This tutorial will explain which are the most common brushes for certain purposes, and also how to create custom alphas. Brushes push and pull your mesh in distinct ways to add forms, whilst alphas mask the shape of certain brushes to quickly add texture and fine detail. The most commonly used functions when sculpting your models. There are hundreds of different tools available to enable the fast creation of whatever you need, but outlined below are some of the most common tools and techniques you will use when sculpting.
Now that you have the basic shape of your model in place, you want to start adding and refining details – pieces of armour, cloth folds, skin detailing, etc. Some subtools in your sculpt may benefit from this approach rather than the more organic sculpting. To create mechanical objects, rather than start from a clay sphere use can use the zModeller tool, which works more similarly to traditional modelling packages such as Max or Sketchup.
A tutorial in using mannequins can be found here: Similar to Z-Spheres, mannequins are pre build humanoid puppets than can be placed in a scene, easily posed and then sculpted on. A tutorial for using zspheres can be found here: With the click of a button Dynamesh will recreate your sculpt with a uniform grid of polys.Īn older technique, Zsphere armatures are still useful if you want to create the basic shapes of insects, animals or other creatures with lots of elements such as limbs or tentacles.
When you pull and stretch your ‘clay’ in zbrush the polys will often get stretched out of their uniform grid like layout, particularly at low sub-division levels. You can do this just by playing with the basic clay sphere, but shown below are a few methods optimal for this first part of the process: Before adding specific details, you first want to create a basic, low detail massing model to show the main shapes, limbs and forms. The first part of any sculpt is laying down a solid foundation to work on. Not part of the workflow as such, but given ZBrush’ very distinct UI and workng method make sure you have these basics down first! Read the following tutorials for some fundamentals! If you think theres something I should add, please add a comment!Ġ: BASICS & UNDERSTANDING TOOLS/SUBTOOLS. Note that as a learner myself, there may be some useful methods missing, and this list may get updated frequently. As such for each stage below you may use one or more of the listed techniques. The process used will depend entirely on what kind of object you are making – an organic creature, a smooth suit of armour, a futuristic gun etc. With that in mind, heres a quick guide for the main processes used in creation along with the techniques you can use to do them. However, it is much more computationally intensive than standard smoothing, and often smooths quite slowly if the mesh does have highly variable resolution.ZBrush is a great program but with so many features and it’s constantly being updated and improved upon, its hard to know where to start and how to actually go about creating something. RobustSmooth: This is a variant of ShrinkSmooth that properly handles variable triangle density. ShrinkSmooth: The standard smoothing brush included in nearly all 3D sculpting programs. This is a much safer type of smoothing for 3D sculpting novices, as thin shapes will not collapse like they do in other sculpting tools. SmoothColor: This operation is similar to Gaussian smoothing in an image texture, but applied to the vertex colors of the mesh.īubbleSmooth: A smoothing brush that smooths "outwards", instead of shrinking. Note that this brush by default still does refinement, so if you use a very small brush, additional vertices will be added to be able to capture the stroke. PaintVertex: Paints vertex colors using the selected color. Inflate: Vertices are pushed along their individual normal directions. When Smooth is set to 0, This brush gives perhaps the closest behavior to other sculpting tools. As a result, the Strength slider is used to control the maximum height, relative to the brush stamp size.
Note, however, that the smoothing inherent in our dynamic meshing will pull the surface back down around the stamp edges if you move the cursor slowly.ĭrawMax: Same behavior as Draw3, however the displacement is set directly to the maximum height. The maximum height is defined by the radius of the brush stamp. Draw: Similar to other 3D sculpting tools, this locally displaces the vertices inside the brush along a fixed direction, defined by the average normal over the brush region.ĭraw2: A variant of Draw that has a stronger directional effect.ĭraw3: In this Draw variant, the surface is incrementally displaced to a maximum height within the brush stroke, but subsequent strokes are overlapped.