Zbrush 2021 Course for Absolute Beginners : Skillshare Class

hi guys welcome to zbrush 2021 for absolute beginners my name is abraham lille and i'm going to be your instructor throughout this series so let's jump right into it welcome to zbrush this is the first kind of windows that you're going to get the first time you open zbrush this window right here is just a basic news window where you're going to see tutorials news all about the updates and stuff i suggest taking a look every now and then just to see what's up with the with the zbrush world but other than that you can just close it and this my friends is the first time you're gonna see this interface now the interface in zbrush it's a rather complicated thing to work with at first it's gonna be a little bit confusing because it doesn't work like any other software it's it's it's its own unique like monster so i'm gonna be guiding you through the main windows and panels that we have in this um in the setup in this interface so that you feel comfortable with moving and modifying anything in here so you need to know that zbrush is of course a sculpting software you probably got into this video because you want to learn how to sculpt creatures monsters even vehicles hard surface stuff environments and any other kind of things and zebras is going to be the best software to do so so uh first things first this thing right here is called the light box and it's sort of like a navigator it's like explore it's like windows explorer you know when you open your your file folder and you can explore all your files well it's the exact same thing but for zebra stuff so if you want to see what the brush looks like what the models looks like this is going to be the way to do it through the light box right here you can pretty much navigate as you can see any part of your windows environment and you should be able to find whatever you're looking for now in our case we're going to be using this dynamesh 128 sphere to start working but before i do that let me show you what happens if we don't select anything and if we just try to sculpt right away by hiding or by pressing this button you're going to hide the light box and this is your canvas this is the place where we're going to be working now more often than not people that start working with zebras they they want to start sculpting and they do this right you start drawing like these really really weird shapes in here and you're wondering where the hell is my face or my sphere or how how can i start sculpting my my monsters right and the reason you're seeing this is because zebras is a software hat that has been built through several years on top of updates and updates and updates and this thing right here is the the beginnings of super cbrush was originally conceived as a 2.5 d painting program and it later evolved into a sculpting program so this interface right here and this affects the juicing right here they have to do with the 2d side of zippers the 2.5 d so all of this painting tools right there you can see here 2.5 dc brushes all of these things work with this kind of environment but that's not what we're going to be working we're going to be working on the 3d side of things so to clean this up just hit ctrl n and that's going to clean your canvas you're then going to go into lightbox and you're going to select uh your first project which is going to be this dynamesh sphere 128. i'm going to explain what that means in just a second so i'm gonna double click i'm gonna say no i don't want to save anything and there we go we're finally here now first things first you need to know how to move inside of zebras for this you of course are gonna need a wacom tablet so every every time i say click or tap or whatever indication i do in regards to navigation it's going to be in regards to using a tablet you definitely need a tablet because tablets have a pressure sensitivity that you can use to have a better management of your um of your sculpture so you definitely want one of this doesn't have to be the most expensive one you don't need a cintiq you don't need like a super advanced one it can be even the most basic like wacom tablet which should be about 60 bucks and uh and that should be more than enough for you i personally am using one of this which is the intuos pro um and um i find that this one really reliable i've had mine for more than five years so um it's it's really really sturdy and really really durable there's other brands like huion that's another one that you can get this i believe are chinese and they're good as well i've had some students use them and they're actually really good and there's another one called xp pen so they are kind of like mid-range or low-range kind of tablets but they they work for the same purpose the only thing is sometimes the the pens need to be recharged or they use batteries or something but um other than that they work fine now here in regards to my movement i'm gonna move my cursor outside of my object i'm gonna tap outside and i'm gonna drag the element and what this is going to do you can see it on the little head right there on the top right corner it's going to move the camera it's going to rotate the camera around so whenever i press that's going to be kind of like my pivot point and i'm going to be rotating my camera around now this rotation is really important because this is what's going to allow us to go to the side view of the character to the front view of the character and modify any things or any kind of thing that we need now if you feel lost by doing this you can always go here to the little head and you can move the head around and it's going to do the same thing so this is like a little gizmo that you can use to um to locate the specific plane that you want to work on now if you're moving your camera to the side and you want to snap the view if you're used to 3d programs having like perfect orthographic views you can just start dragging press shift and then drop your tablet uh pen and drop the shift and that's gonna keep you on the side as you can see here so i start i start moving up i press shift it's gonna snap to the top i drop the mouse or the tablet rather and i drop the shift key and i'm going to be on the top view which is going to be the movement so those are the two rotation elements the next one is the pan i want to move left and right i want to move the camera left and right and top to bottom and that one's actually really really simple you're going to press your alt key you're going to press outside of the interface and you're going to move up sorry up and down left and right and that's going to be your uh your main movement okay so again pressing and dragging its rotation alt pressing and moving up and out is panning and finally it's the zoom how do i zoom in and out of my of my element right and this one is the one that gets people a little bit confused because it's like a street fighter combo you need to do a series of presses on some buttons to make it work so it's alt click with your tablet you drop the alt but you still click with your tablet and then you move up and down or left and right okay so again alt click with your tablet drop the alt and then just move up and down and that's going to be your zoom if you do it wrong what's going to happen if you if you for instance press alt and then click with your tablet and then drop the tablet and drop the alt nothing is going to happen so make sure to press alt click outside the object drop the alt and then just move up and down okay once you get used to it it's going to be really really fast and you're going to be able to zoom in and out of the element if for any reason you get lost you lose your object you don't know where the object is anymore press your letter f as in frame and that's going to frame your object in the center and then you can just like move the little head right here to go to the front view or move around with the navigation that i just showed you if for any reason all of these shortcuts are a little bit difficult for you at first don't worry you can always go to this four buttons right here which is the frame move zoom and rotate and if you press the button and move around it's going to be the same exact thing okay so if you find the shortcuts a little bit difficult the alt and the shift you can always go to this buttons right here perfect now let's take a quick look at the interface this video is just an introduction to so you know where to find things and then in the next couple of videos we're going to start with our first exercise the way this whole series is structure is we're going to have a series of small exercises that should take you about an hour maximum two hours depending on your skill level and after that we're going to do a full project but in order for us to get that we're going to be building our skills up up to that level so up here we have as with any software the main menus alpha brush color document draw dynamics all of this one of the most important ones is this one the tool menu now you can see when i press the tool menu this whole bar over here shifts and goes all the way over here and the reason is this bar is actually snapped to this place so if you press this little white button here on the corner you're gonna delete this bar from here and you can select any bar that you want here and if you drag and drop this you can place it exactly where you want so zbrush is a very customizable software we're actually going to be customizing our um our interface in a couple of videos and later on in the series so that you can get the best buttons in the best places right so the tool menu is one of the most important tools i always have it here on the side because it's really really useful but there are others that are actually really really useful like the light buttons or the light menu you can always drag and drop any of these menus into this sidebar and you're going to be able to snap them to pretty much position them in this area so that you can more quickly select or modify anything in the in the menus and stuff we're going to be exploring all of these things later on so all the menus up here next we have the most common buttons you can see the home page is the thing we talked about before where you can see some news sometimes they share tutorials or classes they highlight the best portfolios from artists around the world so it's a really good place to to check out it's kind of like a social media thing the light box as we mentioned is where you check all the projects all the tools brushes alphas and stuff we're going to be using this quite extensively live boolean is an option that we're going to be using later it's a it's an operation method that allows us to do some hard surface stuff very very nicely and then we have all of these elements in maya you know or in 3d studio max any software that you use you have your movement key your scale key your rotate key well we have the same thing here you can press any of these things and you're gonna see that this gizmo appears on the middle of the sphere right now we don't want any of those so we're gonna keep it in the draw section in here we're going to start talking about the brushes and how the brushes work here in zebras now you probably seen before if you're if you're looking to see brush that this software has a lot of brushes so this button right here opens the brush palette and all of these brushes are the ones that we're going to be using don't worry you don't need to learn all of them some of them are really really specialized and you probably will never use them like i don't think i've ever used like i don't know like the hatchbrush i don't remember using it or the snake cactus it's not something that i normally use but they're there for you in case you need them it's always a good idea to just play around and see if they work for something specific that you're looking for now uh deep brushes for instance right now i have this standard brush allows me to modify the sphere that i have here this sphere is made out of something called polygons polygons if i press this little button right here are small squares and triangles that make up the surface of this thing right here so what the brushes do is that brushes will push or pull the polygons depending on how they are programmed in order to create a change in the form and in the silhouette of our object so for instance the standard brush if i just start drawing it's going to add a form it's going to add this nice little squiggly lines that i'm painting i'm of course painting them with my tablet and this will allow me to pretty much create anything that i want we're going to be covering some basic sculpting forms and techniques later on but right now just be sure to understand that this brush will modify the surface now how can we modify this brush well we have the first option c add and c sub c hat is adding volume it's pushing the surface towards the outside of the object so it's grabbing it and pushing it towards the top if i change this to c sub it's going to do the opposite it's going to start carving into the into the object right so we're going to be able to move inside the object and again do changes now in order for us not to be switching these things right here you can always just press your alt key and you can see that now my cursor has this little negative sign on the on the crosshatch and uh this will allow me to do the opposite of what i have selected so if i have selected the c add i'm going to be doing dc sub and if i have selected the c sub i am going to be doing the c add operation okay now uh let's keep cf c intensity very obvious the more intense you do the more extreme the change or the the modification is going to be the more uh or the lower the value the softer the modification is going to be now keep in mind that this also is affected by the way you press on your tablet if you press really really really hard like this you're going to see that you're going to get like a very extreme variation very extreme silhouette if you press very very very softly like this you're gonna see that we're gonna have a very soft transition so controlling the pressure on your tablet and controlling the intensity of the brush are gonna be the two keys to modify the way we uh sculpt on our objects focal shift has to do with the hardness of the brush let me see if i can explain if you have experience with photoshop this has to do kind of like the hardness so if i bring the focal shift out you can see that the two circles are now very close together so the border of the brush is going to be very very defined you can see it right there and if i move my focal shift down and i have the the two circles very far apart you're going to see that the transition is going to be very very soft so it is kind of affecting the size of the brush but it's not the size per se it's rather like a falloff that we have on the on the inner side of the brush so again not something that they usually change but sometimes for instance for this kind of thing it's it's it's nice to have and finally the draw size now draw size is really important because the bigger the brush of course the bigger the modification or the the influence that it's going to have on the object the smaller the brush the smaller the um the effect so a couple of quick ways to change these things again without having to go all the way to the top and modifying them to change the size you can press your letter s on your keyboard and then just drag and change to the side and as soon as you select a new size this thing is going to disappear automatically so you can see it's gone so s moved to the new size it's gone s move to the new size it's gone so very handy for the intensity i believe there is a shortcut i usually don't use it because the letter is really far away which is the u shortcut so same thing you can just change this and it's gonna modify it i personally prefer to use the space bar if you press the space bar you're gonna see that we get all of these elements and more things over here that you're going to be able to change and no matter where you press your space bar the square is going to appear on that specific area so it's really really important that we um that we select the proper place right so in here i can change draw size i can change focus if i can change intensity all in one single shark and as soon as you stop pressing your space bar you're gonna get this if you press it just once nothing's gonna happen you have to press and hold and then just modify whatever you need and you're gonna be fine now cool thing about zbrush once you start the session every single thing that you've done in that session will be stored in something called the undo history you can see it right here so i started right here and i can move this thing all the way to the to the first square and it's pretty much as if i am erasing everything and this can also be controlled with ctrl c so if you do a lot of control c's you're going to be able to jump back and forth now let's move very quickly to the next part before we we close this video which is this a couple of things right here let's start from top to bottom so in here we have the color of the object if you are sculpting i don't know like a goblin or something you can select like a greenish color and you're gonna get a more closer look of how the skin is gonna look at the end right it's not really important any good sculpture should be able to sculpt everything with just like the basic uh gray material but it's it's it's good to have i strongly recommend against using matte caps now this thing right here is the material of the sphere mat caps are materials that are supposed to imitate in a very exact way although sometimes they don't the materials in the real world so for instance if i grab this shiny material it's supposed to be like like a metal but sometimes and you can see it right here you're going to be able to see each individual square and it might distract you from the from the from the core principles of sculpting so i strongly suggest that you use the basic material for now however later on if you want to change the material to any other material do it the only one i'm gonna i'm gonna forbid is this one the red cap material it's horrible it's horrible because when you start sculpting you're gonna see how we get those very ugly gray lines on every single line of the polygons so sometimes this is the default material change it just go here for instance the basic material and if you really like this one you can just save this as a starter material and that's going to be your material every time you open zebras i'm going to show you later on some other materials for instance i have this one which is like a lighter gray um and it will give you a very similar result to what we're gonna be doing but uh that's gonna come later on when we customize the whole thing right now i'm gonna work with the basic material so that we're all on the same page textures not something that we're going to use you can see they're really really ugly textures they look like windows 98 textures so horrible horrible we're not going to be using we are going to be texturing our characters later on using a technique called polypaint but that's going to come later again and we're not going to be using these things alphas and stroke now this is important the stroke is the way that our brush is being dragged on top of the surface so usually the brushes are going to be either dots which is the one that we have which is a lot of very close dots that create a line you can have freehand which is very similar you're going to see later on how the dots differ a little bit and then you can have something like the spray brush right like the spray what's going to do is instead of doing a line it's going to do like a spray so again things that we can use to change the surface and the the sculpture of our characters the two important ones are drag direct and drag dot this ones are important because they work a little bit different differently than the other ones so let me explain drag rect works better when you have an alpha and an alpha just to finish this small lesson is the tip of your brush so let's go back to a dots real quick let's grab like the arrow if i have the arrow selected and i am in the dot stroke when i draw instead of drawing dots i'm going to draw arrows you can see it right there okay and this is very useful when we want to do some very specific details like i don't know scales or wrinkles that have very specific shapes and stuff well this having a different type of alpha on the on the brush is going to give us a very interesting detail that we can use to our advantage however if you change this to drag rig what's going to happen is instead of doing a line you're going to drag one single entity or one single instance of this alpha and you're gonna drag it and define how big or small you want this to be on the surface which is really handy as you can see we can draw like a big line imagine if we're doing like i don't know like airbender the avatar and we wanted to draw like the arrow on his forehead this would be one very easy way to do so because we can just drag and drop the arrow where wherever we want now the trick with drag direct is once you decide where you're going to position it the only other thing you can decide is the size of the position or the size of the object the other drag stroke which is drag dot is slightly different you select the size by doing the size on your brush and once you know the proper size then you position the thing where you want this to be so as you can see they are kind of similar because they they won't behave like the like the line or the free stroke but they will um they each have their own utility right so drag dot drag direct a really really important thing and that's it guys this is the brushes that we're going to be using the strokes that are going to modify how the brush the brush is applied to the object and then the alphas which are going to be the tip of the brush so depending on which alpha you have your brush is going to behave differently of course and that's all you need to know for this first video this is just an introduction this is just like the general overview of what we have here in seabrush in the next video we're going to start working with our first assignment with our first project and hopefully you uh will be able to learn i strongly recommend you take a couple of minutes probably like 10 or 15 minutes and just play around with the with the interface rotate around make sure you can get lost try all the shortcuts the movement the rotation the panning everything so that you feel comfortable with uh the movement here in series because that's one of the first things that students struggle with and the faster you get used to the way zebras works the better you're gonna be as an sculptor so yeah that's it guys i'll see you back on the next video when we start with our first project bye-bye hey guys welcome back to the next part of our series today we're gonna start with our first model and we're going to be working with one of the most important principles the basic forms so let's jump right into it this is where we left off this is our ugly little ball that we were just experimenting with to learn a little bit of how zebras works so i'm going to go into the light box section i'm going to select projects and i'm going to select the new dynamic sphere 128 once again i'm going to double click it i'm going to say no i don't want to save i just want to start from scratch and there we go this is our new sphere now what's your project what what things are we going to be working on well more often than not whenever you start zbrush um all the tutorials usually start with a school skulls are like the bouncing ball of of the sebrish wall so they're really cool because you can do a skull and you can practice and stuff but i want to make it a little bit more fun if you wish so there's this mexican skulls that we have here in my country i'm mexican by the way and um i really like the decoration i think we can get away with doing some more stylized and cartoony uh skulls in order to get like a very very nice detail so we're going to use this thing as a as a reference to to what we're going to do and the first thing we need to do is we need to create the forms of the element the silhouette the main silhouette and the main shapes of our skull so i think about like the movie like a coco if you saw it from from picture that one is a really good movie so i'm gonna first things first i'm gonna select a new brush that we haven't used before which is called the move brush in order to select this move brush quickly you can use the shortcut which is b to open the brush menu m to go to the brushes that start with the letter m and then v which is the shortcut for that move brush so every single shortcut in here every single one has a shortcut it's a three letter code that you can quickly tap to get to that brush how are you going to learn them the more you use them of course but more often than not it's b to open the brush and then the initial letter for instance like the standard brush is going to be s and then you just look at this and see oh okay the standard brush has the t it's usually either the second letter or a letter that makes sense from the from the name so in this case b s t is the standard brush b m v is the move brush now the move brush is a really really handy brush because it will allow me to modify big areas of the element if i click and drag here you can see that i'm pulling all of this volume very very quickly and that's one of the key things that you need to know about sculpture we always go from the big picture to the small picture so we start with the big round forms the big silhouettes the big shapes and then we start going into the smaller details all the way until we go into the wrinkles and pores wrinkles and boards even though they're probably the most fun thing to do are usually the last thing that you want to do think of it like a cake those are the toppings of the cake this is the foundation the most important part now one thing i'm gonna suggest to you is to turn off this thing right here which is called the dynamic perspective this is a sort of trick that zebras has to try to or yeah that it has to try and get a a normal perspective here onto the scene but it usually doesn't work as well and you're going to see that things start getting really really deformed and i i usually don't sculpt with this most more yeah most of the artists out there won't recommend sculpting with dynamic perspective on but if you want to go ahead just just be mindful that if you're sculpting with dynamic perspective perspective and then you bring this to another software like maya or 3d studio max or whatever things might not look exactly the same and if you do this without perspective they're going to be a lot closer so so yeah so the first things i'm going to do is i'm going to make this brush really really big i'm going to start pushing the form here for instance on the sides to start getting this shape right here so let's see which one is fun i think i think i like this one this this like broad shape and like a t shape i think that one looks looks fun so instead of pushing it i'm actually going to start pulling it now it's important that i change views i need to start rotating my element and modifying it from different angles because one of the most common mistakes that people make is they just focus on one side of the object and they hope that everything else is going to look okay and no you need to modify every single thing so let's just start pushing this so on the on the front here i know that skulls usually have this sort of like curved look here and then down here they have like a like a hole right where that where the neck connects so i'm gonna start pushing this right about there now this is a cartoon uh skull so we can get away with with some um artistic freedom right here now this thing right here looks a little bit ugly so i'm gonna start pushing this up as you can see it's a matter of modifying and moving around your brush until you get the shape that you're looking for again make sure to change the camera like look from different angles because sometimes it will look good from one angle but once you turn it around it will look like really really ugly so i like that i think that's that's an interesting shape let's let's start adding a couple of more details for instance the eyes are going to be really really important so what i'm going to do is i'm going to change back to my standard brush bst and then by pressing alt i'm going to carve in where i want the eyes to be there we go i'm going to make the the brush smaller so that the the hole is a little bit sharper and there we go see how we get that nice little eyes the eyes are quite far apart and i think that's good because that's going to give me this like cartoonish look which we're looking for then we have the nose so i'm going to use my brush here as well the standard brush and i'm just going to start carving where the nose would be there we go and now we can start adding certain things that i know all skulls have for instance all skulls have this cheekbone which is called the psychomatic arc so i'm going to use my standard brush to add a little bit of volume here underneath the eye to incorporate this psychomatic arc right here on the element now you might be seeing something here and this is really important if you remember from the past video i mentioned that all objects are made out of squares and what brushes do is they don't create more squares they just modify either push pull cut or twist or whatever they just modify the existing squares however we have a problem here i'm adding more detail to the skull and you can see that the squares are getting a little bit more tense they're trying their best to to follow what the brush is telling them to do but we're not able to to really capture that element right like we're not able to to to do that because there's not enough squares we need a little bit more resolution and that's that's where dynamesh comes into place dynamesh is a way of working here in seabish and what it means is that the mesh the the polygons that make up your object are gonna dynamically adapt to the new silhouettes or the new changes that you add to your object by default dynamesh is now activated you can find it here on the geometry tab and down here on the dynamesh element so here on the dynamesh you're going to see this bright orange square that says the dynamesh is active and right now we have a resolution of 128 points so if i increase this resolution and then i turn off dynamesh and turn it on back again what's going to happen now is that all the squares are going to recalculate and you can see that we now have more squares you can also see the change here on the number of active points right now we have 30 43 000 and if i do this dynamesh i'm going to go all the way to 108 eighty thousand so um so dynamesh is really really powerful it's a great tool but is it's like a spider-man's power with great responsibility or with great power comes great responsibility you need to be careful to to not go overboard because if you crank this resolution all the way up it's going to be really heavy and it can crash receivers so i'm just going to increase this a little bit let's say to like 168 like that and i'm going to turn dynamesh again now let's say i now uh start carving a little bit more things in here like there's usually a bone here called the temporal bone which is where your ear is going to be and we usually have like a hole there so i'm going to start adding this volume and now let's say i add a little bit of like brows right there we go so let's say i want to recalculate so that every single square like gets better instead of going all the way to dynamesh and turning it on and off again there's a nice shortcut that it's just control you press ctrl you're gonna see that your mouse turns um or your cursor turns yellow and then you're going to drag and drop outside of the element and that's going to recalculate the the thing let me let me do something really extreme so that you can see that this works because i don't think that was extreme extreme enough so let's say we have this right so see how all of these polygons are super super extremely um distorted if i do control and drag and drop outside they just recalculate it and now they have the same density and the same resolution as everything else so that's that's how dynamesh works now that we have dynamesh on we can start working on a little bit more of the main forms of the of the skull so you can see here that we have this very nice sharp curvature going here onto the chin so i'm going to go back to my move brush i'm going to start pushing this in to create that curvature and then over here is we're gonna we're gonna have like the mandible right there we go now i'm gonna show you a new brush and this new brush is really really handy it's a it's a really nice brush that it's a little bit more aggressive than the standard brush and the reason i want to use this is because sometimes when you want to work on big shapes it's easier to do it in a more [Music] harsh way first and then polish it to to look smoother so the brush is called the clay buildup it's probably one of my favorite brushes here in zebras and the shortcut is b for brush c4 clay b4 build up and what this will allow me to do is if i press the alt key for instance it's going to allow me to carve really really fast into the object to separate whatever areas i have here on the on the elements so here i can add a little bit more volume and you can see that i'm creating the the separation or the distance in the in the element the only problem with this brush as you can see is that we get this cross hatching element and that's because we have this uh square alpha we get this crush hatching element that makes the surface looks look really really bad really really ugly right so in order to clean that surface i'm going to use another shortcut which is the shift key if you press the shift key you're going to get your smooth brush and this smooth brush is really really handy because what the smooth brush will allow me to do is it will allow me to smooth the surface of the object and got rid of any like weird bumps and lumps that we might have in sculpting having clean form is one of the most important things because on top of the clean form is where we're gonna be doing all the wrinkles all the details all the all the secondary forms that we're going to be talking about uh shortly and all that stuff needs to have a clean surface to work with the worst thing you can have is a surface that looks like a like a chewing gum or something like that like a like a wet paper towel like ugly right so you always want to have very very clean forms now for instance on the skull we usually have like a little bit of a canal here so i'm going to start carving this to make this skull a little more realistic and if we can take a look at the real skull you know that the nose usually pushes out right so i can use my clay build up to start adding volume here and push the nose out a little bit just a little bit not that much as you can see something like that because this is still a cartoonish skull so so we want something like that so there we go this cartoonish skull is looking really really nice and uh and yeah we can now continue modifying and polishing the form so if i see that there's a couple of like lumpy areas here and there i can switch between my move brush for instance here i'm gonna push where the teeth are gonna be like the volume of the teeth i'm not gonna do the teeth just yet we're gonna wait for that a little bit but i'm gonna push the volume where the teeth are gonna be we sometimes call this the barrel of the mouth because it's this like weird shape it's like a muscle kind of thing not muscle as in like your muscle muscle with c i'm not sure the right pronunciation i like this curvature i think it looks cartoonish and that's that's fun uh over here for instance we usually have another bone like another ridge rather that goes to the back side like this so we're just gonna suggest it and then smooth it out and then we're just gonna flatten this out it's kind of like like sculpting now of course this is gonna be it is difficult for me to teach uh zebras in this way because um i in in other softwares like if we were teaching modeling in maya or or 3d master texturing substance or whatever i can just tell you press this button use this value do this thing right here zebra is a lot more dynamic it's a lot more free so you're gonna see that um the most important thing that i can teach you is the way i'm thinking in the decisions that i'm making when building this thing so for instance here i'm just carving in here so you're going to have to do this and you're going to have to get used to how much pressure you're going to need how big the brush is going to be how how you're going to be modifying your uh your shapes and your elements to to get the best possible result because again it's it's practically impossible for me to tell you oh yes i'm using this much much pressure in my hand and with this angle and stuff it's it's a lot more uh practice oriented learning learning zebras so i'm gonna i'm gonna define this a little bit more and there we go so this is your challenge for now guys i i need you to get to this point this is what i consider the basic forms so all the basic forms of my skull are now here they're they're looking very nice i have a very interesting skull and we can now start working on some more interesting shapes like teeth like some extra secondary details like um again this is just just a drawing right we're doing this as a 3d element so if we take a look again at the skulls right here like the zebra sculpts there's a lot of wrinkles a lot of of lines a lot of texture that we can add later on and uh but in order for us to do that we need to have a very very clean base now before finishing this video i need to show you how to save because we haven't saved we've been working on this for about 15 minutes and it's important to say because zebras is one of those softwares that usually crashes sometimes crashes and it's important for you to save now there's three ways you can save this thing you can save this with a quick save right here if you press quick save this will automatically save a quick save file of this element and if you go into your light box and you go into your quick sub file you're going to have all the quick save things that you've been working on so that's a that's a good way to to work with uh however it will save it on the default quick save folder and it's not as organized as the next one which is saving in this as a tool so i'm gonna go here at the tool i'm gonna say save as and i'm gonna go to my project in this case this is the next to the zebras 2021 i'm gonna go here to documents and i'm gonna say no it's not document sorry it's uh service 21 there we go c tools and you can see here i have a couple of them that i was using to practice of course and um i'm just gonna save this on top of this one as it's called zero zero one so i'm gonna save this and i'm gonna say yes perfect so this now is saved as a c tool if you open c brush again i'm gonna go here to preferences initialize c rush i'm gonna say yes it's gonna pretty much reset zebras from scratch you're probably gonna see my custom interface no it's not okay perfect so in case you need to to load your element it's very easy just go into load tool select your skull double click and this is the important part you're gonna draw one time your sculptor and then you're going to press your letter t to enter edit mode because if you don't do that if you don't press your letter t what's going to happen is this you're going to start doing this weird clash here and remember when we talked about the 2.5 d environment here in zbrush that's exactly what's happening we're we're drawing skulls in the 2.5 the um element so we don't want that ctrl n to clean the canvas you draw one skull and you press t to go into edit mode and now you're going to be able to work with this element and that's it guys this is it for this video i'll see you in the next one where we continue adding more details and the secondary forms to our element keep working get to this point and i'll see you back on the next one bye-bye hey guys welcome back to the next part of our series today we're going to continue with our skull model and we're going to continue with the secondary forms so let's get to it this is where we have right now this is where we left off and as you can see this is this is looking really really nice but now we can start actually adding more stuff to our element let's take a look at our reference again let's go back to our little like a mexican skulls mexicans cold like dia de muertos and you can see that most of the skulls have the teeth like very very prominent teeth like i like this little guy right here i don't want to go with like the full um set of teeth like the 32 teeth that i believe we have i want to go with something simple like this so let me show you a new brush that we can use to start pushing some of them the secondary forms into a more defined state and this brush is called the damien stander now the demian standard and the shortcut is bs in brush d from damien and then s as in standard this was created by by a user a long time ago and its name in its honor and the way that the damien stander works it's pretty much like a knife so it will allow us to as you can see cut very very deeply into our objects so if i were to to separate like the jawline from from the rest of the of the head i can very very easily create a line here that will separate the jawline like this again not necessary but it's good it pushes the forms and it allows me to to be a little bit more intense in the way i start cleaning my forms i think i do want to add a little bit more depth in here usually we don't have as much volume here the best way you can study this kind of things like know where to add or or remove volume is by taking a look at the at the like normal reference so if i look at the skull you're gonna see that right underneath the eye there's a shadow there and that shadow means that that thing is concave so you're gonna have like a little hole so that's why i'm pushing this thing right here to to make that shadow a little bit more more intense now i don't want to push these forms into the realistic side of things like i don't want this to be hyper realistic but i do want to obey that kind of thing a little bit so for instance i see that there's a little bit of a of a bone crossing into the into the nose so i'm just going to add that there so that gives me a little bit more secondary form secondary details that allow me to have a more interesting looking sculpture without having to sacrifice on the on the cartoony side of things so again i'm just i'm just carving here a little bit to to soften this up now i'm going to go here into my into my teeth and what i'm going to do is i'm going to draw where the teeth are going to meet so as you can see it's roughly about here now let's make this a happy sculpture here in mexico uh on the dia de muertos which is november the second we celebrate the death we don't mourn we we we see that as another part of life and and we celebrate and remember our ancestors so we see it as a happy day rather than a than a sad day and now with my clay buildup or sorry with the leaving the standard again i'm gonna start drawing the teeth so i'm gonna be very very careful here i'm gonna do one and then i'm gonna go and do a second one and then i'm gonna do a third one like a bigger one because it's supposed to be like the uh what's the word like the molars and then i'm gonna do the same thing here i'm gonna do one i'm gonna do two and i'm gonna do three and there we go now i i'm not super fond of this last one i think it looks kind of creepy kind of weird so i'm just gonna fill it in with my uh with my clay build up i'm gonna erase it i'm gonna stick with with four teeth and i'm gonna smooth this out like this let's see how that looks that looks even uglier right so we need to find a way to make this work so i'm going to use my move brush i'm going to start moving the the teeth around until we find a way they work i think i think by making the smile slightly smaller would be a nice idea so yeah something like that works a little bit better now one of the issues that you might see here is that um the teeth are not looking completely flat they look a little bit like they're creating a little bit of volume on the silhouette and i would like them to be a little bit flatter now of course we can increase the the resolution if i do dynamesh you can see that it creates new geometry there but we probably do need a little bit more resolution so i'm going to go back here into geometry i'm going to push my resolution slightly higher and i'm going to do a new calculation like that and now i'm going to show you another brush that's really really magical i i really like this brush which which is the trim dynamic brush the shortcut is b t d the trim dynamic brush is kind of like a bevel brush it will flatten the surface it will create a hard surface edge we're going to be using this when we do a hard surface as well and it's really good for instance to make the teeth a lot flatter so by doing this i can very very easily clean all of this area now see how we still get some weird areas right there that's where the demon stander comes into play again because we can just go back here and give this a little bit more definition so we just do this we just push this again and we re draw that nice line that we have inside the the teeth now we can of course add a little bit of uh like that like the border of the teeth you know where where the teeth is uh inserted in candy skulls you usually don't have this or at least not as prominent or as intense but i think we might benefit from having a little bit of this so i'm using my clay buildup to add this little element right here as you can see it's kind of like drawing and fading it in and then we just smooth this out let's see how this looks because i don't want this to look super creepy so i just want this to look nice so i'm gonna probably smooth this even a little bit more and there we go that's uh that's a nice looking skull i like it i think i think it looks good i'm gonna use my clay build up again and then i'm gonna go here to the to the brow and i'm gonna start adding a little bit more definition there on the brow so that we know that that's where the where the brow ends and since we have more geometry and we're working now on the secondary forms we're going to start defining this kind of things a little bit better and we're going to have a lot more definition so that's a rule of thumb that you need to remember the more geometry you have the better your detail is going to look the more definition you're going to have however it's also going to be a little bit more difficult to control certain things because you can see that with just a little thing we mark a lot of stuff and trying to smooth that out becomes a little bit more complicated that's why we work on the basic forms before we jump onto this kind of things so let's mark the the nose here a little bit very very lightly like that just to go and generate a little bit more uh interest there now i think i want to go with my clay build up and i'm gonna i'm gonna carve here on the on the border of the eye because i want to create like a division like a sharp line division where the eye socket is gonna be like that there we go let's push it in a little bit more there we go and smooth smooth smooth smooth to to clean that sharp lines that we have and now we have a nice division without a lot of problems i'm going to use my move brush and there's a couple of things i want to change here with that with the overall shape of the of the skull i think i want it to be a little bit rounder especially here on the back like i don't want this to look like a like an alien element we can of course smooth out and usually here is where we would have like the hole for that for the neck you don't have to be super super specific but just keep in mind that a 3d model um has the the special property that you can see it from a lot of different angles so it's always a good rule of thumb to to make sure that your mod looks good from every single part because you never know if you're like in a game or if you 3d print this and people are going to be taking a look at it you never know what parts of the model they're going to be like inspecting so i want to i want to increase a little bit of the mandible here so i'm going to use my move brush and push this into a like a sharper manner well there we go that looks fun as you can see i'm changing and variating the size of my brush to give it a little bit more depth now here i'm gonna i'm gonna carve in a little bit to [Music] to make it seem like that like the hope because we're not usually there's a hole that goes all the way across our face of course we have muscle and the tongue and everything in there but um i want to just indicate that this is the hole from the from the mandible let's clean this teeth here because we're seeing like that like the back side of it they mean standard again to to recover that and there we go look at that look at this happy dude i like it and we're gonna make it even funner it's gonna it's gonna be a really really nice exercise now uh if we take a look again at the skulls let's see if we are missing any like important detail yeah for instance you can see here on the side where the temporal uh bone is which is where our ear is there's like a hole as well like you can see the the very intense shadow in there and right now we don't have that so we can again use our clay buildup to start pushing this in and creating a little bit more of a of a changing silhouette there so yeah that looks a lot better and now we just of course smooth everything out here smooth smooth smooth we cut here we modify all of this smooth smooth smooth and we're getting a really really nice happy skull perfect i think we're in a really good position here there's a couple of uh holes that we usually get in here i don't think we need them because we're going to be decorating this uh mexican style with all the all the flares and stuff like all these little lines and things so so i don't think we need it i like this hat maybe we add one uh we'll see in the next in the next video but yeah this is it guys this probably will take you a little bit longer than the first one i know that this video is slightly shorter but it might take you a little bit longer because trying to control the form is one of the skills that you need to develop and it won't come easy it's a lot of practice and you definitely need to to put the time into it so so take your time even if this video is only like 10 minutes long try to take your time take 20 minutes if you need to 30 minutes if necessary because this secondary forms and this secondary part of the element is it's probably one of the most important parts apart from that from the primary forms uh we usually go in in order of importance so primary forms are going to be the most important and then of course secondary forms but i'm i'm specifically asking you to take your time because in the next video we're going to be adding all the nice little details like the mexican uh details and if you don't have a clean secondary form all the details that we add are gonna be are gonna look really really bad and this might not be an exercise that you want to show off so so yeah take your time do it nicely and get to this position where we started with something very simple as you can see here and now we have something like this where there's a lot more detail okay so get to work guys and i'll see you back on the next video bye-bye hey guys welcome back to the next part of our series today we're going to continue with our skull model and we're going to finish it with the details and talk about a little bit about symmetry so let's get to it this is where we left off this is the result of the secondary forms now nicely polished and nicely laid out for us to work with and it's now time for us to start working on the details now as you can see the mexican skulls are known for all this amount of crazy detail that they have so let me show you a new technique that we're going to be using to do this we could of course try doing it by hand like literally drawing like the little flowers that it has around the eyes but as you can see if you are not really good with your pulse you're going to have a hard time so we're going to do instead or what we're going to do instead is a technique called masking and by masking certain areas of the element we can draw this sort of things and then modify them so that we get a very nice effect so this is what i'm going to do i'm going to start with a very simple detail like like our little guy here like it has a circle there and this kind of like droplets on the side so i'm gonna start with a circle right here probably slightly smaller and the way we're gonna do it is we're gonna press ctrl and you can see that now our brush turns yellow similar to what we do when we when we do uh re um re-dynamesh but now if we do it inside the character what's going to happen is we're going to create this black area and if we try to draw in on top of that area we're not going to be able to so what i'm going to do is i'm going to draw there and then i'm going to draw like the little like droplet kind of thing and you can erase the mask this is one of the powerful things about this technique that you can erase masks by pressing ctrl and then alt so now this is going to allow me to create this very nice looking element there and if i invert this mask by pressing ctrl and tap outside of the object i'm going to be able to add a little bit of volume here with my clay buildup as if i was adding like the sugar coating that this kind of skulls have now if i drew if i click ctrl and drag outside of the object you're gonna see that we drop the mask but we keep the detail and look at that doesn't that look nice that's exactly what we're gonna be doing in order to to generate the the rest of the element so let me repeat that real quick let's do like some cute um uh like a mustache so i'm gonna do something like this like a spiral let's make the brush smaller it's gonna be like there we go like a spiral right there and then with control control i'm gonna delete a little bit of the of the beginning there so we don't have as much volume so i'm polishing the mask i'm gonna hit ctrl and tap outside of the object and then with my clay build up i'm just gonna very softly add a little bit of volume it's like if i'm extruding a little bit of this volume and it looks like it's an another shape that's on top of the element you can of course soften this if you want this to be a little bit softer and when we take the mask away we're gonna have this a very funny looking uh mustache here for for our guy now let's go for the eyes uh the eyes you can see usually have this sort of like flower pattern and flowers could be a little bit tricky but not if we use this technique because we can do circle circle circle circle circle circle circle it's easier to draw circles like this circle circle circle circle and circle and now we can delete the inner side of the circles very very carefully so that they don't go inside the the character and we just have the like the petals on the outside so very carefully there now it doesn't have to be perfect and that's one of the cool things about this exercise usually uh candy skulls are made by artisans and um and it's okay if they're not perfect it makes it look like they were made by hand rather than by a machine or something so there we go ctrl tab to invert the mask and now we just very softly add a little bit of volume it's important that's a little because if you go super intense there it's going to look really really ugly so very very softly we add a little bit of volume all around the the border of the ice right there to make this petals push out look at that beautiful beautiful beautiful and then we soften everything very very softly i'm barely touching my tablet here so as to not erase the detail completely and there we go we delete the mask ctrl and drag outside of the object and look at that beautiful mask now let's add a couple of more details for instance i think if we take a look at the reference here we have this nice little like curvatures here like this interesting looking shapes or we can do i think i think we can just add like dots now let's have like a like a flower going here like this and then from here let's continue this down here and with the mask it's like painting the the mask we're painting this nice little detail and then let's do like a smaller one like this yeah like that one and then following the shape of the of the of the bone that one's gonna look really really nice there we go and again just a little bit of volume here very very softly we don't want to exaggerate this a lot you can also do this with your standard brush then a little bit of smooth to get rid of the of the ridges and keep only the volume and when we delete that look at that that looks really really nice i think i want to go for some like just traditional circles so i'm going to change the alpha here for like uh like a round heart alpha and then just start adding like a couple circles here let's do like five so four five there we go now here on the inside um yeah i think that like a cross might be a good idea so let's draw the cross let's make it a little bit slimmer so i'm going to erase the mask there and then like this there we go that looks nice and then let's add like a couple of rice so we're gonna have like one ray very soft ray there and then like a short one short one then like a long one here short one something like this and then again we just add a little bit of volume kind of like extruding the thing envelope a little bit so it looks nice and look at that perfect um let's add again a couple of points here just to decorate the whole thing and let's go back to the to the jawline so on the jawline we can do a little bit more crazy stuff so for instance i really like this sort of like flower diagram on the on the bottom side so we can do like the main flower here and then there's like some like weird pedals so let's see like like this sort of pedals and then we have like a like a a nice petal there that's like a secondary palette right here remember all the shapes here have to kind of like push the form of the of the element like help define the the overall shape of the of the character let's draw this here there we go i like that i think that looks nice and then let's have like some lines going in here probably it's slightly thinner like this what else are we seeing like a couple of dots like maybe like one dot there one two there one to there and you can draw the whole skull in one single mask the issue is if you mess up and you need to go back this is the kind of stuff that that can make it a little bit painful so let's add the nice line there on the middle like that uh on the main area i also want to add like oh you know what let's let's do like like this there we go we invert the mask and we add a little bit of detail here there we go just a little bit of a volume there to push the whole surface out and that's it we just soften everything here and look at that now if we want to push some of this things slightly or make them slightly more intense we can always use our them in standard remember and just carve into this now i do like the way they look though i do like that they look soft because usually sugar it looks looks soft it melts a little bit on top of the of the thing of the skull so you usually don't get like a super sharp element now you can also see that we are already having some issues with the resolution if we want this to be even nicer like have more resolution we can definitely push the resolution up a little bit more and this is going to give us more resolution so now when we do the lines they're going to be slightly sharper and we can do like a little bit more detail here and there to push the detail of our skull even more so if we need to we can just like go back again there and and keep pushing this element so they look really really nice uh on top of the elements there's like a couple of of circles so let's add like one and then let's one slightly smaller and then slightly smaller again to create a little bit of a gradient so i think this is called is looking really really nice and you can continue adding as many details or as much details as you want the best thing i can recommend is lookup reference as i'm doing here like switch to your to your tab and look at how things are made in the real world how this candy is called are made so so that you can get a very nice detail now i'm going to go up here and i want to show you another um tool that has to do with the with the brush and then we're going to jump onto the symmetry which is the final part of this thing usually or the best thing i should do is i need to to cover the whole thing up but you already saw how we do this so i'm probably gonna finish this off camera and um just show you the result uh later on when we do like painting or something uh but there's one thing that we can do now if i try to do like very nice squiggly lines you can see that my pulse is not perfect even though i can do like some interesting spirals it is a little bit difficult to have like a perfect pulse zbrush has a very nice tool called lacy mouse that allows us to draw the thing in a more controlled way you're going to find this if you press control to go into your mask pen you're going to go into the stroke section and you're going to go into this lacy mouse option you're going to turn this on now when you start drawing you're going to see a line like a red line that's following your mouse and that red line is the delay that the element is having that will allow you to have a more um traditional approach to the whole thing so let's say i want to do something a little bit more intense like like this detail right here so in order to do that now with lazy mouse it's going to be a lot easier because i can just start drawing the spiral and i'm going to be way more more controlled so i like that it's like a like a heart shape let's make it smaller and then let's do from here like another spiral here let's do like like a leaf or something oh careful there like that see so that's going to give me a very very interesting looking element i think i want to add like a little heart in here and then we can just add like i'm gonna now the lazy mouse is something that gets activated so if you want to change to clay build up you're gonna need to go to create lazy mouse and stroke and turn this off you can also press your letter l and that's gonna turn it off as well so i'm gonna do like uh it didn't it should have but let's just turn it off oh that's right it's it's per uh per element so there we go so mask there there there there let's do like a mask here here let's do another mask here here patterns patterns are one of the the most important things so there we go we change this out and with my clay buildup i can just very very softly add a little bit of volume to all of this new pattern that i just created and when i get rid of the mask look at that beautiful right so this is this is one of the techniques we're going to be looking at a lot of different techniques to sculpt things here in sivers but this is one of the techniques that we can do to add the detail to our elements increase the dynamesh resolution and use our masking to select and and create all of these interesting patterns so have fun with this guys do it and add as many details as you want and now the final thing i want to show you before we close this video is symmetry right now we've been working with symmetry all along the character every single part of the character is completely symmetrical you can see that we've had the symmetry on for a long time and the way you activate or deactivate symmetry is with your letter x so if you press the letter x you're going to be able to only draw on one side of the character or only modify one side of the character and you might be wondering why would i need to do that well let's say we have already finished the whole skull and we want to add this a little bit more character i can use my move brush for instance and modify the way the skull is looking after doing all the detail of course because otherwise it's going to be almost impossible to get this very nice interesting pattern um as an asymmetrical element so asymmetry is really good to give your characters and your sculptors a lot more life as you can see here i could for instance go into my clay buildup and draw like an eye here with like a sphere smooth it out and then draw the other eye over here and by doing this in an asymmetrical way i can now have a very interesting goofy looking cartoonish looking element without having to worry about the symmetry because everything was done symmetrically up to the point where i needed to change it that's usually the advice i give to all my students when they're asking about symmetry like when should you turn it off unless the character is asymmetrical from the beginning like think of a zombie with a huge arm and a small arm like a right arm is huge and the small left arm is really small in those cases then yeah you're gonna have to work with a asymmetry from the from the beginning but in things like this i strongly suggest you do everything symmetrically first and then at the very end if you need to change the symmetry or turn the symmetry off and change it so that you get an interesting result but anyway guys this should be a very good exercise for you as i mentioned this is a beginning exercises we're going to be doing several exercises so that you get to know all the tools and all the processes here inside of search and then we're going to jump into a bigger project that's going to be like our final project for the series so uh try to get up to this point and make sure that you save this this is always good to have you're always going to have your first sculpture as a as a memory of how you started and everyone starts at the at the bottom guys everyone starts with no knowledge and they build their expertise and their knowledge up so don't worry if it doesn't look exactly like this or if it looks kind of ugly if you want to i strongly encourage you to do this exercise several times try to do it two three four times each time you do it you're gonna get better and better and and the result is gonna it's gonna show for it so yeah keep on working guys uh keep on pushing and i'll see you back on the next video bye

Channel: Nexttut

Views: 4,015

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: maya 2018, zbrush tutorial, maya tutorial, nalini kanta jena, character sculpting, zbrush sculpting, zbrush turorial, beginner zbrush tutorial, human anatomy zbrush, modeling tutorial

Id: Shh9P4P66gw

Length: 62min 8sec (3728 seconds)

Published: Tue May 25 2021