Intro to ZBrush 015 - Brush Strokes! Drag Dot, Freehand, DragRect, LazyMouse, Replay Last, and more!

but let's go back to what we're talking about which is a stroke menu over here it's going to go to the very top here where you have a stroke menu docked and if you don't you just again double click these little dividers over here grab the stroke menu and pull it over here and because we're going to be talking about some brush settings just grab the brush menu too and we just drag this down here i'm going to go ahead and close some of these we're just opening these randomly while we're talking about navigation here so we've got a standard brush and we have this one underneath here which is a dot stroke and generally speaking that's what you're going to use to just kind of sculpt so we're going to go through here and like we're doing before we're going to pull out the sternal mastoid and you know kind of sculpt this out a little bit maybe hold down shift to smooth and this is a good general use of stroke if you go in here there's also a freehand stroke which will be very similar there's not a whole huge difference between the two freehand might be a little bit smoother but for the most part if it's on dot stroke and it's just for sculpting you probably leave it on dot stroke now some of these are going to be a little bit better explained with the one palette below it which is our alpha palette so you can see there's a dot stroke and we have drag rect so we choose that one and then we drag this is basically what's on by default when you start zbrush and it's you basically drag an object out on your canvas you go into edit mode that's the default setting now when i do drag break now with the standard brush it kind of just i don't know it drags a vaguely round kind of bump onto me you can barely see to make this a little bit more obvious this functionality what we're going to do is we're going to go into our alpha menu so go ahead and click on this palette and just like it's another big button so just like the other big buttons in our scenes go to close the render menu now here's our tool palette with all our tool options here's our brush palette and here's our stroke palette and now we're in our alpha palette so i'll go ahead and choose this alpha 10 which is a star and now with standard brush with drag rec selected now we have a drag rec stroke and now we can drag an alpha out and this will be how our stroke works are you going to see when i click and then pull on my object it makes the star that big and i can click and pull and rotate this thing around and pull it back in if you want them to all be the same size change it from drag rect over here to drag dot now when i start dragging this out it's going to make a star here and a star here and a star here now just like any other brush functionality if i hold down alt and drag you're going to see it's going to indent so i can let go of alt and i can bump out and i can hold down alt and i can bump in i can make my brush size bigger and of course that's going to make the alpha bigger and make my brush size smaller and hold down alt and that's going to make the alpha smaller let's go ahead and grab our undo slider and just pull that back there's also spray stroke so you can go through here and you kind of spray those alphas over there there's color spray but we haven't gotten the poly paint yet but essentially you're going to be spraying color variants so you can see there's a color intensity variance and also a flow variance spray has the same but since we have an alpha loaded in here let's go back to our dot stroke so we have an alpha loaded with our dot stroke so now when i stroke with this one you're going to see it's going to leave a trail behind so one thing i need to bring up that's really important is our standard brush you may have noticed as i drag this out it's kind of hard to see but there's actually a small little rubber band coming out from behind our brush that's smoothing it out as we stroke you also may notice by going here my standard brush and i just kind of tap on my mesh it doesn't really do anything that's because we have a little bit of lazy mouse turned on by default so if we go in here to stroke lazy mouse you're going to see the lazy mouse button is on and the lazy radius is set to 1. essentially how standard brush works we go in here and turn our alpha off as it allows us to kind of sculpt on our object and there's a very slight smoothing effect that happens i personally don't really like it so what i'll usually do is i'll go into my standard brush and i'll just tap l and l is going to be if you hold hover over the button there l is the hotkey for lazy mouse i can just tap l that'll toggle it off and now when i go through here i can make a small brush stroke and i can go through here and i can actually like touch little dots here where i can go and sculpt and just again just tap so you go through here make stubble make little poor details and it'll let me because i don't have a little rubber band out behind my my brush stroke here so this allows you i mean it doesn't smooth your stroke out so you can get some maybe wavery wavy results you know depending on how steady your hand is but that can also be desirable if you're in here and you just want to like do vein detail you know you can do very tight twisty turns if we turn lazy mouse on and we try to do the same thing it's going to give me a very smooth effect in fact let's go ahead and undo back here in fact we take this lazy radius and we crank it up to one uh well it goes up to 200 now it'll leave a rubber band behind the object now this is a very long rubber band but you see we get very smooth results so let's take this down like let's say like 27. so now i can use this to again just do very nice smooth results if you want to do like a superhero outfit and kind of go through here you can see it gets this very smooth result if you want to like sculpt wrinkles that are very soft and controlled wrinkles and have a very smooth fall off this is a great way to do that is to turn on your lazy radius of course what you can do is you can say okay i'm going to be sculpting with my standard brush and i want my lazy radius at 27 just for nice smooth strokes but then if i want to i can just tap l and then go through here and have a little bit more control over my small strokes here so i can go through here and i can also kind of punch in little dots or little imperfections if i need to as needed and then if i need to i can just tap l to turn that back on and now i'm back to my long lazy stroke now going back to the alpha functionality we turn on uh our triangle alpha here we'd use our brush you're going to see it kind of stacks them on top of each other so we have our lazy radius on we have our lazy mouse on but the lazy step is set to 0.25 so you're going to see it's kind of overlapping if you set this lazy step to 1 now they're going to be right next to each other so essentially a lazy step of one is going to put an alpha every single alpha unit again if we want to kind of overlap those a little bit let's say 0.75 so a little less than one and now you're going to see they're going to overlap slightly if you want to space them out even more you can say like 1.5 so a little more than one and now you're going to see they're a little more spaced out also you can go up here to your z intensity and crank that up and now you'll get an even bigger read or more contrasting read because it's punching into your object a little bit more now if we go back to a drag rack stroke so again we're going to drag the star out you're going to see it kind of has a bend to it and it kind of fades towards the edges here in fact if we make it more obvious going here to square alpha you would expect it to pull a square out but it kind of pulls the square out but it kind of rounds itself out and it kind of fades in the corner where that comes into play is essentially up here with our focal shift or remember if you hit your speed hold down your spacebar there's focal shift right here and if you tap o on your keyboard that's also focal shift so just like when you tap s you can tap o and that'll be your focal shift i don't do focal shift changes that much so usually i'll just hop right up here to the top right hand corner and you're going to see when i pull this focal shift that interior red circle gets closer to that exterior red circle and vice versa when i go here to zero it's going to kind of be medium and then if i go up it's going to increase that distance even more and then the lower it gets the more it's going to go towards the outside so if i drop this all the way down to negative 100 essentially our focal shift line is overlapping our other one so now when i use this to drag it out it's just going to drag out a straight rectangle we go back to the star drag this out it's going to be nice and flat it's just basically taking the star and projecting it straight through that alpha on our brush stroke again if we go back here to our focal shift and crank this up to one or zero you're going to see there's going to be a slight fall off from the interior of that brush the small circle to that large circle so now when i drag this out it's going to kind of fade off you know in the middle it's going to have the most impact and it's going to fade off around that focal shift if we continue that focal shift up to 100 which rarely i do it's basically a lot of intensity right here in the middle and then it immediately fades off to almost nothing so probably i would say rarely does the focal shift go above zero it doesn't happen often it'll happen sometimes but generally speaking if you want more of your alpha to show up do a lower focal shift to kind of get rid of that fall off on your brush or you can kind of dial in that focal shift here let's go ahead and do a couple times now if we go back to a dot stroke and we turn off this alpha you're going to see there's a stroke jitter and brush imperfection of a crankbrush imperfection i can go through here and that'll basically just add some noise let's also take this lazy step and put this back at 0.25 so now we kind of drag this out and it'll introduce some noise to our stroke if we turn this off it's going to be at zero and that's global by the way so if i go to my clay brush and start drawing with brush imperfection on up at one you're going to see i'm going to introduce a little bit of noise in my stroke and then go back to the standard brush it's still there unless i go in here and turn that off same thing with stroke jitter if i turn that up you're going to see it's going to kind of bounce your stroke around if you have an alpha on there again same deal as it's going to kind of take that alpha and kind of scatter it as you go down the surface i'm going to turn that back down to zero so let's go b c b and that's our clay build up brush and you see when i use this brush it's a very common brush for kind of building up muscles but you're gonna see it kind of leaves behind a little bit of stuttering in your alpha there a couple different ways to combat that so we already know we can go in here to our lazy mouse and we can take this lazy step and make it even smaller and that'll kind of smooth that stroke out a little bit but it still has some jitter to it so if you go in here to brush reset current brush we'll put that lazy step back at point one and you see also with this one the lazy radius is set at one so it's just on just a little bit just enough to kind of smooth your stroke out but not draw attention to itself or take away too much control another thing you can do is under stroke modifiers there's a roll distance so essentially what this is going to do is take this alpha and stretch it out as it rolls the higher this value is so if i take this roll distance and crank it up to like four now when we roll this out or we use our stroke it's going to kind of smooth it out because it's going to take this square and stretch it out even longer so it's going to give the appearance of smoothing out that stroke if we make the roll distance even smaller than one you're going to see it's going to stutter even worse so if you want to smooth your stroke out you can kind of stretch that alpha out and that'll give you a little bit of a smoother result and again you don't have to stick with this alpha if you want to try like alpha 38 and use clay buildup this is another really interesting one not necessarily alpha 38 but going through and changing out your alphas to get a different result for brushes that you use if you find something you really like remember you can go in here to brush save as and save your brushes like we did in an earlier session so give some of these a try with your different brushes and see if there's anything useful in here and again remember you can hold down alt and let go of alt and you might come out with some really interesting effects now like we kind of mentioned earlier if you want to say i don't want to make any real changes with this brush or like my standard brush i don't want to start off on my standard brush i want to use that for sculpting you know keep the z intensity where you want it to keep the focal shift where it needs to be but if you want to make a change to standard brush you can take the standard brush clone it off and now you'll have a standard one brush selected and now in here we can be like you know what let's change this to a spray stroke we'll take this alpha grab alpha 60 and now we can kind of use this let's go ahead and change our z intensity way down we can use this to kind of stamp some leather texture over here so we can go through here and kind of spray some leather texture you know what i don't need a lazy mouse assigned to this i'm going to tap l to turn that off and now i've got kind of a leather spray brush and if you like that you know it's right now it's standard one you can save it out brush save as and save it out as a leather spray or something like that now let's talk a little bit more about that roll option that we have and we can't really spray our rolls by going here to dots now roll is available to us if we hit the comma key remember we have a bunch of brushes in here i'm going to go all the way over here to the right and there's a stitch folder so you can double click that let's go ahead and double click this stitch one you're going to see what we have is a brush that is started with a standard brush you can see the base type there it's a dot stroke we have a brush alpha here but you're going to see roll is turned on and the roll distance is set to 1. so instead of just taking a square alpha we actually have some detail in here so when i take this brush and use it you're going to see it's going to go through and wherever it's dark in this alpha it's going to dig in and wherever it's bright in the alpha it's going to lift out so you can use this alpha to kind of pull along our mesh and it's going to leave this alpha behind if we turn roll off and try to do this you're gonna see it's just gonna drag behind and we can kind of go in here and say okay lazy step set to one and it'll kind of stamp this alpha behind here but see how it doesn't really work that well it's not creating the effect of like having this thing kind of roll through your object leave behind a divot with some stitches on the side that's where roll comes into play if you go through here and you can just roll this out and it will take this lazy step and set it back to looks like point one will work now if we crank the roll distance up here to like five you're gonna see it's gonna like we said before it's gonna stretch this alpha out so now it's going to roll it but it's going to say instead of 1 per unit it's going to stretch this out to 5 units per alpha basically you set this back to 1 and that's going to go one per and if you want to go even shorter you can say roll distance of 0.5 and that'll stack them even closer but for now we'll set this to 1. now we're about that you see no back and forth i suppose we can go ahead and talk about that let's go back to our clay build up brush and we'll crank that intensity up a bit if we use this one you're going to see as i go back and forth it's constantly building up if we go here to our brush samples we see but build up is checked on so you can actually turn that off and now it won't build up as much so you can you can like kind of go back and forth and it won't build up as much and then if you let go and come back in it'll continue to build up but with build up turned on you can literally just keep stroking in the same spot and having it build up continuously but to go back to the stroke options here you see we have a no back and forth so right now it's turned off so you can go through here you can go i'm not lifting my pin pressure i'm not lifting my pin up i'm just going back and forth and it's building up with every stroke if i turn on no back and forth now if i don't lift my pin up it's only going to go in one direction your initial direction so if i come in in my initial direction then go back it's going to just allow me to go in one direction without lifting my pin up so that's interesting to you go ahead and use that since we're in here in the stroke options there's replay last and replay last relative so let's go back to let's hit b let's go back to our standard one brush we are working with we'll take this stroke and we'll say drag dot we'll take this alpha and we'll just use alpha o6 for a nice general stamp tap l to turn lazy mouse off and now you can go through here let's crank that z intensity up and go through here and stamp if again if you don't want that falloff on there take that focal shift to negative 100 and now you can go through here and stamp buttons i suppose or if you want you can hold down alt and stamp those in now if i go through here and i stamp and then i hit replay last the hotkey for that is one it'll continue to stamp right over that initial stroke so that'll just continue to stamp on your object so if you ever want to increase a stroke like if we go out of here and we say yeah turn this with a dot stroke alpha off and we go through here and make a line let's take our focal shift back to zero so we make a line down our object we can do replay last and it'll just continue to replay that stroke continuously for replay last relative that's going to be based on my brush stroke so if i go through here let's switch this back to a drag dot and then go back to our alpha o6 take our focal shift down a negative 100 and we stamp so if i do one that's going to replay last and it's going to put my brush stroke right back where it is and it's going to keep stamping over that initial spot however replay last relative with this which is shift one i can go through here and i can stamp and then i can put my brush somewhere else and i can do shift one now you don't wanna change your camera angle so that's something i did so if i go through here i'm okay i'm gonna stamp this i'm gonna do shift one and wherever i put my brush it'll replay that stroke wherever my brush is now this could also be achieved with just using drag dots let's switch this over to like our dot stroke alpha off let's say we just put a line in here focal shift back to zero so i'm going to put a line right here and then wherever i put my brush just do shift one and it's going to repeat that stroke so that can come in handy and you can also go up here to z sub and turn that on and then do shift 1 and that'll do a z sub of your brush stroke so a little bit of cool functionality there for you and one last thing let's go to our regular standard brush here we'll turn lazy mouse off by tapping l on our keyboard and we can go through here and we can kind of just drag out a stroke we've already talked about roll distance rolling in alpha to smooth this out we've talked about lazy mouse to smooth out your stroke you can also if you want to go up here to mouse average and you can crank that up and that'll also kind of smooth your stroke out as well generally speaking that's usually a last resort but it's there if you need it

Channel: Michael Pavlovich

Views: 5,902

Keywords: ZBrush, ZBrush Intro, ZBrush tutorial, zbrush for beginners, zbrush basics, zbrush dots stroke, zbrush freehand stroke, zbrush spray stroke, zbrush alpha, zbrush brush alpha, zbrush dragrect stroke, zbrush focal shift, zbrush draw size, zbrush zintensity, zbrush drag dot, zbrush stroke options, zbrush lazy mouse, zbrush lazy radius, zbrush roll distance, zbrush leather brush, zbrush roll, zbrush roll alpha, zbrush stitches, zbrush replay last

Id: AdkZe1yKFTU

Length: 19min 3sec (1143 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 19 2021