ZBrush Overview
ZBrush is a digital sculpting and painting program that has revolutionized the 3D industry with its powerful features and intuitive workflows. Built within an elegant interface, ZBrush offers the world’s most advanced tools for today’s digital artists. With an arsenal of features that have been developed with usability in mind, ZBrush creates a user experience that feels incredibly natural while simultaneously inspiring the artist within. With the ability to sculpt up to a billion polygons, ZBrush allows you to create limited only by your imagination.
Designed around a principle of circularity, the menus in ZBrush work together in a non-linear and mode-free method. This facilitates the interaction of 3D models, 2D images and 2.5 Pixols in new and unique ways.
ZBrush gives you all of the tools needed to quickly sketch out a 2D or 3D concept, then take that idea all the way to completion. You can create realistic renders directly in ZBrush with lighting and atmospheric effects, or with the many powerful export options you can easily prepare you model for 3D printing or use within any other digital application.
Because ZBrush users are enabled by its powerful software processing, you can sculpt and paint with millions of polygons with out having to worry about purchasing expensive graphics cards. It is for this reason why ZBrush is used by everyone from art enthusiast to major film and games studios.
Leave technical hurdles and steep learning curves behind, as you sculpt and paint with familiar brushes and tools. Download a full trial today and see why ZBrush is a tool created by artists for artists.
GoZ
One of the core functions of ZBrush has always been to provide artists the ability to create in an environment that allows for complete freedom of expression. The lack of technical barriers that make working within ZBrush feel like real world sculpting and painting is why so many have created such ground breaking work.
With GoZ there is no need to invest time in setting up shading networks for your normal, displacement, and texture maps. With a single click of a button, GoZ will transfer your mesh to a GoZ-enabled application of your choice, and instantly set up all the appropriate shading networks for you. Upon sending your mesh back to ZBrush. GoZ will automatically remap the existing high-resolution details to the incoming mesh, GoZ will take care of simple operations - such as correcting points & polygons order - as well as more advanced operations that require complete remapping. The updated mesh is immediately ready for further detailing, map extractions, and transferring to any other GoZ-enabled application.
Sculpting Brushes
With over 30 start up brushes to sculpt with and the ability to create an endless assortment of your own custom brushes, it's easy to see why sculpting in ZBrush is not only powerful but incredibly easy as well. The natural brush strokes you get when sculpting across millions and billions of polygons gives the user the feeling like they are sculpting on a real piece of clay, or wood, or stone, or real any surface you can think of. The wide range of brushes you will find in ZBrush were created with real world sculpting techniques in mind. Maybe you want to sink your fingers into a soft piece of clay to rough out general forms. Or maybe your want to chip off pieces of stone with a metal chisel.
However, simulating real work sculpting tools isn't all you can do with the brushes you find in ZBrush. With tools like symmetry, repeat and hundreds of other custom controls you can now sculpt details like stitching in fabric, hard mechanical edges, and so much more. When using ZBrush's dynamic range of brushes the control you have over your surface is limited only by your imagination.
Lazy Mouse
Even the shakiest of hands will have tremendous control over the direction of their strokes. By enabling Lazy Mouse while sculpting in ZBrush, you get surgical accuracy as you brush across the surface of your model. Sculpt with smooth flowing curves or make perfectly strait line across your surface. Whether you are using a mouse or a tablet to sculpt inside ZBrush, Lazy mouse and its many settings give you the precision you need to create any style of strokes quickly and easily.
Strokes
Use the freehand stoke to brush across the surface the way you would in real life, or switch your stroke type to gain even more control over the surface you are sculpting. Use the spray stroke to add a random spray effect as you sculpt. The Drag Rectangle Stroke allows you to draw out exact details like skin pores all the way to sharp mechanical parts.
Alphas
Using different alphas as you sculpt gives you unlimited control over how you deform your surface. Create realistic wood grains, scaly skin, feathers and so much more. You can use any the may alphas that come with ZBrush or use any image to create your own.
Editable Brush Curves
Adding to the endless controls you have over your brushes in ZBrush is the ability to edit the shape of your brush. The easy to use curve allows you to precisely change the shape you sculpt into the surface. You can even create curves that transition between hard edges to soft rounded ones.
Gravity
Gravity allows simulation of gravity, wind, magnetism, or other directional effects that 'pull' (or push) at the surface of your model. When gravity is on, your regular sculpting will be modified by a pull in the direction of the gravity. Imagine windblown cloth, or the heavy folds of elephant skin.
Polypaint
Polypainting allows painting on a model's surface without first assigning a texture map. A texture map can be created at a later time, and the painted surface can be transferred to the map. Polypainting offers significant advantages compared to standard workflow.
The resolution of the texture map need not be decided in advance. This is particularly valuable if you find you need more detailing on an area than you thought you would. Instead of repainting a new, larger texture map, you can simply transfer the existing surface painting to a new, larger map, with no rework necessary.
Similarly, the UV unwrapping need not be fixed in advance. If one unwrapping proves unsatisfactory, simply create a different unwrapping and transfer the surface painting to that map. Removing UVs from your model frees up system resources and allows you to work with even more polygons!
To understand how polypainting works, first consider a 2048 by 2048 texture map, which provides reasonable resolution. It has a total of a little over 4 million pixels.
If you work with a 4 million polygon model, then in terms of surface painting, simply assigning each polygon a uniform color gives the same amount of information as the 4 million pixel texture map. (Actually, somewhat more, since significant parts of texture maps are typically left blank.)
So, with polypainting, you can put all of the painting details directly onto the model's polygons, and then transfer that detail to a texture map when the painting is complete.
