ZBrush EXPLAINED!! A Beginner Tutorial

hey guys been here 3d gladiator calm and in this video I'm gonna teach you how to use ZBrush so ZBrush is a digital sculpting application that is used by many studios all over the world to create 3d characters and 3d assets and I'm pretty sure that you already know what can be achieved in ZBrush but you maybe don't know what it takes to create these amazing artworks and that's exactly what I'm gonna change in this video at the end of this introduction you will have an in-depth understanding on how to create a project in ZBrush you will know more about the basics than many other people do and you will have laid a solid foundation for your future learning process so why should you spend the next two hours with me so first of all this is not a sponsored tutorial I use ZBrush for more than 15 years now and started with version 1.5 back in 2003 so basically I have witnessed how pixologic that's the company behind ZBrush has turned the software from an interesting piece of concept into a fully-fledged workhorse and I can guarantee that when it comes to poly modeling there is almost nothing that cannot be done in see brush but I still see many people are struggling with the basics and this is totally unnecessary that's basically because if you start the wrong way you become frustrated pretty fast and you do not stick long enough to see first results so if you watch this video until the end we will overcome these initial obstacles once and for all so let me make this very clear this is a complete beginner tutorial so it doesn't matter what your background is you maybe already have some experience with another 3d application or ZBrush is the first 3d program that you learn it doesn't matter because we start at the very beginning and even if you know already something about the basics I recommend that you keep watching because you probably got things wrong so I've broken this thing down into five parts in part 1 we will take a look at the technical background of C brush we take a look at poly modeling and the 200 d concept in part 2 we will download install and launch ZBrush for the first time and I give you a brief introduction on the navigation and user interface in part 3 we will cover everything that you need to know about poly modeling in ZBrush in part 4 we will take a look at several different workflows and in part 5 we will combine everything that you have just learned and start creating a sample model The Seagull model I've created for this tutorial so that's the little bird on my second screen here in the background is inspired by a character from the Disney show the puppy dog paws it is also based on a concept drawing by the amazing Jeremiah Elkhorn I do not own any copyrights on the model or the drawing and I haven't contributed anything to the show or work for this day so our rights exclusively belong to Disney I've also linked the show in the description below and I highly recommend that you guys visit Jeremiah's Instagram profile for more great concept drawings the link is in the description too before we continue I would like to talk about some common misconceptions you can find all over the Internet when you do your research on how to learn ZBrush so let me quickly switch over to my whiteboard and clear a few things up for you guys the first point on my list is ZBrush is hard to learn so let me quickly note this on the whiteboard point one hard to learn right so I think that this is not true at all ZBrush is not much harder to learn than any other 3d application like 3ds max or Maya or blender for instance of course at the beginning it takes some time practice to get used to the tools and the workflows but this becomes second-nature pretty fast I want you to be aware of two important things here though the first one is that you have to distinguish between ZBrush as a tool on one side the craft of sculpting or let's say traditional or digital sculpting on the other side these are two separate skill sets so with the right instructions you can pick up ZBrush and learn it in a couple of weeks with ease but mastering the craft of sculpting that's pretty much a never-ending story and takes years and to unleash the real power in ZBrush you have to combine both skills so let's say if you are already an experienced traditional sculptor then you can pick up ZBrush in a few days and start transferring the great work that you are already creating into a digital environment if you do not have these traditional sculpting skills then of course you can still learn ZBrush as a tool but it takes additional efforts to learn sculpting skills so picture this it's pretty much like knowing how to use pen and paper this does not mean that you know how to create a beautiful drawing right and it's the exact same thing in ZBrush and still the tools are so versatile that you can still come up with complex sculptures even if you have just started learning how to use ZBrush as a tool together with learning how to sculpt right so not knowing how to sculpt shouldn't be a reason not to start learning how to use the tool the second thing is about the input device which is probably still an ordinary Mouse ZBrush relies heavily on the use of a graphic tablet because all of the brushes are pressure-sensitive and if you really want to dive deep into sculpting you have to use a tablet no matter what this may be sounds a little bit easier than it actually is I remember that it took me more than a year to fully accustom myself to the tablet because I made the mistake on falling back when using a mouse again and again so the fastest way to get used to the tablet is to simply unplug your mouse and store it away forever I've even played games with pen and tablet and I would never ever switch back to a mouse again so besides pressure-sensitive and an increase in work speed it also has a relaxing effect on your arm and wrist which allows you to work for long hours when I talk about a graphic tablets I do not mean this crazy expensive Wacom Cintiq for instance where you draw directly on the screen I'm talking about any regular small simple graphic tablet point 2 on my list of misconceptions is that the ZBrush user interface is an unstructured mess so let me notice also on the whiteboard point 2 UI for user interface is a mess I especially here this by people who are just starting out learning ZBrush I have never heard that by someone who has mastered the program and I think there's a pretty good reason why ZBrush looks different than any other application and this is really because it is built around the sole purpose of tweaking geometry in the most intuitive way possible without worrying too much about technical aspects of 3d modeling or poly modeling you will notice why icons and elements are arranged in a certain way in ZBrush when we together take the first steps later on and beside the different look of the user interface it's also worth mentioning that you can customize pretty much everything so you can rearrange all of the icons you can assign shortcut keys to them and this allows you to build your own very personal ZBrush user interface that perfectly fits your needs besides that shortcut keys are essential in ZBrush you control many functions and brush properties through shortcut keys and it is true they're all out of them and especially at the beginning it's quite difficult to memorize them all so I recommend that you keep repeating them again and again until you don't have to think about which key combination belongs to which function I've created a shortcut key cheat sheet which is available for download in the description it does not only contain a list of shortcut keys but also a brief summary of all of the topics I'm going to cover in this tutorial we will talk about shortcut keys in great detail when we take a look at the poly modeling tools in ZBrush this leads us to point three on my list of misconceptions ZBrush requires the latest hardware so let me quickly note on my whiteboard point three hardware hungry right of course it is true that the more Hardware power you have available the better but it's still the newest trick is not necessarily require it so keep in mind that ZBrush only uses your processing power and dren this means a fancy graphic heart is not needed when you deal with meshes that consist of millions and millions of polygons like large 3d scans ZBrush will eat up your resource is pretty fast no matter how much you have available and for this exact reason some initial planning is necessary but if you plan your project ahead at the beginning pretty much every laptop or PC is sufficient to start working so speaking about hardware let me quickly bring up the graphics tablet issue again so if you already use a graphic tablet then great if you have one but you don't use it now it's the time to plug it in and if you don't have one don't worry that's totally fine too you don't need one at the very beginning but like I've already mentioned in the long run you will definitely want one to take full advantage of the pressure sensitivity right so this means that you can apply brush strokes with different pressure sensitivity depending on how hard or how much you press depend against the tablet by getting some of these misconceptions out of the way now it's to take a look at a few technical principles and first let's talk about poly modeling as this is what modeling in ZBrush actually is even if you can create these highly complex sculptures at the end of the day it's still plain and simple poly modeling but the way how this is handled in ZBrush distinguish it from any other application out there so basically ZBrush allows you a much more artistic and result orientated approach than just moving points around in space and besides that ZBrush is also capable of handling millions and millions of polygons and still runs smoothly so for this reason let's take a look at what a polygon is so generally speaking a polygon is a closed figure formed by straight line segments on the same plane so if I draw three points point one two and three and connect them with straight line segments I built the simplest polygon possible consisting of three sides so this will be a three-sided polygon of course the same works with four points so if I draw four points and connect them with straight line segments I end up with a four-sided polygon and to give you another example I can for instance also place five points connect them again with straight line segments and this will be then a five sided polygon right so if we expand on this principle and place our points in 3d space so let me quickly draw a coordinate system like so this is our x-axis our y-axis and if I extend this by an additional axis this would be our C axis and when I now place points in space and connect them again with straight line segments like so I built a face in 3d space and when I now add additional points and connect these points with the already existing points and by keep doing so I eventually end up with something that can be interpreted as a surface or a solid even if it remains hollow inside so by following this logic the more polygons or faces or points a surface has the smoother it appears and this leads us to subdivision surfaces or subdivision modeling so by subdividing a surface or adding more vertices or more points and faces to it we will create a surface that is denser than the original one so if I draw a four-sided polygon again here 1 2 3 4 and connected with straight line segments and then divide each of these line segments by 2 so I introduce new points here and connect these points I create a denser mesh than the original one and if I keep doing this the mesh get denser and denser each time I subdivide it right and with a certain distance to the model the surface appears to be smooth so if i zoom in close to this one I can still see the single polygons so let me demonstrate this on a on a surface that's a little bit more complex let's say something like this if it consists only of a few faces let's say 1 2 3 4 I'm not able to match this curve but the more subdivisions I add to the surface or the more points I introduce or the more faces I introduce the closer I get to this rounded surface here and again if i zoom in close to the surface you can see all of the single polygons and with some distance to it the surface appears to be smooth depending on the calculation method you can turn a box into a sphere like shape this way so let's say if we have a simple box subdivided a couple of times we will eventually end up with something like this depending on the calculation method and the amount of vertices who points we add so before see brush has existed this was kind of a painstaking process because you had to manually move the points of vertices around in 3d space and then at the end you were applying some sort of smooth modifier to it to achieve a detailed and smooth result but with ZBrush you can focus on the creative part without constantly worrying about the technical aspects of poly modeling right so you focus on the creative part first and when you are done sculpting then you can still prepare the model for the later use in the pipeline there is one more thing I would like to talk about before we finally jump into action and this is a big one and an important one is the two other half D concepts ZBrush is based on yes that's correct two and a half D even if you will not use it it is still only present and understanding the core principles of two lahardee will help you to understand why things are handled a little bit different in ZBrush than in other 3d applications so it for instance explains why we have three different saving options and it would also explain why 3d models are called tools so let me quickly write down to D 2 and 1/2 D and 3 D we have 2 D at the very top 3 D at the bottom and as the name already implies 2 and 1/2 D is a mixture between 2d and 3d so it is located somewhere in the middle here and I note 2 point 5 D here and let's start with the explanation of 2d or 2-dimensional pixel first a pixel is short for picture element and it's basically the smallest building block of an image so if I draw a coordinate system here again I can start placing two-dimensional pixels on this great right so I simply place them here and every pixel contains or stores information about its position in the grid and additional information like color values for instance red green and blue right and in consequence the more pixels and image has the higher its resolution on the other hand we have our 3d concept so I draw the coordinate system again this is our x axis our Y axis and I now extend the two-dimensional grid by a third axis which is our C axis and now I can start placing 3d models in this coordinate system like so and as you already know the 3d model here is built by vertices of points in 3d space that are connected with straight line segments right and in this case I can rotate the model around in the viewport or in 3d space and I can also rotate the camera around the model so this is my camera and I can rotate it basically around the model here so pixologic has taken the two lahardee concept one step further they do not store only color and position information into the pixel they also store that information orientation and material information right so it's a pixel on stereo it's so to speak and they do not call it pixel anymore they call it pixel so they've changed the term from pixel to pixel right and I guess this is also where the company named pixologic comes from so what does this mean in practice we still have a coordinate system that consists of an Y and an x axis like so this is our x axis and our y axis and because we are now applying brushstrokes or pixels to the canvas with a brush and we do not only apply position and color information but also depth orientation in material the coordinate system or the canvas as it is called in ZBrush gets virtually extended by a C axis so we have a C axis here and every time I draw a brushstroke to the canvas I apply also depth information right so let's say I have an object here or a 3d primitive that is placed on the canvas then it appears to be some sort of 3d right we have a highlight here we have a shadow side over here and let's say the light is coming from here and because orientation is stored into the pixels I can move the light around and let it shine from here and in this case also the shading or the position of the highlight and the position of these shadows they react according to the position of the light right and I can now switch between different to the healthy brushes and start modifying the pixels I can apply different materials I can change the colors and I can also move the pixels or pull the pixels out or push them in closer to the canvas until they literally disappear behind the canvas because depth information is stored into them but keep in mind that we are still not dealing with a real 3d object here because I cannot rotate this object because the pixels are fixated to the canvas I cannot also not rotate the camera around it because of the same reason right the pixels are fixated to the canvas and because I'm editing the depth value along the z-axis with a brush the application is called ZBrush that's all you need to know for the moment and the next part I will show you what all of this looks like in action but before we can use ZBrush it's a good idea to install the software on your computer alright guys so before we can start ZBrush we have to download and install it of course that you can find a si brush on the pixologic website on pixologic comm and if I click on get ZBrush you have several options here let's start with by ZBrush and you can buy ZBrush 2019 as a monthly subscription or if you are not a fan of the subscription model you can buy it also as a perpetual license and the price is still fantastic for the amount of features that you get and besides buying the regular version of ZBrush you have also the possibility to to get ZBrush core that is available in the 2018 version at the time I'm recording this video and as you can see the price is a lot lower than for the standard license and that's because a few features are missing so if we check the future comparison list here you will notice that not a lot is missing we have dynamesh we have see spheres the maximum number of polygons per mesh is limited to 20 millions which is still more than enough to create highly complex and detailed models life boolean's are missing and sculptures Pro is missing too for instance but still ZBrush core is a great deal to start learning and the sample model from the introduction for instance can be also easily recreated in C brush core right and then of course we have also the option to try C brush the trial version is currently available ZBrush 2018 and all you have to do is register on the pixologic website download the package and connect to the internet every time you launch ZBrush right I am working with the latest version and that's 2019 point one point two so if you come from the future all of the concepts I share in this tutorial should still be relevant as long as pixologic does not change the core of the software so don't worry if you watch this in 2022 the basic concepts will still be the same so this is what you will eventually end up with after a clean installation of C brush and before we take a look at the user interface I would like to show you my tablet settings I am using a Wacom Intuos Pro it's not the newest model but it still does the trick so if you consider buying a tablet look on ebay first because people are selling tablets that are pretty much unused and you can get them from for a very good price there so my tablet settings are available in the control panel here on the Wacom tablet properties and then this little window pops up and I've set the tip field from the middle position here slightly to the left to make the brush a little bit more pressure sensitive and I don't have to depress it that much against tablet right and then we have of course our standard left-click set to the tip of the brush I've set the right click to the first button and the middle click to the second button here for the eraser I have left these settings untouched and for the mapping I have set this to full screen of course to control both of my screens and I have also adjusted the tablet area and set it to portion and these settings really depend on the size of your tablet in combination with the amount of screens and of course also the screen resolution so adjusting these values basically controls how fast the cursor moves across the screen right so it requires some some testing here to find the perfect values for you then last but not least I have said the expressed keys to the right the Express keys all these little buttons on the tablet here and I've set them to the right because I used the tablet in the position of my mouse so I don't have it in front of the keyboard like many other people do I have it next to it where you would usually have your mouse and I've set them to the right so I can move my hand over to the keyboard without touching the express key so I don't use the Express keys and now I can move the hand over without accidentally touching them right and I have disabled all of the touch features of the tablet because they are pretty much useless and that's that's pretty much it you are good to go with these settings alright then let's jump back to ZBrush and give you a brief introduction on the user interface so when you launch the brush for the first time you will get prompted with this built in browser it is called lightbox and it gives you quick access to your projects tools brushes offers and much more and you can open and close the browser by hitting the lightbox button or the little hide button over here and of course there also exists a shortcut key to open and close light box and that's the comma key on your keyboard right and in the preference settings here if you open up the preference palette and go down to the lightbox settings there is a button the tear see brush not to open lightbox at launch so if you disable it it should not open when you start ZBrush the next time for some reason this does not work on my end but you should give it a try maybe it works for you then we have our canvas in the middle of the screen this is where all the action takes place have a drop-down menu where all the tools in ZBrush are stored and we have a left and a right tray that I can open up or close by double-clicking on this little arrow icons here and you can basically store all of the pellets in this trace by hovering over the title and then just simply drag and drop this little circle icon over to the left or the right tray and release it above the trade and to keep everything nice and organized you can click on the title to close it or open it again and when you click on the little circle I can you remove it from the tray so keep in mind that the pellet is still accessible through the drop down menu next to the canvas we have all of these tools and I want to point out that these are not special tool palettes because everything you see here all these buttons and switches they also can be found in the drop down menu right so let me quickly demonstrate that by docking the document palette over to the right tray and if I hover over these guys next to the canvas you can see that they are also get highlighted in the document palette and that's because these are actually one and the same buttons right so I'm able to move the canvas around by clicking on the scroll button and set it back to the center of the screen by clicking on the actual button so basically pixologic has arranged the tools you use the most right next to the canvas and the cool thing here is that you can pretty much adjust everything you see here and you can do that by going to the preference pallet and open up the configuration sub palette and enable customize and when you do that you can see that the user interface slightly changes and that's because you are you are entering the customization mode and in this mode you can now start moving interface icons around and you do that by hitting or by pressing ctrl alt on the keyboard and then you simply drag and drop the icons around right and you can do that also by I have my my tool palette here you can do that by storing or or moving the pallets over to the trace and then for instance in the tool palette here you can start placing icons below the canvas and when you are done with the adjustments simply go to the preference pallet again disable customize and store the configuration so you setup is still there when you start ZBrush the next time so let me quickly undo this by enabling customization again and I press control alt on the keyboard again drag-and-drop the icons to the canvas to delete them and as you now already know they are not gone forever because we can still find them in the corresponding pallet so let me quickly move these guys back in place and exit the customization mode so pretty much the same principles apply when you assign shortcut keys to assign them you do not have to enable customize all you have to do is ctrl alt click on an icon or a button or switch or a slider somewhere on the interface or inside a pallet here to enable the assignment mode so if I do this for instance on the solo button here I hover over the solo button ctrl alt and click on the button and then you can see at the top of the screen and you get this little message that you can now press any key combination to assign a custom hotkey if I move the cursor away the message disappears and the option or the operation gets cancelled so let's do this one more time ctrl alt on the keyboard and click on the icon and now you can assign pretty much any shortcut key to to this button so let me quickly choose one right I've assigned the N key to it and when you now click the N key or press the N key on your keyboard you enable the solo mode here and when you're done with assigning shortcut keys don't forget to open up the preference palette again go down to the hotkeys sub palette and store or save the hotkeys so they are still there when you launch ZBrush the next time when you want to find out what your cookies are already assigned you simply hover over a slider or a button like to draw size slider here and you can see in the description that pops up the little s at the very end that that means that the S key is already assigned to this slider so if you press S on your keyboard any and have the cursor anywhere on the canvas or next to the canvas the little slider pops up again and you can adjust the draw size off the brush on the fly let me quickly talk also about two other settings here and they can be found in the preference pallet so if you open up the config sub palette you have the restor custom user interface and the released warp standard user interface so if you do your adjustments here let's say I open up the left tray they go to the preference tab and click on store configuration the current configuration gets stored as my custom configuration so if I switch back to the standard configuration you can see that the left tray gets minimized again and if I click on preferences config and restore the customized user interface so that's the one that we just saved a few seconds ago you can see that the left tray opens again in case you completely mess up the user interface you have always the option to initialize ZBrush so that gets rid of all of your adjustments and resource everything back to the default settings right so that's an option you have when you have gone too far with the adjustments so that's about it for the user interface this is all you need to know at the beginning so let me quickly recap what we have just learned we have our candles in the middle here and that is surrounded by some tools all of these tools can be found in the corresponding palettes the palettes are located in the drop down menu at the very top and then we have a left and a right tray that you can open up by double clicking on this little arrow icons here and you can dark the palettes by simply drag-and-drop this little circle icon over to the left or the right you can adjust the user interface by going to the preference tab open up the context up palette and enable customization to enter the customization mode and then you can move icons around by ctrl alt clicking on them and simply drag them around to reposition them on the user interface you can get rid of the icons by drag and drop them directly to the canvas so they disappear and you can find them again in the corresponding palette and drag them back in place when you're done with your adjustments go to the preference palette again disable customization mode and store your configuration right and the same of course works also for the shortcut keys you simply hover over a button then control I'll click on it and you can now assign a custom hotkey and when you do that don't forget to safety hotkeys in the preference palette again by clicking on store or safe then there is one more thing I want to point out and that's the size of the icons so if the icons are a lot bigger on your site then they are in my setup and that's basically because of the button size set up in the preference pallet so if you go to the user interface sub palette and take a look at the button size here you can adjust a little slider and move it to the left to make the icons smaller and if you do so you get prompted with this message where C brush tells you that the user interface will be adjusted the next time you start ZBrush so make you adjustments here then restart ZBrush and the icons should have the same size as they have in my setup and I usually also disable these white buttons here and if you look to the left and the brush palette you can see that the brush icons that are currently grayed out they become a little bit smaller so set the brush size to the lowest value and disable white buttons now let's take a look at the two and a half D concept and the two and a half D canvas as you already know ZBrush does not work with pixels but pixels instead so we do not only apply color and precision information but also depth orientation and material and I want you to forget about 3d for a moment where we actually place objects in a 3d scene or through a 3d viewport and think of it more like a 2d program like Photoshop for instance right the simple brush is already selected when you start ZBrush and by choosing an alpha we define the shape of the brush tip and by choosing a stroke we define the behavior of the brush and of course we can also choose or change the color choose a different color here like you would normally do when you set your brush in Photoshop and because we are working on a two and a half D canvass I can also change the material or choose a material let's go for the hair two material and then we can also change the depth information that we apply to the canvas so it's currently set to see it that means I'm adding a stroke to the canvas and the C intensity defines the intensity of my stroke so if I start now applying strokes to the canvas you can see that the color information material depth and orientation get applied to the canvas right now when you paint on the two and a half d canvas you can immediately notice that it looks kind of 3d but we cannot rotate the camera around the strokes or rotate the strokes in the viewport right and that's because the pixels are fixated to the tune of the canvas what I can do though is I can change the position of the highlights and the shadows because orientation is also stored into the pixels and you can do that by going to the light palette here and move this little point around and you can immediately see that the direction of the light effects the shading of our brushstrokes I can now continue adding brushstrokes or add brushstrokes on top of already existing strokes and if you switch from CS to cease up here you basically push the pixels close to the canvas until they literally disappear behind the canvas so let me quickly lower the C intensity just a tad and start painting and you will see that the pixels disappear and behind the canvas here right now we can also switch over to our eraser brush and start erasing pixels from the canvas and if we disable C sub and switch from material RGB over to color information only and pick a different color we now apply only color information to the pixels and the same of course also works with material so if I switch over to material only and pick a different material like the basic material here I apply all the material information let's try this reflective map just to give you an idea how this works and we can of course also change the Alpha to something else like the star here and the stroke type to drag rectangle and of course I have to enable C ed again and material RGB and now we can draw little stars on top of our strokes so this is basically how you add pixels to the two and a half D canvass in ZBrush and now we can make this a little bit more interesting by clearing a canvas so you can do that by going to the Layout tab here and hit clear or let me quickly undo this by hitting ctrl C on your keyboard you can also clear the canvas by hitting ctrl n so that clears the canvas and we move over to our tool pallet and select 3d mesh let's start with this one here and of course the same principles also applied to the 3d models so I choose the hair to material again adjust the color and start drawing out these little stars on the canvas and I want to point out that once you have drawn them on the canvas you cannot manipulate them because we are not drawing or or building 3d models we are just applying pixels right so this is a pixel information that still reacts to the position of the light because the orientation is stored into the pixels but we cannot rotate these things around we'll look at them from a different angle because they are fixated to the tool of the canvas right but we can of course switch over to the simple brush again choose a different color deactivate csepp switch over to the RGB information and apply let me quickly change the Alpha and the brushstroke and apply color information to these 3d objects now let's quickly recap what we have just learned about the two lahardee concept i clear the canvas by hitting control and you can find the two and a half D tools in the tool palette here the simple brush is already selected when you launch ZBrush you can control the brush with these settings here we have material and color color information only material C ad and C sub and we can control the intensity of the color and the intensity of the debt so I'm activating C add again and Patil RGB I choose a material here and a color let's switch to the basic material and the color and I can now start drawing pixels on the canvas the stroke type defines the behavior of the brush and the Alpha pretty much defines the shape of the brush tip like so and because there's orientation stored into the pixels we can change the direction of the light and that effects the position of the shadows and the highlights so you are now probably asking why I'm showing you all this and to be honest we will not expand the two and a half d tools because we will work with polygon meshes in the next step and still we will continue working on the two and a half d canvas in ZBrush and for this reason it is crucial to understand how the principles work and when you start using some advanced functions in ZBrush it is very important that you understand the concept of pixels and the concept of the two and a half d canvas now let's clear the canvas again and in the next step I show you how to get from two and a half D to 3d and I'll go to my tool palette over here again and pick a 3d mesh or 3d primitive draw it on the canvas and because we are still in draw mode I can continue draw instances of the mesh as pixels to the canvas like we did before but this time I clear the canvas again by hitting ctrl n I draw the primitive to the canvas and before I attach anything else I enter the edit mode so the edit button can be found at the top here or you can just hit the T key on your keyboard and this is very important we are now entering the polygon level of the mesh here and this is where the real fun begins in ZBrush and I will talk about navigation and in a second but for now let's take a look at the polygons and for this reason I enable the poly frame you can do this by hitting the button on the right here or just shift F on your keyboard and if i zoom in close you can see that our sphere consists of four sided polygons and some three sided polygons at the poles here and if i zoom out and exit or hide the poly frame again and zoom out even more so that the polygons become small the surface of the sphere appears to be smooth right and I can also hide parts of the sphere and go to the display properties here and enable double so we can see the rear side of our polygons and now you can see that the sphere is hollow inside but gets handled as a closed surface in ZBrush now you have also finally access to all of the brushes in ZBrush they are accessible through the brush icon here or you can also hit the B key on your keyboard to bring up the quick menu and the standard brush is currently selected and if I now try to apply brush strokes to the surface I get prompted with this message that I'm still dealing with a 3d primitive and I have to turn it into a polymesh3d before I can adjust the surface right so what does this mean for every object you see here under 3d meshes you have some unique initialized options so if you go to the tool palette and down to the initialized sub palette you can change the coverage of the sphere for instance and also the size and let's say you are happy with the overall shapes then you have to turn it into a polymesh3d to start sculpting and you do that by clicking on this button make polymesh3d and now you are finally able to apply brush strokes to the surface so the standard brush is still selected and I can now start manipulating the surface right so this works for every 3d mesh you see here and let's switch over to another one and I first exit the edit mode by hitting the T key and C brush prompts me with this message that I'm about to leave the 3d mode and switch back to the two and a half D mode so let's switch back and clear the canvas by hitting ctrl n then I choose a different 3d primitive like the gear 3d draw it on the screen or on the canvas and before touch anything else I enter the edit mode again by hitting the T key and now you can see that I have my initialized options available for the gear and they look a little bit different than for the sphere because I have more options here to adjust the primitive like the coverage or the outer profile right and again when you are happy with the overall shapes you can turn it into a polymesh3d and start manipulating the surface the standard brush is still selected so I can start sculpting let's briefly recap what we have just learned so to switch from two and a half D mode into 3d mode all you have to do is go to the tool pallet pick a 3d mesh or 3d primitive draw it on the canvas and before you touch anything else enter the edit mode by hitting the T key and before you can apply brushstrokes to the surface do your adjustments in the initialized sub palette and when you are done with the overall shape turn it into a polymesh3d by hitting make polymesh3d and now you are ready to apply brushstrokes to the surface like so and when we exit the edit mode by hitting the T key again this little message pops up where the ZBrush tells us that we are about to switch to the two and a half D mode and when you do so you draw instances of the 3d model as pixels to the screen again of course this is pretty much useless so I clear the canvas by hitting ctrl + on the keyboard draw our model back to the canvas one more time and before I do anything else I hit the T key to enter the polygon level and now I can continue sculpting the next part will be quite intense as I'm gonna show you a lot in a short amount of time the things I'm gonna show you are not complicated at all but it still requires you to pause the video from time to time to try to functions yourself so only in case you have already installed ZBrush of course we will take a look at navigating together with a good deal of all the basic functions in ZBrush that all rely heavily on shortcut keys so shortcut keys are not hard to learn but it simply takes some time and practice I have linked the PDF file to the shortcut key cheat sheet in the description if you go to 3d Gladiator calm and subscribe to my newsletters I will send you an email with a PDF file together with a whole lot of other links to everything that's currently available on 3d Gladiator for free before we continue sculpting let's make some adjustments to the canvas and you can find the canvas settings in the document palette so I track and drop it over here and I always make sure that this auto fit window size button is checked before I click a new document and what this does is basically it resizes the canvas to whatever screen size I have available here so I click a new document no I don't want to save any changes and the canvas gets resized right and then the next step I usually also get rid of the gradient in the background so I set the gradient slider to the far left and I also change the the color of the background and you can do that by clicking on these color swatch here and if you if you click and keep the left mouse button click the cursor turns into a color picker and you can now simple pretty much everything that's that's underneath the picker so I go for a slightly lighter gray like so and when you are done with these adjustments simply click on save or startup document and this tells ZBrush to come up with the same settings when you start the software the next time so a save it as a startup document and I'm good to go so let's get rid of the document palette by hitting or by clicking on this little circle icon and we can continue sculpting now let's take a look on navigation and therefore I pick let's go for cylinder here because you can see it a little bit better than just a sphere I draw it on the canvas I hit the T key to enter the polygon level or the edit mode then I assign a different material to it and in the initial last step let's make some quick adjustments and said in a radius like so and before I can start sculpting I have to turn it into a poly mesh again and now I'm ready to apply brushstrokes the simple brush is selected right okay then let's take a quick look on the navigation navigation is pretty simple you can rotate the model around by simply clicking somewhere next to the model on the canvas right and by moving the cursor around and and keep keep the mouse button clicked you rotate the model you move the model around by pressing alt on your keyboard and then click somewhere next to the model on the canvas to move it around and you zoom in and zoom out by hitting alt clicking next to the model letting alt go and moving the cursor up and down so that's a little bit complicated and requires you to try this a few times to get used to it but I promise you it becomes second nature very fast so once again by just clicking somewhere on the canvas you rotate the model by keeping alt pressed on the keyboard and clicking somewhere next to the model you move it around and by pressing alt clicking next to the model letting art go and moving the cursor up and down you zoom in and zoom out and if you do that a couple of times you should become pretty fast right and there's one more thing I want to show you here and that's hitting the shift key while rotating the model so I'm clicking next to the model I rotate it around and when I hit the shift key it snaps in 90 degrees angles right that makes it easier to position the model on the canvas and you will you will see me using this shift key while rotating pretty much all the time and that's already about it for the navigation you have these buttons on the right here and they pretty much do the same that I have done now with the shortcut keys so you can move them on the round here by clicking on this move button you can zoom in and zoom out and of course also you can rotate the model there's one more thing I want to point out and this is when you come to close the model so i zoom in that it fills the entire canvas i cannot rotate it around anymore because there is no empty space next to the model left so if i would click here on the model i'm already applying a brushstroke and this is where this safe border around the canvas comes into play so if you move the cursor over to or behind this white line you are able to rotate or scale or manipulate or navigate without manipulating the actual surface right and let's say if you are that close you can fit the model to the screen again by simply hitting the F key on your keyboard right the same works also if you if you zoomed out a lot at and have it somewhere outside the visible area of the canvas just hit the F key to bring it back or to Center it to the canvas again now let's take a look at the cursor or the brush behavior and I'm still in edit mode here and you can see that the cursor is red and if I exit the edit mode by hitting the T key the cursor turns white and that means I'm only into the draw mode now and apply pixels to the canvas like so so when I clear the canvas and bring back our model and hit the T key I entered the edit mode and the cursor turns red right and let me now quickly switch over or choose different primitive that has a little bit more polygons to work with like sphere 3d so I'll draw it on the canvas enter the edit mode and as you now already know before I can start sculpting I have to turn it into a polymesh3d I do that by clicking on this button here and I have my standard brush selected and see edie enabled I can now draw on the surface right and you don't have to go to the top menu here all the time to switch between C and C sub so C's up push the polygons in and C add tracks them out you can do that or you can switch between these two modes on the fly by hitting the Alt key so if I have C ed enabled and draw on the surface I pour the polygons out and when I press alt and draw on the surface I push them in right so out pretty much inverts whatever I have selected here so if I have selected C sub and press the Alt key I pull the surface out right and there's one more thing that I want to point out if you look at the cursor you can see that it pretty much follows the curvature of the surface and it does that by evaluating the face normals underneath the cursor and this function was introduced a few years ago and I usually go to the preference palette here and go down to edit and disabled is a line cursor to surface so what this does is it makes the cursor a little bit more stable so it's not wiggling around that much while I'm sculpting and of course the behavior of the cursor or the behavior of the brush remains the same right so it's just a little bit easier to look at you can also adjust the radius or the size of the brush on the fly by hitting the S key on the keyboard and this is possible because the s key is assigned to the slider so if you hover over it you can see the little s at the end of the description so if I press the S key anywhere on the canvas then little slider pops up and I can move it to the left or the right to adjust the radius of the brush on the fly and this of course also affects the size of the brushstroke so if I have set it really small I only affect small portions of the model and if I said it's do something like this I create large brush strokes and manipulate bigger portions of the 3d mesh there is another important concept you need to understand when we talk about brushes and this is how they are assigned to different key combinations all to the left mouse button so if I hover over to the brush palette or the brush I can here and click on it I get access to the quick menu you can do that also by hitting the B key on your keyboard and what you see here is pretty much every brush that's available in ZBrush so for most of these brushes I can simply assign them to the left mouse button by clicking on them like to rake brush for instance and you can see that by the change of the icon here so it changes to the symbol of the rake brush and I simply apply it to the surface right and the same applies for a whole set of other brushes like let's say the trim dynamic brush I simply selected the I can changed it's now active and I apply it to the surface right it's important to know that there is a set of brushes that cannot be assigned to the left mouse button so the smooth brushes for instance then all of the mask brushes the clip brushes and also the trim brushes and the sliced brushes right so for instance the smooth brush is only accessible by hitting the shift key let me quickly switch back to our standard brush and when I hit the shift key the cursor turns blue and that indicates that the smooth brush is now active so I can now smooth out the surface right and I can also pick different smooth brushes by opening up the the quick menu here and choose let's say this move bellies and now I can smooth out the valleys between Peaks by hitting the shift key then we have a set of brushes assigned to the control key so if you hit control the cursor turns yellow and that means that all of these mask brushes are now accessible mask pen is selected by default and it allows me to draw a mask directly on the mesh I will talk about masking later on in great detail but for now it's important that you understand that different brushes are assigned to different key combinations and of course it gets also even more complicated we have access to another set of brushes by hitting the control and the shift-key and here the select rectangle brush is already selected by default and we have also access to the clip brushes to the sliced brushes and the shrimp brushes right and you're probably asking why this is so complicated and there's a very good reason for it and this is that with some practice it allows me to focus entirely on the sculpting process instead of going back and forth to the brush palette all the time to pick different brushes so let's say I'm working with the standard brush here right and then I shift on the keyboard to smooth out certain areas then I hit ctrl shift together to isolate certain parts so I can focus only on them then I can mask parts by hitting the ctrl key and draw a mask so parts that are masked do not get affected by the brush right then I can show the entire model again I can clear the mask and I can continue smoothing things out or adding additional brush strokes and I do all of this without having to go back to the brush menu and pick different brushes right so that's a little bit complex and complicated at the beginning but it becomes second-nature pretty fast and you don't want to miss the quick access to a different set of brushes right so we can now basically take it one step further from here and apply colors to the polygons so like we did already when we were applying two and a half d brush strokes to the canvas and you simply do that by having any brush selected I have my standard brush here and I go to the top menu this ABC edge enabled RGB select a different color and when I do that you can see that the selected color gets applied to the entire model so we set it back to white again and open up the color palette at the very top and fill the object with the currently selected color and now I change a different color and apply light directly to the surface so it works pretty much the same way like it did when we had the strokes in the two and a half D canvass right and of course you can apply different colors to the model and you basically paint directly on the polygons that means the denser the mesh is the more polygons you have available to paint on and the more details you can add to the model so if I want to clear everything here I can set the color back to white open up the color palette again and select fill object right and the same of course also works with materials but in this case we have to select the material a channel here and open up the color palette again click on fill object and now with only the material channel selected I pick a different material let's go for the reflective map material and when I now paint I only apply material information to the polygons so again the concept is the same as we already had it with our two and a half deep pixels on the canvas right next let's talk about the mask function in ZBrush and for this reason I go to the tool palette again and pick a sphere 3d draw it on the canvas and to the edit mode turn it into a polymer 3d and add a couple of subdivision levels so you can do that in the geometry tab here by clicking on divide a few times and that basically gives me more polygons to sculpt with and also to draw my mask on I will talk about the geometry sub palette and different workflows later in this video but for the moment I only need a model with a higher resolution so I get rid of the low a subdivision that was here and as you now already know the mask brushes can be accessed through by hitting the control key so if I hit the control key I have here my mask tools and the mask pen is usually already selected by default and if you now draw on the model by hitting the control key you applying a mask right so the cursor turns into a yellow cursor with a little plus sign in front of the word mask and if you hit the control key together with the Alt key the little plus turns into a minus and that allows us to delete parts of the mask so I can mask certain areas and I can unmask certain areas by hitting ctrl + alt together right and these masked areas they do not get affected by the brush so if I start applying direct brush to the surface everything that is masked remains untouched by the brush and we can simply invert the mask by pressing the control key and tapping somewhere next to the model on the canvas right-clicking here and this inverts the mask and now everything that was previously masked is unmasked and I can continue applying brush strokes here you delete the mask by again moving to cursor next to the model pressing the control key and then left clicking and drawing this little rectangle right and that unmasks everything and you can use the rectangle of course also to mask so if you move the cursor away from the model press the control key again draw this rectangle and then simultaneously also press spacebar you can move the rectangle over on top of the model and apply the mask to everything that's visible at the moment so not only the the polygons that are facing us but also polygons at the back of the model right and again that's clear the mask by hitting the control key again and drawing this little rectangle outside the model and you have different shapes of masks available so if you press control key again and go over to the brush palette we can for instance select the circle and it works the same way as the rectangle so I draw a circle somewhere outside the model move it over to the model let it go and then it masks certain parts of my model in a circular area so you can also do that by having the cursor directly over the model and hitting the control key and then draw the little circle here right then there's another cool tool that I use a lot that's the mask curve tool looking quickly clear the current mask by hitting control and drawing somewhere outside the model and the mask curve tool allowed to draw a curve here and I do that by hitting the control key again start drawing the curve let control go and hit the R key or tap the R key and whenever I do that I can create these curve points and apply a mask and this option allows me to paint or place pretty complex shapes of masks on the model alright and again you can switch to a different tool by hitting the control key let's switch back to the mask pen again and when you drag the rectangle next to them on the mask gets cleared or deleted so now that you know how to mask your models with shortcut keys and the mask brush I would like to show you other options for masking and they can be found in the tool palette if you go down to the masking sub palette you have several options here for masking so let me quickly draw a mask back on our model again and you have here the option to view the mask or hide the mask can do that also by clicking ctrl H to hide the mask so even if it is not visible anymore it still works of course right so if we click on view mask we can see our mask again then of course you can inverse the mask you can clear it let's undo this and inverse it again and the very cool feature here is also that you can sharpen the mask so if you click the sharpen button a couple of times you sharpen the mask and it works also the other way around by blurring the masks so if you hit the blur button a few times the edges of the mask become blurry that can be also done on the fly directly on the modern so if I clear the mask and mask this area here and if I now control click on the mask I basically blur it and if I ctrl alt click on the mask I'm sharpening it right so control click on the mask for blur and control all click on the mask for sharpening it and then I sometimes also use grow mask and shrink mask in combination with sharpen so if I grow the mask and click on sharpen a couple of times it becomes a little bit bigger and if I shrink the mask and sharpen it again it becomes smaller right beside that you have several other options for masking these are pretty advanced features already so for instance I can mask by cavity so the mask it only applies in these little valleys here or also lets say by smoothness right so if I'm asked by his movements all the areas that are pretty smooth remain unmasked and I can of course invert the mask and everything that sticks out of the model or has a rough surface gets affected then let's take a quick look on how to select certain parts of the mesh or isolate them so as you already know the Select tool can be accessed by hitting trol together with the shift key and then we have here our tools the door assigned to this key combination the select rectangle is already selected by default and if you press control shift together and start drawing a rectangle next to the model this green box appears and whatever is underneath the green box gets isolated so I'm basically hiding the rest and everything that was under the green box also the faces at the back of the model are now isolated I can bring back the complete model again by hitting ctrl shift together and tapping somewhere on an empty area of the canvas right so let me quickly undo this to show you how I invert the selection and you simply do that by control shift pressing control shift on the canvas and not tapping on the canvas but drawing a rectangle again so this inverts the selection right so let's bring back everything by ctrl shift clicking on the canvas and then repeat the process by ctrl shift clicking again I draw the rectangle then I let ctrl shift go and press the Alt key to turn the deselect rectangle box into a red box and if I now move The Box around or I moved around first by pressing the spacebar and if I now hold down the Alt key I pretty much hide everything that was under the red rectangle all right I'd like for the other tools you also have here some different some different notes available so if I go into the select rectangle or if I go into the brush palette here I can for instance selector lasso selection tool and do the same here by using the lasso - to do my selections right so I can do this a little bit more little more artistically than just drawing a rectangle right if you now isolate or hide certain parts of the mesh you can do that by hitting the Alt key and go to the tool palette again and down to the visibility sub palette you can grow the selection and that brings back some of the isolated polygons again or of course you can also shrink the selection and hide more of the currently visible polygons right and you bring back everything again by simply hitting ctrl shift and then tapping or clicking somewhere on an empty area on the canvas I'm not going to cover any of these advanced process here like the clip brush or this lives or trim brush at the moment but I would like to introduce you to poly groups because body groups are very handy and they usually come in combination with the mask tool and also the Select tool right so the polygroup sub palette is available in the tool palette here poly groups and if I enable the poly frame by hitting shift F on the keyboard or clicking this button over here I do not only see the bio frame of our mesh so the sinc polygons I can also see that a color is applied to the entire mesh and that's basically already a poly group that's assigned to everything that's currently visible right so if I go over to the polygroup sub palette and click on group visible a new polygroup gets assigned to the mesh I can keep clicking and every time I click a new polygroup is assigned right so when I now isolate certain parts of the model by hitting ctrl shift key again and isolate a part right and click on group visible again let's click a couple of times to assign a nice color and exit the isolation mode by hitting ctrl shift together and clicking next to the model you can now see that I have two polygroups assigned to the mesh and the cool thing here is now let's say you would like to to keep working on this part or to isolate this part and work on some details you do not have to use the direct angle to isolate it you can simply ctrl shift click on the polygroup and that hides the rest of the mesh and only the parts that share the same polygroup remain visible right of course this works also when I click on the other polygroup so simply control shift click on it and you isolate the selected part and the rest gets hidden right and the same works if I apply a mask so let me quickly disable the poly frame here and I draw a mask by hitting the control key and when I now hover over the mask and hit control W on the keyboard the mask seems to disappear actually it disappears but if I enter the polyframe mode again by hitting shift F you can see you can barely see that the mask gets replaced by a new polygroup so if I shift control shift click on it I can isolate it I can assign a different party group to it so we can see it a little bit better right I can now isolate these individual parts and work on them separately so this becomes handy when you are dealing with a mesh that consists of millions and millions of polygons and in this case it's sometimes necessary to hide certain parts or to hide large parts of the model to speed up the workflow and to focus on areas you are currently working on right before we take a look at the different workflows in ZBrush I would like to show you a few more tools and an important one is to transpose tool so I go over to my tool pallet pick a primitive 3d let's go through the cube draw it to the canvas enter the edit mode I show the poly frame by hitting shift F on the keyboard and then let's turn it into a polymesh3d and to change the assigned polygroup color we open up the polygroup sub palette and i click on group visible a couple of times and then i also enable or show the floor grid and you can do this by clicking on the floor grid button over here or by hitting the shift P key on your keyboard right to activate the transpose tools you have several options and at the top here next to the draw mode you can see we have moved scale and rotate and there are already shortcut-keys assigned to them W for movie for scale and r for rotate I'm gonna now press the W key on the keyboard this little gizmo appears the middle of the object or in the center of the object and this guy is pretty self-explanatory because you have these elements of the gizmo that allow you to move the object around by clicking on the arrow here so I'm moving along the axis right and I can also scale and rotate it even if I'm only in the move mode here so you can scale it uniformly scale it by clicking on the yellow box in the middle to scale it up and down you can non-uniformly scale it by clicking on these boxes which are placed along the X's right and of course you can also rotate it by clicking on the circles here and you can move it freely around in a space by clicking on these grey arrows around the gizmo with the transpose tool you can do of course a lot more than just rotating scaling and moving the model around but at the moment it's only important that you know how to access the gizmo and how to do basic operations because we will need them in the next step when we take a look at the sub tools so before we do that it probably makes sense to explain what a tool is so basically every 3d object in ZBrush gets handled as a tool right so for this reason also the tool palette is maybe one of the most important palettes in ZBrush and it also contains a lot of functions that can be applied to a 3d model and in this context it also makes sense now to explain you how to save your projects or how to save your 3d months in ZBrush and basically you have three options here and option number one is to save the 3d model as a tool right and you can do that directly in the tool palette here at the very top you have the options to load a tool or save the tool so if you click on if you have your 3d model in edit mode here you can save it as a CTL file as a C brush tool right and when you start ZBrush the next time you simply open up to palette again and click on load tool to load the ZBrush tool and then you can draw it to the canvas enter the edit mode and continue sculpting right and this was basically the only option to save 3d models for a very long time until pixologic has introduced the option to save the entire project and this can be done by going to the file pallet here and save the entire scene as a project and what this does is it basically saves everything you have loaded here into the tool pallet together with your brush settings the canvas settings right and in this case the file size is a lot larger than saving it only as a tune but it gives you the possibility to continue sculpting where you have left off the scene last time right and then there's a third option and this is the one you're probably never going to use because it only saves the document with the two and a half deep pixel information and that works like this so if I exit the edit mode here and draw a few instances of our 3d model as pixels to the canvas you can go to the document palette and save only the two and a half D document so only the document with the pixel information on it unless you do some crazy to other half d illustrations you will not use this option because you are always going to save this 3d model as a tool or the entire project with all the tools by going to file and safety the entire project here right so now a tool can not consist only of one object but we can have several objects stored into a tool and let me quickly demonstrate how this works so I pick the the cube primitive try it on the canvas let's assign a different material like the skin material here to make it a little bit brighter and I also assign a different color to it but before that I have to turn it into a polymesh3d then I select this bride right here go to color and fill the object and if I now open up the tool palette you can see that I have one layer with my cube object on it and there exists a few options to create more layers with different sub tools and the first option I would like to show you is the duplicate option so if you click on duplicate the currently selected layer get Popat and i have now two layers with two cubes on it so if I select layer number two and activate the transpose tool I can move it over to the side and also assign a different color to it like so so we can distinguish them a little bit easier now we have two layers with two tools in it then of course there also exists the second method to append tools as sub tools and that can be done by clicking on the append button here and you can now basically append every tool that's currently loaded into the tool pallet so let's go for the count 3d it gets append as a on a thread layer here and it's currently not visible because it's probably hidden underneath the box so I enter the transpose tool and move the kona side and assign a different color to it again like so alright then we have three different layers with three sub tools on it and you can cycle through them by simply using the arrow keys on your keyboard so let me quickly enable the poly frame that allows us to see this a little bit easier and when I now hit the arrow keys the up and down Keys I'm cycling through the tools and you can do this also directly in the viewport and on the fly by holding down the Alt key and clicking on the model to activate it on the corresponding layer right and you can also organize these layers so I'm on the first layer here by hitting the ctrl key and the arrow key and that moves the layer up and down in the stack the subtool panel contains many other functions and I would like to quickly show you how to use merge and split so let's start with merge I have the first layer in the sub tool list selected and if I click on merge down the first layer gets merged with the second layer so let's click on it and you get that with this message we're see brush tells you that this is an undoable operation but I'm fine with that and click on ok and then we have both cubes on the same layer again here right and if we do this one more time I can merge them down into a single layer so I merge the two cubes with the cone and now let's assign a white coral 2 or 3 of them by going to color fill object and if I go down to the polygroups sub palette here and enable the poly frame and click on group visible ZBrush assigns one thing polygroup to all three objects and if I click on auto group each object gets its own poly group and that helps us when we perform a split operation so I go back to the sub 2 panel and open up the split sub palette and when I now click on group split every object with unique poly group gets placed on a separate layer right so I have my cube here on a layer I have to count on the layer and the second cube on a layer 2 and of course you can merge everything down into one layer again by opening up the merge palette or merge sub palette here and click on merge visible and this does nothing on our list here but ZBrush appends a new tool that contains all of the objects on one layer so before we finally become a little bit more practical in ZBrush I would like to demonstrate one last function and that's symmetry so let me quickly draw a primitive on the canvas again and turn it into a polymesh3d and under the geometry sub palette i divided a couple of times delete the lower subdivisions make sure that my standard brush is selected and if you go to the transform palette you can activate symmetry here or simply hit the X key on the keyboard and this basically allows me to work on on two or more sides of my model simultaneously and this is something that made zbrush famous at the very beginning because it felt so intuitive to work on two sides of your models simultaneously and gives us a lot more gives you a lot more control about the outcome right let me quickly undo this and we can of course also activate more X's like the Y and the C axis all together and that allows us to create very complex shapes in no time all right and there's also another cool function here and that's radial symmetry and let's quickly disable the C and the y axis inside you really count to something like twelve now you can see that I have twelve brushes or twelve instances of my brush enabled at the same time now I can now create really complex models in no time right so and when you are done you can simply exit the symmetry mode again by hitting the X key on the keyboard and then you can continue sculpting with a single brush the great thing in ZBrush is that it's really all about sculpting it's about building shapes and volumes and adding details without worrying about the technical stuff that needs to be considered later on the pipeline so this means you can focus on sculpting first and then still concentrate on technical parts when you are done with modeling furthermore you are already good to go with only a small set of tools so focusing on the creative part first together with working with only a few tools was a real game changer when Seavers was introduced to the market because this approach didn't exist before at the present time there are only two ways to start sculpting in ZBrush you can either create the mesh in ZBrush itself by starting with a 3d primitive or a C sphere or that's the second method you can import a mesh from an external application in a file format that is supported by ZBrush that would be an FBX file and obj file or an STL file the workflows I gonna show you in the next part applied to both meshes so the ones that are created in ZBrush itself and also the meshes that you import from an external application before I continue you also need to understand that there not only exists one workflow to create a 3d model 3d modeling is always a combination of different workflows so basically how you start really depends on the project requirements and your personal preferences and still the goal of each method is to come up with a more or less detailed and clean mesh regardless of the method keep in mind that you are dealing with polygons in ZBrush and that each workflow interlock at a certain point so this means simple piece of geometry can be turned into a dense mesh and a dense mesh can be turned into a simplified piece of geometry again this also means that you are not tied to a certain workflow from start to finish and it's up to you to decide which procedure works best showing you different workflows is what part 4 of this tutorial is all about in the following demonstration I want you to focus mainly on what happens with the mesh and not so much the tools I use by doing so you will see that the approach is a little bit different each time but the subject matter pretty much remains the same we can of course discuss functions like dynamesh or sculptures in great detail in a later video but for now it is very important that you understand the core principles without this knowledge you cannot decide which tools to use when so let's start with the most basic procedure first and this is simply by subdividing the geometry so how to work with subdivision letters is pretty easy to explain I go to my tool palette again pick a 3d primitive place it on the canvas turn it into a polymesh3d and then I go down to the initialize tab and this goes for all of the primitives for any mesh that you have turned into a polymer 3d the initialized settings are now the same so based on these resolution settings you can turn it into a cube a sphere or a simple grid and I continue with the sphere here because it consists only of a few polygons and it's perfect for demonstration and then I go up to the geometry sub palette I'm still in the tool palette here and start subdividing the mesh by hitting the divide button and you will immediately see that the surface looks a little bit more detailed now and that's because I have subdivided each polygon by two right and if I continue subdivides the surface becomes smoother and smoother there's of course also a shortcut key again to subdivide the model on the fly and that's ctrl D so if you hit ctrl D you add another subdivision level and then I want to point out also these active points at the top here and they basically tell how many points or how many vertices you have available to sculpt with at the moment we have a 24,000 so if I hit control D one more time let's say one more time then we almost reach 400,000 points and the surface is now quiet smooth and has enough resolution to apply pretty fine details right and the cool thing here is that we do not only apply subdivision levels but they remain available in the geometry tab here so I can basically move this slider over to the left to go back down to the lower subdivision level this is the level where we have started adding subdivisions right and you can step up or step down through the subdivision levels by hitting the D key on the keyboard to go one level up or you can click shift D to move a level down right and you can do that on the fly here until you reach the lowest subdivision level again so you are now probably asking what this is all good for and one of the main advantages here is that you can use subdivision levels to make large changes on the lowest subdivision level for instance so if I switch over from the standard brush that is currently selected to the move brush right and go down to the lowest or the second lowest subdivision level and make my adjustments here I can manipulate the surface or move large chunks of polygons around and then I can step up the subdivision levels select a rake brush and add smaller details on the highest subdivision level and if I now go down again to the lowest level to the second lowest level switch over to the move brush and make large adjustments on the surface like so the details they remain unaffected if I step up again to the highest subdivision level so our details are still there right the thing is that we are running in a bit of an issue here when we make large adjustments on the mesh so let me quickly step down to the lowest subdivision level or the second lowest subdivision level and with the move brush I'm going to make this heavy changes here and when I show the poly frame again you can see that the polygons are quite distorted or they are now a lot larger than they are on this side here and if I switch back to the highest subdivision level again and start adding fine details here you can see that we already deal with some distortions here and that's because we made these large adjustments on the mesh on this low resolution level right and working with subdivision levers requires you to do some initial planning before you start modeling because the base mesh or the shape of the base mesh it has to remain pretty consistent right so you cannot do these large adjustments without running into these distortions here that means that when you are working on a character you have to build the base mesh or the low resolution mesh in ZBrush or in another application and then bring it to ZBrush and start subdividing it there and work on the details without touching the the main shapes or the big shapes too much right so let me demonstrate subdivision modeling on a more practical example and I I have loaded a concept sculpture I made a few years ago it consists of several different sub tools so I select the head and enable the solar modes to hide everything else and if we open up the geometry palette or the geometry sub palette here you can see that subdivision levels are still available and if I slowly step down through these subdivision levels by hitting shift D I end up on subdivisions level one and you can see that it's basically nothing more than a simple box or a sphere like shape that consists only of a few polygons and I actually started from here this method has the great advantage that you have to focus on primary shapes with this low amount of polygons right and when I was happy with the overall shape here I was adding the second subdivision level and then I was continuing adding details a little bit smaller details and defining the shapes even more until I ended up on subdivision level number 6 which is still low in this case but this was only planned as a concept sculpture and on subdivision level 6 I was able to add finer details like the beard here for instance or single hair strands right and again this method is absolutely fantastic for not getting distracted by the amount of polygons or points so for instance if you imagine that you subdivide a sphere a couple of times you then have already so many polygons available to work with like that it can be hard to focus on primary secondary and tertiary shapes and if your primary shapes are solid also the secondary and tertiary shapes or let's say find surface details are not able to turn it in a great sculpture right I want to point out that nowadays I would probably start a little bit different because a few years ago dynamesh no sculptures was not available so starting with a simple base mesh and subdividing it step by step was pretty much the only method to to reach or to create a high resolution model and I was already running into some issues here like like in these areas for instance so the the distortions become obvious even if I would subdivide the mesh even further because I made quite large adjustments on the base mesh here and today I would start with a dynamesh and lay out the basic shapes there until I'm happy with them and then I am converting it into a subdivision model but I will show you how this works later on right so that's a practical example on subdivision modeling I also want you to keep in mind that subdivision levels are not only useful modeling they are widely used in all kind of production pipelines so for instance for rigging in the animation you would do that on a low resolution mesh and then add some sort of smooth modifier to the mesh while rendering and for a game character for instance you start with a basic base mesh then apply your subdivision levels to it at all the details go back to the lowest resolution level again turn this mesh into a mesh that can be used in the game engine and use the low res mesh together with the high res mesh to bake all kind of maps or create textures right so it's not something that's only used in modeling so subdivision levels also work the other way around so imagine that this is a mesh that consists of only four-sided polygons and let's also imagine that we do not have any subdivision that is intact I go to the highest subdivision levels so this would be level 6 in this case and delete all lower subdivisions right so we do not have the possibility now to step through these single subdivisions and in this case and this works only if the mesh consists of four-sided polygons we can let ZBrush reconstruct the subdivisions so if you go to the geometry sub palette here and click on reconstruct subdivision ZBrush reconstructs the levels step by step until it reaches a point where it's not able to simplify the polygons again right and that's a great way to turn a high resolution mesh that consists of four-sided polygons into a low res mesh with subdivision letters unfortunately this does not work when the mesh consists of triangles and I can show you this by loading up 3d scan and if we zoom in close and activate the poly frame by hitting shift F you can see that this model consists of triangles right and if I go back to the geometry tab and click on reconstruct subdivision ZBrush prompts me with a message at the top that the operation is canceled because the mesh contains triangles right but there is a solution to this and we can still turn the high res mesh into a low poly model or a low poly base mesh and the first thing I do here is I go to the sub tool palette and duplicate the current tool so we have a copy here and as I'm already in solo mode only the selected layer is visible then I go down into the geometry tab and open up the c3 measure and Siri measure basically reconstructs the high resolution mesh according our settings so the current target polygon count is set to 5 I can lower it to something like two maybe two is already too low try 2.5 and I also activate the legacy mode 2018 so this is the algorithm that was available in previous versions of ZBrush and it works a little bit better on smooth surfaces and then I simply click on Siri measure and let's eBrush do its calculations so this will probably take a minute or so and I'm going to pause the video and we'll be back with the final result so see you in a second so this is what we end up with here and I think the real measure did a great job we can compare both versions by opening up this up to palette and I switch between the layers by hitting the arrow keys on the keyboard and you can see our original model has a pretty dense mesh and our low res model now consists of quartz or four-sided polygons and when you take a look at the point count the new mesh consists of around seven thousand six hundred points whereas the original has almost four hundred thousand points right we are running into two problems here so the first one is that we have lost all of our details if I open up the subtool palette and switch between the original and the new base mesh you can see that the main shapes are here but we have lost all of our details right and the second issue is that we do not have any subdivision levels yet and that's what I'm going to change in the next step by hitting the divide button once and then I switch back to the sub tool palette exit the solo mode so you can see that both meshes are overlaying each other we have the original here and our reduced version beneath and what I do next is I make sure that both layers are visible and that I'm on the layer of our base mesh and then I go down into the sub tool sub palettes to the project tab and click on check or grant give it a second to calculate and what this does is it basically transfers all of the details from the high res mesh to the low res mesh or let's say as many details as possible because we are still on a quite low resolution level for our new mesh here right and then I simply repeat the step I open up the geometry tab again click on divide one more time switch back to the sub tool palette and click on project all again give it a few seconds to do it calculations and then it should already bring back even more details from the original and keep in mind that this only works if both meshes are overlaying each other perfectly right and let's do this one more time by hitting ctrl D to add another subdivision level and then I click on project all give it a few seconds again to transfer the details from the high res mesh to the low res mesh it depends on the processing power of your workstation right and here we are with a pretty perfect representation of the original mesh so if I switch between these two you can barely see any difference actually our new mesh is still pretty low res so we could basically add another subdivision and then we are already into the millions of polygons and repeat the project or process one more time by doing so we eventually end up with a subdivision surface so that means I can go to the geometry tab here switch down to the lowest subdivision and start making my adjustments here so for instance I can activate the transform tool and I disable the gizmo here so so the transpose line appears and I can now use the topology to mask the model and make large adjustments like so for instance of a place to transpose in the middle here and bent the mesh over then I'm going to fix these areas a little bit to make them fit and when I'm done on this level I step up one subdivision level switch over to the standard brush lower the intensity down to something like 15 and continue cleaning the shapes here right let's switch over to the move brush one more time lower also the intensity move of the move brush and adjust the surface of course this is also possible without going through the process of rebuilding subdivisions ivories but then it's a lot harder to do so if I switch back to our original 3d scan and activate the the transposed line again I already have a hard time masking the thing right so I would have to draw a mask like so and then maybe blur it and switch back to the transposed line again and let's try to rotate the whole thing as you can see because of these triangles here the mesh already gets distorted and these areas are sometimes very difficult to fix right so having subdivision levels gives you great control on the shapes and on the details and it makes it easy to work on large shapes on a low resolution level and it's quite easy to add details on a high resolution level and you can then later on use the base mesh for map baking or you can export it and use it for rigging and animation and then apply details through maps and textures during rendering right this is all you need to know about subdivision modeling or subdivision levels and give me two minutes again to briefly recap what we have just learned so basically you can apply subdivision levels or you can subdivide every mesh in ZBrush as long as it is a poly mesh so if I choose a primitive 3d here draw it on the canvas turn it into a poly mesh go down to the initialize settings and turn it into a sphere for demonstration so we can start with a very low res model here then I go to the geometry sub palette I'm always in the tool palette and start subdividing it by hitting the divide button or control D on your keyboard you are basically dividing each polygon by four if you take a look at the active points you can see that the number gets multiplied by four each time I press control D on the keyboard right and then I have my subdivision levels here still accessible so I can step through them by hitting shift D to go down one subdivision level after the other and the D key to step up a subdivision level I do large adjustments on the lowest level or on a low level by for instance adjusting the mesh with the move brush and then I can continue adding smaller details on a higher subdivision level let's quickly pick the rake brush here and add some some details and we must be a little bit careful because when we use this method the base mesh has to be already quite defined before we start applying or before we subdivide the mesh because we cannot do super large adjustments on the base mesh because that leads to distortions right so if I do something like this and then try to apply small details with the rake brush again you can see that I do not have that many polygons available in this area as I have it here for instance and that's simply because we have stretched the polygons out too far and then we have to deal with these distortions here right except that it's an absolutely fantastic method for sculpting you can focus on the primary shapes on a lower resolution level and then on secondary and tertiary shapes on a higher subdivision level right and you can also use the low res mesh for map baking or to export or rigging and animation and then reapply details from the high-res version as maps or textures like displacement maps or normal maps later on in the game or during rendering alright and let me show you another method to create meshes in ZBrush so I go to my tool palette again and pick primitive 3d we go with the sphere 3d and I entered the edit mode turned into a polymesh3d and when I show the poly frame by hitting shift F on the keyboard you can see that the topology is nice and clean this film mainly consists of four-sided polygons and if i zoom in close to the poles here you can see that we have some triangles that built the poles right so if you hit F on the keyboard you can frame the mesh and Center it to the canvas and I'm hiding the poly frame go to the tool palette and to the geometry sub palette and we do not touch any of these settings now I go straight down to dynamesh and dynamesh basically is short for dynamic mesh and if I hit the dynamesh button with these settings here it looks like nothing has changed until I showed the poly frame again and now you can see that ZBrush dynamesh has rebuilt the surface our poles are gone and now the surface consists mainly of four-sided and a lot of three sided polygons right so so far so good so if I switch over to the tool palette and pick move elastic brush this time for instance and also enable symmetry by hitting the X key on the keyboard I can start making these large changes like so and if I show the poly frame again you can immediately see that we are running into the same issues like we already had before we have these distorted polygons in these areas because there is simply not enough information or resolution and available to make these large adjustments right but because we are still in dynamesh mode we can tell see brush too rebuilt the surface right and you simply do that by hitting the control key and drawing this little mask a little mask rectangle somewhere next to the model and the surface gets immediately rebuilt right and we now have enough resolution or enough polygons in the previously distorted areas to continue sculpting right so let's quickly repeat this process and draw out these spikes or these horns at the bottom of the sphere and show the poly frame again and we have heavily distorted polygons in these areas like we had before and now I'm running dynamesh comment again by hitting the control key and drawing this little mask rectangle somewhere next to the model and as soon as I do that dynamesh recalculates the D topology and I have now enough polygons available again to continue sculpting right so this allows us to build pretty much every shape or form you have in mind right and you can control the amount of polygons here so to always take a look at the active points here we have around hundred and fifteen thousand at the moment you do control the resolution by setting the resolution slider over here so it's currently set 228 and let's hire it a little bit or let's increase it a little bit to 300 for instance and run the dynamesh command again by hitting the control key and drawing the little rectangle next to the model and it takes two seconds to rebuild the surface and now you can see that we have a lot more polygons available to sculpt with right and let me quickly switch over to another brush like the claybuildup brush for instance and add some small details here like so and there is an important thing I want you to keep in mind and this is that we do not have a subdivision that is available like we had before when we wear dealing with subdivision surfaces so this means that the resolution only gets controlled through this slider here so if I set it back to something low like 40 right and tell dynamesh to rebuild the mesh I'm losing all of the details that I have just added on a higher resolution level so I'm not able to step through the subdivision levels here because they do not exist so if you take a look at the geometry at the top of the geometry sub palette here we do not have any subdivision levels available right and that's something to keep in mind when using dynamesh so you would usually start with a low resolution and define the primary shapes of your model like so and every time you run into areas that needs more polygons you simply let dynamesh rebuild the surface right and let's say you reach a point where you are happy with how the how the model looks right you can then start to slowly increase your resolution like so rebuild the surface and slowly slowly begin to add smaller details like so right I would like to expand on the dynamesh concept a little bit more because there are a few things that you need to know when working with Dyna mashes so I go to my tool palette again pick this fear draw it to the canvas turn it into a polymesh3d open up the geometry sub palette go down to the dynamesh tab and let's lower the resolution down to something like 80 for instance and click on dynamesh right the first thing I want to point out here is dynamesh always works with closed surfaces so you cannot have an open surface and turn it into a dynamesh of course this works but dynamesh will close any holes automatically for you so I can demonstrate that by isolating part of the mesh so I hit control shift on the keyboard and switch back to my select rectangle and isolate this part of the mesh by hitting ctrl shift first drawing the rectangle then let ctrl shift go hitting the Alt key to isolate the part that was underneath the red rectangle right and of course it is still there it's just hidden and to delete this part of the mesh go to the geometry tab again and down to the modified topology tab and here you have the possibility to delete everything that's hidden so I delete hidden right and now the isolated part is gone so if I ctrl shift click somewhere next to the model it does not appear again because we have just deleted right and then let's switch back to the dynamesh tab and rematch the whole thing by hitting the ctrl key on the keyboard and drawing is in the rectangle and in this case dynamesh rebuilds the surface and it automatically also closes any holes right so you cannot have holes in it they will be closed every time you run dynamesh and this is basically not a bad thing but it's something that you have to keep in mind when working when turning meshes into dynamesh then let me quickly demonstrate how dynamesh handles intersections so I make sure the symmetry is enabled hit the X key on the keyboard and then I go to my brush palette and select the move elastic brush and let's try to make the surface intersect each other I drag out these guys like so and then I try to make them touch in the middle here maybe we have to do it in two steps and then let's bring these surfaces together in the middle and if you zoom in close you can see that they are overlapping each other or intersecting each other when I now run the dynamesh comment dynamesh gets rid of these intersections and comes up with a pretty perfect surface here right so this works every time parts of the surface are intersecting or touching each other so when I'm asked this bridge for a moment and drag out this portion here and make it intersect with the top like so I can clear the mask first by hitting the control key and drawing these little rectangles so basically that's the same command that we also used to remesh the model it clears the mask first and then I repeat the command and the intersections are merged now into a closed surface again right so this allows me to create all sorts of openings or holes pretty fast so if we for instance repeat the same with these parts of the mesh they are now also overlapping each other perfectly again and I run the dynamesh command dynamesh gets rid of the overlapping merged everything into a closed surface and I'm good to go to continue sculpting dynamesh also works in combination with insert mesh brushes if you go over to the tool pallet and look for the insert mesh primitives here and have the cylinder selected you can simply draw a cylinder to the surface and the already existing mesh gets masked so we can I switch over to or activate our transpose gizmo and make sure that the meshes are perfectly intersecting each other like so then I hit the control key and draw the rectangle to clear the mask first and then I repeat this comment to run dynamesh again and then all of our parts are perfectly merged into a closed surface so this of course also works the other way around still with the insert mesh brush selected I draw another cylinder on the surface but this time I hit the Alt key to subtract the cylinder from the existing mesh I clear the mask again run dynamesh and then I end up with this little cylindrical holes and each time you see these little there's little polygons left over you can simply hide them like so and go to the geometry sub palette open up the modified topology and click on delete hidden and then you can run dynamesh again and that gets rid of these floating polygons right so basically you can go crazy with your model here so let me quickly choose another insert mesh brush like to tune brush here and let's pick the base arm and place it here like so and then I switch to the transpose tool again place them in a way that they perfectly intersect with the existing mesh next I clear the mask again by hitting the ctrl key drawing is rectangled next to the model and we repeat the comment one more time to run dynamesh and now our hands are perfectly connected to the mesh that's all you need to know for dynamesh at the moment and let me quickly recap what we have just learned in the last 10 minutes so dynamesh can basically be applied to every mesh or every poly mesh in ZBrush so if I go to the tool palette again click on the tool I can select a primitive back to cube 3d show the poly frame turn it into a polymesh3d and then goes down to the into the geometry sub palette and look for dynamesh here I can set the resolution slider to something low like 40 and then activate dynamesh and this immediately rebuilds the surface of my model so if I now hit the X key to activate symmetry and switch over to move brush move elastic brush was already selected and now I can start making all kinds of adjustments without worrying about distortions and every time I run into the situation where I would have to rebuild the surface because I'm stretching out the polygons too far I simply click the control key directly in the rectangle next to the model and dynamesh recalculates the surface right you can go pretty crazy here and create all kind of shapes and intersections fast right like so keep in mind that dynamesh requires a closed surface so if I hide parts of the mesh and delete them like so and then run the dynamesh comment again dynamesh automatically closes any holes and applies a poly group to them because it can only handle closed surfaces right and it's a great tool to focus on the primary shapes we worrying too much about the topology or what's going on in the background with the polygon model and when you are happy with the basic shapes or with the overall shapes you can simply go to the dynamesh tap again higher the resolution let's try 200 reemerge this guy again and give it two seconds to make its calculations and then we have a lot more polygons available to work with and then we can start adding finer details with the claybuildup brush for instance like so and another important thing is that we do not have any subdivision levels here so that means when you lower the resolution again down to something like 40 and remesh the whole thing or read dynamesh the whole thing then all of the details we have just added on a higher resolution or gone and you can then pretty much start all over again right so for this reason it's good to start with a low resolution build your primary shapes and then higher the resolution step by step welcome to the last part of this tutorial so if you are still watching you can be really proud of yourself you have done a great job congratulation and the last two hours weren't easy but I hope you were able to learn a lot and I will complete this tutorial by showing you how I have created this bird right and I'm going to focus mainly on the feet in the next 15 minutes but the techniques I've used to create them pretty much apply to the entire mesh or to the entire sculpture right so we will start with these spheres to create a very basic mesh first then we turn the sphere model into a subdivision model I will then add some details turn it into a dynamesh add more details and convert it back into a subdivision mode at the end and we will then eventually end up with something like this it's a subdivision model with a few levels still intact here and some poly paint on it right so there's a lot to cover and I promise you that when we start combining the techniques I've shown you in the last two hours things will make even more sense and you will be able to apply these techniques also to your projects later on let's get started I'm gonna start the base mesh of the feet with C spheres we haven't covered these spheres yet so they can be found in the tool palette if you click on the tool I can see spheres are located in these 3d meshes here I'm talking about this red ball and you can simply draw it to the canvas enter the edit mode like you would normally do with any other 3d primitive and these spheres are a little bit special so if you hit the a key on your keyboard right you get a preview of the mesh of a little piece of mesh and if we go over to the tool pallet down to adaptive skin we can set the dynamic resolution down to zero exit the preview mode you can do that also here by hitting the button instead of the a key on the keyboard if you do so I end up with very simplified piece of mesh and this is exactly what I'm looking for here so let's switch back to the C sphere again and if I hover the cursor over the sphere you can see that I have this green circle in the middle of my cursor and that indicates that I'm now able to draw additional fears on top of our source fear here right and you can hold the shift key and that tells eBrush to make the new sphere as big as the source fear in the next step I hit the W key to switch over to the move tool and move the newly created sphere away from the center right and if I now hit the a key on the keyboard or enter the preview mode I can see the mesh that I'm building right so let me quickly move this down here and the current mesh is probably now a little bit too low rest and for this reason I switch back into the drum out here by clicking the draw button or the Q key on the keyboard and I simply insert an additional sphere in the middle here by just clicking somewhere in this middle section right like so and when I now hit the a key again the mesh looks a little bit more defined that's exactly what I'm looking for here so still in the draw mode I continue adding little C spheres at the bottom here like so and let's another set of spheres on top of these I hit the shift key to keep the size consistent then I switch back into the to the move tool by hitting the W key and let's move let's move them in place like so so what we are doing here is I'm trying to place or position the toes of the of the foot right and then I draw them out like so that's the middle toe and both toes at the right perfect and let's place additional spheres in the middle here by just switching back to the draw mode of course and simply clicking somewhere in the middle segment to place another sphere and if I now enable the preview mode again by hitting the a key on the keyboard you can see that we already have created a very nice low res base match for our foot so let's quickly adjust it a little bit more I switch over to scale by hitting the e key on the keyboard and now I'm scaling down these guys just a tad also maybe the big one here and I move these fears to the site it's worth mentioning that you don't have to start with these views for the base match actually how you start really doesn't matter you can start with a 3d sphere primitive and turn the sphere into a dynamesh into a low res dynamesh and start adjusting the mesh until you end up with something like this but for the feet here it makes sense to start with C spheres because they give me a lot of control and it's pretty easy to build structures simplifying structures like these will see spheres right so basically we are already good to go now and I enter the preview mode one more time to see if everything looks okay and then it's time to turn the C sphere model into an actual mesh you can simply do this by clicking on make adaptive skin here and when you do that it looks like nothing has changed and that's also true for this tool but if you go up to the tool palette click on the tool icon you can see a new skin C sphere object at the very end of this list so if you click on this we have now our poly mesh available and in this case when I hit the a button or the a key for the preview mode nothing happens and that's because this is no longer a C sphere model right and now we can simply start working on it with our tools I'm switching over to the standard brush so if you open up the brush menu the quick menu is available by hitting the B key there is a way to simply find the standard brush a little bit easier and that's by hitting the S key for standard and now all the brushes that begin with the letter S are visible and the rest gets hidden and can find the corresponding brushes a little bit easier this way so I picked a standard brush here and of course I have my smooth brush already assigned to the shift key and now I can start modifying or just in the surface a little bit and because we have set let me quickly switch back to our CCU model here because we have set the adaptive skin density to 2 we already have a subdivision level here right so this is the lowest subdivision level and we already have one level above library 2 and that's because we have set the density value to 2 before we turn to see sphere model into an adaptive skin right and you can start here to make your adjustments like so making these toes a little bit thinner then I switch over to the move brush and then the inflate brush to slightly blow up the tips of our toes here like so and I do not spend too much time on the shapes here on developing the shapes because I'm going to make some drastic changes in a second because as you now already see the skin between the tails is currently missing and we can build that simply by adding a couple of subdivisions first so I click or press control D on the keyboard to add some more polygons to the to the mesh and then I go in and simply mask these inner parts of the toes like so then I invert the mask let's make this a little bit longer here I invert the mask by ctrl-clicking outside the model I switch over to the transpose tools by hitting the W key and I have my gizmo here available again and I can move the gizmo around without affecting the mesh by hitting the Alt key that let me let me reposition only the gizmo and I place it somewhere like here and then I rotate the unmasked part over to the middle let's give it a try okay let's move the whole thing like so and I'm exiting the move mode again by hitting the Q key and switch back into draw mode and then I switch to the move brush it's already selected I can now try to close this hole here let's boost the intensity a little bit and fill in this section right and of course and this is something that you are already aware of we we have just messed up our subdivision model because if you if you enable the polyframe you can see that we have here these ugly distortions and also some intersections and it's not a good idea to continue with the subdivision model so now it's time to turn this guy into a dynamesh right so we should then have more polygons available in these areas to continue sculpting and dynamesh will also get rid of this intersection here right before we turn the subdivision model into a dynamesh it is important that we go to the geometry sub palette and delete any lower subdivision levels because dynamesh cannot handle meshes that have active subdivision levels right so I go up to the highest level and simply delete all lower right so the levels disappear and we are dealing with our high res mesh here then I go down to the dynamesh and let's see if the resolution already fits our needs by clicking on dynamesh give it a second to calculate and if I enable the poly frame again and zoom in I can see that it may be already consists of slightly too many polygons for my taste so I undo this by clicking ctrl C and let's set the resolution down to something like 80 and apply dynamesh again you have also here this blur settings I usually set the blur value down to zero that prevents the mesh from from blurring but you can leave it on the value - of course - because in this case it's not that traumatic if dynamesh applies a slight blur it's a little bit different when you are working on a high resolution dynamesh and you want to keep all of your details when re mashing the model right so I click on dynamesh again and now the resolution looks quite okay we can then simply continue from here but before I do that you have probably also already noticed that the model is quite symmetrical right so it consists of right and a left side that look pretty much the same except of the skin here and we could use the symmetry tool to work on both sides of the mesh simultaneously so that would speed up the workflows tremendously and we need to perform a few steps before we can do that because if I now hit the X key you can see that the symmetry is off one point of my brush is floating around in space here and that's maybe because the entire model is not positioned correctly in the scene so I turn off the symmetry mode again by hitting the X key and let's let's enable the floor grid by hitting this button over here and you can see that we are actually having the foot in a vertical position right so what I do now is I switch over to rotation and rotate the guy back in place so it stands straight on the ground you can limit the rotation to 5 degree angles by hitting the shift key while rotating and this looks already a lot better so I move it over here and I also make sure that the axis here you can see this little green line down here the line should be somewhere in the middle here of the middle toe right so we have to move the whole foot over to the right just a tad so I press alt on the key ward so that I can move my gizmo or reposition my gizmo without affecting the mesh then I assume in clothes and move this little guy over so that it's exactly above the axis right then I hit the Q key on the keyboard to exit the transpose mode and we can also hide our floor again by hitting shift P on the keyboard I can now show you another very cool feature in ZBrush and this is located in the modified topology sub palette and it's the mirror and weld function and as you can see it is currently set to the x-axis you have these tiny tiny little buttons here that you can adjust I leave it on the x-axis and when I click on mirror and weld ZBrush mirrors the left side over to the right and I end up with a perfectly symmetrical model right so let me quickly hide the floor by hitting the shift P key on the keyboard and I can now turn on the symmetry mode by hitting the X button or by pressing the X key and let's also turn off the poly frame and I am now ready to continue sculpting on both sides simultaneously so that makes sculpting a lot easier and it's probably also a good idea to run dynamesh one more time before we continue so I control click draw the little rectangle and dynamesh cleans up the seams in the middle here a little bit for me and the first thing I'm gonna do here is work on the skin between the toes clean it up and let's get also rid of this bumpy surfaces here you can use this move tool or you can also use the polish brush so if you hit the P key and select polish and increase the intensity here a little bit you can smooth out many of these bumps quite easily right together with this move brush we will create a pretty smooth surface here and my duties on the other side too so the workflow now is pretty simple I switch between different brushes to adjust the surface like the move brush for instance or you standard brush to boost some of the details like so and we can also take a look at the claybuildup brush and for the claybuildup brush it sometimes makes sense to set the intensity to a very low value like three or let's say five then we can use it to slowly build up secondary and already tertiary shapes here like so I can introduce the folds here with the standard brush and then when you when you have the feeling that you are running out of a resolution simply run dynamesh one more time and this cleans up the surface a little bit and we can continue adding details right like so let's make this guy a little bit thinner here and the move brush is a little bit too strong it's also important to mention that you can set the intensity values individually for each brush so for the move brush for instance I've set it to 15 now and if I press shift on the keyboard to access the smooth brush I can set the C intensity value for the smooth brush individually so let's lower it a bit a little bit and if I let shift go and back on the move brush again that has an intensity value of 15 and if I press the shift key again you can see that the smooth brush still has the value of 60 here right so you can set intensity values individually for each brush bring these closer together here just set then dynamesh it from time to time and focus on on the outlines a little bit to create some nice and solid shades here right so maybe we also have to smooth out the skin at the bottom here a little bit more and emphasize the shapes we have to stand a brush like so okay it looks already pretty good let me try one more thing here I open up the quick menu fighting the B key and then I look for the damn standard brush by hitting the D key as this brush here that lets you carve into the surface like so and I'm trying to make this area here a little bit better and I build up some of the shapes at the top with the claybuildup brush all right looks okay and because it already looks quite good now it's time to turn the dynamesh back into a subdivision model again and you already know how to do this so I go to this app tool sub palette and duplicate the current model and as I'm already in solo mode only the selected layer is visible and I also make sure that the cemetery mode is still active so when I go down to geometry and open up the serie measure sub palette here the serie measure takes the symmetry into consideration and lets enable the legacy mode again and set the terminal count to something really low like 0.6 for instance and then I click on C re measure and give ZBrush a few seconds to prepare the mesh for me and we then eventually end up with a perfectly symmetrical clean low res base mesh right so let's switch between the original and the new one and I think it did a great job and I'm not going to project any of the details from dynamesh back to the new base mesh because this would also project all of these little imperfections and I would have to clean them up later on again so the only thing I do here is I select our new base mesh open up the geometry sub palette and then add a couple of subdivisions and you can do that by simply hitting ctrl D on the keyboard a couple of times right and then we are basically good to go to finalize this sculpture so as which the standard brush again lower the intensity a little bit make sure that I'm still in symmetry mode here and then I continue sculpting and reef lining the mesh like so right so again I'm switching between different brushes like standard brush or the move brush and for move and let me select the move brush again and we are now really working on the fine details here of our model to make it look as smooth and perfect let's also emphasize the skin and two toes at the bottom here a little bit more like so I'm also adjusting the radius of the brush on the fly by hitting the s key and moving the cursor up and down and let me quickly switch to the move brush again and the chest the thickness of the middle toe like so perfect I'm still not that happy with this area here and that's probably because I don't like how the leg is bending and because I have subdivision levels I can step down to the lowest level by hitting shift key on the keyboard a couple of times until I reach level one here and now I can mask the leg like so I blur the mask by control clicking on it then I invert the mask by ctrl-clicking next to the model and I activate the rotate transform tool and we can reset the orientation of our gizmo by hitting alt on the keyboard and clicking on this little reset orientation button and then I move it in place by still keeping the Alt key clicked and then I can rotate it like so and we can also move it a little bit and that's of course a lot easier when you have a model that consists of subdivision levels because I do these adjustments on the lowest level and then let's clear the mask by hitting the ctrl key and draw this little rectangle step up the subdivision levels by hitting the D key the move brush is still selected and then I can adjust the shapes of the leg a little bit more like so let's move out this area a little bit more and maybe adjust this shape and make the crease a little bit deeper with the damn stand-up brush like so perfect all that's left now is to apply some colors and you can simply do that by choosing a base color here so let me try to find a nice orange color like so and then I go to the color palette and click on fill object to fill the entire object with this electric color we can also switch to a material that's a little bit lighter like this one then I select my standard brush again turnoff seeit and make sure that only RGB is enabled we then choose a slightly lighter orange and start painting in some highlights at the top here of the toes and we can also maybe make the skin between the toes a little bit darker like so it's probably already too dark let's try this it looks a little bit better right and let's do this at the bottom - like we are still making use of the symmetry here because I only have to work on one side of the model and that makes things a lot faster of course and you can always sample colors directly from the surface of the model by clicking on this little color swatch and then keep the mouse button click and drag the the cursor over to the surface to sample every color that's below the picker so I picked the light orange again and apply it also at the bottom here maybe a little bit too much so I lower the RGB intensity right and that's basically it we are done one last adjustment here right looks quite okay I was applying the exact same method to the other parts of the birds like the body or the beak so for the beak I was starting with a simple sphere I've turned that a seer into a dynamesh with quite low resolution then I was trying to define the primary shapes with the standard brush and the move brush and when I was happy and I turned the dynamesh into a subdivision model again and all I had to do then was cleaning up some of the shapes and applying some colors like we did with the feet right and for the body I started with a sphere for the head and then I literally drawn the entire body out of this dynamesh sphere and when I was happy with the primary shapes again I was turning it into a model with subdivision that was to define the primary shape even more on the lowest subdivision level and to add small details and poly paint on the highest subdivision level and that's basically it so that's it for this tutorial thank you very very much for watching I know this was not the ordinary quickly see YouTube tutorial but I still hope that you were able to follow along and that you are now a little bit more prepared to continue your journey to become a CG artist I publish videos like this every week so subscribe and don't forget to hit the little notification bell and even more important leave a comments give me some feedback and make suggestions for upcoming videos so see you in the next one Cheers

Channel: 3D Gladiator

Views: 69,784

Rating: 4.9631777 out of 5

Keywords: zbrush, beginner, tutorial, 3d modeling, sculpting, learn, digital sculpting, cg artist, 3d tutorial, pixologic, character modeling, zbrush beginner tutorial, zbrush step by step tutorial, flipped, zbrush 2021, zbrush character modeling

Id: 3fHefWRFNMA

Length: 168min 32sec (10112 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 06 2019