Needing help with Zbrush Sculpties.

Hi! I've noticed an explosion of information on the forums about sculpties and I'm a bit overwhelmed with trying to find the information I need.

Has anyone put together a tutorial or full beginners guide to Zbrush with sculpties? I've looked through a lot of their official docs and tried to learn the program a bit, but none of it covers the basics. They all expect you to already know how to do these advanced things and I find myself lost.

Some questions I have run into are how to I set a polymesh to have a specific poly count? I tried using the ready-made object someone else created for Zbrush Sculpties... its preset for 1024 polygons or something and it starts out as a cylinder. When I went to export though I somehow had grown to 1056 polys between editing and converting. I do not know how this happened as the only tools I used were the move and draw.

I can make some nice looking things, even in the low res/poly count yet somehow when I try to turn them into the BMP for Sculpties they turn into a spikey mass of nothing with only partials of what I created actually showing up.

Can anyone help me, or possibly tell me what I am doing wrong? I can upload the .OBJ from a few test projects if necessary.

It'd also be great if anyone could point me to a beginners tutorial for Zbrush and all the different interface options. Thank you in advance!

Try Hypatia's sphere:
/8/20/183764/7.html#post1521794
Also download wings (which is free) and get and install the wings exporter here
/8/20/183764/1.html

Download the file, bring it in zbrush and sculpt it using deformations. Keep checking that the poly count is the same. Hovering your mouse over the selected tool will show the poly count. Do that frequently so you know if and how you are increasing the poly count.
When you are finished sculpting:
From the tool palette export your model. This will give you an .OBJ file. Import the OBJ into Wings and export as the second life sculptie.

As for learning Zbrush: I purchased Zbrush 3 weeks ago for the purpose of doing sculpties. I am still using Zbrush 2 as I am on the Mac. I got the complete package with a book called "Practical Guide" and a couple of little pamphlets. The Practical Guide also came with in PDF form. I am good with computers and profficient in photoshop, but I found zbrush to be pretty challenging. There is a LOT to learn. It takes time. The little pamphlets gave a good intro. The Practical Guide is excellent. It is ALL tutorials, step by step and everything works as described. I am very impressed with the application and with the Practical Guide. They really made an effort to make good tutorials. After three weeks of intensive study, I am getting a handle on the basics. The most useful tools for shaping the model for me at present are move and scale and applying masks and using the deformations (on the tools palette). The projection master will allow you to paint directly on your model which is the best way to apply color to the surface of your sculptie.

If you don't have the Practical Guide, get it and go through the tutorials. It is worth the time.

Thank you! That tutorial is quite helpful. I just have one quick newbie question.

In Zbrush 3, there is a way through the Rapid UI to just import an OBJ and it will open it/create it with its original orientation and proportions. This is done simply enough with File>Open

Is there a way to do this same function through the classic UI? I have not been able to find it...

Oh... and how do I switch between multiple objects in a scene?

Just an FYI, Ive been using (read:learning) ZBrush now on and off since V2 release, and Its an amazing program, although the 2.5D aspect is a bit daunting to grasp for a while until you get used to the ins and outs of it (sorry...that was a horrible pun).

After much hair pulling and gnashing of teeth, I tried to find a video tutorial and was directed to video-tutors.com. After downloading and going through the vids while I worked on the tuts using the support files I had a much much better comprehension and actually was able to produce some surface deformations for a commercial product design used initially as a rapid prototyping file. Needless to say I was and am much more comfortable after going through the tuts. Having a production deadline to follow at that time, I didnt have much choice but to get the vids and get to work. I know theres a rule here against spam, or adverts, of which this is neither; Im an SL resident and a Zbrush user making a recommendation based on personal experience and personal frustration. I currently use Max, TrueSpace, Inventor, ZBrush and ProEngineer for my RL design job, but I havent even begun to dip my toe into the Maya pool. I dont have that much time left in the day.

I realize that STL files and massive poly counts are not applicable here, but using the vids seriously got me up to speed on ZBrush, regardless of the application.

From what I understand they now have a maya and zbrush pack, although I cant say anything about the maya vids. I CAN, however, seriously suggest plunking down the $ for the vids if you want to get up to speed without needing therapy first. Well worth it, especially now that I have yet another use for Zbrush. Mmmmm.....sprims.

Now if I can just figure out what the schmeck "baked occlusion culling" is....

Found the import/export... just need to figure out a few things like texturing and such. Here's the latest shot of what I'm working on.

baked ambient occlusion - a lot of higher end programs can do that by rendering directly to a flat texture. Most 3d programs can bake diffuse lighting on their own or with a plugin.

However by now, most renderers worth a damn can render out ambient occlusion. I don't think its something that Maya will have a lock on for very long. And actually - Maya doesn't - its a plugin for Maya costing an additional 1200 dollars. Modo and 3dsMax both can bake AO maps IIRC. (Modo is high on the list of my next purchase, actually)

The midrange renderers are catching up fast. Zbrush does texture baking via its "projection master" and can bake the lighting and materials on if you choose. Alternatively with ZB3 - you can use AO renderings in orthographic views and simply use Zproject to paint the texture on with good results. Blender can bake AO lighting as well.

A little more time - but saves your pocketbook several thousand dollars.

Here's a question... Since I am starting out with a sphere, how would I make something with multiple points like, for example, a hand.

I've noticed you can't simply just mash down the points between where the fingers would be due to the horrid stretching of certain pixels. And I can't simply cut the mesh... so... any tips?

Also, still trying to figure out how to use/switch between multiple objects in a scene... Any help there would be wonderful

Edit: Does anyone have a model that could be used as a dummy obj like an avatar for building on?

I still -really- need some help in finding out how to switch between which object is my focused target. I can add multiple objects but I can't for the life of me figure out how to jump between. It seems I can only edit the last object added, which is a major pain in my ass...

/8/20/183764/7.html#post1521794/8/20/183764/7.html#post1521794

is where I posted my uvmapped sphere for Zbrush, you use it to export in Wings.

If I was going to make a hand - I would use at least 10 sculpts. You can link them together using the subtools in ZB3 and move them around with the transform tool, and sculpt them to flow together, then export each tool separately to Wings as an obj to create sculpt maps.

(make sure you always have "flp" checked for your obj export settings in Zbrush, or its going to flip your mesh)