I spotted these wonderful rocks made by Jonas Ronnegard @ Polycount:
and he mentioned he was using mostly Trim Smooth Border (or Smooth Border ?) brush to achieve these forms in ZBrush.
What kind of brush would that be to replicate Trim Smooth Border brush ?
I am also wondering if rocks like those are all sculpted from scratch, or if the base mesh is modeled to resemble finished rock as close as possible ?
Thanks.
it looks to me like he dug into it with something like the crease or draw brush, then planed off certain areas using the flatten or scrape brush. it also looks to have a cavity map for the texturing.
Here is ZBrush tutorial for Trim Smooth Border brush:
This should help Blender sculptors to determine what would it be in Blender 
You can build form using the clay strips brush and then something like polish brush to accentuate the different planes.
Making rocks must be one of the most common zbrush tutorials on youtube
Perhaps, but it would be more productive if we could replicate as close as possible Trim Smooth Border brush in Blender, if possible at all.
Got it. I was hoping Blender devs watched ZBrush tutorials to gain some knowledge what’s used out in the world, in terms of brushes, and implemented those in Blender
I guess a part of the problem is that no Blender dev is dedicaced exclusively to sculpting, they’re jack of all trades and bugfix/maintain/improve all areas that are in Blender for years, fortunately it can happen that from time to time a dev focus on sculpting (and why we got that Dyntopo magic) but still it’s not the main focus of such dev.
While the Zbrush devs have been fully dedicaced to sculpting for years, it’s changing a bit nowadays from what i have seen in video as Zbrush is now capable of much more than sculpting, but with years of dedication to their sculpt tools , Zbrush is just way above Blender when it comes to sculpting.
Is there a way to switch between 2-3 brushes quickly ?
i think the fastest way is the numeric keys, each number is a brush, there’s shift+number too.
As they’re not really best bound by default, you can rebind a brush to a specific key too, in File -> User Preferences -> the Input tab, type
brush
at the search bar, scroll down until you reach the sculpt category and you can change the key shortcuts there :
good luck to know which brush is which, it’s very obscure as even if you develop the entries , there’s no mention of which brush correspond to an entry, another un-user friendly part of Blender i guess
edit :
probably the “number” is the actual brush in the brush list, but who know
Like Sanctuary suggested the workflow involves a build up brush (Clay , clay strips or layer) and a refine brush (trim, scrape).
The “Trim Smooth Border” like its name explains is a trim brush which has smoothed brush border / edge. You can do this by using a mask to smooth the edge or enable “autosmooth” in “Scrape/Peaks” brush.
The main difference with ZB trim brushes and Blender is ZB can dynamically adjust the brush normal to the surface, Blender only uses view based or area based surface stroke. This might seem like a shortcoming but actually it results a more user friendly stroke evaluation. (The user can expect a consisted stroke instead of randomly flipping angles - sometimes a surface might be more jagged than it appears to be).
Anyway you can use my rocky brush if you like. It works well for my purposes. You need to create a build up surface then use “Rocky” brush on it. Possibly with “Brush Detail” and “Subdivide Collapse” modes.
The dropbox link for the blend (brush) file is in the Dynatopo Tests thread…
Note: I use dynatopo mostly so my brushes are customized with this in mind. They might not work the same with multi-res.
