Intro to ZBrush 043 - ZSpheres and ZSketching, fun ways of creating outside of just polygons!!

and i suppose i can use this for a segway to talk about z sphere so what are z spheres when we go in here and we have our primitives we have a bunch of 3d meshes and we've already talked about how primitives work and there's some really cool ones in here like if i choose the gear 3d icon i can go down here to initialize and there's all sorts of cool initialized sections in here where i can go through and change these values and change the width and the coverage and all the cool things you can change to make this shape what you want and remember you can open these things up and move these around and add points if you need to to get just a look you're looking for of course it's still a primitive so if you want real polygons we've got to go up here to make polymesh3d and now these are polygons down here is 2.5 d brushes probably not going to use a lot of these in this course but this is for when things are dropped to the document we go out of edit mode and then this is on the document now so if we just kind of drag these things out we'll get more of them and if we go to our 2.5 d brushes like our simple brush we can literally just draw on our canvas we can select an alpha and get that kind of stroke and go in here to the eraser brush and start erasing things from our canvas so all sorts of cool things you can do with 2.5 d document drawing but if you want to clear it just again hold down com or press ctrl n and then we'll go back in here and right up here with all these 3d meshes and these primitives that you can use there's a z sphere so if we tap a z sphere to select it we drag down our canvas go into edit mode and again i'm going to change my material here so we can see it a little bit better i'm going to go sketch shaded too there's a lot of really cool uh these ones that are here for like sketching so here's like sketch shaded or sketchy gummy uh there's some cool ones you can use to get a different preview but this is a z sphere so what is a z sphere well if we're in edit mode so we can rotate around our object here just like with geometry you can tap x to go into x symmetry so here we are in x symmetry we can turn on our floor make sure we're z forward so if we want to make a human let's say let's go to the very top and you're going to see that cursor is going to snap so we can go ahead and drag out from the top and we go to the bottom here and we can drag out from the bottom and up here we'll drag out and we'll just press and drag and that's going to make a new z sphere and the cool thing is about the cool thing about z spheres that are a little more flexible than polygons sometimes is you can go through here and you can just keep adding z spheres and you can hit w to go into move mode so you can move a z sphere out you can hit q to go back into draw mode let's go and turn off our floor we can drag this out as we hold down or as we drag this out on here we can hold down shift and it will snap to the parent c sphere so we can hit w and we can drag this down if we make our brush size smaller we'll only enter will only affect a limited number of spheres here if we make our draw size very big we'll affect multiple z spheres and in fact if we hit q now and we go through and we want to put a joint in the middle we can just tap in the middle and that'll put a joint so we basically have joints joint joint and in between those are bones let's say so we can hit w and we can grab the individual joints and move them around so very flexible system you can go through here and very quickly move around the joints and again we'll hit q we'll draw out a pair of hips and then hold down shift as we draw it on this one move it out hit q hold down shift as we draw out to snap it to the parent size and hit w and then move these down here as feet we'll go to the side and again we'll hit q we'll make a pair of knees and there we go now if i want to delete any of these i can hold down alt and we can just tap through and delete and it's really unlimited as to what you can choose to make with your z spheres here if you want to add another arm you just go through here just add another z sphere drag this out move this over hit q and again we're just hitting q and w switching between draw and move and just moving these z spheres around now you do still have scale and rotate so if we go over here to well if we use move and we move the individual joint you're going to see we can move just the joint in the hierarchy chain if we go through here and move the bone it's going to move this and the child objects here so we can go through here and we can actually use move to kind of get a different pose out of our mesh here if we pull on the bone if we pull on the joint that's just going to move that joint position same thing if we go in here to scale for example if we scale on the bone it's going to scale the entire parent and child relationship if we scale the joint it's literally just going to scale the joint if we go in here to rotate same deal i can rotate the parent and the children or i can rotate just the joint by itself so we can rotate around that axis and then again we can rotate the child and parent here so between move scale rotate and draw you can go through here and you can scale things down just by hitting e to go into scale mode here you can hit q to go into draw mode go ahead and add a neck here and we have a z sphere creation now what you can do is go down here to adaptive skin and if i hit a on my keyboard if i hover over preview see the hotkey for preview is a i can hit a and that will go through and make a mesh you're going to see this is a looks like a dynamesh and that's because that's what it's doing here so the dynamesh resolution is set at 256. however if i take dynamesh resolution down to 0 tap a and then tap a again you're going to see i get a much cleaner version of the polygons here so this is going to be an adaptive scan and the density set to 2. if i set this to 1 you're going to see it's going to drop it down to the base resolution but this again this is just a preview so hit a to go out of preview mode and then just continue to add z spheres here so let's go ahead and add some more z spheres here hit w to move this out hit q and rotate so now we have a new mesh here i'm going to hit a to go into adaptive skin and if you want you know of course you can turn the dynames resolution up and have it dynamesh but you can always do that later so what i'm going to do is i'm going to turn this down to 0 density at 1 hit a and there's our adaptive skin preview if i go down here to adaptive skin make adaptive skin you're going to see it's going to put a skin z sphere right here in our document so now this has this is real geometry this is still a z sphere even though it looks like real geometry and in fact even though you can go through here and make modifications to this geometry if i hit a it's going to go back to a z sphere so just remember that if you go through here and sculpt a bunch of stuff you can take these changes that you sculpt if you want to go through here and inflate on this geometry for example and then hit a and change make changes to your z sphere however if you do make changes to your z sphere and hit a you may lose some of your sculpting changes not necessarily for sure but if we go through here and then we go let's hit q add a little bit of a little face there and then hit a you're going to see i lost my sculpting changes so just be very careful that if you are going to sculpt on the z sphere don't add any z spheres and before you add z spheres go down here to adapt to skin and say make adaptive skin if you want to change those sculptural changes however the safest thing to do is finish drawing with your z spheres here and then hit a so you can preview it and if you like it hit make adaptive skin and that will give you actual geometry out here so here's your skin z sphere and now you have real geo now at this point you can go through here and say geometry dynamesh let's turn off blur and just hit dynamesh and you can dynamesh this as much as you want go through here and start sculpting on your mesh using all the techniques you've learned so far now you can also use these polygroups to your advantage so if we undo that you can just start sculpting on this however the distribution isn't really that good now we haven't talked about zero mesh yet but you can zero mesh say same drop the adapter size down a little bit and you can just give yourself some new topology just by hitting ziri mesh nice even quads and continue sculpting but generally speaking when i'm going to go in concept i may just dynamesh this but before i do that i might make this a little bit easier for me to work on so two things number one if i turn on my floor and turn on z and i make my draw grid size down to one i already know zbrush really likes to work within this space while i'm just working in zbrush so what i'm going to do is go down here to deformation and hit unify and now i know my brush size and scale will work and be very compatible with zbrush so i'm going to turn our floor off here and another thing too is if i'm going to work on these arms it might be a little easier if i go through here and just take these arms off so just ctrl shift tap and arm ctrl shift drag and then tap these remaining polygroups and then go over here to sub tool split hidden and because we have custom menus now i can very quickly just go into my custom menu and say split hidden so i can quickly go through here and grab these legs split these off grab these antennas split these off and now i can work on all these separately so if i want to sculpt on the side of the body and the arms are in the way i just hit solo go through here and we'll just dynamesh this and now i can sculpt on this body separately and if i need to raise the resolution i can go in here to my custom menu dynamesh or go down here to dynamesh raise the resolution go through here with my sculpting brushes and again if i turn solo back on or off now you can see my arms are out of the way in fact i can alt tap these arms hit w go to unmash mesh center or put the pivot where i want and rotate and pose these arms out as needed it's a very quick way to go through here add some sub tool functionality be able to alt tap in here go in use your sculpting brushes go into solo mode and just work on things individually a little bit easier now you don't have to just use z spheres you can use z spheres in conjunction with other objects here so if i go into file open and we go back to this guy we were working on here we can go down here and this original head here i'm just going to go ahead and delete it out of our scene so we just have our body in here i'm going to go through here and say append a z sphere so i have a z sphere appended i'm going to go into transparency mode so now i can see that z sphere so if i want i can hit x to go across x symmetry i can hit w and i can pull this down we'll just put this where his hips are i can hit q draw on the side here move this out and then again q move this down here q to put in some knees and then q draw some feet w to move the feet and now i can very quickly just get some quick geometry i can hit a to go into adaptive skin so if i turn on polyframe you'll see i already get that adapter skin preview which if we scroll down and go here to adaptive skin return density down to one dynamics resolution down to zero hit preview again that's my geometry and if i want i can say make adaptive skin now remember this one that's still in our stack is a z sphere so we hit a we still have z spheres available to us we don't need this anymore we can just delete it out of our scene i'm going to go in here to append i'm going to grab the skinzi sphere that that adaptive skin button made and now i have geometry with my guy here so i can go through here i can take him and merge him down again merge down and you can assign a hotkey to this my hotkey for this is control e so if i have this selected i can hit ctrl e and then say ok and because this already had dynamesh properties i can ctrl drag and that will just dynamesh the entire thing together now again i know zbrush likes to work in that unit space here so i'm going to go down here to deformation and unify or i can go into my custom menu and i have it right here there we go so i'm going to go back in here crank my dynamesh resolution up just a bit and now when i dynamesh this these are all one piece and i can continue sculpting now there's some other cool z sphere functionality that exists if you want to go ahead and let's go out of edit mode let's hit ctrl n and very quickly we'll go in here to our palette grab a z sphere drag it on our canvas go into edit mode and if we hit x we can of course have x symmetry you can also turn on activate symmetry we'll do y direction radial count of eight you can also do radial symmetry so if you want you can go through here and you can add radial symmetry and if you ever want to switch you can say transform let's put on activate symmetry in the x drop out of radial symmetry by turning that off and then we can go back in here and continue to sculpt maybe sometime some kind of a tentacle creature here another thing you can do is you can go down here to z sketch and while we have this object we can go in here to edit sketch and you're going to see it's going to change my brushes to sketch brushes in fact let's go over here and let's grab a sketch shaded shader and as we go through here and brush on our object it's going to leave behind a little z sketch so these are z sketch brushes you can go through here and you can make your draw size bigger and make bigger z sketch strokes you can make a draw size smaller make smaller ones here and you can also hold down shift and you can smooth these together and it's going to have different behavior depending on if i hold down shift you're going to see there's smooth one two and three so these are going to have different behaviors here and there's also armature so if i take a z sketch and i draw this out you'll see it'll automatically kind of go off into space there's a very easy way to kind of go through here and say add wings to an object or antenna and of course you can hold down shifts and if you hold down alt that'll go ahead and delete these as well in fact if you go over here and hit optimized it'll go ahead and get rid of any z sketches that aren't visible on the surface here so if you have a bunch of layered z sketches it'll go ahead and get rid of those for you this is a way to add cool mass to the object here and in fact if you hit the comma key and you go in here to project you're going to see under zoo there's a bunch of really cool animal z spheres in here and you can again just the exact same way you double click on these load these up and those will be your armatures and they're all kind of different animals you can start with and underneath tool you're going to see there's a z sketch folder so i can double click on these and you're going to see like the z sketch shrimpy here let's go ahead and let's go here to subtool turn off colorize here you can see a little bit better now it's important to note you don't have to start with an armature you can just start with a z sphere and start z sketching i'll show you that in a second but first let's explain what happens when i hit a with a z sketch showing if i hit a you're going to see it gets rid of my armature and i only see what's called a unified skin so if i go over here let's turn on our polyframe here and go down here to unified skin you're going to see that preview when i hit a when i have a z sketch it's going to make a unified skin if i go down here under z sketch and turn off edit sketch and hit a now i'm going to get an adaptive skin now i can mix both of these the ease there's a few different ways to do this the easiest way to do this is just to say adaptive skin make adaptive skin turn on your z sketch let's go out of adaptive skin by hitting a we'll turn our edit sketch back on under unified skin if i hit a now i can say make unified skin so now i have my skin z sphere armature and then my unified skin here so i'm going to take my armature skin z sphere go to sub tool append my skin z sphere unified skin and now those are both together and at this point because dynamesh is already turned on with that resolution from the unified skin i can just if i want merge these down so switch back over to our startup material ctrl drag and now these are both dynamesh together that's an easy way to get your armature geometry and your unified skin geometry from your z sketch all at once now of course we grab a z sphere let me go ahead and turn on x symmetry if you immediately go down here to z sketch and just say edit sketch now you can immediately start just sketching on top of the z sphere so we can go through here i can drag off a pair of legs we can connect these over we can go up the middle drag out some shoulders and some arms and again if we switch over here to armature we got some very quick arms in here we can use move so i can go in here to the move brush just by hitting w and i can go through here and i can move these things we can hold down shift hit q to go back to draw mode hold down shift to smooth these together go back in here and start drawing here and let's switch back over to our sketch a so again if i hit a now you're going to see it's going to get rid of my armature and it'll leave my unified skin so you don't necessarily need a z-sphere armature you can go through here and you can sculpt out whatever you want and get some very cool results some very neat designs to start with and again you just hit a to view this and again if you want to go in here turn your unified resolution up to get more detail that'll give you even more detail say make unified skin now this is skin z sphere real geometry here we'll go ahead and turn on x symmetry and we can continue to go through here and sculpting as needed so again just go in here with your clay brush your clay buildup brush your smooth brush your damian standard and go through here and start sculpting on your geometry

Channel: Michael Pavlovich

Views: 3,186

Keywords: ZBrush, ZBrush Intro, ZBrush tutorial, zbrush for beginners, zbrush basics, zbrush zspheres, zbrush zsphere symmetry, zsphere move, zsphere rotate, zsphere scale, zsphere snap, zsphere resize, zsphere add joint, zsphere delete joint, zsketch, zsphere zsketch, zsphere sketching, zsphere adaptive skin, zbrush adaptive skin, zbrush unified skin, zsketch unified skin, zsphere geometry, turn zsphere into geometry, append zsphere, zsphere wings, zsphere base mesh

Id: R0anGrmGiY4

Length: 19min 10sec (1150 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 19 2021