I've been trying out a lot of the brush tools to get used to them. I've been creating textures entirely inside zbrush without using any actual texture images. After an hour of work, the image below almost looks it's a photo of bizare organic blocks. I essentially carved the image out of a blank canvas and then air brushed color over it. In fact, the original file still contains depth information, so I can sitll pull things forward and recess them back into the canvas.
I've been excited to get new work out with Zbrush, but I've been stuck with learning too many commands and finer points of zbrush modeling. Today I went through importing/exporting, subdiving, mouse modeling shortcuts, tool duplicating, individual point manipulation, real time level of detail and primative/mesh conversions. None of it is too exciting, but it's getting me to where I need to be slowly.
The image below I just screenshotted when I was in the middle of working. It doesn't seem too impressive, but what was going on was. Those are real time interactive booleans cutting away an object by "subtracting" a depth value off the surface. 3d boolean operations have been a nightmare in other 3d packages, sometimes locking up a computer due to over complex calculations.
Now that I know how to navigate around in Zbrush, I dove into learning how to sculpt and model. While a lot of the concepts of geometry and models are the same, Zbrush approaches them much differently. One thing I had to get used to, is Zbrush considers each model a "tool", not part of a scene. Whenever you switch from edit to regular mode, Zbrush essentially renders objects into 2 and half D pixels on the screen instead of keeping them part of a 3d enviornment. To work on multiple 3d tools, Zbrush simply has a different heirarchy of tools and subtools. It's not too painful, but takes time to adjust to. Some of the beautiful features though are Zbrush's instant ability to mask off certain areas of geometry instantly, and allow precise control over ONLY what needs to be worked on. The sculpting tools are also much much much more organic than any previous package I've ever used. Zbrush really takes mathematical tools and converts them into artistic brushes. Here's some scenes from what I've been studying:
So right after I start learning Zbrush 3.0's interface, I decided to upgrade to the new 3.1. It turns out its actually a rather big update, and the RapidUI interface I was just getting used to, was completely chucked from the program in favor of a cleaner interface. Without the rapidUI crap, the new interface is definitly a lot cleaner and less confusing. Anyways, right now I'm going through Meats Meyer's introduction to Zbrush 3. Its about 6 hours of lecture, and I'm sure it'll take many times that amount to digest it all. Anyhoo here goes nothing.
Well this is my first experience of the new Zbrush 3. I played around with all the tools and learned how to use the basics of the interface and find my way around. The program is so vastly different than anything I'm used (i.e. photoshop and Maya) that it's taking a bit of time to untrain myself how and where to instinctively click.
My goal in this independant project is to be able to use Zbrush well enough to augment any 3d work I do. Specifcally I want to be able to create extensively detailed models in brush and import them into maya for animaiton. I'd also love to understand the texturing abilities of Zbrush so I never have to use maya's texturing system as long as I live. I can already see where Zbrush is powerful enough that for stills, it can make stand-alone art pieces.
Here some images I created just playing around with some of the basic tools and brushes, enjoy:
