Learning Zbrush

When I first opened Zbrush, I knew, it was not going to be easy. It looked so different from Maya, that I asked my friend who does Game Art to at least explain the basics. To be 100% honest, his way of explaining was quite confusing, so I went on Lynda.com to look for some tutorials. I admit, I am not easy when it comes to tutorials and even when learning Maya or Adobe Illustrator using Lynda.com tutorials I struggles. I find them really slow, mostly because of my problems with keeping attention to spoken word and constant tiredness. What I found better, were tutorials on youtube by professional artists, who did not do whole lessons about how to work in Zbrush, but they did just basic information for beginners and then different tips and tricks, or different talks while sculpting. Those talks were the most helpful for me because it meant listening to interesting information about the industry or art in general, and also watching their workflow in Zbrush and learning what button works for what. One of the first tutorials I saw was this by FlippedNormals founders Henning Sanden and Morten Jaeger, who were my good teachers whole semester. Their way of explaining has the best pacing for me and they are very engaging.

Here we can see how I struggled to understand how Zbrush works. Although I managed to get a basic head-like shape, sculpting the face was an issue, I did not know how to build up the clay and somehow I even managed to create another face without the possibility to edit the original one. I have actually encountered this issue more than once and I still have not found out how to solve it. It just happens sometimes, that my original sculpt becomes uneditable and all I can do is to create new and new sculpts identical to the first one but I can't edit anything. I have tried to google this problem, I have asked for help from people who know how to work with Zbrush and they said that it has never happened to them although it is my number 1 issue.

Another "long-term" issue was finding how to use symmetry because funnily enough, the button that says "symmetry" somehow did not work. I googled it for ages, what to press and how to use it when one day it actually started working. I am not sure how. To be honest, at least half of my self-teaching went from "it doesn't work at all" to "somehow it works now, let's hope it will not break". And sometimes it broke again. Most of the time I think of myself as a fast learner, but this time I started to admit to myself that it might not be true. But I was determined to make Zbrush my friend.

Another tutorial by FlippedNormals is this one with tips and tricks about brushes and dynamesh, which helped me to understand how to sculpt in Zbrush and layer and layer those brush strokes. I learnt that I have to think about it as it was real material, like real clay and the brush is actually my hand moving it around. It was not very enjoyable in the beginning, because to be fair, I have never been good at sculpting from real clay (though the last time I tried it was when I was like 12 years old).

Later, I decided to try to sculpt a face again, from scratch. In the beginning, it did not look bad and I followed a tutorial by Edge-CGI and 3D Tutorials (here) basically step by step but as his sculpt was looking better and better, mine ended up looking like this:

Not something I am proud of but I guess it is a part of the learning process, isn't it? I decided to stop trying to sculpt the whole face while I can't sculpt at all and this tutorial helped me a lot to understand what I was doing wrong (link here). One of my issues is that my knowledge of human anatomy is still not as good as it should be, but for that, I need more practice and time to achieve the level which is required in the professional industry. What I did, was trying different brushes on a basic sphere, to get used to them more and later I started to sculpt elements of human face to understand the shapes. As we can see in the picture below, I was able to sculpt a quite successful nose and that was the time I decided I need to move on because the time was running out.

My next goal was to model a head in Maya, to remember how it works there and then move it to Zbrush to edit it and sculpt more details. I started with lips and eyes, it was simpler than I remembered from the last year so I was happy that I did not forget it.

In the picture below, we can see that the face was looking way better than the face from the character I modelled last year. Last time I struggled to get the eyeball into the eye socket, it was not working and I just clearly did not understand how it worked. This time it fit there perfectly, with just a little bit of tweaking.

Unfortunately, what I realised when it was kind of too late, was that I created to many polygons, especially on the nose and lips. The more polygons I have, the more difficult it is to keep it smooth and to tweak it. At first, I was trying to fix it but then I realised it was just going to take a lot of time, which I did not have, so I decided to continue with what I had, so I could move it to Zbrush as fast as possible.

Connecting the face and the head was difficult because of the number of polygons, which was completely my fault, but next time I know that I can't do that. Anyway, in the picture below we can see how the head looked like when I move it to Zbrush, still untouched, straight out of Maya. We can clearly see that I worked with too many polygons because it is far from smooth, the forehead has a huge bulge in the middle and the top part of the head is just too tall for some reason.

I took clay buildup brush and started sculpting around the head to give it better shapes and to make it look more real. 

In this pictures above we can see that even though it somehow looks like muscles (and the red material doesn't help it to look less like muscles), the shapes and elements of the head look much better than they did before. I lightly sketched the position of ears as well and although I don't really like to draw noses, I realised I love sculpting them. On the other hand, lips and eyelids were quite difficult because of the folds.

When I compare modelling and sculpting ears, I was pretty much successful in both of them. However, sculpting ears was way faster than modelling it! And I think the ear looks pretty realistic, which makes me very happy. My only issue is that there is slight stretching of polygons behind the ear and I still haven't learned how to fix that but I am working on it now.

In these four pictures below we can see the head basically finished, or better said, how I left it. It shows my progress in Zbrush well enough, what it still needs is more of skin texture and of course retopology, which I plan to do later.

When it comes to learning retopology, although I have not done it yet by myself, I have tried to find a lot of sources about how to do it, because as someone who did not have access to this information before and never heard of retopology before last year of the university, I needed to find out why and how we do it. The first tutorial I have seen was one by Alex Cheparev, who was able to shortly explain and show how retopology works and why is it important for 3D modelling. Now I know that we need to do retopology to basically fix the mesh of the sculpt so we can use it for rigging and animation. CG cookie has also a very good tutorial about the basic introduction to retopology for beginners, which has helped me to understand how retopology works.

While working in Zbrush I have learned that sculpting and modelling are very similar and very different at the same time. Sculpting is way less technical and more "fun", however it is very important to be able to do both, because even if I started straight in Zbrush, to make a working game character with proper topology, it needs to be retopologised in Maya, otherwise the mesh would not work as we want it to. I definitely enjoyed Zbrush a lot, mainly after it stopped being too frustrating with creating a lot of uneditable weird faces. During my Christmas break, I plan to continue with my learning process to be more prepared for sculpting in the second semester.

References

CG Cookie. (2018). Introduction to Retopology. [online] Available at: https://cgcookie.com/course/introduction-to-retopology.

Cheparev, A. (2018). ZBrush to Maya to ZBrush - Retopology and UVing with Quad Draw. [online] YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7YqK-E1l6c.

Neag, T. (2018). Tibi Neag SuperBug 01 ZBrush Organic Creature Sculpting. [online] YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qlwdK3uZxo.

Sanden, H. and Jaeger, M. (2018). Getting Started with Sculpting - ZBrush for Beginners Tutorial. [online] YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yKGfcp2z3k.

Sanden, H. and Jaeger, M. (2018). Top Tips for Improving your ZBrush Sculpts. [online] YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAVGcCuSjxA.

Sanden, H. and Jaeger, M. (2018). ZBrush Beginner Tutorial - ZBrush for Concept Artists. [online] YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaBUDawuh7Q&feature=youtu.be.

Sanden, H. and Jaeger, M. (2018). 5 Mistakes Every Artist Makes When Making Faces - Art Fundamentals. [online] YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIKxffo7YsU.

Edge-CGI and 3D Tutorials. (2018). #1 Head Sculpting with Dynamesh in Zbrush Tutorial series for Beginners HD. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lJArPtjUPs&feature=youtu.be.