Hey, what's up guys, Pablo Muñoz here, welcome back to another video tutorial. Today, I'm gonna show you how to render your model inside ZBrush with a single BPR pass and a bunch of filters so that you can enhance the look and feel of that image. Let's go ahead and jump straight into it. Alright, so here we are in ZBrush I'm using my custom UI If you're interested in following along with this tutorial and you want this specific UI I'm going to link to another video where I cover how to customize your UI and you can grab the files for this specific UI as well. But yeah, this is my custom UI and this is a character that I've been working on in the ZBrush live session. So if you're interested in how I've been sculpting and modeling this character, you can watch those ZBrush live sessions but this is the type of image that you can get inside. ZBrush with a single BPR right and I just want to draw your attention to a couple of things. The first one is obviously we have kind of like a nice shadow gradient and that's pretty easy to do, but the first thing that you notice maybe is that there are like different materials maybe around the edges that sort of copper and gold material as well as these clear or clean light metal. and those blending of those materials or the interaction of those two materials for example is happening at render time. There are a bunch of other materials happening at the same time. But the cool thing about this is that it's happening at render time. So as soon as I go ahead and click on the canvas anywhere, I lose that effect. As you can see. This is just a simple MatCap but they don't have any gold or any dust or anything like that because that happens at render time. So I'm going to walk you through how I set that up for a single pass. Let's go ahead and do another render and let's go ahead and open up the filters here on the render palette. This one right here, the BPR filters and you'll see I'm using a bunch of filters in here and if I go ahead and turn off all of them, You'll see that one by one, we start to lose that effect. Right? So the first one is the probably the most prominent one and it's the one that is giving us all those golden bits and pieces. The second one is giving us a bit of the scratching metal as well. The third one is kind of like adding dust. The third one is enhancing kind of like the shadows a little bit or the fourth one sorry. And the 5th one is adding dust as well on the top of like some dirtiness etcetera. Right? So I'm gonna walk you through how I set up these, these filters, I'm going to also share the filter files. So basically the render files you can just click on load and import the CRP file so that you can get these effects obviously is going to look different depending on the materials and the polyp ain't for example that you use but is there in case you want to use it? Alright, so the first thing I want to show you, let's turn off the floor. The first thing I want to show you is that these are just a bunch of MatCaps that you can also get this part of the resources of this tutorial. So if I go ahead and turn off the poly paint of this mesh, right? And make sure that I have wide selected. I can switch to this material which is kind of like a metallic with a rose color in the crevices or this copper or gold material. This is the one that I actually use for those golden beets in the render. This is the clean light metal, another more dull green metal and this other one. So all of these matcaps are customized for the look and feel of this particular project, but in general they're pretty useful to judge the quality of the surface of a hard surface model. Like this one. So all I did really like the first step was to isolate the pieces that I wanted. So let's say this one right here, let's turn this back on, right, isolate those pieces and select the material that I want. I'm just gonna show you with with a random material. Let's say the gold one. Isolate those pieces. So once you have selected the material you can just go to draw. Make sure that M. Is selected not RGB or MRGB unless you have polypaint But I only want to apply the material so the M. Selected. And then you can go to color and click on fill object. I have those two switches and buttons in my UI in here so I can just make sure that the material is enabled, click on fill object and ZBrush will fill the selected sub tool or the visible parts of that sub tool as with this material. Right? So let me undo that because I'm not interested in that. The other thing is that you can select let's say the shoulder pad holding all just to select it. And you'll see this is a single tool or single subtool, Sorry but it has different materials. And the way that you can do that is by using poly groups. So again if you enable poly groups let's turn this off for the time being you can hold control and shift and select let's say the shoulder pads right? And all of these pieces are sharing the same poly group or the same I. D. But you can just isolate them like this right? And like this? And let's say I just want to add gold to this part. Right? So I can click on fill object and bring back the rest and you'll see only those areas of this single sub tools are going to be gold right? They don't do let's undo that. All right. But that's basically what I did. I just selected the different pieces that I wanted and assign different materials and I'm using these materials right here. Now in case you make a mistake and then you assign a material that you don't want and you want to be able to play around and try different materials. You can clear the material by assigning a flat material. So if I go ahead and switch between different materials right now you see nothing is happening because those materials are assigned to all these pieces. So if I select the head for example right? And I go to a flat material which is by default in ZBrush in here. So this flat color right? I can go ahead and fill that object with that material which essentially makes it like shadeless and almost like a silhouette. And then that allows me to go back and test different materials for just the head. Right? So that's how you can erase or clear the material assigned to any piece. So let's go back. I think it was this one and feel object and now we're back to that material being assigned. Alright so we're ready to start setting up these filters inside ZBrush So the first thing I wanna I wanna mention, let's collapse this thing now. The first thing I want to mention is that in order to use the filters, all of these things you need to know which elements or which render passes you're going to use. So in other words let's let's just enable this to give you an example of what I mean. if you pay attention here on the left hand side to all of these sliders or most of these sliders, they are related to the render passes. So you have a mask path, you have a Fresnel pass. Well Fresnel is not really a pass so let's ignore that one. So you have the mask pass, you have the shadow pass, the ambient occlusion, the subsurface scattering, all of that. And those are passes that we need to enable just to show you what I mean. I have enabled all those passes so you have the ambient occlusion here, the shadow depth, all of that. If I go ahead and go to the render properties, this is how you enable those passes. So I just enabled the ambient occlusion. The other ones are set by default so that I can affect the filter from these settings so I know this might sound a little bit confusing but the simplest way to put it or the simplest way to understand this is if I go ahead and render this right now. So hold shift and are just to render or you can just click on the BPR render here, so ZBrush going to render all of the passes that we set up here in these properties. Right? So now we can maybe enable a different a different one just for the sake of demonstration. So I have this this really saturated or saturation filter enable and if I go to the ambient occlusion, I can try to affect this model or this image with the ambient occlusion. So I'm gonna push this all the way to one and you'll see nothing happens and if I put it to minus one, nothing happens. And this is because I disabled purposely I disabled the ambient occlusion pass so nothing is happening. Right? So if I use something else like the mask, which by default when I render ZBrush produces this mask right, I can tell ZBrush Alright, take this saturation filter this F 12 and restricted to only the model. Just by taking that mask to one. So you see now that saturation is happening only on the model and I can do the same thing in the other way around so minus one. I'm basically saturated in the background except the model. Right? So that's how those render passes relates to relate to these filters. Right. Same thing with the shadows because by default ZBrush render a shadow pass, which is this one right here, I can tell ZBrush Hey, in the filters, let's go ahead and restrict this filter to only the areas with shadows with this shadow pass. So now it's kind of hard to see, but let's reduce it a little bit. Yeah, it's a little bit hard to see, but in the shadow areas maybe around here and around there where the shadow is ZBrush is applying this filter with saturation. Alright, so if I turn this on and off, maybe it's a little bit hard to see but it's there, right, you can see probably around this area. Okay, so that's basically the reason why I decided to enable ambient occlusion to be able to play around with this. So let's sit this back to zero. We can reset the filter by clicking on reset filter when I toggle it off because I don't need that one. and let's go back to the render properties, click on ambient occlusion and there are a bunch of other ones that you can use if you want to I think these ones are, you know enough for what we need to create and yeah, that's it. We can just go ahead and do another render and this time ZBrush is going to create the ambient occlusion because we enabled it in the properties and therefore we can we can play around with the, with the filters with the ambient occlusion or with the ambient occlusion in the filters there we go. So here is the ambient occlusion and just for the sake of demo as well, let's just push this saturation all the way and I'm gonna filter it by ambient occlusion, there we go. So you see the ambient occlusion is or the saturation is restricted or limited to that ambient occlusion that I just render because I enabled it. Alright, so that's pretty straightforward. Hopefully that makes sense. I'm gonna reset that filter, let's go ahead and have some fun with the filters. Alright, so the first one, let's go a little bit closer here, let's find a nice camera angle. Maybe lock the camera so they don't accidentally move it around and let's go ahead and hold shift R again to re render Every time that you move the camera and you will have to re render. And again, all of these effects of the filters are happening at render time. Alright, cool, so now I'm gonna enable first one, Right? And the way that you enable filters is by toggling this circle on and off and you'll notice this is the one that is giving us those nice sort of edges. Right? So what I'll do is I'm going to reset all of that all of these filters by going to the filter to the lightbox filter and these are a bunch of settings that you can load at render time. So if you want to make something like a comic style or something like this, right? All of this is happening at render time. So that's those are pretty cool too to play around with. But the one that I'm that I want to show you is this one right here. So this default ZPR if you double click on that is basically going to set all of the filters to the default ones and that's what we want to start clean. So I'm gonna click on the first one and that creates a noise filter. So I'm going to change this to my favorite filter in ZBrush which is the material shading. So I'm going to click on material shading and nothing happens and the reason nothing happens is because material shading uses any material that you want to apply it based on the settings that you set up here. So that's how I achieve those nice golden edges and this is probably the most obvious of the effects and obviously the coolest. So I'm going to click on this texture map right here. This filter texture map and this is just a thumbnail. If I click on that, it allows me to select any material that I want. So I can just for instance select the normal map right? And this is how it looks at render time and I can turn this on and off. And this material shading number is kind of like the influence of that material. So 100% gives you 100% of that material. And obviously this is the normal map that you can get or the normal material and you'll notice that there's some shadows and some ambient occlusion and all of that. You can totally override that. And that is from the modifiers. So we can click on modifiers and we can say, hey, override shadows and ambient occlusion color as well as the mesh color. Right? So that kind of like overrides those those shadows, right? Or we can turn this on and off. And this is just pure ambient occlusion or sorry, pure normal map or normal material. Right? So let's go ahead and click on the gold. Right? So this is something that comes with ZBrush So you should have access to this and again we can play around with applying this material to the shadows. I think that looks a lot better apply this material in the ambient occlusion areas as well. Override any shadow if you wanted to if there's a color for the shadow or the ambient occlusion and override the mesh color. So this one is pretty useful if you already have a poly paint. So I usually just enable this, I tend to add masks and you know, poly paint, but you can try it on and off. You see this. what you can see right now is the poly paint that I have, which is just a mask. Right? So I'm going to override that mesh color. So now we get you know 100% of this gold material. So I'm going to use the copper material that is also provided with the resources and I think it looks better for this for this render which is actually just a hard surface check green. So that's the one that you can use. I just took the color a little bit to make it look more like a corporate material. And yes so we have material shading at at 100 and modifiers, the override mesh and all these two switches enable. So the cool thing about this and the way that you can think about it is that you can do a render and then add render time when you know when the B.P.R. is finished. You can apply a bunch of different materials on top of whatever other material you have. These are the materials that I use to assign to the different tools but then I want to apply this on top. Alright so that's that would be let's say step one of setting up the filters, you decide which materials you want to add. Step two is to decide okay I have the copper or the gold material. where do you want to apply this material on top or how you want to mask it out? The way that I did that image that I showed you at the beginning was using the cavity. Right? And the cavity is awesome for this type of things. So I'm gonna click on cavity and set this to one. Right? And just by doing that, you'll see that we are restricting this material to the cavities, right? You can increase the exponent. So the right hand side, these sliders right here are to exaggerate, you know the ones on the left. So cavity. And then cavity exponents. So I can just push that even further. Right? Let's just set this back to one cavity sense or sensitivity is how it's how much sensitivity ZBrush is using to detect those cavities. So I'm just going to push this further and this is how we can decide. You know, This already looks pretty cool. Right? So let's say five a value of five and cavity to one. This is the effect that we get just by doing this. A couple of values with the cavity and the cavity sensitivity. We can restrict this material, the gold or the copper or whatever you want to use. You can restrict it to those edges. Now, the really cool thing about this is that this is just telling ZBrush how to restrict whatever material you're putting on top in this case, the gold or copper material. Right? So once I have tweaked all of those settings, I can just click on this image, let me just move this, click here and then just try something else. Let's say let's go for that gold that comes with ZBrush and I have a completely different effect. Let's try, I don't know this droplet again, completely different effects. And all of this is just applied to those cavities. So let's go back and let's refine this a little bit more. So on top of the cavity, you can use this edge detect that automatically detects the edges and kind of like modulates the strength Based on on the edges of the of the match. So let's push this 2.3 and it's too much. Let's go to minus. It's gonna be pretty hard. Let's go for .1. It's too strong because the cavity and the sensitivity is set to high. But if in case you're not getting this type of effect, you can play around with this edge detect to enhance it. Another thing you can do is to increase the mask border. So you can decrease it or increase it and that basically changes the mask of that material. So meaning let's say try to find an area, maybe pay attention to this area right here. Okay, so you have this golden edge or the material edge around there, right? So that's where the cavity is kind of like limiting the material. But then with the mask border, you can basically push that inwards or outwards, depending on what values do you use. Okay, so hopefully that's going to be visible in this area. So I'm gonna take the mask boarder, I'm gonna go for three and you see it's kind of like increasing the reach of that of that border. If you go with, if you go with numbers that are too high, you start to see these artifacts. So I don't play around with these values too much. Just go with one or two. Maybe minus. So minus is if you want to restrict it even more. Right? So let's go for -1 and let's click on and off to test the difference. Maybe we can push it even further, so -2. All right, So you get I think -1 is fine, right? And then on top of that you can blur that. So if you increase the blurriness of that mask border, it's kind of like giving a it's it's similar to blending the material from the render properties, So it's similar to this thing in case you don't know about it. This thing right here, the material blending radius and that is pretty useful if you actually paint with material, but I prefer to do it these at render times is like nondestructive, So that's what this blurriness does. Let's just leave it at zero and let's say that this is our first filter done right now, The cool thing about this and You'll see that the rest of this process is pretty repetitive, so there's no need to cover anything else. But if I go ahead and enable another filter, let's turn this on. I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to select a material shading, I'm going to set it to 100% of material shading or the influence of that material and I'm going to use let's use the this one, right? This other material which is very similar to the other ones I have. In fact, let's just do something different so that you can see the difference in the reflected one. So this red material and again, this is a good workflow tips. You can select a very bright or very distinctive material different from what you have applied before. And and that way you can very clearly see how it is being mixed with the rest and then you can change it right? That's what I love about this nondestructive workflow. So yeah, so let's go ahead and set this, detect edges. Maybe minus sometimes it's just a matter of playing around with this play with the different values and see what they give you. I'm gonna increase the sensitivity of the edge. There we go. Right, So any of these red areas, that's what I'm going to apply the material or what the material is being applied and we can restrict it to, let's say the fresnel effect a little bit. So I'm going to combine this edge detection of all these kind of like crevices and little dots, some bits and pieces. I'm going to combine these with fresnel so I'm going to push the fresnel effect so that all this material is not only being detected or is being added to the edges, but it's also being pushed towards the edges so I can exaggerate that and you'll see it is around the edges of the volume of the surfaces, but it's also restricted by the edge detection. Okay, so let's just bring it down a bit and then let's change the material and this is how I created the kind of like the dust and all the stuff. Let's just create, click on. I think this, this one, let's try a few different ones. This one is not bad. And so as you can see, I'm just going for like something similar, but it's not the same thing. I like to play around with these different material shadings just to get the look that I want and I think this looks pretty decent. What I'll do is also go to modifiers and make sure that I'm overriding the mesh color, something like that. So now we have these two passes one with gold and another one is kind of like a dust, subtle dust on the top and that's how you can start building materials on top of each other. So let's do one more just for the sake of demo same thing. I'm going to go material shading this time. I'm going to select a let's go for gold right all the way and I'm going to override the mesh color and I'm going to set this to cavity, but this time I'm going to go for minus one, increased the sensitivity, the cavity and also the radius a little, not bit too much. And now let's see if detect. Just helps us restrict that even further, nah, it's not gonna yeah, something like this, but it's just at zero it's better. So if I if you use cavity that probably edge detectives just not gonna do anything because it's overriding it. But I think this one looks alright, right? but it's kind of like overriding the other color that we have with the other gold. So maybe the inverted option. Like I said, there's a lot of back and forth at this point. I'm just going for kind of like a new style, not what I had at the beginning. Just want to show you some of the properties anyway, so let's say that this one you're happy with this for whatever reason, let's change the material to reflect for example, so it's more reflective and restricted to these areas. We can also change the border a little bit and blur it, right? And not only you have access to these different settings, you can also change the blending or the type of blending between these materials and the rest. So we have these very reflective material that is being restricted to these areas from these settings right here, then we can also go to the blending mode and change that to let's say screen, right? And that gives us, you know, it overlaps that material on top of the other ones. and then we can obviously change the influence of that material. We can also try something like overlay. Right, That's obviously a lot darker. I think screen works well for this one and we can just play with with the shading. So let's go ahead and turn this on and off and you see it's pretty it's pretty decent the effect. I can also restrict it so that I don't have these materials in the shadows. So in the shadow, I'm gonna go for minus one As you can see. So now it's not being applied in the shadows and you can do the same thing with the ambient occlusion so -1. So there's no reflection in those areas which you know, it's gonna be pretty hard to see anyway, so I'm gonna turn this on and off. And this is looking pretty good. You also have the colors if you want to modify those as well. So this this black color and and or back color and front color are basically kind of like a gradient between this and this. So if I just said it to read, you'll see where this is being applied and the green one is not visible, so you can just switch from one to the other like, so, so yeah, for this one I will just set it to black and then the white one is going to give you a full effect of that material. Alright, so that's pretty cool, we have these three materials kind of like changing the look and feel of this image already. and just to wrap it up, I'm gonna show you a couple more things so I'm gonna click on this new filter and the other filters that I like to use are kind of like to relight that image and you can do that at render time. So the first thing I want to do is apply the radial overlay. So this radial overlay is not gonna look great because we don't have the floor enable, so in fact, let's just move out a little bit enable the floor like this and let's go ahead and render again. So this four filter of the radial overlay what it does is essentially creates that the nice fade around around the character and you give it's kind of like a spotlight from the top. So let's go ahead and click on modifiers and you can apply it to the floor or not, which is essentially applying it to the entire background and in the modifiers you can change the Falloff. So the Falloff is just going to make it even closer to like if you imagine this being a spotlight, so it's going to restrict the intensity of that spotlight from the top or increase that a little bit more. So it's making it more visible. So it's like a simple and effective way of presenting a character for example, like that. So look at the massive difference that this filter does And the other one for relighting that I quite like. Or another idea that you can use these filters for. Let's enable the F5 and select something like intensity and intensity All the way to. Maybe not intensity. Let's go for a different one. Let's go for Orton and set this to one, ah 100. So, this filter is kind of like writing things up all the way. So the first thing I want to do with this is restricted to only the character. So I'm gonna use the mask. Set it to one and that way we're not affecting the other filter. This one because this Orton is only applied to the character using the mask. All right then, instead of using these filters to, you know, to play around with the with how it's being applied to the to the entire character. I'm going to use these normal and this is basically using the normal or the normals of the model at render time and You can change the direction of the normal from here. So if I go ahead and click on normal to 1 now it's being applied kind of like directly to the model is kind of like a like a torch from the camera to the model. But if I click on this and move it around, I can say all right, let's push it to the top. You'll see now this is being applied at the top. So it's kind of like a light coming from the top, right? Ah And I can do the same thing. You know, maybe let's exaggerate with the exponents so that you can see I'm going to do it from the right hand side. So now the light is coming from here on the left and we don't have to wait to re render any of that. We don't have to play for additional with additional lights. Everything happens at render time. That's why I like this non destructive workflow and I can turn it on and off just so you can see it's a light coming from the left and if you want to, You know, continue exploring this, you can do something like paint. So let's use the paint very simple paint and I'm gonna set it to a red color just so that you can see a very evident effect. I want to restrict it to the mask again. So just this, I want to set the blending mode actually before I do the blending mode let's do the normal so that you can see. So one a value of one is giving us 100% of that normal from this angle. Maybe we can increase that exponents so that you can see what it's doing and then I'm gonna take this and push it towards the top. Right? So that's how you can relight quickly a model like this. Also I don't want this color, this red color affecting areas that should have shadows. So again I'm going to remove the shadows by taking the shadow to -1, you see what is happening, It's pretty subtle but it is there that the same thing with you know collusion, I'm going to remove the you know collusion so that red is not in the shadows or the you know collusion. And then we can take the blending mode and set it to, let's go for a screen or add if you want something very intense like so and that basically helps you to relight or to change the look and feel of that image with a single Well with a bunch of filters but this one is the one that is currently giving you that red light. Now the cool thing again, like I mentioned with the first one or the first two material shading is that once you have set up the settings of how that filter is affecting the image or affecting the model you can go ahead and change things like the color. So you can go and say okay this is better if you know but if I go for a I don't know like a blue or orange warm tone like that so that looks better and then you know, continue kind of replicating the same process that I've been showing you with other filters. And what's cool about this is that we can save those so if you're happy with this type of thing again, all of this happens at render time so you can go ahead and save these filters and next time that you open zippers you won't have them but you can import them. And that way you can render anything with this set of filters. So let's just give it another try. So from this angle right let's go ahead and render again and there we go. that pretty much it. So hopefully you have found this tutorial useful. Like I said I'm going to provide the resources so you can load actually let me just do that. I'm going to load the render settings because my render settings include things like the shadow properties and all of that. So I'm gonna click on load, I'm gonna select the render preset that I'm going to share in the resources. Open that one up and automatically ZBrush is going to re render whatever we have in here with the new filters or with the new sets, the new set of filters. There we go. let's go ahead and go to filters. The only one that I didn't enable in that set of filters is let me just do it really quickly. The radial overlay Bad, that's pretty much it. Right. So we have all those nice blending of the materials with different filters and you can just go ahead and go one by one, turn them on and off and see what they do and just continue exploring. You can just take, let's say the gold one and you know, change the cavity detection. You want something more like a something more like this. there's a lot of, you know, I can waste a lot of time just playing around with these values at render time. But yeah, hopefully this has been of help let me know if you have any questions in the comments and I will see you next time, cheers.
