Intro to ZBrush 017 - Material Basics! Matcaps, Standard, Material Settings, Lights, and Shadows!

so we're moving along pretty well and before i go into oh there's so many cool things i want to show you but i'm going to slow it down just a little bit well let's slow it down but i want to bring in some functionality earlier than i normally do because you can actually be used uh and some of the things later on we're gonna do like masking so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna you know what let's uh go in here and i'm gonna go right across this neck here let's go into our stroke menu i'm gonna make sure lazy mouse is on i'm gonna crank this lazy radius up and you know what let's crank up this z intensity a little bit under standard brush i was going to go across the neck here so i'm going to put a little dividing line around the neck it kind of looks like he's got a head that's going to be skin and then he's going to have a bodysuit which could have some different materials in fact let's go ahead and do a couple different materials let's just kind of swing this around here and we'll use these as kind of seam lines because we're going to talk about next is materials and poly paint i'll start with materials so i'm going to go in here and we've touched on this a little bit too we have we know there's a material palette over here we've actually gone in here and we've switched out materials to like skin shader 4 and that's gone and updated our material we have here in fact if you go in here and you hover over any of these materials you get a little preview of that character and that's because we have preview material on mesh if it's slowing you down or you don't want that for some reason you can turn that off and then we go in here you'll just see a preview on a sphere but we'll go ahead and turn that back on now we're not going to cover every single material in here but we will talk about the difference between well quick pick up here is just materials that you've used recently so if we go over here and we say okay matcap skeleton and we choose that you'll see it hops right up here in our quick pick area generally speaking i kind of just sculpt with my startup material which for you guys will be the matte cap gray and to save a startup material and go in here to the material say save as startup material and it'll tell you okay every time you set up zbrush that'll be the default material assigned the default material when you're first starting the brush is matte cap red wax and all the ones we're choosing right now are matte cap materials now down here we're going to have standard materials so the difference between high level the difference between match materials and standard materials is essentially matte gap materials have the material lighting information and surface information baked into the material now you can make your own mat cap materials you can even go into photoshop and paint your own matte cap materials essentially you paint lighting onto a sphere and then bring it in as it is as an image here so if we go in here to save matte cap gray and let's scroll let's go ahead and close these two menus out of here we'll go into our material menu we'll take that dot and just drag it over here you're going to see underneath these modifiers here if you scroll all the way down to the bottom you're going to see a little texture plugged in here if i take this texture and i plug in something else that's going to light my object essentially so choose an eyeball it's going to be that kind of lighting so again you can use a texture and there's also a thing called underneath the lighting menu let's move this over so we can see light light cap where you can go through and create your own mat caps i'm going to get into that just now i just want you to be aware that you can go through here and what's driving this is essentially an image that's either been imported or created in zbrush so there's some really cool options in here again generally speaking i'm going to stick with mac cap gray for just general sculpting some people like green metallic matte matcap red wax will really kind of enhance differences between your surfaces if you're doing anything shiny you can turn it to chrome and you can make sure this is also another good one while you're using h polish to make sure your surfaces are nice and smooth but going back to the startup material here or matcab gray in your case you're going to see the lighting is just kind of very general and again that's being driven by the image if i go down here to the standard materials down here so let's say let's just choose the basic material for now it looks pretty similar it's nice gray color however there's something else you can change and that's up here underneath the light menu so i'm going to take the light menu i'm going to dock it over here to the left and just like in a rendering image your lighting your textures and materials are all going to kind of work together and in the case of your standard materials the light right here is actually controllable so we have a light turned on we can take this little orange dot we can touch it and move it around and you're gonna see it's gonna not only update the shader ball but also update the lighting in your scene this is very useful for determining it's just like in your studio if you're sculpting in clay and you want to determine like if your forms are reading correctly you can go in here and you can change your lighting in fact if you tap the dot it's going to send that light around the back and you can actually go through here you can do like lighting from the back so a little bit of rim lighting going on there of course you can tap that again and bring that light around to the front and again just kind of position your light in a generally comfortable position however if we go from our standard material back to mat cap gray and we move this light around you're going to see nothing's going to happen because again that lighting is baked into that texture this is what's controlling the lighting quote unquote on your object it's not actually being controlled by these lights now that's not to say these lights don't do anything if we move the light over here to the right hand side and we hit this bpr button we're jumping ahead a little bit now you're going to see the shadows coming are the lights coming from this direction it's casting a shadow over here and then again if i move the light over to this side rerun vpr now the shadow's on this side so it will affect your render it's just not going to affect the real-time lighting of your object so that's the huge difference between mac up materials and standard materials one has real time lighting capabilities and the other one has lighting baked in now when we choose mat cap gray and we go back down here to the material settings just like when we had a primitive selected versus a poly mesh 3d when you went down here to the initialize options you had two different menus same thing with materials when you have a mat cap selected your modifiers are going to be very different and here you're going to have like an intensity a and b so if you crank up intensity a that'll lighten your overall material intensity b is not going to do anything because it needs to actually have a b texture if we go back down here to mat cap red wax you're going to see on this texture here it has two spheres so now intensity a and intensity b actually do something so you can kind of go through here and adjust these intensities in the case of matcap gray intensity b isn't going to do anything because it only has one image in intensity a we'll go ahead and lighten it up and if you want to change the lighting or at least the light direction on your shader ball here you can go down down here to orientation you can actually just kind of move this around and as you do this is going to rotate your image which is going to update the lighting on your material so i'm not going to dive deep in the material settings for matte caps or go into the mixer or do our own light caps at this point those are some basic things that you can change with a matte cap material now if we switch from our mac material down here to our basic material again you see a completely different menu there's some really interesting powerful things you can do in here we'll start up here at the top so ambient is kind of an ambient light that's going to be affecting your material if you want to make it look self-illuminated you can just crank that up but we can go ahead and just keep this right around eight diffuse is going to be the amount of color that shows through if you create this up to 100 or if you crank it down to zero that's going to basically effectively turn off your diffuse and then go in here to ambient and turn that down to zero and your specular turn that down to zero and now you don't have very much information coming through at all of course generally speaking you you want a little specular here so you can see your forms you want your diffuse up and of course add a little bit of ambient so those dark areas can kind of be highlighted as well so you can lighten the contrast in some of those darker areas now if you go in here to the diffuse curve there's some really cool stuff you can do in here like you can get a cel-shaded look if you go over here to strength and crank that up and then you can change the offset and then you change the focal shift over here to kind of overcrank to the left and the right but generally speaking go ahead and turn that strength down to zero the diffuse curve i don't really play with too much unless i'm looking for a very specific type of look specular over here is pretty self-explanatory you can crank it up it'll make your surface shinier or less shiny more matte and if you click on the specular curve here you can tighten up the specular and make it look more wet so the tighter this is the smaller the highlight is going to be giving you a more of a wet appearance and then of course the broader this is kind of has a completely different sheen there so you can kind of dial this in as needed for the surface you're working on reflectivity isn't going to do much unless you come down here to a texture plug in a texture in here and then when we crank up the reflectivity it'll use that texture to drive how reflective that surface is generally speaking unless i have some need unless i need something to be shiny i'll just go ahead and leave that off metallicity isn't going to make much of a difference on a white object however if we take this color and we turn this red and just to kind of explain this really quickly we'll get more into poly painting in a bit but we don't have our paint brush turned on or underneath poly paint here we don't have colorize turned on that's important because that's going to allow us to go through here and change colors on the fly so if i choose a red color over here and we have metallicity up to 100 you're going to see our specular inherits the underlying color giving it a very metallic look we take that metallicity down to zero you're going to see our specular turns white so now it gives it more of a dielectric or a plastic look go ahead and put our color back to white now there's a lot more settings in here don't really use a lot of them to be honest but we'll talk about some common settings in here you might find interesting here's different types of specular so zero is fong and if you want to change that to a blinn you can do that and of course you can go through here and adjust again that specular falloff so again here's blend and then we can transition that to a phong and down here you have diffuse spec ambient and cavity if you change any of these now like change the diffuse to red it's not going to do anything you'll have to come up here to colorize diffuse and the more you turn that to the right the more it'll start introducing a little bit of that red color same thing for spec if you want to make your spec a little more blue you can turn that a little cooler and then come over here to colorize specular and the more i crank this up the more it'll have kind of a blue tinge to it same thing for ambient same thing for cavity and again i don't generally mess around with these settings but feel free to play with those if you'd like and we'll go ahead and keep specular at white now there's other standard materials in here you can play around with basic material is very similar it's basically the basic material with a few more different settings you can also go in here and you can take the material say steel and you can copy that material you can choose another material like colorize glow and you can say paste material and now you'll have steel over here and then a new steel over here now you have to be careful with this if you do a lot of material swapping and changing of materials and then you only go up here to tool save as you're not going to save any of your material settings when you load up zbrush all your materials will be back to normal and nothing will have been saved on the material side like we talked about way at the beginning the difference between tool and project and document stuff you can go in here to save your document you can load up a document load up a tool and then the associated materials will still be the same but it might be safer just to go up here to file save as and save the z project you just have to remember that if you have a bunch of stuff in here you don't really need you can go through here and delete it like you can select the dog and just say subtool delete and even faster if we know we want to keep this guy around and everything else in here is kind of junk there's a new macro let's go in here to our macros there's delete unselected tools you just hit that button say okay and now any other tools you don't really care about will go ahead and be deleted and then it's safe to go in here to say file save as and you won't save a bunch of junk with your project you can also hit the comma key go into the material tab and you'll see some extra materials in here as well as if you want to bring in folders of other materials you might have or if you want to save out a material with any settings that you've changed just make sure that material selected either go in here and say save or go into the material menu and hit save you'll also see have quick access to in the material menu lightbox materials that'll just load the lightbox right to the materials area for you go ahead and hit comma to go ahead and shut down lightbox and that's kind of the basics of materials

Channel: Michael Pavlovich

Views: 6,170

Keywords: ZBrush, ZBrush Intro, ZBrush tutorial, zbrush for beginners, zbrush basics, zbrush materials, zbrush matcap, zbrush standard materials, zbrush mats, zbrush startup material, zbrush default material, zbrush material options, zbrush light and materials, zbrush lights, zbrush rim lights, zbrush light position, zbrush shadows, zbrush matcap shadows, zbrush matcap lighting direction, zbrush saving materials

Id: aR02CwyPTUw

Length: 13min 29sec (809 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 19 2021