Getting Started with Sculpting - ZBrush for Beginners Tutorial

hey guys having immortan front flip normals here in this video we're gonna cover pretty much everything you need to know to get started with ZBrush it's gonna be a fairly fairly long video compared to normal stuff and at the end of it you should have all tools required to make something like these sculpts here in order to in order to sculpt in ZBrush you don't actually require a lot of tools per se you just have to learn how to use a few tools pretty well so we're gonna cover everything in terms of dynamesh the general brushes and the general sculpting workflow the one of the most confusing things is going to be the UI it is quite confusing just straight out out of the bat you're just gonna kind of have to get used to it yeah we're gonna cover the most basic things you will need to you know to get you through the first couple of weeks of ZBrush but these are pretty much all the tools that we use ourselves yeah so this is what you're gonna see the first time you open up ZBrush we are running severs for r8p to know the hole has really changed in the last version of ZBrush so if you watch this from general tutorials online and they're a few years old they're most likely still gonna be relevant so whenever you start in Siraj for the first time this is confusing because if you start to sculpt you I also let's just note that we're using a tablet you will get these weird things going and you might try a couple of different brushes or just general things here but it can tell this is not sculpting it something went broke yeah something went wrong this is what they call two and a half D and this is pretty much the last time we'll mention to an athlete this is not relevant for us what you need to know is how do you actually get started with 3d so the very first thing we're gonna do is hit the control end key control end for new security cameras just make a new cameras here and then let's go over to our tool place here so this is the very first thing we're gonna cover we just have to know how to get some geometry going out here essentially they call a 3d model a tool so we can go click on this one the tool and fear 3d and if you just drag this out you cannot see that you have indeed a 3d model and if you drag it up again and you have the same 3d model everywhere there will be a lot of hurdles like this in ZBrush where something that might seem illogical in real life isn't in ZBrush yeah so this is cool you know you can't really do this on the 3d software but it's not useful in any way shape or form so again let's clear the canvas control end and let's drag out one another another sphere of this so up here you can see we have the edit mode edit mode now allows you to go into into this into the 3d mode if you wish so now this is in 3d so if you try and drag out another one now if you just hit one a corner you can see that this is now in 3d so the very first thing we're going to talk about here is pretty much the navigation right now you can see by just but dragging around here on a canvas we're just rotating it there are several ways of rotating it the way I prefer to rotate is by holding down the right mouse button and just rotating around here it might be a little tricky to see with a sphere but yes it is actually rotating it the way we scale it is this is this gets a bit tricky you hold down the Alt key and then the right mouse button key so this will pan it around but the way we scale it is to release the old mouse button so alt right mouse button and then release the old mouse button it gets a bit tricky you just have to learn this and then here as well we also have like we said all throughout mouse button is just padding it you can also use these guys this might be easier in the beginning but I highly recommend actually learning to navigate this it becomes second-nature fairly quickly okay so the very first thing we've got to cover here is how do you save something in most three it's all for most software this is not really something you have to really think about ZBrush however is a bit special and that's something you're gonna see throughout this video so there are a couple of ways to save your scene document to whatever you want to call it so the most logical way would be to go in a document and save as we're not gonna do this this will save a snapshot the 2d image here so it's just an image it's just an image if you go to document save as you can't use this for anything what we will do though in just way too quickly in this document menu here we're just gonna change to remove the gradient here so I mean this is just really a personal preference for us but I think yeah most people like it just a bit nice yeah so wait you do this you just go to document and just to range all the way down to zero this is purely person preferences but we're just going to do that so essentially you have three ways of saving you have as a document which you never do never ever ever do this no argument and then we have as a file this is what happens when you hit ctrl s control s is just save most of all things in most software so you have file save as and then we have saving us a tool so saving is a project is probably gonna be the easiest for now saving as a project is has more features it stores your precision let's say you put this up here and you put a material on it and whatnot this is gonna save this is gonna save the position and all that and it's also going to save all these other ones here as well the current state of the project if you save it as a tool which is going if this should be here by default you just go to tool save ass this is cleaner but it's it requires a bit more setup so in the beginning feel free to just save as a project so without out of the way let's cover something some other basic basic interface this is this is where you're gonna be living in see brush it's very different from other 3d software so it takes some time getting used this is one of the biggest hurdles people have when getting into ZBrush and also coming back to zbrush if you stop using C brush for maybe a couple months or so you come back into ZBrush it can sometimes be a little bit tricky to pick it back up yeah so you're not gonna use a whole lot of this to be perfectly honest we're mostly going to be living under the tool palette here which is docked by default you're going to be using most of these menus here over here this is where your you can find something like brushes you can find some alphas you up here we have the edit mode we have draw move tool scale so this is where you can we will cover these more later on but we will be using these features of here but we have you can change your brush size and you brush intensity over here so this is the draw size and this is your intensity if you know the higher brush size the stronger it is of the bigger it is the higher C intensity that this strong orange is going to be you can also see your active points here the higher number the heavier it's gonna be but also the more resolution yet so this said let's just get started with some very basic sculpting and you can see by default the standard brush is enabled and if you start to sculpt now you're gonna see this message here again ZBrush to the rescue yes thought it was gonna be easy it's not so what this is is telling you essentially you have to click this button here so ZBrush by default comes with these standard primitives and the standard primitives you can manipulate in a different way than you would a standard 3d object we're primarily just gonna be focused on the standard 3d objects and that's what polymesh3d makes them yeah oldest said click this button yeah and now you see p.m. 3d which just means published 3 so now we can start to sculpt on this guy here so if you just if you just hit the left mouse button or just sculpt with a pen it's just cut you're just gonna be able to to move out you're just gonna move the geometry out here if you want to move it in you just hold on the Alt key this can also be done through the UI if you go up to you see there's two buttons called the C ad and C sub yeah I would recommend that you just stick with the Alt key all basically just inverts whatever is selected for the brush whether it's C adders ease up once you hold down alt it'll switch the mode yeah we also have the draw size up here and we have the intensity you don't really have to change intensity a whole lot but the draw such you will have to do you will have to use so you can see here it says draw size and says s s means that this is the hotkey for the draw size if you desk you now you can just change the brought the brush size like this so let's just cover some of the basic basic brushes we're gonna be using here you do this you access this by going over here top left and you can see all of these you can also access this by hitting the B key which brings up the brushes so most of these are not useful let's just be fair you have a lot of weird brushes here but the main ones we are gonna be using will be something like claybuildup you might use clay you definitely be using standard brushes so this is even even for us this is confusing so we have a little cheat sheet here where we have all the hotkeys this is something I recommend just getting started with right away I really think hotkeys is it's like it's the name of the game once you start using C brush because going into menus constantly in an hour different menus it's just gonna get super tiring yeah so being familiar with the most basic hotkeys is going to be very useful yeah absolutely so the the the one you have Karen have selected is a standard brush this is a fairly simple brush it's not really doing anything super fancy it's really useful you're gonna be using this a fair bit so the hotkey here is B 2 just to bring up the brushes and then s and T for brush standard put s 1st standard and T for T in the end yes something like that and then you have the clay buildup this is B C and you can see this is a lot coarser this has like a nice little texture to it this is the one I'm doing most of my sculpting with like the characters is on the beginning there sculpted like 95% just using this one here yeah the nice thing about the clay buildup is that it constantly adds clay yeah it constantly adds volume so if you just go over the same spot over and over and over again it'll just either add or subtract to the area yeah it's a fantastic yeah it's really it's really it's a very aggressive brush because there's no limit to it so to speak yeah you can very easily scrub your entire model next one we're going to cover is damn standard this is amazing this is B D s this is this is C sub enable by default which means it's gonna carve into it this is used a lot for adding like wrinkles or general like sharp edges to your model yeah and if you go the inverse of that if you hold down alt while you're using this and then the opposite result this is really handy yeah I use this a lot just for adding like sharp for just your model as well and then we have the trim dynamic B T D so this one is for planes this is fantastic as well particularly for doing anything hard surface or if you're doing rocks or something lat this will just give you nice planes right away yeah also but even if you're doing something organic like a face it's really easy to define like the planes of the the nose the cheekbones yeah things like that yeah exactly and then we have the move brush this is B and V and this does exactly matte this just allows you to move big chunks of polygons around and the last part we have is a smooth brush you access this by holding the shift key and this is regardless of any brush yes so let's say you're using the clay bush okay build up b c d now you can just start sculpting here and if you want to smooth this out now you don't have to change the brush if you look over here now if you hold on the shift key it's just gonna give you the smooth brush right away one feature I think we should just quickly mention is within the draw size if you see there's a tiny little tag that's as dynamic so if you double click that it'll turn off dynamic sizing of the brushes dynamic it just basically keeps track of how close you are to the model or not so it'll keep the same scale of the brush you can see now that it's off okay like a smaller brush mover closer but with dynamic on it stays consistent yeah that's really useful yeah so you can see now that yeah we have all these tiny little brushes here but we are running out of resolution very quickly here no no no no only there was some way to fix this so the way you can see a wireframe here is or just seeing the general topology is by hitting the shift F key or you can click this button here shift F just allows you to see see the wireframe here and now you can just clearly see that you trying to sculpt in this area here nothing is really gonna happen because you have one polygon it's so a few points you move around for this you have four points and you can't define anything so if you want more a solution here now you can go to geometry this is all again all under the tool pallet geometry and under and sorry tool geometry and then you had divide this is something that we talked about this before recording video Morton has literally never touched this button no never I only use the hotkey I did I don't know yeah it's it was just so it seems so pointless to go into the menu and I just it was just hotkey right away exactly so if you hover over this you can see that the hotkeys control D so if you just hit that you could see now we get a lot of more resolution here every time you hit this the poly count increases by 4 times so now you if you had shift F again now we can see we have a lot more resolution here which allows us to really go in and sculpt this you also change the subdivision level here so if you if you want to go down again you can just go here and just change this slider I have really never really used this slider because I use hotkeys for this so the hotkey is shift D to go down and it's d to go up and it's ctrl D to add another level these are hotkeys you will be using constantly yeah so you can currently see we have around 400 or 500 20,000 points this is perfectly fine in in ZBrush you can work pretty smoothly with it after like around maybe 10 million police or so I wouldn't really go above 10 million for most things but if you're in a range from a few million police it's perfect fun yeah and because zebras runs on magic it also it also runs a fairly low-level computers as well I had a laptop for 2004 like many years ago and somehow I was still able to sculpt on that I think that's one of the things that actually make super so accessible that it is hardware it's pretty forgiving yeah you don't need a 2000 gaming $2,000 game in the rebuild run anything here so that is really useful so let's say we sculpt some more stuff on the stove and we having an abstract shape yeah we're really getting to the point now where we're pushing the polygons to it to the to their max so you can see here now that even we've smooth this you know we still don't have a lot more resolution yes sure we could we could keep subdividing this but but if we subdivide this region everything else also be subdivided so if you want to just add more resolution than this guy there is no point in subdividing the entire thing so we have a feature called dynamesh dynamesh is amazing it just allows you to have a dynamic resolution on it just allows you to yeah get the democrat solution areas where you need resolution yeah so it'll look at what requires them it'll have like a baseline resolution that will try to put across everything and in the sort of deep crevices and peaks it'll try to give you more resolution to preserve that detail yeah so dynamesh is found again under tool geometry and dynamesh if you had a dynamesh button now you can see that if we had you have subdivision levels it will ask you do would you like to freeze the subdivision levels before I treat dynamic mode don't worry too much about what this means just hit no yeah always it now yeah that's we're not going to get to in too much into technical details here this is just a beginner's introduction now one important thing that I think we should note about the dynamesh tool is we have the resolution slider and the resolution slider determines how many polygons we assign to your mesh but this is also scale dependent yeah so the bigger your object it has you kinda have to work with the resolution and scale of your object hand-in-hand yeah exactly so definitely keep that in mind but for now probably just mostly worry about resolution yeah so if it keeps on sculpting now and you let's say you're adding your going to the move brush V and V and you want to add some kind of big thing here now before in with just regular subdivision levels you you have to like again subdivide the entire thing but we dynamesh active we can just hit ctrl and drag outside the model and this release and then you can see that it dynamically gives us more resolution in this region here yeah that's the nice thing about the poly frame you can sort of visualize how that looks yeah yeah then like compared to you know subdividing it it was just adding the solution in that area yeah so is this is this is something of this is a question I got a lot from when students what I'm teaching is what's the difference between just subdividing it and Dinah meshing it so as I seen a lot of people who just use dynamesh for and for everything like you it's a 10 million polydynamics version here and that's overkill dynamesh is is not a replacement of subdivision dynamesh is a starting point you know you start off your general design all that and you need more resolution then you do your control drag outside and you get more resolution in that region but once your general design it's working you know it's gonna dynamesh it again with higher resolution just to be able to add details to it then you will just hit control D just so you get more resolution of this because now you can go up and down in in the resolutions and this is just a lot better way of working yeah sort of if you if you're working on something for a let's say it's production or whatever yeah um you would never have a final model that's dynamesh no you would always have a final model where you yourself have defined the topology yeah dynamesh however is amazing unbeatable for concepting yeah it's so fast for for all the models we showed in the beginning they are all dynamesh maybe they're dynamesh up to like five hundred thousand and then at four hundred thousand points and then maybe one one or two level of subdivision but the majority of the work there is done with dynamesh so when talking about dynamesh there's something we should let's just undo all the solution levels control see actually speaking of undo we have a super nice feature up here this is amazing this is something you haven't really seen any other software you can just keep on going here and go back and forth this this stores up to ten thousand undos yeah currently we have one hundred and six or so yeah ten I find that it'll take me a few days probably to get up to ten thousand yeah so you know you're you're probably fine yeah so that's every single stroke you can see now when we do this every single stroke is being it's being added to it so that's that that's actually a good note on back to what we talked about in terms of saving as a project or a tool if you save it as a tool you will not get the undo history if you want to preserve it you can save it as a project and you can choose whether or not to include the undo history or not if you include you undo history the size becomes a lot bigger and you become unstable but it's also really cool because you can very easily backtrack and particularly wanna do like time lapses or whatnot but back to dynamesh so we don't have any sub notion levels now and let's just dynamesh this again and let's say we want to cut something away from this we can do this using something called the trimmed brushes if you hold on the Shift + ctrl button you can see that the menu up here to top left changes so ctrl shift and now you can see that we have the trim curve trim glass ooh we're just gonna use the trim rectangular for this this is really useful if you again hold on a shift and ctrl and you can now see that we're cutting away what's inside this rectangle this is extremely handy because you can just you don't have to smooth anything out let's say you want to cut you want to smooth away this guy here but you can't really it's really hard to do that you can just cut it away mm-hmm it's no reason to anything fancy so with all that said let's now move on to some actual sculpting so the way we start this is let's just use a sphere 3d and make polymesh3d and this is already in edit mode now which is pretty handy so we just couldn't go and rotate this and then you can hold on a shift key just just snap this review yeah if you hold down Shift + F just to get up the poly frame again you can sort of see you have the top of the pole and then you just left that enables you to sort of visualize where I put it yeah so if you if you're sculpting now that's gonna be fine but you need symmetry symmetry is amazing because now we can actually sculpt if you don't have to sculpt either side in the individually symmetry is brought up by hitting the X key or by going on a transform and just activating symmetry right here so this is really useful so now we can just start sculpting some general things here just using the standard brush so let's just do a super quick face here this is not gonna be very pretty but this is just gonna show my general workflow for this there are many ways of doing this this is just one way yeah and this is going to utilize all the basic tools that we've covered yellow far yeah so I usually start by using the clay buildup which is B CP and I usually subdivide this a few times as well just because I need some more resolution that's ctrl D so you see now we get some some texturing from this and whenever I'm sculpting from this I just prefer to get some like like these are the eyes here I just refer to get some some general bounine landmarks down here some cheekbones there's some skull and all that kind of stuff it's like a Cthulhu skull now yes yeah and again what we talked about with the claybuildup brush the claybuildup brush is amazing for these kind of tasks because it's just so aggressive it just it just cuts stuff away if you're working with something like the standard brush for this you're you're often gonna end up with a very soft result just because it is a very soft brush by default yeah the claybuildup brush is amazing for this especially with with the sort of square look that it has to it yeah easy to define planes easy to find volumes so we could definitely definitely recommend using that for most of your basic sculpting yeah and what you're seeing now as well is I I will keep going back and forth between sculpting out and sculpting in to define planes so sculpting out and hold on they all keep the sculpting in so we also just gonna change the madcap the madcap is found here and you see this is just a bunch of materials I prefer the madcap gray most of these are again not particularly useful now so let's just switch the masks out great and it just looks a bit nicer yeah the default red one I really don't like and not just because of the color red is cuz that's a perfectly adequate color it's more because it just the model isn't represented properly no I mean you could make this medical gray you could make that red yeah you have some color options if you wanted to adjust that right underneath the mat cap so if you wanted to play around with that that's totally possible still a good look at God he just shows to model in a good way yeah so when sculpting anything here I prefer to yeah you pretty much only used to claim below and use the move brush B and D this is to just to block in some general shapes here and this is where you know we can get to a certain point if we're just using a the polymesh3d sphere you know what we show you before you can get to a certain level with the existing yeah topologies that that's there when you subdivide and then once you start getting into the more detail heavy stuff pulling out maybe you will pull out like some crazy ears or he has horns or something then you would need to start going into dynamesh territory because all of a sudden the topology just doesn't it doesn't hold up anymore yeah you can see here that right now it's getting very stretchy so even if I subdivide this right now it's going a bit crazy and that's what we talked about before where if you didn't start to subdivide yeah you're subdividing the horn but you're also subdividing everything else yeah it gets very heavy very quickly so let's dynamesh this guy just by going under again tool geometry and dynamesh and hit no and you can always play around with let's say you were starting out you were starting to block this out but you felt there was too detailed you could always lower your resolution read dynamesh it again just to get to a lower level or if you want more you know up the resolution read i nimesh get more so this is a very nonlinear process we're not going like now we're done with subdivision or dining now we keep going back and forth all the time important thing when you're doing sculpting know that we're gonna get too deep into the sculpting here because this is more technical see brush with the important thing is don't go into details too early like do you know just start defining stuff like where the eye sockets are before your you're adding before you're actually adding the eyeballs or anything like that or like your eyelids because you've you if you don't have the socket you can't place an eyelid that's just your order of things yeah so we can also change the feel of this brush this brush currently is has a very harsh feel like Norseman work mentioned if you go under here under brush alpha under alphas here we can now just change this utter - off this said this gives an incredibly soft feel right away you see the brush responds in a completely different manner this is a bit too soft for me and this is something I'll only use for like later stages of the model when I don't need to like it's like taking like turpentine or I just like smoothing down like a real clay model so I prefer to keep this to alpha o 6 this K this is like a mix between this and the super harsh one it still gives you the texture but it doesn't give you this incredibly harsh look yeah and alphas are really a powerful thing in see brush I think to some extent some people tend to overuse the alphas it's actually in the beginning you know you think you're having fun with the alphas you just want to play around and that's totally cool yeah it's like with power comes great responsibility blah blah blah but alphas have you know give you the opportunity to really add some amazing detail to your model yeah it's not just just for this where you just change the feel of the brush a little bit you could add something like skin pores or zippers you could have you have like I have a sipper texture in your alpha it's it's really kind of limitless what you what you can do with it yeah you could increase things or office so I keep going become going back and forth a few new brushes here PMV for the move brush I'm just giving with some ears I guess no now's a good time you can see now that you started pulling out ears it's hard to get more resolution out of it so if you hold down the ctrl key and drag on your canvas you can see that you'll start to add more of a solution so now you can just you can just keep dragging more things out so you're not really constrained to technical limitations which you might be no two three two sulfur you can just keep just adding and changing your design like crazy so let's show the trim versus again in them for more practical point of view now so let's say you want to remove this horn it's incredibly tricky just to smooth this out or like to move this and it can be really nasty sometimes so what we can do we can use the trim brushes so if you hold on control and shift again we know you now how to trim brush enabled here if you don't have this just find it up here so we're just gonna use the trim rect and now you can just cut it out and you can see that gone instantly gone have a little problem though a little problem its symmetry not working with symmetry and this is this is kind of annoying and sivir's so there are either one or two buttons you have to hit for this depending so the first button maybe the only one is under geometry again most things are in the geometry and modify topology and this is a long and scare list we want mirror and weld but now you can see that does the wrong thing and brought a horn back so this works this this works from in mirrors from the left to the right so you would assume oh say from left to right but wait why does it add the horn from right to left that's because we are now actually sculpting this the wrong way we're actually sculpting on the backside and that's something you it's which is kind of hard to know when you're sculpting ZBrush and just having fun with this it's you can like if you were to you know you could activate perspective in the floor mode to maybe give you a better idea of where things are you can see we are it's also upside down we're upside down where the wrong way around right so it's it's it doesn't it doesn't really matter for our concepts go you can always correct these things but those two buttons can sort of help you you know get a feel for where where is your model yeah so if it does this and and it's bringing you back instead of just kind of like kind of cutting away in the other side as well we're just going to go under under tool deformation and now we can go up here and hit Mirror Mirror just that's exactly what it mirrors the model and then we can again go under geometry and mirror and weld and tada there we go this is just something you have to play around with him get used to yeah I think there are a lot of things you have to get used to when it comes to see brush and that's just so super useful that you can just cut stuff away it just becomes it just means that you can be creative and not be attached to your decisions because it's you're not gonna run into all it's too hard to change you can just blitz stuff away hmm anything just get rid of it perfect now like the symmetry options are you can you you have some really powerful tools within symmetry there's also a symmetry option called radial symmetry radial symmetry allows you to Florent define a certain number of points - Alice - actually you know so X would be the standard symmetry where you just have two points around the model if you activate radial symmetry you could define something like 816 points so weight more dense talking but here is currently we have regular symmetry which is which is you know basic stuff but now we have the cool syndrome the coolest it's like is radial symmetry it's not something I use a lot but it's just fun to play around with yeah exactly this actually brings up a good point as well so you find this under under transform and you find under here but it's a bit annoying if you let's see what you use this a lot it's a bit annoying time to go under here all the time what we can do we can talk this over so if you have you see this little button here you can just drag this over here to the right and now that's here so now if you just scroll here you can just go between tool and transform so you see the little guy here called our I know this this is where it gets funky oh yeah radial symmetry and you can define which axis right now it's on the x-axis yeah we do why is it you can do all them at once be crazy but okay it's a fun tool to play around with and you can make some really interesting actually kind of looks like my first 3d model ever again great powers great responsibilities do some really really funky things with us like we said this is not something we use a whole lot but it's really cool once you do need it yeah it does it does come in handy yeah so let's just sculpt a little bit more on this guy here now again just with symmetry hitting the X key disable all the other stuff here you can see now that we're getting into a more a little more refined state yeah that the softer clay build a brush is really nice because it doesn't leave us with now I'm gonna call them like nasty artifacts instead of useful things from the brush you know you don't get the coarse look of the previous alpha something that I also like to do is you I actually just switched between the the square alpha and no alpha hmm that helps me a lot as well so it's just it's just whatever preference you really have it's really great for soft super soft skin details getting some puffiness in the eyes and you can also take the intensity down now like in the beginning it is not something I've touched but let's say let's subdivide this model now so you have some more resolution here yeah if you want just this can be a bit harsh if you just want to blend some shapes together you can set this to something like 5 and you can just work the shapes up it might be a bit hard to see in a video here but it's it's just blending everything a bit nicely this is this is particularly useful when you're using something like you're dragging out elfis like we talked about before with the skin pores right if you were to drag out an alpha like that it comes out at a certain intensity because you don't really have control over the brush pressure as much so adjusting the Z intensity there can really help you yeah and let's add some eyes to this guy as well some actual eyeballs and this brings her to the topic of subtools so if you go again under tool because that's where all the magic happens and you have sub tools here you can see a list of all your sub tools and as we have none we only have one guy here there's nothing here so which makes sense so the way we can add sub tools of this is we can go under append and now we can we can select this sphere 3d and you can see this automatically created a polymesh3d of this yeah you can't have the initial weird cebra primitives with an actual 3d model so it'll just do all the work for you yeah so this is handy because you know you can you can hide stuff here you can and you can just manage your your scene here this is something you will have a lot of sub tools after a while yeah and this is where we get into the differences between so what we've been doing so far in the viewport which is navigating around that's been sort of translating a camera around you know scaling or moving the camera closer and in panning or whatever now we're actually getting into the turret or actually manipulating 3d objects because obviously the eyeball is mal placed yes that's fine so so the way what we won't do now we want to place the eyeball inside his little eye so currently we are on on the main head here now you can just switch here but the mic my preferred way of switching between subtools is by hold on the Alt key and just clicking on them this is super handy because you might have like a hundred sub tools here eventually so it is all thinking and that brings us to it so this also brings us to how do you actually move scale and rotate your sub tools because you don't want to do this we would the move brush because that just gonna you're just gonna screw that up like crazy yeah cuz the actually deforms your your mesh yeah so we can see up here we have move scale and rotate and that's it yeah so now now we're looking into something different right now you see it's clearly different than what we've been doing so far so you can you can just move this around by holding that by going to the handles here and if you hold in the center one you can scale it down a little bit this is kind of like a universal manic place right here yeah again again if you hold down shift while you're rotating around your model you sort of snap to degrees like 90 degree views very very useful so just move this into place you can also rotate this this is a bit hard to see with this guy he's perfectly spherical but you're gonna see the wireframe here now again shift F to good wireframe you see that we now now rotating this and you can see the degree on the bottom as well if you hold on a shift key it snaps to every what is it every 10 degrees 15 degrees C 5 degrees so much snip so as nose that snaps that on that other evil degrees so now we can just move this into place and remember before we use the mirror and weld tool we can do the same thing now to bring this guy over to the other side so geometry and now we go to modify topology and mirror and weld to our eyes another they're gonna be the same sub tool so once you move you know one eye you'll move both eyes yeah so you can I rename this under here history this one you can his reign in this two eyes I highly recommend actually free naming your stuff yeah because this gets messy fairly quickly so if you want to sculpt in this now you have to enable symmetry again now symmetry is always subtool based so you see so now assume symmetry is on if you go in this guy symmetry is we can disable symmetry and I assume tree will be enabled again so this is this is a bit annoying because sometimes you forget to enable or disable symmetry yeah that's that's a pain yeah that is a pain so now we can just start sculpting in this kind of what they were doing like yeah what were the old Bernini sculpture all that they would actually X make sculpt NDI eyeballs here skulls incredibly efficient yes it works so works I will highlight here we also see we come to just something like this and now you can see a difference between the total points and the active points here yeah if you wanted to now that we have multiple sub tools you can let's say you have a bunch of than 100 now you can actually work with one sub tool visible at a time yes just if you just solo it or if you isolate it the super super nice feature if you're seeing get super heavy and you don't want to display everything at once this is something you're gonna use a lot yeah which also brings us to visibility so let's say like right now we can solve this guy here but that that just hides the other sub tools what if you only want to focus on the ears for now we can man we have visibility tools here which is pretty damn useful so if you hold and Shift + a ctrl shift button this is how we got to rectangle tools before sorry the the trigger much like the trim tools before trim rectangle we also have some guys here called as selection tools so these are the default tools that were selected before so by default if you just click on this one this this is what's gonna be there by default if you hold down ctrl + shift now and you drag you see we get this green green rectangle and if you release now everything which is inside this will be the only thing visible which is awesome because now you can really go in and you can just focus your your efforts on one area without it being cluttered hmm really useful stuff the way you get everything back now is for holding on ctrl shift and is clicking if you undo this we can also just hold on ctrl shift and drag getting outside to in averse so again just control shift click to get this back a cool feature of this is like this works like a brush so if you hold down alt at the same time you actually get a subtraction yes and you hide whatever is embedded inside the rectangle cyclist if you will just hide ears and focus on everything you can just do that we also have instead of just a rectangle we can also use glass you so exact same hotkeys as before like I can't speak for anyone else but this I've hardly ever used a rectangle one I can see it's mostly just the lasso tool for me same here so this is usually this is something specific case you want to only focus on the face because if you look at the entire model you know it sometimes you just get overwhelmed by details in ticularly like you know where I run four and five thousand if this gets up to like 10 million pulleys you're just gonna get a bit overwhelmed so really useful we can now just go in here and we can just sculpt this up specific regions here and you can have if you let's say you sculpted everything in one go you had the body the head everything as one hmm where the isolation where the selection tools can really come in handy is if you want to split parts of your model you can actually split parts so you then you create more sub tools in a way yeah just to lighten the load or so these are some nice little hotkeys for you so if you if you hold on the shift F key you all Paulo frame you can see we have different colors here whenever you we trim something away here you can see that we didn't get a different polar group so if you let's just change this back to our rectangle if you hold ctrl shift and click on this now you see you get isolation here you can only select each specific group and what Morgan is talking about is you can now split these into separate into separate sub tools in this case we don't want that because this is just automatically created but that would be terrible pretty terrible but um let's say want to we want to split off the ears at this point because why not yeah well maybe he's got detachable yes yes yes detachable years so what we can do now is we can go into again poi frame and we can hit the ctrl W key control double Q control W will just mask everything which is currently visible so it creates it creates a poly group for everything yes as you see so what we can do now we can go into you can do this we can just refine it like like Morton said before we don't really use we don't really use the the rectangular we use mostly use the the last one it's a little harder to select with the rectangle but it's fine for now so let's see what we want to split this guy off here we can only control w again and now you can see it gets a slightly different color and now we can split this off so if you want to split this off now you go under again tool and sub tool and now we have we have tons of options here I really recommend you going through these and just learn what they are but the one we want now is split and we have group split groups split we'll just first we'll tell you hey you can't undo this this is something which happens in ZBrush I go on that's another thing you have to get used to it's a bit weird so we can now just hit OK and now you see we have a separate sub tool here and we can now call this these gears so if you isolate this now you can see this is a completely separate sub tool and there might be different use I mean in this case it's pretty silly but there are different use cases for for isolating and living things absolutely so let's look into masking next you see how I actually can't undo this like if I want to get back the ears now I can't do that because undos are based on on per sub tool so there is no way to really bring this back now which is a bit of a shame so let's just a masking masking is incredibly handy it's a bit like putting like tape on something if you like with masking tape and you want to paint across it it just means you can't touch the area which is currently mask yeah so if you want to if you want to let's see you know you want to only focus on or you don't want to focus on the mouth here you can mask out the mouth by holding on control key and dragging super useful so whatever is gray now is not gonna be affected by any kind of sculpting this is one of these core tools that it's like so what is the use case for this well everything yeah it's once you it's like you know once you need it yes it's hard to explain it's just incredibly useful so it to clear the mask control-drag outside a model as you might have picked up now this is also the same key as as dinah measuring it so if there is a mask and control-drag outside it will clear the mask if there is no mask and you do the exact same thing it will dine with Shamu yeah and then like with all other brushes it you can subtract from yes from your from your masking as well so now you paint it out with everything regular then you hold down alt ctrl and alt at the same time and then you start subtracting from your mask do you actually see there is a little plus or minus here which happens now it's a pretty handy hmm so let's say we just want to affect like the the bottom lip here now we don't want to top one to be effective you can just paint a little mask or the top one and this might take a bit of time getting used to yeah and now we can just use the move brush B and D and we can just sculpt this end we can just move this enough you see it's a bit harsh and that's because the Martin the mask is just a harsh Moscow it was painted with harsh brush let's just add a bit more masking up here this we don't affect that if you want to soft and mask off you're gonna sit the control key and just you can see how everything is now being softened off here so now if you want to move this out yeah control key and tap on your model yeah control key tap on your model so masking is incredibly useful it's yeah you really shouldn't underestimate how useful masking can be yeah repositioning limbs or you just have separate parts in the model that you want to isolate it's it's super handy and also again if you hold a control key now control ctrl W key whatever is masked will now get a separate polygroup hmm this is the same thing we did before it was just out everything visible so if you want to make a mask or something you can just very oh you want to make Poli over something you can is very quickly just paint a mask for it control W and now you have a weird kick on that where to go which might or might not be useful yeah want to clear all the pull grips now hit the ctrl W key and we'll just get back to to the way it was before from asking as well we also have a little menu for it so this is a little mask this is again under tool like most things are you really don't have to go much outside of tool menu and we have a little guy here which is masking right there so you can do view mosque it's still gonna be there and you can inverse it and all that essentially everything we're just talking about in terms of hotkeys you just have a couple of more advanced features here and - an inverse your mask you can just also control and tap on your canvas and that's sort of inverses your mask yet so it's controlled tap on your canvas to inverse your mask but controlled tap when your canvas to clear your selection so you have to get your mind around these things depending on which tool you actually use actually so this is this is a bit confusing but all the things here are masking is all right here and if you go under right underneath masking you actually have visibility as well which is the selection what we're talking one two four yeah and you can manipulate it from in here if you're uncomfortable with the with the hotkeys for example you also do cool stuff like growing your selection and all that so there are definitely a lot of cool things you can do that enter visibility so it definitely recommend just going through some of these guys let's cover a quickly layers layers are essentially like Photoshop layers in the way that you can just you can you can sculpt something on a layer and you can you can remove it you changed intensity or afterwards it's like having a is like a strange on do and yeah that's where it's like you have its confined to a layer let's say you're making changes someone requested make the nose bigger or smaller eyes whatever you do that on a layer and you always have the option to just take away that one change yeah so that's again under tool and layers right here let not to be confused with again weird but not even gonna talk about it like the two and a half the nastiness which is back like a legacy from the mid 90s whatever so made its terrible stuff so layers under tool and we have this one the big button the only button you have so we cannot just simple pretty simple so we cannot just do a change on this and now all the change I just did now this is stored in a layer so you can see we have a record button here this means that this is now active if you if you know hit a record button and then you can change the little eye here you can just turn it on and off if you want to go back into the layer to change it you have to enable record again layers are a bit confusing but essentially record ya on and off and then record just make sure that you are in record mode you also have sort of opacity for the layer which is just a slider so it like in Photoshop exactly so you just maybe you want to tone it down a little bit or you want to hold her up tone it up okay well okay there's a limiter so really useful stuff in the I know this is more artistic tutorial in terms of like for artists but in production we have to use layers if you if you don't use if you don't use layers you were so screwed because like more and said the note might be make the head smaller or bigger or whatnot and if you do that without layers they will yell at you and write you angry emails as they should as to as this shirt rightfully so I mean one thing to keep in mind is that layers will make your scene file bigger yeah bar tab so that is a necessary sacrifice and that's the sort of sacrifice you can also do this and call it just whatever name whatever any wickedness that delete to remove the layer next up let's look at sea spheres so the way we did this guy here is we just start with essentially a ball of clay and we just extruded that out using using dynamesh yeah there is a separate way which is super cool which is called sea spheres it's a little more old-school yes before hold is gold but also has a lot of uses as well definitely so see Spheeris a found again on a tool and nice friendly red one here so it's kind of like it's kind of like the primitives ZBrush premium you can mix a sea sphere with anything no until you make it a real a real boy yeah real 3d object so the very first thing we're gonna do here is again an able symmetry and now you can see that symmetry is enabled just by hitting X just behind the X key and now this gets funky mm-hmm so this can be used to I prefer to use this to create like a basic maquette for like characters if I'm just using a head I most like will not use see spheres but let's just quickly show you now how you can just make a super quick body of some sorts so this is where these change yeah this gets weird so if draw is enabled you're gonna draw out some things and the size of the depend just on just how much you're dragging out here but if you want to move this out you now you have to use move and this is different from the regular yeah it's it's very bizarre you can just kind of have to get used to it yeah one of these things we can out just keep dragging this out you can also add add an icy sphere in the middle off a chain here so you know see if you just click here we get we get one of these and like with anything else you can invert it hold down alt take away the thing so if you want to remove this hit the Alt key and click so let's say this is an e now we can now just we just add an etude will you use the move let me just move this into place and these T's also work with hotkeys like the move scale and rotate w e and r and the way i prefer to do this if i want to add a limb is not to drag this and then and then use to move i just prefer to add to the last one here and then you just use the w key to get to move and then just move this out you can see that this is moving our entire thing because this is all these two this is because this works with the radius of the brush so if you want to make sure this only affects the single C's for you selected just set a draw size all the way down to one and I was only gonna affect one of them the reason I don't prefer to drag it out is because most of the time we're doing this I want it to be the same size as the last one so we can just add a little bit of a little bit of a body to it again when skies were sculpting general to specific and again using the hotkeys q is for draw you can just hover over these as well little arms here that's kind of gum okay now it looks like a person before it's like almost like a weird Christmas tree I think see spheres is one of those things that nowadays might be overlooked a little bit like see spheres back in the day was all we had was the bomb I still think it's a very relevant in a very powerful tool to quickly you know sketch out your models and a cool thing about it is I give you if you press the a key you can preview a mesh of how it'll look yeah this is not the actual mesh this is a preview of how the image will look like so don't scroll from this yeah in order to actually get this turn into polygons so you just again just hit make polymesh3d you also have more settings here all the way in the bottom you see these are now bit different now now we have a c sketch rigging an adaptive skin unified skin adaptive skin this is what happens in here to a key we can now change the density to this so lower density higher density and you can just change this up I honestly stick with default settings most of time get it into poly mesh and started working on metal this is this is an incredible tool though because you can so quickly change the look of it if used a scale one and you go between the change you see between the chains here you see you this turns green now I know you can just scale stuff up and down looks like you're scaling everything in the hierarchy yeah really Israel also scale each individual one so if you if you want to scale one of them you can just do that by hitting that specific one but now we can just scale it up and down so there you go nice great proportions thank you so again hit the a key maybe take dents it down a little bit too and now we can just hit make polymesh3d and now we have this guy here so now if you had a key here nothing happens because this is now been converted to polygons so the way I prefer to work with this is I use this to move brush for this and just move this kind of stuff out here you can also smooth this out and just get some general proportions I mean this looks like absolute crap at the moment but this is often how I'll start yeah I like proper sculpture the cool thing about this like here's a here's the power of something like masking or polygroups like we talked about before I guess a you wanted to translate just the limbs the nice thing about these fears is that they have like built-in built-in polygroups so each sphere or each length of joint in the sphere becomes its own polygroup so it makes it really easy for isolation so if you want to isolate your arms now you can just hold shift F alright the polar form up here and ctrl shift click on it and now you can see we get different this Laksha looks like one because it's so similar but there are different things if you want to only high isolate one of these ctrl shift click to click on them and then we've ice literate ctrl shift drag outside to invert and ctrl shift click outside this is a mouthful yes who am to get it back now and this is this is honestly how I started from doing if I'm doing something like this or I don't have a base mesh you know we just start off like this starting in getting some some super hacky bony landmarks here getting in a bit of a ribcage getting a bit of like pedal of us here but this is this is how I'll straight off just start sculpting super six-pack because this guy's mega strong but you know he skipped like that he definitely skipped like they don't do that nice yeah it's a it's a very efficient way of working is really good for concept Dean yeah you know you can really just bust out a lot of these sculpts in a day yeah okay so with all these tools here covered such as how to make something dynamesh see spheres the various brushes like the clay build uppers you really have all the tools you need to get started in seabirds just to create some scopes like this but what you might not know how to do is how to actually how to actually sculpt like the theory behind sculpting and some and do some general in-depth ZBrush knowledge so we don't just do free tutorials here on YouTube we also have a whole separate website on flip normals where we have a lot of more elaborate courses should you be interested in that yeah it's probably a little outside the scope of this tutorial but we have something like our creature kids where you can easily add details to everything you have in ZBrush we have actually we have an introductory course a more in-depth introductory course on the ZBrush as well yeah our lighting scene is also super handy for if you want to light your final model there's a lot of good material on here if you want to you know take your sculpt or your 3d models to the next level really so we have a lot of these let's cover some of this so with this one is a creature kit this is essentially you can make a lot of this stuff very quickly like this is we made all the beginning all the scopes in the beginning using this kit here so we have tons of like armor plates Anatomy abstract eyes and so on so if you want to very quickly just concept something up like all these guys here just like dragged out using this creature kit we also have a way more elaborate introduction to see brush this is like three hours long and this covers all the topics which is cover now and more just way more in depth then we have the complete motor to see brush workflow this covers essentially how to work with ZBrush in a pipeline I will set here see which is weird and it's a current with hard to actually work with ZBrush this covers how to use it with modo specifically but we how to use how to make this image here but this is this is applicable the principles are applicable for any render engine or any any kind of 3d software steps are the same and then we have a concept in word Marvelous Designer and c brush this is how to do super sexy clothing yeah it was a marvelous designer focused on like how to do a character with clothing in a marvelous designer and then again pipeline ii where you go back and forth between Marvel's in ZBrush so with all of that thank you guys so much for watching this was a bit of a longer one if you want to see more stuff like this in the future make sure to leave a comment down below like and subscribe and we'll see you guys later thank you so much

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 1,506,201

Keywords: 3d, sculpting, zbrush, concept, maya, tutorial, autodesk, film, vfx, animation, twitch, mjthehunter, flippednormals, henning, morten, creature, character, introduction to zbrush, intro to zbrush, cg tutorial, learning zbrush, learning, cg, zbrush for beginners

Id: _yKGfcp2z3k

Length: 59min 20sec (3560 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 28 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/SparkyPantsMcGee]

Thank you guys for this.

[u/Mattarias]

Ooh, this'll be good for getting back into it. I've gotten so rusty with zBrush. That UI is basically made by either geniuses or aliens...

[u/DPixel8R]

Check out the rest of FlippedNormals work. They’re in the industry and doing a great job with these tutorials.