Monday Bloody Monday – How to Make a Vase or Pot in ZBrush!

I have a tutorial for you today in lieu of my recent posts on methods of sculpty making, and of Tenshi’s post on Archepelis. I have recently become quiet into ZBrush, it only took a little while – but it is another of those – once you know, you can’t figure out how it took you so long – dealies. This is my first tutorial, mind – so if there is anything here you don’t understand or need clarification on, just comment – I will be happy to clarify on anything

You will need:
ZBrush – the free trial is available fully functioning for 30 days from http://www.pixologic.com/zbrush/trial/ – the full version is $595 but there are education licenses available for students (or there was, I can’t find the details right now – but usually there is discounts for students)
Sculpty Maker – Available for free from here:http://www.shiny-life.com/sculpty-maker/ (You only need Sculpty Maker for this tutorial.)
Second Life (Temporary Texture Upload capabilities recommended to save you the 10L if you get the sculpt wrong or anything).
Patience and creativity!

Information on ZBrush

ZBrush is a very strange yet widely used program that combines 2D and 3D in one program, the easiest way to explain it would be to compare it to clay and paint. You begin with your clay, carving and moulding your sculpture – then you use the painting tools to give your sculpture vivid colouring and life. You don’t need a graphics tablet to use this program, but I think it can help with motion and ease of use – so if you have one, even better! This tutorial, however does not need a tablet, and you can just use your mouse.

To start with, open up ZBrush – Press ESC when the main screen comes up – we want a nice blank canvas to start our pot making.

Click in the top left corner where you will see the Tool menu – and find something called a Sphere3D

This is our basic sphere tool and we need to left-click and drag across the workspace, then release the left mouse button to create your sphere.

Once created move your mouse up to find the edit button.

You can now rotate and move your sphere around, to do this you can left click in any part of the workspace, and drag. Hold shift to lock your sphere to an axis. Lock it so it is going top to bottom.

Move your cursor up to the Tool menu and click where it says ‘Make Polymesh3D’

Congratulations! If you wanted to export this now, and have a perfect sculpty sphere in SL, you could – but we don’t – we want a vase – so first we need to edit our brush settings – Start by going to your left and clicking the top of the big square buttons. You need to find the one that says Move and select it.

You then should right click on your workspace (at least, this is how I do it) and where you see the Draw Size, move the slider all the way to 256.

Now we need to move up to the top menu bar and find where it says Transform.

Use the settings as indicated in this image – to give yourself a radial Z axis pointer, which will help us move a larger amount of our sphere upwards.

Click and hold somewhere in the middle of your sphere and slowly, very slowly bring your cursor up. You should end up with a pudgy looking cylinder. The brush details I used to get the resulting cylinder are in the image below.

Rotate your cylinder so you can see the apex of it.

Now we need to create an alpha mask before we hollow out our weird fat cylinder.  Underneath where you found the Brush tools you will find a square that says Alpha. Click it and look for Alpha 14. Make sure to select the brush mode as Drag Rect.

Resize your brush like you did before by right clicking and moving the slider to about 40 or so. Then hold CTRL and click  and drag from the middle of the apex, out wards. You should have a greyed out bit now.

Press CTRL & I to invert the mask, then we need to extract the masked section from the unmasked section, hopefully resulting in a pot or vase.

Go to the Subtools menu and find the button that says Extract. Click it and you should end up with two models like this image:

Now find the subtools menu. Select the top model/layer and press delete! VOILA!

Now we need to go to the Tools menu again and find Export. Click and export your model as an .OBJ file.

Open up SculptyMaker and browse to the location of your OBJ file. For now, leave all the settings alone. Click the Make Sculpty button and a sculpty image should pop up. You can now import this inworld and you will have your very own sculpty pot!

I hope this tutorial has helped you take a foray into creating sculpties, hopefully everyone will be able to do it and then we won’t have to pay extortionate prices for sculpties, cause we can make them ourselves!