Can zbrush make shoes? Shiny Things Vlad?

I have tried ac3d and some blender. I get some usable things, but also some not so usable. I know its not the program's fault, as I can get the basic shapes, its just the slim, bending (side of shoes that wrap around) type things that really mess me up.

I saw some zbrush tutorials on shiny things, which was pretty detailed for beginners, and probably the best tutorial I have seen regarding sl things, so I was somewhat excited about trying it. I love a good tutorial!

What I am curious about though, can zbrush make items like shoes, straight edge items, etc? I do not want to wrap my head around a program, that seems to look fun, if it is more of a program from trees/mushrooms, etc.

If my questions are stupid, I apologize. I am just looking for good tutorial videos.


I found some blender ones, that seemed great, but it only got into pots in stuff, things I could do in rokuro.

Zbrush is perfectly capable of making shoes depending on your approach. Where the program shines is the quick shaping and roughing of a concept. Although it's not the most intuitive program Pixologic has provided excellent free video tutorials on their website and combined with Vlad's SL specific tutorials, you shouldn't have a problem. Although straight edges etc are not exactly Zbrush's forte, they can be approximated through use of the mask and deformation tools ie: mask off what you don't want flattened and then use the deformation tools to shrink/skew/size the unmasked areas into the shape you want. If you learn how to use Zbrush in conjunction with another poly modeller such as Blender AC3D etc. you'll end up with a good workflow. The reason I suggest this is that a decent poly modeller will allow edge/vertice/face adjustment whereas with Zbrush the only way to do this is by shrinking the size of the Move brush to zero and turning Frames on so you can see the poly layout on the model and know where the points are. In Blender and AC3d it's relatively simple to select some vertices and smooth them out all at once which is not really possible in Zbrush without masking.

As a heads up, if you decide to use Zbrush AND another program to work on your meshes, passing them back and forth, then use a program like Blender with Domino's Primstar scripts to bake the sculpt map. The map bakers for Zbrush are picky about the mesh when it comes to baking and may not bake properly with meshes that have been saved by other programs.

Thank you sooooo much. I have been playing with zbrush and so far its the funniest program I have used for 3d. I haven't been able to do anything productive, but it's so neat.

I agree, just takes a little getting used to with adjusting your brush size and the strengths. Have fun!

Yup, I can indeed confirm that you can make shoes in Zbrush. I use it for *all* my sculpts and textures. It's marvellous

[edit] when you are looking for video tutorials, don't just look at SL related videos. Exporting sculpts from Zbrush to SL is about 1% of what you need to know in order to use Zbrush effectively as a modelling and texturing tool. Watch and read *eveything* you can find about Zbrush - I still search every week for new tutorials and am always learning something new that can be incorporated into my everyday use of Zbrush for SL as well as Zbrush for other non SL art that I create.