ZBrush Core Mini for Beginners

1. 00 Introduction: Hello and welcome to zebras core. Many for beginners. My name is Pierre and I'm a character artist has had the pleasure of studying and creating digital sculpting, coursework and assets over many years. If you enjoy CGRP or 3D print, digital sculpting is a fun and interactive path into the world of polygons. In this course, we will cover all the brushes and features available as he brushed core mini. And together we will sculpt a pomegranate fruit and a lovely goldfish. So if you're ready, join me and let's get started. 2. 01 Hardware and Navigation: If you are new to CGRP, you may not own a graphics tablet, also known as a drawing tablet. This is fine as you can use standard mouse and keyboard to create. However, a graphics tablet makes the creative process more intuitive and can be used for almost every computer art program available. There are many brands and price points for graphic tablets. I suggest purchasing a cheap one is basic functionality will have all that's needed. Less open ZBrush core mini. And the top left-hand corner, press this 3D rectangle button to load the stone mesh base. Zbrush will ask you if you'd like to save your current progress. Select No, Unless cover navigating around your model and ZBrush core mini. Right-clicking anywhere will rotate your model. Right-click while holding the Alt key will pan your model. Right-click while holding the Control key, we're zoomed in and out of your model. Alternatively, you can use the cam view icon in the corner to navigate around your model. Click and drag to rotate the head model to snap your mesh to set angles. Click the axes arrows to quickly snapped to the front and back views, left and right views, as well as top and bottom view. We repeated clicks. Running along the right side of the interface is a collection of navigation unrelated buttons. The perspective button will toggle perspective on and off. This comes in handy for examining the profile of your model. The letter P is the hotkey for perspective. Note that hovering over any interface items while holding the Control key will display additional information. The next two buttons control how you rotate around your model. The rotate on y-axis button limits are cameras spinning around the height of your model. The rotate on all axes button enables you full access to rotate around your model and will likely be a preferred method of rotation. The local button enables navigating around your model relative to the position of your cursor. You'll want to keep this turned on. The Next button will enable the floor grid on your scene. Toggled a little x, y as the icons within the display, additional floor grids if desired. Shift P is the hotkey for the floor grid button. The next button frame will send you your model and the workspace. When pressed. The letter f is the hotkey for the frame button. The move to zoom and rotate buttons. Alternative means of navigating around your model. Simply click, drag on buttons to interact. Pressing the poly frame button will display the polygons making up the wireframe of your mesh. This is handy for viewing the density of polygons distributed throughout your mesh. Disabling the fill option or move the color leaving only lines. Shift F is a hotkey for toggling poly frame on and off. Take some time to practice navigating around your model on screen until you're comfortable rotating, zooming, and panning around your scene. And the next clip we will cover brushes. 3. 02 Brushes: Click the new sphere button here to load a new mesh. Currently the brush core mini includes 12 brushes, sculpting brushes, and for stamp brushes consisting of multiple stamps per brush. Control the size of your brushes with the draw size slider here. Control the strength of your brushes with a Z intensity slider here. The standard brush features around tip with the soft fall off. Varying your pressure on your graph is tablet would change the size, intensity of your brush. Hold the Alt key to switch to digging into your model. The standard brushes ideal for doing most of your surface sculpting. Anytime with all sculpting brushes, hold the Shift key after your initial click to create straight line strokes. The clay buildup brush features a square root tip with a heart fall off. Varying the pressure on your graphics tablet will change the size as the intensity of your brush. Hold the Alt key to switch to digging into your model. Clay buildup is ideal for quickly building up form, creating textures, as well as bold, flat strokes. By default, dynamic is enabled on your brushes. This keeps your brushes the same size when zooming in and out. Double-click to disable. And your brushes will scale up and down. As you zoom in and out. They inflate brush features a round tip with a soft fall off similar to the standard brush, but much rounder. Varying the pressure on your graph is tablet will change the size and intensity of your brush. Hold the Alt key to switch to dig into your model. At anytime with any brush, hold the Shift key to briefly activate the smoothing brush to smooth your strokes. The pinch brush pulls all geometry and range to a single point along your stroke. Varying the pressure on your graph is tablet would change the size and intensity of your brush. Holding the Alt key will produce a recess pinch stroke. The pens and brushes ideal for creating hard edges and increases. The Move brush grabs and pull geometry and your direction of choice in a linear fashion. Choose your draw size, Z, Intensity, and camera angles of sutra situation. Hold the Alt key when using the Move brush to push and pull geometry in a direction of your surface normals. The Move brush is ideal for establishing your base shape and form, as well as nausea proportions on your model. The snake hook brush pools and stretches out a portion of geometry and the fluid fashion. Lowering your Z intensity will allow you to pull out short spikes. Much like Move brush, rotate around your model and position yourself to pull in a direction desire. The snake hook brushes ideal for stretching now arms and legs and anything, elongated. Slash three brush cars creases into your mesh. Varying the pressure of your graphics tablet will change the size and intensity of your brush. Hold the Alt key to create arrays edge stroke perfect for enhancing any hard edges. This last three brushes ideal for creating soft creases and raised edges along your geometry. At anytime with any brush, you can repeat your last stroke by pressing the number one key. This feature that requires you not to move your model after your last stroke. The H polish brush will flatten the surface under your brush. Varying the pressure on your graphics tablet will change the size and intensity of your brush. Hold the Alt key to pull the surface upwards. Age polish brush is ideal for flattening areas and further stylization of your scope. When apply thoroughly. The chisel 3D breast consists of a collection of 3D stamp noses, eyes, and ears. Hold the Alt key to create a cavity in your mesh, the shape of the selected 3D stamp. At anytime. Press this button to disable or enable symmetric and sculpting on your mesh. Chisel brushes are ideal for rapid placement of prescriptive features for further editing. The chisel creature brush consists of a collection of 3D stamp creature inspire noses, ears, eyes, horns, teeth, and scales. Be aware that producing large stamps are likely to affect the rear of your mesh depending on how thick it is in the area. That chiseled shapes brush consists of a collection of 3D stamp geometric forms. The chisel organic brush consists of a collection of realistic noses, ears, eyes, mouth, teeth, tongues. For, and much more. It takes some time to play around and experiment with the brushes on your mesh. Mix any combination of brushes you like. In the next clip, we will cover sculptors problem. See you there. 4. 03 Sculptris Pro: Understanding the surface of your scalp and how detailed is generated will make you a much more efficient sculptor. This here is a polygon. It has a minimum of three vertices, three edges, and exactly one face. Used it to a bunch of these together and you will have some geometry. Sculpting often requires millions of polygons. Sculptors Pro uses dynamic tessellation in order to automatically divide your polygons, adding detail where you want as you brush across the surface. You can view this by pressing the poly frame button to see your polygons. Stroking across your model. The area affected by your brush has added a significant amount of polygons. The amount of polygons or detail apply to your strokes are controlled differently depending on if you have dynamic enabled or disabled. With dynamic enable, more detail or polygons are added to your stroke. The smaller your brushes. With dynamic disabled, more detail or polygons are added as you zoom in closer to your model. Either way works perfectly fine to sculpt normally, then isn't much of a difference until you need to smooth your model. Sculptures, pros, dynamic tessellation works the same. Let's move into your mesh. Rather using a large brush or zoomed out of your mesh. Appliance mood will reduce polygons on your mesh, essentially erasing them. Rather using a small brush or zoomed into your mesh. Smoothing will also add more polygons or detail to your mesh. The closer you are. The deepest core mini has a polygon limit of 750 thousand polys. You can monitor your current poly count after every stroke here on your interface. Both to inflate and move brushes don't have sculptors pro enabled. You have the ability to disable sculptors Pro on all your brushes by holding the Control key. This will create strokes without dynamic tessellation, simply using the geometry or detailed currently present. The benefit of this is the ability to control your detail and poly count as you're working. Re stroke and the stroke on the left, normally with sculptors pro enable produces this result. While adding extra polygons to your limit. Your stroke and a stroke to the right. Holding the Control key to disable sculptors Pro produces better results without adding to your polygon limit. The idea here is that it can be beneficial to momentarily hold Control key to simply use the current poly count under your brush. Additionally, some of the sculpting brushes work differently while holding the Control key. The pinch brush with the Control key had a sharper finish to it. The snake hook brush or with the Control key, had a slightly different look. Without sculptures pro. Smooth brush with the Control key offers better results without sculptors Pro. If you hit your poly limit, There's no worries. Debra's core many will notify you of this and offer you the option to upgrade to a higher version of ZBrush or select reduced to automatically reduce your polygon count by decimating your mesh. This process will take a minute, has the brush core, many will remove as many polygons as possible, while retaining as much detail as possible. Typically resulting in a mesh around 300 thousand polygons. You can reduce your poly count at anytime with these buttons here. Pressing the Load button and will reduce your mesh to a polygon count of 150 thousand. Pressing the mid button will reduce your mesh to a polygon count of 300 thousand. Pressing the high button to reduce your mesh tool polygon count of 500 thousand. Now are the poly count, the more detail is retained afterwards. You honestly continued to sculpt beautiful pieces, never knowing these things. However, I believe understanding what's happening on the surface is important in order to get the most out of this program and its tools. And an S clip, we will cover the remainder of the interface items. 5. 04 Interface: Let's cover additional buttons and options available to you as ZBrush core minis interface. Whenever you're interested in learning more about an interface item, hold the control key while hovering to be presented with a pop-up window with additional info. In the top left-hand corner. The first folder icon is the Open button. Clicking it will open a window for you to navigate to a previously downloaded or saved ZBrush core menu file on your computer. The second folder icon is a save button. Pressing it will also open a window for you to save your current project to a location on your computer. Click this drop-down menu here. You have a few options to choose from. The first two options, save your project and formats native to ZBrush formats. The last two oxygens save your project into a viewable image file. This file can be shared, downloaded, and uploaded into ZBrush contain your saved project. Moving below the previously covered brushes, we have the color palette. The color palette allows you to change the color of your model, has two parts, an outer square and an inner square. Use both to select the color of your choice. Under the color palette is a collection of Matt caps, also known as materials. Do you wish core mini comes with eight different materials have changed the look of your model. Select them materials, simply click this icon and the model will immediately be updated. Under the Mac counts as the occlusion button, enabling the occlusion option will give your model deeper shadows and shading throughout, adding a decent amount of depth. Control. This effects with the intensity slider below. I'm ready to start a new project. Choose between a new sphere button or the New Stone mesh button. Click either button as ZBrush core menu will advise you to save any unsaved work you may want to keep clicking. Yes, we'll take you through the saving process. Wants done, a new mesh will be loaded. Clicking know will immediately load your new mesh of your choice. Don't mesh option feature that virtual stone texture applied to your sculpt. This texture is really good at masking any areas with low resolution. The next uncover interface item is the export image. Whenever you want to save an image on your progress, press this button to select the location and name. Press Save, and a new window will pop up for you to crop your image if you like. Click and drag in the viewport to move around the image. Click and drag the red corner circles to crop. Okay, when done to complete a sport in your image. The next item is to export for 3D print button. Press this to select the location and name of your file. Zbrush core menu will save an OBJ file for you to low into any slicer to prep for printing. I use this button to export and print these projects we will create later in a future clip. Next we have the record turntable button pressing. This will pop up a message pretty much telling you that higher versions of ZBrush will export better resolution turntables. Press Okay, ZBrush will spin your model on screen recording all the while. When done, a new window will appear for you to select a location and name to save as the video format is mpg. Without any special video editing software or third-party movie player, this video likely won't play. So be aware. The next set of buttons are quick links to upgrade to ZBrush core or ZBrush. Press the visit Zebra Central button to view artwork made and posted by other ZBrush users. In the next clip, we will cover some ways to approach sculpting your project. 6. 05 Workflow: Over time, as you continue to sculpt and become familiar with the brushes, you will indeed develop your own approach to sculpting. Offer two ways of working as you find what works for you. The standard method started off with the Move brush to push and pull out large, overall shapes. Smooth as needed along the way. If you're making arms or legs, use a snake hook, brush. Try to work at a medium distance from your mesh. Edit three-quarter angle in order to view and scope. To measure angles simultaneously. Consider using a slash brush to sketch out placement of additional forms. Build and carve out forms with the standard or clay buildup brushes as smooth as needed. Be strategic with their detailed areas. As you have a poly limit of 750 thousand. The stamp method. Place one or two chisel stamp brushes on your mesh. Next, use the Move brush to define the direction of your scope. Smooth as needed along the way. Repeat adding chisel stamps and the mood brush to modify. Use your standard and or clay buildup brushes to sculpt out smaller forms. You small slash and pinch brushes to add details. This is a fun way to create something new. Every time. In the next clip, we will dive into our first sculpting demo with the creation of a pomegranate. 7. 06 Pomegranate sculpt: Okay, let's start things off. I have a image of a pomegranate home screen for reference. Now with a nice large H polish brush, I'm just going to flatten about half of the sphere. Just kind of move to a three-quarter angle. Then just continuing to press back till I think I've cut away enough to start sculpting on the inside of our pomegranate here. Use a shortcut key to change my Z Intensity. Just continue to flatten. I think we just about got it. Also keep in mind, holding the Alt key will pull the surface upward towards you using the age polish brush. Switch between normal mode, standard mole and holding Alt key. That just about does it sound most half? Non-point to smooth? Along the edges? Turn on poly Frank can see the polygons. Okay, and how would a smaller brush smooth again around the edges? All right, and up the top here. We're going to start to create our stem using the Move brush. I'm just going to pull that outward. And have you got this dark? I'm just going to pull it out from the back as well. And pomegranates had a really interesting kind of star tip, flared star shape. I'm going to grab this snake hook brush and just start to pull out those little flaps there. Figure out which direction to go here. We're only doing half in that direction. And keep in mind the moon brushes and as well as the snake hook brushes definitely work best when you find the best angle to pull out your geometry. So you'll constantly move around your mesh as you're sculpting the standard brush, I'm just carving in a little recess in the stem. Fall a little smoother. Okay. That looks good. And now smooth brush. And just add some geometry. To start our scope. Now you don't have to do that, but could make things go a little bit smoother. Edges sculpting. The geometry already prepped. Now with the clay polish brush, I'm sorry, clay buildup brush. Just carving in the recesses to add our seeds. I much prefer the look of the standard brush here. Just continue to dig out a little. Most sections here. And now for the bottom part, here, sort of resembles a P sign. Just continue to use that standard brush. Okay, and follow with a bit of smoothing. Justice, smooth things out. Looks good. Now we're gonna go ahead and move with the moon, brush and just kinda widen out this inner flesh here today, Back in these areas. All right, just trying to give enough room to build up those seeds and this area. And just trying to add a little irregularity to the strokes to make them look a bit more organic. Now at the pinch brush, I'm just going to squeeze a section in a little bit on the edge as well, just to thin it out a little bit closer to our reference. Now, I'm gonna go here and grab, Move, brush and do a little bit more pushing. Want to see how things are looking. I'm just going to pull out a little little pit section at the bottom. And that's looking good. I think we're just about ready. Start building up the seeds here with the standard brush. I'm going to turn off symmetry. As I want this to. Not be symmetrical. And making tiny circle strokes, creating Little small bulb shapes that look like seeds. Now great thing with sculpture is pro, is that you can reach stroke these kinda create additional sees on top of other seeds. Works well as the additive method. So this is one of the great uses of sculptures Pro, because this isn't a functionality with, you know, with a disabled, get a much different result. I'm doing this. I'm just going to make bigger shapes here with the standard brush. And the reason for that, I just want to build up the the base to start building up the seas as they protrude out from the from the base a bit more than other sides. So I'm just going to continue to get it a little bit high. Buildup the height. And now with smaller strokes, start to fill in those seats. And there's really no rhyme or reason. I'm just trying to fill in the area for now. We can always reshape or redraw these if needed. So walk all the way around trying to keep the shapes relatively consistent. The sizes and the pomegranate seeds don't change too much. Mostly the same size. So aim for that. Continue to fill up that little pocket. Like so. And this is definitely the best brush to do this task. You can try inflate but doesn't work as well as the standard brush. Okay, I've done sought to a decent start. Let's go ahead and make some asymmetrical edits. Since we have symmetry off. Just doing a little tweaking, trying to create that recess and flesh in our reference. Like so. And now standard brush just continue to stroke the c's here. Just nice circular patterns. And just continue to add those seeds, making those small circular strokes. And as corner here. One good thing to note is if you overdo it or continue to build too much, but just standard brush because simply smooth with a larger brush to reduce the surface area or grabbed the clay buildup brush, hold Alt to carve into the mesh. Alternately, you can do the same with the standard brush. Simply returned to the standard brush and redraw an area constantly throughout. I'm also holding Alt key to dig into the mesh and then releasing it, continued to use it in a standard mode. Now I'm working on the inner core, the pomegranate using a standard brush. I'm just adding a bit of detail. Make it look a little bit more dynamic, similar to our reference. Running that standard brush along the inner flesh. Dividing the pomegranate seeds right around that trim to give it a bit more of an edge. As it was sliced around the outer room, then what I assume it was pulled apart. The reason as to why the seas aren't cut. So it's trying to make the edges look a little bit sharper here. Alternatively, you can do the same by using the slash brush and holding the Alt key. And it'll give you much more sharper edges. But for this, standard brush works just fine. Just about done with that. Just filling in some more seats here. Wherever it's needed. Some point in time, we'll come back and definitely refine the shape and appearance of these sees as they're the main focus of this piece. We never had a pomegranate, actually, actually pretty delicious. Kind of a cross between a cherry and a cranberry tastes. Also super good for you. Now and a full version of ZBrush. It would be beneficial to approach this in different pieces of geometry. Busyness, ZBrush, core mini on it supports the one piece of geometry. Can have to really think how to approach During your scopes and limited to one solid piece. By, for instance, we would probably do the seeds with three pieces of geometry. And the, the base has an arrest with another piece. So typically you produce sculpting and pieces. But that's also the joy of using ZBrush core mini up. We hit our cap of our polygon lemma here. She's going to hit reduce. And that's going to process. All right, and now we're back down to 300 thousand. See up here an active polygons counter there. But I will say as to joy of users sculptors, pro, here is the brush core mini. Just get to sit back and kinda approached this as a clay sculptor. So let's look at this. I'm just going to use a brush to change the formula below, less, less perfect, I should say. Knows this edge is still pretty soft. Here with these standard brush, does run it slightly across the edge. Remembering that our size is determined by our pressure. So just a light touch. Still working in this cavity. Add a few more seeds. And now up here near the stem, I'm just using the clay buildup brush, just faintly. Running alone. A cross-section of this pomegranate just to build up a bit of texture. Just for visual interests. I don t see this in the reference, but I assume there's just a bit of a texture there. So I'm just going to kind of fake it here. Coming in here. Adding a little bit of depth. Okay, Just checking a poly, polygons there. There's continued to brush alone as I see fit. All right. Thank you. Choose to not do this. So different, different aesthetic. Alright. As a little bit. All right, I'm just going to continue to fill in this cross-section here. Evenly placed that texture all the way around this edge, just making light strokes overlapping one another. All right. Ready to move on, but I want to click the Load button or reduce our polygons. And now we're down to 50 thousand. It's pretty low. Now I want to grab the pinch brush and just run it alone across somebody seems between the pomegranate seeds. Just to tighten things up a bit. So make sure your brush is nice and small otherwise it well not work very well. And out to inflict brush. I'm just gonna run it across the seas here. And you can see he gives a much natural look to seize that. And definitely don't want to smooth over those with the sculpture is pro enabled. And now I'm just gingerly applying in-flight here and there. Let's try and get things that look a bit more rounder. Just continue to use that inflate brush here. Like you shouldn't change the camera angle. See how things look from different angles here. And I think that's looking pretty good. Tina, use this in areas that aren't too round. And just moving in tiny circles to build up some volume here and there. Now the reason I don't use inflate from the start to form the seas is that it will create a bit of an overlap. But for our cases, whereas good on adjusting our ready sculpt it forms. Now with the slash brush, I'm just running across the seams, just trying to dig in some deeper crevices. And this is more just artistic liberty because the depth between the C's are more consistent and the, and the reference image. But for our purposes I'm just making things a bit deeper. Some spots. And then the plan is to come back with the inflate. Even down here. Because you never know angle you might want to capture for image. So try to cover all angles. At this point, we are definitely in the detail and stage of our sculpt. As we finalize what kinda details we want to get in before concluding. Now at this point, we do have most of the information and just trying to fill in any gaps and make any final corrections. Just tweak anything that you feel could be better. Now over to the Move brush here, I'm just going to use it to kinda reshaped some areas using a bit of smoothing as well. Here and there. And push and pull. I can show it to rotate around your model. Get a different perspective and so forth. That two slash three brush. I said before. If you hold Alt while using a slash through your brush, you can create a tighter crease. Arrays edge. I should say. That's pretty tight. Which works great for the this cross-section. Certain areas, especially the areas that they're possibly cut with a knife. Just a simple result of tearing it. Ripping it apart would create some some edges in here, especially in thinner areas. As I said before, I'm just accentuating what's in our sculpt. Deciding what I want to, essentially a way as to what I actually see or don't see. And the image. Once again just happened between the Cs and the same here. I think we've just about push those far as they can go. Alright. Just went ahead and removed our reference. Just going to go ahead and finalize a few bits before concluding this in the stem portion here with the moon brush. Just try and get a bit of asymmetry in a cooling things off to the side and pushing and pulling. Now the pinch brush, I just want to taper off the tips here, but moving in the direction of the stems or the app. No idea what these are. Not leaves. Guess petals, almost. Okay. Just seeing how things will look in what angle we might want to capture this from. Bit more mood brush to ask them irregularity. And this is likely an angle or capture our image. It just going to click the Export button and save it under zebras document and default name. Create as the Rust Core, many texts comes with it so there's no getting rid of it. And essays. And now with that say, we can go ahead and click the Export for 3D print. I'm just going to name it and save it to our desktop. From here, you can go ahead and upload this to a slicer. And the next clue will sculpt a goldfish. 8. 07 Goldfish Sculpt: Okay, In this demo, we're going to create a goldfish. I'm going to start things out with the Move brush. Position it to use symmetry from the side view of the goldfish. Turn off dynamic, prefer having it off. And what that movie brush just began to pull out the shape to form the body of the goldfish starting with the head. Here. Just try and get that snout like look, even though they don't have a snout. And just pulling out the shape, tail here and the rear. I figure out which direction I should pull it in. It's turned off symmetry momentarily. Try and get a good approximation of the shape work right in here. How perspective? And there's no rush here. Definitely take your time when forming the base shape for your sculpt. Switched to the snake hook. I'm just pulling out the fin that's on the top of the goal fishes body here. Snake hook brush offers a more fluid transition that can be acquired at times. Sometimes I had to switch between that and the Move brush. As we continue to form out this fin here, trying to get a nice shape resembles our reference image. If I didn't mention it before in the last clip, I'm using the app pure ref to load up our images, our reference images. Now I'm just using snake hook to pull out the rear fins. As I'm remembering now that he's actually split. Like so. So it's best to view that from the top to pull that out. And now going back to shape the fins from the profile view. All right, like so. You can see very quickly, we can kinda form the base for our sculpt here. Starting to look like a goldfish. I'm going to pull out more fins. This guy has fins everywhere. I'm just pulling out these down here. And let's see where it has next to go. Another pair of front here. I'm just trying to get a nice shape, a little bit of smooth. Follow up those shapes. We just pull it out. Like so. Same for the other side here. All right. That's looking good. Let's go ahead and move on and grabbed the standard brush. I'm just going to pop in an I here, making small circular strokes. I'm pretty happy with that placement. I'm just using the hotkey to bring up my intensity slider. Continuing with that standard brush to kinda form the gill area. And a bit of bit of volume around as I hear a bit more on top of his head. It's filling in that shape. Continue to work around the eye. I'm just examining and looking over at that reference material and it's trying to figure out what's going on. And this is why it's good to have as many angles as you can kinda figure out what their mouth is doing from the front. And just continue to build things up here with the standard brush. Now to the Move brush, I'm just going to shape things a bit. That's kinda how I typically work in many other sculptors. Sculpt then moves sculpt and move or tweak as I call it from time to time. Sculpt and tweak has now I'm just tweaking the profile. And as you start to add details or moderate details, you start to get a better idea of where things should be placed. Still making tweaks with this smooth brush here, continuously moving around a model, looking at it from different views. His plan with the shape of his belly here. A really interesting shape. It's trying to capture some of that push in this era here, pull this back. And there's a lot of nudging that's going to happen when you're trying to get your piece of look closer to your reference. Just a part of the process. Just embrace it. Try not to rush into your details to quit. Now at the nice large brush. Continue to zoom out and make tweaks. Might even be helpful to open YouTube or another app and look at some videos of fish. Goldfish, maybe even snapped some screenshots of anglers. It's probably difficult to find online. Right? Steady, tweaking that tail shape like this direction a bit more. Keep in mind allowed. This is just placeholder shapes and forms. Then tweak things drastically. If we want. Looking at the top reference image, I like the way it's head fan of shapes. I'm trying to mimic that. Plan on being a bit creative with the flow of the tail fins. Wait till we get to that a little bit later. Alright, starting to shape up. Just looking at my geometry with the frame off for a moment. And holding shift, I'm just adding a bit of geo in here. He's areas that are kinda low in density. Once again, this isn't necessary. It's just something I like to do, another sculptors do from time to time to prep the surface. Just going to go ahead and save out a version of this. It's always a good idea to save your work. Okay? Because crashes do happen and you should just be prepared and save every five to ten minutes or so. That way you won't lose too much work. Okay. Checking out things. I want to leave my I'm going to leave working on the base shapes too early. Now in the chisel organic brush, I know there's a skills brush in here. I just want to navigate to it. He could just draw these skills individually with perhaps a clay buildup brush or standard brush. But I found when you can use a stamp, definitely use a stamp. Let's see, not this one. Let's continue to scrub through the selection here until I find it. Let's try this one. It switched brushes to chisel creature. There we go. Scales three now that's a bit strong. So let's go ahead and undo that. I'm going to lower my Z intensity. Alright, That's looking much better. I'm going to drag out quite a few of these. Fill up the side. Alright, place one up here, one down here, another up top here. One in the middle. Much smaller now because they get smaller as they recede back towards the tail fins here. So I'm trying to mimic that or at least keeping in mind as apply these stamps, apply them to the underside as well. And if you want, you can always use these placeholders and just come back and possibly stroke down with another brush. It's all up to, you. Could turn off symmetry, but I'm going to leave it on. I'll place a nice Okay. And continue to fill in these gaps here. Economically smooth out detail in areas I don't want it. Alright? And towards his face, you don't see these scales as much. So I'm just going to smooth that out. Okay. Relatively happy with that. Wanted to clay buildup brush here. I'm just going to try to fill in stroke. They're just kinda fill in a few areas that we didn't get the scaling here. A few simple strokes, nothing too. To detail, zoom out, see how things are looking. Move along here. The movie brush, just sliding scale texture that we just apply. Just trying to establish the flow that this gills have in the reference images. Just nudging things around a bit here. Being sure to check from all sorts of camera angles. Alright. Checking things. From here. We'll be doing too much to the scales. Alright. Let's go ahead and move on here. Just applying a bit of smoothing to the front. And now standard brush. And go back into further define the gill area of the goldfish. I'm not super sure what's happening in this area, even with my reference images. But I do see almost a kidney like shape here. Something similar that I'm just trying to establish that with the standard brush. I'm just going to carve in here, knows a bit of a lip around the shape here. So I'm trying to create a bit of a recess to create that lip. Right. And a bit of smooth to knock it down a bit to Sam around his mouth. And this area right underneath. Come around to the front and give it a little bit of the same attention. Using that standard brush. Over time. The results you'll get from each brush, rather, using its default method or holding Alt will start to become second nature. And you'll know which brushes to give you what results. So now around them, I smooth things out a bit. Let's try to add a bit more definition. Now the clay buildup brush on a low intensity, gradually building a form in here. I'm not crazy about that texture it comes with, but I do like having a flat a flat brush and inform here as opposed to the round round tip that comes with the standard brush. So if I have something in-between, that will be perfect. So when I use the clay buildup brush, I like to follow it with some smoothing to get rid of that texture from the hard edges. Okay. Still focusing on the front here. It's trying to fill out what error are going to work on next. We'll stay here at the front. Up a little volume here. Smooth in it. Like so. It's not super bumpy. On the head of this particular species ago fish. But I'm sure there's, it's not exactly flat or smooth. So just trying to send you, wait. What's there? Which to test stroke with the slash three brush here. I'm going to create a bit of a sharp, sharp recess underneath the eye just to situate it. Now because I necessarily see it, they're just making an eye a bit bigger using the Move brush. Maybe a little bit too big. All right, Now back to the clay buildup. Just going to add a little bit more definition to the eye. Just trying to add some interest. And now each polish brush, I'm just gonna kinda flatten things a bit here. Like so. Alright, like how that's looking. Now, two slash three brush. I'm just going to just run that around that little detail. Just added. And over time, you'll, you'll probably do some of these. Make somebody's decisions. Such as deciding what's, what you see versus what would make the sculpture look better. For instance, some of these details I'm sculpting around the eyes I don't necessarily see FOR form, but I felt they'll make the sculpt look a little better. Okay. Smooth here. So that's pretty good for the face. Go back to the moon, brush and make some tweaks. Use that brush to change a few forms here. Alt click to push the mouth portion and a bit like so, just flattening that area a little bit more in a few more nudges and smooths. I'll just pull this down a bit. And just to make these tweaks here. Now using the snake hook brush to pull out the lower fence. And just redefine the shape and flow of these fans here. Sometimes it's good to play with the more fluid and organic results or the snake hook brush. And applying a bit as smooth as needed here. Like so. Fairly medium to small brush. I'm sure I'll get a nice smooth right. Back to my Move brush. Usual. The Move brush. Never too far away in the process. All the way until we're done. We'll be reaching for that brush. Right. Now. I'm just kind of working from this three-quarter angle and seeing which direction I want to push the fans in and get them to look a bit dynamic. Also kinda considering what angle will try to capture the fish from. Keep that in mind. Kinda looking back-and-forth at my reference images, just trying to see which direction I should take the fins in. Continuously making nudges as ultimately decide which shapes I want between the reference images. And this is likely a similar angle capture our final from Saul costly return is angle. Now that pinch brush, I'm just squeezing towards the base of that thin one is origin. Just so I can get a smaller, smallest section here. Looks a bit more natural. And try the same thing in here. And it's very critical that you get the right breast size to perform pinches like that. Alright. A little bit on the tail there. And now back to move. And a little bit of moving. Now, the standard brush here, you see if our running across these skills will still retain most of their form. I'm going to do that here to create a slight deviation in the base form of the fish's body. Here. I say I'm nearing our polygon. Limit here. So very song. We're gonna go ahead and reduce that. Just playing around with the, some detail on their fin here. Holding Alt to carve in and releasing to create raised strokes. I'm going to click that little button to reduce our mesh stated earlier. Just let that process and wants done. We went from over 6 thousand now 250 thousand, right? Also going to go ahead and save our file. Alright, so now we're all good. Just start a new with low-res and work on a few new areas here. I'm just smoothing out some stuff. Alright, so now I'm going to put a bit more work into these fins here, and I'll start to develop a bit of texture. So what the standard brush, I'm just running across lightly. Not all key to kinda press down, flatten out the fin. Now I'm holding the Control key and all. I'm not using sculptures Pro as I'm working. And you can tell this by the texture that's usually created. When you use sculptures, probe rashes, things get a little crunchy as I like to call it. A little mood brush to tweak our form here. Pull things out. Just thicken it up. Feel that fits the style of official little bit better. Check from this angle as well. Trying to change the direction a bit. I think that's good. Supply a bit of smoothing. And I'm just trying to H polish out, see what the results will be on this. I'm trying to flatten it out a bit. Quiet care for that. So I'm just applying a bit of smoothing wherever it's needed. And we're just going to go ahead and re-establish the shape of this fin here. I want it to be smooth first. Alright. Spine angle. However, ultimately be working from I'm going to tug on yeast tail fins till I get them in a more dynamic shape and flow. Okay? Now, standard brush here. I'm just going to start laying in some detail. Just using that smooth brush again, a small size to add some geometry here. And now the holding Alt with the smooth brush and occasionally not holding Alt. And a variation of recessed strokes and regular re strokes here. And the key here is to make sure these lines, or as Nate from the base of the tail of the goldfish, moms, we do that. They'll look natural. And I'm making my brush smaller and time and time. And just restructuring areas and just building up this texture here. And my goal is we work on this as not for the goldfish to look exactly one-to-one. We hit our cap here. So we're going to have to go ahead and reduce. That is the earliest not to get a one-to-one look and resolution and style, but just mimic some of these details here. Now we're down to 300 thousand poly goldfish. I'm just going to continue to add those details. Alright, important to keep in mind as we, the more we reduce were losing polygons elsewhere. So we might want to keep an eye on that. Especially the resolution that we're reducing our mesh to, like how it's looking thus far. So let's do the slash brush and just accentuate what we have here. Now. Occasionally I'll also hold the Control key and make these strokes as to not add additional geometry. While we're working. As you see, there is no additional polygons being added for these strokes here. Now we're getting deeper recesses. And you do the same thing while holding the Alt key. If you want to create some ray strokes here. And that is a very good tip to keep in mind for managing your poly count. And it's trying to get the most out of your detail. I'm pretty sure we're going to see that bit of the back side of the rear side of this tail fins or insight to say. So I'm just going to add a little bit of that detail a here to still holding the Control key so as not to add any additional policies. Right? Like how that's coming out. Can go to the clay buildup here. Just kinda add some would be scales. It's making strokes here. Like we won't be viewing from this angle, but I just wanted to add that in there. Now with the pinch brush, I'm just going to apply a bit more pinching back here. Like so. And help us to get a more natural transition between the body and the tail fins. Good. Let's go ahead and grab the Move brush and continue to tweak some overall profile of our goal Fisher. And we're going to do same thing for the other. Fence in in a moment. Some of it done making adjustments. Right. Come out along. Continue to make our nudges here until we're ready to move on to apply some detailing to another area. So figuring out this profile, this tail area, and his tummy. So just realize I had occlusion off all the time. Give us a bit more pop to our depth as we sculpt here. Definitely want that on. Then also try some of these met caps. See things in a different light immaterial. Even the gold one. Skin shade. Shiny toy. That's a flat one and a foil won. Chess for just for checking out, scowl, go back to the mat, cat 1. First 1. Just move around and continue to make some nudges on these scales here. Trying to establish a little bit of a flow to the skills that similar to the one I referenced. And down to that head thin, they're going to do saying same thing we did to our Till. And just get ready in a bit of smooth brush. Now on to the standard brush. I'll just brush naturally. But in sculptors pro do is work hadn't geometry via the size of my brush. Alright. And now holding Alt to make some raised edges in our fin here. Go ahead and grab the pinch brush. I'm just going to run that along the base here. Just trying to create a bit of a tighter edge. Do it again with a bigger brush. And it's more noticeable. Now. Let's try it one more time. Not as intense. Can we can just create a bit of a tighter edge around the base of that fin there. Come back to a standard brush a little bit closer in this time. And she continued to add more layers. More strokes in-between our previous strokes. Little bit more pressure this time around. Out. Just kinda blend that in the base here. Like so. Maybe a little bit of smoothing here and there. My brush size. And make sure to do a few strokes from this angle here. No, to create some depth on that edge. Near the back. And almost near near a moderate completion here. From here we can just proceed to detailing. Continued detail as to say, use pinch here while holding control. As to not use DynaMesh. And do the same here. And just use a little pinch wherever. Little h polish you can actually flatten these details out. Hold the control key so as to not use sculptors pero. You could see the difference. Okay. Mssa, good way to kinda polish down the surface while retaining some of those details. Now I'm going to come back in here with a slash brush this time. And just kinda restrict some of that in time to just fill out the details and try things out. See what works. You can always undo. If you didn't like the H Polish portion. But this time with the slash brush, not getting as much information. As much depth as I was with the standard brush, which works fine for the thin. Or you can use all the brushes you want. Okay? But to the snake hook, just going to play around holding the Alt key. So sculptors Pro won't decimate the surface as I'm editing. Back to my brush now. Just pushing and pulling some things here. Never really done tweaking until you call it quits. So just continue to tweak big part of the process. So return. Down here. She wanted to fill in this gap here to make a few strokes that can assimilate that texture that we apply. Making a few light strokes. Going back to the tail. Like so. Just to kinda get a better blend. And I'm going to smooth the inside of this fin that I'm seeing a bit of a low resolution there. Alright, let's return back to the lower fin here and give it a bit more detail. Switch to the Move brush right now. Kinda get its form setup for sculpting. Want to get something a bit more dynamic in here. I'm holding Alt and just pushing and pulling all around just to see what type of type of shape kind of create here. Okay. Maybe I should try. Flatten this out a bit more and go ahead and get the clay buildup brush. And just use that to try to help define the form of bit more sculpting normally, button sculptors pro sub-divide as needed. I'll get some nice detail in here. Not the best really symbolize the natural log of the fin. Just continue to layer these strokes over one another. As we build up this texture here, we are nearing our polygon limit. So very shortly. To decimate our model. Just applying a little smooth brush to smooth out some of the low resolution. Now with the slash brush, I'm just going to see if these layer together. Well, the texture we're trying to create here, just up my, the intensity. It's looking better. Alright, nice light strokes. I felt that a work. Just apply a little bit more smoothing up top here. Maybe need to get in a bit closer with the smooth brush to add some more resolution. But for now I'm just viewing things from our future Capture Image angle. I'm going to cross the mid button here. For a medium decimation, I'll take our current count of 6600, 43 thousand to almost 300 thousand. Okay. Let's go back to that fin were working on and what the slash three brush, just try to blend that fin texture into the body a bit more. Get it to look a bit more natural. I'm going to apply a little bit of that action to this fan up for the previous one. Continuing to use a slash through your brush. Just a bit. Let's go back to that clay buildup brush and try to re-establish that same texture that we have before. Just changing my brush size here and they're holding Alt occasionally to dig into the mesh like that. Much better and do sound to the backside. Supplying a bit of smooth. Because that will be seen in our final image. Somewhat nice and smooth. I'm just going to run the brush across debt side as well. Too much as it is in the background I want to save some are polygons to the slash brush and apply that to the backside of this fin. Could really see some more depth now, which is all we need to continue to do so to the fin in the foreground. Just moving around to grabbing the pinch brush. Now, the medium-size brush, planet bit of smoothing around that base of that fin. And try to use a pinch brush to create a tighter, tighter edge around the base here. Like so. It looks a bit more natural to me holding the Alt key while performing that pinch. Looking at this fin now, thinking about doing the same, let me get a few tweaks with the Move brush. Smooth and back to the pinch. Okay? Blindness, move a bit thicker, brush a bit smaller. And we're going to try. As we have. We have some geometry and the way so we have to kinda maneuver and make sure to strokes and move our camera. So it's really a sweeping motion because you pull in geometry towards the center. And I'm ultimately going to use the Move brush can establish the same effect. Just pushing and pulling. That shape looks a bit better in that area. A bit of smoothing. Now with the age, pause, undo that, silent a whole control, and apply the H polish. In order to deactivate sculptures Pro. As you can see, things do perform differently. These are how the brushes and the brush before normally without sculptures pero enabled. Back to the Move brush. Now, just continue to edit that shape that we're coming closer to this up now it looks pretty natural. Natural for our Argo fish. Let's see here back to the clay buildup and try to establish that texture we had going for ourselves that hello while back. And kinda feels like I might need a bit more geometry and the fin. But it is working. Trying to create some contrast in these layers strokes. We have to return to slash brush to add that. But I am pretty happy with this. Okay. Let's continue to make strokes from its rear angle here. And some on the inside as well. Not to hold the texture. So too much of this be seen. Undo that straight stroke. They're saying what too much of this be seen. But it's good to add a bit of detail. Okay. Some out a bit. And add a few of those strokes to the head fin. I kind of want to keep things a bit consistent here. Just changing the pressure which I'm applying it. Okay. I think that really ties in together a bit more. Let's go ahead and grab the in-flight brush. Just see what it does for his eye a bit like that. A bit of a bulge their eyes. Someone to decimate our model. This time clicking high. This way it will retain more of our details, but we won't have as many, much of a gap to our limit as we're now near 500 thousand. So we have to be strategic with our, our details going for here. But we're almost done. The perfect kind of project for sculptors pro. A single asset with a minimal amount of detail can be accomplished using sculptors pro here, I'm just adding some extra polygons to the inside of this tail. So I'm pretty sure the inside we'll be seeing when we capture our final image. And add a bit of standard brush here. It's trying to add a bit of that fin texture here. Like so. Okay, a little bit of smoothing. Just keep my eye on that polygon count next. So that's pretty good. Just switching between holding the control key. I'm making strokes here and there. Okay, Just checking our main angle here. We'll go ahead and save a new version of this. Okay? I'm gonna go ahead and turn off symmetry. Go to the snake hook brush. And I'm going to hold Control key to deactivate sculptors Pro. And while we make edits here, and I'm just trying to do a bit of thin posing. Trying to add a bit of asymmetry here. At a bit more of a natural look. Nothing too crazy as its only it's fence. I'm just shifting from different angles and pulling. Not too far as you'll see some stretching. The further you push and pull. Just trying to add a bit more the dynamic aspect to the fence. Kind of the fun part here. No real wrong answer. You can't really push it too far as well. Definitely. One of the more standout features of the goldfish. Okay. One thing you'll see too much of this on trying to pull it up. Like so. And let's proceed now with our References off screen. Just pose up on do that. Make sure you hold that control key. Pool. Like so. Try and retain in good shape. It's trying to look up top here. I'm going to turn on symmetry back on what the standard brush, but to make a few more changes at three, decimating our model once again, once again unhide, it is checking out geometry, smoothing out a bit here, turn out a bit more extra GL. Next few steps here. Because you want to retain as much of our detailed as possible here. Just making a few last minute sculpt changes here. Right here on the head. Little bit more definition around his eyes. I'm just doing that with the standard brush, KG, changing my brush size. And just light repeated touches to build up just a little form. And now H Polish, low-intensity. I'm just going to round out some areas here. Slightly flatten them out. A little bit on the eye. Helps you catch a bit of light as well. Okay. And just moving around. Find any other areas. Use this on back to a standard brush and put down some kind of indication of a nose. Still a little bit. And now a little bit around the mouth. So extra detail into the slash brush to create a deeper cavity, sharper KV as well. Make sure that mouse stands out. A bit of a recess here. I'm holding Alt, but control as I'm stroking and using the geometry that's already on our model. Trying to make sure we don't use any additional geometry until need it in there, just go. Don't be too concerned about geometry, that's only something to worry about. We really want to push sculptors Pro, just sculpt and get as much as you can out of it. There's really no problem to continuously re, meshing or read decimate in your model. Zbrush is really good at retaining detail. So alright, just going to click this turntable button here. I feel like we're a bit off center. So my hat to redo that. I'm just gonna go ahead and name this anyway. Go Fish movie and save it to the desktop and it is clipping. So going to try that one more again, just trying to offset that rotation. Make it smaller as well. Okay, I think that should work. Let's try clicking their core turntable button. It's better. A little bit off. I'm going to cancel that. Just click frying the center. Our viewport made my goldfish smaller. Slide it back a bit. And I think that should be much better. Alright, just save over the other movie. Yes. Right. And that is our turntable. Let's go ahead and try one more again. I think that one's much better. Okay. Definitely happy with that one. All right, so now let's go ahead and capture a image. Just trying to find the best angle. Can have a few. I like this under view, but also like it's top-down view here as well. I'm just gonna go ahead and press the Export Image button. Go ahead and name it goldfish. Large. Click Save. Next, click to drag around the viewport. Click and drag these cropping corner icons, these little red circles. And use a slider if you want it to do the same thing. Okay? So when you're done, click Okay. And that will export our image. Wraps up our goldfish demo. In the next clip, we will conclude the course. See you there. 9. 08 Conclusion: This concludes the course. I hope you enjoy learning the tools and methods used for digital sculpting ZBrush core mini. Don't stop here. Continual growth by studying the working methods of other digital sculptors via YouTube. And as always, remember to have fun at me on social media and subscribe on YouTube to stay in a loop of content and future courses until next time. Happy sculpting.