see here you know what let's delete our little ring and instead of doing that I think instead if I can make his mouth area a little bit wider you know what let's just do like a quick tiny mouth instead of doing that what I had before I will use the curved tube snap brush yet again but this time let's do like kind of a cute like catty mouth you've ever seen like the three the three mouth as it's known all right and there is some stuff that's breaking in the back but that's okay okay so from here I'm going to need to do some transpose mastery stuff but I think there's just a few more parts that I want to get on this guy before we decimate him and I want to make sure that I have all of that in before I do that let's do some insert meshes and we use the same techniques that we did for creating our trees to kind of pull out a quick little tooth quick little sasquatchy Fang and like I said we're trying to go quick here so this isn't normally probably how I would do this but for something quick here for a demonstration I think it'll work fine um I am I think going to fill this all back in and just have it be the eyes that are oh come on cover it up there so excuse the quick explosion of geometry but I want to do this stuff really quick so I think we're we're good on a lot of the shapes I just want to do some proportional stuff we're good on parts mm-hmm not necessarily good on shape I want to adjust a lot of that though so for example I want his mouth to be a much larger on the face because we're gonna be rendering from a distance we want that to be visible same thing with the eyes he's just going to be walking off in the distance being a little goober sasquatchy goober and now I'm gonna adjust the shape of his actual head to be a little bit more visually interesting than what we have right now including the position and scale of said head and I also want to add a beard something to transition from the head to the body and I'm thinking a beard will we'd be nice so these arms are a little bit thick to be noodley same thing with the legs will have to probably adjust that here in just a moment looks like something you'd see in South Park well I've not watched outbreak in a while but I love me some South Park um what's up what's up with you guy let's do the beard so for the beard I like the curve dude snap brush a lot I'll use that again boom all right now for the beard I am actually kind of just using it as a transitional piece so that the the head and body don't feel like they're just kind of stuck together so that's kind of what we're doing here but again everything being super clean and and perfect like I said earlier it doesn't matter because we are decimating this so let's just kind of like pull this around really quick as well as do the same thing around the mustache resume so get something real quick up through there and for those that aren't familiar with Mirren wild and curved brushes essentially what I'm doing is I'm drawing the curved brush on without symmetry the reason you do that is because when you draw out a curve that meets in the middle of an asymmetrical axis it tends to break where it connects in the middle so that is why I'm doing that you I'm just trying to get this to a place where it's a little bit more visually interesting though he is very do fee that's okay so I'm trying to do stuff quick so excuse the lack of explaining please little bit of rotation here and let's maybe make the arms swing a bit more maybe like lean him back a little because he's like hunched forward or hunched forward I need to run Auto groups on this because that's getting really annoying I just want to make sure that we have enough time to talk about lighting here at the end it's a very noodley arm new to the army I kind of want to do the same thing with legs but I'm going to have them be in the opposite direction of course no focus on our contrapposto are good good posing for our stupid little sasquatch character and very quickly just going to do some editing here proportions and I'll fix the rest of that here in just a moment all right so let me decimate our arms again over here pre-process current and decimate simple low poly stuff let's move this leg even further back so we can break this little bit more I'm not sure why this is freaking out there we go get a little just a little bit of step action there with the foot something super quick it won't matter once we decimated I don't think and filling our polypaint and we're getting there we're getting somewhere real quick so this is kind of the effect that we're looking for for those that are maybe just joining us you don't know what's going on at all no worries we are working on a little environmental scene here and we are creating a little sasquatch to put in it so we've been doing a lot of low poly stuff this entire time and I'm very quickly trying to make a little sasquatch character that we can add to our scene something just kind of simple real fast like I said he probably wouldn't come together until we started to get some of the stuff here at the end we'll do the same thing choosie knows it that little low poly schnoz in there I'll just keep the mouth and eyes the way they are kind of clean and simple and not decimate those I think that would kind of destroy the effect of the eyes same thing with the mouth we'll just keep that all the way it is let's go ahead and create a folder for that guy we'll stick with our trend of saving time and not name them things get in there come on all right awesome so we got our forest scene we got our giant Squatch he's way too big so let's grab our 3d gizmo because this only works with the 3d gizmo remember I said earlier that I would tell you if one thing doesn't work with the transpose or vice-versa and we are going to transpose the set so what that will do is that will allow us to move and adjust all of our individual sub tools for our sasquatch character here all at once Oh No being weird as symmetry on symmetry is on that's what was going on there let's go ahead and bring that back to the middle of our character and I think he's too big compared to our trees let's scale him down and get him in there let's see how does that look proportionally what do you guys think maybe a little bit smaller let's go just a little smaller and I think I will move him just to be a little bit more central to the scene so something like that we'll probably I'll probably adjust that a lot more for the the final image if I end up actually rendering this but now I want to talk a little bit about lighting before we kind of end here so we have maybe about like 20 minutes left on the stream or so so any questions that we have about anything that we just did or anything that you maybe missed before we continue on feel free to shout it out before we do so but if not we'll go ahead and talk a little bit about lighting there is rigging in ZBrush but it is not the type of rigging that you would expect and in my opinion it's not something that I like to use personally personally I like to manually pose my characters so for instance if you check out my art station you will see a bunch of different characters and all of these have been posed in ZBrush using Transpo's master as well as just you know manipulating my sub tools through sculpture through sculpting tools so that's how all those characters were were created if you are trying to rig something to be animated though that is not something that you can do Mizzy brush which tree is the happiest I'm gonna guess this little guy up front because he is cute fat stubby and he's within view of the camera or at least about where we're going to render from all right um yeah he is a chunk that's for sure so again for those that are just joining us if you have missed some of the stream you can go to youtube.com slash polygon and check out the upload later once I get that on there ah yeah so let's go over to blender really quick and I will be using blender for this demonstration for lighting but you can absolutely do this in any rendering software I just enjoy using blender for setting up renders so what we're going to be looking at very quickly for the next 20 minutes or so and maybe maybe even dry importing a couple things really quick or I can at least talk about the process for that we're gonna be talking about setting up some simple and nice lighting and and I'm gonna I'm going to actually keep it non software specific because there are so many different software's out there for rendering and I think they're all great it's really just about kind of understanding that you're working about what you're working with so if we kind of look at the top of our scene here you'll see that I have these three planes set up and these planes are set up with light or light materials in a blender here so I am going to explain a little bit about what we're looking at so this is a very simple studio lighting setup and I don't have the lights turned on right now which is why this looks very dim on the right and to set up something like this all you need is three pieces of well I guess four pieces of geometry you need your floor plain which is something very commonly made as just like a flat plain that curves up which is what I've done here and then you just need three three planes I have recently started using spheres just because the plane lightning mitr has a very kind of odd cutoff between the corners of where the light terminates so it's a little bit awkward so I've been trying to experiment with some different shapes of spheres tend to work a little bit better I've found but yeah let's kind of look at this so we have three lights set up and y3 it's called a three-point lighting system or three-point lighting setup it's very simple you have a front light or a key light you have a side light or a kind of a fill light and then you have a backlight or a rim light the key light which I will turn on here right now is your primary emitter this means that it should be probably it should typically be the strongest light in your scene again I'm not going to talk about the values of this but I'll maybe talk about the relationship between the values of the lights so this should be your main light it should be the your main illuminator the fill light should complement that light it should not overpower it unless you're maybe trying to go for like a super washed out scene or maybe something specific so this would not be the same strength typically as your your key light and the reason for that is like I said it starts to kind of overpower that this can also be dependent on the scale of your light the distance of it from your scene in this case you would probably want to make it if it's like the same distance for this I'll make it like we'll try half of what I had there before and that actually looks like it's doing pretty well there and then the backlight or rim light is something that you can in my personal thing you can do without in a lot of cases for something like this I think it's something that you could probably do without it's really nice when you're trying to light a portrait to get a really nice rim light around your character for this though I don't think it's super necessary but I will go ahead and turn it on just so you can see how how much more light we get in the scene and how how well things kind of work here in in tandem I have a great gift that I created showing all of this as well over on my Instagram if you guys want to check that out Instagram slash polygon it just kind of describes what three-point lighting is very in a very like easy way to understand I was hoping that this would like make it a little bit more visually apparent maybe we can just turn off every light except for except for just like one or two here so you can kind of see how much of a difference not having something like a key light makes in a scenario like this or if you just interact with only your your backlight and what that kind of looks like so having just a key light or just having one light or just a couple lights here I think I think it can work but I think typically it um I think typically it feels really boring and really flat what's awesome about three-point lighting is that you have the ability to experiment with lighting your scene from multiple directions so it doesn't feel super boring and pretty much every time I set up a quick little render like this I try out something new so I'm not always using the same values I'm not always using the same exact placement for my lights I'm trying to experiment and try to create something a little bit different so that is something that I recommend playing around with like I said I don't want to talk software specific here more so just kind of generals in terms of you know how you can set something like this up in key shot or in Maya if you want to play around with any external renders v-ray mental ray whatever a ray be ready all the raise but yeah that's that's like pretty much it three-point lighting is very simple I get asked about how I create my renders and that's it it's super super simple it just comes down to I think experimentation and threat setting up here your lights in an appropriate distribution or what would be the word how they kind of interact with each other I guess but yeah that's that's literally it I could let this sit here and like turn up the samples to let it sit here and calculate for longer but I have a feeling that the stream might be slowing down a little bit I'm your guys's and just because this tends to make things a little bit slow for my machine especially while streaming but yeah that's basically it and we have a little bit of extra time here so we can play around I think with our scene and adding some more variation really the key to setting up a scene like this if we go to wherever I had that image when creating a scene like this for me it's really easy when doing something like this to just duplicate something multiple times and it ends up looking really bland and boring which is kind of what we have right now so if you look at this image you can see that the height of every tree is completely different there's also a good distribution of heights between the trees it's not like they're all tall over on one side and all short on the other so variation is super important there's also some variation between the colors of my trees I think that's really important for doing like a little low poly scene like this it's also important for doing something you know higher poly or super realistic same thing with you know the rocks and ass and everything variation variation variation the same thing when you are texturing a character if you are texturing a character you don't want everything to look exactly the same you want some variation in there so I think it's fine for just like setting up something quick and like trying to block it out but this feels really really boring compared to something like this where there is so much more variation and unique uniqueness to the scene so definitely keep that in the back of your head if you guys are wanting to play around or experiment with something like this and for some reason that texture on my grass is messed up I'm not sure what happened there but that got deleted so that's fun so we have about like 10 minutes or so here for questions and just kind of hanging out and chatting it doesn't even have to be a question about what we worked on for tonight's stream I am NOT your disposal I guess so to speak hmm what about the black in the rendered image how do you remove it without over lighting the scene that is an excellent excellent question allow me to show you let me open up one of those renders so in this case you can see how black and dark that is at the top of the screen right there so there's a couple ways you could get rid of that the environment is really important to interacting with your light obviously and for instance if we were to slide this back towards our scene here that is typically the objective or the point with creating a curved or sloped background like this so in photography this is often the case because it kind of blends the ground into the background which kind of creates this kind of infinite effect for the background you can see that there's still some black back here though so let me show you one way that you can get rid of that or one way that I like to try to get rid of that and typically if it's something quick and I don't want to sit here and play with the lighting of my scene if I'm really happy with the lighting of my object and not happy with the lighting of my scene like there's this black spot back here I'll show you what you can do let me just find the render really quick where everybody's my computer a little bit frozen here there we go cool so here is a my render for the image and I'll just undo or hide all of these so you can see my render mic this is the original render here that I have and what we can do here is create a new layer whoops I'll just use a bunch of hotkeys and typically what I'll do is I'll grab the gradient tool in this you can do this and you know you don't have to be using Photoshop or whatever so I'll try to keep it a little bit more general and what I'll do is I'll just sample a couple colors back here and a very back so I'll sample this lighter color and then I'll sample this slightly darker color and then I'll just draw up a quick little gradient and that kind of covers things up so too to get rid of that I'll just add a layer mask and find a good place for that maybe like about that's a little bit too dark so maybe something like that right there and then when I have previously done is i rendered the V scene with a mask here so it's just the trees by themselves so I have that on another layer so that the background a little bit better there and you can see how that kind of gets rid of that super super dark background and maybe you can play with your opacity if you want to kind of adjust that a little bit and then any other post-processing effects that you want to do here to kind of clean that up typically I will adjust some of my my levels and my what's it called my curves for my legging to adjust some of what we're looking at so for instance what you can do here is ctrl alt shift e I believe is the hotkey and ctrl M to adjust the curves of your image if you want to make things a little bit lighter or darker or anywhere in between and you can kind of get the same effect here by adjusting your levels which is ctrl L in Photoshop and then kind of play with that and adjust that even more until you get maybe a little bit closer to the colors or the effect that you so desire but that's that's basically it's pretty simple to set something like this up like I said with three-point lighting and that is how I typically get rid of that super duper dark background which can be very frustrating to deal with especially when you're already happy with the lighting on your scene mmm what are you go to brushes so I have a number of default brushes here set up in Photoshop that I use all the time I have a bunch of different brushes that I use and if you're interested in grabbing them they are on Gumroad comm slash polygon right here at the top polygons brushes and that comes with free updates for ever somebody was just asking me about this on Instagram today and they were interested in some of the other brushes in here so recently I updated my so that comes with a bunch of brushes I recently updated my where is it insert hand brush so for those that have my my and brush and enjoy using that I definitely love my own brush it's a simple insert brush that creates a really clean hand here that you can that actually has subdivision levels so you can reconstruct those after you insert it which is very nice I recently added and I haven't up look updated it yet I'll be updating it here in the next few days or so once I have time but I recently added a foot to it because I got tired of sculpting feet that's why I created this base hand go get tired of sculpt hands so I also created a base foot little insert here and the way that these are both set up are very very nice for a couple reasons for the hand in the foot you'll notice that all the toes and fingers are separate meshes and that is on purpose that is so that you can adjust your hand and foot for a variety of different types of people so if you have a character with really big hands you will find it hard the geometry is all connected to adjust the scale and proportion of say your fingers and make them really thick but this way you can scale them up or you can maybe even scale up one finger get it really thick and then duplicate it multiple times similarly you can do that with your toes down here so I will be adding that here like I said in the next few days but that is a really nice brush in terms of other brushes that I just are kind of my go-to I use the new brush board literally just about everything it's 90 percent of my entire workflow I love my clay brush I love my trim brush it's probably the like first three or four brushes that I use the most I really like my sharp soft brush which is kind of like a damn standard or Demian standard brush if you guys are familiar with that it's just a little bit a little bit softer I would say kind of like if a damn standard and a standard brush had a baby and then on top of that there's my mech brush and all sorts of other stuff that I enjoy using check it out if you're interested in it interested in my brushes I should say again that is just Gumroad comm slash polygon my brushes are up here at the top you're like a life saver thing so yeah I love like I said I love the insert hand and foot it's very nice very nice to have how did you get into ZBrush that's a good question I back in my college days I was really interested in animation 3d animation at the time and I was playing around a lot with Maya and creating simulations and little things like that and I realized that I hated animating it was really really hard and I just didn't like it I I was decent at it like for the very small amount of time that I did play around with it and I think I could have made a career out of it but it just wasn't for me and I ended up discovering digital sculpting through some art websites played around with Mudbox for a while didn't really like it and then kind of fell into ZBrush and it's all downhill or maybe a little bit uphill from there now how do you go on your dynamesh resolution that's a good question I would say your resolution for your geometry should always be as how should I wear this it should only be as high as you need so for instance with this hand if I dynamesh this at 128 that's obviously too low because it starts merging together two fingers there so maybe let's try like 300 that's still married in some stuff that's fine 400 is more than enough because it's still retaining all the shape there I can tell though that it's just gonna have some problems here because the thing a little bit too close there Sonny I'll just move it really quick in now we'll try that and give it a quick dynamesh and wallah we got it so as low as you can possibly keep it while still retaining the form that you want is what I would say I wouldn't say that there's like every specific number because dynamesh depends on the scale of your objects scale of your tools your 3d models so if your objects really large and you dynamesh really high it's gonna be different than if it was at this scale right here there's not like really a specific number that I stick with but yeah it goes all the way up to 4096 it's not really not really super important I don't really pay attention to the resolution of my geometry I more so just have the number of polygons that I need and I don't really think about it too much other than that maybe if I am like doing some low poly stuff in ZBrush then I will you know start to be a little bit more cognizant of my poly count but other than that you know if I'm just sculpting away it's whatever I need at the time nothing that nothing too specific but yeah it doesn't look like we have any other questions in chat so I think that is where we will go ahead and the stream for tonight so thank you guys so much for for coming and hanging out like I said before if you guys are joining us a little bit late in our interested in creating low poly assets in ZBrush creating some cute little scenes or interested in learning more about lighting and rendering then check out the stream later once it gets uploaded on youtube if you guys want to check out my youtube it is just youtube.com slash polygon again the Gumroad Gumroad slash polygon for my brushes base meshes materials courses as well like my appeal Academy course which is a peel back you guys want to learn how to make stylized and appealing characters much like these three goons up here yeah you know Instagram social whatever check it out if you're interested and boom beautiful all right you guys have a fantastic rest of your night and I hope to see you next Tuesday at the same time same place final final thing the zbrush summit is this weekend I think I have the website pulled up here if you guys don't know what the ZBrush summit is it is a three or four day or a three day event I think because the sculpt off is on the 26th if you guys are not aware of this go to summit not pixologic calm this is kind of like the big ZBrush event that happens each year I think this is like the fourth year this has been going on I will not be attending in person but I will be watching online during the livestream so if you see me in chat at least say hi but yeah you don't you don't really need to register or anything like that to watch online unless you want to get an email reminder when things are going alive there's a live sculpt off on Thursday and then there are presenters with live events for the rest of the weekend so definitely check it out I will be there like I said watching watching in chat say hi if you see me alright you guys have a great guy sir night like I said before le and dating the sky jce a mere goodbye everybody see ya

Channel: Follygon

Views: 10,113

Keywords: zbrush, lowp oly, render, zbrush tutorial

Id: LVgJG4V1Beo

Length: 119min 55sec (7195 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 05 2019