From the course: ZBrush 2020 Essential Training

Starting ZBrush for the first time - ZBrush Tutorial

From the course: ZBrush 2020 Essential Training

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Starting ZBrush for the first time

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- [Tutor] ZBrush is a very powerful, but at times unintuitive software. One of the biggest hurdles, is right at the very beginning when you first open it up. If you've never used it before, it can be very unclear, how to start doing anything. This is partially because ZBrush started out as more of a software for painting than sculpting. The 3D sculpting part of the software, is now the dominant feature set. But some aspects of the old software are still there to confuse us. So the main thing that you might notice when you first start up ZBrush is this sort of browser or library of assets. And you can sort of scroll through here and find different templates to start with. Now, this is the recommended way to start, just find some object that's similar to what you're working on and click on it and go ahead and start with it. However, there is something I should show you and this is just in case you don't have this Lightbox visible, you can make it go away by hitting the Comma key on your keyboard, or there's also this Lightbox button here. So if for some reason you have turned off Lightbox, and you're not sure what to do here, you might start... Just tryna to click in here, and you'll notice that what you get is this strange painting effect. And this is because we're in 2D painting mode, by default in ZBrush. So the way to fix this and start getting into 3D mode, is first you want to go up to Document, and click New Document. And don't worry about saving this, so we'll click No. Now, this did two things, it cleared out all of that painting that we did. And it also extended the document all the way to the edge of our canvas, so there's no wasted space. Now to get a 3D object to start working on, you might want to append a Primitive. So you could come over here and click on Cylinder 3D. With this active, you could Click and Drag in the canvas to draw out a cylinder or you could click on Cylinder 3D, one more time to bring up a couple other Primitives to work with. Ring, cone, sphere, cube, so on. So let's just pick a cube. So now with that picked, we can click and drag into our canvas. Now there's still one more complication, before you can do any editing in 3D mode, you have to come up here and click Edit. Now we're in true 3D mode. So because this is all very convoluted and unintuitive, I recommend starting with the Lightbox, so if you don't have it visible, hit Comma, or click on Lightbox, and just find some sort of object that gives you something that you want to start working with. So maybe this DynaMesh sphere, for example, I'll just Double click on that. Now, just be aware that any of the scenes that are in project, will replace whatever you have open. So if you really wanted to save that cube, make sure you click on Yes, I'm just going to click on No. Okay, so there's the first roadblock that you'll hit when using ZBrush. Now that you know how to get around that issue, you'll be able to start doing things in this fantastic program.

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