Visualizing Digital Sculpture

Fatmir Gjevukaj recently posted a series of images at ZBrushCentral used to visualize his digital sculptures in real-world materials such as bronze, wood and marble.

Each image was rendered inside of ZBrush using quad channel materials.

Quad channel materials give you four material channels to mix up different material properties. This give you an incredible amount of control over the look of your final image.

Fatmiri has also included the light setup that he used to render these images. It uses a little bit of ZBrush’s Global Light Mapping properties as well as raycasting shadows for high quality lighting.

Note, when trying these materials and light setup out you can decrease the render time by reducing the number of Rays in the Shadow sub-palette of the Light palette.

You can learn more about Global Light Mapping here

Marble Material

Fatmiri’s marble materials are really powerful. The image to the right is rendered using one of them. These materials work by combining MatCap materials and the basic material. We’ll explore this process more below.

Wood Material

The wood material uses the Gradient 1 utility in the first channel, a matcap material in the second channel, a basic material in the third channel and another matcap material in the fourth channel.

The grain of the wood material comes from the first shader channel called S1. You can blend this effect on or off by adjusting the intensity slider.

The cavity effect comes from the MatCap materials in S2 and S4. By adjusting the Intensity A and B sliders in each channel you can blend the effects of each one.

The basic material settings in S3 are used only to add some illumination to the entire setup. The diffuse slider is set to 6. by increasing this or decreasing it you can add more or less brightness to the material.

Bronze Material

The Rusted Grey Metal material is also a quad channel material. It mixes a basic material in the first channel and three matcap materials in the other 3 channels.

While you do not need to for the majority of Rusted Grey Metal’s effect, you can turn on Best render for some material-based noise effects that can only be seen in Best Render. This material-based noise effect creates an antiqued feel.

To adjust the amount of the effect select S1 in the material palette and dial down the Color Bump slider. It is set at -2.89. At 0 there will be no noise effect.

To increase the size of the noise effect you can increase the Noise Radius slider.

Remember, these material-based noise effects are only available when you press Best in the render palette. If you adjust the setting and it doesn’t change, you can press Render in the Render palette to force it to render.

Download and Install Materials

Click here to download Fatmiri’s materials.

These materials are a great addition to your ZBrush arsenal. Once you have downloaded the file, unzip it to your hard drive. Move the contents of the zip file to the ZStartup/Materials folder in your ZBrush directory and they will load everytime you start ZBrush.

To load the light setup, press Load in the light palette, navigate to your ZStartup/Materials folder and select Fatmiri’s_ZLights.ZLI.

Click here for the ZBrushCentral thread.

Check out Fatmiri’s website here.