Learning ZBrush! - and creating triple A quality game art along the way

General / 05 December 2019

Hello everyone! 🙂 

My name is Tim, I'm a Senior 3D Artist at Digital Extremes and Tutorial creator and I am proud to say that ever since I started with the tutorials I've been reaching hundreds of thousands of people all over the globe! (Google analytics is an amazing tool to check on that every once in a while).
Reaching people is also one of the main factors that motivate me to keep on creating them even if it means to sacrifice a lot of off work hour time!

Getting started with ZBrush!  
If you take a look at my portfolio and tutorials you will see that I've been mainly a hard surface guy for most of my career. It wasn't until I joined Warframe as a Weapons Artist that I had to start using ZBrush!
Fast forwarding two years, I've been using ZBrush almost on a daily basis and I learned from the best at Digital Extremes. No kidding.. I did have some initial struggles with the software: UI, Controls, layer management... a lot of it felt very foreign to me and it didn't come easy being mainly a 3Ds Max guy. Throughout my learning phase of ZBrush it became more and more natural to the point where I actually enjoy loading it up instead of cursing it!

The ZBrush Beginners guide focuses on all of the subjects and struggles that initially confused me and I hope it will help fresh starters too!




SWORD and MACE Tutorials  

It is my belief is that the best tutorials are those that go over creating an asset from A to Z which reflects in the idea of the MACE and SWORD tutorial. Once you are through with these tutorials and the Beginners guide I am quite certain that ZBrush will come much easier to you too!  

Before I will bother you with more text I am going to leave you with both the chapter overview trailers for the Sword and the Mace and I will talk a bit more about them once you scroll further down. 





Learning ZBrush! 

Creating these tutorials was a big challenge and the reason why I haven't published any new tutorials in almost two years was solely that I wanted the next ones to be ZBrush focused.. which I first had to properly learn! Fast forwarding to today: here we are with two Tutorials that I hope will truly teach you ZBrush by combining hard surface with organic modeling. Of course the tutorials are not just about ZBrush but will show you the full workflow from block out to highpoly to lowpoly, unwrapping, baking and texturing (and even creating renders). 

For me these are some of the most important tutorials I have created so far and I hope that they will benefit and help fresh starters (I try to avoid the term newb - but hey we are all newbs before we dig into something) to ZBrush! 

Difference between SWORD and MACE Tutorials! 

In order to keep my YouTube channel fed with new content I decided to have some free content apart from the "Beginners Guide to Learning Zbrush Video" as posted above. Usually the free tutorials are as in depth as the paid tutorials but not as time consuming. In this case we are talking about the MACE Tutorial. It consists out of 4 chapters out of which the first 2 are free to follow. The SWORD Tutorial is for paid customers only, much longer as well as more in depth as we are both going over organic and hard surface shapes. The last two chapters of the MACE Tutorials will take you over the lowpoly, unwrapping, baking and texturing steps! 

Watch the MACE block out and ZBrush modeling part here:



Final words! 

So essentially with this blog post I hope to benefit people who both have never got their feet wet with ZBrush yet as well as reaching people who might be interested in my hard surface/organic workflow in general. I truly believe that these tutorials will make a difference for people who have not quite yet found their start with it and I look forward hearing your opinion on them! In case you are ever stuck please don't hesitate to join the ChamferZone discord and bang away with them! https://discordapp.com/invite/sAkTtKG 

Cheers and see you in the Tutorials, Tim

Gumroad: 

Sword & Mace Bundle: https://gumroad.com/l/xEtnV 

Sword Tutorial Complete: https://gumroad.com/l/CoaRi 

Mace Tutorial: https://gumroad.com/l/ytLBF 

Cubebrush: 

Sword & Mace Bundle: http://cbr.sh/zyupft 

Sword Tutorial Complete: http://cbr.sh/u16wud   

Mace Tutorial: http://cbr.sh/ju2c2i

Report