Learn Zbrush in 8 Minutes - Zbrush Beginner Tutorial

a while back i did a video called learn zbrush in 12 minutes in this video i'm going to go over all the main functionality of the program and show you even more in just eight minutes even if you're a complete beginner with zero experience you'll be able to get started on projects of your own right away there is a huge amount of information to cover in this video so let's get started if you haven't already downloaded zbrush you can go to the pixelogic website click on try zbrush and download a free 30-day trial when you first open up zbrush you get this splash image you can just close that and the light box is open you can just click where it says lightbox and close that as well at first it looks like there's a lot of information going on here but don't worry we're going to go over the most important menus first in the right side divider you have your tool menu this is where most of your functionality is stored inside of zbrush if you click this little wheelie icon in the top right the menu disappears but fear not any of the menus up at the top can be clicked and dragged and dropped in either the right side divider or you can go to the left double-click that divider to open it and menus can be dropped here as well so if you ever lose any of your menus you can just click and drag that wheel icon and drop it on the right or the left hand side to create a 3d object in your scene first go over to the right on the tool menu and select the simple brush pick any of the 3d objects in the top half don't worry about the bottom half those are two and a half d objects and we're not going to worry about them today so choose any of these objects like this cube click and drag anywhere in the canvas to draw one cube if you mess up and you draw more than one cube you can press ctrl n on your keyboard to clear it and try again once you've drawn one cue go up to the left and turn edit mode on or press t on your keyboard go over to the tool menu on the right and select make polymesh 3d now press x to turn on symmetry click on the brush menu on the left hand side or select a brush by pressing b on your keyboard press the alphabetical letter for whichever brush you're looking for and then use the shortcut for that brush and start sculpting if you mess anything up just hit ctrl z to undo it and there's actually a timeline of your undo history right here along the top of your viewport that you can slide backward at any point in time now if you're new to zbrush you might have trouble sculpting if you aren't familiar with navigating in 3d space if you click anywhere on your canvas outside of your object it will rotate around in 3d space hold alt and then click and drag to pan your object from side to side now zooming in zbrush is a little different all you have to do is let go of alt while you're panning and your camera will zoom in and out when you move your cursor if you're rotating and you hold shift it will snap to the closest side view as you can see by this little head in the upper right hand corner and last you can turn on the floor to see where your object is positioned in 3d space and below that is solo mode which you can use to just see one sub tool or one object at a time if you're using a tablet to sculpt with which i highly recommend you're going to want to go to preferences go down to tablet and turn use tablet on otherwise you're going to spend all of your time adjusting your brush size and your intensity with this little slider up here which takes forever even buying a simple 50 tablet from xp pen or huion saves you so much time you can sculpt using your mouse but it's not going to give you the same level of control that a pen does with that pressure sensitivity to change your brush size press s on your keyboard and use the slider or press space and you have a load of other options here notice at the top here we have z add and z sub each brush is preset to either add or subtract geometry by default the clay buildup brush has z add turned on all you have to do is hold alt and it will flip to z sub and now you're subtracting geometry this can be applied to most brushes so try it out with every brush and see what it does nice just below your brush palette on the left you have your stroke and your alpha when you change the stroke or the alpha for a brush it only changes it for the current brush that you're using your brush stroke can be left alone for the most part unless you want to start putting on cool decals in which case you can select the drag rectangle for your stroke then go down to alpha to pick something that looks really cool and try dragging it out on your mesh next we're going to talk about masking when you mask a part of your object it just means that it can't be sculpted on to mask part of your object hold ctrl and click and drag this box over any part of your object that part is now masked and cannot be sculpted on hold ctrl and click one time on your mesh to soften the edge of your mask so that it's not as harsh and you can do this as many times as you want or hold ctrl and alt and then click on your mesh to sharpen the edge of the mask and make it stronger and to clear your mask just hold ctrl click and drag outside of your object and now your object is completely unmasked if you press w on your keyboard or go up to the top left and turn move mode on you get this little 3d gizmo you can switch back to draw mode by pressing q on your keyboard or you can switch those options with these buttons here at the top you can use this to move scale and rotate your object around in 3d space if you hold alt and click and drag on the gizmo it will move the gizmo itself now when you rotate your object your object will pivot off of the location of the gizmo if you move your gizmo out of the way and you need it back in the center of your object press the google maps checkpoint looking icon on the top which is actually called go to unmask mesh center if you have symmetry turned on your gizmo might not snap to the center of your object so press x on your keyboard to turn symmetry off then go to unmask match center and your gizmo should be right in the center of your object if you move your object way off in space and you need to bring it back to the center of the world space simply click the home button on your gizmo and it will take your object back to the world center nice alright that covers all the basics now let's look at the tool menu the tool menu is the most important menu in zbrush it's the menu that comes pre-docked on the right-hand side when you first open the program under the main tool menu on the right you can see all the objects in your scene by clicking the sub tool menu right now i only have one sub-tool on my list i can add a new sub tool into my scene by opening the subtool menu going down to append and selecting a 3d object like we did before the difference is now when i click this because i've already told zbrush to make it a 3d object now i don't have to do that again so when i append in a new object like this sphere it automatically becomes a 3d object and i don't have to click make polymesh3d now that you have multiple sub tools you can switch between them by clicking on whichever one you want in your subtool list or by holding alt and clicking on whichever one you want in your viewport when you have a sub tool selected you're only affecting that specific subtool and nothing else you can change the order of your subtools with these little up or down arrows if you have a lot of subtools you can send one of them to the top or the bottom of the list by holding shift and then clicking the up or down arrow if you scroll down in your subtool menu you can duplicate or delete subtools you can also hide any subtool by clicking the little eyeball icon next to it in your subtool list just remember that if you have a subtool selected it will show up in your viewport even if it's hidden something important to remember is if you delete an object in your scene it is you can't press ctrl z you can't go back it is gone unless you've saved which is something that i should probably talk about zbrush allows you to save your files a couple of different ways you can either export your current subtool as an obj or go to file save as and save it as a z project saving as a z project does save you a lot of time it does take up more space on your computer but it saves all of the sub tools all of the presets and anything you have set up in your scene now that you know how to save your project i want to talk about a few shortcuts that will help you work even faster if you mask a part of your object and go to the visibility menu on the right hand side you can hit hide part and this hides the unmasked portion of your object you can do the same thing by holding ctrl and shift and clicking and dragging this big green box over any part of your current subtool it will only show what is inside of the green box and it will hide everything else on your sub tool if you hold ctrl and shift and click and drag outside of your object again it will flip whatever is showing to the opposite at this point you're probably wondering why is this useful the reason this is useful is because you can work in a powerful way to control your object using groups if you mask any area of your subtool and press ctrl w on your keyboard it will change the vertex data of that section to its own unique color you can see these colors by turning on the poly frame button on the right hand side of the viewport and if you separate one sub tool into different pieces using polygroups you can isolate those pieces and work on them one by one by holding ctrl and shift and clicking on that polygroup now everything else on your subtool is hidden and you can just polish that one part of your mesh to bring everything back just hold ctrl and shift and click outside of your object now there's one more thing about polygroups that's kind of confusing but i want to explain this because it took me a long time to figure this out if you hold ctrl and shift and you click on one polygroup it will show just that polygroup now if you hold ctrl and shift click and drag the green box outside of your object it will flip and show the opposite of whatever you had selected now because you've flipped your view when you hold ctrl and shift if you click on a polygroup it will hide whatever polygroup you click on this is a quick and powerful way to have complete control over your object using polygroups just gives you that much more control so you can get your sculpts looking beautiful and finished did we do it i think we did it i think we did it in 8 minutes so what do you do now that you have all this information and you want to start a project you can start off by appending in a new object into your scene like i showed you before the most important thing you want to do when you start any project is block out all your major shapes this isn't the only way to do it but it is really helpful if you're first starting out you can append in as many sub tools as you want and you can shape each one of them into a different part of the body or whatever it is that you're trying to make blocking out is going to give you 100 control over how you create your object and it gives you a lot more practice working on all the individual parts if you like creating characters like i do chances are you're going to have to start practicing how to do faces and if that's the case you're going to want to watch this video next which is going to show you a step-by-step process for creating faces in zbrush guys if you like this video please leave me a thumbs up and a comment down below to help my channel out don't forget to turn on notifications to see what i come up with [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Gatz 3D

Views: 202,366

Keywords: zbrush tutorial, zbrush beginner tutorial, zbrush, zbrush sculpting, learn zbrush, zbrush beginner, things you should know about zbrush, things you need to know about zbrush, learn zbrush in 12 minutes, learn zbrush in 8 minutes

Id: pCjzgYuS6WQ

Length: 9min 7sec (547 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 07 2022