Learn Zbrush Fast

[Sara Legath]

Zbrushis still the best 3D sculpting tool. Blender also offers decent digital sculpting tool set. You do not have a lot of choices when it comes to high resolution 3d sculpting tools. Blender is a decent contender. It can definitely be used for high quality work.

real perspective

ZBrushs perspective is at best described wonky, people cope with ZBrush viewport in a way to import and export their meshes regularly into wherever they want to create their final visual output.

Making a likeness in ZBrush can be heartbreaking when you bring it into your renderer and it looks nothing like the real person.

Others disable the perspective view to not have to deal with the gobshite which ZBrushs viewport is.

Blender on the other hand gives you a real visual perspective.

ZBrush has lost its coolness factor due to bad business practices.

one being that perpetual purchases (one time purchases) as well as maintenance (you pay to keep the license update/upgrade path active) are getting less features than those which pay for subscriptions.

But Blender literally acquired new essential abilities, each trimester.

( EEVEE, Grease Pencil 2, Voxel Remeshing, Sculpt mode refactor, Geometry Nodes, Asset Browser, Color Attributes painting, New Hair )

Of course, you work a lot faster in Blender 3.6 than in Blender 2.79.

In 2.79, the skin modifier was already allowing to obtain quickly a base body shape.

There were addons distributing metaballs or Bsurfaces addon allowing to quickly obtain a surface from Grease Pencil Strokes.

And there was already Dyntopo.

In any case, I fouond blender easy to use to position shapes and run 3D like a sketch, and I can go jump in editmode and sculptmode use modifiers to build pieces, I use skin modifier very often when blocking out a character and in blender these operations are made very convenient and easy.

What you notice immediately is that he is a pro. These people, the uber pros, they would make an amazing character also using one of those webapps for sculpting, its all in their already acquired skills. Do not think you can do the same in zbrush or blender just because yuo picked one of the 2. And, zbrush will help you more if yuore a beginner. This guy instead reminds us all that skills matter more.

Thx guys for the replies. Not sure exactly what to do or look at actually. Trying to learn zbrush as fast as I can but Lol when you only used Maya all your life its hard to try to learn a new program on your own.:lol:

For the last 13 years I have worked with the artist Tom Otterness. With Tom and his crew of assistants, I have developed a method of digitizing and enlarging his hand made maquettes, using Rhino to create armatures to hand build full scale patterns for casting, and to design elements for fabrication to meet the hand made features. You may see examples of his work made with this process at Hamad International Airport in Doha, Qatar, and soon at the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Tasmania.

I have been amazed at the accessibility and affordability of photogrammetry software to digitize and generate high quality, beautifully textured or vertex colored meshes. There is even free software, Alice Vision Meshroom, that is easy to use, and though not as fast as other software, still is able to produce a beautiful result.

I want to share the knowledge I have about how to create beautiful, detailed models using photogrammetry, and then how they can be used in a variety of ways, including in Rhino, by artists and designers. I have a short, confidential, one question survey here. Fill it out if you are interested in learning more. Your answers will help me to know what the community needs.

Over the next day or two I will be posting here some images and basic explanations from the process I used for working with scan data in Rhino. This is a process to enlarge sculpture maquettes and to help the artists to refine forms at full scale.

The model of the topography was made with less than 10 photos, taken out the window of a commercial airliner at cruising altitude with an iPhone. Clearly this is not a high quality mesh, but then photographing from 30,000 feet on a hazy day, not with photogrammetry in mind, is not ideal planning.

Tom Otterness originally sculpted the figure with a spherical body encased in a block. This was one of several maquettes made for a public art project at Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, NY. This was scanned by Digital Atelier in Princeton, NJ.

Having this scan created a lot of possibility for the artist. The original sculpture maquette was enlarged in limestone, using the measurement data from the scan as the starting point, to almost 14 feet tall including the base. Later, when the artist had a show at the art gallery representing him, he could cast the original in bronze, and also was able to use the scan to modify the original and resculpt it in new forms and sizes, developing on the theme of the show.

The original sphere figure sculpture was molded and the artist modified a duplicate plaster, pairing it with a cone figure, both at the original 28 inch tall size, and then enlarged to 72 inches tall.

I made a rough, quick scan of the cone figure plaster at 28 inches tall. It was not necessary to do a very high resolution, detailed or precise scan because it would be rebuilt at a new size and Tom would change it according to the way the relationship between subject and object transforms with changes in scale.

I analyzed the profiles of the sculpture in Rhino, and projected curves across the surface of the scan. I offset these to create a cage of profile planes around the form of the scan:

02a2_project.jpg800575 150 KB

This process enabled Tom to resculpt the figures at the new size and to change the relationships of the parts and the details of the forms authentically and by hand, according to his artistic process and decisions:

05a_clayFullScale.jpg800557 158 KB

A waste mold and plaster pattern were made for stabilizing and refining the forms. Here is the sculpture at full size in plaster, ready to be sent to the foundry:

06_plasterPattern_72in.jpg800600 168 KB

Scanning the sculpture created freedom and opportunity in the process. The scan data became an asset for enlargement by hand building, reduction, quality control, and production in entirely new materials, including bronze, limestone and marble.

Learn how to capture a real-world object through a sequence of photos taken from your phone camera to produce a photogrammetry mesh scan. I introduce methods of combining and modifying the digital twin of your object and open up creative workflows. I will show examples from my process for using high resolution meshes in sculpture design for well-known international artists. We will also discuss #OpenAccess and #openGLAM initiatives and scanning legally from museum collections.

Are you thinking about a career as a 3D artist in the video game industry? Do you want to become a faster and more efficient modeler and learn the latest techniques in 3d modeling and game art? This tutorial will help you understand and apply all aspects of creating high-quality game assets!

Follow this course as we mode a military radio to current generation video game standards. Every step is documented without fast forwarding.

In this chapter, I`m giving you a detailed overview of my workflow in over 3 hours of fully commented video. I will be providing you with all the scripts, hotkeys, and plugins that I use on a daily basis. I will walk you through where to get them and how to install all of them. I will give you detailed examples when and how to use them in your workflow, turning both Maya and Zbrush into powerful tools for hard surface modeling.

The modeling part covers the scene setup followed by the block out, high-poly and low-poly modeling of the military radio in which we make use of advanced actions, modifiers, and scripts. You will learn how to use Zbrush to quickly create a high-poly model as well as add some wear and tear and dents to your asset. After the modeling process, we will jump straight into creating UV coordinates for the asset and focus on the importance of an optimized UV-Layout to get the highest texel density possible.

The tutorial is aimed at beginners as well as intermediate artists. This tutorial contains all the scripts, hotkeys, and shortcuts that I have picked up in my entire career in video games and will teach you everything you need to know to create AAA quality game art.

Until they get updated by their authors, you can work around this issue by not using them. If you like to follow along exactly as in the video, you would have to use a version of Maya before 2020. I`ll update the videos as soon as this changes.

To introduce myself a bit more, I started working professionally at the age of 19 after I completed high school, I got to work in Technicolor Bangalore as a Concept Artist. I worked there for one year then I switched to freelance and have been doing it since then. I have contributed to a few AAA titles for Ubisoft while working there in the company and few freelance projects with Netease on an upcoming Marvel project.

I started using ZBrush primarily for sketching in 3D almost 3 months ago, I have used ZBrush in the past as well but very little and I gave up thinking it was too complicated. There was a big reason why I started learning ZBrush in-depth. I remember I was working on a freelance project where I had to build weapons which was a mix of Organic + Hard Surface. Plus I had to do a bunch of different ideas in a day or two. And I was trying to pull it off in Fusion back then. Oh my god, that was a really tough time for me to get anything to look organic yet good in Fusion, Plus CAD and Poly I feel both are quite slow for Experimenting/Concepting in general because there are so many restrictions with topology and surfaces. And other artists on the project were using sculpting programs like 3DCoat and ZBrush. They were able to come up with great design solutions in a matter of hours! That really got me interested in ZBrush.

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