ZBrushCentral

Best way to create scales in zbrush?

ZBrush Usage Questions
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#1

Hey,
I’ve been working on a Cassiopeia fan art and I started laying down the scales for her tail by hand with an IMM brush I made.
Now, it’s ALOT OF WORK! I don’t mind taking the long road if it’s gonna look best, but I was wondering, is there a better way to do so? I tried nano mesh but it’s not really working well for me as I need the scales to be patterned in a criss cross pattern. I thought about alpha brush but I’m afraid it’ll look a bit random.

TL;DR
how would you approach sculpting scales into a model?

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#2

Nice sculpt.

Some ways to make a snake

In the end I went with the third method. I created a snake body cross-section and applied as an IMM Curve brush, varying size along the curve, to get a scaled snake body. I laid out the snake body pose with ZSpheres which can be turned into a curve easily now. Then applied the scales curve brush.

When making the IMM brush just make sure that it repeats along the length so that each repeat welds properly along the curve.

Also, you can add different variations of the cross section into the IMM brush and have them chosen randomly along the curve. That way all your scales won’t be exactly the same. Just be sure not to move the outer edge vertices otherwise they won’t weld.

hth. Cheers.

#3

Thanks for the reply! I will look into it! :blush: