Few things you must know about zbrush:
Navigation:
Rotate mode : left click, hold and move
Snap to orthographic : shift + left click
Move : Alt + left click, hold
Zoom : Alt + Left Click and hold then let go of alt (really stupid I know)
Never save your document unless you want a still image. The only way to save your work, including the levels of subdivision is to SAVE THE TOOL. Save tool is located in the tool menu.
Download this file to follow along with the tutorial: http://www.staticcurve.com/Tutorials/Zbrush_Intro/ZbrushTut_Head.rar
Ok welcome to the worst and most worthless interface of all time. open up zbrush and the first thing were gonna do is import a .obj file in.. Unzip ZbrushTut_Head.rar.
Go to, tool import, and naviate to your .obj file.
Click and drag in the center of your canvas to draw your tool in the scene. Once its on there, click the edit button in the top left of the interface ("t" is the hotkey for edit mode)
We are going to be using the tool menu a lot so open the tool menu again and click the little "circle with the line through it" in the top left of the menu. This will dock the tool bar to the left side of the screen
Once the menu is docked, scroll down and find the Morph Target button. Click it to open the menu. We are going to create a morph for our little head so that when we divide it will retain its original shape better.. You will see what I'm talking about in a second.
Once the morph target is stored, by clicking the Story MT button we can now start dividing our mesh. Find the geometry menu, within the tools menu docked to the left side and hit divide twice.
You should notice that the head shrinks a bit and we lose the overall shape of the mesh. This is where the morph target comes into play. hit "Shift + d" a few times to get back down to the original tessellation.
Go back into the morph target menu and hit Switch. The geometry should pop back to its original form. Hit the d key to look at the higher levels of subdivision. As far as hot keys for this stuff goes: "shift + d" moves to lower subdivision levels, "d" moves to higher and "control + d" will subdivide the geometry even more.
Now for the fun stuff... Sculpting! Look at the big button that says brush.
Click and and it will open up all the brushes that you can play with. I wont go into detail on what they all do cause you can figure that one our for yourselves.
Symmetry is a big thing with zbrush, it mirrors all your brush strokes so that you can work on both sides at once.... (not that that isnt blatantly obvious ) To turn it on, just go into the Transform menu < activate Smmetry and choose your direction.. Im kind of a retarded and rotated the model for some weird reason so Z should be the correct option for sculpting each sides of the face.. sorry about that.
Ok with the standard brush selected sculpt away at your model.. by default it should pull all the geometry out.. if you hold down "alt" it will push it in and if ya hold down "Shift" it will smooth.. yay!!! easy huh?
zintensity, Draw size and Focal shift control the way your brush interacts with the geometry. Go ahead and mess around with them. Just so ya know though.. every brush you use will have different settings.. so if ya wanna change the intensity of the smooth brush, you have to grab it from the brush menu to make it active.. then change the settings.
Aliright, now play.. any questions don't hesitate to ask
