ZBrush Character Creation - Advanced Digital Sculpting 2nd Edition

216 chapter 6 ■ ZSpheres

Making Hands and Feet

Next, let’s add hands and feet to our ZSphere figure. There are several approaches to making

extremities, some more complex than others. More involved approaches can offer animation-

friendly topology right out of the adaptive skin, while less complex procedures offer a hand

mesh that is ideal for sculpting with minimal effort. With the addition of topology tools in

ZBrush 3, I find it is best to work with a simple ZSphere layout and build the animation

mesh at a later time. This allows you to get to the sculpting phase faster, and the chances are

a ZSphere mesh (much like any starting base mesh) will need to be tweaked for an animation

pipeline. A simple process for making hands and feet follows.

1. Begin by drawing a hand sphere at the end of the arm chain. This new sphere will be
   the palm and all five fingers will be drawn from this sphere. Draw five spheres on this
   hand sphere (Figure 6.29a).


2. Move the thumb sphere down slightly. This will allow the four finger spheres more
   space in which to flow into the hand and also creates a more realistic placement for the
   fingers (Figure 6.29b).


3. Press A to preview the skin. The hand will mesh with each finger flowing logically into
   the palm (Figure 6.29c). This is a function of the new ZSpheres2 skinning system. In
   previous versions of ZBrush this method of making a hand with ZSpheres would not
   have been possible. We will look at the various methods of working with Adaptive
   skin settings later in this chapter.
   This same process applies to feet as well. When you adjust the sphere placement, the
   foot shape can quickly be blocked out. In the next section we will look at some of the adap-
   tive skin controls available in ZBrush.

Adaptive Skin Controls

Throughout this chapter we have been using the A key to preview our mesh. What this

is doing is creating an adaptive skin based on the ZSphere chain. As you recall, adaptive

skins are like polygon socks stretched over the ZSpheres. You can control how the sock

stretches as well as how dense it is by altering the adaptive skin controls. These are found

under the Tool → Adaptive Skin menu. It is important to note that between ZBrush 3.1 and

3.5 a new ZSphere skinning algorithm was introduced called ZSpheres2. This method of

Figure 6.29a The hand sphere drawn
on the wrist

Figure 6.29b The thumb sphere

moved down slightly

Figure 6.29c The ZSphere hand in

preview mode