How to make an ancient artifact wall in ZBrush

[Music] hey what's up guys pablo munoz here and welcome back to another video tutorial this time i'm going to show you a breakdown of how i created this concept that you can see here on the screen so i'm going to show you the simple setup in zbrush how i detail this piece using custom brushes and the render engine that i use at the end so let's jump right into it all right so this is the final piece in photoshop and i just want to give you a quick breakdown like i said so if i turn this into a black and white piece um you can see that this is an incredibly simple setup and you can see the the primary shapes are very basic it's just a couple of cubes uh with subtraction of some spheres and this kind of like horn right in the middle so let me just turn this on to give you an indication of the primary forms so one two three and four pieces really or four um four main primary shapes that i'm going to show you how to set up in zebras so this is a very simple way to deconstruct a more complex piece right so just simplifying it to to the basic geometric shapes all right so let's jump into zebras all right and here we are in zebras this is the actual piece that i use for the render and like i mentioned let me just switch to skin shade four if i select the one in the middle turn on poly frame this is one piece the top area is another piece and the bottom area which is another piece right so let's go ahead and set this up i'm going to click on the tool palette click on a cube and this is a primitive so i'm going to turn that into a polymesh3d from the bottom right here and now we can go ahead and start editing it all right so the first thing i want to do is simplify this even further with a q cube so clicking on a q cube which for you should be under the initialize tab at the bottom of the tool palette this one right here and that basically simplifies this quite a bit now i'm going to bring in the gizmo 3d and i'm going to go ahead and start scaling this to determine that you know the size of the first part of the wall and i think that's that's pretty good all right let's go to the subtool palette and from here we can go ahead and duplicate that piece so we have two subtools bring in the gizmo and we can push this down and i'm just gonna go ahead and hold shift while i rotate so that i can lock that camera to the front view and kind of like establish that that gap between the two walls or the two pieces of that wall and now let's go ahead and bring in the spheres so append sphere select that sphere and the same thing just with the gizmo 3d i'm going to go ahead and scale this down and position that kind of like in the middle there and scale it down when i'm i wanna have enough like half of the sphere embedded into that wall kind of all right so that's the main element of course we have other two pieces so instead of just selecting the sphere and duplicate it a couple more times to place them in different areas i'm just going to hold ctrl and with this gimbal selected i'm going to click and drag and that automatically duplicates that sphere and because we are creating a duplicate zebras automatically mask the rest so i can just go ahead and place this around there maybe rotate around place this a little bit better that's the second one and i'm going to repeat the same action so again holding the ctrl key and clicking and dragging to create the therapies all right so this one is going to be slightly larger and a bit closer all right let's back to draw and i'm going to clear the mask because remember every time that i click and drag to duplicate that mesh zebras automatically mask things out so control click and drag so the next thing we need to do is subtract these measures of these spheres from the actual wall so i'm going to click on this icon which means subtracting right this one right here and i'm going to enable live booleans and that's it right so now these meshes these spheres are being subtracted from the wall so this switch for you guys would be on the render palette um the rendering booleans this one right here that's it so i'm going to turn this off just for a second because i'm going to create the other piece before we boolean the whole thing so i'm going to click on the tool thumbnail again and i'm going to select a spiral 3d and before i convert this into a polymesh3d i can actually take this primitive and play around with some sliders to generate a more interesting shape so i'm going to scroll all the way down to the initialize tab and i'm going to play with the coverage so i'm going to reduce that so that it's you know less curly i'm going to play with the radius of that initial base so all the sliders on the left hand side they affect the root or the base and all the sliders on the right hand side they affect this tip or the end of this curly horn right so if i take the radius of that i can increase only that area right there or the thickness that's probably a lot easier to to see let's just give it a bit of thickness and let's go ahead and displace that a bit more so i'm going to displace that just a tiny bit and maybe let's let's reduce the coverage there we go and another thing you can do is if you enable the polyframe you can see the wireframe so you can also change the subdivision and the division in the length so you can do a something a little bit more low res if you wanted to but i think i'm happy with this you can spend more time on this let's go ahead and click on make polymesh3d so now if we bring in the move brush we can edit this mesh quite easily we can hold the shift key to smooth everything out and that sort of thing right so from the sub tool palette i'm going to click on copy and i'm going to go to my working tool this one right here and i'm going to paste that and i'm going to also bring in the gizmo and place that a little bit better so this is just going to be an element kind of like floating in the middle of that sphere let's go ahead and turn on booleans or live booleans on so that we can actually see where we're placing this guy all right so that's it we have completed the block out of this piece so now we need to convert this into something a little bit more useful in order to add details because right now everything is is kind of like just the blocking right so the first thing we need to do is to actually combine everything with the live booleans so you can put everything into a folder and from the folder settings you can create that boolean but because this is such a simple tool i'm going to go ahead and do it from the subtool palette so here we have the boolean section i'm going to click on make boolean mesh and zero is going to go ahead and look at everything that we have here and it's going to produce a new tool that has everything combined so let's look for that one here we go and if i enable the polyframe you can see that only the areas that were sort of like touching or like subtracting are the ones that created like additional geometry great and we keep all the polygroups and everything else so if i turn off the line this actually could be very handy to do a remeshing if you wanted to but i'm going to keep things very very simple so what i want to do now is an auto group so that we end up with only the three pieces that i showed you at the beginning so let's go down to polygroup and i'm going to click on auto groups all right so now we have slightly different pink colors but now we have three different polygroups so now if we go back to the subtool palette something we can do is split by groups so this one on the display palette we can click on group split click ok and now we have exactly the same thing that i show you at the beginning but of course without the details so we have the bottom area we have that horn in the middle and we have the top area and now all we have to do is convert into a dynamesh object or you can do a remesh sub to you so i'm going to click on dynamesh and enable the polyframe so that i can see maybe this is not enough resolution so let's undo that and increase the resolution of dynamesh let's do it from this area so the geometry palette dynamesh i'm going to increase that to 500 and dynamesh and we have a little bit more i think we need definitely more than that so i'm gonna go for a thousand of resolution and this is gonna be different depending on on the size of your object so make sure that you try small numbers first click on dynamesh and that's all right we have 300 000 points for this so i'm going to go ahead and repeat the same action for the bottom 1000 dynamesh and this one the same thing let's click on 1000 dynamesh and there we go all right so now we have meshes that we can start editing so if i bring in something like the the damn standard brush and i select the top area i can start adding all of those details but just to make things a little bit faster what i'll do is i'm going to bring my custom brushes and i'm going to use the geiger and beczynski pack as well as the rock pack so these brushes are from a pack that i recently released and they're a lot of fun to play around with so i'm gonna go ahead and start with these organic cracks i'm gonna click on that increase my brush size and start doing this type of thing so as you can see these are kind of like the same details that you'll see in the final version of my of my concept i'm going to go into the bottom one just pressing the alt key and that's kind of like the the details that i want to go for so it just makes it a lot a lot faster working with these type of brushes and like i said it's just a lot of fun all right i'm gonna do the same thing for here a little bit and i might need to re-dynamesh now that i have more details and i can also increase the resolution a bit more so two thousand so now we move from 300 000 to 1.3 million so now we have a little bit more resolution to add more more details in here so i'm going to replicate the same thing here 2000 you can do that from the very beginning all right let's go ahead and bring in another brush um maybe something like these bumps alright so let's go ahead and use this one just to add some additional bumps towards the edges of that rounded shape and one of the brushes that come with sewers that i really enjoy using with these type of effects from these brushes pack is these smooth peaks so let me just bring that one up so the smooth picks so if i click on the brush palette i should be somewhere here the smooth picks that will respect more of the of the crevices so you can go ahead and smooth these bumps a bit more but maintain kind of like those crevices already in there so this is the one that i use to to polish things a bit more right select that one there and the rest it just becomes a a process of trial and error i suppose and uh trying the different brushes and see what which one gives you the effect that you are after and of course you know this looks pretty basic right now but it's just a matter of again spending the time and adding details on the rest of the playing areas so i'm going to bring in another one this pattern right here and this is just a simple pattern but it is very organic in a way so it allows you to create these details very very quickly um so i can just go through all that kind of like empty space i'm probably not going to do the entire mesh just because i want to have enough time to show you the rest of the process right and like i said because i have the smooth peaks enabled that smooth brush is going to respect a lot of the crevices and it's going to create this nice weird looking bony surface so just like that we have something a little bit more interesting and it's kind of like the first pass the first quick pass i'm not putting you know i'm not doing this very very thoroughly um as i should be doing it again just to show you how that works but let's say if i bring in another brush like let's go for the cutter brush so this is like a super strong damp standard brush that cuts into the model and push things quite a bit so this is the one that i would use to start pushing in some areas like more featured pieces or for more feature uh cracks in a way but as you can see they're not cracks um like the type of cracks that you would expect from you know like a hard surface area like a rock or something this is more like like false and that's kind of like the organic feel that i want for this weird looking thing right again it's just about spending the time and you know doing this a little bit more carefully than what i'm doing another brush that might be useful is the standard or the standard strung this one right here so if i select this bottom one going to solo mode that's how i created that pattern so doing this type of thing again um you need to be a bit more thorough than what i'm doing right here but you know it just gives you the idea of how easy you can set things up right so yeah not a not a great example but you get the idea right it's just a matter of going through with a bit more care and adding those details so this is another brush another thing that i use as well is from a different pack so if i go back to my custom brushes there is these rocks sorry there's a bunch of rocks or these are brushes to create basically rocks that's all they do so i can use this cliff builder for example and this is an interesting brush that respects the normals of the polygons a little bit so i can just do this type of thing again just to add further detail maybe with a larger brush so you can see the effect right and it creates additional crevices and and cracks so i use that quite a bit to set up the the rest of the empty areas and then just with a smooth pick brush um softening it and i keep repeating myself but of course you can spend a lot more time in this and this stage of the detailing process and do things a little bit more more careful that what i'm doing right now but i just want to show you the entire process so another brush would be the trim dynamic so if i click on the brush and filter by the letter t trim you have the trim dynamic right here and this brush allows you to go ahead and flatten some of these areas a little bit more so i just want to maintain a good balance between that sort of organic pieces right here so these crevices and falls and the more kind of like hard surface or not hard surface but like you know rock or uh some somehow rough surface and you can do that with these stream dynamics so it's going to maintain that level of polish a bit better all right there we go now another cool thing that you can try uh just as a preview in zebros is the occlusion and that is from the render palette so you can go to the occlusion to the preview occlusion or preview ao and if you enable that one here that's going to give you a a quick ambient occlusion to see how your details are are looking and you can change the intensity of that and this is just a preview it's not going to affect anything in the render or anything like that it's just a preview alright and that's why i have it in here all right so let's say that you went ahead and completed this this whole thing and at this point i can go ahead and maybe select the bottom one and go for a blue color like that let's go ahead and turn on the skin shade for so it's easier and i'm going to fill that object click on the top one fill that object and the center piece maybe give it a slightly variation in tone and fill that object and i can use some of the tools inside zebras to start painting this so one of the things that you can use let's go ahead and select the top area is the ambient occlusion the ray trace amine occlusion and for that we can go to the zip login go to the ambient occlusion right here click on compute and that's going to compute that ambient occlusion and create a mask so now i'm going to hold ctrl and click outside in the canvas to invert that and i can go to the masking tools as well right and i can hide that mask temporarily and i'm going to select a darker version of that blue color and click on fill object so now i'm going to fill the the crevices on these areas just with that dark color so that's how i started that kind of like albedo block out so i'll do the same thing for the bottom area just to repeat the process compute ambient occlusion invert the mask hide it and fill with blue this um this type of color so let's clear the mask same thing for the top area and from the masking palette you can also use the smoothness or mask by smoothness if you click on that it's going to try to mask the smooth areas same thing with the peaks and valleys and that just gives you different patterns and you can hide that mask and maybe bring a different brush so i can use this standard brush and turn that into a painting brush just by turning off the z add enabling the rgb and just target something a bit more desaturated like that and if you want you can invert that mask right let's hide it again and target only those crevices here and that's how i sort of created that that glowing effect so if i go back to the to the render all of those things you can just go ahead and do the same thing um with poly pin so let's click on the cavity click on mask by cavity and it sort of targets only those cavities so we can go ahead and blur that mask a little bit inverted hide the mask and select a different color and i'm just going a little bit faster here but it's just more of the same right it's just masking selecting certain areas and playing around with the colors as well and also keep in mind that in the final concept i i definitely spend a lot more time with the details not a lot more but you know i wasn't doing it as as randomly as i did this one right so there you go so that's how i can just go ahead and continue adding more um more details or more visual interest to this very very simple block out with poly paint and with the custom brushes all right so once i finish with this you can go ahead and let's let's take this one as an example right you can go to the zip login palette and go to the decimation master right and in the decimation master this one right here you can tell zbrush actually let's put that on the right hand side you can tell zebras that you want to keep all the work that you did with the poly paint but you want to optimize the rest so if i turn on the poly frame just so that you can see what i'm doing i'm going to click on use and keep polypaint from the decimation master and i'm going to click on preprocess current all right so once xerox has completed that process of analyzing the volumes i can go ahead and tell zeros all right i want to have only 10 of the original 1.3 million polygons right so i'm going to select 10 of that and decimate current and i'm going to turn off the polyframe and you'll see we keep everything that we need in terms of the color and everything else but if we look at the rest of the model it's completely optimized right so we can go ahead and export this already and start rendering because we have the color and basically all we need is in here all right so you can go ahead and do the same thing for the rest of the pieces now this specific one the top area is comprised of 132 000 points so that's pretty decent for any type of render so for this piece i use a render engine called maverick render and i have everything set up so let me go ahead and jump into maverick render so this is the maverick render studio this is the one that i use for this piece um i use this uh quite often i find it like really really powerful it has a bunch of features that not only make sense but they work right off the bat and the lighting inside this renderer is fantastic so this is the piece like literally this is the one that i use for the render in fact let's just go to the camera view that i use and i'm going to go ahead and turn on some of the lights so right now this is the ambient light but i do have a bunch of other lights so this is kind of like giving um a nice blue tint from the top uh kind of like simulating the sky uh this is the one that creates the nice pattern and this is the one that i want to show you how to recreate that it's very easy um another one another pattern coming from the left hand side and the one that sort of like unifies everything so this is the this is the render basically that you see of course i did some uh post processing in photoshop at the end but this is basically the render okay so let's go ahead and show you what this is doing so the light patterns is just to add another layer of complexity to this rather simple block out in zebras and with all these details um so i use a thing called projectors uh they're kind of like gels if you use you're familiar with that term as well so my regular studio uses these projectors and it's again they're fantastic so i'm going to go ahead and turn everything off and just show you the effect of a projector which is this one right here so this is a spotlight so if i select that and i go ahead and press the w key to bring in this coordinates thingy let's just put it here so you can see um i can enable the rotation position and scale of that light and it's this one right here so i can just move that up and down right so pretty you know pretty straightforward pretty basic stuff from any other renderer right so you don't need to know all the basics uh but you should be familiar with these type of things right so you can move things around i'm just going to click accept so i currently have that light hidden but it is it's kind of like a spotlight so if you look at it from almost the angle of that light is it has that rounded shape uh of the spotlight and it's creating that um yeah that shadow basically so what i'm gonna show you is how to create that pattern um which you can do very easily from this from this software all right so once you select the light in maverick render you have some attributes for that light on the right hand side so you can increase the intensity quite a bit decrease it so on and so forth we can click on the color and just give it a you know something completely different let's just leave it as a yellowish tone just for the sake of showing uh so that you can see better and let's change the intensity to 0.2 all right so that's not bad so when it comes to lighting in 3d one of my favorite things is storytelling so the lighting could be really really powerful to create a story or two to suggest some type of story behind you know anything even though this is a very simple piece and very basic shapes you can create something very interesting just with lighting so i want to create this sense of an action artifact right so imagine if this is kind of like an indiana jones type of thing and this is one of those artifacts that are embedded into the rocks or some mountain or something like that so i want to create an atmospheric lighting that reflects that environment but if i go into my into my shot right into my camera shot you don't see much of the environment and that's part of the the idea right so i just want to suggest things a little bit with the light so what i can do is with a simple spotlight i can use the projector so with the light selected this hard spotlight let's actually rename it context right and this is just a simple way for me to remember that i'm giving with this light i'm giving context to where this place is so that's it with this selected here are the properties and i'm going to jump into photoshop very quickly and show you this is the image that i use as a projector or one of the images that i use as a projector and the idea is that the software is going to use this as a mask to project that light only in the white areas right so you can use on splash this website right here to find an image like that this is not the one that i use but you can totally go for something like this copy and paste it into photoshop and desaturate it and use the levels to get something like this or you can paint it yourself it doesn't have to be perfect like you see this is like very noisy and it's not perfect but that's all we need right so i can take that image go back to my maverick render studio and on the light you have this projector and you see it's like a like a slot for a texture i'm going to go ahead and drag that image like you see here and i'm going to put it into that projector of the light and just by doing that you'll see how everything changes completely now it feels like there are more elements outside of the of the shot of this render but it all helps to create that sort of context that sort of idea that there might be some other elements that are not visible but they contribute to the same story right or you know contribute to give it a context to what i'm trying to show which is that floating artifact in there but this is not the only thing you can do right this is the most basic setup uh if i select the light again and we can go ahead and increase the angle right so from the shot itself we can go ahead and crease uh change that the angle of that spotlight and of course we're moving or changing the size of that um of that projected image right or the areas that are being projected with light we can also change the intensity and we can keep playing around with the color maybe switch to something different but i think that yellowish tint is fine another thing you can do if you want to blur that shadow a little bit more is to increase the size of the actual source so right now the size of the actual light is 0.001 so that's like a very tiny almost like a laser projecting this right but if i go ahead and change this to 0.01 you can tell a slight change in the definition of that so let's go for 0.1 and that moves things quite a bit so this is a more realistic way to create these more diffused shadows and that suggests that whatever element is cast in this shadow is not as close to this area right so it's maybe you know three or four meters away but still casting those shadows now another really cool rendering technique is to to variate or to change the color of the light source and that helps to situate this concept or this artifact in more of a fantasy land right so i can go ahead and go back to photoshop take my projector like this black and white image and i can add some colors i just did a random color gradient um to fill all the white areas so just a layer on top that i set to multiply and i saved it as another jpeg let's go back here and i'm going to bring that colored image into the projector so you'll see that image if i drop it in here now we get the same pattern but we are getting some extra rich color coming from that projector so now we're not limited to the color that we have here which you know we can still change right because that's the base color but this base color that we're using is being mixed with the colors from that projector so that's really cool and you know again as soon as i do that it sort of situates this whole concept into a more of a fantasy line um and you can totally play with with those um you know the placement of those colors and all of that all within this simple um projection but i think the black and white um i think works a bit better right and we can go back to the light and i'm going to set this light to yeah i think that's good and also change that to a more desaturated color more like a white color all right so that's pretty good i'm going to go ahead and turn on the other lights that i use for my final render so you see this is another projector if i turn off the one we use so this is the the type of pattern that i found interesting so it's not like an organic nature type of shadow but it's some kind of like columns or even like a big window or something like that so i quite like that one but yeah let's keep the one that i created and just turn the other ones on the ambient lights and now we have a completely different render all right so that's it for this tutorial let me know if you found these techniques useful and if you want to see more of these breakdowns on some of my personal work and i'll see you next time cheers

Channel: Pablo Muñoz Gómez

Views: 3,037

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Id: 5tv6Ko93GEM

Length: 28min 41sec (1721 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 11 2021