STEP BY STEP

GET STARTED WITH FIBERMESH

01 MASK TO FOCUS

Select the toothbrush head tool and mask out areas where you want the bristles to be. I created three separate groups of bristles for a more eye-catching look. Reduce the Focal Shift to -100 for a focused selection with no falloff. We want the bristles to be limited to selected areas only.

02 REMOVE VARIATIONS

With the areas masked out, open up the Fibermesh menu, click Preview and open the Modifiers tab. We can start by reducing the amount of fibres used for this group and its coverage. Because the fibres need to be thicker than human hair, we will not need a great amount of them to be visible in the scene. Set the Gravity Profile and Revolve Radius sliders to 0. Change the Scaleroot and

Scaletip to 2. Reduce Density Variations (DEV) to 0 – we want all fibres to be exactly the same.

03 COLOUR AND PROFILE

Make sure that all kinds of variations (length, clumps, direction, coverage etc) are set to 0. We want to make the fibres as uniform as possible. Choose a base and tip colour for the fibres, in this case, bright blue. We cannot allow the bristles to be flat, so we have to bring the Profile up to 3 or 4. Accept the changes.

04 REPEAT THE PROCESS

Now repeat the process for the other two groups of bristles. Zbrush remembers the last fibre settings, so the only things that really need changing are the length, number and colour of fibres.