Award-winning artist Meats Meier's unique wire style has become one of his signature forms of sculpture. Courtesy of Meats Meier.

Pivotal to ZBrush are its use of alphas. Alpha’s form the bridge between the painting side of ZBrush and the sculpting side of it. Alphas can be used as masks in the same way that an illustrator uses masks or as a stencil through which you can paint in your deformations or applied to a surface in the same way displacement maps are applied in 3D packages.

ZBrush has the ability to take a 2D grayscale image such as an alpha map and give it depth. A digital elevation map, DEM, which is basically a grayscale image where value equals height, can be downloaded from the Internet and used as an alpha to create a 3D terrain. Graphical text can be rapidly turned into 3D and 2D graphical images of gears can be used to model, you guessed it, gears.

While ZBrush is most visibly a modeling program, modeling is only a part of what ZBrush can do. As a 3D texture painting package, ZBrush combines the use of 3D objects with texture painting allowing you to utilize any of its 3D tools to create 2D textures. It now supports 16-bit images and has added cool new brushes like the Deco brush that stretches a texture along the path of the brush and is very useful for painting in wrinkles and other such details. High frequency details that you “paint” onto the model can then be exported out as displacement maps.

Painting in ZBrush has a unique reality. Pixols interact with each other so painting on top of another pixol does not necessarily give you the same result as painting on nothing. This gives a level of realism to painting that is very unique to ZBrush and resembles Painter’s ability to mimic traditional materials. You can also paint at different depths and adjust your very last brush stroke.

Pipeline guru Jason Belec has been adapting 2.5D techniques used widely in matte painting for ZBrush 2.0. Courtesy of Jason Belec.

Of particular note for production is the use of ZBrush as a matte painting tool. Pipeline guru Jason Belec has been exploring the use of ZBrush to create 3D camera projection mattes. Belec notes that currently we can get a 3° angle of rotation in mattes. With ZBrush, he is able to get a 10° angle of rotation. Not to mention you are sculpting and painting your mattes in the same program and not going back and forth between two separate programs.

At the center of ZBrush 2.0’s texture painting is the Projection Master or PM, as it’s known. The Projection Master is an extension of the Texture Master of previous versions and the name says it all. It allows you to use ZBrush’s tools to either texture or deform the surface of your 3D object by projecting your strokes onto the object in a similar way to Body Paint’s projection mode. Within Projection Master, you can texture paint your model, model fine details like wrinkles, or paint different materials onto an object such as, say, paint metal screws onto a piece of wood, for example.

ZBrush’s materials, while they do not necessarily mirror other 3D programs, do give you great results fast. Their subsurface scattering shaders are very realistic. Also, while the ability to bake out materials is not available yet when it is it will be a very powerful feature that realtime gamers can use to make cool baked textures fast.