TUTORIAL - ZBrush for Beginners

imagine a world one of incredible art CG like you've never seen before stuff better than any film that you've ever witnessed boundless creativity all brought to life through the mainstay use of a single program ZBrush and you think to yourself I'm going to go I'm going to get this program and I'm going to sit down and I'm going to be making cool in no time only to learn that this program is as interface as a complete nutter mess you don't know where anything is the people that do know how to do it and make tutorials over it just gloss over a that's really important that can completely up your entire workflow without giving it a second thought and no one just goes about teaching somebody how to use this program like they know nothing about the world of cg well hopefully I can help you out this is the Complete Idiot's Guide to ZBrush assuming you know nothing about talking program so the first thing we're going to get into is what version of C brush are you working on because the changes all the time I currently am going to do this tutorial based on zbrush 4r7 64-bit now the one thing that a lot of people are going to say about ZBrush is what kind of Rick you have plays a lot into how far you can go how big your textures can be how detailed your mouth dense your model can be so on and so forth a lot of people don't really preface that in the beginning they just kind of sculpt away and all their looks amazing but that's generally not the case if your computer is not up to snuff then you cannot get a 50 100 million polygons character rocking on this thing and if you can you wouldn't be able to export the maps off it because this would crash constantly so I'll get into my specs in a different video maybe I'll link it here if I have it made already but for starters like this is going to be what happens when you first boot the program up from scratch alright so here we go so you brush r7 starting now and the first thing is going to do is it's going to fade up like weirdly because know where the program does that and then the lightbox is going to open now lightbox is just filled with a lot of pre-made stuff to help get you started and examples to show you like what's going on in the program models you can open all this we're not going to worry about that you're going to want to click the lightbox which is this little box if you need in fact you can click on this there's also a tool over here either way you're not worrying about there that right now and the first thing you're going to do is you're going to click and you're going to see that what the is this what is this what what is this and then you're going to be like alright well as weird s it's like poking out at me so I'm gonna click on this aw ok I see some shapes let's just draw out a sphere okay awesome wait wait a minute put the what the like what like I can't oh fast is caucus program okay so after you calm down a little bit and you know you get your head straight and you're ready to give it a go again the first thing that you got to do is not worry about this any of this the only thing you got to worry about right now is this little red buddy right here does vsphere this is what you're going to start on so you can hold you can click and drag and it's kind of weird you hold shift and it snaps and then there you go now before you do anything before you touch anything now you'll see that edit is not grayed out anymore the quick key is T but we're just going to not do any quick T's because that's right now we're just going to click Edit and now you see that you have control over everything now you can drag a part of this out this is also looking pretty weird but say we're doing a monster with horns right so you're not going to do that yet going to control Z now you're going to hit X and you're going to see that you have two little bitty dots and now if you click you'll see that it's completely symmetrical on both sides and now that all of these aren't grayed out as well you have move scale rotate this is all really basic you can move it you can scale it and you can rotate it perfect and right now we're just going to go to move now here's the first quick key to keep in mind which is K now a shows you what your mesh is looking like you're going to want to keep it on draw instead of move and a is going to show you like what you're working with essentially geometry wise so if we come out here to the side now we're in order to move it around whatever you have selected will be the center and wherever you just click and rotate with your mouse without any other buttons you're going to be able to move around now if you want to just move laterally this is going to be hold alt click anywhere but on the model and then move around to rotate you just click anywhere and rotate and where and wherever you have selected will be the pivot point so move around and then to move in and out you have to hold alt you click and then you let go of alt and then you can move up and down which will scale in and out now that's already really complicated right you hold all you click you let go of alt you scale in and out like pretty soon like navigating around will will become second nature so I wouldn't worry too much about it right now what we're going to worry about right now is just adding things to this model and anywhere you click it's going to add a new kind of bubble so we're going to click on a bubble and turn to the side and we're going to say this is our monster from the side that's going to be the snout and then on the back we're going to have a neck and then we're going to move drag it out now here's a cool trick anywhere you click inside this line we'll add another thing so you click here you click here and now when you start moving stuff around you can see that we've got a monster with a pretty cool little bitty head and then you just continue down this line of logic until you get something that looks pretty cool at least as far along as you're hoping to get at this point we're not going to worry about anything else so there's our monster with it's big antler horns you're going to hit a and you're going to say okay this is the mesh that I'm going to be looking at right here so say this is what you're happy with right we're hitting a you can see that there's here yours these fears which are all fine and good you hit a you come back now you can continue down this line you can continue to add more stuff to make the objects like a little bit more rounded you can you can do this as much as you possibly can to really really work out the silhouette of your model we're not worrying about any details at this point right now we're just trying to get this guy looking close to what his overall shape is going to be and you can can you can continue to do this as much as you want if you need to remove any of these fairies you can just hold alt and then a little bitty - will pop up and you just select it and it goes away that's all you have to do you hold alt little - on this little big thing that one selected click it goes away adding is just the draw button and you'll be able to add them anywhere you want just so you know but say we're really happy with this say we're like this is a good outline this is what I want to start working with you can hit a and and what a lot of people will do is they'll just start doing this right they're going to be like re I'm doing it yay but you know like you'll notice that there aren't really enough polygons like you don't you can't do a whole lot with this and this is when you're going to have to get into these menus but before you do any of that I recommend going to the user interface layout which are these two buttons right here you can cycle through these and there's a whole bunch of them depending on what you know and how you like the program I'm going to say that this one right here with a nice selection of the most important brushes along the bottom is my favorite because all the options that you need to work with are like right here now you can click on one of these guys and you'll see oh my god now it's just getting intense but you don't need to worry about any of that all you need to worry about our here brushes here's my model and when you start moving around you'll notice that the other red dot is right there symmetrical to the other side and anywhere you paint it's going to be perfectly symmetrical but again we have a problem we don't have enough polygons right so one way to go about this is to go to geometry and then you're like oh I can't like I can't go to a higher res I can't like increase the resolution what you have to do is make this a polymesh3d which is your whenever you hit a those Easter's are going to be gone so this is going to be gone forever when you move this next step so keep that in mind so we're going to go to here we're going to hit make polymesh and now when you hit a nothing happens nothing happens at all you are now stuck here and it automatically deactivates symmetry so keep that in mind too so you're going to hit next symmetries back on okay so now the next step is geometry like you don't have enough polygons here to do anything with so you go to geometry and you notice that all this stuff is different now from when it looks like a pup from when it was a z series when you look as these fairs it looks like this when you look at your poly mesh it looks like this so the first thing you need to do is divide this bad boy and you'll already see you've got a ton more to work with and you can divide this a lot of times generally the best way to work is to slowly build up by layers so you would divide it once and then you'd come in with like standard tool any one of these will work they pretty much show you a picture and like identify standard move smooth at this point we'll divide it twice take a look at it we have a lot more polygons to work with and we're going to start sculpting on this bad boy so on to the next step all right so here we are we have our guy he's all subdivided out his symmetry is activated everything looks really good we cannot return to poly spheres no matter how hard we try and we're ready to start sculpting on our crazy monster guy so the brushes that I think are most important clearly the standard brush is really important move is really important flatten you don't to worry about too much smooth is super important but you're going to notice right off the bat when you click smooth you get this warning right because smooth is not something that you really select on smooth is something that is forever going to be bound to the shift key when you hit shift over your model you're going to notice that it turns blue and any time you do that it's going to smooth out a little bit any area that you have selected now the first thing that you need to know before you get into any of this is how to make this little reticule bigger now your options are up here right you can scale these around scale focal shift mess around with all this crap here's the intensity RGB is for texturing you know so don't worry about any of this stuff just yet but really you're talking with brackets bracket up bracket to the right bracket to the left you can hold them down it'll scale in and out this is the quick key on how to do it so if you're looking to smooth a really big area and make it really big hold shift smooth and it's going to smooth all this guy out like hardcore right like you know this is this is how you get like really big areas and you're just like I want the neck to be kind of like this and blah blah blah so not going to worry about any of that but that's how you smooth forever on the shift key don't worry about clicking it but if you want to use the other ones here we go so we're going to start with a standard brush we're going to get up on our model and another navigational tip is whenever you click somewhere that's going to be where your camera orbits around right so you're orbiting the model wherever you click also if you find yourself like this and you can't like you know like stuffs happening and you can't panic because you've scaled in too much if you just hit it'll snap it back to fullscreen no problem so right now just off the bat what we're going to do is we're going to start sculpting on this guy so we're going to lower the intensity because you don't want to go crazy you're going to go to your standard brush and you're just going to start slowly building more on your character you're going to build and build and build and this is sort of like the basics right like you just scale up and you build a little bit and then you scale down and you build a little bit on the back of the head smooth it down puff it out if you've realized that it's going kind of crazy on you like it's moving too much just lower the intensity until it starts to feel right additionally you get the move tool which is right here scale it up and you can really like move this guy around doing all kinds of craziness bring like that like that and now you can like move big parts of them around you really just have to kind of get a feel for it for the most part like a lot of this stuff isn't going to feel natural or right in the beginning you're just going to kind of have to like you know do the best you can because using this program does feel pretty weird in the beginning the genius of it kind of comes into play a lot later on when you start when it starts becoming a lot more second nature to you when you know a lot of the weirdness with how the program is kind of structured and how different it is from other stuff kind of like kind of like melts away a little bit then is going to start feeling a lot more natural and essentially like this is it like for the most part like that either of course much more detailed Wizkid about it you probably watch tons of tutorials on how like nutty things get with this program or how less incredibly detailed but pretty much like this is how you can make cool now it's not looking like a whole lot right now trust me but when you start getting into stuff like you know here's the magnified tool and you can just like pump stuff up a little bit and you know keep going like this and like really refine up the jawline make the lobes in the back of a head and like fill this stuff out then you're just like okay you know it's like it's all looking pretty good but you know like there's not enough polygons like you can try to get in here and like make an eyeball right so you come in here so holding alt at any time will invert whatever brush you're using generally for the most part so if you take this brush right here standard and you make and you jack up the intensity and you make a stroke awesome great but say you want it to go in so of course you hold alt a little bit - pops up and it punches it in as opposed to popping it out like all pretty much everything kind of does it that way and then you smooth it out so one brush that I really like to use at this stage is the clay brush one because it builds up really nice like kind of like actual clay a little bit a lot of these are made to emulate clay and how clay actually works it will be really tricky in the beginning like you have to get the intensity just right and kind of like really play with it and can always keep in mind like your silhouettes essentially just make sure that your silhouette isn't like getting away from you that none of this stuff is going too crazy you'll most the polygon lines are like really kind of jacked up at this point but they're kind of supposed to be because we're going to take this as far as we want to take it and then we're going to have to divide again eventually what will happen though just as foreshadowing is that this the poly layout of this character is not very well done you see that there's not a lot of detail right here around the eyes where that needs to be it's probably too many polygons here in the tip where there shouldn't be or you don't need a whole lot so there's a way to get around that I'm going to get to that in a minute but right now we're kind of a free form sculpt mode divided a little bit you know and then you kind of come in here grab a brush that feels right punch an eyeball in you know grab that clay tool start something really really kind of low build up some brows you know kind of like make a nose for your little animal you know and then you're just going to keep doing this like this this is there's no real secret the secret is only practice to this program like it's going to feel foreign it's going to feel weird in the beginning stuff isn't going to really look good but the more you mess with it the better is going to get here's another really important one that you may want instead of like the zi project is a so a trick about navigating all of this nonsense is any letter that you pick off the keyboard will automatically search for stuff so there's one great slicing tool that I use and it's called you should be it's called damn standard and this guy will cut like it's really good for adding stuff like mouths you know no program is perfect adding stuff like a mouth you know it'll slice the polygons kind of like in and like look really good right now there's there's really not enough polygons around the eyeball so it's going to be really hard to kind of like get that to look very good but you know kind of do your best to like work it in you know and then before you know it like it's going to start to look like a thing like honestly and then as long as you're just free-balling this and not working off of like an image that you're kind of married to or anything you can kind of like move this stuff around you know kind of like do what you can to just like make it with the way you want really really really play with stuff you know like this is this is a fun program when it gets down to it like you can you can do a lot with it it's incredibly powerful but this is just how to get the ball rolling 101 in ZBrush and at this point we're already using a ton of tools we're navigating around holding alt moving it around orbiting around objects increasing the subdivision getting stuff looking really good we're going to divide one more time we can see we're already at five now if you want to know how many polygons are in your thing total if your computers like start to slow down you can collect subtool when you hover over it it'll tell you alleys six hundred and ninety four thousand now this is really an efficient mesh we're not going to be sticking with that in any sort of manner but right now doesn't matter a whole lot because we're just kind of getting the ball rolling on this guy and say like alright we're looking really good everything's feeling really nice now on to the next step how do we kind of like now that we're happy with things a little bit how do we refine the mesh in a way that like really organically spreads the Polly's across the shape of this creature so we can continue to sculpt in a really efficient manner so here's a neat little tip on how to kind of like restructure the model so you'll notice here when you click and drag the thing around you can see if the polygons kind of change right well this is it switching it kind of dynamically to a lower resolution to make navigation like really easy but you can already see right here where this thing needs polygons around its face in its eyes and its mouth there aren't a whole lot but on the tip of that horn there's like a ton and you don't need that many polygons there so this is a quick way early on to kind of tell the polygons where to go essentially like where you need them to be the most for this thing to be really efficient it's pretty easy all you got to do is with your sub tool open right here you're going to duplicate this guy hide the other one so now you just got the one right there right on top of each other so you won't even be able to see it as long as you just have one selected in the other one hidden it's totally fine this little black bar lets you know when you have something selected so what you're going to do is you're going to come down here you're going to go to geometry and down in geometry you're going to see a thing called zremesher right now zremesher basically completely changes the entire mesh of this guy it's going to lower the resolution of it way down this is why we duplicated if we want a high res and a low res so underneath geometry and there's every measure this button right here if you just click control over anything inside the ZBrush this is the amazing thing about it it's going to tell you a ton of information about it so this sliders value is in the thousands thus a value of five would result in a target three topology of five polygons and if you remember our guy right now sitting it like six hundred and ninety four thousand total Polly's like that's the two things together so but six hundred ninety four tops way too many at this point because we're subdivision level five trying to get enough into these eyes for us to like sculpt around so what we're going to do is we're going to leave it at five keep everything the same right here at adapt this means it's going to adapt the Polly's like as best as it could going around where it's going to hit zremesh it's going to take a second to process okay now look at this guy right already you can see that the flow around the eyes is a whole lot better the flow around the mouth is a whole lot better when it comes to poly flow like I really figured this thing out man this this little aspect of ZBrush is getting better with every iteration so what we can do now is we can just divide them and divide them and divide them and you'll see here when we move them around like things are really nice and even even we go back to our old guy and move around you can see stuff is really messed up but say we had like a ton of detail in this one that didn't carry over to this one and clearly a lot of it didn't what you can do to transfer the detail from the unofficial one to it's a detailed one is turn this guy on and I'm going to tell you why like I'm going to put a little bit more detail in this guy so I'll take my dim standard and I'll just put some rakes like in his neck right here so it was going to really stand out and I want that detailed now to be transferred over to this guy because he doesn't have any of that stuff so what you're going to do is you're going to turn them on turn them both on have the one selected that you want the detail to be transferred to and then you're going to go down to project and you're going to hit project all and of course it's going to take a second to process but then BAM so they kind of shrink-wrapped to one another so when you hide the bottom one and you look at your top one and you're like holy crap all that little stuff came over and this is the neck this is the more refined mesh so even here you look at these eyes and you're like holy crap like the stuff looks really bad and that's only because it was really bad on the previous one on the new one your Polly's are a whole lot better so if you just smooth this stuff lightly smooth it so turn this down smooth it out you'll see that it just transfer it over all the bad that you didn't want but it's actually a much more efficient mesh much much more efficient stuff is really starting to look you know easier to work with essentially and that and that's a process that I like to repeat over and over again honestly as I'm like freeform sculpting now this is just me when I'm like making up off the top of my head like I'm not really worried about following anything this is just me being creative essentially so you'll come into here and now that this is all like a whole lot more kind of like detailed you have much more to work with essentially you can start poking around with like all these things and really really really start bringing this together essentially now the next little trick is say you're like making these eyes but you don't have a ball in here now what a lot of people will try to do is will try to use like a magnify tool and they'll kind of like couch something out like this doesn't look too bad it looks kind of weird and when you start sculpting on this thing you'll notice that a lot can go wrong like I'll just start deforming the eyeball and it really works so we're going to put some balls in here and the way that we do that is well now we can delete our old mesh not have to worry about it so we have our new one here if you even hear like I was like sculpting on this and it looks fine from this angle but for here it's like well sunken weird that's not like good that's not going to work you know you're going to you're going to spend a lot of time trying to fix that and it's just going to be a big pain in the ass so we're going to put some balls in there so we really know what we're working with and the easiest way to do it is to come into your sub tool menu I'm going to hit a pen and then you're just going to add a sphere 3d BAM right there's just fear it's kind of messed up but there's your sphere now how do you get it aligned into the eyeball like well there's two ways to do it one you can use the move scale rotate so if you use move you have to click on the object and drag across and this is a weird way to control anything but you know once once it's set up you can move from any of these accesses right you can move it it'll squash it it'll slice it'll do all kinds a weird this is I mean this is a whole thing into itself to kind of get like your brain around like if the reset it constantly when you do the scale like you have to like kind of bring it in a little bit it'll do it from either end and kind of like make it elongate I mean such a weird thing really have to get used to like working with moving objects around this leg the alternate way is to go down to the deformation panel and this right here is all just a bunch of sliders so like offset you know and tells you which way and right here you have X Y and Z's super tiny so depending on what direction you want to move it in you know like it's you can do it this way it's kind of troublesome but I mean just take the time to kind of work with this method and try to figure it out as best you can you know because eventually you'll be able to get it lined up just move it in here move to the side kind of reset everything again it's a super pain in the ass I know I don't really like it I wish it was much more sort of like you know the way other 3d packages have stuff kind of set up but eventually you can get that eyeball in that now this is going to be a completely separate object and now that it is a separate object you won't have to worry about drawing on it at all because in order to draw on it you have to have the sub tool selected so I can draw on it right now I can do all kinds of stuff to it but the second I have the head selected like I can't expect it at all right so now this is how you get objects like really close to each other and to really look like they're intersecting so I can start moving like this stuff around where it hugged this eyeball and looks really really nice um or at least much nicer than it would any other kind of way like you'd spend forever sculpting on this thing trying to figure this out anyway but this which is super painting which now leads you to the next question so you've got an eyeball here but you don't have an eyeball here so how do you get the eyeball like transfer it over well one you can do the whole process again and try to line it up but there's a really easy method you have your eyes selected you go to Zee plugin you go to subtotal master you hit mirror merge into one sub tool so this is going to make both eyes into one object you want it on the x-axis which gives you a little picture it's going to go across you hit OK and it just kind of knows BAM so now I got two levels two eyeballs in the you little demon head you little diamond ear watch your thing and the races are off my friends like this is pretty much how I go about sculpting almost anything now we can get into more of what these tools do but they're all really obvious by name pinch will pinch stuff together and and really kind of like mmm this is better for like a hard surface stuff you can like really get creases on bangs make it look really nice you know you can bring entire gaps together like this you know I like pinch a whole lot pinch pinch really gives like a cut kind of sensibility to a lot of objects you know you can really kind of like refine and do all kinds of neat stuff but essentially like this is the secret like this is how you make things now this is all really really simple and this is just me around a little bit mostly trying to teach everyone stuff but a lot of this stuff is really applicable to almost every sort of scenario within the world of ZBrush all of its going to fall under this realm like you're doing to mess around the intensity you're going to come in and you're going to say I need nostrils so then you're going to punch some nostrils in and then you're going to puff the edge a little bit smooth it cool now you got nostrils right and it just goes deeper and deeper and deeper from there and that's going to be all for lesson one but just remember the retail college izing how to move stuff around how to add details how to add different objects and shapes and to be able to sculpt on them independently all of that I mean this is just brain-dead basics 101 how to make things I haven't left anything out it's that easy we've got good polygonal distribution on our model more or less so far but nothing's like super crazy and also if you look at our total polygons right now at four subdivisions where it's six hundred thousand which is really close to what we were before but we were able to do so much more with it than we were before so that's going to be it for this first round of learning stuff of course this is a infinite well that haven't time to have a touch texturing displacement Maps oh my god that this program is is so deep it's sickening and a lot of it's really really tricky but this right here will get you going just making making you can actually use because anything that you can make in here can be refined and tweaked and treated until it's in a usable form as long as it has like basics as long as you don't have like two million polygons and the tip of this thing is you have to subdivide this thing 15 times and now it's crashing your computer and like all kinds of stuff like this is just getting set up sculpting 101 as simple as it gets and I'm going to make more lessons in the future kind of going over the more detailed aspects of this program but this is this is for the super super idiots beginner guide and hopefully you can make some really cool stuff using this method so I'll be back with more tutorials in the future kind of like covering different different aspects also a mother to like three studio max and you know After Effects and a whole bunch of other that I've learned throughout the years but this is just going to be the start of a whole lot of that's coming to this channel and hopefully you know you'll get some use out of it and make some cool based on all stuff I teach you all right well don't get discouraged and stick with it and I'll see you soon bye so a quick little thing that I actually forgot and on all this is how weird it is to save things inside ZBrush just so you know like it's not under document like there's all this this all right you know like how do you save this model right here is you got to go to save as right here so you just hit save as it's going to have the name that's assigned to it that's like right here here you can change it to anything I'll just save it to my desktop and I'm going to go Diamond gearhead oh under school one but safe and save often too so now what you're going to see when you want to load this thing back up again is close the program you're going to ask you to save whether you did or not just in no-load the program back up load tool on your desktop demon dear head underscore one open click drag it out hold shift let go and again like in the beginning because it's track and edit before you touch anything and now you can you got your model back in the program ready to go looking that but you know it's just a start ultimately it's an object back into the scene additionally to I want to show you another thing so how do you get something that you've already made into this program here's a free model but I have it inside 3d studio max right now so you grab this guy you're going to export selected or L so to bring everything in the scene end go to desktop you want obj for an object file then you're going to go man stuff save it now that all this is a lot of complicated that you don't need to worry about because I have a preset right here in this big long list fresh export nonsense forget this program come back into ZBrush come to another empty slot just don't have a selected on him and then you're going to go import man stuffs obj open and then there's you guys and remember symmetry is not on by default so you're going to want hit X and then you can do whatever getting big boobies big ol boobies that's stuff also there's your demon head right there so you know don't worry about it too much and remember if you want to add a booby guy into demon head then you just hit append grab a guy and there is bam that is like super huge oh yeah oh yeah there's my demon head right there oh yeah that's another thing too is the abridged by default makes stuff like really really tiny so this came out of max this came out of a brush I don't know weird thing but that's just another one of those weird things that you got to worry about and then you can just delete this guy mainly I believe it's because if I should grid right here inside of 3d studio max you can see this guy's like super giant and also way off to the left from where like my demon head is so it actually made a whole lot of sense but you know just more stuff to get a worry about here's your demon head there's a bunch of tricks in sculpting have fun see you later

Channel: TroubleShotVFX

Views: 149,104

Keywords: Zbrush, VFX, Animation, 3D, pixologic, tutorial, learning, teach, guide, beginners, 3dsmax, maya, logna paul, corridor, freddywong, model, bust, lesson, TroubleShotVFX, TroubleShot

Id: P5igRyXWEa8

Length: 36min 40sec (2200 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 23 2017