Using Reference in ZBrush

hello my name is Joe harid and I'd like to welcome you to this e3d tutorial on using reference images inside of zbrush reference images are pretty much the most important thing to have when starting any project whether it's an M4 gun or a realistic character or even a stylized character the more reference images you have the better you simply cannot rely on just a few images from certain angles to get a full picture of how that form looks so the more reference images you have the better and that's just part of the planning process when starting a new project now there are numerous ways that we can actually bring reference images into zbrush and some of them are better than others so there are pros and cons of each and I'm going to take you through that whole process so let's start off by going through image plane image plane is located in the texture Tab and under image plane so we go to the top and click the docking icon it'll dock to our right sidebar if we expand the reference views we can see we have a number of different views which we can actually load references into we have the front and the back right left top bottom and custom views where which we can load in uh three quarter views or a up or a down view so let's start by loading in something into our front view but first when you load the image in you have an image size slider where if I load an image in now it'll use the document height as uh to fill the canvas uh and that's that's not going to work for us at the moment because of the window size so I need to bring this down to something that fits into my window you can see that it fits in now because there's a small gap between it and the interface I draw out my mesh again and clear the canvas and I'll click front view and this will take me to what zbrush thinks is my front view so if I load an image in now go to our reference folder and change it to JPEG and load in my front view of Norbit from 3d.sk see which we'll pop them in the background there now we can change the model opacity which lets us see the model see the reference image through our model and lets us make changes so if I changed to the move brush and start moving our sphere around to match this reference image see that's a quick way of getting the rough shape of the head now if we go to our left View and load an image in we can now do the same thing matching everything up to this reference image and getting a rough shape of our model now if I switch back to the front view it will go back to uh just the default view of my object with no reference in the back so I'll need to click store view now every time I flip back to the left view my model will be stored my reference image would be stored so I can just keep flipping between these uh as much as I want now to go into perspective to continue to model this I don't want my reference image in the background so I can just hit contrl n to make a new document or to clear my document and then every anytime I want to model with the left view again I just click left View and it'll load it back in now those are the benefits of using image plane to work but the negative is my reference images all have to be completely perfectly matched up in Photoshop beforehand I can use the image slider but it is a little bit of a trial and error guess as to match these up so I have the option to uh resize each of in Photoshop to be matched up perfectly but for me that seems to defeat the point of using references in zbrush and having a very quick and uh sort of almost single program workflow I don't use image plane very much except in certain circumstances where I'm going to be modeling something uh maybe more hard surface and I'm going to be spending a lot more time in one single view like this now we're going to go on and discuss uh the grid view which is something I use a lot okay so now I'm going to go over the grid method getting images into zbrush so we dock the draw tab like I have done here and then click on floor you'll see that we get a grid appear underneath our object now the floor is really useful in in zbrush now for seeing if your model's uh scale looks good or seeing how the model um sits in a scene rather than having it just floating as you can see that we get Shadows now on the floor but it's even more useful for loading in reference images go to the front and the back view uh expand that and click on map One Import and our front view of Norbit as as you'll see uh it's been loaded in on one of the reference grids now if I go and load in also a left view that'll appear on another axis another reference grid and the beauty of using this method instead of the image plane method is that we can now just scale these images inside of zbrush and make sure they match up so for example we can see that the top of his head is hitting about this uh first grid line so that's the case in the second image as well but the bottom of the chin is certainly not matching up at all you can see this even more clearly by hovering over your object and it'll actually draw a point on the reference grid as it translates to the other reference grid so I'm going to adjust the side view by uh moving the vertical offset down so I can uh get it a little just in the middle of where I think uh it's appropriate and then increase the scale to match as well now it's just a matter of playing with the two sliders and getting it as close as possible see the the line of the lips as well match up and the bottom of the ears as well so we've got uh pretty well matching images now and we can take this a little further and we can add a back view is useful for seeing the back of the ears and we'll use the same method to make sure that it matches uh our left reference by scaling it up and in this case it's good to work off the ears and see we've just got the bottom of the ear here uh is matching the bottom of the ear here and the grid lines absolutely help a lot we can increase the grid size or the tiles value so we can have a few more lines to work with and what I find quite useful is just to quickly adjust the tiles to match up to the bottom of the ear for example and check it does in the other uh view as well a little adjustment and that's uh good to go so now we can continue to adjust our model now based off these reference images there's a couple of ways to to do this most efficiently so we'll just sticking orthographic view for now but we always want to make sure that we model in perspective as well as much as possible so we've got the different fill modes now we can fill with uh number one two or three and in fill mode one we've got a transparent slightly transparent and Faded reference image in the second one we've got a pretty much full uh bright reference image and in the third one we've got an exaggerated opacity which is uh pretty much based off like a Fel uh effect which we can use uh the enhance Slater to uh control the ramp that that FAL is based off and then we can enhance the opacity of the background image as well this itself is is kind of useful to sculpt in but it isn't the best and when you've got a lot of detail it's can be quite hard to see what's going on so I much prefer to drop down to fil mode one and turn on front now front just makes the reference image appear in front of the mesh and with transparency and you can still use your fill modes with the m gray with front on and a fill mode of uh one I find this the most uh efficient and best looking way of sculpting so I'll start to just pull out my model the rough forms using this dynamesh sphere it really only needs to be uh rough and then we'll change to our side view and do the same thing because we're using dynames we can really just pull out without worrying at all about topology all we're trying to do right now is just get the shape the rough rough shape of our in the scene so I suggest that you set up a hot key like I have with shift p to turn on and off the grid and we can turn on and off perspective with P the next phase if I Ramesh now is to match up in for example a three quter View using some sort of other reference images which would you'd be able to take it to the next level and then keep these uh grid views open every now and again to make sure that you're roughly matching the outline once we've gotten through this first stage of matching proportions to these two images we can move on to loading in a three quarter View and in that three quter view we can match up a few more proportions and then start working with multiple view angles to really make sure all the proportions are correct on our character and we've got a good base to work from so I'm going to use one of the new features of zbrush called see-through mode see-through mode is located at the top of the uh menus and all it does is takes the zbrush window the program and adjust the transparency of it I suggest I highly suggest that you make a hotkey for this and I've just used e but shift e works or anything that just um is is sort of at hand because we adjust this quite quite a lot now how see-through works is that you take your reference images folder open up one of your references let's take this side view this 3/4 view we just put it in the background of our zebras window somewhere and go back into our application can turn off the floor and we can just adjust the see-through slider so we can see our reference image behind now putting it to something like about 40 we can then match up our head reference roughly to where we where it would be and we can start pulling again pulling around our object to match this reference so how do I save this view because every time I want to come back to this I'm going to have to match this head back up again we can save this we just need to go into the zpp link properties which is in the document tab scroll down to zpp link properties and we have two custom views which we can use uh to store uh the current views that we're using so if I just click on custom one and then I move it around a little bit or scale the model it down and then go back and click on custom one it'll always revert to this uh this view another method of using reference images is to use Spotlight now the way that Spotlight works is you load images into it and you can use those adjust those images use those in your texturing or as in your reference or sculpt through to create certain patterns or effects now if we go to the texture Tab and we go to import image and we'll select an image for example this one where he's looking down if we select that and click add to Spotlight it'll appear in in our viewport canvas we've got a few tools here which we can uh use to adjust the size um size and the rotation values of our Spotlight image and we can also adjust the model the opacity so we can put it anywhere we want on our canvas hit Z to uh drop the spotl and then we can adjust our model look at in the views move it to roughly fit our uh reference and we can then use the move tool to adjust certain elements to match up this is a nice method of working it allows you to uh use multiple images and keep them all stored but again it uses the same concept of of saving views using uh the zaping properties pick up zap link again by hitting Z we can move that one aside and we can load in another reference image example this 3/4 one and we've got both of our images here which we can adjust the size of and put together a little workspace I can drop can check tools check my model against this one against this view move this a little about a little bit and then check it again against this view or just have them open adjust the opacity make it a little more on and we can just just again use this in our sculpting process to Aid uh Aid Us in looking at proportions it's very similar to using the see-through slider except it's inside of our Viewpoint inside of our canvas the downside is that we can only really use the move tools for example we can't use the clay tools or the standard tools there is there is a work around by using the pin Spotlight button putting the spotlight somewhere in the middle of your uh image and then you can use the clay tools and the smoothing tools but they're sort of based off the size of this image and it they don't function exactly like they would if I just hit shift C and turned off Spotlight completely but it does give you some tools to work with to have these reference images open which can be quite valuable I personally think that while it's nice to have these images open if you're working with limited space it's a lot nicer to have these images just open in the background you to use transparency to see through and have as many many images as you want here which you can then switch between you just using regular Windows functions of opening and closing images and layering them behind each other and choosing the one you want another technique that I find really useful is just to load in a background image with lots of views of my object in and one of the ways I like to do that is to use Google's Picassa software select all of my images inside of Picassa and go to create picture collage that will create a reference sheet of all of my images in that folder automatically which I can adjust uh into into other sorts of uh grids like this which is a fantastic way of just arranging all of your views on on one sheet and sometimes I'll do this for weapons or for for characters or props and have hundreds of images on one massive sheet that I can just scroll through which is so much more efficient than opening and closing a huge folder of lots of images and just trying to find the one that you want to look at see here here's another one I did with a weapon a barrel for my M4 or the stock for my M4 just a seethrough mode on I can quickly come and match this up to any of these views now if I want to load this into my scene all I need to do is go to the texture tab go to image plane go to my custom one View and load image I load in my reference images and then click store view I can also set up this model opacity Slater which will let me have transparent model as well and I can match this up to any of these views in the background or simply do my sculpt keeping these in the background so I have always got a reference now of of these of these images somewhere in the background and at any time we can just clear The View with crln and then load it back up again using the custom one button the all these methods just allow a lot of more flexibility in sculpting in zbrush and using reference images there are many ways to load in images but really at the end of the day you'll figure out your own preferred methods some might like Spotlight or image plane or exclusively using the see-through mode and never touching the grid view or anything autographic this is how the head turned out in the end and reference images were a vital part of the process of bringing realism to this model and I thank you for watching and if you've got any questions about using reference images inside a zbrush just drop us a line and I hope to see you again in the future

Channel: Eat 3D

Views: 264,270

Keywords: tutorial, training, eat3d, Free, zbrush

Id: 2b8pATe5Rp8

Length: 19min 23sec (1163 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 27 2014