How to Transfer Layers from Zbrush to Substance Painter

[Music] hey guys i've been wondering for a while how can i get my z brush layers when i'm working on a head specifically when i'm sculpting tertiary details on a head how can i get all these layers out of z brush especially when i have a head that's like up to like 50 million points as i do right now how do i get all that data all these layers out of zbrush and into something like substance painter in a way that is relatively efficient and paint free so that i can continue to tweak the intensity of my layers perhaps continue to mask out where certain details are applied and also generate a whole bunch of other cool effects in the process there i've been wondering for the longest time how can i actually accomplish that and i figured out a solution for this and you'll see it's really simple it's great it works wonderfully and it is my pleasure to finally be able to share this with you guys starting next week we will start to go through the whole pipeline whole character art creation pipeline from a to z and that's pretty much what will occupy us until we get all the way to summer break there uh so that will be probably at least eight weeks maybe even 10 weeks or so i'm even now struggling to uh with the amount of content i i have to cut out some things but there are some things i didn't want to cut out so i'm like i should i should try to put that back in there so we'll see how the schedule goes uh i also want to have summer break here at augang conveniently sync up with when i will actually be free to go out because of kovid and uh still have to wait like four months until i get a second shot because of supply here in canada there so hopefully i can get vaccinated sometime once more before summer there the idea is that pretty much the whole topic from here from next week until summer break will all be about the character art creation pipeline and we'll go through pretty much all of the steps all the different buckets if you will uh that constitutes the pipeline itself we will talk about uh pretty much every step what's easy what's hard about them what are the kind of things you want to pay attention to how much time it takes what tools do we have at our disposal how do we do those steps properly so there's a lot to talk about every time of course it's not going to be just theory we'll also look at the tools of course why you're using these tools or how to use these tools or how even can we define a proper result as the result of these tools so that you also kind of know what to do if you're using a different tool um i know there's a lot of misconceptions when it comes to even things like low res creation like what's the proper low res should everything be quieted should everything be triangulated you know is it fine to cut across edge loops on the low res if you want to support the silhouette of a fold somewhere so the answer is yes but you know like all of these things um they're not always necessarily uh very intuitive especially when it comes to laura's creation there so there's a lot to unpack and i'm quite excited to get started with that so that will be starting next week i don't know what time it will be exactly i'm not sure what day we are today to be honest i think we're still in may right we are in may guys yeah here we are yep yes yes cool what 23rd third okay so that would be 30 if i think next sunday would be 30th is when we'll start the uh character art for video game pipeline there so yeah cool one two three four five six that 18 there's literally 20 people here so cool it's great to see the community grow so at this point we're almost like a militia there but hopefully we'll grow as an army at some point how can i get all my layers from zbrush when i have so many layers like these because i've been sculpting all my tertiary details on different layers as you guys can see i've done quite a lot of improvements on this i've also subdivided this up to 50 million so that i can get [Music] a just another subdivision level because i was unhappy with the resolution of some of these details so this is my painter scene with my updated albedo there for the head and if i go in here right so if i just rotate this around you guys can see the skin force here and actually if i go to my height here i now have a height holder in here i actually have all my detail layers in here and i can say yeah well maybe those um maybe those skin pores there so these are these large pores yeah maybe i i don't quite like the intensity that they have right now maybe i want to lower the intensity of these and so i have this whole layer that's been completely separated out now i have more than one layer with skin pores so i have also these small pores here which is also a z brush layer and i can also turn that off as you can see and now that's pretty much it i don't have any more skin force there so it's super nice super easy to tweak things as we go and that becomes very important once we get to unreal because we likely will want to boost the value of the intensity of some of these details so how did i accomplish this magic trick and it's actually very fast too to do uh it's extremely fast and like this is just magic really um how i got all these details in here is that i've pretty much used zbrush's displacement map baker here and i realized the displacement map baker this is something that's been under the radar for me for like forever um like i've baked normal maps in zbrush back in the day back in zbrush 2 and that was kind of the way to do things i've used that i've never really used this placement back baker too much so it's been kind of under the radar but it's a great tool it works wonderfully i know it's been there for like a while so it may be on like everyone's uh workflow uh or that may already be within everyone's workflow and i'm just slow to catch up on there but you know there's some of these things sometimes that uh about software but especially about zbrush 2 where there's so much stuff in here that at some point we just completely disregard some of these things we're like yeah i don't care it's like i um like i've seen it so much that now it just becomes just just part of the furniture so so to speak and we kind of like don't even bother to like look at these things that have been there for uh a long time there but the the displacement map baker it works really well it works great uh and it gives awesome results and in fact it actually gives you even better bakes for your base normal map even if you don't do this whole layer separation that we're about to do um just picking normal maps now uh if you bake it from the displacement map uh within painter there you'll actually get a crisp result out of your uh out of your uh out of your data there you will actually get a better result uh and i wanna show this to you guys actually right now just just just to really uh nail the point home then this is a really powerful thing that a lot of people should actually use um let me show you guys results here of baking with the displacement map option uh so both bakes that i'll show you guys have been baked within painter okay because uh in in one case i've simply exported the hi-res out of uh zbrush uh as a standard obj and in the other case i've baked the displacement map out of zbrush within painter there so both the final normal map baking has happened within painter there okay so first of all our high-res projection bake okay because it is projected of course we already have issues that are very standard of parts that interpenetrate but if you guys take a look at the zbrush the normal map that was baked from the zbrush displacement map there's no issues there's no problems here there's no problems there there's not even any problems around the eyes look at how clean this whole data is around the eyes there like it's crazy how good this is first of all so that's the first key thing that we can kind of spot here so first of all we don't have these interpenetration problems second of all okay and this for me is actually the more critical one uh because that one you can't really fix any other way take a look at the precision of the data okay so uh this is like super high res right now this is our zbrush displacement bake it's super nice super sharp the details are very crisp right and this is our high risk projection wig and let me just do a back and forth and we can see if i start to zoom in on here let me zoom in even more right let's take a look at i don't like this zone here right this is my zbrush displacement bake this was my projection bake right this looks all kind of a little muddy a little like kind of like almost blurred or like uh smudged a little bit and there's these kind of problems kind of everywhere this kind of little smudging that kind of happens you know if we take a look at this here again right like look at the beautiful noise that's been captured here in our zbrush displacement bake look at how nice and sharp and crisp all these details are once i show you the high-risk projection bait see like we kind of lose all of that it looks this kind of stretch all kind of uh muddy these sorts of things sure i'm like zoomed in here really really close but ultimately like you know if you're going to spend your time sculpting some really high-res data within zbrush you want to make sure that all that data carries through as uh as closely as it possibly can after baking right you don't want to just have the impression that you just apply whole blurred over your your surface there after the fact and that's kind of what happens because like the sharpness that we get here is because the data isn't projected within paint or crucially uh our height map is actually simply converted to a uh to a normal map by the software so there's never any projection that kind of happens which is why we have data that is as crisp as it is but the drawback of that is that um because there's no projection uh there will in certain cases um if you guys take a look at these kind of wrinkles here these are deeper wrinkles within the skin there you guys can see that on the projected bake i actually have something here that is probably closer to what i would expect than on the displacement bake and the reason for that uh is because why that is happening is because over these wrinkles um i have used a uh a bit of pinching there i've used a pinching brush uh which i believe was actually that probably would have probably only been dab standard i believe but damp center does have a slight amount of pitching in there uh and because our data is not projected it means that if there is pinching over the surface you guys can see just even just the fact that i have a few edge loops here that are running vertically across that are closer together there because uh there is pinching uh and because this is not baked using projection that pinching is not factored into the bake so there is that drawback um that we uh we we can deal with though but uh that is good to know as a limitation it's the only drawback i was able to find about this particular approach but it's worth to mention it there if you use a lot of pinching uh in your brush set uh if you do rely on a lot of pinching brushes this this will impact your data anyway uh okay cool so what's happening then okay so enough talking about the uh the results there how do we actually make this happen there and uh it's actually very very simple it's so simple it's so stupidly simple guys it is so simple i can't believe i've never done this before and that i've only discovered this only recently but it's my pleasure to share this with you guys how do we do this super simple guys we just we take our mesh we say uh okay so i want to bake the full 50 million polygons out the full 50 million mesh and maybe in painter i want to have a mesh that will be at about let's say i want to bake it out at about 50 000 uh triangle mesh or 50 000 point mesh maybe this is my laura's i could go blower there's no reason this will work just as well if you're at a lower subdivision but you know because this will eventually be a portfolio piece and these sorts of things we usually um you know go a bit higher in terms of resolution there and look at how easy it is to just get the data out of this okay uh we just go in here and we say well in this case here uh first of all do turn this button off okay or rather this will be turned on by default in fact by default your settings will look something like this i believe these are your default settings for your displacement map within uh zbrush there so we do have to tweak these a little bit okay um and let me just run through the the import once since we're here so the smooth uv button will essentially um apply a smoothness to your uvs uh which you've never really seen what it does it just takes your uvs and just does like the equivalent of a mesh move to them as you go through the subdivision levels um i don't necessarily always like that because that does screw up the uvs from time to time uh but it's okay if you're using that it's not necessarily like a hard no but the only thing that's important about this that you need to know right now okay is that this button needs to match the same button if you go up in your geometry uh palette needs to match this button here okay like you need to have the same one turn on in both cases uh because this is uh whether there's a smoothing that happens to your uvs as you subdivide your mesh and go up and down the subdivision levels in zbrush i like to turn it off because it usually screws up my uvs more than it makes them better so i think it's turned off by default now because it's been a while since i had to turn this off but every time i see this turned on i turn it off because i really hate this feature um but yeah so just just make sure that you have the same value if this is turned on then this also needs to be turned on and so on and so forth there so i'll turn it off because i don't like smooth uvs um flip v because we know that textures are always exported with the v channel flipped from zbrush so this conveniently puts them upright so you don't have to do that in photoshop afterward and finally uh and this is the most critical part of all this uh your data needs to be exported as 32-bit because if you don't then you'll get a nice 8-bit texture and like you can forget about the height map then it's gonna it's gonna be garbage but this will export a lossless data um data set so this uh this has to be turned on for pretty much everything to work properly there now one thing perhaps worth to mention before we do move on okay one thing that you may have as a question right now is okay but so how does it know what texture resolution to export out you know because you guys could see that uh i have 8k data here uh but you're like so does it just always export aka data is that how it works like no it does not always export ak data uh you have to actually set that somewhere uh so that is important to know okay uh like because here there is no resolution slider in here uh but it doesn't mean that you don't have control over that the resolution of your displacement map is actually uh generated uh or rather derived from when you go to uv map here this little value here that i've conveniently cranked up as as high as it possibly will go here so this by default is um i don't know what's the default but it's not ak for sure and uh so you go to ue map and you can crank this up all the way to 8k if you want to export ak data out of this that's pretty much it guys so okay so we're at the 50 000 polygon or point mark here our mesh has 50 million polygon uh just to remind that and so let's see how much time it takes to export this out so let's go here let's do a displaced test let's write this down displays test okay let's go in here let's say uh so this is our um let's say full details because all our layers are turned on right let's do save and uh let's see here okay it's doing something it's doing something it's doing something so how long will this take guys how do you think it's going to take it's already done argue that ain't that nice already done okay okay okay so what does the data look like now so it's a tiff which is good because that's lossless let's go into photoshop let's take a look at the data once you look at that that's a nice very nice displacement map now you're like well where's my details in there well they're there they're just very very very low contrast extremely little contrast but because this is lossless because this is 32-bit it means that it doesn't matter that the details will contrast as long as the detail is there you don't have to worry about anything at all in fact i could take this here and just crank crank up the contrast on this and you guys can see that pretty much all my height details are all there we can use this to easily export out all these layers individually as separate height maps which we afterward combine within substance painter and that's what i've done let me show you guys the library of height maps that i have for this particular hand so i go in here and here process these are all my layers exported as tiffs and uh let me show you guys just a few ones so that you see what they look like so here's my chicken skin my chicken skin here's my chicken skin right it's a nice gray texture you're like yeah that's a nice flagrant laura you worked really hard on this i know i'm very proud of this right super gray super boring and then we apply a level on this and then we start seeing the magic appear here's our chicken skin data 32-bit lossless so it doesn't matter how much you compress the levels it will always be not nice and smooth uh here's here's that here's another one uh so we're talking about the skin pores uh here's what the data looks like for the skin force so these are my large skin pores again there's nothing here at all but once i crack this up you guys can see my height map for my skin pores my large skin pores which i've only applied over the cheeks and a bit on the chin as you can see so it's there this is a separate layer and i have my separate data here all right cool now um at this point you may start to have a bit of a question which is like how did i get this data out to be so clean there because you know from the height map we've exported before which was this one here right sure i have all that tertiary detail in there but i also have pretty much everything else in there too right i have like not just only the layers but i also have in here uh all of the uh like kind of like the the bump of the surface if you see what i mean like i can see the nose in here i can see all the wrinkles everything that's that's that's been sculpted into the base mesh essentially like all of that is in here and uh yeah so you're like okay but so what do you do with those how do you get data that's so clean it's like yeah i can see my skin pores here but i also see everything else so you're like yeah okay so how did i get that well it's actually very it's simple now uh it didn't it wasn't before but i made it simple for you guys uh so it wasn't that simple but it is now i mean it was never really complicated but it's a lot simpler now you can actually do that in just a few clicks so what we need to do is that we need to essentially extract out the data of the layer that we want from the pool of data that is in there we need to extract and just just sort of extirpate that data out of of all the other tertiary details that we have so for this to work for me to be able to extribate this out i need to export two height maps i need to get two height maps out of this and the first one is actually um what the head looks like without any of these layers so what is the the ground uh the base if you will the the base of the head that i want to uh to have so this is my base on which i add my tertiary details so first of all let's start by exporting out a displacement for this let me go down back so we said about 48 thousand points that's what we want to do okay so flip v 32 bits move your visas off everything is great resolution set ak everything is good so let's do that then let's do create export map and this is uh within our displaced test uh so this is uh let's call it uh no details when i don't call it no details all right oh sorry i always forget that there you go so quick right it's so incredibly quick like it's crazy okay let's let's go back to our higher subdivision level or highest in this case let's go back to our highest 50 million subdivision level mark let's turn on our poor layer let's go back down to 48k and let's generate this again but now let's call it uh pores export so don't you wish that there was a way you know these kind of dialogue boxes it's like you can say yes no we're always yes it's like but i want to say always no you know it's like most software is they fix this with a little checkbox that says remember my answer to this kind of reminds me of those dialog boxes that's like yes or no but if you try clicking on note the dialog box moves like somewhere else on on on your screen you know it's as dissatisfying as that so uh no i do not want to export a base mesh and i would really like you not to ask me the question again but so we exported out two normal uh two displacement maps and uh if we take a look at the data there then it becomes very obvious right so i go here i was in let's place test this was my no details becomes very obvious that you know i have essentially um no details but i do have the the basic displacement map of the face that is there and uh so it's actually very simple we just need to do a difference like the data that we want is actually the difference between those two textures that we have so let me go back in here let me take my poor let me duplicate that over my no pores or no details so it's actually very simple what we want is simply the difference between these two textures one has my skin pores and the other one does not we just need a difference that's all it is right so i've conveniently made myself a little action within photoshop that does just that and so for me i just have to click on this here have to say this is a layer zero this is layer one yeah just press this here and that's it there you go i have my texture which is just a height map for just my layer and i can throw this inside painter and use that on a layer within painter there so that's great but then you're like okay but then okay so that's a lot of stuff you know um to have to go through there and uh i could share the action but then i thought could i also maybe share something better with you guys than just a photoshop action because you know photoshop kind of is a dinosaur it needs to die a little bit um so do we have something better than that and the answer is yes we do i've created something even better for you guys so in this week's handout you guys can go and actually download that there is in there a substance sbsr file that is opened with substance player that's how you open sp stars uh traditionally i mean you can open them any sorts of ways but if you have substance player installed it will open in there substance planner substance player guys is free software okay even if you don't have substance you can actually type in substance player and download that which allows you to use substances so you don't actually need a subscription to substance to use any substance materials because you can actually download the substance supplier for free and you can use that so that's great to know um but uh so i conveniently have it installed of course and we go to classes we are in rendering and here it is so this is my little spsar it's a little substance player icon i simply load that and you'll see it's so simple uh so incredibly simple you just go in here and you just say input a which in our case here in this place test is our no details so this essentially this little substance graph simply generates the difference between two input type maps that's all it is it's a very simple graph anyone with basic knowledge of substance is able to do that uh substance designer there and the other one is our pores and so we say this is a ak texture and if ever the data is not in the proper orientation you can inverse the result using this here but it's kind of hard to see because it's such a low contrast and then we simply want to export this out now so i will export this out to uh let's go into back into displace test let's plug it into there let's call this um i don't know [Music] and let's make sure to export this out as a tiff because if we don't it's not going to be 32 bit and it's simply not going to work afterward this is super important of course spurs out as a tiff and that's it let's export this out close this go in our folder still a great texture but once more let's boost the contrast on this and we have our isolated layer data hey guys as you can see this particular workflow uses a little substance player graph that i have already distributed to all our gang members there but it's my pleasure to also make it available for all of you guys free of charge so if you want to have access to this little substance player helper tool to be able to generate a difference between two height maps and so that you're able to use this workflow without any encumbrances visit us on algae.studio you simply have to go to the lecture page of this particular lecture i will leave a link in the video description below and you will be able to download this little substance player graph to help you generate a difference between two height maps and be able to use this particular workflow that we're describing right now all right guys let's get back to the content and that's it then you just plug all these within uh with painter there so you like let's go through that okay um okay so i need uh this head and so this is my head where i have baked out the hi-res but have picked out the high-res without any of those tertiary detail layers turned on so this is essentially the high-res as you had seen here with all the layers turned off but with the v2 little layer that is turned on there so this is pretty much this that i've baked out as a high-res and the reason why i've baked this out as a high-res i have exported this out and i have baked this out using the traditional baking approach within substance paint or there is because the pinches were important as we have talked about i really wanted to have some nicely pinched wrinkles over the surface there so that was important for me so it was important for me to bake the the base with all the wrinkles using traditional projection baking within painter there to really have that there but other than that what do we do afterward well it's simple we just go to file we go to import resource we load all our individually processed textures our high data is there let's import this to the project import go to layers let's make a fill layer in here let's turn off everything else let's create a folder as well while we're there let's put that in there let's call this height take our fill layer go to height height and let's just say so this is a height map so which one do you want because they're all there now uh i don't know let's load the uh well we're talking about skin pores but let's let's see the chickens can one there we go this one here load that in there and let's see how our data looks like it could also be while we are here let's make sure to just create a base layer under everything else and i like to put this particular one at 0.5 because i could be able to see the height map and uh where is my data actually this is not working it's not working what is going on in the wrong material am i oh i'm in the eyes material that's why thank you i could have would have looked for that forever yeah so here we go got our chicken scanned here and then what i would do i would go in here add levels add levels and then same thing here i would just um i would just crunch the values just to get a bit more base height in there and uh yeah so now we can actually just uh if this is too strong now we can just bring the opacity back down so we can control the opacity of this as much as we want right i could duplicate this i can make masks based off of that too uh that's really really nice okay i can easily start to mask things out based off of this okay so do take a look at this this is really really cool now that i'm here let's do something okay guys let's uh let's go to let's create a fill and uh just as a demonstration uh i won't properly texture this but just to give you guys very quick demonstration here let me go to my fill turn off all my uh all my channels let's put some red in there perhaps see the same thing we've done like 15 times uh over the texturing class let's uh let's add a black mask to this let's add a generator let's select a mask editor right there but now take a look at this this is really really awesome uh now what i can do is i can from this here i can get rid of the curvature and instead go to micro height and in here i can actually load the same displacement map that i have applied here so i know this kind of disappears from the screen but i'm essentially just looking for my same height map for the chicken scan and i'm simply loading it in here and so there it is and uh now i can go to micro details micro height turn that on and uh let's go to curvature now was this up here a little bit oh yeah the only thing though is that uh you can't actually use a curvature if you get rid of the curvature here so what you have to do is load like a flat gray texture in here um which i have already exported one of these so i'll just go in here but you may have to create one and add one manually to your shelf there if i just click on here there isn't one by default but i've just conveniently added myself a flagway texture in here that i can use let's go to curvature let's put all these values to zero ah maybe keep define up and let's boost the courage intensity here and take a look at that so i'm getting that nice chicken skin to really be nice and isolated so i can create my albedo i can use this height map if i want to change the roughness values this right now is uh you know it's only in edges there i could use only the cavities if i want to use the spacing between my chicken skin so on and so forth right super good super good workflow i hope you guys like it i hope you guys like this particular workflow and that you find this interesting and that you sort of start to really uh use this because it's a really really powerful workflow here so yeah and i've used that quite a lot here on my second pass on this particular head here so as you guys can see i still have pretty much uh pretty much everything we've done but i have added myself a height folder right here i have added on top of that my albedo folder here what i have created on top of everything is a final folder uh using masks that reference the different height maps as i have shown you guys including my chicken skin uh i have these little uh commandos here that are a bit wider there i have my skin pores here that i have separated because i wanted to make it just a bit darker wrinkles so on and so forth and once more i can tweak the intensity of the height map of each of these layers individually if ever the particular flavor isn't what i want either here or once we get to unreal so that's it i hope this was interesting and that you have learned something in the process there don't forget to subscribe and if you want to have access to more outgang content do visit us at algan.studio to see how you can become a member and have access to all our weekly lectures on how to become a better character artist take care guys

Channel: Outgang

Views: 31,327

Keywords: zbrush, pixologic, allegorithmic

Id: SNTHSlTh9Wo

Length: 36min 42sec (2202 seconds)

Published: Thu May 27 2021