Sculpting Stylised Hair in ZBrush

Once you have the setup ready you can use the Standard Refiner brush (or a dam_Standard brush as alternative) along with the move brush to create the initial volume of the hairstyle. This is a very important part of the process becasue it will set the basis for what you are going to sculpt later on. So even though it seems like a very simple step, make sure you spend the time to get it right with a very low resolution mesh.

The next step in the blocking process is to identify the main ‘chunks’ or ‘clumps’ from whatever references you are using. You can squint your ese and try to look for large shapes with lots of contrast so that you can mark them down in your mesh using the Standard Refiner brush.

You can also use the Paint brush to quickly add bright colours to the different portions of the hair to help you stick to the plan and work on smaller portions at a time.

The next stage is sculpting the smaller portions or clumps of hair using the Surface blocking. This brush could be replaced by the clay tubes or clay build up, but the idea is to produce the ‘flow’ of the hairstyle… Try to go over the areas that you have marked down in the previous step and give direction to the larger volumes. You can variate the size of the brush but try to stick to larger brush sizes for better results.

Once you’ve blocked out the secondary forms, you can bring in the Standard Blocking brush which has a nice sharp crevice in the centre of the stroke. The idea is to go over the same areas you just defined in the previous step and refine them with additional volume. Make sure you alternate between ZAdd and ZSub (holding ‘alt while sculpting) to create a natural variations and additional indentations.

At this point you should have something that looks pretty solid in terms of the silhouette and the main volumes. With the same Standard Blocking brush, you can reduce the brush seize and add smaller details or go back to the standard refiner to add additional and smaller crevices that will enhance the contrast and detail of the sculpted hair.

Finally, you can use the move brush with larger brushes to adjust and modify the overall shape a bit. This part might not even be necessary but since you are likely to keep adding volumes as you go though the steps, the general volumes might be a little off so you can always tweak them with the move brush.

Also with a curve brush like the CurveAlpha, you can create additional thick strands of hair to produce eve more detail on the sculpt: