Hey! Long time no read, I know. Been busy with life for a while but I’m happy to say things are good. I feel like it’s a good time to get back to making things and sharing them with you online. Above all, that’s what this post is about, sharing some things about sculpting and making hair with Fibermesh in Zbrush.

I recently posted a couple videos to YouTube for the first time in a long time. Like, a really long time. So to get back Into the swing of things I decided to dive in and make something as a study. This time I chose a smiling girl, which allowed me to focus on sculpting a facial expression and Fibermesh. Fibermesh is the best way to make and style hair in Zbrush which ultimately became a big part of this final image. Check the bottom of this post for a link to download the Fibermesh presets I used along with a few tips that might help you with your own Fibermesh projects.

The above image was composited using several Render passes from Zbrush then edited in Photoshop. More info on that at the end of the second video. Also, I did a few quick hair studies and Fibermesh tests beforehand to get the hang of things and the confidence to play around.

Starting the Sculpt

Being new to this video thing again, things got away from me. So these videos are a lot longer than I expected and I’ll focus on making more bite sized videos in the future but hey, if you’re into sculpting in Zbrush, there’s plenty in here for you.

This time I decided to start from scratch so to block out the basic proportions of the head I started with a sphere using Dynamesh. Started from a sphere and now we’re here! sorry. After the blockout of the bust, I used ZRemesher to get better topology for sculpting with divisions and then worked to refine the forms. I eventually append spheres for Eyes and import the teeth from my previous Frankenstein project to get a head start on her teeth for the smile. After the bulk of the sculpting was completed I used fibermesh to add the hairs for her eyebrows, eyelashes, and hair.

I tried to pack as many useful tips in there as I could thing of, for instance one on Eye orientation that I see as a super common mistake. Trying a new thing where I mix up time-lapse footage and real time stuff. Some peaks at actual sculpting speed for those curious (spoiler alert – it’s slow) so let me know what you think about that.

Finishing with Fibermesh

The final video covers the last bits of sculpting tweaks and the Fibermesh work. Lots of hair in this one because I knew from the start it would be an important part of the final image. Overall, I’m satisfied with how it came out. Two his isn’t a production model or even super finished but for a study I think it was successful. I got some experience sculpting emotion and doing Fibermesh hair work. In total, I think this took around 8 hours spread over a couple days.

Fibermesh Presets & Workflow

The Fibermesh Workflow I demonstrate in the video is pretty simple, which I like. The goal for me is to be able to make and style hair as quickly and intuitively as I can so I can focus more on the look of things and less on technical workflows. To do this, I use the Move Brush, Pinch Brush, Masks, and Polygroups. All of which I use on almost everything I make in Zbrush. The key to using the move brush with Fibermesh is to adjust the Brush settings. All that info is at the beginning of the Second Video Above. The two Settings to change are “Preserve Length” and “Front Collision Tolerance”

Click the button below download my presets I used in the video from my Gumroad page

The presets included are for getting a jump start. One is a starting point for the overall hairstyle and the other is for facial hair, eyebrows, eyelashes, etc. The third preset is used for using Fibermesh with the intent of exporting it out of Zbrush as Curves. Curves can be used in hair sims in other software like XGen in Maya. Maybe more on that in a future video.

Hope this post finds you well and helps you to start using Fibermesh in Zbrush more in your own projects. If you have questions on this or suggestions for future Tutorials please let me know!

Cheers

The post Sculpting with Zbrush & Fibermesh + Presets appeared first on The Art of JHill.

This is my detailed Eye tutorial with lots of images and files. My Eye tutorial video went over well and helped some people, which is awesome, but was much too fast for some. I’ve also had a few comments and messages asking me to go more in depth with some of the process. Beginners find the video too fast to follow, which I can understand. I’ve made this tutorial suitable for beginners and for anyone that would like a more detail. I think there are a couple tricky Zbrush things in here that will hopefully come in handy in other projects you do as well. If you’re new to Zbrush, I think this is a great project to do to learn some things and end up with a finished asset you can use in other projects. I’ve also wanted to give something away to you so I’m including my files for you to download. Use them as reference, a starting point for your own stuff, or whatever just take em!

The first part of any project is to collect good reference for what you’re gonna work on. Get a range of detailed images to give yourself some options and different perspectives. Try and cover your bases so think of as many aspects you’re unclear on as possible. Here’s the Pinterest board of reference I used

We will be making two Models. the Inner Eye model with the iris and pupil and the Outer Eye model with the cornea. Here’s a look at the final models

So first things first. We start with a sphere, which isn’t as straight as it could be. In the tools pane select a sphere and make it a polymesh so we can work with it. After making it a polymesh we are going to rotate it 90 degrees to get the topology flowing forwards which we will use to make the pupil hole and give us a nice edge flow for the shapes we will be making. Before we do anything else, duplicate this so we have the two identical starting spheres to work with. You can Hide one of them so we can focus on one at a time.

with our first sphere we will make the Inner eye model. That will consist of making the pupil hole, defining the iris shape, and giving the model thickness.

First hide the polygons you want to delete to make the pupil hole. You can hide/unhide until you get the size you want. Next you can use the ClipCurve brush to clip the eye from the side to flatten out the iris quickly. Next we will use some tricky shit to give it thickness. This method will work without Zmodeler. First invert the mesh so its inside out, then you’ll use panel loops to extrude it and bevel the edge (check settings below) By inverting it first it extrude inward instead of outward, giving us depth and keeping the size and shape we had. Now lets make a polygroup for the whole eye then one just of the Iris to make our selecting easier. Then by Ctrl+Shift Clicking the Iris we hide the rest. Ctrl Clicking the Canvas masks all visible. Unhide the rest and Ctrl click the ball, blurring your selection so we can get a nice soft concaved Iris (press W and position action line from the side and translate it inward)

Now we can divide up to get more resolution to sculpt the details of the Iris. We’ll create some fibers first which we can blur and add more and more on top giving a layered effect of fibers flowing inward. Activate Radial Symmetry from the Transform Menu. Set your brush up with spray and the lines alpha. now spray some lines flowing inward. Try doing it large then smoothing it a bit and adding more, mess around and see what looks good to you. Then to get the more complicated fibers and folds along the center we can draw out our shape as a mask to inflate and push up. Take your time to mask out a shape you like based on your reference. Keep the brush small to get get a crisp edge toward the center and you can lightly feather and blend out the outer edge with a larger brush size.

Back to the second sphere to make the outer Eye model, or “Cornea.” Now we can quickly make the outer Eye model by inflating the sphere a little, in this case by “5” to get it like an outer shell to the inner Eye model. Then by making a blurred mask the size of our Iris (use transparent view to see both models) we can extend the the cornea out as a smooth convexed dome.

I painted the colors and patterns in Zbrush using polypaint and did some balancing with Photoshop as well as create a mask to make Color Variations. PSD is included in the download. I use Photoshop CC at home because its always up to date and relatively inexpensive. I got the Photography bundle and pay 10$ a month which is worth it to me since I use Photoshop A LOT. Here is an affiliate link for Photoshop CC if you want to check it out for yourself.

Onto the Iris painting, first we lay down a dark blue then lightly we add a lighter blue to the center to get a gradient. Then the same way we sculpted the fibers we are going to add fibrous color variation. Then we can paint some highlights by hand, choose another light blue and start brushing the the edges of things and you can add some lines fading out from the center. We can then pop out some of our detail we sculpted by masking by cavity then lightly brushing a highlighting color over the middle, try inverting the mask or blurring it and painting darker colors. Lastly fix up anything by painting by hand and to finish it up add some brown spots here and there to add some contrast and character.

After the Iris is done the last thing to paint is the blood and veins. This is a pretty quick method to just get some random lines and detail in there. This is a small detail in most characters so don’t get caught up on parts you can’t see or barley see. First we spray a bloody red color all over and fade it up to the Iris. Then drag out some vein stamps to quickly add detail and fill it out. Lastly paint some hero veins by hand. To get a smoother clean line turn on Lazymouse.

Now lets turn our Polypaint into an Image file to use as a texture so we can edit it in Photoshop and apply it in our render program. First we need to create UVs for our model to transfer the color info to. Open UV Master from the plugins menu and with Symmetry on hit Unwrap. Then in the Texture Map pane click “New from Polypaint” under Create. Then to get it over to the texture pan click “Clone Txtr” at the top. Then from the Textures menu we can export.

Baking the Polypaint to a Texture file

I use Keyshot and the Keyshot Bridge to render my eye which makes it super easy but these files can be used in any Raytrace Renderer. To render our eye in any another program we need to export the two models and texture and import them, Keyshot Bridge does this automatically.

Once in Keyshot all we do is choose our environment and drop some materials onto the two models to start with.

The two materials we will start with are Plastic for the inner Eye and Glass for the outer Eye. Apply the Plastic material to the inner Eye and choose the Texture we made for the Diffuse. *In Keyshot Bridge you then need to select UV Coordinates as the Type and 0 out the settings below. The inner Eye doesn’t need to be shiny, my specular is all the way down, the reflection comes from the Outer Eye.

The outer eye model plays two important roles in the appearance of the Eye. It is what is most reflective and wet looking as well as refractive. Refraction is what happens when light moves through transparent things and why things in glass or water appear different. Its also an aspect of the human eye and gives the iris a distinct look from all angles. The “index of Refraction” of glass is around 1.5, it varies from material to material but its what Keyshot’s glass shader defaults to. By googling “refraction index of Cornea” we find that the Human Cornea has an index of about 1.376 which visually makes little difference but makes it so much more fuckin cool.

That’s it! You should now have an Eye model of your own. Remember you can make a variety of eye shapes and colors by modifying this model and method. So save your Eyes to stick in a monster head or something. These are the models I used for Hanza

I hope you found this Tutorial and the Download helpful. If you end up making something with these I’d love to see it, so please share!

SaveSave

The post Make an Eye with Zbrush + Free Model appeared first on The Art of JHill.

I wanted to create a character breakdown of my latest project. This character fan art project was done in my spare time as a way to practice some skills and techniques as well as pay homage to the minimalistic art style of Overwatch. Here are some notes on the creation of her and a few tips I picked up along the way. hopefully you find something useful.

For the full images check the Portfolio

I’d work on this a few hours here and there and some weekends when I could. All told it was probably 4 months start to finish. I didn’t have that much free time to do personal work since I work full time, started a new job, and had a long commute the last couple months (84 miles)

That’s a actually good tip to start out with. Something I learned from Akihito Ikeda when I heard he worked on one of his personal pieces an hour a day for months during a busy schedule and full time job. Even if you think you “don’t have the time.” You can make time. Anyone can spend an hour a day doing anything and eventually those hours add up and you’ll eventually finish. Just keep chipping away.

Here’s a shot of my scene in Zbrush “all low” and a look at the subtools. I like to keep pretty low divisions, it makes everything easier to work with and I knew I’d be posing in Transpose Master at the end.

Wireframe and Lowest division in Zbrush

I got the hair to look the way I wanted by adding a lot of Fibermesh. I created several “clumped” strands and some larger sections to fill it out then some loose/short hairs.
20 subtotals total not including the eyelashes and eyebrows. I created a seperate Fibermesh preset for the hair and for the eyebrows. I even created seperate Keyshot materials for the eyebrows, eyelashes, and hair.

The tattoo was done by first sketching the design onto the model in Zbrush then tracing those guide lines in Photoshop. I built up the elements of the tattoo in photoshop to allow for easy adjustments, layer effects like glow, and adding a tiling scales to the masked areas.

The rope was made entirely in Zbrush. I used Zspheres for the creation and position and noisemaker for the spiraling and detail. The little furs where done with fibermesh.

I whipped up a little info graphic of an extruding process I use a lot. On this project I used it for the dragon logo, patches, tech socks, and leather trim.

Extruding Process

Here is that extruding process used on the dragon logo on the sake bottle

Extruding the Dragon Logo

All of the Rendering was done in Keyshot using the Keyshot Bridge and Photoshop. The Keyshot Bridge allows me to move everything from Zbrush at its highest Sub-Division over to Keyshot without exporting any files. This is great for creating images without the hassle of creating render meshes, displacement maps, or other traditional render time assets for renderers like Vray and Mental Ray. Other benefits of an IRay Renderer or “interactive Retrace Rendering”

First thing is the environment, which is what is lighting the scene. You can have subtools in zbrush that are used as lights in keyshot by applying a light material on them once bridged but my image is all lit with an environment probe. I downloaded the one I used for free using keyshot cloud. The lighting is super important, I don’t need to say that but a program like keyshot really illustrates how lighting can elevate the subject or make it quickly look wack. I always play with the “rotation” of the environment to see what the look is at any position so I can find one that looks best. I like this environment a lot, especially for that studio look I was going for. Pictured here and named 33

I found it easiest to create a new Keyshot material for each element of the character. I created a folder and named every material accordingly. This helped with applying everything from one scene to another (T pose and Posed). It also helps if anything messes up and was my way of saving the material work progress.

Another tip for keyshot materials is with metal. I found the metal materials were too clean and shiny, especially within a clean studio lighting environment without much color and noise to break it up. After doing some research in what others did I decided to make my own. I started with a “anisotropic” material. This allows me to tweak roughness X – Y and specularity independently. Metal material has one value. Since I felt the metal was too clean this shader is about noise and breaking up that reflections and highlights. I made some maps including a bump so the light had all kinds of imperfections to trip up on.
Here’s the metal material settings:

Keyshot Metal Material Settings

Here are the texture maps I made for the Keyshot metal material

The material used for the skin in keyshot is called “translucent.” Some tips I can give are that I’ve dropped the translucency number any time I’ve used it and tiling a micro-bump map helps. I don’t know if the shader just defaults with a high translucency number or its based on size and sculpts that originate in Zbrush are super tiny so you need to drop it. Be careful not to make your model look too translucent. My character is a bit high because of the stylized Overwatch/Pixar look I was going for. Tiling a micro-bump map for the skin helps break up the highlights further, I’ve sculpted some pores but having an overall noise helps the skin look. Here are my settings.

Keyshot Skin Shader Settings

Here are some other various textures created for the project.

Then there is the rendering and compositing. Compositing and post processing/corrections is a big deal. Pretty much every image made with computers goes through a post process and it’s relatively easy to achieve big impactful results.

I rendered two passes, a beauty with everything and an ambient occlusion pass. The ambient occlusion is achieved by assigning a matte white material to everything and selecting the pure white environment. I rendered these passes quite large so I could be free with the different compositions and final format of my images. It took about 5-10 minutes to render the beauty, the occlusion is much quicker. The translucent shader takes longer. In photoshop I added the finishing touches like a focal blur, vignette, and overall value and color improvements.

The focal lens blur effect is achieved by using the lens blur filter in photoshop with a custom mask. Adding little inconsistencies and physical camera effects is a great way to add another level of realism to your images. I mean when it comes to “real” stuff we see in images, its always been shot with a camera, in the real world, and with real light. The more of these things you can convincingly add to your image the more it appears like a real piece of photography. And it looks good! I mean portraits are so improved by focal blur that the iPhone 7 fakes it too ;P

Focal Lens Blur in Photoshop

In other renderers and the full version of keyshot you can render out a Zdepth pass. Zdepth is a black and white image where the closest thing to camera is pure white and the farthest point is black. I haven’t found a good way to do that in bridge. So the Zdepth for this is faked by painting softly and loose inside the masked character. Heres the Zdepth I made and the blur which I think makes things looks a lot nicer and more physical.

painted Zdepth pass

That’s it for this breakdown. I hope you found something to help you in your own creations. It was a long process to get this project finished, especially with all the goings on of life. Remember to keep at it even a little at a time, chip away. About to move in a couple weeks into a new spot much closer to work. Things should be settling down for me soon and I hope to create more art and videos to share. Happy Zbrushing

Peace

The post Hanza Character Breakdown appeared first on The Art of JHill.

Zbrush gets a bad rap for its User Interface and I think that’s due to its overwhelming amount of things you can do and its use of brand spanking new made up terminology. So to a new user it can look a little crazy, but I have something to admit…. I kinda like it. At least I like a specific thing about it, and that’s the customizing. Customizing Zbrush is simple and fast. Open Preferences, click Enable Customize then Hold down Ctrl+Alt and start dragging things around!I’m not one to normally customize software. I just suck it up and get use to it but with Zbrush it can be a time saver and with how easy it is to change, there’s no excuse not to. There is one bad thing about it all and thats keeping straight all the different files it uses and where they go if you want to save or transport your custom interface. It’d be WAY better if it was just one file, but sadly its several and that is what is confusing. I’m gonna try and set that straight.

Here’s what you need to know:
Zbrush is a large collection of files. Brushes, meshes, materials, hotkeys, tools, everything including interfaces and interface colors. All tucked away in their folders inside the main Zbrush folder.
Then there is the Config file. This file is what stores your configuration of everything inside the app. So what we need to do is load up everything we like and customize the interface how we want, save any necessary files then store our config file so the next time we open Zbrush everything is right where we left it.

I’ve placed the files in the same directory structure as they should be in your Zbrush directory.

Once all the files are in place load up Zbrush and load the user interface and the Color file, you can also cycle through these by clicking the buttons in the upper right until they come up (it just cycles through files in that folder) The materials and Hotkeys are already ready to go.

I also reduce the overall button size of my UI to get it even more out of the way and to squash everything in. This is done in the Preferences Menu under Interface. I set mine to 38. The thing to remember about this setting is that it doesn’t take effect until you restart Zbrush so you probably want to make all of the changes you want and then store your config before restarting to take a look at your shiny new setup.

Be sure to save your startup config!

Once you get everything all nice and how you like save the config so Zbrush starts up the way you want. Do that by going Preferences>Store Config or feel like you’re programming the Matrix by pressing Ctrl+Shift+I

That’s it! Let me know how it goes and how you customize your zbrush to work better. I really love how quick and easy it is to rearrange Zbrush and to make hotkeys but it’s a bummer how scattered all the files are and the extra steps you need to take to save it. It’s worth it though because once you understand how to do it, it can make your day to day work more fluid and let you move your setup to another machine.

Happy Zbrushing