Book Image

Sculpting in ZBrush Made Simple

By : Lukas Kutschera
Book Image

Sculpting in ZBrush Made Simple

By: Lukas Kutschera

Overview of this book

Embark on a creative journey with ZBrush, the leading software for creating characters, creatures, and props in films, games, and 3D printing. This guide will take you through its powerful yet user-friendly workflows, allowing you to explore its dynamic organic sculpting, painting, and hard-surface modeling tools. The first part of this book is dedicated to helping you become familiar with ZBrush’s user interface and learning the very basics, from sculpting brushes and painting the model with Polypaint to setting up lights and rendering images. You’ll also create a demon bust with the help of ZBrush’s concept sculpting tool, DynaMesh. In the second part, you’ll get to grips with the creation of a humanoid character that is optimized for 3D printing. Focusing on anatomy, poly-modeling, and preparing the model for 3D printing, you’ll acquire the skills essential for sculptors. The final part delves into portrait sculpting, where you’ll learn everything from basic facial anatomy to hair creation with FiberMesh. By the end of this book, you'll have developed the expertise necessary to succeed in the ever-evolving world of 3D character modeling, complemented by portfolio and social media tips for showcasing your standout work.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Part 1: The Adventure Begins: Sculpting in ZBrush
9
Part 2: Creating Characters from Scratch: A Comprehensive Guide
13
Part 3: Sculpting a Female Head: Tips and Techniques

Creating your own custom brushes

ZBrush offers a wide variety of useful brushes, but there are many instances in which you want to achieve a specific effect on the sculpture’s surface. Custom brushes offer a great solution for this.

We will use an Alpha we created in the previous section and create a custom brush with it. Then we will use that brush to add some detail to our demon bust and save it for later use.

Returning to our demon bust, using the DragRect mode makes the most sense because it will allow us to precisely place the horn on our model while scaling it interactively. This type of DragRect brush with a custom Alpha equipped is among the most commonly used custom brushes and one of the most simple too, so you can use this blueprint to create a variety of custom brushes for your specific needs.

In order to create this custom brush, complete the following steps:

  1. Select the Standard brush (since this brush has basic settings, it is a good choice for...