Making Killer Creature Alphas for ZBrush

In this video tutorial, we talk about how you can make killer alphas for creatures and characters using Photoshop and ZBrush. These techniques have been born from doing a lot of characters for films, and they have been production tested.
Learn how to use the maps you created in this tutorial in Mari:
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[@RAYROD]

You guys are beyond my favorite channel on KZbin. The podcast with Matt vs Japan was amazing. Thank you for the great content!

[@FlippedNormals]

Thank you so much! We really appreciate it. You put a smile our our faces :)

[@TheWolv17]

I did some tests and found another way to do it getting good results without sculpting: 1. get the cropped image into substance B2M, materialize(free), crazy bump or similar sftw 2. get 2 different maps, one extracting just black details, (removing whites) and other extracting just white details 3. in ZBrush apply each map on different layers 4. set the intensity of the "black layer" to a higher value to increase the wrinkles 5. smooth the "white layer" to remove high frecuency details and noise 6. add a inflate deformation modifier to the white layer to increase white values I did both ways and I can say this method might be better but just because I didnt spent to much time sculpting, hope you found this useful

[@cloudjumper5324]

Just made my first alpha..... Thanks to u two! Much appreciated Flipped Normals! So good! Cheers!

[@ValrixV81]

You guys are killing it with the quality content!

[@FlippedNormals]

Cheers Nick! Much appreciated.

[@toddlawrimore3577]

Great tips. A judicious use of blur is more important than I had previously thought. Thank you.

[@tokyorose1123]

I really appreciate the content you guys put out here. Thank you so much for continuing to share such valuable information and for putting in the hard work to allow your viewers to grow and benefit from it. You guys are rad. All the best to you both.

[@FlippedNormals]

Thanks a lot! We really appreciate it :)

[@CONTORART]

You could batch process this by recording an Action in Photoshop of the filtering process and then use File > Automate > Batch... and then apply it to a folder of images that you wish to prepare.

[@FlippedNormals]

Definitely :) If you do this a lot, it's a good idea to make an action. This is why we prefer to do it in Nuke, as you have far more control there.

[@andreas.mischok]

Yeah, I did so for one of my projects, but you have to be a bit careful, due to resolution differences. You might want to use a different radius on the high pass and blur filters depending on your source.

[@CONTORART]

WIth Photoshop actions you can toggle the dialog box on for specific steps of the action to allow additional control. I've tried Nuke, it's a great program that I'd love to add to my Toolkit however it's beyond my price range currently. I love all your videos FlippedNormals!

[@TheParadigmShiftTV]

I use Substance designer to create alphas. You could bring that image into Designer using the bitmap node. I like what you did using highpass. Sculpting the alpha will give you the most control. I would just convert your PSD to 16 bit before blurring it although Zbrush's displacement feature always produces banding no matter if you use a 16 bit high quality map or not. I wish they would fix that. Still best to use 16 bit for drag rect alphas, it's just the displacement feature that's buggy

[@Floatharr]

Wavelet Decompose is essentially built for this. You can use it to decompose an image into a stack of high pass layers with residual color at the bottom automatically with a single filter. Then just flood fill the residual with mid gray and disable a couple of the highest detail layers. Krita and GIMP come with this built in, both free. Not sure if photoshop has this nowadays as I don't use it anymore.

[@FlippedNormals]

That sounds really nice! Thanks for the suggestion.

[@FloTasser]

Affinity Photo also has got a function called "Frequency Separation" that does that, too. In pretty good quality usually. I try to find good methods to get bump/displacements out of bad images with as little as possible work by hand since I need to restore old coins and stuff like that all the time for work. Great to see you guys doing a tutorial on this, as I used ZBrush a lot to sculpt details and bake the maps afterward. I still am looking for ways to make my life easier. Cool to see some different workflows like the ZBrush layers. Didn't think of that really. Thanks!

[@JMTBFLOW]

Cheers, boys. Learned a lot from this one. Love the free content :)

[@FlippedNormals]

Cheers James! :)

[@helios4753]

Very helpful and straight forward as usual guys. Great stuff.

[@FlippedNormals]

Thanks a lot! :)

[@threecolonist]

Elephant in the Studio! 😃 Definitely talk to studio head, when working on a similar project!!

[@adaferran15]

Texture artists looking for elephant full-time. no experience needed.

[@FlippedNormals]

Hah!

[@amirbabaei7048]

Thank you so much guys . You are the best .

[@mmmuck]

I've used materialize to delight and process images into displacement which looks great as an alpha

[@Blacksheep3DLabs]

Another really informational video, please do a video about texturing in future . A lot of doubts regarding texturing.

[@miguelcurto3455]

I know this is 5 year old but just found it and its very informative, whoever as a note to someone who might find this and coming from PS background you definitely should change to 16bit before blur+high pass+contrast , even for a crappy 8 bit JPG coming from internet, mostly because the math in PS 16bits is more much precise, I'm betting with all the blur you won't have any banding in final PNG/whatsoever after you merge everything and convert to 8bit.

[@acidicbloom]

Guys, I love you! It's what I need at the right time!

[@FlippedNormals]

Thanks!

[@bencoomer2000]

Neat. Makes sense to spend days on one thing than days and days and days on thing after thing...

[@rainevermore4683]

Man you guys really are the best!

[@MikeSmith3D]

Hey guys! At 23:41 you talk about not knowing where to find the default alpha from the Dam_Standard brush once you lose it. I'm pretty sure it's the Falloff_Sharp alpha that comes in the ZAlphas folder. If it's not, it's close enough that whenever I lose it, I load up Falloff_Sharp and it works just as well.

[@FlippedNormals]

Ah! Thank you. Really appreciate it.

[@asjacastelli8150]

Phenomenal tutorial! It's been a week since I've started photoscanning every texture in Nature I see in order to create some alphas storage to use in the future ahah Just a question! At 22.50 you have a "ZBrsuh crash" or did you "fucked up" with the resize of the document? Cause I haven't fully understood how the resize in ZBrush works and I'm curious to ask what happened to you and how to avoid resize mistakes in the future! Thank you in advanceee, Asja

[@SpadeApeiron]

U guys are Helping Me out like Crazy these days. I was in a Gr8 need for teacher.. & umm ~ Thanks for teaching me stuff which "actual paid" teacher can't get you. :) cheers Ps__. i Spent 36$ on getting Texture maps for Zbrush skin alphas for dragon werewolves & soft human skin. Now i can save money & time + preference. heh cheers

[@manishvashist2487]

That's really helpful thank you so much

[@j.a.harvilla2819]

During the video you mention fighting the texture if you don't take the time to grade the original image and refine it in ZBrush, can you show us what you mean by "fighting" it? Excellent video thanks so much for making it!

[@jirivehovsky1912]

as always great advice, thanks

[@FlippedNormals]

Thanks a lot!

[@scoutwindsor]

Awesome technique!! Thank you!

[@Dumbanana00]

Just need to wait for Allegorthmic's Project Alchemist to make this process even easier! Good video!

[@isaacolander2893]

Great content, as always.

[@FlippedNormals]

Thank you Isaac!

[@demetriosmazurok25]

Thanks for the cool tips!

[@Glenn3D1993]

Cool Video! You should try using Surface Noise instead, its like displacement on Steroids and you dont have to have a Texture assigned to the Subtool.

[@FlippedNormals]

Ah, cool - thanks for the heads up :)

[@ScottishZoop]

Awesome Content guys!

[@FlippedNormals]

Cheers!

[@Diallo268]

Would it be easier to make it a VDM then get the alpha from that so you don't have to resize the viewport? Or just use them as a VDM? Also, there's a reset all brushes button in the brush menu so you don't have to restart zbrush if you lost the alpha or generally messed up a brush. When I did it the alpha was still there. The new alpha is still available too after resetting as well. Great video!

[@FlippedNormals]

Thanks a lot! That's a great tip. You can totally make VDMs too, that's what we've done for the FN Creature Kit. One of the advantages of using alphas is that you can use them in Mari too :)

[@TheSatzy6699]

Great tips! What kind of pc config do you guys use?

[@GeorgeLikoudis]

Thank you for the great content, once again guys! So, a question, about he mid value set to 50, isn't another solution to set the midtone in photoshop to 127? And if so, how would we achieve this?

[@parsoova]

When I create alpha and apply it to a mesh with focal shift -100, on the other side of the mesh it becomes apply too, what did I miss?

[@septimusclark8394]

So Zbrush (2021) crashed on me in the exact same place it did with you guys - when you tried to resize the finished document to 1024x1024. Unfortunately, *unlike* you guys, I could not figure out how to get round the crash. Is there a fix? Thanks

[@knuckledancerny9595]

Thanx bro!!!

[@onlyf3168]

hi, are you planning to do a tutorial about attaching ARMOR to rigged charecter? about weighting?

[@FlippedNormals]

Hi! Honestly, this is probably not something you'll see from us, unfortunately

[@mikkelmelby]

Super nice!!

[@balenwalker8209]

Hi! For some reason when I try to import the png into the displacement map it doesn't work. Im not sure if it has something to do with the png file or I missed something. Any help is appreciated! Thanks! I did follow everything exactly up until this point.

[@balenwalker8209]

Im extremely new to this, but after doing some trouble shooting I got a tiff to work. I guess it didn't like the png file I was using. Not sure if its a good fix, but I've seen others run into this problem during my forum search lol. For the people like me, a tiff is file you can save as in PS. Its just a bit bigger of a file with some added benefits for photo editing.

[@m4r_art]

hey do you guys make use of the cavity, convexity, curvature maps to get your models to 100% when using them in production? in d. neg?

[@FlippedNormals]

Yes indeed, we use all those maps.

[@m4r_art]

thanks :D

[@theburnboss]

What is the advantage of sculpting the texture in Zbrush instead of drawing the texture itself in Photoshop?

[@FlippedNormals]

You have a *lot* more control about the final result in ZBrush, as you can fully control it then, while in PS, you only have an approximation of what it will look like.

[@leerobinson186]

What about fur? Can you guys please do a video on adding different fur to our models? Thanks.

[@louaial-bitar5721]

Thanks for the vid guys, by the way the dam standard alpha you can find in lightbox, alpha... I always lost it and it's annoying!

[@FlippedNormals]

Thats nice! Pretty handy.

[@prod.pastel9261]

do you have a community discord?

[@FlippedNormals]

Booom! discordapp.com/invite/uXtDUqs

[@JiriMatys]

What about Knald?

[@FlippedNormals]

What about it?

[@JiriMatys]

Just if you guys tried it. Its very nice way of modify diffuse map to any other map like height or normal. Of course its not perfect, but it has some power to speed up things.

[@FlippedNormals]

Gavin Goulden actually uses it for his first Creating Characters for Games. It looks amazing, though we havent used it much ourselves.

[@randypower9317]

I think I like the NON-blurred better!

[@xxNightWulf]

wouldn't this bit of detail be better off done like in Substance painter?

[@romannavratilid]

7 adds in 30 minute video... LOL are you kidding me?