Project Breakdown:

Queen of the Stone Age

Adjusting the interface

As you can see in the following short videos and screenshots, I have adjusted my ZBrush interface quite a bit. It’s not that the standard interface isn’t already great but depending on the project, it’s nice to have the ability to adjust it. Changing the interface is easy and straight forward. Tons of settings in the “Preference” palette give you a lot of freedom and it’s really worth it to carefully look through the taps there.

Interface adjustments and settings I always change before I start sculpting:

1. to get a little bit more space, turn off “Wide Buttons” and set the “Button Size” to 38 (program restart re-quired). To leave all submenus open, disable “Use UI Groups”.

2. if you would like to deactivate the QuickSave function for any reason, scroll down to “QuickSave” and set “Maxi-mum Duration” and “Rest Duration” too 600; “Max QuickSave files” to 1.

On the next pages I give you an insight into the creation of “Queen of the Stone Age”. I’m not going to explain every step in detail, so some knowledge about ZBrush will be necessary. I hope you can use some of the informa-tion for your own projects!

3. Go to the render palette and search for “object shadow” and “shadow length” in the “Preview Shadows” tap. Turn them both down to their lowest value. I have placed both sliders directly on my interface to have quick ac-cess. By turning the object shadow down to zero, all viewport rendered shadows on your model disappear. That helps to see the shapes much better.

4. What I also do is assigning a hotkey to the SubTool Master “Save ZTool” button. Make sure that SubTool Master plugin is installed, go to the “Plugin” palette, open the SubTool Master tab and CTRL+Alt click on the “Save ZTool” Button. Now ZBrush allows you to assign a hotkey.

5. Make sure that the document background is one solid color and has no distracting gradient (gradient back-grounds are great for presentation, not so much for sculpting I think), a mid-gray works best most of the time. When you feel comfortable, you can save the document settings as a “StartupDocument.ZBR” in the ZStartup Folder so it loads every time you launch ZBrush.

6. In the “Preference” palette scroll down to “Edit” and turn of “Align Cursor to Surface”. Now your brush cursor behaves like in older ZBrush versions and doesn’t align with the surface when you hover over or it. That’s less dis-tracting - I just couldn’t get used to that feature :) You can also assign a hotkey to that button.

7. I change the standard smooth brush to the “Smooth Strong” brush – launch LightBox and go to Brush/Smooth/Smooth Strong.ZBP click on it and the standard smooth brush gets replaced.

8. Re the ZMaterial, I use a slightly adjusted version of Adam Lewis “z3” material. The red tint comes from pulling both hue values, A and B, in the Material/Modifiers tap to the left.

9. Always turn on “Perspective” for sculpting, except you use the ClipCurve and SliceCurve brushes a lot. Then it’s better to temporarily turn of perspective to get a planar view on your model.

Custom palettes

There is a great way to create custom menus that contain all the buttons and sliders you use all the time. It gets even better if you assign a hotkey to these custom palettes so they behave similar to a right click popup menu and allow you access to the settings without leaving the canvas. This is how to set them up:

1. Go to the “Preference” palette and open up the first tab, named “Config”. Press “Enable Customize”. That’s the mode that allows adjusting the interface, moving buttons around etc.

2. Now, still in the “Preference” palette, scroll down to the “Custom UI” tab and click “Create New Menu”. By doing so, a small windows pops up and ZBrush asks you to name the new menu. I name it “Z-Custom Palette” for in-stance. Press Enter on your keyboard. The reason why I put a “Z” in front of the name is because ZBrush creates

a new entry in the main menu at the very top of the interface. If the name of your new palette starts with the let-ter A, ZBrush puts it at the very beginning. I want all my custom palettes at the end of this line, so I wrote a “Z” in front to keep it nice and clean.

3. Dock the new palette over to the left or right tray. Because “Enable Customize” is still activated, we can now start dragging buttons and sliders into our new menu. Let’s take some from the Transform palette and drag them over. To do so, keep CTRL+Alt pressed, click on the item you want to copy and drag it into the new palette. You can rearrange the items by CTRL+Alt dragging them around. You can also add fillers and even submenus. These items are available under “Custom UI” in the “Preference” palette.

4. When you have placed all the items you need, turn off “Enable Customize” in the “Config” tab. Now let’s assign a hotkey. Go to the main menu at the top of the interface and CTRL-Alt click on the menu name. ZBrush prompt you to assign a hotkey of your choice.

5. Every time you press the hotkey now while working on your model, your custom menu pops up and you have direct and fast access to the settings. That enhances the workflow significantly and makes you a lot faster.

Sculpting the female body

After I import one of my standard base meshes I usually use for sculpting human figures, I start assigning a bunch of polygroups for the head, limbs, fingers and toes. This polygroups help me posing the model during the next step. If you are sure, that you don’t have to change the pose at the end, it’s best to pose the figure right at the start and work on it with symmetry mode turned off. Of course then it takes almost twice as long to complete it, but posing the sculpture at the very end can be pretty tricky if you are trying to achieve an anatomical correct looking model. The pose affects the shapes of skin and muscles and defines where the bony landmarks are visible or shinning through. Keep these characteristics in mind from the very beginning on. A squeezed or stretched body is never symmetrical by any means. It’s a fact, that the bony structure stays rigid, but everything else, fat tissue, muscles and tendons create asymmetrical shapes.

The main goal here was to build a sculpture that works from every angle. That’s something totally different than creating a model that gets animated later on for instance. Therefore it’s necessary to make the pose as dynamic and significant as possible. By that I don’t mean you have to twist and bend the limbs like crazy. Sometimes slight movements already create great tension. The more movement a pose has, the harder it gets to make it look good from every angle. It becomes already pretty obvious if a pose will fail or not, when you tweak it at the lowest

subdivision level. Take your time, turn the model around, squeeze your eyes or just zoom out and observe it from all sides. Try to find spots that look interesting and appealing, the more the better. But as already mentioned small adjustments make the difference – a fully stretched arm, a bended knee with a prominent patella or the twist be-tween the ribcage and the pelvis for instance with a slight tilt of the head. It even helps to mimic the pose yourself to get a physical feeling for it. If your base mesh looks kind of wrong, so the final sculpture will do.The time lapse shows how I use polygroups, masking and the transpose tool to adjust the base mesh. Sometimes it’s necessary to bring the mesh to an external 3d package for adding additional edge loops, depending on the distortions that might occur while posing.

When I’m happy with the pose, the actual sculpting work begins and I add a new subdivision level. I come back to the lowest subdivision from time to time to make bigger adjustments, but the main position of her body stays as it is now. The cool thing by starting with a symmetrical base mesh is that you can still use the symmetry mode for the head later one. That makes the placement of the face features a lot easier. All you have to do is to turn on symmetry and press “use posable symmetry”. That allows you to work on both sides of the head or on both feet simultaneously and speeds up the process.

At this stage, good reference material comes into play. As soon as I’m happy with the pose, I search for suitable reference pictures. As you can imagine, it’s almost impossible to find exact reference material if you invented the pose. So it’s necessary to collect images from different sources and pick out the information you need to get the job done. The best thing of course would be to engage a model and take pictures. If it has to be super accurate, that’s to only method that really works.

I still use subdivision levels to my advantage when I elaborate the shapes of the body. Starting with a low-res mesh forces you to focus on the big shapes first before getting lost into details. Sure, it would be possible to turn the geometry into a Dynamesh right now and treat it with the clay-buildup or clay-tube brush, but it’s much harder to keep it clean without turning the model into a bumpy mess. As a golden rule you can say gesture comes first, then the outline and finally the volumes. After you have established gesture, focus on the outlines of the body and examine how these lines interact with each other. Be aware of that these lines are always rounded on the human body (that applies to all organic shapes in general). A cavity occurs whenever round forms are lying next to each other and build a “V” type looking shape where they meet. Concave bumps are almost nonexistent. Your job is to create flowing lines that interact with each other. A hollow on one side is opposed by fullness on the other side.

Try to avoid straight lines because they have no variety at all and tend to look stiff. The tricky part is to apply that in a way that these lines keep flowing, no matter from what side you are looking at the sculpture. A great side effect of this method is that the third point of our golden rule, volume, is almost establishing itself. When the ges-ture fits and the outlines are flowing, all you have to do is smooth out the volumes between prominent landmarks directly on the surface. Of course it doesn’t hurt if you have profound anatomy knowledge. The more you know the better. But knowing about human anatomy is just one part of the puzzle. For creating volume, I have made a custom brush by tweaking the flatten brush that comes with ZBrush. This are the settings:

1. go to the Brush palette, select the “Flatten” brush and clone it.2. scroll down to the “Curve” tab and enable “AccurateCurve”3. under the “Depth” tab add an “Imbed” value of +154. in the “Samples” tap disable the “Buildup” function5. move one to the modifier tab and change the “Brush Modifier” slider to +100, set the “Smooth” slider to 1.6. Next, switch to the Alpha palette and choose alpha no. 28, the square one with blurry edges. In the “Modify” tap, still in the Alpha palette, increase the blur value to +15.7. Finally go back to the Brush palette and save the adjusted brush.

What you have now is a tuned “Flatten” brush which builds up volume and slightly flattens the surface at the same time. I’m working with this one since release 3.0. Be aware that on some systems the increased alpha-blur value of +15 can cause trouble. If you feel like changing this setting slows down ZBrush, turn it back to zero, create a similar rectangle in Photoshop, blur it there and save the PSD file under ZBrush 4R5 (or whatever release you have installed) /ZStartup/Alphas.You can also download my brush and copy it to ZStartup/BrushPresets, so it loads every time you start ZBrush. Make sure the corresponding alpha PSD is in the Alpha folder under ZStartup and assigned to the brush in ZBrush.

When working on the body, I often leave hands and feet untouched until I know what their final position will be. A hand that grasps an object looks different than a hand that rests on top of an object. As soon as it’s clear what to do with it, I go down the subdivision tree and start finishing it. The same goes for parts where I’m not sure if they will be hidden by clothes or accessories in the final composition. Don’t waste too much time working on areas where you are sure that no one is going to see them at the end. The rest of the process is pretty straight forward: I slowly add volume with my adjusted flatten-brush, I use the standard brush to define anatomical landmarks, I do a lot of smoothing to keep the surface nice and clean and keep an eye on the outlines.

Sculpting a female head and face can be pretty challenging, especially when she has to look young and attractive. I advise you to avoid wrinkles at all for the beginning – even small once. Wrinkles make a face look older (older, but not necessarily old! depends on the amount of wrinkles you add of course) As already mentioned, I work on the face with symmetry mode turned on (“Use Posable Symmetry” in this case) Focus on the profile first; the size of the nose, the angel and the length of her forehead, the distance between the chin and the lower lips and the shape of the back of the head. Then slowly work your way to the sides. Examine where the eye sockets are and where the bottom line of the lower jaw bends upwards. The low-res mesh forces me to focus on the main shapes. I try to elaborate the mouth area as a simple cylinder and the eyes together with the eyelashes and the corre-sponding muscles and fat tissue as a sphere. It makes not much sense to add details on such a low-res level. The female head can have almost child-like proportions. In this case: a high forehead, a short nose with a smooth tip, full lips a short and smooth chin. Definitely look out for round forms. Place the cheekbones high and make them full. So the bony border that represents the eye socket becomes less defined and smoother. That creates an awake and healthy facial expression. On a higher subdivision level, I temporarily add some gray around the eyes, tint the lips and draw in the hairline and eyebrows – I add some makeup so to speak. That helps quite a bit to define a feminine look during sculpting. I also don’t add separate subtools for the eyeballs yet. I prefer working that way because the eyeball has a tremendous affect on the shape of the eyelids and the surrounding area. It’s easier to get these shapes done, when the eyeballs are part of the face mesh. Later on I mask off everything except the eyeballs and push them inward to allow room for spheres, appended as separate subtools. On this model, the neck gets partially hidden by a necklace. That allows me to separate the head from the rest of the body and add an additional subdivision level for further detailing the skin.

Sculpting the female head

The necklace:

1. Select a Cylinder primitive and draw it on the canvas. Go to the “Initialize” tab in the “Tool” palette, lower the Z-Size and give it an inner radius. For the HDivide add a value of 20, lower the VDivide down to 4. Then make a Polymesh3d out of it.

2. With the “Select Lasso” tool select a few polygons, invert the selection and click “Delete Hidden” in the Tool/Ge-ometry tab. Close the resulting holes with the “Close Holes” function.

3. Mask one of ending, invert the mask, select the “Transpose Move” tool by clicking “W” on your keyboard and place it directly on the unmasked polyon. By CRTL clicking on the inner circle, you can extrude the face and build up new polygons.

4. When you are done with adjusting the shape, select the polygons as shown in the recording and press “Crease” in the Geometry tab. Now divide the mesh a couple of times. As you can see, the creased borders stay sharp. Click “UncreaseAll” and add one more subdivision level.

5. Now mask the inner part of the mesh and press “CTRL + W” on your keyboard. This shortcut will assign a new polygroup to the masked area and remove the mask. Select the new polygroup and search for “Panel Loops” in the Geometry tab. Uncheck “Double” and check “Append”, then click on “Panel Loops”. That creates an extrusion based on the selected polygroup. To change the thickness, play with the “Thickness” slider.

Let’s move on to the belt buckle:

1. Select a box primitive, lower the Z-value in the “Initialize” tab and make a Polymesh3D out of it.

2. Turn the Box into a Dynamesh and duplicate the tool by clicking on “Duplicate” in the “SubTool” tab or use the shortcut key CTRL+Shift+D

3. Adjust the new subtool with the transpose line as shown below and mark the “subtract” symbol next to the tool icon in the subtool palette.

4. Select the topmost tool and hit “Merge Down”. Before you do that, make sure that Dynamesh is still enabled for this subtool. After merging it down, redynamesh the object by CTRL click-dragging somewhere on the canvas, so the second tool gets subtracted from the first one.

Although the head is like any other part of the human body, it’s also the part where people recognize immediately when something is off. Therefore it takes a lot of time and practice to become a good head and face modeler. It’s even more complex if you try to create face expressions without getting creepy results.

Adding clothes and accessories

Clothes:1. Go to the tool palette and append a ZSphere as a new subtool. Move and scale the ZSphere so that it lies inside the body mesh. Then scroll down to the “Topology” tab, activate “Edit Topology” and start building polygons directly on the body surface. Hit “A” on the keyboard to get a preview of the resulting mesh.

2. When you are done drawing the new geometry, add some “Skin Thickness” by adjusting the corresponding slid-er in the “Topology” tab. Next switch to the “Adaptive Skin” tab, set the “Density” to 1 and press “Make Adaptive

Skin”. Go to the “Subtool” palette and append the piece as a new subtool.

3. Subdivide the mesh and start detailing.

Texture painting

Spotlight is a great tool for painting textures directly onto geometry. Therefore make sure that your mesh is pretty dense before you start painting. The process for texturing the body is really easy and straight forward:

1. First of all, I apply a new material to the model. For human skin, I switch from the one I usually use for sculpt-ing to the standard material “SkinShade 4” and enable the “Wax Modifier” in the material palette. I set the “Wax Strength” value to 26 and “Fresnel” to 15. The look of the textures depends on the underlying material. If you would like to know what your textures look like without any shading, switch to the “Flat Color” material temporari-ly.

2. Search for suitable reference pictures; ideally pictures with even colors and low contrast. Go to the texture tab and import them; then press “Add to spotlight”. That opens the spotlight control wheel and let you place and scale the image you just added. Use the Spotlight wheel to do adjustments like color or intensity correction. Don’t forget to save your Spotlight settings later on under Textures/Save Spotlight.

3. Center the image to the ZBrush canvas and press “Z” on your keyboard. Choose a standard brush, make sure that only “RGB” is enabled, set the “Focal Shift” to a negative value and start painting.

4. I try to evenly apply color to the entire model before I leave Spotlight and start refining parts manually. There-fore I set the “RGB Intensity” of the standard brush to a very low value (5 – 10), select the spray stroke and Alpha No. 7. Then I color pick directly from the model by hitting the “C” key or by selecting directly from the color choos-er. I add some light green, red and purple where I think it’s necessary.

The final image

For the final image, I combine several BPR renders in Photoshop. Before I hit the render button, I adjust some settings in the render palette and add some additional lights.

1. Go to the “Light” palette and lower the intensity of the main light down to 0.85. Then add two additional lights. The first one has a green tint, an intensity of 0.1 and comes from above and slightly right. The third one has a blue tint, also an intensity value of 0.1 and comes from below, either left or right. I activate these lights to add some color variation. That helps to make it look less flat.

2. Next open the render palette and scroll to “Render Properties” – set the “Details” to 3. Move on to the “BPR Shadows” tab and change the “GStrength” to 0.5, “Rays” to 36 and “Blur” to 8. Changing these settings blur the shadow outline and make it less dark.

3. The canvas size in the “Document” palette is also responsible for the resolution of your renders. Set it high if you need a high-res image.

4. Now press the BPR render button! In the Render palette, search for the “BPR Render Pass” and save the “Shad-ed”, “Shadow” and “Mask” channel by clicking on the icons.

5. The resulting image looks decent but still a little bit flat. We can change that by adding some additional lights in the form of two additional renders and some overlaying in Photoshop. Since we already received all the color/diffuse information from our first render pass, let’s fill all parts of the sculpture with one solid color and material. I choose a pure white and the standard “Blinn” material for that purpose. Adjusting all subtools at the same time works best with “SubTool Master”. Open the “ZPlugin” palette and press “Fill” in the SubTool Master” tab. Then choose the fill option “Color and Material”

6. The first light pass should serve as our rim or back light. Deactivate the two lights we added earlier in the Light palette and set the intensity of the remaining one to 1. ALT + Click on it the little circle on the light sphere, so it gets placed on the rear side of the sphere and move it to the left. While dragging, you can check the results direct-ly on the canvas. Hit the render button, save the image and name it “Rim-Light”.

7. Now let’s create a light that shines from the above. ALT click again on the little circle on the light sphere so it shines from the front again and move it to the top. Render the image and save it as “Top Light”

8. Finally I combine all the layers in Photoshop.