Render Improvements
From ZBrush Info
In addition to the enhancements in materials and their creation, the Best Preview Render (BPR) has been optimized to produce cleaner and sharper renders while also introducing new functions and settings with which to fine tune your renders.
The core ZBrush rendering engine has also now been optimized for a 32-BIT rendering pipeline, providing greater bit-depth and color variation for each pixel.
Contents |
Faster Render with Light and Shadow Reuse
Whenever you are preparing a render, one of the most time consuming processes is the computation of the scene’s lighting together with its shadows and ambient occlusion. Simply changing the model’s material settings, color or light direction ends up triggering another render. This can often result in more time waiting for renders than is actually spent making the desired adjustments!
To avoid waiting for a render, ZBrush will now store the lighting and shadow information the first time you render a model. Simple adjustments that do not change the surface itself relative to the camera can then be rendered in a fraction of the time because ZBrush can simply apply the stored light and shadow data, adjusting only for the property changes.
If you do change the camera position, mesh shape or add a new light ZBrush will need to calculate the lights and shadows again, which means waiting for a full re-render. For that reason it is best to perform a BPR and make all desired adjustments to materials and color (performing new BPR renders as needed) before continuing with scene changes that would require new light and shadow calculations.
Render > Render Properties > Details Slider
By increasing the Details slider, you will increase the quality of your render. This is done by creating larger maps for the Light > Environment Maps and will also affect the quality of LightCap creation from a background image. These environment maps control the overall quality of material output.
For quick renders or quick LightCap creation, keep the default setting of 1. Once satisfied with your various settings you can then increase the Details slider’s setting to create environment maps with a higher dynamic range, resulting in your best quality final render.
The size of the Diffuse and Specular maps created by the LightCap process is 512x512 pixels with a Details slider value of 1 and increases to 2048x2048 pixels with a value of 3.
Render > Render Properties > Smooth Normals
With this mode, you won’t need to add extra subdivision levels to create a smoother surface at render time with BPR. This rendering mode instructs BPR to automatically smooth the edges between polygons which in turn gives the model’s surface a perfectly smooth appearance.
In order for this mode to work, you must also enable the Tool > Display Properties > Smooth Normal option for any Tool or SubTool(s) that you wish to be smoothed by the BPR. This means that you can toggle render smoothing for individual surfaces as desired.
Materials Blend Radius
By increasing the Blend Radius setting located in the Render > Render Properties menu, ZBrush will be instructed to blend all materials when they come into contact on a model’s surface. This eliminates jarring transitions between materials that have dramatically different properties.
A low value means a blend with a very short/narrow transition while a high value means a blending with a broad transition for an extremely soft effect.
This Material blending value is global and will affect your entire model. If you wish to also control some SubTools on an individual basis you will also need to adjust the BPR Material Blender slider in that object’s Tool > Display Properties menu.
Wax Preview Mode
When enabled, this will apply a wax-like appearance to the model’s materials in real-time through the Preview render. This means that the effect will be visible even during normal sculpting and scene set up. The wax effect is fine-tuned using the Render >> Preview Wax sub-palette.
For more information about the Wax shader and its settings, please read the BPR Wax chapter.
