Since ZBrush for iPad release last year, I was willing to dig into ZBrush again. I learned some basic ZBrush back in 2022/23 but never actually take it seriously. Until now.

So, over the past week or two, I've been learning ZBrush via Rafa Souza course.

I still have a long journey ahead, but I just finished the first project, that was to sculpt an alien character based on a concept from Rayner Alencar.

Here's the concept:

Primary forms

We start everything with basic primitives, a sphere for the head, a cylinder for the neck and chest, and a box for the face and chin.

After some basic sculpt and form sculpt using primary clay build up + move, we combine everything using ZRemesher.

Secondaries forms

Here we started putting more information into the model, by sculpt pretty much the overall character itself. On this step, you define its silhouette and everything in between.

Tertiary forms (with painting)

Finally, we add a bunch of details to make the character more "realistic". For this step it's important to have a good base of the previous step, otherwise things may look weird.

Here we also do some basic painting, using ZBrush.

Final comp and final thoughts

And here is the final comp with a pose.

I'm not particularly happy with this composition, especially with the background I painted, but I truly enjoyed the process of sculpting everything.

Sculpting is so relaxing and somewhat easy to use, once you get to know the basics of it.

And ZBrush itself is not that complicated like I used to remember, maybe I think that now because I was somewhat familiar with some of its tools, but anyways, really nice experience so far!

Cheers!