Exploring Brushes and Alphas

In this chapter, we will take a look at the wealth of brushes that ZBrush offers – this includes standard brushes used for sculpting and detailing, as well as special brushes such as the InsertMesh and Curve brushes. We will also explore Alphas and how to create our own before using a custom Alpha to create our own detailing brush, which we will test out on the demon bust from the previous chapter.

The reality is, you will most likely use only a few brushes in your sculpting career and there will be only a handful of brushes you use most of the time. However, if you need to create certain models that require very specific brushes, having knowledge of the brushes and brush options available in ZBrush can save you lots of time and give you great results.

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to choose the right brush for any task, and if you can’t find the right brush, you’ll know how to make one yourself.

We will cover...

Technical requirements

For the best experience, it is recommended that you have a strong PC that meets the minimum requirements described in the first chapter’s Technical requirements section. However, you can work on this chapter with just a mouse, a functional PC setup, and a ZBrush license.

Learning about brushes

In this section, we’ll look at the various brush modes and properties, as well as brush libraries. The goal is to give you an overview of what brushes are available, so you’ll find the right one for any design challenge. Later, we will test and adjust the effect of various brushes until we eventually create our own brushes that fit our needs.

Accessing brushes

There are several places where you can access brushes. In this sub-section, you will learn about these options and their benefits.

3D Sculpting Brushes Menu

The 3D Sculpting Brushes menu contains the most important and most commonly used brushes that come with ZBrush, and you will be able to create almost anything with them.

You can open the 3D Sculpting Brushes menu by pressing B:

Figure 4.1 – 3D Sculpting Brushes menu

Easily accessible and structured alphabetically, this menu is convenient and lets you browse a relatively large amount of...

Learning about Alphas

Alphas are grayscale images that give height information to brushes, which displace the surface of your sculpts accordingly, creating cavities, protrusions, or a mix of these. Most brushes use Alphas, which makes a good knowledge of Alpha creation an essential part of your ZBrush education.

To access and select Alphas, navigate to the Alpha palette or click on the Alpha icon on the left side of the canvas. Then, by left-clicking on one of the Alphas, you equip it to your active brush.

Figure 4.20 – ZBrush’s Alpha library

In the following sub-sections, you will learn how to modify Alphas and create custom Alphas.

Important note

The Pixologic website has a great selection of Alphas, from organic patterns to skin and rock detail. There are many categories, so it is worth checking out to see whether some of them can be useful for your project. You can download them for free here: https://pixologic.com/zbrush/downloadcenter...

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...

Summary

In this chapter, you learned about ZBrush’s most important brushes. You got to know the default brushes from the main brush library, as well as extra brushes in the LightBox menu. We looked at different brush modes such as FreeHand, DragRect, and Spray, and various options and menus that allow us to adjust the brush properties to our liking. From here on out, you’ll be able to sculpt on surfaces while applying color and material, as well as use LazyMouse to create smooth, flowing strokes.

We also looked at Alphas and modification options and used a Plane3D model to create our own custom brush, which we used to apply horns to our demon bust. Finally, I listed some of the most popular sculpting brushes that will be useful for a wide range of tasks.

The next chapter will introduce a workflow using subdivision levels, ZRemesher, and projection tools. We’ll follow along with our demon bust by adding more resolution and detail to it – a great point...