What is the best way to build up a shape?

[system]

Extreme newbie here, trying to play around and learn. New to Zbrush and 3D in general. I’m attempting to make an anchor. I somehow figured out how to combine the 3D ring shape and a cylinder shape then started building an organic texture like rusting metal being eaten away. Now that I had the ring and stem in the edit mode I’m trying to figure out the best way to build up the bottom curves of the anchor. This is probably so wrong, but the best I could figure out at this point was to just insert a ton of spheres and try to build up clay ontop of that and smooth it out…however I can still see the outlines of the sphere shapes. I’m guessing this is NOT the way to build up large amounts of surface. So how should i go about doing this? Something about “extrusion”? Whatever that is…

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[Cad64]

It looks like you’ve created a bit of a mess by adding all those spheres. At this point, I would recommend running ZRemesher to try and get your topology straightened out. Then use the Clay brush, Clay Buildup brush and the Clay Tubes brush for building up form. And of course you can always use the Move brush to push and pull the mesh around. Also remember to always work at lower subdivision levels when building up the rough shape and then move to higher subdivision levels for sculpting detail.

[system]

There’s lots of ways. You could use Shadowbox then smooth off the corners. You could append a ring then cut off what you dont need and fill the holes. You could insert a cylinder, use a bend deformation then dynamesh it. You could use the curve tubes brush. You could look for a multi mesh insert brush that will get you close then just make minor adjustments. You could watch some basic tutorials.