IHey Dominic, how's this week treating you?

Today's email is going to be a short one. I got some more details about this week's live workshop and a simple but very effective way to create quick details in ZBrush for organic stuff!

UZG Free workshop Friday 9th at 9:00 AM

The workshop is tomorrow! I've been sharing on social media different parts of the process of creating a new quirky character for the UZG course called 'Enoki'. The main focus of the upcoming free workshop is to walk you through a very straightforward process to create characters in ZBrush. will also cover the detailing process, texturing in Substance 3D Painter and a little bit of rendering. Here is a quick visual summary of the process with the character I created:

Surprise bonus section with Unreal Engine!

I'm also very excited to announce that at the end of the workshop, there will be a dedicated section for Unreal Engine so you can also get an insight on how to set up your characters in this awesome software... so make sure you stick around until the end!

Here is Enoki in UE5:

ZBrush quick detailing trick:

Here is one of my favourite and most effective tricks to generate organic shapes and surfaces in ZBrush. The premise is very simple: Use a random texture or photo as alpha but instead of using it to control a sculpting brush, use it as a masking alpha so you can then affect any unmasked area with more control.

Step 1

Find a cool-looking texture or a photo and import it to ZBrush from the Alpha palette (here is a link to the one I used)

Step 2

Hold CTRL to select your masking brushes and make sure you have the MaskPen selected, then while holding CTRL change the stroke to DragRect and finally from the Alpha palette select the imported texture:

Step 3

Holding CTRL to mask, click an area of your model and drag the texture as a mask. Then invert the mask and blur it a bit (you can click on the mask while holding Ctrl to blur the mask).

Step 4

From the Deformation Palette, use the 'inflate' slider to push the surface and create the cool intricate pattern of the texture over the surface of your model:

Step 5

I like to repeat the inflating step to create a 'lumpy' effect with rounded softer details. This 'double inflation' will likely produce multiple intersections so the next step is to Dynames your object at a high resolution.

Step 6

The final step of this tiny trick is to go over some areas and increase the controls of the crevices and high points using the Standard and the Dam_Standard brush. 

I like to leverage the patterns created by the alpha and inflate effect, so I simply polish and enhance the lines and crevices that are already there. 

That's about it! 

The reason I wanted to share this quick tip is that it is actually a very nice way of producing custom alphas that you can then use on your own brushes (just apply the same technique on a plane instead of a sphere).

I actually used this method for some of the manually painted alphas I create for my brush packs, including the Bark and Wood brushes pack that is coming very very soon. Here are some assets I was testing the brushes on:

Hope you had a great rest of your week and I'll see you tomorrow FRIDAY the 9th (this week) at 9:00 AM Australia Time!

Cheers,
Pablo M.

Let's hang out on social media...