From the course: ZBrush: Stylized Sculpting

Starting sculpting: Massing the skull - ZBrush Tutorial

From the course: ZBrush: Stylized Sculpting

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Starting sculpting: Massing the skull

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- [Voiceover] What I want to do is actually go into the skull and start sculpting that and I'm going to walk through all the different process and tools that I use to do that. The first thing I want to do is go into my geometry menu and I want to increase the level of divisions just a little bit because right now it's just too low. Alright so I'm going to go up to just a level three and I want to begin sculpting in the skull eye sockets, nose, and general features, which again everything is symmetrical. So you'll notice as I'm moving my cursor right now, I happen to have X symmetry turned on by hitting the X key on the keyboard. I can go into just one side or symmetrical. If for some reason you're not getting this result, you need to look in your transform and just check under activate symmetry, make sure that you're on X. Sometimes it'll be Z or Y, but we'll usually be in X symmetry when we're working from the front of the object, which is facing in the Z direction. Alright so I'm going to begin sculpting in the eyes now. What I want to do is switch my brush so over here in this menu, I have my brushes and I'm going to select clay tubes. To me, ZBrush is very much like working in real clay so whenever you're working in clay, you need to first build up the massing of your object, of your sculpt. You don't start detailing right away so same is true for this. The first thing I want to do is begin putting in the general idea of the eyebrows or the eye sockets around the skull. I know that I have my nose in this area and, of course, we're going to have our cheekbones in this area. Now I'm currently working in ZEd and I can turn on ZSub which allows me to push in, but what we tend to do in ZBrush is work with hot keys so by holding down the ALT button, it gives me the ability to actually start sculpting down or carving in to the object, okay. Now ZBrush is very important that you actually build up your object, that you don't just go to a very high setting right away and start detailing. You want to begin building up as I mentioned before. You're adding clay and massing out your object. So I'm just going to just add a little bit more detail here in the cheeks and the rest of it we can leave for now. I'll go up into my next level and essentially do the same thing. I'll add in my eye brows. Now I do want this to eventually be more creative, which means making the skull asymmetrical. We'll give it a lot more character, but we don't do that right away, alright. It's easier for us to just work symmetrically to get all the basic components in place before we start to break it out. So it seems a bit redundant or boring at first when we're doing this, but it's necessary. We just have to get all this massed out so we have something to work with. What I also like to do is to just kind of rough out over the model to just give it a little bit of texture. And from time to time, you'll see some stretching that occurs in certain areas where we're pushing the geometry a bit more than the divisions are allowing. What I can do is just smooth those out just to kind of relax them a little bit more. And that's telling me that it really wants me to move up to the next level at this point. I'm just going to do a little bit more detail before I do that. So I'll bring my brush size down and add a little bit more definition to the nose area. I want a bit more intensity.

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