Concept Weapons with Pen Shadow in Zbrush

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hey everybody what's going on Alex Kolakowski here from Tiger skull RPG today I'm gonna talk to you guys about how I use pen shadow brush in ZBrush to concept weapons and armor that sort of thing before I get into it I want to mention the music they were listening to today's from Planet comm really cool save lots of music so let's get right into it here we're gonna start so first you kind of need a canvas and I'm gonna use this plane 3d which is just a primitive in ZBrush always make polymesh3d a real 3d object by clicking the made quality mesh 3d button before you begin and we're gonna subdivide this quite high we're gonna go up to 4 million roughly we don't really want to go I find any sub tools I try not to go higher than that if I need more resolution I might just split it up a bit multiple groups or something like that because ZBrush is kind of chugs so there's the pen shadow brush here now this is in ZBrush I believe the latest version has this brush but you will have to set up the alphas used to be set up this way cave is this alpha 58 we want to use here but and then the checker pattern for whatever reason in the latest version of ZBrush they you know they've kind of changed the brush I used to be this but this way by default and now it isn't but at least it's still here we can still do this make this work so I'm gonna fill the canvas with gray because this brush you know draws the two colors at once it's really nice to have a mid-tone my okay let's just do a few Oh set this to white my texture back on there there we go so you can see I'm getting a really nice kind of highlight and shadow so yeah so what we're going to draw today is halberd it's kind of a long spike any staff kind of weapon and you can hold shift and let's make this line really sharp we're really clean I should say so yeah something like that and I don't really like to plan too much what's what I'm about to do because honestly this pen shadow brush has a lot of happy accidents autumn detailed that is kind of comes you wouldn't you know it really need to be a hundred percent expecting it I guess so I'm just imagining maybe there's a couple spots on this place where you would hold the thing so I'm just gonna landmark into it maybe some grips on this guy so I am working in symmetry here but I think what I might do just for now is well I think I might change my symmetry to be a different one of different axes it's going the z-axis how's that maybe not Z maybe I want you get a wall Y there we go so now whatever I do up here will be done down there perfect okay yeah I like that okay so one side is sort of the blade side can decides - yeah the not blade side so let's see here again I always like to change this I mean we're not really the silhouette isn't helping us here so let's go to the thumbnail and turn off silhouette so we can see slightly larger so you can really see what we're actually trying to make ears you know kind of want to blade so let's just draw some kind of you know some blade shapes and again it doesn't really have to be super precise making kind of a Klingon blade here looking thing I think I think my details are getting too much I'm gonna undo a little bit of this turn make something a bit smaller okay let's pretend that it's cool I think I like where that was going it was just too large yeah I'm not gonna worry too much about front to back symmetry I really just want this thing to be kind of interesting and unique already [Music] feeling getting some interesting shapes here and I like how those highlights and lowlights on this form of designs and you kind of get those for free with this tool and the direction that you that you drawing is really important with this one you know if you draw one way you get the highlight on one side just draw the other way comes the other side so kind of want to be careful let's zoom out and see what this is looking like it's kind of interesting I'm not sure 100% if that's what I'm going to be after but we'll go with that I wanted these hand holes to be turn on my symmetry again here okay so this is where the middle is now let's make sort of doesn't really have to be too thought out right now but just I just want to see where my middle is at because I wanted the the grips to be kind of like shielded by a blade or something because I just want an excuse to kind of have a little bit more shape to this thing so probably just on one side so I want to go ahead and turn this off yet again I think this yeah okay so they're gonna be holding on in the oaf right here it's made kind of kind of shaped for this to be grip to be kind of guarded and kind of cool if these shapes were flowing into one another right which way you just kind of have to draw it erase sometimes or undo just to see what kind of like direction you're going in these [Music] couldn't eat let's work on the backside now I think like so this is the side facing the person so you don't want it to be too you don't work to be too nasty and gnarly back there so now I'm thinking about this sort of it's almost like there's a blade here let's go with that it's reinforced this shape here and again kind of letting accidents happen here quite a bit really trying not to be too specific about this because I just kind of want well I want something I've never seen before and I want it to be interesting to look at but it's interesting to keep going keep going I don't know if I like that let's pay attention to which size our blade side like our highlight shadow let's see here [Music] hmm know what you can do with this tool that I really like I mean concept our students quite often is you know flip your canvas right so because this is essentially just like kind of like a piece of paper you can really just flip your paper around that could interact that's where they're holding it here and here it's kind of blade on this side I think this could be I think this side could be more aggressive where and I'm literally what I like about this tool is I'm just literally drawing on top of stuff I've already you know put down so we can add some segmentation there no fur like that [Music] let's clean this up hey you know you just have to kind of draw over what you've you've already drawn to clean this stuff up it's pretty it's pretty liberating you know you don't really need an eraser brush you just kind of need to go and draw on top of it one more time yeah I think that's better it's the hold shift it's going to smooth out what you're working on and also you know it's a bit of order of operations happening there where if you hold the old shift after the click then you will draw a straight line which was what I was trying to do trying to make more sense out of what's happening here and you know what because this is just you know literally quick and dirty is the name of the game here if I want to make this blade a little longer I just can just come and pull it right out let's do that all right where's my pen shadow pen shadow to here it's bit softer and I think I made that one for myself earlier let's just get a regular pen shadow bps sorry guys this late at night and I'm just gonna go to bed but I decided to just film this video here let's see what this looks like with maybe another blade [Music] and I'm just using the move tool like just the ZBrush move tool here to kind of adjust my proportions real quickly [Music] sort of like liquify in Photoshop and you can even go so far as to use the spiral tool to add a little bit of spiral I guess definitely go too far with this so just be careful you do want to kind of draw most of what you're thinking because you know you're gonna you're gonna push and pull to a point where you can actually really break this stuff okay let's make this let's make this one piece really just steer into this kind of crooked blade on top okay so what I'd like to do after I've done a bit of design like this is to just change my brush to more of a standard brush and and really refine the shapes I've made and kind of paint out stuff that I don't like so I guess I went pretty quick there BEP a is the paint regular paintbrush I'm gonna turn the focal shift up so this is a nice hard brush and let's just start the paint out stuff that we don't want refined the edges a little bit and just see what we get to from here just make some choices for ourselves we're fine because you know we've got a lot of good stuff going on but I think it's also getting a bit messy messy is good you know that's where all these details are gonna come from you know we're gonna keep the good ones and get rid of the bad ones so let's just go ahead and do that and find these shadows a little bit decide what I want to be you know what exactly want to be cut out and what I want to be a real detail so like maybe this config ative shape okay clean this up here I do you like this big crooked curve but think come to a point with this and yeah and the back blade I'm not sure how I feel about that but maybe we can figure that out later so I'm starting to see a weapon here I think at this point what I'm you know I always like to do things that I know are going to be effective as soon as I know that they're there so I think that oops I'm gonna just get a really dark color here so what I'm saying is like this design isn't done but I know there's a lot about it I'm liking so I'm going to go ahead and just start to do some shading as if it were done and then see see it a little bit closer to the final and see what I like just like a polka design at that point and then I can really refine it and the way the way I like to do this is to start dark [Music] and then bring the highlights back in so let's go ahead and do that and you know what I'm gonna do just to just somebody I don't distract myself turn the range off hold on here let's switch to the flat color there you go so now my background is more of a neutral color and I mean up here my silhouette I wonder if I can change that there we go okay so even my silhouette now is kind of fading into the background so now I'm seeing a lot more of what looks more like your traditional concept art where it's kind of like just on a canvas here and it's all just a trick your mind into thinking you're looking at something to D because really this is you know just like me painting on the 3d object so okay alright done my shading I'm really gonna just quickly clean that up again seems like you know again Photoshop maybe you'd have layers masks all this stuff out real quickly and half but I think the lack of you know sometimes that lack of organization can seem like it slows you down but it's also really empowering to the same time can never be sometimes it's worth it to just like cut out your object you know one or two more times for the freedom you get to just kind of play around really quickly you know without having to stop and think about having a stuff would think of an organization and all that so I I kind of like that even though it's you know destructive it's more like drawing on say drawing a notebook with a ballpoint pen right like you get what you get I mean we can edit a little bit and we're going to do that here but I think it's a good balance between digital and more traditional [Music] getting that speed and that looseness but also you know making use of the precision of a digital instrument here okay so okay so bear with me here cut this bottle out a little bit and we're starting to kind of see a little bit more the shapes oops I'm going to think now I'm starting to kind of look at this he's like a silhouette and you know just do whatever works for you right you know I always get those details back when we need them if we need to that's what the pen shadow is for it's kind of gives you the forms that you want [Music] and I'm really switching super quickly here I realize that kind of gotten used to wear all these hotkeys are I think I need some negative space here because I don't want these to feel like the same max on both sides of the staff maybe this is getting to be a little bit too weak here think of this getting some time it's not terrible see if we can make these shapes flow together like this really try to match this curve this other one has maybe that's what it means something like that and I think I can even trim this down and since I'm flowing just clean this up flowing that way maybe on this side I can flow this way I [Music] mean this is where it's really just feeling the design okay let's just pretend that's good for now I mean maybe we'll change it who knows you know and a lot of times you know you're you know cuz this asset isn't done so it's done you know just cuz the concept is one way it does not mean it's you know gospel and and I find sometimes you need to really just see the model in 3d to maybe you don't need to see it in 3d but once you do a lot of these design problems are a lot easier to sort out because you're seeing you just see you're just seeing more of like the equation that makes up this as a piece right it's like you're doing algebra and you're seeing more of the you're just getting more hints of the unknown if that makes any sense maybe it doesn't okay okay so here we go let's start to see the fun part let's do some highlighting so I always just I don't do anything fancy I know I want just to kind of be like just top lit so let's go and find all of our upward facing angles here just highlight it a little bit it's I'm gonna give the full bow which is kind of this like highlight in the middle I just called it a bow it's Albert damn it let's give it a highlight and then when you do a highlight like that you want to come back in and cut your shadows back in so something you just kind of got some horizontal lines happening here so we'll cut those back in to just get some of us form back that means glossed over here and I'm really rotating this like crazy that's because you know if you're drawing on paper you know you always you always moving your hand around the sheet of paper just to get that right angle but you know digital I'm working on a Cintiq so I really like to rotate the whole image around to kind of match my hand angle so I'm also drawing in a downward direction fine you know it's just easier to stay loose if you're drawing with gravity so I always try to orient myself in such a way that I'm drawing if gravity let's add a little bit of silhouette break here I think that's kind of cool it's like the top this staff it's kind of got this little piece here that's attached or screwed okay so another tool I use a lot is this mask glass so let's this is really good for when you want to isolate you know a piece I'm gonna isolate this blade what's happening here cuz blades really need time I would say gradient work so let's do that and I'm going to turn my symmetry off here because I want to maintain this top lip so get this and the edges are always gonna catch those highlights a little bit more about and on the bottom side you know metals especially these really glossy metals we've get as bright as the highlight is that that means you got to have that dark shadow too so you can't if you want to highlight you got to either low light or whatever whatever you want to call that I can't have one without the other otherwise it looks kind of weird in my opinion kind of not really reflective I think I might push this up right here and creates a little bit more contrast let's use our black and white this is the fun part and you know this also kind of lets you know whether your designs you know you put the razzle dazzle on it's like oh this design is actually okay you know it kind of works whereas if you start putting the razzle dazzle on and it's like looking bad then just stop just stop right there and you know just keep doing your trial and error or look for more inspiration or something whatever it is that helps you to solve that problem okay so it's oh yeah go to this side I like the whiteness I like that way highlight there maybe I should go a little bit brighter at you yeah let's do that oh let's do the low light and even this what I'm doing here is really not even super necessary because like I said I'm not making finished illustration you know for me this was not I'm not gonna put this in an art book this is really just figuring out my shapes of what I want to make so spending a lot of time rendering is a waste of time you know I will render the final illustration that's a neutrino I will render the file a mistress tration and spend time there but on this it's really you know fun as it is if you're having fun and you have the time you know why not I mean it's not the end of the world don't have all the time in the world got miniatures to make so I'm going to just do as little as I possibly can that's still that is actually helpful to me and then just plus a tiny bit more because that's it let's see and you know it's nice to like what these highlights are doing or showing me I guess you know I'm just guessing at where the blades kind of begin and where the structure of the staff so I did that one upside down and I'll fix that later if I care to and where the kind of anatomy of the staff ends so let's just see here that's the way I like to render these staffs is like I make the blades very glossy like that's where they're really shiny and really reflective metal is on the blade and then the you know the staff is kind of the more structural part of these weapons are dollar like they don't they don't get the highlights right because I just think it's kind of cooler to focus on the the sharp parts I feel like the damage the damage doing Parts is where you want the eye to kind of focus on so that's why they get the shine and I'm zooming out quite often just check my shape or just see what it looks like and this is going to benefit folks into the contrast here let's clean this up a little bit and sometimes I don't know [Music] exactly where to put the light and sometimes I need to play around with it a little bit I think I'll make this metal as well or shiny metal I think this kind of now I have to constantly see if I have my surgery on or not let's pick the shadow in here shoulder worth really want to just make it clear which layer is above and which ones below this will do almost like a drop shadow kind of shape treatment I should say yeah even though I have this silhouette up in the corner which it is good to look at that from time to time in Photoshop I really rely on this silhouettes but sometimes I think you know there's no substitute for just zooming out and having a quick look from a distance especially when you have to zoom in know when you're honest and peek like this you really have to you know you have to kind of tailor your viewing distance for the strokes you want to make so you have to get kind of close sometimes which is great but it's not you know doesn't always help you solve the design by being zoomed in so close this is kind of Samba fix this shape here and I'm hitting ctrl H to hide my mask so that I can see [Music] so they can really see like cuz the mask kind of you know darkens your whole object and it's like it's hard to tell what's really happening you know I just want to see you I wanna see the as close to the final image as I'm editing it as possible so I always go to my way to really hide the masks as I'm masking things in let's do that it's just these edges everywhere that's kind of catching [Music] so I think this is actually I think you know this design that I've got here the more I render it the more actually enjoying it I think it's gonna work out so well she was painted over my painted down here to fix my mirroring and then I went broke done but I liked but whatever I'll just draw it again if I were you know maybe this were like eight years ago I might freak out about that sort of thing like ah man I'd like that what if I can't wear free pretty sight again [Music] kind of choked about it but longer you're an artist the more you realize that your art gets you know you throw away a lot of art and it's just the nature of things I'm just gonna highlight these little kind of little spots here so it's like there's a blade in there maybe you could stick your finger in there get your finger cut off or something fun like that highlight this detail here a little bit I don't know what it is just some kind of striation stuff okay let's do the this sort of Griffin you know and do that in extra shadow that infantry on do you want kind of you know kind of describing a form here you know you want your forms to be symmetrical and you don't really want your lighting to be symmetrical so when you're carving out shapes make sure symmetry is on when you're lighting I would say turn it off and kind of fun with lighting so let's do that actually the one episode I'm not quite sure how I want this to be you know one to me together right now okay I think I will solve the rest with some lighting okay let's do it okay I'm gonna like this I'm just going to light the staff handle part here and we're gonna call it we're gonna call it good and I'm gonna head to bed so there we go you know we're doing a top-down light so it's kind of it's kind of hard to say where the you know this is kind of diagonally facing edge so we're not gonna get super hot highlights you know on the edge of the blade like we were able to get here I guess we kind of cheesed it here we just added that highlight because look good so maybe it isn't a true top-down lighting so let's add dial because that this really bright highlight here cuz why not [Music] little dude and then these sort of sections here I just wanted to define these with shadow just so it's really clear that what's happening here that this is being layered down I think that'll be cool just to do some like repetition there I'm going to add a little bit more highlighting what's happening here it's blurry as you move around it's just kind of the way ZBrush works you know the way it handles resources yeah okay let's do let's do the bottom one okay so we are we're not doing it true top down with the in kind of like two angle kind of this way angle so I will instead of putting the highlight here I'll threw it on the side let's get to the stuff later so we're gonna get a highlight down here where it's facing upward again we get the shadow fix it down here and sweep it back up and maybe we can do another highlight here it's just I should be a little bit sharper okay let's add highlight there so yeah it's almost it's almost I would say take it out I mean that's what I do to this thing add some glue and I can make my brush soft here this bloom should be white [Music] highlights if you want to [Music] I mean this is pretty much done you can come in and continue to render this if you want to add some shadows here but you know what I think I'm gonna call that good so let's just leave this weapon like this this will be something for future release yeah probably the [Music] probably the August release I think I've already pretty much got all the items done for July so yeah I'm kind of jumping ahead a little bit to do this unless you're watching this in the future then it's all okay yeah I think I should just stop right down but I'm liking you know I was said before that it was gonna preserve these bright highlights cooler for just the weapons but now I'm just having fun adding them to everything so here you go but you know this is you set up your model slope earlier on set up your whole way your whole workflow on this design so you can get to this part which is you know this is the fun part right like adding blue highlights with the end itself it's ok - ok - enjoy it even if you know if your purpose is to model something ok ok I'm gonna leave it there alright thanks so much for watching I hope I know this was longer than most of my other tutorials but yeah it's just kind of a draw a long sort of thing so thanks for thanks for tagging along here if this is the sort of thing you're into just you know subscribe comment and I can do more this sort of thing and good luck concept in your weapons or what have you this is great for shield as well because shields are usually symmetrical - although I haven't done asymmetrical things it's just a little bit takes a little bit longer anyway that's it so thanks a lot guys have [Music]
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Channel: Tiger Skull RPG
Views: 866
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: tabletop, figure, sculpting, zbrush, custom, brush, rpg, dnd, dnd5e, dungeonsanddragon, mini
Id: jJgiGtMMP70
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 42min 45sec (2565 seconds)
Published: Wed Sep 02 2020
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