Intro to ZBrush 001 - Tools, Canvas, and Edit Mode - everything you need to get going in 3D!!

all right welcome to zbrush and let's get right in there so when you first start up zbrush and you've got a vanilla install this is probably what you're going to be greeted with right off the bat you're going to have the zbrush homepage what i like to do is go up here to this gear icon say only show me if news has been updated go ahead and exit out of this and then click this little x button there if you ever want to get that back you can go right up here to this home page button in the upper left hand corner and the second thing you're going to see is this light box essentially if you just click in here and drag you can go through and it automatically defaults to the project so you can go through here uh project tab i should say so here's all of our projects we can go in here and we can look at tools and brushes the only problem with this is if you're brand new to zbrush these don't really mean a lot to you just yet but we'll go ahead and explain that to you in this very first video and by the way this very first video is probably going to be the hardest video you're going to have to watch the good news is once you've learned the basics of file management in zbrush the rest of it's easy so let's talk a little bit more about that the first thing i'm going to do is hit the comma key in my keyboard or go up here to the lightbox button and just click that now you're going to see when i hover over the lightbox it's going to say the comma key is the hotkey for that in fact if you hover over any of these interface buttons you're going to see there's a hotkey association so scale is e move is w so if you hit w e r you'll go to move scale and rotate if you hold down control over any button you're going to see a little pop-up menu that shows you even more information so when you go in here to a menu and you see something that's kind of cool you can hold down control and it'll go ahead and tell you more information about that let's go ahead and get out of those rotate modes we'll go back in here to draw so you're going to see you can draw and then you can also move scale and rotate so we'll put it back here on draw which you can see the hotkey for that is q and then once you have that selected you can go through here on your document and you can start drawing things now this is kind of cool and there's some cool stuff you can do in 2.5 d mode but this probably isn't what you're looking for when you're thinking about zbrush you're probably like hey how do i get an object in here and how do i start sculpting well right now what we're doing is we basically have the simple brush selected over here and now we're talking about menus so here's the tool menu here you can also see it's right here so here's the tool menu in this top menu section here you click tool you can see it disappears from over here and it shows up over here you're also going to see a little divider right here so if i double click these two arrows it's going to close that little section and open it you're also going to see on the other side another little divider so again you can double click these dividers to close and open them by default the one on the right is going to be open and your tool menu is going to be docked so how you dock a menu you see this little white button right there in the corner if you click that it'll get rid of that menu if you want to get it back just go up here to this menu grab that white dot and just drag it right on over there in fact you can make in fact you can dock multiple menus we can go in here and say take the stroke menu grab the white dot put it right underneath and if you don't want that menu just click that little white circle there so we've got the tool menu docked over here we've got a mess on our canvas and i'm going to be using the word canvas and document interchangeably it's the same thing so we've got some scribbles on our canvas here and we have the simple brush selected in our tool menu palette so this is our tool palette it says our current tool is the simple brush and that's the default thing that's going to be selected in zbrush if you click that you're going to see we have a quick pick and these are recent things that you've used in zbrush underneath that you're going to have 3d meshes and these are going to be your primitives and also z spheres which we'll get to and underneath that you have your 2.5 d brushes this is kind of what we're using to scribble on our document you're going to see simple brush is selected so 2.5 d brushes we're going to leave alone for now and we're going to go back up here and we're going to talk more about these 3d meshes because these are the objects that you can use to start sculpting or creating 3d assets in zbrush if you want to get out of this section here just hover your mouse over the document and it'll go ahead and just automatically close out of that menu so we can just tap over here you have access to this and then if you just move your mouse out of that area it go ahead it goes ahead and closes it for you now you're going to notice we have two simple brushes over here here's the simple brush and then here's a bigger simple brush well this isn't really a bigger simple brush this is just showing you that this is your palette and you have simple brush selected if you go through here and click alpha brush now you're going to see there's a small simple brush a small alpha brush and then your big palette so in your palette this is the one you have currently active and if you go over here and start painting this is painting with the alpha brush click the eraser brush now you're going to have an eraser brush and you're going to see it keeps putting more and more little versions down here those are just recently used so the more things you click in here the more it's going to kind of stack these options underneath here this just allows you for some quick access to those recently used brushes if you don't want to see those you can click this little r button right here and then i'll go ahead and clear those out doesn't delete them they're still available in here but you just don't have to see them now we've made quite a mess on our document here so let's go ahead and hit ctrl n and that's going to clear our canvas so now we got a nice fresh canvas right here for us to create on now again we want to sculpt in 3d let's say we want to sculpt a head so how we can do that is we can go back in here to the palette right now it says colorize brush is selected and let's say instead of a colorized brush i want to grab one of these 3d meshes now just so i can talk about orienting yourself in zbrush space and also maybe a little bit of navigation what i'm going to do is i'm going to click on this arrow 3d primitive and it's going to select the arrow 3d primitive now your first instinct is probably to go over here in your document and click and drag and if you keep doing that you'll just keep dragging instances of your selected primitive and that's cool there's nothing wrong with that that's kind of neat but again probably what you want to do is manipulate that tool and right now again we're just making a mess on our canvas so let's go ahead and hit ctrl n one more time and this time i'm going to take this arrow 3d and i'm going to drag this out now you're going to notice over here we have drag rex selected in our stroke if for some reason you don't like say you're in a weird state and you've got like dot stroke or something just go over here and choose drag rect i'm going to hit ctrl n one more time i'm going to drag this object out of my canvas and the next thing i'm going to do is right up here next to draw remember we did q-w-e-r q is draw mode you're going to see right next to that is edit mode in order for me to start manipulating this object the first thing i need to do is click edit if i don't and i click and drag on my canvas i'm just going to make more copies however if i go up here to edit mode now when i click in my document i have access to this one object right here so if i click and drag in my document you're going to see it's going to rotate that object around now i still have a mess on my canvas here but again if i want to clean that up is hit ctrl n and now my canvas is nice and clean and now when i click on my document i can go through here and just rotate around so great we have an object on our canvas here and we're able to click in our document with our tablet pin or your mouse left mouse button and just click and drag and you can rotate around your object now as i'm doing that and probably you've noticed this before you have a thumbnail view up here and you had a cam view over here now this cam view you can use to orient yourself in space so you're going to see if i rotate this arrow so it's pointing up you're going to see the head is also pointing up and if i click and rotate this arrow around now the head is pointing forward so essentially that's telling us this is the front of our object and then this down here is the bottom if we want to see that a little bit better we can go over here and we can click on this floor grid or we can do shift p and again if you hold down control that'll give you more information not a whole lot in this case so go ahead and click that floor grid here and now you're going to see if we click and drag in our document that we have a blue line on our floor that points forward a red line that points left to right and you can't really see it but there's inside of here there's a green line that points straight up and down so while we're navigating uh we can just again click either left mouse click or just push your pin to the tablet and i would say if you're going to be using zbrush get a tablet you're going to need the pressure sensitivity for a lot of the brushes and it's really more built around using a tablet so i would strongly consider getting a tablet so from here on out i'm probably going to talk more about tablet functionality than am like mouse clicking functionality so you can see as i click and drag in the document i'm tumbling around my object and if i hold down shift it's going to snap it to the front view if i start clicking and dragging my document and start going over here so to so we're looking at this side where the red line is and again our head is turning to the left so we're looking at the left side of our object if we hold down shift it's going to snap to the side and if we keep going around we hold down shift it's going to snap to the back hold down shift we can snap to the top go down here hold down shift snap to the bottom now you can also use in this instance this cam view you can actually click on this blue button and that'll make it forward you can click on the red button if you click on it twice it'll go left to right top to bottom front to back now not all cam views will have that and you can do custom cam views if you'd like but for right now we're just going to talk about orienting yourself in space with that camera view now over here on the left you're going to see this is your thumbnail view you can actually click and drag on that you can make it bigger or smaller and this is just a way for you to evaluate your silhouette while you're working so while you're over here sculpting you can see if your silhouette's working up there in the upper left-hand corner now we're not going to get too heavy into the functionality of either of these right now we're just kind of getting acclimated to the space but since they're there i figured i'd go ahead and bring them up

Channel: Michael Pavlovich

Views: 19,220

Keywords: ZBrush, ZBrush Intro, ZBrush tutorial, zbrush for beginners, zbrush home page, zbrush lightbox, zbrush interface, zbrush basics, zbrush menus, zbrush help, zbrush draw, zbrush canvas, zbrush document, zbrush palette, zbrush docking, zbrush moving menus, zbrush simple brush, zbrush tool palette, zbrush 2.5D brushes, zbrush primitives, zbrush 3D Meshes, ZBrush polymesh, ZBrush edit mode, zbrush edit, zbrush snapping camera

Id: HQzoW6ye2hA

Length: 9min 38sec (578 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 19 2021