Create a 3D printable miniature using zBrush for beginners

1. Class introduction: Hello, my name is Jamie. I'm a digital sculptor based in Sweden. I've been using ZBrush for coming up on six years now. However, for the last year-and-a-half or so, I have been primarily focused on creating miniatures for 3D printing, and I've decided to create this course to help you do the same, whether you're new or old to the 3D printing hobby. This course is aimed at those of you that are new to wanting to sculpt your own miniatures. And if you've chosen ZBrush as the program to do so, then I've created this course as what would hopefully be a great beginners guide to help give you a solid foundation and using ZBrush to sculpt miniatures for 3D printing. Together we'll be launching ZBrush for the first time together. I'll be showing you some of the common tools and functions that we'll be using. And then in the final section of this course, I will show you my entire workflow start to finish of me creating this target dummy miniature. Something that you could follow along and hopefully create your own first miniature as a great early victory on your journey TO learning ZBrush to sculpt miniature. So if that all sounds interesting to you, then please consider joining this course and I look forward to seeing you. 2. First launch: Hello and welcome to the first video lesson of this course. In this video, we'll be launching ZBrush together for the first time. And I'm just going to help you and try guide you to start sculpting and playing around with digital clay for the first time. In the next section of this course, I'll be covering a lot of the various tools and functions of ZBrush, more in depth, in shorter and more concise videos. But for this video, I thought that I would take a more relaxed approach and just launch the program and answer questions that might come up as they come up. So I'm gonna try get into the mindset of a beginner here. When I launched the brush, I'll try answer questions and then I'll sort of guide towards the steps you need to take to start sculpting and CB brush. I imagined that a lot of you that are following this guide might be using the 30-day free trial, so let's not waste any time. Let's get you sculpting and let's get you to experience what the ZBrush experience is all about. All right, with that said, let's launch the program. Now whenever you launch ZBrush, the first thing you might notice is that a window pops up. This is what's called the ZBrush homepage. This window basically just shows you any sort of updates or news related to ZBrush. Right now here you can see that there is an event going on, a new video tutorial and new video to check out. Basically, this is going to contain anything that the ZBrush Creators Wanted to push onto their users. So if you don't want to see this every time you launch the program, you can go to the cogwheel up here on the top right. You can check the show if news updated button. So this will only show the homepage whenever there's something new to show you. Once we close the homepage, we are now in ZBrush. So let's take this from the beginning. The first thing I want to talk about is Lightbox. The button here, lightbox. This will show and hide this window that pops up. This will pop up every time you launch ZBrush. And it'll show you some files and folders that are found within the ZBrush directory. This is all content that comes with C brush, but isn't automatically loaded when you launch the program. So there are some pre-set projects here to get you quickly started. And some extra brushes and some various resources for you to use. For now though, let's hide this window, but it's good to know that it exists. And think of it like a file browser, quick access type thing. To hide it, you can click the Lightbox button here on the top-left. Now, now we have full access to the canvas or the workspace that we have here. The first thing I want to talk to you about is the fact that there are two major modes in ZBrush. So by default, ZBrush is set to what's called a two-point 5D mode, or 2.5 D painting mode. Basically, if you try click and drag on the canvas now, you'll notice that you're just drawing a bunch of red squares, or it depends on what tool you have selected. If you have the simple brush tool selected, you're just going to draw a bunch of red squares. This is what's happening when we are in the 2D painting mode. This is actually what and C brush was originally made to do this sort of painting program that also recorded some depth information to give this 2.5 D Look to your paintings. It's important to know that this mode exists. It's not something that we'll be using in this course. But there are some quirks associated with it. For example, right now, if you want to start sculpting, there are a few steps you have to take to get into the 3D edit mode or the sculpting mode. So if you've drawn some squares on the screen like I have here, you can press Control and N to clear the canvas. Just a quick note on the bottom left here you can see what hotkeys I'm pressing. Control N is to clear the canvas. Now, how do we get into 3D edit mode? The fastest way to get into 3D edit mode to start sculpting is to go into your lightbox and select one of these sort of pre-set projects that are already set to 3D mode. But I want to first show you how to get there manually, just so that you better understand ZBrush as a program. So I'm gonna hide like books. And what you want to do is you want to put a 3D mesh on your canvas. On the right here. In our tool palette, you can see the sphere 3D tool. If you don't see the sphere 3D tool, you can click the current tool icon here, which is the larger one. And this shows you what current tool you have selected. If you click it, it'll open up the entire tool palette. Here in the 3D meshes section, you can see the 3D primitives that we can draw onto the Canvas. Select the sphere 3D. Now, once you've selected the sphere 3D tool, we have to turn it into an editable mesh. We do this by pressing this button up here. Make poly mesh 3D. This tells ZBrush to turn the current tool we have selected into an editable mesh. Once clicking that, you can see a new tool has appeared here. Now, when we click and drag on the canvas, we are drawing that poly mesh 3D sphere tool that we just created. Now notice that if you try click and drag again, we're still in 2.5 D painting mode. So we're just drawing new instances of the same sphere. So we're still in 2D mode here. So we're not quite there yet. So press Control N again to clear the canvas and just draw one instance of the object. And then now we want to enter edit mode, which the button for which can be found up here. Edit object or T on your keyboard by default. Once you switch to edit mode, you can see that a gray border appears here. This head appears in the top right. Now when we click and drag on the canvas, we're not drawing new instances of this object anymore. Instead we are rotating this sphere might be difficult to see, but let me zoom in here so you can see the faces. We are rotating the sphere now. Also, now when you click and drag across the surface of the mesh, you are applying the effects of the brushes that you have selected. The way we manipulate or one of the ways that we manipulate meshes or the digital clay here in ZBrush is the use of brushes. The current brush that we have selected by default is called the standard brush. And it makes this sort of line effect on your mesh. We can see the current brush here on the top-left. And clicking on the current brush, much like clicking on the current tool, wear will bring up a menu of the various different brushes that you can have available to you. There might be more or fewer brushes that you have loaded up. But this we can go over later in the next section. But for now, just know that there are a variety of different brushes that will manipulate the surface of the model in in various different ways. To better illustrate this, I'm going to turn on this button here, which is draw poly frame. Clicking. This allows us to see more clearly the different points and edges that we have on our frame. I just want to have this turned on to illustrate just what exactly is happening when we draw across the mesh, it might be easier to think of drawing using the standard brush as you're adding a line of clay. But what's actually happening is that you're pulling the points of the mesh up. Holding Alt while clicking and dragging across your mesh will do the inverse of what the regular version of the brush does. Fruit like. For example, clicking and dragging with the standard brush here, races. If I hold Alt, it'll indent and go inwards. Now, I implore you to play around and try out the various different brushes here and these menus and see what they do for you. Another thing you can do is up here, there's a slider to change the size, the area of the effect that the brush has on the mesh. So you can see the red circle growing and shrinking. Now I have the Move brush selected. And what this does is it pulls the points, the direction of where you're pulling the cursor. Now this takes some getting used to having it pulled in the direction you want it to go. But it's all about practice. Now that we're in edit mode, playing around with this sphere. If this is your first time in ZBrush, I do. Encourage you to play around, move this ball of clay and the various different ways. Try out the different brushes you have available to you. Clicking on the mesh, seeing what it does. If at any point you want to undo any sort of action you've taken on the sphere. Up here, you can see the undo history timeline. Of course, by pressing Control Z, much like any other program, you can step backwards. But if you want to undo several moves, even go back to the very beginning. You can just click and drag up here, and it'll go back to that point in time. Now this undo history can go on for several 100 steps. And you don't really need to worry too much about making mistakes in ZBrush, which is one of the great things of working digitally, is that you can always undo and undo any mistakes and redo them if you changed your mind. Another thing I want to talk about before I let you explore on your own how to, how to move the mesh around so that you can, for example, if you want to sculpt the backside of this sphere, I flattened the front here just to show you, just to better illustrate what it looks like when we're rotating. The movement functions can be found here on the right. These icons here you can find rotate, Zoom to move. However, these three functions can also be achieved within the canvas. So clicking and dragging on an empty space of the canvas, you will rotate. If you hold Alt while clicking and dragging, you will move. If you hold Alt, click and then let go of Alt, you will zoom. Now this took me quite a while to get used to, but it's definitely, I definitely recommend you learn these hotkeys because it'll speed up your work flow quite a bit. If anything, learning the movement hotkeys would be most beneficial to you at the start. And of course, the brush modifier hotkeys, which we'll go over in the next section, more in depth. But for now, have a play around with this sphere. Just to quickly show you how to get back into this mode, I'm going to show you how to restart ZBrush. So saving from, instead of closing the program and reopening it again, if you ever want to start fresh with C brush, as in like start a new project? You can go up here to this menu preferences. You can click Initialize the brush. What this does. It'll prompt you to ask you whether you're sure to do it because it'll delete any objects that you have created so far. You click yes, if you want to delete and start over. And then now we're back to the beginning again. So I'll show you a quickly again how to get into 3D edit mode so that you can start playing around with ZBrush here and the tool palette. You click the current tool selected to open up the tool palette. Click on sphere 3D, make poly mesh 3D. Draw one instance of the poly mesh, and then enter edit mode by clicking this button up here or pressing T on your keyboard. Now we're back here again editing a sphere. That's this quick introductory video to ZBrush. Hopefully, I've covered enough for you to start exploring what it's like sculpting ZBrush as it's quite finicky with the 2D mode and it's quite confusing at the start. Another way you can start sculpting directly, like I mentioned earlier, is opening up a default project here on lightbox. I also implore you to open these up and see what they're all about. For example, this DynaMesh sphere 128 project, for example, double-clicking that will open, will open this editable sphere. The difference with this one compared to the previous one that we had was this is DynaMesh enabled, and we'll cover DynaMesh in the next section of this course. And also symmetry is activated, which when I draw on one side of the sphere, the action is mirrored on the other side. So I'll cover this again also in the next section. But I just want to encourage you to have a play around yourself and just do some self-exploration before we move on. Thanks and see you in the next video. 3. Custom UI: Hello. In this video, we'll be going over the UI a little bit and I'm going to try help familiarize you with where things can be found. And I'll also go over how to customize your UI and how to load custom UIs. In the resource section of this lesson, you'll find a link to download my custom UI, which I will be using throughout the rest of this course. And I recommend that you use to, to follow along. Now I was debating for a little while whether or not I would do this. Whether or not I would make the rest of this course in the default UI. But after some thinking, I came to the conclusion that custom UIs, they are sort of an integral part to my workflow. It really does speed stuff along and being able to customize your UI is a big part of ZBrush. And even if you are a very new user, I do believe that working with a custom UI is fine because it's not really something that you need to learn is not where the buttons are on your UI, but where they can be found in the palettes if you need to go looking for them. Which comes with time. My main goal with this course is to get you to see results quite quickly. I imagine some of you might be on a time limit, whether you're on a ZBrush trial and you want to get a feel for it before you commit to purchasing it. Or whether you just want to make your own minis and you don't really care about the technical side too, too much, which is understandable. And also whenever you follow a course or tutorial, you're essentially following that instructors workflow. And because this is my course, you are following my workflow and for me, my UI is a big part of that and that's why I thought I would share it with you. With that said, let's go over the UI a little bit and then I'll show you how to customize on load UIs. The ZBrush UI is broken up into several different palettes. So any tool or function that you want within ZBrush can be found within a palette. And those pallets are found up here in these buttons. So each of these buttons represent a sort of palette that correspond to the title that it's given. So for example here, the brush pallet affects all your brushes. The document palette affects the document color, light, yeah, all sorts of stuff. And the tool palette here affects your tools. Now, good news is a lot of this stuff. We won't be needing to know how to use or we won't be using it. All. The thing about ZBrush is that it's a program designed to do a lot of stuff. And if our sole purpose of using ZBrush is to create miniatures for 3D printing, then a lot of the features and tools and functions aren't necessary and we don't need to learn a lot of this stuff. In fact, we only really need to know about brushes, little bit about the document tools and some Z plugins that we'll be using it later down the line to export stuff in 3D printing. For example, the 3D print hub here, and the decimation master. And also the scale master to help Resize tools to real-world size. It's very little. So this might look like a lot. But there's only three or four menus that we will be using to completely start to finish create models for 3D printing. With that said, I also want to bring up the fact that even if you have the same end goal, the path you take within ZBrush to get there can be quite different. User to user, or if you follow instructor to instructor, the workflows might be very different. At the end of the day, this comes down a lot to personal preference. Whether you prefer to keep things very clean and do box modeling or whether you want to treat Z, treat ZBrush more like a digital version of traditional sculpting. Whether you want to treat it more like you're manipulating clay and you're adding clay and trying to emulate what traditional sculptors do. There's no wrong answer here. You know, there's, there's more than one way to skin the cat within ZBrush. And that's also the reason why customizing UI is so prevalent. So to talk about customizing UIs, let's talk about here, the border around your canvas is where you can put buttons. And by default, this is what it should look like. And all these buttons correspond to buttons that can be found within the, within the palette. For example, these buttons up here, the drawing move scale rotate. These can be found in the Transform palette up here, move scale, rotate. They all these buttons correspond to buttons that are found within pallets. Pallets you can dock in your shelves. On the right here, you see this divider. If you double-click that, you can close it. And then there's a similar one on the left side here. You can double-click that to open. By default, the brush pallet is open on the left shelf and the tool palette is open on the right shelf. I'm right-handed, so when I work, I keep my right shelf open with my tool palette there. If you're left-handed, you might feel more comfortable switching it. To do that. You see the circle up here on the top right of the palette. You can click and drag the palate. So if I click and drag off, it'll remove it. I can go back here to the tool palette, which is the same palette that was here. And I can click and drag the circle and I can move it into the right shelf. If I wanted to. On the left side, I can open the left divider here, remove the brush pallet, and then move the tool palette over here. And then I can close the right side. You can do this as well if you want. I however, keep it on the right side. Close that. There's also a divider here on the bottom, but this shelf, you can't put palettes here, but you can drag buttons here. So you can have buttons all across around the border here. To move buttons around. What you have to do is you have to go to the Preferences palette up here, and then you click on config. And this is everything to do with your UI. So you can restore the standard UI. So you can go back to this default UI whenever you want. You can go, you can load custom UIs and you can save your UI if you've made any changes to it that you want to save. To move buttons around, you have to click the Enable Customize button once that's toggled on. Now you can use the keyboard keys Control and Alt to tell zebras that you'll want to start moving buttons around. So if you have control and alt held down, you can click and drag buttons around. I could, for example, move this scroll button down here. Or if I want to remove it, I can just move it over the canvas and it'll remove the scroll button. And if I want to, like I said, all these buttons are found within various palettes and menus up here. If I want to bring back the scroll button, it's in document over here, right under my camera face here is the scroll button. And I can click and drag while holding Control and Alt. And I can move that back there. So this is how you customize UIs. Just quickly. I'll load up my UI and I'll just show you what that looks like. If I restore custom, this is what my UI looks like. I'll give you an idea of what it is like when I'm in edit mode so that everything is visible. What I do is I like to keep my most used brushes available as buttons that are just one-click away. It saves me from looking through this brush menu every time I went to pick a brush. And it saves me from learning too many hotkeys. And up here I have various other brushes that I use very often. And then here are some functions and different stuff that I will go over in detail in the next section. In the next section of this course, I'll go over the various functions and tools that we'll be using. I'll be using my UI to cover it. I'll also show where all these things are found within the sort of menus and pallets. So that if you do choose to not use my UI, I'll, I'll try my best to satisfy both, but I really, really do recommend that you load my UI. To do that. You go back to Preferences and config and you click Load UI. And all you have to do is once you click Load UI, you navigate to the file that you downloaded, whether this be in your downloads folder, for example. Then you just click that and open and it'll load the UI. That's it for this video, I'll see you in the next section where I'll be covering all the various tools and functions that we'll be using in the rest of this course. Thanks, and see you. 4. Tools & Functions: Doccument: Hello. In this video, we'll be talking about the document. Now. What is the document? Within ZBrush? You are technically always working on a 2D image. This goes back to the fact that ZBrush, who's originally created as a 2.5 D painting program. Because of that, this space that we're working on here, this canvas is a document that we can see better visualized here, if I click the Zoom button, zoom Document button on my UI, you can see that we're zooming out. Now that you can see that when I tried to draw, I can't draw outside of the document. The reason I'm making this first video is because it's just a point of confusion that I wanted to clear up before we move on. And also you can edit the color of this document to your preferences. Let's open the document palette together, which can be found up here. I'm just going to click and drag it. And I'm going to move it onto my tray on the right here just just so my face is another way, but you can work on it up here if you want. Here. There are several options that are related to this rectangle here. So all these options, I change this document that we worked from. Here, we can see background color, which I like to change to a darker one. I like to click and drag and pick the same color as the border of my UI. Then here in range, I like to eliminate it. I like to bring it down to 0 so that it's snow gradient. That's what I personally like to do. The resolution should be already automatically set. Depending on what monitor you open ZBrush on, it should be all good. However, if you find that your document is too small or pixelated, you can increase the size of it, but you shouldn't need to worry about that. Now to fit the document to the size, to the actual size, you can click this button here. Actual size. This will make the document fit your workspace you have here. And then I like to save as startup document. This is so that every time I launch ZBrush, I'll have this gray colored document that I like. You can make this any color you want, anything that you prefer. If you like having a gradient there, you can just leave that. But that's pretty much it. Other than that, the only other time you need to worry about the size of the document is if you want to have a higher resolution image that you save. But for our purposes we don't need to worry about that. So that's all that we need to talk about the document for. I'm going to just remove this palette and we never need to open it again. I just want to quickly illustrate to you what I mean by that. We're working on a 2D image. If I place a 3D object here on the canvas and I make it an editable poly mesh. Now we're, we're, we're, we're working on a 3D object here, but we're still within the 2D image. And if I zoom in on that image using this zoom Document button, you can see the pixels that are that are within the image. So that's all that I wanted to talk to you about. Just to clear up any confusion about what the document is. Also the save option up here for the document. It's only going to save a 2D image, so it has nothing to do with the 3D object. That's nothing we need to worry about really. That's it for this video. See you in the next one. 5. Tools & Functions: Saving your work: Hello. In this video, I'll be talking to you about how to save your work. In the previous video, I mentioned briefly that saving a document only saves a 2D image. Here's another quirk of ZBrush that you have to understand is that there's multiple save buttons. But depending on where you find that button is what it will save. For example, in the document palette save will only save document. The file palette save will save the entire project. And in the tool palette, which can be found here docked on our right tray, will only save the current tool. What do we want to save? If we're working on single 3D objects, for example, me personally, I make single miniatures. What I'd like to save our separate tools. So the single objects that I'm working on, that's what I'm going to show you how to do today. Together we're going to save a sort of a very useful tool for us, which is a 25 millimeter base. Let's get into it. So to do this, Let's start with a cylinder. If you don't see the cylinder here, you can click the larger icon on the left to open up the menu of tools that we can use, we click the cylinder, make it a poly mesh 3D. Click and drag it onto our canvas and then go into edit mode up here, or pressing T on our keyboard. Now, the next step we want to take is we want to make this 25 millimeters. So how do we do this? We can do this by going to Z plugin and going into scale master. This has options relating to changing the size of our sub tools more precisely. So the first thing we want to do here is we want to set the sliders are first we want to select millimeters, and that's already selected by default here. Then we're going to select sliders to sub tool size. This will change the sliders down here to the relative to the size of the sub tool that we have selected. Then we want to untangle the lock ratio here so that we can change the sizes independently. Because we want to make a 25 by 25 base, but not 25 tall. Instead, we'll keep it at two. So let's unlock that so that it's not enabled. And then here we want to change the x and z. Within ZBrush. By default, the y-axis is the relative up and down. It's different for other programs, but that's how it is in ZBrush. For the x, Let's press 25 and enter for the z to five. Enter. Then here we can click the resize sub tool button. Now, we have a 25 millimeter circular base. The next thing we want to do is just quickly go back into scale master. And then click ZBrush scale unify. Basically, everything scale wise within ZBrush is relative. Zbrush doesn't know if 25 millimeters is big or small. But because it started off as two millimeters, 25 is a lot bigger than what it was. We need to change. We need to unify the scale so that everything is all the tools work properly. Just to better show this, if I turn on the floor grid here, you can see that the relative size of the floor here, like this green square, is quite small in comparison to the size of our sub tool. If I go back to scale master and I click unify, ZBrush scale unify. You'll see now that the size of the floor relative to the size of our object is much larger. So this tells the brush out, okay, 25 millimeters isn't super big, It's actually pretty small. That's all you have to do. And now we're done. Now we have a 25 millimeter base that we can work with. This is a great starting off point when working with miniatures because we have, we have something, something to compare relative size to. Anything that we work on to this base will know that when we export it later, we can have a good idea for how big it's going to be for 3D printing. How do we save this, this base that we just created? Like I mentioned, it depends on which palette you say from. So because we want to save in just this single tool, we have to click the save as button within the tool palette. Here we click Save As. Then here we can call it 25 millimeter base. I've already created one previously, but I'll rename it 25 millimeter base. And then just click Save. You won't get this prompt because you haven't saved one yet. But I'll say yes. Now that we've saved this 25 millimeter base, we have, we can recall it anytime we launched the brush. As an example, I'm just going to close the program. I won't save any changes because we've already saved. Yeah, I'll open ZBrush again from scratch. Now, because we saved the sub tool within the ZBrush directory, we have access to it via our lightbox. Here the light box is open. We can click up here on the top-left tool. And now we can see our 25 millimeter base tool here. So every time we launched the brush, we can always go into lightbox here looking tool and double-click that to to have our load, our 25 millimeter base tool onto our tool palette here. So now we can see it. We can go into edit mode and it sits there just as we made it. So just to quickly illustrate, like let's say if we add objects to this, which I'll go into more detail about how we add the sub tools and stuff in a future video. But I just wanted to show you that. Let's say we've made a figure. If I wanted to save this as a separate tool, let's call this oval man. We can save as call it oval man. Now, we'll still have our 25 millimeter base here. We can open that. But we'll also have our oval man saved in a separate sub tool. We can see that we have saved a different sub tool. That's it for this video. See you in the next one. 6. Tools & Functions: Subtools: Hello. In this video, let's talk about sub tools. Now, you've heard me say tools and sub tools when referring to 3D objects in ZBrush before. But just to reiterate, a tool in ZBrush is what they call the 3D meshes that we work on. When you save a 3D object or a Z tool, you are saving the 3D object that you're working on. In the previous video. The example of this was the 25 millimeter base we created. That is called a tool. What sub tools are the parts that make up a tool? So a single tool can be made up of multiple sub tools. So as an example of this, I'm gonna load a tool that I have worked on recently, which is a miniature that I created of a scarecrow. When I load this tool, I am loading the tool that I've that is made up of several different sub tools. Here it is, the preview shows you only the selected sub tool, so you don't get a great idea of what it is. But when I draw this onto the canvas and I enter edit mode, you can see that when I open the sub tool menu here, which is the first option under our tool palette. You can see here that it is made up of several different sub tools. Now let me make the bass sub tool visible. So you can see this scarecrow model-like created Is a single tool made up of various different sub tools. And to get an idea for this, just think of them as separate objects or Lego bricks that you use to build a single piece. You make a building and Lego, it's made up of several different bricks to make one building. So now we're making one tool or one miniature, but we use several different parts to put together. This is important to understand that a single tool is made up of various sub tools. And then when you save a tool, you're saving all the sub tools that it's made of, even though the preview is only a single sub tool. And that's sub tools. Basically, I just wanted to show you that it's made of parts. Just to give you an idea for how this comes into practice. Let's say I want to add something to this existing miniature. All I would do now is I would insert a new sub tool. So let's say I would like to start with a primitive sphere. Then I can use this sphere to make something that I would like to add onto this figure. Let's say. I don't know, I want to put a feather in his cap. I would do something like this and then move it into his cap. So now he has a feather in his calf, or maybe two feathers, a single tool or the object we work on. In this case, we're gonna be making miniatures, eyes made up of several different sub tools. Let's together practice adding a sub tool to a tool. Let's go into our lightbox. In the tool menu, appear tool and double-click the 25 millimeter base that we've already created from the previous video. Highlight box. Draw it onto our canvas and enter edit mode, which can be found up here or T on our keyboard. And let's add a sub tool to this. So to do this, one of the ways we can add a sub tool is by going to the sub tool menu, which is the first option here under our tool palette sub tool. Then here, the button insert sub tool. In starting a sub tool, clicking this button will let us insert any of the primitives that are here by default. But you can also insert other tools that you've created in the past. But for now let's just insert a sphere into our tool here. Now we have a 25 millimeter base and the sphere. Now to move sub tools within a tool we make use of what's called the gizmo. It's this thing here. I'll go for this particular thing in more detail on how to move sub tools in the next video. But for now, we have recall, we have cold in a sub tool within the tool and I just wanted to show you that elected, which I do. If I want to work on the base, I need to select the base first and then I can manipulate it. See now I have the base selected, I can't, the sphere is untouchable. Another quick way to select which sub tool you want to work on is you can hold Alt and left-click and hold Alt and left-click and you see how it selects the, the sub tool that I click on, holding Alt and left-click. That's the basics of sub tools. That's it for this video. See you in the next one where we'll talk about this thing, the gizmo, that lets us move sub tools. 7. Tools & Functions: Gizmo: Okay, so let's talk about the gizmo and also maybe practice a little bit about the camera movements within ZBrush because you might still have troubles moving that around. So we'll go over that as well. Because it's all kind of related. What is the gizmo? The gizmo is this thing, this thing that pops up in the center of a sub tool when I press W. By default, we should be in Draw mode, which can be seen up here, or Q by default. This is the mode where our brushes are in use, like our pointer is our brush and we can draw. So it's in drawing mode. If I go into move, which is the next button over W on our keyboard, we're in move mode. This circular thing should be here. If it's not, then this gizmo button might not be toggled. You might have this thing here instead. But I recommend you not use this because it's kind of confusing. This is what ZBrush used to use and this is called the transpose line or Transpose Tool As it, but I recommend using the gizmo, which is toggled on with y on our keyboard or this button here. It's just a lot simpler in my opinion. What the gizmo is is it's like this. It's a tool that lets you move, manipulate sub tools within a tool to quickly go over its functions. It can move, scale and rotate. To move a sub tool. You can click the arrows here, the green, blue, and red arrows, and this moves it along the corresponding axis. Clicking on the green arrow, locks it to the y-axis and moves it up and down. Clicking on the red arrow, locks it to the x-axis and moves it left and right. And the blue is the Z, which is the in and out. If you want to freely move your object, you can click the any of the four arrows here. The corners of the gizmo. This moves the object relative to your view of it. So if I'm looking at it from the front, I'm only moving the object on the XY plane. That is the plane within the x and y-axis, and it's not moving in and out at all. If I look at it from the complete from the right side or any side, then I'm moving it along the z and y-axis. If I'm looking at it from behind or from the top, it will be the Z and X axis. Yeah, it's relative. So if you're not at a, if you're not viewing the object orthogonally like from the front side or top, using the corner arrows here we'll move it still relative to your view. So it will go sort of all over the price. To better illustrate this, maybe I'll add a second, I'll insert a second sub tool, maybe a cube. With this cube, I'll show you the second, the second function of the gizmo, which is to scale. To scale. It's about these boxes here. The green, blue, and red boxes scale along the the axis. And the yellow box here and the center scales from the center in on all axes. With this cube. For example, if I click the yellow box here and I drag down, it scales it down evenly on all sides. If I click only the blue box, you can see that it will scale. It will flatten it only along the z-axis. I'm pressing Control Z to undo. And same goes for the x and the y to flatten it. Now, the next thing is rotate. Rotating is done by clicking on the circles that can be seen here. Much like the corner arrows for moving this central circle, the gray central circle here. It will rotate the object relative to your view of it. And clicking on the circles that are coloured will rotate around the axis that it's colored by. Clicking on the, I'm gonna click on solo here on the right just to isolate and only look at the square just to better. Show you this. So clicking on the blue circle and rotating will rotate it around the z-axis. Clicking on the green will rotate it on the y and x will rotate it around the x. And as you can see, the green is not pointing up anymore because we've messed around with the rotation. If at any point you want to home it or make it go back to what it was. You can click these buttons. This resets the orientation. If I click that, it'll snap back and go back to where it was, up, down, left, right, or XYZ. If you click home, the home button, it will center it. In the world. If we turn on the floor here, if I click the floor button here, we can see where the center of the world is. The floor will be where the bottom of the lowest sub tool is. The center of the world is found right here. This point there, it's covered by the the bass sub tool there, but clicking the Home button will center the sub tool you have selected in the world. Here as a cog with various other options that change the effects of this gizmo, which we won't need to go into at the moment. For now, it's best to think of this as a simple tool that lets us move, scale, and rotate sub tools within our tool. That's it for the gizmo. To get into the gizmo, remember to click the button up here, move or W by default, and Q to exit the gizmo and back into Draw mode where we can continue manipulating using our brushes as we can see here. Yeah, that's it for the gizmo. Another thing I just wanted to touch quickly as you see me moving the camera around a lot. I just want to make sure that you have a grasp on how that's done. I made it. I may have touched on it like in a previous video, but just quickly I'll just go over it again just so that you can maybe practice here as well with me. So clicking and dragging while you're in Draw mode or edit or gizmo mode, either one, clicking and dragging when you're not on an object, will rotate the camera or the view of the object. Holding shift will let you snap to an orthogonal view of the object. So the front side, top and bottom, this is me holding shift when I'm close to it. To snap. Holding Alt will let me move the camera like this and sort of move my view like panic around. And then if I hold Alt, left-click and let go volt, this is me activating the zoom function. So let me zoom in and out. Just, just, just wanted to go over that quickly again just to make sure that you have it down. The reason I want to cover that here is because as you can see, moving the camera or our view of the object isn't moving the object in any way. It's not moving the object relative to other objects. And it's not moving it relative to the world, as we can see by the floor here. Using the gizmo is what is how we move objects relative to other sub tools, or it's how we move sub tools relative to other sub tools and relative to the world basically moving this is moving our view of it. And moving this is moving the actual object. I just wanted to cover that quickly and that's the gizmo. That's it for this video. See you in the next one. 8. Tools & Functions: Brushes: Okay, so let's talk about brushes of older videos. Probably brushes can be the most extensive because there are so many brushes in ZBrush and they, and they can vary and use wildly. So technically every brush might deserve its own video. As you can see, there's a lot of different brushes. But good news is we probably won't make use of most of these as some of them have very niche uses that aren't necessary to know to get a good result. Of course, when it comes to learning ZBrush, There is a lot to learn, but I'm trying to focus on the basics and what you need to learn to sort of quickly be able to start making your own miniatures. With that said, I just want to cover basically the brushes that I've put forward here. As these are basically the brushes that I use most often. So very quickly, I'm just going to select the sphere here by holding Alt and left clicking or you can click the sphere here on the right. In our sub tool menu. Make sure that we're in, in Draw mode so that our brushes affect the sphere. Very quickly. I'm just going to go over the brushes that I have here on the side. As these are probably the ones that we'll be using most often or it is it is the ones I use most often. That's why I put them there. Some of these I don't even use too much, but let's go over these quickly. So the Move brush moves points. Before we continue, let me just quickly show you how to scale the brush. If we press S on our keyboard, we get this. Draw size slider appear where our cursor is. And we can use this to make our brushes bigger and smaller. So that's what you'll see me do to resize brushes. I press S on my keyboard, and I scale. Let's turn on poly frame mode, just so that we can better see the points on the sphere. Just so I can show you what the brushes do. Let's quickly run through these on the right here. So the Move brush moves points. If I hold Alt on the Move brush, it will move points perpendicular to the surface of the sub tool. So control Z, control Z, control Z. Just quickly to show you again, the Move brush moves points, and holding Alt, we'll move it perpendicularly to the surface. Next up is the snake hook brush. This is sort of like the Move brush except more extreme. And as you can see, it really does warp the planes here and it really does move it quite aggressively compared to the Move brush. This brush is good for pulling out, I guess, as spiky bits, horns, spikes, and stuff like that. Next is the standard brush, and this is the one that's on by default. This sort of makes a line, pulls up the points of the surface. In this manner, holding Alt does the inverse effect in dense points. The other major thing with the standard brush or what I use it for, is here. On the left side we see what's called the stroke. This changes the effect of how the brushes applied. By default it's on dots, as you can see here, but my faces in the way. But you can see the draw rect function here. This, this makes the function of the brush, click and drag style effect. The thing with the standard brushes. Down here, you can choose alphas, which is the sort of texture that the brush applies. And with the click and drag stroke or the drag rectangle stroke. And the different Alpha. We can start applying sort of patterns to the surface of our meshes here. As you can see, quick texturing. That's something we'll probably cover more later during our live demos. But just so that you know, that that's part of the use of what I use this standard brush for. Next, is this the Damian standard brush? It's kind of like the standard brush except it's a lot sharper. You can, you can see that it pushes in. In a much sharper manner and holding Alt, we'll pull it out in a sharp manner as well. Next is the insert multi mesh primitives. With this brush selected, you get a menu up here of different primitives. So here you can insert, I guess, you can think of it as another sub tool on a tool, but because it's a brush, it will append. It will, it will make both of these part of the same sub tool. If I deselect it and reselect that, you can see here in the preview that this is, this is one sub tool, but they are grouped differently. As you can see, there are different colors and these are what's called a poly groups, which we'll cover in the next section, where we talk about masking as well. So I'll cover that later, but this is basically to insert more geometry, more objects into our tool quickly. Next we have the flattened brush. This flattens the surface. Pretty self-explanatory. Next we have trimmed dynamic, which does something similar but little differently. Like it's more of a feel thing. It's a little bit more aggressive. But yeah, you'll get a feel for it when you play around with that. Next is the curve tubes function. This is the first of there are quite a few different curve brushes. And what a curved brushes is when you click and drag a curve brush, it will draw a curve, and then it will, it will add the shape that you have, in this case tubes over that curve. As another example, if I click the curve tubes and I select the curve straps brush, for example. Let me look for curves straps. Here. I'll draw a curve again, but instead of making a tube, it'll make a strep. That's just a different function. Curve brushes are a little bit finicky to use. Took me awhile to get used to them. But again, this is more about just adding geometry to work off of. If we want sort of tend to Kohl's or maybe anytime we want sort of this sort of tubular shape in our scene, we can do that. I'll also show you how to do this with maybe instead of just a plain tube, you can make a chains and ropes as well. That's also a good function. Let's start again from the top. But on the other side, this is move topology. This brush is useful when you have multiple objects within the same sub tool. So let's say I have two spheres here you see there are different colors because there are different poly groups. If I have the Move topology brush on, it will only move the one that I clicked on. So for example, I click on the orange sphere first. I'll only move the points on that sphere. If I click on the pink 1 first, it'll only move the points in that pink one. If I had the regular Move brush activated, Clicking, even on this sphere, as you can see it, it'll move all the points within the affected area, even if it's a different poly group. Move topology will move only the object like this, the same poly group. Next we have clay tubes. This sort of applies clay in a tube shape or in this sort of shape. If you think the standard brush is sort of more a smoother line, I guess. Clay tubes just plops down a flat block of clay holding Alt will do the opposite and remove remove in the same manner. Next is the clay buildup brush. Similar, but it will build up clay tubes. If I go over it again like this, if I click and drag clay tubes back and forth, it won't add on itself. If I have clay buildup on, if I click and drag on itself, you can see that it's infinitely adding up onto itself like that. Control Z. Next we have the clay brush, which is sort of a circular shape, adding clay, removing clay by holding Alt. It's kind of a smooth, slow type of brush. Next is the pinch brush. And this sort of pinches together points. This is best when working on sort of an edge. So if I use the flattened brush and I flattened on one side of the sphere, you see this edge that formed around the circle. I can use the pinch brush here to sharpen that edge and make it really sharp. It's kind of aggressive at the moment, but we can change that later. I can show you now. If you press space bar, you can see some additional options pop up where your cursor is. And this all changes the intensity of your brush, for example, the size of it, how intensities or how like how much it affects. The lower the intensity, the slower it is. So if I bring this all the way down to 0 and I pinch it, it won't pinch as quickly. Let me show you. It's 0 now, so it won't pinch at all. Let me put it on three. You see how slowly it pinches before it was on 20. And you can see that it pinches very aggressively. That changes the intensity of it. This space bar menu is a lot of various different buttons you can also press. Here's the move scale rotate. Here's the camera functions as well. The zoom, rotate, move. Another, change the color. We don't need to worry about color, but yet, anyway, let's move on. Let's move it along. Next is the inflate brush. This inflates sort of balloon IFIs parts. And yeah, that's pretty much it. These last two brushes I won't cover because you won't have this one. It's something I loaded and this one we won't be using the Z model or brush is a completely different beast and would require its own course to go over properly. But we might touch on it briefly in a future section. So yeah, those are the basic brushes I have here. But as you know, there are a lot more brushes available to you, which can be found up here. And there's a lot to discover here. The chisel brush, for example, is pretty powerful. You can just add add facial features like a nose, an ear, snout. Yeah, all sorts of stuff. There's a lot of powerful brushes and you know what, I, I really do encourage a lot of self-exploration when it comes to these, because there's a lot that you can learn by just playing around with these. But these are the ones that I use most often and these are the ones that we'll be using most during this course. So that's why I put them here and that's why I just went over them quickly. Just for you too. Get a feel for it. So yeah, definitely play around with these, and that's it for this video. In the next one, we'll go over these masking brushes up here and talk a little bit about masking. Thanks. 9. Tools & Functions: Masking: Okay, Now that we've briefly going over some of the basic brushes here, let's talk about the masking brushes. To activate the masking brushes, what we do is we hold control. By default. I think it should be the mask pen tool. When you hold control, your brush turns yellow and this indicates that you are now masking. By default, the mask pen tool is active and what this does is when you brush over your object while holding control, you will start painting on a mask. Now what is a mask? A mask essentially freezes the points that you color in. So that when I try and manipulate any of the other points by, for example, either using a brush to move or maybe I use the gizmo to move the entire sub tool. You see that the masked points are frozen in space so they can't be affected. This is useful in a variety of ways that will come up. Many instances. I will go over a few of them now here for you. But in its basic form, it's to freeze points on your mesh. Masking is to freeze. And here are three masking brushes that I use most often. The mask pen tool is sort of a brush that you paint on. The mask Lasso tool. To select these brushes you hold control and click on them. If you don't hold Control, it'll prompt you to hold control. The mask Lasso tool is like a lasso that lets you lasso. The mass curve tool is sort of align tool that masks on the shaded side. If I click and drag from the top-down, it'll mask everything up that way. If I do from the bottom up, it'll mask everything down that way. If you hold Alt while using a masking brush, it'll do the opposite effect. So here I am masking. If I hold Control and Alt it will and paint. Same goes for all the other brushes. With the mask, pen tool active. You can also click and drag off your object to make a masking rectangle. This can mask all the points within a rectangle. And if you hold Alt, the mask rectangle will turn white. So this will unmask the areas that you cover. And to clear a mask, you can make the rectangle and let go of it off the object. I mask on the object. And if I'm off the object and make the rectangle, it'll clear it. Some uses of masking. So what I like to do with masking is like I said, you can freeze an area to work on another area. You can also click this button here, which is split unmasked points. You can also find it in your sub tool menu here in the tool palette, split on mass points. I'll put it down here. In my UI. What this does is it splits your current sub tool. All the unmasked points to a separate sub tool. If I click this button now with half the sphere masked, you can see that now I have two sub tools. If I move one out of the way, you can see that there are 2.5 spheres in separate sub tools. That's a useful way to use masking to split sub tools. You can also use it, use it to make poly groups, which is a similar function. If I hold Control and mask the top half of this sphere, I can press Control W to give it a new Poly Group. This is to say that I'm making all the points on this half of the sphere, a different group as all the points on this half of the sphere. And what I normally use this for is I use Control and click to hide the undesired parts of a sub tool. And then I can click this button up here, delete hidden, which would delete all those points. That's what I use. Poly groups mostly for. So those are just some of the things that come to masking. And poly groups. More uses come into play later on and that will be covered as they come up when we are creating our model. But it's good to know that we can freeze points. Also, if you want to freeze all the points within a sub tool, you can just Control and click on your canvas and control and click to unmask. So control-click. Also. Control clicking would inverse the selection of your, of your, your. If not all the points are selected like here, some of the points are selected but not these points. If I can Control click, then it would inverse. It will make the unselected points selected. And the selected points unselected. Again, control drag to remove the mask. That's masking. And a little bit about poly groups as well. Next up, let's talk about these brushes up here. These brushes are active when you hold down Control and Shift. If you hold Control and Shift, you can click these brushes and I'll go over them with you. Now. The first one here is clip curve. What this does is it and it makes a line similar to the mask, mask curve. But what the clipping brushed does is when I release, it will take all the points on one side of the line and flatten it down. As you can see here. If I hold Control Shift with the clip curve selected, I can make a line and I'll flatten all the points to that line. You can also, once you've drawn the line, you can let go of your keyboard hands so you don't need to hold Control Shift anymore, but you're holding left-click. You can also click ALT, the Alt key to create sort of points along the line and make a curve. Now you can see I am making a smooth curve and clipping all the points down. The next brush while holding Control Shift, we can click the select Rectangle Tool. And this does similar to the effect of isolating a poly group. But we're selecting points and hiding the unselected points. At this point, we can also click the Delete, delete hidden button if we want to delete all these points that I didn't select. Now you can also hold Control Shift, let go of it. And once the wreck select Rectangle tool is out, you can hold Alt to do the inverse. Instead of selecting, you are now de-selecting. You can de-select parts to delete those points if you click this button, for example. Or if you're working on quite a complicated model, what I like to do as well is you can only you can select one part of it so that you can sculpt on that part and not have to worry about the other parts being in the way or affecting them. That's also useful. Next is the select lasso, which is the same except it's a less so shape instead of a rectangle. Next is the trim Leso. Trim brushes does something similar to the clip brushes, whereas it'll make a slice. But it will, it does a different process for calculating where to put the points. So these are new points and they are a new poly group which can be visible if I Control. Shift, click on them, you can see it became a new poly group. But the trimming button, the trimming lasso brush. I use this mainly just to create sort of chips and swords or maybe ragged fabrics. So it's, it's an edge use, but it's quite useful. But just know that it, it does weird calculation here to make a new Poly Group. Also something I didn't cover in the previous video. With regards to brushes, if you hold just shift, you see that the smooth brushes activated here and your cursor turns blue. And this smooth brushes definitely one of the most important ones. Basically, whenever you do stuff on a mesh, you see how the points gets stretched out. Jaggedy. Holding Shift brings up the smooth brush and this will start relaxing all those points and making things smooth. Again. A combination of putting on a regular brush and smoothing is something you'll be doing a lot. So just click and drag, holding Shift and click and drag to smooth. This was something that we'll be doing a lot of holding shift for the smooth brush as well. Say Yeah, I know it's a lot. There's a regular brushes which she just click. You can hold Shift to smooth. You can hold Control to mask, you hold Control Shift to clip and trim. There's a lot of different the stuff you can do, but I'm just making these videos just to quickly go over stuff just so that you can always refer back to it in case you need a refresher. But we'll always, I'll always take a slow in the future videos like when we do creations and the live demo, I'll always go over this again. Don't worry about it if things are a bit too quick now. I'll I'll take it slow. The future as well. Yeah, that's it for the brushes, the masking and the clipping brushes. In the next video, we'll be going over DynaMesh. 10. Tools & Functions: Dynamesh: Hello. In this video, let's talk about DynaMesh. What is DynaMesh? Dynamesh is, I guess, a way that ZBrush uses to calculate where to put points on surface of a 3D object. So there are various different functions within ZBrush that lets you recalculate points in a number of ways and each have their uses. You can use sculpt truss, you can use 0 measure, you can use decimation and DynaMesh. We'll be covering DynaMesh because that's what we'll mostly be using. 0 measure is there for you to get cleaner topology and decimation Master is there to get efficient use of points. And this is what we'll be doing later on when we export models, just so that the file sizes aren't too big. But let's stick to DynaMesh for now. And this will be using as a way of recalculating our meshes just to make sure we have enough points to work with basically. So enough talk, let's get into it. As a practical example. You might have thought to yourself like while we're working with this sphere, like while I've been showing you how older brushes work, you might have thought to yourself, how do I get smoother brush? Or a smoother effect on the sphere? For example, if I, if I pull up a brush on the sphere, you can see that the points here are quite separated, stretched out and give this sort of jaggedy effect. If I turn on DynaMesh, you can see up here, I can click DynaMesh to turn it on. This button is also found within your tool palette. Here. Under Geometry, DynaMesh. The slider here for resolution affects how detailed or how high resolution you want the surface of the mesh to be. How many points you want there basically, with DynaMesh activated, you can see the difference being that it's recalculated where to put the points in a different way. Now when we move. Now because the resolution is slightly higher than before, we can see that the effects of our brushes is a lot smoother on the surface. But the other use for DynaMesh is to add more points. Well, it's the main use basically, for me. What I use DynaMesh for a lot is to recalculate points whenever I've manipulated it too far. So when we stretch out, for example, apart of a mesh like this, if we look at the points, you can see that there are quite stretched out. If I want to add details on this spike that I just created, you can see that it doesn't really do quite what I want it to do because there aren't enough points to work with. What I do now is I can recalculate by holding control and dragging the masking rectangle off in our Canvas to recalculate the points. Now you can see that the added more points here. So that now when I try to add details to it, it does more of what I want it to be doing. Use DynaMesh as a way to re-calculate the points. Where to put the points on the surface of your mesh and to add more points when you've stretched it out. And also to change the resolution of your meshes. Low resolution is best when we are working in sort of general shapes, because the fewer points you have to manipulate, the easier it is to move them around. So maybe I'll move it around like this. Then what I can do, once I'm happy with the general shape, I can raise the resolution, recalculated. So now I have more points to work with. I can smooth it out using the smooth brush. Here. I can keep, keep manipulating it in the way I want. I can add details. And if I find that, oh, it's still it's not high resolution enough. I can always raise the resolution slowly, recalculate, and now it's super smooth and doing what I wanted to do. So That's DynaMesh. That's the basics of DynaMesh, and that's how we're going to use it. Also, you can use DynaMesh to Close Holes and merge sub tools as well. And I'll show that quickly here for you. If we go to the select lasso brush by holding Control Shift, I can select and hold Alt to de-select. Now I've hidden those points. I can delete hidden points by clicking this button. Now if I recalculate DynaMesh, you see how it closed that hole. That's one case of using DynaMesh to Close Holes. And another one is let's say I want to merge sub tools. So if I use, for example, the insert multi mesh brush to add a sphere to the sub tool. You can see they are not connected, they are separate. Even if I move the sphere in here, it's still separated in a way like they're not. I can show you better if I slice it like this, you can see that it's not part of the same sub tool, they're not merged. However, if I calculate, if I recalculate the DynaMesh, you can see now that they are merged together, fused together in a way, if I use the smooth brush to smooth, you can see now it's there. Now, there, now there are one part. So I can cut it to look inside it and you can see that it's all one piece. It's like Hello. Yeah, That's DynaMesh. And in the next video we'll go over Symmetry. And then after that, the next section we'll do our first sort of practical walkthrough on how to use all this stuff we've learned in this section, which I'm excited for. 11. Tools & Functions: Symmetry: Okay, final video of this section. Let's talk about symmetry. So symmetry is one of the great benefits of working digitally is that we get to do the same thing twice automatically. So to activate symmetry, you can press X on your keyboard. And this will light up the symmetry buttons down here. If you want to find it in the palette, you can find it up here. In transform. You can see activates symmetry button or X under keyboard by default, if I press X, it'll activate symmetry. And these buttons light up here on my UI. What these buttons correspond to. The same here. This changes which axis you want to be symmetrical throughout. So for example, x is activated by default. So if I'm on the right side, if I have my brush on the right side, it'll mirror it on the x-axis on the left. If I have the y axis enabled, you can see that it'll, it'll mirror it down along the y-axis. As you can see here, because our sphere is not centered in the world, the other side of the brush isn't affecting anything. What I can do here is I can go back to the gizmo and click the home button to center our sub tool in the center of the world. Now the y axis symmetry works as it should, and now it's top to bottom. And if I activate the z axis symmetry its front and back. You can activate all four of these at once to manipulate all four corners of your object. Or maybe just the front four corners or just the sides. Let's click solo here. Just set the sphere is here. Let's turn on DynaMesh, because that's what we learned in our previous video and we can use it to recalculate when we start pulling stuff out. So have a play around with symmetry. This is one of the funniest parts of working digitally is that we have access to symmetrical functions like this. And there's also radial symmetry. So down here, you can press R. Let's, let's undo the things we did here so far. So you can press R and it will, it will, it will apply the symmetry function along a circle, like a radius around the axis that you have selected. Let's select the y-axis instead of the x. And this will be the up and down. And with radial symmetry active, you can change the radial count by how many points you want it to activate. Right now there are eight points that are being affected at the same time. But we can make this down to 22, doesn't make sense, but how about for four? We can make four points, where we can make 31 points. There's a lot of stuff you can do here. The effects, I mean the applications of when to use symmetry, all its stem in all sorts of different ways. For example, radial symmetry like I'm doing now, is best to use when you're maybe working on cylindrical objects like a weapon handle or something like that. So i'll, I'll make a handle real quick here for you. Just pull out a palm will get the Damian standard brush and draw some texture. Here you have a maybe a hilt as well. Rounded hill like rapier. Cia, you can, there's a weapon handled for you or a mushroom. That's symmetry, super-useful. Something we'll be using a lot of. And I think that covers all these sort of tools and functions I want to cover in this section. I know it's a bit tedious to just watch how to do different functions without actually having a practical application for it like right in that moment. But I just wanted to make this section, section of videos for you to refer back to and have a look for things like a refresher if you wanted to know about certain, about where to find certain functions. But now with the oldest covered in the next section of this course, we'll be creating a target dummy. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna take everything we've learned in this section and apply it in live demonstration, or we create a target dummy model for 3D printing. And this is something that I encourage you to follow along with. And it's a great first project for us to do together to consolidate everything we've learned so far before moving on to more complex stuff in the next section after that. So yes, so that's it for this section, this video, and see you in the next section where we go and create our very first model. 12. Project: Intro & Sketch: Hello. In this section, we are going to take what I've taught you so far and combine all these elements. And I'm gonna show you a live demonstration of me creating a 3D printable miniature from start to finish. And I'm going to structure this so that I take it slow enough for you to follow along. But you can also just watch if you want to as well. I'm just going to be covering the basics, taking what we've already learned and just going one layer deeper and applying it in a practical manner. And the concept for this first project is that we are going to create a target dummy or a medieval training dummy. I'm just going to quickly sketch out sort of the idea that I have for this. Basically what I'm thinking is that we're sort of simple project to start out with. It's gonna be some simple forms. I'm going to create target dummy that is made up of sex, tied up together with ropes. And on a post with some stick arms. Maybe even holding a shield of some kind. That would be good so that we can practice making shields and such or accessories in general. I'll show you how to do that. Maybe holding a sword. This is just a very basic sketch. Just to get what I'm thinking across. Probably give it a helmet as well. We'll do some basic detailing work as well with some common stuff that you'll see, like maybe seems and stitches. I'll show you how to give this a bit of a texture as well to make it look like a sack. I'll texture the wood to make it look like wood. And this is the basic idea. And I know this is not an art course, but there is, of course, artistry involved with sculpting. But this is something that you'll develop over a long period. Getting becoming a better artist is a long journey. This being a more of a technical course on how to use a software. But the one tip I can give you is use reference always. Whenever I'm sculpting or whenever I'm creating something. It's not all, it's not all coming from my head. It's, I would say 80 to 90%. You use reference images to understand how things work in real life. And it will make it a lot easier for you to sculpt it. Because if you've never seen a belt buckle in your life, how are you going to sculpt the belt buckle? And it's a lot easier to sculpt. They'll belt buckle while looking at a belt buckle rather than trying to recall what a belt buckle looks like from memory. So always have reference images up. If you have a second monitor, that's perfect. If you don't, you can always just tap out. Yeah, definitely recommend that you look at references. So this is what we're gonna be making, some sort of target dummy or medieval training dummy. 13. Project: Block out: Okay, so after you've created a sketch of what you want to make or have reference images up. Now it's time to launch ZBrush and start blocking out your model. What blocking out means is that initially when you set up a new tool in ZBrush, it's a good first step to block out all the different sub tools you'll need to create the different elements within your miniature or whatever you're trying to create. So in the case of this target dummy, let me bring back the image here. What you want to do is you want to break down what you want to create into simple geometric shapes to bring the sub tools in and start. Start having an idea of the proportions of everything. Blocking out initially is best done with simple shapes. And what I mean by that is for the head, I'm just going to make a sphere. For the body. I'll make cylinder. And then for the post, I'll make an elongated cube. Same for the arms. I'll make elongated cube. The shield can be a flattened cube, for example. Or maybe a flattened circle will make a flattened cylinder here, we'll make a circular shield. Then maybe just a cylinder for the sword as a place holder. Maybe with the hilt as well, just to get an idea for that. And this is what we're after. What I'm the initial step now when creating a model is the initial block out. So we're going to build simplified version of the model we want to create so that we can refine it in future steps. So let's start off from the very beginning. Let's create a appropriately scaled base to work off of like we did previously. You should already have a 25 millimeter base created here, but I'll do it again just for those of you that didn't follow the previous time. So you can hide your lightbox. And let's click on the cylinder. If your cylinder is not here, you can click the current tool menu to select the cylinder from the 3D meshes. Tools. We make poly mesh 3D. Let's draw it onto our canvas. I'm holding Shift to snap it so it's like straight up and down. Let's go into edit mode. Up here. Now, we are going to make this a 25 millimeter base by going into scale master. Sliders to sub tool size. Unlock the ratio. The ratio button so that we can change the sizes independently. Make the x 25, make the Z 25. Pressing Enter after I put the number down and then click resize sub tool. I'm going to turn the floor onto it to sort of show you the size of the sub tool compared to the size of the floor, which is huge. What we have to do now is we go back into scale master and click ZBrush scale, unify. This sort of rescales R sub tools so that it's more appropriately sized relative to the world. And this makes our tools work better on it and older functions work better on. Now we have a 25 millimeter base appropriate for this project. I am going to now save. It's very important that you intermittently save your work because ZBrush can crash and losing valuable work or losing time is always a bummer. So definitely save periodically and we're going to call this target dummy. Save. All right, so now we have our base saved as target dummy. Let's start adding sub tools and blocking out what we just sketched out, which is this thing here. Let's start with a cylinder. For example. I'm gonna go to the sub tool menu. And then I'm going to go down. We're in the sub tool menu of the 25 millimeter tool that we created here, this base. And now we're going to insert cylinder. Now. Now we're going to use the gizmo to manipulate this cylinder and move it relative to the base that we created. I'm going to press W to open up the gizmo here, or up here, this button. And then we're gonna click the center box here to scale it down. I'm going to scale it down about half the size of the base. I'll maybe a bit more, that's a bit thick. I'm gonna move it up by clicking the white arrow and I'm gonna try keep it centered in the world. So I'm not going to be moving it freely and I'm gonna stick to the axes here. I'm gonna move it up along the y. Let's make it above the base. Then I'm going to scale it down even further using the yellow box. Maybe about that much. That looks good. And then I'll scale it along the Y using the green box here to make it longer. We can always change the size of this later, but for now I'm going to keep it at that. Now let's insert a sphere for the head. And then again enter the move mode to get the gizmo, scale it down, move it up along the y. Scale it up a bit. Maybe something like that. You know, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to insert a cube and I'm gonna make this cube 25 or 28 millimeters. Told just that I get a reference for how tall I want this ministry to be. That's also good to create. So I'm gonna go back into the Z plugin into Scale Master. Click scale sliders to sub tool size with the cube selected. The ratio is unlocked. Now I'm going to unlock the All button here because later when we resize, we don't want to resize older sub tools. We just want to resize the cube. I'm going to uncheck that. And I'm going to make the cube 28 millimeters toll in the y-axis. And I'm just going to make it to millimeters in the x and two millimeters in the y, z. Now when I resize sub tool, I should have a long stick. I should have a long stick that's 28 millimeters tall. So I'm gonna move it along the x here to the side. This is how tall I want the final target dummy to be. I'm going to use this as reference. I'm going to click Alt, click on the sphere to select it. Or you can click here on the sub tool menu to select this sphere. I'm gonna move that down using the gizmo. Let's move it down and scale it down a bit as well. Do the same with the cylinder. I'm going to make it a bit smaller. Move it up. Alright. Now let's add the post. Instead of inserting a new sub tool every time you can also duplicate current sub tools you have in your scene. Because I need to post this, this sort of long reference stick that I made can be used as a post as well. I'm going to just duplicate this sub tool because it's already the appropriate shape. I'm going to click duplicate here. So now I get a new instance of that same sub tool. But this one, I want it to be in the center of the world again. So with the gizmo select, with the move mode selected, the gizmo pops up. I can click the home button here, which centers that sub tool in the world again. Now I know it's going to be in the center just like everything else. And I can just move it up along the y. Now I have a post. I'm gonna make it a bit wider. I'm going to use the box here, the red box, to scale it along the x-axis and make it a bit wider. So it looks like a more like a wooden wooden plank, like a wooden board of some kind. Gonna make a little bit thinner. Scale it. Lozi. Yeah. That's good. Just like just so you know, I'm I'm doing everything, everything, every step I'm doing, like the sizes I'm making things, It's all, this is all just from imagination. So I'm just going to make things what I think look good size-wise. I'm not really strictly following any any sort of predesigned concept. All I know that I'm creating is sort of a sec man on a stick. And then we're gonna give it some weapons, a shield, and the helmet just to practice that. You can, you can adjust sizing or how, how it looks to your preference. You can make it however you want. I'm just going to just, I'm just doing this as just a follow along just so that you know the processes. But you're free to break out and do what you want. If you think it would look better, wider, or shorter, or whatever the case may be. All right. Let's continue. Because I want a wooden same sort of wooden plank for the arms as well. I'm going to duplicate this, this post tool again, the sub tool, and click duplicate. This time with the Gizmo selected. I'm gonna hold Alt and click this thing here, this button. If you hold Alt and click these buttons, it will move the gizmo without moving the sub tool. If I click here, it's going to center on the sub tool. And now I'm going to rotate. I'm looking at it dead-on from the front. If you have perspective active, this won't work. So turn off perspective or P on your keyboard. This is so that the view modes are orthographic, I believe it's called. And with with looking straight on, I know that I'm only rotating it within the x-y plane. So when I click this gray circle and rotate it, I'm going to rotate it 90 degrees and I'm gonna hold shift so that it snaps to 90 degrees and you see the degrees down here under 90 degrees or negative 90. Now we have the arms, we're going to move it up like that already. Now what did we say? A sword and a shield. Let's make the shield. I'm going to insert a cylinder. Then with this cylinder, I'm going to bring up the gizmo again. And we're going to click the green cube to scale it down so that it's flat. Then we're going to look at it from the side to rotate it 90 degrees that way, holding Shift to snap. And then now we have a circle that's facing the front. Now, I am going to move this up and to the right so that it's on its hand. And then I'm going to scale it down to a nice size. I think that's good. Then let's move it out so that it's in front of the hand. I'm going to move it up a bit. There. There we go. I'm gonna, I'm gonna hold up like just quickly again, when you want to select different sub tools that you have, you can hold Alt and left-click to select around, or you can click them here on this sub tool menu as well. I'm gonna select this reference stick. And we don't need it anymore because it's already done, it's job. We've already made this. We know that this is now going to be a 20, excuse me, 28 millimeter tool. Target dumbing. I'm going to use this stick now just to make the sword. I'm just going to make it shorter by bringing up the gizmo again, scaling it down along the Y, moving it up. Then there's a sword. Now we can give the sort of hilt. And to do that, I'm going to just duplicate the sword. Rotate it 90 degrees. Then just make this shorter and then move it down. Now we have a hilt. There we go. That is our target dummy blocked in and ready to be created. Again. Just to reiterate why we block in our model is to have a idea for the final proportions of our miniature. Everything, all the elements that we want to detail, or at least most of the elements we want to detail are present so that we can have a good idea for the final will be. And then of course you need sub tools there to modify. So you need to add the material before you make it look pretty. So. This is why we block in and it's also quick and easy. So now we have an idea for what our creation will look like. And don't forget to save your work. So go up, click Save as. And if you save as the same name, of course you will overwrite the previous save we had. This is fine because previously it was just a circular base, so we've come a long way, so we'll replace it. You can save multiple versions if you want. Just changed the name target Dummy 123. But in my experience, you rarely ever need to go back to a previous version, especially if you've already gone and moved forward. But yeah, save your work and make it a habit to save at least every every 15 minutes or so just to make sure that you don't lose any work. 14. Project: Head & Body pt.1: Okay, so once we've done our initial block in, we have our sub tools in place where we want them roughly in the right size that we want the Min as well. Now let's come to the point where we start adding details or refining these basic shapes to look like what we actually want them to look like. Now is when we bring into play what we've learned when it comes to DynaMesh, the brushes and symmetry and masking now is when we further manipulate these basic shapes and turn them into the final result, right? What I like to do is I like to take gradually take things in stages. So I won't take I won't take it all the way. For example, let's say I start working on the head. I won't make this head all the way to the point where I'm done with it. What I will do is I will go over and take things a little bit further altogether. Gradually, what I mean by that is I'll start manipulating the head little bit, making it the way I want it to look and then I'll do it the same with the body. And instead of doing everything 100% each part I'll, I'll slowly bring everything together. So of course everything is relative. So you get a better idea for how parts will interact with each other once you make them. For example, in my head, the construction of this target dummy, I imagine that it's, it's a wooden cross with some sort of sack over it and a smaller sac for the head. What I'm thinking is that the head will be tied around the neck with some rope and the sack. The body sac will have holes on the sides for the arms, and it'll be tied off on the bottom with some rope as well. The idea is that these are maybe like straw filled sex, kind of a bit like a scarecrow. Then the shield I'm thinking I'm just going to make it like a regular wooden shield, like something that irregular warrior would use. So it won't be a fake shield. It would be a real shield that would be just sort of strapped onto a wooden arm. And then again with the sword will make a real sword That's just maybe tied onto the hand here on the wood with some rope as well. So That's the idea. So let's start refining the shapes and making them sort of how we want them to. So to do this, select the sub tool you want to work on basically. So we'll start off with the head. I've already got it selected, but you Alt and left-click to select the sub tools. You alt, left-click the head. Now I'm going to turn on DynaMesh, which can be found up here, or in our geometry menu, which is in our tool palette, right under sub tool geometry, DynaMesh. So here's the DynaMesh button and the resolution. So we're going to turn on DynaMesh. And now it's now that dynamics is active. We can always recalculate. To recalculate all the points whenever we make larger adjustments to it so that we keep it smooth. Next, I'm going to turn on symmetry. Because I want this part to be symmetrical. For now. We're going to press X on our keyboard to turn on the symmetry function here, and it's on the x-axis by default. But that can be found up here on the Transform palette activates symmetry x. Now we have the symmetry active and DynaMesh active. So this sphere is a DynaMesh enabled, symmetry enabled sub tool. Let's select the Move brush first. I like to start off with the Move brush to pull the object into the more general desired shape I want. Having a perfect sphere here is quite unrealistic, so I'm going to pull it down. I'm gonna click and drag and pull this down to make more of a sort of oval shape. Flat, pull it to make it more ovular. There we go. There we have it. Just going to a lot of nudging around back and forth, basically just make it to your desired shape. I'm thinking that the post, the wooden posts that's supposedly under this sac is going to be all the way at the top. So there's there's of course going to be. More material along the bottom so that it's sort of sags down. And it's going to be looking like an egg towards the end. I'm pretty happy with that shape. You can keep working on it at your own desired pace. That's done. For now. Going back to what I was talking about, I like to do a little bit on one sub tool, move on to the next, refine it, just so that everything comes up together gradually. I'll leave the sword and the shield to last because those are gonna be like final objects that we could just clock bond. For. Now, this circle and this blocky sword, they can just serve as placeholders just so that we have an idea of where they're going to be in the end. So now that I have the body selected, I'm gonna do the same here by turning on DynaMesh. Turning on symmetry by pressing X. Now we have symmetry here and DynaMesh active. Now I'm a smooth this cylinder, so it doesn't look quite so blocky. I'm going to hold Shift to bring up the smooth brush. And I'm just going to smooth the top so that the edges pretty much curved over disappeared. And I'm going to smooth the bottom as well. There we go. Because this is going to be sort of tied off at the end here. I want to give it, I want to taper it down a little bit. With the Move brush still selected, I'm gonna sort of taper the bottom of this down towards the stick. Just going to click and drag hold Shift to smooth it out. Similar to what the head, because there's more material. Like if you think of gravity pulling down the sack of, hey, I'm gonna, even though I wanted to taper down here, I still want it to be drooped, the drooping. So what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna select the inflate brush. I'm just gonna click in. Slowly, do some clicks here and inflate the bottom of this sec. I'm going to smooth that out. As I go along. Going back to the Move brush, pull out, taper in, and pull in the sides a little bit. There we go. I'm gonna pull in the back here as well. The front to give it sort of that's sort of a shape. Pull it out a little bit. There's a lot of there's a lot of technical stuff to do, but a lot of this is also artistic. It's up to your artistic vision to be able to do what you envision it to look like. So if you don't agree with the choices I'm making, you can you can change it however you like. There's no wrong answer here, as long as it looks good in the end. I'm quite happy with that in terms of general shape. Now, what I'm thinking here is I'm going to show you that I want to add an extra sub tool to create sort of the freely willed sec bits at the bottom here, below where I imagine it to be tied off with rope. To do that, I'm gonna hold Control, bring up the masking functions. And I'm going to Control and drag and mask the bottom of this, this body part, this sec sub tool. With that masked, I'm going to press Control. Then I'm going to click the canvas to inverse, invert that mask. I'm going to go to the gizmo, W or up here, the move function to open up the gizmo. And I'm gonna press the green arrow here and just move it down. Then I'm going to press the yellow the yellow box to scale it out a little bit. I'm pretty happy with that. That looks pretty good. I'm gonna control drag another box out here and let go just to unmask that point. And then I'm gonna do that again to re-calculate the DynaMesh. You see how it reapplied the I'm going to press Control Z just to show you again. And then I'm going to click Draw poly frame because we've moved down the thing, the object. It's stretched down. I'm going to press Control drag here, just so that it recalculates and add some more points that we can work with. Now that that is, now that that's down, I'm gonna select the standard brush, which is this sort of line brush here. But I'm gonna hold Alt so that it does the inverse effect. So it does the indenting. I'm going to indent the, the separation here just to make it look like it's pinched, like this is where I want the rope to be later. Go back to the Move brush and I'm just going to pull up the move up the, the center of this to give it more thinner appearance so that it's not looking like a big blob because this is supposed to be a sec, so there is not supposed to be a thick material. But this is 3D printing and 3D printing miniatures at this scale, you have to think about thicknesses as well in a different way. So things might not be realistic, but if you're printing at such a small scale, sometimes you really do need to thicken stuff up just so that it will print successfully or not be too thin that it will be too easily to break. Especially if you're gonna be handling these miniatures. With that said, I also don't like the bottom of this post because if I glue this onto the base, that's going to be a pretty weak point. So what I'm gonna do is I want to add more supports, more. Maybe like a cross down here to sort of show that this is a wooden, wooden cross that's on a wooden base, like some sort of cross. So we'll add that later as well. But for now let's continue refining the body and the head. I'm gonna make the head a little bit smaller. So whenever I, whenever you see the gizmo up, this is just me answering the move mode just to manipulate it a bit. I'm just gonna make a little bit smaller the head, move it forward a little bit as well. And so I'm gonna do the same thing that I did down here with this part of the body, with the head as well because I imagine that it's a sec that's also tied off. I'm going to press Control again to bring up the masking rectangle, controlling and clicking on the canvas to inverse, bringing up the gizmo again and moving it down. I'm going to hold Alt and click the center button here just so that the gizmo is centered in our selection. When I scale it out, it goes outwards, F from that point of origin rather than from up here where it was. I'm not gonna go quite that much, maybe a little bit like this. Control drag to make clear the mask. Excuse me. And control drag again to recalculate the DynaMesh to add points where there were no points before. Now again with the standard brush, I'm gonna go around and hold Alt to indent this area. Because we were working in quite a low resolution DynaMesh. You see that we've, we've sort of gotten this freely texture for free. In the case of what we're working on, this fits. But if you wanted a smooth texture here, then you would've had to raise the resolution of your DynaMesh, but for now, it's works for us. This texture is a happy accident, I guess. Just going to get the Move brush again and just move the parts down, making sure that it's sort of folding where I want it to fall. Maybe a little bit more down here in the front. Just pulling it down, holding Shift to smooth it out. Pulling it out. We did smooth out a lot of that texture there, but that's okay. We can always bring it back, sculpted back in. I'm just going to use the Move brush now just to further move in where I want the pinch to be. And move down the sort of extra sec flaps or extra bit of material from the the head sec. That's looking good. I'm just going to smooth that out. Actually, will add that texture back in later. I'm going to press Control and drag on the canvas again to recalculate. And that should be good for now. Yeah. Pretty happy with that. Like I said, I imagine these pinched areas here. I'm gonna add a circle of rope to make it look like it's tied by rope. Here. We're going to just continue. I'm going to pinch it a little bit more, actually. Smooth it. Alright? Now I'm going to take the standard brush. Then I'm going to go around the around the where the arms are coming out just to make it look like it's a whole. Because this looks kind of unrealistic. There's no there's no indication of how these two shapes are related. It's just like one coming out of the other. It's very, very fake looking. I'm gonna use a standard brush to draw along the edge. Gonna make the brush a little bit bigger. Along the edge of where the Wouldn't arms are coming out. And continue with the I'm going to hide the head tool by clicking, by selecting the head and clicking the little eye icon here to hide it. Now when we select the body, you see the head is hidden. Because I just want to see the top of the it's the top here where it meets the arm. I'm just pulling up material around where the arms are coming up. Control drag again to recalculate. Use the Move tool. As you've noticed, we've only been using like the standard brush and then move brush, very basic stuff here. Just slowly manipulating the sub tools that we've put down, like the initial block out just to make it what we want it to look like. And we're just working with general shapes for now because everything is still quite low resolution. We're just slowly, slowly refining. And you don't want to go too high, too quick with the resolution because it becomes difficult to work with. The fewer points you have in a sub tool, the easier it is to manipulate, the quicker it will go as well. Let's show the head again, clicking the i icon. So now we see that the, we can see the material coming out from underneath. Going to select the head and move that up. As you can see, once we manipulate one part, it's sort of covered that part. So I go back and forth just to make sure that everything works as it should. There we go. Now we have some sort of semblance of what we're looking after or what we're looking for. It's going to move that up. So that is the SEC and the head. I'm pretty happy with that. Before we move on, remember to save your work. Save as save. Do you want to replace? Yes, I do. 15. Project: Wooden base & arms: Okay, so let's move on to refining the post and the arms. Go about building a base for this thing, like I mentioned in the previous video. So basically everything that this and this will be made of is going to be wooden, right? So we can get away with creating One wooden plank and duplicating it across to create sort of pretend like we're a carpenter and craft a sort of a wooden base for this thing as well. We're going to block in some more shapes. So even if you're past the initial block in phase, nothing is stopping you from adding more sub tools as you go along to block and more stuff. The initial block in is just to sort of give you a starting point, but you can always add more stuff. For the base. I'm gonna insert a cube. And then I'm going to bring up the gizmo and flatten it along the Y and the X to create like a flat plank thing. I'm just going to move it up here above the base. That might shorten it so that it's about that. The idea here maybe is that I could, I'd want this to possibly be able to stand without being glued onto a base. So just have a sort of standalone prop that I can have. Decorate my scene. Or what have you whenever you see might have for, for target dummy Minnie. So I'm just gonna make some like a cross. Basically. Once I have one plank down here, make it a little bit thinner. I'm gonna duplicate it. From the top. I'll rotate it 90 degrees. Now we have a cross. Yeah. That's pretty much it. And like I said, it's all gonna be made of wood. So I'm thinking we will make one sort of wooden plank texture. I'll show you how to do that. And then basically just make everything look like wood. Let's get into that. On the right here. I'm going to click solo to isolate the view of just one sub tool. This button will take whatever sub tool you have selected and let you work on it without seeing any of the other sub tools. Very useful if you want to work on just one sub tool without having everything else in the way. Here's the main sort of plank post sub tool that goes up and down. I'm thinking I'm just going to take this and turn it all into a plank. Then duplicate it to make the arms. What I like to do when creating wooden texture is make use of thick skin. I'll show you how to do that now. First, we wanted to enable DynaMesh to turn this poly mesh sub tool into DynaMesh. Then I'm not too fussed about the resolution of it. Maybe. Yeah, I'll heighten the resolution. So up until now, we haven't really messed around with the resolution because we're not really that sort of detailing phase yet, but because this is going to be a wooden plank and it's gonna be we're not, we're not gonna we're gonna black reuse it. It'll, I'll take it now to the final look of it. I'm going to raise the resolution of the sub tool to, let's try 500. Then I'm going to recalculate the there we go. That should be okay. Then let's turn on thick skin. Down here on my UI, I have a button that says thick skin and a slider next to it, a thickness. So when you activate fixed skin, the slider will activate and lets you determine thickness. I'll go over what that means in a second. But I'll show you where to find that if you're not using my UI, you can go in the tool palette. Down here is thick skin. The thickness. Basically what thick-skinned does, I'll give a brief demonstration, is whenever you are using brushes on the sub tool, the thickness of the thick skin sort of limits how far above or below the sub tool you can work with. So for example, let's alternate thick-skinned off. And then I'm just going to use the Move brush to move the points outwards. I can move this out infinitely as much as I want. It says no limit to how far I can move the points on this mesh. But if I have thick skin activated. And I set it to, for example, 21. When I use the Move brush and I try move it, and I try move the points of this sub tool. I can't move it more than 21 thickness away from the original point. When I use the Move brush now it's sort of stops at a point. When I create wood texture, I like to set a thick skin to however deep I wanted. This limits how far you can go with the sub tool. Then I'd like to take the Damian standard brush or dam standard group brush, which is like a sharp drawing brush. And I just basically draw on wooden texture on the what happened just there. Sorry, I accidentally press space bar and I changed the focal shift of the brush. If you ever want to reset your brush to whatever the default is, you can go to the brush menu, scroll down to the very bottom of it, the brush pallet. And at the very bottom you see reset current brush that just resets brushes in case you messed around with the settings and want to get it back to the default. Anyway, I have fixed skin activated at six. That looks about right, you know, like the unit circle relatives. So it's more, instead of always knowing exactly what thickness you want to make stuff fat or what resolution you want to use DynaMesh. It can be relative to the size of the sub tool. So it's always trial and error for me. If you find that it's too low resolution, you can raise it and lower it according to taste. With thick skin active, you don't have to worry about going too deep or too high. Depending on what you want to do. Here, you can just freely draw in a wooden texture with the Damian standard brush. There are definitely faster ways to do this, but I like making. I guess it's a stylistic choice. How you choose to texture objects or your sculptures, miniatures like it's all personal preference. And everyone has their own style and way of doing things. For me. This is what I do. And just basically some lines. I think a lot about how if I'm going to paint this miniature and let's say apply a dark wash on it. Basically, I'm just thinking about making deep grooves where the wash the dark wash can settle because you get a lot of mileage out of using a wash when painting minis and this is the primary way I do it. So that's also considered when working on miniatures is like, what are you gonna do with it? That's telling you to think about basically, you spend as much or as little time on this stuff as you want. Of course, the more time you spend on things like this, the more detail you can make it. The less time, the less detail. But just make some vertical lines. Go down. Maybe add like not that you would draw around. Another thing I want to point out is that I'm using a mouse. I'm just using a regular, let me show you regular mouse for all this. Whereas normally I'd be using a stylus on a drawing tablet to show you. But I just want to point out that you can do all this with a mouse. As an absolute beginner, I imagine that you might not have invested in a drawing tablet. Maybe this is something you'll do in the future, but for now it's like you want to try, try something. Just try it as cheaply as possible before committing to making a purchase like that. Just drawing on some wooden texture, making it look like wood. Another thing you can do is you can hold Shift to just draw straight groups. So if I click and hold Shift, now this red line appears. If I could just and then if I let go of Shift, it'll just draw that straight line. So click shift and then have a straight line, let go shift. And that's just to It gives some grooves on the side of the m on the side of the plank here. Do it again here. Because basically you just want to break, break up the flat, large flat surfaces because it's not very realistic. And then when you're printing at such a small-scale, you really going heavy on details is a lot. You're gonna get. It's gonna show up a lot more. Being subtle about things is, is a 3D printing something that's gonna be two centimeters tall. It's not very not really worth the worth the time because the the product you'll get at the end won't do it justice. It's a complete other thing if you're sculpting for video game characters or animation, where it's going to be so closely scrutinized and high detail like on the screen. But here we're just making a wooden plank. That's gonna be like this toll. So context matters. With that done. I'm going to duplicate it and then rotate it 90 degrees from the center there. Move it up and make the arms out of it. Now that we've replaced basically what the arm are, we can select the sub tool that we use to block in where the arms we're just click Delete here, just to delete the sub tool. Now we have wooden wooden post. An arms will do the same for the base here. But maybe something a little different. Lu, we got to think about how this is constructed in a way and sort of gives some indication for how it's put together. I'm thinking we'll we'll add some sort of support brackets and maybe some nails as well. Just to quickly indicate how this is put together. I'm going to duplicate one of these, one of the sub tools. I'll take this one here. I'll rotate this 90 degrees so it's vertical. Like this. I'll make it a little bit shorter. And then I'll just put it in here. Now we can make use of the clipping brushes. I'll turn on DynaMesh for this piece here. Turn on symmetry with x. But this time, instead of being symmetrical on the x-axis, Let's pick z. So it's symmetrical from the front to the back of this and turn off the r. We can keep the x symmetry, so x and z activated. Again, it's up here in the Transform palette activates symmetry than x and z. We can use the Control Shift key. Then select the clip curve brush up here or wall. While holding Control and Shift, you can click the brush, brush icon up here and then select the clip curve brush. Then let's draw just a 45 degree angle here like that, like so. There we go. Just a quick clipped triangle shape. Now if we isolate it, you'll see that there's some points that have clipped down. This way. To get rid of this, we can clip the bottom like so. And then like so. Just make sure you're clipping again just to remind you what the clipping brush does is it takes all the points from one side of the curve and flattens it down. So when you make like, for example, if we go back to this initial cut here, which we did a 45-degree, all the points that were above that On that side made a if you can. It's not visible from the side because this is like just 1 wide. This will cause problems for us. If we clip that down and in on itself. We can see, we can eliminate it. And then when we recalculate our DynaMesh by control, clicking and dragging on our canvas. We make those points disappear. Or essentially, now that we have that, maybe I'll click the top here just to give it a little bit of an angle. Like so. And then now I can duplicate this sub tool, clicking duplicate. And now with the gizmo, I'm going to rotate it along the x. Turn off symmetry first, and then rotate it along the X 90 degrees. Then I'll, let's make that a bit thinner as well, just so that it's not going past the initial plank there. There's some sort of indication for how this thing is built and how it's supporting itself. So that's nice. Let's drive some nails into this. And to do that, I'm basically going to use thick skin again. But this time I'll show you that, for example, thick skin enabled. We can use the Move brush. While holding Alt. We can make it so that the move function will be perpendicular to the surface. I'll show you that quickly. Let's take this initial, this first one here. First, I'll turn off symmetry. The x. So it's only going to be symmetrical on the z. So the front and back. I'm going to raise the resolution of the DynaMesh to around the same as what this was around four hundred and five hundred. Let's look at it. Re-calculate. Yes. Then now we're going to activate thick skin at 20. Let's try that. I'm going to use the Move brush. I'm gonna hold Alt and I'm gonna click and drag. And what this does is it will pull the points up perpendicular to the surface of the mesh. And this creates this circular protrusion, which I like to do when creating sort of rivets or sort of shaped like this. I like using thick skin to quickly pull out a shape like that. That looks okay. This is all this is again, just sort of up to you like what you want to do with this. You can construct the completely different base as well. Like if, if you feel like This doesn't look quite right. In fact now that I'm looking at, it doesn't look quite right to me either. So maybe we'll change it like this. This is, this is all part of why concepts or reference is very important, is because if you don't, then you'll just be playing around in 3D and wasting, or maybe not wasting, but spending unnecessary amount of time trying to figure out the design within 3D, which is fine too. You can't do that if you want. It's up to you. But I'm going to undo everything up until this point. I'm going to clip curve again, Control Shift. Cut that part. I'm gonna do the same down this way. What I'm thinking now is that instead of a a wedge type bracket, maybe I'm thinking this is a metal a metal bracket with nails driven on both the sides and have these two parts being wooden and not texture this part so that I can paint it to look like metal instead. Pretty happy with that. I'll make that a bit larger by bringing up the gizmo, moving it up, recalculate the DynaMesh, and then I'm just going to smooth it out with the Shift key. Do the same with this one. Clip curve. Turn on symmetry along the x this time because it's facing the other way. Raise the resolution. There we go. A bit bigger but thinner. Now I'm thinking that this might not be accurate for the the time it's supposed to be created. But yeah, you can do whatever you want. Again, this is this is not an art to this is merely a technical course showing you the processes. What I hope to achieve is to give you a good understanding of being able to apply what you've learned in all sorts of manners. You don't have to be making a target dummy using the information you've learned from this course. But of course, following along on a step-by-step together on a tutorial is always going to be a lot simpler than coming up with your own thing, especially if you're new. But anyway, let's go back to activating thick skin again, using the Move brush to do the same thing. Applying couple of couple of rivets or nails. There we go. Very nice, quick and dirty. Same on these little ones. Let's just do one in the center. Fixed skin active. Then just smooth it out a bit with the Shift key. Now let's work on the making these things look wooden. I'm gonna do the same thing as I did with the post and arms. Go solo, activate DynaMesh. What? Race? A resolution a bit. Reapply the DynaMesh turn on thick skin at about six, was it? Take the dam standard brush, make our brush a bit smaller and just draw on some wooden texture. I only have to do one side because the other side is going to be facing the floor. So it's not necessary. Just going to draw some grooves. Hold shift when clicking so that you can bring up this line. Let go. Hold Shift. Hold Shift. Like go, light, go. Whoops. Now I am just showing you quickly. But when it comes to 3D, when it comes to a whole art in general, you get what you put in time-wise. If you want to make this look a lot better than what I am doing, you can always just spend more time. And that's what it's all about really. But for the purposes of this demonstration, I'm just want to keep things quite brief so that I can show you the entire process without being too long and boring. Because doing, if I were to show you start to finish of how I make for example, that scare crow minutes for that I did. That's gonna be like a six hour long video or eight hour long video and doing stuff that long? I don't I don't know. I don't think it's very helpful for someone just learning because it's gonna be too long and boring, I think. But maybe not like, it's all dependent on how you prefer to learn. Everyone's different in that regard. Me personally, I do prefer sort of shorter content snippets and stuff. When it comes to learning ZBrush, the best thing I've found for my personal journey, like when learning is that I like to take on projects, do different projects. So it's more like you decided what you want to make first and then try making it. And if you run into any issues, you should look up how to solve that particular issue then and there. So it's like, let's say you're making a figure of a guy. You want him to wear chain mail armor, but you don't know how to do chain mail and ZBrush. If you just google how to chain mail ZBrush, you're gonna get a ton of different tutorials showing you how to do it. But what's important is knowing what to search for. Having a basic understanding of the program so that you know enough to be able to do things. So that when you look at those tutorials are videos like you know how to apply what they're showing you. Anyway. That's the base and arms. End. Of course, remember to save your work. Save as target dummy. Yes. Alright. 16. Project: Avoiding voids: Now before we continue, I just want to make a quick video to talk about voids. Something that I'm naturally inclined to do now that I've been sculpting for 3D printing for awhile, is to avoid creating voids in my models. What I mean by that is when you have a shape, Let's say for example, this head shape and this body shape, right? If I make, if I move the inside of this shape up and then the edge of it down. This connects down. If I were to close the gap only along the edges. This is an extreme example, but let's see, I try closing the gap, but I managed to miss this little gap here. What that is is there's a void now between these two sub tools and later when we export for 3D printing, that void will manifest itself when we make our slices in our slicing software. And it won't print like a little air pocket in there. And that can cause troubles later on for your 3D printing in a resin gets trapped in there and it might not work as intended. Basically, you want to be conscious about avoiding creating these sort of voids. That's something I do automatically without thinking, is I always create shapes and make sure that they're fully within each other and not creating avoid. Another example of that is down here, when I created the brackets, for example, if we take solo mode, you see it's all one piece. You both of these. And it's all connected in it and it goes deeper into the into the sub tool. I can show this to you by clicking this icon here. Activate edit opacity. So this makes subtotals transparent. As you can see. This is fully nestled into the sub tools surrounding it, so it's completely in the woods. If instead I created a bracket, for example, that was only I'm going to duplicate this just to make, make an example out of it. I'm going to take this delete hidden. Let's say I made a bracket That's just just the size of the bracket. And then I put it I put it on the wood exactly on the edge like this. As you can see, because there's texture on this wood grain that goes underneath. There's a tiny void there now that will, when 3D printing, it won't print any material, they're creating a void. And this can cause issues. So I just wanted to make this quick video in-between just to make, make sure that you're conscious of not creating voids. And some of the steps I take to, for example, creating brackets that are just like one large piece like this. Part of this is so that I am sure that there's no voids being created between these two sub tools. Just made a, just want to make a quick note. Just to illustrate the point of voids, I guess. 17. Project: The helmet: Okay, Let's go and make a helmet for this guy to where this little dummy. To do that, Let's start off by bringing in a sub tool to work on. Because we already have a head shape. Here. Let's just duplicate the head sub tool. Select the head, and click Duplicate. Now, let's select just the top half using the select Rectangle brush by holding Control and Shift and clicking up here or up here in the brush menu to select the select Rectangle brush. And let's just select the top half of the hip. This will make the bottom half not visible or hidden. So now we can click the Delete Hidden button up here to delete those points. This button can be found in your tool palette within the geometry menu. Modify Topology and here delete hidden. So when you click that, now those points are deleted. Now when we recalculate the DynaMesh by holding Control, clicking and dragging on the canvas. We now close those points and added have this sort of Half Dome mesh. Let's make the head visible again. Just to we didn't delete the header. We just duplicated it and got the half and turn the half, top half of the head into its own sub tool. Now let's, let's click the Solo button here. Solo mode just to work on this helmet thing independently. So we don't see the other stuff in the way. Okay? The first thing I want to do is I want to make this, this sub tool symmetrical in four quadrants. So the x and the z, right? So symmetry is already active on it. I just turn on the z. And as you can see now if I'm moving my master and it's not quite symmetrical already, what we can do is we can make use of the mirror and weld function so that it creates symmetry along these, along the axis that you define this button here, mirror and weld that can also be found in Modify Topology, same as where Delete Hidden was. On the top of this button, you can see the little XYZ. Let's click the X and the Z so that they're highlighted. This tells ZBrush that we want to mirror and weld along the x and z-axis. When I click this, you see the shape changed. It's sort of mirror and welded the points so that it's now completely symmetrical on these four quadrants. So along the x and z, now that we know, now we can work with a sort of a shape that is symmetrical on four quadrants. And my idea was this is I'm just going to create a simple sort of rounded helmet. Maybe. The idea with this is that I want to make a line down the center and then sort of a rim. And maybe like a thinner sort of partition or section around the side. Make the quadrants. And I'll add some rivets. And maybe an extra sub tool here along the front just as a protrusion like something for the like a nose guard, just a very simple helmet. The first thing I want to do is make this just a little bit bigger. So I'm going to clear the mask. I just made click W to get the gizmo up. Now I'm gonna hold Alt and click this button here. And this center is it. It says since center to unmasked mesh center, right? Because we have the z symmetry active, it will center itself on one of these four quadrants, which is fine. Because when we move the center yellow box here, it'll scale on all sides equally, which is what we want. We just want to make it a little bit bigger. I'm just gonna click and drag that, make it slightly larger. Now I want to sort of clean this up and raise the resolution a bit. So let's do that now. I'm going to raise the resolution to around 470 or whatever. Maybe 500 will see total trial, trial and error here. Don't really know. I'm gonna take the clip curve brush by holding Control Shift. I'm just going to flatten the bottom here. And then hold Shift to smooth it out and then control click drag to recalculate the DynaMesh. That should be okay. Let's have a look at it. Good size. Now let's make use of masking. To get the masking brush you hold control. And by default it's the mask pen tool which lets you brush on a mask. But that's not what we want. Let's Control click and drag to clear the mask and just look at it straight on from the side. Now when you hold Control and click and drag, you get the masking rectangle. We've used this to a recalculate the DynaMesh when we click it off the canvas. But when you click it on to a sub tool that will mask the sub tool right? Now with the rim masked. I'm also going to mask. Let's take it one step at a time. Now the rim around is masked. I'm going to Control click on the canvas to inverse that mask. Now I'm going to click the gizmo tool again. But this time I'm going to hold control while clicking and dragging on the yellow box. This does what? This does like an inflate function and sort of inflates the points outwards. The same can be found here in the deformation menu and our tool palette. Down here you can see a inflate slider. This lets you inflate and deflate points as well. But you can also hold Control and click and drag on the yellow box here. I'm gonna inflate it out just a bit to create a rim to this helmet that might clear the mask. Then again, recalculate the DynaMesh. Now I'm gonna hold shift and smooth it out. I don't like that. I'm going to undo that. I want smooth it out just yet. It's too low resolution too. Preserve that edge. So I'm gonna keep it like that for now. Let's have a look at it. Now I am going to, let's, let's make that a sharper edge. I don't like how it curves down this way. So I'm gonna take the clip curve again, Control Shift and just click the bottom of this. Just to give it that sharp edge again. Then I'm going to mask, select the bottom half around the rim. Control-click too. Inverse the selection. Bring up the gizmo again. I'm just going to move that down just a bit. Now, let's recalculate the DynaMesh. Then let's smooth that out. By holding shift. There we go. The final position of the helmet isn't quite where I want it to be, but we still want to work on it in symmetry, so I won't move it quite just yet. Let's continue working on it and solo mode. Let's take the masking rectangle again. And this time let's take a section out of the center. Then. Let's make another masking rectangle. But this time let's hold Alt to unmask the points that it went over the rim there. So now we've only got the top half dome here, masked. Again. Let's click Control, click to get the inverse of that. Get the gizmo up hold control to inflate it outwards and create a bit of a raised thing. Their control drag to unmask, outweight Control Z. Before I unmask this, I'm gonna move the points down with the Move brush just so that it intersects like that. And then Control click, Control drag, and then let's control drag. Apply the DynaMesh again, and let's press Shift to smooth it. If you find that it's smoothing a little bit too much, your resolution might be low. So I'm going to undo this. Before I reapply the DynaMesh, I'm gonna raise the resolution to 1000 and try again. Now on our press the smooth brush. It's smooth a lot slower because there are a lot more points to work with. Yeah, I'm pretty happy with that. Now. Let's add some rivets around. I'll do the same way we did the rivet or nails on the brackets, so the bottom there. So let's use the thick skin again and turn off symmetry or weight. Keep it on but turnoff the, the, I don't know, Let's keep the symmetry on actually. And make sure that your cursor is just like in the center, so that it's just 1 instead of two, like you see here when it comes off. So this shows you that you're sort of in the center of the sub tool with thick skin activated and then move brush. You can hold Alt to pull out shape perpendicular to the surface of the mesh. And just continue doing that. Going up the sub tool. I'm just going to redo that just to make sure it's the same size. Just change the brush size. If you have a larger brush size, it'll be larger. Did you have a smaller brush size? It will be smaller, so just change the size to one that you're happy with. Just try it and see. It looks pretty good. And just add some rivets. I'm gonna try just smooth those out with the Shift key. It looks a lot better with its smooth out a bit. See what that looks like. All right, I'm pretty happy with that. Then let's bring it in another sub tool up to R sub tool menu here. Let's click Insert and bring in like a little cube. It's a pretty big cube. Let's move that up and make it a lot smaller. Let's bring it out to the front here and make it let's make nose guard for this helmet. Something like that. Get a bit shorter. Move it up. There you go. Make it a bit thinner. I'm gonna hold Alt and click the green arrow just to move the center of the gizmo tool up, but not the sub tool. And then I'm gonna move it up here so that when I rotate it from like when I let go of Alt and I rotate it, it'll rotate and pivot from that point. Basically, I want to try get rid of this overhang. So I'm gonna rotate it down so that it's intersecting with the sub tool, the face up till here below it. This is subject to change later because we're going to move the entire helmet anyway and we'll do that now. Actually, this is gonna be the first time we merge a sub tool with another sub tool. Make sure that the cube sub tool that we created is right below where the helmet is. With the helmet selected, you can click merge and merge down, which will merge the the sub tool that you have selected with the sub tool you have below it. So we're merging the helmet with the nose guard. I'm gonna merge down and click Okay. Now this is one sub tool. I'm going to turn on poly frame here just so that you can see that we just merged it, but this one is DynaMesh enabled. This one isn't, and there are different poly groups as well. One thing we can do quickly is to just control drag, to fuse these two objects together. And now they should be one. Let's turn off symmetry. By clicking X. Press W to open the gizmo, hold Alt and click this to center it. Now we can move the entire helmet freely. I want to move it forward down. I'm going to rotate it up slightly. Let's move it back to eliminate this sort of overhang. What I'll do is I'll actually just move it with the Move brush. Let's turn the symmetry on again, but turn deactivate x so that it's only symmetrical. The mean, the activate z, so it's only symmetrical on the x. Let's move that down this way. There we go. Now I don't like how how sharp that edges. So I'm going to smooth it out a little bit. And I'm also going to use the flattened brush to go around and flatten this edge. Just to give it more of a, I guess, hammered metal appearance rather than a perfectly perfectly square cube. That's what the flattened brush. There we go. What I'm going to make that helmet a bit bigger, actually, oversized. Make sure you avoid creating these little voids here. So let's, let me show you another technique. Once you have it or you want it to be. You can take the Move brush and enable back face mask. This option can be frowned in your brush pallet. Under auto masking, back face mask. What this does is it will, it makes it so that your brushes won't affect the opposite side of the surface that you click and drag. Practically if I turn off back face mask here and I use the Move brush, I can show you that if I move this sub tool, it will move the entire everywhere, the brush effects. But if I have back face mask enabled, if I click and drag down, you see how it closed. It only move the points that are that way. And it won't move any of the points that are on that side. And same goes for if I click and drag on the opposite direction, it'll move all those points, but it won't move the points on this side. It masks or treats the backside of your object as, as if it was masked. That's what back face mask. Thus, this is perfect for pulling down sub tools and closing holes without affecting the rest of it. I'm going to turn that off now and fudge around with this shape here just to make sure I'm happy with it. There you go. We have a helmet. Again. If you want to spend more time to make things look a lot better, you can bet. For the purposes of this demonstration, I'm just going to make it pretty simple helmet. And of course, you know, go out and look for reference of some nice helmets if you want to try copy that. But it's all about adding in sub tools, simple shapes to do what you want to do and then make use of some masking or some of the other brushes to pull out the shapes you want. And of course, don't forget to save your work. Save as yes. 18. Project: The sword: Okay, So next up, let's make the sword. Because the sword, You know, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna show you how to make a separate sub tool or a separate tool. Just reincorporate it. So what you can do with the sword here, for example, is, let's merge it down so that the sword and the hilt is one piece. I'm going to merge down, make sure that the hilt is below the sort. And click the Merge Down button. With that merged, let's click on make poly mesh 3D. And that creates a new tool from that sub tool that we had selected. Now that's its own tool. Let's open the gizmo, the Move tool, hold Alt and click this button to center it on the sub tool. Click the home button to bring it in the center of the world. Let's, let's make a sword out of this using this sub tool that we have here as more of size reference rather than the actual sword. Let's bring in a new sub tool to work on and use this just as reference for the size, the rough size we want. So let's do this in parts. So let's make the handle, the hilt, and the blade as three parts on this new tool. So we can have three sub tools in this tool. Let's start with the handle. Let's insert a cylinder. Insert cylinder. Let's scale this down so that it's the right size. Let's keep it. Now it's basically invisible so we can hide the or let's make, let's make, click the Transparent button here to make the, so that we can see the cylinder underneath the sub tool. And let's just use the gizmo to scale it along the y-axis to make it just a little bit longer. Let's make it that long. It goes into the hilt. And just to make sure that the shapes are intersecting. Let's hide the main sort. Let's turn on symmetry by pressing X on our keyboard. But let's go. Let's click the y symmetry, uncheck the x, and click radial symmetry. So now we're affecting trying to be symmetrical inner radius around the y-axis. Let's activate DynaMesh, raise the resolution to five hundred and six hundred. And let's apply that. Let's smooth, smooth along. To make it just a bit smoother. Now with the Move brush activated, we can start manipulating the shape of this. I'm going to pull the bottom down to make sort of a pump will type shape, smoothing and moving as I go. Pretty happy with that. Take the dam standard brush and just draw a. If you find that it's doing it a bit too deep. Let's press space bar to bring up this sort of brush menu. Let's lower the Z intensity down to, let's say ten. And try that. And it's quite soft. So let's raise it to 17. I'm happy with that. Let's draw that group there. Then. Now let's draw pattern. Again. This is going to be so small that it's not really perceptible like the texture of this. But what you can consider is when you apply a layer of paint, it will settle in these areas. So that's what I'm thinking of when I'm making textures, is you've got to consider the scale you're printing at and what's, how much is worth texturing. And this all comes with practice because you'll know yourself when you start sculpting and printing your own sculpts, like what is necessary amount of detail. But I'm just thinking about like when you paint this, like where does the sort of wash settle when you paint, right? That's the handle done using the radial symmetry. So it's pretty simple, straightforward. Next, let's make a hilt by inserting a cube. Let's zoom out. If you're ever too zoomed in on an object, you can still have access to your camera functions by clicking, holding Alt and clicking and letting go of Alt on the outside border. Outside this gray border, you can still have access to your camera functions, even if you're so zoomed in on the sub tool. Let's make this cube that we just inserted small. Let's bring up that sword again as reference. So let's make, make it the same height and width here. And make it the same width in this way. Let's hide the sort again. There we can have, we can start making a helped for this, Let's turn on symmetry in the x and z so that we are affecting basically all four corners. At the same time. Let's activate DynaMesh, raise the resolution. 500. Supply that let's have a look. It's kind of overkill, but That's fine for now. Control Shift to bring up the clipping brushes. And let's select the clip curve again. Let's cut the corners to sort of make that sort of thing. And then now let's, let's use the clip curve to make a curve. So hold Control Shift and click and drag so that you see the line. Then you can let go of Control Shift. Then you can tap Alt at a point to sort of anchor point on this line where you want it to start curving. So I'm going to move in from the edge here. If at any point you want to move the origin at all, you can hold space and, and move the origin of the curve, like Go space to lock it. Then you can, like I said, you can press Alt to anchor a curved points. So I'll go in, press Alt. And now you see it's curving the line. So let's, let's make something like that. Something like that shape. Pretty happy with that. Let's sort of curve. Let's clip that edge as well. Let's give everything a quick smoothing. Then. Reapply the DynaMesh. There we have a simple hilt. I'm gonna move it a bit, just warp it up so that it's not quite so straight. Just to give it some character. Again, everything is dealers choice when it comes to this type of thing, It's all up to your art history on how you want to make things look. If you want things to look better than what I'm doing here, then it's just a matter of spending more time. Now let's make a blade. For this, we'll just insert a simple cube again and make it the same size as the reference sword we have here. Let's turn on the transparency and make the blade the same size. Here. Make sure that you go into the hill two-bit so that you're making sure you're avoiding voids by intersecting the sub tools. Now, blades are a kind of tricky in the sense that making things come to a point is kinda hard. I'll, I'll show you an example here. If I turn on symmetry in the x and z, turn on DynaMesh here, Let's raise the resolution to 700. Have a look at it. Let's say I used a flattened brush to flatten along the edge here. It gets kind of weird with ZBrush when you want to bring this edge in on itself. For example, let's use the Move brush. It becomes impossibly thin here. What I like to do when making a blade is you go, you go past where the angle should be. And then I use the mirror and weld function to create the blade. So to do that, normally i'll, I'll turn off. I'll only work on one side of the sort. I'll turn off the symmetry and only work on one's face with the x symmetry. Let's turn on the DynaMesh. Quite a high resolution. I'll start by, I'll start by doing the edge, the edge of the blade. We can do with the x. Then. What I do here is I will mirror and weld the shape. Mirror and weld along the x and z. The reason I don't clip with the X and Z is because if you clip pass the center, it'll create like a thin, thin layer of points that are just impulsively thin. And it's easy to miss and it causes problems later. So this way with the mirror and weld function, it's sort of takes care of that automatically. Now it's a matter of sort of flattening it or, or now you can turn the x and z on and play with it. All right, so now, now I can flatten the edge actually slightly because I don't like having things come to a point like that when 3D printing, it's good to have a little bit of Palantir edge like this will look sharp on a mini, but not, it doesn't need to be super sharpen the program. I'm going to make it a little wider to white. Let's go just a little wider. I'm going to make I'm gonna make it thinner. So one thing I can do is I can just clip curve like this. Now, let's make the point of the sword. Doing the point of the sword. It's kind of finicky. One thing you can do is let's extend the tip little bit by making it a little bit longer. How long did we want to make this? Not too long. Okay. So never mind. Let us just make the tip right here. Again with the clip. Just cut the corner off. Then now there's three cuts you have to make. One is you got to line up the the tip of this cut here to the center, roughly from the center of the middle here. You can clip into where that edge was. Then now we want to create a line that goes from the center of the tip across the center here, down to that point there. We want to shave oldest material off the corners. And to do that, it's kinda finicky because you go to, if you want to make use of the clip curve for, for doing this, you've got to line everything up, right? I got to see that point and that point and makes sure the line goes across the middle of there. It doesn't have to be exact. But lining it up and just making one slice or one clip like this, like that should give you that kind of a shape. That's a very sort of fantastical looking sword. But again, like there's more than one way to skin a cat. And when it comes to making blades, I've seen a lot of people do a lot of different techniques. I don't know if you've noticed, but my approach to sculpting is very sort of free form, free-flowing, and kind of just as long as it looks right, It's, it's okay. In the case of 3D printing, that is fine because we don't really need to worry about correct topology or anything like that because the east things won't get animated, they won't get textured or, or anything of the sort. So That's why you can be a little bit more free or when your end result is 3D printing. I think I'm going to make the handle a bit smaller here. Just to fit the rest of the sort. Like that. I'm going to make the hilt a bit more interesting on a pull-up the sides. Just a bit more of an interesting shape. Take the flattened brush and just flatten the edges so that it's not that it's not a crisp edge like that. Just smooth everything. I'm going to add a bit of a. You're going to duplicate the blade. Duplicate. Use to select Rectangle, blush, brush, control, click, and just select the bottom. Delete hidden. Reapply the DynaMesh, bring up the gizmo hold control and inflate it with the the yellow box. And then control click and drag or you apply the DynaMesh and I'm just going to clip I'm just going to clip the top of that to bring it down. There we go. There's a simple sword because we've made all this on a separate tool. What we can do now is with the if this is hidden, the placeholder sword that we had, we can click the Merge Visible button so that all this will become its own sub tool that we can then insert into our original model. So I'm gonna click Merge Visible down here. That'll merge all these sub tools together. Then now you see up here on the tool palette, we have the sword as a separate tool. Now we can go back to our dummy model here. We can insert that merged sorted sub tool and it'll pop up here. It should be the right size. So all we have to do is just move it up to where it should be. There we go. We have a sword. Now we can delete the placeholder or original blocked in soared sub tool here I can delete that. That's done. Remember to save your work before moving on. Save as target dummy. Yes. 19. Project: Using booleans: Just quickly, I thought I'd make a short in-between video just to illustrate the point that there's more than one way to do something in ZBrush. I thought that I would make another sword blade with a different technique just so that you know that there's multiple ways to do something. And it all comes down to personal preference. For me the way I sculpt as quite sort of quick and dirty. In my, in my mind, I have this mentality of as long as the shapes, right? It's okay with me. But some people might want to have a cleaner approach or a more precise approach. Something you can do with making blades is make use of Booleans. So that's also something new that we can learn. So I'm just going to click, I'm just going to click the Tool Menu here and click a cube. Make poly mesh 3D. Then let's make this smaller and longer. I'm gonna turn this into a DynaMesh. What I'm gonna do now is make use of Booleans to cut out the shape of the blade. So let's make this a little bit wider. And think of this sort of like a metal blank that we want to cut. Put an edge on it. One thing we can do is use booleans. And what booleans is it's sort of like you use a shape to subtract or add to another shape. I'll just quickly give an example here. If I insert another cube, the Boolean functions can be found within the sub tool menu. On the particular sub tool, these circles here, they correspond to add, subtract, and multiply. If I subtract and I turn on up here on the top-left Live Boolean. You'll see that the queue by inserted is subtracting from the sub tool above it. So it's creating the shape. If I move that cube out, you can see that it's creating a space. What multiply does is it takes the sort of the Venn diagram, it like the intersecting points and turns that into a shape. But what we want to do is we want to subtract what we can use with this cube. This Boolean cube is we can subtract an edge from it. If I, if I rotate it at a 45 degree angle, I know that I'll have a 45-degree angle on this side that I can subtract, or this side, I'm going to hold Alt and reset the orientation so that it's that the gizmo is reset. Let me turn off live Boolean so you see what their shape is doing. I just rotated the cube 45 degrees just to get an angle on one side. Then I held Alt to reset the gizmo so that it's back in the world orientation, like left and right. Now I can just move this along. If I show the Live Boolean function now I have a blank with an edge, right? What I can do is I can duplicate that. Also make it a subtract. I can now rotate it 45 degrees in the other direction, for example. Then reset the orientation and then move this up to create this looking shape. Or maybe I'll just go halfway like that. Now we have this sort of a shape. To apply the Boolean. What we can do is either merge everything down and DynaMesh, or we can click this button. Because I created a separate sub tool at all. The functions are within this one sub tool. I can go down to Boolean within the sub tool palette and make Boolean mesh. When I press this, it will create a new sub tool or a new tool up here that is only that shape we just created. As you can see, it's merged everything together and created the shape that we've cut out. What I'm trying to get at is if you can look at the shape and think of it as one-quarter of a sword blade. What I can then do is use the mirror and weld function. We've been using mirror and weld across the x. Or let's make sure it's in the center. I'm going to move the gizmo like that and put that in the center of the world. Mirror and weld x 1 second. Let me DynaMesh first before I mirror and weld DynaMesh mirror and weld x. Then now we have this half blade shape and then mirror and weld Z as well. Move that across and center that in the world so that we can mirror across the z-axis as well. Oh, sorry. Down here. Put it in the center of the world. And then z. Z. I've been looking at it from the wrong angle. There we go. Orientations weird sometimes. Now we have sort of a similar shape we had. It's a bit bulky, but I just wanted to quickly show you, like if you want things to look, right, you spend more time to refine it. But what I can do is I can just make this all thinner, like so. There we go, using Booleans just to quickly show you that there are more than one way to do something. 20. Project: The shield: Okay, so let's continue working on our target than me. The next thing I felt we'd make is the B field here. Similar to the sort. What I'm gonna do is I'll work on it on a separate tool and then I'll bring it in. So to do that with that sub tool that we blocked out selected, we can press on make poly mesh 3D. Then now it's its own tool. I'm going to press W to get the gizmo up. I'm gonna hold Alt and click the center icon to center it. And then I'm gonna click on the home just so that it's in the center of this new this new sort of tool. Again similar to the sort we're just going to use this as a size reference really. So we know that it's gonna be the correct size. Not completely necessary to do it this way, but it's just a lot easier to just move in to the, to the original sub tool later. Let's create or insert a, another cylinder. What I imagined for this shield, I'm thinking it's gonna be just a regular wooden shield with similar to the helmet will do something like a rim and some rivets, maybe just to give it some stylistic cohesion can be plausible that it's made by the same people are taking, taking inspiration from the helmet will do the similar sort of this pattern basically. Maybe are around the rim and maybe one sort of circle in the center. So let us, Let's do that. The first thing I'm gonna do with this new sphere is turn on DynaMesh. Let's raise the resolution. I'm going to undo that, raise it to 500 ish, and then DynaMesh. Then I'm going to select the inside of this sphere. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to, I'm going to turn on radial symmetry. Let's press X to activate symmetry and then click the R here. And again, it's found here on the Transform palette. If you aren't using my UI. And then I'm gonna change the direction to Z and turn off x. So now we have this, now we're working symmetrically around this shield. I'm just going to mask by holding Control. I'm going to mask out the center just roughly. I'm not gonna worry about the backside too much because we can just mirror and weld the backside because the masking doesn't really, doesn't affect the it doesn't go through the model very well. As you can see, it's slightly masked on the backside. This is because if a model, if, if, if a sub tools too thin and you mask one side with the pen tool, it'll mass the backside as well. We can hold Control and click back face mask so that it doesn't affect the backside as well. But like I said, we're just not going to worry about that because we'll use the mirror and weld function. What I want to do here is I want to invert selection we just made by holding Control and clicking that I mask out the the rim or the edge of this. Now what I can do is I am going to look at it from the side and open the gizmo. And I'm just going to slightly move in. Move in the right. I'm gonna, I'm gonna make the original cylinder we put in invisible so that we can work on this. I'm going to move in this part of the shield, clear the mask, reapply the DynaMesh. Then I'm gonna mirror and weld on the z. So I'm gonna turn off x and press on z. We are in weld. Now it should be on both sides. What I'm thinking here is that this will be the rim. Let's move this up. I'm gonna hold shift and smooth out this this sort of geometry looking shape out of, out of the way. It looks a bit smoother. There we go. Now I'm going to insert another cylinder. Again, just rotate it 90 degrees, make it smaller, make it flat. This one's gonna be thinking like, I'm thinking like this going to look like a butler. Just like a dome, like shape here. I'm going to turn on DynaMesh again. For this one, turn on radial symmetry on Z, same as the shield. So we get this. I'm going to smooth it out. Then I'm gonna use the Move brush to just pull out the center of it a little bit. There we go, smooth it out some more. And yet something like that. Looks good. Maybe a bit too, up their scale that back a little bit. Then I want to maybe put some maybe wood texture like some grain up and down. I'm going to turn off. I'm going to select the main shield here again. Turn off radial symmetry. That it's only along the z here so that we get the front and back of the the shield. And I'm gonna do the same thing we did with the wooden planks. How we textured that using the dam standard brush and thick skin. I'm going to put this down to six or seven. See what that looks like. Something like that. Can do a couple of vertical stripes. Let's hold the Shift so that they are quite straight. There we go. Click hold shift and drag, and then let go of Shift to draw the line. Click hold shift and drag. I'm thinking like these will be the separation of the board. Let's do the back side. Then. Then maybe add some extra texture on top of that. I am going to reapply the DynaMesh and then reactivate thick skin so that I can go a little bit deeper on these groups. I'm gonna go down again over it once more so that these groups a little deeper, deeper. Then I'm going to then I'm going to go over the in-between parts with a smaller brush size and just draw on some wood texture. Again. If you want this to look better, you spend more time. It's all about spending time, you know, when when making something more detailed or just when making anything look better. Told that time spent. Drawing. There we go. The back side, I guess we'll texture as well. Then I am going to add rivets with thick skin away. Now let's reapply the DynaMesh first. Redo thick skin, but raise it to a higher number. Let's make it 12. Let's see what this looks like with the move breaths, with the Move brush, selected, hold and holding Alt, we're pulling stuff out like we did with the helmet. I'm thinking this rim is slightly too too small, too thin around the edge, so let's make that a bit thicker. To do this, let's turn off the skin for now. I'm going to turn off symmetry. Let's turn off symmetry. Bring the gizmo in. First. I got to mask the center of this. So let's hold control and click on the brush here and use the mask perfect circle. I'm brush. Lets us mask. Circle. When you click and drag, it'll bring up a circle. And then you can hold space to move that circle. Then let go space when you're happy where it is. So we're going to put this roughly in the center. It doesn't have to be too accurate as long as it masks past the inner circle of this border. Because what we can do now is with the gizmo open, we can scale from the the yellow square to extend everything outwards equally. Now I've made that a little bit wider. Let's see what that looks like. Go back to the mass pen tool, reapplied DynaMesh. And that looks good. Now let's do what we were originally going to do and open the sorry, I just noticed that we're looking at this thing backwards, but it doesn't matter. We can just flip it later because we're working in symmetry anyway. So let's turn on symmetry again, but this time on z radial. Now let's add some rivets. So thick skin on at about 20, I think. It's hard to get the sliders, but 21 is fine. While holding Alt, we are pulling out. With the Move brush selected holding Alt pulls out the points perpendicular to the surface and with thick skin on its sort of limits it. So it makes these sort of rivet looking shapes. You know what, I'm happy with that many. So it doesn't have to be like too much. Reapply the DynaMesh by clicking and dragging. And let's smooth it up. I'm pretty happy with that. Now we can move this sub tool into our, into our into our target dummy. Let's go back to the shield we just made, and then click on Merge Visible. Make sure that the original sort of blank sphere isn't visible. So that when you merge visible, it's only the shield we created and these sort of metal, a dome here in the center Merge Visible and now it's its own sub tool here. What we can do is we can go back to our target dummy. We can insert that merged shield we created. And now we can move that up to where it's supposed to be. And like I mentioned before, we did it backwards, but we can just use the gizmo to rotate it 180 degrees in the other direction. I'm holding Alt and clicking the orientation to reset it. And then just going to move it into position. There we go. We have a shield. Now we can delete the delete the other sub tool that we use to block out the shield, the other cylinder, we can just delete that. Delete. Okay. So we're coming along nicely. And don't forget to save your work. I'm going to remind you at the end of every video because it is that important and you should get in the habit of doing it. 21. Project: Head & Body pt.2: Now we are done with most of the separate parts here. And as you can see, the head and body is sort of lagging behind. So like I mentioned at the beginning, I don't take, always take things to the end. You bringing up the details like all over the model gradually. So after you work on one part, you go back to another part and then go back to that apart. So it's not always like a linear progression, but you just sort of bring everything up as we go. In this video. We'll finish finish up on the head and body. I mentioned that I wanted to add rope around the neck and the base here, I'll show you how to do that. Going to make this look more like it is afraid hole. Maybe add some details and give it a texture and maybe add some straw as well, like out of the arm holes on the bottom here just to indicate that it's filled with straw. So let's do that. Let's start with adding rope. So I have a rope brush that I created. If I open my lightbox and go to brush, I have a brush that I made rope. I made this brush following tutorial. If you want to make your own rope brush, I recommend you sort of find just Google how to make a rope brush in ZBrush. And you'll find a lot of articles or videos showing you how to do different making different brushes. But if you want to use mine, I'll leave it in the resources section of this lesson. So you can just download this brush. To load a brush into ZBrush. All you have to do is go to the brush pallet up here and click Load brush, and then just select the wherever, wherever you saved the the brushy downloaded. So if you download my this rope brush, just click on that and it should come up. What this rope brush is, is it's a curve brush. We haven't used curved brushes yet, but I didn't mention it briefly and the brushes section. But basically what a curved brushes is, you draw out a line first and then it applies the shape of the brush. It's a bit finicky to use, getting used to curves and such. But let's give it a go. So I'm going to Control Z with the with the head, with the head the sub tool selected. I'm just going to turn off symmetry for now. Then I'm gonna click and drag the curve around its neck. And we can do this in steps. Let's go into solo mode, just so that we isolate the head. And so we can work more freely. So I'm gonna start from the beginning here in the center and just drag along the head around the neck. If you find that the rope is too big or too small, It's all dependent on the size of your brush. If I make my brush larger and I continue drawing this curve, you will see that this, you'll see that the size, maybe it doesn't like it, but let me start over. So if I'm brushes really big, you'll see that the, the size of the rope is really big. What we can do is before we draw the curve, make the brush size smaller, give it a test. And if you liked this size, keep it that way. But if you don't, you can undo, increase the size of your brush and draw some gonna make it a bit smaller and start drawing a curve around the neck. What you can do here is you can extend the curve by going back and waiting. If you look closer, wait for seeing this red line up here next to the, you see how it snaps this red line. That means that you are going to extend the line of that curve. If you start drawing somewhere else, it'll make a new curve and that's not what we want. We want to extend this first curve. So wait until you snap, then continue, then snap. And then now we're going to close off the curve by going to the end here. Now it's closed off and it's going to be slightly constricted. But it doesn't matter. Now we have a rope. What we can do is just click off on the sub tool somewhere just to sort of get rid of the curve that we drew and say that we're happy with the shape of this rope. And then now because the When using the curved brush, it'll mask the sub tool you're working on and unmask the the, the curve you drew in. So while this is still masked before we clear it, we can split unmasked points, this button here. Or you can find this button in within the sub tool menu under Split, split on mass points. What we're doing, what we just did there. If we turn off solo mode, we can see the rope is here. That is, we just created a separate sub tool for it so that it's not connected to the head, but it's a separate sub tool. I'm just going to bring up the gizmo and make this a bit larger just so that it just so that it doesn't, I'm going to center it the hold Alt center and then make it a bit larger. I went the gizmo hold control and scale outwards. This does what's called an inflict function. And basically what I'm looking for is I just want to inflate it so that the sections of the rope are touching each other. Just so it doesn't create any voids. I'm gonna go back to drawing mode, press Q, have a look around. And then I'm just going to use the Move brush to sort of move it in place. So I'm gonna make the brush quite large so that it Moves. Doesn't just move one part of it, but a lot of it just going to move around the rope there. Now, I'm going to I'm gonna make that a bit larger. Just fiddle around with it until you're happy with the placement and the size. And it's a bit blocky. Now Texture wise, what we can do is we can sub-divide the geometry to make it smoother. To do that, we go into geometry. Here. You can press on divide or Control D as short key, but we can press divide. That it essentially doubles the amount of points and makes it smoother. We can do this a couple of times. So divide again, make it smoother. Then what I like to do is delete lower. Then reapply the DynaMesh. So we're going to make this like maybe 500. And then click and drag. Now fused all the parts of it as well. Because originally the brush was two separate strands that twisted around itself. But because we DynaMesh it, we can look at it now and see that it's fused here. So if I undo the DynaMesh, you can see that it's that it's still two shapes not quite fuse together. After the DynaMesh it is fused. Going to move that back. Just gonna do the same down here. For the, for the bottom part of this. Select my rope brush again. If you want to find it, just press B. If you've already loaded at once, it should be at the very bottom of your brush menu. So pressing B brings that up, or clicking up here. Get the rope brush in there, make it a similar size to the rope up there. Select the body, turn off symmetry and start drawing. It's too big, so I'll make the brush smaller. Two small, make it bigger. Like that. Drove around the curve. Brushes they take getting used to definitely is learning curve when it comes to using these. But you'll get the hang of it eventually. Now that's now that's connected. I'm going to click off, split unmasked, select the rope, centered, the gizmo, make it bigger, inflate by holding Control. Let me make it a bit smaller. Actually. What I'll do is I'll shrink the, the the sack inside it so that it looks like it's more pinched. Going to have a look at it. Solo sub-divided control, D, be inflated a bit more, holding control. Then DynaMesh. Go. I'm gonna select the body. Turn on symmetry again, like we had. I must select the standard brush. While holding Alt. I'm going to indent around the rope here. So just going to pinch it in slightly, make it look like it's tied tied on there. Basically, I'm going to just rotate this down slightly, just going to use the Move brush, just moving, moving stuff around, nudging it in place, just make it look the way I want it to look. Now, the size difference is a little bit. It's a bit larger here, but it doesn't matter. It looks fine. Now, maybe. Let's start detailing the head and body. The head and body are quite low resolution, so I'm going to raise the resolution with the head selected 500 or so. Reapply that turn on symmetry again. Just give it a quick smooth all around. What I'm thinking is I'm going to add maybe some details around where it's tied off. So as you can imagine, the first sack is being tied off at one end. It's going to create a bunch of creases with the standard brush on. I'm gonna draw sort of peaks and valleys with this. So I'm gonna draw down once with the standard brush. I'm gonna hold Alt to do the inverse and draw one line next to it. And then I'm going to hold that. I'm going to click and drag normally. And then hold Alt and click and drag normally. It's creating this sort of rippling up and down. Sort of ripples in the fabric. Going to hold Alt normal, ALT, normal, hold Alt normal. Then same for above here I'm just going to make some creases, make the brush a bit smaller. Just regular away. So hold Alt regular, hold Alt, regular, hold Alt regular. It's very simple. Just alternating between holding Alt and just a regular stroke, width, the width, this standard brush. And it creates this, this look. And use the Move brush to drag it down so that it stretches it out a little bit more, just in these parts here and sort of tucked in behind the rope. So it looks like it's coming from behind it instead of through it. Just going to drag it down. Hold Shift, smooth it out a little bit on top here. Let me drag in the bottom parts as well. Just adding some details. Another thing I thought I would add is give it some eyes, I guess, maybe make some buttons to insert here. What we can do is I can show you how to make an insert brush. So before we continue, let's just save our work quickly. And then I'm just going to quickly make a new poly mesh here. I'm going to make a cylinder. The cylinder here, make a poly mesh 3D. Going to make a quick sort of button shape. I'm going to do the same processes as we made the shield. I'm just going to make this make a little button. So I'm going to turn on DynaMesh quickly. Going to just smooth out. Turn on radial symmetry. I'm going to flatten it a little bit. Hold control to select the center. Move it in. And this time I only need one side to look like a button basically because it's gonna be like on the ice. What I can do here is I can turn off the hour or turn down the radial count to four. Now I get these four holes. Thick skin. It's quite low resolution, but it doesn't matter. Now I'm going to insert a ring shape. I guess. Make it smaller, make it thicker. And then just add them sort of as what you would consider like the stitching. I'm gonna make it a bit compressed there and I'm gonna hold control and inflate by holding Control and clicking the yellow box just so that there's no small, tiny voids within this thing. Going to make it just a bit smaller. I'm just going to quickly show you how to make an insert brush slow. If you've taken the time to sort of create a shape of some kind. Like, like I have here with this with this with this button. By the way, like how I'm duplicating the shape is if you're in the gizmo mode, you can hold Control and move your sub tool, and this will create a duplicate of it. But it's all within the same sub tool. As you can see here. It's all, it's all the same sub tool. If I solo that it's just created duplicates. So that now what I want to do is I'm just going to merge, merge these two shapes down. Merged down. What I'm going to do now is show you how to add a shape to a brush. Using the insert multi mesh primitives brush. This brush is already set to add shapes or add the add sub tools into an existing sub tool. So we can sort of look at this menu up here or shapes available to add. We can add a shape that we created, which is this one right here. So looking at this shape from head-on, what we can do is we can go into the brush pallet here. And then underneath, like where the brushes are. While you have the Insert Multimedia primitives brush, active. You can go, you can click from mesh. So append mesh to brush means add the current mesh we have selected to the brush. Now you can see the button is up here. So we can now use this. Go back to our dummy here. Symmetry is active. So when we click and drag, we're sort of adding two little buttons as eyes, but they're a bit too big. So I'm going to just do that. And now we can get the gizmo up to adjust the positioning of it. One thing I wanna do is I just want to make it thicker along the z. I'm going to select. One thing you can find. If you find that some of the functions you want to do when it comes to gizmo and symmetry is weird. It's because it's using the symmetry of the world instead of the symmetry of the object. So there's a button here, local symmetry which takes, which only considers the symmetry of the object or the sub tool that you have selected or the unmasked points that you have selected. That same button can be found in the Transform palette under here, local symmetry. With that activated. Now, the functions like scaling and stuff, we'll only consider the symmetry of the local object that you have selected instead of the entire world symmetry. I'm gonna just make that thicker along the z and then move it down along the z. Now it's got two button eyes. Because in certain multimap does something similar to the curved brushes, it'll mask off the original sub tool that you're working on. So while, while the head is still masked, I'm going to click split on mass points so that the button eyes that we insert it with the brush and the head are two separate sub tools here. Now, I'm going to turn off local symmetry just to go back to normal. I'm gonna select the standard brush and I'm going to just work on the head a little bit, add some more creases just so that it looks like it's a sack instead of a super smooth balloon. I imagine that because the helmet is sort of weighing down on it, I'm gonna use a standard brush to draw around. Just to add a bit of a bulge around the base here. Hold Shift to smooth. I'm going to give it some bulging around under the eyes. Can use the Move brush to move, sort of compress it down a little bit. I think I'm going to change the position of the eyes here. Just move that down. I'm not a fan of the way this looks at the moment. I'm gonna remove one. I actually seems like it should be missing an I. I'm gonna turn off symmetry. I'm just going to select hold Control Shift to bring up the select brushes. And I'm going to just select one eye and delete the other one. So delete hidden because selecting essentially. I shows all the points you want selected and hides them. What happened? I lost my sub tool. If at any point you sort of move the camera and you lose your sub tool, you can always just exit edit mode and then redraw your sub tool and then enter edit mode again, just so that you have it back. It happens sometimes. Accidentally create a folder. There. Doesn't matter. Now we're back here. Here I can, what I want to do is select the head again when you use the dam standard brush just to draw a little x here for where the other I used to be. So it says a bit of an extra detail. Now, symmetry is not on. I'm just going to move, push and pull it a little bit so that it's not quite so Symmetrical. Symmetrical symmetry is good for when you're working on stuff, but it's always good idea to break symmetry. Start working on the model out of symmetry just to give it more, make it look like it's more real than sort of a computer-generated thing because nothing in the real-world is complete, completely symmetrical. Just going to nudge it around a little bit. Let's give it just a weird sort of asymmetrical mouth. Just going to draw in with the dam standard brush here. A couple of strokes, just make it deeper. Standard brush. Just sort of pull up the surface a little bit. After you've just drawn a little mouth shape. Then I'm going to use the let me use the clay brush to just add some stitching detail. Just going to do a couple of strokes over. Just to add stitch like appearance, reapply the DynaMesh, and then reuse the dam standard to sort of exaggerate the the areas where the stitches come out. When printing at such a small scale, it's almost more beneficial to just overdo certain details because when you print them, there'll be there'll be good. But because if you're too subtle with certain things, they just won't show up very nicely. And it helps with thinking of like painting. Where you want the how are you going to paint it or where you want the wash to settle, stuff like that. Here I'm going to pull down the bottom of the shape, but I want to preserve the top. So I'm gonna turn on the back face mask, which we've done previously with the Move brush. And just pull that down just so that it creates. Again, just for 3D printing in mind, you know, just making sure that it's going to be easy. Alright. Now let's do the same with the body. First things first, let's raise the resolution of it. Reapply the DynaMesh. Smooth it out a bit. I'm gonna do the same thing with here, down here, using the standard brush, just going to alternate. Drawing, holding. Regular, regular, regular. I'll very simple. As you, as you work more and more in ZBrush, you'll, you'll find different techniques to achieve different looks. This thing with the standard brush and just pinching in and out. I've found works really well for creating this sort of creased point here. As you, as you get more experienced doing different things, you'll, you'll find your own ways of doing things. Your own ways you'd like to do things as well. And also depends on sort of the final look you want to achieve. My work is very much, a lot more stylized than some of the other sculptors out there. And when it comes to making minis, because I prefer it's like sort of more stylized, bulky shapes rather than realism. Like when it comes to making miniatures at this scale. Because I don't, I don't think realism translates very well when you're printing something that's two centimeters, three centimeters tall, you lose a lot of detail. But to each their own. Let's make the arm holes look a bit more like they are holes. So let me use this snake hook brush to pull up at a smaller size to sort of pull up that it is more aggressive. Pull up these sort of jaggedy edges. Or phrase, I'm going to turn off the symmetry actually so that the left and right side doesn't look the same. I'm going to do them independently. I'm just going to pull out some jag ease. Same on the other side. I'm just going to pull out. Yeah. Like if you want to make this look better, you spend more time. And I keep saying that, but it is, it is That's all it is really. It's just time. Of course there is skill involved, but lot of it is time for this. So I'm just going to use this dam standard brush to draw in and hold Alt to pull out the opposite. So I'm gonna draw in while holding Alt, sort of the edge of the fabric so that it's more sharp. Instead of looking like a rounded shape. Now I'm going to just regularly drill in on the creases. So with the dam standard brush, I am drawing regularly, holding Alt for the edges here. I'm gonna pull that in soon because that's not going to print very nicely where it's like unnecessary amount of space there. But for now let me just throw in a sharp edge. It's going to take the Move brush and just move that in. There we go. That looks a lot nicer. Let me do the same on this side. Broke symmetry because it just makes it look a lot. I guess. More interesting. Symmetry does have a way of making things look fake, unnatural. Not that I'm saying this looks super real, but you know what I mean? Breaking symmetry also has that handmade quality to it rather than made by computer. Because nothing nothing is symmetrical. I think I've already said that, but but yeah, I'm gonna reapply the DynaMesh real quick just to recalculate and get more points to work with. But yeah, happy with that. Looks like a frayed edge. Let us what else am I gonna do? Want to add some stitching along the side here? I'm going to turn on symmetry for this one because we can just have the same. I'm just going to, oh, one thing I can show you is how to redo a stroke. Let's say I have the dam standard brush selected. I've got symmetry on, so it's gonna do the same thing on this side. But what I want to do is make one continuous stroke from here to here. And once you make one continuous stroke, you can press without doing, make sure you don't do anything else just after that one stroke, press one on your keyboard. And what one does is it Read does your last stroke? If I press one now, you see that it went a bit deeper. If I press one again, a little deeper, going to press it a couple of times, just to make this sort of deep groove here. Then again, I'll use the, use the clay brush to just draw in some stitches. Very simply. Just to add some extra interest to the middle. Just a couple of stitches along this side. I'll reapply the DynaMesh, go back to the dam standard brush. I'm just going to exaggerate those stitches. Now there's a lot of ways to do stitches. I'm showing you a very simple, quick and dirty way, but you can download stuff like a stitch brushes, or If you look in your lightbox by default, you can find the stitches. Stitches somewhere here. Where is it stitches there? Stitch. By default, you should have these in your ZBrush. So I could, for example, click this one. And this is a curve that add stitches to your model. You see very, very nicely. You can raise the Z Intensity a bit to make it more intense. Let's make it a bit bigger. You could do that as well. In fact, let's do that. Let's undo everything we did here. Just use the default sort of stitch brush that comes with ZBrush. To find the stage brush, you got a lightbox go up here to brush. Then find the stitch folder. Stitch, whereas Stitch, open that. And let's select this stitch one CBP brush and then just draw that along the side. I'm gonna do one stroke. And then I'll do the same technique by pressing one on the keyboard. I'll redo the stroke. Doesn't work so well with this brush. I guess we'll have to raise the intensity. So Z intensity up just to make it deeper. Because you've got to consider that where 3D printing and this brush maybe wasn't made with that consideration in mind, but you want a thicker details when your 3D printing something. Yeah, that's one way to do it. What else was I going to do? Give everything a texture. I'm going to give everything sort of this cloth texture. So before we continue, let's save as and let's go down to noise. Whereas it or surface, yeah, noise. Okay, so click within your tool palette, scroll down and click on the surface menu. Then you can click on lightbox noise makers to open up the lightbox. And you should have a noise that looks something like this one here. This one will make her wait. No, this one here. Noise 50. This one will make like sort of this pattern. If I double-click that, I hide Lightbox, you'll see that it's turned our body second to this weaved mesh thing. What we can do now is we can edit the noise and change the scale of it. We can make the noise scale smaller. Not that one. Whereas it this one, yeah. Plug-in scale make that smaller. Then you can see that it's made the texture smaller. So it's not going to look like this at all when we're, when we're done with it. Because when we apply, apply to mesh, you can see that it's sort of not as detailed as it was before, but there's still something when you 3D print this, it'll, it'll give a rough sort of indication to the surface noise, but a lot of these creases in details might be too small for your printer to recognize, but it'll do something, but it won't all be there. So that's just one way to add texture to your objects and there's different noises you can add. Like there's just a rough sort of rock texture. But I'll do the same here. Again with that same noise. Whereas it here. Highlight box. Again, we edit, change the plugin scale down. We can zoom in on the preview here to see roughly what it's gonna look like. I'm going to make it a bit smaller. Press Okay, roughly the same size, they're applied a mesh. And then just reapply the DynaMesh. There. We have just some rough sort of texture just to give it more interests when we print it. Okay. Everything looks a bit dark now because the noise applied to a color, to everything. But we can just go back into the color here and go back to white. Just that everything looks a lot brighter. What else? Let's add some. Hey, let's, let's add a couple of sub tools here. I'm going to insert a sphere. I'm just going to make this small and tuck it under the bottom here. Basically I just want some material to work with. I'm gonna make sort of move it around. Just that I have something sticking out the bottom of this of this sac here. With this, I'm just going to use this snake hook brush. And I'm just going to pull out some strands. Just pull out some thin strands. What we're gonna do with these strands who are going to inflate them so that they're more friendly to 3D printing. Let's pull out some wild strands. Turn off symmetry if you want to have more interest in it. But I'm just going to just pull out some some wild shapes here. Just so it looks like hey is sticking out of the bottom. Once I'm happy with that, I'll bring up the gizmo and hold Control and scale up so that it inflates the strands. We're going to apply DynaMesh. Raise the resolution. Then just use the Move brush to move it in place. What I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna use the Move brush with the back face mask on to just thicken those strands further and sort of merge them in place with the, with the, with the post here. If you, for example, look how this overhang is. I'm going to use the move with the back face mask and just drag that down into into the post so that it's just one shape. This is purely for 3D printing in mind. Back face mask on. Let me use the brush to independently inflate some of these strands. I kind of regret doing this in symmetry because it kind of looks a bit weird. But you get the idea. Just some strands there. Yeah. I mean, that's the bulk of the work done. Remember to save your work. 22. Project: Adding details: Okay, So I'm thinking that this is going to be the final video before we go through the process of getting this ready for exporting as an STL to 3D print as a final sketch. As a final step, I'm thinking that we're just gonna do some final touches, adding details here and there. Just making it look the way we want it to look. Maybe break the symmetry a bit to add some more interest. So let's get into it. The first thing I want to do is I want to go and take care of these edges of the bottom of the sac, the body here, and the bottom of the head here. It's all symmetrical. So we're going to break some of that symmetry up. And I'm going to mess around with these edges so that they look a little bit more frayed. I'm gonna use the Trim lasso tool here, hold Control Shift. And I like this brush to just trim little cuts and groups into things. So you can see that it, it does that basically you hold Control and Shift to make use of these brushes. Then you'll just slice in a little curve. And you'll do that. And we'll just do this a couple of places. I'll, I'll do this for adding chips on swords and, and chips on things. It's just a quick and easy way to add some. Here's a good example of something that went wrong. If you use the trim that lasso brush in the wrong direction, it'll trim everything except what you want to trim. Here. If I go from if I go counterclockwise, it'll do what I wanted to, but if I go clockwise with the trim, it'll only preserve that part. So it depends on which side you're working on. So if you manage to do it the wrong way, just press Control Z to undo and do it the right way. I'm just going to add some notches here. Then I want to sharpen the edge a bit here. I'm going to use the dam standard brush and just hold Alt and just sharpen this edge because it's a bit too rounded at the moment. I'm just going to hold Alt and draw along the edge here. Also will be adding some wear and tear. This, this is a target dummy, so it should have some indication of it being cut up and shot out with arrows. Maybe we might, might add some arrows. I noticed that there are a few holes here from when we just reapply the DynaMesh on the after we've added the noise, I didn't reapply the DynaMesh. But when you do it'll close all the holes. Make sure this is a solid shape again. But anyway, the bottom of that is done. I like how it's sharpened up the edge and added a few notches. Brooke symmetry. I'm not too keen on the way the stitching look at actually, especially since after we added the texture on it. I'm going to flatten this out using the flattened brush and I'm gonna redo them so that they protrude a bit more. And I'm going to deepen the deepen the mouth hole with the dam standard brush. Just going to draw it in again. And then hold Alt to pull out and sharpen. You want some thick some deep cuts in here. Then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna insert a couple of cylinders Basically, just for stitching. I'm going to take the cylinder that we inserted, rotate it that way, make it thinner and smaller. Move it up to the face. Bring it out. Just going to make it small and flatten it out a little bit. Just to make a sort of a stitch shape. I'm going to turn on DynaMesh and I'm going to smooth it out just so that it's a bit rounded. And what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna move it in place in the first one. Make use of the rotation, they get it right. You can have bit smaller. There we go. Then while I'm, while I have it selected, I'm gonna hold control and move. And what this does is it will duplicate, duplicate the sub tool can move this one in place. Just rotate it around, hold control with the gizmo uphold control and move it to duplicate it again. Keep going. I'll Control, duplicate it again. Rotate it in place, move it in. I just wanted more definition with these stitches basically just to make sure that they will print out. Okay. Go back to the head and I'll use the standard brush to indent here by holding Alt. There we go. Make sure it's visible. Quick and dirty way of getting that to look like stitches. Use the Move brush on it just to sort of the back face mask is on. This can be a bit finicky like if you've managed to leave the back face mask on the Move brush doesn't work the way you want it to. About time spent, spend some time. I'm going to fix the little I X here. Just make that a little bit deeper. Hold Alt. There we go. Let me add a cut on the side of its head. It's going to use the dam standard brush to make all these cuts just going to drag once, press one on my keyboard to redo the stroke so it's a bit deeper. But I'm gonna hold Alt and just sharpen up these edges. Be looking like a tear for the metal parts. I'm just going to just going to add some scratches. We can use the chisel brush for this. Actually. I'm going to go into the brush menu and press on chisel, which is up here. I'm going to pick a quite a sharp chisel. This one maybe gets smaller. This one. Maybe this one. Just pick C, which one you like best. And then I'm gonna turn off symmetry and just draw a couple of scratches in on his head, on his helmet. Maybe some chips. Yeah, maybe some chips. I'll use the Trim trim lasso brush again. Just to cut in some chips like that. What you can do is like before this step right, is quite destructive, like we're breaking symmetry and adding wear and tear lucky you might not want all of them that have the same. What you can do is you can save this file as a separate file or a separate tool. Maybe call it like Target dummy weathered. And then you'll have the on weathered version and the weathered version or the detailed version as a separate tool. You can have both. We can do different things for the different dummies. Going to I'm just gonna go around, just add details and like this is do what you want. Basically. Make it your own. Spend more time than I am with this stuff. Because the more time you spend, the better a little look. Just going to add some tears here with the dam standard brush. My interest. This is by far the step that you can spend basically forever on adding details, constantly everywhere, just more and more details. You can spend as much time as your as you desire. Any. I just again, I'm simply using the same brush for all this with the dam standard. I'm just drawing in a line, pressing one on my keyboard if I want to make it deeper. And then holding Alt to sort of Redefined the edges there to make it look like it's torn into the material basically. I mentioned we can add arrows. What can we do here? Like I can just, let's save, let's save our work. Let's call this target dummy final, just because we've added a bunch of weathering to it in the cylinder. Let's make poly mesh 3D. Make DynaMesh. And I'm just going to make a very quick, quick sort of arrow, right? So just a cylinder here that I'm going to add some, what's it called? Some flexing too. Let's just add a cube. Make it thinner. Do that, get the clip curve out. Something like this, maybe mirror and weld x. You know, very, very simple stuff. Let's mirror this along the z. Add a couple of grooves. I turn on DynaMesh for X and Z. Just a big point of using older everything we've already learned. Like, I'm not doing anything new here, but you can apply it in a infinite number of ways to get what you want. I like the desired results you want. So here we have a simple arrow shape. And now we can take this merge visible. Now we have this merged sub tool here. Go back to our target dummy and just insert that tool we just created. So now we have a bunch of arrows that we can stick in all over. Anywhere we want. It's going to make that a bit smaller. It's, realistically, it should be a lot smaller, but this is 3D printing miniatures. So a lot of the size of things tend to get exaggerated. Just for better, for better. Printing. Better. What's it called? What's the word I'm looking for? Better recognition or just come out so that it comes out a lot clear. When you're printing at a small-scale. Let's add a couple of arrows here. I'll hold Control to Duplicate. Rotate it around differently. Maybe I'll add one on the head. Where it's where it's other I was maybe next to it. Like this. You don't have to add these arrows if you don't want, but you can do whatever you want. This is the power I would like you to feel is complete control of the freedom of being able to do whatever you want. Like being able to, like the whole beauty of being able to sculpt your own minis is that you have the ideas in your head, just make the need to make them a reality in being able to do that feels, feels wonderful. It's a great feeling. I'm going to go back and you use a standard brush to sort of pull out. So it looks like it's the material rather than just digitally attached to it. Bulge it out a bit. Do the same for the one in the head. Select the bulge it out a bit. What else do I want to do? Well, yeah. Maybe some. Like right now the sword and the shield isn't really attached to the arms in any way. So I was thinking that I could make. That something make something that attaches that. So one thing I don't want to be completely straight up and down, so I'm going to add little bit of angle to it. Move it out, angled backwards a little bit like this. Make sure. It's like Eden, partly in the arm as well. So it's not just floating in mid air. It doesn't matter if it's clipping in a little bit, that's fine. To be expected. I was thinking how to add like some sort of a, sort of a bracket here. So what I want to do is I can show you the extract function. I'm going to duplicate the sort. And then I'm going to select the arm and I'm going to duplicate the arm. And then I'm going to use this button here on the right while holding Shift to move the arm all the way down to the bottom in order. And I'm going to move one of the sorts all the way down to the bottom as well. Basically, I moved the duplicated sword and the duplicated arm sub tool all the way to the bottom of the sub tool menu. And this is because I just want to merge them together, merge down. So I merged the arm and the sword. And there we have it. Our first crash. This happens. How much did we save? And this is why it's important to save your work. Sometimes the brush crash, crashes and hopefully the quick save function saved us because apart from saving ourselves, often as ZBrush also saves for us. Now and then, let's see if the quick save. If the quick save saved us. So let's go to the latest quick save recovered document. Which one would this be? Let's try this one. No. Not document. Recovered project. Let's open this. It appears that the quick save saved us. Fortunately before the crash, ZBrush manage to save our project. But that doesn't always happen. So that's why we need to save our work. And this is a good time to save As and save our work. Now that now that that is done after we've merged the arm and the sword together. Basically what I'm after is I'm only after sort of a section here. The reason I merged it is because I want a shape that contours with the the, the arm board and the handle, this sort. Basically what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna get the select Rectangle tool and just select this pretty much. I'm going to go at an angle and select it just so that it's more interesting. When a select like that. If I go solo mode, you'll see that we created this shape here. If I DynaMesh that, what do I get? Oh, wait, delete hidden first and then DynaMesh. Not quite what I wanted, but we can work with this. I'm going to select de-select the back part there because I don't need that. I'm going to delete the hidden. Then I'm going to take the Move brush, select back face mask. And I'm going to pull out the back of this just that it's thicker. It's going to look a bit Genki and weird, but let's just DynaMesh that and smooth it all out. It's a bit too high resolution actually, so I'm going to lower the resolution and DynaMesh that. There we go. Basically I've just after a shape that will contour the Do this, do this type of effect basically, as you can see, it's sort of shape that contours around the handle and the the arm plank thing. So there's more than one way to skin a cat. There's a lot of ways you could get the shape, but that's just how I chose to do it. From here, I'm just going to manipulate it a bit, thicken it up. Raise it a bit. I have back face mask turned on with the Move brush. This is so that I am preserving the, if I go on transparent mode, you see that it's already, It's partway inside the arm. This is again, just to avoid making a void and creating problems when 3D printing. I'm just after sort of what I'm imagining here is maybe some sort of metal bracket holder things. So it's like a metal piece nailed down at both ends just to hold the sword in place. How I got the gizmo here. If I go into move mode, you can see that the gizmo is like all the way over here. If I wanted to put that onto the sub tool somewhere, I can just hold Alt and click on the sub tool somewhere. Just to get it in view. I'm holding Alt to move the gizmo so that it's giving me the up and down so that it's relative to the angle that I made this shape up. Because when I press the scale on that angle, I want to just make everything a little bit wider. Then maybe a little bit wider this way. Rotate it a bit. Go back to the Move brush, turn off back face mask. I'm just going to move this in. Now I can raise the resolution of this shape. Dynamesh, smooth it out. I'm gonna use the pinch brush to just make the edge a bit sharper. I'm going to lower the Z intensity of the brush. There we go. Just give it a sharp edge, make it look like it's metal. This might be a leather strap actually that's sort of tied. That's sort of strapping this sword to the hand, sorry. Brain fart there. Let's do the riveting thing. We've been doing. Thick skin, bring it up to 21, and then hold Alt with the Move brush to create that sort of effect. You go ply the DynaMesh, give it a quick smooth. Now that's sword looks like it's attached to the arm. Let's do the same with the shield. For this, let's just insert a sub tool. Let's just insert a cylinder and play with that. But before I do that, I'm going to just select the shield and maybe rotate it a bit so it's not straight up and down. Just move it up this way. It's fine. Select the cylinder. I'm just going to make again more than one way to do something. So for here I'm just going to make some sort of a strep thing out of a cylinder using the gizmo to manipulate the shape of the primitive. Then using the Move brush to just sort of pull it in place. Turned DynaMesh on, smooth it. Very simple stuff. But even with simple techniques and tools like we're not using a lot of z brushes capabilities here we were using very little. The grand scheme of things we're using maybe less than I'm just pulling a number out of my butt here, but less than 10% of ZBrush is functions we're using and we're able to create something like this. And of course, there's a lot of steps you could have taken that made things a lot faster, but it's good to get comfortable with the basics first before learning what every brush does or how to do every function in ZBrush and a lot of it we don't need to know because a lot of it is for applications that aren't used to us, like in ZBrush, you can do stuff like gravity simulations and all sorts of stuff that I've never had to use four. Because that's not what I use ZBrush for. What I'm doing here is I'm just going to move the shield back so that it doesn't make a void between the shield and the arm. It's going to clip a bit here on this side, but that's fine. It's better and better at that than having a void here in the center. Another thing I can do is select the arm with the Move brush and the back face mask selected. I can just move it. Move it. Why isn't it moving? Weirds, not doing what I wanted to. Let's turn off back face mask. What's happening? As ZBrush does some weird stuff. Sometimes I'll even I know what it's doing. So I'm going to I'm just going to duplicate this arm and see if that fixes the issue. No, it doesn't. I'm suspecting that because this was a recovered sub tool that there are some issues because of the crash that we just had. So I'm just gonna save this. And then just restarted ZBrush and open it again. I'm just going to close ZBrush. If you're ever experiencing issues with ZBrush, sometimes it is just a case of turning it off and on again with a lot of with with a lot of electronics or programs and stuff sometimes just rebooting, restarting just fixes the issue. Let's open our target dummy STL, the final one. Go back into edit mode. Let's see if the Move brush works on this arm. No, it still doesn't. Very strange. I just reapplied the DynaMesh and now it started working again, so I just control drag them. Yeah. I don't know. Sometimes ZBrush just does weird things. But yeah, Move brush and the back face mask enabled. So what I want to do here is I want to pull the arm into the shield a bit so that there's no voids created here. Just slightly, just so make sure that there are no holes around the edge. Let's go back to the strep we were working on. I don't want it to be visible from the front here. So from the side I'm just going to use the clip curve to clip it in. Now it's not visible, they're only on the back. I'm just going to reapply DynaMesh. I'm just going to mess around with this. Just so I just said until I'm happy with the shape, basically, I'm just going to pull it up. I'm going to use the standard brush to, while holding Alt to just make a little groove here in the center. Make it look more like a sort of cloth or leather strap, I guess. Instead of being quite so bulky, then just manipulate it around. I'm happy with that. So I'm gonna just going to add some tabs here and add some, I guess nails or something. Something to indicate that it is in place there. Again, fixed going on around 20. Just hold Alt with the Move brush just to add a, just to add a little something here. Like that. Reapply DynaMesh, give it a quick smooth all over. Pretty happy with that. Now let's see. I don't like the edges of older wooden planks being so stripe. I'm just going to go around using the flattened brush and just sort of break some of these corners. Because even a wooden board is not always going to be super perfect like this. Especially if not, if it's supposed to be a worn down target dummy. I'm just going to go around and flatten the corners. Flattened the edges in certain parts, just give it a once-over, all over the place. Just using the flattened brush. Just to make it more interesting. Give it some give it some interest, some details. Maybe even use the Trim, Trim lifestyle like we've been using to make some chips. Some chips in the wood. Maybe a trip there. Maybe a chip here. As you can imagine, like someone's striking this target dummy from the top might be chipping the arm here between the sort and the head. Like that. Same thing here. Maybe. If it sort of, if you hit the top of the shield, Let's chip the shield. And sort of glides down, hits the arm. Just imagine imagine what it would be like. Going to add a few more chips along with shield. Maybe some scratches as well. Again, with the chisel brush. Same thing we did with the helmet. Make it smaller. Yeah. Let's add some scratches. Like it depends on what look you're going for as well. You can try different brushes, see if they do better. Sort of scratches. Basically you're after just your desired effect with certain things. You can even download different brushes so you don't have to rely on what comes with C brush. You can look online for different brushes to download for different effects and uses. I'm sure there's a lot of scratch and chip brushes that you can use to do this type of weathering work. But for this simple tutorial or this simple course, we're just going to be using what ZBrush gives us. Now that top part is done. Going to flatten it some more. The wooden parts here. Like so. Then I'm just going to flatten the wooden base as well like parts of here. And another thing I wanted to do is cut a groove here to show that these are two separate pieces. So let's do that now. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go back to our sub tool menu. Select one of these feet. Both of them do the same thing that we did with the hand and sort. And let's move them both the sub tools to the bottom of the sub tool menu by holding Shift and clicking the Move down button. Select the top one, merged down. Okay, Then now I'm going to DynaMesh these together so that they become one. Now that they are one, I'm going to use the dam standard go solo mode here. What I wanna do is I want to make a symmetry with the x and z and do like this, this type of shape. Basically, I'm gonna hold shift to get a straight line and then just do that at a 45-degree angle. If I go just to give an indication that these are four pieces of wood that come together to make this. Then just gonna do that twice, actually, start over, hold shift away. Now click hold Shift, make a line, let go, and then press one on my keyboard and do it again. And again. There we go. That should be good. I'm happy with that. Now the flattened brush again, so I'm gonna flatten the edges same as we did with the arms, just to make it look more realistic. I'm going to take symmetry off and just do this a little bit all over the place. It's going to flatten the edges, the corners, the the sharpness out of it just so that it's actually like a worn-out piece of wood. Not going to worry about the bottom edges because that'll be unseen. Again. If you want this to look better, you spend more time than I am. That's how it's done. Let me try thing. What else needs doing? Just gonna have a quick look at the model after this and just assess what I feel like needs doing. Now we are done with. Let's have a look at the model here. I'm pretty happy with that, like it's coming together quite nicely. These last few steps, adding details and interests of the model really did, do a lot to it. I think the sword, The sword needs some scratches on it, some scratches and some chips. Then I'm pretty much going to call this done. Exciting stuff. Coming to an end. This is my first course, so hopefully it was a good one. Hopefully you enjoyed it. Hopefully you've found a lot of help. Gotten use out of it. Just going to turn on DynaMesh for the sword. Heightened the resolution a bit. Dynamesh. Please. I would appreciate you to leave a review. Let me know what you thought, how I could improve. If you have any questions as well, feel free to leave them in the lesson here and then I'll be more than happy to answer questions as they come across. I'm sure you've already done that, but yeah. Definitely love to hear from you guys here how I did use the chisel brush. That's some scratches. There we go. I'm just haphazardly adding scratches more to the front that anything because I'm just imagining where it would likely be struck. Another thing I want to do before I finish is I just want to add a little bit more asymmetry with the arms. I just want to tweak everything here slightly. So basically I'm going to select the sword, move it all the way to the bottom by holding Shift. Select this, move it all the way to the bottom. Select the arm, move it all the way to the bottom holding Shift. Select the shield, move it all the way to the bottom. Select this back part, move it all the way at the bottom. And basically I want to merge all this stuff together. So I'm gonna merge from the sword downwards. Let's merge down. I'm going to press always, okay, so that I don't get that pop-up. Merged down, merged down, Merge Down. Now, all this is merged. If I center this here, you can see that I've merged the arms, right? So basically all I want to do is move the gizmo here to the center of the body. And I just want to slightly, just very slightly rotated upwards like this, just to give it more more interest, I guess. But because of that, we sort of messed around with the placement of the body parts. So I'm just gonna use the Move brush to just move the arm hole up here, up this way slightly and then move this arm hold down. I just wanted to give it just a quick just to just to make it a little bit more interesting, just nothing looks good when it's like straight like that. I just want to make the arm come out come at an angle like this. I'll just adjust the head part here and move that down. And then move that up. There we go. I'm ready to call this done before I leave you because we emerged all this together. If you ever want to sort of unmerged parts after you've merged them. You can see that if we turn on poly frame thing, you can see that there are, they're made of different poly groups. Trimming using the trim dynamic brush also creates new poly groups. This will cause problems if we want to split. But basically if we go to the Poly Group menu, down here, poly groups in our tool palette, we can click Auto Groups. What this does is it auto groups, the DynaMesh parts that we've made to its own groups. And if you ever want to split these sub tools that we merged here, if you don't want, if you don't want the sword and the shield and the arms together anymore. What we can do is we can split groups, so we can split group, split here, auto groups and groups split. These can be found here on my UI, but auto groups can be found in the Poly Groups menu to group up stuff together and group split to split them apart. So I'll press that now just to show you as you can see, The Shield and like the buckle of the shield is also separated, but we can merge them, doesn't matter. But all this stuff is now separated into its own poly groups again. So I merged it temporarily just to move them altogether. But if you want to split them again, that's how you do them. Now. It's done. I'm pretty happy with it. It looks good. Now it's just onto getting it ready for 3D printing and that'll be covered in the next video. Before we move on though, remember, save your work. And this is going to call this target dummy final. Save. Yes. 23. Project: Exporting: Okay, So now the final step is to just export this as an STL ready for 3D printing. So basically, it's purely just a couple of technical steps left to do here. What we want to do is the basic idea is to merge this all as one object so that we can export it as an STL. We're gonna do something called decimation to lower the amount of points in the entire model just to lower the file size because right now this is quite a high resolution model. Here you can see the total points at 4.7 million. We want this closer to 200 thousand. If you want a file size of around 20 megabytes. So let us go through the process of combining all this and turning it into an STL file. So how do we do this? The first thing you want to do is make visible everything you want to merge. For example, I want this model here to be one piece, but I don't want to include the base. I'm going to select the bass sub tool. Click the eye icon here just to hide it, and then click on another sub tool that's part of the model. Now it's just this sub tool. Now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to merge visible. Merge, merge visible. Now I created a new tool of all those sub tools merged together into one sub tool, one piece. Now I'm going to go back to the original tool here and make that base visible again. And I still want this base because it is going to be our, what we're going to use as a size reference because we've already made it a 25 millimeter base from the beginning of this project. So that should stay that should stay the same. I'm going to reinsert that base here into this sub tool. Now, what we have compared to our working tool, I guess the model that we worked on. Now we have another tool here with a 25 millimeter base and a single sub tool of the entire model that we worked on. I'm gonna save this. I'm just going to save as target dummy, merged, I guess. Make sure the location of the saved file is where you want it to be. I'm just gonna save it on my desktop for now. But you save it into your folder, but you want it to be so target dummy, emerged. Save. Now, this is not quite merged ship. If we turn on the poly frame mode, it's still all different parts. What I want to do now is I want to select everything. With that sub tool selected, I'm going to control click the canvas to mask these mountain case. I'm gonna control click and drag, and then, and then control-click. If you have parts that are automatic, that means it's just they were masked from previously to unmask and read mask, just click and drag and control-click to mask everything. Now I'm going to press Control W. Now if we look in the poly frame mode, it's all one poly group. But now I want to DynaMesh all this together and to preserve as much detail as possible, I'm going to max out the resolution. This is overkill, but it's better to overkill them than to break it. So as long as the active points are above or around 4 million, it should preserve as much detail. So if I click DynaMesh now, it's going to go about DynaMesh in this entire model that we created. And make sure you max out the resolution beforehand. We lost some points slightly, but that's okay because what this did was it. Remember when I talked about fusing objects together, how instead of having two pieces that are with intersecting points, my DynaMesh, it creates it into one piece. What I can show you here, I'm gonna illustrate this by using the select Rectangle Tool. I'm gonna slice half the model that I'm going to turn on display properties. I'm going to turn on doubles so that we see the inside of the model. Here's what happened. If I undo the DynaMesh. Let's see. Here we see this is before I DynaMesh it. You see how there's this plank inside the body. Basically all the sub tools are still intact. So the oldest stuff is intersecting shapes, but we want to create one sort of unified skin. When we DynaMesh everything, max resolution, DynaMesh. Now when I look inside the model, I'll show you once it's done calculating. You'll see that before we saw the whole plank inside the body. Now that Planck's disappeared because it's ended here, because it's only skins the object. So this is all one sort of watertight vessel. It's hard to explain. But basically what we turned many different objects that are intersecting into one singular hollow object. Basically. Another reason we turn on display properties and double is to check for voids. If we've done everything right, we shouldn't have any voids in our model. We can double-check using the perfect. Perfect example is we do have a void because I want to show you how we can solve or fixed voids. So here's, I'll show you the void we created. It's very subtle, but I'm going to select only in this part. If you look here, you see these, this void right here. How it comes inside. That is because there is a hole here between the rope and the head that we created. See that hole there, which created a void inside the model. How do we fix this? Now we can simply just take the Move brush and turn on back face mask from the inside of the model. Like what we're doing here using the rectangle select tool and turning on display properties double. We see this void here. What we can do with the Move brush and back face mask selected as we can just drag it across so that it closes. That hole. Will do the same down here. We'll drag it upwards to close that hole. And then maybe close this whole close that hole. That hole. Basically I'm just collapsing in this void Onto the opposite wall. So what I do now is I'll read reapply the DynaMesh control click drag. And what should happen is when I look back here now, those voids should be gone. Mostly. There's one left here. Let's drag here. Let me clean this one up. Let's reapply and have a look. Yeah. Clean. No more voids around the rope there. Let's check the other side. Pretty clean. Clean enough. Let's check down the bottom. On slight void here. There's a bit of an extra normally, you know, when you've done everything right, you shouldn't need to take care of boids, but voids. Always good to double-check though. Once everything is DynaMesh together, this is all 1111 sub tool that is just one sort of unified skin. What we do now is we go to the Z plugin menu and click on decimation master. For something of this size, I'll usually do between a 150 to 250 thousand points. But let's click 250 thousand just to preserve details. So before I click that button, I'm just gonna show you the the lines. So this is what a dynamic model looks like. You see if I zoom in all the tiny, tiny, teeny-tiny points, right? There's 3.6 million points here. But we're gonna try turn that 3.6 million into only 250 thousand by using the decimation master. Now of course, this is going to kill some detail, but it's necessary to have a manageable file size is that we do this step. So I'm gonna click 250 thousand. And with that sub tool selected, I'm gonna, I'm gonna show the poly frame here just to show you the effect of what happens, it's gonna take some time to calculate. Zbrush will analyze the mesh and basically what it's thinking. It's trying to preserve as much detail while putting as few points as possible. So it's going to find the areas that are flat and put fewer points there and then find the more detailed areas and put more points there. Basically, it's going to reconfigure where the points are to the desired number we selected there in the decimation master. So I pressed on 250 thousand. But you can apply on the slider your own custom values. When I make smaller stuff or less detailed stuff, I can, I can bring that all the way down to 20 thousand points just to make much smaller file sizes for us to work with. When exporting the STL. Just click that button and give it some time to calculate its processing. Now, 75% 80%. Let's see. There we go. As you can see, like I said, the flat areas. It's sort of took all the points out of there because it doesn't need those points to make details. It really concentrated the points where it needs to go. Turn on poly frame and you see that it looks pretty much the same. So we've preserved quite a bit of detail still. But instead of 3.6 million points, we have 250 thousand points, which is perfect. What do we do now? Now we just export to STL. And to do that, we use in Z plugin, the 3D print Hub menu. In Z plugin, we've only used three stuff so far. We've learned how to use the scale master to make something a certain size. Before we start working, we use decimation to bring down the number of points on our model. And then now we're going to use 3D print hub to export STLs. Important note here is I want you to select the base for this trend. Go to Z plugin, updates, size ratios, and it should be 25225 millimeters. This is what we set it up. This is just a double check and confirm. We say yes to that. Make sure you don't select the model now because then it'll print, it'll export and those dimensions just so keep the base selected and click Export to STL. That's pretty much it. So choose where you want to export it. I'm just going to do the desktop real quick. I'm gonna call it target dummy. Um, it doesn't matter what you save it as because what you do here is you click, Use the sub tool name as the file name. So it's gonna be cold target, dummy, merged. But just so we know, that's done. One quirk I just want to show you with ZBrush is the fact that the orientation of the export might be wrong. So ZBrush is up and down is the y-axis. But for example, if you are using cheap to box like I do, then the up and down is the z-axis. So what you can do here is you can rotate the model in ZBrush before exporting it. Here I can press the gizmo tool and I can click this button here just to make it move all sub tools within the tool. Together. I can rotate 90 degrees out this way so that it's up and down along the z. So I'm going to export this one as well just to show you the difference. So this one is the rotated one. I'm gonna export STL, the desktop as well. I'm going to just rename it something different. Target dummy rotated. Yes. Now we're done. Now. We have successfully saved an STL file over our model. What I'm gonna do now is we're going to open these files and I'm gonna show you what they look like in cheeto box just as an example. Just quickly, let me find these files. Go to my desktop. Desktop. Here we go. I'm going to open the here you can see my desktop folder. Here's the target dummy that we saved. You see how it's lying down and here's the one that's standing up. So that's the difference of rotating it before you export it. So we'll just open both of these just to show you. This just depends on your slicing software. I guess. There we go. Let's go Open File. Target, dummy. That one. No. It's happened to become its two millimeters tall for some reason. And I know exactly why. This is because we didn't update the size ratios when we rotate it. There's something we got to do. After you rotate it in the 3D print hub, you have to click Update size ratios again, just because now it's 25252 instead of 25225. Do that before you export it. And then call this rotated. Yes. Yes. Okay. Now it should work as intended. Let's open the lying down one. Open file, the standing up one. There we go. There we have our two models that we made. So this is just like if you want to export it standing up, you have to rotate it beforehand, but you don't have to because even the lying down one, slicing software is there already capable of doing functions like rotating. So there I just rotated it up so it doesn't, it doesn't really matter. Let's delete one of these. There we have it. 3d model that we made, ready to slice and ready to 3D print. If you've been 3D printing for a while, you should know how to support models and export them. So I won't go over that here, but there we go. Our first, our first 3D model. So yeah, that's it for this course. I'll make a separate video just to sign off, I guess. I'll see you in the next one. 24. Final Words: And yeah, that's it. Thanks so much for becoming a student of this course. Hopefully it was what you expected and that you learn a lot from it. But of course, I might have missed some things. So please, if you feel like you still have some questions that you feel haven't been answered properly, then please just comment thumbs and I'll be more than happy to answer questions. If I see the same question popping up, I might add extra videos to explain things further because even though I tried to make sure I covered everything, I may have missed some things or gone a bit too quick and with certain things. So yeah, don't hesitate to ask and please, please leave feedback. So I know how to improve for future courses. This is the first time I've done anything like this. So hopefully it's a good first start, especially for those of you that have never used ZBrush before. And it was a very simple, easy first project. And hopefully you guys have been able to 3D print your very first miniature from this course and I would love to see them. Please send them to me or tag me on Instagram or, or whatever. And I'd love to see it. Of course, also joined the Discord group I created. If you want to share, share some images of what you're working on. I asked for feedback and help. More than happy to sort of start a community surrounding these courses that I would like to start making. So, yeah, definitely check that out. I'll leave a link somewhere either in this lesson or you might get one upon joining becoming a student. And the welcome note, I guess, and also put in the completion notes. So thanks again and happy easy brushing. I guess. Hopefully you continue on this journey and continue to improve. And hopefully this was a good first step for you. Thanks so much. Have a nice day.