How about a thumb pin like this?  

Pretty tough?   Not really!  Start with your basic cylinder with about 172 by 100 divisions:

Now a little masking using Ctrl-drag:

Invert  (ctrl-tap outside the model) and inflate (Deformation subpallet):

Now for some stripes.   On the masking subpallet, Mask All, and then set sel and skip to 3 and 8.   Hit Col for a nice striped mask:

Let’s restrict to our inflated area plus a nice little edge:

Inflate again:

Pretty good, but I like ’em all twisty on thumb grips.  Grab and invert a quick selection:

And Twist a couple of times (Deformation subpallet):

A quick mask and deflate on the body, add a texture, and it’s done:

Time to model, about 3 minutes.

Tags: 3D, Zbrush

Zbrush makes it easy to quickly create an alpha from geometry, which in turn can be used to detail objects.   Let’s take the hex nut from the previous exercise.   By turning SMT on in the Geometry Subpallet art level 4 and subdividing a bit more I’ve rounded the edges to give me a nice bevel.   I just position it so I’m looking straight down on it, (use shift-drag outside the object to snap the view to the nearest orthogonal position.)  To make an Alpha from this shape, it’s just as easy as going to alpha pallet and clicking “GrabDoc”.   A new alpha is available on your alpha pallet, starting “ZGRAB” like magic!

You’re not quite done yet–ZB prefers square alphas to avoid distortion and because I was lazy, the canvas was actually 800 x 600.   It’s a quick fix in an image editor, so export the alpha from the image pallet, fire up photoshop and crop to 512×512.

Name the file it something suitable, reload it into ZB, and now you sculpt with it using any brush you like (I prefer the Clay or Layer brushes for example.)  

Turn on symmetry and with one stroke, I have detailing on a plate.

Tags: 3D, Zbrush