ZBrush Character Creation - Advanced Digital Sculpting 2nd Edition

■ ZBrush to Photoshop 279

2. If there were any active ZTools when you resized the canvas,
   they are now dropped to pixols. Clear the canvas by pressing
   Ctrl+N. Let’s now change the background from the default gradi-
   ent to pure black. From the color picker, select black, and under
   Document, click the Back button. This action assigns the currently
   selected color to the background. Turn Range and Center down
   to 0 (Figure 8.21). Your document will now be too large to see on
   screen so you will need to zoom out. Click and drag the Zoom
   document button on the right sidebar to view the entire document. You can work in
   this view, but you will want to press the AAHalf button before you export images. This
   button will reduce the image by half size and antialias the pixels, giving you maximum
   image quality.


3. Switch your active color swatch back to white and draw the char-
   acter ZTool on the canvas. Turn on Perspective with the controls
   found under Draw (Figure 8.22). Click the Persp button to turn
   on Perspective (or press the P hotkey) and adjust the focal angle
   until the character looks good. Click the Align To Object but-
   ton to disable to slight rotation that is sometimes apparent as the
   object moves to the edges of the screen.
   Figure 8.23 illustrates the
   difference between perspective
   and orthographic views of a char-
   acter. Perspective adds a natural
   sense of depth that more closely
   approximates the human eye’s
   view of the world.

Creating Render Passes

In this section we’ll create several
versions of our character with
different material settings. These
various renders will be loaded
into Photoshop and composited
together. Since it is important to
maintain the exact same position-
ing between each render pass,
now is a good time to store the
character’s position on the canvas.
You could drop it to the canvas
and create pixols, but this would prevent you from making separate subtool passes unless
you dropped each to a different layer. Saving a project is the easiest way to ensure you can
return to the same position if you accidentally move the character.

Figure 8.21 Setting the document

background to pure black

Figure 8.22 The perspective controls

under the Draw menu

Figure 8.23 Orthographic view as seen on the left appears flat and unnatural

compared to perspective view on the right