184 chapter 5 ■ Texture Painting
- Select the Simple brush and Alpha 01, then lower the draw size to 10. Select a cool brown
and paint a light squiggly pattern (Figure 5.44). This squiggly pattern is inspired by
photo references I have seen of bison horns that feature this light patterning in the grain
of the bone. This pattern is pushed back with the blur brush and a light intensity pass of
the original cool white. - Continue by misting the original cool white back over the horn with a very low intensity.
Also add a touch of yellow and blur again. Pick up the ZTool from Projection Master by
clicking the PM button or the G hotkey. Make sure that Double Sided is on; this will cre-
ate a slight stretching at the top and bottom of the horn. To fix this, simply reorient and
drop again to paint the top and bottom of the stinger. Be sure to turn off Double Sided
when working on these areas so that your texture does not project through, thus damag-
ing the work on the other side.
You have now completed painting the creature skin and stinger using polypaint free-
hand techniques as well as Projection Master and 2.5D brushes. In the next section, we’ll
address the side horns of this creature with a slightly different approach.
ZAppLink
ZAppLink is a free plug-in for ZBrush available from Pixologic. ZApplink allows you to
seamlessly integrate ZBrush’s painting tools with Photoshop. This program will allow
you to use all your favorite Photoshop brushes and filters in conjunction with ZBrush.
ZAppLink must be downloaded and installed. Download ZAppLink from the Download
Center at http://www.pixologic.com. To launch the program, click the ZAppLink button found
under the Document window. In the section called ZAppLink Properties (Figure 5.45),
click the ZAppLink Properties to open this menu; then click the name to unroll the menu
and access the options.
The ZAppLink Properties window contains the options for storing views of your model.
Views allow you to store a model’s position on canvas so you can use layers in Photoshop. We’ll
cover views later in this section. For now let’s look at ZAppLink as a connection to Photoshop.
Load the character model from the previous section. Draw the Stingerhead on the canvas and
enter Edit mode. Orient so the horns are visible from the top, as shown in Figure 5.46. Mask
the horn area and invert so the horns are now unmasked. Load ZAppLink by clicking the
ZAppLink button under the Document menu. Photoshop will now open (or the program you
have on your system that opens PSD files).- Since we only want to color the horn, mask out the rest of the head. The simplest way
to do this is to mask the horns and then invert. Orient the head on the canvas so the
top view of a horn fills the screen. Once the head is placed, you will load ZAppLink by
pressing Ctrl+Shift+S or by opening the document window and clicking the ZAppLink
button. This will load the ZAppLink window (Figure 5.47). - Click the Drop Now button and Photoshop will load with the ZBrush document as an
open image (Figure 5.48).
Figure 5.45
Accessing the
ZAppLink menu
under Document