Your First ZBrush Sculpt

I guess handily Morton from flip normals in this video we are going to be taking you through one of your very first sculpt in ZBrush it's gonna be based on this very eloquent cave troll from water rings and we're just gonna be taking it very slowly so you know if you if you're reducing Seavers for like two years and you're complaining that we're going to slow this is video is not for you is meant for people who are very fresh to just getting into sculpting before we could start with that make sure to subscribe and hit the notification but just so you get notified every single time we put out new video we are going to be starting off the project by hitting first to sit in the coma key and then on our projects we have some dynamesh spheres we are going to use in the dynamesh sphere 128 so simply just double click this and this is gonna load up this project here this just means that we have a sphere already set up for us and we can start working on this we are gonna be using that using dynamesh as well which simply this means when we're sculpting like this and then you see we run out of resolution I hit shift F to get this I'm a controlled dragged outside we are now going to really meshing what we're working with so it's a good way for us to constantly add more of a solution to our our sphere so it's very this setup here is gonna be very nice simple we're gonna be enabling perspective and we're gonna be disabling the floor because that's just that's just annoying it anyway then we are also going to be using simple like two brushes or so we're probably gonna be sticking mostly to the clay below brush but then we're also going to be dealing a little bit with the move brush which you can access by hitting B and V the move brush just allows you to move stuff around and the clay brush which is B C B play build up allows you to work on top of this with these two brushes you can scroll basically anything you want to yeah it's pretty you know we get a lot of questions about that and I think especially as a beginner you tend to have a tendency to find the magic brush there is no magic brush and we try to keep it as simple as possible just to speed up the workflow but also because you know you don't really need a little brushes to get started this is the stuff we're sitting one day in day out from sculpting yeah so before doing this as well we are just going to be disabling the Alpha this just makes the brush a bit softer you can see here it's a bit harsh it has a lot of texture to it we're just going to be turning alpha off and then you get this way nicer stroke so a quick thing you might have noticed there is we can change the brush size the draw size of the brush you don't necessarily have to go up into the menu that's highlighted you can just get this by hitting the S key that is a shortcut for just that menu as the for size yeah and it's a really quick way to change the brush size then we also could be enabling symmetry by hitting the X key or I'm just clicking this button so we're gonna be we're just building this up very slowly we are going to be starting off just by getting some cavities for for the eye the mouth and maybe the nose as well before you you you know totally panic about the references this is a program called pure ref pure as in pure and ref as in reference that just lives on top of our UI it's a free software that you can just go and download by just googling pure ref it's absolutely fantastic and we talked about this way too much but it's really that good so let's just get started with this we are going to be holding down the alt just so we can get the opposite effect if a regular just with a sculpting with the tablet it gives pushes outwards then the old K pushes inwards so this is just gonna give us distant holes which we can just keep sculpting I'm just holding in circular patterns here just to get this nice little rounded feel and this is gonna be basically where we're gonna be putting the eyes into it yeah and many people have a ask us of like what do we need in terms of like a tablet and mouse is it possible to sculpt with a mouse and generally we default to no I mean technically it is possible to sculpt with a mouse but you're just gonna get a way better result using a tablet yeah so you know starting off with something like that cheap or cheaper Wacom Bamboo it's always a good option yeah they're pretty pretty damn good as well so just hold on the Alt key and just scope the end some nostrils as well for the notes gonna go and then we can just not hold on the old cane which is work over the surface a little bit yes this alternating between alt and not holding alt is you know the bread and butter of doing this kind of sculpting yeah and if you are unsure how see brush actually works like if you if you don't have the basics down we have a free tutorial on this as well on our youtube channel which is available for everyone yeah it's such for introduction to ZBrush for beginners I believe yeah hold on the old kiss well and now we're just gonna get some screaming he is very mad and if it takes you some time to get down with strokes don't worry about it you know it this this just takes some time to get use to in the beginning now it loans to see if we had the shift F key but we're running out of a solution here so what we can do is we working with dynamesh now we can control drag outside and now you can see that we get more resolution in this area yeah so that's just you hold down the ctrl key and you know click on your canvas and drag and that release makes new topology on your mesh and then we can just put in some basic skeletal features this is just gonna be some some cheekbones so we can just sculpt this on top and then we can continue this further back the more you know but Anatomy the easier this is gonna be and you know seeing as this is probably your first of one of your first sculpt dealing with a lot of anatomy on top of you know short cuts and getting a handle for how severs actually works can be quite challenging but it's really about practice like the more you do these kinds of studies the more you look into Anatomy the more second nature it just becomes the keynotes give him a tiny little ear around here as well just teeny-tiny year just a tiny troller tiny troll here and so far you can see we're only using one brush with sculpting out with us and then just in if I hold the Alt key just very nice and simple then we can also sculpt some bones going over his eyes as well just just put the tablet just moving over like this I will always try to get the feeling down as early as possible what I want like this guy here is a bad guy so you know we just we just call ting we just go up and down so that he looks at the bad like this because you don't wanna if you're doing this he's gonna have way too kind and scared so I just prefer to get the feeling I want the character to have right in the beginning and as a basic sculpting principle or basic design principle when it comes to creating a character like this obviously we're going for something that's like menacing disgusting not something very happy not someone you want as a friend no you know it so you have to treat the strokes and the way you're sculpting in the same way you sort of feel about the character you want it to be unpleasant you want it to be a harder kind of character so it's very important that you try to translate that into your brushes as well yeah that takes some time to get used to but you know you'll get there and then we're just getting in some basic jaw line for him I'm always rotating around quite a lot as well just so you can see from all angles it's actually interesting when we look at it's sort of like sped up versions of ourselves sculpting there's a lot of going in going out rotating around so it can be kind of hard to look at time lapse something but that's a really good tip especially when you're starting out is not trying to focus on one area too much but also viewing your work at a distance because that just helps you evaluate the piece a little bit better it's easy to get caught up in the details if you you know you just look at the nostrils for like two hours yeah it really is and also don't worry about speed really if you if you're struggling with getting to this level I currently have don't worry about it just take your time it takes time to become a decent sculptor yeah so let's just use the move brush now now have some some elements and let's just start to move them around be an MV for brush move and we and then we just gonna look at a reference and we're just going to see if we can make the proportions just a bit better here so first we need just to move the nose up a little bit and then we're gonna move the eyes down a little bit like so yeah so like when you're first when you're initially just putting in the first kind of landmarks they don't have to be spot-on the important thing is just that they exist yeah once you go in with your move brush you can always tweak things around so that the beautiful beautiful thing about sculpting digitally it's a lot easier to manipulate than if you're sculpting in real life it really is you can see from the site that he's going a bit it's just looking downward and this isn't this is simply just because we haven't really looked at young women you're looking at a sphere we haven't really had all thought about his volumes so what we can do just move getting a big brush size look at the side view you can snap to the front and sideways but hold on is Shift key and just moving it around that's really handy so now we can just move this entire around here like this yeah he's missing a bit of a chin and a jaw yeah those little things yeah pretty important when he's a big menacing monster so I'm just trying to get this nice curve of the mouth as well because now you can see it goes it goes like this around and I just want to move this in here it will say if you've been sculpting a little bit in severs beforehand you'll notice in that theory so there's a brush called a smooth brush which you can actuate a whole image Shift key we aren't really using that brush at all in this case it's it just removes the foam for it like this so we really aren't gonna be sticking with this brush at all the smooth brush is excellent excited for what hanging mentioned there you want to destroy detail you know you want to take things back a step smooth brush is excellent for that because it just allows you to basically erase things but it can also sometimes it can be a little bit detrimental that it actually smooths out your details too much you just want to be a little careful with using it so now you can see all right now we're getting character into it obviously it's still incredibly rough but you can still see the you know we're getting we're getting some of this character in here and what I'm looking at now is I'm just looking at the shape of the eye I'm just trying to get this shape here to be a little bit more true to reference yeah he really has like this kind of fish eyes that stick out a lot and very deep cheeks big big chin and big jaw and very very thick problems the more I'm learning what sculpting is well the more I'm simplifying my approach I used to always be like you know you need all the crazy brushes it's always like the next brush here you can see you know we're just already getting something which resembles it and we've been using literally two brushes for this entire thing so even like getting something like the on the ears as well you know we don't have to sculpt it and we can just use the move brush just use the move brush just to get this the shape right and you know just really keep it simple this simply you can keep your tools to better lists because that means you're not getting confused by the tool because honestly ZBrush is really confusing for a beginner if you were struggling right now and you're kind of like wanted throw it out the window like we get you yeah we were there like daily yeah you take a little bit of a break from ZBrush you come back to it after a few weeks you've gotten half of it already it is something you just have to keep on top of unfortunately and what I'm trying to do as well as also keeping really clean shapes like here I'm trying to keep this is a nice curve and I'm trying to keep this here as a nice curve as well so you have the eyes going out and then meeting this point and then just having this as a nice curve there's really just keeping everything as nice simple curves it's gonna make your life a lot easier yeah but also look at reference whatever is you're doing just look at reference all the time because that is probably number one beginner mistake we're seeing that people aren't being true to reference this is also such a cool design like the it's like the super late 90s early 2000 CD as well it holds up really well even today yeah it's like when you look at the original Jumanji no I limp did an amazing job at that as well now one area which is really bothering me now is this region here is I just want to refine this so I'm just going to go back to the clay brush PCB and then we can just hold on the Alt key and just working this region here up a little bit this hole on the Alt key this sculpt in this town is making this nice clean shapes I notice that we haven't added teeth or eyeballs or anything here like you know we're just keeping it simple we haven't even added the eyelids yet but it's really keeping this simple because if the scope doesn't work at this stage then it's it's never going to work like if you start adding fanta stuff right away then you already you alright you far like this shape here is all we're a bit too advanced I'm just gonna I'm just gonna simplify it a bit down just making a nice strong shape now that's the nice thing about using a brush is that you can vary your stroke by you know varying your pressure yeah so the harder you press the more rest of the stroke was gonna be and vice versa and we just keep going between constantly between sculpting additively meaning you're sculpting like this and sculpting subtractive lis which means you're sculpting like this it's kind of like I'm sculpting with this like now and then I'm just hold on the Alt key and sculpting in and then holding not hold down the Alt key and sculpting out it is a constant thing yeah I'm really getting into sculpting is just it's a lifelong pursuit I think really you know because you're constantly learning things about form how things go too well together on a face I make interesting contrast between the shapes so there's just something to learn at every step in the way so whatever when you're doing this and you know if you're if you're working on this golf now and it's really one of your first codes make sure you save the progress make sure you save them the tool somewhere or screenshots off it and you go back to it later on because then you couldn't be able to see your insane progress because it's really used to become demotivated after a while yeah we can also just read an omission or just is control-drag outside and then we can you see we get some slightly more even topology so already now we're getting to a point where you know we can good clean shapes and this again is after a two brushes this can some slight more definition here into it now I'm just hold on a shift key just to smooth out the shapes a little bit if you you know that's up to you if you want to do that I want to get this brow thing here whatever this is it's pretty pretty funky in terms of anatomy but I just want to get some of this in here I made up stuff yeah looks like they have a freestyle not to me a little bit here yeah it looks pretty cool so it looks like he can Ram this head into something yeah yeah a little hard so it's like it's you wouldn't see this on like a monkey so whatever is but they were also not rounding their head center stuff so we also have a video called sculpting like a pro and super which goes over sculpt and technique more specifically which talks about a bit more about how to build up volume because there is no way we can cover everything you need in you know in this quick video this is really like an introduction to it and then you know you just need to refine this for more advanced techniques we can also discuss it aside you I can hold on a shift key and then we can use B and V for move and we must make this a bit cleaner I like to exaggerate some of these shapes a little bit just so there they read a bit better maybe is the back of a set is also better crease you know we're not going to do any of it or any neck or anything on that I'm just gonna keep it simple move this entire shape in like this so it's also really important to look at the head shape and not just look at the face because if you're just looking at the face then it's incredibly easy to to have a beautifully sculpted ears and ice and whatnot but you have really terrible like a you have really terrible silhouettes for your for your character it's kind of reminiscent of when people do portraiture join in the beginning oftentimes day they don't have the ability to perceive like volume and perspective yet yeah so it's very easy to get caught up in you know the contrasting details like drawing the eyes or doing the hair doing the mouth because that's the thing that you're like the most trained biologically like from picking out but the more you do this the better you become at perceiving form and shape give it some slightly to point your eyes here it's a bit too goblin like you wanna make it a bit of rounder but again only with the move brush because once this is working then you can go in and you can really add details with with other brushes as well one brush you might want to check out is called damn standard which is amazing we aren't don't really think we're gonna be using it here but that's one you can use to really get sharpness to things but honestly for the majority of all the sculpting I ever do I stick to I stick to like three brushes and that's that let's not just us that's like the majority of all of all sculptors out there like there are some would use some fancy ones but there are there are far too many person deceivers they should really reduce them like it had a garage them I could load them in if you need them yeah exactly and also just in terms of pure anatomy on the face you know there's there's so much to cover and I think one of the only ways to really get better at it is just to do face studies you know one thing is obviously doing a creature but another thing is also doing a person and the more you do I think the more you do people the more you get sort of grounded in real Anatomy and that really teaches you how to break the rules of of anatomy and then create something like a cave troll like I've really learned how to sculpt a cave cave Travis Corpening real humans yeah now we can sculpt the the eyelids as well and I prefer to do this by using actually named brush standard brush B as T standard brush is fantastic and it's often very overlooked this is very simple like claybuildup does a lot of fancy stuff like that builds up volumes satin brush simply takes the points and just moves them out so very simple stuff it just you just do a stroke and you get it's kind of like a pen brush in some other software if you're just doing with 2d like it doesn't do anything fancy at all that's what you need that's what you need keep stuff simple mm-hmm we have some more tutorials as following sculpting realistic faces which might be really useful for you because that that then we recover a lot of things which you aren't covering here like you know specific and not to me and all that so to in order to create these shapes you know you can see here just quickly just sort of relative slowly just working over the shape and it's incredibly low poly you know you can see we have like forty seven thousand points it's very very low poly and often one of the things we talk about here as well as that if you try to keep it low poly for as long as you can that really forces you to not look at the details and it's a good exercise to you know take with you you know it creates a good foundation for your sculpting career going forward I think yeah everyone is raging or receiver so you can have a kabillion poly sanity is irrelevant what you need is you need like a million and do it well mm-hmm we can also use the standard brush that's a bit more just to get some more definition for instance we want like um like a nice little fold going down here you can see in some of the survey's references like here we have this nice little fold called a nasolabial fold let's just do it from the same angle and then we can just hold on the Alt key and we can just sculpt it down like this there's almost like you're cutting into the mesh now yeah exactly this is something you see a lot in humans as well basically every single human has this to some degree or not or another so we're gonna sculpt and you see another wrinkle here as well I just want to create some light supporting shapes for this now you can see it's just getting a little bit more realistic we can go over the nose as well with the damn standard OS with a standard brush and it's really working up the shape moving in and moving out as well get some sharpness of the lips as well the corner of the mouth and that's again where you wanna you want to go in and out evaluate what you're doing so that you never end up in a place where part of your mesh is a lot more detail than other parts know so now we're getting into a pretty decent level in terms of features now we can we can disable dynamesh we can just simply just hit control D we go on a geometry and then we go under dynamesh and dynamesh disable this and then we can now we can start subdividing it we can do this by hitting ctrl d and i can see that we we increase the poly count by four and we get another sub version of all this means that we can never up and down in levels by going here or hitting the d and shifty button you can divide it by hitting ctrl d as well to get even more resolution this is one the main strengths of c brush because it means that you can you can just keep on going and it really really crisp resolutions so back to the clay build a brush and now we can just go in and we can just work up some of these volumes the way i'm smoothing it out now you can see that if it looks kind of like I'm smoothing it I'm this hole on the Alt key and is working across the shape I'm working like this across the shape just with a really low pressure but importantly still using the claybuildup brush yes this way we kind of ensure that we stick to the form and we don't destroy it too much with the smooth brush that's very important only disable dynamesh once your main parts are ready so like if you need to add like a neck to this and a body you know that's that's too late now then you got a dis delete your subdivision levels and remake it into dynamesh so my way of working with this I like to really work across the form I want some more volume here I'm not gonna work like this I'm going to work like I'm going to work like this this is just my personal preference but it really means I'm controlling the shape while one what and you get this really nice texture as well [Music] so I'm considering this like a refinement pass or I'm just really going over everything and just refining it and the thing is will sculpt like this you can keep working forever with it like there is no point you're gonna go yeah that is it sculpt is done completely done like for the scope they did it wetter for for the for the cave troll you know that's probably taking years these months and months and months to do yeah and little the feedback round back and forth design has probably changed quite a lot today so it's a long process when you're designing characters and creatures for four films or games really Asst here it looks like it doesn't really have defined lips it's more like a hole which goes into it so I'll just try to get a little bit of that just working across a little bit mmm this just like this is not a refined creature which is like smacking his lips and drinking drinking fine wine this here is he's he's just getting food into his mouth yeah he's really missing an upper lip but there's a lot of volume up there yeah but a lower lip is has that flappy boxer up and hit in the face that kind of lip exactly every single stroke I'm doing also has a purpose I'm not just randomly going over it like it's it might look like I'm sculpting fast here I'm grouchy sculpting deliberately like this is you're just putting down a store because you want to volume specifically now I want to I want more volume which goes in here so then I'll just slowly just work it up with it just a few strokes if the stroke doesn't do anything then I'm not gonna do it there is no point at all in in doing strokes just for doing it you don't want brush strokes because it's cool you want volume because the volume helps serving have to serve the model : the Alt key and just bringing some more volume here I really like to get some more volume in here as well or to get some more like a cavity in here yeah that really helps us you know selling that more in the end Athol look where you recess the eyes and put them deep in the socket just getting like some heavy wrinkles as well for the eyes and this is the kind of thing like the kind of detail that you know how to put down with more practice you know the more studies you do the more reference you look at and more you're just gonna be exposed to different kinds of faces and see what really sticks out is there's always going to be stuff that repeats on on a human face obviously there's a lot of individual variation you know the way the the cheekbones connect to the back of the ear in the jaw and the way a brow looks the basics of how the face works they will always stay the same and once you start to master that that's when you can start to play with the proportions of it and and really make it your own so it's a little bit hard to sculpt and talk at the same time yeah that's just the way it is you know once you once you start entering that sculpt mode is the same thing happens for me you just you just tend to focus on the actual sculpting instead yeah and sometimes the commentary that's what we do here one thing which is really nice as well to keep in mind when you're sculpting is that you have bony bits and you have softer bits so bony bits this is like the scale from which it goes under that would be like this kind of stuff this here is really really hard and if you were to hit it like you were to feel this on your own your own head would feel is really soft then you have areas like this like are on the eyes which is really soft and I tend to treat them very differently I talk to treat it here it's like it'll just looks harder I have a look at it we'll talk more tomorrow before like you treated different there's a stroke quality because this is this is bone and this part this is flesh so I just make this softer and I make this harder which and the contrast between this makes it quite nice yeah anything that is soft you want to treat it softly with your your brush and and vice versa and the second reference it's not because I mean this is something you can just keep on going forever with so you're just looking and seems there are some more final things here I think I just want to move the ice shape the ice a little bit more and make them a bit more angular be and the movement to move brush because he looks a bit droopy now let's just move has I up a little bit and now it looks ten percent more evil if you want to make something look more evil then you make his their eyes really small and more angular you'll make cute you make them like this make them begin yeah it also has an added bonus that you know if you make your eyes smaller like this we have a tendency to look little less intelligence sometimes and especially if you spaced and further apart you often see this in cartoons or animated films where evil people also tend to have a smaller pupil it just gives all this evil impression bigger pupils obviously looks cuter and then you approach more anime territory at some point be careful with that if you're doing the carrot like this is far for personal project I wouldn't look too much about specifically at these kind of references even if I'm doing a cave troll sure I'll still have them up what it would look at it would be like gorillas or real world things which are similar to this because it's it's so easy to just get stuck in this and this is this is not very defined it's like it's pretty cool but you want some more specific reference like real world stuff so I always try to look at the real world where ever possible so this is also where we you know we would ideally put place in an eye and some teeth as well but you know we got just finished this is almost another 45 minutes to it so really last thing I would do here is I would break symmetry look you see you you know he asked like a little snarl so what are we gonna do there we can go up to transform activate symmetry all right 2x key and now we can just really just like making nice this is this is going to add quite a lot of character to him I often like I often put my I put myself in front of the mirror and I just do this kind of stuff and I would just go you could screaming like ah yeah it helps quite a lot actually have a mirror yeah hide your desk you know so just you know moved one ear up a little bit maybe maybe he's been bitten so he's missing a piece here Frodo stabbed him in his ear yeah he had a piercing when he was a teenager rebel rebel troll yeah especially symmetry symmetry something that you can really add a lot of character and even even if you add just a slight bit of symmetry it doesn't actually have to be all that much all the time obviously when you have something that's really messed up like control here you can really play around with how much symmetry start to break but even in regular phases when you do scopes of men women kids whatever it is there's a surprising amount of a symmetry in the face actually it really is really interesting once we do see scans so people photos don't really do it justice because they the lighting just makes it look weird even if it's a perfectly symmetrical face it just looks weird because the lighting but scans really show that how wonky people are yeah so I also prefer to do this go in and like actually sculpt each eye by itself adds more character to it just you know really go in and just make this nice unique you see your hands like some of these wrinkles which go around the nose maybe we can add a little bit of that just to add some stock variation to it now that's again where the standard brush comes in that's it's like Henning said is an underrated brush yeah ironic because it is the standard brush and see brush but I think because it is that people tend to go away from it because they are looking for the magic brush solution but the standard brush has a lot of really good uses so yeah this is this is pretty much how you do how we sculpt anything you're starting from very simple very very simple piece of geometry you start just carving in the eyes you carve in the mouth you added a little thing here for for the ear and then you just work it up and refine it you know keep in mind that we have the Morton reference throughout the entire thing and that's not just to help you that's to help me when sculpting because if I were to freestyle something this is just significantly hard to sculpt with a reference so you know we keep talking about this and basically all our videos but you know if you want to if you want to sculpt anything get some awesome reference and just sculpt with that and if you're interested in learning more about sculpting we have a lot of free videos on our youtube channel where we cover a lot we also have some more premium tutorials as well which cover sculpting a male and a female face sculpting like very specific eye areas like the eyes the mouth the nose whatever and that that's really relevant even if you're sculpting characters like cave troll whatever yes we really hoped you would enjoy this video and if you want to see more content like this in the future make sure to like comment and subscribe and hit the notification bell as well to get notified every time new video you

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 78,308

Rating: 4.9669943 out of 5

Keywords: 3d, sculpting, zbrush, concept, maya, tutorial, autodesk, film, vfx, animation, flippednormals, henning sanden, morten jaeger, creature, character, texturing, substance painter, substance designer, education, foundry, pixologic, nuke, art, fundamentals, art fundamentals, art school, art tutorials, blender, flipped normals, 3d tutorial, learning 3d, learning ZBrush, 3ds max, cubebrush, cube brush, gumroad, marvelous designer, photoshop, mari, blender guru, free tutorial, cgi, cg, computer graphics

Id: rGFBd6YmJ7c

Length: 32min 40sec (1960 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 03 2019