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

Breakdown: Sculpting and Animating a Detailed Evil Jester Character

Sia Melnychenko spoke about her workflow on the Evil Jester project, explaining how she sculpted the clothing, approached the makeup, and tackled the technical challenges involved in animating the character.

Stylized Take on Serie from Frieren That Feels Purely 2D

Mani Salguero shared his workflow behind his first Blender project, a 3D portrait of Serie from Frieren, exploring a digital-painting approach to texturing to capture a distinctly 2D feel.

Amazing 3D Portrait of Dr. Caitlyn Mahler from The Callisto Protocol

Ivailo Ivanov continues to impress with realistic portraits.

Check Out This Stylized 3D Reimagination of Ellie from The Last of Us Part 2

Do you imagine the game in this style?

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.