What Most ZBrush Sculptors Get Wrong - Mid Frequency

hey guys anyone from flipped normals and in today's video we are gonna be talking about mid frequency so this is something that we covered in a live talk that we had a few months back we actually recorded it for everyone but all the references and everything kind of messed up so we couldn't we actually couldn't use that footage so say thank you to some of these parts we've also covered in the observation video but this is more specific to mid frequency detail and mid frequency is also something that we've talked about when we've been teaching and I think it's like it's an overarching topic that we keep coming back to just because it's so important especially in the beginning stages of starting when you're doing art if it's painting or sculpting or whatever it is it's very easy to be distracted by details because details are what we sort of notice first but with mid frequency it can be a little harder to decipher what actually what is mid frequency so sometimes people tend to skip over that stage especially if you're just starting out with art and it's something that you can create a bad habit of doing so like you can continue doing it for many many years and when it comes down to it the mid frequency is really what makes or breaks in this case your sculpt yeah people tend to first off just doing the baton the basic anatomy you know they're doing the main shapes the muscles and then they go straight into pores when a reality there's so much variation between these two like subtle changes in planes little fatty pads just really a lot of shapes so the reason we're showing these sculptures first of they're just absolutely gorgeous sculptures but it was part of us but they they don't have any high frequency like there is there is specificity in them like if you look at this beard it's beautifully sculpted yeah but just by definition in the medium you can't have the high frequency because I mean good luck getting pores into the stone and all that yeah you use can't so what they're doing here is just really focusing on like low and mid frequency which is you know you still have the you still have veins you still have hair but there is nothing when it comes to you like the really high frequency off and these sculptures are infant they're fantastic I mean the closest we get to high frequency here would be you have something in the beard his pubes as a little fold here Proserpina and then you know maybe some veins that could be kind of an indication of higher res detail but everything else is just low and mid frequency you know it's so beautiful and if you were to slap a texture on top of this like if you have this in 3d you know the texturing would be free yeah it's just because the underlying forms are are so well defined not in terms of definition but they're they're thought out there's there's a sort of like there's a lot of thought behind it where is it how does it interact with all the other forms that just means that whenever you're gonna proceed into texturing any sort of tile a bowl or detailed pour map whatever you're putting on top is gonna everything is just gonna look right yeah people want a texture did him to put way too much modeling into the texturing in reality or for optimal results you should just put as much into modeling as you possibly can if you have if you know if you have stuff like veins and all I don't do that as a texture I don't make that a brighter color because the veins by himself wouldn't be brighter they would just stand out more so they might have more highlights in them I see this as one of the main issues people have when they started texturing the under model it and now we have two over texture it will show you some specific samples in a bit again there is just nothing you see like some stuff some wrinkles on their fingers and on the toes and you see some fur and all that yeah well that's just descriptive they're just hints can't express how important it is to not go crazy if it's good enough for for these guys then it's good enough for you believe me knew what he was doing you know so I think these classical sculpture is a really a perfect example of how to do mid-frequency because you know you have something like this for the nails okay bear we're getting into some nice high detail stuff but even here with the knuckles this is just a slight indication of wrinkling linkage on the knuckles right but everything else just supports that so having that there now it's sort of like it becomes a focal point because the mid frequency of the other parts of the knuckles and the wrists just sort of like it creates some nice contrast whereas if you're just detailing the living house something you've really hard for your eye to sort of find rest and figure out where to actually look so it serves multiple purposes but also it's I think sometimes high frequency is a way for people to try and hide they're a bad sculptor yeah if maybe it's they don't possess the skills yet or maybe they're just blind to it I've seen that multiple times where people don't know that they're missing them in frequency you know they look at it they ask for feedback like I you know I've been doing this I'm looking at my reference and I've made what's in my reference I can't tell what's wrong the problem is people don't actually look what's in their reference this is back to the observation video where sometimes when there's a lot of detail in a reference picture it can be really hard to discern what is what is the mid frequency what is the high and low frequency yeah whenever I've ever been teaching sculpting that seems to be one thing absolute key issues in sculpting I mean once you get above a certain level of you can operate ZBrush and and all that is is that people they're missing a whole frequency for it yeah looking at sculpt something isn't right yeah you're missing you're missing a whole frequency you can't just you can't just take over take that away like a low frequency is easy yes because low frequency is basically the majority of what defines the silhouette in your with a character or creature it's something that everyone can understand whether you can make a good silard or not that's a different question but most people they get the low frequency because it's so fundamental and then they think that you mid frequency but that's that might still be part of the low frequency and then they jump directly to high frequency afterwards this is also easy to understand you're looking at a sec surrender of something in this act all these like XY sea surface mimic maps and you get it you know you just get that of course that looks super crisp but how do you explain what's in the middle yeah I must look realistic because he has a lot of pores yeah and scars yeah not because his muscles are defined and no Anatomy is it's good and it is important to have that as well if you're going for realism you need that frequency all frequency we can't say that one is more important than the other but if it comes to you have let's say you have you're missing all this mid frequency low frequency and and you go straight for pores the moment you zoom out of the face and you know you have a you have a long shot or something a medium shot even you can't even see it you can maybe see some subtle breakup or something maybe the spec looks a bit more interesting but basically you you will not be able to see anything at all yeah so you're starting off with you know make sure the long shots are working the medium shots and then close-ups if if you if you do close-up if you only focus on the high frequency close-up is gonna work but nothing else yeah if you focus on that then the super close-up like the close-up around the mouth it's gonna look beautiful with some depth of field and color grading is gonna look super tight but a regular medium shot is gonna look is boring yeah and miss miss old interest yeah it's and I think mid frequency is one of those I would say sorry but almost say that it's the hardest like okay so I'm making a good silhouette is obviously super hard yeah but if you were let's say you're working off on a scan or you have like other scan reference then getting the ciliary down can be pretty straightforward but then filling in the rest obviously if you have a scan just project but if you're sculpting from scratch there then filling in the mid frequency could be really hard because you need I mean you need to practice it you need to figure out when do I transition from low to mid and when does this not make sense to make in my mid frequency anymore and when do I need to transition into high because I would say this like it's not just black and white when it's low mid and high there's definitely some levels in between mid and high as well because you like high res detail you think about pores but you can you can have lower high-res details that aren't quite mid-frequency either that's sort of in-between so maybe a small pimple or something yeah yeah you know and then there's certain types of wrinkles that that don't really affect the silhouette that much but a little bit okay they could also be high-res high-frequency so it could definitely be very tricky yeah but I think that all that just comes with more experience and sculpting but first of all being aware of it because like I said I've seen people that have sculpted for years but are still neglecting mid-frequency and that's not because they're bad sculpting that's just that was something that they maybe never observed they were never told and then you continue that bad habit of just too early going into high-frequency detail and not understanding why your sculpt doesn't look as good as it could so we've had this example before our little penis Turtles slightly phallic torus so this is just an example of trying to disguise the detail levels right when you look at it it can be really hard when you just find a picture like this so we came up with a super ghetto well we just take it into Photoshop color grid it's black and white and then blur blurred yeah so basically up to this point for your Oscar guys so what the hell is mid frequency but focus is basically what we're seeing in this picture high frequency is in the color one where you know we have everything you have all the fine frequency you have all the subtleties of the breakup and all that kind of stuff but you aren't going to see that if you blur it meaning if you are further away than one meter yeah you aren't going to see this at all on the creature which means they're not that important time you see it it'll like the little ridges on on each little scale all the little variation yeah look at all this Dameon standard exactly like this stuff here all the individual like this basically a bump map here you know just like a little bit there you know don't do this in sculpting just apply a bump map yeah do tamari tiny little teeth I never noted that observation there you know so and these are important it's really important to get this in we're not saying you shouldn't do and we don't have a fanboys but it comes to frequency ever but it's more that you got a dis dude in the different in different levels so in different steps so if you go to the next picture then we can only see then we can see what's there when it comes to if you take away all the old frequency if you take away all the really fine stuff so if you were to sculpt this and you're not a more veteran sculpt you fairly new to sculpting and if you look at the color one it's impossible to start sculpting there's too much stuff you blur it now you can't you can't sculpt them because they don't exist take a look at this you have this skin fold right here which is kind of easy to miss if you're looking at it in the detail view but as soon as you blur it and make it black and white tonight I mean the black and white thing is just to help your eyes not be distracted we now you just see how how dominant that is there have the wrinkles that go around here it's little sack something there there's no flesh the sack of flesh all of this would be mid frequency because it deforms the silhouette and the surface so much it's quite deep actually no but all this little stuff maybe you know this one could be reserved for a little later in the mid frequency sculpt and then all of these ones definitely high frequency you can see this is this is what they do to the surface no point in sculpting all these little tiny bumps there at least not early on if you only there is an argument if you want to sculpt everything serious because you're crazy person I mean regardless on how you do it the girls how you do it it's just don't do it early on don't add any of that until you sculpt this and want one thing you can do is well you can sculpt it from you can sculpt them in different with different blurmeh or yeah blurred is from different blur months so risky blur it but like 50 pixels and then use Coleman sculpt that then you take the original blur for 30 pixels sculpt that too to the point where you know you blurred by nothing and then you have all of it I think that's actually a really good way of doing it cuz then you you don't have to counter your stupid brain no by trying to take in everything once then you you can't the interesting thing is like when you zoom in like this everything that was the eye before you know all the little Damien standard niceties they have disappeared yeah all you can make out now is that okay there's a shape that goes around there the eye and it's a shape right but I they're you know fold there there's fold there and then there's like a fold there as soon as you zoom out you start to get more of a picture and if you sort of like lean back and you go further away from the screen because I can't actually zoom out more you would be able to sort of like you kind of see more detail then you go back to the color one you're like oh okay there's so much detail and now we're back to all these little little bumps and stuff which could just be one sausage shape to begin with so that's the power of mid-frequency mm-hmm it's it's so important and then we have a more specific example as well this is from one of her students were in Denmark Alaska fantastic miss Jen really good sculpture and this is this is took his model into Mari and with all his all is nice sculpted mid frequency and then I just applied a single bump map on Ted which is titled yeah and obviously needs balancing and all that kind of stuff and maybe it's too big or too small or whatever but at least you know it looks it looks ok and then we go to the one with no mid-frequency yeah here we just smooth out all its mid-frequency and just took it away and now you can see it starts to look very tiled particularly in a very flat areas it just like on a sphere screen right it looks just so tile yeah if you look right here and we go between you definitely see the tile pattern as soon as you go in here yeah you can you can kind of see that there's some tiling going on but it's a different world so whenever I've been texturing this is what I was talking with before if you're texturing this this is easy to texture here you can do a lot of stuff with tiles so you can you can slap them on top and you're you're done oh there's more stuff to do but you know you still get a really good frequency and you can do a lot of stuff with tiles but if you had the other one which is just flat I mean good luck texturing this this is in order to texture this successfully if if there is no displacement or anything then you're gonna have to add so much into the color map you can have to add so many shadows and like highlights and shadows and everything into it which is gonna break every kind of physicality in any shader and it's just gonna knock them not gonna look very good it might be one of those things where we I feel like we've had this a lot with our videos we people they watch the video and then go like well da yeah of course you're not gonna not sculpt this I can see the wrinkles yeah but trust us yeah this is what it's like a hundred percent of the time especially when we go out to teach this is what people are missing yeah every single time yeah it sounds obvious once you start talking about it because now all of a sudden your eyes like been opened it's like if you don't know the word for orange you're never gonna you know identify an orange yeah everyone tells you what an orange is now you're gonna start looking for oranges everyone see oranges all right okay so it's the same thing with mid-frequency you're gonna go out in the street now I'm just gonna stare at people huh okay what's the mid-frequency gonna love looking at old people we have this as well with particularly when it comes to sculpting when I had this recently where I was talking to somebody who would she was she been starting to get more into sculpting and suddenly it was like holy the muscles are deforming the body so much yeah yeah I know but I didn't understand yeah but I told you like five months ago yeah but I didn't get it but and that's tough because of because you're not a good artist or whatever it's just because you don't notice it yeah we start off by saying that arts first you start off with a skeleton and then you have muscles which deforms it but and they were like yeah I know honey shut up yeah this is so basic but then you wouldn't they forget when they start the next guy yeah then they start sculpting like yeah you got it first but skeleton then your muscle and you're like oh my god I'm so stupid but that's what you meant it weren't just words okay exactly they're like of course I know the skeleton is under the muscles but you didn't did you yeah and the same thing with mid-frequency now you gonna go back in and if you would feed like your stuff be like oh my god we have another example here of spot the tiles mmm AHA and actually had to look at this ourselves for a little bit so if you look right here right there that's when it starts to you see a seam there this seam right there it's all the way up across which is a lot easier to spot yeah it's a little bit easier to spot here but we're also very close that's another thing that the mid-frequency can help you sort of hide just because there's a lot of undulation and a lot more variation in the surface obviously most your map should probably be real tile herbals and really good for tiling but it's just an example of what else mid-frequency can help you do especially when you move into texturing we were always asked us so do you how do you fix seams issues in production and we just like to argue like you hide it in motion blur or you just you just have so much on top of it yeah comments like that as well for like displacement so what do you what do you do about displacement seams yeah we have displacement seams yeah yeah I definitely don't look at close-up shots for Pacific - is there no displacement seams there absolutely none maybe a few interesting that you don't notice as soon as you you have a good title on top you have the mid frequency you add a little bit of highest high frequency spice on top now the the seams kind of disappear yeah and you look at add some top laners and which aren't which will be but definitional have seams yeah it's so important if you go to the next picture as well we have some were just showing like you know just how shitty the map actually is this is how it looks pretty decent here yeah in this book this looks fine this is a different map so here it looks good here looks terrible you see the time yeah you really see the tiling but in it just looks it looks fine and if you could but then you seeing like absolute the monstrosity of this map I mean it's a good map my new it's just the problem here so that is tiled to death yeah if I were to do this for actual production offer my own textures I would I wouldn't do it this extreme I would I would use a few few different ones maybe I would I could even take the same map rotate around and mask it out a few different places yeah and that would work well but I mean even just because of the mid frequency it just it just kind of works and this is also I mean this is like a little tangent this is why you don't sculpt everything by hand in zebra yes some people do that yeah some Seerat carboys they really go ham on it tried to sculpt all this in ZBrush at first of you need 600 million Polly's but let's say you could and you had the two years it took but now you're like oh everything is too small you're like oh man I don't want to hear anything about hdgo me know in in Mari or paint or whatever use if you do this in texturing doesn't really matter yeah then you can just change the scale of it and then you know you just have you just have all this nice frequency here these maps can be found on text from X or C or service mimic this is this map I believe is from service mimic and they just there's adding so much to it but as you can see the magic isn't just in the map itself this is the high frequency but without a high frequency I always serve without the mid frequency then you have nothing that really just like there's no point yeah it's not yeah you're gonna struggle so much and you have to sort of counteract the lack of work in texturing map that and you might as well give up I mean there's no reason to do it yeah so first beam just these two pictures is purely mid frequency we smooth out everything else high the high frequency is exactly the same the low frequency exactly the same but now you know yeah now you know the magic of sculpting yeah yeah I think that just about covers everything mid frequency well maybe yeah you can talk about this for so long yeah we can show it selves in four hours yeah really no reason I think the most important thing is like back to the observation video is now you start to go out and you start to observe you look at maybe go back to some of your previous sculpts previous paintings whatever it is and see if there's mid frequency missing and working you what can you refine that and also check out our observation videos as well yes you you probably need to yeah we have I think we have two of those now yeah talking about different kinds of observation so yeah I think that mark covers it so if you want to see more content like this in the future make sure to LIKE comment and subscribe and hit the notification button the little bell because YouTube is it's being very hard to work with yes so some people aren't getting notified so make sure to hit that little Bell button as well yeah you

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 31,119

Keywords: 3d, sculpting, zbrush, concept, maya, tutorial, autodesk, film, vfx, animation, flippednormals, henning sanden, morten jaeger, creature, character, texturing, substance painter, substance designer, education, foundry, pixologic, nuke, art, fundamentals, art fundamentals, art school, art tutorials, blender, flipped normals, 3d tutorial, learning 3d, learning ZBrush, 3ds max, cubebrush, cube brush, gumroad, marvelous designer, photoshop, mari, blender guru

Id: VKstQNoI2w0

Length: 22min 23sec (1343 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 20 2018