ZBrush Character Creation - Advanced Digital Sculpting 2nd Edition

40 chapter 2 ■ Sculpting in ZBrush

Brush menu option Description

Modifiers Provides general brush modifier controls, including the BrushMod slider

as well as Smooth, Pressure, Trails, Tilt, and others.

Auto Masking Controls the automatic brush masking options. Masking by Polygroup,

Direction, Cavity, Backface, Color, and Topology are available here.

Tablet Pressure Controls the tablet pressure options.

Alpha And Texture Offers alpha options as well as brush blending modes. The Polypaint

mode slider will allow you to select from the color blending modes

Standard, Colorize, Multiply, Lighten, and Darken.

Smooth Brush Modifiers Provides fine-tuning control of the Smooth brush.

Brushes are further modified by alphas and strokes. Alphas are grayscale images that

are imported into ZBrush or selected from the default alpha set. They serve as the shape

of the brush itself. Alphas can also serve as stencils or texture stamps, which we’ll cover in

Chapter 4, “ZBrush for Detailing.” Figure 2.6 illustrates the effect of various alphas com-

bined with different strokes.

Figure 2.6 The effects of various strokes with different alphas

Alphas are grayscale images that control the shape of the brush. Strokes control how the

alpha is applied to the surface by the selected brush.

The Edit curve controls the strength of a brush over the course of its center to the

outermost falloff ring. The point on the left of the curve represents the brush strength at its

outer radius, whereas the point at the right represents the strength of the effect at the brush’s

center. Manipulating the Edit curve can create many interesting brush effects, as you can

see in Figure 2.7.

Table 2.2: Additional brush menu options (continued)