■ The Brush Menu 35lowest levels with some brushes and then higher levels with Clay and Rake tools, but it is
important to understand each approach and its merits. Most of all, always remember to work
on the biggest shapes first and work your way down to the details.
The Brush Menu
The Brush menu contains all the real-time sculpting tools that you will use while working
on an active tool in the document window. These brushes can be used on the model at mul-
tiple subdivision levels while you freely rotate in Edit mode.
You may notice under the Tool menu there are several brushes listed, including the
Simple brush. These are not sculpting brushes and we will not use them at all. We explore these
in the bonus chapter on the DVD. They are 2.5D painting brushes and are not to be confused
with 3D sculpting brushes, which can be found in the Brush palette. In this chapter, we’ll focus
on the Brush palette tools, which can be used on a model that is in Edit mode. The Brush pal-
ette contains a versatile selection of brushes and brush modifiers (see Figure 2.2). It also allows
artists to create and store their own custom brush variations that are loaded each time ZBrush
starts. Several specialized masking options are also available, as well as control curves to facili-
tate altering the way the brushes interact with the surface.
At the top of the Brush window, you will find a selection of brush icons. These rep-
resent the most recently used brushes and are not representative of the full brush set. To
access the complete selection of brushes, click the active brush icon. The active brush icon is
the large button in the upper left of the Brush menu as well as the upper left of the standard
interface. This opens the brush fly-out menu (Figure 2.3).
Beneath the brush icons are several sliders, curves, and icons. These represent the
many different modifiers you can apply to your brush. The most important is the BrushMod
slider. The BrushMod slider affects each brush differently depending on the brush selected.
For instance, when Pinch is selected BrushMod determines whether the brush pinches in
or out (Figure 2.4); however, when you’re using the Smooth brush, BrushMod controls the
height of the smoothing effect (Figure 2.5). We used this slider to affect the Pinch brush
when working on the lion head in Chapter 1.
Figure 2.3 Clicking the active brush icon expands the Brush menu fly-out.
Figure 2.2 The
Brush window