CUSTOMIZING ZBRUSH -- UI - Materials - Brushes

hi all in this tutorial we're going to be looking at how to make zbrush startup with custom brushes materials and a custom ui interface now this is a really simple tutorial it's based on the way i like to start zbrush and you can do a lot more advanced stuff than this but if you just want to kind of have a little bit of flexibility and make it your own then this is how to do that i will also be linking my ui interface and my preferred brushes and materials down below so one of the things you'll see in my videos is that i have a few customized pieces to my interface so i have some brushes down here i have a few more buttons up here and i also have a few extra brushes in my brush palette here so i first want to show you how to add these to your palette so that zbrush loads in these as well as uh cause some custom materials when you start up zbrush and it's really easy so what we need to do is go to our zrush folder and that is in c drive program files pixel logic and zbrush 2022 or whatever version of zbrush you are currently running and then we want to scroll down until we find zstartup and in this is all the folders few different things and anything you put in these folders will load up so i have a few brushes and materials that i've put together already so i advise you to go and look on the zbrush website and even just type in on art station or something like that there are so many custom brushes and materials out there that other people have made that artists have made that are absolutely fantastic in terms of brushes one of these things is the orbs brushes and especially the orbs crack brush it's something that i use all the time and i've said many times on this channel to get so i would check out orb's work so what i'm going to do is just go to the brush preset folder in the zbrush folder and i'm going to select my custom brushes and i'm just going to drag and drop them into here and then you want to go back to z startup and to materials and we can drag and drop our materials into here and then you might also want to do the same for alphas as well there's some great free alphas out there and it's really useful to have a selection uh handy to use while modelling so now if we restart zbrush and let's just drop a object in here go to edit mode if we click on brushes we can see that we have all them brushes loaded in on startup relief to use straight away and the same for our materials as well we've now got a few extra materials okay then so next we're going to look at the interface so when you start up zbrush you get this or very similar to this now i don't like to overly customize my interface there's a lot of people out there that like to make custom menus custom right-click menus and really kind of make it their own but i like to stay quite close to the original zbrush layout with just a few extra things to make life a bit easier so uh what we need to do is go to preferences and go to config and we want to enable customization this will kind of unlock zbrush for you to start moving buttons around and stuff like that the first thing i like to do is add a few buttons to the side of this palette here and i've been doing this for years and one of the buttons is the activate symmetry button so to move a button onto a ui we want to find that button so in this case it's activate symmetry and we're going to hit control and alt and then left mouse button and drag that to where we want it now the reason i put activate symmetry up here is um because maybe because i'm an idiot i don't know but it's because i always forget that i've got symmetry active or should i say not active so i might sculpt on one side of a face for about half an hour only to realize that i hadn't been sculpting on the other side and that is an absolute pain i even need to redo the work again or i need to mirror it somehow so i find that having activate symmetry up here it's a nice big button and it's nice and highlighted when it's on so i can quickly see that it's on or off maybe even in my peripheral vision i just find it a lot easier to work like that but i also like to add some other bits of this as well so just while we're doing this what we can do is we can go to this menu and we can click on the menu icon here and just drag it into a side palette so we can quickly get to the rest of these buttons and i'm just going to drag all the other bits of symmetry buttons here and it doesn't really matter where you put them just somewhere neat so i'm going to place them underneath this and kind of use a similar layout to what is on here and then i'm also going to put the radial button on and the radial slider and i can never remember the exact layout of these you know you can shift them about quite easily but i do use these quite a lot so it's very handy just to have there now that's all i'm going to add to the top bar for now i might add some more as i start sculpting and realize that there's other buttons i need but for now that's fine now the other thing i like to do which most people like to do is have a selection of your favorite brushes handy and i like to just put them down here i don't like to load out any more of these menus because i like to have as big a canvas as possible but i do like to have a few of my favorite brushes down here so one thing we can do is go to brushes and we can select a brush and the same again ctrl alt left mouse button and drag that place it here but these buttons are quite big and we don't get as many of them placed here so i'm just going to remove that and i like to have smaller icons so what i'm going to do is go to preferences go down to interface ui and i'm just going to turn off wide buttons now if we go back to brushes you can see that these buttons are a little bit smaller and they're also a bit smaller up here as well i just find that a little bit easier and also i can fit more on the screen at once so at this point i need to fill this menu out with some of my favorite brushes so i'm just going to go through this and select some of my favorite brushes so i'm going to have a clay build up and pinch and inflate damn standard and we want orbs cracks hates polish trim dynamic and there's possibly a few more but these are the ones that i use most often so now we go back to the brush palette we can see we've got all them ones here but the much smaller little brushes so we can start to place these in here and we can fit a lot more of them in okay now there's a couple more brushes that i like in here but they're not in this menu if we go to lightbox and go to brushes in this menu you will find one in trim and it is trim smooth border an absolutely brilliant brush for doing rocks and stuff like that so i'm going to double click that one now that's loaded in here we can go up here find it in our palette and drag that in here and i'm going to go back to lightbox again and this time i want a smooth stronger a really useful brush to have and that is in smooth and this smooth stronger is really great if you're trying to smooth off big areas on a very high subdivided mesh so if we double click that then back in our palette we can find smooth stronger here as well and i'd like to have a few more but they are probably my most commonly used ones now when you reload zbrush these two bottom ones aren't going to appear here they need to be in z startup currently they're in one of the standard zbrush files and they only show in the light box so to get them to show here every time you start zbrush you need to take them from the standard zbrush folder and put them in z startup but if you download my file with all my brushes in i've already done that so you can just drag and drop that into your start zbrush and these will appear every single time so we can go back to preferences here and go to config and we can turn off enable customize that's ready to be saved but before we do the next thing i like to do is just add a little bit of a different color now you don't need to do this there's no real reason for it but i sometimes like to have a few different versions of zbrush installed so that i can use the copy that my students might be using um also you know when you get a new version of zbrush it's nice to have a little bit of a facelift like getting a new haircut just feels kind of cool so so go to eye color and we can change all these different colors here now i only like to change these bright colors so example to do that we can go to our color palette here and select something off these menus so let's do something i've never done before maybe a purple real bright purple then we can go to preferences and with that color selected there all we need to do is click on the color swatches that we want to change to that color so i'm just going to do these ones now we can see we've got a nice purple here i'm also going to change the border color as well but this one i'm going to make a little bit darker okay so you might want to save your ui colors here so i'm just going to save this to desktop and the next thing we can do is go to preferences config and storecon and then also save ui so i'm going to save this out now if we restart zbrush so you can see when we restart zbrush it's come up with our ui colors and our custom buttons but one thing you might notice is that the buttons from the top have not appeared but that's because we are in draw mode so if we select an object from our menu at the side here drag that out on screen you can see now that we have a 3d object in here we've got our symmetry buttons back up so we go to edit we put symmetry on and everything is working as it should be okay so the next thing i want to do is change how our canvas loads when we start zbrush up so i don't like this tiny canvas i want it to be the actual size of the screen that i've got set up here and i also want to change the background color some people really like this gradient but i don't i like it to just be a single flat color first thing i'm going to do is just go to preferences and initialize the brush that'll clear out everything and just keep our custom ui but it'll also set the canvas to the screen size and then i want to go to my color swatches here and select a color for the background so i'm going to probably want to keep something fairly light and i'm also going to slightly tint it the color of my interface and then we're going to go to document and down here where it says back this color swatch if we select that it'll change that to the color that we've selected in our color swatches and then finally to get rid of the gradient we just need to slide this slider to zero okay so that's now ready to be sculpted on so we want to save this as the startup document so to do that we can go back to document and hit this button here save a startup document okay now if we close zbrush and restart it we can see zbrush begins now with our document how we want it and with our custom map caps and our custom brushes all loaded in and also our custom buttons now you can really customize zbrush a lot more than this you can make things transparent you can make custom menus you can do all sorts but i find this to be a nice balance between the default zbrush and a few extra little things just to make life easier so i hope you found this tutorial useful and if you want to download my custom ui and my custom brushes and mat caps i will link them down below so thank you for watching this video and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Robot Army

Views: 6,478

Keywords: Zbrush 2022, Zbrush, Pixologic, Maxon, Ui, Matcaps, Materials, Custom Brushes, 3D, Layout

Id: I4ctFvDY56s

Length: 11min 32sec (692 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 13 2022