ZBrush

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ZBrush is a digital sculpting and painting program that has revolutionized the 3D industry with its powerful features and intuitive workflows. Built within an elegant interface, ZBrush offers the world’s most advanced tools for today’s digital artists. With an arsenal of features that have been developed with usability in mind, ZBrush creates a user experience that feels incredibly natural while simultaneously inspiring the artist within. With the ability to sculpt up to a billion polygons, ZBrush allows you to create limited only by your imagination.

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Features:

ZRemesher

ZRemesher is the next evolution in our automatic retopology solution. ZRemesher has been designed with an artist’s point of view in mind. With a single click, ZRemesher produces ideal new topology based on your original mesh. The new functions in ZRemesher are smarter, able to analyze the curvature of your model with the precision of a computer, but with the subtlety of the human eye. Add more polygons locally where needed, changing their shape to create perfect topology flow. As with most ZBrush tools, ZRemesher also lets you take control over the automatic process and give your own guidance to the core algorithms. It is easy to drive the flow of polygons with the help of curves. You can also define where you wish to have more or lower polygon density. You can perform local retopology to a specific part of your mesh while keeping a natural connection with the support model.

New Brushes

ZBrush’s powerful creative toolset is largely based on its brush system. With each release we add new brushes that can transform your way of working or simply make your daily sculpting easier. With ZBrush 4R6, we continue this long tradition. The new Trim Curve brushes cut your models in a way that is very similar to the Clip brushes, but deletes the affected polygons rather than pushing them to the stroke line. And as you can imagine, these new brushes will be DynaMesh’s new best friends!

Creating holes through a mesh has been possible since the introduction of DynaMesh and more recently enhanced with Mesh Fusion. Now ZBrush adds another option for this purpose with the Bridge Curve brush: select an opening, PolyGroup border or crease edge and connect it with another to generate a bridge of polygons. And because this new topology detection is so useful with the Frame Mesh feature, we went ahead and enabled it for all brushes that use curves. You will love it as much as we do!

Other additions

The new additions and improvements don’t stop there! Here is a brief summary of other noteworthy new functions:

DynaMesh now preserves PolyGroups. This makes it so easy to do Panel or Group Looping on a DynaMesh after having used Mesh Insert or Mesh Fusion!
The Slice brushes now only operate on the curve position and won’t propagate. What you see is now exactly what you get!
Group Front — a new PolyGroup creation function — detects all polygons which face the camera and assigns them to a single group.
This tool will let you create special effects by using your point of view, such as deformation of only the parts of your model that are visible to the camera.
The new Solo Dynamic mode keeps only the current active SubTool visible when manipulating it in front of the ZBrush camera, in order to improve 3D navigation.

ZBrushRecent articles

Creating a Realistic 19th-Century Sewing Machine for Sierra Division's Antique Prop Challenge

Sheila Alessandrini shares the best places to go reference hunting for historic pieces, explains how she approached the polygon limitations of the challenge without sacrificing the visual complexity of the prop, and talks about how she made hand-drawn ornaments to make the texturing of her prop look more lifelike.

Storytelling Through Details: Sculpting Souls-Like Corvus Soldiers

Quentin Riviale talks about the challenges of balancing visual richness and clarity when it comes to creating characters for games, discusses the importance of using subtle visual hints to communicate crucial information to a player, and explains how he made his 3D character sculpt come to life as a 3D-printed figurine.

Exploring Thin, Pale, Slimy Skin Texture by Recreating The Demogorgon From Stranger Things

Nikhil K S talks about the challenge of collecting real-life textures for further use in lookdev, explains why more displacement does not necessarily equal more realism, and shows how he set up the lighting to keep the scene chillingly dark yet make every little slimy crevice on the Demogorgon's pale skin stand out.

Breakdown: How to Create a Hard-Surface Philips Radio with ZBrush & Substance 3D

Ravikanth Gupta discussed the workflow behind the Philips Radio, explaining how he used a repair video to understand the radio's wear and aging, modeled the organic details in ZBrush, and used six UV sheets plus UDIMs to prepare the asset for texturing.

Breakdown: How to Create a Detailed ICA Dresden Folding Plate Camera

Rajan Verma discussed the workflow behind the ICA Antique Folding Plate Camera, explaining how he created it for a 3D art challenge that earned him first place and detailing how he built a fictional backstory and textured each part to make it look more realistic.

Breakdown: Creating a Realistic 3D Environment of an Ankara Street

Nore Pollentier spoke about the creation process behind the Ankara Alley project, detailing how she gathered references of a real street in Ankara, how she created the tiling wall and road materials with Substance 3D Designer, and explaining how she achieved the cozy vibe.

Assembling Abandoned Middle Eastern Courtyard in 3D Using Pass-Based Workflow

Irmak Çavun talks about how the culture she grew up in inspired the Abandoned Middle Eastern Courtyard project, how she switched up her workflow in favor of a pass-based approach to save time, and how she created an efficient, quick-to-use material system.

Modeling 3D Character with Medieval Fantasy & Post-Apocalyptic Elements

Seori Nam discussed the workflow behind the Princess of a Lost Planet character, explaining how she sculpted the face from a base mesh, how she built the clothes in Marvelous Designer, and detailing how she prioritized texel density and balanced the colors across the character.

Turning a 2D Illustration into a Realistic Two-Character 3D Piece

Anna Smirnova spoke about the creation process behind the No Mercy project, explaining how she used base meshes for both the body and the head, and detailing how she built detail directly into the textures rather than relying on procedural shaders.