Zbrush Renderpasses, why?

goekbenjamin

What is the purpose of renderpasses in Zbrush for rendered images?
To get a right look of a certain material, reflectivity of a "metal" etc? 
if so, can i not just skip that passes and make my textures with principled based shaders, like substance painter, export textures and render that stuff in keyshot? isnt that much more "professional"? or did i not understand the purpose of it?

Thanks 

Burpee

Some people just don't have acces or don't want to care about going too " deep " with uv, texturing in painter, rendering etc...

It's like a cheap and quick way to render your stuff, ( I say cheap but some artist does really amazing job with it ! )

goekbenjamin

cool, so concept sculpting can totaly have that workflow like
- sculpt in zbrush, prepare uvs
- paint in subst. painter
- render in keyshot
right?

Burpee

Yeah usually they don't even go into painter, depend on what people likes. 
For concept art you can really do whatever you want, you can texture your stuff in the 3D viewport of photoshop if you enjoy it.

goekbenjamin

Burpee said:

Yeah usually they don't even go into painter, depend on what people likes. 
For concept art you can really do whatever you want, you can texture your stuff in the 3D viewport of photoshop if you enjoy it.

the thing with SB is that material setup is not a guesswork, so i can fully concentrate on other stuff than that

Laughing_Bun

Sometimes you don't want physically accurate renderings.Being able to play with the lighting to show off your sculpt can produce better more illustrative results than a physically correct render might. 

goekbenjamin

Laughing_Bun said:

Sometimes you don't want physically accurate renderings.Being able to play with the lighting to show off your sculpt can produce better more illustrative results than a physically correct render might. 

true that, thanks alot

musashidan

Before Keyshot ZB BPR render passes/compositing was very popular. I us to do it myself, all the time. The thing to understand is that this technique is a truly liberating one from a production workflow. Render pass/comp/paintover is a way to get extremely fast artwork out because anything goes. It's main use industry-wise is concepting and it is purely an illustration technique. he beauty of it is that is really feels like you're doing freeform art as you don't need to worry about any of the technical aspects of a pipeline for production authoring: topology doesn't matter, you can mash and kitbash all you like, you don't need to unwrap or bake or texture or rig or create complex shaders and lighting or even bother sculpting/modeling parts of the subject that won't be seen. You just churn out any amount of material/lighting passes and start comping, adding more as you need them.

The real fun is the paintover phase. Anything goes here including painting with light with the lighting passes, photobashing, blending on whatever texures or photos you like, painting scratch masks, painting DOF and SSS. Anything.