Zbrush surface noise how to#

Then I added a couple of Omni red lights for 'dramatic effect': In terms of the lighting, I created a directional light coming from the back and rotated it so that only a portion of the right curved wall was in the light. Since I was after some kind of sci-fi corridor or hangar, I made my point of view quite close to the ground and place the camera in a way that you don't see the other side of the tunnel to make it more 'mysterious'. The next step is to play around with the camera and find a position that works for the shot you are trying to create. (I also added a plane at the top as a 'roof' to block the light) Here is how my mesh looks before setting up the camera for the shot (not very impressive haha): However, the idea is to get just a base and to break up the light and values to create something interesting for the shot using the details from the maps. Play with the 'Texture Tiling' slider to refine the placement and scale of the details.Īfter setting up the material and assigning it to the object, it might not look great.

Add PN Triangles to add some tesselation (add resolution to the mesh).

Also, play with the 'Scale' slider to tweak the intensitY.

Heightmap goes into the Displacement slot (you need to enable 'height' from the drop-down).

The assign a material to it and plug the textures into the material: In Marmoset, you can drag and drop the FBX of OBJ file into the viewport to load it. The last thing to complete the setup is to give this piece some UVs (you can use the UV Master in ZBrush) and export it as an FBX or OBJ. Very simple but we don't need anything more than that. I spent a couple of minutes creating a very basic tunnel shape with the ZModeler and some Deformers (to bend the structure): All we have left is some kind of object or platform that we can use to apply these maps and find the camera angle for the concept. Make sure you click the 'UV' switch at the top to project the texture based on UVs: Within ZBrush, you can use the Surface noise to import the Heightmap and test it on an object. Now we should have two tileable square images: Normal and Height (from alpha). To create this second map, you need to go to the Alpha Palette, expand the 'Transfer' subpalette and click on the 'GrabDoc' button: This alpha will work as a displacement (height) in the render. The next thing will be to extract an Alpha from the current mesh. I saved the document as PNG image and that is one map (the normal map) ready to be used in the render engine. Once you finish adding the objects, all you need to do is go to the Document palette and hit the 'Export' button (make sure you are at the 'actual size' of the document). (to choose this normal material, click on the material thumbnail and it should be in the under the 'Standard Material' section: 'NormalRGBMaterial') Here is a quick timelapse of what I did to come up with this arrangement of objects using this plugin: I like to do this process with the 'Normal Matcap' to see the result in real-time as I insert the meshes. I went ahead and inserted a few different meshes in my NanoTile tool and got something like this:

Click on the 'Create NanoMesh Brush' (if this option is greyed out, you probably haven't selected an IMM brush).

Go to the brush palette and expand the 'Create' subpalette.

Select the IMM (Insert Multi Mesh) brush that you want.I selected the IMM ModelKit brush that comes with ZBrush, and turn that into a NanoMesh brush.

Once the plugin has created and framed the tool, you can use any NanoMesh brush to insert objects and this setup will automatically tile what you insert.

Click on the 'Create New TileTool' button (leave the rest of the settings as default).

Go to the ZPlugins menu and expand the NanoTile Textures plugin.

Once you have the maps you have a digital playground to find them an appealing camera angle, mood, and lighting. The trick for this technique is mostly on the generation of the maps which is what I'm going to show you next. Here is the final concept inside Marmoset toolbag 3 before colour adjustments:Īnd here is the final shot after tweaking colours and levels: NanoTile Texture Plugin for ZBrush (free).

Zbrush surface noise how to#

We'll be looking at the NanoTile plugin from ZBrush as well as an IMM brush to produce the tileable maps and then I'll show you how to set them up for the shot inside Marmoset Toolbag 3 (you could use any other renderer for this part) In this quick tutorial, I'm going to walk you through a very simple process to generate tileable sci-fi textures to add visual interest and complexity to a very simple scene.