ZBrush Character Creation - Advanced Digital Sculpting 2nd Edition

270 chapter 8 ■ ZBrush Movies and Photoshop Composites

Featured Artist: The Art of Steve Jubinville

This image caught my attention when it fi rst appeared on ZBrush Central. The creature is imagi-

native in its design, and the rendering and compositing are striking.

Turntable Animations

ZBrush comes with the ability to render high-quality rotations of your models. Turntables

are a staple of most modeling reels and an ideal way to show off a sculpture in the round.

While it is possible to do this in a third-party renderer, it is often faster to generate a rota-

tion directly in ZBrush. You even have the option to add an overlay image of your name,

logo, or contact information. To create a rotation video, follow these steps:

1. Open the Movie menu from the top of the screen. Click the radial button to dock it on
   the side tray.


2. Under the Modifi ers menu, set Recording FPS to 20 and Playback FPS to 20. At the
   bottom of the Modifi ers menu is a SpinFrames slider. This slider determines the num-
   ber of frames in a single rotation. To set the value, determine how long you want a
   single rotation to be; in this example, use a 5-second rotation. If we are playing back
   at 20 frames per second, we need to multiply 20 by 5 to fi nd the SpinFrames value. In
   this case, it is 100. Leave Spin Cycles set to 1 since a single rotation from ZBrush will
   loop when played back. There is no need to render more than one seamless rotation.
   You can set this value to –1 to reverse the direction of the rotation.


3. When you are ready to record, click the Turntable button at the top of the movie
   screen. The ZTool will rotate around its y-axis. If the model seems to rotate in the
   wrong direction, change the Axis selection at the bottom of the Modifi ers menu. The
   rotation video can be saved as a ZMV fi le or exported following the same steps as
   detailed in the previous section.

Keep in mind that only one movie can be stored in memory at a time. If a movie is stored

or loaded when you record, the new frames will be appended to the end of the last movie.

To clear memory, click the Delete button under Movie to start a fresh recording.