Hey , how’s it going? I hope you had a great weekend! I sold my VIVE Pro VR headset and bought an Oculus Quest 2, so I spent most of my Saturday and Sunday setting it up and playing with Gravity Sketch and the public beta of Adobe 3D Modeler... So, very exciting things to show you soon. I also tried the Moss game in VR and it is beautiful!

Anyway, let’s get into today’s email which is full of cool stuff and updates, these are the highlights (warning... long email):

• ZBrush comic shader tweaks!
• We’re getting closer to the WORKSHOP!!! (a few seats left)
• Today’s tip on productivity with ZBrush subtools (dimming, all low visible, visibility groups)
• Brand new video tutorial in collaboration with NVIDIA
• A little update to my ArtStation page ;)

ZBrush comic shader tweaks!

Alright, let’s begin with a little tip I wanted to give you about the ZBrush comic shader I shared last week. This is not today’s tip by the way haha... just something extra I thought would be useful since the material has had such a good response.

Once you load the Material in ZBrush, you can open up the modifiers of the material and update the image used in the shader 3 and 4 to really customise the look of the comic material. For instance, if you replace the image on the MatCap of S3, with something with colour you’d get this:

And because the fourth shader (S4) is a refinement of the outline of the model, you can also replace the image of that MatCap with something that has a coloured outline to get some cool effects around the ‘glassing angles’ of the model:

Just think that the Comic Material I made it’s just a ‘good looking template’ meaning that it already has the structure to look good as a comic shader but I made it as a template so that I can easily modify it and tweak it whenever I need a specific look.

In other words, the comic material is just another asset in my library that can be easily modified... which bring me to my next point... the asset library workshop update hahaha (that was smooth ;D)

A few seats left for the live workshop!

I promised I would let you know how the enrolment for the live workshop was going and we are pretty close to wrapping it up. There are still some spots left but I’d suggest grabbing yours if you are keen to join because they might be gone before my next update hehe.

I just added a couple of things to the program... there are lots of things to cover already but I’m confident that we can properly go over everything I’ve set up for the live sessions. Like the comic material adjusted to work in Blender Eevee with some custom settings:

And I also updated the testing object to display some of the material assets we’ll be working on:

Looking forward to seeing you in the workshop, we're just a couple of weeks away from building a cool library of assets!

Today’s tip on productivity with ZBrush subtools

For today’s tip, I wanted to share something that is not super exciting but I think is one of those features that can really help your workflow and make you more productive over time. I’m talking of course, about dealing with subtools in ZBrush... so here are 2 very handy tips and 1 that I learned recently.

Dimming:

The first one is subtool Dimming and it is a nice segway from the comic material stuff I mentioned earlier to this series of tips.

When you have more than one subtool, ZBrush automatically makes the selected subtool brighter than the other subtools so that you can easily identify the one you are working on. This is especially obvious with the comic material where the selected subtool looks white and the rest are just a light grey colour.

From the Preference palette, you can expand the ‘Edit’ subpalette and change the ‘Inactive subtool Dimming’ slider (think about it as an opacity slider). The default is ‘0.75’ but you can change it to ‘1’ and all subtools will look the same:

This could be useful in this scenario where you have a comic material applied and want to see how everything works together without the need of doing a render.

Obviously, the slider works both ways... if you set it to a lower value like ‘0.4’, the inactive subtools will be a lot darker:

Also since we are in this palette already, try out the ‘Allow click to solo’ switch. If yo unable this switch, you can just click once on the canvas (left click) and ZBrush will go into ‘Solo mode’ with the selected subtool... you can click on the canvas again to bring back the model. Pretty handy stuff...

Visibility Groups:

The next tip has to do with the Visibility Groups... those little switches on top of the subtool list. They are awesome, again... not the most exciting tip, but when you work with a large number of subtools they are great. You can simply click on a Visibility Group (V1, or V2, or V5, etc), toggle everything off (shift + click the visibility icon of the selected subtool) and then toggle the visibility back on for any subtool you want to quickly isolate into the group:

All visible high or low

Now for the third little productivity tip, I chose something that I learned recently... someone asked me during one of the ZBrushLive sessions if there was a way to send specific subtools to the lowest or the highest subdivision levels with one button.

Of course, you have your ‘All high’ and ‘All Low’ buttons in the subtool subpalette, but the question was whether or not you can actually do it on specific subtools. I did a little bit of digging and the answer was pretty simple and it fits really nicely with the previous tip on visibility groups:

Let’s say that I want to view just a set of subtools in the lowest subdivision... in this example, the character and the pebbles, but I don’t want to do it manually and want to keep other subtools in the high subdivision levels.

Fortunately, I spent some time sorting out my visibility groups and I have the character and the pebbles in my ‘V3’ switch, so toggling it on, temporarily hides the rest:

And here is the real tip... once you have isolated the group, you can go to the ZPlugin palette and from the Subtool Master you have two buttons called ‘Low Res vis’ and Hi Res Vis’ which allows you to do just that... sending all the visible tools to the highest or lowest subdivision levels:

that’s it! hopefully, you find these productivity tips useful!

New video tutorial (Part 1)

My third video tutorial in collaboration with NVIDIA is now available (part 1 of 2). The tutorial itself has 4 parts but 1 and 2 are in the first video and 3 and 4 are coming in part 2.

In this tutorial I walk you through the process of sketching, blocking, sculpting, cleaning and detailing the 3D scene for my ‘Duff spirit’ creature:

you can find this video on the NVIDIA STUDIO channel and in my youtube playlist called ‘Other tutorials’ along with the previous clips on this NVIDIA tutorial series: Stylised floating island, Crystal rocks Part 1 and Part 2

A little update to my ArtStation page ;)

In case you missed it, in my previous email, I shared the final image of my Phycodurus concept on my ArtStation page with a few other renders and WIPs. I also decide to update my portfolio banner image to give the Shaman guy some ‘screen time' at the top of the work I have there:

Also, my ‘Duff Spirit’ render from the NVIDIA collaboration is also there with a couple of alternative renders, WIP images and a video from the 3D Scene:

Hope you like this guy!

That’s it for today... pretty long email but I think I covered it all haha. Enjoy the rest of your week!

Cheers,
Pablo M.

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