Why so serious? let's make a custom scar brush in ZBrush (updated)

[Music] hey what's up guys if you're new to the channel my name is pablo munoz gomez i'm a 3d concept and character artist and i run the search guides website if you like the content that i'm sharing here on youtube feel free to subscribe and turn on the notifications so that you know when a new video is up and in this video i'm going to walk you through the process of creating your own custom asset we're going to build a custom brush in zebras to add skin damage and kind of like a scar to your own creatures and characters so right now what i have here is the latest version of series at the time of this recording is 2021.6.3 and this is my custom ui uh i just wore one my custom ui because it is easy and faster but i will point out you know any ui element that i use in the process i'm going to go ahead and open up the left dock and i'm going to bring in my brush palette tuck it to the right and i'm also going to do the same thing for the stroke palette and i'm going to put that on the right hand side and that's it that's pretty much all we're going to do we're going to use for for this tutorial and obviously i have a single sphere and i'm going to turn the poly frame so that you can see it's just a simple sphere and what i'll do is just add a couple of subdivisions uh which for you guys might be on the geometry divide a couple times so for subdivision levels maybe one more so we have two million polygons and this is just so that we have enough resolution to test our brush so it could be anything like if you want to do it in a in a queue you're totally up to you all right so the first part of this tutorial is to walk you through what are the simplest things or attributes that you can change in your brushes to alter the effect of the brush so we're going to take the standard brush which is the one that i currently have selected you can access it by pressing the letter b then s and then t that's kind of like a quick filter for um for that brush and yeah this is essentially the effect of that brush pretty straightforward right we're going to undo that and some of the things that we can do to alter the brush obviously the simplest one would be to invert the z-add and then just enable the c sub if you're using the standard ui these two elements should be around the top but also under the draw palette these are the two ones that i'm that i'm using so this is basically the same thing as holding the alt key so with the standard brush this is the standard effect if i hold the alt key i'm just inverting the effect right so one pushes the geometry outwards the other one pushes in so that's just a quick element um of you know customization but you don't have to hold the the alt key that's the point you can enable this and without holding the alt key you get the same effect and the other thing is you can turn off the lazy mouse so if you go to the stroke palette that's what i have it here and you open up the lacy mouse section you can turn that off and the lazy mouse allows you to have a lot more control on your strokes but as soon as you turn it off it gives you a more like a smoother path right so if i go ahead and compare something with the lazy mouse which again gives you more control let's do a bit more pressure you'll see it's not as smooth you can sort of see the instances of that brush if i turn that off and i do the same thing you don't have that much control but you have a lot more um pressure in a way like the effect is a lot higher a lot more intense all right so i'm gonna undo that so just with two things with two switches we basically change the standard brush so we have the c sub enabled and the lazy mouse disabled now the other cool thing about buildings brushes in zebras is that it kind of like works in a in a progressive manner so you can start from like a very small detail and build your way up to something very very complex so i'm going to give you an example of that and i'm going to use a brush that comes with zebras called the extractor brush so with the standard brush with those tweaks that we just did i'm going to reduce my brush size by the way another element obviously to customize this brush is to tweak the the c intensity but i think it's fine as it is so i'm going to go ahead and do something like this just pressing to create a dot and that's you know it seems it seems like a pretty simple thing to do um but once you combine this with more of the steps that i'm going to show you it becomes something very very powerful now i'm also going to switch back to the c add the one that adds and also enable lazy mouse so this is basically resetting the standard brush i'm just going to go closer and maybe add a little bit of volume around that it could be a pore for example and i'm going to hold the shift key to smooth things out a little bit that's it right so let's go ahead and switch to the extractor brush so you press the the thumbnail and i think what i'll do now is i'm going to turn off my camera so that you can see both of these things a little bit easier all right so i'm going to click on the brush thumbnail and i'm going to go all the way to here we go these three brushes these are the extractor brushes so i'm gonna click on this extract or drag rect click on that and i'm also going to go to my undo history here and go back to a state before i actually created that detail right and this is an important step because this brush works with the history so let me just bring in the epic pen um very quickly so that i can explain this a bit better so essentially what this brush does is it looks at the surface so imagine the the yellow line is the surface right and we are going to record a point in time so that's why we sort of went back a little bit where the surface is unaffected right so as soon as we record that we are telling zebras hey remember this exact state of the surface and then when we go back to where you know whatever detail we did so this state right here you know the the one that we created that sort of whole um or poor like that right we're going to tell zebros look at the previous state that we recorded in this point so this pink line and just give us the difference between the previous state and the new state so if you look at it from the side and this is the the original state that one right here and the new one is with the kind of like the hole in there like that little bump right sirius is going to analyze the difference between that previous state and the new state with the details that we created and it's just going to grab those and give us an alpha with just those details so i know this might look a little bit more confusing than what it is so i'm just going to show you but i wanted to give you a a quick understanding how that works so in order to record this current state what i'm going to do is hold the control key on my keyboard and click on this timeline or in this undo and you'll see now we have this sort of white square right in the middle so now let's go back to this state where we have the detail so all we have to do now is press the g key on your keyboard or alternatively we can go to the alpha palette and we can click on this from brush and you'll see now my cursor changes to this sort of aqua cyan color i'm going to click right in the middle and drag click and drag and this will determine the size of the alpha so i'm going to do something like this and we'll just wait until 0 sort of computes that remember it just needs to go back to that previous state that we sort of saved and then analyze the difference between those states but that's pretty much it it already did it so let's bring in the alpha to the left the alpha palette and you'll see this is the new brush or the new alpha sorry that was created for that brush so now i can just go ahead and click and drag and you see it's just an instance of that alpha which is fantastic so now that we have that let's go ahead and place a couple more of those pores around something like that it could be pretty random but you see the longer that you drag the the larger that detail is going to be so you can just drag a little bit and make you know smaller smaller points right pretty straightforward and if you want you can also hold the shift key just to smooth out some of those so that they're not as intense and they could just work as a you know like as a bump and again we can go back to even in this brush the extractor brush which currently has the alpha that we extracted we can simply invert that effect and we can click and drag and now we're creating kind of like a pimple rather than a pore right so this is pretty convenient for this type of things but i'm just going to undo that go back to what i had and because if you notice let me bring that that one again this is the point where we saved this this alpha but we have gone ahead and created all of these different states or different details and we are currently here right so we still have the the original sword that has none of these ones right oops the right color so that original state has none of these details that we just added so we can basically go ahead and do another alpha from that sequence of alphas that we just generated so in a way all we have to do is you know to to recap create that single dot then use this the extractor brushes to create that alpha and now that we have that sort of initial state still recorded there we can go ahead and do the same process so we go to the alpha click on from brush and we can go ahead and click and drag and this time i'm going to grab all of those dots and we just need to wait until c brush computes that and now we have an alpha that has all of those points so when i click and drag i have a more complex alpha right and i can keep doing this and this process becomes kind of like an you know exponential in a way you start with a single dot then you create this alpha and now we have something that is even more complex right all of these dots and if you wanted to you can obviously keep going right so we still have that original state recorded all we have to do is go to the from brush click and drag and let's just wait there we go so now we have even more complex alpha we can do it on this side right so we have this alpha to generate this sort of pores if we wanted to and something else that we can do to make this brush even more complex is to change the type of stroke so right now by default this brush is using this drag drag red alpha to do this process but if i go back to my standard brush so let's go ahead and press b s t so this is the standard brush i can go ahead and select one of the new alphas that work that was created with the previous brush so let's select the probably this one yeah this one is fine right and i can click and drag and you see it's not giving me the same result obviously because the standard brush is using a different stroke so i can just switch to the drag rack and that will give me the same effect and the main difference is that let's just drag it you see if i rotate around this actually creates a bit of a bump right so it adds volume so this is the thing that i wanted to to show you and the reason i changed to a different brush so now we have the standard brush the same stroke type but if we go to the modify tab here under the alpha we can click on this surface so what surface does is zebra is going to analyze what the the best kind of like mid-range of um of these values in this alpha are going to be so that doesn't push things out so in other words it's going to try to find the middle grade so if i do that this is a little bit more subtle all right but obviously we can tweak the the amount of the intensity let's say 12 and we have something closer to what we had before now we can take this even further and click on the spray so now the spray is just going to give us kind of like a spray version of that alpha maybe this is way too small i think this one would work a lot better if we use the the single alpha the first one that we created right but you see how quick this is just to switch between between these brushes and these alphas um that one is actually quite quite all right right so very quickly we can just go ahead and change from a standard brush like the standard brush and make i don't know this could be like a brush to create pores in zbrush right and this is essentially how i go about creating my own custom brushes right now this is obviously super basic super simple we've just tweaked a few things in the in the stroke palette um a few things from the actual brush palette and some things in the alpha so those are pretty much the the three main elements or three main sections that we will be uh changing right the alpha the stroke and the actual settings of the brush but again this is super simple now we're going to go ahead and create something a bit more complex now that you know these sort of basic you know tools to create brushes we're going to do something a bit more complex for that scar scar brush so let's go ahead and jump right into it this is kind of like the second part of the tutorial i'm going to keep using this as a reference but i'm going to reset this standard brush so we can go to the brush palette and in here we have these two buttons to reset the current brush or all brushes i'm going to click on current brush so now it resets all the settings back to its original state so we have the same original standard brush and what i'm going to do is what i did at the beginning so i'm going to turn off the lazy mouse and if you want you can switch this c sub i think i'm going to leave it as c add for the time being and we're going to change the alpha okay so instead of using the alphas that we created that was just a demonstration of how quickly it is in series to create your own alphas but we're going to use something that come with zebras um let's let's try alpha 54 right so when you drag this one this is the type of effect that you get right pretty cool now the next two things that i want to show you that you can tweak is the roll distance as well as the orientation so i'm going to start with the roll distance just to show you what it does i'm going to draw one stroke in here and i'm going to take the roll distance and i'm going to go ahead and click on roll right so just to enable it that setting right here is on the stroke palette this one right here so it's the same the same switch so now what cyrus is doing is taking that alpha and he's rolling it so like if he was a you know like a roller to paint a wall right so in other words what is happening this is the alpha right and here sorry this is the kind of like the square where the alpha is located this is the actual alpha as soon as we enable this row what cirrus is doing is taking the whole placement or this whole square with the alpha and is just rolling it so that is how you can create tileable alphas in a way or tileable brushes so right now what we're doing is just duplicating that alpha like so right obviously it's happening um with less spacing but that's from a different setting that we're not going to look into because i'm interested in showing you some other stuff all right so i'm going to leave this one there and now i'm going to take that roll distance and i'm going to increase it by something crazy so that is pretty obvious something like let's go for six right and i can click and drag and this is completely different right so what we're getting now is if this is the alpha right and those are the dots in the alpha when you take this roll and then increase the roll distance series is going to roll so it's going to duplicate that but it's actually going to stretch the alpha so that's why you end up with something that looks like that all right so um these roll distance and this roll are pretty convenient when you're creating some some kind of like you know weird looking brush like i'm about to do all right so those are the things that we're going to be doing now this doesn't look anything like a scar brush and we're going to try to to make it look like a scar brush but you can use any alpha by the way i just want to show you that the you know i found that this one um works alright so you can use that that comes with zebras so the next thing that i would show you is the orientation and that is under the brush palette right an orientation is pretty cool i'm gonna open this one up and you'll see you have the spin center and the spin angle and the spin rate so let's have a look at what these sliders do sometimes it's just easy to just play around with them by the by default it should be at zero but if you take the speed center and change it to let's say spin center of uh three and you do the same thing you'll see that everything is happening kind of like away from my brush so in other words this spin center is sort of like pushing things away from the pivot of the of the stroke so i can do this and it sort of like spins around my keyboard or the center of my mouse i don't know if you saw that but basically it's just following me around like it would normally you know like the normal effect of the brush but it's sort of spinning around the the point so in other words if you have hopefully this is not too confusing so if you have the alpha there and this is this is the current alpha that we have um changing this spin orientation if we imagine like uh some kind of like pivot in the middle what we're doing is shifting this to this point for example right this is a an abstraction of this is not exactly what is happening this is an actual effect of the brush but i don't know this is an easy way to understand it so it's just just shifting that um that pivot so when you move your brush around right in this fashion what series is doing is taking the all the settings that we've been doing raw distance and all of that but it's spinning it around your brush right and this is the the p with the center where you have the um the the cursor so once again that's what it's doing right so i'm gonna reduce this quite a bit not in interested in changing the spin center but the spin angle would be more evident so the spin angle is is kind of like rotating that pivot that i just demonstrated so you'll see just by doing that it sort of like rotates that alpha you can exaggerate it a bit more and now we're starting to get something a lot more interesting in terms of what we want to achieve which is that sort of a scar tissue right and this is just like rotating or spinning that alpha on its own or on itself as we drag so that's pretty cool all right so i'm going to leave that one there another another stroke and also the sp the spin rate how fast is c versus spinning that alpha so at zero it was you know taking a while but if we set it to set it to three we get this spinning right so obviously it's just a matter of finding the right balance between all of these settings so let's just go ahead and go to another space here i think that's enough uh let's just reuse the spin right a little bit and decrease the spin angle again there's no like a like a formula as to okay i won't give you numbers exact numbers to put in here it's better to just experiment with those and i think this one is pretty cool right so it still doesn't look like a scar or anything but it's giving you something a bit more random more organic which is what we're looking for so i'm going to increase the roll distance a little bit more right so that's looking good and if you want to you can also turn off the roll so basically if you turn the roll off you still have the roll distance but series is not going to roll that alpha so you get a little bit more of overlapping so have a look at the difference here so this is with the roll this is without the roll so it's very subtle you can see in certain areas all right so the next thing i want to show you is in the modifiers so you go to the modifiers on the brush palette you have all these settings they're absolutely fantastic and they control the behavior of the brush or how the brush is applied so what i'll do is take these trails and enable let's say let's go for six trails trails are basically um instances of the brush so if i go ahead and do that you see everything is a lot more like you know a lot smoother than what it was before and that is because as i draw one stroke zeros is actually drawing six of those um you know strokes behind it so it's kind of like duplicating so when you increase the amount of trials and you know and this is not a this is not an exact number but it's a rule of thumbs i would say to decrease the intensity a little bit because you're actually adding six strokes in one right and again we can turn on the roll distance maybe we need more trails actually let's just go for 12 so it's pretty obvious all right not too bad so we're getting there so what i'll do now is start playing around again there's there's no an exact value that i can give you i'm just going to start playing with those values and see if i can find something that i like as well as modifying the spin angle and the spin rate so let's go for the spin rate increasing that so it's more more like a like a knot like this it's pretty cool when i reduce the spin angle so that it's less obvious and let's increase that roll distance quite a bit all right so we're getting somewhere and now what i'll do is reduce my intensity a little bit more so intensity of 12. okay we're good we're getting somewhere now so all i've done so far is play around with the roll distance just to stretch that alpha and play around with this spin and the spin angle and the spin uh the spin right to get something like this now the next thing that i want to do is change my focal shift so the focal shift is kind of like a fading between um let's see between this point and this point or this area of the brush right so if you have a [Music] an alpha that is just a square like that so imagine this is a new alpha and you change the focal shift what series is doing is kind of creating a fade between this point and the outer kind of like rims of this of this alpha so if i go ahead and right click and change my draw size just so that you can see more you see my focal shift is at zero if i change it to minus 92 you see that secondary circle that is kind of like in inside the brush get closer and that's basically encompassing more of the stroke but you will be able to see um you know some add effects you'll see more of that stroke right so it's a bit harsher so instead of that we can just go ahead and push it forward and create more of a fade right of the same alpha so now we get something that is a little bit more subtle which is pretty good i'm going to decrease the spin rate again and i'm just going to start playing around with those values again because it was a little bit too intense until i get something that works a bit better i think i'm going to set it to 2.5 and the spin ratio the spin angle sorry to 0.5 0.5 all right so i think this one is working fine now i can reduce my brush size and i'm also going to reduce the intensity a tiny bit and if i do one stroke this is the effect that we get right so this would be my brush to create a scar now this doesn't look exactly um you know doesn't look great so we can add a few more things but sometimes the effect of the brush in order to to generate something that is a bit more convincing is the way that you apply it so rather than just do like single motion what you can do is go back and forth because remember this brush sort of rotates or spins around so it allows you to sort of cover more more space so i'm gonna do the same thing going back and forth as well as sort of jiggling the line a little bit so just doing something like that and you know variating the pressure so by doing that you see the way that it's applied this is still a manual process of adding this sort of scar detail but the effect it's a lot more convincing so this is the reason why i wanted to show you this process and to show you this this particular effect of this car because you can create something that it's very very cool very convincing very organic but you shouldn't expect that the brush does all the the work for you right it's just a way to you know speed up the workflow really and now we have kind of like this scar tissue um yeah generated with a simple brush and that's pretty much it so i'm just going to do a quick recap of what i did and then i'll show you a couple more things about the the brushes in zebras so the first thing was to select the standard brush you can use any brush as a base but i found that the standard brush is for the most part the best way to to understand and get get started with the with the custom brushes in zebras so the standard brush i turn off the lacy mouse i turn on the roll distance and i set the roll distance let's set it to 7.5 just to round out that number i left the c add-on i selected alpha 54 right again you can use any alpha and i'll show you that in a second and in the brush palette under the modifiers and orientation i set the spin angle to 0.5 the spin rate to 2.5 and in the modifiers i enable the 12 trails so i just added 12 instances of that brush as i said once you have this brush all you have to do is create your own alphas and variate a bunch of different scar brushes so i'm going to select this alpha 53 let's see if that one gives us something interesting right so it give us a bit of a sharper effect right oh the other thing that i changed was the the focal shape right just to make it a bit sharper i quite like the alpha 54 brush just to create that scar you undo all of that and one more thing that you can do is obviously invert the effect so now this is sort of like pushing in and you sort of carving into the model right um and it's quite good the the effect i mean it's quite convincing it's just a matter of like i said how you applied that effect into into the mesh all right so let's just keep that add so and yeah so i'm happy with this effect so the next thing would be to save that brush so that you can build your your asset library so the first thing i would do is change the credits of that brush so let's go to the brush palette i'm going to turn this off and here on the brush palette you have this create palette so if you expand that out you can edit these brush settings obviously it's it's a standard brush but i you know customize it in a way that i can say this is kind of like my brush that um that i tweaked so you can click on edit credits you can give it you know you can put your name there or your studio name whatever you want and you can add a website right and then just click ok now to generate the icon for the brush what i'll do is just create one really quickly by selecting a new sphere making it a polymesh3d there we go and again i'm just gonna divide it a few times so that we can get a good you know a good effect decrease my brush size and this is going to be the scar brush so i'm just going to create a quite a big scar so that i recognize it the next time that i i want to use it all right that should be enough to recognize it as a scar brush and what i like to do is just change the material so i'm going to click on the toy plastic you can use any other shiny material i found them to be the the best option so the toy plastic is kind of like the default one that would look very similar to other brushes in xerox but you know you can use something like basic the mat cap anything you want so i'm gonna go to toy plastic go to the brush palette and here on the icon i'm just gonna click it once and as you can see it just gives me that icon based on what i have in the canvas now you can also load your own custom icon if you want to make it in photoshop all you have to do is press the alt key and click on select icon and that will bring up a browser that you can select all right so now that we have the icon as well as the credits we can go ahead and click on save as and that will give us our brush and we can just load it anytime that we want to all right and just to wrap up this video i'm going to show you one more thing that i think is really cool in terms of poly painting and using these brushes or these custom brushes as you know another tool to paint or poly paint a creature or a character so what i have here is obviously a brush that allows you to add a sculpted details right but if let's say select the skin shade 4 so that is easy to see i'm going to fill it with a kind of like a fleshy color fill object because this brush is actually using an alpha that has you know kind of like transparency in a way we can as long as we have this alpha enable we can also turn on the rgb right and these two switches are on the these uh draw palette right so you have the alpha right paint with an alpha and the rgb which is basically converting whatever you have in the brush as a painting brush so now not only i'm affecting the model but i'm also gonna be adding some some color so i'm just gonna select something like that so as i sculpt i'm also adding a little bit of color where the alpha you know with where the white values of the alpha are there we go right and also you can hold the shift key and if you hold the shift key you also see that the rgb is still enabled in this case so the the smooth brush is a way to smooth everything not just the details i'm going to reduce to a lower subdivision level so this fast but also a way to sort of blur out some of those details in the colors right so i just thought i i give you that extra tip because this is pretty handy and i know it could be very useful once you understand how things work all right so i'm going to leave this video here hopefully you have found it useful and if you like this type of assets i have a few uh packs online with custom brushes that i created for myself to detail skin or detailed creatures and that sort of thing and i'll put a link in the description of this video in case you're interested i'll see you next time cheers

Channel: Pablo Muñoz Gómez

Views: 3,902

Keywords: ZBrush, ZBrush brushes, custom brushes, ZBrush resources, 3D, 3D sculpting, ZBrush sculpting, Creatures, digital suculpting

Id: cDwyM18hFwY

Length: 32min 35sec (1955 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 28 2021