■ ZBrush to Photoshop 281
- The next render will serve as an Ambient Occlusion pass. Ambient Occlusion
renders are used to accentuate shadows, and most major rendering packages
have the capacity to create an Ambient Occlusion render. We will use ZBrush’s
Ambient Occlusion rendering tool to create this pass. Switch to the Flat Color
material. Under Rendering, turn off Shadows and turn on AOcclusion. Click the
BPR button at the top of the menu to create this particular render (Figure 8.27).
The BPR button stands for Best Preview Render. The BPR rendering engine is
new to ZBrush 4.0. It has the benefit of real-world shadows, fur, and subsurface
scattering algorithms built in. Save the resulting render as occ.psd. - We also want to create a cavity pass to help darken the shading in the fine
details. A cavity pass will render white for the high areas and dark into the
pores and wrinkles. Make sure you are at the highest subdivision level and open
the Masking menu. - We will create the cavity mask from the highest subdivision level to capture the
fine details of the sculpture. Click the Cavity Profile curve to open it. Add points
to the curve and change its shape to the one shown in Figure 8.28. Set Cavity
Intensity to 100 and click the Mask By Cavity button.
Figure 8.25 Fill with
a material by clicking
the FillObject button.
Figure 8.26 The character head with the Flat Color mate-
rial. All shading information is removed and only the
painted color remains.
Figure 8.27 This Ambient Occlusion pass was created
using the BPR mode under the Rendering menu.