Zbrush for the First Time Beginners

1. Course Introduction: Hi there. My name is Sean Fowler and I'm a 3D freelance artists with over ten years experience and a ZBrush artist for almost 13 years. And I'm here to give you an in-depth tutorial on my newest course, ZBrush for the first time, beginners course dedicated for those interested in learning ZBrush. In this course, we have an introduction section for our first-time users before proceeding right to sculpting alongside with us. Sculpt and environment, utilizing both 2D and 3D reference provided for you. Some of the things we'll cover are as follows. How to sculpt in ZBrush for the first time with a, an intuitive and compounding approach as each lesson progresses. And understanding of the viewport of ZBrush with a simple breakdown of its elements. You'll gain a grasp of the most commonly used functions of ZBrush, such as poly grouping, zero, measure, and the gizmo tools will cover an introduction to how the basics of life booleans work. And in addition to you, again, a solid understanding to ZBrush is built-in hair system, viral rash, and finally, a breakdown on the basics of rendering and exporting an image. Now it is my hope that by the end of this course, you should have a solid foundation and confidence in understanding ZBrush, as well as a fully flushed out character yours to add to your portfolio. Now, with that said, let's start sculpting 2. What To Expect: Okay, so let's officially begin. Hello and welcome to the ZBrush for the first time beginner course. This course is basically dedicated for a beginner person that's opening up ZBrush for the first time or somebody who has a general beginning amount of experience. And of course, in this video, I'm going to outline to you the basic three Section approach of this course and what to expect down the road. So to get started with, we're going to have a section one Introduction. And on this section we're just going to be covering in the first seven lectures about, I should say, first six lectures. Really, it's about the basics of ZBrush. And it's really something mainly geared towards a person opening up ZBrush for the first time or a person that does has not had a lot of experience at all with ZBrush. It's sort of like a conditioning point to get you into the second section so you can have a start off base of everything you need to know. So to break that down a little further, that first section, we'll be covering things like viewports, learning how the gizmo deformer and gizmo tool translate tools work how sub tools are organized in ZBrush with multiple meshes. And some of the more basic core concepts of digital sculpting with ZBrush like subdivisions and how they work with brushes, smoothing, isolate, select understanding polygraphs, DynaMesh and 00 measure. All these things are covered pretty much in the introduction to ZBrush. Now, we're also going to say that the very first section does not cover every single small feature of ZBrush. And that's because we want to start you with the starter basics to get you started with sculpting a character. These are some of the more commonly used features in ZBrush that we included in here. Now, as you continue in the second section where we begin our character sculpt, you will continue learning new features within ZBrush, which can translate to how small things like dynamic thickness or surface noise, how all those, all those fun things work. But I would like to stress to you very carefully that ZBrush is main function is a digital sculpting program. So definitely have a mindset of you're gonna be learning things pertaining mainly to what it's mainly used for, which is sculpting. So with that said, when we go into this beginner section, we're going to give you a 2D reference. We're gonna give you 3D models also of that same reference to give you a little bit of flexibility. And that's going to help you to start and follow along with us as we block out a character. Now will be blocking out the character's body with basic shape primitives. We'll start with the top of his head, that mushrooms sculpting area. We're going to be sculpting a mushroom. We're gonna be working on eyes, mouth code, just about everything. And then from there, we're going to finish off with a section three where we sculpt and create an environment for our little mushroom monk to exist into. And after all that said and done, we're gonna be doing rendering. Now again, some of the things we'll be doing environments is, is we will be learning how to create rocks. How the concept of sculpting ground can work with various brushes and nice quick little introductory into fiber mesh and how we can break down that feature and use it to our advantage in creating something like grass. So once you are done with that, as I say before, the very end of this course, we'll conclude with a rendering image of a character. Now, again, you can feel free to use this rendered a character that you sculpted and added to your portfolio to have to assist in your career or a beginning your journey as a 3D artist. Or you can just do it as a hobby to kind of build your skills off of. So with that said, the last thing we're going to talk to you a little bit about is just trying to have a strong emphasis on this course is all about learning through a process of iterations repeatedly, over and over again through practice. And finally, when you are learning, if there is ever a time, I'm going too quickly or talking too quickly. Again, this is a video course online, so please, please remind yourself that one of the biggest advantages is to stop rewind, watch again. In fact, my own instructors said one of the preferred ways is just simply watch the video completely through without having to do anything. And then go ahead and follow along on the second time because you wouldn't believe how many things you catch if you re-watch the video or stop rewind play to catch something that wasn't there before. With that said, I want to wish you a awesome journey to learning ZBrush. And I say, let's start sculpting 3. View Port Breakdown: Okay, so let's begin. In this first video of the course, we're going to talk to you a little bit about what z brushes. And also we're going to go ahead and do a demonstration of how you go about drawing an object into ZBrush and go over the basics of the button configurations you have to press to make it sculptor. And after that, we're going to then conclude with a breakdown on the viewport of ZBrush and all the components around it. So let's go ahead and begin. Now. The question comes to mind. What is ZBrush? And ZBrush to put simply is a digital sculpting program most commonly used for artists for our portfolio purposes or for gaming or VFX industry standards of workflows. They are used to create high red sculpts. And then most commonly those high-risk gulps get projected into low res models for normal maps. It's very much a program that is capable of doing rendering. And it's also capable of doing Rita apologizing as well. But those two, amongst other side feature ZBrush can do isn't really what it's known for. As I said right at the beginning. As there are many different softwares out there that can do sculpting. Zbrush is still the most in-depth digital sculpting program out there. It is definitely an industry standard. So let's just go ahead and give you a little demonstration of it. When you first open up ZBrush, you're going to notice this little shelf typically most commonly shows. And what this is is called a light box. And a lightbox is sort of like a, an asset organizer. It gives you a whole bunch of things to start off with, to get a project started for you. Think of it like a spice rack that helps you put several ingredients together to get an object. So if we go up here, we can see like projects, like we can go into here, like a head planes if you wanted to sculpt like for example, a head, there's many things for that. It's just a sort of compiled nation of many different 3D objects. And furthermore, it's a place that stores any extra brushes that cannot be fitted onto the main brush pallet that shows up. You can always refer to here and do some experimenting. In addition to that, you also get a whole bunch of alphas as well. And if you just kinda go through, you can see there's even a quick Save tab that shows all the quick saves you do if you want to choose a certain quick so file, it will automatically calculate that for you. Now to turn on or off the light box, you just simply go up to here where it says lightbox and just click it off. Or you can just hit the Comma key. So that's just sort of a quick little intro to light box. So now we have a complete blank canvas. You should have hit the Comma key or hit the light box. So what we're gonna do next is let's just draw in a 3D primitive of ZBrush. So I'm gonna go over here to the right side here where it says Tool. And I'm going to choose a 3D permanent, such as the seed cylinder 3D. Left-click on that. You'll see a whole bunch of drop-downs and just sort of options modifiers for there. And if we click, left-click and drag, you can see a cylinder come up. But if you left-click and drag again, it doesn't really kinda draws one over. And so we're asking ourselves what's going on here. I'm constantly doing all of these little left clicks and drags, but I can't seem to sculpt on it. Well, that's because right now what you're seeing is is what they would call two-and-a-half d mode. It's sort of like a blank canvas. It's a little confusing to explain to a first-time person, but a lot of the times we use this mode to create things like normal maps or alphas, et cetera, with the sRGB grabber, It's a, it has a multipurpose use, but for us, it doesn't really serve our purpose. If you're a first-time beginner and you're trying to learn how to sculpt. So let's just go ahead and hit Control N to clear all that out. And I'm just going to draw one more in. If you want, you can hold Shift to snap it in. Now. Go ahead and hit the T key. And that will make this rotatable now. So now when we move Around, not new cylinders won't show up. Now, you may think you're ready to sculpt at this point, but believe it or not. Because if you left-click and try to sculpt, you'll get this to enable sculpt sculpting, please convert this 3D primitive to a poly mesh 3D. Now, before we go into this, it's important to note that right now what you're in is sort of an initialize edit mode of the 3D primitive. So this means that if I hit go into wire-frame, which is Shift F, you can kinda see all the wireframes. And if I go into the modifier of initialize, you can do things to initialize and create your own customized version here. Now, to truly make the sculptural as the sine gave you, we go over here to tool and we hit make poly mesh 3D. So that's how you do that. And once that happens, you'll be able to sculpt. You can kinda see geometry displacing when you hold left-click down. So with that said, we're going to review how you do that. First thing you do is you will go ahead and left-click drag. In a primitive, you will hit the T key. And then from there you go up to here where it says make poly mesh 3D. And then you click on that and you're ready to sculpt. Of course it's got a lot of low density and a lot of low geometry to make any sort of high resolution. But we'll go over that down the road. Now, moving on, Let's just talk now about all the components that are around all the areas around here and just do a real quick basic rundown. And we'll start over to the right. Now over here where it says Tool, you'll have your options for loading and saving project files which are typically stored as CTL scenes or as ETL files. Down on import, you can import 3D models into here. And also the format for that is it dot OBJ, FBX. Typically, you can do also export FBX, BJ's, or FBX is out. Now below here are the different sub project files. So if I have another project file and I wanted this one to be like a cube, you can work in different areas here, but I don't want to get you to focus on that just yet because I want you to kinda stay with me on this one. So after that, we're going to show you there's a whole bunch of things we have to go over and a whole bunch of courses that can actually talk about each and every one of these. So we'll just go ahead and keep it down to just a little bit that all these areas are pertaining to a form of modifying the object in some way. The tools for this are most commonly if you want to modify an object like deprivation, these are all things that have different functions that give a behavior out to the sculpt that we're doing. If we made a thing called group loops on here, we would have also a whole bunch of modified topology options we can do where we can put edge loops around those group loops. It's just endless supply. So we're not gonna go too deep. It's just this is where we go when we want to manipulate the undo some auto topology. The only thing I'll talk about here is that we do have something called sub tool and any 3D model, whether it's an environment or a character that has multiple separate meshes is typically under here. As we go through further down the road, this is gonna make sense how we organize this, how we split it, the various ways we can split it through concepts called masking, which again we go over. But that's sort of what we're going to do. They're now moving on. We're going to go to the top here. And this area right here, particularly these three areas here, here and here, are pertaining most commonly to the manipulation of the brush in terms of its radius and its focal shift, which is that small circle that is within the ZBrush diameter brush. So it's like if you hold spacebar down, you can also get a similar quick pop-up menu that shows up right here. And you can kinda see where focal shift is and how you can change it. We'll go over that later down the road. So all those things are gonna be lots of fun. And then down over here, this is sort of modifying the attributes of the brush most commonly. So like we have a standard brush, a stroke for that standard brushes are gonna be sprinkled on there. We sprinkling Alphas of any kind or just regular dots. You can do a whole bunch of modifications to it. And then of course, down here we have something where we can change the mat to help us see the texture better. So to kinda give you an idea and conclude this, this area here is about talking about the, how the brush paints onto here. Over here. The standard, the brush, the stroke and the Alpha. Those are all things that pertain to how the brush behaves and paints on here sort of like its behavior. And then on here, discusses the size of the brush. Over here, these features have become outdated, but they're most commonly associated with a concept called gizmo, which is this piece right here. If you hit the W key, you can kinda see it pop up again. That's the W key. And it's gonna be something that we cover in the next video lesson here because we want to show you how to manipulate objects before we start sculpting onto them. So with that said, let's go ahead and move on to the gizmo deformer 4. Learning Gizmo And Subtools: Okay, so let's continue. In this video, we're going to talk to you how to manipulate and move an object, both with out and with the gizmo deformer. We're going to also go over a brief demonstration of how sub tools work and which will be one of the first tabs under our tools section. And then after that, we're going to move on to how to sculpt and the concept of subdivision levels. So let's go ahead and get started. Now, if we take a look at what we have here, one of the first things I want to say is if you don't like this gray area and you wanna get your screen to be bigger. Go up to document here, and just go ahead and hit new document, but make sure that WE size is turned on. Once you do that, it will say closing document has been changed. I want to hit no. And then you got a nice big canvas. Let's see if we can draw that once again, right back in there with left-click drag, go by what you learned before. If you drew another one, like so, hit Control N, do it one more time. Hit T. You can move it around. But it's not. Well, it is sculpt the bowl, but most people will hit poly mesh. Now, to pan this, you can hold left, left, Option, left-click. I'm thinking of a different software because I work in a lot of different 3D softwares. And of course, if you wish to zoom in, zooming in is a little bit tricky. It's holding left option down. You're in left-click down, so you're in this pan mode right? Now while still holding down left-click, release, left option. And now you're still holding down left-click and you can just kind of zoom in that way. It's a weird, weird, weird way of zooming. I know. But it's, it becomes pretty, pretty fast. Also, another thing is, is you gotta do it in empty space, like here. So again, that's left Option, left-click. And then once you're in this pan state, release the left option, but you're still holding left-click and that's how you zoom in. So that's kind of how you manipulate and rotate han an object. It's left Option, left-click per pan, just left-click for rotating around. And it's left Option, left-click, then rotate, release. Left option. And you're gonna go ahead and get the Zoom as long as you're holding down left-click. So that said, let's talk to you a little bit now about what's up here. And it is going to be the Gizmo. If we want to access our gizmo, we can hit either the W, E, R keys, and you'll see this kind of target radical come up. Now. This is an important one for manipulating objects around here. But what you're looking at is basically like a mini user interface to move an object. Of course, you've got your circle to rotate it around and you can rotate it in different directions. And of course, if you want to go back to that default state, all you have to do is just hit Control Z or drag up here to the history bar. Like so. Remember, again, probably a very common one to use Control Z undo. Alright, so moving on, we're going to go ahead and just kinda show you that in gizmo, we can also hold down Shift and it will snap by 30 degrees. In addition, it does that for the scale. But it won't be doing that for the translate. On top of that, we have a whole bunch of things that go by. We see a whole bunch of little area under Transform type which is characterized by this cog here. We can do things to manipulate and bend the shape of a gizmo. For example, 11. A type is, you can kinda see right here, we can manipulate it gizmo through the orange cones under taper, which was this modifier, you can just hit Accept. And if you want to turn gizmo off, you can hit the Q key and then you can just sculpt from this state. So to summarize again, to turn on the gizmo, it's either the WE are keys. You can move, you can translate, you can free roam, or you can rotate. You can scale, you can stretch it like so Course I'm hitting Control Z to undo. You can manipulate transforms like for example, I did the twist for one which are, I'm sorry, not the twists but the, Forgive me, the taper. But to give you an idea though, 11 thing that advanced users do is they will compound a whole bunch of things on here. Like you're seeing me do right now. You can do that. So this is where you have to go through. And as I say, we're showing you how to explore the whole thing. We're not going over every single one, like it's an encyclopedia because this is still not constituting a digital sculpting. But you can do quite a, quite a few interesting concepts through here. If you want. This is an example of another deformer, the bend line. I'm sorry, Ben curve, forgive me. And you can manipulate the dots like so. And you can kind of have fun with this. So that's kind of a little breakdown of the deformers that you're seeing here. You can also change the primitives out if you wish. Now, moving on to the gizmo, the next one is going to, I don't really touch sticky mode that much but this upside-down teardrop, you ever, if you ever have a center point off, you can just click that upside-down teardrop. And it can basically turn everything. You can turn it back into its center point. If you hold left option, you can move this around and the gizmo will move through here. And another interesting point is that sticky mode is kinda like maintaining where the pivot points that I never really touched that though. Mesh to access is sort of resetting everything. Mesh reorientation is just like as you can hold left option and click on the translates. You can also do that for here as well. So when you do that, if you hold left option and then click Reset orientation, it will reset to a default space. And of course, when you click to go to access, it will go to its center point. So actually I clicked the upside-down teardrop. Now, transpose is something I kinda want to stay away from until we're clear on understanding other concepts of ZBrush. So with that said, we're gonna go ahead and conclude with the sub tool section. Now. No backup here just a little bit. Now the sub tool is basically like an organizer for all the different meshes that exists within a character or an environment that you have that you're sculpting. So you can be sculpting multiple different meshes at the same time. Now, the sub tool, It's a little, there's a lot quite a bit to go through. But one thing I will say before going any further is if you hold the left command, you can go through and see all the different descriptions under Neith, where it says sub tool. So we have quite a bit that we can do under here. But to put simply, since we only drew in one object, we have one sub tool. If we wanted to duplicate this, which we can, we can then hit the W key and translate across and you'll see two pieces. Then I'll go ahead and give a taper so you know which one's which. You can hit. Accept. And I'll hit Q to go back into edit mode now and before I forget, Q is sort of, I'm sorry, right here. Draw is right where you want to, if you want to do any sculpting. So if I try sculpting on here, nothing's going to happen. So I need to be on the right sub tool in order to do sculpting. You can also turn the visibility on or off. These extra buttons here pertain to Boolean operations which are a little bit more advanced and complicated for hard surface, ideally But an additionally, we have things like we can rename the Boolean like straight, and it will rename an update. We can do a lot of things also like delete it, That's pretty obvious, but let's say you wanted to import your cone in here. Like so. And you wanted to go ahead first, you'd have to like, let's, let's pretend for a second. I hit the Import button and I was importing a 3D model of a cone and it came out looking like this. I wanted to combine it with this. Well, first I'd have to choose, you can kinda see the two which represents the two sub tools. First thing I'd have to do is click over here where it says a pen. And I'd have to go ahead and impend the cone in here. Now you can't see it very well because it's in that cylinder. I can kinda see how it works right there. So this is kind of how it works. Another thing you can do is you can also merge sub tools in a whole bunch of digital noise. Merge down means merge one-piece down below this one. So like we do that, we can kinda see and we can also split them, which can be done either through a group split, which we see there's two different poly groups. We didn't talk about that yet, but poly groups are represented by two different colors. Once you hit Shift F in wireframe. Or we can go ahead and split two parts. Since these are two separate parts, it's going to split them automatically or split masked points, which can also do something where if I hold down control, a mask will reveal itself. So let's go ahead and go with split masked points. I'm sorry, split two parts. And we can kinda see R sub tools are kind of rearrange. Now, you can also drag these to the top or bottom, like so. You can use the hold shift and bring one all the way to the top or all the way to the bottom, hold Shift and left-click. And of course, lastly, you can kind of put them all into a folder. So let's say if I wanted to create a folder and call them Prim's, and I just simply left-click and drag all these pieces in here, like so. You can categorize the multiple sub tools that way as well. So it's pretty easy. It's not that hard to go over. A lot of these other things are just kinda self-explanatory. When we said split two parts, that's like a two sub tools are combined and you wanted to do it through the unmasked points or the mass points, which again, that's just if you're holding control and dragging a mask over something. One last thing I want to go through is, is remember when I said that you have to click on a sub tool in order to sculpt it. While also, if you hold left option, you can kind of automatically click on any of these sub tools. So that's kinda nice to go through in case you want. So from this point on, we're gonna go ahead and do a quick save. And then we're gonna move on into the concept of subdivisions and sculpting with your first brush and take it from there. 5. Understanding Sub Divisions and Brushes: Okay, so let's continue. In this video, we're going to talk to you about subdivisions of a mesh and sculpting for the first time by manipulating the brush size and going over the type of brush and many other brushes that come with it through hotkeys. So let's go ahead and dive in. Now, subdivisions are the first thing I want to cover here because the resolution of a mesh has everything to do with the resolution of what sculpted. Let me give you an example. Now. If we look here, we can kinda see in wireframe mode, a sort of default resolution and it's pretty relatively low, or I should say it's relatively low for sculpting. If I tried sculpting, you can kinda see the displacement of the sculpting and we're just doing a basic standard just to show. And it's all kind of pixelated. And that's all because we have a very low resolution. So I'm going to hit Control Z and undo that. And this time I'm just going to hit Control D. And if we do it again, you can kinda see that the sculpture is slightly bit more finer. Now what happened was that we doubled the amount of geometry when we did that. So let's go ahead and go over here to the right. We're kinda gone through one. Let's go into geometry. Geometry is one of the main places where we're modifying a sub tool. And if you can see that big button where it says divide, That's the same as what Control D is, as it shows already right next to there. And don't forget to hit that left command button to learn of all sorts of new things. So you can go ahead and hit it again. So now I've hit it twice. And as you can see, we have yet again an even finer looking sculpt like. So let's go ahead and go undo. And also, if you look up here, we have subdivision levels. Now what that means is if I write now I have three of them. If I drag this all the way down, you can kinda see the first resolution is there. And of course the second resolution is there. Then the third resolution is there. So we have multiple resolutions we can sculpt in. And this can be sometimes very useful when you want to collapse and smooth things down real fast on a slow division and then rebuild them in a higher division. It's very useful. When we go into the smoothing tutorial video. We'll go ahead and talk to you about the relevance of subdivisions there. But to go into it a little easier, we can kinda see basically, if you look up here where it says active points, Let's go ahead and just swing this back down to the first division. And you can kinda see the resolution kinda change, but also look where those active points are, those vertices. You can kinda see also a little bit of a change in it, but the total points is still remaining the same. If you go up one, you can see what it looks like and it's doubled and tripled state. So every time you hit control D or divide, you're gonna get another subdivision level. And again, subdivisions can be explained right here. Course, when you do that, you can kinda see an even finer sculpt like so. Let's go ahead and drag our undo bar all the way. Have some fun. Now. Now that we have that, we're going to talk to you about the hotkey for switching back and forth between subdivision levels because you're not really gonna go over here and put any subdivisions on hearing constantly switched through the slider. You can put it takes a large amount of time. So I'm going to start from the beginning. I'm going to hit Control D wants now it has one subdivision twice, three times. Now I have hit it three times. And if I wanted to go to a lower subdivision without clicking on here, I just hit Shift D and it will go down one shift D, it will go down again. And shift D, it'll go down to its first. To go back up, you do not hit Control D because it will simply give you this message. So what you want to hit is just the D key, like so. So Shift D to go down and subdivisions, and D to go up in sub-divisions. It's pretty much that easy. Now another thing you can do is you can delete subdivision levels by hitting Shift D, maybe you didn't like. And what that will do is that will just delete all the subdivision levels below it, which is what Delete lower is. I can also undo that to regain them. And if you want, you can go to the very first one and delete all the higher subdivisions and you'll see the total lacked points return. So that's sort of its breakdown of subdivision levels so that it kind of gives you an idea how it works when we sculpt first things first, we need resolution in order for things to work out here. As we progress, there are ZBrush has multiple ways of establishing resolution. It doesn't necessarily have to be Control D, but whenever we want to sculpt some detail in, you gotta always keep in mind first you need to divide it. And so that you can start seeing some resolution because this thing is isolating geometry. And you got to also be careful not to go too high. Because I've seen people do like some pretty crazy. Like you should never have a sub tool around 3 million or 1 million is what my instructor always said, but I always cheat and go over 1 million sometimes because I have some pretty crazy sculpts, but that's for a different time. So with that said, we're going to now kind of end off with the brushes and how to modify the brush. Now, let's start off with standard brush. If I click on here, again, you can see a whole bunch of brushes that we can use and we're going to give you, and you may think again that you might need to go through no, all of these brushes. It's not necessarily the truth. In honest reality. You could get away with doing most sculpts with five or six brushes. And then from there, you can honestly expand out with experimentation and make more interesting, quicker results through a similar brush of, from your basic five. It's very important to go through and experiment with these brushes. But don't think in your mind, you have to know every single one of them. For me, it's like five or six is what I use the most to get what I want. So with that said, we're gonna start with its default brush. Now this is one of the five, but there are several more. I honestly think I could use six, but it's not really a big deal of this default brush, which is standard, can be accessed by clicking on the brush. And then looking for standard on here in this lovely Where's Waldo outfit here? And we can just simply find standard right there. Another way we can do is hit the B key to bring up brush. Remember B for brush, and it's standards, so that's s. And then it narrows things down. And you can kinda see this letter right here is t. So t will access standards. So BST will always switch to standard. You can kinda tell every brush kinda has something for you on here. So like if you wanted to move brush, it would be B to bring up the brushes palette M for the first letter, which is move. And then we look in here and we see that V is that key, so V, So now it will switch to the brush and now we can move our mesh and again, go back to standard BST. Now, having said that, there are ways of making a quicker like similar how we have ZBrush is built-in little mini pop-up. When we hold the Spacebar down, we can get our brush where we want here as well. And we can also make additional small little mini pop-ups like Control C to make all our favorite brushes come up. I'm a little bit against that for a first-time user though, because I really want you to get used to the hotkeys of accessing everything and commit it to memory because I don't want to skip you ahead and you don't develop the right habit of knowing how to access things from a different computer. So I do have a tutorial on that, on my cyber punk ZBrush character. But in this one, this is a first-time user. We're trying to get you to access everything in its default phase. So with that said, this first icon is the type of brush. The second one is the type of screw stroke So we saw like what dots do. You can see these debits, but of course, Control Z, undo. If I choose freehand. You can kinda see it's a similar case because it's standard. There's not really much of a difference behavior. But if we choose focal length to be a little bit smaller, it blends a lot easier. That's because the distance between the focal length and here is sort of a blending point to make a different shape like that. Now the thing to remind you is that you can also do an alpha brush, which doesn't really do anything with stroke. But let's say if we experimented with some different types of strokes, like for example, spray, that's what it looks like when it's combined with brush. But then again, you'll get different results if you did like spray with the stroke changed to that too, instead of free hand, go ahead and do that out. So let's go back to standard. And other one is rectangle, which is sort of like a drag and drop. So that would be very, very, very important with alphas. If I wanted to make, for example, this alpha, you can kinda see the edges kind of fall off. So let's give one more resolution by hitting Control D. And I'll give you a preview, kinda see those corners there. That has something to do. Again, the focal shift which is up here. I'll undo it and this time change my focal shipped by holding spacebar in that area. And you can kinda see a little bit more of a harder edge across everything. That's because there's no blending or fall off to the end. Take a look at over here. And then you can kinda see how it blends into this alpha over here. Because you can imagine like a circle is kind of giving you, just take an imagination of a circle being put in that inner circle. It's kinda blending it all the way into 100% value for it to be seen. So that's kinda how focal shift can be made. But don't let that keep you from experimenting because that's what it's all about. Experimenting. Strokes can be done, sprays can be done. Strokes kind of give a little bit more randomness in depth. Whereas spray is kind of a consistent depth. Drag and drop is a little bit more of a of a similar mentality as the drag a rectangle except you can manipulate it. Whereas drag rectangle is stationary to one spot. So you can see how all of this works. We want you to understand this part right here. Not this heart, but the whole idea about combining alphas with different brushes is really where the creativity in ZBrush is. It's really, really got sort of a, a, you can really drag through a whole bunch of unique of scenarios with it. We also want you to be very, very, very curious. And in the idea of doing things like experimenting two different strokes and flows. Like we'll go back to this one and you see this. But then if you go to spray and then go ahead and turn the flow like really down, you can kinda see it look like this, which is a lesser Hello than what it was here. So it's like kind of putting it in random spots and making less stamps in the process. You can do stuff like that. And now this is about where you got to experiment and have some fun and experiment. Like just kinda create your own unique look. Now, one last thing before we will go, and this part we almost did on its own video, but we wanted to talk about it was the smooth key This is a very important one for a sculptor, probably for one that is for organic sculpting. And smooth is sort of this concept where you're kind of imagine it like the eraser button, button in some way. And what it is is it's basically as it sounds, smooth, relaxes what you've sculpted. So if I, for example, made a whole bunch of dots like so, and try it. And I hold, held down the Shift key. Then while holding down the Shift key, you can see my whole mouse goes blue. So when I click on the surface, you can kinda see it kind of smooths set out. Now, it's still pretty lumpy. And that's because we got like six subdivisions. So let's go ahead and undo all of that. And this time, let's take it down a couple of resolutions. Same thing, except this time. A lot quicker process of smoothing. It's a lot less bumpy. Smoothing is something that helps us relax and kinda give us a do over or blends what we sculpted into the surface. It's very, very useful. But one thing to keep in mind about smoothing is that the lower the subdivision, the more it will collapse, and the higher the subdivision. Like. You know how this works, I'm old and smooth down. You can kinda see it's not really collapsing. We got a lot more geometry, quite a bit more than we should. But you can kinda see how it stays together like that. So one thing we can also do is when we're holding Shift down, we can control the intensity of the smooth. If I release Shift, you can see this is the normal brush intensity, sculpting in and out. And then holding shift is the maximum intensity. So you can control the intensity. Turning it down will kind of give you an idea of the debris of the intensity. And just like with the regular brush, you got your own focal Shift and draw size as well. With that said, we've gone over everything in the brush, but we didn't go over the one thing that is used almost as much smoother. And that is the alternation between z add in Z sub. So what that means is by default, if this is on z add, Most people say, well now I gotta hit c sub two minus. Well, not necessarily. You can hold left option or, I'm sorry, no left option and just do z subs this way as well, then go about it that way. Now left option doesn't, isn't a quick key for z sub, it's just the inverse of it. So now if I hold left option under z sub, it would just give me see, if I hold left option with the head turned on, it would just give me z sub. So that's just the last thing that we wanted to kinda go over with you. So this concludes the basic rundown of brushes and subdivision levels. The next lesson we're gonna go over is going to be about masking and how masking works along with isolate selection. So that said, stick around 6. Grasping Masking and Isolate Select: Okay, so let's continue in this video now we're gonna go ahead and do a demonstration of how to do masking and how the isolates selection function works. So let's go ahead and get started. Now to put simply what is masking. We're going to start with masking. It's going to be a way to cover up the geometry with a mask or a shaded area that cannot be edited or sculpted upon. To give you an idea. Let's go ahead and draw out a stroke. If I show stroke right there, notice I'm also on basic material. Again. If I draw a stroke out and you can kinda see it performs as expected. But if I hold down the Control button, just the Control button and sort of paint a glob right there. You can kinda see this as a mask, this dark shaded area right here. So if I paint that same stroke, you can kinda see it went everywhere except the glob area. I'll undo that. Now. One thing to note that when I hold down control and I just hope did left-click to draw my mask. You can sharpen the edges of this mask simply by holding down control and left-click tapping. And then if you, I'm sorry, left option click tapping. And if you want to soften it, you can just sort of hit left-click. Now, it has a very, very high resolution, so the falloff is going to be a little bit slower than a sharp. So we can go down a subdivision here and do the same thing where it's left. Option, click to sharpen. If you want to soften it, just hold control and left-click. And you can kind of make it soft again. So Control left Option, left-click makes it hard and softening it makes it soft. If you wish to clear the mask, one thing you can do is hold down Control and just simply delete the mask that way. So with that said, there are several different ways we can apply masks. We did one which is done through a stroke, but you, if you build off of what you want, if you hold down Control, you can see the mask brush as its own little different areas separate from the regular brush. So you can apply similar concepts like this, where we do a stroke modification and experiment with an Alpha. And if we hold down control and maybe adjust the focal shift, we can make a little bit more of a pronounced alpha. And one thing that's very interesting is, is that if we draw in an Alpha like this, Let's get a little bit more of a sharper one. Like so. Go ahead and bring it back up. But we do anything like this and drawing an alpha like so we can see our mask. We can also invert this mask as well by holding down control and left-click in open space. And you can kinda see the same thing. So if you wanted to kind of draw on something like so you could do something like that. Or if you wanted to go with something like maybe you want to try inflate, you can do something like that. Then of course smooth it out. You want. So that's kind of an idea. So to recap, to draw a mask first, hold down control. Take note that the brushes change up here. Modify the stroke to what you want. And it can be anything. And you can just draw a mask with the alpha on or off. It's up to you. This is all about experimenting. And you can change the focal shift down. And again, that's holding down control and left-click or control option to sharpen the mask. Or if you want, hold down control and left-click. And of course like smooth at higher Division Subdivision levels, the process is going to be significantly less than what it would be if you made the mask at lower subdivision levels. Now, the other thing is, is you can create a mask noxious with the stroke on here, but you can also do it with the mark key, like right here. And one thing we didn't talk about yet is we can also paint off the mask. So if we hold spacebar, spacebar and give a demonstration, we hold Control, left option or left home. And then we can also paint the mask off Like so. If you wish to clear off the mask completely, one thing you can do is just hold Control and just simply drag off and you'll clear the mask as such. Now, one thing I will say is that's sort of the basic rundown of how masking works. This becomes a little bit important down the road as you become a more of an advanced sculptor because you learn to organize poly groups through masking quite often and it becomes very useful. We didn't talk about poly grouping, but that's definitely coming up. So the second half of this is going to be looking at something called your quick pick 3D sculpting brushes. I call them your secondary sculpting brushes tools. And if you kinda take a look at any of these, you're going to notice that you get something that is by default a select wreck, tangle. This brush right here, Is it like an isolate selection? It's basically if you hold down Shift Control, you can access it. And if I hold shift control and left-click, you'll get a green little drag. You can kinda see what we did right here. We can kind of isolate geometry. This is another way. We can also mask. Now, just like the mask, how it changes different brushes up here. Also the isolate, the select, select radical rectangle is going to do the same thing. Now, one thing that I will go on record of saying is that if you hold Shift Control and then release shift control, but you're still holding down left key. You can kind of just keep that alive. It doesn't require you to hold Shift Control, you just need to do it at it's initialized state. So again, if I hold shift control and left-click drag, I can still release Shift Control. Still keep this as live as long as I'm holding it down, holding left-click mouse button down. But another thing that's interesting is if I hold the space bar button. Now I can pan this around. Now in case you're wondering, masks are similar. You just hold down control and left-click and then release control and then hold down spacebar. And you can pan the mask like so. And it also goes without saying holding left older left option can create a subtractive state. And then you can invert that and paint that out. Or you can hold the press DW can push that out if you want. You can have all sorts of fun. Or hold the Shift button and bevel it. It's sort of compact, compounding all the things we've learned. Or if you really want, you can also hold inflate and I have a whole bunch of fun there as well. It's part of that you got to experience experimental learn and have fun sort of scenario. So if we again hold Shift Control and we showed you that spacebar trick for panning. Let's show one more demonstration of that by modifying the brush, I'm going to hold Shift Control. I'm going to change a radical this time to curve. You haven't done that yet. We haven't touched this. But now I draw out a slant. Like so. We're going to get ourselves and isolate, select on whatever's on the green side. If I'm going to go to a lower subdivision, if I want to draw a shift control slant and maybe stop at Midway and then tap the left option key or level. I can create a curvature. And then we can kind of have a little bit of fun there. Of course it doesn't like to obey that very well. So we might just have to do it the old lasso style, but that is something they need to fix. And of course we can also try it with the circle. So it's important to kinda do that. Goes without saying when you hold mass down, you get the same result. If you're using example a curve, you can have fun doing things and manipulating things this way. Now, one other thing about isolate select is, is that you can also do Subtract of things. So hold Shift Control, release Shift Control, and then just hold down option. And that can subtract things as well. So all of these things are very important down the road because like, let's say you really want to manipulate geometry like or have a specific pattern here. And you want to poly group out of that for future sake that all of these things come down to an important function. So with that said, the next lesson down the road is going to be about poly groups. And it's a little bit of a complicated one, so feel free to re-watch it, but it's not something that I am going to say. It's in paramount priority, but it's something to get a good head start on if you're a first-time beginner. So with that said, we're moving on into polygraphs. So stick around 7. What are Polygroups: Okay, so let's begin. In this video, we're going to now talk to you a little bit about poly groups and how poly groups work. And we're going to go over compounding that with what we learned in the last lesson with Isolate, Select, and masking. So let's go ahead and get started with that. Now, poly groups are a little bit of a complicated subject in ZBrush, but to put simply, as I can, poly groups are sort of ZBrush is built-in way to organize a mesh or pieces of a mesh into a section by color coordinating its poly groups seen in wireframe to do various ZBrush functions. Now, that probably sounded a little bit complicated. And it's one of those things where we're just going to have to show you an example of in order for you to understand a little bit more. So let's go ahead and get started to create a poly group which can be created in multiple different ways. One of those ways is by creating first a mask. So I'm gonna go ahead and hold down control just like we did before. And I'm gonna change my stroke back to free hand. And I'm just going to create a mask. Now it's just a normal mask. But what we're going to do is we're going to turn this mask into a polygraph, just this section right here. Now, if we do that, to do that, all we have to do is hit Control W, and that's it. Now, you may see like awake, nothing happened. There's no color. I, it's all the same. Well, in order to see a poly group, fairly, you have to hit Shift F to see the poly group. Also, you can just click over here to go into wireframe mode and you can see it from there. Now, this is what a poly group is. It's sort of an organized little section that helps us to identify a little bit more of like various ZBrush functions can be performed with using the organization of a polygraph pick. What's a good example of that? Well, if you remember also like with Shift Control, we can hold Shift control and left-click and you can kinda see a poly group will only be selected. Another example of various functions that ZBrush uses poly groups for is for example, edge loops, like maybe you look at here. And if I turned, if I, for example, isolate selected all of this, hold a mask on here, and then to bring everything back, I would hold Shift Control, left-click and open space, and then sort of invert the selection. Let's say I wanted to move this like so. Well, it's all jaggedy up here. But if we did something, for example, like for example, we could do something where we could use a group loop which basically looks for poly groups and puts an edge ring over it. That would be a function of ZBrush that relies on the assignment of poly groups that you have. You can kinda see a nice new plane is there. So we tried to repeat the function. You would see a very, very clean mesh over there. In addition to that, there are other, there's a whole bunch of others like there's a deformer that will polish things by the groups of poly groups that you have. There is auto remeshing processes like zero measure over here that looks for freezing poly groups so that a more or keeps the groups intact. So when array mesh is done, you can have a nice little edge flow based on your auto remeshing. It's basically a very, very, very organized way to control how you're doing things. Now, you may argue it could be like the, how do I say this? It could be something that is little bit complicated because we haven't gone over any of these things yet. But again, we're getting there. This is again about trying to look for a sort of baseline start with you on all the important things in ZBrush that are its best-known for and that's sort of digital sculpting and poly groups is important when you want to help yourself with like sculpting certain areas that you don't want to interfere with on the rest of the areas. That extra little nudge As you progress and learn more and more in discover more features in ZBrush, you'll be able to make more combinations in your heads using new ideas in your mind using polygraphs. So this is one way we did an example of a poly group simply by creating a mask and just hitting Control or Command W to create the poly group. That's like I said, one way to do it. There are also like if you go into the polygraphs tab, you can hold down left command or left control. And you can kinda go through and see all the different features that are used. Like group by normals is focused on the angles, on how acute the angles are on in the XYZ axis of trying to get some good poly groups. It will auto, apply poly groups like so. If we turn the tolerance down, you can kinda see an auto group normal happened for these two areas because there was a nice clean angle here. That's usually through the normals of the 3D model. If we kinda see like this little waviness here, we can do things, for example, that can help us clean up all of that. Like this area right here. Maybe you want to go through defamation and Polish by groups. Now you can do that. You can kinda see it a little bit in this area here when I do it. And it kinda cleans that up pretty good. And that, like I said, there's just a whole bunch of features that ZBrush has with the concept and basis of polygraphs. Now we're only giving you just a brief intro to it. But hopefully down the road as things get more complicated. For example, one thing I like to use is often is zero measure. And I always like to use keep groups. And you can, you'd be surprised how well you can get a pretty nice 3D mesh just through poly groups. I don't think I kept the borders same, but you can kinda see we have now a very basic mesh based off of this. And now of course, that's just going off of one of the many functions ZBrush has that obeys into polygraphs. Another example is, for example, if I tried to divide this because when you see Ramesh, you go, which is re, reconstructing a lower res model out of what you've already sculpted. If you do that, you delete all the subdivisions. So if I tried to delete, divide the subdivisions again, you would probably see it rounds out, so I'll undo that. And another perfect example of using poly groups is, for example, if we go into Geometry modify or I'm sorry, geometry crease, there's something called crease poly group borders. And if you look really close at these borders, I'm going to hit crease and kinda see a little barrier was there. It's kinda like an invisible not counting a edge holding edge loop. And so if I divide again, it's going to kind of keep it sharp, as you can see right there. So it's pretty nice to use poly groups to kind of give yourself that redistributed plane. Because if you can see like how we use poly groups to get this nice, clean, crisp edge. We were all the way over and I'm going through my whole we were at a point where like it was quite frankly a lot better than what we had, which was this ugly piece. We did two different functions in ZBrush that relied on the organization of poly groups. We started with poly loops around the poly groups, which looks for poly groups that are too different places and inserts a set of poly groups between them like an edge loop to make it cleaner. We went through the deformation to clean that up and make it more smooth than we went through geometry. And zero measure to keep those poly groups intact. And then we just simply remeshing it, maintaining the polygraphs. There was a whole bunch of features on it. So we're just kinda getting you warmed up on understanding what poly groups are And just how far they can take you. So with that said, we want you to keep on going through and experimenting with all sorts of things. One thing that is this is more of a, this is something that we're going to talk to you relatively quick about, is going to be a knife, cut brush. And well, it's actually going to be a knight curve brush. And what this is is just something we wanna kinda NGO off with. Since we now have an idea about poly groups and how they all work, we wanted to show you one more demonstration of poly groups and how they work with some other features. Now, what I have here is a knife curved brush, and in order for it to work, you have to sometimes delete the lower subdivisions, but it's basically like this slicing mesh. And if I left-click and drag, you can kinda see we cut off the mesh. If I hold Shift F, you can see a poly group is right there now, the avarice is a two. This are pretty profound. Like you can do a lot of fun, hard surface sculpting with this concept. And it will be of very, very fun thing to do. I mean, you can have a whole bunch of fun creating a whole bunch of things. And again, this goes back to more hard surface, but it kind of gives you an idea of why we need to understand poly groups so much so that we can understand more advanced brushes like the knife curved knife circle. Now these brushes are taught in a different course. One, regarding a turtle, a space turtle that I did. We go pretty deep into it regarding all its functionality because this is again as a beginner level course for ZBrush, so we don't want to overload you were just kinda giving you a preview of things. So again, practice establishing poly groups, particularly in masks. Start building and compounding what you've learned. If we've showed you how to do poly groups through a manner of Let me go ahead and do a different mesh here. If we start doing poly groups this way for you, then by default, you should have the same concept apply then for curves as well. So this is a good example of repeating the whole thing that we just did. Once more just to kinda give you a straighter, an easier time of understanding how it all works. We want you to kind of be in the whole process of practicing like that, doing something really fast like that. So like, like going from doing an isolate select to hitting the mask by holding down Control left-click and then creating an entire mask for things that are isolated selected, then doing an invert, then hitting the W key. And then you learn that this was the center masks. So it's going to go over here. And then we want you to bring it in like so now we want you to kinda compound the things that you've learned so far. And it takes a little bit of practice and a little bit of time. But it is definitely worth it to sort of learn to compound this before we begin our character because it will make, it will be easier to track through. So with that said, we're going to finish up with one more lesson. And that's gonna be into DynaMesh. And then we can start our character. So with that said, stick around, stay tuned. 8. Dynamesh Zremesher Introduction: Okay, So let's finish off. In this lesson, we're going to talk to you a little bit about DynaMesh and how DynaMesh works. And if we have a little bit of time, we might just go over one extra remeasure just to give you a sneak peek of things to come. So let's just go ahead and get started. Now, DynaMesh is sort of like a remeasure which basically rearranges the topology of a mesh. Now, you may ask, why do we need to have that? Well, there might be some certain scenarios and where you stretch out. For example, let's go over here to one of our pieces. If I choose the move tool. And there might be some scenarios where the geom, she's so stretched that when you start dividing it, you don't really get a lot of tessellation here versus the areas that have all divided in more scrunched in areas. So this is kinda where DynaMesh is very useful in maintaining that. So let me go ahead and just stretch out a piece of geometry for you and go through the location of where DynaMesh is. If you go and check under pardon me? If you go through and check under Geometry and we go into where it says DynaMesh. You'll pretty much find DynaMesh there. Once you click it on, you'll see how all the geometry suddenly is really meshed and now you have a whole bunch of resolution. So now when you divide up, you can kind of have a lot more sculpting resolution that will be a little bit more sharp. So with that said, some things to take into account about DynaMesh. Usually I like to do a deal where I just give it a couple of divides or a few divides and then turn on DynaMesh. And when it asks for free subdivisions, I normally hit No. That way I kinda have a nice standard setup for DynaMesh. And if you look at it, if you need to make any readjustments like you notice how I'm really stretching everything. Dynamesh can simply accommodate you by holding down control and dragging a mask and then releasing. And you can kind of, it will basically re-compute these areas so I can keep dragging. Let me go ahead and establish something more like the snake hook for you. Like so you can kinda see how we have the Stretch Geometry and we can just reach, apologize it now, this is pretty good for things like for say, blocking out. It's kind of a nice one. Now, let's go ahead and go back. One extra thing I'd like to bring into account is DynaMesh. Also, if we were to go through sub tools and if I hold down control and left-click over, you'll notice I duplicate a sub tool like the, I'm sorry, I duplicated the Mesh, not the sub tool. If you kinda look over here, it shows basically two different meshes. So we didn't hit the duplicate button. We didn't duplicate any sub tool. We just duplicated mesh here. So let me clear off the mask. Now, one thing that's interesting with DynaMesh is that if I were to have these pieces intersect, so if, for example, I had these pieces intersect like this, no matter what, the pieces are two separate meshes, they would be very difficult to separate, but something like move topology could segregate them off, like so. So if you want, one thing DynaMesh can do is if you use DynaMesh and intersecting geometry, you'll notice that it merges and recomputes it and everything within is taken out of the account. So that's kind of a nice looking scenario for how we do it. You can kinda see all the geometry and transparency mode. There's not really anything in there. So that's always nice of a feature and DynaMesh and it's something that we want you to keep in mind when you are blocking out. Typically with DynaMesh, one of the most common things it's used for is in fact character blackout is the one that gets a lot of choices. A lot of people like to use DynaMesh for character block out. So if you were to use a whole bunch of nerves and I'm sorry, not nerves. That's a My term primitives in here to help you with a character block out using a combination of that and maybe the gizmo tool to stretch some objects and taper them into shapes you want for a character, block out and then combine them all up with DynaMesh. You can do that. Additionally, you can just keep constantly stretching things out and just reading a meshing by just control, hitting control and dragging off like so. So that is kind of weird. Dynamesh is. Now, before we end this, I want to kinda give you a quick show real quick of another type of remeasure that ZBrush has. And this remeasure I always like to use because I'm a little old school where I like to work with multiple subdivision levels. And that is under Geometry. And under DynaMesh, we're going to go to remeasure. Now, zero measure is another form of auto remeshing topology similar to DynaMesh. But it also does the job a little bit more clean. Like if you can kinda see all of these pieces right here. It's not really like too terrible on this one, but there's like some pinches on here that we have to always deal with. Zero measure on the other hand, gives us a more clean Ramesh. However, the problem is with zero measure, it takes a little bit longer to compute that clean mesh. Another thing that we can talk to you about regarding see remeasure is that you can guide it example. You can create edge flow here and then create a more uniform piece. But we wanted to kind of give you a little bit of a different Overview between this and DynaMesh and kinda see how everything's more uniform here has a little bit more cleaner topology, whereas DynaMesh is just sort of constantly got this little tapering off. Tries are everywhere. So we just wanted to show you the difference between this. What I like to do is a lot of times if I'm using DynaMesh, I'll start off with my block out with DynaMesh. And once I have what I want, I like to use zero measure more than just work with multiple subdivision levels, which I can just hit with Control D and then go down and up with shifting. So with that said, this concludes our crash course or for the first timers that are opening ZBrush. Because now we're going to take what we have and start to begin a very basic, very simple character for you. So with that said, stick around and stay tuned. 9. Establishing Reference Blockout: Okay, so let's begin. In this video, we're going to go ahead and start our character for the first time. And we're going to start by teaching you a couple of things that are new that we're not in the first-time section. And we're also going to do a quick little basic block out to get us started. Now, before we begin, I would like to remind again everybody on this, if you, this is your absolute first-time opening ZBrush. I do recommend that first section to use first because a lot of the things we're gonna be doing right now kind of compound in to what you've already learned in that first section. It's basic stuff. It's sort of that stuff that it will become naturally ingrained because you're reusing it so many times. So please feel free if you are the first, first-time beginner user and you don't know things like dividing a mashup and then cycling up or down through the different meshes. I would definitely recommend that first section for the first-time user. So with that said, let's get started. Now in the, again, the video is about on here. For this one going to be about how we set up our reference and how we can do a blackout. So with that said, go ahead and try to download the references. There should be two files from your resource folder. In those two files are a J peg, a 2D image, and a OBJ, which is a 3D model containing the end product result. So take a moment to pause and download those. Now if you can. Now, once you have downloaded that, what I want you to do is just kinda double-click and look at that image. Because what's happening right now is that that image is going to look very, very different from what we see on here because I'm going to load my reference image on here. And what you're looking at is an image of a finished product. And I kind of, I'm going to put in a quick scratch image just to demonstrate what it looks like. It's not gonna be like a finished concept or anything like that. It's just gonna be like a quick sketch that I did just for the sake of demonstrating how to load 2D reference image. And that's really all it is. And we're gonna be going over spotlight and how it works with the 2D reference images. You do have a 3D model also in there. And if you want, you can go ahead and hit Import and bring that in. We've shown also in sub tools how to append models. So don't forget we can do that. So with that said, let's go ahead and get started. Let's first disabled a light box, like so. By clicking on the lightbox or the comma key, Let's bring back a little bit more real estate here. If you want to get more image, we did do a demonstration that just go into documents. Click w size and hit new documents. Remember, feel free to pause, stop, rewind, play again if I ever go too fast. So with that said, let's go ahead and load in our 2D reference image. First we go up to texture and scroll to where it says Import. This is where we bring in our 2D image and go ahead and I double-click on your image. It will show up right here. And you can kinda see this sketch which is very different from the image that you have, which should be an ortho. Go ahead now and left-click on that. And what you want to do is just click on Add to spotlight. And it's going to show up right there in front of you. Now from here, we can, if we're going to have a little menu here, and this is the spotlight dial. There's a whole bunch of things we can go over with this, but for now, we're going to just show you how to move the spotlight like so, rotate it like so if you want, you can also do Shift, rotate to snap. We can also write next to rotate, scale it. And we can pan it across like so. We can move the spotlight dial and like a pivot point when you scale it and it can kind of go bigger or smaller. And again, this is a different image from what you're saying. And if you want to make the dial disappear, hit the Z key Z as in zebra. And if you want it to come back, hit Z again to make all of spotlight disappear, hit Shift Z. So that's kind of the basic breakdown of spotlight. So let's now go ahead and go into bringing some primitives in here. Now, a lot of people are going to use the 3D image. In my opinion, I'd like to see if people can use the 2D reference. If you can. I only put the 3D image only in as reference. But let me go ahead and show you something real quick first. If you do decide to go with 3D reference, I'm going to draw in a pre, a primitive first I'm going to click on the cylinder. I'm going to change it to a sphere. And then I'm just gonna go ahead and left-click drag, bring it in, hit the T key, hit the make poly mesh 3D. We already did all this before. Now, if you try to import a 3D image on here, it will replace this piece. So what you need to do is click off of here into another place like a cylinder. And you need to go ahead and import the 3D image from here. And then once you have that 3D image, like so, whoops. Trying to figure out which one I have. Go ahead and hit make poly mesh. There we go. Once you have everything that you want, we're gonna go ahead and we're going to hit sub tool and append. And you're going to look for your 3D model up here where it says quick pics and you can bring it up there. And of course you can press the W key to go through and translate across your main model so you can kinda see it. Now again, I'm not recommending any one to do that, but I just want to kind of give you a heads-up. One thing to note about spotlight is when this is turned on, you're not really going to have access to a lot of sculpting tools, I believe Move brush you will, but to kinda turn it to make sculpting enabled. Turn it off like so. It's not, it's a very stupid rules. The brush has never been a fan of it. Also keep in mind x is cemetery. I like to also have local symmetry. So if you ever want to do anything there, that's what you got. So let's go ahead and set up some primitives. So to begin with, I'm going to go ahead and this is probably going to be the head. Let's append in a, another piece on here. If it wants me to, there we go. Let's see. I'm going to choose the sphere in 3D. And let's bring this guy down here. And I'm using my gizmo, hitting the W key. And I'm just going to bring this in like so. Maybe bring it in like that. Like so. I'm just kinda go in through here. And let's see. We can do the same thing for the arms and the legs here. So I'll just go ahead and duplicate the mesh instead of appending it. I'm going to hit the W key again. And then I'm just going to bring this guy in. One thing that we have to decide here at this point is do you want to make this a T-Pose? Are in a pose? Normally, I would go with a T-Pose only if I was planning on doing some sort of work on the character for rigging or animation. If not, then we'll probably just go with just a pose, since this is mainly digital sculpting beginners course. Now we're just kind of putting placeholders in here. We're not really doing anything else than that. We didn't talk to you about mirroring. So this is an opportunity to also learn something new. Now, just before, we're going to duplicate this mesh as well. And then this time to mirror. It's a weird place to find mirror. But if you go through deformation, you'll find mirror right there. And now you might notice also the, because we mirrored the gizmo is in a different place. Let's go ahead and re-center the gizmo over here with that upside-down teardrop and just kinda bring him like so. Now hold left alter left option to reorient the piece right here. And again, pause, pause, pause. We're just kinda going through And setting things up to be a very simple, basic mesh. Halfway through it. Then we're going to append. And I'm probably just gonna go again with another cylinder. And I can also just click, instead of finding over here, I can find it here by holding left Alt, left option, and left-click. And then hit the W key. And he's got pretty short, stubby legs. He's a, he's a little guy. Now repeat what you've learned. What? Again? That's going to be duplicate. Deformation, Mirror, center point, that guy. All right. We got one more thing do and that's the hat. Not gonna be too hard. This is gonna be pretty easy. Append. We need a new shapes so we can go with the cone. The arrow will to cone. This is gonna give me some opportunities to show you how to read mesh geometry, to give us something different. Let's bring it down. I'm scaling the guide out. And I'm not going to mess too much around with the rotation because I'd like to have some symmetry options with me. I think that's gonna be it. We have a staff to work on, but until I know where everything is here, the steps is going to kinda come towards the end. This is sort of a basic block out. Now, from this point on, what we're going to do is we're going to show you how we're going to merge these meshes in with DynaMesh, which was one of the end resulting last lessons to bring these together and sculpt and smooth all these pieces in. So feel free again to do anything from just quick, like just real easy, quick adjustments of any kind. If you feel that there's something you want to see on there, go for it. So take your time. Just kinda get that right shape. If you're that first-time user, this is where you're supposed to be taking your time. In the next lesson, we'll talk about how we can bring all this together and DynaMesh and start sculpting out with your brushes. So with that said stick around and stay tune in. Don't forget, quick save 10. Creating Block Out Body: Okay, so let's continue in this video, we're going to pick off where we left last left off by sculpting certain volume, you may notice you don't see anything. That's because we quick saved. Now, we did a little bit of talk about quick save a little bit back. People can choose to save the file out as ETL and then go back to low tool and reload the file that they want. But another thing we can do is click Save. But to access the quick save files that you hit, you gotta be able to go into spotlight for one which is in again lightbox or that comma key that you want to bring up and choose quick say. And we can bring our lightbox. And that way, one thing that we will notice is, is that we didn't bring this up very well. You will need to save out your spotlight. And what that means is like, we didn't really save a spotlight out. We just kinda loaded the texture and then just did nothing. So let's go ahead and try again by reporting that texture in. Taking that texture, left-click on it, add to spotlight. And then we can go into Save Spotlight. And you can call it a mushroom ref. And then you can choose the folder that you wish. Hit save that way. Now every time you open up a file, you can just load in your spotlight right there. So some extra things we wanted to remind you on. So let's go ahead and bring them in, bring him in here, and then don't forget, choose spotlight to save. So from this point on, we're going to use DynaMesh to combine all these pieces up and then sculpt in. Make these look a little bit less primitive and a little bit more, a little bit more. How should I say organic to cloth where it kinda meshes into one another. So with that said, we might go with a little bit of a bigger head here. And it goes without saying bigger hat. And of course, so when the time comes, that's gonna be a very fun one to work with. And we're just going to go ahead now and take all these pieces here. And we need to merge them all down. We didn't go over merging sub tools too much in there. So let's go ahead and say to ourselves, Okay, what all needs to be merged right now, I just want the arms, body, and legs to be merged, will do the head in a different time. So make sure that heads on top. You can just drag it on top and go through and make sure the hats on top, you can just simply left-click on here or hold, Shift, left-click and just bring it all the way to the top. Then from there, you can click on the body and just hit go down below. And the sub tools merge and just choose Merge down into sub tool, which takes the sub tool below it and merges it down. I'm just going to always hit always. Okay. Just keep merging down. Like so. Now that we got that all taken care of, Let's go ahead and give this a couple of subdivisions just to smooth it out a bit. Maybe something like that. It's just fine. Now, let's go ahead and close out our sub tool and then go through geometry. Dynamesh, turn on DynaMesh and hit now. And you can kinda see it move, it, went on ahead and merged the meshes within. Now, like if I hold the Shift key, let me first turn off spotlight because it likes the screw with you. You can kind of merge all of these pieces in. Now. That said, I'm probably going to want to take a little bit of time, just a little bit of time to go through and sculpt some volume out on here. And this is where I like to use my webcam tablet for. And so what I'll do is I'm just going to kind of go through and first of all, smooth out all these Kravis, these cracks areas where they intersected and bring it all in. And again, I'm hitting the shift key. And I'm also hitting the Z key to bring up my reference. Hit Z again to turn off that piece. And all I'm doing is just kinda going through Smooth and this guy out just a little bit more. I have been working with any brushes yet and believe me, we'll get there. But this is all just a matter of just kinda smooth and everything around. So it kinda blends in. So take your time on how you want this to go through. Don't forget underneath. Alright. Now one of the first brushes we use on here, it's going to be one of your main ones. It's believe it or not, not the standard brush, move brush or any of the movie brushes, by a default are probably going to be what we use. There's anything you don't like. Remember you can undo. But we're going to use the Move brush to kind of give us a little bit more of a just sort of rearranging the shape a little bit more. You know, he's, he's sort of average, portly fell out, kind of smooth that out. With he's got he's got the pack. Now. Let's see if we can bring that in. You always want to check that profile. You can also do so with the head. Now one thing about these Move brush in case you don't know is if left option, left all kind of moves as Z in command. And that's something that's very helpful because this is like, for example, asleep, you can kinda bring something in here. Then kind of just kinda pushing it. But we're not there yet. So let's just go ahead and don't. Also, another thing that I neglected to mention is don't operate on a small brush when it comes to move. Work on a slightly bigger brush on this one. Maybe. Worked all to kind of bring it in. Take your time to bring this all out. I'm holding Shift and just kinda going back-and-forth between shift and move, shift and move. Just kinda bringing everything in before I start sculpting out some of my pieces leftover and just kinda see how that looks. Maybe the higher density. And I'm just kinda messing around with them. Just kinda scene what I like and don't like. Might make this a little bit bigger towards the end to kinda show like asleep, for example. Make sure that's checking the side profile. Then I'm just holding spacebar to bring all of that back in. That space holding spacebar to kinda bring all of that. Don't worry about stretching anything. Again, stretching is not something you should be afraid of ever when it comes to DynaMesh. Because we got a little bit of a sleeve here. Might need to readjust this down the road when the time comes for putting your hand in there. But that will be a different time. A little bit in there Scratch something, then if you want, you can kinda give yourself a little mask to help you get an idea how it's going to look a little bit. And again, it's just a blackout. It's not to the official sculpt. We're just using the Move brush to move things around. No, I don't know. And be careful not to do what I just did and use the x key. Feel free to, if you ever feel the need to kind of use DynaMesh again, you just to kinda draw, you can no big deal on that. Let's see if we can bring this guy up. Now. What I'm gonna do here is something I'm going to mask this area here, hold Control or out the mask. Hold control and left-click, invert the mask. Then press W, hold, left, option, lift, bring it in here. Maybe kind of bring it in. Little bit more like this. So he's kind of just out here. It looks a little it's just sort of, you know, iteratively going through it as you go. Scrunched in here. I'm going to touch too much into the gut, some ideas for the fee, but right now I just kinda wanna leave it alone. X, I'm going back-and-forth between hidden x, turning X off. I'm creating a little bit of symmetry. Kinda check it out the profile. Like so. This is going to be kind of like a jack and so maybe make it a little bit more on some brushes I want to use, but I'm going to be taking it nice and peaceful. Alright, now, we're gonna put some hands in there. And that's usually going to come out in the the when we get to the body section, but this is pretty much the block out that I need to get started for sculpting. So you'll notice all I'm using is mainly the Move brush. Now there isn't really much of a need of symmetry for sculpting on this guy. So what we're going to do is leave the face a little bit alone right now. And I'm going to also remind anyone if they want, they can feel free to change the color of the change the color of the whole area here of the mat or the material, I'm sorry, kind of talking and also sculpting at the same time. It's so much fun. But this guy, this is probably going to be the last part we block out. It's gonna be sort of a mushroom looking heads. So we want to kinda get that just right. So that's going to require some remeshing and playing around with DynaMesh a little bit more. So with that said, let's go ahead and take a break there and do some stuff on the head, remeshing the head on the next lesson. Again, go through and click Save or if you want, go through and save the CTL and simply load. And if you need to reload it, just go ahead and click up here and click on one of your earlier profile. Save files. So with that said, I'll stick around and stay tuned. 11. Blocking Out the Cap: Okay, welcome back. Now in this video we're going to finish off our blackouts by working a little bit more now on the hat here. And you can kinda see how the hat looks like this. It's a little bit different than what we have, so we're going to have to go ahead and do some work on it. And if we kinda hold Shift F, we're going to try first of all, one thing and that is, I'd like to look at the hat by itself without the character here. So first things first, we can either do this by turning the visibility off on all the sub tools, or we can just simply hit Solo. And this gives us an idea, like if you hit F twice, you can kind of center the rolling point a little bit easier. Again, F twice helps with the center point, centering the hat to you. One thing I'd like you to take a look at, especially down here, is that there's not a lot of sculptural geometry because this all pinches off and you'd have to divide it like 100 times to get something. Well, not 100 times, but five or six times to get something really sculptural and as a result, you'd have a really high dense mesh. So what I'm gonna do is is three mesh this through DynaMesh, first of all. And to do that, I'm just going to go ahead and first of all, smooth it a few times until I see that is all smooth. And you can kinda see it's really dense. It's kind of somewhat semi dense here. I don't really like any of this. I like to have consistent geometry sculpting across everywhere. So let's just go ahead and just divide it to smooth that out. And let's just go through DynaMesh and geometry. Then let's just go ahead and hit DynaMesh. Don't know. We got something that's a little bit more evenly distributed. Now this is a pretty good spot right here to get into. One thing that I will say about this is that we may need to, since there's like little poof, some pouches, we may want to refrain from making this wavy until maybe the end. The reason I say that is because if we start sculpting, moving this around in the similar way that it's moved and wavy up here. That's going to make it very difficult to sculpt all of these pieces consistently and evenly. So what I wanna do is maybe go through and just get a nice cone with a little bit of abroad or top here, little bit of a dip. And this top right here where it's pointing, I want it to be a little bit less pointy, but still jutting out a little bit more. So it's a little bit more rounder. And I'd like for this to poof out a little bit. And from there, we can kind of do some things with radial symmetry, something we haven't talked about yet because I want to give them an opportunity to discuss a little bit on what radial symmetry can do. So this may be the first thing we officially really sculpt on the character. We'll see how it works. But first things first, let's go ahead and try to hit the B key. And let's look for inflate now. I'd like to inflate this just a little bit. So b, i, and n, which is going to be the three button key for inflate BIN. Now if we can plate this like so and just kinda make it look like this, don't worry about all this tearing. Or we can do something where we hit radial symmetry. Now, normal symmetry is when we hit the X key and it's just two points. So what we have to do is go through transforms on the top, hit radial symmetry. And you'll notice that radial symmetry is turned on, but it's turned on, on the wrong access. So we got to change that access to y. And now we've got something that's a little bit more evenly poofed. Now, be very careful how you prove this, because this can really bulge up a lot. Like so. So I'm probably going to turn my intensity down a bit. Just enough To kind of bring out and I'm not worried about any of this. Okay. I'm not worried about any of the stuff that I'm seeing because a you can just smooth out like so you can do that and just sort of radial symmetry, all of this. And again, I got intensity that's pretty low in them right now using my mouse, but I'm not carrying out any bit about that. Go ahead and see how this looks. Okay, Let's go ahead and now hit BMD and just bring this up. If you keep your mouse can go, only go so far, kinda double-click on that dynamic and you can make it much bigger. Let's see if we can just bring this mushroom head a little bit more in. Like so. Looking for that dip. And then press the B key. It saves the brushes that you want for that session. So I forgot. Don't forget. To turn off your your spotlight. Let's go ahead and go back. That's about where I want. And remember, you see all this stuff here. You can do something about it just by dragging off to the side, by holding Control, left-click, just dragging a mask off. And you can also hold left option to kinda push some of this in as well. And that is something that we're going to do here because we want to have a little bit of a dip right here. Okay. Bring this down to just kind of taking my time. Holding shift. Just captivating the blackout. Bit too big. The whole thing moves, then it's probably too big of a piece. I'm just kinda trying to get that right. Mushroom look here. Now remember another thing. If you feel like you didn't, don't forget, we can do things to kind of bring this out a little bit more. It's not like we have to be in a certain mindset, for example, of committing to this shape. Right now what I'm doing is holding control and kinda doing some experimentation with it. See what this looks like. Centered around the mask. Then it's trying to bend down. And I'm just right now just experimenting. So don't like that a little bit. It's a little bit too wide out. So let's do a couple of things. Smooth this down a little bit, and then hold Control. And then left option or left Alt. Now let's bring it in a little bit like so. Something like that. I'm curious what DynaMesh is gonna do on this guy that's going to hold resolution. And I figured it wouldn't figured Let's see if Z remeasure can actually clean this a little bit more up now that I have a little bit of a shape that I can work with here. Z remeasure again is a different autorun measure from DynaMesh. It's giving you more clean topology. I will say, I'm not sure. It's results will be though in this since I've done a lot of deprivation and pinching here. But hopefully we get something that's fairly whoops. And it can also look a lot like that if you have the, if you have the symmetry turned on. So let's try that again. Kinda has a little bit of a look to it. One thing that we can do is this. We can undo everything. It controlled W. So we have two different meshes. And we can then say keep groups. Let's see whether I want to smooth it or not. To just see what it does just with those three turned on. This is more me experimenting. If it works, I'll explain how it worked. That's a little bit more clean. Okay, so now what I just did was something relevant to polygraphs. In the introductory section we talked about poly groups and how they can be used to help ZBrush guide automated processes like Z remeasure poly groups can also be useful in organizing the top section with shift controls, isolate, select, or the bottom selection. But the other nice thing about poly groups is if you divide, you get a nice little crane clean piece right here, which is very nice. But the other thing is, if this for whatever reason didn't divide and it kind of smooth into this bottom section, you could always just go through crease, increase poly groups. So that's kinda what I was expecting to do, but fortunately it didn't require that. Let's go ahead and divide this a little bit with Control D. And let's just see. And I just want to see what that looks like. Just sort of messing around with it. Just kinda creating the mushroom. You have a little bit of a problem there. You can also do things like turn off symmetry, taper, which probably won't work unless you make it its own little mesh. So we can do VMB and symmetry on kinda bring these guys and by holding left, Alt, left option. Okay. It's looking slowly, slowly, slowly like a mushroom. It's getting a little bit closer to it. Once we start painting the segments in here, we can then begin to create some waviness within here. So we're getting there, we're getting close to it. But like I said, this is all about the blackout. So let's get out of solo mode here. Gonna look a little bit weird as it's like this, don't worry, the final touches usually come with the a rearranging deformations similar to what we did with the body, the beginning blackout. And from there we're going to then work on the face. So what we'll do from this point on is trying to think we should do the face first or the head first. I'm gonna do the body last because there's a lot of, it gets more complicated with that. Screw it. I'm gonna go ahead and do the body last. That's going to be the fun one. With the next lesson we'll go ahead and get started with is working on the mushroom cap and having fun trying to get a cool looking shape out of that where we'll start creating some segment and pieces here, probably through the dam standard brush for fun. So with that said, stick around and stay tuned. 12. Sculpting the Mushroom: Okay, so let's continue in this video now we're gonna go ahead and sculpt out some of the segments underneath this mushroom and see if we can kinda pose and maneuver it the way we want. Similar and to our concept, which is my ugly little sketch. And your very awesome and peace. So let's just go ahead and begin. This is a good chance also for us to get to one of our main most commonly used brushes. Another one that we're going to breach into of the big ones that we use. It's a dam standard brush. And that's what we're going to be used to sculpt the under part of these segments. So let's start with that. First things first I'm gonna go into solo making sure my sub tool for a mushroom is selected. I'm gonna kinda go underneath here and I'm going to mask off everything except this. So I'm going to hit Shift Control left-click. I'm going to hold Control, left-click and drag a mask off. And let me go ahead and turn the Alpha off there. And then Shift Control left-click to bring everything back. Then I'm going to hold Control left-click to invert the selection. Now that's a lot to do if you're the first time beginner, but I swear to you, the more time you do it, it gets so natural and it becomes so fast. So bear with me. Now from this point on, Let's go ahead and select that dam standard brush. We hit the B key, will find that it is right over here. Now if we hit D for dam, and then standard is S, So d a b, D s. Now, what we can do is we can sculpt a piece in through here, or we can turn our symmetry back on. Remember, you're supposed to have radial symmetry. And one thing I want you to take notice is your focus shift might be a little bit different. But another thing I'd like you to take notice is the alpha, I have the stroke changed from dots over to free hand. Now that's my personal choice, but you can go with something else. Now. The other thing is I changed my intensity to seven. If I really, it would be, I'd probably have a very skewed looking piece right here. And some people might be okay with this for a to10 look, but I'm gonna go ahead and do something that's a little bit more subtle. I'm also going to turn my focus shift a little bit up and just start taking some simple strokes. Like so I'm just kinda iterating the strokes through until we have something nice and soft. Nothing too crazy. Something like that. Alright, so let's go ahead and clear that mesh off and turn solo back on. So now that we got everything that we want, it's time to have a little fun with the process of going through and having a way of just kind of pushing this all into the right spot. Now this can be a little bit tricky. Let me hit X to turn off radial symmetry, because you can use either a Move brush or a snake hook brush. But this is not something that's done in a step-by-step manner like we've been doing. This is typically going to be some finagle mean that you have to feel out and practice. First things first, we're gonna be working with move brushes. So I want you to switch to the lowest subdivision and if you don't have any, make sure you hit reconstruct to get all your low subdivisions on. And you can use either the Move brush, that's b, M, v, or you can use the, the snake hook brush. I prefer snake hook brush. It's just a little stronger and what I'm kinda used to. But it's up to you. I think I would choose if I were you, the Move brush, because it's a little bit more beginner friendly. So let's just go ahead and just kinda bring this in. One thing to take an open mind is, is you're gonna kinda most things together. So you need to be consciously aware that first-off, turn your turn off your spotlight so you can use a smooth there's ways of disabling that by the way, but I kinda want to Keep it oriented. And you're gonna be doing a combination of kinda want to keep it a user-friendly. You kinda want to do though a combination of smoothing and moving. So, you know, kind of, or I should say relaxing. So we got this, okay. This might be a little too thick, so I'm going to isolate, select Control, bring it all back, invert, hit the R key. Let's see if we can maybe flatten out a little bit and move it up a little bit more. Might work a little better. That's just my take. Notice my rotation is off, so I'm going to hold Alt or option and just kinda re-center that because maybe I want to bring the head up a little bit, like so. Maybe back a little bit. Just for now like that. And with Move brush, we always like to kind of take some little bit of small movements. Like so. Now it kind of tapers out and this is kinda tapering down. So now feel free to go a little bit off the rails. There are some brushes like spiral where you can have a little bit of fun. It just kind of breaking things in. But if you work with spiral, maybe go with something a little bit more like that, might, might do it a little bit more off to the side. Then switch back into move. And this is what we do. We basically are kind of going through and taking the time to switch between different brushes. Like this one here, this would be a spiral right here. So maybe I can spiral it downward. It's little bit more downward here. Little bit more downward here. So it's a little bit like that. Maybe here. So I'm just kinda getting it sort of blocked out because we see that underbelly a little bit more. Just for the record. Getting more and more tempted to use the snake hook brush because that's kind of my personal go-to, kind of stretches things out a little bit easier. Of course, you have to make a lot more adjustments because it's not as smooth around like this straight line. I kinda, I want it to be a little bit round here. We want it to look round everywhere in every angle. Just go ahead and just keep making my adjustments and not to something that, you know, there's one right way or anything like that. It's just kind of a Let's see how it looks here. Let's see how it looks here. I like it better. Let's move it the other way. So let's put it right here. And I'm just gonna kinda just make my adjustments and that's what it is. We're not really going too far into the mode of of sculpting too deeply with the brush clay to just kinda making the adjustments, smoothing it down to get it to a little bit of a straighter line and rinse and repeat like this again. So then it's a little bit too far out. So we'll just go ahead and bring this guy in. Like that. Looks like there's a little bit more of a straighter wave going on here that we're not seeing. So let's go ahead and bring that in and then smooth the way out. So Bezier is a little bit better. Again, that's smooth as the key If you get this, don't fret, just quickly do a very brief smooth around and you'll kinda get things to kinda come back to their place little bit. Don't freak out too much to do it on the next subdivision to just a quick little smooth to kinda bring everything back into its place. And if you lose a little bit of the segments, don't let it get Tia, it's not gonna be the end of the world. I was hoping that it wouldn't, but let's just go you can just go ahead and kinda see where there are indentations all were and go through and Dan standard all of it. Make sure your brush is fairly fairly, fairly, fairly sized to the right radius because we don't want to It's not going to be the end of the world. It's just all sort of trial and error. And don't forget to have a little fun with the the the gizmo. Let's go ahead and just keep going here. I'll keep using snake hook. And if probably have to. This is really one of the best ways really to learn the brushes is just kinda getting yourself out there to kind of just sort of see what it looks like here. By the way, that's Shift X to separate the meshes like that. And I have no problem going around and just seeing if I can push a shape like so and then kinda flush something out a little bit from it. And it's just like not really a sort of correct, right or wrong roadmap. It's just sort of kinda mask and the bottom part so I don't affect it too much. Going into move. And just kinda bringing it a, re-establishing that smooth curve. C. It's just all kind of a process, you know, I'm using left all to also in case anyone's wondering. So we're just kind of, you can kinda see it's starting to take a little bit of place, but again, we got to go up through the subdivisions, correct. Anything like right here, go through dam standard, that's gonna be an area that's known. Let's maybe turn up the intensity just a little bit and see if we can maybe bring that out a little bit more. Yeah. And maybe use the Move, brush and hold left all to kinda push this out just a little. I'm doing it again through the low subdivision again, I do moves mostly mostly I'm saying through the low subdivisions Alright, so once you get to a nice place like that, just from here on out, kinda smooth, like this area right here needs to be smooth a little bit. I can do it on a higher subdivision. And then if you want, you can give it a couple more divisions like that. And one thing that you can go about doing on here is kinda give it a little bit more real estate room for something where you can kind of I would do your realist finishing touches on this with the gizmo just because you want to kinda get some idea of where the eyes are gonna be. But another thing is I did put now a couple of more subdivisions on here because I'm going to hold Shift Control, mask, isolate, select or I'm sorry, reverse the mask to put it right here. I'm going to hold down control and I got dragged right now selected. And I'm going to just choose an alpha like that has dots on it. So like alpha three, for example. I can kinda just see, in fact, I think what I'll do is this. I'm just going to isolate, select the alpha like so. Like all I'm doing is to kinda just drawing dots on here. Then I'm holding left Alt or left option and control and left-click and sharpening the mask. You can just kinda get a little creative here and just kinda drag some dots on here. Let's Control Alt Option again. And then kinda invert the mask. One thing we can do is just go through and maybe do a very soft inflate, you know, just to kind of bring it up and then hold shift to kinda bring it out. You know, it's it's really up to you on how far you want to take that. My opinion. I think maybe since it's stylized, it may look a little bit better. If it's like less like that. Since we're dealing with something that's stylized. And then maybe we can do, this is what I'm, what I'm doing right now is nothing more than experimentation. And just kind of seeing what something looks like, a little bit, like smaller dots at the edge, holding Control left option for this by the way, then that probably is the right one. Then I'm just using a blade. We can do something like that, although not the biggest fan of the little glob mushrooms there. So I'm gonna go ahead and mask that off. Make sure they don't get touched. These big gloves alone. Okay. Then of course, just kinda bringing them all in. We can just kinda do something like that. Just something to bring into the effect. And of course, you can repeat, repeat this same concept again with maybe the lines. Maybe you wanna do something that's a little bit more segmented here. Like, you know. Then soften that up and then use the tool to kinda bring it in. You can kinda do something like that. You can kinda get a little bit more. I'm not gonna do it though, because again, this style is a little bit more of a cartoony. So I kinda want to keep it simple. I may put a noise texture on here like a real basic, simple noise texture just to kinda keep it all some simplified. But yeah, that's gonna be sort of the aftermath of this. So once we're done with the hat now, we're going to move now into the face, which is left all leapt option. Don't forget to click Save. And we'll see you on the next one. 13. Constructing Eyes: Okay, so let's continue. Now in this video, we're gonna go ahead and begin to block out the face and establish some eyes on here. Nothing too complicated to start with, but we're going to show you a little bit of an old school trick to establish things like eyelids and maybe go over some map material was signing up for a first-time beginner. So let's go ahead and get started. One of the first things we'll go ahead and do is we're going to append some extra spheres into here. So first, let's go ahead and hit sub tool append. And let's see if we can find ourselves a sphere, sphere 3D. And if we go down here to that sphere, It's probably underneath this sphere. Let's hit the W key and move it forward. And we're going to talk to you about adding some materials on here for the first time just to kind of give you a heads up of how it works. So let's start with that. Before anything. If you want to change the material and the color of something, first, click off z ad and click on RGB. And then we can kinda go through here. And I'm going to choose skin shader. I'll choose toy plastic. Now you'll see the whole thing change. And that's expected because we didn't assign anything on here. So this thing goes universally. So let's assign this toy plastic onto this sphere that we see. And to do that, we just go through color and just merely hit Fill object. Now when we switch it back to basic material, it will stay the same. Let's go ahead and go back into toy plastic now, just one more time. Because we want to show something else. If you want to change the color, you can do so right here. Obviously it changes for here, but it didn't change, we're here because it also took the color value of white and also a swine did on there because this is material, as well as the color channels, RGB, red, green, blue. So now let's go ahead and reassign it again, since it's now set to black, and this will now be set to black. Let's bring it to white again and bring it to basic material. So now let's go ahead and just simply give it a couple of bites. Make that nice and smooth. We got something like an I, a cute little lie. Let's go ahead and bring this guy in here like so. And this is up to you how you want to form this. There's no way. I'm gonna go ahead and do a little bit of experimenting. I'm gonna just kinda hit into the DMV brush, move the, and just kind of go into Symmetry mode and just kinda flatten things out for me. Give myself a little bit of the canvas than left Alt. And turn off symmetry. I'm just going to tuck that guy in there like so. Now we can decide that shape. And honestly, the shape is up to you. I'm sorry, the sizes up to you. I'm kind of leaning towards some nice big eyes, like so. Now we can do one of two things. We can duplicate the mesh and merit over or we can just duplicate the sub tool and mirrored over either way. So I'm just going to duplicate the sub tool. Since we're going to be marrying overthrew defamation, one of the first things you have to do is realize you got to delete subdivisions to do this function. So let's go into geometry and hit Delete. Don't worry, we can reconstruct the subdivisions again because we are not going through and changing or remeshing anything. Let's get back into defamation. And let's hit mirror. And don't forget to center the pivot on this guy. Now, we can do one of two things. We see this like so let's go ahead and see if we can combine these two sub tools. Now we go through the top one and let's go to merge, merge down. Now that it's merged down, if we make sure our local symmetries on we hit the X key, you can kind of decide placement of our character, like so. So this is just you experimenting. Kinda like the look of that So now let's go ahead and go back into our, our face, which I again, I hit left Alt, left option, click. And just kinda give ourselves a little bit more real estate room on here. Maybe we want to do something like that. Just some easy. Now here's something that we can do. This is a little bit of an old school trick. First things first, I'm gonna give a couple of subdivisions so we can smooth this out. And I'm gonna go up to brush. And this is an old school trick to use to create eyebrows width. And that is working with the Z project brush. Now, Z project brush is kind of something that we haven't really talked too much about. And to put simply, it's a brush that's kind of used to project onto its shape in front of whatever is in another sub tool. So it's kinda down here. So let's go ahead and click it. And if you want to get an idea how it works, we can kinda show you right here. But first let's go ahead and do transparency. You might need to go through and bring the mesh up higher. I don't know if it really, it doesn't really work if you turn the intensity up. But in order for it to project its shape on here, need to have a little bit more of a higher, closer proximity to the mesh. So let's go through Move brush and just kind of bring this up. Like so. Way project has something to work with. And let's just go ahead and switch into Z project again, which is now probably up here. Kinda see it's so little bit of a tricky brush to work with on here. We kinda turn the eyes on. See if we can bring that up here again. Does the trick a little bit with here, we turned it off, it kinda does the trick right there. So it looks like I'm going to have to bring a little bit more of this on here. One thing I can do is just kind of just go through and hit the move. Like so the eyes open. And that probably is a little bit more of a closer proximity. Let's go ahead now and do the Z project. Kinda likes to do that, but unfortunately it also kinda likes to like so. So we kinda get ourselves what we need on here. Now what we do is go in, Whoops, I hit the V key. There. We go through the Move brush and just kinda move this forward now. Like so, we get this nice clean projection. Now if there's anything that's often in any way, you just smooth it out. We don't have too terribly much if you want, you can go down subdivisions, hit Shift D and smooth it out. Any place that it might seem. D again, smooth it out. And d once more smooth it out. So it's kinda perfectly overlapping everything. If you need to do another, if you need to just kinda go through and redo anything going ahead. I'm a little bit okay with what I got as far as the depth goes, the eyes. So what we're gonna do next is we're going to go through and sculpt the eye openings This, and this is where you can get the shape that you want out of this. So remember when we're doing something like Z project, keep in mind that you're going to need to make the proximity of the mesh pretty close over this to make it round. You're also going to need to use the Move brush to kind of bring things a little bit forward. And then once we're done, we're going to sculpt things a little bit back into the shape we want. So, so let's go ahead and just give you an example of this and what we can bring to it. Like if you want to do brush clay tubes or brushed standard, you can do that. Don't forget to turn right now the L key off. But you can begin to sculpt in your eye. Like so. Guys, visibility off from here. Just kinda getting everything situated. And we can now also use brush and the left Alt to push in and out as well. That is something you can use. Additionally, we can also sort of craft in, for example, the the pinches of the eye. We can smooth and push in, push out the eye. It's something I kind of like a little bit more, but it's also something that requires a little bit more finagle in kind of you get a really good sense of using the left Alt button to this. Kinda like the AI version of the Move brush version better. Because you get more practice with this and be good to establish a little bit more crevice of the the eye socket through here. So please remember when doing this. This is definitely about utilizing the the left Alt or left option button. That's gonna be a big deal when it comes to using the Move brush here to sculpt gently smooth away. We may also do one more. This is kinda all right, keep accidentally hit. Wondering if I can just left old pushing in Kinda wanna do this without the hat. Now, going to have to turn that off and bring this in. You can kinda see I'm just kinda working through this shape. Like so. Relax, smooth on here. This is just sort of a of you taking your time moment. It's going to come differently for everybody. Let's go ahead and see if we can pinch this. And there is a pinch brush. It's not one of the ones that I would use completely, but we do have a brush that kind of scrumptious things in a little bit. Maybe put a little bit of volume on here. Let's try volume brush, brush Clay Tubes. Brush clay tubes, by the way, it's gonna be a brush you'll use very often for anatomy. Kinda see how I use the smooth very carefully to kind of blend it in. Kinda show little cheek. And let's do a standard to kinda bring back a little bit, a little bit of thickness. Another thing we can do is we can use the Danes sander brush. Feel free to use that as well for anything you might want to try. Just remember when you sculpt it in to smooth it also Al, you can kinda see how I'm kinda working it in very subtly, very gently and then kinda just bringing a very, very much out. Just kinda smoothing it and bringing it back out. You hold left Alt and left option. You can also invert the dam standard as well. This can be nice to create, maybe like a fold line on a end of an eyebrow. Be very, very gentle. Doing it. Make sure you are taking your time. And just take it one stroke at a time. I'm just simply kind of working it in. Move in and out. Being very, very light on my webcam tablet. Okay, so that's how we're gonna do the eyes. We may do a little bit more with the eyes down the road, just kinda do a little small tweaks. But this is where we're going to leave it for this one. Afterwards, we're going to go ahead and work a little bit more with the mouth and then tweak them out to match a little bit more with the eyes. So with that said, we are going to say stick around and stay tuned. 14. Sculpting the Mouth: Okay, So now we're gonna go ahead and sculpting or real quick mouth and then go over just a little bit more detailing, usually with the dam standard brush. So if you haven't already, go ahead and select your **** standard brush, that's B, D, S. And just go ahead and if you want, just kinda, i'm, I'm, I'm gonna just make sort of like a little bit of a smirk here. I'm going to also set my focal length, something like that. My focal length is around 40, 49. I'm looking I'm just taking a couple of practice swings on this. I think what I want is just to give kinda like a short mouth, you know, like just the real short one. Then I'm going to press left, alter left option to invert it. And I'm going to make us not parallel, but just kind of a slightly down angle on here. I'll just kinda something simple like that. Um, I may do this a couple of times. I may just kinda just shifted, but I'm going to take a couple of swings. Just define that right spot. Just that right spot. Because there is no such thing as the wrong way to do it. Especially if you're learning for the first time. Maybe just kinda make a little dimples spot right there. Then I'm just gonna go through my volume brush, which is going to be BCT. That's Brush clay tubes and maybe just carve a little bit more cheek into this and then just kinda smooth it in. Just to kinda give us a little bit. I'm just gonna kinda, what I'm gonna do is we're gonna keep practicing doing this until I kinda capture this, just right. So if I have to basically kinda go back a little bit and try one more time. I'm going to just to kinda give myself a couple of little bit of little bit of fun with it. Want to make it longer? Go ahead. I'm just experimenting with it to do just that. And after you sculpted, don't think one sculpt for one brush. I'm also kind of, you know, using the Move brush in conjunction with the dam standard brush to kinda look for what I'm just kinda find a spot that I'm looking for here. Kinda like how he hangs down like that. So just don't feel you need to commit to anything completely. Let's go ahead and turn this down real low and see if we can. Then one thing I always like to do is I'd like to go through the search history and see if there's anything that I've ran into that I kinda like more. There's that one and then there's that one. Kinda like as well. That one. Yeah. I like I think what I liked, what I did. They're the most. Let's just go ahead and bring that and just kinda give us a little bit more of a subtlety. Now, once you get that kinda taken in, I know we used I only tried using the sculpting brush because I or the clay toothbrush because I wanted to give an opportunity to try to use it. If there's anything you want to do from here, feel free to like, if you want to sculpt a second layer on here, then smooth it in. You feel absolutely free to do so. Same thing here. If you just kinda want to reaffirm the eyes a little bit or anything like that. Feel free to. I kinda like doing it this way. This isn't supposed to be like a super advanced course on anatomy sculpting. This is just sort of having fun with your spot. I am, I was thinking about doing a nose, but I kinda like his look a little bit like that. I can do also more detail to it. It's really easy. If you look at some of my other courses. It's pretty pretty. I love sculpting a lot of detail, but I also don't like to go overboard if it's kinda like a beginner first-time or course, because it can sometimes be a little bit overwhelming. So with that said, there's a lot more things we can do. And I'm thinking about saving it kind of towards the end. Like one of those things is going over the whole surface, detailing material where we create some noise just out of the texture. And try to have some fun with that. And try to put some noise onto it. That's always something that you can always do as well. But we're gonna go a little bit more into the noise thing a bit later on down the road, you can't really see the noise all too well on here. So having said that, what we're going to work on next is going to be the body. Then we're going to try to sculpt out a little jacket out of this guy. And then we're going to put a little bit of a staff on him and see if we can finish up with a little bit of a plate to put him on with something. So with that said, let's just stick around and move on to the body 15. Blocking out Coat: Okay, welcome back. In this video now we're going to talk to you about blocking out that jacket and getting that jacket established. And for that, we're going to use poly groups. Now, we gave you a little bit of a demonstration of how poly groups work. So we're going to show you how we can build off of that first timer to first-time or tutorial to kinda give us what we want. At this point, you should have a good idea or have your face flushed out. At this juncture. If not, just take a moment to sort of get it everything, everywhere that you want. Sort of speak. Just kinda like take your finishing touches out and go from there. So with that said, let's just go ahead and get started on this jacket. Now the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna go ahead and select the sub tool with the body, which you can do with left option, left, Alt, left-click, or go to the sub tool and just click it there. For this, I think what I'm going to go ahead and do is duplicate this sub tool. I know why am I duplicating it? Because I'm going to cut a jacket out of it. So let's go ahead and show you how that looks. First, let's turn off our Reference Shift Z. Duplicate this sub tool. And for now, I'm just going to go through and delete. I'm not delete. Why did I say that? I'm just going to turn the visibility of everything off. Now, from this point on, I want you to go ahead and just maybe toggle between back-and-forth between symmetry and with the X key and turning on Cemetery and hold down control and just simply carve out a jacket. Even I like to kinda hold Control drag and do a marquee for these back areas here. And you just kinda looking for like a carve-out of a jacket. It's basically only thing we're doing here. So just take your time if you want, if you want to really get a nice sheen jacket, one thing you do is you can, while holding down control, go up to transform and not transformed. Apologies. Go up to stroke and hit the lazy mouse. And you can kinda have a lazy mouse curve on here. So to help you with like a sort of smoother line, if you will. So just take your time on this curve, what you want from it. Just a cute little jacket. And if you want, you can also make sure to kind of get a nice little spot right here. And then you're going to have your jacket now, make sure you get all the spots and this sleeve all taken care of. Now, if you remember from this point on, what we're going to do is we're going to build off of what we learned in the first time beginner intro course. And that is, I'm just going to hold control to soften it and then Control left all to kinda hard it and kinda go back and forth to kinda smooth out the edges there from this point on, hit Control W. So we can create a poly group out of this. And now that we have some poly groups, let's get something that's a little bit clean here. So let's go through geometry. And let's go through edge loops. And then we're gonna do some group loops. And that's just going to make us give us a nice little cleaner line here. So if we hold Shift Control, we can see a nice clean line in all of this. And if you want to make that smoother, if you wish, you can always do that just by going through defamation and then hitting Polish by groups. And then we can give that a couple of runs. I like to go up here and click that to hollow circle in. That kinda gives us a little bit more of a cleaner sheen. So once you have all that taken care of, You have a nice clean drag it. Let's hold Shift Control, left-click to get this guy. And something we didn't talk about is, is this back face calling here. If you want to see the back face, you can just go through display properties and hit double. And so now what I wanna do is say this, I isolate selected all of this. That means if I Shift Control left-click, it's going to come back. What I wanna do is delete that geometry like so. So to do that, we're going to have to go through and go through Geometry, modify Topology. And under here is where we hit delete hidden and that's how you go about geometry. Sorry. Go about deleting hidden topology through and isolate select. From this point on. I like to go ahead and kinda clean up the mesh, make it something a little bit too smooth, ER, because this may give me some unwanted debits that I may not want to see. So I'm going to go for a cleaner looking topology and as we know, DynaMesh, a blackout, remeasure zero measures sort of where we want to zero measure. It gives us the quality that we want to get something cleaner. We don't have to have a very advanced setting for this. We can just simply hit the button in default and we'll get something like this. Now if you notice, the hand kinda went this way, That's because x symmetry was turned on. So let's go ahead and turn off x. So symmetry must be off. And we can see a much cleaner topology. This is a topology that we can also build off of. Now, one extra thing I want to say right here is that we have a thin fold. And I would like to go about creating some thickness here, kinda like an extrude. Now, Z modeler has some options for extruding. But I think what I'd like to do is just go ahead and do the extrusion through DynaMesh. So before anything before giving myself any thickness and going over DynaMesh and a whole another feature on having like a sort of a thickness. I'm going to want to block this guy out a little bit more. I'm going to want to reposition it on to my main sculpt, which is this guy, because it's right now just overlapping the geometry. So what we're gonna do in the next lesson is sort of position all of this kind of over the body before we start in by giving it a little bit of thickness in the process. So with that said, sick around and stay tuned. 16. Blocking out Coat Sleeves: Okay, let's get started. In this video, we're going to move around width the the blackout that we have here. Of course, if I hit Shift F, i, you can kinda see how it's occupying the exact same space. So we're going to use the Move brush to reposition this jacket to look a little bit more like a jacket. Once we do that and move it above the body mesh, we're gonna go ahead and then add a little bit of thickness once we're completed. So let's get started with that. So one of the first areas that we have to focus on pretty much mainly is going to be this area right here. So let's go ahead and select your brush, b, b, M v brush. And then look for the move brushes, which is right there and the V key. And I'm just gonna go ahead and remember we're using left Alt, left option to bring all of this kind of above. Because we don't want to see any of that grade topology going through. We want to have just enough distance really to kind of just enough distance to see that thickness happen. Let's just go ahead and bring that out and you kinda see how it's kind of going through. Now, remember I'm using left Alt, left option to kinda push it through. It's sort of z like Access. Little bit of a kind of move that camera around to see all the different parameters. Like so. Too worrisome for me, this area right here, because the hand's gonna kinda look cute little mitten is gonna kinda The put through here. Like so. And you can kinda see like the, it's kinda separating through here if you want, you can also left, all left option, just kinda bring things back this way as well. There's anything that you're seeing that's above. You can kinda, just kinda cut it out. Another thing you can do is if you hit transparency, you can also just hit select radical and just kind of cut out everything that's holding Shift and dragging out a piece and then releasing **** I'm sorry, holding Shift Control, dragging out a piece and then releasing Shift Control and hit left, Old Left option to turn that red and you can delete any unwanted geometry that way. Which is nice because then you can just go through Geometry, modify Topology, and then just hit Delete Hidden. Yes. So let's get back into it again and turn off the transparency, like so. And we're almost there. Let's just go ahead now one of the things I wanna do is kinda square up this area right here because it kind of smoothed out like this. Some people might be okay with it and some people might not. So let's just kinda give it a little bit more of an angle. Like so. And even if you want to smooth it, that's fine because it's not going to hurt anything. Because same thing over here as well. You're just going to kind of just kind of give it a little bit more of an angle. Like so. And of course, just give it a little bit more of an angle. Alright, so now that we have that kind of established, let's go ahead and add some thickness to it. And for that we're going to use something called dynamic subdivisions. Now, dynamics subdivisions is something I would throw into intermediate users, but we're not, we're not really going to be using, in essence, actual dynamics subdivisions. It's really a feature that's built within here that's been very convenient and creating clean thickness that we're gonna be using. So to start off with, I'm just going to first-off turn on Dynamics subdivisions. Now, if you turn it on, nothing really changes. You may get a little bit of a smoother mesh. But the first thing I'll have you do is turn your smooth groups down to zero subdivisions. That way, nothing really changes even with this as on because this kind of functions like IT projects the subdivisions without actually having to divide them. And now I just want you to kind of add some, go through and go through the thickness slider, and just sort of add a little bit on here. You can define or decide the thickness. I'm okay pretty much with this. It's kinda nice because you also get a poly group in here, which is really, really convenient for me. Now, one thing to take into account is, is you may think that you have a mesh that's been created and that's actually not true. You technically still don't have a mesh. The reason for that all is, is because it's been sort of instance and projected in as a dynamic. It's, it's sort of like hitting three mode in Maya. From one, from three key in Maya worth smooths everything out. It's not actually adding geometry, but we can still go through and add this. We can still go through and add topology. And that's just simply by hitting the apply button. And once you do that, this becomes topology. Now, one last thing I'm going to want to do here is I'm going to go through, and I'm just simply going to go about sort of wanting to do this is Chris the poly groups. And that's just something that's kinda nice because if you ever want to add subdivisions like so, you can get something that's pretty clean and a thickness. And in addition, you can now smooth this out and it will collapse into a nicer area. Now that's up to you, but this is just sort of the part two of blocking this out and establishing some thickness on a character. In the coming up. Once what we're gonna do is we're gonna go about trying to add some tears into here, make it a little bit ragged. We may drop the mesh and which by the way, I'm completely alright with we may do some editing of how the hardness comes across here. So with that said, stick around and stay tuned. 17. Finishing Coat Block Out: Okay, so let's continue in this course for now. We're going to start to turn our little jacket in here, in here too, a little bit of a trench coat, since we're working also with poly groups as the theme on our character, we're also going to explore knife cut brush a little bit and how we can reuse that to guide zero measure with the poly groups that it creates. So that may be a little bit confusing, but Let's just go ahead and go show you what I mean. Now, if I hit Shift F, I go into solo. You can kinda see poly groups were made and everything. But maybe I want to make this a little bit sharper. So one thing you can do is hold Shift Control, left-click and just select that knife curve, brush and hold Shift Control left-click drag. You can maybe draw out a curve left, Alt, left option while holding down left-click kinda gives us a little bit of a Bezier curve. Now we got a little bit of more of a sharper piece here. So that's something that we can work with. See if we can show you again. And of course we hit Shift F to look wireframe. We can see a new Poly Group has been put there. And that's important to look at because it's a different poly group. We can then add, for example, crease the poly group there and which creates creases around here. So when I divide it, it will kind of go through. And once more like we did before, we can also do things like go through zero measure and go through the whole process of once again remeshing everything if I like, for example, say keep groups, detect edges, keep creases, maybe turn the smooth groups down a little bit. We can do another zero mesh. And maybe you might have to do a couple of them. Like to clean up some geometry because the first try is always a little bit wonky, but it kind of builds off of what you make. So like if you see something like this, kinda undo and just kinda keep at it is the operating word here. Keep experimenting two different areas. One thing I do is change the target poly group so that it can kind of go through and find something clean. And you saw the progression of how I work that out. If you get through if you type it like a few, four or five times and you're still not getting what you want. Kinda go all the way back, maybe store with a different polygon count to get your way out there. Now that we have all of this, Let's go ahead and kinda elongate this. All. I'm going to hold down a mask like right here. Just kinda mask out the, the, the sleeves here. Because I'm going to use the Move brush and I'm going to drag this all down. Let's turn off solo. And if you want to take a moment to kinda bring back your guy, you can. I'm gonna go into the Move brush and kind of bring all this down if you see something like that, don't worry, just go ahead and bring it in and just kinda slowly but surely kind of bring everything closer in. You can just kinda bring this code down. You can use snake hook, you can use any kind. Don't worry about the topology stretching because again, we're just going to remember all this. We're just bringing this guy and see if we can also maybe sake of argument, do something about the mesh there. And if you want, you can just hit zero Michigan and we can get a nice little clean piece off all this. Since everything is creased poly groups, it should be at least if it's not and you see collapsing link right there. Just go ahead and go for once again another crease Poly Group. Fill in that gap right there. And then just go ahead and give it a couple of two bytes. And this is where you can do another thing where you can create terrorists on here if you want. But it's sort of this buyer beware sort of thing. If you go through and create terrorists, I would do it at the very end. Because one thing that I like to do is I like to sculpt out detail on here. I like to maybe like for example, wrinkles we can do. And to do that, we're going to be much easier to do that with the utilization of like, for example, a, The utilizing multiple subdivision levels. And if you're going to try and sculpt out tears with the knife curved brush. You're going to have to delete those subdivision level. So I would just go ahead and just kinda say that towards the end. And keep yourself in trying to get all the work you need done while you still have the subdivisions available available to you. So I'm just gonna kinda, I'm on left Alt and move and just kinda pushing this in a little bit deeper, kinda gives us a little bit room, wiggle room to kinda make this slightly thinner. So last thing we'll do here is, is if you want, this is your call. You can just maybe do a quick little. Just glaze. Smooth, lightly smooth the corners here just to make it a little bit thinner. And then after that, we can go ahead and get started maybe sculpting some detail on this jacket and just sort of going about and having some fun with wrinkles, sculpting, and seeing what we could add to it. So with that said, let's stick around and stay tuned. 18. Detailing the Coat: Okay, so now in this one we can start sculpting. So we're going to sculpt some details of some folds, go over some review of what we know on how to use masks and soft and masks to create some folds with you. And also how we can sculpt some wrinkles in here. So let's go ahead and get started. So one of the first things I'll do is I'm gonna go back into solo mode here. And I'd kind of like the idea of just simply going through holding down Control and just painting just those fairly even little mask here. And you can just go up to around here since the head already covers it. Kinda just, you know, you can make it. It's your choice on how thick you wish to make it. But what I'll do is I'll just kind of go back and forth between control and control, left Alt or Option, and just tap a couple of times either way. Until I got what I want, make sure that that's still being covered up there. Yeah, little bit. Back into it. Kinda see what I'm doing here. Alright, so I'm just kinda kind of just invert the mask and I'm going to start with bringing the Move brush and that's again be M V and just bring it out and slide it over like so. And then just simply hit the smooth key. And all I'm doing is just kind of grading myself a little bit of a trim. You can do the same thing over here. And I will just start with the trim. We're just kind of outlining some pieces here. And this is one of many, many, many, many ways we can go about establishing a sort of a, a fold in a wrinkle. Go. Just kinda bring that out left Alt, kinda push it towards us, then move it to the left a little bit, and then just kinda smooth it down a little bit more. I'm gonna make this area a little bit shorter. So let's practice this a little bit more with this area. Now remember when we hold down control, we can change our stroke to something like curve. And if you hold down Control and then release and then tap all kinda create yourself a little bit of a Bezier curve and then switch the stroke back and kinda like it like that. I'm just going to soften it by holding down control than control option to kinda bring it back in. Then invert the mask by holding Control again. Better. I can. I think I'll bring it out this way. I'm just gonna kinda move all this forward like so. Just to kind of give us like a little bit of a minor little scene. It looks a little jagged, don't worry, because we can smooth it right out. If you want to thicken it up. Now you can always go back to inflate if you want. And you can kinda bring in a little bit more thickness to it and then of course, relax it back out. Do that too. All right. Then I'll just kinda do a once-over to kind of bring it all out. Like so. Let's go ahead and do the same thing as well. Another thing that we can do is a little tedious and a bit of a pain is, is we can use one of the stitch brushes in your your lightbox. And you can create sort of like a stitch that kinda rolls around here as well. The only, the only reason I'm not doing it is because it doesn't really make much sense with stitches being at his size. So alright, so now that we got all this taken care of, Let's go ahead and just take the time to just do some light to sculpting on the body Before I start, another thing we can do, go ahead and hold down control. We can also, I can't believe I didn't really go over this, but we can also make like a little bit of a pocket here. Let's make sure we understand where the pocket is in retrospect, packet can be like for example, right here. You can just kinda bring in a pocket. Same concept again, where you're just moving it in a little bit and left all left Z to bring it down. Like so. And then kinda shifts smoothing it out a little bit. In other way you can do a pocket is similar to how you did the mouth. And I may even experiment with in-flight just to kind of give myself a little bit of volume on this and poof up the pouch a little bit more. Go through each subdivision. Just like that. Pretty easy. Just kinda bring it through. So and of course you can do like a dam standard brush with and just kinda cause carve-out. Like a little bit of a divot. If you want. Just to kinda show he's got a little bit of a pocket. So you can always do something like that. That's just really quick, fast stuff that we can do. Just make it very subtle. But I kinda want to now get into some fun sculpting. So let's go ahead and do some some work with wrinkles. Now, wrinkles are a little bit of a tricky thing if it's your first time. So one thing I'm going to want you to do is hold down spacebar. Look at your focus shift. I'm starting off with 35 on intensity of 25. And when I sculpt in a single wrinkle than first thing I'm going after is thinking, okay, I want to smooth the ends here because the whole idea here is to make this blend into the code. So you gotta kinda smooth the ends. And the more it gets to the center, you do less smoothing. In addition, I hold left Alt, left option to do the inverse effect. And I have no problem with the idea of just kinda giving a little bit of a taper there. Now, there are things like anchor points that we can go over with a width creating wrinkles. It's not something that is, it's kind of like a science that I don't want to get too much into. Definitely go a little bit more into it with the, the Cyberpunk character that I do, which is a little bit more advanced to intermediate, but it can also be something fun for beginners as well. But I don't want to really go to too deep into that until you get a basic understanding of the basics here. So let's just go ahead and keep it fairly simple. There are even more advanced techniques to sculpt out wrinkles. Even in this stage. The other thing to take into account is wrinkles. For this type of character. I kind of feel should be. How shall I say? I feel like they should be kind of less detailed since it's like a cartoon. But it's your call how you wanna do it? Again, if you're having trouble smoothing it out at the ends, just hit Shift D and kind of work your way through it. You know, just take your time and ideas. Do you use the wrinkles to kind of break up everything? Not make it look perfectly smooth one way or not. Just kinda wanna play that subtle game. Bring that back. So kinda getting through it, we're kind of making our way into it. Just kinda hitting Shift down and kind of trying to relax it a little bit. I don't wanna get too too overly wrinkled. Kinda want to just have it. Because if it shows too many wrinkles, one thing that it tends to always look like as silk in the process. Now, one other thing we can do is go to the top here. And if you want to, you can also maybe put some trims on here. Same thing, same concept. Pretty much like a perfect beginner level thing that we would do. Just to kind of hold left all to tuck it in. Excel. This out. Like so. Invert and of course smooth. And of course the same thing goes here. Spacebar trick for panning the curve and bring it in. Like so. Then left Alt, left option to kinda push on the z-axis. Once more, space bar or smooth it out a little bit. We got that going. Alright. There's anything that you feel you missed. Maybe on here, kinda bring it all back. **** Standard. And of course, one thing that we'll have to do is kind of guard against this because we were turning the the there's two layers. There's one underneath and below. So we were in Isolate Select, so Let's go ahead and mask this stuff out and use the Move brush to kind of push all this in so it doesn't interfere. You're not really going to see what's inside the hole because the hand is going to cover that up. All the fun stuff we get to do. Even now, I just BST it on here. It's pretty nice exercise when you can do this. I forgot also one thing that I love to do is use my quick key tool palette for brushes. Again, we don't cover too heavily into that because of the because we're really, really centered around trying to get this whole thing. Basically looking a lot more like getting you to remember and remind yourself of all the brush keys. Like DMV is brushed, move, BST is standard ECT, brush, Clay Tubes, things like that. All right. So all that's left is holding Shift Control. And we're going to now just cut some cuts into this to make it a little bit more ragged. We're going to use the knife curve and we're going to delete our subdivision levels. Because once you're done or have a place, you can just kind of, you know, kinda just go through and well, to go something like that. Just having some fun with this. This probably would not be ideally though, a fun thing to reach. Apologize. I mean not reach, apologize, but not be a fun thing to auto, reach. Apologize on four here with C Asher. And again, I'm making these acute cuts through a double tapping the left option key on here. Even spaced. Got to break it up a little bit. So we're getting there. We're getting there. So we've got a little bit more down for that. We'll just finish off with putting a few buttons on them, just some basic little buttons. So I'm just going to go to sub tool and hit Append sphere. And I'm going to take that sphere and I'm going to bring it in here. And it's just a small little sphere and just kinda flatten this guy out like so. And make that a button. Just something very easy, very simple. Got a little bit more to him. And I'm going to hold down control to duplicate the mesh. Notice that when I hold down control and I translated, I did not duplicate the sub tool. So there is that we're almost getting done here. It's kinda nice when you hold control because it's, it creates a mask so that you're not moving the entire sub tool, which is always nice. You need to change any of these. I would go with move topology As your choice to move brush because they'll move multiple meshes at the same time. You want to move one at the same time. So now that we have a little bit more of a jacket here, we're going to go ahead and now just move into the next phase, which will be the little certain belly here and finish with the shoes. And then from there we'll work on hands and staff and finish off with a little bit of a platform that said stick around and stay tuned. 19. Sculpting the Chest: Okay, so let's continue. We're going to now work on the chest here and start to sculpting out some detail. It's gonna be a pretty easy one because we're going to build off of what we already did on the jacket onto here. So let's go ahead and click on that body here. It's not going to be all that hard. It's just gonna be sort of like I'm just going to create a shirt here, area here. And just like what we do with these scenes here, we don't have to go with something too crazy. We can just kind of put a jacket over it. Sorry, not a jacket but a shirt over it. By kind of pulling this out a little bit more careful it doesn't go past the the jacket. So if you have to tuck in, if you will, the pants instead, that's fine. But don't forget when you're doing this. Definitely want to smooth it out. So smooth is your friend. Now, from here you can go ahead and put some fun things on here with standard, just like we did before. Maybe you want to do like maybe some more of the similar, similar styles that we've so far done, as is with the brush. That's not the similar wrinkles that we have done before. That's not a problem as either. One of the reasons that we do stylized cartoon is because it's less detail for a beginner to tackle. We wanna, wanna go ahead and do this a little bit more easier for the first time, beginner. Feel free to add anything that you want on here. Whether it's something like a trim, like this. This is just the dam standard that we're doing here. You can definitely do that. You're welcome to take any kind of interpretation to this as you see fit. It's yours to go with. So once you get a nice-looking sheen of a character on here, what we're going to do now is just have a little bit of fun, just kinda improvising some things here. So one such thing is like maybe some sort of a little necklace here. You can now build off of the things that you've learned and know so far. If you want to do that. Like for example, build off of how we append cylinders in here. Like let's see here. Maybe you want to go with the cylinder piece and it's usually on the bottom. Let's go ahead and just kinda bring it in here. We want to make it like super thin. And this can be like maybe a string that connects a whole bunch of pieces of some sort of shrink it necklace that we want. We can improvise that as well. And again, we are building off of what we've learned. So like we've learned how to manipulate things through many different ways. And one such way is the bend arc. Now you can just make a little bend there. So let me go ahead and make this slightly smaller, slightly wider. And yeah, we'll just go ahead and do a bend arc. Try that again. Much better. And we can just bring this guy in here like so. Bring him, remember the bend arc is sort of the, the, it's the green arrow, so to speak. So go ahead and click on that cog and hit Accept. And you can just sort of either use a combination of move tool or a scale to make it fit in there to just kinda bring it in. You can do that. We can use likes. After we get this place, we can maybe start connecting some beads. So I'll just use the Move brush tool to place this guy in here. Like so. We can do something like that. And then like maybe anything you want to do, anything. But the idea is, is you're starting to get to a point where we really are starting to encourage you to break the boundaries of experimenting with things It's not going to just be us, it's going to be about you exploring. That's the most important thing about ZBrush. Maybe this is a mushroom guy. Maybe you want to put a domino on here. It's your call. I'm not going to put a domino, I'm just going to put some maybe sculpt something in with random. Do something with the mask. Maybe give it one more subdivision for comfort. Invert that mask, bring it in like so. We're at the point where you should now know something about how to make something through improv. Right now I'm just sort of improving with a standard brush. And let's see, I can do a drag Alpha or maybe a drag piece and we know how to make these hard if you were in the first part. So that's changing. Our focal shift. Brings in here, wants you to experiment with how to manipulate things through here. So it's gonna be sort of a free for all. I want you to practice on alphas here. I also want you to feel free to go through and have some fun making combinations. Like what I'm doing right now is I'm making a combination with alphas and Ben darks to see if I can flush out a fun shape, like you see right here. Maybe I want to see what it looks like when it's like so. And maybe that can be part of a trinkets piece. So what I'll do is, for example, sub tool. I'll hit, except maybe this can serve as sort of like a gnarly looking Guitar Pick. Though. We may, if we do a guitar pick, we're going to have to do something about that. Maybe a guitar pick is something that we can do to make this piece sort of proportionately sized for him. We'll duplicate that and then we'll go back to the original one and z it all the way back into this default state. Maybe now I want to go ahead and flush out another shape out of this. So like for example, bend arc or maybe taper. That was something fun happened there with that, let's go ahead and see if we can sort of something like that. Maybe they'd accept and maybe tweak something with move. Because again, this is all about not doing any one particular move, but combination of moves. So let's bring this in. Now. We're just, like we said, we're just kind of putting combinations in, putting combinations. And let's put a little bit of Jenga and this just simply being random right now, because this is one of the biggest advantages about what ZBrush can do. And that is it can just flush out the shapes that you want. Super, super fast So here's another piece right here. Let's go ahead and V&V brush. Let's go back to this guy. Now that we haven't, let's duplicate it. Deformation and let's mirror. And let's center that point and reset the transforms. This is going to have to be a little bit more readjusting. Alright, go. We're just going to have some fun, just doing some fun stuff. Just be as random z1 come up with your own design. I made a very quick design very quickly, but that's really what the crux of learning z brushes we did. We've been doing a lot of like step-by-step guiding. But this lesson is really starting to be more of an emphasis on things such as well, trying to explore ZBrush and trying to get through it With an example of just doing random things to see what they do. As my instructor famously said, push buttons is the key to all of it. Push buttons, push buttons, and learn from what it does. For example, I don't know what this does if I stretch this guy's cloth out, like so. Or maybe if I do this in combination with something like, for example, the spiral brush that we learned to see what that does. We don t know at all. So we have to kind of push buttons to see and learn how something works. So that's kind of what I'm hoping that you're going to get out of all of this when you go through and if you don't like it or if you feel that it is like a little bit off or doesn't match up very well. No. You can just simply slide it all the way back and just return it back to to what the original piece was, which is right here. You can just decide where did you like it at? You like it here. You like it here. We're, where's it better at? You know, use the slider to guide your way through. So please, please, please understand pushing buttons is important. Learnt doing experimental things just to flush something out more is something that's, what's going to happen is, is you're going to kind of create an incremental process in all of this, where that transfers over to your next project, your next 3D project. That's actually part of the reason why they do things like speed sculpt practices because they want to get you to discover something really quick, really fast without thinking about it. So that's kind of what this lesson is all about. Take a minute to just simply push buttons and have some fun with it, like we just did. In fact, I may even just leave it draped over like this. With that said, we're going to now move into making some hands here and crafting some legs. And then after that, we're gonna go ahead and finish the character itself by putting a staff on there. And of course, make a platform for him to stand on. So with that said, stick around and stay tuned. 20. Creating the Hands and Pants: Okay, so let's continue. In this video, we're going to go ahead now and work on the hands and work on the lower body here. So it's gonna be fairly easy, fairly nice little review from the blackout base meshes and DynaMesh. So let's just go ahead and get started. First things first, we do what we always do. We append a sphere in and go to the bottom of the sub tools to collect that sphere. Will go ahead and hit W key to go through the process of rearranging the sphere into a certain spot. And from here, I'm gonna go ahead and just take my time to kinda make this. This is gonna be like a cute little mitten hand because he is after all, a little mushroom guy. So we're going to make something like that. Let's go into solo mode so we can see things a little easier. And I might even work a little bit more, just experimenting. And this point I'm hoping a lot of people had some fun with experimenting before. In the last video with some fun looking little piece right here, just a fun little flap. Then feel free to make any final editing adjustments of the piece. Like So. Hit F twice so I can give myself a little bit more of a you can just make whatever shape you want. I'm going to go ahead and duplicate that are not duplicates sub tool, but duplicate the mesh. Just so I can now have something that is just a little bit easier, like a kind of opposable thumb. And then from here, I'm gonna go ahead and duplicate that sub tool. Now, from this point on, I can go ahead and make this a little bit bigger. I can make this a little thinner. Probably bring it up to hear a little bit. And then I'm just gonna go through the process of DynaMesh and just kinda combine this all up into one mesh. So let's just go through geometry and this is just real basic stuff, beginner stuff. See if we can project and see if we can get something. I don't like project that way. Let's just crank up the resolution. Whoops. Turn off that project. Yeah, something like that. And we'll just go ahead and bring solo backoff again. And now we'll just bring this guy in here. Let's turn that just temporarily turn that sub tool off. So it's kinda like a little claw. I'm just using the just sort of bringing it in like so working my shape and maybe even do something with a bend arc. Just to kinda experiment with things are at. Now, this is kinda like with the hat. You just got to take your time, find your mesh, find your shape. And definitely go through the whole fun process of just having a little bit of a blast, just to simply just relaxing and taking, just flushing out the shape as best as you can. See if we can avoid cutting in a little bit there. Alright, so let's go ahead now, repeat the whole process for the other guy as well. The second piece. So let's just We're going to see these two pieces here. Let's go ahead and hit Control W so we can turn them both into a polygraph that way. If I need to mask one of them, I can kinda just go through that and just isolate select mask and to work on the other one. So let's go ahead and mirror this one over Deformation. Mirror shouldn't have any sub tools. Let's re-center, pivot point that back. And let's bring it out a little bit, kinda like we did before. What we're gonna do is this guy is going to hold himself a staff. Let's give him a staff. Now I'm going to isolate select. And I'm just gonna kinda move this guy in here. I'm not too worried about the the whole intersection into the sleep. Just doing one thing at a time right now. I think we can do it just fine there. It's DynaMesh this in. Let's go into solo mode and geometry. Try it again with a little bit more resolution. There we go. I'm not too. We can go higher resolution and fix all this by going up to resolution slider here. But if the staff is going right through it and you're never going to really see it. It's not worth doing the time. For a first-time beginner. Let's go ahead then and bring this back on. Make sure the visibility of our off. All right. So this is all just sort of a funneling process to get it all looking right? We're just gonna kinda plan a little twig stuff in there. Make sure make sure it kinda angles out a little bit. Okay. So we're getting that taken care of. One of the last things we'll do is we'll just go ahead and kinda give the indication that there are some pants on this guy. So like for example, one way we can do that is just going through solo. Now let's just kind of bring it to yea, Hi. Fact, let's, let's give it a couple of subdivisions. And try that again. We'll control and bring it down like that. And then just like we did before with the shirt and everything else. This is all like very basic. Now, bear in mind, there are a lot of ways to do this, like how I'm creating this fold. Like one way is to turn this into this mask in Nepali groups and do group loops, polish the group loops, and just clean it up that way. For a nice clean look for you can isolate, select between the two areas. This is a very, very simple ones model, so it's not like necessary for that. But it's just sort of help, helpful to know like that you have multiple choices in all of this. When going about. Let's just go ahead and bring it through here like so. Now again, we can go through the whole process of of of sculpting like some very subtle and small wrinkles. So I wouldn't ever go. It's stylized and I always prefer and stylized to do things that are, how should I say very subtle, minimalistic, and limited. It's not necessarily a hard line rule about stylized, but it's, it's just A good way to start off things with. We want. We can create a trim for these pants as well. By holding down Control and selecting your stroke to be holding down Control and going into the mask menu and selecting your stroke for occur. To be this. Let's go ahead and try that again with higher resolutions. Just to sort of give us a hint that this is like, Hey, this is a, this is a trim. Then now you check out the other side here too. This is kinda like one of those things. So if you're due at your own cost because it's not going to really be seen too much on here. But you can do the back. Then we just kinda go through, okay. Let's go through the Move brush. Ring the guy in. I'm sorry. But just to give it sort of like a an illusion of parents that this is a this has got trims just like the jacket does to help us out. Same thing over here. Something real simple, real easy. And then we'll just kinda solo, bring this guy out. Like so. Your choice if you want to put a zipper on there. If you do want to put like maybe a quick little zipper, one quick trick, you can always use this brush and then go into like slash. Let's see. Where would the slash be on here. Wants to smash. Usually slash two is what I go with. High vocal shift. You can melt a zipper into all of that as well. Ideally with this, if you do go the route of a zipper in any way, you can. You can. I would hit the wall. I put it, the lazy mouse, the L key for it. And that would help a lot. I wanted to do this without the zipper though. Just to kind of give you a little bit more of a blank canvas to work with sultan. Know, like make sure we're smoothing this on a fair resolution level. Make sure we get a good amount of super smooth. Just some very subtle, something like that. But like I said, feel free to experiment in this as much as you want. You can do a whole bunch of things you can do like this and something like this. This is like I said, your character. So it's kind of up to you on where you want to take it. You know, kinda like it just sort of like a boxers scenario. Who's thinking of actually putting a little bit of a checker boxers on him, but we'll see how it goes in there. So from there we got the hands, we got the legs and the feet all taken care of. So what we're going to work on is a little bit of a staff and then after that we'll finish off with our platform. So that said, stick around and stay tuned. 21. 19 Creating Staff: Okay, Let's continue in this video now we're going to create a little bit of a staff here for our character to hold. And it's going to have some buttons attached to it. So let's go ahead and get started with this first half of making this staff by just making the little staff itself. So like, kinda like how we did before. We're going to append in a cylinder just like this little round area here. Except this cylinder is going to be slightly different. And whenever you impending sub tool, It always comes to the bottom of the sub tool. Let's hit the W key and bring this one out. Now. So let's just go ahead and scale this down. It's gonna be really thin and well, it can be whatever you wish it to be. But I'd like it to be a little bit thin. Probably something like that, maybe. Something with a little bit of headway for it. And probably put it like right here. The idea I want to have on this is that it shuts and angles out a little bit. But before I do that, let's just go ahead and kind of crooked it up. Make it crooked. Alright, so see here, first thing I'll do is I'll give it a couple of subdivisions and then maybe just smooth it out here. And I'll just go ahead and make a mask and kinda just crooked, make it a little bit crooked here with that mask. Just kinda bring it like so. And like that. And kinda see that. It's just kind of a crooked little piece. Reset this guy. Bring that back up again. Some peace. Q and I'm just kinda going back and forth between this and what I'm making here. It's just making it a little bit slim, little bit crooked, and hitting the space bar to smooth it out. So now from here I'm gonna go ahead and add some volume to it. So I'll give it one more subdivision and I'm going to add a little bit of volume. And for that I'm going to use the in-flight brush just gently though. So b, i for, inflate an n to complete that key. And it's just sort of a, a, kind of a, you might need to turn the intensity just a little bit down just to give it a little bit of inflate our way. We can just kind of break this down a little bit more. You can feel free to bring this in any way you want just to kind of give it just a little bit of inflate in areas that way. When we do this in sculpted down, it will be a little bit easier to manage and it won't collapse completely in this in Excel. Okay, So now I'm just going to hit the B key and I'm going to look for something called high polish. And a high polish isn't something we touched very much. It's definitely a hard surface brush, but it can also be used in certain circumstances if you're skilled enough with it to sculpt stylized wood. And this is going to be a very brief intro to giving you an idea of what that looks like. So let's just go ahead and select our high polish brush, which is there. So that's B, H P for the three keys. Take your time on this one. This is very much You just taking time to see how you see those little lines right there. That's what you want to go for that You want to kinda take away the look that this is a rounded object. You want to remove that. So now just kind of do very, very quick small strokes on here. Kinda helps with, you can kinda see how this can kind of bring into like something such as stylized would little bit here. All right, So it's kinda, kinda filling out a little bit more here. Again. That's all we need. So now that we have that, let's just go ahead and center this sign here. And let's just finish by just placing this into our character. If you want, you can kind of shrink it down a little bit. There we go. It's probably an angle I'm happy with. Just bring it in through here, like so. And then I'll use the Move brush to kind of make that bottom piece kinda. And so don't forget, move is a great way to kinda finish off everything. Like so. Alright, so we got to our piece, so let's just put a couple of buttons on there. So that's gonna be our next lesson. So we got a little wooden staff there for our mushroom monk slash hobo. As so, let's go ahead and move on. So stay tuned. 22. Making Buttons through Booleans: Okay, So let's finish this character out. We're going to put a couple of buttons on here to finish the character out and just kinda prop them onto this little step here. And we thought this might be a good opportunity to cover for the beginner another ZBrush feature which will be live Booleans. Now we've gone through a lot of different features. Live Booleans we dipped into very briefly in the first time or section, but now we're going to try to put it to applicable use. And so to do that, let's first of all sculpt the initial shape of the button. So what that means is like we did with the staff here where we brought a cylinder in. Let's go ahead and do that again, where we hit a pen and bring this time a sphere 3D in here. It's gonna be at the bottom of your sub tool. It will be probably tucked behind this head. So I'm just going to bring this forward. And just for now, I'm going to go ahead and go into solo mode right here. Additionally, you can go through and turn the sub tools off. And I'm just going to hit W to bring up my gizmo and scale this guy to be a little bit flat. Now, from this point on, I'll hit Q and hold down control and select for stroke my drag or I'm sorry, my circle stroke, not My Drive rectangle but my circle stroke because I kinda want to give you a little bit of a heads up feature that you can modify the stroke by going to center. And what that means is this. If I draw something out, it comes from the corner. If you can kinda see kinda in it's sometimes hard to kind of pick the right spot and where this goes. And that's why sometimes using a spacebar trick which we covered again in the Mask section and isolate select is very helpful. But another way that can be helpful is turning on this center key where you just go simply straight to the center and drag a circle in that way. So utilizing that, let's go ahead and hit control D couple of times to get to a couple of of subdivisions. In fact, I'll do one more. And you don't normally necessarily have to have an Alpha on there. So you can kinda just leave it blank with the alphabet turned off. But try to drag in a rectangle. And if you want, you can release control but still holding left-click and then just simply hold spacebar down to kinda get yourself a nice little clean spot right there. Now, from this point on, I'm going to soften the mask. I may even hit Shift D to a, soften the mask a little bit more. From this point on. All also kind of turn the mask off there. That's holding left, Old Left option. And I'm gonna go ahead and just simply press this button in. Like so. So it's kinda like that. So that's kind of all we're doing. And then from here, we can do a couple of things. One, if you wanted to kinda push up a little bit more, you can do that several ways. I mean, you can just kind of give it a bulge and then just kinda push it back like that if you want or you can go with inflate and poof it out that way. That's also an option. There's no such thing as the wrong key, except failure to experiment. From here. Now, once you get this kinda situated one, what we'll do next is we're going to do a demonstration of making a boolean. A boolean is what it is broken down is where we use the mesh of one object's mass to subtract away from another meshes mass. So to give you an idea, I'm gonna go ahead and hit append. And I'm going to choose a cylinder, cylinder 3D. And you can't really see it because we're in solo modes. Let's turn solo mode off And let's also bring it up a little bit. I'm going to divide this cylinder up a few times, like so. And then I'm going to go through geometry and hit Delete lower. I'm also going to click on here and delete lower this geometry. So now I'm just going to rotate this cylinder, going to really lower it down. And let me give you a demonstration of how this works. What we're gonna do is make this a Boolean that's going to cut through this piece here. To do that, we need to enable two things. First of all, we have to turn on Live Boolean, which is up here. Additionally, run in the renders tab, you can access Live Boolean here. And then finally, we have to tell this sub tool. This is the one we want to make Boolean under Live Boolean mode. So let's go ahead and click that. And this is the cutaway intersection. You will see the mesh disappear, but don't worry, you can still see it again if you hit the Shift F, which is kinda hard to see, but it's right there. So if we move this through, you'll see a cut right through, like so. So let's go ahead and build off this concept. I'm just going to kind of make this a little bit small, break it through. Maybe something like that. Do you guys remember when we did the F4 button or the duplicate mesh? Well, because this is a live Boolean, we can do the same thing here. Then. Don't forget to draw masks to clear both off. Like so. Now, Right now all this is doing is merely projecting the look of a button. If we turn this off, nothing really happens. So we got to turn this into a Boolean. But to do that, we've got to turn everything here off. We're going to turn off all your sub tools. And that has a lot to do with the fact that if we made a Boolean out of this, this whole mesh would be included as well. So let's go through our sub tools. Disable the visibility of everything. I know we gotta go through and disable everything. It's not so bad once we get through it. Alright, so now we're on justice piece. So now that we have this piece, let's go ahead and turn it into a boolean, which is very simple. First we select the button, then we go in the sub tools to where it says Boolean and we simply hit make Boolean mesh. Now, before I hit this, one should keep an eye out over here where it is because the Boolean mesh becomes its own little tool stored out here. It's going to go ahead and do a union mesh. And you'll see right there our piece is created. So now if we turn off everything and append this piece into our 500s sub tools that we have so far. You'll see it at the very bottom. So now we have our button and it's got its mesh on there. Cool. So now that we have that, let's go ahead and yeah, you probably guessed it. Let's turn everything on. It was a pain. I now we'll go through in return everything back on. Like so. All that's left now is just going through and putting this button on here. Now, we'll just go ahead and delete these two meshes since we don't really need them anymore. And then don't forget to hit this upside-down teardrop to center it on here. So now that we have that we can kind of put a button on here, I'm going to want to probably have maybe like a little tether or something on this mask. So like a little ring that's similar to our necklace. Nothing really too crazy or anything like that. Just something that can bind all these guys together. So what we'll do for that is we'll go through and we'll append. And we'll bring in, and yet again another cylinder. Bring that guy in here like so. Really make it then and really stretch it out And then let's just go ahead and go through our deformer and do a bend arc. Remember it's the green cone. Once we hit Accept. Let's go ahead and give it a couple of subdivisions. All right. Let's recenter the point here. This is all just about giving a little bit to give him just a little bit more detail onto it. Not happy about the length of that. So let's do the undo bar and bring this guy a little bit more wider. Fact, it probably should just kinda bringing in like this. See what that looks like. Yeah. That's fine by me. So kinda redoing what I did again, trying to get this looking just right for me. You can scale it like that. Boom. That's what that one. Here we go. No hold left Alt, left-click, and just kind of bring it through. You can have it go through a whole bunch of different ways. Including one way of just having one of maybe the holes go through here. Like so. Then duplicating the mesh. Gonna see it's just sort of coming together, but it's a little bit of a process. Because if I can't make this go through and might just have to go through the process of just dealing with one. I'm very close to doing further down. Excel. So I'm going to hit Control W. So these are two different poly groups in case there's anything I want to edit further. But now we got ourselves a little bit of a button going on, a couple of buttons. So it's sort of like his staff. So now that we have that all taken care of, the next lesson we're gonna go over is gonna be the environment, the whole background, the platform. He's gonna be on, just some basic, simple stuff. And from there we'll talk about rendering. So with that said, stick around and stay tuned. 23. Sculpting Rocks through Noise Masking: Okay, so let's continue. In this video, we're going to begin by making our environment, starting with sculpting some rocks out for you. Also, it will be helpful to know that since we have finished our character, let's go ahead and put these sub tools that we have here into a folder. Now we would never really gone over folders and sub tools. So it kind of is that continuation. So first thing I'm gonna do is go to the very top sub tool. And I'm just gonna go ahead and under sub tool, I'm just going to go down here to where it says new folder and I'm going to call this mushroom. And then from here, I'm just going to drag the fold, all the sub tools in here like so. And you can kind of see this vertical line a denotes and signifies a folder that it's in the folder structure. So let's just go ahead and bring this through. Scroll down a little bit further. Like so. And we're almost done. Perfect. Now we can collapse this folder down. And now we have cleaned a little bit more up on our character. So let's move on. Now that we have that taken care of, Let's go ahead and append a yep, you guessed it, 3D sphere. And let's turn the, let's click on that sphere and turn the visibility of this folder off. So now that we have this sphere, one of the first things I'll do is I'll just go ahead and maybe just hit the R key and stretch it a little bit like that. I don't ever like this little convergence of topology. So usually I like to DynaMesh something. So nine times out of ten, I'll just go ahead and just hit Control D and divide the mesh just to smooth it out and then go under Geometry. And DynaMesh hit now and just kinda give ourselves a little bit of a smooth rotation right here. So now we can begin sort of sculpting our rock. Now, there's a lot of different ways a rock can be sculpted. This is one of many ways. This is definitely a way I would start if I was ever doing stylized rocks because it tends to look have a cartoonish feel to it. So one of the brushes that I found to be a very good one and it's a little bit old school. If there's anyone that's familiar with it, is a brush called trim dynamic. Now it's not one of the main brushes that we would use, which are, again, brush Clay Tubes, brush, standard Move brush, Dame standard brush. And I'm forgetting one and the high prop and the inflate brush. I wouldn't bring those as the most commonly used brushes. Robots still. This is one I kind of like it's all the way to the very bottom here. And if you hit b, t, d, you'll get the quick key for that. Now that we have this, it may feel you may get a little bit confused on which the top side is. Just go up to your head up here and you can reorient yourself like so. If I take a shot at this, you can kinda see how it works. It's kind of a, we want to sculpt this into quadrants like so. You can kinda see how it pushes in and creates that nice little crease there. And we kinda know that's kinda what we want. We want to put a crease into these areas here and create a lot of randomness. And you can make your own interpretation as much as you want. And it is yours to work with. And make, just make sure when you're doing this to have fun, take your time. Definitely something you would want to do with a webcam tablet just to enjoy. But you can also see how we can kind of go through and find all sorts of fun shapes. If there's something you don't like in the design, like maybe that little center spot you can kinda make it disappear through sort of a by pushing into the adjacent areas. Make sure you take one stroke to smooth it out. Kind of just see I'm having fun just being random You can also experiment with, of course, it goes without saying different sizes. Get yourself something that's fairly representing to what looks. I would say like a beginning, start to a stylized looking rock. Now, when we finish going through all this, it's not going to be okay. We can put it down. Hey, mean you can, you can use it in this format if you want. But one thing that we're probably going to do then is we're going to go ahead and kinda put some textures on it. It's rock. It can have imperfections on it. So once you get it to a spot that you like, if you are that you are comfortable with, you can then go to a new function. We did a little bit of this function when we're doing the mushroom cap. But I guess we can actually explore a little bit deeper into this and that's under surface, hitting the button noise. And that gives us an interactive preview. And if we bring this in, it's the same rules over here. You can kinda move everything like you do normally. And the two most commonly featured dials in this little edit bar is going to be the noise scale and the strength. And that's where I would start if you are a beginner. So let's go ahead and rotate this around, see if we can find ourselves a fairly apt representation here. Something like that. That's good enough for me. And let's start with noise scale. And you can kinda see a consistent noise that's applying across everywhere. Whoops, I accidentally hit noise magnify if I bring it all the way up, like so you can kinda see what it does. Now the strength is up to you, but I start with a that's like the strength is essentially like the intensity, how deep those cracks and crevices go. Then down here you see this diagonal half checkered, dark half checkered light shaded area. This is an area that helps you find, tune the crevasses and to look for some interesting shapes. It's something that is, in my honest opinion, not easy to get on your first try. And it's also something that I would probably put as you got to just practice it a little bit to really grasp it. And if you ever get stuck or lost 31o delete something, you can just hit the reset button and you can just take it from there. One thing I just like to do is kinda draw in extra areas for these little cracks, crevices here. Give myself something that I'm working with here. Just to kinda see what I can make for a rock shape. It's not very much something that I would call exact science. There's a little bit of a method to it. So like this could be like one type of mesh, which could be fine. If you want, you can reset it and you could just sort of make this kind of a mesh. You just have to play with it. You just got to have to work with all the fun features. Like Here's another fun one. I kinda like this one a little bit more because it can give us some flat surfaces. But at the same time, I also kind of want to make it perfectly flat, but just right. Then we can tweak the intensity a little bit further down if you want. Kinda see like an intro area to Iraq. And this is sort of like a beginner state. And we can have like a little bit of a rock looking texture out of this. Now, if you apply to the mesh, it's gonna look a little bit different and you'll have what you want. But normally, the representation on here and the intensity are two different things. So one thing I'll do, I like to do is depending on how much is mast I like the test to ground by something called mask by noise. And that will sort of give us a like a little bit of a an opportunity to do manual sculpting on it with what was masked. So if we kinda go through and hit B, C, T and change your stroke to something like spray or dots and then turn off the Alpha. We can maybe hold left all to push in. We can kind of move around and see what we got here. We can just kind of do something like this. If you feel that it's a little bit too soft, we can also sharpen the mask a little bit like so. Start off with something like that. Now, you can reapply what you've learned already. And you can then also do an additional applied to mesh to kinda get to both areas. But I kinda like to go through the mesh and just have a little bit of fun just experimenting with all the different types. Like sometimes I'll just do something very standard hit, Okay. And then a mask by noise to see what that looks like. And then sharpen the mask out. Like so. Even sometimes I'll invert the mask and then repeat the same process again. So like I'm kind of bringing in everything. You can kinda see, smooth out these cracks and then kinda maybe I'll push like this to be the area that I push in. So let's go ahead and invert the mask and put it like so. Then what does this look like? Well, too much noise. So maybe I'm just going very light. Too much hair cell. Let's just start it out here too much. So we'll just push it in here. Kinda just using the inverse mass to find areas I liked, don't like etc. So you can kind of make yourself a little bit of a mask already, like that. Now, if there's any areas you feel like maybe you left out, you can just kinda put another mask on there just by simply hitting me. Look for it. Strength of the mask. No, I don't want that. I can go through and just change the noise, plug the scale, and then once again, mask by noise, sharpen the mask, invert the mask. And we can just kinda put something in. Like so. You can do several of these pieces like a one can be done like this. And then we can just simply duplicate that. Go back to the one with the history bar here. And just simply, if you want, you can stretch this guy out. Maybe you can have technically a completely different looking rock like so. And duplicate that one off. And I'm going to of course turn off the I'm sorry, the pieces, the viewports. And maybe like this. And you know, you can do a whole bunch of them. So we have now like a few rocks that we made. But one last one I want to go over. This is one that I feel is a little bit of important things since it's a beginner class. We go through all sorts of different features and we try to use every video to talk about something. Like In this video we talked about noise plugs. We didn't really talk about the insert mesh brushes and that's what we want to conclude to sort of get you into a final thought. You can also insert brushes are basically pre-made models that are inserted onto the mesh. Let me give you an example. Let's go through our spot or lightbox, go through our brush, and let's go ahead and look at our insert multi mesh brush. Now, I'm going to click on the brick here. If you look at all of this, you can see all the different types of bricks that we can use on here. Including a little bit of a fun Claude. And if we left-click drag, we can drag in a whole nother rock. It's a little bit different because it's a pre-made model and it's different from the model that I made. But if we kinda turn in that spotlight once again, you can see bricks as another choice and you can see all the different bricks you can bring in. Like here's one brick. This one was done pretty well and has a nice looking sheen around it. Similar technique of what I did, but it's in the form of a brick. So I could probably do the same thing where I kinda trimmed dynamic the same thing. It's a little bit less debited. But if you ever wanted to do an insert mesh brush to add to your environment, you can definitely do that. Notice when you draw an insert mesh brush, you have to have a couple of things done. First, you gotta go ahead and understand that this is still technically being done in one piece. So to separate this from this mesh here, we have to go through sub tool split and then hit split unmasked. And what that's going to do is that's going to put this in its own little sub tool, like you see here. Of course hit the center point, but it's just something to keep in mind. So if you want to use that, that's fine. We're not going to be making a whole bunch of insert multimethods, but we wanted to give you an opportunity to understand the different brushes and the different options that are available to you on here. So with that said, we're going to conclude by moving on into creating a platform with some dirt that we can place some of these rocks on. So with that said, stick around and stay tuned. 24. Sculpting Dirt Ground: Okay, so let's begin our platform and sculpting out some dirt. So what we're gonna do in this lesson, we're going to create a little bit of a platform and a dirt mount for this guy to start on which we can build our foundation to place all our props in including grass. So let's just go ahead and get started with that. Now, the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to append a cylinder. I'm just going to left-click on here. And before I go any further, if you look in my sub tool section, you're going to see I've placed all the rocks into a folder to kinda keep things all nice and neat. So moving on, I'm just gonna go ahead and left-click on this guy right here. And I'm just gonna go ahead and just simply bring it in. What I'm doing is just kinda giving myself a little bit of a foundation platform for him. You bought a couple of divides on there to smooth that out. We're just gonna kinda, I may put this a little bit below for now and then see how that may make that slightly bigger. Actually, that's a fine size for me. So let's just go ahead and thicken it up and see if we can sort of duplicate this mesh. And we'll make this one go right below. And just kinda like that. So we got something started. Now, I'd like to go ahead and append another primitives. So we'll put a sphere in here, like so, and will bring us sphere up just for now, up here. And if I hit Shift F, I'm gonna go ahead and rotate this around. And I'm going to take half this sphere away because I really don't need two sides. I'm just going to kind of go through half of it. Like so That's really all I need. And then I can just delete the hidden parts. And again, we did it once, but let's just review to delete hidden, it's Geometry, modify Topology and delete hidden. So we can have a little bit of a smooth area here. And if you want, you can also mesh the whole piece so it's a little bit smoother. Like that. I don't mind it being one mountain though I'm not going to lie. So I might just leave it like that. So let's go ahead and this mound here is going to function as our dirt clods. So I'm just going to make this a little bit bigger. And then I'm going to scale this just a little bit down and just kinda put it right down in the center there. And just kinda expand this across, like so. I may even flatten it a bit. Now, this comes down to a little bit of readjustments. Like for example, I may bring this mount a little bit lower down so I can make room for the mount or the platform a little bit down. So I can make room for the mount a little bit more and give it a little bit more thickness to see. Maybe something like that. That might be it. So I'll just kinda bring it through. And you can kinda see I'm just kind of size and everything up. Kinda like so. All right. So once you have that taken care of and you got to your mount all established, let's go ahead and give that little mound there a couple of subdivisions for us to work with. So from here, I'm gonna go ahead and start with the brush standard, which is your basic brush just to kind of what the goal here is to sort of break this all up is sort of speak. And that's the only thing I'm doing here. And if there's any adjustments you want to go through the whole process of making sure it kinda blends into the lower platform. So kind of work with that a little bit. I'm just gonna kinda work at very, very slowly, very gently, and may even do my final adjustments on here. With the Move brush. Just to the whole idea is, is like, like for example, this area right here, the whole, the edges that you're seeing here, they all just need to be broken up a little bit so that it kind of gives the illusion of just a little bit of an uneven surface for you to work with. Kind of see how I'm doing. It's just kind of a bit of a chore, but, you know, then I'll maybe do my final adjustments with the Move brush and use that left Alt to kinda bring things out a little bit more. Kinda see, kinda like that. This is still a little bit of a chore, but it's all good. Just wanted to give a sort of indication of sort of a dirt mound indication. Then from here, you can go to your your higher subdivisions and go back to that brush trim dynamic. And you can go about also just kind of taking your time to break this up and create sort of like an, a little bit of an angular look on here. That can also help with the a, look a little bit. You can kinda see how it's given us a certain look. So it's not, it's not just something you can use for rocks. You can also use this for like patches of dirt, for example. And just go ahead and cycle between the three brushes, move standard and trim dynamic and just kinda go about, Let's see if we can make our adjustments there through and see if we can little bit more of the pouch area. Alright, so kinda have a little bit of this. If you want it to be less, more flat, you can just bring it in like this and kind of make it come up like so you can do that as well. But once you have all this taken care of and you've done your final touches, we can kinda compound what we've learned about rocks and just have some fun experimenting again on surface with noise again and just kinda seeing what we can flush out like we did before. And now it's, it's really something that you just gotta kinda play with and have some fun with. Like just giving you an idea to look for patterns on here that you might enjoy. Just feel free to kind of look for some sort of scale. Ron right here could be an interesting looking scale. And you can just kinda hit Okay, and see a little bit of that. Of course, because we have small division right here, it's not going to be the best projection if you hit Apply to mesh and it's not too bad. You just wanted to kinda give it a extra amount. Another thing you can do is just a mask by noise again and bring it all in through that same pattern that we did before. Now, feel that too. It's too soft or anything like that. You just kinda undo it and just bring it in another way like that. Now, you can just keep reapplying the noise or edit the noise and hit reset and do something like maybe a strength to be here, scale to be something like that. Maybe it okay. It's more just experimenting to see what something looks like. So once you go with all of that, I would say just make your final finishing touches on here. I'd like you to try to get a good amount of real estate in all of this. So you can actually make room for things like rocks or grasp or grass or things like that. Just the kinda have some fun with. So with that said in the next lesson, we're going to talk to you a little bit about grass. So cigarette and stay tuned. 25. Introduction to Fibermesh: Okay, so let's continue in this video now we're gonna go over fiber mesh and utilizing techniques we did regarding surface noise. Show you how to apply fiber mesh into the, a new combination of what we just learned to something new that we learned. So let's go ahead and get started. Now, first off, before we wonder what is fiber mesh? Fiber mesh is sort of like ZBrush is built-in hair rendering system. It can also be used for grass. And to give you an idea how it works, I'm going to go into solo mode here and show you this piece. And we're just gonna go to the right here and look where it says fiber mesh. And if you want to enable it, just simply hit the Preview key. Now, as you can see, it's showing like a dark little fuzz. So if you want to really see an actual preview of this, you can just go all the way up here where it says BPR and hit BPR rendering. You can see everything that you see there. Now, it's kind of a little furry to qualify for wrap grasp, but if you want to turn it off, you can turn it off. But remember, preview is sorted, just giving you a preview of what it looks like. When we are done modifying the grass. We then go through the process of hitting except to turn it into a sub tool to which we can sculpt. So another thing that I want to go over is, is there are several ways to apply fiber mesh. One of them is going to be mask. But before I cover that, let's go ahead and talk to you a little bit about some of the parameters under the modifiers of fiber mesh. Now, you see a whole bunch of these sliders and you're not really sure which one to go off of and what these all mean. So since this is beginner, we're going to just highlight the ones that are most important. Now, the first part is the max fibers. This dictates the number of fibers that we see in here. And it's a good way to do some fun little testing if you kinda go through, you can kinda see a demonstration. When I turned down the max fibers, we saw less fibers. Of course, if we go through a render, you can kinda see what that looks like. But also something that's incidentally very interesting is, is that if I just leave fiber mesh on this way scattered throughout, take note at the density and number of fibers. Now, if I turn preview off and hold down control and simply just do a quick little mask right here. And then turn Preview on. We will see probably a denser group of fibers. And the reason that is is because these fibers on here, they are scattered evenly across here. But if they're all bundled up into a small little mask, you're going to see it there. So to compensate that you got to work with the fibers, max fibers to get something that's interesting out. Now, having said that, moving on, let's go ahead and just go back into preview again. Another thing that's very important is length. Length is a sort of giving you the length of the fibers. You can kinda see a little bit of fur hair out of all of this. And finally coverage. Well not finally coverage kind of details into sort of like the thickness of the fibers. We decrease these fibers a little bit and then turn up coverage. You can see what I'm talking about here. It kind of gives us an edge extrusion thickness. Now, moving on, if you take NO to how these fibers are all kind of divided up into like an insert edge loop here and insert edge loop here. And it seems almost like there's a plane, well, down here where you see segments. You can change that. Now. Drooped down so you're going to have to go ahead and work on sculpting that backup. So I'm just going to go with just a kind of a simple default right there. Now, these other ones like gravity. Gravity is something that less gravity the higher it goes. But the only other thing that I'm going to talk to you about before we get into this, is that you can change the color. Let me go ahead. First of all, turn down the coverage and make these guys thin again and maybe give A few more of these. If you take a BPR render, you can kinda see the color of all of this. But if you want to change the color like say white, you can change the tip and the base to white. You'll see sort of a lighter looking representation for hair. So that's kind of a breakdown of all the important modifiers that you see there. So pardon me. What we're gonna do next is we're going to put two levels of fibers on here. One will be for like little nooks and crannies in here using this surface noise. And then we're going to paint a little backdrop area. So let's get out into solo mode here. And let's go ahead and turn off the preview. And let's go through and hit surface. Click on noise. Hit Edit. Let's go through here again and do what we always do. Maybe start off with a high scale with something like with a very subtle strength and mess around maybe with the whole of the the curves here. Just to kinda have a little bit of fun scene. If we can find something interesting out of this. And if you lose it a little bit, that's okay. Maybe something like that. Just kinda bringing it down, just building off of what we did before. We just haven't done anything different. Now we're getting that projection. But I want to use a mask because again, fiber mesh relies on masks, not actual projection sculpts. So let's mask by noise. And if we put fiber mesh on now, it won't really do anything. It's just gonna kinda go through and give us wherever you are. There's areas mass it will project fibers onto. So let's invert the mask into all these areas here. And then just for kicks and giggles, let's see how fiber mesh handles it. Turn on preview. And we can kinda see a little bit of a preview on this. Let's now going off of what we went over with the parameters. Let's apply it altogether. So I want to make this particular group let, let lot shorter, but at the same time, a lot shorter but at same time increasing their numbers. So like for this, for example, let's do a BPR render because we said that's what puts it. And you can kinda see already the fibers are showing up. Now since this is a white background, I might do something like maybe go with a slightly darker color of hair because it might contrast a little bit better and be easier to see. You can kinda see it like that. Alright, so let's just go through fibers. Just maybe, let's just go ahead and maybe just add a little bit less fibers and do slightly wider coverage just to see what that looks like. And it's all just a game of just seeing what it looks like. Let's work around the gravity and maybe turn the gravity up to kinda angle out these fibers so they're not perfectly straight. I mean, grass can be perfectly straight, but so we have a little bit more of an easier time with grasps. So I'm okay with this. I'm just gonna go ahead and maybe give it a little slight tweak on the length and then just hit accept. Yes. Now when you hit Accept, you'll see a new sub tool shows up here. And of course, if you want to see it again, you can just hit that BPR render. Now, let's just repeat what we did and kinda create sort of like a back area right here. So what we'll do is, is all just kinda create sort of like a little back area here for fiber mesh to kinda come out on. And then we'll go through and we'll have fiber mesh again by hitting first preview, changing the length to something a little bit easier. And maybe I'll make the tips a little bit wider. We can kinda see a demonstration of grass. Now at this grass, I can say probably is going to be a little bit too high on the coverage, so I'll just lower that down and do another preview. Yeah, it's a little bit more grassy. That grass likely To this point, now that we have a little bit of a, some grass established, this could be a good time to go over and end with explaining things like, for example, the, the grooming brushes that are in ZBrush to help form the shape. If we take a look room brushes are here for you. You can do, for example, Hair toss if u, which is a good one for like. First of all, I have to go ahead and make this into a fiber mesh and then go through sub tool and select my longer hair. We want we can manipulate grass a little bit. If it gets a little tingly, like you see here, that's because of the fiber mesh segments, which is down here is low. So higher segments will mean less tangles. Please feel free to experiment as much as you want, including groom lengthen, which gives us a sort of we double-click on that. Sort of a groan lengthen look. Then from there you can do something like groom spike. But that won't behave like anything. Fiber mesh though, which is probably a kinda just see how that works. It just indent doing BPR render. You can kinda look. You can manipulate things different. Now if I wanted to do like for example, hair, one thing I would say is I would turn up my segments because when you try doing things like grooms, spike, you can kind of see how it tangles like that. And segments helps with that a little bit. So this is now where you take the time to sculpt your character and your grass as you see fit. Maybe you have different variants of heights. So again, you would go through groom lengthen to get there. Now, clump it in a little bit. You can certainly do that if you want to have it, like go straight up. My opinion the best one is the groom. Hair toss. That one always resets the hair just exactly in the direction that you want. So you can do it IPR render and see how that looks. But honestly, I kind of like just having the grass be like that just a little bit. I think that kind of gives me the look that I want. So with that said, that's how we do fiber mesh. That's the breakdown for the beginner. Alright, so there was a lot more to cover and what my teacher always said again, push buttons, learn push buttons, learn push buttons, learn. You've got to be able to take that step to go beyond the confines of the video. So we've given you that map guide. It's up to you to drive and explore further. So I hope you do have some fun with this and we've given you a good head start for you to explore and try all sorts of fun things. Maybe you want to have, for example, a grooming lengthen of different pieces here. You can do that, which is once you to experiment and do your own thing. Now, from this point on, we're going to go ahead and show you a little bit about decimation master and how to reach apologize count, size and rocks so we can read, duplicate the rocks across here. And then from there we're going to go over to rendering. So that said, stick around and stay tuned. 26. Prop Placement and Decimating Meshes: Okay, so let's continue in this lesson. We're going to go ahead and just finish up by putting our rocks into our place and also do a quick breakdown of decimation. Master that final step you do before you want to just in case, export a high rose out of ZBrush and bring it into another program, such as read apologizing programs like Topo Gun, et cetera, so forth. So let's go ahead and get started. First things first, I'll go ahead and open my folder that I had originally put in, which is for that I have my rocks put into and I'm just gonna go ahead and select one of the rocks here that I did and bring that forward. And you can kinda look at the poly count. Now, this is already a pretty low poly count. But to give you an idea of how ZBrush war decimation masterworks is. It reduces the poly count of it while still preserving the details. It doesn't mathematical computation of rearranging everything to a more efficient mesh. So first of all, to give you an idea, go ahead and make sure we in the right area, I'm going to click on Z plugin. And I'm going to click on that upside-down arrow and dock that over. And then I'm going to click right here where it says decimation master. And the first thing we hit is going to be preprocessed current. And what that's going to do is pre-process the sub tool here. So we can do that. And because it's such a low mesh with this amount of points, you can get a pretty quick result. Once that completely goes all the way through, you can just simply hit decimate current. Now, if you look, you saw that it changed a little bit. So it's alright to do this, but Just don't do it a couple of times because eventually you will start to lose detail. One thing I will say about all of this though, is, is I'm not going to duplicate. I'm going to I just wanted to show you how that works, but now that you've seen how it works, I want to show you something. Hit the R key and kind of stretch it. You begin to see all the little areas that are decimated down. So I'm gonna go ahead and just keep it blank like that and just kinda go through every rock. And well, basically I'm just going to go through and put some rocks in here like so. Some of them I'll put on the ground, others I'll rotate around and change the scale of them like so and just kinda place them in random spots. And I'm using the mesh duplicate for all of this. And remember when you're duplicating the matched by holding Control and trading the Translate key. And now it's going to create a little bit of geometry that will eventually tax in. So bear that in mind. So we're just gonna kinda go through and it probably would be wise to always scale about. And I'm just kinda get a good head start into all of this. You can do all do that guy last. If we're if we do it, I only wanted to show you the demonstrate. Here's another one we can do. We can just bring this guy in like so and you can just see I'm just filling in areas with this rock like it is right now. Another thing we do is just create sort of like a clump of rocks, which can also be good to do just to kinda get the atmosphere of the whole area here, like ECE. Let's go ahead and turn on that rock that we did here. This guy right here. We can kind of, once this is turned on, we can kinda bring this through and just kinda bring it about like so. Maybe make this one rotate different direction and scale this one to be a long, longer. You can just kinda see, it's just sort of a process. Just want to take your time on it. It may feel a little bit too boring, but it does add up a little bit Just a simple, harmless saw a little bit of fun. It's a happy rock. Maybe rotate this one. You can just see I'm just being very random on all of this. Course might be interesting just to see what this looks like when you just kinda duplicate the whole thing and mesh and just kinda repeat the whole process like this. And if you want, you can hit EMT to select Move topology and just bring these guys and like so. So it's all just a little bit of it's just meant to sort of give us a little bit of like a little bit of fun just going through and having some fun improvising all the different kinds of meshes. If you do want to do the final brick, you can always do that. It's not like a big deal. Just got to make sure you choose a nice place for this brick, maybe to bench or some kind. Now, you can decide where you want it to be. So it's just all meant to be all in good fun. So this is, you can kinda see the number of times I duplicated this and see how the number of points has duplicated. And now we have a lot more to decimate down. So if you want, you can always hit pre-process current. And it will go through and pre-process all the meshes. And then once it completes, you can hit decimate current and you can kinda see it kinda goes down while still preserving its shape. So that's always something that is very, very useful, very handy. And so this is going to be where we stop, is at this point it's nothing but just sort of fine detail in making some adjustments. The very last piece that we're going to work on is just going to be doing a quick little render. Give you a breakdown of ZBrush is render and how we can have fun with that. So with that said, stick around and stay tuned. 27. Rendering in Zbrush Introduction: Okay, so let's finish up. Is it will be the last video of the course you've made it. Alright, so now we're just going to render this out real quick and go over the rendering process and give you a crash course on this. Now rendering has a lot of depth in every software, ZBrush is no exception. So since this is a beginners course, and this course focuses on what ZBrush is mainly known for digital sculpting. We won't be covering every single itty bitty, nook and cranny of the absolute smallest pebble left unturned in renderings, but we'll still be able to walk away with something decent by the end. Pretty good in my opinion. So first things first, before we begin, if you want, you can go ahead and turn on perspective, which is over here. And that's going to give you a slanted look to kinda give you a little bit easier time if you want to do any compositing. But first thing I'd like to do is talk to you about maybe manipulating the background of the document and changing the resolution in case you want a specific image size. So let's do that first. Now, to do that, it's pretty easy. The document is where we change all our resolution and where we go over things like color. If you see this color right here, it says document background. Well, you can actually change that to anything. You can change it to white and you can give yourself a nice new color scheme right there. If you're interested in something like, for example, changing the resolution, like say 2048 by 2048. Well, we got to turn this pro constraint off because it will adjust accordingly. And we can just sort of click at 20:48 tab 2048 and we can just hit, resize. And you'll hit yes. You'll see it stretch. But don't freak out. Because remember the very first thing we taught in the first time resection Command N and just redraw it back in like so. Now, 2048 by 2048 is a resolution of a square, but this doesn't look like a square. So if you want to see the full spectrum of this, you would go ahead and just kind of see where it says zoom over here. Just go ahead and zoom back out. Like so. If you're having a problem with that ramp, you have no problems whatsoever because you can just easily go back to a gradient color of dark if you wish. Just too, to go over and give you an easier time to see something. So let's go ahead and zoom out so we can see everything a little bit easier. So now that we have this all taken care of, we have a good idea of the ramp. One of the basic and easiest things to do and rendering is just start off with the BPR render, which is pretty easy. And by default you already get a very nice image. But we kinda wanna do a little bit more than that. We want to manipulate the lighting, for example. So how do we do that? Well, first things first, let's go to where it says lights up here and let's dock that over. Now. Right now as it stands, there is currently one light active with this little brush. And if we move it around, we can see all sorts of different fun looking dark, light schemes. And you can kind of get an idea of how something works. You can also do the same thing over here. Maybe you want to put something like this. You can now see his face a little bit easier. And that one. Another thing you can do is create a rim light where if you just kinda click in the back of that corner of empty space, you can create sort of like a rim light. And that's kinda need to, if you want to do something like a nice little cool rim light that kinda goes over the side there. But of course, that rim lights not going to really be enough in here. You can also change the intensity. Look at the light property, et cetera. But what I'm thinking I'll do is I'm thinking I will go ahead and bring this guy in like so just kinda start off with a rim light. And from there, once I have that rim light, Let's bring in a second light. So all we do is just click on a new light bulb and double-click and bring it in like so. And this guy is going to be a little bit of an aid in right off the bat. We can now do a little bit of filling the volume. Now. We could go ahead and try to bring that up a little bit more just to see what that looks like. And you can kinda see already how this fills out I'm thinking now I'd like to this is kinda the trial and error concept that we're doing now we're trying to go through and enjoy having to do quick little iterations of the character. So see what it looks like from one area to the next. And now it's gonna be a little bit tedious. It feels like, but it's pretty easy to manipulate the whole rim light process. I think I wanted to take this guy off and make my make my oops. There we go. This here is usually my primary light, my dominant white. I'll bring him to about here. And then I'll go ahead and take my room line, put it here. And this is all it is. It's just kind of going through and experimenting with different experimenting with different little color scheme strategies and see what you can like. It's kinda fun, it's kinda interesting to go about doing. But if you have one light that's clashing in against another, one thing you might want to try doing is turning off the shadow of one light. That way you can kind of keep the the second one, the ambient occlusion or the second light from going through. I kinda like just working though with one light and just seeing what I can get from it. Bring him through. No shadow. I forgot. So it's just kind of trial and error sort of thing. This is already something I kind of like, I don't mind too much. So now I'd like to kind of take you through. Again. Rendering is not something I too, too terribly much matter too. But one thing I do want to kinda go over is the anti-aliasing. And that's just sort of a thing that we're going to find as an issue with grass. So let's go ahead and take a look at that. Kinda see already Let's turn the super samples up. I forgot to also turn of the detail. That helps us to see it a little bit easier. So there's a whole, whole bunch of fun things we can try doing. But one thing that I do want to take your eyes onto is the Render passes. These render passes are mainly used for things like compositing and Photoshop. If you click on them, you can export them out. And it's something you can then bring into Photoshop. So bear that in mind. Another thing you can do on here is try to experiment with different shaders, like for example, see what this looks like with a fast shader. If you like that, feel free to go about enjoying just all the different pieces that you can do. You can also do the plastic basic material to know and you can kind of get a little bit more specularity out of all of this. So feel free to experiment and draw out because it's very, very important to kind of go about trying to find that right. Look. Another thing you can try is filters. Filters are a little bit of an interesting BCE. Like for example, they can help with certain things like blur. If we, when it comes to grass. And we can actually have a little bit of fun with that. I think I'm going to go with shader is my choice by the way. Or maybe I'll just go with the basic material, has a little bit more ambient occlusion I can work with So it's, it's kind of something you have to take a little bit of time doing this. There's a lot of forms of rendering. Lot of different softwares that have rendering. If we want to be honest. It's sort of a, you pay for what, you get, what you pay for. So like for example, Maya is an expensive, expensive bees, but it has Arnold on it. And it's probably one of the better renders out there amongst them, even more so than IRA. But then again, there's another one called marmoset tool bag, which has been mainly known for rendering. Such that two is a like a possibility that you can bring yourself to enjoy. I personally like to use. If I had a choice, I would probably go with the marmoset tool, but I'm sorry, the Maya Arnold. That's not something that everyone has. So you can still go with this. One of the biggest issues about a rendering with this is there's not really a very good they have a very wonky animation turntable that is very difficult in non-intuitive to animate motion in here. So it's a little bit tricky. But then again, this whole thing that we're looking at, it's mainly for a concept of trying to work with and enjoy sculpting this whole software, this entire ZBrush software. It's mainly known for digital sculpting. And these things that you're looking at right now, they're more like extra side features that kind of accumulated lead got implemented over the years. So that's kind of why we're focusing mainly on the sculpting part and not the rendering. But I can tell you from my experience that this is my rendering. It's still used every now and then. But over the years, it's really being more common that people will use something like marmoset tool bag or even blenders rendering, which I would probably put higher because it's easier to do and using Arnold for Maya. So keep that in mind. So one final thought in all of this is that I would love to have a takeaway of, is. First of all, when you are done with your rendering, you want to export it out. Go ahead and hit the Export Image button under document, and you can go ahead and hit Save. You'll get a little bit of a pop up here and heal. Zoom in a little bit, but don't worry because he'll come out the correct frame based on what you see. And anyways, what I was going to say is if you are a beginner and you watched all the way through this course, I congratulate you and I patch on your back, but at the same time, I can't stress to you how important it is to explore, explore, explore, even using the thing, not necessarily explore features, explore combinations of the features you've learned. That's probably the most important thing. Like you've learned Booleans and you've learned how to use booleans. But what does booleans look like if you'd wanted to make a full mouth cavity through a sphere. Or what if you wanted to use this eyeball as a way to create a Boolean, to create, for example, a mouth sphere or anything like that. Just build off of what you've learned through masking and through poly groups, through all the different things that we've gone over. And please just keep on sculpting, keep on doing just random fun scopes. And please, by all means, show them to me. Feel free to email me or message me on my platform. And I will definitely get back to you. I always get back to everybody. So with that said, thank you for watching this and hope to see you down the road in some of my more advanced classes. So stick around and stay tuned for that next course. Bye