I am looking for a user near Evansville, Indiana who might be willing to sit down and clear up a few questions for me. Or for that matter any experienced user who would be willing to talk to me for a few minutes on the telephone to answer those same questions.
Is anyone out there?
Have you tried reading the Zbrush Practical Guide? If you read every page, this should answer almost all questions. I found it to be a great learning tool, and a very quick read.
Besides that, there are the Gnomon Zbrush Tutorials. They are pretty good, but the Practical Guide answers some things not in the 3 Gnomon Zbrush videos that I have.
Good luck.
Actually I am currently working my way through the practical manual. I’m using the downloaded demo version and there seem to be things that have been locked out in that. I think there might even be a bug or two. Anyway, It would just be nice to talk to a live human being for once. I really get tired of trying to work through problems this way.
My brother downloaded the demo version and he said there were some types of restrictions and mentioned problems. He said that it didnt allow enough memory to open some of the reference files and had mentioned something else. Also the practical guide does have a few ommissions, such as when it instructs you into Move mode, and then has you do something in Edit mode without telling you to switch back to edit mode. I encountered that a few times, so be on the lookout that you are in the correct mode for what its asking you to do. I probably found 10 or so instances of things like that, but its still a great learning tool. If you do get stuck, sometimes its better to start that lesson from the beginning again. Good luck.
{X}MN8,
Yes I’ve had to compensate for a number of omissions in the guide. Its gotten pretty frustrating. I still can’t get the EDGE LOOP to function in the beginning of the telephone tutorial. After going through it, I haven’t the vaguest idea what a displacement map is or what I would use it for, but then I’m coming at this from a product design perspective. I’m pretty sketchy at the moment on how to use zspheres as well, but I haven’t gone through the figure tutorial yet, just the Scimitar. My hope was to be able to use ZB for some surface sculpting on bowl forms. At the moment I don’t think I can even make a bowl form.
I’m about to start the Box Modeling section. Wish me luck,
Michael
You might want to think about one of the different zbrush intro dvd’s. Going through one will save you weeks of time.
There’s one from gnomon studios by Meats Meier. It does a fantastic job of explaining how to use the deformers and the parametric primitives which would be great for doing the base form of a bowl for instance.
Another one is from kurv studios by Glen Southern. I haven’t seen it, but I have read good things about it.
Michael, skip to the Warrior tutorial. You can go back for anything unfinished, sounds like you need the reward of doing the warrior, it is fun and not too hard, easier than the bamboo part it seems to me 
Zspheres are fun, you just got to be open to playing with them, and practicing.
I am still learning to, Ive been using it for about a month. You can see my warrior at www.mn8.net/zbrush
These works are still pretty rough, because I’m still a Zbrush noob, but I put several hours in each day and I am committed to learning it well, and making some great artwork.
Zsphere’s are essentially box modeling using the extrude function available in most modeling apps. Although when you add a zsphere, you are not only adding and extrusion, but a joint (as in forward/Inverse kinematics) for each Zsphere.
To be able to edge loop, you need to turn the Zsphere mesh into a “poly mesh 3D”. Then using the crazy shift/hold/Ctrl/release hot keys, hide the poly faces you don’t want to edge loop. The draw back from creating a poly mesh 3D is that you can no longer repose/add zspheres to the polymesh 3D. You will have to use the edgeloop function to creat new geometry.
Zbrush 2.5 seems to have the ability to create a volume rig. This means that after you create your Zsphere character, convert it to a polymesh 3D, edgeloop etc… You will be able to set up a ,“volume rig”, that seems similar in function to how Zspheres operate. Allowing you to repose that mesh to further sculpt it.
Hope that helps some.
-B
hi
the hardest thing about zbrush…specially if you are used to other 3d programs way of working is letting go of what you “know” or are used to. Once you quit looking for the tools you expect to find, you’ll find zbrush really is rather intuitive. That’s about the best advice I can give you about zbrush. It’s a different animal.
And yes there are a few missing items in the manual and am sure they will fix that and be extra careful next go around. A lot of the time tho when going thru it I found my eagerness led to alot of skipping over things…even though I read it a million times over, pulled my hair out etc…a day or two later…this mysterious never before seen sentence would appear and be the missing pieces fell into place…so sometimes a break helps.
Meats Meier’s videos are excellent, the second more so but if completely new to zbrush you’ll find the first a big help. Haven’t seen any of the buy it videos from Souther but have seen some of his freebies both from silo and kurv and they are great too for giving you some zinterface knowledge and some ideas on how to.
have spent most of my life frustrated which used to make me angry…still does sometimes but am (very dense I am) slowly learning that sometimes one must back up and relook at the whole to see a new approach rather than keep ramming those horns in the same place. If ya get stuck somewhere, take a break and start a new tutorial or play around with what you have learned so far…lot’s of times this opens doors and eyes unexpectedly.
and remember that everyone has a learning curve…even folks who are masters in other programs. Zbrush is an artist designed tool and truly is more intuitive than it is feeling right now.
keep going…it’ll click one day soon and you’ll sigh and not believe you didn’t get it only an hour earlier.