ZBrush Character Block Out Tutorial

welcome everybody I am folly GaN and in this video we're gonna look at how to block out a character in ZBrush I'm gonna try to keep it to as few or as simple as tools as possible so pretty much everything that we're gonna be using is over here in the tool menu and on-screen already so a sphere if you don't have this figure on your screen click up here under tool click on spear 3d and then just click on make polymesh3d i've also turned on x symmetry which you can turn on just by pressing the X key on your keyboard I'll also be using the not the 3d gizmo but the Transpo's line which you can get just by pressing W on your keyboard and clicking this little button up here I just prefer the transpose lines so you guys can feel free to use the 3d gizmo if you want as we continue forward but let's go ahead and get started here so again like I said pretty much everything is going to be over here in the tool palette with our good pal the sphere I pretty much always use primitives to block out characters as I feel like it's the most simple way to go about it keeps you from you know getting too caught up and making things too complicated early on so all I'm gonna do is duplicate our sphere and use my 3d gizmo to slide that object down pretty crazy I know very simple and all we're gonna do is repeat that process a few times here and essentially we're gonna use these three spheres to make our torso and this one up here is gonna be our head so let's get another sphere in between and if you want at this point you can scale this down using your transpose line or 3d gizmo there's also some options if we scroll down here under geometry in size you can directly adjust the size of that object in there so from here let's see let's let's make our sphere neck a little bit more thin and then I'll just use my transpose line test to stretch that out using move and pulling down on that bottom piece and maybe maybe just like a bit more thin so we'll continue on from here let's see we also need some arms and some legs but before we do that and introduce the move brush which is pretty much 90% of everything that I do in ZBrush happens with the move brush and I'm going to be using this brush we add a pretty large draw size you can change that up here if you need to to begin just pulling and shaping some of the shapes here some of our good good sphere friends to get them a little bit closer to the shapes that we would expect to see in a character so obviously starting just with the what is going to be our ribcage up here this is going to become our hips in a moment here and this is just going to be like a little kind of inner connecting piece kind of the stomach area just kind of a little kind of connective area between our ribcage and hips similar to our head and ribcage we got the neck connecting in between there so already you can kind of see this starting to shape up I've even added in kind of a little bit of a curve here to make it feel a little bit more dynamic it's important that we kind of get that in there early on so things don't feel too stiff later on and we can always make changes to this later it does not have to be perfect let's go up here continue just using the move brush I'm keeping things as simple as I can during this stage not trying to get caught up in details but more so just focusing on the larger forms which is always tough which is why I recommend trying to keep your resolution of your geometry as low as possible during this stage we'll look at that more so here in just a moment but we need some arms and some legs to continue on here with our character because it's just a little stump boy but let's go ahead and append some more objects so we can append down here with another sphere and that just puts it up here by our head at the top of the screen let's just move our sphere around and stretch it out I'm gonna be using spheres for pretty much everything it's a pretty thick leg though so we probably don't want it to be quite that large I think that's kind of a good starting point another cool little trick instead of continuing to append or duplicate over here and use their 3d gizmo and trans those line to duplicate objects by holding the control key and clicking and dragging that object out so we can do that really quick and drag out a lower leg and then just kind of focus on getting a little bit of an s-curve here in our upper leg as well and we're gonna have to mess with all these shapes a bit more as we continue forward try to shape this up get a feeling a bit more closer proportionally to what we would expect but that's a pretty good starting point for our legs and at this point we want to duplicate that over to the other side which of course is in our tool menu as well under geometry a modify topology and we can just do a mirror and weld and that should be okay what could happen though here we're pretty close there in the middle of the the screen or in the middle of the X symmetry plane you'd get something like this or you could also very quickly get something like this if this is happening to you just take your 3d model push it away from the X symmetry plane or even slide it out a little bit just to make sure and then run the mirror and weld just so you're sure that those are not combining they're in the middle of the screen or in middle I keep saying screen middle of the X symmetrical plane it's a little little frustrating when that happens so just make sure that you are aware where you're symmetrical plane is when mirroring we also need some arms we're missing some arms on this so let's do that really quick I will just click on app end again grab another sphere grab that sphere and slide them right on down here to our torso and what I typically like to do when blocking out my characters for figuring out the transitional area of the ribcage and torso into the shoulder girdle and arm it's a really complicated area so I typically like to have some kind of connective piece here to represent the the deltoid as well as just kind of be the armpit and we'll shape this up a bit more later but for now just starting with this is perfectly fine that's what we've done with everything else remember we're just trying to keep things really simple so we can kind of continue to pull and stretch out some more objects here for the upper segments of your arm you can even do this for yourself to kind of like test it out bend your arm and figure out where your elbow hits in your torso typically it's about where your belly button is so for us that looks about correct there are some other proportions that we're gonna tweak here later but as a starting point that's a pretty good place I'm just kind of control click and drag pull that out and I would say that our torso is probably gonna need to get a little bit longer here in just a moment but before we do that I'll just continue using my move brush and try to shape up my rib cage a little bit more looking a little bit wonky everything here is a little bit wonky but especially this rib cage let me see will turn on solo mode down here and I'm going to push up on the rib cage using my move brush just get that a little bit closer to the shape that we might expect and we're starting to get those two slot in a little bit nicer which is always a good thing that's really starting to shape up nicely and let's mirror our arm over to the other side instead of doing this twice I think I'm just gonna merge it down on these two objects just like that and then we can mirror those all at once mirror and weld and let's just make sure we hit the x key on both of these so that our symmetry is back on alright so we've done it we've got pretty much everything in there - hands and feet which we can worry about later this is the stage that I would start taking everything and working on it all as a whole so it's really important that you don't get too focused and zoomed in work on one area because you get a little bit of tunnel vision so it's important to take a step back and look at everything together and right now everything together doesn't look all that great so what we want to do is go into our Z plugin menu and under transpose master click on T pose mesh this is going to take all of your all of your individual sub tools and combine them but it only combines them temporarily so if I make a change to this and go back to the Z plug-in and click on T pose sub T it will go through all of our sub tools and apply all those changes to those sub tools very quickly so let's go back to our T pose model here I'll undo that and we can begin shipping this up and working on it with X symmetry so make sure that's on and let's go ahead and just start with the head and neck area and begin just using the move brush yet again to start shaping this up and controlling the form a little bit more so we'll adjust the head maybe use the smooth brush to thin out the neck a little bit nothing needs to be perfect at this stage remember that we are just kind of blocking things out trying to keep stuff really simple and clean and it's really easy to you know take it a step too far so let's make our torso I think a little bit longer and probably our head a little bit smaller looking like a watermelon up there but let's uh get the halfway point of our characters height about where the crotch is there at the bottom of the crotch so to do that I think I will just select all of these objects do a could do a quick control tap on the canvas and hide all of that and just lengthen my torso a little bit more so that's feeling a bit better to me maybe we could widen out our hips and our butt as well as our ribcage and stomach things are kind of feeling a bit thin this also is very dependent on the character that you're trying to create you could have you know a big fat or muscley dude you could have a really thin female character all of this is going to be really dependent on a lot of those character decisions let's just from the profile make sure that we're not getting too bland and straight up and down so we'll get a little bit more curve in there as well as just continue adjusting some more geometry here in our legs and I'll just kind of use this in combination with the smooth brush and maybe try to thicken these bad boys up a little bit and that's starting to feel a bit better because our legs are currently 1 sub tool that we appended into Transpo's master it's going to make both of these the same polygroup so if you're having trouble and you want to select just one of these using your 3d gizmo or transpose line you can just control click and drag from one object to another and it will topologically mask that polygon island so that's what I did there to only select that piece of geometry all right we'll try to finish this up quick because my favorite dogs are going crazy so let me just here with my move brush a little bit more try to thin this out as it goes down get some more kind of tapered shapes in there like I said we'll worry about the arms and legs later on we can kind of get some more shape down there our arms look super super boring but let's just kind of thin out our melon of a head a little bit more and that's feeling a bit better to me as well as the arms we'll just come in here and I think start to adjust this shape a little bit more and we'll do this pretty quick and I think that's probably good for a first pass here in transpose master we can continue to come back and refine and make more changes from here but at this stage this is probably a good point where you'd want to grab your Z plug-in menu hit that tipos button get rid of our awkward curve there and go on back to individual sub tools and we continue to edit and refine this more from here so this is the point at which I would probably start adding some more tools into my workflow so using stuff like the clay tubes brush to build up and subtract form if need be as well as the pinch brush and trim dynamic brushes the pinch brush is great for kind of figuring out the plane changes of your your character and the individual parts that make up that character and the trim dynamic brush is a great brush that can also help in that area for just kind of very quickly planing out certain areas and helping you to as well as figure out where you need to make some continual proportional changes such as up here in our rib cage but really that's about it it's not really all that complicated it's not you know a ton of different tools that you have to use you can really get by with using a very minimal amount of tools in ZBrush like I said I think at the beginning of this video and 90% of everything I do here is pretty much the move brush at this point this is probably where I would start to dynamesh some of these pieces together for instance in our legs we'd want to combine these and continue working on them so let's scroll on down into the dynamesh menu and the resolution here is going to be pretty high by default at this scale 200,000 Poly's is just way too much for what we want to do here so I'm gonna click and drag here let's try the lowest resolution of 8 and that is actually perfect that is what we want I know it looks super messy and unrefined but in all honesty and that is what we want we want something that's extremely low poly and something that is going to act as insurance so that we don't begin kind of taking this past this most basic level where we want it right now so now as I mentioned earlier we can continue using some additional brushes stuff like pinch and clay tubes trim dynamic all that good stuff to begin building up form if we want to start adding in something like Annie here I'm going to begin sculpting that up we can use the pinch brush to define some plane changes a little bit more in here so that's basically it that's basically the entire process other than maybe starting to clean up and refine some of your geometry a little bit more and for that I just recommend using zero measure so if you're at a point where you're dynamesh resolution isn't doing it for you anymore I recommend using zremesher to begin cleaning up your geometry and starting to get that to a little bit more of a simplified state yet again but also a little bit more clean so that's looking pretty good with just the default very low resolution and maybe we could do that for something like our arms up here so we want to combine the pieces first with a dynamesh very low resolution dynamesh and then a very low resolution zremesh to begin cleaning up and refining those arms further so pretty simple geometry pretty simple workflow we could do that for our torso as well but I would say that's a pretty good place to stop for now if you guys want to learn more about blocking out characters and the character creation process I have my new course mastering appeal there's a link down below and check that out as well as a link to my Gumroad where I have a bunch of other courses and tutorials for you guys so hopefully that was helpful for you guys have a great rest err day and I will see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Follygon

Views: 183,254

Keywords: zbrush block out, character block out, zbrush tutorial, block out tutorial

Id: gJuzn-NkI0o

Length: 16min 52sec (1012 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 09 2019