From the course: ZBrush 2020 Essential Training

ZModeler introduction - ZBrush Tutorial

From the course: ZBrush 2020 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

ZModeler introduction

“

- [Narrator] For a long time, ZBrush was considered a software that added finishing details to models, rather than a software for creating the basic meshes in the first place. But with the addition of several new features, including the ZModeler brush, ZBrush can now handle polygon, vertex, and edge level editing, in much the same way that poly modeling programs like Maya and Blender can. Let's take a look at the basic usage of this brush. Okay, so we have a model open that in fairly low poly. Which is generally the type of mesh you want to use with ZModeler, but not always. I'll show you some exceptions. So let's get the ZModeler brush by hitting B, Z, M, and let's also turn on Polyframe just to make it easier to see exactly what we're working on. As we hover over our model, you can see that it's highlighting faces, edges and vertices. Now this brush will do different things on these different components independently. And we can set what the brush does to these components by holding down the space bar while hovering over one of them. Right now we're hovering over a point, Let's hold down space bar and see what we get. In the ZModeler brush, we're going to get a pop up that shows us several different actions that we can perform to points. And then below the point action we've got a little window of options and this is going to set which points are included in this. Now different actions might have different targets. So for example if we hover over a polygon, hold down the space bar, we're going to get some very different windows here. There's different actions that can be done to it. And then there's different targets, so there's all sorts of different ways that ZBrush can look at this mesh to decide which ones get effected by this. And then each one of these options is going to have different settings and options as well. So if we change this to extrude for example, there's different modifiers. Change this to polygroup different modifiers, everyone of these is going to have some sort of different option. Now finally let's look at the edges, holding the space bar over an edge, you can see, same type of situation here. Different actions and then different targets or modifiers that can be done to edges. Now I'll get into some of the more commonly used actions later on in this chapter, however one that I want to point out right now is one called Do Nothing. This seems a little funny at first, but once you start working with this brush you'll actually find it to be fairly useful. So, let's turn on Do Nothing. So with edges now clicking on it does nothing. And this is useful, let's say you want to do something that's only going to effect polygons. You could come into the Point Actions, and set this to Do Nothing as well. Now you're actions are only going to effect faces, so if you accidentally clicked on a edge or a point nothing would happen by accident. Let's say we're hovering over this polygon, we want to switch this to Inset. You just click and drag it on that polygon and it's going to inset that, if you click on something else, on an edge for example it will inset the polygon but it won't actually do anything to that edge. Okay, now we have a basic idea of how this brush works. In the up coming videos, we're going to take a closer look at some of these commands and settings.

Contents