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Stylised Tileable Textures in ZBrush
Sep 17, 2019

Stylised Tileable Textures in ZBrush

A mini tutorial series covering the process of making stylised assets to create tileable textures

let's get started

Tutorial Snapshot.

Tutorial Video.

Quick Overview.

Tutorial Playlist.

Quick Overview.

Stylised Tileable Textures in ZBrush
Stylised Tileable Textures in ZBrush
Stylised Tileable Textures in ZBrush
Stylised Tileable Textures in ZBrush
Stylised Tileable Textures in ZBrush
Stylised Tileable Textures in ZBrush
Stylised Tileable Textures in ZBrush
Stylised Tileable Textures in ZBrush
Stylised Tileable Textures in ZBrush
Stylised Tileable Textures in ZBrush
Stylised Tileable Textures in ZBrush
Stylised Tileable Textures in ZBrush
Stylised Tileable Textures in ZBrush
Stylised Tileable Textures in ZBrush
Stylised Tileable Textures in ZBrush

Tutorial Playlist.

Quick Overview.

Stylised Tileable Textures in ZBrush
Stylised Tileable Textures in ZBrush
Stylised Tileable Textures in ZBrush
Stylised Tileable Textures in ZBrush
Stylised Tileable Textures in ZBrush
Stylised Tileable Textures in ZBrush
Stylised Tileable Textures in ZBrush
Stylised Tileable Textures in ZBrush
Stylised Tileable Textures in ZBrush
Stylised Tileable Textures in ZBrush
Stylised Tileable Textures in ZBrush
Stylised Tileable Textures in ZBrush
Stylised Tileable Textures in ZBrush
Stylised Tileable Textures in ZBrush
Stylised Tileable Textures in ZBrush

A Bit More About This Tutorial.

An important note about the tutorial…

Note that in the tutorial I end up exporting the ‘BaseColor’ texture while the ‘SkinShade4’ is selected. This process produces a ‘BaseColor’ that has some material properties baked into the map.

In most cases, for a PBR workflow, you probably want to have an Albedo map that has no ‘shading’ information (pure colour, no lighting, or anything else). To produce this type of Albedo map with just colour information, you can simply select the ‘Flat’ render mode from the Render palette to visualise just the polypaint and export that view.

The reason I used the Albedo as a mix of polypaint and material, is purely to accentuate the stylisation of the texture and to bake some of the highlights/shadows into the colour map itself. However, in most cases you should aim for a flat color with no shading as the base colour:

In the image below you can see the same scene using the same maps that were exported at the end of the tutorial and simply switching the Albedos (the on with material and the shadeless one).

There is not a huge difference but as I mentioned before, in most cases (for PBR workflow) if you want a more realistic effect for your materials, you don’t want to have any shading information within the Albedo map.

Renders

Below are a few images rendered with he maps from this tutorial. You can produce a very different effect by simply tweaking some of the maps (either from ZBrush, Alchemist or Photoshop).

For the ‘blue alien terrain’ I changed the Hue of the Albedo map as well as the emissive.

You could also play with other maps like the Height map. For the image below, I just inverted the alpha from ZBrush and exaggerated the ‘Scale’ value in marmoset:

Setting up the NanoTile Plugin…

The NanoTile plugin that we use in this mini series, is one of the most useful plugins you can get to work with textures (specially tileable textures). The plugin is FREE and you can download it directly from the Pixologic download centre.

Click the download button and you’ll get a Zip file that you need to extraxt into the ZPlugin folder.

Here are the instructions to install the plugin (there will be a .txt file with the Zip file with exactly these steps):

Install Instructions:

  1. Close ZBrush 2019
  2. Extract the Zip file
  3. Copy the contents of the folder NanoTileTextures_Install (‘NanoTileTextures_2019.zsc’ and the ‘NanoTileTexturesData_2019’ folder) to Pixologic/ZBrush 2019/ZStartup/ZPlugs64/
  4. Launch ZBrush
  5. NanoTile Textures will be located in the ZPlugins Tab at the top [ZPlugin:NanoTile Textures]
  6. This plugin has had limited testing and could contain potential bugs; please save your work before using it!

Textures rendered in Marmoset

These renders are the result of the textures maps exported from ZBrush and applied to a material in Marmoset Toolbag 3:

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