The Brush System

Stroke Menu Overview

The Stroke Menu in ZBrush is a powerful tool that provides artists with various options to control and customize their brush strokes, allowing for precise and dynamic sculpting and painting. It offers a wide range of settings and features that can greatly enhance the quality and efficiency of the digital sculpting process.

Brush Modifiers

Within the Stroke Menu artists can access Brush Modifiers, which allow them to adjust settings such as Alpha, DragRect, DragDot, and Roll. These modifiers enable artists to define the specific characteristics of their brush strokes, including shape, texture, and orientation, providing extensive creative control.

Lazy Mouse

The Stroke Menu also includes the Lazy Mouse feature, which enables artists to add stabilization to their brush strokes, resulting in smoother and more controlled lines. This can be especially useful for creating precise details and clean, consistent brushwork.

Curve Mode

Another significant feature within the Stroke Menu is Curve Mode, which allows artists to define and customize the path of their brush strokes using a variety of curve types. This enables the creation of intricate patterns, smooth curves, and complex designs with ease, providing a high level of flexibility and versatility.

Sculpting and Painting

In addition to sculpting, the Stroke Menu is crucial for painting workflows in ZBrush. Artists can utilize various brush settings to achieve different painting effects, such as blending, masking, and texturing, allowing for the creation of realistic and detailed textures and colors.

Overall, the Stroke Menu in ZBrush plays a fundamental role in the digital sculpting and painting process, offering a rich set of tools and options to tailor and refine brush strokes according to the artist's vision. By leveraging the capabilities within the Stroke Menu, artists can elevate their creative output and achieve stunning results in their digital artwork.

Alpha Menu

The Alpha Menu in ZBrush is a powerful tool that allows artists to manipulate and control the shape and texture of brushes and strokes. It provides a wide range of alpha shapes and patterns that can be applied to brushes for sculpting, detailing, and texturing 3D models.

Accessing the Alpha Menu

To access the Alpha Menu in ZBrush, users can navigate to the top menu and click on the "Alpha" tab. This will open up a window displaying a wide array of alpha options to choose from.

Alpha Selection

Users can select alphas from the Alpha Menu by simply clicking on the desired alpha shape. ZBrush provides a diverse library of pre-loaded alphas, including organic textures, skin patterns, mechanical details, and more. Additionally, users have the flexibility to import and create their own custom alphas for personalized sculpting and texturing.

Brush Modulation

One of the key functionalities of the Alpha Menu is its ability to modulate the behavior of sculpting brushes. By applying different alphas to brushes, artists can achieve varied effects such as adding intricate surface details, creating realistic skin textures, or simulating natural patterns like scales and fur.

Alpha Adjustments

Within the Alpha Menu, users have the option to adjust several parameters of the selected alpha, such as intensity, contrast, depth, and tiling. These adjustments allow for fine-tuning the appearance and impact of the alpha on the brush strokes, providing precise control over the sculpting process.

Alpha Masking

The Alpha Menu also enables users to utilize alphas as masks, allowing for precise selection and manipulation of specific areas on the model. This can be particularly useful for creating sharp edges, carving fine details, or applying complex patterns to specific regions of the 3D model.

The Alpha Menu in ZBrush serves as a versatile resource for artists, offering a diverse collection of alpha shapes and patterns that can greatly enhance the sculpting and texturing workflow. Whether it's refining intricate details, adding surface irregularities, or achieving unique textures, the Alpha Menu provides an essential set of tools for unleashing creativity within ZBrush.

VDM Brushes

What are VDM Brushes?

Vector Displacement Mapping (VDM) brushes are a powerful tool in ZBrush. They allow artists to sculpt intricate details and complex shapes by using 3D Information to displace the surface of a 3D model. The ability to use and create theses brushes are predicated on the sources of the 3D object you are applying to be built from a 3D plane. This section will cover the use and creation of these bushes as well as tips and tricks for you to keep in mind to achieve your success with them.

Using VDM Brushes:

• To use VDM brushes, first, select the brush from the brush menu.

• Then, click and drag on the model's surface. The 3D displacement mapping of the brush determine how much the surface is displaced.

• These type of brushes allow for overhang that other alpha brushes simply can not replicate due to the nature of 2D alphas.

Tips: As long as you are not using sub-divisions on your object, you can activate Sculptris Pro to capture more of the details that your VDM brush may contain.

Creating VDM Brushes:

1. Prepare the Design

• Create a 3D plane on your document

• Make sure Draw and edit is turned on

• Sub-divide your 3D plane (aim for no more than 250K - 1 Million polys)

• Mask all 4 boarders and feather the mask.

• Sculpt you design onto the center of the plane.

• Once you are done with sculpting your design, Invert the mask and go to Tools > Deformation > Morph to grid.

Tips:

• For best results you must not move the boarder edges of the 3D plane that you are sculpting on.

• Save your source designs by topic to add to your brushes, i.e.: Horns, Teeth, Noses, Ears, Hard Surface decals, etc…

2. Creating the Brush:

• Select a chisel brush and create a copy of it with Brush > Clone.

• Change the name of the brush by using Brush > Save as (your brush name)

• Delete the existing designs with Brush > Create > Delete Mesh.

• To add your personal designs select your subtool and Brush > From Mesh

• To access an existing brush design model to modify into a personal design, select Brush > To Mesh

• Once your brush is created, make sure everyone knows that you are the creator. Go to Brush > Create> Edit Brush Credit. There you can add your name and share your website or ArtStation link. It is pretty common for artists to create and sell your 3D brushes of various types on ArtStation and other platforms. I personally have a few brushes I sell on ArtStation that still make sales even after being there for several years.

Tips for Creating VDM Brushes:

• High-Resolution Images: Use high-resolution images for having a good start build upon where needed for your design.

• Reference and Study: Study real-life textures and forms to understand how light and shadow interact, and use this knowledge to create accurate VDM brushes.

• Testing and Adjusting: Test the VDM brush on a simple shape to see how the displacement looks. Adjust the design where needed.

• No Additional Polygons: Do not change the topology of the 3D plane. meaning, do not model or create additional polygons. This will ruin the point order of the displacement and with always have negative results.

• Keep Your Brushes Organized: Create a master folder for all of your brushes with in your personal folder structure for future use.

Successfully using and creating VDM brushes is a skill that can greatly enhance the level of detail and realism in 3D sculpting. By mastering these techniques and continuously experimenting, artists can unlock the full potential of VDM brushes in their workflow.

Week 2 Recap

We are not starting our creature just yet this week. First we need to do a little wax on wax off. This week we’re focusing on some of the more common tools that you’ll be working with. Open a sphere make it a poly mesh and start subdividing to level 5 or 6. Use this to practice your VDMs on. Don’t exceed 14mil. Remember Sculptrice Pro will not work on models with subdivisions.

What to practice with…

• The Brush System

• Stroke Menu

• Alpha Menu

• VDB Brushes

Tip: Practice with the tools inside of ZBrush with curiosity. Adjust sliders, number values, press buttons, play and have fun with the idea that it is okay to crash ZBrush. While ZBrush is resilient it will crash under certain circumstances. This is okay as long as you are “Quicksaving” your projects you should never lose much of your progress when you make that a common practice. Take note that your Quicksave folder can get quite large too. You may want to delete or move some of it when needed.

As long as you aren’t deleting ZBrush system files, you should have no problem navigating ZBrush. Learning what not to do will ultimately make you a faster sculptor.

Action items

Here are the areas for what we will be focused on moving forward into our next week of class

• Practice with and become familiar with: Brush system, Stroke Menu, Alpha Menu, and VDM Brushes.

• Create a Collection of VDM designs: Use designs that you find opportunities for from the creature thumbnails that you created in week 1. See me if you need clarification. Aim for no more than 10 - 20 designs for each brush you create. Good Luck!

Titans