From the course: Sculpting a Creature with ZBrush and Photoshop

Using ZSpheres to create basic anatomy

From the course: Sculpting a Creature with ZBrush and Photoshop

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Using ZSpheres to create basic anatomy

- ZSpheres allow you to sketch out a character's basic anatomy. In this video, I'll show you how using ZSpheres can help you do this quickly and efficiently. So here is ZBrush and let's get right into this. First thing I want you to do is go over where it says "SimpleBrush" and select the actual numerical value there. Type in "46" and hit 'Enter', you'll find ZSphere. Now I want you to drag ZSpheres onto the screen and make sure you hit the 'Edit' button, because if you do not hit the 'Edit' button, you'll be drawing ZSpheres all day. The next thing I want you to do is hit the 'x' button. That's gonna allow you to turn on symmetry and the other thing we wanna do before we get going on this, is we wanna bring in that nice reference photo that we had earlier. So go to 'Image Plane' found in 'Texture' and 'Load Image' and select 'Exercise Files' and we wanna go to 'finalchoice_and_2' and boom, you have that right in the back there. So ZSperes, let's get moving on this. As you get close to a ZSphere, you'll see the green icon pop up. That's gonna allow you to draw. And then, once you've drawn on the ZSpheres, you can select the 'Move' button and you can also scale them. So we're gonna be dancing back and forth. We rarely use 'Rotate' but we might need to use it. We're gonna primarily focus on just building the core skeletal structure of our character. You'll notice that as you have 'Draw' selected, once you get into the center of the core, it'll turn green. That way you know you can pull down from it. And I'm just doing the basic joints right now. I'm not worrying about fingers at this moment, I will be getting that later. And remember, frog has a little bit thicker neck, so you'll kinda see that protrude a little bit more. It's got a little bit more of a round face. Let's go ahead and draw in that pelvis a little bit more and we'll scale up that region as well. Just be really basic and you can go a little bit thinner on this as well. Sometimes it's better to go thinner, because you do the build-ups with the other tools. It's supposed to be quite a bit more skeletal, so go ahead and take this scale and just kinda size down some of these areas. And also remember, we wanna create those really cool looking legs that we designed, which will have a little bit of a double bend in them. Just mainly the basic joints is all you're doing here. Go back to 'Draw'. He's a little widespread, so let's see if we can kinda move those knees in a little bit. He'll feel a little knock-kneed, but we'll be able to fix all that later. So go ahead and scale those down a little bit as well, that way we can see what we're doing. We'll make this back bend a little bit more extreme. Okay, so we've got a good foundation to go off of. Let's jump down to 'Adaptive Skin' and click on 'Preview'. What we can do here is tell the computer how dense to make our mesh and this is a really good way to start off our Dynamesh, because we can't start sculpting on the ZSpheres. We have to actually be turned into a PolyMesh. So once you have that, go up here to the 'Make PolyMesh3D' and click that and you've got a mesh to start sculpting on. So now that we have a base mesh to work off of, let's go into the fun part, Dynamesh.

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