Hey, what's up, guys! Today? I'm going to show you how to record
a clean timelapse movie for your ZBrush sketching session. So let's jump straight into it. All right. So here is the head sketch
that I'm going to use in this tutorial. And I have the timelapse
with all the undo history here at the top. This is this line that you can see dark and dotted line. And if I go here at the end of the timelapse,
I have about 4271 undo points and I want to create a timelapse
to show how I created this sculpt. So I started with a single sphere and I basically started
sculpting and moving things around to get to these head. And I want to show how I did that.
But the problem is that I forgot to start recording with a screen recording software
or anything else before I started. So if you're going to start your ZBrush sculpture
and you know that at the end you want to create a timelapse, the easiest way is to just create a timelapse
from the beginning inside ZBrush. So if I go to the movie palette here at the top,
you can just click on timelapse. And what this button is going to do is that it's
going to record every time that the mouse is press, right? So you can just click on that and start sculpting. Now, let me just show you an example of what
the default settings are. So I'm going to click on this cylinder that I have dynamesh
just to show you, and I'm going to use the Clay BuildUp brush to start doing some brush strokes and changing
things here and there ReDynamesh, maybe some more things out. So this is just to show you
that I just want to create something, nothing specific, just a few points here in the timeline
so that you can see what I mean. All right. So let's DynaMesh that. And let's say that this is another hair
or a creature or anything else. Right. And I want to create a timelapse,
but I forgot to click on timelapse before I started. So the simplest way of creating the timelapse
see brush is to go back in time so you can click on the Orange Timeline Indicator
and go back to the very beginning. And now that I'm here in this section at the beginning of my
in this case, 30 undos or undo history, I can click on movie and I can just go to F history,
which means forward history, in other words. So we're just going to take this point
and go forward in the history and create a movie. So let's click on forward history. And as you can see, ZBrush creates that movie and I'm going to go ahead and export
that movie, click on export here from the movie palette. And I'm just going to save it on my desktop and that's it. It's export
now. So now let me go ahead and bring it in here. All right. So here's my folder for the timelapse tutorial. And this is the movie that was exported. So if I double click on this, here is the timelapse. Right. And it's not great.
That's the there's a reason of this tutorial. So the first thing is that you have the logo overlaid,
you know, you have the UI of the server. Well, the ZBrush UI. And I want to clean video and I don't want the sculpture
to rotate around constantly or the camera to rotate around. I just want to focus on one single camera angle. So I'm going to show you how to fix that very easily. And not only that, I'm going to show you
how to automate the way that you change those things. So again, with this same example,
what I'm going to show you is that if you go to the movie, you can go ahead and tweak all of those things from here. So let's go ahead and open up the modifiers. Let's go ahead and open up the title and the overlay. So title and overlay and those are the things that happen at the very beginning and the modifiers
is what causes the camera to sort of like move around. So I want to show you how to fix that. But instead of just doing it manually this time
and every time that I open ZBrush I'll have to do it again. If I want to create a clean movie,
I want to show you how to create a macro so a macro in ZBrush, let's get rid of all these palettes. I wanna click on the movie palette, drop that here
to the left and the macro palette, which is this one right here A macro in ZBrush is basically
a way of recording actions similar to Photoshop. You can just start recording and anything that you do
after the beginning of the recording of the macro, it will be saved. So in other words, I want to create a macro
to automate all of those settings for my clean movie. So I'm going to click on macro
and I'm going to click on New Macro. I'm going to get this pop up saying
that I need to initialize ZBrush, click yes, blah, blah, blah. I'm just going to click on No
and now you see that, that macro was gray. Anything that I do at this point, whatever I click,
whatever button I use is going to be recorded in this macro. So make sure that you have the palette on the left hand side
and we can go ahead and get started. So the first thing I want to do is go to the modifiers
and I'm just going to turn these spin frames to zero. So click and drag or the one
sorry and the spin cycles, I'm going to set that to zero. And when you don't really need to,
but just want to turn this Y off just for the sake of keeping it that within the macro I'm recording,
then I want to take the orientation and the sorry, the H position
and the H orientation back to zero like so just for the sake of it, I'm going to set this one
just to one as well so that you can see. So basically these Horientation
and this Hposition are the sliders that cause the camera to kind of like pan around
and move around every time that I record the movie. Now, on top of that, I want to go down to the overlay
and I want to make sure that the Opacity is set to zero and that the fading and fade out of this
logo is also set to zero. I don't want to have the logo in here. On a side note, if you want,
you can just click on these logos and load your own logos if you want them to appear in the timelapse. But I don't want any logo to appear in there,
so I just set everything to zero. That is about it. That's all the things that you need to do
to create a clean movie. When I finish doing all of that, I can go to macro
and I'm going to end my macro and these will appear. So when you click end macro, you need to save it. So the name that you give to
the macro is going to be the name of the button. So I'm going to call this one MyZBrushMovie, right? You can actually save spaces in here. Obviously, the size or the amount of text that you add
that's going to also affect the size of the button that is going to be created. Now, because I'm using ZBrush2022,
I just went to the startup macros and you'll see that I have these custom folder called my macros
so I can click on here and it will be saved in you know, all of these are macros that I've tested
or that I've tried myself so I can just save it in my own folder
so that I can keep track of what I'm doing. So MyZBrushMovie.txt, I'm
going to save it in my macros, click on Save and that's it. It's asking me that image contain material
indexed embedded within each pixel. So I'm just going to click on Nope,
I'm not going to save that or separate the channel. So that's it. That's fine. And now if I go to macros,
let's just drop that to the left right in the macro section
you'll see I have the miscellaneous folder and my macros. So this is equivalent to the folders
that I have in the Zstartup. So if I click on my macros,
I have a bunch of random things that I've tested, so let's try to find the one that I just created
and it should be here. So here we go. So MyZBrushMovie, that's my macro. Now the cool thing about this
is that I can place it in my UI, right? So if I want to add this button to, let's say
this area in my UI, I can go to preference, enable, customize, and I can hold control and alt at the same time
click and drag and put that button in there. Go back to preferences and disable this Enable customize. Okay, so now we are ready to go and there's just
a couple more things that we can set up and that I don't necessarily like to do within the macro, because sometimes
I want to change like the document size, right? So that's why I didn't include them in the macro,
but you totally can do that. So I want to click on this delete button click No. And that's going to remove
the previously created timelapse. And now I'm going to set up the document. So right now
if I click on window is going to capture the entire window. If I click on Doc is going to capture only the document and
then you can decide how big you want this document to be. So I going to click on large. Okay. So now that that's done, let's go ahead and go to
we have it already. I going to click on the beginning of the
undo history actually. Let's go back to the end first and let's sort of place
these. Let's say that this is the front view
that I want to maintain. I don't want to move around that this is going to be the,
you know, the front of the face. And I want to show you in a second how to do that. So I set this one to the beginning,
and I'm going to click on forward history. And there we go.
We have a pretty clean version of that movie. Now you want to remove the zoom in and out
that happens in the movie. You can also turn these Hsize to zero. Sometimes I kind of like it
because if you start doing some details as it automatically zooms in to whatever you're doing the details
and that's the reason I left that one outside of my macro. But again, if I played the movie, let's click on export. And this is another cool thing. You can click on the H2 export
as the highest quality when export. Now I'm going to save it. Just overwrite the previous one and you'll see we have a pretty big document. Let's bring that up. And here it is. Obviously, this is too fast, but you can see
there is a little bit of a zooming in and out. So I think that's good if you want to kind of like zoom in
when you're doing details and crevices and things like that. But if you want to have like again like a very clean,
no nonsense video that is not zooming in and out, you can just remove this altogether. Okay, now let's delete this, right? And I can just change things like I did before
so I can put this back to what it was, which is every time that I start ZBrush
it will be like this let's put spin cycles of 4 and let's move
the H position and orientation. And on top of that, let's also fade this in and add the oppacity. So all the things that we basically change with the macro. So now we can go to the sketching session
and record these timelapse. What I need to do before I go back in
time is to find the angle or the camera view that I want to keep
because this is not going to be rotating around. So I think something like this would be fine. We could actually go to draw
and in the camera we can flatten things a little bit so that you can see a little bit more of the sides
and that's about it. You can also click on Zoom and then zoom out so you can see the full document
and you can change the background from the document here. So again, here is what you can zoom in and out
and the background. You can just select something else other than Gray and that allows you to sort of visualize
where things are going to be placed. Right.
So this is the entire document as we have selected in here. So this whole thing is going to be recorded,
so maybe get a little bit closer here. All right. I think that should be a decent camera. I'm going to set the background to something darker. And another thing that is important when you are setting up,
let's say your document for the timelapse is to choose the material and color
that you want to have at the end. Right. So I think I'm happy with basic material,
but I can choose something else if I wanted to. Maybe something like this. But I'm going to add a bit of color just to, you know, pretend
that this is some kind of like a clay sculpting sketch, maybe something subtle. All right. Something like that. Cool. So I'm going to click on AAHalf or actual doesn't matter. So I have a pretty big document at the moment. I have something at 2964 by 1840. You can obviously change that too to suit
something more realistic in terms of video. So if you've set this to nonproportional, you can set this to 1920 by 1080, for example,
and that's not going to affect anything in your timelapse. I can just resize my document, click on Yes,
clear the canvas with control and drop that head again. Press 'T' to enter edit mode
and I just need to zoom out again and reposition my camera. All right. So I think that's looking good. So now I can go to AAHalf another thing you can do
if you want to have these very harsh shadows is going to the render palette,
go to the preview shadows and you can either click on deep shadows or flat shadows to be on
something like more posterized type of thing. So yeah, I think Deep Shadows work
sometimes when you're working, but in this type of scenario you can reduce it and change the opacity as well. But anyway, this is what I like. And the cool thing again going back to the first idea
of the tutorial is that I'm going to click on MyZBrushMovie So this is the macro that we created.
So pay attention to some of the values in here. So if I click on MyZBrushMovie,
I basically change all of those values at once. The only one that I mentioned
you might want to actually change later is these HSize so that there's no zooming in if you're not doing any
like fine details, like pores and stuff like that. So in this case, I can just change it to zero or you can
create a new macro or another button that has these disable. That's it. Once we're ready, we need to go back in time. And this is going to take a little while
because we're going to go back to the first point in history,
which is obviously number one, and this has 4271 points. So it's going to take a couple of minutes to go back. And then I'm not going to touch anything
because it might crash, because it's going to be very intense process
to try to go back in 4000 points to the very beginning of the undo history. All right. Here we go. So now that took about 3 minutes,
but I'm now back to the very first on the history of this sketch, which was a simple sphere. That's how I started that sketch. Now, be careful that when you are at this point,
you don't move the camera around because you will have to go back to the end result to reposition the camera again
because you don't know what is going to finish. So now that we're here, I'm going to go back here, the top of my movie palette,
and I'm going to click on Forward History. And ZBrush is going to start the process
of recording all the steps. But as you can see, there is no moving of the camera around. The actual model is static and because I changed
the HSize is not doing any zooming in and out. Sometimes, like I set, I prefer to have that little bit of zooming in and out when I'm doing details
and I want to record a timelapse for that. But in this case is, you know, mostly working on the anatomy of the portions and the main
volumes and the secondary forms of the head for the sketch. So I didn't go into that many details, if anything. So that's why in this case, HSize was set to zero. But like I set, you can create your own bottom. So I'm going to go ahead and speed this up
and I'll see you in a second. All right. So it took about 7 minutes for ZBrush
to record the beginning to the end of this timelapse. And now I'm ready to export it. So I'm going to click on The H2 export
the highest quality, and I'm going to click on export. And this time he's going to call this one man head sketch. And I want to pose it here. I come back when this is exported. All right. ZBrush finished exporting this. I'm just going to bring it here
and I'm just going to play it at twice the speed, just so you know,
I just want to show you the entire process. So let's just play that. And you see it's a pretty clean,
you know, pretty clean timelapse that shows the process of how I went from a simple sphere
to these the sketch. So that's exactly what I wanted. There's no panning
or moving of the camera around. I'm just going to keep a few bits and pieces
to show the entire timelapse. But that's exactly what I wanted to do. So yeah, hopefully this has been of help. All right, so that's pretty much it. As a way of recap, all I did was I changed some settings
in the movie palette, and I converted those changes that I did into a macro so that every time
that I load ZBrush I can just click one button. And all those settings that I like for my movie
settings are going to be changing one button, and then all I have to do is go back to the undo history
and I switch to record the history. Now as a next step to wrap up this tutorial,
if you feel like your sculpture has too many undo histories and you feel a little bit a little bit worried about going back to the very beginning of the history,
what you can do is use the B history instead. So the be history button,
what it's going to do is record backwards. So it's going to obviously going to be backwards. But at the end, you can just take any editing software
and reverse the timeline as you're going to get exactly the same effect. All right. So I'm going to leave it here
and I'll see you in the next video. Just.
