Poly Painting in ZBrush

In this article, I will describe the process of poly painting your sculpt inside Pixologic's ZBrush and techniques we can employ to control...

In this article, I will describe the process of poly painting your sculpt inside Pixologic's ZBrush and techniques we can employ to control and vary the effect.

What is Poly painting and its Pro’s and Con’s
It would be remiss of me not to detail what poly painting is all about and its pros and cons against such programs as substance painter or Photoshop etc
Poly painting in ZBrush is basically a way we can add texture by alphas, images, or brushed on colour, but you need to be aware the amount of detail is governed by the resolution of the mesh, because colour is worked out by each vertex so fewer vertexes or resolution less quality of colour!

Programs such as Substance rely on UVs and can be painted without the loss of quality as your painting on the UV canvas (UV are flattened maps of the sub-tools)

Using Polypainting inside ZBrush
Its pretty simple to apply paint to a sub-tool inside ZBrush just choose a brush (standard) and make sure ZADD and ZSUB are off and then make sure RGB is turned on (if you turn MRGB you will also be painting material) and the RBD intensity slider is on 100%, in order to start the painting fill your model with a base colour just choose a colour from the left pallet and then go to Colour menu top and drop down to fill object now if you change the colour from the colour pallet the sub-tool will remain the same colour!, now just start painting!

Other techniques
We have the ability to use multiple techniques inside ZBrush to get better results including these:

Control opacity’s via the RGB intensity slider
Use alphas
Use layers to be able to alter colour intensity
Use images
Use masking to control our colour

These are just the basics if you want to know more sign up for my in-depth Polypainting course inside ZBrush

FIND OUT MORE AND TAKE THIS COURSE

Categories: : ZBrush Related