076 ZBrush 2021.6 - Mesh Project Brush - Quickly Create Geometry that Conforms to your Geometry!

all right we've hinted at this brush before but we're going to get into it now but first let's hit the comma key let's go into the project tab and we have a new female and male project so you can open these up it'll say you can go uh check out this guy's art station svedermer georgiev i can go check that out and we'll just tap on our canvas and we'll get started so the first thing we need to do is i'm going to turn off the floor and turn off perspective because that's how i like to work and then i'm also going to go in here to geometry and you're going to see we have subdivision history on here here's level 1 all the way up to level 3. i'm going to go ahead and say delete lower and that'll kind of free us up to do more geometry edition stuff to this sub tool now we've already gone over a lot of features when we talked about mesh balloon and them two mesh extrude brushes but now we're on mesh project but a lot of those same rules still apply now the difference between mesh extract and mesh project is again in this picker menu instead of one z we have continuous z on there so we can hold down control and you can just mask where this is going to go and it'll make a mesh now it's a very thick mesh so hold down control hit control z hold down control drop that z intensity down quite a bit and you also notice we have a long lazy mouse stroke behind it you can change that too you can go in here to stroke lazy mouse and you can crank that lazy radius down before i do that actually let's talk about one more thing if we go in here to b c and grab bch the chisel brush here if you remember from earlier versions of zbrush if you go through here and you use the chisel brush on this mesh for example let's hit ctrl d one more time just to give us a little bit more resolution so you can go through here and you can choose different chisel brushes and it has lazy mouse turned on however in the old days if you held down shift and did lazy mouse it would actually stop before it got to the end not anymore so now it goes all the way to the end of your stroke just wanted to bring that up because as we're using you know holding down control and mesh project and using our lasso stroke the mesh is stopping exactly where those would be i need to delete lower the mesh is stopping exactly where you expect it to be and actually i subdivided let's go to subdivision level 1 and delete higher there we go so now we're making a mask and if you go into stroke and you hold down control you can drop that lazy radius down and that'll reduce the amount of lag in that stroke or at least that red line trailing behind it now just like the other brushes if i go through here and i just keep adding it's going to keep overlapping all these different meshes in here let's go ahead and hit ctrl z however if i make a mesh a mesh in here from the mask and i don't move my camera i can hold down control and then hold down shift and then hold down control and then alt and i can even go in here and change my stroke to like circle and then hold down alt or i can change it to rectangle and even add a alpha and then hold down alt and also another thing too if you hit the comma key and you go in here to the alpha pan or the alpha tab there's hard surface alphas in here you can choose from so let's go ahead and you'll choose this other one here just double click it it'll throw it straight into your alphas hit the comma key to go out of light box and if you hold down control oops hold down control and then add that alpha and now if you do alt it'll go ahead and punch through or you can hold down control and don't hit that hold down alt and it'll add it to the existing mesh now again if you change your camera you can go through here and you can add a mesh and then you can hold down control and then alt and it'll punch it out and i'm not quite sure why it didn't let's see there it goes stuck to the mesh there i don't know why what that was all about but you can again you can add this to here and then you can go through here and it'll punch through and you know that actually gives us some pretty cool shapes there now if we go over here to the subtool menu we're just working on one subtool here we're just kind of adding and subtracting meshes that are stuck to the subtool if i want those i can control drag to unmask everything you'll see the body is all just one polygroup so if you hold down control shift and tap the body and then go down here to split hidden now these are all on their separate subtool if you don't want those you can go in here and delete and then you're kind of back where you started now just like the tail end of the last video if you go up here and you click on live boolean that's going to change the functionality of how these mesh brushes work so i'm going to switch this back to the lasso stroke here and turn off my alpha and again we're going to hold down control and drag on our object and if that's all you do the functionality doesn't change now as soon as you start holding down alt and shift is when live boolean is going to do something slightly different let's go ahead and undo that and this time when we draw something new let's hold down shift before we let go of control and it's going to put it into its own sub tool and the cool thing about with live boolean is not only can it do that you can hold down shift and it'll shoot it into its own sub tool really quickly you can also change your camera view and then you can continue the strokes and hold down control and go to the back view hold down control and go this direction and then hold down control and again i'm changing my camera view every single time and when i control drag to unmask you'll see it's all one seamless mesh now if i turn on polyframe you're gonna see it's actually overlapping meshes but we can clean this up later i'll show you how to do that but for now you're able to change your camera view because we have live boolean on and we're in a separate sub tool now if i hold down control and then alt that'll do a subtractive mesh now in this case i don't necessarily want it to going into his base body here i want to leave the base body alone because he's a human being and i don't want to cut into him with armor right so i'm going to go up here to this initial mesh this additive you know these are the three different icons we have so the first one is you can add you can subtract and you can do a union between uh two shapes for booleans however you're also going to see this little arrow here you can click that and that's a start group if you want more information on this in particular the basics of booleans can be found in the zbrush 4r8 what's new videos but what that does is it allows us to say hey start here and ignore everything above it and what's above it is the male body so when we're using booleans it's only going to go through and cut shapes in here now because we've added a new subtool if i was to go through here and hold down control and then alt again it's going to add another subtractive subtool well there's no reason to do that let's go ahead and delete that since we already have a subtractive subtool that's set to subtractive and you could change this if you want you can make it additive and that's what it's going to look like you can change it to union and that's the result you're going to get but if we keep this subtractive now we can switch to any other view hold down control and then don't hold down shift or alt or anything like that just keep drawing and now you can go through here and you can start subtracting pieces out now previously you know we were just you know changing this last stroke or the circle stroke you know and cutting in circles you can also use this curve stroke and this is a cool one because you can hold down control and it's going to maintain a straight line no matter what so i can go through here and if you know anything about the curve you can tap alt once and that will give you a bezier curve and then you can alt tap twice and then i'll give you a sharp curve so you can go sharp curve by alt tapping twice so all sharp through here and then bezier curve and then a sharp curve you can get very very precise lines so again we're on that subtractive mesh we're going to alt tap a couple times and then go ahead and close that up and that'll give us our subtractive mesh now you can do the same thing for additive now so if i hold down control and i say start drawing this line and then tap a couple times here we'll make another shape inside of here and now this time i'm going to hold down shift that's going to give me a brand new sub tool out here and again i can change the stroke up let's change it to a circle and because this is additive i go down here and i can add to this i don't have to hold down shift i'm just going to keep adding it to this one subtool here i can add this here i can switch this rectangle stroke out i can go and grab another alpha out of our lightbox by hitting the comma key just double tap any of these alphas here hold down control add the alpha drag it on here and there you go now let's say you wanted to you know put this as a handle on here and it's going to be like oh it takes into account you know all the subtools well if you hold down control and you switch your picker to once z it's going to take the depth of that one and then it's going to leave the rest of them alone it's not going to continuously update the surface it's just going to do it once where you first click and then you have this separate shape now on this one if we want to pop this into its own subtool here because it's you know on top of this one let's go down here to split mask points we can select this one here we can hit w we can scale this in a little bit let's go ahead and turn on lsim so it uses this local axis symmetry here and if you want to reset this pivot you can also hold down alt and just tap on there there we go so now he's got little knobs that you can turn and if we want to disregard everything else we can go back here to the male hold down shift turn off the eyeball that'll turn everything else off and now i can just drop some straps underneath here let's ctrl drag to unmask everything ctrl shift tap the body and then again go back here to split hidden hold down shift turn the eyeballs back on and now we have straps underneath everything that disregarded the other visible subtools now we alluded to this functionality when we were doing the if you hit b e these extrude profile brushes especially especially the extrude profile 2 brushes here so for this one let's alt tap this subtool because we want to work on this one i'm going to go in here you know we'll just use this brush alpha i'm going to grab this brush alpha again i'm going to hold down alt so we can do a subtractive mesh here and let's say i want to add an extruded profile around this well let's go ahead and i'm going to duplicate this off so we can see it i go into solo mode now if i turn on poly frame and let's go ahead and switch this out to skin shader 4 so you can see it better you're going to see we have polygroup borders that we can use and if we hold down ctrl shift and isolate we have open borders we can use as well i'm going to ctrl shift click this pink one ctrl shift drag and now we have a border along here let's do ctrl shift s to shrink and now we just have this blue open border so i'm going to go in here to my stroke menu let's drag this over here to the left that little white dot and then go down here let's hold down shift and open up all these curve functions and then all these curve menus and then underneath curve functions we're going to say open border turn off the other two hit frame mesh and that's going to put a curve if we zoom in there's a curve going right around this mesh border so let's go in here to b e extrude profile 2 we can choose any one of these go and just choose one and we'll tap to update this curve it's a little bit big so let's make our brush size a little smaller and then again tap to update that curve here and it is giving me overlapping geometry temporarily i'm going to turn off x symmetry and that way it's just going to give me one solid piece around here so if i go into solo mode here and turn off poly frame you're going to see on this duplicated mesh we framed it but i don't i already have a subtractive mesh i o j i was just using this geometry as a placeholder so i'm actually going to go down here to visibility hide point and then ctrl shift drag to invert that and now i have an extruded profile of geometry around that border let's go ahead and switch back to our startup material are in your guys case matcap gray so let's go ahead and tap away from our object to delete that curve and again if you want way more in-depth information on how curves work go back to the very first couple of videos in this playlist here and in fact we don't even need that placeholder geometry anymore so let's go up here to geometry modify topology and again if we hold down ctrl shift and drag that'll invert it so what we're not seeing is this placeholder geo we used so we hold down ctrl shift and drag that'll invert that visibility i'm just going to go down here to delete hidden so because we don't see it anymore now i can delete what we don't see so now we have a new additive mesh framing that open hole so if i turn this one off and then click this one you're going to see there's the open hole we had and now we have an additive framed mesh but we can also choose this mesh here and choose that to be subtractive and this is a live boolean so if i turn on our poly frame here you're going to see it's not really interacting in any meaningful way but if we hit w and we grab this and we pull it back a little bit you're going to see now that geometry is pushing in if i turn on poly frame you're going to actually see all we're doing is moving this geometry in so it's interacting with the underlying mesh so you can push this in and now we're getting an interesting bevel around that open circle and in fact you can just use your move brush if you want to you can go through here and just move things around you can even go down here to your deformation menu go down here to inflate and you can thicken it up or thin it out if you want to and there you go so you can add a lot of visual interest you can use booleans you can use mesh extractions and mesh projections to go through and make very very quick armor now i did mention z remesher before so let's talk about that a little bit i'm going to go to the very top subtool here and i'm going to hit delete and just keep hitting delete to we're back to our original person here now if you do want to make the zero mesh process a little bit easier i think you can remove the bevel and you can always add that in later so we hold down control go down here to mesh mask modifiers drop that bevel down to zero you can start your shape so again hold down control and then shift to add a new sub tool and then go through here and control and just kind of add shapes to this and then we turn off the body you're gonna see by removing the bevel we've really simplified this and in fact you can simplify it even more let's hit w let's go tap x to go out of x symmetry hold down control shift and delete that half so again geometry modify topology delete hidden it's simple enough to where we can go through here and again use our dynamesh trick turn the resolution up turn blur down make it all one solid mesh and so we can see this a little bit better let's go up here to our skin shader four i'm going to isolate again all these top polygroups here hit ctrl w ctrl shift tap and then ctrl shift tap all these down here ctrl shift drag to invert grab those two ctrl shift drag again ctrl w so we have a top bottom and middle groups here again we'll turn off lines you can see that a little bit better and we don't even need it that high resolution we'll drop the resolution down ctrl drag to re-dynamesh under zero measures say keep group smooth groups up to one target polygon count of whatever you want let's say maybe 10k ish adapt the size down to zero hit zero mesh there we go let's go ahead and turn on line did a pretty pretty decent job if you want to you can actually smooth these lines out too remember you can always go down here to deformation polished by features and as you crank that up it's going to use your polygroups as a feature and then you can go back here to ziri mesher this one we don't need to smooth the groups anymore so i'm going to keep my groups but smooth groups down to zero and you know what let's just say half and zero mesh again and there we go we can keep doing zero mesh half if you want i'll keep reducing this lower and lower but now we have a very usable mesh here now if we want to add our bevels back in we can hold down ctrl shift i'm going to isolate this top one ctrl shift drag grab the bottom one hit ctrl w so all of the middle polygons are all one group ctrl shift tab to bring everything else back and now because we lost our bevels or we didn't we wanted to add them later let's say we can go in here to the crease menu and we're going to again hold down control grab the bevel width and then you can just manually go through here and add a bevel in between all of your poly groups now at that point you can go through here you can say crease pg which will add a crease through all your polygroups and in fact you can just run a crease tolerance at 45 to set crease as well and then you can go up here to geometry dynamic subdivision turn on dynamic and now you're going to see you'll get a mesh like this now of course if you didn't want to do you can say uncrease all then just say crease pg that'll create your polygroups here so again a much lighter weight more usable mesh that's all one piece but again all from that original concept mesh that we did

Channel: Michael Pavlovich

Views: 28,777

Keywords: ZBrush, ZBrush New, zbrush 2021.6, zbrush mesh baloon, zbrush mesh from mask, zbrush mask from mesh, zbrush maskmesh, zbrush mesh maks, zbrush mask extrude, zbrush extrude mask, zbrush quick geometry, zbrush mask geometry, zbursh mesh extrude, zbrush mesh project, zbrush mesh projection, zbrush armor, zbrush mask armor, zbrush mesh armor, zbrush extract armor

Id: XnxD5t--KWA

Length: 17min 12sec (1032 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 04 2021