Book excerpt: Essential ZBrush offers a detailed overview of the popular digital sculpting tool as well as a guide to mastering digital sculpting. From the basics of ZBrush to the creation of a number of models that demonstrate hard surface sculpting, realisitic organic sculpting, and environmental sculpting, this book provides readers with the tools to produce high-quality digital sculpts. With this text, the reader will explore the various ZBrush palettes, brushes, and settings, and learn how to customize the interface; discover how to create a base mesh using ZSpheres; find out how to use normal and displacement maps in both 3ds Max and Maya; understand the importance of properly posing your models; explore a variety of production-tested pipelines and workflows; learn how to create and apply materials to your models. Includes companion DVD with more than 3 hours of video tutorials showing how to model and texture the image shown on the front cover! It also contains full-color versions of the images in the book.