[Scott Spencer]ZBrush Character Creation Advanced Digital Sculpting(pdf){Zzzzz}

A stunning, content-rich update to this top-selling ZBrush guide!

This second edition of ZBrush Character Creation has been fully updated for ZBrush 4, the newest version of this fascinating and popular 3D sculpting software. ZBrush enables users to create detailed organic models using a brush-based toolset and tablet. The startling results look as though they've been painted with real brushes and oils, and ZBrush is increasingly popular for use in film, game, and broadcast pipelines.

Author Scott Spencer is embedded in the ZBrush community and his movie credits include Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix and the upcoming The Hobbit. Learn Spencer's invaluable techniques for texturing, chiseling, posing, costuming, and more with his newest ZBrush guide.

Explains ZBrush 4, the newest version of the revolutionary software tool for creating 3D organic models in a way that appears to be traditionally painted or sculpted
Shows you how get the most out of ZBrush, from the fundamentals to new tools for texturing, chiseling, and costuming
Offers plenty of insights and professional techniques for creating characters for films and games, drawing from the author's own experience on such films as Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix and The Hobbit
Demonstrates the author's own techniques of using traditional sculpting and painting concepts and applying them to digital art for greater artistry

Discover the beauty of ZBrush with this colorful, in-depth guide.

Publisher: Sybex; 2 edition (February 8, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0470572574
ISBN-13: 978-0470572573

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover
Become a digital Michelangelo

Learn to sculpt and chisel like the masters using ZBrush 4 and this beautiful, full-color guide. Sculptor and designer Scott Spencer blends cutting-edge technology with artistry to show you how to use ZBrush to create fascinating characters limited only by your imagination.

You'll learn new ZBrush 4 brushes and brush controls, how to sketch complex forms with ZSketch, cool ways to costume your characters, and much more. Above all, you'll master time-honored concepts such as sculpting gesture and sighting proportion—techniques that will help you become a better artist, no matter what the medium.

Bridge the transition from traditional to digital sculpting

Get familiar with ZBrush 4 sculpting tools

Learn valuable techniques for detailing, texture painting, and rendering

Explore ZSpheres, polygon meshes, and adaptive skins

Design a lion's head, a character bust, a biped figure, a raygun, and more

Create animations with the timeline, and export videos and highly rendered images from ZBrush

Gain valuable insights and tips from guest artists throughout the book

About the Author
Scott Spencer is a freelance character sculptor and designer. He is currently at the Weta Workshop in New Zealand, where he is working on Peter Jackson's The Hobbit. He has created creatures and characters for film, games, and collectible figures. His credits include Iron Man, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Golden Axe, and Species 3. He is also a leading digital sculptor, longtime beta tester, and consultant to Pixologic.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

A perfect circle
By Dan Mihaila on September 4, 2012
This book is the perfect tool if you want to get an idea about the whole process of working with a mesh for games or for movies. It basically takes you from the most basic sculpting tools and walks you through each process in order to get a final product ready for game or movie rigging. It explains you major things like Sculpting, Texturing, PolyPaint, and Zbrush Animation Tools as well as not so common stuff like Displacement Maps and Normal Maps (Scott Spencer is the first one who managed to explain me what these are and how you make them and how you use them), Considerations you should have when sculpting certain areas and many more.

On top of this, Scott Spencer backs everything you read with video tutorials which are great! There you will find much much more than you find in the book (which is a lot) since you can hear his reflections while sculpting... you can see how he sees things when he designs and what his approach towards sculpting is.

Before I end this, I want to recommand the other two books and I STRONGLY advice you to start with his first book, which is Zbrush - Human Figure. The book was made back in the 3.5 days but nevertheless is such an amazing tool to learn the basics of sculpting and the basics of Anatomy. He is a master of Human Anatomy in Sculpture and here is the chance to see him in action.. to go and take a Maya box man with about 100 polys and transform him into what you can see on the book cover.

Great Book To Learn With
By Quincy Robinson on October 2, 2012
I can't imagine there being a better paced learning book for ZBrush. I work in a toy sculpting studio and have seen our interns become ZBrush proficient in the course of a week with the guidance in this book. ...Incredibly well written and thorough.

Great book - Very good purchase
By B. Caldwell on October 1, 2012
This is a great book, hands down. I am a huge Zbrush fan and I am in the process of learning the Maya pipeline. I was looking for a professional level book that covered the use of Zbrush in creating characters destined for games or production film work as opposed to sculpts destined to be art in and of themselves. While "antimatable" topology is not covered (other than mentioning ideals), this book is about Zbrush and it's use as a sculpting tool, so i would not expect advanced topology concepts to be covered here but rather in an animation/rigging book.

Like others have mentioned, the chapter on displacement/normal map generation and use in other programs (specifically covers Maya, which was wonderful for me) is worth the price of this book alone. It even goes in depth about the Maya shading network setup, from scratch, needed to display the maps properly. The internet contains a lot of conflicting and dated information on these topics - primarily because Pixologic has been pumping out updates and revisions every few months that change the game again and again and a lot of the tools that people used to use have been replaced once or twice with new tools from Pixologic. This is the only thing i have read that has all of this information in one place.

That being said, with Zbrush being up to Z4r4 now, i would love to see a new edition of this book from Scott Spencer or a new book altogether including the massive updates to Zbrush since this book's publish date. It might be wise to wait for Z5 since that seems to be the next thing for Pixologic. Heed my only warning about this book, which is that it was written based on Z4 original release, and does not include any more recent topics such as dynamesh, insert brushes, fibers, noisemaker, qremesher from Z4r2 through Z4r4

Excellent Book for learning zBrush even if your not going to make scary creatures.
By Glenn Schot on October 19, 2014
Into third month of learning zBrush using YouTube (very valuable) and zBrush website (very skimpy). It seems both methods leave out little details that are essential. It sometimes takes a lot of struggling & hunting to figuring out a project. I finally brought out this book by Scott Spencer I'd bought when I first got zBrush. It is very comprehensive and covers every detail you need to succeed. I am studying zSpheres now and by simply checking the index found the all the info I needed — way more detained information than any other source. Highly recommend even if your not going to make scary creatures.