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

Building a Stylized Mountain Cabin with Modular Assets and Custom Shaders

Arjun Perayil explains why blockout is the most important part of production, shows how he created a complex master shader for the cabin in Unreal Engine 5, and talks about the process of hand-sculpting stylized vegetation.

Building a Game-Ready Nordic Village Scene with Day & Night Lighting Setups

Danylo Kyslenko shares his tricks for saving time when building modular assets, explains how he made a custom Material Layer Blend function and used it for texturing, and demonstrates how he created fake interiors for the nighttime view of the environment.

Terraforming The Alters: Last Variable with Blender, ZBrush & UE5

Artem Ostapchuk of 11 bit studios shared how the team built the terraforming pipeline for The Alters: Last Variable, visualizing alien flora over a barren planet with opaque Nanite cutout geometry, PCG scattering and a global HISM system so every level worked in both its scorched and terraformed states.

Building an Abandoned, The Last of Us-Inspired Mediterranean House with Custom Materials

Barış Kılıç explains how he blended Mediterranean architecture with The Last of Us aesthetic in his Mediterranean Echoes scene, shares his trick for distributing polygons wisely, and reflects on the challenge of making a set of custom materials in Substance 3D Designer.

Creating Realistic Textures on an Old Woven Basket Decorated with Seashells

Shubham Vijay talks about the meticulous process of recreating an intricate pattern on a woven basket in 3D, breaks down the process of texturing several different surfaces, like rope and seashells, and explains how he integrated 3D scans of real-life objects into the project.

Gunfire Reborn's Dragonchaser Reimagined as Painterly 3D Asset in Wayfinder's Style

Max Osta showed us the workflow behind the Dragonchaser project, discussing recreating the gun from Gunfire Reborn in a painterly, Wayfinder-inspired style, sculpting wood planks and jade in ZBrush, building ropes with Blender modifiers and procedural textures, and rendering in Eevee.

Sculpting Scales & Simulating Clothes for Creature Chef in ZBrush & Marvelous Designer

Yuriy Barchuk walked us through the workflow behind the Breakfast – Chef Extraordinaire project, discussing clothing simulation for a non-human character in Marvelous Designer, sculpting scales in ZBrush, and rendering in Unreal Engine 5.7.

Maxon One 2027.0 Release is Here with Scatter System for Cinema 4D & UV Editor for ZBrush

The release covers Cinema 4D, ZBrush, Redshift, Red Giant, and Autograph.

How to Build an Atmospheric Stylized Lighthouse Scene with a Custom Modular Set

Albert Serrano explained how he created tileable materials for the scene, shared his tips on ensuring smooth blending between different materials, and talked about how he made an atlas of hand-sculpted plants to create stylized vegetation.