From the course: ZBrush 2020 Essential Training

The most commonly used brushes - ZBrush Tutorial

From the course: ZBrush 2020 Essential Training

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The most commonly used brushes

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- [Instructor] Zbrush comes with a lot of brushes built in, and some of them do very fancy things, however, there are a handful of them that are my go-to brushes for almost everything I do. Let's see which ones those are and how they work. By default, ZBrush starts with standard brush active, and it's exactly what you might expect, it's a very standard basic brush, if you just start stroking on the model, you notice it just creates a build up effect. For other brushes, let's hit B on the keyboard. Now, every brush has a three keystroke code that will switch to it. So for example, let's take a look at one of the Clay brushes. So after hitting B, you'll want to hit the first letter of the brush name, so C, and now you'll see that each brush has another orange letter or number next to it, and that is the third keystroke that you'll use to get a brush. So let's look at the Clay brush, it's L, you can either click on it or hit L on the keyboard. So if you want to get back to that brush, you just remember, it's B, C, L. Now this brush is kind of similar to the standard brush, let's just stroke with it a little bit. You can see it's a little bit different. The way this brush works is it tends to fill in gaps before adding volume to other areas first. So it kind of fills in the hole there in the ear, and then it'll start building up volume in other places. So it's a slightly different behavior. Let's look at another brush. Let's hit B, D, and let's look at this one called DamStandard, it's short for Damien Standard, which is the name of the person who created it. Now this one is interesting because it has a very sharp crease in the middle of it and then a soft fall off. As you can see, this brush is useful for creating creases and lines on faces and anatomy. Now there's another brush that's similar to this that I made myself called the Crease brush, it's not built into ZBrush by default, but if you do a search on the internet for Ryan Kittleson Crease brush, you'll find it, and I find it works even better than the DamStandard brush. Okay, let's take a look at another brush, let's hit B, F, and you're going to hit A where we find the Flatten brush here. So Flatten works kind of like a power sander, everywhere you use it, it'll just sand down any form or structure. Now, you want to be careful, some of these brushes will create an effect on the backside of the model, and we'll take a look later on in this course on how to avoid that problem, but for now, I'll just point out that that's happening and later we'll see how to fix that. So Flatten will just kind of chew down the material, flatten it out. Okay, let's take a look at Inflate, so B, I, and you can find it here, it's N, so B, I, N for Inflate, and this one just puffs up whatever you're sculpting on. So we come around to the ears, everything's just going to get inflated. Can have some fun effects with this. Okay, next let's hit B, S, and find Snakehook. So this is an interesting brush, it pulls out and really stretches out anything that you pull on. Now this one you have to watch out for, it can stretch your polygons a little bit too much and things can start to get really distorted and pulled too far if you're not careful. So I'll just hit Control + Z to undo that. Another brush I use all the time is the Move brush, B, M and V, and this brush just simply grabs whatever you click on and pulls it around. Now this brush is interesting because, right now, it's just pulling relative to the view plane, so if we pull from this view, it's going to pull out to the side, however, if we hit Control + Z to undo that and pull from this view, it's going to pull relative to the view angle. However, this brush can work also relative to the surface direction, so let's try this on the forehead. If we oull right here, what it's going to do is kind of just pull out and kind of creates an awkward effect, but if we hold down Alt, it's actually going to pull relative to the surface direction, so it'll actually go out and away from the surface, or inwards, but relative to the direction that the surface is facing. And there's a variation on the Move brush that I use all the time, it's called Move Topological. So let's hit B, M, and T is the shortcut for that, B, M , T, and it behaves a lot like the Move brush we just looked at, however, it will tend to work, let me just demonstrate actually, it might be easier to show you rather than tell you, is that this brush will ignore gaps, so it'll ignore anything that's on the other side of this gap, so it makes it easy to adjust the lips on one side without affecting the lip on the other side. So if we were using the regular Move brush, B, M, V, you'll notice that this affects across gaps, but the Move Topological does not. Okay, that's the most common brushes, as you can see, there are a whole lot more brushes to work with, and we'll be looking at some of these later on in the course, but feel free to play around with them and see what else can be done.

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