WHAT IS THE BEST WAY TO POSE A LARGE CREATURE IN ZBRUSH?

Often we create creatures using symmetry to save time, but very rarely in nature do we find anything that 'stands' in that unnatural way that you see when sculpting with symmetry on.

- Glen Southern replies

Lewis Bake, Newcastle

Sculpting big creatures and monsters is one thing, but posing them is a whole other skill.

'Breaking the symmetry' is where an artist will work on a creature with symmetry on until it is 'blocked-out', and then 'break' that symmetry (turn it off) to sculpt each side in a different way. Of course, we would keep the muscle groups and skeletal landmarks there, but they would look different depending on how the creature has moved. To pose a creature it is often the case that a model has to leave ZBrush and be rigged for animation. The 'rigger' creates a skeleton digitally and the sculpted creature is posed using that rig.

But what if you don't want to invest the time and effort into another program? In ZBrush there are two ways to pose a creature, and in this tutorial, I'll cover how to use masking to pose the model. The other way is to apply something called a ZSphere rig, which is a ZBrush-only way to add a posable frame to the models. ZBrush binds the model to the rig and you can adjust the pose as needed. It's a great system, but it can't be exported and used in other programs even though the posed model could.