How to Sculpt Realistic Scales with Painter and ZBrush

hi this is hening from flips.com and in today's tutorial I'm going to show you a really cool tip for texturing all sorts of characters this is particularly useful when it comes to something that has scales or very leathery skin which you just have to spend a lot of time sculpting up in seab Brush instead of sculpting this from scratch do some techniques like this where we just kind of eyeballing things we can be using image maps and texture maps to really make this a lot easier one of the problems with this approach that I'm currently doing although not very well is that it becomes very inorganic where it just becomes not very pleasant to look at real life has a lot more variety to it so if you're texturing something like this like this dinosaur you don't just want this kind of stuff to be hand drawn on top by utilizing a texturing software like painter or Mari we can really get a lot more variety in our sculpt which we can then use to add additional details to our actual texture Maps when it comes to the pure texturing process so this video here is going to have three parts the first part is going to be grading photos in Photoshop the second part is going to be projecting the photos in painter and the third part is going to be sculpting this in cush so stay tuned for that before we get into the video this asset is provided by Damian who's an absolutely fantastic artist this asset here specifically is available on flipn normal.com so you can buy this asset yourself support Damian and um you can check out how this is made the version we're using in this video is the low poly version of this and of course the whole thing comes with a cush file and all the texture Maps so this is a very professional asset which is how Damian has been working in VFX so the first step is going to be to grade photos the reason we want to grade photos instead of just projecting these directly on top in painter is that there is a way too much information here there is color information and we haven't really graded this in any way also the image is too large as well so in this case we want to just go through and first just crop the image now we're using Photoshop here but you can really use any image editor what we're doing here is dead simple then we are just going to make a duplicate of this just to be sure we don't destroy it and then we're going to turn this into black and white and this is where you can start to grade this up just a little bit the images we're using here are really low quality images and that doesn't really matter a whole lot because what we're doing now is we're just going to be using this as a b for sculpting though it's of course a good idea to start to grade these as much as you can really try to get the um creases in here this is what we really want we really want to be sure that we have as much contrast and that the creases are as visible as possible sometimes I'll even go in here and I'll straight up just paint out certain areas if this here is too strong so I just like paint out certain areas like this because I just want to have some nice information and then once we've done this we we can take the whole thing control shift alt e one hell of a mouthful and then we can duplicate this a few more times the goal with this is that we're going to turn this into a high pass that we can blur a little bit so filter other high pass and then you can see what this does if you were to set this to a very low value you get really a neutralized version where it's going to turn into 50% gray and really turn give you this really lovely quality here which is a lot nicer than what you would have normally right like with between this and this is just a lot easier to texture another advantage of this approach is that all the images are going to have a similar grade so the midpoint is going to be similar so we can just turn this into this and then we are going to be duplicating this a few times so this one here is going to be first one here is going to be blur just a little bit so we're just going to go to blur filter blur and then we're just going to go and set this to goshan blur we want to just blur this just tiny amount like maybe like how how much you blur it is entirely based on how large the image is we take the other one and we blur this less and then we're going to be setting this to Overlay so just blur this less if you have a a picture that's like 3,000 pixels this obviously needs to be blurred a lot more but this is a pretty low rest picture so now we can set this to Overlay and the advantage of this approach is that we get even more details out of this so if you were to compare this to this we just have a lot more details what you often find is if you start to project something that's too detailed like this you just get noise so you usually have to blur this a little bit more then we can just set this here on top and we can just blur this a little bit less or you can see what happens if we just put this to Overlay as well you can see that we get it gets sharp but it gets too sharp so we can just take this here you can just blur this and then we can just set this to something like 0 2 just so we get a just a little bit more details out of this so you can see how much more info we get out of this than before and then we are just going to be saving this out and then we're just going to be doing this with a few more pictures but you know the process is exactly the same so I'm just just going to be skipping ahead a little bit here what we want with these pictures is not so much the pure textural detail we really want just the the organic nature of it so it's it's really tempting to to try to Gra these like to like to a crazy amount so you can use this right away but I find it to be very useful to just think about this is we just want a pattern because then we we just have reference it really doesn't matter too much about the quality of this and you can see by high passing this you really get a lot more details out of this you you can kind of get rid of a lot of the highlights and shadows this way the exact values just varies based on what you want and then we're just going to do the same thing as before so back in painter let's import these guys simp by dragging them into the asset library then we select all three of them set this to texture and just import this into the current project then we are going to we're just going to be dealing with the color map for now this would technically kind of be the height but it doesn't really matter because we are just using this as a entirely temporary map so we are just going to make a fill layer first and this only should be set this should only be set to color I'm just going to be sure that this here is set to 50% gray doesn't really matter a whole lot but you know we can just set this to 50 50% gray and then we are going to create a new paint layer and we can just call this projection so projection there and then we are going to go into our projection tool and we are just going to go all the way to the bottom here and then we are going to be dragging one of them into the uh base color slot and now you can see we have our color now this is where you just have to be a little bit Vigilant when it comes to to this you just have to spend proper time on this just to be sure that we have something that's going to work properly so we are just going to start to project this onto our leg we're just going to be doing the leg for now this is not going to be perfect but it's going to show you it's going to show you the process of this so just painting this on top of this and this is the advantage of this approach that first you can see how fast you get coverage like this but also because it's going to be organic so we can just go through here with the um the projection tool just do this different angles and of course where breaks you're just going to have to go through and fix that a disadvantage of this approach is that you can't really warp it right like in in some software you can actually warp this kind of stuff so you can properly get in and get all details you want in specific spots you can really like blend things together you can't really do that in painter but that's that's okay you know if you you just have to be a little bit more conscious of what you're doing so I'm I'm not really thinking too much about exactly how this stuff here connects it's it's fine if it's not this is just for a quick demo but this should hopefully show you the potential of this workflow so we can just start to connect these things up you just check this in the color slot as well right here now you can see what this actually looks like and then we can go under and use a different image just w this in under here and we can just see that we can just play around with the different images so just going through here and just projecting another picture on top of this which we just created so again this is going to be a little bit bootleg in terms of like the actual quality of it the final quality but it's hopefully going to show you the approach to this we can do the final image as well just to get some coverage over this and don't be too concerned with actually painting across the udims here like the painter supports udims you shouldn't really be concerned with that this is is going to cause issues in C brush like we just mentioned but that's something we will deal with in C brush so just painting this across and just trying to blend this a little bit then we're just going to be dragging another one in this is going to be the first one again and just now that we have some feedback here we can just start to play around with this I always find to be a little bit confusing how the projection tool worked in terms of the navigation but it's very simple you know how we have alt left Mouse button and zooming and navigation all that it's exactly the same for pictures here just that we use the uh the S key instead of the ALT key so that's that's how that kind of made sense for me cuz I had to constantly look up the hotkeys for the protection tool so there we go you can now see that we get some some good details in this now as a little bonus tip this is actually an area where Mari really really excels so if you don't know Mari totally fine this is just a little bonus tip where the advantage of using Mari for this is that you can actually warp things what I'm I mean by that is you can project something like this which is exactly the same as a painter part from the fact that you can now move this around which is great so this is in a paint buffer so you have a lot more control in this way but you can also warp this around so you can go in here and you can select one of these guys you can just warp this around like so so you have a lot of control you can increase this so you can really start to get in here and then you can bake this down and then we can just add go into another one here and we can start to just warp this around in a different way so the Mari is a fantastic tool for this for this kind of stuff Mari is I think much much better than painter but pros and cons right it's not better of everything but just for this kind of stuff specifically I definitely prefer to use Mari for this you do of course have the warp project in painter as well you can set make a fill layer set this to warp project right here warp projection and then you can drag one of these guys into the color slot right here but the problem with this is you need one one layer per thing right like per projection so that's going to just create a lot of layers and it's nowhere near as flexible but you know this is an approach you could take if you want if you want this texture right here you could of course do that as well you can go in edit vertices place this down snap this to the surface this is going to work and this is going to give you a lot of freedom but becomes quite cumbersome when it comes to to actually doing this kind of stuff in a in a real ection like if you're doing this character here you would probably need like up to 100 projections because you just keep working with this so that's really it for the painter part I'm just going to spend a little bit more time on this off camera just to be sure this looks a little bit nicer because this is a little bit boot like at the moment so I'm just going to be making sure this works a little bit better all right cool so we have an area here that's working all right now this is not perfect but it doesn't have to be perfect this can be quite dirty to be perfectly honest because we are going to be sculpt in this so now we are going to Simply export this out for this we only need the color map as well so this is the only thing we're exporting this should also only be 8bit because the original images are 8 Bit And honestly the original images are kind of crappy anyway so there isn't really a whole lot of data in there then we just hit export and here we have all the images and that's a lot of images because this character here has 24 udims so if we just go to view and then we just go to details we can now see that they're all basically 17 K kilobytes which means that all of these guys here they're not really doing anything apart from this these two which I have more data which means that there just is not going to be any data on them which means they haven't been painted on so we can just safely take all these guys and just delete them and then we are going to go to cush now in cush here is our model this is around 2.3 mil which is going to be subdivided to around 9 million the workflow is now really that we are going to be importing these images in and then we are going to to be sculpting on top of these ones so we are going to go under texture import then we're going to find these pictures we're going to take this one here which seems there seems to be the most stuff going on import now the trick here is to have to flip this because cush is C brush and every single picture you import or or export you have to flip as well the same if you're going under multimap export you have to flip on export so flip on import flip on export then we go under texture map and then we can now just add this here and now you can see that this indeed puts this in the correct spot but the problem is that it puts it everywhere because C doesn't support importing of udims so that's a problem how do we solve this well we can't really solve this to be perfectly honest because it doesn't accept importing of UDS so if you're working on a character with a lot of UDS like this what you just have to do is you just have to work on one em at a time so if you want to work on this place you have to just import this picture this image map and then you work on this part you import this texture map as well so the way you can work with this so it's not confusing and so you can actually see where it's importing is that you can go to just go to the lowest subd level it's going to make it easier then we go to poly groups then we hit UV groups and what this is going to do this is going to provide us with a poly group based on the udims so and now you can just control shift click on this polyr here and now you can see that we only have this udm selected which means that you know this is the only thing we have so this is a lot this makes it a lot easier to work with this now before we do any kind of sculpt or anything silly like that we are going to just make a new layer on top so just hit new layer and we can just call this projection what you could do now is you could straight up start sculpting this is the gist of this workflow that you're now sculpting this up because now you can see the patterns this is a lot of manual work of course but you can really see the patterns in this approach and remember what we did in the beginning where we just kind of sculpt to kind of what we felt like we just kind of did this kind of stuff this is what this fixes because now we get this really nice organic patterns which in theory would of course be over the whole body but an additional trick to this is that we can import this as a displacement map but the way we can import a displac map is we can go to Alpha import and select the map here as well and then we simply go under Alpha again with the select and and flip V and then we can find this right here and now if you start to enable the dis map here just set this to a very low value 0.2 maybe let's see how this goes that's way too strong 0.02 and we can just start to see that something has been happening here so we probably need to add an additional 0.02 here 02 just so we don't kill our system and now you can start to see that we actually get this projected onto it and this is where we need to be sure that we are in a layer like this or in a selection mode like this we don't apply this everywhere and we need a layer as well because this is going to cause some seams then we hit apply this map and now all this is going to be applied onto this so now what we can do is we can just disable the texture map and you can see we actually have some some sculpting in here right we actually have some some something like a bit of a basis but just what we have to be sure of is that when we go out of the poly frame that we don't have any seam going around this is very easy to get seams if you're not careful and then we can go over this whole thing and we can just start to smooth this we can just go over with the smooth brush set this to low intensity and this is just blurring it so if you if you blur this enough in Photoshop you can go through and you have to blur this less and then we can just go through here and we can just start to sculpt this this is a really powerful workflow because we can now just go through here with something like the alpha6 and just sculpt on top like so and just really go over this and just create really nice sculpted details and one of my main thesis for sculpting for creating textures and just creating good characters is that the sculpting is the master meaning that if you're trying to texture something or look up something or make something look nice that has insufficient details meaning that the stuff here just isn't good enough it's going to be really really difficult to uh to get something nice simply because you're missing a very very important part of it and on the other side if this is done to a very high level meaning that you have really nicely sculpted details texturing becomes not too difficult it's always difficult to texture a dinosaur right like that's just inherently a challenge but if you're deliberate about this then you can use this here as a basis for curvature cavity and inclusion map and you can often get away with just using simple gradients for for your text map of course you need a lot more than just simple gradients but a starting point that works very well I find that if a model is under sculpted basically if the model is under modeled it becomes very very very difficult to texture it but if a model is kind of over modeled almost where this kind of stuff is really really carefully done then it becomes so much easier to texture it so it's not just good enough to go through here and um go over with a dam standard you have to add volume to this as well otherwise we're just going to be carving things around this so what you can do is you can go over with the clay brushes I find that the clay buildup is decent for this but if there is too much variety within each scale it can go a little crazy and this is where the clay brush the regular clay brush is is really good as well so you can just go over this just decrease the intensity a little bit and you just go over this and I also find to be quite useful to use just smooth brush inside of each one of these scales because this way you really just creating a stronger shape so I'm just going to be spending some time now just going over this just creating a slightly better base and uh you can just see my Approach for this it's it's all manual at this point you could of course do this without the grading and the projection in Mari SL painter but this just means that it's it's a lot more Mindless to be honest you can just kind of put on some headphones and just listen to a good podcast or something like that while doing this and you don't really have to think too much about it and the problem with not doing it like this the problem with sculpting this entirely just based on on you know kind of our human instinct is that it just gets very rigid or it just it just looks very man-made instead of this that would look really nice and organic you can also just enable the text W as well if you want to see some more details like this then sometimes you just need to see more details because they didn't translate particularly well so I I sometimes prefer to go over this like this just really carving in the details based on what I'm seeing and then I'm integrating this later on and for areas like this where we kind of go between two maps it's not really a problem either because it's some where you can use your intuition and you can start to just sculpt this and kind of resculpt it based on what you think would work so if you have areas that haven't been perfectly projected in this case you we spent like only a few minutes on the actual projection it's not going to be perfect but even if you spend a proper good time on this it's not going to be perfect so you can just go through this and then just fix this by hand like so so it's it definitely a big benefit to sculp this kind of stuff by hand just with the the um text map enabled as well and then once you're done with this udum you just move on to the next udum this is why I don't really think it's a huge problem that CBR doesn't support udims for this it would be absolutely fantastic if it did but uh that hasn't happened yet so maybe it will never happen but since you're spending so much time on each part this is not really a huge concern particularly like if you if spending like 2 hours on each part here an hour on each part if you have to spend 2 minutes replacing udum it it's honestly it's honestly fine this might be something you only do for the most hero Parts as well of the of the mesh because you might not have the pull account for this for the whole area or you know or the patience for it some of this you probably just want to do procedurally in in a texturing software as well but the goal is that we're we're getting coverage over everything now you just have to check without the texture as well because otherwise you're going to rely way too much on texture and you just need to see this in a more organic fashion still trying to be a bit gestal about this trying to make sure that there is a bit of flow between these scales and not making sure that they don't just seem like single scales there needs to be some Unity with it that's one of the advantages of using this technique where we can really go through and um and sculpt this kind of stuff up because using pictures because if you do this by hand again like we mentioned before then it's going to feel very much like individual scales instead of some nice Unity that you you really get with with these photos and obviously the more time you spend grading and finding good reference the easier it is go going to be as well because right now we have pretty crappy photos but I kind of think that's cool as well I I want to show you how you can actually get away with using crappy photos instead of absolutely perfect reference because in reality whenever you're sculpting or creating any kind of character like this most likely going to have pretty mediocre reference because that's what you can find right or maybe that's what your client provided you with so if this was perfect reference then you would be dealing with something like texturing xyc or Surface mimic and then you're don't really have to do a lot of what we're doing now then you can straight up project this in a texturing software and then it's going to work pretty much out of the box but then you're also reliant on those those texture Maps you if if you want something highly specific it's really hard to to do that if you if you rely on those specific Maps cuz maybe the dinosaur or the crocodile or whatever you're creating doesn't have like doesn't look like those pre-made texture Maps this is something you can do as well if you've been provided a um concept by a client as well where they might have a highly specific texture or something that they want to have in like on the on the model maybe a cons arus has made that and you have to translate that you can straight up project this on top of your your mesh and then just start to sculp this up it's a very powerful approach straight up taking the Best of Both Worlds the best of the the image map approach and the best of this approach in some cases you don't even have to sculpt this in some cases you can just kind of get away with doing the um doing this directly in in painter if you have good enough pictures then you you might get away with that the best thing is of course if you have your own reference because then you going to have so much more resolution so now we have a base of this let's just start to clean this up a little bit like so I'm just going to go over this this is where you probably need more resolution in this case we're at around almost 10 million po or 9.3 and you can see we're running out of juice but at the same time we're also looking at this crazy closeup right where you have to zoom out and see well are we going to be seeing this character this closeup if if no if you're going to be seeing at this level this is actually fine because you can't see the polygons here but if you have some crazy close-up shot like this you'll probably need a lot more polygons than this sometimes you even have to split the model up this is what we had to do for some of the movies I worked on where we had to really split up the model because we just couldn't get enough resolution and don't do that don't split your model up in unless you really have to that becomes incredibly annoying to deal with particularly if you're dealing with any kind of pipeline that you you know you're most likely will doing if you're working that high poly what you can also do instead of just grading the photos this is something I would done a few times is you straight up just draw on top of the photos in Photoshop you just create a black mask where you have the the lines around it and then you you just project this on top this this can work really well as well because then you have no noise whatsoever in the sculpting in the scales and details you're getting in but obviously it takes a lot longer as well but if you are going to be doing a project like this that's going to be it's going to take quite a lot of time to to get this right then it's worth spending a fews hours grading photos every second you spend grading photos is like 2 seconds you're getting back I would almost do this when I was in production in the film industry that whenever I start a new character I would just spend a lot of time creating photos particularly if you're spending months on it then it's it's just a massive massive massive benefit benefit to that so we've kind of done the outer now and we added some volume to it but now we can go through here and we can just go through and and add some some like life into each specific scale again we're quite low poly now but um so we probably won't want an additional subdivis level but uh yeah this can work quite well I'm also just trying to make the scales more separate this should still be gestural like we talked about but just going through this and um and making sure that they they do feel separate is going to help a lot it's going to help a lot when it comes to the rest of the texturing because now it is a lot easier to create masks for this for instance so what you can do for instance is you can bring this back into painter as a displacement map and then you could um almost like bucket fill it like around these ones here if you're careful enough you can't actually bucket fill this uh I don't think that would work though unless you might be able to create some script for that but at least you it you can kind of like draw within the lines so you can create different roughness values for this or just different color values based on on this I'm sure somebody smart has made a designer script or something for for exactly that so yeah that's really how you how you'll be working with this uh you can see here that quite quickly we've created a pretty nice and organic texture like so this is not perfect in any way but we've also haven't been working on this for a very long time so the steps are really find good pictures find good images grade them in Photoshop or whatever image editor you want to using highp pass and a blur save them out try to match them to each other as well so this is a little bit more they're a little more consistent then you're projecting them in painter or Mario or any other texturing software and then you can now go through and apply this in C brush actually apply the display map and then you can sculpt this up as well this is a fantastic approach for doing this kind of work particularly if you're doing something that you already have direct photog for you don't have that for a dinosaur like this obviously because doesn't really exist though of course you could have maybe Museum models but if you're doing something like a lizard or a crocodile that you can have one to one reference with then you can line those up using cameras or just projecting them on top and that's going to work very well so that's it for this tutorial I hope you found this to be really useful we have tons of really cool training and resources on flick normal.com like this introduction to Anatomy course recently released or a full master class showing you how to create this whole character from scratch so check out f.com if you want tutorials and awesome resources and we'll see you in the next video

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 10,892

Keywords: 3d, tutorial, flippednormals, henning sanden, morten jaeger, art, art school, art tutorials, learning 3d, cube brush, blender guru, cgi, b3d

Id: vG-_zS753es

Length: 29min 27sec (1767 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 11 2023