ZBrush

Zbrush is a sculpting, modeling and illustration application produced by a company named Pixologic.

ZBrush has now been around for a few years and it has evolved from a simple but mind-blowing sculpting tool for CGI into an immeasurably powerful application for all sorts of visual needs. Most people who are into graphics and design are familiar with a vaguely conventional layout of workspace, tools and workflow, but when trying to describe ZBrush to a friend of mine I said that it was sort of like wandering in the desert and finding a forbidden, heretofore unknown piece of alien technology; awesome but bewildering – at first.

Once you wrap your head around pixols (not a typo) and 2.5D versus 3D, the different sculpting and modeling techniques, the Shadowbox and ZSphere, you start to grasp just how wondrous this application is. It originally lent itself quite well to organic forms, such as flora and fauna, but over time has adopted new tools that enable hard-surface modeling like you would associate with machined parts, robots, industrial design etc. The original idea was that you would import a mesh created in the likes of 3ds max or Maya, and then use the sculpting tools to add intricate details that would be too CPU-heavy to create geometrically, and then bake those details onto a texture and put them back onto the original model, thus creating immense detail with a low polygon count. This is really important for game assets. Over the years, however, the addition of tons of new features has turned ZBrush into an environment where just about anything can be made from scratch.

Here are some images I have made with it:

I have this world in my head, some of it I write down from dreams and some I just invent, for a personal project I am working on.

I think any tool that allows you to think outside of the box and even go beyond the original intents of the designers is great. You never know what inspiration might hit, what an unexpected moment of serendipity might reveal, and ZBrush seems like it was built for trying things in new ways and perhaps reaching higher plateaus with visual creativity. The whole reason I got into CGI in the first place was for recreating my dreams and architecture and ZBrush definitely works wonders for creating dreamlike images.