Rendering the Enforcer - ZBrush Creature Design: Creating Dynamic Concept Imagery for Film and Games - page 646

setting up a basic lighting scenario and go from there. While working on the lighting, there are a few things
you can do to make the process a little faster. The Enforcer model is fairly dense and, while ZBrush renders
are fast, you can save some time while tweaking lights by making adjustments in the Render palette.
1. Open up the Enforcer_start.ZPR project located in the Chapter 10 folder on the DVD or download
files. The model looks very blocky because all the SubTools have been set to the lowest subdivision level.
This helps speed up the performance of ZBrush while working. Scott has modeled all the elements and
polypainted details on the surface.
2. In the SubTool subpalette of the Tool palette, select the enforcer_body SubTool, which is at the very top
of the SubTool stack. Press the Solo button on the right shelf so that all other SubTools are hidden from
view.
3. The body has a total of seven subdivision levels, and at subdivision seven the point count is about 3.35
million. While establishing the lighting, we don't need to be at the highest SDiv level. Set the SDiv slider
to level 4. At this level the body has 52,224 points, just enough so we get an accurate read on the silhou-
ette and major details, while at the same time the performance of ZBrush is not compromised.
4. Open the Render palette and place it in a tray for easy access. Under the Render Properties subpalette,
set the Details slider to 1 and turn on the Smooth Normals button (see Figure 10-2 ).
Figure 10-2: Adjust the Details slider and turn on Smooth Normals in the Render palette.
The Details slider controls the resolution of the maps used by the lights to create shadows and the overall
quality of the lighting, which you'll be setting up in a moment. While establishing your initial lighting
scenario, you can set this to 1, and then, as you get closer to a final render, you can raise this setting to
improve quality. A lower setting means a faster render, a higher setting means higher quality but increased
render time.
The Smooth Normals button softens the edges where polygons meet so that the surface looks nice and
smooth at lower subdivision levels when you render with BPR. Activating this feature is another great
way to speed up a render while testing because it allows you to get a good sense of what the final high-
resolution render will look like even while working at a lower subdivision level.
5. In the SubTool subpalette, turn off the little eyeball icon. This disables polypainting, which will hide
the colors and details on the model. This way we can see how the lights interact with the surface without
the interference of the colors on the model.
6. Set the color in the Color palette to white.