Setting up reference images - ZBrush Tutorial

- [Instructor] While you can just start creating characters straight from your imagination in ZBrush, you'll usually be starting from some sort of 2D concept art. ZBrush lets you bring in art and use it as a guide for modeling. So let's take a look at the various options we have for doing this. So I'm taking a look at the exercise files we have for this video. This is similar to what you might get if you're working on a professional project. Let's take a look at the character poses. So you might get drawings of a character doing various different activities or actions. And this gives you a sense of the range of motion that the character is needing to express and the different facial expressions and how the face stretches and squashes. So it gives you an idea of what sort of shapes you need to make and incorporate into this character in order to achieve all of these various poses and facial expressions. So back in ZBrush we have a fresh start of the program, and let's go ahead and click on the DynaMesh sphere, if you have the Lightbox open. If you don't have it open go ahead and click on this button up here or hit the comma key on the keyboard. Let's bring up a DynaMesh ZSphere as a starter project to work with. Now for bringing in reference images into Zbrush, we're going to place them on the grid. I'm going to zoom out a little bit so we can see more of the grid. Now let's bring a reference image in by going up to the Draw menu, and coming down to Front-Back, click on Map, and Import. Okay, go ahead and find the folder for this video in the Exercise Files. And let's click on character single pose, and open. Okay, so this places the image on a plane on a grid behind the model. Now let's take a look at some of the settings for the grid. One thing you might notice, and something I'm going to change is there's this line that gets projected from the model to the reference image, and it can sort of help you see what part of the model you're hovering your cursor over, and where it relates to the reference image, but I find it distracting. So I'm going to turn that off under Draw, and the Front-Back. I'm going to turn off its PLine or Project Edit Line. Now there's also something it's doing. We're sort of seeing through the model to the image behind. And that can be good if you want that. But if you're finding that distracting, you might want to turn that off, change Fill Mode to two. If you change Fill Mode to one the reference image gets even more transparent, and setting it to zero just turns off the reference image altogether. So feel free to change this to whichever setting is most useful for you. I'm going to leave it on Fill Mode one, just because I want it sort of faded off into the background a little bit. So as I create this character in this course, I'm going to be using this reference image in the background. And as you can see it's a posed image, so I'll have to be sort of interpreting the proportions and the placements of the different limbs based on this image. So I'm not going to be lining up exactly with this image. However, if you want an image that's more precise to a tpose that you're going to be modeling from we can put that in as well. So let's go up to Draw. Let's go to Front-Back. Go ahead and click on that map we had brought in and let's import a different map. So let's get the tpose front image, and let's go ahead and put a side image in as well. So Draw, and let's go to Left-Right, click on Map, Import, and let's get that tpose side view and there's even a few more images we could bring in. So let's go back to Draw and let's go to Up-Down, Map1, Import, and let's get that tpose top view. And then we can even put in an image on the back side. So let's go back to Draw, go to Front-Back, and let's go to Map2, Import, and let's get the tpose back. So now you can see when we're looking at it from the back side we get the back view and from the front side we get the front view. Now one last thing I want to change here, is turn off Perspective. So now we're seeing a really flat orthographic view. That means no perspective distortion. So now as we move around, if we hold down Shift, we'll snap to perfect side, top, bottom, front views. So you have your choice in this course. You can use these orthographic images and this would an easy difficulty level. If you want a medium challenge you might want to place that posed image in the background, and just work from that. And if you want an advanced challenge, try working with no reference image at all. One last note if you want to turn off this grid and it's getting in the way, just temporarily click the Floor button and turn that off. Okay, now that we've got reference images worked out, we're ready to continue with the course. Now, these image planes don't save if you just save a tool, for example if you go up to Tools, Save As, and save your work through this button it won't save the image planes. So you'll want to go to File and Save As and save a project instead, which does include the image planes if you want to save your work with the image planes.