How to create a custom Alpha in Zbrush!

Hello everyone!  I hope all is well. Today I’d like to talk about to you about creating custom alphas within zBrush! Yes you heard correctly custom! It’s one of the many cool things that zBrush can do. This will be my first time creating an alpha so please bare with me! So lets begin shall we?

Lets open up zBrush and start a new document. We can begin with a new dynawax and then we want to append a 3D plane. This can be accomplished by going into the subtool pallet and click append, and 3D plane. After we add the plane we can go a head and delete the dynawax.

Now you can grab something like the standard brush and we can start adding some detail.. Today I’m going to play around and see what kind of alpha we can create.

So I decided to make my own rock alpha like in the video..  Which is okay we might be able to use this in the future. 

Now lets open the side tab over on the left of zBrush and drag the alpha menu here.  With the alpha pallet open we can see that nothing is there. Next we want to go into the transfer option in the alpha pallet and click  “ Grabdoc”. So now your alpha should be in your alpha pallet. Once we find our alpha we’ve created click on it ( it should be at the very bottom of the alpha list.) Found it? Great! Now it’s usable but when we use it the outlines of the square is still there and we don’t want that. So we want to go back into the alpha tab and click “modify” and we want to set the contrast to something like 2 or 3. That way the lightest parts will be brighter and that darker parts will be dark, thus hiding the squared edges. Voilà! Here’s a nice rock texture for you to use. Now to save this alpha, we want to hit export and we can save this as a photoshop document. Also to save any changes you’ve made to an alpha  you can hit EP which is export processed alpha. So happy sculpting everyone! I hope this helped.











Here is the video that helped me with this tutorial!
H. (2015). Zbrush - Create and Modify Alphas. Retrieved June 27, 2016, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyMmeoHrWjk