Demystifying ZBrush Materials

This video starts an in-depth look at each of the settings found in the Material palette for the ZBrush Standard material. These include Ambient, Diffuse, Specular, Reflective, and Metallic settings and why you can ignore the Transparency setting.

Continuing the description of each of the settings found in the Material palette for the ZBrush Standard material. This chapter demonstrates using Noise, Color Bump, Gel Shading, Environment Reflection, Colorize Ambient, and High Dynamic Range sliders. It also discusses which settings require "Best" Quality Rendering as opposed the "BPR" Rendering.

This lecture rounds out the discussion of the ZBrush Standard material modifiers with a look at how Anisotropy and Cavity settings work. It also looks at modifying reflectivity and adding custom colors to the slots at the bottom of the Material palette.   

This lecture presents three custom materials created using the Standard material as a base. See if you can figure out the settings used to create each variation. Each custom standard material is broken down in the lecture giving you some ideas on techniques you can use on your own custom materials.

MatCap materials use image data as a basis for the material properties. Sounds complicated but its actually pretty easy and a lot of fun to edit and create MatCap materials. This lecture goes over how MatCap materials work and how they are different from Standard Materials.

This lecture demonstrates some ways to create custom MatCap materials in ZBrush or using another 3D program or even Photoshop.

This lecture describes each of the settings found in the Modifiers palette for the MatCap material.

This lecture presents three custom materials created using the MatCap Grey material as a base. See if you can figure out the settings used to create each variation. Each custom MatCap material is broken down in the lecture giving you some ideas on techniques you can use on your own custom materials.

This lecture explains how the Shader slots work and how you can create a complex material by copying and pasting existing or custom materials into the shader slots. The Double Shader, Triple Shader, and Quadshader materials are explained as well.

This lecture explains how the Shader Mixers is used to blend 2 to 4 materials together using various custom controls from Fresnel, to ambient occlusion, and blending modes.

This lecture continues the discussion of the shader mixer with an explanation of how to use RGB and saturation values to layer materials together. Cavity and Depth controls are also discussed.

This lecture presents three custom materials created using the Double Shade material as a base. See if you can figure out the settings used to create each variation. Each custom layered material is broken down in the lecture giving you some ideas on techniques you can use on your own custom materials.

This chapter describes how to render subtools as transparent using BPR settings found in the subtool palette. This type of transparency is not realistic or physically based but can be used when creating stylized illustrations in ZBrush,

This lecture introduces Redshift materials in ZBrush, how they compare with RedShift materials in other programs such as Maya and how to set up Redshift lights to render them using the Redshift plug-in for ZBrush.

This lecture discusses the modifiers for the Redshift materials found in the Material palette. The lecture discusses Index Of Refraction (IOR), anisotropy and transparency using refractive settings.

This lecture continues describing the modifiers for the Redshift material with an emphasis on how to use the sub surface scattering settings. Emission, Thin Film, Reflection and Shadow Catching settings are also explained.

This chapter gives three examples of Redshift materials, see if you can figure out the techniques used to create these materials all starting with the Redshift Basic material. The lecture also describes the process for creating a ZBrush MatCap material from a Redshift material.

The lecture summarizes the key points of this tutorial series.