Brush Tools-Ornament — VOL 01

The volume the ornament series opens on: 70 ornament alphas, each supplied as a 4K height map and as a ready-made brush. It is a brush set rather than a model pack — there is no geometry in it — so it suits texturing and sculpting work where the ornament is stamped into a surface rather than placed on top of it.

What you get

• ✓70 ornament brushes with their height and alpha maps
• ✓Everything at 4K
• ✓ZBrush brushes, ready to sculpt with
• ✓ABR brushes for Photoshop
• ✓JPEG previews of the set

Both brush formats ship because the work splits in two. The ABR set belongs in Photoshop, where an ornament is composited into a texture flat and the result goes into a colour or a height map. The ZBrush brushes belong on the model, where the same drawing is cut into the surface and picks up the curvature of whatever it lands on. The JPEG previews are there so the choice of which of the 70 to reach for is made by looking rather than by opening files one at a time.

Beyond those two, the alphas work anywhere a program reads a height map: Substance Painter, Quixel DDO and NDO, and after that 3D-Coat, Cinema 4D, Blender or anything else that takes a greyscale image as an input.

The reason to start a series with a brush-only volume is that ornament work is mostly about placement, not sculpting. A trim, a border, a rosette repeated round a dome — the shapes are settled, and what takes the time is fitting them to a surface that curves. Stamping a 4K alpha lets you try a layout, undo it and try another in seconds, and commit geometry only once the design is right.

The ZBrush brushes need ZBrush 2020 or newer. The set was made with Mirage3Dart and Milad Kambari.