Hair Tutorial In Zbrush. An Alternative Curve Brush Method.

Hello, my name is Francis Martens, I'm a 3d character artist, and today I want to talk about how I use curved brushes in ZBrush to make hair it's not a normal method that you usually see online, although there quite a few tutorials that cover curved brushes. I want to try something different using the zremesher guide brush and I'm gon na use in this Gandalf model to explain what I mean so, let's get into ZBrush and start so looking at this model, it's just a sculpted mesh with different slope tools. You'Ve got the hair the face I had to craft the beard, a mustache and so on and so forth. So normally what you do with the curved brush is you'd select a brush. So if you're going to the brush palette and select the curve snap brush, what would normally happen is you would get your mesh ready and drawn it like this, and then you tap on it and draw again and to reposition you'd use the brush with the blue Icon showing move around, and sometimes you get this crunching happening with the brush stroke, so you have to lock to start in order to get it to behave. The way you want to, but sometimes it's not enough - you have in some in some instances, you'll have the stroke moving around and intersecting with other bits of geometry, because ZBrush is trying to cover every visible sub tool and sometimes that can be frustrating. So the principle is simple and I'll just show the isolate. This first share the wireframe and I'll just use a slice tool to slice this quickly and I'll go to my stroke palette and functions polygroups frame mesh. Now, if we select any any curved brush, use a stain brush wheeze before the curve, snap brush and tap on that curve, you get a fruit, you get it framed on that curve, and this is basically the general principle I'm trying to to use when I, when I use the zero measure guide brush, so I'm going to show you how I do it turn that off and let's to select that brush now skip that and draw some curves on the air base, starting from the root I'm going to quickly open up the stroke Palette here I'll show you something quickly. Normally the stroke snap distance is set to about ten. This is fine if you're drawing strokes on a regular basis, but if you're drawing curves close to each other I'll, just tell enough to emphasize what I mean. So if you draw a stroke, that's close to the next one, you get this happening where I'll draw it down instead, so you get it joining up. What you get the stroke preceding joining up with the next one you draw and if you're drawing curves close to the roots, you don't have to happen. So what I tend. What I tend to do is turn this down to one, and that way I can easily go in. I turn my brush size down. If I have lazy mouse on and turn the radius up, I'm able to go in and draw strokes close to one another without him touching when this is done once you've got the base done, you can then come down and continue the strokes. You can turn this back up now because you will need that to carry on without having to go so close to me, so you can parry on with a stroke, and if you get a situation where you have a stroke, that's not quite what you want. It'S not smooth enough for you to be jagged. If you press six a few times on your keyboard, it will smooth out the curve for you, let's emphasize that with this one here yeah. So obviously, it's not going to smooth it out to perfection, but it will smooth it out a bit if you have a bit of a kink in your curve, so if you've covered the whole base with your curves you'll end up with this, this took about five Minutes to draw it's not very precise, it's just for the purposes of this tutorial and you can see I've covered more or less every part of the of the hair base and I've used the zero Michigan brush to draw the curves, and it's not perfect about it. So for this tutorial, so once you've got this covered, you've got it's evenly. Spaced out, all you need to do is, go and pick any brush. I'M gon na use a hair brush. I found online by Dylan Edwin they're. Quite a few brushes online. You can get you've got some brushes by Shane. Olson you've got brushes by Martin Vail Alvin Martin. I hope I'm not pronouncing your name, because it's very full of vowels you've got brushes by many people and that's gon na select Dylan's brush. Here it's free online. You can get it on Gumroad you can get even on his website. You can get it everywhere. Basically, Shane Wilson's, probably nice newsletter. You can subscribe to and get these brushes as well so tap on this and you get this mesh, but it's too small. So what you need to do is obviously go in press s, increase your brush size and tap on it again. So you get the situation happening now. I'Ve got this taper. I don't want. I want it to be. I wanted to taper, but not that much. So I'm going to lift this up, bring this down and that will have been his up. I'M also gon na change the style of the brush. I don't want it to be smooth. It'S a multi, Multi multi tool brush. So if you press M on your keyboard, you'll get some options. I like to use the multi thick a for the strand effect. If I top again, you get this happening, make the brush a bit bigger, maybe okay and you're left with this situation. We'Ve got the hair on the brush, I'm just completely soft quickly. I'Ve got my split. I must point down here somewhere, because I've got my menu. The way I like it, I don't like hunting for menus and submenus and ZBrush is the king of sub menus. If you want to find a split you're going to split underneath tool and it's a little masked points - I've just customized my menu because I don't wanna - spend my life hunting for menus and grow gray hairs spit that off and now you're left with this situation here. So you've got this, but obviously you've got gaps in the middle of the head and between strands fefe, because you can do to this, you can quickly mask out the middle and the mask. Select your pinch brush and pinch together. You could also inflate also inflate the strands to fill in the gaps. Just won't take that long, if you, if you just if you a bit more precise with it so after doing this for a few minutes, just get this camera okay after the mints. For a few minutes I ended up with this, which is more like what we want now. Looking at this, I'm gon na show the hair base again, so you can see right, so you can see that even underneath these strands, you've got the hair base. Still, there's still quite a few gaps which we need to look at and sort out, but because we have the base still there, we can go back on it and draw some more curves with a Z michig I brush quite easily. Just repeat the process. Draw curves select our hair brush again and tap, and so on and so forth. So after doing this a few times, I'm just gon na undo this quickly and I'm gon na get rid of this guy because we don't need him anymore. Okay, after doing some curve work a few times, I ended up with that top layer and the bottom layer. I'M gon na hide this then again unhide this one as well. I think I have three of these, so that's all of us, that's all of them hidden. So after drawing the curves tapping with a brush drawing somewhere close underneath tapping again, we've got this nice layered effect with the hair. Now the advantages of this are, you could have your dynamesh on top of your base, draw your curves tap and do it again, and but this is this is a very simple hairstyle, but you could have a different hairstyle, which is more complicated where you want spirals Or curves you could draw your curves tap on it adjust and because you have this, these, this particular IMM brush is quite handy, because if we use the Move tool, you move everything I'll show you what I mean. If you take the move tool, you can adjust it all you want, but if you take the mystical topological brush, you could move individual strands and you could basically have flyaway hairs. You know just give it a variation to it and once you're done, I'm sure your hat again. I like this system because it's quite handy doesn't take long. It'S very versatile and it saves me the trouble of trying to manipulate the hair brush from the beginning from the get-go say it so much time and then yeah, that's about it. So a few things to note to remember or to have your curve modifier make sure when using zremesh make sure the stablish sense is one make sure when you're tapping on your and your curve with a hair brush make sure the curve itself is the way you Want it so if you want just give us a brush again, so if you want your hair to taper at the bottom, you want to make sure that the curve is facing that way and, if wanted to tip at the top gon na, make sure it tapers That way, and if an answer is quite straight forward, so that's it. I think I hope you found this tutorial useful if you have any questions. Just hit me up on poly junkie on our station Instagram or Facebook.