Painting on the Sculpt

The ZBrush-KeyShot-Photoshop experience continues today with a little painting practice. I selected a quick and dirty bust made from sphere in Zbrush and brought it into Keyshot. Unfortunately I had some hardware issues as it turns out keyshot is a beast and uses 100% of my CPU resources unless my render is set small. 
It was a struggle but I managed to get 3 renders of my sculpt out of light shot before I decided to bring it in to photoshop and get used to painting over a sculpt. 
I first layered all 3 of the renders as such: 
 

As you can see, there was something a little funky with my mesh in the front forehead area. Also, because this was a quick and dirty sculpt, it's fairly stylized with big disproportionate eyes, bulbous nose, and shortened cranium. 
For the purposes of this exercise I wanted it to be obvious that realism was not my end goal. 

So after getting these three renders in Keyshot for hair, skin, and shirt, I then took the image - which is now flat 2D image- and brought it into Photoshop. 
I layers all 3 of these images and removed, masked until I had beige skin, brown hair, and blue shirt. I then created a new layer and set it to overlay, and did the same with my brush and began painting. When the basic blending and colour blocking was done I created a new normal layer and put in some more opaque details. 

The end result is a little more 'soft' than I would like, it gets a little muddy in the nose area but I'm well on my way to figuring out the right balance to paint over my sculpts. 
 

More Floating Tree

“Update to include some the extra work I did on it this afternoon. ”

Yesterday and today I took my model from ZBrush into Keyshot and immediately discovered something I had not considered when making my model. It turns out that in order to use keyshot to apply different materials to different areas of the model they each need to be a subtool in ZBrush and not all one part of the same mesh. Now, in hindsight that seems obvious but it's not outside the realm of possibility that I would have been able to mask off the different areas to apply textures, materials, and such to specific areas. BUT such is the game when learning something new. There may still be a way to do this masking but I believe I can make my modeling experience MUCH easier if I just ensure that my model includes subtools. 

So in familiarizing myself with this application I played around with the various materials that are in keyshot. I also have done some exploration of light source and texture but the big "GLAMOUR" change is easily the materials. I took some screen grabs to show you what I mean. You can easily see how this little change in materials on my sculpt can really trigger the possibilities and also force you to consider you materials when designing your sculpt. You've got to keep the end goal in mind right from the beginning. It's a fun was of working that take a bit more planning and forethought that I am going to thoroughly enjoy. 

Check out the screens. :)