Double Action Brushes PART 1

This is going to be a very quick video guide, but in it, I talk about the main attributes you can tweak to get a nice “double” effect in your brushes. The ‘double action’ refers to a secondary effect that can be produced by the same brush, simply by altering the speed of the strokes or the pressure.

Creating ZBrush “Double Action” Brushes

ZBrush allows you to modify and create your own brushes, but the key for a smooth work-flow is to understand what the brush actually does. In this quick video tutorial, I’ll show you the effects of 4 brush modifiers and how you can use them to create very specific brushes.

This is an example, I modified brush to create skin pores while maintaining a smooth surface. So you’ll notice in the first pass or stroke, the brush displaces the surface and produces a sharp noise effect; the second effect that smooths out the surface and creates that ‘bumpy skin’ texture is achieved by simply lowering the pressure of the stroke (using a Wacom tablet for instance).

‍

‍

And this other one has a different behavior but is creates more exaggerated details. It works great for creature bumpy skin:

‍

ZBrush “Double Action” Brushes examples

So, in this video tutorial, I showed you what some of the brush modifiers do and how to use a couple of my “double action” brushes: The skin pores brush and the Creature bumpy skin (you’ll get these brushes in the resource pack). Here is an example of the effect of this brushes in context:

‍

‍

These images above, are just a couple of spheres with the “double action” brushes effect applied, a bit of colour (Polypaint) and rendered with ZBrush BPR. if you are interested in rendering skin all within ZBrush, check out the eBook Guide on: ZBrush Skin Material & Single Pass BPR.

Just so you know, “Double action” brushes is NOT a new ZBrush feature or anything like that, is just how I named the folder where I put this brushes in my computer and now I’m stuck with the name. I called them “double action” because they sort of combines two effects in one stroke.

More advanced ZBrush “Double Action” Brushes

I hope you find the information from the video on this guide useful and that it helps you can create your own “double action” brushes in ZBrush. There is a second part on this ‘Double Action’ series, so if you want to take your ‘DA’ brushes to the next level, go ahead and check out PART 2 of the series.

Here are some previews of brushes for Skin creature detailed, Skin base, Sharp semi-scar, and Quick flesh damage brushes.

‍

‍

You can change the effect of these brushes quite a bit by simply changing the alpha. Feel free to download some alphas from the ZBGs Alpha library and see what cool effects you can get.

Quick Tip:

Apply the brush’s effect to a simple plane with a high polycount and then create a detailed alpha using the 2.5D tool called MRGBZGrabber by selecting a portion of the plane (hold shift to make it a square). This tool will grab the depth of the details and automatically create an alpha.