Hey, what's up, guys! Pablo Muñoz here,
I just released a brand new set of brushes for detail in series called The Bark and Wood Texturing,
or Detailing Brushes. So this tutorial is more of an overview
showing you how the brushes work and the type of patterns and effects
that you can achieve. Fairly simple with these brushes. It's a lot of fun. So let's go ahead and jump straight into it. All right, so here we are in ZBrush. I'm currently using a custom UI. If you're interested in building your own UI or
you want to download this specific UI that I'm using, I want to put a link
so that you can go to that tutorial. What I cover, how to do that
and how to download the current UI that I have. I'm also using see which 2022.0.5
and this is the latest version or the last version of free updates from scratch. But these brushes work with 2023 and 2024 as well. Now, these are the icons of all the brushes. And as you can see, there is a ton of brushes here. They're about 115 brushes that you can download,
and yet they're a lot of fun. A lot of them are very similar. They're just variations of kind
of like the same purpose. But again, I want to cover this in just a bit. Now, before we get started,
I just want to mention that although these brushes have a very specific purpose,
like, you know, creating wood and bark patterns, I've been using them for,
you know, different organic detailing purposes. So, for instance, a lot of creature work. Let me just show you
some of the stuff that I've been working on. So this is PureRef, and this is one of the concepts that I created, kind of like a like a lava bark
wood girl type of thing. but this is basically the model in ZBrush. And he has been detail entirely with those brushes. Here's the final render, the final concept. So as you can see, there's a lot of details here, but
they're fairly simple to achieve with these brushes. now here is one of my favorite concepts
that I created for the series. So the same thing,
the same idea is just a fairly simple base model. Obviously, it has a bunch of like, you know, you know, tubes and I would say horns or roots
coming out of it, creating this sort of armor thing. But all the details, all the surface quality
that you can see in this character has been detailed entirely with these brushes. So let me just show you an example of that
going back here into ZBrush. So here we go. So this is the base model that I use. And again, it's fairly simple when I go into solo mode. So I just have the body and the head in one subtle. Obviously I sculpted asymmetrically
because that was the whole point of my exercise here. And then I have this mesh right, or the this or the sub tool that has all the tubes
and all these horns right there. Again, the very, very simple.
I have subdivision levels. So if I go to the lowest of division,
you see the fairly simple you can achieve these either ZSpheres or tube brushes, that sort of thing. And obviously,
you know, tweak them a little bit as well. But anyway, the reason I'm showing you
these is because this is as far as I went in terms of defining the secondary shapes
or the secondary forms. So I would say this is my base model or my base mesh. So I would say this is my base model or my base mesh. And from that I went into detailing
and here is the final model that I use for the render. This actually has poly paint. So let me just show you. It's pretty close to the concept. So the final concept,
obviously I exported these and rendered this out. But you see, you know, it’s there. Right. I want to turn off poly paint,
go back to basic and let me go closer here. So you see all of these very, you know, intricate detail in this amount of detail
that's fairly simple to create. I know we might look a little bit complex, but once you have established your primary
and secondary shapes and you're happy with those, those are the most important steps, The detailing,
like I've always said in my livestreams and all the tutorials, is the easiest thing to do
is the brush. And these brushes will help you to achieve
something that looks very complex and very intricate, fairly simple. But the most important things
are your primary and secondary shape. So if you managed to have those working, anything
that you add in terms of details will work as well. So Anyway, I just want to mention these
because like I said, with these type of brushes or any of the brush pack
that I have available, creating these details become a, you know, a simple task is just about creating those
or having those secondary shapes in order so that everything works fine. right. So as you can see, these brushes can be used
in a bunch of different scenarios, not just for creating the look of wood,
which is what I'm going to show you in this tutorial. All right.
So let's go ahead and start with the base mesh. I'm going to go ahead and click on a ZSphere
And I want to start here. and I want to make sure that I have the draw selected
and I want to click and drag like so. And I'm going to use the move tool here
And this is basically to create the length of, you know, a piece of wood or a log of wood,
and then we're going to take the rest. But that's pretty much it, right?
This is how you start. Let's go ahead and click on Draw. And I want to click on someone here in the middle
that creates another ZSphere. And when I click and drag from that ZSphere,
just to create a kind of like a knot, I think that will work fine, maybe something bigger. So clicking on skill, pushing that out. Just click on drag again and let's go ahead and add another one in here
and click and drag. So this is going to be
probably how the tree will split. Maybe I'll go ahead and click on Draw again
and I'm going to click and drag another one so you can create any shape you want. I'm just using ZSphere because I think it's
for these more sort of complex shapes. It's very, very simple. And let's go ahead and give this a bit of a curvature. Not too much. And I think that should be okay. Like I said, you can do more than this. This is just a quick example of how I would approach,
you know, a complex shaped like a nanomaterial like these. With ZSpheres. And then once we have the base
mesh, we're going to be able to detail those. Like I said, fairly simple with the brushes. You see this this material is not going to take that
long after I finish with this, with this set up. All right. So let's go to the adaptive skin. I want to make sure that the dynamesh resolution
is set to zero just because I want to be able to produce a low resolution mesh. So just like that.
and then we'll probably do a ZRemesher. But I want to make sure I have a simple base mesh. All right.
So I want to click on Make Adaptive Skin. Let's go here and we are ready to start. All All right. So here is our simple mesh. So what I want to do now is I'm going to use them
move brush to adjust things a little bit. So I want to start pushing things. Maybe I wanna go to the brush palette,
go to curve, click on AccuCurve. So that way we have a more pointy effect. I'm also going to use the smooth brush
because more things out. This is a pretty strong brush. So I'm going to press spacebar hold shift to access the properties of this smooth brush
and reduce the intensity, the Z intensity. And that way
we have a bit more control over the shapes. All right. So I'm going to push this angle a little bit more
so that it's thicker at the bottom. And I'm not using any reference. maybe I should be using reference,
but this is just to cover the process of how I would approach something like that. But, you know, if you want to create something a bit more realistic than what I'm doing,
know, using references is always a good idea. right. So this
is the base, but we're going to go ahead and edit this a little bit more and make it more interesting. So what I'm going to do
is I'm going to convert this mesh into a dynamesh. But before that, I want to click on Unify just to make sure
that it is using the right sort of size for ZBrush And by the way, this unified would be on the
your deformation palette unified this one right here. Okay. Now I'm going to click on dynamesh and because I have subdivision levels, I'm
going to get these problems when I click on No. And there we go. So it is a you know, it's a decent amount of polygons
for what we need. All right. So now I want to take my knife
cut this one right here. By the way,
you can access those by holding control and shift, click on the thumbnail on the brush thumbnail
and selecting it from here. So again, holding control and shift, I’m going to
I click and drag and let's say this is been cut by a, you know, but I saw or something
so it's going to be pretty flat in there. I'll do the same thing for the bottom like so and for the top of this asset, I'm
going to do something a little bit more interesting. So I want to click on the brush thumbnail
and I'm going to look for Snake Hook Brush, and I’m gonna click, okay. So it's just a simple pop up saying that
these brush works are a bit better with Sculptris Pro. So fair enough. Let's go ahead and enable it. So these one right here
and for you would be under the stroke palette. Sculptris Pro This is the icon that I just enabled. so when a Sculptris Pro is enabled,
you see that the cursor changes to these purple color. That means that you can do these sort of things
and ZBrush will change the topology or updated topology as you move it along. Right? So let's not do that
because what I want to do is edit this brush. I'm going to double click
these arrows here to open up the left tray and from the alpha palette, if you click on this icon
here at the top left, you can drop that in there. All right, now in the alpha thumbnail,
I'm going to select something like the Alpha07. I think this one will be okay when I click on that. So now when I push, you'll see that I'm not,
you know, creating a very a very long sort of effect or pushing the geometry for too long
because I'm using these alpha to restrict the areas that this brush is going to affect. So this is a pretty cool trick
because basically the areas that have white, those are the areas that I'm going to push
and anything else is going to be left behind. So this is how you can create
maybe with a smaller brush size, you can start pushing things like that and create
a, like a crack on the wood. So I'm doing this from different angles and you see how easily we're going
to start to create something that's a bit more complex, maybe reduce the brush size
even more is to add a bit more geometry. Okay, So that's pretty good, right? It's kind of like where they want the tree sort
of like cracked or it got rotten or something inside and this will be fine
for what we're going to be doing next. right. So let's
go ahead and revert these back to what we had before. So no Alpha and I want to try to push
from the center inwards. So this is going to hollow out the tree a bit more. So so far, these are kind of like sculpting
tips and tricks and techniques. I haven't started with a with the actual brushes, but
that's kind of like the tutorial part of this video. Before we get into the overview. All right. So I think you get the idea right. You can just spend a bit more time doing this,
but I think it works. So now that we have this, I'm going to go ahead
and also maybe smooth out these edges a bit. I still have the Sculptris Pro enable. So as I do this, I'm also adding
geometry in these areas. I think this one is okay as it is. It's going to be more like a knot than anything. and let's go ahead and turn of Sculptris Pro. I'm going to switch to the move brush and also
holding the smooth brush or the shift key sorry to access this move brush. I'm going to simplify these
because I want to see these faceted polygons just for a bit
so that we have something a bit cleaner to work with. But this is essentially be the asset, right? Obviously right now
this is still a dynamesh object, right? So it's not the cleanest topology. I can go ahead and redynamesh again and you know,
the brushes would work just fine with dynamesh. However, if you have subdivision levels, that's
kind of like a better way to add these type of details. So in order to do that, I'm
going to go ahead and duplicate this. So I went to click on duplicate,
so I have two sub tools that are exactly the same. first one I want to call is sketch for you reference. And the second one, let's call it subdiv. Alright. So with the subdiv what I need to do
that's go into solo mode and let's collapse this. I want to click on the summary ZRemesher
which I have here, but I'm just going to give you the settings
that I'm going to use from the geometry palette. Let's open up the ZRemesher. So I want to make sure that I think 5000
polygons is fine. So this target polygon count is in
the thousands of five is 5000. So I think that should be okay. Yeah, let's go for maybe 4000. All right. The rest is going to be exactly the same. I'm not going touch any of the settings,
so it's going to be pretty much the default settings. You can change the target polygon count depending on how complex or you know,
how many polygons you want in your mesh. All right, let's done on poly frame so that you can see
what the result looks like and click on ZRemesher. There we go. So not too bad. It actually created a fairly simple mess here. Some of these areas need a little bit of work just to remove some of these details,
but that's again, something simple to do. I can use the select lasso to hide these polygons. And then let's go ahead and go to the modified
topology, delete hidden. And I'm also going to use the close hole feature
just to close any area that might have a hole. And you know, at this point
we can just go ahead and remesh again. But I think I need more polygons. So I want to set it back to 5000. I think that was the original idea anyway. All right. So I think this area that is pretty complex
did a pretty good job. I want to use the infinite brush
to add more thickness to this area. B>I>N to access the inflate brush just a tiny bit and the rest looks pretty good. All right. So now I want to recover some of the details that
I had, even though I want to create my own details. what I want to cover this process
in case you spend a lot of time on a sketch and then you want to,
you know, recover all those details. so with the sub tool, with the subdivision selected
and the sketch also visible. Remember in solo mode, you can turn this on and off. It doesn't matter as long as they are both visible. I want to go ahead and click on project
and this project would be under the sub tool sub palette, this one right here. So when I click on project and you see
it is projecting the details of the original mesh into this one,
it's going to be something going on here. Let me just check what this is. It's an extra stranded polygon in there. All right. So I'm going to delete that as well. There we go. But yeah,
you basically can recover all of those details. now, if you want to see more of those details,
you need to obviously add more resolution. So in the subdiv these let's
go ahead and click on Divide and let's project again, Divide, project again, Divide project again. Okay. So that's not too bad. Let's go ahead and hide the sketch
and we can concentrate on this subdivision. Let's change the material to basic. So what I want to do
is maybe smooth this out a little bit. Like I said, we recover some of those details in here,
but we're going to use the brushes pack to actually generate those details. Okay. So let's smooth this out. You can also use the deformation palette, by the way,
and let's go to deformation. You can use something like polish might be a little bit
too strong. That's right. If you're starting to smooth things
and you don't see the effect straight away, what I would recommend is to use the smooth stronger. So I have it already in my custom palette here. Smooth, stronger, But this one comes with ZBrush.
So you can load it from the lightbox. All right.
So I'm going to reduce the intensity a bit and see whether they smooth stronger is a lot faster,
but a lot easier to smooth this out. All right. So like I said before, if you have references,
this is probably a lot easier or a little better to create something more realistic,
especially if you're doing a specific type of tree. Right. Because I don't know
if it is like a sequoia tree or something like that. You might have like a more pronounced sort
of secondary shapes, like that. But again,
I just want to show you the effect of the brushes. So. All right. So that's the end of setting up this asset
or at least the base mesh of these asset. Now we're going to jump into detailing. So let's go ahead and bring in the brushes. And I'm going to start with some of the simple ones, because the brushes come with three different
categories or let's say four different categories. The and all of this is cover in a tutorial
that comes with the pack. So that's
why I'm not going to spend too much time on this. So the most basic ones are the alphabets brushes that
have be a Drag Rect icon like these ones right here. So this is what you would expect to get in. Most of the brushes that you can get online again is
just a complex alpha that has all the details in there. You can click and drag and that's it. So for example,
I can take these, knot double click on that to load that in and maybe in this area
what I'm going to do is when I click on layers and I’m gonna click on a new layer and I’m gonna to click and drag and there we go. Obviously we need a bit more resolution,
so let's actually undo all of this. I'm not going to do a layer.
I'm actually going to duplicate the subtool. So I have more options to show you. So let's duplicate that one and hide this
and let's subdivide this a couple more times. So now I have 6 million polygons.
This should be enough. Let's go ahead and click and drag now. And we now see all the details. now, the first thing that I want to give you in
terms of sculpting is that once you draw something like this, right, or
you do any type of stroke before you do anything else in terms of sculpting, you can use the AdjustLast,
which is in the stroke palette, this one right here. And that will basically increase
the strength of whatever you dragging. So I'm going to add a tiny bit more contrast in there. Perfect. Now, this doesn't look super realistic,
especially because of the base mesh, right? So it's very, very simple bump, Right? so I want to maybe
edit this a little bit let’s undo this a bit. Go to the lowest of the visual level
and let's use the move brush. And again, this is the reason why I said that at the beginning of the tutorial
that having the, the primary and secondary shapes is very, very important. So it's going to make sure that the knot looks better. All right. Something like this I think should be okay. Let's go ahead and use the knot again, click and drag
and let's increase the intensity with the adjust last. Let's go ahead and use the knot again, click and drag
and let's increase the intensity with the adjust last. All right. So that's a little bit more realistic. Perfect. Let's go ahead and use a couple more of these
brushes that are very simple. So, for instance, we can take this one is pretty good. The log cut 12 I’m going to double click on that
and I want to use these for the bottom click and drag and this is what you get right. You also get these
sort of like extra overflown details here. So if you don't want to have any of that,
the simple thing to do would be just to mask an area. So for instance,
if I select this mask tool that I have here, it's kind of like the mask pen
just a custom one that is a bit sharper, but you can do the same thing with Mask Pen
So I'm going to quickly mask this out, right and you can lower the subdivision
level to blur that mask. There we go. Go back to this, the highest subdivision level. And when I click and drag to add this
and also maybe this is not the one I want let me just start a few more,
see what works on something a bit stronger like this. Let's see another one.
This is the fun part. Like you have a lot of options too, to try
and figure what you want to achieve. All right. So I think this one works
when I increase the adjusts to add more contrast to it. Perfect. So that's working fine. Let's go ahead and do the same thing
for. Yeah, with a different one. Maybe something with less cracks
or like thinner cracks, maybe let’s try this one up. All right, perfect. All right, So let's go ahead and detail
the inside of these of this trunk. Just kind of like a very rough,
maybe rotten or burnt wood. So to add details to this area, let's go ahead. I'm bringing some of the brushes and just to introduce you to a different type of brush
that comes with this pack. So I've shown you the most basic ones
that are just about clicking and dragging the detail. The other brushes that come with this pack
are the ones that have this brush icon with layers. so these ones are really, really fun to play with. I want to show you
any of these three really would work just fine. so to show you how these brushes
or this type of rushes work and want to use these hallowing trim tree, which basically gives you
a very practical example of how these brushes work. So the idea is that with this brush now,
I can just go ahead and push the geometry quite a bit and you see I'm just hollowing that tree, right? But this is just a single stroke.
So now that I let go, I can click again and you see it creates kind of like another layer,
another level of, of depth. And I can keep doing that. So this is a new stroke and a new one and so on and so forth. So that's how you can, you know, hollow out a tree. So I'm going to use this. Let's not do that. I want to use this around here to hollow these area. Again,
multiple strokes will vary the surface quite a bit. So I think this one is the best way
of approaching this area. But you can also, you know, say you can continue the crack around here,
I'll do that with a different brush. All right. So you see, it's fairly simple
to achieve an interesting look. And I'm doing this, you know, quite rapidly. I would spend a bit more time
probably if I'm doing this for a proper asset. Now, let's bring back the light works
and I'm going to use this one right here. The tree long strong.
So this one will give you a much more textury effect. You'll see if I do it here,
it has a bit more of a of details so I can use that. Or actually I think the this one
the tree strong might give you more details. Yeah. so depending on which one you use
you have a different set of details really. So let's go with this one now
and I'm just going to extend this bit. I'm also creating the strength
by pressing harder or softer on my tablet. Here we go. So here is the cut I think I'm going to. when I don't do that,
so when I make sure that this area is not as thin. So let's go ahead and use the inflate brush
first and smooth that out. that way it can sort of push in like that and it makes it a bit more realistic. All right. So that's kind of like the idea of that brush. You have three of the same
to create, very similar results. now this is pretty cool.
But I think I want to add a bit more detail inside. So with the lightbox, let's go ahead
and something like the burn bark, something like this, that is pretty rough.
I'm going to show you the effect here in a clean area. This is pretty rough. And I just go over the same area with a stroke and
it creates this very rough kind of like a burnt wood. So I'll use that to add an extra level of detail. More like surface noise than anything. But, you know, it has a reference of a bark,
so that's why I would use these one. Okay, let's go ahead and use another one
so you can go to the ones at the end of these pack. So let's say from here, from wood pattern
one to wood pattern 22, those ones are pretty stylized. But the intention of these
is not only to create a stylized kind of like patterns of wood,
but once you start layering this app and use them in combination, you can create something
very intricate and very realistic as well. I want to use these wood pattern 21 and do something like this. Change the brush size as well,
and just pressing with different strengths. There we go. All right.
So it's not to create something a lot more interesting than what we had. All right.
So the next thing I want to do is show you the application of another layering brush
in combination with a normal sculpting brushes. So the sculpting brushes or when I
when I say sculpting detailing brushes, I mean anything that has the brush. so the simple brush icon that is a sculpting brush,
meaning that you can use a pattern, for example, this Hickory strong base, If I double click on that,
I can just go ahead and drag to create the effect. Right. Very, very quickly. And we have details already. But the cool thing, obviously,
is that you can control the flow of it right? Depending on the, you know, the brush that you use,
you might get better results. So, for example, these Hickory flat allows you to add all of these details. So again, a lot of different brushes with different
effects is more about playing with them. Just to get familiar with the different effects
more than anything. let's go ahead and create something that has kind of
like the original bark of the tree and maybe part of the tree
or part of the bark has been stripped out. And you can see the sap wood or the hardwood in a way,
like kind of like the softer or inner cleaner version of the wood
that you would see in a tree. I believe it's called sap wood or sap wood,
yeah sap wood. so for that, I'm going to do a couple of things. First, I'm going to store a morph
target that I have here in my UI. But you can also do the same thing from Morph
Target here. So I just press this button to store more target. Right now we have recorded a state of the model,
the current state of the model. The next thing is I want to use the mask lasso
to define the areas that is going to have the kind of like the exposed wood. So is something random maybe like that? I should be okay. Maybe use the mask pane as well. Just to variate this a little bit. There's not, you know, perfect. The more organic, the better. I think. But I'm not going to spend too much time on this. Just just a quick outline changes like so maybe extend this a bit more. There we go. so basically this mask area is going to have the bark
and anything that is non mask at the moment is going to have
the kind of like the pattern. So let's go ahead and do that pattern first. And for that I'm going to use know what? Let's go ahead and use this furrows
pattern01 at double click on that one, large brush. I want to test this out. Yeah, I think this will give me a pretty good a pretty good idea of,
you know, the type of wood that I will end up with. So it's going to go along the entire trunk of the lower wood to define it. And I think this is one of the most important things to highlight about the brush is that
even though they have, you know, they have alphas and basically the alphas are the ones
that are defining the type of wood, the ability that you have to dictate
the flow of the details is kind of like the most powerful thing about this. So I'm going to try to integrate these furrows with the with the note
a little bit more. All righty. Yeah. So not too bad. In just a few seconds, we have something that looks
pretty, pretty interesting. Now we can go ahead and combine this effect
with something else. So let's go back to the lightbox
and let's try some of the more stylized brushes and you'll see when I say stylize, I mean, the effect
that you get is rather stylized compared to the other alphas, the simplicity of these brushes
or the pattern of these brushes is by design, right? The idea is that you can combine multiple of these
and create something a more complex and having a bunch of these simple brushes allows you to customize
the look that you want by combining them differently. so you have a lot more control
and ultimately create something that is more unique. So I want to use this wood pattern19 Let's go ahead and yeah, let's go with this one. So this is going to add smaller veins of wood. I would say. But as you can see,
it's pretty it's pretty straightforward. There's no there's not a lot of tips or tricks
that I can give you aside from using the, you know, following the flow. I’m going to exaggerate the patterns
here, getting closer to the bark or the unmask area, sorry, the mask area. There we go. All right. And just to mention it, because it is included
in the pack, I do have an extra brush which is called the Pablander brush. This is a, you know, a personal brush
that I use for a lot of things. Not It has nothing to do with it. Bark and wood
brushes. However, I included this brush in the pack
just because I think it is very valuable for the type of, you know, things that you want to achieve
with these brushes. so I want to click on Pablander Slash and is what
I like a slash or a very strong dam standard brush. But it's really good to create
these sort of like cracks like so, so I'm just going to extend these cracks here. So at the end of the day, these brushes will give you
a pretty good starting point for detailing. But I would suggest once you have them, you you can just go ahead and take advantage
of the suggestion of detail. So I'm not really,
you know, coming up with new details. I'm just kind of like refining or highlighting some of the details that are already there
generated by the brushes, really. And I think that's one of the key
elements of once you have done the base layer of details,
you can just go ahead and refine it like that and create something that is very unique
and very convincing. Alright. So I think that is okay.
Now let's go ahead and invert these masks. So holding control and click once in the canvas and I'm going to go ahead
and do the same thing for this area. But this time I'm going to use a layering brush. So again,
this press the comma key to get into the lightbox. and there are a bunch of these a layer and brushes
like the ones with these icon that are really fun. I'm going to go ahead and click on this secret control
line layer just to show you what these does. And you see straight away we get something that, you know, it has changed
or is displacing the geometry quite a bit. And I would say that's one of the main differences
between these layering brushes and the and the normal sculpting brushes,
the ones with just the brush that with the layering brushes,
you can actually display the geometry quite a bit, especially if you do
multiple strokes over the same area. as with the sculpting brushes, you are actually adding the details over the surface
so that you don't distort the volumes as much. All right. So with this one selected, I'm
just to go ahead and start doing this. And you see we can achieve a fairly complex
and interesting effect quite easily. Now, these brush also has a depth mask,
and this is one of the key, I would say one of the key features
or settings of these brush. So I'm not to worry about pushing this all the way down
because the depth of this brush is preventing it
from actually affecting the bottom of it. So let me just give you an example
so I can press really hard here, go all the way down, and I know I'm
not affecting these this part at the bottom. So it's kind of like finishing at the edge,
which is exactly what I want for this type of effect. Right. Let's go ahead and use the the flow
or like let's control these with a stroke to figure out how we can combine this
this protrusion of the tree or this splitting of the tree. a funny thing about these brushes
is that they kind of look like if you already had these details and then you use the morph brush or something to reveal the details,
but in reality you're building the detail. So that's one of the fun things about these brush. All right. So that's pretty good. Let's go ahead and attention
to these edges a little bit more. So I'm just going to push from this angle up just to make sure that I have all of the details that I need around the edges. There we go. That's pretty good. And, you know, the bottom is also looking pretty good. Let's go ahead and add a bit more of a layering effect
towards the edge. You see, as I do this, I mean, I can press really hard
and go over it and then you'll see it in here. But if you just sort of like stop around the edge,
the brush itself will prevent, you know, prevent you from adding details in this
in this area and just because of the angle of it. So just be aware that they're like
certain things about the brush that are really useful but it's good to know how they work
so that you know how to take advantage of them. That's what I meant. All right. So another thing, let's go ahead
and bring in my Pablander slash. So when I actually continue the crack here. All right.
So I'm going to push this all the way up. And, you know, maybe in this area we can hollow
the tree as well or add something in there. Just a reason for having that crack. And the other one doesn't go all the way in. But, you know,
this is the type of details that I would spend time working out bit more because they're just fun. So let's say what I meant about adding a hollow in here
or a hollow part of the tree is using the hollowing layers. I’m gonna use this one, this time it's going to push this in. Not too much, just a hollow area,
maybe something that lives in there already. So before I clear the mask,
what I want to do is I want to use my move brush. Just a normal move
brush, and I want to push this out a bit like not out, but up. And the idea is that it
sort of like gives me that effect of the bark being a separate or different layer
from the one underneath. I don't want to push it too much
because I don't want to distort the polygons. But, but yeah, you get the idea. This is this is one of the subtle changes
or the subtle details that would make a big difference. Obviously, the edge is not perfect
because he's defined by the quick mask that I did. But I can clear the mask now. Right. And you see, it's a pretty convincing effect,
I think. Right. And I can just go with any other brush,
any of layering brush Just for the sake of demo, I'm going to use
something like these hickory wide strong layer02 and I'm just going to push the edges a little bit more actually, before I do that. The reason I saved a morph target is so that I can edit
anything that I don't need. In this case, I'm pretty happy with the results,
so I'm just going to delete my more target when I delete here
and I want to store the more target again. So that way if I just go over, let's say the,
the wood pattern, I can go ahead and clean that up. So I just want to refine the edges a little bit
So that is not as, you know, as manufactured. I want to make sure that it looks organic enough. All right. So now, if, for example, you went over, let's say,
this area right here, you can use the Morph brush. So I want to use the morph brush. This one comes with ZBrush obviously, I can go ahead and go back
to kind of like the original pattern a little bit. So it's kind of like erasing that what you just did just in the areas that you don't need it. Right. So again, I want to spend a bit more time doing this, but
I want to cover kind of like the workflow a little bit. So there we go. So this is a pretty convincing effect, I think, and it's fairly simple,
and I only use maybe five brushes altogether. And remember,
you have about 115 brushes to something very unique. So there you have it. That's kind of like how you can use some of the brushes
and what you can expect from it. So just to wrap up this tutorial,
I want to show you one more effect just to illustrate the efficiency of these brushes. If I were to just actually work
without explaining the steps. So I want to use the one that I haven't touched. Right. And I want to load something, one of my favorites,
which is a sculpting brush. so this one right here,
the sequoia control pattern maker. So this one is one of my favorites,
even though is not a layering brush, which ultimately are the coolest brushes of this pack,
these brush is pretty, pretty cool. And the reason I like it
so much is because I'll show you what it does. It's a it's a pretty strong pattern. And as you can see, it doesn't continue like this
cut right here. This crevice is not continuous. Right? So you have one cut, then you don't have a cut,
then you have a cut. and the reason I build these brush this way is because
I was working on a bonsai tree asset type of thing. So there was a lot of twisting and contortion. And this one allows you to, you know, simulate that.
So let's do that. And just for the sake of demo, again,
I'm going to go ahead and do this with multiple strokes like so,
and then continue like that. So kind of like twisting those details around the around the tree. So a very convincing pattern
in just a few seconds, really. And I really need more resolution. hang on. That's why I me do all of that. So a bit of a waste
because this brush has a lot of details. I want to make sure I have enough detail. So 6 million polygons in one single motion. This is the same stroke just going over the same area
a couple of times, then let go the same thing here, same stroke. I haven't let go of my click, let's say,
and let's continue from here. So I would say just a few strokes to generate the base. And then of course you can use other brushes
or any other sculpting brushes, let's say the dam standard brush to refine
some of the crevices of these and things like that. But generally
speaking to build something like this, it would take quite a bit of time, I would say. And, you know, this allows you to get the base
right quickly and then you can obviously refine it as much as you want to. But yeah, so this gives you an idea of another brush
and this is one of my favorites in the pack, precisely because of the kind of like the flow that it gives me
and I can just do this is just create a note here very quickly. So there we go. All right.
So I guess the point that I was trying to make is that because you have this sort of ability
to control the flow of the details just by, you know, directing your stroke
like you would with any sculpting brushes, That's the reason I call them
sculpting brushes with details. You have something that looks a bit more customized,
more bespoke, based on the type of asset that you want to create, really. So in that sense, this is what I think makes these
brushes quite unique and interesting to work with. So I'm going to leave a snapshot here, shift s
and then switch back to the other one just to show you the difference, like the drastic difference
between two types of, let's say, trees or assets done with different brushes
at different speeds, I would say, and that's about it. so as a quick recap in the brush pack,
you will find the sculpting brushes, which is the one that I use for the for that asset
just before. So the ones with the with this icon right here, you have the layering brushes,
the ones that have these icon with multiple layers. Those are the ones that will build volume a lot faster
and they're really, really cool. Then you also have the very simple click and drag
brushes, mostly for the kind of like the knots and lock cuts,
that sort of thing. There are a couple more you can add. For example, this crack alpha, let's
just do this one here. And this guy, you know, is a it's a pretty interesting
sort of like cut, probably not the one for this type of asset,
but you can add it in there. So those are the a very simple one.
So three different brushes. Now, the final two brushes that are part of a separate
category, I just included them because they're fun. But you know, don't expect them
to give you a fantastic result straight away. It's just more like a,
I would say, exploratory or discovery brushes. So these two brushes right here, you see,
they have like different icons. And also the icon here is different. So these ones are kind of like a fun to play with.
I want to just show you the effect of these one and it's actually duplicates and isolate these. And I'm going to go back in time. now this brush was kind of like a happy mistake
as I was developing other brushes. but it works a lot better if you have a tubular shape. So for an asset like these would work fine. And the idea is that with the spray stroke,
you can just click from the top to the bottom. So that's kind of like a stroke. And there you go. It builds the asset like this.
So let's do a couple more. You see depending on how you apply
it will just change the pattern and depending on how hard you press as well. So the reason I included is because, you know,
you can discover like very interesting patterns fairly quick, like I said, it's not going to be
as control and perfect as the other ones, but it's a fun one to play with and it's fairly simple. So you can just do something like this. Maybe you can actually click on backface masking
if you don't want to affect the back of the tree. And this is not nothing to do with the brush itself. You can do that from the brush palette, auto
masking and click on backface masking for any brush. So that way when you do this,
you're not affecting the back. Right. So anyway, just a fun brush to,
you know, to discover things. You might have something that that looks cool
or a creature like this, maybe the hands of a creature or something or a horn maybe. And this is your base mesh
and if you had store a morph target, you can just go ahead and clean it up as well
and then use something like the like the Pablander slash or similar to just go through the model and make it more intentional
than what these brush gives you. But yeah, hopefully you get the idea. It's a it's a fun pack of brushes.
That's what I would say. It is very helpful for not just creating bark
and would like to show you with the with the character that I created. Those details on this character were created
100% using these brushes. So it's not just about creating wood or bark. You can use them for creature skin details
and and all sorts of different things. So hopefully you found this video interesting. If you have any questions, drop them in the comments And if you make something cool with these brushes,
please tag me at Pablander in social media. I would love to see the result
or the application of these brushes. All right. I'll see you in the next tutorial. Cheers!
