A Look Into Zbrush - Rendering with Photoshop CC

Zbrush to Photoshop CC

Hello! Today I'm going to give you a run down of this neat feature is Zbrush, what it is, it's functionality and a quick blip of a tutorial I did trying it out for the first time myself and some issues I ran into.

What is it?

Zbrush to Photoshop CC is a free plugin through Zbrush that allows you to send BPR passes to Photoshop for editing. It's quick and easy rendering, all you have to do is determine your camera angle and what passes you want like depth, lights, mask, specular, ambient occlusion, then hit SEND TO PHOTOSHOP, and voila!

Functionality

Now! First things first, once you export it may take a bit for it to process depending on how many passes you're asking the program to go through. Unfortunately for me, I chose to demonstrate with a model that has A LOT of pieces so it did take a bit but still only took a few minutes to go through them all.

On to the fun stuff.

Zbrush pops your file over to photoshop for rendering. Everything you had selected previously went into the layers section in photoshop. As you can see below with a short video I made, the masks, effects, geometry, lights, and materials were all transferred over into their own layers, breaking down the individual pieces for processing.

What I ABSOLUTELY love about this whole process is that it creates a bunch of different light angles for you, allowing you to try out different angles, fiddle with the lighting on different parts of the machine, increase the shadows, lessen them or hide them entirely from the model. You can also, jump in and mess with the adjustments in Photoshop, I took some time to played around with the levels and the color balance, trying to give the model the feel of a warm/hot environment with orange and red hues reflecting off the metal material.

Another perk...NON-DESTRUCTIVE WORKFLOW!!!

This process increases the speed of BPR renders and makes the whole process much faster. Not only that but now but by using smart filters in Photoshop we can make edits and changes on the fly without having to worry about rendering and re-rendering every time we make a change.

Troubleshooting

I only really had one issue while using this plugin and that was getting it to jump over to Photoshop. You might have the issue of photoshop not being set as the default plugin, my Zbrush tried opening the file in one of my scripting programs (such a Bracket). to resolve this issue you simply need to go into your Zstartup file in your applications and get info on the .jsx file that is provided for the plugin, you'll be able to change the default program through there. Confirm the changes, reboot Zbrush and it should work like a charm!

For troubleshooting on a Windows computer check out this link from Pixologic:
http://docs.pixologic.com/user-guide/zbrush-plugins/zbrush-to-photoshop-cc/

Zbrush to Photoshop really is a unique plugin, especially for those whose job it is to pump out high quality renders in a short amount of time, and as we all know, time is money in this industry!

Thanks for reading this blog, I hope you learned a thing or two!

Happy rendering!

-Breanne