268 chapter 8 ■ ZBrush Movies and Photoshop Composites
Figure 8.1 These
options allow
you to specify
what portion
of the screen is
recorded and the
resolution of the
video.
records a frame each time the mouse is released, thus creating a smaller file with faster play-
back. For this demo, we’ll record the entire screen in real time:- On the Movie menu, click the Window button (Figure 8.1). This will record the entire
ZBrush window. In the next line, click the Medium button. This will record frames
that are half the size of your current document. If you want a larger video output,
increase your document size and select Large for 100% of the document size. - Click the Modifiers menu under Movie to unroll these options (Figure 8.2). The first
slider is Frame Size, which specifies the scale factor for each frame. You set this by
selecting Small, Medium, or Large in the previous step. By default, it is set to .5. If
you set it to 1, the frames will capture at 100% of the document size. Leave this value
at .5. Auto Zoom can remain at 0. Set Recording FPS to 20 and Playback FPS to 10.
This slows down playback to a more natural speed. Leave the buttons Skip Menus,
Antialiased Capture, and OnMouse activated. If you want menus to be visible as you
work (which may be desirable when you’re demonstrating a technique), turn off the
Skip Menus button—this will record menus as well as sculpting actions.
Figure 8.2 The
Modifiers menu
- Unroll the Overlay Image and Title Image menus by clicking their names (Figure 8.3).
The Overlay Image is a logo that will be overlaid on the movie. The default is the
ZBrush logo, but you can load any image from the Texture palette by clicking the
ZLogo icon. To turn this off, set the Opacity slider to 0.
Figure 8.3 The
Overlay Image
and Title Image
menus
- The Title Image menu defines the image and text that appears at the start and end
of the video. You can load an image from the Texture palette by clicking the Z icon.
Enter text by clicking the Text1, Text2, or Text3 button. Clicking one of these buttons
opens a text entry box (Figure 8.4) that allows you to specify font size and enter text
in the field. To disable the Title text, set the FadeIn and FadeOut sliders to 0. - When you’re ready to record, click the Record button at the top of the screen. ZBrush
will begin recording your actions. Perform a few strokes on the canvas; then when
you are ready to end the recording, click the Pause button. ZBrush
will pause recording and allow you to save the movie as a ZMV file, export it as a
QuickTime movie, or resume recording from the last frame by clicking Record again.
Click SaveAs to save the video as a ZMV file. Depending on how long you recorded,
this may be a large file. ZMV files are only viewable inside ZBrush. Load them by
clicking the LoadMovie button under the Movie menu. The movie will play inside the
ZBrush interface (Figure 8.5). - Once the ZMV file is saved, you’ll export a copy as a QuickTime file. To do so,
click the Export button and specify a filename. Click SaveAs, and the QuickTime
Compression Settings dialog box will appear (Figure 8.6). Select H.264 as the com-
pressor, leave Frames Per Second to the default, and set the Quality slider to Best.
Click OK, and your video will play as it exports. Do not press Esc or leave ZBrush
during this process as it will cancel the export.
For the best-quality results, I recommend exporting MPEG-4 with no compression from
ZBrush and applying H.264 compression in the full version of Quicktime, QuickTime
Pro. Set the compression to None and the Frames Per Second to the Recording FPS
value set in the Movie menu. This value should be the default in the menu. Set Depth to
Millions Of Colors + and the Quality slider to Best. These settings will create a very large
file, but you will have better results by compressing to H.264 in QuickTime Pro.