From the course: ZBrush 2020 Essential Training

Creating ZSphere models - ZBrush Tutorial

From the course: ZBrush 2020 Essential Training

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Creating ZSphere models

- [Instructor] There are lots of ways to start creating new digital sculptures, but Z Spheres is one of the more unique to Z Brush. It's like making a simple skeleton first that you can pose and adjust easily before locking it into a mesh. Let's take a look. So I'm starting with a fresh restart of Z Brush here. You can start that way, or if you have something open already, you can follow these same steps. So what we're going to do is start a new tool by clicking on the Cylinder 3D, or it might be a sphere 3D depending on how your Z Brush is setup. We're just going to click on that and then click on it one more time and this brings up a library of basic things to start with. Go ahead and click on Z Sphere. Now we need to drag it into our canvas to start working with it. And let's go into Edit mode. Okay, so let's take a look at our sub tool folder. In here we just have one Z Sphere. So this is the basic building block of Z Spheres. We're going to create more Z Spheres and they'll be chained together to create an armature, or a skeleton. Now as I hover my cursor over this you're going to see that it creates this little line and a little green circle showing where it's going to create a new Z Sphere from. Now I want to turn on Symmetry mode. I want to make a symmetrical character here so I'll just hit X on the keyboard and now you can see we get two of them. I'm just going to zoom in a little bit here, see this more closely. Okay, so I like to start with a Z Sphere being sort of in the center of gravity of any character that I'm building. So let's say this is the hips of the character. So let's go ahead and create some legs coming out to the side. So I'm going to just click and drag and it's going to create two new Z Spheres that are attached. Okay, great. So that's the start of hips. Now let's create some legs going down. I'm going to just click and drag again one more time and now we've got the start of some legs. Now this could be a knee joint, however, it's a little high up to be a knee joint. That's simple enough to adjust. All we have to do is go into the move function here and just pull down knees. Now what I might do is bring this all the way down to where the feet would be and now I can actually go back into draw mode and insert new Z Spheres in between. So let's say, let's create one for the knee and one for the ankle. Just going to move my view up here. And then if we go back into move we can start pulling these into places that look appropriate. Okay, not too bad. Now let's look at scale. With this we can just simply click and drag on any Z Sphere and change the size of a joint. And I'll make a little adjustment here going back into move. Bring the toes back down. Okay, great. Now let's continue building the torso upwards. So let's go back into draw mode to create a new Z Sphere and you'll notice what happens when we get close to the center line is our symmetry sort of snaps into one. So this makes it so that we don't actually build two Z Spheres on top of each other. We're just going to make one here. Go back into Move mode and we're just going to snap my view to the side here and let's just drag this up to where the shoulders would start. And then from here I could just do the same thing I did before by inserting some new ones. Let's put some in for the chest and the waist. And just move these to where they'd be appropriate. Okay, now really quickly I'm just going to bring out some shoulders and a neck and a head. Okay, we've got a start on some shoulders here. Just going to draw out one more. Let's move this out to the wrists. Look at it from a top view. Let's draw and insert one more here in the elbow. Now there's one thing that's also interesting is you can delete some of these. So let's say we create one too many. Maybe we didn't want this one. We just hold down alt and click on it and it gets rid of that Z Sphere. Okay, so going back into move here, maybe I'll scale this one. Let's go back into draw mode. I'll make one for the head. And let's go ahead and move this up. And let's go into scale mode and make his head bigger. And let's insert one for the neck here. Let's make the neck smaller. Okay, great. So you can see we've got a very simple character going without a lot of work. Now let's look at some more things we can do with Z Spheres here. So we've looked at how we can move individual Z Spheres but we can also click on the space between the Z Spheres to move that, and it actually kind of does more of a rotation. But that could be useful as well. However, if we hold down alt while we use the move function it's actually going to move everything that you've selected and everything down the chain from it. So we could actually stretch the entire arm out like that. Now let's look at rotate. So if we click on rotate, basically going to do exactly what you'd expect. It's going to rotate these joints around. Now if you click on a Z Sphere itself, it's going to sort of spin that joint around. But if you rotate on one of the segments in between Z Spheres, it's going to do more of a straightforward rotation that you might expect. Okay, go ahead and practice a bit for yourself. You could go ahead and continue creating fingers and toes and noses and ears, but I'll let you handle that on your own. It's basically the same steps we've already been doing. So as you can see, Z Spheres can be handy for all kinds of branching structures or for establishing the basic proportions of all kinds of creatures

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