The Only 6 Brushes You Ever Need in ZBrush

hey guys henning from flick normals here and in today's video we are going to be talking about brushes in c brush a big problem with zebra is there are just too many brushes if we take a look at the available brushes we have in cbrush by default this is enough to give anyone a headache and particularly your beginner you might try every single one of them and you just don't know when you're gonna be using different ones so in today's video we are going through the brushes you will actually be using so before we get into exactly what brushes we're going to be using let's talk about how we can actually map the brushes to hotkeys i'm using the numbers row above my keys one two around six seven depending how many brushes i use and these will be the main keys i use for my hotkeys this means you don't have to use advanced hotkeys like b m v and remember three keys you only remember one key so first what you do is you click on the brushes you want then you select the brush you want in this case maybe you want this slide brush if we're not really going to be using this one but for sake of argument we'll just stick to this one click slide now you can see it pops up here and if we go to brush it also pops up here so if you want to hotkey something you hold down alt and control and you click on it and now you can see on the top it's going to say say click the the key you want to assign to this brush now we hit from the zero key and you can see this is assigned to something else hit ok if you want to use this hotkey if you want to resign it if not do it cancel then once you're done with that you go to once you've done all of them you go to preferences hotkeys and then you hit store and you can also hit save out as well so now you can load in this hotkey file and store means that it will load this file this hotkey file every single time you are restarting zbrush so the brushes we are going to be using now are going to be the move brush standard dam standard clay build up smooth and trim dynamic we are starting off with the move brush the move brush is fantastic for all sorts of things i have mapped this to the four key where this is really useful is for instance if you want to change the shape of something real quick you can easily do that with the move brush where we can now just drag out the clean shapes you want and you can just keep moving from here this works really well with dynamesh as well so for instance if you want to move the brush out like this move the geometry like this with the move brush then you can dynamesh and now you have clean geometry or clean working topology for this you can move this further out and you can dynamesh it so the room move brush is just phenomenal at actually moving shapes around you're not just using this early on though when it comes to actually blocking things in you'll also be using this a lot for instance we have a shape like this where you have a character and it's a bit rigid so what we have to do is we have to go in and we have to just move some things around we just want to make him a bit more interesting we want to give him some more curves and this is a model which is around seven million or two million pulleys so in this case you want we can just go in and we can just start to do bigger changes to them so essentially the move brush is fantastic when you need to move things around then the second brush we are going to take a look at is the standard brush the standard brush has a bunch of different use cases we are going to be looking at the first one now which is general like mid frequency sculpting so here we have a character where we already have a lot of the fine frequency in just using the flipping skin kit just to get a lot of this stuff in but we want to enhance some of this maybe we want this wrinkle here to be a lot bigger so now we can go in with a standard brush which i've mapped to the letter two and then we can go in and we can just start to give it some volume as you can see this works with the details which are already there some brushes like a clay brushes will destroy it it will replace what's there well the standard brush is fantastic in this sense because it will just keep pushing and pulling whatever is there up and down which means that you're not going to have to you're not going to have to redo all the wrinkles so i really prefer this where working where first you are blocking out the main the main pores and all this kind of stuff and then you can go in later on and you can really enhance what is there with the standard brush like so it's also really good if you want to add a lot of specificity in this case let's say you want this line to be sharper but we don't want to be like a mechanical sharp line we just want to be more defined then we can go over with the standard brush and we can just sharpen it up it's important just by brushing it so like so and this is a great way of adding like some variety by see if my brush is going like up and down like this so then we can just go over it like so and then we can just start you know enhance some of the things we already put down the standard brush is also great if you want to add alphas to your alpha details to your model in this case we'll change the stroke type to drag rect then we'll just add an alpha in this case we're just gonna use alpha o7 and now you can see that we can just drag out a lot of these um these alphas this is great if you're using our skin kit or if you're using any other alphas and zebras you probably want to stick to just a standard brush with the drag rect and selecting alpha we can easily just disable the alpha by clicking alpha alpha off and drag rack back to freehand or two dots whatever we prefer and now we can just keep on sculpting with this then the next one we're going to be using is kind of similar to the understanding brush but it's a modified version of it it's called the dam standard brush i've mapped this to number five on the keyboard you can just find this by b d and you can find this under here s where this is great is that we can very easily add big cuts into our model you can see here we add this really nice sharp line going in like so now always in this case this is terrible but where we can use this is for instance we want to really enhance some of these wrinkles we have here we can go in and we can just really start to enhance what's there you can use a bigger brush which means you get more low frequency shapes like this so now you just get more volume in them i tend to do this a lot where i'm just going over my shapes and i'm just using the dam standard to to add volume to it what's also cool is you can hold down the alt key and this is going to give you sharp lines this is not crazy useful at this stage of the model you know where it's the model is essentially there but it's really useful if you're for instance in an earlier stage of the model and you need to do something like this you need to add more sharpness to it like so so i really like damn standard in the sense that it it's like my one like my finalizing brushes to really refine the shapes you can just see how easily you can get these nice clean sharp shapes so damn standard is a brush it's a brush i use a lot next up we have clay buildup i have mapped this to number three on the keyboard and it's found right there by default this has a square alpha this is nice but it has too much texture from ice you can see here if i start brushing up that this side just has a lot of texture in built into it which can be great but i find that it's really easy to get lost in the brush strokes when you're sculpting as you can also see with the clay brushes or the clay buildup brush specifically here is that when you start to build up it you lose everything below it so you don't want to use this as a finalizing stage like after you've done all the pores and everything you want to use this brush before you've done all the pores so i tend to use the clipbuilder brush with either no alpha like this you know so you get this really soft result or i tend to use it with alpha o6 which is this one here which is kind of like in between stage of it it doesn't give you that sharp brush strokes but it also doesn't give you like this incredibly soft result when i'm using the clay blood brush i'm using going across the shape so i'm not just go i'm not going like this on the shape i'm going like this stroke stroke stroke stroke stroke stroke start this just gives me a lot better control and this also allows me to not really use a smooth brush a whole lot a lot of people when they work they're sculpting smoothing sculpting smoothing and that's a fine workflow for some people it's not my personal way of doing it i find that with the clay brushes i can avoid using a smooth brush at nearly all times so for instance a way i prefer to work when i'm starting off is that let's just turn this into polymesh and we have symmetry on is that i'll start up just like holding down the alt key and then i'll get in some eyes and then i'll just sculpt regularly get in some eye sockets and then we'll go in get some cheekbones in get some some of the skull parts for the nose and then i'll just work it up from here then i'll take it through with the move brush and then i'll start to shape it up dynamesh a little bit and from there we can we start to shape it up more so the clay brushes is a brush or the particular buildup brush is a brush i'll use throughout my entire sculpting it's a really really versatile brush and you will really find this to be a great brush once you turn off the hard alphas and you start using either alpha o6 or you start using no alpha you can see here as well if we go to this model here and we'll talk a bit more about this one later on where right now this has a bit too much stuff going on here so what you might want to do is hold down the alt key and then simply just sculpt on top of it remove the alt key hold down the alt key and you can see it just refines the shape when i'm sculpting over it this is instead of just smoothing it down to oblivion we're instead going over the shape and refining the shape in case like this i would probably set the intensity lower as well so that we now have an intensity of maybe around ten or six and this just allows us to go over the shapes and blend the shape together the advantage of doing it this way instead of just smoothing it down is that this allows us to refine the shape it allows me to look over this and like think oh the shape can go like this then i will go like this and just work over it so this is a really really powerful way of working it allows you to refine the shape as you're going along and just make the model continuously better instead of instead of working stages which is block in and then you're suddenly done blocking now it's just adding skin and fat it allows you to work in a more non-linear fashion and just keep refining all the shapes as you go along in this case you can see how much nicer we can or how much refinement we can get into the shapes just by using the clip the clipbuilder brush with no alpha and then later on we can go in and add alpha 06 to it and then we can start to add more refinement again into our model then we look into the smooth brush let's just undo this so we can go back to our original model which is deliberately broken like this the smooth brush is great in a case like this where you need to smooth something out a lot of cases where i'm particularly if i'm taking over student work i don't want to just like move stuff around and tweak it i want to kind of like destroy a bit what's there so we can rebuild from scratch in a case like this this is a great example now we can go over and we can smooth stuff out like so and you can see that everything just becomes smoother and nicer problem with this is that it does destroy the form so be very aware of that that you do destroy the form by using the smooth brush which may be good may be bad you access the smooth brush simply by hold down the shift key and releasing the shift key takes you back to the regular brush so regular sculpting hold down the shift key regular sculpting hold down the shift key so this means if you do prefer this method you can work really fast it means that you can add some volume you can smooth it down you can add some more volume smooth it down so it's kind of like you're adding volume and then we're integrating it into it adding volume integrating you can also see that if you are clever about this you can have areas like this this area here which has a lot of texture and you can smooth out the other parts so it's not like you have to destroy all the ship it means that you can have areas which will be smooth and areas which will be hard like this and then you can start to have areas like this where you're just blending it in like so so this moon brush isn't evil there is definitely a use case for it it's just not my personal way of working but you know if you prefer it awesome a little tip as well is that we can use a brush called smooth stronger in this case in order for us to smooth stuff down because of the high poly count it can be pretty tricky with the regular smooth brush so what we can do is if we hit the comma key or we click light box we can go to brush and under brushes we have smooth the bunch of general brushes in here and one of them we're going to be using now is going to be smooth stronger we find that right here so now if we double click it and now it will tell you hey this brush will be selected as the sculpting smooth brush press the shift key and then click to activate it so we do that now if you hit the shift key you can see we have smooth strong more active and now you can see if we had to hit the shift key now this is just going to like destroy our model it is going to remove essentially anything on there and just equalize everything down this is fantastic for high res models as in some cases you literally can't reuse smooth brush on because the model is too is too high-res that said be careful if you have like a low-res model like this it's just going to destroy everything it's like one click and you just destroyed all the shape but this can be cool as well for instance if you know about it then you can almost use as like a trim brush see in this case it's almost like i want these shapes to be clean and kind of go over with smooth stronger and it acts essentially as some kind of trim brush which really gives you good clean planes like this and then you can just hold down this move stronger again a little bit less intensity on your brush strokes you can start to kind of start to blend it as you can see as well if you hold down the shift key now you see we haven't seen intensity up here so 200 when the smooth brush is active and set to 23 when the clay brush is active this means that the smooth brush has a separate intensity slider so if we now want to hold down the shift key and set the smooth stronger to be something like 30 we can now go over and we can have less of a smooth stronger brush which means you can get something in between smooth stronger and regular smooth which can work better on models like this and then we have trim dynamic we're just going to go back to the original version here as well and i'll show you where trim dynamic is useful if we hit the b key t and d then we get trim dynamic i will set this to the six hotkey as well trim dynamic is useful because it allows you to give you get really clean planes that's something that you won't do at the final stage of your modeling but it means it's something it's something you might want to do early on because early on you might want really nice clean planes particularly if you look at the back here there's a lot of junk sculpting here it's a lot of ambiguous sculpting and you might want to be tempted to keep what's here because of the brush strokes might look cool or you have small little bumps which you like but it doesn't really add a whole lot to the sculpting so what we can do we can just use the the trim dynamic and then we can just start to sculpt like so and now you can see we get really clean shapes you may not want this shape to be that clean but we can do we can set the intensity down a little bit and then we can work over the shape as well sometimes i've even set this to be the smooth brush meaning i hold down the shift key and then i set trim dynamic wherever it is see this is the problem right there are so many brushes that you don't necessarily know where they are that's why i use hotkeys then we can click the shift key so now if we hold down the sorry then we can click the terminal brush and then now if i hold down the shift key it's going to use trim dynamic which forces me to think about shape instead of just blocking or removing the shape it forces me to think about what i'm doing when i hold down the shift key so that's just a little tip for you holding the shift key allows you to actually change this to any other brush if you want to go between two brushes like so so those are the brushes we are using most of the time i want to show you just a quick demo of how i'm actually using these brushes here we have um an early version of the final result for indoor sculpting this is like after chapter one i'm not sure exactly how long this is maybe it's like half an hour and at this point we need to refine him a lot so i'm just going to do a quick demo for instance looking at his eyes these are a bit too far out so i want to use the move brush now to move them a little bit in and then i want to refine the design a little make sure perspective is enabled and then i want to just refine some of these shapes just a little bit and then you see his eyes are very cartoony i want to make them more realistic in this case using the move brush is great for that you can sharpen his eyes like this on either side and then we can just shape his eyes just a little bit in general so this is where the move brush is great because it allows you to very quickly make big big design changes then we can do a dynamesh we can add a little bit more resolution so now we have an overall shape of the eye what i want to do now is i want to refine the eyelid in general so i want to use the dam standard brush which i've set to five then i want to force in an eyelid like so so now we kind of have an eyelet doing the same thing here we can force on a shape like so and then we can force and a bottom eyelid as well and then we can use the move brush again we can move this a little bit out like this which means that it's going to conform to like an actual eyeball because you want the eyeball when you're doing the eye then we can use the smooth brush now we have to set this back to the actual smooth brush so now if i hold down the shift key now i can just smooth out a little bit like so i'm going to smooth this shape out a little bit and you can see the eyes are looking a lot better just by using just a few simple brushes then we can just move brush again to move this down try to get the emotional cross of what you want the character to feel like when you feel evil and mean so let's just move this down early on move brush again is great and then i'll switch to clay buildup with the alpha o6 and then we'll just start to refine it and here you can see i'm just working over the model you don't just want to keep using the move brush over and over again you want to you want to add refinement to the model like this you can see i'm adding some lines going down and then i'm working across them then we'll go in and hold on the alt key and we'll add some refinement to the nose then we'll go across it like so and we'll add some more features like the the wings of the nose and you can quickly see that the model just becomes more refined as we go along like this we can get in some definition of the cheekbones like this right here can add cheekbones or the cyclomatic here as well this word the basically the cavity of the of the face just it's adding all the cavity of the eye just adding a little bit of definition here and now you can just see the model just becomes more refined it's not like i'm going over with a standard brush i'm just pushing and pulling some things here with the move brush i'm just refining the model so this is my main approach for sculpting i'm using the clay builder brush for the vast vast majority of all my work and then i'm going in with the move brush to refine the shapes a little bit the standard brush to refine the shapes the vam standard brush to really add some like creases and scars and wrinkles and these kind of things early on i might use the clay buildup or they might use the trim dynamic brushes to to add shape to things and to add planes but for the vast majority of your time you can get away with using only the clay builder brush in the case like this where we have a little even more resolution this is dynamesh this once more now you can see that we still have a lot of brush strokes here and a way of getting rid of that might be to smooth it down which is a totally legit way of doing it my preferred way is now to go over with the clay builder brush and low a low intensity and then we just go over it and we just work across the shape like so and you can see that the shape becomes more refined as we're doing it and the brush strokes are now disappearing the reason we want to remove the brush strokes is because you don't want them there in the final thing unless you're doing something which emulates real clay it's really tempting to keep the brush strokes there because it makes it look more artistic but if you're doing like an actual actual character you have to like a human character made of skin you have to remove the brush strokes simply because it's not going to read as human it's going to read more as clay so now you can see that pretty quickly the shape becomes a lot more refined and we are getting rid of the brush strokes and we're just going to set the intensity lower and lower and lower and every time you decrease the intensity you can zoom in a little bit more and you can refine the shapes just a little bit more as well and at the end of this it's almost like a progressive renderer you see you're just seeing more less and less noise in the render the shape so it's progressing more and more it's like you can't really see the shape progressing that fast but it just becomes a little bit better one area at a time and you didn't use a smooth brush you didn't use anything fancy you just use one brush over and over again and you just properly control the shape which is really cool of course you can also go over with the smooth brush as well at this point this is where it might make a lot of sense to go with a smooth brush because now you can see that we still have brush strokes but they can be a bit hard to remove as well because if we try to go we have to just keep iterating and iterating going over this like 10 more times you know lower and lower at the end you have like intensity of like one and you do get really clean shapes by doing this but at some point you just have to go all right it's good enough let's just clean up shop now and let's just hold down the shift key let's just smooth it out so it's not that smooth brush is bad it's just there is a time in place for it so now you can see some nice clean shapes very quickly by using um the move brush standard brush just a little bit damn standard clip buildup so the brushes we use by far the most would be exactly that start off with the move brush get the shapes where you want to be maybe refine the shapes a little bit with a standard brush go in and creases and wrinkles with the damp standard go in with the clay brushes particularly clay build up set the alpha to alpha o6 and then really just go in and refine the shapes use a smooth brush for to get rid of brush strokes and to destroy form and be careful with the smooth brush so that you don't just accidentally destroy form and it just you just end up with this like soft gooey shape so i really hope you liked this video if you're interested in learning more about sculpting i recommend our introduction to sculpting series which takes you through essentially everything you need to know about sculpt including what we just talked about in this video and if you just want to check out more sculpting videos for free on youtube we have a bunch of that as well on our channel so make sure to check that out as well and thank you so much for watching

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 53,379

Rating: 4.9742293 out of 5

Keywords: 3d, tutorial, flippednormals, henning sanden, morten jaeger, art, art school, art tutorials, learning 3d, cube brush, blender guru, cgi, b3d

Id: TpS0QdlfHWU

Length: 24min 57sec (1497 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 17 2020