I'd especially like to thank Raffael Frank for guiding me through this project. But, with the help of mentors and peers, I have achieved my dream of becoming a 3D artist and I'm now able to do what I love. Coming in, I had no knowledge of the programs or pipeline. I had to be a part of it! After a long and windy road, I found the VFX path by attending Think Tank Training Centre. When you’re a kid, imagination is the only limitation, and somehow those two never grew out of that. I grew up mesmerized by the movies of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. I believe that learning and exploration should span a lifetime. As a citizen of the globe, I’ve lived on 3 continents and received much of my artistic inspiration from nature. Learning a new medium is challenging, and I enjoy sharing my journey to help other artists achieve success. It’s probably an endearing feature, so make sure to save often when projection painting with this tool.With a background in Computer Science, Fine Art, and Graphic Design, I am currently in my final term as a student at Think Tank Online, focusing on VFX 3D characters. ZBrush appears to be a very stable app, except when it’s in Spotlight mode, where it’s prone to crashing. You can also switch between other images that have been added to Spotlight, but I find that part less than intuitive (like pretty much every aspect of ZBrush). There are also options to flip, mirror, tile and clone your image. There are plenty of goodies on this mysterious dial, such as the Nudge option that lets us distort the image before painting with it (ideal for adding organic imperfections). Position the object underneath, align your image and press Z to hide Spotlight. Hover over each icon and find the Opacity option, with which we can dim the preview of our image. while clicking in the middle of the circle will move our image around. Icons on the circle will let us adjust the image in size, rotation and even colour. This shows the shortcut circle of Spotlight, and the image you’re painting with. You first need to load your textures using the Alpha palette, Texture palette or Light Box. The mode supports ZAdd, ZSub, and MRGB information. In this state the flattened surface can be sculpted or painted just like you would the 3D mesh. Once a 3D mesh has UVs, clicking the Morph UV button will flatten the mesh down to a 2D state based on the mapping. It is similar in some ways to the ZBrush Stencil feature. How Sculpting & Painting to Morph UV Works. This next step is potentially every so slightly disturbing for newcomers as you’ll see something like this: SpotLight v2.0 is a projection texturing system which allows you to prepare your source texture directly in ZBrush, then paint your model with it in 3D. When you’re ready to paint, press the ON/OFF button to start Spootlight (green, or press shortcut SHIT+Z).

There’s a plus/minus button that’ll do that (red). Images need to be added to Spotlight before they can be used. Kev docks the Textures menu on the left hand side of his ZBrush interface for easy access, but that’s optional. Some are included with ZBrush, feel free to pick the Jelly Beans image for a quick test. Click on the Textures Menu and import images you’d like to draw with. Let’s take a look at Spotlight now, which is the tool that lets us paint with textures on our object. We’ll cover how to turn those into textures in another article. Remember we’re not painting on a texture, but directly on the outside vertices of the object. Make sure to subdivide your model so that we have enough vertex detail (pixols) to paint on. Pick another colour and see that you can paint on your object. To do that, head over to the Color Menu, pick white and select Fill Object. We need to fill the object with a background colour first so that our stokes appear properly. Note that when you pick a colour with the picker on the left, you’ll notice that the whole object changes. Pick a white mat cap instead of the default red one so we can see what we’re going to paint. At the same time, make sure to enable the Rgb button at the top, enabling paint mode. In edit mode, the default is to sculpt on the object, let’s disable by making sure the Zadd button is not highlit. I’ll draw out a new 3D object (a Sphere_3D in this case), then turn it into a real mesh by pressing Make PolyMesh3D on the Tool shelf. import or select images, then add them to Spotlight.apply a white matcap and fill the object with a background colour.Kev explains it really well, here’s what I did to follow his instructions: Last night I found the above excellent tutorial by Kevvfx and thought I’d take some notes on how to get started with it. It’s very powerful and yet another fun way for us to project textures onto 3D objects. I remember making notes on the projection painting tool in ZBrush back in 2013, it’s called Spotlight.

Zbrush spotlight sculpting