Pixologic: ZBrush Blog

Andrew Baker, Senior Designer at Weta Workshop Design Studios, in a world exclusive at Phoenix Atelier! Will be teaching a New Program, Breathing life and presence into “DIGITAL CREATURES”! Using current digital software like ZBrush. Andrew shows you his design process and philosophy of conceptualizing a realistic creature or character for digital FX on a feature film. Designing a hero and generic orc like he does for, The Hobbit.

From concept, sculpting, coloring, final pose/expression, final illustration and sculpture (Design Marquette and perhaps prototype). How to use real life references and people to come up with fresh approach to an orc and create a character capable of speech and having presence on screen.

Take a step towards a better tomorrow come and learn today at Phoenix Atelier.

Registration is open, with his program starting on Sept 16, 2013. Visit PhoenixAtelier.com to reserve your spot today.

Check out an interview the folks at Phoenix Atelier did with Andrew last month:

If you are trying to find new ways to get twisted inside ZBrush, don’t miss this great tutorial covering everything you’ll need to know about generating realistic dreadlocks using FiberMesh. Coming in at a whopping 23 pages, this is no ordinary tutorial! ZBrushCentral member Pablo Munoz Gomez aka Pablander, locks it down with this over the top offering. Be sure to download the PDF file in all its glory to start generating your own Marley inspired dreads. If you want to take your understanding of the Fibermesh settings further, visit ZClassroom for an entire series of video tutorials dealing with creating hair.

Act fast to take advantage of these two free ZBrush courses by Digital-Tutors! Until August 4th Digital Tutors will be offering a handful of free ZBrush courses as well as offering registrants the chance to win an Intuos5 medium and free Digital-Tutors subscriptions. Check out two of them below and sign up here to register.

Creating Game Assets in ZBrush

ZBrush is a fantastic tool for creating very detailed looking models, from characters, to props and environments. The powerful sculpting and painting tools allow artists the freedom to create whatever they can imagine.

Many times, however, the process of building game-resolution geometry and baking the appropriate maps to reproduce that detail falls to other applications in the pipeline. However, if you don’t have access to Maya, 3DS Max, or TopoGun to name a few, ZBrush has all the tools you need to create a low resolution game-type mesh with all the appropriate maps.

In this ZBrush tutorial we’ll go over techniques for sculpting our initial high-resolution asset, a ceremonial dagger. We’ll use DynaMesh, clipping brushes, masking, and a variety of other tools to get our final result. We’ll also paint the dagger appropriately. Once that mesh is done, we’ll talk about different options in ZBrush for creating a low-resolution mesh derived from the final asset. We’ll also create and edit a UV layout in ZBrush, project the detail through, and create our maps.

To finish we’ll bring everything into Marmoset Toolbag to see how it will look in real time. In the end, you’ll be able to go through the same process on your own meshes without ever leaving ZBrush.

Maximizing Your Wacom Device for ZBrush

If you’ve used ZBrush for any amount of time, it’s a good possibility that a Wacom tablet or pen display is a critical piece of hardware in your day to day work. The goal of this course will be to help you maximize the features of your hardware, whether Cintiq, Intuos, or Bamboo, in a way that is specific to ZBrush. Whether it is your Grip Pen, ExpressKeys, Touch Strip or Radial Menu, each is a powerful feature that, when properly used, will extend the functionality of your Wacom product so that it is much more than a simple surface for sculpting or painting.

We will learn how to set each one of these features up for ZBrush and then wrap up this course by learning how to backup and restore our customized tablet properties. After completing this course, you will be able to fully harness the power of your Wacom pen display or tablet when working in ZBrush.

The more you can do, the more you will have the opportunity to do. Diversity of skills and flexibility are two traits that will serve you well in this industry. That’s why Danny Williams is not only going to teach you how to design a video game character, but he’s also going to show you how to create characters for film and visual effects! That’s two very different design processes from start to finish covered in a single course!

Sign up today at ZBrush Workshops!