ZSphere Tutorial: Biped by Ryan Kingslien

From ZBrush Info

Here’s a little something I put together while trying to force Z spheres upon myself. At first, I was a bit uncertain of them as blocking in tools primarily because I wanted to establish my own edge loops first and secondarily because I was under the impression that ZBrush was best at high-frequency details.

I was wrong. I can’t wait to see what else I am wrong about with Zbrush.

To build your mesh, layout your ZSpheres in the simplist way first.

Create one ZSphere while holding down shift and dragging down. This will keep the ZSphere locked to a usable angle from camera.

Press "T" to enter edit mode. then press "M" to create a marker for the ZSphere. This will enable you to edit the object later if you accidentally drop it to the canvas.

Press "Q" to stay in the edit mode and while pressing shift draw another ZSphere onto the first you created. Pressing Shift makes the new ZSphere the same size as its parent.

Next, press "X" to turn symmetery on across the X axis, turn the ZSphere to the side view and draw out ZSpheres for the arms and then for the legs. I create 3 ZSpheres for each limb (the shoulder, elbow, and foot).

Once they are laid out position them for human proportions.

check the mesh. keep it simple right now. don't get detailed.

Now start thinking about the placement of the joints from the sides. Positioning them with diagonals in mind. Adjust the scale of the joints as well.

check the mesh.

Here, I am just adding the feet and hands. We will not be going into them very much here as I want to keep it simple. The hands are for another tutorial.

At this point you are only going for a general figure. We will go in and sharpen up the masses later once all the proportions are established.

Check the mesh again but lets also check out the adaptive skinning parameters - Tools/ Adaptive Skinning. The first one is the deafult except membrane curveture is set to 70.

This is with minimize child on. Notice how the neck has been lost but how the hips look more realistic. There is a time and a place for each of these settings. Experiment with each to see if it works for you. If you use minimize child you will just have to add more ZSpheres.

Now add ZSpheres for the masses of the thighs, biceps, forearms, and calves.

From the side, it is too shallow. we could try to scale the zsphere but that won't do much. Instead, we have to add ZSpheres to the front and the back of the chest zsphere and then turn them into attractor ZSpheres.

To create attractor ZSpheres, go into edit mode, click on the front of the chest ZSphere and pull the Zsphere out a bit. Then from the sides, switch to the move tool and pull the ZSphere out further. Then switch back to the edit mode, while pressing alt click on the grey linking spheres. Do the same for the back. Adjust these by using the move tool to pull them further out or in. keep checking the skin by pressing "A".

Also, notice how I put a Attractor ZSphere on the back of the foot. This helps create a better mesh for the foot. The above image is with minimize parent turned on - Tools/ Adaptive Skinning

Here it is with Minimize Parent off. Notice how it adjust the ankle

Now tighten up the masses by adding a ZSphere before and after the elbow and knees. Also, put an Attractor ZSphere in front of the knee. Put a ZSphere in at the neck and the head. It will add rows of poly and that is what we are looking to do now.

Here's the mesh straight from the ZSphere. Its Ok, but needs a lot of work. So, press the Make Adaptive Skin button (tools/Adaptive Skinning). Clear the layer and from the Tools menu choose the skinned model and draw it on the canvas.

Use the move tool to move the points around to a more realistic model

Divide the mesh once (Tools/Geometery/Divide) and use the move and scale tool to adjust the mesh to where you want it.

Ok, that ends a quick and dirty way to get a mesh. The whole process hasn't taken more than a half hour to lay out these ZSpheres and get them to a usuable point but we didn't do the fingers or the toes. There is no one way to do this and this is only a lesson as I learn more and more about the program. I hope this was helpful.

Ryan Kingslien 10/07/2004