Colouring the Character

My next task for this pipeline was to tackle adding colour to my model in order to bring it to life. Within Zbrush, I was a little confused how to apporach this, I would be fine if I were to use substance painter however that won't help my learning and I would have to reduce the quality of my model using decimation master Zplugin which will drastically lower the quality of my finished product. So in order to begin this process, I decided to once again head to youtube in order to see how others have tackled this. The standard process for this is to firstly select a material and set the colour of the material. I can apply that material to select layers of the model and then, using colourisation and polypaint, I can adjust different areas of the colour like I am physically painting on top of the base colour and bring my model to life.

There are 2 main materials I am going to use for my model:

Skin Shade 4 - for the skin, hair, tail and antlers
Basic Material 1 - all clothing and equipment elements
I might still use some others for example I have a metal spear head so use a metallic material would be beneficial here

The process doesn't look too difficult but the people below who have done these tutorials have been doing this kind of work for years and have much better knowledge of the software when compared to me, who is a beginner. I might encounter some problems with my computer due to the large file size and number of polys that my model has.

Sculpting a Creature with ZBrush and Photoshop - Using PolyPaint for the base coat and materialsJoin Rayce Bird for an in-depth discussion in this video, Using PolyPaint for the base coat and materials, part of Sculpting a Creature with ZBrush and Photoshop.

Bird, R. (2015) Sculpting a Creature with ZBrush and Photoshop - Using PolyPaint for the base coat and materials. Available at: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/sculpting-a-creature-with-zbrush-and-photoshop/using-polypaint-for-the-base-coat-and-materials?u=57075897 (accessed on: 15/04/2020)

DannyMac3D. (2018) How to POLY PAINT a Head using Zbrush and Photoshop – Tutorial. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9V1_mN-VbY&feature=emb_logo (accessed on: 15/04/2020)

Follygon. (2019) How to Paint Skin Tutorial. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IlcgeJSNzY&feature=emb_logo (accessed on: 15/04/2020)

Follygon. (2019) How to Hand Paint Eyes In ZBrush. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnTKZCj1Ld8&feature=emb_logo (accessed on: 15/04/2020)

My starting point is to use the skin shade 4 material to apply a base colour to the face, hair, tail and antlers. This is where I stray from my original concept. I decided to change the colours of my model up from my original choices. I will be making the skin lighter instead of a dark orange colour that I originally designed and the hair colour changed from white/grey to pink and the clothing will use a white and black colour scheme for majority of the pieces.

In order to help with the stress the model is placing on my machine, I hid as much as possible that I wasn't working on at the time when applying colours to my model, figuring that would free up some memory space and prevent the model from crashing (which this did).

If I had the time, I would actually go back and rework areas of the hair as close up you can see it's very messy and could definitely do with some work to make the sections of the hair nicer. There are overlapping segments I';m not happy with and the shape is a little weird near the neck area.

For some reason the ears refused to change colour when I changed the material so I fixed this by merging them down into he same layer as the hair and used polypaint to add the base colour to them instead

Once I had added the base colour to the hair, I painted in some darker areas to add some contrast as hair doesn't naturally have just one tone and shade, instead hair has many difficult colours within the base colour.

From the videos above, I was able to learn a fair amount about painting skin, how there are areas where more blood flows through naturally and that the skin will naturally appear more pink in those areas. There are other areas that have slightly more blue tones like the jaw area of the face and the forehead tends to have more yellow tones so I added a hint of these colours into the different areas which really helped create a more realistic face rather than the base colour without any other tonal values.

The eyes were relatively simple too, I adjusted their colour to a base white/grey mix as eyes aren't pure white and then used the polypaint to paint the iris and pupil of the eye. I made sure that the pole of the sphere was facing the front so I knew where the centre of the eyes are.

Once again I used skin shade 4 to create a base colour here except I went for a light white/orange mix, a little similar to bone. I painted in some browns and orange values where there is some indentation to the bone and shading so they had tonal value and weren't purely one colour.

I decided it would be best to apply some base colours to the other areas of the model before I made some more tweaks to all the intricate areas of the model.

Using Basic Material 1 I added base colours to all of the clothing so I could get a feel for how the character would look before moving on to different areas of the model. As you can see, the colours work very well with each other and lend themselves to the stylised look I want to achieve. I feel the contrasting colours help the different areas of the model to stand out for example the white clothing components don't blend in to the model and the black elements. Without them contrasting, the different components might get lost and go unnoticed on the model. I also made sure to pick quite neutral colours as this would allow me to add gold accents that will really stand out on neutral and contrasting colours.

Here you can see the chest area of my characters clothing. I made sure to keep the clothes somewhat simple as I didn't want to go too extravagant and give myself a really complicated task of trying to colour the different areas of the model. By keeping all of the spheres in a separate layer I could easily change the colours of and the materials without affecting any other areas of model. For the spheres I decided to use a different material called jellybean as this has a translucent effect to it which also provides a marble like effect, a bit like a jewel. I then used the basic material 1 to create a base white colour on the costume. Then for the gold accents, I used a mask with lazy mouse on so I could have more precision and by using the mask I could make sure that the gold material would only go on to the areas of the model that it should, it helps me to more accurately paint the clothes. The material I used for the gold trim was the gold material within Zbrush.

I made a simple piece to cover the belt in Maya, to save myself time. I was able to use the mask by peaks and valleys in Zbrush to mask the risen areas of my model. Then I could apply the gold material to the areas shown here quickly and efficiently. For the silver section of the belt, I found it easiest to use a metallic material and the inverse mask of the peaks to apply this material.

It turns out that the original material I had applied to make this section of my model white was actually skin shade 4 and not basic material 1. To fix this I used mask by hue to mask off the areas that area that were white and then I could change the material and colour to a darker white and blended in a few grey areas to where the model would be naturally darker t emphasise the darker areas.

I also wanted to make the texture of the material more like clothes so I used the noise maker to add a little texture to the clothes but I'll go over that a little later on the blog.

The belt could've had a little more texturing to it, I just stuck with the basic material and didn't use the noise maker. I should've found an alpha to give more of a weave pattern on the rope so if I were to remake this I would definitely look into doing that.

I followed a similar pattern when texturing all of the parts of the clothes here. I made sure to add a base basic material 1 and then applied the base colour to the whole object. I also proceeded to add noise to each of the subtools to give them a texture akin to clothing. I feel as though it really adds to the outfit providing the texture since the flat clothing without the noise didn't provide a good finished look for the outfit and looked indistinguishable from some of the skin apart from the colour. I wanted to experiment with some of the other brushes in Zbrush so i used the stitch brush on the shorts to add a little something extra to the costume, not that it will be seen by everyone as the details are tiny. I chose to use desaturated colours for the clothes so they weren't bright and overpowering, drawing attention away from the skin and other areas like the hair that I would prefer to be noticed. Using desaturated colours also help to emphasise the darker areas of the model as I can paint in darker accents that will be amplified by the shadows when I render my model.

Alpha for stylised scales

Tileable Scales Alpha on Cubebrush.coHigh quality Tileable Scales Height Map , great for dragons or snakes skin patterns

NachoR. (2020) Scales Alpha. Available at: https://cubebrush.co/riesconacho/products/579oqa/tileable-scales-alpha?autodownload=true&token=rutcrhn7aFoKRKBTFd-P (accessed on: 17/04/2020)

I added a base layer to the tail that was the same colour of the hair so the two matched and the tail blended in with the model more. I made sure to use the same colour as the skin on the tail since the underside of lizard and reptiles tails are more flesh coloured. I felt as though the flat colours again needed something to help lift them off the model so instead of using noise maker, I decided to take a different approach. I looked for a stylised scales alpha that I could apply to the tail. I chose to use the alpha as a big brush size so the character would have oversized scales that lend themselves to the stylised style I'm going for. I added hints of darker colours to the tail to add some variety to the tail and tonal values here similar to the hair.

I think If I had a little time to make the tail better, I would definitely add the extra section of the tail at the end of it as I had in the concept however that section was a little difficult to make within Zbrush. I would also like to add raised sections down the middle of the top of the tail that I could give a yellow accent to help the tail blend a little more with the gold accents on the clothing. I want the colours to keep everything fitting together.

Alphas could prove to be a very valuable tool for texturing models for future projects and with more practice, I'd like to use them more often. I could've potentially used them for clothing or for hair textures.

Custom Alphas

Antonyj3D. (2016) ZBrush Alpha Series – 01 – Creating Custom Alphas in Photoshop. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwHH1GaMvbo&feature=emb_logo (accessed on: 17/04/2020)

https://www.poliigon.com/texture/graphic-design-simple-tribal-elements-019

I wanted to emblazon my characters cloak with a symbol, as if they belonged to a team or a special soldier of some kind. It would be difficult to accurately paint a high quality symbol with neat lines and that flows along with the shape of the cloak with the polypaint tools in Zbrush. Instead I was aware that I could use alphas to drag and practically print the shape onto the subtool. I had a look in how to create a custom alpha for Zbrush and came across a guide that used photoshop to create a black and white image. I found an image on poliigon that was seen as a tribal tattoo on their website however to me it looks more like an emblem of a knights guild. Using this image I took it into photoshop and followed the guide there on how to make the image ready to be used as an alpha.

By setting the alpha to the brush texture and setting the brush type to drag rect allows to to drag and size the alpha to fit the back of the cape without losing the fine lines of the shape. As the alpha comes in as a mask, it's simple enough to simply just apply the gold material I have used for the other gold tints of the clothes. Now I have a high resolution and clean pattern on the back of my character.

Noise Maker for clothing

Klein, A. (2011) ZBrush 4r2: Using Noise Maker. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wET7Fw0yzWE&feature=emb_logo (accessed on: 18/04/2020)

Saunders, D. (2013) Adding Patterns to Clothing With ZBrush NoiseMaker. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=UcJmr8yJ5B0&feature=emb_logo (accessed on: 18/04/2020)

When it came to adding some textures to the clothes, Zbrush has a handy built in feature called noisemaker. I came across this during my research and found it somewhat difficult to get the results I wanted (especially with my PC behaving very slowly at this point). I didn't know that this tool existed until I looked into creating textures for clothes. using this, I can add some patterns and break up the smooth mesh by adding slight variances in the colour of the material to help break up the mesh and add a fabric like texture.

Cell Shaded Style

Pavlovich, M. (2019) 005 ZBrush Material Cel Shading. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ItJO-_P6xw&feature=emb_logo (accessed on: 20/04/2020)

When it comes to making this project fit the stylised look I wanted to achieve, I actually looked into different ways I could achieve a cell shaded style for my model. Cell shaded styles are used to make the shading on the character appear without a large variety of tones and have flat colours and shadows.

Introduced into Zbrush 2019, you can alter the render properties and render settings to create a posterised effect, where there are limited shades and tones produced in the PBR renders. In order to do so, I'd have to make sure that each material I apply has it's individual render properties edited. I did a few experiments to see how playing with each of the settings mentioned in the video would appear in Zbrush.

I experimented with this before applying materials as I know my PC wouldn't handle the rendering very well at all due to large amount of polys and points in my project. There's a lot of scope for creating different styles that can fit within anime styles and there are a lot of different properties that I can experiment with to create all sorts of different styles just for one model with little to not effort on my part.

I did opt not to use this feature for my renders as I didn't want to lose a lot of the features and tonal values for this project that I obtained from the 3 point lighting set up however I have no doubt I could use this feature for other projects.

Edit the diffuse curve. By dragging a point to the left or right of the graph and off the graph, dragging that point back on to the graph creates these flat lines and steps on the graph. Alternatively, increasing the strength to 1.0 and then increasing the steps will also produce the steps on the curve.

There's an option to increase the outline of the model which produces a darker outline that surrounds the model. This is also quite commonly used in cell shaded art style games and I thought this would be a good fit for my model however the outline is too thick and makes the model look blurred.

I reduced the outline down a little and increased the depth which caused the darker outlines to be reduced. This helped the outlines to blend in with the model a little better however the outlines are still too much for this project, I don't feel like they're that good of a fit for the final renders.

There are also features with the lightbox called RenderSets. By copying our models in the project, I can open a renderset with preset settings and pasting the model in, the settings from the renderset will be applied to the model automatically and would be good for me to experiment with a lot of different styles quickly.

For the spear I used:

basic material 1 for the wooden pole
Gold for the gold trim
A simple metallic material for the spear head and the ring through the centre
jellybean for the orbs on the spear, similar to the clothing
I noticed that there was a bone material within the materials so that was a simple decision to use for the skull.
I used poly paint to add some natural darker areas into the different sections of the spear. Natural variation on the wood and skull would happen through weathering so I added lighter and darker tones to try to emulate that.

Here are 2 basic renders using the basic PBR settings. These don't have lights that I have made however they use the default light set.

The model looks pretty good with the default light set however there are definitely some changes I could make to the lights to show off the different shading and tonal values of my model. When rendering out my model, I need to make sure I add enough lights to highlight all the areas of my model whilst preserving the shading. I also want to make sure I have rim lighting so the model is backlit too.

References