Making Killer Creature Alphas for ZBrush

hey guys heading in working from flip normals here in this video we are going to be showing you how to make some pretty awesome alphas in ZBrush this is something which is really useful for overall character artists who really want to add some nice quick details to your model the way I'm actually using this is normally not so much in ZBrush but actually in Mari we have videos not later on but regardless the technique for making the alphas will involve supership so it's gonna look at the end result it can look something like this we'll get some nice alphas we can just drag on top of a model just to create some really cool and quick wrinkles or scales over whatever it might be yeah this is because when we've seen a lot of people use alphas or generate alphas it's typically just been done from a high contrast image and it's actually not it's like it's almost counterintuitive but it's not the best way to do it you end up with something that's usually more blobby and less sharp this does require more effort as you can I have to go in and do some sculpting on your own and like really pimp it up but you end up with alphas that are super crisp at the end you really do this is this is the way I've been doing it for quite some time in production err and it just gives you really nice and sharp alphas so let's just jump into Photoshop first so we're gonna mean first we're gonna be grading our maps in Photoshop and then we're going to take them into ZBrush to sculpt them up we're gonna apply the map as a displacement up and really sculpt them up here so let's look at what we're doing here first thing we have to do is we have to get some good images we need we need images which are which are very neutral in terms of lighting and we need them which are high-res enough normally we just can be using one a region of images we just can be doing like a region like this which is really nice we can go to textures comp this used to be called c2 textures and under the animal section they have bunch of cool stuff here one of our favorite ones is on if it is for elephant and you just have a bunch of cool things here such as close-ups and what are you just looking at these it's really easy to assume that they're all awesome and ready to be used here but this is this is not case something this we'll be terrible for actual mitten alphas at least parts of it because the lighting has been baked into it you really want something which is nice and neutral let's look an example here so we have the bad example so this is this is a this is an example where you you might assume this here is fine but it's it's really not so the way this here works in when you're making a map here is that you have the pain to live here that's just so everything which is everything which is white will go out and everything which is black will go in if this here is the mid value white will go up here and black will go in here so when you have something like this this region here it's not going to give you a nice curve like this it's gonna do this everything is black is just gonna cut her off you want your curve to go like this but it's just gonna cut it off so you really really want your maps to not have direct sunlight in them like this I can't stress that enough ideally if you can get an elephant into a studio that would be great that'd be perfect we can just get this nice neutral lightening like this so this or is great because you can't really tell the light source here yeah it's probably in shadow under so it's really overcast so this risk great so let's show a practical example if the differences between these two so um this was make a plane here first you don't have to do any of this this is purely to show you what is come up like well to show you the differences in quality so here we have good or standard brush and then we're just going to look at the bad one and there's a few times so you can see it's very nondescript here it's nothing is really direct really in good shape sir it's just kind of like a bit all over the place the district so it looks a bit like noise yeah you can see actually there's big flat areas like the one right in the center there that's the shadow part because it's so dark you're like your your mind assumes okay it's just nice smooth fall off but that should really go like this yeah exactly region that's not what it translates to into 3d exactly so what is what the difference between the good and the bad image is versus this now the only difference between these two images here is the source image they have been graded in the exact same way so really make sure you're starting images are correct it's not like a TV shop thing where the face thing is we made it shitty to start with exactly so let's look at what we have here we're gonna be doing some fairly easy grading to this you really really want to grade your images beforehand so let's just take a part here which we like make sure this is a square and we can just position little like this so if you find out you find enraging you like maybe you like it up here or down here this is where we're gonna be using because there's a there's a lot of variation here a lot of very interesting shapes and we're just gonna hate it okay district crop it here now so the first thing we're gonna be doing here is we're gonna do a high pass on this high pass is the best thing ever I pass for textures is fantastic if you go to filter other and high pass what you're gonna see here is doing is it's equalizing everything to around 250 L of 0.5 or 50 as a mid value in grant and it just gives you these really nice peaks and valleys here it's really really nice for grading textures so we are going to we're going to leave it fairly fairly high value for this and what we're gonna be doing is we're gonna be layering base on top of each other and we're gonna be blurring them quite a lot so let's just desaturate it as well ctrl shift key you because we don't need any color in this so this has been high passed once look and duplicate this I'm going to do another high pass and we set this for a lower value like this so you now see all the details are sharper like this yeah and if you would apply this in Siebert's right now you would have a more flat image but you would have like these crisp cuts into it exactly and then we're gonna do duplicate this the lower one once again and let's do I pass value here and then you really sharp here this is we can really get the different frequencies so we are now going to be blurring them this is this seems a bit counterintuitive then you have to blur your image because then you Yorba definition would do see the detail in it but we'll show you in a bit why it's so important to blur so the bottom one here we're gonna blur the most second one blurred least and this last one just blur a little so this one had a big high pass so we're gonna be blurring this just filter blur Gaussian blur and you can be blurring this quite a lot so so you see like some some the general features here like so then we're gonna set this one here I'm gonna blur this less like so and now we're gonna set this here to overlay so I'm gonna see what happens we can kind of combine these two frequencies you do one and then in top for now we're gonna blur even less so the nice thing about blurring is that it gets rid of a lot of our noise yeah but because we keep these different levels of detail you know with a high pass we can still retain it when we overlay it so now you can see we don't really get a whole lot from last one here we'll get a little bit here what you're also gonna be noticing is we are going to get like banding and stepping here because we are referencing an 8-bit image here there is there is no real information apart from what's captured here it's a JPEG from the internet this is a terrible source for quality images but it's what we have and it's most of the time what you'll have to work with I mean it's the case where you have raw images captured from a camera never happened so I can ever know exactly so now we we have we have a based work just experiment a bit with this disabling certain layers just to see what you're getting so something like this is pretty decent let's just add a bit of contrast to it it's just not as sharpened so let's show you why you need to blur this so we have our thing here a plane and we have none alert this is what its gonna look like if you don't blur in there this is just straight up in high past and you can't really use this or anything like this here is it's basically useless you can use as a guide maybe but you're gonna have to smooth it anyway which is just blurring it which is yeah you can see how much better it is already just by blurring it because you don't want the high-frequency stuff you really should get that from different sources like a bump map or something from the surface mimic of texture and for X Y C so compare this which has been blurred or just convert to something like this which has been blurred it's just so much easier to layout with this so let's just review here see if there's anything here what I also do is well we're not gonna do this in the video here because that would take ages is I would actually go over this and you're straight up this paint with white where I want I want stuff to go up and black to where it goes down just because then you controlling it better here and we just can be doing on Seavers instead to put a route really do this in two stages where the white areas are going up and the black air is going down once you understand that the black goes down and white goes up and that's really all there is to it everything is gonna be so much easier for ya yeah and then I guess you can blur that as well like the what ya seen in Photoshop exactly just and if you have issues with your pen pressure which might have in Photoshop we have a video on that on how to fix that that is the internal pressure somewhere somewhere that is the eternal issue with Photoshop and windows and Wacom tablets so once you're done with this you you just save this out you can save this out as a PNG Photoshop severs will accept PE so we're gonna save it out here and we're just gonna save this here as good one case why would it default to good because I wrote good before perfect various like windows getting intelligence Oh add in there now we should name it good yes winners you also want to see the size of this as well so this is like seven eight hundred pixels here we're gonna we the final map is gonna be around a thousand mind it's a 1k map you can also make this as big as soon as you wish if you however small as you wish sometimes you don't want all this sometimes you just want like one small region here because you do have a really big map here you'd also vary this quite a lot so let's jump into ZBrush now so essentially what we are going to be doing now is we're gonna apply the map we just didn't know the good map onto a plane and then we're gonna be sculpting that and then we're going to be capturing that map as a final map which we can now use in severs as an alpha or we can use in Mari or whatever it is you want to do hmm so the first thing we're gonna do now we're going to go to plane 3d you just find it under here and just plain 3d this is not a poly mesh so you can't really do anything with it now but you want to turn this into a poly mesh like this and then we want to go under geometry and divide but we don't want to divide it right away because then second that's gonna soft nor corners so disable this guy and now you can see if if control D is going to nothing's really changed it just means you have a lot more resolution now for it so the corner so now smooth and we can take this off to around a million if this is a 1k map we aren't going to be using more than a million polish anyway so now we need to import our map into this so what we're going to be doing we need to import it into the displacements loft down here this is a bit annoying because in order to apply this we need to stop in the texturing slot which is really annoying so first off we need to go on a texture and this creative one came up here and you said new then we go to texture math I would just select this guy here and now we can go under and displace them up here and we can just select our map displace map import and we say this alpha one base and now he gives up to such intensity up here which goes a bit crazy it goes here it goes quite crazy pretty quickly but something like 0.01 or syrup on one let's try this yeah that's way too much but it doesn't really matter because we're going to be applying this to a layer so we can just adjust the size or strength of the layer some odd might be fine now you can see the banding I'm talking about here like you see the stepping here yeah that is simply just because we have kind of shitty starting point we have a Jake a JPEG from the internet so before we move on we need to make a layer wondering if like because you're blurring it anyway right you're applying a leg you could do that in 16-bit mode and if you save the blurred ones out as a Photoshop file maybe that may be because then it would be 16 maybe you guys should try that yes try that do you guys have any better ways of doing any of this let us know yeah this is the best to our knowledge yeah but I'm sure there are definitely better ways of optimizing this so we go to layer now we have a layer here and we need to apply the displacement map onto this so we just hit apply displace map and I can see this went off here and now we have actual displaced geometry here so this is this is why it was so important that we graded this properly in Photoshop before and discuss now we have a nicer map here yeah and so if you if you want this here to be a bit softer just blur it a bit more just very easily take the different levels and display them a bit so then we go to layers here and I can just disable and enables when the cool thing is what a layer is that if you now just paint areas out with a morph target which we're gonna be doing a bit later on as well so I just want to soften everything over again just blur everything just once more sure you're in the recording mode and just blur it a bit more you really just kind of blurring morgan thing because you still have the banding here and then we are going to go into damn standard and I'm just working on the same layer for this you can work in different layers but I just prefer to keep it simple now so this is where you can be spending most of your time with this technique here you are going to be just straight up sculpting here now this is where you're just taking the shapes here and just sharpen them up whenever you do any project like this let's say this you're doing a full um like a full um leathery character or you're doing some kind of turtle or whatever it might be I highly recommend that you spend a lot of time grading your photos beforehand the more time you spend grading the photos the you're the texturing is gonna be whether it's making a bump map displacement like this or whether it's it's for color maps really to spend a few days on that you're getting those days back easy afterwards so yeah and your result is gonna be so much nicer it really is because then you're not fighting it you know if you're if you if you were to use the first map we showed here the non blurred version you're fighting in constantly now we can real just go in here just sharp and stuff up and just sculpt the top fold yeah and the cool thing is like doing this you build up a library of super high quality alphas that you can always use for other project and most of time you really just need like a few alphas whatever your text rings yeah for like three alphas use for everything one that's concrete the other one that's probably also concrete so this is where you really should spend time on it yeah so this is also where you like well why handing in Morton didn't you just sculpt this from scratch like you're sculpting on top of it anyway well it's because nature assault resolved so many other issues here it's all resolved like this the direction of the wrinkles here's it solved so many things automatically for us so why would I do this from scratch when I can just trace an image now if anyone of you watched the long long video interview we did with Matt last week is exactly what we're talking about like just exploit the work of others you know nature has done so much stuff beforehand and nature's pretty good at doing stuff so arts are if you sculpt this just using reference and from hand by hand you're not gonna end up with skin that's folded as nicely as an elephant in real life now if you think you can score better skin leathery skin from imagination than elephant I mean you can't fact fact because elephants are pretty good at wrinkly skin that's kind of their that's kind of their thing here yeah so this is where you can just keep sculpting in this way just we're obviously not going to do that but areas you probably do want to do is if you see here it's just a bit messy it's just it you can't really use this for anything because it's just completely unfocused so what I prefer to do here I'll just go in here and here just kind of make up what's here and I usually start off with a damn standard with us just to like trace in where I want my lines and then I'll change this to a clay buildup just reduced take off the Alpha and just build up the volumes I think it's just as important to build up the volumes as it is to to carve in with it I'm just an underbrush you can really see the difference where where we've used the dam standards really accentuate the details versus just the straight-up what we have from Photoshop really is they're also like a bunch of alphas which come with ZBrush I believe they're under here and these are kind of shitty yeah they they're first of the ancient and they haven't really been graded properly they we need we need alphas for like this 21st century 2018 and notice from like 2004 2005 yeah so you really want to spend time on this just to really get her up here so it when I've been doing this for production I've made in way nicer than this like I've spent a little one day on this and they just become super crisp like you're just going in here like produce this and you can just like really made sure that you have all the nice little details here the better your alphas here are the better everything is going to be as you move along with us it's real it's gonna speed up the work significant so what you can do now cuz now we're done clearly what do we do now is we can we can just capture this but before we're doing that we need to but we don't need to but we can we can soften off the edges for this so when you when you're going to be applying this in ZBrush um you're um you're gonna have issues like you can see here with this thing here that you are going to have issues where everything is like nice and round here and nice and round and you have this like area in the middle which is kind of shitty yeah I don't like between two things here so what I prefer to do I prefer to have a map which doesn't do really any fading all the it's done because the map fades naturally that was the wrong table so what I would like to do is I really want to control where the Fate happens and I'll show you what I mean so first off disable the layer and then we're going to morph targets you need to learn how to use morph targets they are integral to your part to work for here enable this again now so now if you use the morph we can erase from this we have videos in this as well which is just how to erase erase from the layer but essentially make the morph target and now we can just paint this out here so what I want now is to hear a new layer and then just around the edges the reason to make a new layer now is that I can I can remove my erase everything so just are all the way around the edges now I just want to go and reduce this so that I in can I am in charge of where the map smooth and not ZBrush because see which would this radial effect radially fight fader out here so let's just kind of do a bit of that and then we can go in here and we can just do this ourselves we can just just decide ourselves where this fades this is notice a radial fade we're now working with the map here just drove I try to avoid the interference we had before from radio yeah because this way you can make sure that your map can flow nicely obviously it's not a tiled map but this way it can flow nicely into another map exactly yeah I think that's so important layer yeah like this is definitely not a level you would never use this here has a title that is a different chapter yeah yeah but you can see how the shape is getting faded now that it's like there's still things that sprout out from the side and these could potentially be this is easier to make if you drag this out next to like two of these out next to each other you could then manually sculpt some stuff in between and they can fit exactly so we're gonna be just be taking covering a bit more in here and then I'll still be sculpting the fade here I'll still be sculpting in here I really want to fade in and this is where you could legit spend a week or a day on this but I really think is worth spending for the time making good alphas they are going to save your life so much one of the reason I also do this is like I said my primary use of this is not ZBrush it's Mari because then I can real this warp these into place I farm a resolution and I can just really just make sure these are flowing nicely into each other yeah and all the grading that we did earlier something we talked about as well it's not something recovering but you can actually do the same thing in ooh yes it's yeah yeah we have tons of nooks crypts for this we use in put them up together Anouk and I'll put the reason we are showing us because nobody uses new cuts on big studios and there are some people here and there but a majority of people would have access only to Photoshop yeah probably yeah nuke is super cooler as a texture artist I've been using you get a lot because if you have like 50 you dim setting to blur them all just export them out to blur them do your magic tune in there it's kind of like using substance designer just less intuitive but with a little lot of patches yeah so now you can real just get in here I think we're making a point here where it's just what sculpting it I think we're good so let's capture this alpha nom so the first thing we need to do is we need to make sure the document here is the resolution you wanted capture it so document disable Pro this is just proportional it constrains it so this is type in 2024 and thousand 24 and then hit resize okay so we just had a teeny tiny bit ZBrush crash just could anyone cuz clearly you should never change this is silly that's you know why would you want a basic feature that vegans of a resize document so what you have to make sure to do is you've matured this year is up to 1024 1024 or however yeah whatever I listen you want yeah so for production I will make this a bit bigger this goes in Mari I prefer to miss to have a bit more resolution to play with here hit the F key make sure your zoom out because now this is going to scale perfectly to this make sure it's you had to shift key so it's perfectly forward and I just hit the F key yeah and we are good to go so the only thing left now if it captured this is we need to we need to make sure that we are using a brush which doesn't have an alpha on it because it's gonna replace the alpha this is extremely annoying if you're using the damn standard brush this alpha lives so exactly so if you if you if you captured with the damn standard brush it's just gonna go to and disappear forever and you kind of got a restart C brush so I usually use the displacement brush displays in buses because I don't think it has anything I just use to doubt the standard was good doesn't have anything so the way we capture this is under and we just hit grab doc and I can see if tada we have a nice little Alfa over here which just captures the height information off it hmm so now we can export this out and now we just go to our little folder and call this super final because it is super final habitat so if we were to not open super final in Photoshop this is what it would look like that so if you want to you can gray this additionally more here you can still paint on top of it but this is really what its gonna look like you can clearly see where there's been sculpting involves eyes like this so sharpen looks amazing in there mmm so this is you want to entire map to look like this yeah so next step now is let's apply this in ZBrush and let's start sculpting these if you had a pack of those you can snow that yeah exactly people would very interested and have some all this so we have some legs and see there's just crashed they're still stuck in there where these guys go here um sure there's a smarter way of doing it and I don't know reloading the legs yeah now that would be impossible actually this is actually a good point because you know we just blur this year to oblivion just by blurring my card crazy you get this like nice mid frequency stuff that's actually kind of a nice tool I guess you could put that on a layer and then play that layer mmm exactly so what we are going to do now now we have the standard brush let you see what happens when we do this so clearly the first thing we have to do is we have to change this to the default of rectangle drag rect so now we can drag it out here but you see I don't really like that it's fading it off here for me that's that this is what I was talking before now ZBrush is like none or I'm gonna fade the alpha for you yeah so you need to adjust this there are many ways where you think you can adjust this but the what is happening here is you have the focal shift so what's going on now is you set the focal shift and minus 100 and now you have a map which is exactly what you do but wait what's going on here this is because the mid value of the map is not set correctly if we go into Photoshop now and we'll look at this the Mid Valley here is 50 we know that because this is what happens when you high-pass something yeah everything is trying to average the map will neutralize the map so it's gonna go to 50 this is actually something you should do for all the alphas that you load and just make sure that your mid value because like when you have the focal shift on it tends to hide the fact for you but you can actually see once you start to drag it out like if you keep the focal shift on you get this bulge effect exam when you drag it out on top of your mesh let's show this here so nice so yeah it's gonna if you set this you to Sara I mean this just show show what what's happening here yeah so now it's going out here with this is with a mid value let's see let's look at middle value first so this here is under alpha modify and we have a little guy here could mid value this is important this is the same thing you have when you are doing when you're extracting this place map so our mid value is 50 so let's just see what happens when it's set to 0 inside it goes out here let's see what happens when is it to a hundred I was going the other way here and let's say what happens when 50 50 there we go now if something's going in and someone's going out so it's important when do maps like this that you set this here to 50 yeah so now if you do this you saw before we have this nasty stuff here never go now this is just fading nicely into it so just make sure this is working so now we can just we can just set this here to if you if you prefer to keep the focal shift here really really low and have the entire map that's fine or you can set this to something like zero and you can just have the radio fade that's gonna work as well yeah so now you can just start going you and just get your stuff out here and we have a super nice alpha which you can use in so many different projects here so the steps here are really first you need to find good images if you don't have good images for anything texturing your textures are gonna be you're gonna be fighting that constantly then second is you're gonna gray them properly pass you blur them and you make them all nice then you take them to the ZBrush you apply them as displacement map onto a plane then you sculpt them like crazy make sure they're properly sculpted and spend proper time on that then you just take them in and you just apply them to a map here up to something like this and make sure it drag rocked is set correctly and then you just make this super nice I really recommend that you do your alphas on a layer as well which we didn't do yeah but that's also a different tutorial because that way you can just erase them and you can really smooth em out yeah yeah and importantly your mid value has to be set to 50 otherwise you get weird results yeah exactly so cool really hope this or here has been used for you if you have any ways to optimize this workflow if you have some cool tips to share we're gonna alphas scream out like I said I'm mostly using these maps in Mari where we do have a separate tutorial on how to not to make them because this is really how I would do that do that but really have to sculpt them in Mari and set all that up so please check check that out if you're interested hmm and if you want to see more content like this in the future make sure to LIKE comment and subscribe thanks guys you

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 54,791

Keywords: 3d, sculpting, zbrush, concept, maya, tutorial, autodesk, film, vfx, animation, twitch, mjthehunter, flippednormals, henning, morten, creature, character, texturing, sanden, jaeger, substance, painter, designer, education, foundry, pixologic, nuke, cinema4d, art, fundamentals, art fundamentals, art school, art tutorials, drawing tutorials

Id: p88g6wKIJho

Length: 29min 43sec (1783 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 20 2018