Zbrush Starting Guide

ZBrush Starting Guide ZBRUSH Starting Guide Welcome to ZBrush! In this document you will discover how to quickly get started with ZBrush, understand its main concepts and explore its user interface. Along the way you will do your first sculpting and 3D painting, complete with a quick render! This short primer will introduce you to what can be done. 1 ZBrush Starting Guide Table of Contents 1. ZBrush UI presentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2. The Pixol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 3. ZTools and the Edit mode . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 4. The Canvas Document . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 5. Saving Tools and Documents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 6. ZBrush Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 7. 2D and 3D navigation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 8. Create concepts in 2D . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 9. Your first 3D creation with ZBrush . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 10. The different ways to create a base mesh . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 11. The Timeline and Animation in ZBrush . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 12. ZBrush Main Shortcuts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 13. Where to find ressources and learning resources: . . . . . . . 36 2 ZBrush Starting Guide 1. ZBrush UI presentation ZBrush’s Main UI is composed of several elements: 1. The ZBrush window. Elements cannot be undocked and moved outside the win- dow area, but most of them can be highly customized and placed how you like within the window’s space. 2. The ZBrush canvas: Like with 2D software, the ZBrush canvas has dimensions but is measured in pixols. The canvas can contain 2D, 2.5D and 3D elements. Unlike other 3D software, ZBrush doesn’t have a 3D space scene in which the camera (the user point of view) can be moved; instead 3D objects are manipulated in front of the camera, within the canvas. Think of the ZBrush canvas as being like a window within your house, looking out onto the 3D world beyond. Objects can be moved around outside the window, but you can’t move the window itself. This is a key element to understanding and being comfortable within ZBrush, and is actually part of the reason why ZBrush is able to work with millions of polygons in real-time. An animation pack- age must track every element of your scene at all times, from all angles, regardless of whether something is visible to the camera at the moment or not. That’s a lot of system resources bei…