Despite being pretty mediocre at anything involving 3D, I recently decided to start the slow and painful process of learning how to sculpt with ZBrush.

Now, I had my first computer around 30 years ago, I have at least a basic knowledge of every 2D and 3D software worth mentioning, and I consider myself not completely dumb.
After about 30 minutes of pointless clicking around, I finally figured out that there’s NOTHING you can do with ZBrush out of mere intuition.
Not a sphere, a cube, not even opening a bloody template file. Nothing. I seemed like a monkey trying to put together an Ikea bunk bed.

The thing is, ZBrush’s interface seems to be specifically designed to make beginners feel stupid.
Common commands are buried under submenus with creative names, buttons are scattered around in no apparent order, everything is chaos.
I love it.
But trust me, find a bloody tutorial from day one and just follow it, there isn’t a single thing that ZBrush does like other softwares, not even zooming in and out (keep ALT pressed, click, release ALT while keeping clicked down, drag up or down. Really?).

However, after some proper training, your muscle memory will kick in, tasks that seemed impossible become second nature and you’ll finally find out that ZBrush is real fun.
I will never bother with proper 3D-people’s stuff (normal maps and things like that). But I’ll definitely use it to support my future efforts in painting.
ZSPheres and ZSketch are powerful tools to create maquettes and study scenes with multiple figures in just minutes.

Plus, sculpting forces you to be ACCURATE with shapes and volumes. Messing up a muscle or a proportion becomes depressingly apparent on a 3D model, so I have to be particularly careful with anatomy.
Below there’s the result of my last tutorial.

She’s a bit muscular, I haven’t polished her skin and well, no breasts or face yet. But everything else should be in order.
I think I finally learned what happens between shoulder blades and deltoids, for example, and also around armpits, ribs and latissimus dorsi.
I’ve always had problems drawing those areas.

Basically ZBrush can make you better at drawing, once you get past the BIG barrier of its interface.
Hopefully I’ll be able to use it a a tool to draw more interesting things pretty soon.
It has a steep learning curve and it requires time.
I would recommend it as a past-time if you’re home alone because your family is on holiday, for example. And you’ve already finished every quest in Skyrim worth playing, and you’re too old to party like twenty-five-years-old-you would have done if home alone.
Oh well.