Sculpting SKIN DETAILS with Zbrush

hey i'm jay and in this video we're going to be talking about sculpting skin detail [Music] all right so in this video i want to talk about sculpting the tiny little details the surface of skin uh at least how i do it how you can do it uh if you're sculpting in zbrush and how we can do it by hand so off the top it's worth mentioning when it comes to this sort of it's really small tertiary detail that's meant to convey the material of skin and reach that last kind of bit of believability there are two main ways of applying this sort of micro detail to character models there's the texture way and then the sculpting way really when you're gonna sculpt it like we're gonna talk about in this video right now it's gonna end up as textures but on the other hand you could get like photo scans and even brushes me with photos and use that so in this case we're going to be doing everything by hand or using assets that were made by hand and the reason why i like to do that in my personal projects is because i feel like there is a different sort of look uh i'm personally more interested in like hyper realistic characters uh that i am trying to recreate real life one to one another question is you could ask like a portrait painter uh why are you painting a portrait when you can just take a photo of somebody so i feel like similar answers to questions if i was in a studio setting and they needed the top most quality possible like the camera zooming in and stuff especially if time was a factor i would absolutely use photo scan texture sets which are huge but that workflow to do it right often uses things like plug-ins like z-wrap and zbrush which is about 100 bucks or using mari which is another texturing package so in high-end productions they definitely do that and i also think if you're going to put the camera like right next to someone's skin probably best especially if they're supposed to be a digital double or like a photo realistic human being using photos probably makes sense but for what i do not really what we're going to talk about here is just some general sculpting and skin aspects that would help you in work it's another thing why i like doing it is it's a little bit more of a challenge it's satisfying when you complete it and it feels believable enough and you did it by hand and also i feel like it kind of forces you to understand skin a little bit which might help with your characters in the future or doing creature design and what have you alright now i can't go too much further without mentioning the og chris costa aka antropus freaking ilm artist i've been a fan of this guy for so long i don't know if he's got his old work on here yeah i mean some of this stuff was in my inspiration folder like 20 years ago or something uh yeah this guy is amazing obviously if you haven't heard of them you probably have but if not chris costa you can follow him on instagram and everything but all of his work is done by hand it's like a labor of love he does these tributes recently to heroes of his completely by hand which is a incredible and i think a lot of people without knowing you know what they're looking at i mean it looks as close to a photo as you're going to get and i think a lot of 3d artists probably assume that he's using some photogrammetry or something since that's that's commonly done but yeah all by hand uh obviously a brilliant artist skilled with years of experience but it's just cool to see what can be done i even took his course a couple years ago he does courses uh where you can watch him make an entire character i mean here's just some of the alumni here oh there i am hey so yeah i did this steve jobs in his course uh was great to see him work and just hear him talk about the things that are important to him what he thinks about how he approaches things and everything so this was a great experience for me and also kind of the thing that started it all was he did a demo at zbrush summit on his portrait of dick smith and he goes over some techniques there shows you some his some of his brushes and techniques so go ahead and watch that i'll try to put the link to this video in the description you can watch that he also has a youtube channel so shout out to chris costa definitely if you're interested in what i do you obviously are interested in what he does so go ahead and subscribe and watch his videos if you're not doing that already but yeah the man the myth the legend chris costa so first off the top obviously reference is really important before you do something like this i just want to point out i do have a pinterest account that i add stuff to and uh you know i had have a category on skin so you can see things close up and one of the really good references here is this image that was made by glauco longi who is a a great character artist if you don't know about his work so glauco has an instagram and an art station everything and uh he's great this is actually kind of old now but this image right here is really useful that he made for breaking down how the skin detail is applied so you can see so you can see he's pointing out the different shapes the fact that these are stretched a little bit in this case and that these are more dots that the lines come in this direction for compression so it's a good little diagram that could help you when you're looking at photos so it's something that i've always had saved because i thought it was a really nice eloquent breakdown but there's plenty of references here that i've saved that you can see close up it's really important when you're doing skin detail to be very specific with the type of skin you're going for and and not trying to figure it out really along the way if you're not sure maybe do some experiments on your model in a small section but also just getting really specific reference is key because age and gender play a role in skin detail so you have to factor that in and look for reference that's similar to the kind of character that you're making plenty of references online i do want to show on you another one if you type in facial cartography there's this photographer that has been taking these huge photos daniel bashung that's my attempt but uh kind of funny because this this website has been passed around in the cg world for a while and you're gonna find out why in just a second i always wondered if this guy like realized he's getting a bunch of hits on his website and he's like what's going on you know so if you go to this guy's website and you look at the photos he's taken of these different models you can find you know similar age range and if you click on them it'll bring you to this little zoom in thing uh web like viewer and you can see how close you can get so this is why this reference is amazing because you know i've used it for reference of peach fuzz you know you can actually see like the taper on peach fuzz and the clumping and the directions you can see kind of like micro uh breakup maybe you know that's not necessarily big stuff but like these little lines so this type of reference is huge and you know we use it a lot look at the look at what lips look like when you're really close up you know you might not think of it that way but there you go so that's some examples of some reference that are really useful and so to do the sculpting i'm going to be using my brushes that i made you don't have to use my brushes you can use default brushes in zbrush to achieve similar effects you can also use you know different brushes probably from like web stores and stuff but obviously i made my own brushes for doing this so that's what i'm going to be using so if we come in here these are the brushes i'm going to be using i'm also going to be using a tiling texture that's in my skin kit that i made so you can get this if you're interested but like i said you don't need to and then we're generally just going to be talking about some skin aspects that might be useful in what you're doing anyways okay so really quick before moving on to more detailed stuff i just want to show some alternatives using zbrush's default brushes you know if you don't have my pack or something else but just showing you the kinds of things that you can do some of the brushes you'll see me use is like a pore brush but you can always come in here change the spray and choose one of these you can also load alphas obviously but this type of stuff you know it's still going to get you something divide even higher here and you'll see like you know there's not such complex detail in this but depending on what you're doing like certain stylized things this could be fine and you can see like i can already kind of create some organic patterns this way bring down the intensity start to do bigger ones and then have them come out and you know so we can create skin with all kinds of stuff you don't need specific brushes so this is just some of the like poor noisy stuff another thing that you'll see me use is the fine wrinkles brush when i'm doing like really fine lines now i use this a lot um i use this all the time it's just alpha 60 again with a spray and if i'm holding alt you can see like i could come down here if i was doing this underneath an eye you know but then also i can lightly come in here and just start doing circular patterns and this kind of does that criss-crossing stuff right that makes it you know look like leather or if i did it very very lightly and small i could go over the top of stuff like i could come back over here and i could just go over the top of it really lightly and it's just going to create a noise in an organic way though it's not just like pointillism noise which can help me out so that's all just default stuff too and the other one and i'll be using like a fine line brush that's something to get extremely small lines you can see here this is the default damn standard which i use all the time everybody uses this but you could just duplicate this and choose a different kind of alpha like you could try choosing this one right and then just oh maybe that's not going to work well you could uh change the lazy step maybe change the lazy smooth a little bit change the intensity so you know now we're making small lines so that's just by editing brushes and you can make even finer lines and like obviously get even smaller and like oh look how small i'm making lines now so so feel free to make your own brushes that's what i did and that's what my kit is made up of is brushes i use to detail skin so now let's get on to doing the detailing all right so here is a look at the final result of what we're going to be making right now and we're going to do this in zbrush and we're going to do it with the hd geometry workflow hd geometry why are we going to be using that well really it's to get another subdivision level so hd geometry is a tool inside of zbrush that essentially lets you divide the mesh in a different way so that it doesn't have to be all displayed at one time so that you can go higher you can go you know above the ceiling of what your machine or what the software can display at one time so you might be thinking is that really worth it well it depends and in this case it is i don't use it every time but the goal of this is to produce a very high resolution detailed texture that we can render in other programs so we're trying to do really fine detail in the sculpt and to do that we need a lot of polygons how many polygons well the base mesh that we're starting with is 6240 polygons so when we divide that up you're quadrupling the polycount right because you're splitting every polygon into four polygons so by the time we subdivide all the way up to subdivision level seven we end up with 25 and a half million polygons now that is enough to sculpt detail for most applications you know for what i do for work at video games that's around where i'll stop 20 million 30 million 40 million something like that 40 million is high it might even get a little slow to work with you don't need too much because in those cases for real-time rendering productions that aren't using 8k texture maps or 32-bit displacement maps or something you don't need all of that information it's gonna come out in the texture anyway and there's other techniques like tiling textures in the material at render time that can help to achieve a sharpness so by using the hd geometry workflow we can go up one more time you might be thinking is the difference between a single subdivision level and the next one really that big of a deal well in this case it is because now if we subdivide one more time we're at 102 million polygons that's a huge difference between 25 and a half million so with all of those extra polygons we're able to sculpt detail essentially we're getting a higher resolution sculpt that can capture more detail so when we're done with all this we can export a high resolution texture map and capture as much detail as possible so there's pros and cons of using the hd workflow obviously you get the highest amount of polygons and that's good for what we're doing right now but the trade-off is you can't see the entire mesh at once to see the mesh you have to mouse over a section and hit a on the keyboard and that will show you the mesh in its full resolution a preview it'll show you as much as it can display and because symmetry doesn't work it's another kind of a quark the best way if you want to sculpt symmetrically is to turn the character and then disable perspective in the camera and then hit a a little bit towards the front of the face so then you can see it's kind of creating a butterfly effect because it just kind of makes the preview shoot through the camera like straight if you can think of it that way so by lining it up straight it lets us see more of the front of the face at once okay so you might think we're gonna subdivide all the way up to subdivision level six or seven like as high as we can go then we'll turn on hd geometry and go the extra one or two steps no we're not going to do that we're going to go up to three or four in the traditional subdivisions and then we're going to add the extra three or four in hd and the reason we're going to do that is because once you go into hd you are not able to go below where you started and the best way to sculpt is to be able to go up and down in divisions you don't want to just have one division that's extremely high because then you can't do things like drop down and smooth or get different effects by using brushes at different subdivision levels so it's best to kind of split it in the middle another couple of quirks of using hd geometry before we move on to doing some detailing is that every time you get into hd you can essentially think of it as a new mesh it doesn't have the same uvs so we're gonna be using things like morph target which i'll have to store every time i jump into hd you have to remember that that's that's gonna get lost and you can't like make layers and then jump out and jump back in and then it'll be there uh so it's just something to keep in mind because that's a little bit odd compared to the normal modeling that you'd be used to doing okay now that we're in hd geo and we've stored our morph target the first step in making the skin detail is we're going to make a bed of pores so i'm going to do this by loading a tiling texture that i have in my skin kit that has the pores and little wrinkles in it that i can just tile over the whole head to get started so we're going to use surface noise to do that in zbrush if you open surface noise in the lower left you can select your own custom alpha texture which is what this is that's just a black and white texture technically it's a 16 bit height map and zbrush can use that in this case to drive the surface noise then you can adjust the tiling and things like the depth removing any mix of the basic color any rgb and just play with the scale and strength of your texture now what's cool about doing this too is i feel like it's a little bit easier to establish the scale of the pores to start with because if you were to do the wrong scale in the beginning then everything would be off and it would be such a pain to change it to kind of have to go all the way back and like i said in the beginning pores have to do with age and gender and so getting the scale right is key and i find it easy to just adjust the scale in surface noise and then check it out in 3d without committing to really dialing in before i do commit to actually distorting the mesh in my case it's a female so the pores are going to be smaller so once i'm checking it out in 3d and it's preview before i hit apply if i'm happy with the scale and the depth i hit apply it looks a little bit different so you might want to do that and then hit undo if you have to and make some changes but after i hit apply i've committed it to the mesh now we stored that morph target in the beginning because now i can use it to get rid of any mistakes or any errors like stretching that's happening because projecting textures like this in hd geo it just projects it from the orientation of the camera you originally had when you hit a to see the preview again a little bit weird so we're just going to be changing the camera angle and applying this detail all over and using the morph brush helps us blend out the seams and also helps us to add some variation right now that we're adding it down because you don't want all the pores to be an even depth and you also need to remove them from around the eyes for instance and the lips so that's why storing a morph target's always key when you're doing any kind of detail that you want to be able to have more control over so after using surface noise to get the tiling texture over most of the head then i'll come in and use the custom alpha like the cluster of pores to just by hand kind of bridge the gaps that might be there and also kind of adjust the size to make sure that the scale seems correct in the different areas of the skin and just fill in all the blank spots all right so now we're getting pores pretty well across the surface here definitely on the front of the face now something i'm going to do is i'm going to start adding a little bit of detail with the brush you can see i'm just using a standard brush and then i'm spraying the little dot alpha i stored a morph target before again so i can wash it out you can see me doing that over and over that i'll store a morph target so that i'm not like really committing and then i might go too strong you know i can have a tendency to go not strong enough so i find it best to like go too strong in some cases and then use the morph brush to knock it back so after adding some blemishes imperfections in the skin really quick i'm jumping right into using my fine wrinkles brush to start adding these fine wrinkles on the eyes and the bridge of the nose uh the nasal labial fold here where it gets compressed when she would open her mouth so i'm paying attention to the direction of the lines too these are really fine lines this is really going to be breaking up the light this isn't like big stuff it's adding fine wrinkles to the skin in the direction that it would be compressing so it helps the believability and break up the surface that way so you can see like the lines are going circular around the eyes like if her eyelids were to open and close still right now the skin surface is very even but just by doing this spraying the fine wrinkles again in different directions even within fine detail we have kind of categories from big to small and those are kind of examples really small so now i'm actually choosing the skin surface brush that's made for beating up the surface and i can use alts to pull out or the normal push in and changing the brush to different sizes by going over the skin i'm like creating this kind of modeled look just like beating it up you can see on the cheek is a good example right now but the skin surface now is much less even so it doesn't feel so much like a solid perfect structure with fine detail we're creating like breakup within that and that that helps to make it feel organic you know the skin shouldn't feel perfectly smooth that would make it feel like plastic or solid so kind of beating it up or or adding imperfections on the surface irregularities at different sizes including kind of medium size is a good way to add that organic feel you can use morph target a lot of different ways to add complex detail and give yourself a lot of control the first thing to try is to first store a morph target and then add the detail or whatever you're trying to do very heavy-handedly in this case i'm going to add a bunch of these wrinkles all over the eyelid i'm going really far adding strong deep detail and i'm smoothing it but then i'm doing that with the intention of hitting switch on morph target which turns it back to when i originally stored it and now what the morph brush does is it brings back what i just did so now essentially this morph brush is just adding all this so i can do it very lightly in some places i can feather it out maybe i just want strong detail inside of wrinkles that already exist or on the edges of something so this is a way to make a lot of complex detail and then bring it back with a lot of control something else you can do with morph targets too is by storing it and then adding all the detail you want you could also change the spray pattern of the morph brush and lightly add break up that way so that you can quickly add complexity to the overall detail you have which can help everything to look more organic too so i love using morph target it can also give you some confidence to just experiment and try something because you can always wipe it out with the morph brush so i use it in all the sculpting i do and if you don't do it you should definitely try using the morph target way more one of the brushes that i don't use very commonly but i do end up using it when i'm doing fine detail is the elastic brush what makes the elastic brush special is that it can add volume without disrupting fine detail work like it doesn't smooth like on the other end the clay brush for instance would add mass to what you're sculpting on but then there's an inherent smooth that happens but the elastic brush is meant to be able to manipulate the surface while preserving details so i'll end up using the elastic brush with a very low intensity to kind of build up forms in between wrinkles and fine lines like you see here so here you see me doing it on the eyelids and also i'll be using it in the lips coming up one of the few really important types of detail when making skin is fine lines and we do that a lot with the damaged standard brush and i also made my own fine line brush that makes an extremely small line essentially i made it to make the smallest line possible and with that i can go over wrinkles or lines that i already have maybe and then emphasize it to make them a little deeper a little sharper because it's so small i can make very sharp lines so i'll add them like around the nasolabial fold that smile line to show that that's an area that has wrinkled quite a bit and that's what makes these deeper kind of memory wrinkles from doing facial expressions i'll use it on things like the lips which we'll see a little bit more later on and also on the forehead i'll make a few of those like surprised frown lines on the forehead and reinforce that with a very fine line too so some around the eyes somewhere on the lips forehead things like that it's important to have that tool in the arsenal and to use here and there to make small very sharp details that can stand out above the rest okay so when detailing the nose some things that you can keep in mind some differences that you might want to use when detailing noses is to make the pores a little bit different than like say the cheeks that are nearby in that they're not as deep generally they may even be farther apart but there's sort of a smoother more polished look to noses and then the pores that are there that are a little bit more far apart also can be clogged you know like blackheads and things like that so rather than adding a lot of inward pores you can have bumps on a nose which you're going to see when the light comes and breaks it up so i always try to add that type of detail to noses so there's a general noise as with everything to break up the surface again you can see the irregularity in the highlight when you do that and then not having such deep pores but then adding small dots that are representing like clogged pores or blackheads or bumps or whatever i also try not to add too much noisy detail on the nostrils it's really the tip of the nose and then as it transitions to the bridge up towards the top then you're gonna get those horizontal wrinkles too from like facial expressions the underside of the nose and nostrils going to be relatively clean just have that general noise and break up but really the end the ball of the nose is generally smoother than other parts of the skin with just that kind of noise breakup and then the actual like blackheads or clogged pore detail that you can put on the tip to get some sharper detail and things that might catch more in the light i'll sometimes add the clogged pores one by one you can do that just by like doing a drag dot kind of alpha to get them in exact locations and then i'll use that same technique that i've used before where i'll store a morph target then start bringing out like pore clusters this time holding alt to invert it so all the bumps are coming up making like a lot of pores at once and then morph brush i can adjust like where they go or the strength that way and that's generally how i'll detail a nose okay so sculpting the lips sculpting the lips very unique so i'm going to be doing them all asymmetrical and i'm primarily going to be using just default zbrush brushes i'll use a few of my own but mainly this is just sculpting stuff and then paying attention to the shapes of actual lip detail so in my method what i'm doing is i'm again trying to go from big to small i'm always trying to do that when i can so i'm going to start out with just the damn standard brush to start sectioning the lips into the various kind of padded sections of the folds it can help to think of lips as they're rolling outwards from the inside of the mouth and then they're being compressed a little bit so there's folds in them and wrinkles because the actual surface area of the lips is larger than we're seeing it so what you're trying to do when you're doing detail is a mix of fine detail and also some pretty strong folds so first thing separating it into those sections with a damp sander brush and then actually i'm going to use my fine wrinkles to just spray a lot of fine wrinkles all over the lips i'm going vertically and horizontally though i'm not trying to do too much diagonal but this is the kind of detail that's on lips kind of cracking you might think we can add this more at the end but really what i'm doing is trying to just break up the surface now and also give me things to cue on because i'm going to now make smaller and smaller wrinkles so now that i've got some patterns i can use the damn standard brush or like a really fine brush and go over some of these shapes to make them deeper i'm also kind of gradually adding depth and strength as i'm working through sculpting the lips while i'm breaking them up into the smaller folds and wrinkles i'm starting to add these different lines and i'm trying to pay attention to the shapes i'm making to try and make it as organic as possible i don't want to duplicate it i don't want to make things too repetitive so i'm doing this in basically these kind of catching arc shapes if i do one line my next line might be coming slightly in the opposite direction maybe at a different length and they're kind of catching into each other and then sometimes i'm crisscrossing them and making shapes that look a little bit like the letter y you might think of so those are the kind of things i'm doing as i'm breaking it up even smaller after i break it up even smaller i want to add volume now in between these deeper lines again to make it look like the lips have been compressed and the form is kind of protruding out and what these wrinkles are are just kind of overlapping so doing a mixture of brushes again clay brush i'll use if i want to also smooth the surface a little bit if i want to even it out if it starts to look too muddy and then also we can use the elastic brush like we spoke about earlier if i want to start to really bring out the form and preserve any kind of fine detail i want so i might want to use that but any brush that you're comfortable with the idea is just to start adding form and volume small but strong in between wrinkles same goes for the bottom of the lips i did the same method sprayed a bunch of fine wrinkles started to section it out and so i'm gradually adding smaller shapes now but keeping it strong and that's kind of one of my main tips when you're sculpting lips is that these kind of if you wanted to categorize the small detail that we're doing the medium-sized detail making it pretty strong that you're actually breaking the silhouette you know with some of these wrinkles like we saw when we saw that really macro photograph of lips we want to actually have some form here and then on top of it obviously sharp crisp details too all right so lips looking uh pretty organic now gonna continue on refining now so something i'm doing i'm dropping the subdivision level going back to the skin surface now smoothing that out another thing you can do to help break things up uh you know we're adding variation variation that's kind of the name of the game when it comes to organicness by smoothing it on lower resolutions you're essentially softening the form while preserving the sharp detail so i might want to do that in some areas i'm helping to blend the pores out from the eye right now because we don't have strong pores around the soft skin of our eyes so smoothing out the pores there leaving it a little bit to just have a break up on the surface and now with the fine wrinkles brush coming in along in the direction of the eyes you can see by swooping it this is you know as the eyes move around skin compresses here and then these small little dots like tiny tiny little pimples that sometimes come up around the soft skin of the eyes there's another like tiny detail that we can add so that's some of the kind of detail you can use to do eyes it also depends on the age and what you're going for to you know we're doing a very young woman in this demo but if you had an older character or maybe one with like eye bags or something then you'd have a lot stronger forms in between the wrinkles and a few deeper wrinkles like maybe crow's feet and things like that the sculpt i'm doing you can see some of the body too and when you're doing bodies it's the same tool same techniques just different kinds of detail depending on what kind of skin you're trying to depict so in the case of the body in these kind of areas right here it's a lot more of the fine wrinkles and micro wrinkles a lot of the surface break up to make it feel organic and just not a lot of clear deep pores that you would find on a cheek so pay attention to reference at specific parts of the body but generally the techniques are the same it's just important to really focus on trying to depict the right kind of detail for the right areas one of the last things you should be doing when you're sculpting faces that you want to be believable is to make them not symmetrical nobody's face is symmetrical but obviously it can be extremely advantageous while you're modeling or sculpting something to make it mirrored right because then you're doing half the work but what you want to do towards the end uh maybe the last 25 50 you know it's kind of personal preference but you should break symmetry after you think you've gotten the advantage of having it on so you turn off the mirroring in zbrush that'd just be hitting the x key to turn off symmetry and then start intentionally moving stuff you know like rotating the nose like not just moving stuff too but like rotating the nose a little bit maybe so the tip isn't pointed perfectly in the z-axis making the move brush really big and moving the ear on one side just a little bit moving the lip a little bit you know rotate underneath the nose and see if you can do something with the septum uh maybe the eye just changing scale is all really subtle stuff but getting rid of that perfect symmetry really helps when our brains are identifying faces even though you might not be consciously aware if something is perfect it just is not going to feel believable until you start to knock it around a bit so we've already been sculpting things asymmetrically like some of the details that we've been doing uh the lips you know 100 but we want to be doing the big macro stuff too and since we've done all of our work with symmetry on so far we need to turn it off and then actually go back and start pushing and pulling things around and that's really one of the final steps of making a face look more naturalistic so the things to take away when you're detailing skin is variation to add the organic feel varying your brush size varying the pressure that you're putting on varying the alphas paying attention to the direction that wrinkles would be flowing in based on how the face moves around and the kinds of details like where they would be what kind of details would be on a nose what kind of details would be around an eye or on the lips so hopefully that and some of the techniques we talked about can help you in your next project before we talk about how to export all this detail we're going to first talk about this video sponsor all right thank you to this video sponsor skillshare if you're not already a member check out skillshare they've got tons of classes on all kinds of things i've been a member for a long time now there's tons of classes that are applicable to whatever you're interested in like for me you know i like to look at these successful youtubers and kind of hear their story and some tips on how they you know juggle work life balance and just general tips on uh on what makes them successful or how they found success on youtube basic photography and videography i've watched you know to figure some stuff out here that i'm not too familiar with i like to learn all kinds of different things outside of just 3d modeling and skillshare is a great place to do that so if you haven't already check out skillshare by clicking the link in the description below the first thousand people are gonna get a one month free trial of skillshare and you can check it out for yourself and look at some classes right now for free all right back to the video okay so now that we've sculpted all the little fine detail on our head using hd geometry how do we get it out of zbrush if we want to render it in other programs like arnold or blender or marmoset or what have you well what's cool is even though you can't see hd geometry all at once you can actually render it in zbrush if you come into the render menu and under render properties you can turn on hd geometry and this will show all of the hd geometry in a render so it is a good way to kind of check it all at once if you wanted to do that and then also when you export maps using the multi-map exporter you will get all that detail exported into maps so right now you see displacement and normal map select you can do whatever you want in here come down to the export options and you can see you can go all the way up to 8k you can export displacement maps if you're going to do something in an offline renderer and you could have it export what's going to be a 32-bit exr so a ton of data which is great so you can really recreate the high poly at render time and get the most accurate physical render possible but you can also just export all the detail as a really big 8k normal map and you actually don't even get any interference because of the way that zbrush bakes its map you're not really baking a high to a low because it's baking it to itself so you get a really clean normal map and that's actually what i did to make the image you saw at the start of the video all right so we jump in here to marmoset this is actually just using like my subdivision level three or something and then using that high res normal map so you can see it gets a little pixelated but that's fine some of this stuff ends up being chatter but for this application i think it's fine and what i did for the thumbnail is i actually used ray trace rendering which i'll turn on right now and make my computer cry and uh i have a little bit of subsurface and so we let the light do its thing we get bounce light and we get a little bit of more bleed in there with the subsurface you can see how it ends up looking pretty believable as skin we can have it do more samples in the viewport if we wanted to so it looked a little bit nicer you come in a little bit closer and we'll just let it resolve there you go so you can see a little bit more detail now and you see with the bleeding through like some of this detail gets washed out and you just really retain the sharp details in the highlights and that's what you want when you're doing skin so this is just the marmoset viewport what i did to render the final large scale images i just adjusted my my image output settings to have a lot of samples and make it really big and then i came up here to render an image and that's what i did to make these images right here we'll talk about rendering in more detail in an upcoming video i'm going to turn this into sort of a series so some upcoming videos i'll talk about painting skin and then rendering it in different applications we'll do offline rendering we'll do real-time rendering like this so subscribe to the channel and stay tuned for that if you're interested all right and that is how i sculpt small skin detail in zbrush um specifically this hd workflow which i've done for a few projects so if you're interested in doing this sort of thing hopefully you can apply some of these techniques into your future projects the full process video of sculpting this character demo from start to finish is going to be on my patreon right now for members if you're interested in that or other full process videos of my past projects consider checking out my patreon there's some full process videos on there and a little mini tutorial and q a so more to come on the patreon shout out to anyone who's become a member already super appreciate you thank you thank you to anyone watching the video at this point appreciate that hope you learned something make some dope see the next one peace [Music]

Channel: J Hill

Views: 52,518

Keywords: zbrush tutorial, zbrush skin, digital sculpting, 3d modeling, zbrush sculpting, skin alpha, zbrush alpha, zbrush detail, realistic skin, realistic skin in zbrush, skin zbrush, realistic skin alpha for zbrush, zbrush sculpting tutorial, zbrush sculpting face, zbrush sculpting head, how to, sculpting skin, sculpting detail, skin detail, normal map, pores, skin pores, sculpting pores, skin brushes

Id: HlHoIGE2Ocs

Length: 36min 33sec (2193 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 17 2021