Polypaint a Head in ZBrush - Color Theory

you [Music] hey guys having a Morton from flip normals here in this tutorial we're going to cover the basics of poly painting in ZBrush and some some color theory and general texture painting theory here we're gonna be using this guy here as as our little target and let's just get started with us first we we're just gonna cover briefly some color theory here on on how to face works you can find more information here if you go to James Gurney's blog just a gurney journey blog I mean yes this amazing article he's an amazing painter there's no painter and he does his his understanding of color is exceptional so definitely other than the blog as well just check out more of his stuff because he's he he knows what he's talking about phenomenal painter so we we generally have a couple of color somes of the face this is this is not a hard rule this is just some general tips which can help you one of the things I see a lot when when you're looking at general texture painting in CG is that everything is just skin color is this like beige or you know depending on on the ethnicity here if you're if you're a general location you have this like just general beige look terms that the skin has whole much color in it which you don't really you don't really see unless you only you don't really put into it unless you know it's there no and all these things come from from different kinds of things that are underneath the skin whether it's you have visible veins or if it's a lot of fat in that area a lot of bone in the area as well like you can see here like on the brown where there's not really a whole lot of stuff going on in terms of muscle range this is it's pretty much all straight bone so you get different colors based on a depth here so again this is not a hard rule this is just a tool we use just to get some variation into it like really just observe some real skin tones and just see how incredibly rich it is in in various in various hues and general colors so with oldest set here we shouldn't keep this up here well let's just get started in ZBrush here with polar painting so when it comes to polar painting I'm useful this working with a standard brush very rarely do I actually change anything at all and you can see here by default if you just change the color you can see that we now get the color on the model and this this changes for the entire more like for all the tools here so what we're gonna do now is just select a basic color here something which resembles skin for a Caucasian guy and we're just gonna go crazy and paint over the soft words then we have to go over to color and just set fill object here be aware that the the RGB intensity here is is the intensive which will be applied to if you set this to 10% it's gonna fill it with 10% and we're using pure ref to have our references on top of the window here purif is fantastic we keep using this in all our videos and there's always somebody who's like what tool is that it's purif so now we have and then we have a base color here now we can essentially start painting we have two disabled z ad and z sub and just enable RGB here otherwise you'll be sculpting at the same time you're painting this that that can be useful sometimes it's about this maybe you want to add like little you know touch to him while you're painting at the same time you want little things here exactly so that can definitely use will be aware that you can paint at the same time for this though the model here is pretty much done so we're just gonna enable RGB and then we can just start painting here before we do this though let's just enable symmetry this is a little cool feature because this guy here is is it has symmetrical topology but he is this noses pretty messed up and he is asymmetrical so we do that by going on transform and actuate symmetry and then we just hit use possible symmetry now we can see that this is now this model is now perfectly symmetrical this only works if you have symmetrical topology yeah so if you've if you've done any sort of non symmetrical seri mesh or your dinah meshing it or something it's not gonna work or c-bro sculptress pro yes you now have lasers so now you can just start painting here the way I do this is just by bashing out a lot of quick colors here like I'm not going in and just and and working at this level here I'm really just going broad and I'm just gonna bash a lot of colors out really quickly yeah because if you look at the table reference it's only you know we only have three distinct colors and they're all very soft and very broad there's no detail work being put in there no so the first thing I do here is I switch this here to a color spray mode I can see that we get a lot we get we get a huge shift into a color and just brace out we just make some organic and then we'll so I'm also gonna enable something like the Alpha oh seven or alpha oh eight we're gonna see what this is doing here it just gives you like a more speckled result it just looks more organic right away yeah you get you get some variation in there for free basically yeah and you can play around with that with the two primary and secondary color you've selected yeah sure the V key you can change that yeah so the V key is generally silhouette view but it doesn't actually change the silhouette this Turtles between these two colors here that's a V so obviously this here is kind of crap right now like right now I'm not actually thinking this is just just for show here but let's actually start with this so color spray and and like a general grungy alpha with some variation here and then we're just gonna like bomb this out and just this like I said this zero is not gonna look very good in the beginning but don't worry about that this is seriously just to get some variations you just to get some base color done it's kind of like if you're doing like an oil painting it's like an under painting just to get some general variation you can also hit the C key for color just sample the color so if you want to like let's say you have the reds and yellows here and you want to blend them together you're good to see here on the yellows and you can just paint across and you get to see on the Reds and unis paint across and just blend this I never use a blur or like a blur feature for this all this here is it straight up blending by color by sampling this I think you can I think you can smooth between colors alone yeah you can you can't do that with a smooth brush yeah which is pretty handy I just prefer to do this because this way I get the texture and the nice thing about using c4 for sampling colors is that once you have your base colors down you know necessarily have to go back and color pick all the time just pick from within your model yeah yeah that's quite useful so right now again just bashing this up this is actually a trick I learned about ten years ago from Telescope code model in Spencer which is just a traditional airbrusher who is just doing a lot of this essentially the same approach in airbrushing as you would do here just quickly just get some variation out here and a really good reference to look at is especially you have old sailors like old sailors really have that damaged face because of all the alcohol and all the Sun and there's you can get a little you also like if you look at someone who drives a truck in like you know somewhere in America where it's hot all the time or something you get a lot of skin that looks kind of weird and wrinkly because it's been exposed to the Sun for so long yeah so you don't have that perfect Hollywood pristine skin look yeah you really don't want to look at Hollywood pristine look for any of this because that that's you have makeup on it yeah every single person was on camera for that has makeup on because you have to you want to do and this is actually interesting like once you because the whole point of that makeup stuff is just to cover up any of the blemishes that you have in your skin but all the blemishes are what make you that's what kind of gives you gives life to your skin because it adds color lilius and also as with polar painting as well you it's a it's called poly painting it's actually not painting on police it's painting on vertex on a vertex so if you zoom all the way in here you can see that it's good if you enable dynamic but regardless it's the point here is that it's actually giving every vertex a color and not every polygon you have to be mindful of that when you're painting is your resolution dependent yes depending on how many how many vertices or polish your model has up here how many points we have yeah so if you were on lower subdivision level you would actually get a lot more blurry and pixelated result I highly recommend that when you start painting in when you actually started in a Paulo painting that your model is done unless it's like obvious like so quick concert piece or something just a 5-minute painting job if you use this for texture painting I highly recommend that you don't add some radiation levels afterwards because then you're painting it too weird you get tons these artifacts everywhere I mean all right now this is obviously a super quick painting job here but you can just see that there is a lot more variation into this you have like this the blueness here maybe has a bit like a stubble or something some like subsurface underneath which is comes from always his beard or whatnot like it's just a lot more organic right away instead of just skin color and I found that if you look at sometimes it's a little heart I think with people with sort of olive skin you you tend to get a fairly good representation of sort of blemishes around it I don't know it just shines more through with that kind of olive tone so areas that would be like the corners of the mouth for example and underneath the eyes like where the eye bags are they tend to get this yellowish tone to it there's a little more yeah it's but that's the thing like if you look at it they're very different in terms of skin tones like you look at dark skin versus like light skin like there are so many variations within skin that you have is you can't just be okay so I'm doing someone from Africa now so I'm gonna look at this guy here it's it's not gonna work that way you have to be true to your to your reference there you really have to I used to when I when I was a fairly rookie in Sidi I used to disco skin shader and I wouldn't know I wouldn't know anything about color variation or anything else I would just go this point is losing mac so I just got like three remarks meant for a skin shader yeah and apply the general access and I'm like why doesn't this look right and does it look right because I don't know anything about actual color hmm like there is so much color variation in skin so one of the things I recommend doing as well is also switching math caps to something the disser is fine this is a fairly neutral math cap here but what I recommend is is also where it says skin shade skin shade for this guy here this is this is a very neutral matte cap I don't think it looks super nice in a way that it's very is very bright here it is very you I think you can adjust can you adjust that I mean let's ignore that but I think you might be able to adjust it yeah but it is pretty neutral you know really don't want to use something like this like like what why it looks fine particularly like I see a lot of people painting with this kind of stuff and then you are overcompensating by the fact your entire material is red same alike don't use something general Madcaps not going into around here will rent don't use fancy Madcaps keep this kind of stuff simple if you're sculpting that's one thing but particularly for for poly painting and texturing keep this stuff very simple I really like this one the men kept white as well because I don't get any of that crazy spec yeah this is really nice one thing is like a lot of people use something like skin and has a skin base yeah don't use this because it has a skin base you can see older he has a color into it I think I think that are use cases for because you see people doing these stylized sculpts within ZBrush where all they need like they don't necessarily need a complete texture because maybe they just want to present it in Seberg shops then they use the base skin as just you know as a base and they could maybe touch it up with a little blush here and there if you if you're doing it from scratch like we are here then you want to stay more neutral because now you have to compensate for exactly and then you get crazy colors so you there was definitely some merit to having that's not dismissing this or crazy just point is keep this neutral oh nice done so I'm gonna go back to the masquerade just because I doesn't have color and it just looks kind of an interesting thing as well as if you look at at men with that 5 o'clock shadow mmm they get a thick beard you actually get that sort of blue tone to it like if they have dark hair so if their dark hair not if they're blonde obviously it's blonde but the darkness sort of like it gets this sort of blue tone to it almost which is actually interesting yeah yeah so obviously this is a big deal nobody like this is like before but I said so the way we do this as you can see here the general approaches lay this down and then color pick from a more neutral area and then you blend it in here this is the same of you if do any kind of digital painting as well like my background was more from digital painting before I really got into this series the way the way you just blend this together it's pretty much exactly the same way it's not a lot of fancy stuff here also generally there is more redness if there was no blood around so around the eyes and around lips as well this will of course also depends how tight you want your your texture to eat like if you if you're doing something like an old man here you probably want like maybe like a looser lip here but if you're doing this like super sexy woman you want you want this year to be pretty tight like you want the lips here to actually be properly defined cuz I really looks like she's smeared makeup all over face which may probably not be what you're looking for yeah probably what we also can do here is currently we were from which only painted way that would color we can also paint with value as well just really introducing that so value is just brightness so if you look at this in super flat view you see this is this is very flat so we can we can make like darker bags around the eyes here and do some general value variation when I'm painting textures I I really don't want to paint shadows into the model like I really prefer to to avoid that but you can they're directly bally variation on the skin yeah and there's also some cases I mean the public is it probably applies to something in games maybe without knowing too much about it that you can cheat some things with that you know you have a cavity map for some of the darker creases you could argue that maybe it's not directly shadows maybe it's more yeah it's because you can definitely use value to your advantage where let's say yeah inside the nostrils and stuff that would darken it in the texture for you already so I mean how often you're really gonna shine like a spotlight inside the nostrils so yeah it's like physically you generally wouldn't have you wouldn't have too much deliberation here like if you were to look at a pure albedo texture from a scanner or something or polarized route is fairly uniform but we are also not doing complete physical accurate we are we are doing we are doing art so hey I mean that said though I still I still apply displacement maps and cavity maps on top of my textures like I generally don't paint in in ZBrush because I use Mari for motionless but even when I'm doing that I still paint I still paint in some some shadow information into it discuss it it just looks a bit better yeah it really helps you gotta be selective for that though absolutely don't go too crazy a bit red nose here again just going a bit crazy you know just adding a variation here and then we can just tone this down afterwards so I mean from a technical point of view this wrist easiest thing in the world the hard thing here is actually observing life and really knowing what something like this looks like yeah because technically I'm using one brush with one alpha and I'm using one hotkey apart from navigation and that's it also kind of cool thing as well is if you hold up the Alt key you still get the ultimate color which you can use for something kind of a nice little tip if you went on that like cold running trip where you get covered in like powder and yeah or it's a clown maybes a clown yeah so just going over now refining this you can see I'm going a bit for a bit closer now with this instead of just working this I'm actually getting a bit more granular here now so like I said I'm painting in Mario sort of time but I also find Mario to be pretty annoying when it comes to this base level because Mario doesn't actually allow you to to paint across the model here like you can see here that I'm painting on a nose here but you can see that the brush goes around the model so I can paint like this and it goes actually across the model well in something like Mari you're painting on like I'm like a glass pane or something like Rivlin to that so you have to paint and project paint and project you get tons of seams this kind of hand painting it's not that efficient in Mars not at all so if I do hand painting which I do I did for this character here the way I did the final character for this was I did I did all like the fine stuff in Mari like the disp and the displacement bump and and really all defined colors but like projection from photos as well but all the artistic stuff which was just general this general pass here I'd actually in in in ZBrush just using poly painting I think it's worth noting that this you can totally do in substance yes painter as well absolutely the same thing you know you paint directly on your model yeah you also have the ability to project onto your model we're just doing in the ZBrush for now yeah yeah so so all everything we're covering here is relevant I mean regardless of where you are painting like yeah if you are doing this in Mari as well the theory here is just yeah yeah it's just a bit annoying or you know to the people using body paint yeah if that still is somebody using body paint please let us know because I used to use body paint before as well because that was before marking but I was really looking for a good texture application you had in Mudbox but I wasn't really super good yeah oh yeah I mean you can do this in Mudbox as well actually but what works is actually realized yes ace level it's just not good for finalizing your textures but if you're just doing painting mud boxes is fantastic for that yeah so I just want to make his his eyes a bit darker discuss that that adds contrast and yeah and you can sort of assess them in in the skull so we we generally we've they're drawn to contrast so if you want to have focus around your eyes it's like add contrast there contrast could be in terms of darkness like this or it can be in terms of color so if you want the eyes to be very expressive you can make them you can make them more contrast it maybe the rain was saturated or d saturated if everything is super saturated and the eyes are very light this actually like gray you also get focused that way yeah and you would have a you would have a really strong focal point with Wyatt of of your eyes yeah contrasting with the skin color so and generally that's where we look yeah anyway and we're trained as as humans to look for eyes yeah yeah generally spend spend more time on this region here and you do on this region yeah like definitely actually spend time on the eyes because like Morgan says it says here we really do pay attention to it it's something that you know if you if you look at 3d sort of digital bowls or replacements for film games whatever it is there's something like ears noses top of the head brows and stuff that usually looks pretty good yeah but where it falls short most the time is the mouth and the eyes because the eyes are what we usually connect with in the mouth some you know you look at when people are speaking or so so we have really trained like on a basic level to look at a mouth and a nice yeah if for sure definitely spend some energy a lot of energy on that so you switch your mouth caps as well just so I can evaluate the textures a bit more I'm actually gonna hide this guy the hotkey for that is controlled shift a if you are using purif just because I don't need about right it's still super useful and I still bring that up from time to time so just trying to give slightly different color word there is more bone here yeah you generally have where the bone sort of is closer to the to the skin you know it would kind of you can think about if you have a let's say you have a colored balloon or like a piece of latex or plastic right if you wrap that around like this nice it's red and you wrap that around super tightly around your fist or something and you start to see your fist sort of shining through a little more so the color gets dispersed so instead of being pure red now it's it's really sort of light red the same principle applies when you have bone sticking out close to the skin yeah so at this point here the base is is pretty much there I mean it's still it's different very rough but yeah at this point we can actually go more we can we can go introduced intents a little bit here and we can go more granular you can also switch to alpha one which is really cool is this one alpha 22 this is this is like more I should intensity all the way up and we can just look at what this this is doing here it has sounds like a cool x-men or something yeah send out alpha 22 we get like a nice sort of veiny look yeah in places you really have a lot of the vania vania look and in skinned okay if you are doing them if you're doing texture painting for if you do if you do texture painting for realism I highly recommend that you you don't just paint like this but but you actually get proper polarized photos for this it's gonna be hard to do this by hand like if you wanna if you actually want to emulate real skin with real texture in it I mean you you sure if you want to go ahead and do an hand painted but then get some reference in the form of like graded just pure albedo a skin texture it's gonna take you ages to do this here is is really a Turkish in the task yeah so if you are doing that I highly recommend looking into into texturing XY c section XY c is is one of the best resources out there for anything to do with human skin again not not sponsored by them just a really good service now but yeah we are we're out of this kill so I kind of wish but it's x-ray expressed a really phenomenal because they have they have polarized polarized photos and then you can actually look at what I what a polarized map is actually looking like and they also have these incredibly high frequency maps which you can use for a bump map and your skin what a one thing what you feel people people forget about when you're doing general texturing like this is they spend all their time on their on their albedo map order color map and turns out skin is a lot more than that like this here is the base level of my sculpting in ZBrush but this is not the final result in terms of texturing like all this here is is very clean you can see that this is the forms are super clean but I take this into Mari and I use maps from texturing X or C to really break this up and this also speeds it up so much but if you are doing a face like this sure you can paint up a hand but if you use maps like like specifically the x4 C maps you can you can do a face in like this kind of stuff in essentially a few hours or a day or so because you you just projected you stay go from this angle here you just project the face on top of the polarized pictures on top you go from this angle project project project you need to fix some seams and then you're pretty much good to go you'll actually be surprised once you start looking at these kinds of if the textures from XYZ Braille so you look at pure scans of your face really be surprised how how much depth there is to the face in terms of like sculptural details poor details or scars or wrinkles there are a lot deeper then because when you look at it just from a regular picture a lot of the light sort of the light washes out the depth a lot yeah there's speck on top as well exactly there's so much there's so much specularity or specular and and reflections and all those kind of stuff going on so if you're looking at if you look into pure albedo you're seeing the actual color but if you if you are looking at a real photo and you're projecting from a real photo onto it which is not been polarized you what you're not taking into account is reflections on top before he stood up like crazy you're talking some sort of scattering yeah you're talking maybe colored lights as well you're talking about all kind of crazy stuff so that this is also why I excite erect my model a bit here like you still like you know it's this bit it's a bit crazier but most of this here is actually gonna disappear the moment you put it into a shader because of said reasons ZBrush really severs doesn't do you any favors when it comes to the depth because because of how most of the Madcaps work obviously because it's not real time you know there's they cheat with the light you you often time with Madcaps get a lot more depth in your model than when you're actually lighting it yeah so it cheats a little bit just keep that in mind yeah yeah real trying to talk about these kind of things as well I'm not just brush 6 is good for alpha whatever you know like technical features but actual what we're trying to get a lot of cross in football Moses you know these kind of core principles like I learned this ten years ago and and what I learnt err wasn't how to use 12 years ago like ages ago well what I learned was now to use the tool it was it was how to how to think and how to look how to observe because zebras maybe see versus these these features here obsolete in a few years I mean who knows maybe they're gonna read the polar painting but if the fact is this doesn't matter like we looked at PRF here this is on a 500 year old model like I mean like oh is this a statue in a lot but then you know this is everything applicable here is will be applicable in 500 years and it was applicable five hundred years ago it turns out we don't change that much no yeah no maybe our over a few hundred thousand version might change a little bit maybe yeah you have bigger issues so we're really just trying to be deliberate about artistic principles because you know like if we weren't to go into games or commercials or whatnot they're the same yeah the software might be a little different and certain techniques but it's very translatable yeah I used to be way for way more focused on software than the technique and I used to be like well how why can't a model is well it's probably because I don't have know the features of the software turns out it wasn't because what a surprise yeah so when we actually started we started using Maya at the animation workshop many years ago now but at this point both Morton I picked up Maya pretty quickly but we already knew how to do this kind of stuff in max and see brush and all that it would it was just translating it it's like if you want to learn you know English and you want to learn German sure you got to learn you got to learn new language and all that but you don't have to learn what language is you know you know how to communicate your ideas you just want to learn to communicate in the weirdest slightly different syntax and a different words still still work of course but it's once you know the principles if you know linguistics it's a lot easier to learn different languages that if you if you have to learn what language is so what you're saying is if you can talk you can sculpt yes essentially you know one to one one to one no it's big English you know I think it cool tip here as well is that when you have skin folds that get you know as you get older the skin folds get heavier and heavier because your muscles kind of start to release they just kind of give up everywhere and this is also a parent on sort of more like overweight people that you have like thinkers obviously not in the face so much because the fat sort of smoothes out a lot of stuff but around the body well you have a lot of skin buildup there's a there's usually a lot of strain so you can see that here on the old guy sort of nasolabial fold that the skin sort of folds down yeah so in those crevices there's obviously a lot of strain on the skin not not too much because it's just tiny amounts in the face but in those areas you would often have you'd have like a little bit of red build up because they're strain on the skin maybe gets a little infected here and there people don't shower discuss thing but it's just these kinds of things that you can start to observe yeah on different kinds of faces and bodies yeah I mean this is how we learnt this kind of stuff we didn't just we didn't just look at Brad Pitt and we like yeah now we know now we know what if Facebook's done gotta look at different ages yeah and body shapes and all that turns out there is just so much variation here the cool thing about polar painting as well here is that you don't work for are you nice this guy has you beasts but you don't you don't require this which means this is fantastic for constantly if you want to bring this into something like if you want to well you don't do like every concept of it you can just do this and you can just kind of hit shift art and just render it take this into Photoshop and just do it just do it there paint over it because it's really knowing if you have to paint Hughie's on top of this so let's say our painting is now done now this is something we can keep working on for ages there's not really any there isn't any real point where you go yeah the texture map is perfect on but now let's say that you want to bring this into something like Mario or you want to just take this into a render engine and render this so the way you can do this is go to Z plugin and you can now go to mult multimap exporter and you just set this here to to texture from poly paint maybe notice that you're a solution here whatever a solution one for this honestly you don't need a lot now important now you do need you've ease yeah that's how you do definitely give ease so the distance you're exporting a map out of this so in terms of your resolution here you have like on this one we have our on form 4 million police or so around that so I mean for that you know you really do need a lot like a 2k map is 2,000 by 2,000 pixels so I mean you can do the math that's around 4 million pixels so you don't need more than that if you D if you have a 4 million pulley model here you don't need 4k because that's 16 million pixels you need 4 million pixels yeah so just be aware of that you don't have to go crazy with this and also all this kind of stuff here is super soft I mean there is nothing you don't need this is probably perfectly fine on the 1k map as well I think you also have to keep in mind though once you do start to export this a map your map might change a little bit because right now it's 1 it's really it's just one to one on the Polly's but depending on your resolution your map might come out a little different yeah but essentially you just said multiple max border texture from poly paint you set your map size your map border this is just how much it's gonna bleed I set that all the way up make sure make sure flip V is also enabled if you don't do that you have to flip your map outside and then you just hit create old maps and you're gonna get this texture map out which means you can start rendering this in whatever software you want to do so we really hope this has been useful and that this this has been more the theory of the face than appropriate reduction to poly paint you can see the tools here are super simple we use one brush essentially with one or two alphas yeah color stroke on top we change the opacity here and that's that's pretty much it for 4 Pollock introduction to poly painting in in ZBrush it doesn't take a lot it's mostly theory and once you get a hang of the theory you can really apply this to any kind of software yeah you really can't so thank you guys so much for watching and if you want to see more content like this in the future make sure to like comment and subscribe you

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 185,733

Rating: 4.9418001 out of 5

Keywords: 3d, sculpting, zbrush, concept, maya, tutorial, autodesk, film, vfx, animation, twitch, mjthehunter, flippednormals, henning, morten, creature, character, polypainting, texture a head, texture, head, coloring, albedo, zbrush painting, painting

Id: 8iAbH3zSQak

Length: 33min 0sec (1980 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 12 2018