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

Turning 2D Concept Art into a Detailed Painterly 3D World

Angelo Ciervo took us behind the scenes of his process for creating a colorful, immersive stylized environment, from building modular pieces and hand-crafted trees to texturing the scene.

Turning a 2D Concept into a Real-Time 3D Medieval Village Scene

Beomsu Ko talked about the Disappeared Medieval Village project, explaining how they created a dark fantasy atmosphere with a subtle sense of hope while building the environment as a fully playable space using modular assets and tileable materials.

How to Sculpt and Texture a Stylized Wayfinder-Inspired Scythe

Artem Romanov discussed the workflow behind the Scythe project, explaining how he sculpted the organic "creature" and his approach to stylized PBR texturing and hand-painting the prop.

How to Create Hair and Feathers for an Owl Harpy Character

Eugenia Zanina discussed the workflow behind the Owl Harpy project, focusing on how she created the hair and feathers using XGen, how she used a custom hair shader to make the feathers look soft and fluffy, and how she set up the lighting in UE5.

Creating a Detailed and Expressive Character Inspired by Cretan-Mycenaean Culture

Dmitry Bezrodniy spoke about the creation process behind the Ariadne character, discussing how he used MetaHuman to adjust the proportions, how he dressed the 3D scan, and how he turned AI output into usable ZBrush brushes.

How to Build a Stylized and Painterly Scene Inspired by Impressionist Art

Boyoon Kim discussed the workflow behind The Green House project, detailing how she used a two-part fog system for softening contrast and reinforcing depth separation, and explaining how seeing the project as a single painting helped create a more cohesive scene.

Breakdown: Creating a Star Wars-Inspired Arabian-Style 3D Scene with Sci-Fi Elements

Matvey Meleshko discussed the workflow behind the Ember Bazaar, talking about how he was inspired by Star Wars, how he created the canopies with Marvelous Designer, and explaining how he made the materials look more realistic.

Breakdown: Game-Ready Bloodborne's Old Hunter Fan Art

Victor Monge López discussed the workflow behind the Old Hunter fan art, explaining how he analyzed the concept by assigning different colors to major aspects, how he sculpted the face with asymmetry, and detailing how he used brushes and hair cards to create the hair.

From Concept Art to UE5: Building a Stylized Catalonia-Inspired Town

Tai Le discussed the creation process behind the Stylized Catalonia Town, explaining how he made six initial concepts to define the direction of the environment and detailing how he made architecture kits in small, medium, and large sizes to create the building sections more easily.