There are many ways of approaching your workflow when working on creating your sculpture. Aside from the menus, the artist has the preference of using keyboard shortcuts and contextual menus in order to modify their brush, colors, materials, etc. While this is extremely helpful and necessary in order stay in the creative flow, some of the lesser commands (in which you press a button combo and then release one of the buttons in order to do an operation) can be cumbersome and easy to forget, unless you do it consistently. To that end, ZBrush does offer helpful hints in order to remind you of what you can do through the process, so you are not banging your head trying to remember what to release. It would be awesome if they included the mouse wheel as part of your choice of movement, but I can understand that they designed the program with the intention of artists also using some kind of digital pen tablet. All and all, if you can memorize the workflow movement that is best for you, it is not hard to speed up your creation time.
Now, after you have gotten accustomed to the environment itself, then actually creating and experimenting in ZBrush is a blast! Whether you are molding a 3D primitive or applying digital clay to a canvas, you will be amazed with all the ways you can effect you media. You can go in and push and pull the mesh as if it really is clay, build it up, smooth it down, make it rough with alpha textures, or apply whatever colors over the whole object.
Mixture of sculpting, texture, and color.
Where ZBrush truly shines is in being able to increase the polygon count at any time or going in to create intricate grooves to make scars and wrinkles. In addition, all of it can be exported for use in other 3D animation programs, which makes it a “must-have” addition to your tool set, if you are big on doing great CG work.
The available menus are quite extensive and offer many hidden options with which you can explore and experiment. The Standard Menu List at the very top has all the palettes the program possesses for you to open or relocate. Any menu that you open here can be relocated to a more convenient region. On choosing which section to place it in, you have your choice of foldable shelves on the left and right sides of the main canvas. In fact, all the palettes you place in the shelves can collapse on themselves so that you can keep related options close together, while keeping open the most pertinent information you use most frequently. Also, familiarizing yourself with commonly used keyboard shortcuts will go a long way to speed up your workflow. With all these alternative approaches to achieve results, you can create your own style of workflow that works best for you.
Depth of Options ZBrush’s range of tools and options for working with your mesh are thankfully exhaustive. Three iterations and plenty of beta testing by notable artists have contributed to a very robust program that seeks to answer any possible need the digital sculptor may need. Here is a list of features of significant merit that may appeal to the ambitious computer artist.
When approaching a labor and detail intensive job, such as creating a character, the last thing that you would want to fight with, in a program, is trying to keep your sides symmetrical. Thankfully, ZBrush provides a mirror symmetry option, with a lot of depth. You can choose from the X, Y, or Z-axis for a more traditional approach to sculpting.
Example of Mirrored Symmetry.
You can also turn off Mirror Symmetry to sculpt two sides in the same direction, or make some interesting spiral effects by turning on the Radial Symmetry. Lastly, Poseable Symmetry is a great addition that allows you to pose a symmetrical model and continue to sculpt.
