Does Zbrush Live Up to the Hype? (Making the Most of My 30 Day Trial)
sublime tool
DAY 0
For this project I'm going to attempt to re-learn ZBrush, and sculpt something cool for my portfolio in under 30 days.
I learned a little bit of ZBrush back at art school, but I didn't liked it all that much. I never clicked with the user interface and the camera controls. A couple of weeks into that sculpting class, I discovered Autodesk Mudbox, and I instantly liked it's camera, it's UI, and especially it's price tag, so haven't touched Zbrush in years.
However, Zbrush is still very much the industry standard, and some studios list it as a requirement in their job postings. Also the sculpts I see other artists create with ZBrush are incredible. So I guess it's time I give it another try. . . or trial. (Let's see if the grass is indeed greener on the other side)
For this project I've decided not to do 30 individual, experimental 'learning' sculpts, like a daily challenge set-up. Instead I would rather spend my time working on one fully-realized sculpture. My plan is to spend the first few days of the free trial running through tutorials, trying to get a feel for the software, then spend the majority of the trial working on an idea I have for a jade dragon statue. (See below:) I will try to sculpt, re-topo, bake, and have a fully finished model ready for substance painter in under 30 days. (Although if I need more time, paying for an extra month won't kill me. Thankfully ZBrush's pricing structure has become a lot more reasonable since I was in college.)
(My main reference is on the left, and my rough sketch on the right. I haven't fully decided on the design for the gold sphere yet, I might add gemstones. Also I forgot to draw a bushy bit on the end of the tail. I will sculpt it in though)
If anyone has any suggestions for good ZBrush tutorials, or workflows to look up, let me know. It would help a lot! Otherwise I'll start with the ones on the ZBrush website.
For this project I'm going to attempt to re-learn ZBrush, and sculpt something cool for my portfolio in under 30 days.
I learned a little bit of ZBrush back at art school, but I didn't liked it all that much. I never clicked with the user interface and the camera controls. A couple of weeks into that sculpting class, I discovered Autodesk Mudbox, and I instantly liked it's camera, it's UI, and especially it's price tag, so haven't touched Zbrush in years.
However, Zbrush is still very much the industry standard, and some studios list it as a requirement in their job postings. Also the sculpts I see other artists create with ZBrush are incredible. So I guess it's time I give it another try. . . or trial. (Let's see if the grass is indeed greener on the other side)
For this project I've decided not to do 30 individual, experimental 'learning' sculpts, like a daily challenge set-up. Instead I would rather spend my time working on one fully-realized sculpture. My plan is to spend the first few days of the free trial running through tutorials, trying to get a feel for the software, then spend the majority of the trial working on an idea I have for a jade dragon statue. (See below:) I will try to sculpt, re-topo, bake, and have a fully finished model ready for substance painter in under 30 days. (Although if I need more time, paying for an extra month won't kill me. Thankfully ZBrush's pricing structure has become a lot more reasonable since I was in college.)
(My main reference is on the left, and my rough sketch on the right. I haven't fully decided on the design for the gold sphere yet, I might add gemstones. Also I forgot to draw a bushy bit on the end of the tail. I will sculpt it in though)
If anyone has any suggestions for good ZBrush tutorials, or workflows to look up, let me know. It would help a lot! Otherwise I'll start with the ones on the ZBrush website.
Replies
Downloaded Zbrush and it says it's good until December 17th??? I guess my 30 day free trial got a bonus 15 days. . . (nobody tell Pixologic).
Went through the introductory videos, and some of the beginner level tutorials. I spent most of the day trying customize the UI and controls in an attempt to make it feel more like Maya and Mudbox, ha ha.
Day 2
Watched more of the beginner tutorials, but stared to get tired of them.
Day 3
Itching to get going, I decided to start on my sculpture, and just learn features as I need them or look things up when I get stuck. Today I blocked out the sculpture with the Zmodeler and Zspheres techniques.
Zmodeler felt really weird, and was kind of frustrating. It seemed like every action I wanted to do, required many additional and unnecessary steps to make it work. I'm guessing the problem is that my brain is wired to model things in workflows that are great in Maya, but modeling in Zbrush requires a totally different way of thinking.
Zspheres are just like I remember. Simple, easy. . . good stuff.
Couldn't find much time to work, not much to show.
Day 5
- I added more detail to the block-out, I'm still working out the proportions though.
- After looking at my reference again, I decided to extend the neck to better match the typical dragon design.
- I'm starting to get the hang of Zmodeler, . . still don't like it much, ha ha. I'm loving radial symmetry though.
(Need Feedback:) I'm not sure if I like the placement and posing of the back legs. What do you guys think, does it look weird, or does it look ok? Maybe it's the inverted knees this type of dragon has, maybe its that the back legs make the silhouette unbalanced. I'm not sure.
I adjusted the proportions again and tried to add some final details with Zmodeler before moving onto sculpting.
Day 7
Took the day off
Day 8
Finally sculping. I decided to start at the bottom with the dog heads and work my way up.
I didn't think to use multiple models for blocking out the face. How does Zbrush handle seams between separate objects? Would I be able to smooth them into each other after merging them and retopologizing with Dynamesh?
Over all, Zbrush seems pretty good so far. Though it's still early
The Lion head is starting to take shape (turns out the reference I was looking at were actually statues of lions, not dogs).
I did a test of merging and retopologizing a couple of primitive subtools with Dynamesh, and it was great. no seams.
I started adding the lion's mane as separate subtools. I think I'll re-do the beard and eyebrows as separate subtools as well, then merge them back in and smooth out the seams. I think I'll do the teeth as separate subtools as well.
Also, I put together a texture sheet of patterns, and tested out the stencil feature. It took a while to find a brush that worked well with the stencil though. The 'Layer' brush seems to do the trick.
I decided to take a break from the Lion heads, and work on some decorations.
I started working on the small dragon heads. It's going much faster than the lion heads.
Also, Dynamesh is AMAZING!
So. . . I've been forgetting to post updates (Ha ha, oops), but I've been slowly working on the sculpture. Because of the 15 bonus days I'm actually still on the free trial. I've got about 7 days left. Although, I'm starting to like Z-Brush, so maybe I'll keep it around on subscription mode afterwards.
Since last time, I finished detailing the lion heads. At first I tried using the rake brush to speed up sculpting the lines on the hair sub-tools, but they ended up looking to messy. after some trial and error, I decided to just free-hand all of the lines with the dam-standard brush. I'm sure there was probably a brush or technique to do that kind of detail faster and easier, but I didn't want to spend a bunch of time trying to find it. (Eventually I'll need to figure out what all of the other brushed do. So far I've only used like 12 of the 143 default brushes.)
I also had a bit of an issue with symmetry toward the end, . . in that I turned the symmetry off and forgot to turn it back on for a couple of hours. And yes, I know there's that re-sym tool in deformation palette, but for the base of the lion heads, I was using radial symmetry. (I didn't see a re-radial-sym tool.) It seemed like a good idea at the beginning, sculpting all four lion heads at the same time, and just eyeballing the individual face's symmetry. But fixing a radial symmetry goof-up was a big pain. It involved cutting out the one good head, duplicating it around the base, and stitching it back in with dynamesh. I probably should have been working with the lion heads as separate sub-tools from the start, instead of trying to sculpt them out from the base.
Oh well, ha ha. At least they turned out ok.
Meanwhile, I've almost finished detailing the small dragon head. The only thing left is adding scales, then I can duplicate it around to the other positions. I'm not sure yet how to add scales though. I'm thinking maybe with the 'chisel creature brush'. It seems to be able to add scales to a mesh very easily, but the default scales are not the shape I'm looking for. I'm wondering if I can add custom items to the list of available chisels? I'll need to investigate that brush more.
I decided that the little dragon head was far enough along to duplicate, scale-up, and placed it on top of the Z-sphere body to get a "head-start" on the main dragon. (nope, not ashamed of that pun). Then I changed up some of the proportions with the move brush to make the big dragon head look older (Like an Elder Dragon or something). I gave it a longer snout, a longer beard, bushier eyebrows/moustache, longer antlers, saggy eyelids, a receding hair line, and bigger ears/nose (I heard somewhere that old people often have bigger ears and nose because cartilage just keeps growing). I might make the elder dragon's hair and beard over again from scratch to get a different flow.
I also decided to remove the moustache from the small dragon, and adjust it's proportions a bit to make it look younger.
I started detailing the dragon's body by sculpting one foot, and duplicating it into position. Then I worked on the arms/legs. I wasn't feeling the 'chicken drumstick' look of the legs from the reference, so I decided to give my dragon more human-like muscle tone (it's my imaginary creature, I can do what I want. Mua ha ha). I then sculpted the underbelly with the Layer Brush and the Dam Standard Brush. I keept the D.S. brush large and soft to, get nice smooth belly folds.
I found this video by Flipped Normals that taught me how to make a custom 'Vector Displacement Mesh Brush' so I could easily sculpt one fin and duplicate it down my dragon's back. I also put together some quick scale alphas in photoshop and loaded them into a cloned Layer Brush with a drag function.
To help keep things organized and consistent, I painted a racing stripe on my dragon to use as a guide-line, and I used the edge of my cursor's red circle to judge the position and size of scales and fins before I dragged them out onto the mesh. To slowly shrink-down the fins as I went, I made sure to taper the racing stripe that I was using to judge width, and incrementally decrease the Z intensity of the brush (from 100 to about 55). I made sure to save a morph target before dragging out the scales so I could easily clean up any mistakes with the Morph Brush.
Placing all of those scales was still a HUGE pain, because if I tried to do too many at once on too curved of a surface, they would stretch and warp out of shape. I kept thinking "this would be soooooo much easier to do on the low-res model by just straightening out the UVs and slapping a tiling texture on in Substance Painter". But, I wanted to see if I could do it in Zbrush, . . so here we are. Ha ha
I still need to place scales on the arms, legs and neck. Figuring out how to make them transition neatly between sections is going to be an interesting challenge.
I really loved the custom VDM Brush workflow though. . . like a lot. I'm thinking of adding some relief sculptures to a couple of the other sub-tools, just so I can play around with VDMs some more.