001 File Handling Overview Video Lecture | Zbrush: Create Realistic Modelling - Professional Skills

So, when you first lauch ZBrush, you're probably
going to see something that looks like this.
This is ZBrush 4R7P3, and as versions of ZBrush
come out I'll update these as needed.
Now, a lot of this stuff I'll be showing you
hasn't really changed in a while, so we'll
see how relevant that is as new version come
out.
But, for now, you're going to start like this!
And you're probably going to have two menus
on either side, you're probably going to have
a material menu over here, and a tool menu
over here, and you're going to have this thing
right here, which is your lightbox.
Navigation in ZBrush is fairly intuitive;
what you can do is on these menus over here
you can click and drag, and kind of drag around
these menus, and as these menus get longer,
you're going to be doing a lot of clicking
and draging and navigating over there.
Same thing with this side here, and these
are actually little docking stations over
here.
So you have one on the sides, so see these
little two arrows over here that's the divider,
you can c.lse and open those as needed, if
you need a little more room to work in here.
You can close these down as you need to.
Generally speaking though you're probably
going to have this side open, because this
is your tool menu, and this is where you're
going to be doing a lot of your modeling work.
We'll go ahead and open those both.
And other thing you're going to see, right
there smack dab in the middle every time you
load up ZBrush (probably), is going to be
your lightbox.
You can open and close this by hitting your
comma key, that's going to toggle your lightbox
on and off, and I don't spend a whole lot
of time in here up front, but as we go through,
and again I'm not going to go through exhaustively
and talk about every single menu just to start
out.
A lot of these arent' going to make a whole
lot of sense to you until you get deeper into
the program, and they become more relevant
to you as you learn more about ZBrush.
So for now, I'm just going to take a really
quick look through some of this stuff, and
we're going to hit a lot of this stuff later
on when it makes sense to discuss them.
But since lightbox is open right now, lets
go ahead talk about it just a little bit.
You're going to start here with your projects,
and because we don't know a lot about this
stuff yet, you can go ahead and kind of double
click on these and look at them, so if we
want to look at this cool one that Joseph
Drust did, you can double click it, and that'll
open up this project, and I guess now that
we're looking at stuff, lets go ahead and
open this subtool menu here.
So here's your tool menu.
So, we've opened up a project, we've actually
loaded a project from lightbox, and now we're
talking about tools.
And we also have a document here.
So, already we're kind of deep into ZBrush
and we don't really know anything about ZBrush
yet, so lets take a step back.
So your document is actually this viewport
window right here.
This is where you're going to have objects
that you're going to be placing on there,
going into edit mode, and manipulating these
objects in your document.
Your document is also going to have a couple
other settings we'll talk about in a minute.
Another really important thing about ZBrush
is your tool.
Your tool is actually what you're going to
be manipulating in your document window.
And if you take your document settings, and
your tool that you're manipulating, and you
put those all together into one, kind of,
file, kind of project file, that's going to
be a zproject.
So, what does that all mean?
I think the easiest way to explain it is,
like I've kind of done already, is we have
a tool over here, this is technically a tool,
and a tool is actually in this case made up
of a bunch of different subtools.
So as I click through here, you're going to
be selecting a bunch of subtools here.
Your document is going to contain a lot of
information, such as your lights, your materials
settings that are applied to your tools, things
like that.
We don't...in this course, I'll explain when
and where you would want to have those document
settings available to you, but generally speaking,
your tool, your model, is what's going to
be the most important.
So when you go and manipulate these tools
that you're creating in here, you're going
to go to Tool, save as, and that'll save a
.ztl file.
That's your ztool.
If you for any reason you want to save your
light and document settings, what you can
do is go to document, save as, and that'll
save a zdocument.
If you want to save your ztool and your document
settings at the same time, you can go to file,
save as, and that'll save a zproject.
Now, zproject, if I hit the comma key, bring
our lightbox back, we're in the project settings
here, so here's basic zbrush, here's project,
these are zprojects, these contain tools,
document settings, all sorts of cool stuff.
So this is all of them together.
If we want to simplify this down, what I'm
going to do, is I'm going to go to preferences,
and I'm going to Initialize ZBrush.
So we're going to start over again.
So now we're back where we started.
So we've got our lightbox here.
To navigate our lightbox, what you can do
is just click and drag, much like when you're
playing with your tool menu over here, and
your material menu over here, you can click
and drag.
You can also click these little keys over
here, so you've got one level, two level,
three level, four level, if you want to kind
of see more stuff.
As you click through here, now we went from
a project to a tool settings, to a tool tab
basically, to a tool menu.
And this will show you kind of a bunch of
basic tools that you can start with.
So if we double click lets say Nick Zuccarello's
human here, we can drag that out, and now
we have a tool that we can manipulate.
Now, you could create this, using a bunch,
see all these menus that poped up over here?
You can create all sorts of cool things with
your tool menu over here.
If we hit comma again, we'll go into brush,
and when we start creating custom brushes
or needing very specific brushes out of here,
this is where you can kind of find either,
these are the brushes that ZBrush loads, plus
I've got some kind of brushes that I've made
over the years, so you can store brushes in
here.
As well as a little bit further in we're going
to get into these brushes here.
So, the cool thing about ZBrush is, these
are going to auto load with ZBrush, so every
time you start up ZBrush, these are going
to be in your ZStartup folder, and when we
get to customizing brushes and bringing in
your own custom brushes, and loading up your
own custom brushes, you can have stuff that
you've made load up every time ZBrush loads
up, or if you've got custom stuff that you've
made, or custom stuff you want to use, you
can go into your lightbox here, and you can
kind of store them separately.
It's like, you know I don't use these a lot,
but every once in a while I'll use them and
I want them easy to access, you can load them
up in here.
Same thing with textures, same thing with
alphas, same thing with materials.
Noise, fibers, arrays, we're going to get
into later, I'm not going to get to heavy
into that (right now).
Another important one is over here in the
quicksave--so every time you're in ZBrush,
you're going to be working on a file, and
about every twenty minutes or so, and if you
go to preferences here I think there's a quicksave
in here, yeah, so by default I believe the
maximum duration is 20 minutes.
So while you're working in ZBrush, ZBrush
is going to save your tool over here every
twenty minutes.
So whatever you're working on, and all these
settings in here, it'll save every 20 minutes,
a quicksave version in here.
As well as, if you ever stop working, like
lets say, you're working on your tool and
you're actually like I need to take a break,
I'm going to use the bathroom, go make some
lunch, go browse a website, if you go over
here to your preferences again, you're going
to see that there's a rest duration of one
minute.
So if you don't touch ZBrush for one full
minute, it'll save a quicksave.
And if you ever want to, you can actually
store a quicksave as you work, and I do this
all the time, and you can see as I roll over
this quicksave menu you're going to see that
the hotkey for that is 9, so you can hit the
9 key, so it says quicksave projects to quicksave
folder, you can hit 9, that'll save a quicksave,
so lets say we're working, and you know what,
I don't want to do a file, or tool save as,
or project save as, I just want to do a quicksave
so I have it available to me if I ever need
to do that.
Sometimes it'll dissappear, you just need
to tap and rotate in your document and that'll
bring it back.
So now when I hit the comma key and go into
quicksave, I have that version right here.
If I double click this, I'm going to say no
I don't want to save changes, because we didn't
go to tool save as or project save as, that'll
just load up that last save point we had.
So you've got these save points, just like
in a video game, you know every once in a
while you're going to hit these save points,
you can save or you can have it saved for
you every twenty minutes, or you can go up
here and hit quicksave and have that just
do a quicksave, it'll basically just do a
save snapshot of everything that you see,
it's going to save a project, so it's going
to be your document settings, and your tool,
any tools you have loaded over here.
Or if you want to, what I usually end up doing,
and what we're probably going to end up doing
to start out with, is we're going to be working
in a ztool, and then we're going to go to
tool save as, and just start saving ztools
into project folders.