ZBrush Character Creation: Advanced Digital Sculpting 2nd Edition

This book is the perfect tool if you want to get an idea about the whole process of working with a mesh for games or for movies. It basically takes you from the most basic sculpting tools and walks you through each process in order to get a final product ready for game or movie rigging. It explains you major things like Sculpting, Texturing, PolyPaint, and Zbrush Animation Tools as well as not so common stuff like Displacement Maps and Normal Maps (Scott Spencer is the first one who managed to explain me what these are and how you make them and how you use them), Considerations you should have when sculpting certain areas and many more.On top of this, Scott Spencer backs everything you read with video tutorials which are great! There you will find much much more than you find in the book (which is a lot) since you can hear his reflections while sculpting... you can see how he sees things when he designs and what his approach towards sculpting is.Before I end this, I want to recommand the other two books and I STRONGLY advice you to start with his first book, which is Zbrush - Human Figure. The book was made back in the 3.5 days but nevertheless is such an amazing tool to learn the basics of sculpting and the basics of Anatomy. He is a master of Human Anatomy in Sculpture and here is the chance to see him in action.. to go and take a Maya box man with about 100 polys and transform him into what you can see on the book cover.Basically, the three books work together... You get the basics of Anatomy and Sculpting in the first one, than you get all the additional processes explained in Character Creation (texturing, mapping etc) and than in the last one you go through several types of creatures and characters and you are concerned with more advanced stuff like rendering and lighting, composition etc.Take this book, take the other two as well, remove all your distractions and get on with them. You will fly through what used to be walls of questions.

This is a great book, hands down. I am a huge Zbrush fan and I am in the process of learning the Maya pipeline. I was looking for a professional level book that covered the use of Zbrush in creating characters destined for games or production film work as opposed to sculpts destined to be art in and of themselves. While "antimatable" topology is not covered (other than mentioning ideals), this book is about Zbrush and it's use as a sculpting tool, so i would not expect advanced topology concepts to be covered here but rather in an animation/rigging book.Like others have mentioned, the chapter on displacement/normal map generation and use in other programs (specifically covers Maya, which was wonderful for me) is worth the price of this book alone. It even goes in depth about the Maya shading network setup, from scratch, needed to display the maps properly. The internet contains a lot of conflicting and dated information on these topics - primarily because Pixologic has been pumping out updates and revisions every few months that change the game again and again and a lot of the tools that people used to use have been replaced once or twice with new tools from Pixologic. This is the only thing i have read that has all of this information in one place.That being said, with Zbrush being up to Z4r4 now, i would love to see a new edition of this book from Scott Spencer or a new book altogether including the massive updates to Zbrush since this book's publish date. It might be wise to wait for Z5 since that seems to be the next thing for Pixologic. Heed my only warning about this book, which is that it was written based on Z4 original release, and does not include any more recent topics such as dynamesh, insert brushes, fibers, noisemaker, qremesher from Z4r2 through Z4r4.Author is great, examples are great, additional resources are great - If you like Zbrush, you should own this book, especially if you also use Maya. As usual, the concepts are not application specific, but it helps to have the actual menus and examples in Maya since I am currently learning.Thanks Scott, this book is great.

As a sculptor fairly new to ZBrush, I found this book extremely helpful and recommend it to anyone seriously interested in learning how to apply ZBrush to create digital sculpture. The book and companion DVD with movies and tools are packed full of specific projects that are pertinent and practical. A reader with two monitors can watch a demonstration of techniques on one monitor and work on the projects within ZBrush. The companion DVD that comes with the book contains downloadable ZBrush assets including tools, brushes, alphas, materials, textures and reference photos related to projects for a `hands on' learning experience. The author and contributors appear to be a who's who within the ZBrush community. The Second Edition published in 2011 with examples using ZBrush version 4.0 is not outdated. ZBrush Versions 4.2R and 4.2Rb contain written documentation in pdf format shipped with the new releases explaining what's newly added to ZBrush 4.0.

It's a good reference to "how to" many things within ZBrush. I have several of Scott Spencer's training and they are all good.

It was gifted.

This is an excellent book Scott Spencer covers a lot of great techniques and tutorials i have used several versionsof zbrush books out there and i can tell you this is one of the better ones. although it may be a little much for those who never used Zbrush before i think that they would still benefit from it quickly. And the steps are clearly told to you in a precise manner for the tutorials as well as techniques that apply to sculpting. The dvd that accompanies the book is great to. Overall if you are a new to moderate user of zbrush this is a must have book if you are hesitant to buy this book dont be just buy it Scott Spencer is one of the best charter Creation artist out there BOOK WELL WORTH PRICE.