In this Essentials video, I just want to give you the briefest of introductions to ZBrush, and specifically the facets of ZBrush we'll be using for the series, that is navigation, some masking, and a few of the deformation tools. So today I want to talk a little bit about ZBrush. Now, ZBrush can be a really intimidating tool the first time that you pull it up. It's really confusing and has a lot of features, and it has a very very flexible toolbar, and a lot of very flexible UI which only serves to make it more confusing when it starts off. Whenever I'm teaching students ZBrush and they've had Maya before, they're shocked because they thought Maya was so confusing, and then this feels like a whole another level. I'm going to go ahead and just set my UI to be, the default UI you're likely to see if you open up ZBrush as well. Now ZBrush may be complicated but it's also absolutely the standard for modelers these days especially if you're working with organic shapes. So it's important for you to have a working knowledge of it. ZBrush well, it can seem really strange at first, it's actually designed to be used with a pen. I have here a Wacom, a brand that I really like but of course other brands work too, and all of the menus although they seem very strange at first, make a lot more sense when you understand that they intend you to use a pen when you're working with this. When you first drop into ZBrush, you'll probably see this light box open. Usually it opens by default, it gives you projects you can start with. I just go up to light box right here and turn that off. Now, you might notice as you start dragging in here it's creating these like random squares, and ZBrush can be hard to get used to because it originally started as a 2.5D painting tool. It was intended for people to be able to paint with depth more than it was designed to be used as a 3D modeling tool which is what I think most users use today. If you start doing all this don't fret, just hit "Control" or "Command", and on your keyboard, and you wipe everything off the screen but the problem is you start doing this again and it just gives you the same thing again. What we need to do is get this into edit mode to really do what we want to be doing with it. Now, we call them models most of the time but ZBrush likes to think of them as tools. This dates back to its time as a program used primarily for painting rather than for sculpting. For this project, we'll mostly be using import to bring in our models from my end of this but I want to show you, if we click "Tool" here, we can choose any of these simple 3D meshes like a sphere, and then by clicking and dragging into our scene we drag out the sphere. Now before you start clicking anything else, what we want to do is go up to edit. We can also hit "T" on our keyboard and do the same thing. You will notice that we get this frame now because now we can actually rotate around, and navigate in our scene. ZBrush is designed to let you navigate with a few simple keys without having a right mouse button so just clicking off of the model with your mouse or your stylus will let you rotate around your views, where "Shift" will let you snap it to different orthographic views, and then "Alt" will let you pan, and then if you keep your stylus or your mouse button held down and you let go of "Alter", it'll let you zoom in and out. This can be pretty confusing, some people really don't like it. I've gotten used to over the years but another option for you that you might find easier under "Preferences" and under "Interface". Let's go down to navigation, and you can always turn on what's called "Right Click Navigation" which I think by default is on now, and that simply means if I hold the right mouse button it will rotate, Alter the right mouse button will let me pan, and control and the right mouse button will let me zoom in and out thinking about they used the right mouse button the way we would use "Alt" or "Option" inside of Maya. So now that we've got this we can start actually affecting and sculpting this but we notice as soon as we click it it says we need to convert this 3D primitive to a polyMesh 3D. PolyMesh 3D is the unique system that ZBrush uses to handle all of its points. It's a little different than verts which is what makes it so powerful, but if we come up to "Tool" and we click "Make Polyamides 3D" then we can see we can now start sculpting on the surface. We can draw on it or by holding Alter option we can clubs into it, and we'll get different effects depending which brush we use. In this case, we see on the left side we have the standard brush picked, and there's so many brushes that are here. We're not going to be using most of these because again this isn't a sculpting class, this is primarily we're using ZBrush for its ability to control edges which is what I'm going to show you today. But I want you to let you know that these are all hear. What we're really going to be using this for in ZBrush is the power it has to smooth, combine things together using tools like DynaMesh. So for instance, if I come into my geometry tab by clicking this open, and I come to DynaMesh, I can turn this on, and what this will do is it will automatically retopoligize the surface based on how far away things are. So you see it's a lot finer, and as we start adding more and more sculpting it starts getting looser because it's taking the same points, and pushing them further and further away but if I just control and drag off the model it'll re-DynaMesh, retapoligize these objects to smooth it all out, and we're going to use this a lot to take low poly objects, and add enough definition to him to polish them or smooth them out. So a better example might be an example of what we would do. Let's come into our sub tool, and let's append in a cube. In this case the cube we say, well we want it to have all nice soft edges on everything. So this might be a low poly object, we can see this by turning on our poly frame. Let's turn off the sphere, and we can see the geometry and the surface, we have hard 90 degree edges. Let's turn that back off, but I want to create a nice smooth edge. Well, first off you might notice everything's red right now. This is the default, what we call MatCap, and by clicking here in this red wax MatCap you have a bunch of different options including some really crazy looking metallic ones. Personally I'm a big fan of just going down to basic material, especially basic material too because it's really good at showing shiny. It's nice, it's simple. I find it especially when I'm doing fine detail stuff that MatCaps can sometimes lie to me, and if you're not sure exactly what the MatCap is doing it can actually confuse you more than it helps you. So I'd like to leave this on basic material. Now that I'm in here, let's go back down to geometry, and let's set dynamics but this time let's use a higher resolution. If I show you right here by sending in a higher resolution we click "DynaMesh". It'll actually create a much higher density of all of these little shapes here. Let's turn that back off, and what we can do now that we have this much higher piece of geometry here, I could come down to the deformation tab, and I can use things like polish which will apply like a smooth edge to the whole model. So we use polished with little circle close, we'll get a different effect than with the circle open. So we can see we don't get the same pillow, and we got versus when we have the little circle opening. It gave us a tighter crease over the edges. So we can see we get that, what's called pillowing this. So what's nice about especially this program ZBrush is there so much definition here that we're actually working with 1.6 million points right now, which is something that Maya would barely ever be able to handle, and we can make selections based on areas using masking. So for instance, let's say I wanted an inset in the top of this object, and I'm just going to create a little shape. If I hold "Control" down I can draw out a little shape maybe a symbol or just a couple of lines like this, and I can tighten that up by control and Alt, lets me remove from area. So clean up these edges a little bit, and then I can control, and click on the object to smooth it or control, and Alt click on the object to tighten it like this. So when I have this shape, and what it means is if I use my standard sculpt tools it won't be affected, it won't affect any [inaudible] that are masked. I can reverse this mask by control clicking off of the object, and now only the areas inside the mask will be affected. This is really great to use with things like our deformation. Inflate will give us a surface either inset or away from the model. Let's push it out there, and then I take this whole thing, I control drag which will re-DynaMesh the whole model again, and I can run that polish maybe a little smaller this time because I have a finer edge I'm trying to create, and we can see definitions that are really easy shapes that are really easy to create here inside of ZBrush but would be really really tough to use or create inside of something like Maya. I'm going to be using some of these techniques. We'll be going deeper into later to create our high poly meshes inside of ZBrush for a couple of our more complicated shapes.
