Useful brushes

- [Instructor] Before we go any further and start with some of the more practical bits of this course, I'd like to show you some brushes and settings that are extremely useful for kitbashing. The first one is the move brush, quite an obvious choice, but I'm going to show you a couple of settings that will be indispensable when editing forms and shapes, after inserting the objects. You can follow along with any object. At this point, I'm only showing you the tools we'll be using later, so I'm not trying to create anything specific. From the brush palette, let's go ahead and expand the cursor palette and click on the AccuCurve switch to enable it.

This switch allows us to pull areas with the move brush very sharply like so, as opposed to the default behavior. Let me just turn off the AccuCurve again, and repeat the process, maybe around this other side so you can clearly see the difference between these two modes. Not as sharp or as pointy as it was with the AccuCurve one. Another setting that is extremely useful is the Mask by Polygroup Slider. You can find this slider on the debrush palette and within the automasking sub-palette.

So let's turn on polyframe with shift + F, and by default, if we go over this area of our image and move it, everything that is within range of the brush size will move. However, if we enable Mask by Polygroup, just by taking this slider and moving it all the way to a hundred, Zbrush will create a virtual mask based on the polygroups of the image, affecting only the polygroups where we initially clicked as you can see. This is great because kitbashing will very likely end up with a bunch of polygroups from every in set of image.

And obviously, with this setting, we can easily adjust them individually without going through the process of masking them first. Great, I hope you can see the benefits of these tools already. Another fantastic brush is the move elastic. You can select it by pressing the letter B, then M, and then E on your keyboard. And this is a brush that works really well to explore silhouettes and exaggerated forms, especially for the organic kitbashing workflow. We can pull a few areas like this, and even increase the size of the brush just to affect a larger area of your model, and within seconds, we have a very different object with interesting shapes that we can keep exploring.

A couple more brushes that are probably not very widely used are the curved quad fill brush and the curved multi edit. These are two brushes that are curved-based that can become essential in the kitbashing process, particularly for organic shapes. Let's go ahead and select the curved quad fill brush first, this one right here. And with this brush, you can click and drag something like this, and Zbrush will fill in that area of the drawn curve with geometry, very very handy. Similarly, we go ahead and select the curved edit, this one right here, we can generate random shapes like this where you only have to draw the curve to establish the profile of the object.

And remember, that after you draw the curve, and this is why I think these two brushes are really cool, you can click on it to keep editing its shape. You can also click somewhere else and lock that shape or delete the curve, and because the rest of the object is masked, you can use the workflow from previous videos to manipulate the new geometry in place.