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Stephen: Hi and welcome to 3dmotive.com.
My name is Stephen G. Wells and I'm a senior character artist.
In this little tips and tricks tutorial we will take a look at
creating custom alphas in ZBrush.
We're going to look to just do the basic settings, basic parameters,
this is your jumping off point if you need to create some alphas
this is how you do it.
You can get more sophisticated as you become more practiced with it
but we're just going to jump in to doing something simple,
something easy but as quickly as possible,
just a few steps as possible.
Because I know sometimes with ZBrush
like any program, if you're not used to it some things can be confusing
and we'll try to keep it as simple as possible for you.
This is the view port in ZBrush obviously.
I'm going to go to my document, I'm going to take the slider
and I'm going to change the range to zero
that actually just gray scales it.
I don't like that particular gradient,
and if you guys don't either that's the way to get rid of it.
I'm going to click on this simple brush tool,
going to grab plain 3D.
I'm going to left click and drag in my view port.
I'm going to hit T so I can edit it
and if it came in wonky or side ways,
I can always hold down my shift and left-click drag in the background
that will snap it very nicely.
I'm then going to click on the make poly mesh 3D button.
Going to hit Ctrl D to subdivide,
you can see here as I do this.
I'm going to subdivide, subdivide, subdivide
and I'm going to do it one more time.
I like a million polygons because if I'm creating an aplha,
I want it to be as clean as possible
and I want to make sure I have enough polygons
support the details I'm going to create.
So that your alpha will look good on whatever you draw it on to
or use it for, especially with sculpting purposes.
I'm going to go from the stroke and into the dots.
This is the stroke, I'm going to go from dots to free hand.
In this case, let's just look at ...
If I were going to look to make tentacle suckers for instance.
As you can see I've got the mirroring on
and I'm going to turn the intensity down a little bit,
turn off the RGB and let's do something,
just get an idea of what we can do.
We're going to do something really simple with this.
I'm going to add in a little, I'm going to turn off my X,
I'm going to add in this just little bit here.
I'm also going to get into my, the H polish tool.
I hit H, that obviously goes right into it
and turn my symmetry back on X.
I'm just going to lightly hit that rim a little bit.
You can see I'm just doing it.
I'm not trying to perfect on this,
I just want to get something in there.
Also want to, let's just go ahead and knock that down.
I'm going to hold down my Shift, will blend that out a little bit.
I want to blend this edges a bit.
Something really simple.
It's not overly complicated, I'm going to go ahead and just zoom in to it.
I did that by holding my Alt, left mouse
and then I'll let go of the Alt, I can zoom in and zoom out.
I'm holding on my left and I'm just pulling in and out.
Just going to pull it in to about here, going to go to alpha,
you want this transfer and you want to hit this button here, Grab Doc.
See what it did right here, it just grabbed that little,
the sculpting I just did on that, see that?
It's now there.
If I select my standard brush and go to do the drag rectangle
click that alpha, there it is.
I can now just drag and there I go.
I can start to pull some of that in.
It's not as intense as this because the intensity is down
let's crank this up a little bit.
See there you go.
I'm going to turn off my symmetry because what I'm going to do now
is I'm going to grab another plain 3D.
I'm going to make sure we select the make poly mesh 3D
and I'm going to divide that as well.
So I'm going back up to about the 1. ... just over a million polygons.
In this case, I'm now going to just drag this out into different areas.
Now if I want to make this so there's going to be suckers all over the place,
I'm just going to do some random placement.
I'm also going to be changing some of the size on this,
just go ahead and do that.
Just a little smaller, get one's that's little -
you want some variation to the sizes on this thing, obviously.
It's best to just try and work some different locations
and space them out a little bit.
Going to do a little bit here and do something big there.
I'm spacing them out.
So you get something like that for instance.
I'm just going to zoom in a little bit, center it.
I'm going to go to alpha, Grab Doc.
Now as you can see, we now have an alpha that has multiple little suckers on it.
In this point I can actually click to
a sphere 3D.
Can hit Ctrl N to clear my canvass and then left click and drag the sphere.
Could hit T to get into edit.
We're going to again make this a poly mesh 3D
and let's subdivide it,
so we've got enough polygons to support what we're going to do.
Two million is a little high, we can go for five, about 525,000.
Just to take a look at what we're going to do with this.
All right, with our standard brush we're in the drag rectangle stroke,
the alpha we just click and go to our second grab.
Okay so there it is.
Let's just click and drag.
Rotate this around, as you can see it stretches a little bit up here
because this is a curved surface.
So if I done a bit of a smaller drag
it wouldn't have done that quite as much.
There you go and I can rotate it around.
Now I can click and drag,
I've just left-click and drag
but as long as I haven't let go of that mouse
I can spin this around as I need to.
If I don't like the placement, it came out too small
then I'll just place it again and this time square it up a little bit.
Again because I've made some variations and placement and sizes
of the little soccers, you can see where it starts to place really nicely.
And yet looks like it's like you've actually done all the sculpt to yourself.
Just one of those where you have to click and drag
and play around with some of this stuff.
If you don't like the placement on something,
just Ctrl Z it and go again.
This gets with something about there,
as you can see it's pretty simple.
By the way just to show you the difference,
you can use the dots, if you use the dots actually what happens is
it will actually click it, if I just click and drag
that actually is like taking the tentacles
and making it like it's a long kind of comb that I can drag through.
You might want that as a particular effect for something.
We obviously don't want something like that for this.
I wouldn't suggest using something like that.
You can go to the stroke and use this, this drag dot.
Now the drag dot is really interesting.
If you click on the sphere, you see this?
I can actually, I'm just left-clicking, I've held it
I can zoom it around and spin it around
and it doesn't become placed until I decide to let it go.
But as you can see, let me let it go,
so it's now placed.
You can see it's really tiny,
that's because drag dots is really based on the size of your brush
and because my brush isn't very big.
The outer circle is the relative effect, it fades off.
The inner circle is where it's going to be the hardest.
The problem is it's not very big,
so if I use my bracket keys and scale the brush up on the fly,
I can now grab something that's like ...
so I get a much nicer size so it's bigger.
I can literally click and drag to move it into a position that I like
and then let go.
I can also do it again over here.
By the way you can actually spin,
if you'll notice I can actually spin this around
based on what I'm choosing to do, what sort of placement I want.
It's one of those things where you'll get to learn
how to use a little bit better as you work with it
if you're going to work with the drag dot.
Because you really want to make sure you line things up
so it has a good variation to the model.
Obviously for this, the suckers are a little bit small
in comparison to some of this.
I'm going to zoom out and try it again.
This time, oops goes really big so let's not go quite that far.
I'm just going to left Alt, drag it in a little bit.
Let's just pretend we're doing something like this.
Anyway you can see very quickly how to do just a base set up
for what you want to try and do
with your particular alpha that you create.
All right.
Again, I tend to use, when I'm doing the alphas,
I tend to drag rectangle for the most part.
We can just drag it out, you can scale it, move it around, the size you need
but I do know some people that use the drag dot quite the method, quite a bit.
I prefer the drag rectangle because it's better placement
and I can move things exactly where I need it.
By the way once you're done with this all you have to do is click on this alpha.
You can click and export it, call it whatever you want to call it,
like suckers and it will be a PSD.
You can create yourself an alpha library
that you can then input anytime you want
to be able to stick it on your models and add details as you need to.
Anyway that's about it.
I hope you've enjoyed this.
This has been 3dmotive.com and my name is Stephen G. Wells.