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Projection Painting with Spotlight in ZBrush

by Justin Marshall

In this ZBrush tutorial, we will learn how to use Spotlight in ZBrush 4 to create seamless, photorealistic textures for a human head. Software required: ZBrush 4 and up.

What you'll learn

In this ZBrush tutorial, we will learn how to use Spotlight in ZBrush 4 to create seamless, photorealistic textures for a human head. ZBrush has been a powerful texturing tool for several years, giving us the ability to paint very quickly and intuitively onto our models directly. With the addition of Spotlight in ZBrush 4, we can project existing textures onto our models in a very user-friendly way that will get us great results in a matter of minutes. We will begin our project by importing our reference images and learning to save them out as a Spotlight that we can reuse over and over. From there, we will learn to adjust aspects of our images, like hue and saturation, before painting with them. We will also learn to move parts of our images around to better match the underlying geometry. We will also cover techniques for filling gaps on the model to blend in areas for which we may not have reference. We will finish up by using LightBox to download any additional images we might need and incorporate those into our existing Spotlight. Once you are done, you will be able use Spotlight to very quickly paint your characters or other models using existing images. Software required: ZBrush 4 and up.

About the author

Justin thrives as a lead modeling author at Pluralsight. Growing up, Justin found a deep interest for the computer graphics industry after watching movies like Jurassic Park, Toy Story, and The Abyss. His ambition would lead him to work at Sony Imageworks in Los Angeles on movies like Monster House and Surf's Up. Justin has also had numerous articles, tutorials, and images published in 3D World and 3D Artist. As an author, Justin enjoys collaborating with fellow authors, especially on project... more

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