Painting the Interdimensional Traveler - ZBrush Creature Design: Creating Dynamic Concept Imagery for Film and Games - page 233

able to access tools via hot keys allows you to focus more on the work and less on the process of using the
software and hunting down tools. Also, be sure to check the DVD or the download files for a fully narrated
video of this chapter project. You can follow along the chapter steps in real time as I work on this image.
While I do most of my work in this chapter with basic round brushes, varying their harness,
you may want to use some of the specialty brush presets available on the DVD or download
files. See the video on loading custom brush sets.
Preparing Images for Composite
Before we can composite the images together, they all need to be the same format. This facilitates using the
“load files into stack” Photoshop script. All the image files need to be RGB 8 bit images. The shadow and
depth passes are rendered from ZBrush as Grayscale multichannel images. These cannot be processed by
the Photoshop script and therefore they need to be converted to 8 bit RGB. Follow these steps to prepare the
images for composite.
1. Open the Shadow, Ambient Occlusion, Depth, and Matte passes in Photoshop.
2. For each image go to Image ⇒ mode ⇒ and convert to RGB. If an image is Multichannel, convert to
grayscale first and then convert to RGB. Next convert each image to 8 bit under the Image ⇒ mode menu
( Figure 5-2 ) .
Figure 5-2: Convert to 8 bit RGB