Making the basic forms with primitives - ZBrush Tutorial

- [Instructor] There are lots of ways to start modeling and sculpting a character in ZBrush. But one way that gives you a lot of flexibility is by piecing together primitive shapes as separate objects. In this video, I'm going to go over some of the ways to add primitive objects to the scene. As well as some theory on how to put the pieces together to make a character. Let's jump in. So we've already got one sphere in our scene. Let's go ahead and switch to the move tool. It's the gizmo here. And if the gizmo isn't showing up, you might need to turn on this gizmo 3D button. Otherwise it'll turn into this line thing that you don't necessarily want. Okay, so let's come around to our front view and just start positioning this where we want it to be. Now, the concept art is a little bit off center in places, but we want the character to be centered with the world, or centered with the grid. So you might need to eyeball things a little bit in order to keep things where they should be. So I'm just going to scale this up a little bit by clicking dragging on this yellow box. Now, I'm not gong to worry too much about the shape of it. I just want to get the basic position of a sphere here for the center of the character. Sort of, it's hips or it's center of gravity or it's belly. Now, don't worry about being precise or exact at this stage, it's just about creating some basic objects to flesh out the proportions of this character. Okay, let's look at some ways that we can start creating new objects. One thing you can do is just simply duplicate an existing object. So I'm going to come over here in my Subtool pallet and then just click Duplicate. And now we can move this copy up and position it for the chest. Now maybe we'll come around to a side view and maybe I'll kind of pull this in a little bit, might move it forward or backwards. But really at this phase it doesn't matter, just trying to get the basic objects out here. Another way to create new objects is with the gizmo. If we hold down Control and then click and drag on any of the move controls, we can actually drag out a copy as well. However, what this does is it creates two objects within the same Subtool. So we'll want to split these. We could either Split to Parts or Split on Masked Points, or Masked points, it's actually going to do the same thing here. Just because there's two objects and one of them is masked, so we'll just Split to Parts. And this is okay. All right, so now we've got two separate objects here. And this one still has a mask on it. So I'll clear the mask by holding down Control and clicking and dragging in an open area. Okay, let's select the head object. We can Alt click on it to make it the active Subtool. And I might just kind of stretch it out a little bit here with the scale. Going to make that head a little bit more spherical again. And maybe let's move it down a little bit. Okay, good enough right now. Okay, let's add more objects. Another way you could do it is through the Subtool pallet and clicking on a pen and let's add a cylinder. After adding it, we need to make sure it's the active Subtool. And let's go ahead and move it down for one of the legs. Just go ahead and shrink this down a little bit. Going to move this down, adjust it into position. Now you'll notice we only have one leg, so let's actually mirror this over to create another. So let's go to Geometry, let's go to Mirror and Weld and make sure that X is turned on. Go ahead and click that. And we'll get a leg on the other side. So if we want to move both of these, we need to turn on Symmetry. So I'm going to hit X on the keyboard to turn on Symmetry. And now, if we move these two, they'll move symmetrically. So, maybe I'll move this out just a little bit. Just trying to keep a balance between where the legs should be on the left and the right side. So you can see the body is kind of coming out to the side a little bit here, so I want to sort of compensate and have a similar offset on both sides. Okay, let's look at another way to add objects to the scene. Let's Alt click on the head to make that the active Subtool. And let's bring up a different brush here. Go back into draw mode. Hit B on the keyboard, I for the insert brushes. And let's get IMM Basic. And I'm going to insert some rings for the ears. So making sure I've got Symmetry turned on, I'm going to click and drag on the head. And just kind of put in some ears. Let's go back into move mode. And we can just sort of rotate these so that they're kind of more aligned with the sort of looking straight forward. And might want to shrink them a little bit. Now you'll notice that when I shrink them, that they sort of shrink relative to the center of the grid. And we can actually have these shrink sort of more relative to each other by turning on Local Symmetry. So now, when we scale these, they're going to scale but stay in the same place. Now, we can actually puff them up a little bit. Looks like these ears could be a little bit thicker. So I'm going to hold down Control and then click and drag on the scale and that actually does an inflation. So, with this, I'm just going to try to scale and inflate these appropriately. Okay, looks good from a front view. Let's come around to a side view. And maybe these ears need to come back on the head a little bit. Now these insert mesh brushes, they actually create new objects within the same Subtool that you draw them on. So I'm actually going to split these off like I did before. Let's go to Split and let's do Split Masked Points. So now the head is split off as its own separate Subtool and then the ears are in their own Subtool. Something you might want to do at this point to help keep things organized is to name the different Subtools. So, when we've got the ears selected for example, we can just click on Rename and call them Ears. So it's easier to pick them out from this list. Go ahead and click on this one. So it highlighted the head. We'll just click Rename and type in Head. So on and so forth. Okay. There's several more primitives you could place. But I'll go ahead and let you handle that on your own from here. And in the next video, we'll start with all of the various primitives in place. And then we'll start arranging them a little bit more precisely.