Learning about Alphas
Alphas are grayscale images that give height information to brushes, which displace the surface of your sculpts accordingly, creating cavities, protrusions, or a mix of these. Most brushes use Alphas, which makes a good knowledge of Alpha creation an essential part of your ZBrush education.
To access and select Alphas, navigate to the Alpha palette or click on the Alpha icon on the left side of the canvas. Then, by left-clicking on one of the Alphas, you equip it to your active brush.
Figure 4.20 – ZBrush’s Alpha library
In the following sub-sections, you will learn how to modify Alphas and create custom Alphas.
Important note
The Pixologic website has a great selection of Alphas, from organic patterns to skin and rock detail. There are many categories, so it is worth checking out to see whether some of them can be useful for your project. You can download them for free here: https://pixologic.com/zbrush/downloadcenter...
