How to Make an Ancient Artifact Wall in ZBrush

In this video tutorial I'm going to cover 3 stages of the process to create an 'ancient artifact wall'. I'll show you I setup the scene using very simple primitive objects and Booleans in ZBrush, then we'll get into detailing and polypaint using custom brushes to speed up the process and towards the end, we'll optimise the mesh and send it to Maverick Render to play around with the composition, materials and lighting.

Alternative ways to create light patterns

As you can see from the tutorial, the 'Projectors' are awesome to create light patterns and 'art direct' your pieces within Maverick. This Projectors that 'block the light' is a concept that you can find in other software with different names but if you want to do something similar and don't have access to Maverick Render, here is a simple and straightforward workaround:

I'm using Marmoset Toolbag 4 for this example but the principle applies to most 3D renderers. In ZBrush, you can create a plane to literally block the light and if you use the 3D Plane in ZBrush, it should already come with UVS. You can set up the scene entirely in ZBrush before exporting or export just the plane separately and use the tools in the renderer to adjust the scale and position to block the light.

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Then you can create a material for the plane and since it has UVs already, you can just drag and drop a black and white texture into the Alpha map from the Transparency channel of the material (this should be pretty similar in other rendering software). I used the same image from the video tutorial and Marmoset is using the 'black' values of the image to block the light in those areas so the effect is exactly the same.

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To wrap up, just make sure that the 'blocker' is not in the way of the camera you are going to use for render and you are good to go:

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