Sculpting Brushes

From ZBrush Info

ZBrush's Digital Sculpting system includes a robust set of sculpting brushes. There are many kinds of brushes and many brush controls for each brush. The powerful combination of brush types and controls give you an incredible amount of freedom to create your own brushes to imitate real-world sculpting tools or anything else your imagination can come up with.

A brush is composed of several elements:

• Brush type
• Various brush control
• Alpha
• Stroke
• Texture
• Material

Brush Types

There are several brushes you can sculpt with in ZBrush 3. Each brush has a unique property that allows it to do something the other brushes can not. Also, brushes in ZBrush can be modified using several important controls such as Gravity, Wrap Mode or Density.

Here is a short list of the brushes available in ZBrush 3:

• Standard Brush
• Move
• Elastic
• Inflat
• Magnify
• Blob
• Pinch
• Flatten
• Clay

To see more brush types click here.

Brush Controls

ZBrush has several brush controls such as Gravity, Wrap Mode, Alpha Tile and more. These controls effect the behavior of the brush and add an extra level of power to ZBrush's sculpting brushes.

To learn more about brush controls visit the Brush Palette page.

Alphas

Alphas control the shape of your brush. To select an alpha you can do two things:

• Click the large Alpha thumbnail to the left of the canvas and choose an Alpha from the pop-up window.

or

• Open the Alpha Palette, click the large thumbnail of the Alpha and choose an Alpha from there.

To learn more about alpha aontrols visit the Alpha Palette page.

To learn more about alphas visit the Alphas page.

Stroke

ZBrush has several different Stroke types available for the artist. Each is useful for a different task. In the First Painting section we learned about the Colorized Spray stroke. For sculpting, the Dots stroke, Drag Rect and the Freehand stroke are very useful. Some of the strokes to the right are not visible while 3D sculpting. ZBrush's interface is context sensative. It will only show you the controls that you can use.

In the beginning try the following experiments:

1. Dots
   1. Select the Std brush
   2. Select Alpha: Brush 59
   3. Set Z Intensity to 25
   4. Sculpt on the surface
2. Drag Rect
   1. Select the Std brush
   2. Select Alpha: Brush 56
   3. Drag out multiple strokes all over the place to try to get the look of skin
3. Freehand
   1. Select the Clay and set the slider inside it to 15
   2. Select Alpha: Brush 28
   3. Set Focal Shift to -100
   4. Set Z Intensity to 50
   5. Sculpt on the surface

To learn more about Stroke Controls visit the Stroke Palette page.

To learn more about Strokes visit the Strokes page.

Texture

Textures can be applied to a 3D model surface by simply selected the texture in the Texture palette or the Texture pop-up to the left of the canvas. However, you can also use a texture to paint on the surface of the model. This feature is only accessible when you have Tool: Texture: Colorize on and are PolyPainting.

To learn more about PolyPainting click here.

Materials

ZBrush can also paint materials directly onto the surface of a model. To do this simply turn on M on the shelf. To learn more click here.