Rendering the Enforcer - ZBrush Creature Design: Creating Dynamic Concept Imagery for Film and Games - page 645

Look Development in ZBrush
Often you will find that a director wants to see some variation in materials and color before they make
a decision on the final character. This is often called “look development” or “look dev.” The brief for
this chapter is to explore some variation in skin and material representations on the Enforcer character.
Using the ZBrush material menus, explore how to create and apply material representations to the Enfor-
cer character and produce some final showpiece renders.
Advantages of BPR
The primary advantages of rendering in ZBrush are speed and flexibility. While the ZBrush rendering sys-
tem is not a physically based photorealistic renderer such as V-Ray or Mental Ray, I consider it an excellent
“artistic” rendering option. In other words, your goal when rendering in ZBrush should be to make a pleas-
ing composition that shows off the model as opposed to creating a photorealistic one through the simulation
of physical light properties, which is a task better suited for external rendering systems.
This means that if you're used to working in Maya's Hypershade or in 3dsMax's material editor or any
other integrated 3-D animation and rendering package, you're going to find that the ZBrush approach is very
different if not altogether alien. So expect a little “quirkiness” when rendering in ZBrush, but if you've come
this far with ZBrush, a little quirk should come as no surprise.
ZBrush offers options for rendering realistic and stylistic lighting such as ambient occlusion, subsurface
scattering, depth of field, and image-based lighting. But these features are not based on physical simulations
of light—rather, ZBrush uses some special “cheats” to achieve these effects, which are designed to create an
artistically acceptable result. This is why I consider ZBrush as an “artistic” rendering solution. The approach
to designing lighting and materials is very flexible and fast and even fun once you get the hang of how all of
these elements work together in ZBrush. While this chapter is not intended to be a comprehensive guide to
every single feature, it should give you a good sense of how powerful ZBrush rendering is as well as some
ideas you can use for your own projects.
This project uses Scott's Enforcer model as the subject. Our goal is to use the ZBrush lighting, material,
and rendering toolset to help make the character look believable and impressive. The final image should be
portfolio quality, and we'll see just how far we can go without leaving the ZBrush environment.
You'll find that ZBrush's rendering tools are great for look development because you can test, tweak,
render, and create variations very quickly. In a production environment, speed is of utmost importance. If
you can pump out 10 different options for your director to review in the time it takes to render a single still
in another 3-D program, clearly you'll have a competitive advantage over many other artists.
Establishing the Lighting Using LightCap
One of the most interesting tools introduced in ZBrush 4 R2 is the LightCap lighting editor. This interface is
meant to augment the existing lighting interface with more advanced options so that you have more specific
control over how the simulated lights interact with the surface properties of your model.
Lighting, rendering, and material development all work together in Zbrush, so often you'll be moving
back and forth between various palettes as you tweak settings. That being said, I think it's easiest to start by