LUZ — Vertex-Based Lighting Tool for ZBrush

LUZ is a ZBrush plugin designed to simulate area lights and point lights by converting masked vertices into virtual light sources and baking their contributions into a vertex mask.

Unlike ZBrush’s native infinite lights, LUZ provides local, area-based lighting directly on the model. This baked lighting is captured as a vertex mask which can then be used to guide Polypaint shading or create lighting Render Passes.

LUZ is intended for artists who want to:

• Add lighting and shading directly into Polypaint
• Create light maps for hand-painted or composing layers in Photoshop.
• Shade dense meshes such as Dynamesh sculpts, subdivided models, or scan data
• Generate shadow and highlight patterns without external renderers

The plugin works by:

• Interpreting masked vertices as potential light/emissive regions
• Optionally clustering them into a manageable set of light sources
• Performing raycasting from each light to the mesh surface
• Baking the accumulated illumination into the mesh’s mask channel

It is not a renderer and does not generate images.
Instead, it produces an editable light mask, which is normally used to:

• Darken areas using Multiply fills (for shadows)
• Lighten areas using Screen or Color Dodge fills (for highlights)
• Build up Polypaint lighting and stylized shading