For instance, did you know that you can just select the Fibers1 shader and render to get your mesh covered in hair instantly? You can also use the modifiers from the Materials palette to tweak things like the ‘density’, the ‘length’, the ‘waviness’ etc:
So with a bit of tweaking, this shader might be useful in some situations:
Another cool standard shader in ZBrush is the GradientMap2 shader. By default, it looks like a ‘wood’ material but you can use this to create a bunch of cool effects. This shader in particular is what I would call the ‘missing link’ between the standard shaders and the MatCaps, because this actually uses a tiny strip of texture (256 by 2 pixels) to generate the ‘wood vains’ effect:
You can play with the sliders of this shader it tweaks how the ‘gradient’ image is projected over the material to customise the effect:
If we take this one step further, you can actually replace the little gradient image with anything you want. Simple click the image thumbnail at the bottom of the shader and import your custom gradient… you’ll see the effect straight away and of course, you can tweak it to make it look more interesting. Here are a couple of tests I did:
Anyway, this is more of a ‘playing ground’ than anything so let me know if you come up with something cool using these tricks!
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