Create concepts in 2D

Before starting your first creation, don’t forget to think about it first, even if only for a couple of minutes. A good preparation and understanding of your concept will help you later in the sculpting process. Sometimes, a simple 2D sketch can be very helpful and perhaps save time later.

For this purpose, ZBrush offers two plugins:

Quick Sketch which as its name says is a quick solution to sketch out your ideas. It uses a few brushes located in the Brush palette, starting with the “Pen” name.

Just click on the Quick Sketch button located on the top left of the ZBrush interface and start drawing. You will notice from the first stroke that symmetry is enabled. To disable symmetry just press on the X key or go to the Transform palette and disable the Symmetry mode.

When you are done with your drawing, you can save it as a Tool or a Project. From there you can load a new project to start your sculpt in 3D or reset ZBrush by going to the Preferences palette and clicking the Init ZBrush button.

PaintStop is a plugin that will temporarily replace the ZBrush default interface and transform it into a full painting software. As mentioned in the introduction of this Starting Guide, ZBrush is also a 2D program, capable of being used to paint beautiful illustrations!

PaintStop is designed to mimic real-world media. Draw with different pencils, continue with oil painting, crayon, pastels, watercolors and more to perhaps create more than just simple 2D concepts!

To launch PaintStop, go to the Document palette and click on the PaintStop button.

You can find the PaintStop documentation in the Documentation folder in your ZBrush directory.