Intro to ZBrush 018 - Polypainting and Material Painting, apply mats and color to your model!

now you can assign different materials to different areas of your asset here but before we talk about that let's talk a little bit about poly painting because materials and color of course are going to go hand in hand so if i'm going to open up the subtool menu here and we haven't talked a bunch about subtools yet we've mostly just stayed with one asset and that's okay we'll get more into that in a bit but you're going to see in here right next to that eyeball it's visibility so if we want to turn on this other head we can turn that on we can go back in here to solo mode you can see if we select that subtool there's that head selected now i can select this body go out of solo mode turn off the other head that's the basics of visibility and subtool selection of course there's cooler ways to do it but we'll get there in a bit but right next to this eyeball you're going to see a little paint brush if i turn that on right now it's not going to make any difference at all to our object but what it's essentially doing is showing you what your poly paint is and what that means is coming down here to the poly paint menu and turning colorize on and off so if i turn colorize off and go back up here you'll see the paintbrush is gone this is really easy access to that colorize functionality now let's talk a little bit about color right now i have a standard brush dot stroke just basic standard brush i go through here and i can sculpt on my object i'll go ahead and hit tap l to turn off lazy radius and so now you can see we're just sculpting on our object however up here you're going to see we have z add and z sub and we've already talked about that you can hold down alt to get that or you can switch it over to z sub and get that result let's go ahead and keep that on z add and right next to z add you're going to see we have a material or m which if you hover over that is material and then rgb and then material rgb or mrgb so essentially you can paint with a material rgb which is color or both while you sculpt or without sculpting at all what i mean by that is if i go over here and turn on rgb and i go down here and i start sculpting it's going to look the same that's because we have a white color selected and the poly paint defaults to white now when i say poly painting what does that mean in zbrush what that means is i go through here and i'm basically going to be applying color to every single vertex point on my object of course the more verts i have the higher resolution my poly paint is going to be so it is very resolution dependent if we go in here to poly frame you're going to see every single one of these points can hold a little bit of rgb information so let's talk about that let's go out of polyframe mode let's choose a red color and it doesn't change color anymore previously when we chose a red color when we had colorize off it turned my whole object red because my whole object with colorize off is just going to show you whatever color that you have selected over here as soon as you turn colorize on that's telling zbrush hey show me what my vertex colors are or poly paint in zbrush terminology and when it does that it makes everything white because there hasn't been any color applied however because we have rgb turned on now and a red color when i go through here and i do z add with rgb turned on now i'm going to sculpt and it's going to turn red if you just want a poly paint and you don't want to sculpt simply go up here and just turn off the ad now i can go through here and i can paint with red on my object if i want to choose a different color i can go over here let's choose blue we can now paint with blue and just like when you're sculpting if you go in here and choose orange you can do a very light orange and then use your tablet pressure to go and make an even more firm stroke now there is an rgb intensity up here so let's go ahead and choose a green color i'm going to turn my rgb intensity down quite a bit let's tap s to make our draw size bigger you're going to see if i paint softly over all this will just start introducing a slight green tint to all the underlying colors if we press harder it'll go ahead and build up faster so again the lower you do this rgb intensity the less of an impact your color will have and the harder you'll have to press in order to fill this with green color if you crank it all the way up to 100 now you can very quickly paint with a fully green color now just like when you're sculpting let's go ahead and close out of the light and the material options here and we'll go back to our stroke menu drag that white dot and pull it over here all of these settings still apply you can still have a lazy mouse you're just using this to paint color instead of doing a brush stroke you can still go in here to an alpha choose a star alpha change this to a drag rect change your color go through here and stamp on a yellow star and of course you can also turn on z add at the same time so you can sculpt and stamp and you probably want to go in here to your focal shift and turn that down as well so now you can go through here and you can add height information or hold down alt and stamp it in now when you hold down alt it's going to switch to our secondary color so what you can do is go in here to your secondary color and choose you know whatever you want maybe a light blue and now when i hold down alt it'll be light blue for my secondary color we did talk earlier about color spray let's go ahead and choose maybe alpha 23 so we can spray color on here let's go ahead and turn off the add so now with orange selected you know let's make this more obvious choose like a magenta here we're going to color spray with magenta and you're going to see by default this color intensity variant set to 0.2 go ahead and drag that all the way up to one and now you see when we spray with pink that'll start introducing some other colors in there you can see some purples and some oranges a little bit so you can use that to kind of break up your colors generally speaking i'll just keep this on a dot stroke i'll go through here and i'll paint either with an alpha or without an alpha to get the result i want now to smooth your stroke out just like we did before you can go in here have your lazy step down and that'll smooth it out the focal shift is also at negative 100 so we can drop this back to zero and that'll help a little bit with that stuttering you can also throw in an alpha o6 to kind of clean that mask up a little bit so just like when you were sculpting a lot of these same attributes still apply to poly painting and like i said before you can turn on z add and sculpt and paint at the same time now if you don't want to mess up your standard brush you want to keep your standard brush for sculpting then you want to have a dedicated painting brush it's going to turn our alpha off you can go to b p a and that's going to grab your paint brush it's essentially a standard brush with zia turned off and rgb intensity at 100. so with this one you can use this as your dedicated painting brush but if you want you can also just have your standard brush selected turn off the ad turn on rgb and just continue to paint now let's explain resolution a little bit more so i'm going to go out of edit mode say always switch hit ctrl n to clear my canvas we're going to go over here to our palette and we're going to choose plain 3d let's drag that on our canvas go into edit mode say make poly mesh 3d and now we have a plane that we're ready to start sculpting or painting on if you go down here to poly frame you're going to see it's not very high resolutions okay and you're also going to see the plane is pink if you're used to white that's because usually we have white selected we usually have colorize off by default as well but since we had pink selected and colorize off it inherited those pink colors if we turn colorize on it'll default to white which is the default setting for this object now if we have colorize turned off and we choose like okay i want to start painting with blue on my object we have our standard brush rgb on z add off and i start painting you might notice a slight graphical glitch all you have to do is just kind of rotate your object just a little and it'll unglitch and you'll see okay what we're actually doing is poly painting blue on a previously white plane now you're going to see let's go ahead and turn l for lazy radius off let's go ahead and paint a little smiley face on here you're going to see the resolution is pretty bad same thing if i turn z add on and rgb off if i'm sculpting on this plane i'm not getting a ton of resolution here so both sculpting and poly painting are reliant on geometry resolution so if we go over here go to geometry and we choose divide you're going to see our point count is going to go up considerably and if we go in here to poly frame we've got more points now so when we go in here and sculpt it's going to be a little higher resolution and when we go in here and paint so again rgb on z add off and you can make your brush size bigger or smaller you go in here and paint an eyeball you see it's a little higher resolution hit divide again even higher resolution divide again and now we're getting to very very fine detail now you can always have access to your subdivision history you can drop all the way down to one and all the way back up you don't lose anything another really cool thing about zbrush is you also have access to all of the sculpting abilities you had previously so let's go here to sub tool turn on your colorize let's go in here to transform let's do activate symmetry or t tap x on your keyboard x symmetry is fine so now you can go through here and you can start poly painting on your asset in symmetry so let's go ahead and divide this plane up say the solution level four you can go through here and you can put in a midline you can hold down shift to make a straight line and go through here and start drawing across x-axis here you can put in like a little brown line little eye line and you can start drawing across symmetry now we have blue color selected rgb intensities at 100. so we can make a bigger brush we can drop our rgb intensity down we can go through here we can start shading a little bit we can go over here and change our color in fact we can also sample a color so if we want to sample white all we have to do is hit c on our keyboard it'll sample the underlying underlying color here and go through here and we can paint in white or effectively erase we can change the color over here so we can choose red and we can start painting in the red color and in fact you can go in here to the color menu let's go ahead and dock this color menu over here you're going to see there's a lot of color options if you go in here to color modifiers a lot of different color selection you can do but again you can also go in here and you tap c and that'll switch the color to the underlying value that's on your canvas so you switch this to black and go through here now you got to remember you're just painting on polygons so at any point if you want to switch over to your move brush you can move these polygons around you can actually go to the side and sculpt out you can go back to your clay brush your clay brush has rgb turned on so if you do this it's going to actually sculpt with your color so you can turn rgb off you can use your clay brush to go in here and sculpt if you'd like and up here at the top of the color menu you're going to see fill object so what that's going to do is we have rgb intensity at if we turn it up to 100 and we have white selected we go in here to color fill object it's going to fill all the verts with white if we undo that hit ctrl z drop your rgb intensity down to like 29 and then hit fill object it'll slightly fill it with white color so you can hit fill object a couple times and then come back in here and refine your sketch now of course we also have under transform you can activate symmetry in the z direction turn on radial symmetry crank up the radial account you can go through here choose a color you can paint in radial symmetry make your brush size bigger and if you hold down let's go ahead and go back up to transform let's activate the x symmetry turn off radial symmetry and z you can also go in here if you hold down shift you're going to see this will smooth both the z add and rgb in this case there's not a whole lot of geometry to smooth this is nothing really deforming the surface however hold down shift and smooth it's going to smooth your poly paint if you go over here and turn off rgb and just turn on hold down shift turn off rgb and just have z add turned on you're going to see it's not going to smooth my mesh but if we did have go back to our standard brush we turn on z add and say we had some sculpting on here we can go through here hold down shift and just smooth out the z information or the geometry and leave my rgb alone alternatively if we have sculpted information and we just want to smooth out hold down shift turn on rgb turn off z add we just want to smooth out poly paint go through here and just smooth out the poly paint and it'll leave your geometry alone so there's a lot of flexibility there with your smooth brush now while you're poly painting if we go through here and we'll choose maybe a purple color let's go down here let's take our brush menu and we'll put it over here to the left down here at the very bottom you're going to see alpha and texture options in here there's a poly paint mode if you hover over this you're going to see number one is standard that's default now you also have colorize multiply lighten and darken so for example if i go over here to 2 and i paint with purple and we turn on rgb and turn off the add that's the result i'm going to get if i change this to 3 which is multiply that's the result i'm going to get change it to 4 lighten that's the result i'm going to get and finally five darken that's the result i'm gonna get so you can actually use these like blending modes in photoshop but like i said before the default is one and that's just normal poly painting behavior now like we mentioned way back and if when you're talking about the alphas we drag the alpha menu over here there is the streak length in here so we'll go ahead let's say standard brush with a square alpha rgb turned on we'll go ahead and crank that rgb intensity up to 100. take your streak length and pull that up change the density maybe a little intensity maybe a little more strength and now when you go through here and paint you'll see it'll give you a little bit more of a brush stroke effect you're going to see it kind of streaks out on the alpha so you can use this as more of a painterly look while you're going through here again you can hold down c to sample drop your rgb intensity down and you can kind of start blending colors and again getting more of a hand painted look by turning on your streak length turning down your opacity and then sampling colors in here to kind of blend with so let's go back to our character we're working on let's do some quick poly painting here uh we'll continue with this green theme so i'm going to tap c on my keyboard we'll go ahead and select this green go up here to color fill object let's create our rgb intensity up to 100 do color fill object again now this whole outfit is covered in green let's go ahead and choose kind of a yellow orange color and then over here we'll just go ahead and paint this now if you want a painterly look you can go through here and you can keep our alpha streak length up i'm going to go ahead and turn that down to zero and in fact we go ahead and get rid of this alpha altogether and we can just paint right on our object here now if it is you know not quite as tight as you would like it on this transition here you can go in here and you can do maybe an alpha o6 that'll increase that a little bit more you can even go sharper maybe alpha 14. i'll go around the back and i'm going to be a little more careful as we paint next to this line here and then i'm going to tap s on my keyboard make my draw size bigger or go up here and make a draw size bigger and then just paint these areas right here so i have a green area and a yellow area however we've only been painting with rgb information if i go over here and switch this material to anything else the material on the entire object changes so if we want to fill this object with a certain material in this case let's switch back to our basic material here what i need to do is go up here and to choose m then go in here to color fill object and now if i go over here and choose another material nothing's going to change you're going to see no matter what i choose those vertices all have this one material chosen now when i tap c while hovering over it's going to choose yellow and green yellow and green but in order to choose a different material or to choose a material that's assigned your object just click and drag off of the material swatch onto your object and it'll pick the material underneath same thing for color you can actually click and drag off your color and use that as your color picker but you can also use the c key to choose your color so let's go down here switch from the basic material to skin shader 4 let's choose a skin tone and instead of painting just rgb we can go up here to mrgb and we can paint a color and a material so we went over here and we choose just like a skin tone and we chose skin shader 4 and now when we paint on our object not only are we going to paint with the underlying color but we can also paint with that material let's go ahead and fill in this area here and another cool material attribute you can use is again i can click on this material and drag down here and select that material and click on and select this material so we have skin shader 4 assigned let's go ahead and close out all of these menus over here and we'll re-drag the material menu over here to the left and if you see wax modifiers down here there's going to be a strength option let's go ahead and change that strength and just crank it up a little bit it's going to tell you for a real-time wax preview activate the wax preview in the render properties so hit ok go over here to the render menu go down to render properties and then turn on wax preview so now you can see as i crank the strength up it's going to give us a little bit of a subsurface scattering effect so we can also go back in here we can turn this back to rgb since we've already painted our material and if we go over here let's choose a red color over here you can see as i paint across here since we're only painting an rgb it's keeping the underlying material but painting the color so if you want to just paint rgb and disregard material or keep the previously existing material you can do that all we can also do is go in here to rgb turn that rgb intensity down let's go ahead and take that brush alpha off and go through here and we can just lightly paint maybe some redder areas and then maybe some little more lighter golden areas maybe some cooler areas and while you're painting remember you can go through here and you can sample just tap c or drag from the color picker over onto your canvas here so you can very quickly go through and just blend colors across your mesh here now you may notice the transition between colors is a lot smoother you're going to see there's a there's kind of a nice fall off here however in these materials we have our skin material and our shirt material so we go ahead and select this material go in here tap m and kind of repaint here to kind of clean this up you're going to see it's going to be difficult because the material can only be either on a face or off a face there's no real gradient however if you want when you go to render and you hit this bpr button up here that's the best preview render we're not going to get heavy into rendering right now but if you go in here to render right where we turned off that wax preview you're going to see there's a material blend radius if you crank that up say 6 and hit vpr you're going to see that's going to give you a 6 pixel blend that's going to blend this material to that material so on render you can get rid of that artifacting but while you're just painting a material just keep in mind that that transition may be a little bit harsh depending on the material types and the resolution of your mesh now if you want to turn off your poly paint if you just want to kind of sculpt on your object here you can always go back over here turn off colorize and now i mean it turned black because you had black selected but we can go here select a white color and now we're back to our usual functionality if i can go back up here choose my startup material continue sculpting as normal and you won't have your material or your color in the way however if i hold down shift and i have rgb turned on and i start smoothing you're going to see my poly paint comes back because whenever you have rgb on on any of your brushes it's going to assume you want to start colorizing again just go ahead and turn that off hold down shift turn that back to z add rgb off and now you can safely come back through here and knock this back a little bit now there's another alternative you can go over here and you can turn on the colorize again you can go back to the render menu and right here there's a fade opacity so you actually fade the opacity of your poly paint out and you're going to see it keeps your material setting so here's my skin material here's my basic material so the materials are still the same it just fades out your polypaint opacity so if you ever just want to sculpt on your materials or you're using poly paint as a guide for sculpting and it's a little bit hard to see what your sculpt is actually doing to the mesh you can temporarily go up here and just turn up fade opacity you can also change the fade color if you would want it's a little more comfortable if you just sculpt gray or red or whatever you want you can change that color and you can also go in here and render and then turn that back down to zero so let's go ahead and turn off our poly paint and there's actually one more thing with poly paint you need to be aware of when you go over here and you turn off your poly paint and then you control drag and re-dynamesh if you have geometry dynamesh turned on and you turn your poly paint back on you're going to lose your poly paint information so if you want to let's go ahead and undo back to where we had our poly paint if you want to keep your vertex information that includes poly paint and materials make sure you have colorize on if you go through here make any changes and control drag so you don't lose your poly paint now we did lose our material settings so it might be safe to say keep your material painting kind of towards the end unless you're just doing some quick previews because if you make any major changes like we just did and ctrl drag you're going to lose your material settings in fact we're back here to the startup material we kept our poly paint our rgb information but we lost our material information but at least we know how to apply materials so when we get to the end of our project and we want to reassign materials where we want to that'll be nice and easy

Channel: Michael Pavlovich

Views: 5,630

Keywords: ZBrush, ZBrush Intro, ZBrush tutorial, zbrush for beginners, zbrush basics, polypainting, zbrush polypainting, zbrush vert color, zbrush vertex color, zbrush colorize, zbrush rgb, zbrush paint brush, zbrush texturing, zbrush forground color, zbrush background color, zbrush drawing, zbrush streaky paint, zbrush streak length, zbrush mrgb, zbrush material painting, zbrush fade opacity, zbrush dynamesh polypaint

Id: eQ7B3Y4aGZY

Length: 24min 10sec (1450 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 19 2021