ZBrush - Sculpting Ornamental Designs

in this tutorial we will learn how to sculpt detailed ornamental designs in ZBrush like you see in this crown with a variety of techniques available with standard ZBrush tools so before we get started I wanted to show you the final details on the crown that have created for my skull and we'll just kind of take a look at this really quick you can see there's a bunch of different shapes in here different cuts that we've done but the main thing that I want to show you is how I created these larger shapes and then also some of the smaller detailing that's in between and this is a pretty fun piece that I've been working on that for those either familiar with Dark Souls 3 is based off of the high lured of Wallner encounter boss encounter and this is a original concept of the goblet piece that I'm working on and you can see here there's a nice little design swirls things like that and then also here's the actual skull as you see in the video game so I just want to make what I consider kind of like a realistic version of this so I use a lot of artistic interpretation as I'm working on the piece so let's go ahead and get started I'm going to hide this piece and now you can see we have our original crown that's in here and we're just going to go through and start making the designs I don't want to make this tutorial super super long for you guys so I'm going to stick to the basics first thing you'll notice I have symmetry turned on you can just turn that on or off by pressing X and then I'm just going to start drawing out masks and for me I like using masks and sometimes I do it in Photoshop but a lot of times I will just do it directly onto my object like you see me doing here so I'll draw something out that's kind of thick at first I'm not worried about getting super tiny details right off the bat as you can kind of see here me drawing out these shapes and again since this is a tutorial I'm not going to do a ton of different pieces in here I just want to kind of show you the basics of how to use the techniques that I've done here so here already this is a shape I think it's going to work and now the next thing to do was I'm going to cut away from that mask and I'm going to make the brush a little bit smaller and pressing s as a hotkey to bring up the brush dialog and then now I'm going to press ctrl alt and this will allow me to do a negative version of the mask and I'm just going to start cutting away because I want to get something that feels a little bit sharper in here especially around these edges that were a little bit fatter and sometimes I'll bring back in a little bit more if I feel that I've cut a little bit too much away I'm not going to worry about making this super super perfect for the purpose of this demo but I am a bit of a perfectionist when I'm working at home probably a side effect of working at Blizzard Entertainment so I would go through here and painstakingly spend time to get these things super super sharp and again as you'll see I'll go through and switch between doing a regular mask and then cutting away details and for those of you that watch my tutorials you know I like to consider this even if it's for a beginner so because of that I'm going to be telling you at the hot key that I'm using even though some of this stuff is very basic to advanced users so okay this isn't perfect but for our purposes I think it'll work I'm just going to sharpen this mask by doing ctrl alt click on the asset and that will just sharpen it right there you can do that also through the menu down here the masking and you can sharpen up or do different things in here and then now I'm just going to invert the mask what I'm going to do too is I'm going to hide that skull although it's pretty to look at we don't need it in here let's just hide these other things so now we have just this so I'm going to click off this and invert the mask so ctrl click here and that inverts our mask I'm going to make sure that we didn't have any bleeding through any other part of the crown and for those of you that know me I love the deformation tools so I'm going to come over here and click on deformation and I'm going to use the inflate brush and I'm going to numerically set this to a value of something like 6 so it'll take a second for this to pop there you go we have a nice emboss that comes out now the one thing you'll notice is on the sides here you showing some topology which I don't really want to see and also this feels a little bit fake so what I like to do is after I do that positive inflate I'll go through and then I also use the inflate balloon tool and I usually just give this a value of something like 1 and press Enter now if you guys have a slower graphics card the inflate balloon does take a little bit longer than the inflate so just give it some time it'll take a moment to go so here you go now we have that and what that has done is it's pillowed this out a bit so if you look at it from the side 3d it feels a little bit more natural and also to some of these edges here that were showing really bad topology a minute ago where it felt like that cookie cutter stamp I have now smoothed out but it still feels a little bit too soft and a little bit Plato like so this is where I come in and I'll add a pass with a damn standard brush so I'm going to press B to pull up my brushes and I'm going to press D to isolate and then find damn standard it's already up here and I think I've got it selected that's why you're seeing it grayed out but you can pick the damn standard brush and then what I'm going to do is going to make sure that ad is on and I'm going to increase the brush size and basic I'm just going to add a little Ridge here right through the middle and it's up to you how big you want to make this bigger or smaller again if I was doing this or a production I can't even clear that because I am a bit of perfectionist and I just don't like seeing it like that but let's just go through here and basically imagine we're adding like a little Ridgeline to this if that drives me crazy we'll make it look nicer but don't have time so now what I want to do and I'll show you guys here is like if you come in close it's like a little Ridgeline that's on top and all this is cool it doesn't feel natural so what I usually go through and do is I'll do a smooth on top of this so just hold down the shift key to activate the smooth and then just draw right over top of that and that'll bring it down some and I have pressure sensitivity on my Wacom pen so I usually go over this pretty lightly so that I could not keep the smooth that's not too strong because if I do super strong you can see it fades out a little bit too much so I just kind of come in here lightly and go over top of it and then now when we look at the side that feels a little bit more natural and when we zoom out this is already looking pretty cool so one final touch that I like to do is I like to cut in around the edges here so again we're going to invert the mask bike doing control click out here and we're going to keep the damn standard brush activated but now we're going to change it to Z sub if you wanted you could hold down the Alt key while you're doing that to invert it you know but I like to just have it on by default so that I'm not making my pinky finger all super tired so I'm just going to start going through here around the edges and cutting it a little trough and what this will do is it will give us some nice shadowing whenever we do our final renders especially if you're going to take this into another 3d package like me eventually I'm going to be rendering this in v-ray so I want to use all the tricks I can to get these shapes to pop you know whether this would happen in real life or not I'm not too worried about that it's about making something that is going to look cool now honestly I probably should have made this damn standard brush a little bit smaller as I was doing this so I'm going to change it make it a little bit smaller as I do the remaining part that way we'll just keep that a little bit tighter and I accidentally changed my focal shift here that feels a little bit better it's going to feel a little bit you know not perfect all the way around but again I don't want to waste your guys time by trying to make everything super perfect so let's just go through and do this demo so one thing about me I don't know if you guys play Dark Souls but that game is amazing I love dark fantasy I love challenging games you know I grew up in the 80s where I was playing classic Nintendo games where it was a real challenge to beat games such as like Castlevania one and teenage Ninja Turtles anything like that if you're able to beat it you had this really big sense of accomplishment Dark Souls is one of the first games that I really felt like that again in a long time so it's fun to do a tribute piece to one of the cooler moments in the game all right so now if we zoom out you can see we have kind of a nice little shape that's falling around there that will give us a nice shadowing runners I'm going to clear our mask by ctrl-clicking out here and dragging so now our mask is cleared if we were doing little BP our render would probably get something that looks okay and again if we were in I surrender you'd see those nice troughs another thing I'm going to do through here is just so we don't have all this pillowing I'm going to use a H polish for us so let's go B and find this H polish if it's not already in there you just have to find it from your brush folder section is included with ZBrush it's just been so long since I've gone to this default brush settings side I don't know if it'd be loaded in there for you guys already anyways what I do is I go through here and see where feels really soft here by using this H polish brush I can go through and it tightens things up a bit you can do that with a pinch brush as well if you want but I like doing this because in the end this is going to be a metallic surface so in addition to kind of making these edges feel sharper and let's doey it's going to give me a side benefit of making some imperfections along the surface of the metal which will create some nice reflection values what I mean by that is you know if you do something like this than this you have different angles for the light to catch as you're doing stuff but that would be another lesson so anyways that's looking pretty good to me final step that we want to do is add some little details in between so let's go back to our brushes press B let's go to damn standard again and we have our Z sub let's do this way way down and let's just start drawing out some cool little swirls in here doing some extra design and me for those of you that see a lot of the art that I do I have a tendency to cram every little area that I can find with detail that's just how I like to work I should definitely practice working on things where I have some more negative space at times but it's just a habit and you know this isn't perfect but I kind of do this to just fill in the space once I have the big thicker pieces like you see in here and there's no rhyme or reason to it you know I'm just kind of coming up with my own design on the fly that I feel echoes the design that's true to the game but also giving it a little bit of extra realism in there that's pretty much it guys not a lot else to show you on this I think a lot of people they like to work in Photoshop to have more control over the sharp nativeness of masks and those kind of things and you can totally do that but I find that you know just creating masks like you see here using these kind of techniques you can really quickly get some really great values and also you're seeing this in real time on top of your model so it's easy to go through and create something that is going to look good but also you know you won't have to take the time to go through and Photoshop and paint it all in there so yeah that's about it thanks for checking this out and I hope you guys learned a couple little tips and I guess I will talk to you soon thanks

Channel: Seth Thompson

Views: 211,697

Keywords: zbrush, Pixologic, ZBrush Tutorials, ZBrush Sculpting, ZBrush Learning, Tutorials, Sculpting Tutorials, ZBrush Sculpting Tutorials, Darksouls, Darksouls 3, Wolnir, High Lord of Wolnir, Darksouls Fan Art, Skull, Skull Art, Skull Sculpture, Skull Goblet, Ornamental Design, Ornaments, Filagree, Swirls, Twirls, ZBrush, 3D Art, 3D Tutorials, Seth Thompson, Seth Thompson Tutorials

Id: RByXIvjcS7U

Length: 13min 4sec (784 seconds)

Published: Tue May 02 2017