Top 10 Tips ALL Zbrush Artists Should Know

zebras is awesome but it does have a lot of things that are hidden and a lot of workflows that people don't really know about and so I thought I would put all of the pro tips that I use in every single one of my projects and the things I think everybody that uses zebra should know all into one video so if you're getting started using zbrush or if you've been using it for a really long time there's probably something in here that you didn't know so let's jump into it right now okay tip number one I think this is the most important tip so if you're not familiar with this this is the one takeaway that I think is really key and that's projecting so in zbrush if we come down in here we can see something called project let's say you have a model like this one this model is a dynamesh so it's got really messed up topology just been sketching on it not worrying about topology which is great you can get messed up junky meshes a million different ways and this is why this is so important so if you have a messed up mesh like this where it's the shape that you like it's the sculpt you know it's not the topology we can put better topology on it so I'll show you that right now so you can see with the base mesh I've got got nice clean topology right so in this case I want to wrap this topology onto that new shape so I want all the subdivision levels I want the nice topology of this mesh but I want to look like the other one so for this I'll just rip off this stuff there we go so we have this so now if the only two things I have in my sub tool palette are the things that I want to project the source and then the thing that I want to be projected onto it there are two meshes visible now it'll just project everything that's visible so if I come down here to project I want blur off looks like it's off now great distance mean you can leave this right now and you can also project color if you wanted to so if the mesh had poly paint or something vertex colors you could project that too let's just hit project all right now there you go so now it kind of looks like it right but couple problems you can see the mouth is shooting through it that's because the Border edges of the mouth are just like projecting super through because the junky mesh doesn't have an open mouth like this and then the other problem is that we don't have enough resolution here to even capture here the detail right so let's jump back here we'll undo this so in my case what I can do is I can divide up you can see I'm at subdivision level four right now so let's go to six which is pretty high and then I'll store a morph Target I'll just make sure to isolate everything except the inner mouth and then I can just paint a mask so come in here I'm just going to paint a mask along the border Edge there you go so I'm just saying hey don't uh project this stuff now we'll hit project all there you go you can see the changes from the other mesh came through now we get the detail but then we still all have these problems right well what we can do is bring the morph brush back and then with this morph brush I can just morph it back to the original shape just to get the parts that are problems there you go so now if we jump back and forth you can see I get all the details but I also get the nice clean topology now the reason why this is super key is that I think it's an important distinction to make between shape and topology as long as you're comfortable with this sort of stuff then you can feel very comfortable that you can always make make the kind of mesh you need and then the shape because when you start out you just want to be creative you just want to make stuff and then also sometimes in production or even in your own projects you realize oh I want to make a big change you know if you have a creature and you just want to have an extra set of arms you can just Jam an extra arm in there dynamesh melt it all together just play with it like clay So then whenever you're ready for nice topology you can duplicate that kind of clay sculpt and then work with zero measure and whatever you want to make nice topology then divide that new duplicated mesh up project the details and now you'll have a mesh that has all the exact same details and look but with subdivision levels and with nice topology tip number two is scale scale is one of the weird quirky things about zbrush and if you're not careful you can get into a pretty messed up situation so the scale is definitely Jank and zbrush there's some like translating in and out anyways it doesn't matter but here here's the thing if you look down here in the bottom if I go to export you can see there's numbers in here that's actually really important every one of your zbrush files especially if it has the correct scale is gonna have numbers like that so there's some operations and I don't know them specifically but you can get into a situation where this gets zeroed out and then you are in a problem because if you export your model out and bring it into any other kind of DCC it's gonna be really tiny and if your scale is wrong can really mess up a project it's really hard to resolve it because scale kind of has to be perfect right and so for me the best practice is a establish or scale outside of zbrush start with a base Mash start with a cube or a sphere and actually measure it so it's correct and then bring it in and then start versioning from there so you can always roll back you know that you have a version where everything is correct if you do get into a weird sticky spot there is a plug-in up here called scale master and I have used this when I'm in a real bind it's not going to be perfect though but if you're just doing things for renders and stuff doing something like that can at least get you in the ballpark of a realistic scale all right tip number three keep it low I know zbrush is great because how many polygons it can do and that really is its special ingredient but keeping things as low as possible while you sculpt is so huge like if you're sculpting like this you want to keep it as low as possible while you're establishing things size proportion you know like maybe even like points of anatomy and stuff like that and then when you feel like you've gotten the most out of this resolution that you're really limited then you jump up and that's really the best way to sculpt because you're limiting and making sure you're focusing on the big to small the most common mistake in zbrush especially for newcomers is to go way too high quality way too fast especially dynamesh and and then they don't have any subdivision levels and then they're just sculpting on this super dense High poly brick of a dynamesh and everything is hard and if you wanted to like just do something like this and go you know what I think his arms should go like this you just can't so in general the best practice for sculpting anyways is to work from Big to small and really trying to get the most out of each subdivision level is a good way to ensure that you're focusing on what's important you also want to have subdivision levels that are low enough like this like this is getting pretty low right because then I can smooth all this out and it's super easy to do if the mesh was really really dense and I wanted to smooth everything out it would be really hard and take a lot more time so until you know exactly what you're doing keep it low tip number four is reconstructing reconstructing is another kind of odd thing I do sometimes and I think also can like break people's brains if they don't really know what's going on here but it is pretty simple so if I show you I have subdivision levels right here right so I can step down and I can step up now let's say I deleted these now I don't have any subdivision levels oh no well here's this button reconstruct subdiv so if I click this one two three now I've jumped all the way back down and my poly groups are here and everything and I can step up so now I've got the four subdivision levels back whoa It's like reverse dividing I can do that because I know the mesh had four subdivision levels right because that's how we got here so just to show if you had a polygon like this and it was divided that's how it would divide so everything would have to be perfectly divisible by four if I divided this again then it would divide like this reconstructing is just going down but it has to have this perfect poly count so that it can divide by four so why is this button here why is it useful it is useful sometimes in cases where you need to perform actions on your mesh that need to have no subdivisions here's an example so I have this character it's got four subdivision levels but it's got this arm that's welded right but maybe I don't need this torso like maybe maybe he's gonna have a shirt on like this you know so I don't need this torso okay well let's delete like this like this all right so then now I'm going to delete Hidden doink so now all that stuff's gone now I'll also split okay so now boom so now I split so now what do I have I have the head and I have the arms as separate objects but they don't have subdivision levels well I can come over here and I can click reconstruct and now I'm back down to all four same with the head now I have two sub tools and I have all the detail that I sculpted I have the pieces that I want and I didn't lose anything I just got to separate it and that's because I Could reconstruct because obviously I can go all the way up I can go all the way down next I want to share a couple brush settings that I think are really useful that if you don't know about Are Gonna Change Your Life okay here's the first one back face masking because how many times has this happened right you're over here you know you're in the zone you're sculpting some stuff and you're like yeah dude I'm doing some some cloth oh yeah yeah listen to my Tunes just chilling but then oh you realize what's this oh it's been going through that's not what we want you can see now if I get the clay brush and I just go really hard look at that no well you can use back face masking in brushes Auto masking back face mask I actually put it in my UI because I use it a lot so now with back face mask on that doesn't happen I will say uh it can cause its own problems this isn't perfect this isn't something you want to just leave on all the time but definitely when you're running into this exact problem it's going to be just on these like little nooks and crannies or things were meshes or planes or right next to each other and just need to do a detail then you can just check on back face mask and then turn it off whenever you're done so really really useful little thing if you're not aware of it already all right next Tip since we're on the subject of brush parameters is something that has to do with the smooth brush if you are used to this sort of thing check it out I can come in here and I go you know what I want to smooth all this well look what's happening you can see here right this dip we don't really want that sometimes but what's happening is the borders are pinned you see that the borders ain't going nowheres well sometimes you do want the borders to go somewhere sometimes so it's nice that it's on by default but I'll show you where you can turn this off so if we hold down shift you can actually see right that it switches to the smooth brush so actually when I go to the brush settings when I'm holding shift I'm changing the smooth brush settings crazy but here we go so smooth brush brush smooth brush modifiers and you'll see here minimum connected points to smooth three if we drop that down to one now we can smooth everything check that out now we're smoothing it all yeah yeah see no problemo useful just that took me years to find and every once in a while you're gonna come into a spot where you're like man I just want to smooth this whole thing how come I can't smooth this whole thing that's where that is and next is the smooth groups brush if you know it you know it and if you don't know it your mind's gonna get blown here it is so here's my character and then let's say I'm making some cool sci-fi dude or Batman or something it's got some organic armor on there super common thing to happen so what we're going to do is we're going to create an organic shape and then we want to extrude it out to make some armor right so really common to do in zbrush and this is how we do it let's make a swoopy shape really cool Batman shape check that out cool cool cool cool there we go nice maybe you should be able to bend his arm a little bit okay cool there we go so we'll come down here and we'll go to polygroups group masked now we look at our polygroups there you go so we're halfway there but obviously the problem is these Jagged edges either the resolution of the Mask or the resolution of the mesh is not going to be perfect that's okay because we can use the smooth groups brush come in a light box brush smooth and smooth groups so credit does go to Mike climber who I initially saw this from from a zebra Summit in like 2017 and when he showed it you could tell from the crowd that even though it had been around for a while people hadn't been using it or seeing it with smooth groups on there if I paint over that group Edge yeah that's the same reaction I got last time so here you go we have the smooth groups brush you can see it's smooth groups now so now I want to hold shift there you go magic happens turn off the line there you go so always super satisfying to see too honestly sometimes I just invent reasons to use this because it's the most satisfying brush to use I mean look at the nice curvy thingies on here um look at that doesn't make you just want to make groups and smooth them so look at that nice and tight so boom you can do this delete Hidden and then we can do some zero mesh from here and now because we have a perfect line look at that topology Perfecto all right so we'll set this to one instead of height and thickness hit panel Loops doink and then now we got a little thingy here then we could even do like a cool Beverly chisly thing if we wanted to like insert an edge Loop right here delete that one group that and then go crease crease polygroups divide up boom boom boom look at that nice smooth thing right now we can like uncrease everything give it a little bit of a Polish boom so there you go there's the smooth groups brush so awesome fun and satisfying to use like I say I'm always just looking for an excuse to use this brush in this case the excuse was this video all right next tip is dynamic subdiv okay if you're not using it you gotta use it I'm gonna show you some other things too that you may or may not be using armor belts everything hard surface clothing you know I use this a lot everybody should be using this I think if you're making stuff inside of zbrush I'll show you why in a second let's go through just a quick scenario of making a belt every character has a belt right every character has a million belts video game characters are just belts pouches and shoulder pads remember that okay so here we have this character so I'll come in here I'll go to the curve strap file turn off Symmetry and I'll try to draw on it oh look I can't do it because it's got multiple subdivision levels I knew that I knew that I just left this in here so that I could do reconstruct again for you see delete lower now I can do it but I can always reconstruct so we have the curb flat snap brush I'll come over here and I'll just hold shift so it goes all the way around there we go now I don't need this curve anymore delete and then you can see it's unmasked so if I split unmasked points boom there it goes and then just wrap it up we'll go reconstruct look at that now we've got our divisions back okay so we'll come over here to our belts so cool so now we'll just have this guy so I can turn symmetry back on just start getting in position but here you go just like cloth the thing about belts is you need to have uniform thickness and as with everything in 3D modeling you want to have a pretty simple cage a pretty simple mesh that's using subdivision levels like a modifier to get complicated if you divide it up it's kind of a destructive way to do it but then you could if you had thickness already then you could drop down but then now all of a sudden the thickness is getting messed up so I'll show you why Dynamic subdiv solves all those problems so here we have about super low poly right now just in this case it so happens that this brush makes a mesh that has creases already so I'll turn it off just so you can see uncreased all okay so if I go to Dynamic sub div there you go in the geometry palette I'll hit Dynamic and then boom it's smooth now you can see we lost a bunch of that thickness and we can get that back by creasing so if I go to crease if I hit crease PG that's the polygroup Border this whole thing is one poly group so that's going to crease the Border increase border boom so now we have the right thickness I can come back into Dynamic subdiv and I can play with some settings you can see showing me a preview of if it was subdivided twice I can make that four and now look now it's like nice and smooth right but it doesn't stop there there's also thickness everybody thickness okay use this please people don't use this I don't know why so I can make thickness come up try to find exactly like look I'm actually dynamically figuring out the thickness of my belt isn't this better offsets at zero this is pretty good this means that you know if there's um if this is the plane of your belt looking top down then it's going to split the width both ways and if you swing the offset all the way to the right you can see then it's popping out all the way to this way right you can choose what you want I'll just leave it here for now so now here we go we have a belt it's smooth it's got thickness and then look I can start positioning it so fast so easy start to tilt the bottom so that it curves with his body and all the while it's this mesh the whole time I hit D on the keyboard and instead of going up to subdivisions we don't have subdivisions so zbrush asks hey do you want to use Dynamic and yeah I do and then so if I hit always yes then as long as I'm in this session I can use shift d to drop down and D to come up and there you go so then I can position it however I want and super easy the last aspect of this and maybe the most important and why this is the way Superior workflow is that I can always make edits to the mesh which I can't do if I had subdivision levels so if I wanted to for instance come in here and bevel something and delete a polygon I can still see it with Dynamic so if I crease PG boom so now I just made an edit to this mesh and I can easily move the mesh around and add topology if I wanted to add more bevels round this out it's always this low res mesh so we get to preview it as if it's finished while keeping it low and fully Dynamic I keep it like this for as long as possible especially if I'm inventing things because it lets you see smoothness and thickness without committing so you really get a good sense of what things are but when you do want to commit you can do that back over here in Dynamic subdiv you can see the apply button well now it's just a mesh but if I subdivide it I know that it's going to look exactly the same because we already saw that preview tip number nine is about z remesh z remesher is a function in zbrush that gives you pretty good topology with the click of a button rather than having to do it by hand so it is awesome but it is kind of a black box and that you click a button and Magic happens and then you get something back so you do give up unlimited control but there are some little tips you can employ to help guide zero mesh and get something a little bit more predictable and what you need to do good looking models so let's take a look at this mesh right here in zbrush we have this sculpture of a boy which was started with dynamesh if we take a look at the wireframe right now you can see it's very dense so very high and then not great right it's got these like triangle things you know got some intersections and we don't have subdivision levels the flow is not great so it'll be very difficult to turn this into a finished polished mesh so we want much better topology so to do that we can use z-re-measure so let's do that before we do that though the first step we want to do is duplicate this mesh this is what we have now and now we have a duplicate so now on this duplicate we'll come down here into the geometry pane see under zero mesher we have zero mesh and for Target poly count I have three and you can see that means that the result would be 3 000 polys I want it to be as low as possible and like we did at the start we're going to divide up and project so let's click zero measure right now you can see at the top it's going to start to do its magic okay there we go we have much lower topology now right if we jump in here we can take a look okay much lower the flow is okay you know we could divide up and we might be able to get this to work got a problem with the nose and a common trouble area is the eyes it's kind of pinching and we're losing the depth for the lid so what can we do about that well we can step it up so we'll go from three thousand to four thousand polygons and also we'll employ some of our little tips and tricks here to help zero measure give us a better mesh for what we want first thing we'll do is we'll jump this up to four let's get a little bit more then what I'll do right now is I'll make polygroups of the different sections that I want zero mesh to pay attention to because we can turn on this button right here keep groups then it's going to try and make topology to outline those groups so that's one of the main ways we can use to help zebra mesh know the kind of flow that we want all right so quickly I'll come in here and I'll just draw a mask around the eye okay so we want a circle come in here I'll show you with polygroups we'll go group masked doink a group right there good I'll turn off line for now so we can just look at the sections alright so now we might want to put the ears on their own Circle here group Mast hide those ears then we can use slice slices away that we can actually just slice up the mesh just from poly groups and also it does add a line does add a cut line I want it to come in right here trying to get the tear duct there we go and then another thing we can do in addition to polygroups is you can actually just emphasize the form because Z remesh is also looking for form changes and the more dramatic the change the more likely it's going to try to put some topology there to preserve the line right so you could just like slice right down the middle with the slice brush you can also do something like get damn standard and then rather than drawing in lines like that you could hold alt so that it pulls up and then I'm going to pull a sharp line down the middle where this topology might go same with the nostrils by trying to emphasize that this is a border here it's more likely that we'll get topology here and you'll see in a second why this can be useful so now we have this stuff before we run it you can see we got jaggy lines because we use group Mast well we can still go back to our handy smooth groups brush see always looking for an excuse anything that you actually slice is going to be perfectly straight but anything that you do from a mask is going to be janky all right so we'll draw our line back on here and now let's run it again so we have a little bit more density in our topology the number so that should give us a little bit more resolution to capture some of the form and we're using polygroups I'm using actual form change that we sculpted in to give us a more predictable result hopefully before we run it though we need to make sure that we're going to tell Z re mesh to use our group so we're going to click keep groups as you can see smooth groups is a parameter that comes up online so by default smooth groups is set to one so it's actually going to keep in mind those groups but then kind of like Smooth them together so you might lose some of the shape but we'll keep it at one and see what we get before we tweak it so I'll hit Z re mesh and see what we get all right so let's go so now let's take a look so you can see a little bit better than we had before we actually have a loop that goes all the way around and we look over here this eye it's got totally messed up you can see at least we're getting a circle around the eye but there's still some problem area so let's try adding even more poly groups and reinforcing some more of these form edges to see if we can get an even better quality so first we'll reinforce the eye topology and then we want to do the nose and the mouth and then we'll slice it along the inner lip line it should get it already honestly but this could help really Ensure there we go all right now we're cooking now we'll hit it and see if we get a mesh that is a lot closer to what we want in the end all right there we go so this is outlined the features better than it did before see like not perfect for sure sometimes I would come in here and just clean stuff up like I can just go to the Z modeler brush kind of delete this guy and then weld this to here that kind of stuff but in general you can see the part that we didn't do on the eye is pretty messed up but this is outlining the features and it's still super low right so that's what we want and that's why we took the time to do these extra steps and doing poly groups and reinforcing some of those forms because now we can combine this with the first tip and I can divide this up I can come over to my palette I'll turn everything off except our original so now we'll project not at the full res right now I'll do project on three projectile doink and I'll go up a couple times make sure the topology is not too pinched okay so we're almost there let's let's divide one more time and we'll do one more project and this one's probably gonna take a while because it's a heavier mesh you can see at the top it's thinking a lot more than it did before but that's how we're going to capture all the detail we had in our original sculpt that original shape okay so here we are projected let's zoom in here okay and we'll jump over to the original here's the original mesh that's dynamesh you can see the topology all the little you know janky triangles and stuff now we'll pop over to the new one can't even really see a difference other than these little things moving work we actually have more res and now look at our topology if I group everything as one color you can see the flow now we can drop all the way down and look at that now we have this nice mesh we can make big movements on if we divide all the way back up it looks exactly how we had before so this is really the power of combining the things like Z re mesher and polygroups together to make finished models after the fact and then we used projection to project the model we made initially onto there so it looks exactly the same but now we have way more control we can go up and down we can finish the surface and make something really smooth and also we can do things like UV map this export it to another program we could use textures display some maps to do a nice clean finished model and it's really a joy to work with something like this and it just took us a few minutes to do all right my last little Pro tip here is about reference images and using them in zbrush over the years I've tried a lot of different ways of bringing in reference pictures so I can trace on them and then save cameras and Views and stuff so that I can come back to the project later and continue where I've left off without everything messing up so I'm going to show you the best way that I know how to do it right now so say I want to bring in a reference image I'll come over here to draw come over here and I'll go to load image click that and I'll click open and doink now I have a reference image so I can't really see through my model yet so I'll go to draw and I'll go to model opacity and let's go down here doink you can see also that the shadow is still on there I think there's some kind of multiply mode so actually if I go to the light and I boost the ambient it'll actually make him a little bit easier to see through all right now let's position this guy first of all I want to keep in mind the kind of lens that maybe was used for this Source reference image it's it's super kind of flat or is it very distorted we want to go on one of those ends right so this looks like a portrait maybe at a distance typically if it's something that's meant to be a portrait it's a longer lens so we'll go to draw you can see 85 is set that's a good length maybe a hundred because it's a little more flat it doesn't have to be super perfect we just want to make sure we're in that neighborhood is it wide or is it long okay and then we'll come over here and we'll start positioning our guy there we go we lined up our model to the reference image so that we can start moving things around right we can just say like okay this needs to go more to the eye like this right this eye comes down a little bit like this is your nose a little bigger you know that kind of thing is melted down here that kind of stuff right cool now I need to save this so that I can keep working on it right so if we go over to draw we can go to store camera and then I can store the reference image doink cool background image stored so now if I go file save as and I save this project it'll save all my cameras with my images so you go now it's saved so now I can quit zbrush then when I open it later if I open the project everything will be just how I had it so another cool things about this is if I come over here to draw you can see here's this cool button this toggles the opacity so that I can flip back and forth between seeing the reference image and seeing my model so I could just easily hotkey this if I come over here hold Ctrl and ALT click this and then go shift Q now I've got shift Q flips back and forth check that out now I can do over here and go oh you know what I know it's a little bit like got a nice eyeball like this cool then I go up yeah looking good looking good right I can also do this with multiple cameras and then I can even flip through them so I can jump around so that I'm working on the different angles because you always want to work on different angles when you're working on a face like this like this because if you work on it too long in one angle it's going to start to look flat and weird so we need to be jumping around so if we come over here you can see I've got toggles between the cameras I've already saved so if I make this a hotkey then I can toggle between my different angles each with their own reference image Isn't that cool and I can always toggle this on and off come in here and I can say you know what I need I need to like see way through this there we go yeah and then move this around there we go this goes like this yes I like this you know and there you go so this makes it really easy to jump around in the different reference images toggle between the transparency and really help you dial in your likeness if you're just getting started with zbrush I suggest checking out my video on using dynamesh the right way and if you want to brush up on some sculpting fundamentals check out my video on form hierarchy thank you for watching peace out

Channel: J Hill

Views: 62,656

Keywords: jhill, J Hill, Zbrush, Character Art, digital sculpting, zbrush tutorial, zbrush 2022, zbrush tricks, 3d modeling, zbrush, zbrush how to, zbrush 2023, digital sculpting tutorial, digital sculpting for beginners, zbrush pro, zbrush beginner, 3d sculpting, zbrush sculpting, zbrush tips, 3d art, game art, zbrush 2022 tutorial

Id: xsyCV6s4CoM

Length: 29min 12sec (1752 seconds)

Published: Mon May 08 2023