A GUIDE TO ZBrush Comic Style Render by Pablo Munoz Gomez

A guide to: Zbrush Comic Style render! 

By Pablo Munoz Gomez 

A guide to: 

Zbrush Comic 

Style render! 


www.pablander.com 

1



Hello and welcome to another ZBrush guide! 

In this guide, I’ll try to tap into the fantastic world of comics 

and borrow bits and pieces of what’s considered a “comic 

style” to create a reusable Comic Material for render 3D 

sculptures using ZBrush BPR. 

In this tutorial you’ll learn: 

An illustration on its own is rarely referred to as a “comic”, 

unless is part of a sequence of related images, which are, 

in most cases, driven by a story. But there are also a lot of 

different comic styles simply because each artist has his/her 

own style. So how do we determine those visual clues that 

suggest our next piece of art is COMIC ART? 

- Various techniques to achieve the “Comic look” in ZBrush; 

- To create and render a “Comic style” artwork in ZBrush; 

- How to create your own Comic MatCaps; 

- Combine materials together for more complex effects; 

- A bunch of tips and trick related to material creation. 

• 

Resources! 

I have compiled a bunch of resources with this guide to help 

you understand certain things or simply to give you a head 

start in the right direction. Some of the things included in the 

resource folder might not make sense outside the context of 

this tutorial, so I encourage you to go through the tutorial 

and bring up the resources as they get mentioned 

(in yellow) in the different sections. Afterwards, feel free to 

use them as you want in your personal projects. 

Intro 

Although defining what a comic style is and what is not, 

could be a volatile topic of discussion, I will simply use the 

term to refer to a particular set of visual clues that (in my 

opinion) suggests an illustration could be part of what’s 

commonly referred to as a comic book or a graphic novel. 

A short answer could be: consistency. In other words, no 

matter what your style is, if you want to put together a short 

comic book or an epic graphic novel, consistency will be 

a strong element that could bind your sequence of 

images as a whole. 

Take for example the overpowering dark shadows and 

stylised anatomy of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy, or the 

beautiful, clean and simple linework of TinTin by Herge. 

The soft palettes and detailed illustration from Moebius, The 

bulky and oversized proportions of Rob Liefeld’s art, The 

psychedelic compositions and colours of Jim Starlin, The 

dynamic poses and zombie-like characters of Ryan Ottley 

as well as the complex lines and shadow work of Todd 

Mcfarlane or Jim Lee. I could go on and on just to mention 

some of my favourites (and I’m leaving a lot of big names 

out for the sake of not going over three pages here). I’m 

sure that you get the idea... 

In the construction of this tutorial I have used many 

references of my favourite comic artists and I have 

identified what I consider to be the key elements 

that make an illustration an artwork for a comic 

book. So here are the visual clues and what I will be 

discussing in this tutorial: 

OUTLINE AND LINE WEIGHT 

This is probably the most important one out of the four visual 

clues. Since most comic books are 2D in nature, Sculpting 

your character in 3D and getting the right shader to mimic 

the look and feel of a hand drawn illustration, is essential. 

We’ll take a detailed look into this further into the tutorial. 


2



In this particular case, and because we are going to be 

working in 3D, we have the advantage of quickly and 

interactively change the direction and intensity of the 

shadows much more efficiently than if we were just drawing 

of inking in 2D (more of these in the matcap section). 

“RESTRICTED” COLOURS AND RIM LIGHTS 

DYNAMIC POSES AND PERSPECTIVE 

This clue or idea is quite obvious. Not only a dynamic pose 

will make the character look more interesting, but it suggest 

movement which could make your image a bit more 

“sequential” even if you are working on a single image. 

The perspective is not simply a choice of camera angle, but 

an additional tool that could also add to the dynamism of 

the image and help to accentuate the mood of the scene 

(a hero pose usually from a low level perspective aiming 

upwards, for instance). 

In this fourth clue I’m doing a generalisation, but it’s 

necessary in order to create a couple of specific examples 

that can be explained in a step by step scenario. 

Regardless of the colour palette, you can use flat colours 

or a more sophisticated gradient that defines the volumes 

better. The reason why I called it “restricted” is because the 

different hues are usually applied to well defined areas of 

the characters. 

Ok, with this introduction out of the way here is a little bit of 

the structure of how we are going to tackle this guide: 

HARD SHADOWS AND CONTRAST 

Surely one of the coolest visual clues is the use of hard 

shadows that are often there to define volumes and the 

anatomy of the characters. In some cases they shadows are 

very intense and create an overly contrasted image with a 

very dramatic lighting, sometimes the shadow itself is the 

driving force of the whole composition of the image. 

First, I will show you some of the different approaches 

that we can take to achieve the look and feel we 

want, as well as giving you a rough indication of what are 

the process involves. 

Then, I will mention some points that are important to 

consider when sculpting in 3D if you want to go for 

this particular “comic style” look. This will lead to a better 

understanding of the use of ZBrush Matcap materials. 

Finally I will explain each one of the techniques in 

greater depth, finishing with a visual step by step 

guide of how I created the COVER IMAGE for this 

tutorial in which I make use of the technique previously 

discussed. 

For more advanced user, you can quickly scan the tutorial 

by reading the Green and Orange highlights, if you just 

want to have a general idea of the tools and methods used. 


3



Let’s get started: 

Let’s kick this guide off by establishing some of the the 

methods and/or ZBrush features that we can use to get 

what we want. Keep in mind that all of the aforementioned 

features can be combined to make even more complex 

illustrations. 

The following diagram showcases my hero character 

called Kepler, illustrating the result of each one of the 

methods that I will be explaining in this tutorial. 

This is just to give you a rough idea of what can be 

achieved and the tools involved. 

looking comic style render within zbrush. You have 

the advantages of the ZBrush MatCap materials and when 

combined with other shaders the possibilities are endless! 

I’m sure you will definitely enjoy this process. 

Outlines and photoshop finishing: With this approach, 

you will also have a whole lot of options. We’ll take 

advantage of the 3D nature of the model and the versatile 

materials of ZBrush, to produce an very accurate and 

clean outline that we can use as our linework to shade it in 

Photoshop, anyway you want! 

THE IDEA BEHIND THE MATCAP FOR COMIC STYLE 

(USING TESTING MATCAPS). 

Now I’m guessing you are as excited as I was when I 

started testing these techniques, but before jumping into the 

the action, I want to show you a few things that helped me 

achieve the look I was going for, instead of settling for a 

“good enough” result. 

This is the more technical part of the tutorial but I think it 

is fundamental to have a basic understanding of the way 

MatCaps in ZBrush work in order to make it work for you 

and for what you need, so here we go: 

TECHNIQUES AND METHODS TO ACHIEVE BPR COMIC STYLE 

Lightcap: This is one of the quickest ways to achieve the 

comic look within ZBrush. It gives you a lot of control on 

shadows and the way the colours (lights) are blended. 

Also it has a super fast render time, under 1 second without 

shadows. 

ZBrush Matcap: This is an obvious choice, you can 

quickly create a whole bunch of materials that have the 

lighting your want embedded in a single image. There are 

a few limitations that we’ll discuss later on but overall it 

gives a very decent result and the render time still is under 1 

second using BPR. 

MatCap is short for Material Capture and it captures 

the lighting and reflections of the environment. There are a 

few ways to create a MatCap but will get into that when we 

talk about the specific approaches of attaining the comic 

style. 

I believe that you learn best by doing, so let’s try to 

understand some of the features of a MatCap by jumping 

into ZBrush and playing around with some of the testing 

objects. 

In the resource folder you should have a .obj file called 

“MatCap_Objects_Tester.obj”. Open ZBrush and 

import that file, drag it into the canvas and enter the “edit” 

mode: 

Photoshop MatCap: Creating MatCaps within ZBrush is 

probably one of my favourite methods to experiment with, 

and when Photoshop is added to the mix, the results are 

very interesting and precise. 

Mixing Shaders with MatCaps: In my opinion 

this is the best possible way to get a really cool 


4



Nothing fancy here, but I found these objects to be 

the best simple forms to understand how a matcap 

interacts with a 3D object. In other words how a simple 

image is wrapped around a 3D model. 

In the same resource folder you should have a material 

called “RGBY_Testing_MatCap.ZMT”. Go ahead and 

load it up from the Material thumbnail > load. You’ll 

see a colourful set of objects like this: 

Pay attention to the left row while you slowly rotate the 

object clicking and draggin up or down like this: 

Repeat the rotation but this time keep in an eye on 

the row at the right. What you’ll see, is that the transition 

of the colours is smoother on the right and more abrupt 

on the left. The reason why, is because of the difference in 

the amount of geometry in the objects. 

First thing I would like you to do, is turn the perspective 

ON and OFF (by pressing P) just so you see that 

perspective doesn’t affect how the material is 

displayed. 

The testing material is a simple MatCap that consist of one 

channel with an image (the four squares of colour). 

Essentially, you could click on the image of the material and 

replace it with whatever photo you want but let’s stick with 

these colours for now. 

This also means that the objects with less geometry or 

less subdivisions, have less normals. This will be more 

relevant in the next section when we talk about modeling 

for comic render. 

So how is this colourful testing MatCap applicable in 

anyway? There are a couple of things we can assume: 

No matter how much we rotate the models, the BLUE and 

GREEN colours will always stay at the bottom and 

the RED AND YELLOW at the top. 

In the same way, YELLOW and GREEN are always 

right, and BLUE AND RED are always left. 

Now frame the objects and snap them to a front view 

(Hold shift while rotating). 

With that in mind, we could also assume that no matter 

the object you use, at any given angle that it is viewed, 

the polygon that has normals facing up and right will be 

YELLOW and the same principle applies for the rest of the 

colours. 

Let’s see if that is true with more complex objects, I just 

loaded my character and applied the MatCap that we’ve 

been using: 


5



Let’s load the “RGBYK_Testing_MatCap.ZMT” material and 

see what happens with our testing objects. All I did was 

edit the image in the MatCap and add a black dot 

right in the middle. For the purpose of this tutorial, I am 

going to refer to the faces with normals pointing directly at 

the camera as “front normals”. 

Ok cool it, looks like it’s true!... There are some faces that 

I’m sure are facing directly to me (or the camera if you like), 

and they still have colour. 

A couple of interesting things happened to our testing 

objects, the front normals are now black but the first object 

at the top left has no black in it. This is purely because the 

object is a pyramid with only five sides and none 

of the faces is pointing towards the camera. 

Here is when MatCaps start to get more complicated 

because you have to take into account all normals of 

the objects not just left, right up and down but also front 

and all the rest in between. 

The good news is that the image I used in this testing 

MatCap, is so simple that we can actually detect which 

parts of a more complex model are facing “the camera” 

at any given angle. The centre of the image used by 

the MatCap (where the four colours meet), is actually 

the point that is facing the camera directly, so in the 

Kepler character example, these are the areas that have 

polygons facing the camera. 

Rotate the object 180 degrees and things are quite 

different, the pyramid (now at the top right) is just black 

because the “base” is a single polygon with front 

normal. 

So now let’s have a look at this testing material applied 

to the Kepler character: 


6



Very cool! Although the colours are too saturated and 

too bright at the moment, things are starting to look more 

interesting. Let’s have a look at some of the attributes of the 

material to modify it a bit more, before we move on into the 

more meaty part of this guide. 

Load another testing material called RGBYW_Testing_ 

MatCap.ZMT. This is an exact copy of the previous 

material, but I just changed the black dot in the centre 

of the image used by the MatCap to be pure white. 

With cavity detection enabled (value more than 0), Zbrush 

is rendering the peaks or high points of the object, with the 

colour in the channel A and the cavities or low points with 

the colour in the channel called B and its also using these 

two colours to shade the materials using a 50% of each of 

these channels, which is why the colours are darker and the 

white areas look grey (50% white and 50% black - or 50% 

A channel and 50% B channel). 

I sculpted a couple of lines with the Dam_Standard brush 

in this plane to show you the above paragraph in practical 

terms: 

We are now going to take a look at two very important 

things for our comic look, the first one, is how to get the 

outlines that describe the volumes of the sculpture and the 

second one, is how to alter the “range” or depth of the 

MatCap. Make sure you turn off the polyframe so that the 

effects is more evident. 

One way we can achieve the outlines from the MatCap 

is by tweaking the Cavity Detection and Cavity 

Transition values (Intensity A and B are also relevant 

here). Let’s change the Cavity Detection to 1, you’ll 

see that the colours are less bright and the outlines in the 

model are pure white. Let’s invert the effect by changing the 

Cavity Transition to 1: 

If you move the Cavity Transition slider back to -1 

you’ll get the opposite effect. However, it’s important 

to know, that this attribute is not inverting the A 

and B colours but rather smoothing or sharpening 

the transition of the Peaks and the cavities (black 

and white in this case) so you are actually inverting the 

transition. 

Hopefully is not too confusing, but give me another 

chance to explain it. Imagine that A and B are a simple 

gradient from White to Black: 

If Cavity detection is not enabled, ZBrush will only 

take into account the A sliders. 

Great, now we have some black outlines but the colour 

are still a bit dull. The black or white outlines and the 

less bright colours are 

determined by the same 

attribute, which is the 

colour I chose for A and B 

at the bottom of the modifier 

subpalette. 


But is Cavity Detection is enabled, the Cavity 

Transition will sharpen the transition between A 

and B: 

7



when you invert the values in the Cavity Transition 

slider you are essentially flipping the effect: 

Let’s go back to the testing objects. As I mentioned 

earlier, the Intensity A and B are also very important 

here and this is how we are going to change the grey back 

to white. Turn the Intensity A all the way up (to 5) 

and Cavity Transition to 1. This is basically our original 

MatCap but now we have black outlines. 

These attributes are mainly to intensify the appearance 

of cavities or peaks, but the real value for us in this comic 

tutorial, is that we can change really quickly the area 

covered by the “front normals” colour in the image 

of our MatCap. 

These are some examples at different values and you can 

actually “flip” the MatCap image if you go to the negative 

values: 

You can play around with the Cavity Detection and 

Cavity Transition values to tweak the amount of 

lines and the thickness of the outlines. Now that you 

know that the colour of the outlines are determined by the B 

channel, you can simply change the B colour to something 

else to get different outline colours: 

Here are some screenshots with the same values from the 

above samples but used with Kepler character. 

We are getting closer! Maybe you are starting to get 

excited about the possibilities? I know this first part might 

be a bit tedious but I think we need to tackle some of these 

basics before getting into the super cool effects. 

MODELING FOR COMIC RENDER 

(DEEP INDENTATIONS - SHARP LINES - CONTRAST SHAPES) 

Ok, the next thing I want to show you is the Depth A and 

Depth B. The easiest way to understand the practicality of 

these attributes, is to see it as a “pinch” (positive values 

like 3) and “Magnify” (postivie values closer to 0). That 

ZBrush does to the MatCap image. 

One of the things you’ll realise when creating your own 

Materials, is that sometimes they look great in one model 

but not so much in a different one. If you create a Comic 

MatCap material and want to reuse it, chances are that 

it will look good with a variety of models and using the 

testing objects provided with this guide will help you get 

a more consistent result. However, it’s not all about the 

material, so you might be modeling a really cool character 

but when you apply your brand new Comic MatCap, you 

may be disappointed. So this section is about some tips and 

tricks to make the models more likely to look awesome with 

the comic style materials. 


8



The head in the image on 

the right, is a quick dynames 

sketch that looks alright in the 

MatCap Gray. The model 

seems clean and there are 

some organic shapes and a 

bit of hard surface around the 

helmet/mask. 

I took the head and applied 

one of the MatCaps I made 

and suddenly, it started to look 

a bit boring. We are losing 

some important lines of 

expression and there is no 

much contrast: 

To upgrade the look of this head I exaggerated the 

volumes and indentations a bit more. I also added 

some alphas and a few lines on the suit; these subtle 

changes helps to accentuate the contours of the face and 

create greater contrast between the surfaces. 

Here is what’s happening… When we take a model and 

we exaggerate the low and high points or peaks and 

crevices we are also increasing the normals variations 

in the model. Take a plane for instance, if we apply the 

Testing Matcap with the black circle and we snap the view 

to look at it from the top, we will see the plane is totally 

black. Since the plane has only one face normal (pointing 

at the camera in this example) it can only pick a single 

colour from the Matcap determined by the view angle. 

Now, this is the same head with exactly the same 

material. It looks more defined and more interesting; the 

differences is purely in the model, not in the render 

settings or the MatCap attributes. 

If we subdivide the plane (more faces, more normals) 

and we pull some faces, the sculpted area will have 

normals pointing in directions that matches other 

point in the image of the MatCap. 


9



If you have a Matcap with an image that has very thin 

black outline, and you want to get some black lines 

within your model, you’ll need to carve deep in the model 

until the normals are almost 90 degrees from the view 

angle. 

LIGHTCAP FOR COMIC STYLE RENDER 

Lightcaps are very powerful. They essentially follow the 

same principle of MatCaps in that they both intend to 

capture light information. The main difference is that 

with LightCaps you can interactively adjust the light and 

its properties while you create it. With the MatCaps, on 

the other hand, the light information is baked into a single 

image, which means that to modify the lighting you’ll have 

to edit the image. 

A simple TIP to enhance your models for comic render: 

Work on your model as you normally would. Once you 

are happy with it, test your Comic MatCap and see if the 

model itself needs tweaking the you can simply create a 

new layer and exaggerate the cavities or crevices you want 

to be more prominent. 

Here is Kepler with a gray matcap so you can see the 

model. Ideally the volumes and lines I exaggerated should 

make the character look more consistent across different 

MatCaps: 

Although this is a very powerful method to achieve a comic 

style look, it is not my personal favourite. I chose it to be 

the first in the list to discuss, because it can give you very 

quick and interesting results, so this might get your 

creative juices flowing and get you excited enough to make 

it through the rest of this lengthy guide! 

Ok, the first thing I’ll get you to do is initialize ZBrush 

so that we can start fresh. Load the “Testing_Hero_head. 

ZTL”, drag it into the canvas, enter edit mode and dock 

the Light palette to the left or right tray. Also, select the 

SkinShade4, you should have something like this: 

You should also have only one light enabled from the 

Light palette, go ahead and turn it off. Also set the 

Ambient light to 0 You should see something like this: 

Ok, now that we have gone through some basic concepts 

and a few tips we can start using the different techniques 

I mentioned at the beginning, to achieve our comic style 

render. 


The reason you can still see the model and some 

volumes is because the SkinShade 4 has a bit of 

Ambient. If you open up the Materials palette and then 

10



the Modifiers subpalette, you’ll see the first attribute is 

Ambient and it’s set to 15. Turn it to 0 and now we 

have a pure black silhouette (I also got rid of the 

Background gradient). 

Now find the LightCap subpalette in the Light palette. We 

don’t want to alter any MatCap but rather start fresh so 

select the SkinShade4 material again (keep in mind 

that the SkinShade is a ZBrush shader not a MatCap). 

Click on the “New Light” button from the LightCap 

subpalette. You should see something like this: 

Before we start creating our first LightCap, I want you to go 

to the material palette and click on any MatCap. 

Great! we just created a light that is letting us see the 

volume of our object again. Now let’s do a quick 

overview of some of the attributes we will be using 

to create the comic effect. 

THE STRENGTH is quite self 

explanatory. The higher the value the 

more light that is diffused from the 

object. 

What is going on? We have turned all the lights off! Why 

are we still seeing the MatCap? Well this is the practical 

example of some of the things I have been talking about. 

MatCaps have the lighting information already 

baked in an image so you can see it even if you don’t 

have lights in your project. 

When using MatCaps, the only difference between having 

a light on or off, is the ability of casting shadows on the 

model at render time. 

THE SHADOW slider determines the 

opacity of the shadows cast by the 

selected light in the LightCap. I will turn 

this attribute to 0 in most cases when 

creating a comic LightCap. 

THE APERTURE AND FALLOFF. These two attributes will 

be the most important ones to create the look we want: 

THE APERTURE defines how the light is 

spread over the model, think about it as a super 

concentrated laser beam when you have lower 

values or a huge diffused light box when you 

are in the higher values. 

THE FALLOFF defines the distance cover by the 

light in the model. For our purposes, the easiest 

way to think about it is as a “sharpen / Blur” 

slider for the area covered by the light. 

With all this in mind, set strength value to something 

like 1.3 and the Aperture slider to 60, you should get 

something like this: 


11



From this point you have a two options: 

1. Keep playing around with the lighting and add 

some polypaint to your model so you can start 

getting some colours into your comic illustration. 

2. Use the light sources to colour the model and 

then create a MatCap from the lightCap. 

Now go ahead and change the Falloff slider to 0… 

voila! The first step towards something cool in this Comic 

style guide. Finally! 

Here is a quick example for option number 1. I just 

position the light in the angle that I liked and assign some 

flat colours to the hero head. 

Option two it’s a bit more juicy! so let’s see what else we 

can do. 

From the LightCap editor preview image, click and drag 

the little red dot that appears in the middle (this is your 

light). With just one light you can create a whole bunch of 

comic-like style effects: 

Keep the polypaint ON so you can see how the lights 

affect the colour. In the LightCap subpalette, there is a 

Colour picker next to the blending mode of the 

light, this allows you to pick a colour for your light source. 

I’m going to start by creating a bit of shading. I want to 

have strong sharp shadows but I’d like to see some details 

and the volumes a bit more. Let’s create the Base for this 

material: leave the colour in white and tweak the strength, 

aperture and falloff. I set the values to 1, 120 and 1.2 

respectively. 

NOTE: If you see a bit of gray between the black and the 

white areas on your model, this is because we haven’t 

turned off the Specular slider in the Material modifiers of 

the SkinShade4. If you want pure black and white, you can 

just set the specular slider to 0. 


12



Now create a new light from the “New Light” button. 

You will be able to cycle between the lights using the 

light index. When you have multiple lights, make sure you 

select the one you want to change because the attributes 

are unique to each light you create. 

The new light will be the specular or highlight but very 

subtle. With the Strength at 0.15, Aperture at 60 and 

falloff at 5. 

Finally, we just need to add a couple of highlights to 

make the render more interesting. Create another light (the 

fifth one), and change the colour to something like this 

bright yellow. Set the blending mode to Replace(normal) 

and crank up the strength to 20. Play with the aperture 

and falloff to get a sharp highlight and position the 

light to the right: 

The next step is to get some shadows but instead 

of enabling them,we are going to use the light itself as 

a shadow… WHAT? 

Yes, we’ll use is as a 

“black light” simply by 

changing the colour 

to black and the 

blending mode to 

Multiply. Position it 

where you want, I put 

mine at the bottom left 

and got this: 

I’m sure you are starting to see the value of this method but 

let’s wrap it up and finish it by adding a few more lights. 

The next one is another “black light” that I positioned at 

the bottom and slightly to the right, just to make those sharp 

shadows a bit more prominent. 

Create one more final light 

that we’ll use as a secondary 

light source. This time I set 

the colour to blue and moved 

it to the left. Instead changing 

the strength to 20, I left it at 1 

and changed the Exposure to 

6 (the exposure multiplies the 

value of the strength slider… 

just so you know is there). 

Cool, so this is, in a nutshell, the idea of creating lightCaps. 

You can click on the “Create Texture” button to bake 

the lights into a single image that you can save with a 

MatCap. Alternatively, if you want to have the ability 

to further tweak you lights later on, you can save the 

LightCap and all your lights and attribute will be saved. 

There is an extra tip that I want to share with you before 

moving on… You don’t need to have polypaint on your 

model, you can actually turn the polypaint off and just use 

the lights to create your colour shading. For example: 


13



Obviously, you can enhance the render by mixing this 

method with some of techniques we’ll discuss in the next 

sections, but I think this can give you a good starting point 

for your comic style illustrations. 

This is Kepler with the LightCap image saved into a 

MatCap and I just tweaked a bit the Modifiers I mentioned 

before like Cavity Detection and Cavity Transition: 

First thing we should do is dock the Material palette 

to the left or right tray for easy access. Open up the 

modifiers subpalette and reset all the attributes. 

(I chose “Chalk” MatCap, also because you only need to 

reset the cavity transition to 0 and the intensity A to 1). 

The next step is find your reference image, try to pick 

something that has all the shades and colours you would 

like to bake into your new MatCap. I just loaded an 

illustration of Kepler and added to the spotlight (Texture 

palette > Select the image > Add to Spotlight). You can 

turn Spotlight on and off with Shift+Z and enter the 

spotlight edit mode just by pressing Z. Move your 

image to the side and your 3D model to the opposite side. 

ZBRUSH MATCAPS FOR COMIC STYLE RENDER 

The next technique I wanted to share with you, adopts 

the same idea behind the creation of a LightCap but this 

time we’ll be creating the MatCap image based on an 

illustration. 

This time we’ll be editing the image of the MatCap directly 

as we build it up. This approach is great if you want to 

create your material based on the style of your 

favourite comic and I think is one of the fastest ways to 

construct the look and feel what you want. 

I’ll start by loading the Kepler character, you can use the 

testing hero head, load the Kepler_bust.obj or your own 

model. The process should be exactly the same regardless 

of the model you use. Select a MatCap that you don’t 

use much because when we start the MatCap creation, 

the image used by the MatCap you choose will be 

overwritten (until you restart ZBrush again). I picked the 

“Chalk” MatCap. 

TIP: If you image has black areas, ZBrush will read it as 

transparent. An easy fix is to increase the intensity of the 

image from the spotlight menu. 

The most important thing to understand, is that the 

image used by any MatCap, is a capture of the 

“environment” (lighting, reflections, etc) and the best 

way to capture a 360 degree image is using a sphere to 

map all the light interaction points. So what we need to do 

before anything, is to identify in our reference image 

the closest thing to a sphere or a rounded surface. 

This could be a deltoid, a contracted biceps, a close up 

to the chin or a nose assuming it is a humanoid character, 

or in this case the head / helmet of the Kepler 

character which will work great as our reference point. 


14



Ok let’s introduce the MatCap brush! Go to the tool 

palette, open up the tool menu and select the MatCap 

brush from the 2.5D brushes section. 

ZBrush will tell you that your current tool is in edit mode 

and ask if you want to exit edit mode and switch tools. We 

need to click on “Switch” because we want to drop our 3D 

model onto the canvas and start using the MatCap tool / 

brush. 

Because we have chosen only one colour, there shouldn’t 

be any shading but a flat colour. If you still see some 

shadows is because the preview shadows are on. 

I personally don’t mind having them but if you want, 

you can turn them off from the Render palette > 

Preview Shadows > Object Shadows slider. 

Now we are ready to start building our comic MatCap. 

Begin by finding the colour or tone that is more 

prominent or that covers the biggest area, in my case, the 

light blue is a pretty safe choice. Once you have identified 

the primary colour, click on it (over your reference image) 

and you’ll see three things happening simultaneously: 

1. A small sphere with a little red arrow appears in the 

canvas. 

After choosing the first colour, I realised that there is 

actually a slightly darker blue that should be the 

primary and the light blue is just a really big 

specular / highlight so removing a marker (the point 

created where you click) from the MatCap is quite easy, 

you just need to sort of remember where you clicked. 

Hover over the area you clicked to pick your colour and 

you’ll see a little red square. You can now hold “Alt” and 

click on it to delete it. (the image in the MatCap or the 

3D model will not change until you click on a new colour - 

new marker). 

I clicked on the new colour that I think should be the 

primary shade and then click again on the lighter 

blue, but this time I’m going to give the highlight some 

direction. To do that, click and hold, then drag in the 

direction you want. You’ll see the little preview sphere 

updating as you drag the red arrow. 

2. The image used by the Chalk MatCap has been 

overwritten by the colour you chose. 

3. The 3D model (that is not editable because we 

dropped onto the canvas) is filled with the blue colour. 

Once you let go (of the click), you should start to see some 

shading on the model. 

This is a great way to create all sort of MatCaps, but we 

want to get the comic look and feel and at the moment, the 

transition between the colours, is very smooth. The 

next step is to learn how to get a sharper transition 

between the colours (moving from diffuse light to a more 

specular point). 


15



Click again on your image reference to select another 

colour. while clicking, drag the mouse to set the 

direction of the light and before releasing the click, 

hold Ctrl and keep dragging. When you add Ctrl to 

the equation, you’ll see how the area with the colour you 

picked, gets blurred or sharp as you drag from left to 

right. 

Ok, I know it doesn’t look quite right yet, especially in 

the very smooth areas (like the head and chest of the Kepler 

character). But don’t give up! this is a great way to achieve 

some very interesting shading. Once you have used all the 

markers you need to describe the lighting of your reference 

image, you can move on to refining the MatCap. 

First, check the image we have created 

in the MadCap texture. Just hover over 

the image input in the material to see 

how it looks, you might decide you 

need some extra markers. This is 

how mine looks: 

Since the idea is to make a very defined transition between 

colours to achieve the comic style, we need to hold Ctrl 

until we get a very sharp highlight. The problem is 

that each point you pick on an image is trying to mimic 

a light source, so the area of the light gets smaller as 

you make it sharper. You could think about using “Ctrl” 

as a way to modify the MatCap roughness; Ctrl + drag 

will change the “surface” between concrete and metal, 

for instance. Modifying the way the light interacts with the 

material from diffuse (like in a concrete wall) to very sharp 

highlight (like in a metal piece). 

Definitely not the best, but the way colours are mixed 

in the actual model is not too bad. This is why is a good 

practice to create your MatCaps based on the model 

you are intended to use the materials with. 

To refine this MatCap, open up the Matcap Maker 

subpalette (the last one in the Material palette). 

Here you have a series of attributes that you can tweak to 

change the look of your MatCap, the first one is: Gloss. 

This slider can help you sharpen the transitions between 

the markers or blur them a lot: 

All that to say that in order to make a sharp larger area 

in our MatCap we need to create various small sharp 

highlights of the same colour: 

I followed the same process to create the other colours 

including the black outline and got to something like this: 

Then you have the Refine attribute which I rarely use but 

you may want to experiment with it. The way I see it, is that 

it acts as a “burn-saturate” colour slider: 


16



Next you have intensity, saturation and contrast but 

these are self explanatory. Since these attributes modify 

the MatCap image, you could think of them simply as 

Levels, Hue/Saturation and brightness/contrast in 

Photoshop: 

For instance, the following image has the gloss slider at 

0.3 which is quite diffuse: 

This other one has a gloss value of 5 where you can start 

to see a clear definition of the different colours: 

Now look what happens if we take the first image with 

gloss at 0.3 and we increase the specular to 500. The 

image now looks almost like the one with gloss at 5: 

Then there is Backlight, but I haven’t found it to be that 

useful. I believe is a slider to exaggerate the fresnel 

effect depending on the samples of your image (if 

you have a very thin white outline around for example). 

Now, the specular 

slider is quite 

interesting. At first, 

if you are just playing 

around with the slider, it 

might seem that it does 

the same as the Gloss 

slider but it’s a different 

effect. It does blurs and 

sharpens the transitions 

between the markers, 

but it also reduces 

the radius of each 

marker sample. 


So if we keep the specular at the maximum number (500) 

and we slowly increase the gloss value, we can see that 

ZBrush is reducing the diameter of each sample marker. In a 

way it’s like the Aperture and falloff attributes that 

we talked about in the LightCap section. 

So these are the final setting I used in the Matcap Maker 

to edit the image captured. Before and after: 

17



TIP: Keep in mind that while you refine the MatCap from the 

Matcap Maker subpalette, you can add, remove or edit 

your existing markers at any point. 

Great - I think we’ve made good progress, but the next 

couple of methods are really going to take the comic style 

to the next level. 

Finally, you can also play with the MatCap falloff curve 

to create a wide range of very cool and interesting 

effects, by creating additional point in the curve or using 

the noise slider: 

One last thing, if you want to delete all the markers you 

have created, go to “Marker” in the top menu and then 

click on “delete Markers”. 

PHOTOSHOP MATCAPS FOR COMIC STYLE 

RENDER 

I know, I know… the idea of this tutorial is getting the comic 

style using just ZBrush BPR, so why Photoshop? Well, we 

are still using ZBrush to render the materials, is just that we’ll 

take advantages of the precise tools in photoshop to create 

the MatCaps images before using them in ZBrush. 

It doesn’t have to be photoshop, most image editing 

software will be ok to do what we are going to do but 

I’ll use Photoshop as is the most widely used software for 

image editing and because it is the one I prefer. 

I could have started this guide by describing this method, 

because it allows you to ditch out a large number 

of options, test various combinations of colours and it 

just make the models look very cool. But I thought it was 

necessary to understand the LightCap and MatCap 

creation process beforehand, because what we’ll do 

now is essentially the same thing but “blindfolded”. In other 

words, we will be creating the image for the MatCap 

but without the interactive feedback that the 

previous methods offered. 

Once you are happy with your MatCap and if you want 

to save it for later use, simply go to the top of the Material 

palette and click save, give it a name and you are 

good to go! 

Let’s begin by opening the Photoshop_MatCap_template. 

PSD that I prepared for you. I use Adobe CC so the file 

might not open in previous versions of Photoshop but you 

can create your own template really easily, I just shared the 

one I use to save you some time. 

You should be able to see just a couple of layers, a 

Background and the smart objects that has the image. 

TIP: If you want to have your brand new MatCap available 

every time you start ZBrush, you need to save your 

MatCap into the startup folder. in windows is something like 

this: 

C:\Program Files (x86)\Pixologic\ZBrush 4R7\ZStartup\ 

Materials 


18



If you double click on the smart object, it should open up 

as a separate document that you can edit, you can add or 

remove layers and hit Ctrl+ S to save it. When you close 

after saving, all the changes will be saved into the 

template (because of the smart object) and you can save 

a JPEG to import into ZBrush. 

Within the smart object. you should see a few layers 

with objects that make the material, these layers can be 

anything, shapes, photos, hand painted, etc. Only what 

is inside of the circular area is going to be used by 

ZBrush to render the material. That is why there is a 

mask image at the top for your reference which you can 

turn off before saving (doesn’t make a difference if you 

leave it on though). 

To start, delete or turn off the layers in the smart 

objects, leaving just the background and the mask. 

whatever we create in between this layers is going to be 

our MatCap image. 

I found that the easiest way to build an image for a 

MatCap is to work from the back to the front, or from 

the outline to the inner areas. So we’ll create the first 

colour that is going to be the dark outline. 

Create a new layer and let’s create a circle using the 

Ellipse Tool (u). hold Shift to create a perfect circle. After 

you create it you can also click Ctrl + T and transform it to 

put it in place. Fill this with Black, or use your reference 

image to colour pick the area with the colour you want. 

The next layer will be the next colour inwards: The 

dark purple. I also like to open my reference image as a 

separate document so I can keep it side by side. 

With his approach we are going to create the same image 

we created before with the MatCap creator, but this time 

we are going to have much more control over the 

transition of the colours, making very sharp distinctions 

between them and therefore achieving a better “comic” 

look: 

Using the same process as before, create a smaller purple 

circler to end up with something like this: 

TIP: If you created a shape (using the ellipse tool) you can 

simple press Ctrl + J to duplicate it and then Ctrl + T to scale 

and reposition it. Then just change the colour. 

Save the smart object, close it and save the 

document as a save a JPEG to the desktop for quick 

access. Switch back to ZBrush and import the JPEG 

into the texture of a matcap (I keep using the Chalk 

MatCap). 


From the modifiers subpalette, click the texture > import. 

19



So this is roughly what we should have: 

If you look closely to the reference, the light purple is 

touching the darker purple on the right hand side and at the 

bottom, so I tweaked to look like this: 

Not super exciting yet, but we can easily see that the outer 

black ring, is what is giving us some outlines in the 

model, even when the rest is a flat purple colour. At this 

point you can decide if you want thicker or thinner outlines 

and change the size of the inner purple circle to make the 

outline bigger or smaller: 

Now let’s add the lighter blue 

on top. It looks like it’s another 

horizontally squashed circle and you 

can also see a little bit of the light 

purple on the left. 

Finally we’ll add the tiny bit of green that is a subtle 

highlight towards the top. 

I will leave it as is, because the thickness of that outline 

colour can be tweaked within ZBrush and we’ll explore 

the attributes of the MatCap once we finish creating some 

more colours in Photoshop. 

Let’s save the image and test it in ZBrush with our MatCap 

(just replacing the previous image). 

Switch back to photoshop to create the next layer 

with the blue colour. Looking at the reference, if we 

concentrate in the rounded 

areas like the head, 

the purple colour gets 

thinner towards the top 

and bottom, so for the 

next colour I scaled it 

non-proportionally 

mimic that effect. 

to 

The next layer could be for the lighter blue or the lighter 

purple, but it looks like the lighter blue is sitting on top 

of the lighter purple and since we are working from 

back to front, the lighter purple seems like the 

right option. Since I’m using shapes, I can use the Direct 

Selection Tool (A) to manipulate the point in the ellipse to 

alter the shape. 


Looks pretty decent giving the amount of time you can 

spend creating this images in Photoshop. It is also looking 

very close to our reference image and you can 

quickly tweak any of the colours, the size and shapes of 

the layers and completely change the MatCap really fast. 

20



If you think that the model is looking too “flat” for instance, 

you can add a tiny bit of shading to define the volumes a 

bit more: 

This is where we explore that method. I will show you what 

most modifiers do but not in a particular order, we’ll start 

with the ones that affect the “shape” of the colours: 

Depth and Orientation. 

You’ll notice that you have Depth A and Depth B (same 

goes for most attributes) and that is because you can 

individually change the way the Raised (A) and Recessed 

(B) areas look in your MatCap. What Depth does, is 

visually change the elevation of the surface in your 

model, basically it does the following without altering the 

geometry: 

I prefer the flat look as it resembles more a comic style, 

but if you like the above image, all i did was create new 

white circle, assign some inner shadows and set it 

to multiply and save a new image: 

So let’s change the “outer line” so it cover a larger 

area in out Comic MatCap, by moving the Depth A to 

something like 1.5 

I think we are getting very close to the particular style we 

are aiming for. All we did in this section was create an 

image in Photoshop to use with ZBrush as the MatCap 

image. This is very helpful to create those precise lines 

and separation of colors and to achieve the comic style 

look. However, this is not the most powerful process of this 

technique, the best part is to modify the attributes 

of the MatCap once we have a working image like 

the one we created. 

We are now going to tweak our material and dig a 

bit deeper into the modifiers of the MatCap. At this 

point is good if you are around 70% happy with how the 

MatCap is looking. Switch back to ZBrush and make 

sure you have your recently created image loaded in the 

MatCap you are creating. Also, double check that all 

modifier sliders are set to default values. 

I looks like the colors are being 

duplicated and overlapping, that 

is because the Depth B is still at 0. 

There are a couple of ways to fix this, 

the easiest is just giving the same value 

to A and B unless you actually are 

going for this type of effect. 

Remember when I said that we can change the thickness 

of the outline? We can do that within ZBrush and without 

drawing a new image with a thicker border in Photoshop. 


And the other way is to set the colour of B (at the bottom 

of the modifiers subpalette) to black and just increase 

the intensity of A. 

21



For now we’ll stick with the simpler way and give the 

same value to A and B whenever we modify a 

slider. Set the Depth A and B to 1.5 

If you use the same values but in the negative numbers, you 

should get the same effect with the colours upside down: 

Now let’s say that I am not a 100% happy with the colours, 

rather that update the image in Photoshop, I can simple 

change the Hue of the image changing all the colours at the 

same time. 

Find the Hue sliders in the modifiers subpalette and 

tweak it to your liking (it works in the same way as the 

Hue/Saturation adjustment in Photoshop: 

That might be useful if you want to invert the direction of the 

light or where the highlights are placed, but I rather 

not use negative values here and use the Orientation 

slider instead and you’ll get the same result. Before we 

move to the orientation slider I should remind you that if you 

want the opposite effect in the outline of your model, that 

is a thinner line, you just need to enter smaller values in the 

Depth sliders like 0.5: 

In fact you can also modify the Saturation and the 

Intensity of the colour in the same way you would in 

photoshop. for the following image, I change the Saturation 

to 0.2 (also for A and B) and the Intensity A to 0.1. 

Orientation A and B are basically a control that allow 

us to rotate the image of the MatCap and therefore 

the orientation of the light we set up in the image. Let’s 

say I want the little green highlight moved slightly 

from the top to the right, all I need to do is put in the 

orientation sliders a value of 45 (as in 45 degrees). 

Pretty cool huh? I think I’m happy with this MatCap, You 

can save the MatCap from the material palette and also 

save the texture with all the modifications we just did. To 

do that just click on “create MatCap texture” at the 

bottom of the modifiers subpalette, and that will save 

an image to the Texture palette, which you can then export 

as an image file. 

I’ll finish up here because I think I have covered a fair chunk 

of information in this section. we’ll take a look at some of 

the other attributes in the next chapter as they become more 

relevant to the technique will be using next. 


22



MIXING SHADER AND MATCAP FOR COMIC STYLE 

RENDER 

Lets begin by understanding the QuadShader and 

defining some terminology that I’ll be using quite a bit: 

I hope you are still with me! I have covered the basics, 

sort of… and now we’ll get into more advanced Material 

creation. I’ll try to avoid repeating some of the things I 

have already mentioned, so I’ll encourage you to double 

check the previous sections, in case you are not sure about 

something that I say in here. 

QHADSHADER is a material in ZBrush that has 4 inputs 

(S1, S2, S3 and S4). There is an in depth explanation 

about this, in my tutorial on Making a skin material for BPR, 

we don’t need to be that extensive here, but in case you 

want to know more you can get the skin tutorial. 

In this section, we’ll be multiplying the power of a 

single MatCap by 4! as we’ll use a QhadShader to 

build our next comic Material. You will find that there 

are heaps of application for this technique but for this 

tutorial I’ll concentrate on generating a comic material that 

we can use with or without polypaint. 

THE 4 INPUTS in the QuadShader, are simple channels 

in which you can insert either a MatCap or another 

single shader. You can also use the Mixer to define how 

each one of this inputs or channels interact with each other 

affecting the overall look of the Material. 

Now let’s define some terms: 

SHADER: For this tutorial I’ll refer as shader as any 

Standard Material from Zbrush 

MATCAP: We should be clear on this by now, but let’s 

say that any shader that is driven by an image is called a 

MatCap. 

S1, S2, S3 AND S4 are shader inputs, but because they 

can be part of a QhadShader (which is a shader) it can be 

a bit messy to explain so we’ll just call them Channel 1, 2, 

3 and 4. 

MATERIAL: At the end of the day, a MatCap or a Shader 

or a QuadShader, is a material but for the illustrative 

purposes of this tutorial, I’ll call a Material to something 

made out of a combination of shaders and MatCaps. 


I hope I’m not complicating things too much, I’m sure you’ll 

get the hang of all this once we start with the practical stuff. 

The idea is to create a reusable shader that can easily 

be tweaked to suit a variety of “shading” styles. 

23



These are all screenshots using the same Material but with 

some small value changes: 

Once you have selected it, 

you’ll see 4 channels 

under the modifiers 

subpalette, click the first 

one to select it (pressed or 

orange) and then use the 

“PasteSH” button. 

NOTE: The little dots on each channel, are to turn on and 

off the visibility of that channel. Empty circle means ON 

and filled dot means OFF. 

Great, we have our base shader ready to start, but before 

we can see what it does or how it really looks on our 

model, we need to turn off all the other channels. The 

idea with this base shader is to: 

1. Create the “first pass” or basic outline of our comic 

material 

2. Remove all or most of the shading and 

3. Create a few subtle dark contour lines. 

Let’s get started! 

First, we are going to create the basis of the Material using 

a shader. Go to the Material palette and select the 

SkinShade4, this is a very versatile shader and is great 

for what we want. This also is going to be channel 1 

(first from left to right) in our comic material QuadShader, 

so start by copying the SkinShade4 into the first 

channel of the Comic Material, here is how: 

Creating a quick shadeless material with a black outlines 

is not hard, we could simply use the technique from the 

previous section and just build a MatCap. However, the 

reason I want to use a shader like SkinShade4 is because 

it will give us the option to do some simple shading 

or speculars later on if we want. 

Go ahead and turn the Ambient and the Specular 

sliders all the way down to 0. Doing this, will get rid of 

any ambient lighting and specular colour, leaving us with 

just the diffuse to tweak. 

With the SkinShade4 

selected, under the modifiers 

subpalette, you have two 

buttons: “CopySH” and 

“PasteSH”. click on CopySH 

to copy all the modifiers of the 

shader. 

Now we need to find the QuadShader under the 

Standard Materials in the Materials palette. 


24



At this point, I like to turn on the polypaint of the model 

or simply select any colour other than black or white. The 

idea is that this shader should not affect the colour so that 

we can use it on any other model with any polypoint. 

In other words we are creating a material for the 

“linework”. 

With that curve shape, you should get something that looks 

like the image below, with some sharp and subtle black 

outlines but you can also see a bit of the volumes. 

Now there are some Modifiers in this SkinShade4 that 

we don’t really want to have ON. Change Colorize 

diffuse, colorize specular, AnisotropicDiffuse and 

AnisotropicSpecular, switching all to 0. Also reduce 

High Dynamic Range to 1. 

We can still see some shadows that help define the 

volumes, but those have nothing to do with the 

Material we are building. the shadows you can see 

are simply “Preview Shadows” and you can control 

them from the Render palette, under the Preview Shadows 

subpalette. I turned the DeepSahdow off and the 

ObjShadow to 0: 

Cool, I think this is very exciting because we managed to 

create this with only one Modifier of a simple shader. Since 

we are using a shader and not a MatCap, this also 

means that we can affect the outlines or shadows just 

by changing the light position! wohooo! look at this: 

We end up with a very basic material that it’s basically 

controlled by the diffuse amount and the diffuse curve 

alone. We’ll leave the Diffuse slider to 100 but the 

Diffuse Curve is what does the magic trick. Play 

around with the curve but we are roughly looking for this 

shape: 

Not only that, we can 

change the light colour, 

intensity and the ambient 

light to quickly modify our 

comic look. think about the 

possibilities! and we are only 

25% done with our Comic 

Material. 


25



For our second channel (S2) we are going to use a 

MatCap. You can use any MatCap because we will 

modify it anyway, but I think the FlatSketch01 is already 

pretty close to what we need. Following the process of 

“CopySH” and “PasteSH” from the first shader, bring the 

FlatSketch01 into the second channel (S2) of our 

QhadShader material. 

CAVITY TRANSITION: This is obviously linked to the 

Cavity Detection slider, but it deals with how sharp or 

soft the transition is between the raised areas and 

the crevices. This modifier will greatly affect the look of 

the shader because it allows the input of either positive or 

negative values (This will also serve as an “invert” function 

for our purposes). 

Turn off the first shader (S1) so that you can only see 

the contribution of the shader 2. The idea with this second 

shader is, to create the “volume lines” that describe 

the shapes and masses in your character. I’d say that the 

FlatSketch01 does a pretty good job but it can be further 

refined. 

Start by turning the opacity to 100 to make sure we see 

what this shader does at a 100%. 

We are going to tweak the Cavity Detection and 

Cavity Transition to create the lines based on the 

crevices, peaks or hard edges of our model. Let’s just 

do a quick overview of what these modifiers do: 

CAVITY DETECTION: Essentially, this slider defines how 

strong or how much “contrast” there is between the 

raised areas and the crevices or cavities. For the 

purpose of what we are trying to achieve, its almost like 

using Levels in Photoshop to contrast the lines of a sketch. 

As soon as you turn this slider ON (any value other than 

0), you are enabling all the “B” sliders. I have already 

mentioned these in the last section when I talked about 

Depth A and B and Orientation so let’s just sum it up like 

this: If the Cavity Detection equals to 0, any “B” slider is 

irrelevant as it won’t have any affect. 

TIP: You can benefit from the “B” sliders without having to 

see the cavities. You can make the Cavity Detection = 1 (this 

enables the “B” sliders) and change the Cavity Transition to 

0 (which keeps the “B” sliders ON but without seeing any 

cavities. 

Hopefully that is not too confusing. Basically what we need 

to know about these sliders to create our comic material, is 

that the Cavity Detections will gives us lines in deep 

areas and that the Cavity Transition will determine 

the sharpness of those lines (also invert them). 

Before we tweak those setting, 

change the colour B to black 

and leave the colour A in 

white. We are not going to use 

the Intensity A and B that are 

right below the Cavity Transition 

so change them to 0, instead 

we’ll use the Intensity A slider 

at 1, located towards the 

bottom of the Modifiers 

subpalette. 

The difference is that the first 

two deal with the Texture input 

of the MatCap and the second 

two refer to the intensity of the 

colours we picked for A and B 

(this will make more sense in a 

few paragraphs). 


26



We also need to get rid of 

the texture image used 

by the FlatSketch01 shader 

so select the texture input and 

then select “Texture Off” 

from the quick pick popup. 

Ok, all we need to do now, is set the Intensity A to 1 to 

get 100% of the A colour. Then you can play with the 

Cavity Detection and Cavity Transition sliders to to find a 

nice balance between A (White colour for the raised areas) 

and B (black colour for our cavities). 

Here are some examples with their settings: 

We basically want a good balance of white for the 

raised areas, close to pure black for the crevices (our 

volume lines) and gray as an in-between for all the flat or 

smooth areas. 

At this point, this is as exciting as the ZBrush default sketch 

shaders could be, but there is a difference: We have set up 

the rest of the modifiers, to just add a couple of extra steps 

and watch the magic happens! Ready to be amazed by the 

power of ZBrush? 

And the final values I end up using: 

Turn the Intensity A to 3 (the first one right below 

Cavity Transition). Nothing happens… still no magic. 

That is simply because as 

I mentioned before, this 

Intensity sliders are very 

important for a MatCap, but 

our shader right now, is not 

really a MatCap in that we 

haven’t added any Image. 

Go ahead and click on the Texture input, and select 

the Texture 28 (the one that looks like white Marble). 

YES!!!! THIS IS IT! this is what we are looking for but how? 

You don’t necessarily have to use the settings I used. Since 

you have a different model, the material will look slightly 

different than how it looks in the Kepler character. Either 

way you should aim for something that look a bit like this 

using the test head or test objects: 


27



Well, once we add the texture we have an actual 

MatCap again driven by the texture. The texture is 

replacing everything that we set up to be gray 

when we tweak the Cavity sliders. leaving the raise areas 

white and noticeable (colour A) and the cavities black 

(colour B) everything in between is governed by the texture. 

This is super cool because ultimately, we can add any 

texture here, to create any type of MatCap, and we’ll 

retain the “Volume Lines”: 

TIP: you can shift+Click a subpalette to open it while 

keeping another one open. 

I see the mixer as the blending modes of layers in 

photoshop but on steroids… Not only you can decide the 

blending mode for your material, but you can also 

assign where and how it is applied. It’s like having blending 

mode and masking all in one place. 

We want to keep all the Volume Lines we achieve with the 

MatCap S2 but we want to also have the functionality of 

the Base Shader S1, that reacts to the light position and has 

nice sharp shadows. So go ahead and set the blending 

mode to Multiply in the Mixer, to keep all the dark 

values and render the white colour transparent. 

You might have noticed in the previous examples, that the 

colour information from the texture input is mixed with 

the Gray colour which makes the colours look dull. 

This can be fixed by tweaking the intensity A, but we 

want the comic look so we won’t worry about that in this 

tutorial. 

Cool, all we have left is turn ON our base shader (S1) 

and see how it looks. 

Hummmm it doesn’t look quite right… you can see the 

volume lights from the S2 but there are very weak and 

changing the intensity doesn’t do anything. I don’t know 

how familiar you are with Photoshop, but you might have 

encountered this problem when you have a couple of 

layers with different blending modes and you merge them 

together? suddenly the effects you had on your image 

change completely. In a simplified way, this is what is 

happening but is a super easy fix, just turn on the button 

called “Black” next to the blending mode drop down. 

This will tell ZBrush to apply this MatCap (the S2) as if there 

was a black surface underneath it. all good now: 

OH WHAT! all the hard work gone!.... no, it is still there 

but we haven’t told ZBrush how to mix S1 with S2 

so we are just getting both at the same time with the same 

contribution. All we need to do, is open up the Mixer 

subpalette to define how we want the Matcap in S2 to be 

mixed with the Base Shader in S1. 

Make sure you are in 

the MatCap (S2) and 

open the Mixer. 


28



Finally, turn on your polypaint or change the Main 

Colour swatch to something other than white or black. 

It looks good but it’s a bit dark in some areas. So to 

render outlines is working great, but if you want to use a 

colour or polypaint with this shader you should tweak it a 

bit further. You can play with the intensity A (remember 

we changed it to 3 which is a lot) and with the Cavity 

sliders to find a nice balance. 

You could also turn the Ambient slider from channel 1 (S1) 

all the way to a 100 and you could also swap Texture 28 

with MagicTexture.jpg from the tutorial resource folder 

which is just a plain white texture: 

Perfect we are 50% there. Turn the polypaint off and set 

the Main colour Swatch to white again. 

Looks like we need an outline right? don’t worry - it 

won’t take us much longer to finish this Comic Material, we 

have covered most of the theory so the next steps are 

very easy and good for revision. 

The next MatCap we are going to create is a simple 

contour line to add it to our super 

comic Material (QuadShader). 

Feel free to use any technique we 

have talked about to create this new 

MatCap, we just need something in 

black and white that looks a bit like 

this (I made this image in photoshop): 

Pick a MatCap from the Material palette. I’ll stick with the 

Chalk MatCap I have been using as example. Copy and 

Paste the MatCap into the fourth channel (S4) of our 

QuadShader. Make sure you add it to the fourth channel 

because we want the third one free, for an extra effect and 

the order of the channels, does matter. 

Turn off the channels S1 and S2 and replace the 

MatCap image in the S4 with the one you created or 

use the one I provided with the Resources: Simple_Black_ 

outline.jpg. 

Now go to Document 

and click on the 

Document background 

colour to choose a 

white colour (click and 

drag the cursor to a white 

area from the interface). 


29



This image gives us a very nice outline straightaway 

and due to the very defined crevices in the Kepler 

character, we are also getting some extra volume lines. 

All we need to do here is define how thick or thin we 

want the outline to be, and if you remember, we can 

control that with the Depth A and B. since you are going 

to do it one at a time, you’ll witness another display of 

awesomeness when you make Depth A and Depth B 

different values: 

All we have left to do for this MatCap S4 is to tell ZBrush 

how to blend it with the rest and we are done. I set the 

blending mode identical to the previous MatCap: 

Multiply and “black” enabled. 

I’m very happy with how this is looking, but I wanted to add 

a little extra option to the comic material. we’ll use the 

third channel (S3) for that and it will be another very 

simple MatCap. 

NOTE : If you don’t see the effect of “double shading” 

happening, make sure your MatCap settings are reset to 

default, remember this is why I chose the Chalk MatCap to 

start with). 

I’m sure you are already getting many ideas with this so 

far but we’ll keep this MatCap as a simple outline for 

now. However, we are building a template material that 

can be reused in many ways, so is good that you know the 

capability is there. This is my outline MatCap and the setting 

I end up using: 

You can actually copy the S4 into the S3 since all we are 

going to do is change the MatCap image and tweak 

the setting just a bit. 

The image we are after is something like this: 

I made it in photoshop so you can create your own or use 

the one in the resources Long_shadows_rim_light.jpg. This 

image in the MatCap, will create some nice contrast 

shadows and a thin white rim light. 


Add the image to the MatCap we copied to channel 3 

(S3) and turn the rest of the channels off. 

30



The cool thing about having this extra MatCap, is that we 

are getting some cool shadows and a rim light at the same 

time. At any point, we can change the Depth A and B 

and the Orientation A and B to achieve different types of 

shading. I call this MatCap “the ink” and you can use it in 

combination with the other channels or on it own: 

Also one more thing. Remember that the MatCap in S3 

and S4 are just MatCaps so try plug in different 

images to experiment… that is the fun part: 

Set the blending mode to Multiply and turn “Black” 

ON. Turn the rest of the channels ON, this is what I got: 

OUTLINES FOR PHOTOSHOP FINISHING. 

This technique is probably not worth a full chapter in this 

tutorial, and from all the methods I have described, it 

relies a lot on your painting and illustration skills within 

photoshop. However, I think it deserves a mention as we 

can use ZBrush as our main tool of creation and then 

use Photoshop to render the illustration: 

The reason why I put it in the third channel (S3) and not 

the fourth one (S4), is because “the ink” shader has a 

dark ring that works as black outline already but there 

is also a little white outline or “rim light” that you 

can use. Once you turn the Outline MatCap on (S4) it 

will override the “Rim light” so you get two types of 

outlines very quickly just by turning ON and OFF the fourth 

channel. 

Ok, this was a very lengthy section but I hope I managed to 

illustrate some important concepts and that you now have 

the necessary tools to make your own Comic Materials. 

One more thing I would like to show you before moving 

on to the next section of the tutorial, is an obvious but often 

overlooked modifier. 

Using the multipurpose super Comic Material we 

created in the previous section, I tweaked the shader and 

MatCaps (primarily S2 and S4) to get some clean 

outlines and make a render. I saved the render and 

opened it in photoshop, I also created a new layer and 

place it under the ZBrush render. 

Setting the render layer to multiply, I can enjoy all the 

painting and drawing tools to create the shading of the 

character. 

THE OPACITY SLIDER: 

Changing the value of this slider 

on the different shaders and 

MatCaps from your Material, 

you can add a whole bunch of 

other effects. 


31



Here is a very quick step by step visual guide: 

1. Fill layer with base colour: 

5. Light suggestion and other details. 

2. Apply some initial shading: 

6. More colour variations to contrast the mask/helmet. 

3. Colour variations: 

7. Exaggerating the shadow areas. 

4. Continue with colour variations to help the design. 

8. Enhancing the lighting with soft gradients. 


32



9. Backlight or Rim light added. 

13. Final touches and curves tweaking. 

10. Scratches, Crosshatching and little details. 

We’ll talk a bit more about setting up the document a bit 

later on and also about BPR render passes and how to use 

them. 

MULTIPLE MATERIALS IN ONE OBJECT 

11. Energy string FX. 

Let’s talk a bit more about materials, about how we can 

apply them to our models or just to part of them. So far we 

have created MatCaps and a complex material that give 

use very cool results, this next chapter will take our 

shading complexity to the next level. Although the 

technique we’ll be using is super simple, if you combine it 

with previous methods you’ll get very interesting results like 

this: 

12. Enhancing and tweaking lighting from the energy string. 


33



Basically we’ll be doing some polypaint, but instead 

of using colour information only, we are going to paint 

with MatCaps. Since the MatCaps we are going to use, 

already have colour information you’ll end up with a very 

complex looking image. 

To begin, turn on Colorize on ther the Polypaint 

subpalette and choose the Standard Brush. 

Now, make sure that the switches at the top of the UI for 

Rgb and Zadd are off and turn the M on: 

With this settings, the Standard brush will paint but only 

using the material (M) information and nothing else. If 

you want to be very precise I’d recommend you mask out 

some areas before painting and when you are happy 

with the unmasked area, paint with the desired material. 

To mask simply hold Ctrl and draw over the model. 

TIP. you can Ctrl + click on the canvas to invert the mask, 

Ctrl + Drag in the canvas to clear the mask. You can also 

hold Ctrl and click over the mask to blur it and hold Ctrl + 

Alt and click the mask to sharpen the edges. 

At this point, before I get rid of the mask, I want to apply 

a different MatCap to the softer areas of the suit. All I 

need to do is invert the mask and load/select a new 

MatCap and filled the areas. 

You can go crazy with the different MatCaps, but try to 

create a balance with the colours you choose so that they 

enhance the design instead of breaking it: 

Ok, so I spent a couple of minutes masking out the 

“conductive” areas in the suit of Kepler and I want to give 

them a green bright colour. All we need to do is load the 

desired MatCap or image in the current MatCap and 

paint the unmasked areas. 

Feel free to use any of the MatCaps I shared in the resource 

folder Comic Materials. 


34



This is just one way in which you can use the MatCaps 

in your model, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be a 

MatCap, you can save 3 or 4 versions of the multipurpose 

super comic material we made in section 9 and apply them 

to different parts of your model. 

Then you can simply tweaks the setting to create 

variations for each part that you applied the Materials to. 

This will produce an effect similar to having different line 

values and various depths of outlines! 

There are two approaches that I found to be very 

effective: 

1. Sculpted details or deep crevices. 

2. Polypaint using alphas. 

The first method is very good if you want certain scratches 

to always be visible and react to chances in the 

MatCaps and light. 

The second option is probably less time consuming and 

can give you great results. The disadvantage is that the 

little details that you add will stick with the model, so if you 

rotate or change the angle they might not look ideal. This is 

something that I would do after choosing a final angle 

for render or strategically paint with the alphas in places 

that will look good from most angles. 

I hope all this keeps you motivated to do awesome stuff! 

In the next section I’ll explain a super effective and super 

simple technique to bring your renders closer to the 

comic look with some crosshatching and “ink” effects. 

The only thing I’ll say about the first approach is that the 

Dam_Standard and Pinch brush work great and is just 

a matter of patience sculpting the details. 

CROSSHATCHING ALPHAS AND POLYPAINT 

After posting a few WIPs online while I was working on 

this tutorial one of the most common questions I got was 

about how to do the cross hatching effect. So that is why I 

decided to dedicate a whole section to it, even though the 

techniques I used are extremely simple. 

With the other approach, choose the color of the outlines 

of your Material (I’ll assume is black). choose The 

standard Brush and pick the DragRect from the stroke 

menu. 


35



I have created and compiled a series of cross hatching 

alphas for you to use in the resources folder, but feel free 

to create your own. Click on the alpha thumbnail and 

load any alpha you want. 

Make sure you turn the Rgb on and the M off in the 

top menu (assuming you haven’t changed it from the 

previous chapter). We want to only paint the colours 

not the material. 

Now all you need to do, is click and drag over the 

model to project the cross hatching and other line effects. 

In essence, it is a control that changes the angle of vision of 

the camera therefore flattening or exaggerating the 

perspective: 

You will find this extremely useful when you start to render 

different angles of your character/scene to tell your story. 

Setting up the document is really a matter of defining 

how big you want the output image to be, the 

dimensions and the quality of the render. I usually start 

by resizing the document to something like 3000px x 

2000px from the Document Palette. then just drag your tool 

back into the canvas. 

I also like to set the SPix (sub pixel) slider to the 

maximum 7 to get a better quality anti-aliasing. 

Pretty simple right? you can also use the alphas with Zadd 

or Zsub to actually sculpt the effects and that way you can 

get the best of both worlds (not my favourite but you can do 

it if you want). 

TIP: Pressing the “AAHalf” will zoom the document to half of 

its current size to show a very clean preview, closer to what 

you will get once you render your image. 

RENDERING 

CAMERA ANGLE AND DOCUMENT SETUP 

We are coming to an end in this lengthy guide but there are 

two or three things I would like to mention before I let you 

go to create great comics. I reserved these last sections to 

talk a bit about setting up the document for rendering 

and post-rendering effects. 

First, let’s talk about the 

Camera Angle of View, 

which you can find in the 

Draw palette. This is 

a single slider that can 

dramatically change the 

render of our models but 

it could be overlooked 

sometimes. 


Although, “rendering” is a key word in the name of this 

guide, we haven’t discussed it much. The only reason 

why this section is so small in comparison with the other 

chapters, is because we barely need to render to 

achieve the comic look! the preview is almost good 

enough in most cases. 

So why render, if what we see is pretty much what we get? 

Well for a couple of reason: 

Using BPR render we can take advantage of all the 

passes that can be generated from a single click: Mask, 

Depth, Shadows, AO, SSS, etc. These are extremely 

useful if you want to compose or edit your image later on in 

Photoshop. 

36



As part of the advantages of rendering a few passes, we 

can also apply filters and adjustments based on 

those passes, to enhance the comic look or to change it 

completely. 

Let’s say we want to render this 

Kepler character and do a bit of 

post-rendering effects. Open up 

the Render palette, expand the 

Render Properties and BPR 

Render Pass sub palettes. 

In the Render Properties you can 

select which passes you want 

to generate. I generally turn on 

Shadows and AO occlusion but in 

this comic style, I prefer to create 

the shadows using a MatCap like 

we did on the Comic Material S3 

MatCap. 

You can choose a blending mode for each filter 

individually and play with the sliders to determine how 

the filters is masked and applied to the entire document. 

These are my favourite filters to use in rendering comic style: 

NOISE: This is great to get a more “papery” look and give 

some texture to the colours. 

Hit the BPR button to create all 

of your passes. Render shouldn’t 

take long but it will depend on the 

settings you set for each pass, once 

is finished you can export each 

pass to a PSD file and use them in 

Photoshop to compose your image. 

SHARPEN: It helps to sharpen the transition between the 

colours and define the outlines a bit better. 

NOTE: If you want a bit more in-depth explanation on 

rendering passes you can download the guide to ZBrush 

skin material & BPR rendering or the Wet Clay and 

rendering tutorial. 

FILTERS AND ADJUSTMENTS 

Finally, we have the BPR filters and adjustments. I just 

wanted to mention briefly these extra tools that ZBrush 

offers because they can modify your render quite a bit to 

make it look very interesting. 

ADDITIVE: I find this filter useful to create an extra sense 

of depth. Driven by the Depth slider and a bit of radius you 

can create a foggy render. 

There are up to 27 

types of effects you 

can add to 12 filters. 

To use them, turn on the 

selected one (similar 

to how we turn on and 

off the channels in the 

QuadShader material), 

and select the type of 

filter from the first drop 

down menu. 


PAINT: With this filter you can add an extra bit of shading 

37



or gradient across the whole model. particularly useful 

when used with the cavity and depth slider. 

And here is a version using all the filters: 

REFLECT SELF: This filter produces an effect that is 

weird enough to be interesting and useful in some cases, 

experiment with it and you might find yourself using it more 

than you think. 

last but not least we have the Adjustments at the bottom 

of the render palette. This are pretty much like using 

curves in Photoshop and can modify the whole look of 

your render quite a bit. It is tempting to change the values a 

lot because of the cool results you can get, but I suggest to 

keep the changes here very subtle. 

NEGATIVE: Not a “must have” filter but through 

experimenting I found a good use for it. Setting it to 

overlay, changing the colour to black and maskin 

its effect by fresnel you can add some shadows to the 

model like a broad Ambient Occlusion. 

This is just a quick alternative, but you’ll get better results if 

you render an actual AO pass and multiply it on top of the 

render image. 

Done! 

That’s it! This turned out to be a long tutorial but I think we 

have covered the essential bits. I hope I have shed a light 

on my process of creating comic style renders with ZBrush 

BPR and that you have learnt something. 

I hope you can share with me some of the things you make 

with the help of this tutorial, I would love to see what you 

come up with. If you have a question, feel free to ask me on 

my facebook page. I do get a few emails but I’ll try answer 

as many as I can if I feel I can help. 

Feel free to share this tutorial with anyone you want, I just 

ask you to please share the download link, purely 

so I can keep track on how it is being received and to get 

feedback so I can continue to improve and refine the next 

guide! 


38



I invite you to like my facebook page www.facebook.com/pablander where I generally post updates on new projects 

I’m working on, including tutorials and resources. You can also follow me on twitter @pablander and now I’m starting 

to like instagram so we’ll give that a try too: Pablander. 

Looking forward to seeing what you create! 

All the best, 

Pablo Munoz G. 

PD: My new website is almost ready, I’ll be posting updates soon on my facebook page. If you enjoy this guide I’m sure 

you will like what’s coming! it’s going to be epic! 

As I promised, here is a quick visual step by step guide on how I created the cover for this tutorial: 


39




40

A GUIDE TO ZBrush Comic Style Render by Pablo Munoz Gomez

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?