Material Palette
From ZBrush Info
Note: The image of the Material Palette to the right was chosen with a selected material that has a fairly small number of modifiers. Some materials will have fewer, and other materials may have more.
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General Controls
General controls are those that appear in the palette no matter which material is selected.
Show Used: Remove all thumbnails from the main palette except for those currently used on surfaces in the document. (All materials will still be accesible through the popup inventory list.) This is a convenient way to determine whether you've used a particular material.
Load: Load a new material from a disk file into the active material slot. A number of material files are included with ZBrush (located in the ZMaterials folder), and you can create and save your own with the Save function.
Note: Loading a material from disk completely replaces the active material, not only in the palette but on any pixols or models that use that material. If you haven't saved the material, you can get it back by quitting and restarting ZBrush.
Save: Store the active material to disk in the ZMaterial (.zmt) format. This material can be reloaded using the Load button.
R: Reduces the number of small thumbnails shown in the palette; use it if your palette is getting unwieldy due to the number of thumbnails. This does not affect the popup (full) inventory of materials.
CopyMat/PasteMat: Allows you to copy one material and paste it in to replace another. You can do this if you want to change the replaced material wherever that material is used in the scene. It's also useful for getting a copy of a starting material, so you can modify the copy but not affect the original.
The following controls appear at the end of the the Material palette. Depending on the selected material, not all of them may be present.
Dif/Spec/Ambi/Cavi: These color pickers choose the colors that affect rendering when the various ambient, specular, diffuse, and cavity colorization modifiers are nonzero.
Material Texture/Surface Bump: These two thumbnails, to the left of the Render and Cursor buttons, allow you to choose a texture that will be used in certain modifiers (an environment map for those effects that use an environment, such as reflectivity is the most common use) and an alpha that will be used with the Canvas Bump modifier.
Render/Cursor: Both of these perform a Best Render on the scene, allowing you to see those effects which do not show up at other render levels. Render will render the entire scene. With Cursor, you click on the Cursor button, and drag to a point in the scene; a 128x128 pixol area around that point will be rendered. This can be much faster than a full render.
CopySH/PasteSH: These allow you to make a copy of a single shader channel (S1, S2, S3, or S4), and paste that into another shader channel‚ either in the same or a different material. You cannot paste into a nonactive channel, but by copying and pasting a material with all four channels active, and then pasting into the copy, you can create any combination of shader channels you like.
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Shaders
S1/S2/S3/S4: Up to four shader channels that go into defining the look of a material. The settings of the shader channels are combined sequentially to produce the final effect of the material. Each channel may have a different group of settings.
For example, in the Dots0metal1 material, the first shader, S1, lets you specify a dot pattern, which the {{Ctl|Color Bump|| control in S2 can then act upon.
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A number of materials in ZBrush use one or more special shaders in addition to the basic shaders. In general, these are found in the lower-numbered shader slots (S1, and possibly S2 and S3). In most cases, their functionality is self-evident.
For example, the GradientSky shader, shown in the following illustrations, lets the material simulate a reflected sky gradient and ground plane. The HorizonSharpness setting appears only in the rendered image.
Gradient Sky settings.
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Material Modifiers
Each shader channel in a material has a collection of material properties, which are typically sliders, colors, or textures. The properties in a shader define the effect that shader has on the overall material.
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Basic Properties
Modifiers:Ambient: Ambient controls the intensity of ambient lighting, which will brighten or darken the model as a whole.
Modifiers:Diffuse: Diffuse sets the intensity of diffuse lighting. Diffuse lighting comes from one or more light sources, and illuminates surfaces to a lesser or greater amount, depending on how much the surface is facing away from, or facing towards, the light source. Diffuse effectively makes all light sources dimmer or brighter, when calculating diffuse lighting.
Modifiers:Colorize Diffuse: Normally, the diffuse reflection of light on a surface is based on the surface color. The Colorize Diffuse property lets you specify an arbitrary color for diffuse reflection. To use it, set the numeric value of Colorize Diffuse and the diffuse color in the Dif color patch.
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Specularity
Modifiers:Specular: Specular controls the intensity of specular lighting as a whole. Specular lighting is responsible for glints and hotspots on glossy or partly glossy surfaces, and depends on the angle of the surface with respect to both the light source and the camera.
Specular highlights normally show the color of the light source but not the color of the surface; this is the way most specular reflections work. Increasing the value of the Metalicity slider will increase the amount of surface color that shows through. (Metals, such as copper and gold, typically add their own colors to specular highlights.
Modifiers:SpecularCurve: Similar in effect to DiffuseCurve, this can be changed to obtain banding, inversion, or other unusual effects in areas of specular reflection. Basically, it modifies the normal smooth change (from bright to dim) from the center of a specular highlight to its edge.
Modifiers:Metalicity: Specular highlights on non-metallic surfaces are typically white, while those on metallic surfaces (such as copper or gold) are typically the color of the surface. As Metalicity is increased, specular highlights will take on more and more of the color of the underlying surface.
Modifiers:Colorize Specular: Normally, the specular reflection of light on a surface is based on the light source color (and, if using the Metalicity modifier, the surface color). The Colorize Specular property lets you specify an arbitrary color for specular reflection. To use it, set the numeric value of the slider, and the specular color in the Spec slot.
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Transparency and Reflection
Modifiers:Transparency: Controls how much light passes through a material. However, obtaining transparency in ZBrush depends on more than just the adjustment of this slider. Please look into the ZBrush main documentation for details.
Modifiers:TransCurve: Determines the amount of light that passes through a surface as the angle of the surface changes. However, obtaining transparency in ZBrush depends on more than just the adjustment of this slider. Please look into the ZBrush main documentation for details.
Modifiers:Reflectivity: Turns on reflection for a material, which allows the material to reflect a texture (reflection map), or to show reflection in a ray-traced scene. Please see the ZBrush main documentation for more details.
Modifiers:ReflectCurve: Changes the reflectivity of points on a surface depending on the grayscale intensity of those points; the left side of the curve determines the reflectivity of dark points, while the right side determines the reflectivity of light points. This can be used to implement surfaces of varying reflectivity, such as a metal surface that is rough in some places and smooth in others.
The comments for the Reflectivity control also apply.
Modifiers:Add Reflection/Sub Reflection: These are special modifiers found in the S1 channel of the ReflectedMap material. The Add Reflection and Sub(tract) Reflection controls let you reflect brighter and darker colors by different amounts. Add Reflection controls the reflection of pixels brighter than underlying pixols, while Subtract Reflection controls the reflection of pixels darker than underlying pixols. For instance, if Add Reflection is higher than 0, and Subtract Reflection is 0, it means that the S1 reflection can only make the surface brighter, never darker. An example of this would be a shiny metallic surface, like a car.
Further, the two controls work on a differentiated RGB basis; that is, the software compares the brightness values individually for the red, green, and blue components of each pixel/pixol pair.The curve works normally, with the right side affecting the pixols facing the viewer, and the left side affecting the pixols facing sideways.
Modifiers:Spherical: This setting determines the extent to which ZBrush uses surface curvature to warp a reflection. In the real world, a reflection in a curved surface is distorted, and by default ZBrush reproduces this distortion accurately. To reduce the amount of distortion, lower the Spherical setting.
Modifiers:Env.Reflection: The source images for environmental reflections are created in the Render:Environment subpalette. The amount that the image created there is reflected on current material is set here.
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Noise
Modifiers:Noise: Adds noise to the shader, which will result in the shader's effect being uneven; for example, this might give the result of a rough surface, or cause a regular pattern to become irregular.
- The farther the Noise value is from 0, the greater the amount of noise.
- Positive values of the Noise setting give standard noise, created using fractal math.
- Negative values give recursive noise, often resulting in more complex patterns.
Modifiers:NoiseCurve: The noise curve lets you specify which parts of the noise pattern use the surface color and which parts use black. The default curve, going from the lower-left corner to the upper-right corner of the graph, gives the greatest variation in the noise pattern. You can reverse the shading of the pattern by making the graph go from upper-left to lower-right. Countless other variations are available by editing the curve.
Modifiers:Noise Radius: The noise radius setting, determines the resolution of the noise effect. Lower settings provide finer-grained noise, such as a sanded surface, while larger values result in larger noise patterns, such as a jagged surface.
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Cavity Properties (A/B Settings)
These settings allow you to specify that recessed areas of a surface render differently than raised areas. This can be used to intensify shadows, achieve the effect of raised areas of a surface being more weather-beaten or more polished, and so on.
Modifiers:Cavity Detection: Cavity Detection tells a material how strongly to distinguish between raised (normal) areas of a surface and recessed areas (cavities). With cavity detection on (greater than 0), the various A and B settings will then apply to normal and cavity areas respectively.
Modifiers:Cavity Transition: When Cavity Detection is greater than 0, this controls how sharp is the transition between cavity and non-cavity areas; this will in turn will result in softer or sharper cavity effects.
Modifiers:Depth A: Affects the way that rendering of A (raised) areas of a surface is done, so as to make them appear more or less raised, or even recessed. Various aspects of the rendered appearance will be affected, such as size of specular highlights, ambient occlusion effects, apparent lighting direction, and so forth. The actual geometry of the surface is NOT changed.
Modifiers:Depth B: Affects the way that rendering of B (recessed) areas of a surface is done, so as to make them appear more or less recessed, or even raised. Various aspects of the rendered appearance will be affected, such as size of specular highlights, ambient occlusion effects, apparent lighting direction, and so forth. The actual geometry of the surface is NOT changed.
Modifiers:Intensity A: Determines the brightness of the normal (raised) areas of a surface in cavity-enabled materials.
Modifiers:Intensity B: Determines the brightness of the cavities in cavity-enabled materials.
Modifiers:Monochromatic A: As the value of this slider is raised the colors applied to raised (A) areas of a cavity-enabled material will be dampened. At its maximum setting, the colors will reflect grayscale intensity only.
Modifiers:Monochromatic B: As the value of this slider is raised the colors applied to cavity (B) areas of a cavity-enabled material will be dampened. At its maximum setting, the colors will reflect grayscale intensity only.
Modifiers:A: A color or texture that will apply to normal (raised) areas of a cavity-enabled material, in proportion to how raised the surface is. (Transitional surfaces will receive a mix of A and B properties.)
Modifiers:B: A color or texture that will apply to cavity areas of a cavity-enabled material, in proportion to how recessed the surface is. (Transitional surfaces will receive a mix of A and B properties.)
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Other Properties
Modifiers:Color Bump: This setting uses variations in the surface coloration to create a bump-map effect. With negative values of Color Bump, the lighter parts of the surface are higher than the darker parts. With positive values, the effect is reversed.
The Bump effect takes into account any surface coloration, whether produced by painting the surface, applying a texture, applying Noise, or any combination thereof.
Modifiers:Gel Shading: The Gel Shading value can be 0, 1, or 2. The effects are:
- 0: Normal.
- 1: Jelly Bean, emulates a transparent effect.
- 2: Gel, emulates a different transparent effect.
Modifiers:High Dynamic Range: Most art programs use a range of 256 shades between black (0,0,0) and white (255,255,255). Nature isn't constrained by those rules, and the high dynamic range setting simulates this. Black remains black, but all other colors are intensified. The closer to white they are, the greater the effect. This setting is very useful for any image with a bright visible light source, such as the sun.
In most cases, it is best to turn off the material's Ambient setting and set Metalicity to 100.
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MatCap Capture Properties
The MatCap material properties only have an effect when you are creating or modifying a MatCap material using the Tool:MatCap tool. They are used to refine your MatCap sampling, to apply global effects that can't be easily achieved by sampling single points, and to modify your material if you want it to look different in some ways from the image from which you've sampled.
MatCap: Occasionally, materials may not immediately show the effect of changing a MatCap modifier. In this case, press the MatCap button to force the materials to update.
If none of the changes you make are affecting the screen, you should check that the Tool:MatCap tool is active, and that a sample of the material you're modifying has been painted somewhere on the canvas.
Gloss: The Gloss setting works only when creating or modifying a MatCap material using the Tool:MatCap tool; it makes the material more or less glossy.
Depending on the samples used to define the material, the useful range of the Gloss slider may be only a part of its full range, so experiment to find the best range for your use.
Intensity: The Intensity setting works only when creating or modifying a MatCap material using the Tool:MatCap tool; it increases or decreases the intensity of the material, which generally achieves the effect of viewing the material under a brighter or dimmer light.
Depending on the samples used to define the material, the useful range of the Intensity slider may be only a part of its full range, so experiment to find the best range for your use.
Saturation: The Saturation setting works only when creating or modifying a MatCap material using the Tool:MatCap tool; it increases or decreases the color saturation of the material to make a material more or less ‘vivid’ in the way that saturation normally does.
Depending on the samples used to define the material, the useful range of the Saturation slider may be only a part of its full range, so experiment to find the best range for your use.
Contrast: The Contrast setting works only when creating or modifying a MatCap material using the Tool:MatCap tool; it increases or decreases the contrast (dynamic range) of the material to make a material harsher or more subtle.
Depending on the samples used to define the material, the useful range of the Contrast slider may be only a part of its full range, so experiment to find the best range for your use.
Backlight: The Backlight setting works only when creating or modifying a MatCap material using the Tool:MatCap tool; it creates a backlight (key light) effect that can be used to enhance the silhouette of an object.
Depending on the samples used to define the material, the useful range of the Backlight slider may be only a part of its full range, so experiment to find the best range for your use.
Specular: The Specular setting works only when creating or modifying a MatCap material using the Tool:MatCap tool; it increases or decreases the specularity of the surface. Try this if you find you are not able to get the results you want by adjusting the specularities of the individual MatCap sample normals.
Depending on the samples used to define the material, the useful range of the Specular slider may be only a part of its full range, so experiment to find the best range for your use.
Sample: The Sample setting works only when creating or modifying a MatCap material using the Tool:MatCap tool. It defines a value used internally in MatCap computations; experimentation is the best way to see if it will be useful to you.
The useful range of the Sample slider may be only a part of its full range, so when first experimenting with it, make sure to change its value in small increments.
Refine: The Refine setting works only when creating or modifying a MatCap material using the Tool:MatCap tool. It defines a value used internally in MatCap computations; experimentation is the best way to see if it will be useful to you.
The useful range of the Refine slider may be only a part of its full range, so when first experimenting with it, make sure to change its value in small increments.
MatCap Falloff: The Falloff curve works only when creating or modifying a MatCap material using the Tool:MatCap tool. It's best to experiment with this curve to see if it will be useful to you.
Changes in the falloff curve may cause large changes in the appearance of the material, so when first experimenting, change the curve just a bit at a time.
