ZBrush: Tips and Tricks

- [Instructor] Geometry HD allows you to sculpt at a much higher polygon count than normal, while maintaining a project that doesn't render your computer useless. Let me demonstrate. So I'm going to bring up Lightbox, and then we'll select one of the projects here. So in this case, I'm going to select the demo head. And then make sure you have the tool palette either on the side here or somewhere that you can actually use it while we're sculpting this guy here. So I have the tool palette here, and then just around here you have the Geometry HD. So click on that, and once you click Divide HD, you want to make sure first that in in your geometry you are at the highest level. If you're not, if you do this, and you try to click Divide HD, it's not going to work. So let's go and bring up the highest level, and then click on Geometry HD and Divide HD. So pay attention to the total points here. So while we're clicking here, you're going to see this jump pretty high. So now we're at 239,000 points, and if I click again, I'm going to be at almost a million, and then three million, and then 14 million. Well, while I was doing this, my model maintained the same level of points, so it maintained probably the 57,000 points. But to access or sculpt in HD, so if you want to see the HD, you either type A while you're not touching the model, like so, and now you're going to see your HD model, or you click on the Sculpt HD. The Sculpt HD subdivider here is basically the same thing as if you were doing on the geometry from three to one and so on so forth. So if I want to scroll down to a lower level, I do this, and so on, so forth. If you want to sculpt in HD, what you do is you either type A and then you sculpt on it, but this is going to be resource-heavy. So the best way to do this is to type A while you're in the region you want to sculpt on. So let's select a brush first. So I'm going to select the warp crack. You can select anything to test this. So while I'm in this region here, I'm going to type A. So now what's going to happen, ZBrush is going to calculate the amount of space that it should use while maintaining computer resources. So now it can sculpt, like that, and I'm going to maintain my HD level, and my computer's not going to crash. When you want to go back to the active points that is slightly lower, what you want to do is type A again, and now you're back to 57,000 points here, and then you can actually sculpt in this resolution with no issues and then go back to seeing the full model. If you want to see your model in full HD density, you can place your brush outside of the model and type A again or click Sculpt HD, and you're going to see what it looks like again. Once you start moving, it's going back to the 57,000 points. And you can do this with any region, so let's do this again, let's select another brush, I'm going to do clay build-up, and then what I'm going to do is go here and then type A, and now I want to brush here, so I'm going to go ahead and start adding some jawline to this guy, maybe add a little bit more chin, and also add some cheeks. But as you can see, if I do this and I don't have the section selected here, it's not going to allow me to brush here, so you want to be careful with that. And then go back to A, and now this is what I have. So if you want to start brushing in this area without having the issue of having only a selected part, what you want to do is go outside, type A, and then do your brush, like so. And now you've actually brushed in HD resolution, and then you can type A again to see what it looks like. So this is how you can use Geometry HD inside of Zbrush.