ZBrush Quick Tip Series: How to use the Spotlight

okay so just another quick video and this time we're going to go through the spotlight it's just something that i feel that isn't as well utilized insane brush or just not utilize at all sometimes and we're just going to go through that so yeah i have a piece of geometry just subdivided up a few times and i've deleted the the lower subdivisions okay so we're just going to get right into it and go right here to texture and i just want to import a few textures okay i mean it doesn't matter what it is i'm just going to click on this and then click on open and you can import multiple ones so i'm just going to go ahead and click on a few of them and just open multiple okay so i'm going to select one and i'm going to say add to spotlight okay and this is where the magic is okay the add to spotlight button i'm going to scale this down okay then right click and drag this and this just kind of moves it around and you can see as i hover here you got these control points okay or these snap points and if you left click and drag the circle to the middle or any one of these snap points on your image okay these are these on all the images it just snaps okay and then you can uniformly scale that okay you can also go to the edge here okay left click and drag i'm just going to left click and drag that again just to snap it there and now you can scale it from that point not the best um tip but yeah that's something that's there that it might come in handy right and shift z and z are those control shortcuts okay for uh the spotlight if by some chance you don't have those shortcuts or you overwrote it this is what you can do right the button is right here okay so that's going to be your shift z shortcut it's right here okay that's under texture it gets that button right there it's next to the add to spotlight next is your transform button and right here you've got the spotlight okay which is just z okay that's to bring up the spotlight and that's where you find it okay so just in case you overwrote those shortcuts that's where you find them okay but back to what we were doing i just want to go and drag this and you can also drag this on the geometry you can see the geometry has snap points that's going to come in handy a little bit later on what i want to do is show you these functions here opacity okay this is just visually for you as the user okay fade on the other hand that's for the computer so that's fading the actual image so that when you want to apply it it's a faded image okay so next i want to go to texture and add to spotlight add these a few ones here okay just wanna show you what you can do with multiple images okay you can right click and drag and then scale that or you can click on this tile uniform okay i'm just gonna tile it all to one side so it's just all out of the way you can also click on tile selected and that'll take the one you've selected and then the others will just be pushed back there right so the one you've selected will be a larger image okay and that's just another way to organize your images here okay there's quite a few options some of them are quite self-explanatory okay okay you've got these ones here like flip horizontal again pretty self-explanatory and then flip vertical here we've got tile vertical and tile horizontal okay so you can just tile the image as well that's also pretty cool and you can also control z and that'll undo just the spotlight stuff it won't undo anything in your zbrush file okay that's also pretty useful so in case you've done that and again you can tile vertical as well okay and these other functions right here next to these these again pretty self self-explanatory right if you use photoshop you kind of know what that's about okay so i just want to show you another function that we have here and that's the paint function okay that's the one right here not that one this one okay if you just click on that it's now selected you can see that green bar above it okay and if you hold down control and alt and you click and drag it will kind of sort of fade the surrounding areas that you've clicked on okay so if you click on white and ctrl alt click and drag that will do that okay so another thing you can do is just have your color palette at hand and you've got black and white okay so black is the main white as the secondary and if you go back to paint making sure it's selected or activated right you see the green bar right if you just paint with alt okay this will sort of erase your image right if you just paint without alt they'll just paint white or whatever color you have selected rainbow black acts as an alpha and you can erase parts of the image that's kind of useful when you bring an image in and you just need a piece of it and you haven't edited it in photoshop right you can just do that so that's just a quick way to edit your image right in z brush instead of using photoshop okay another thing that i always do is i switch off spotlight projection whenever i bring pictures in i switch off spotlight projection which can be found under brush okay samples right there and then you've got spotlight projection over here so i always switch it off okay so i'm going to go back here and i'm going to switch it on on purpose just to show you what happens if i have any one of my draw brushes so move works but if i use dam standard or clay build up nothing happens if i switch off spotlight projection you can now draw okay what it's trying to do is project the image onto your canvas but you don't have an image there so it's not doing anything so let me show you what that does do okay so if i have spotlight projection on and i just want to up the total points here okay i'm just dynameshing okay so i'm just gonna zoom in here okay i've got spotlight projection on i have an image i've got clay buildup and the intensity is quite low it's about three you can see there okay and i'm just to draw this on okay so i'm just drawing with labeled up and spotlight projection on and as you can see it imprints this like an alpha okay so it makes use of the image and it actually imprints this now i have symmetry on that's why that was on the other side and this is actually pretty cool it's a really quick way to get textures onto your geometry and then you can just do a little bit of clean up here and there this isn't the best way to do it but i'm just showing you that you can use spotlight for this okay another thing that you can do okay i want to have perspective off i had perspective off the whole time but you do want to make sure perspective is off i want to bring in some more textures and these are just some logos that i quickly did in photoshop i have a wrong logo and just the right logo if you will the one in red is correct and the one in black and white is wrong and that's because zbrush doesn't really read black okay it works like an alpha okay so i'm just going to bring the the cursor to the middle there right just snap like i showed you in the beginning okay with the spotlight i'm going to press z to bring our spotlight back and now i can snap this to the geometry right so now it's snapped to the picture in the middle and the geometry in the middle the picture is a little bit off-center that's my fault because i did that in photoshop but you get the just right now we've got spotlight projection projection on i'm gonna press bpa to get the paint brush okay and you can use any color and you can just paint this on press shift z and shift z again just to show you okay and it's painting everything right again it does not paint black and so as long as it's in color it will paint that okay so next i want to go to masking okay i want to go to mask by color and then mask by intensity okay sorry mos by you okay not mass by intensity mask by you and this will get the red unmasked okay and then you can bring out the gizmo by pressing w and then just scaling that okay and now you've got a little bit of a 3d imprint there you can also do this with the wood image that i brought up okay you just have to mask by intensity this one is masked by intensity okay i'm going to go up here to our sub tools i'm going to switch off poly paint so we can see what we're doing when i invert the mask by control clicking and press w to bring up our gizmo and then just scale that out okay just just a little bit not that much there you go just a little bit okay and i'm going to dynamesh just to smooth that out okay and i'm going to smooth it out manually and now you can see again there's another way to bring up details onto your objects okay another thing that you can do i figured while we here might as well do that switch off poly paint okay we have this logo on here you can see it's a little bit jagged i would divide this up until it's like three four million polygons okay i'm gonna press ctrl shift and e and that is gonna bring us a uh a polygroup so i'm just gonna isolate that i'm gonna press delete hidden okay and now we've got these jagged edges again i would use a higher polygon count but that's fine usually sometimes it's you're always lower for the most part so if this happens you can just go to deformation and then polish by features okay you can just click that click and drag that a few times on poly spy features okay you see it does smooth it out not the best job in the world but we're going to fix that in a second okay the polygon count is still high it's not something we want to work with we're going to go to geometry and go all the way down to zero measure okay and i'm gonna click on zero mesh another thing i would correct here is i would remesh at ten thousand polygons and not five thousand okay and i'll give you a smoother result okay and you'll see what we're doing in a second again i'm gonna go back to deformation and smooth by features that looks a lot better okay obviously some of those edges you don't want as rounded we can then go to the z modeler okay and then right click on the polygon make sure we have q mesh and then polygroup all and then click and drag that out okay and now you just created a 3d logo okay of from the word logo right and that's not the best way to do it by the way i wouldn't probably wouldn't use spotlight for that but you can and if you need a quick way just to kind of get an alpha out and then just create a 3d version of it this is a really cool way to do that okay and that's pretty much it for this one i've given you guys quite a bit of tips on this one and some pretty weird tips and i can't wait to see what you guys do with him so i'll see you guys in the next one you

Channel: Thivolan 3D

Views: 1,360

Keywords: Quick Tip, ZBrush, Pixologic, Quick Guide, Tutorial, Spotlight, Remesh

Id: eLx-QnckTtc

Length: 9min 40sec (580 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 07 2021