ZBrushCentral

Getting Started Doing Reliefs

ZBrush Artworks
#1

Hi, I’m starting to learn Zbrush specifically for doing relief work, for instances of animals. I’ve been making a tiny bit of progress. I’m hoping someone can answer some questions I have below:

  1. My basic workflow so far is to use grid to bring in the image, create a plane, mask the animal and then invert so I am just working on the animal, then start laying up clay etc. Does this sound like a good approach? Is there a better one? Perhaps you know of a guide on doing reliefs in ZBrush?

  2. I find the masking process to be time consuming and hard to get accurate. Is there a magic wand tool to select a color range region of the grid reference image like the magic wand in Photoshop? That would really be handy…

  3. If I want to bring some of the mesh back to the original plane, is there a tool to do that?

  4. Once I get the body done, is there a way to apply the image texture to create surface geometry mimicking it? The hairiness for instance?

Thanks!
Sam

#2

i’ll tell You what I know :wink:

  1. I would do it in little other way, if You got animal masked, then I would extrude or panel loop that selected mesh, and then i could be working using for example dynamesh on separate subtool.

  2. look for spootlight projection, its a simple way to paint textures on model.

#3

Thanks lukasso, I’m starting to figure this out. Using polygroups is definitely a help, and I see that spotlight can get me texture geometry from an image.

Still trying to figure out #2, as would save a lot of time if there were a way to use a magic wand to get the boundary of an object in an image rather than masking manually all the way around… perhaps the workflow for this will involve another program and alphas or maybe even spotlight… If anyone has any thoughts, I’d be grateful to know, thanks!

Sam