10 EASY ways to CREATE GEOMETRY in ZBRUSH

hey guys today we are talking about all the different ways you can create geometry inside zbrush let's go [Music] [Music] so i know it sounds like kind of a weird topic for a video because it's just like oh you just make a primitive or a sphere and you start sculpting on it but the truth is there's a whole bunch of different ways you can create geometry to sculpt on in zbrush they each have a different use and a different time and place when you might use them and how they might help simplify or speed up your workflow so i wanted to go over all those different techniques and hopefully by the end of this video you have a better understanding of when you would use those why you would use those and that sort of thing so let's go ahead and jump in and get started so first up and most obvious is just importing your geometry from a different package so you know if you use max or maya or blender or whatever just making geometry in there exporting it out and importing it into zbrush and then sculpting on it doesn't get more straightforward than that after that you have the same technique that we used in the beginner series for zbrush and that's just creating a primitive turning that primitive into a poly mesh 3d and sculpting on it you've got the primitive menu where you can choose from a sphere a cylinder a cube a whole bunch of different shapes and those are your go-tos most likely you know whenever you're doodling or just blocking out a head you're probably going to grab a sphere or something like that so it's always the easiest most straightforward method however there's actually a second menu for creating primitives that's called the qmesh menu or initialize it's a very useful menu and it's kind of weird to me that it's so buried but it's super useful especially if you're intending to use z modeler or if you just need a really simple clean primitive and the way you get to this menu is once you have a primitive and you make it poly mesh 3d you can scroll down to the bottom and go to initialize and you can see the different settings you have q cube q sphere and so on and you can set the resolution and once you spawn one of those in it creates a very simple clean geometry and you can see compared to the typical like cube primitive for example the cube has that really nasty geometry on the top and bottom a q cube is clean and then you can go ahead and use z modeler to model that extrude build on it that sort of thing so very very useful if you just need a simple primitive before they added this would actually have to import a cube or primitive from maya for example and do it that way so it's nice that this is there now and easy for you to get to next up what we have is what's called z spheres and i absolutely love z spheres i use them all the time you can use them for blocking out characters you can use them for things that are long and narrow and you want a very specific pattern to them basically what a z sphere is is a mannequin or approximation of geometry that you can then convert into geometry you access these z spheres through the primitive panel so you can go up to the primitives in your tool tab and choose the z sphere and you can click and drag that out you can as these spheres remove these spheres and kind of move them around almost like they're a rig it makes it really interesting to be able to block out characters block out shapes using z spheres and this is still one of my go-tos i use these spheres all the time so you can see we can quickly block out the shape of a leg or an arm or a torso you can even do more complex z-sphere rigs like hands and pretty much anything and actually if you go to the light box menu there's an entire folder that zbrush provides of z sphere mannequins that you can look at how they did or just use them to sculpt on because they're super cool once you've completed your z-sphere rig you can go to adaptive skin or unified skin and you can actually make adaptive and turn that z-sphere chain into actual geometry and there's settings in there to smooth it out how dense you want it that sort of thing so it's super useful and one of my favorites one thing i wanted to mention about z spheres at any time you can hit a to get a preview of what the geometry of that z sphere chain will look like and that's super helpful when you're trying to figure out the best way to block out a chain especially if you're doing something complicated like a hand it's really useful to a and preview that mesh so i just wanted to add that in there building on top of z spheres is what's called z sketch now i don't really use z sketch that often i remember when it came out i used to try to use it and i remember early on when it came out people doing really impressive musculature and stuff with a z-sketch but basically what z-sketch is is it's letting you hand draw z spheres on top of your z sphere chain so for example you could have like a stick figure mannequin of a human and then you could use z sketch to sketch in the muscles and anatomy and then you could turn that into rough geometry to actually sculpt on so you kind of block out your forms and your shape with the z-sketch before turning it into geo i think this is a totally valid workflow but it's not something i really use i'd rather just get to sculpting on actual geometry as soon as possible it's pretty cool and if you want to learn more about it i'm sure there's some videos you could find but i don't really see people using it in modern workflows the next one on the list is mask to extract and i use this all the time it's where you can paint a mask on an area and convert that mask into actual geometry so you can use this for armor for clothes in this example we're doing it for eyebrows it's super easy to just paint a mask and then go down to the sub tool at the very bottom you have the extract menu you can extract that and then hit accept and it immediately turns it into new geo this is one of my most used ways to create geometry in zbrush following mass to extract we have what's called shadowbox i don't use shadowbox too often but it is actually really cool and i think it has a place in being useful to you if you need it the way you access shadowbox is once you have a piece of geometry selected you can go down to geometry shadowbox and it'll create basically a little stage it's basically a cube with a bunch of the sides deleted you just have the two sides and the bottom and you can clear your mask and then what you can basically do is paint a mask in each directional axis so x y and z and it'll create geometry based on that mask so you're like projecting your mask to create real geometry and then kind of carving it from each direction to modify it you can see in our example we make this key by painting a key from the one side and then adjusting the proportions from the other two axis the other two axises accesses xsi axis it's pretty cool uh i don't use it in my own workflow too often but if there's just like a weird shape or something i could see it being totally useful and i think it's pretty cool and it's worth knowing about the next one i want to show you is just straight up retopology and i'll be honest retopology and zbrush is not great but sometimes you're too lazy to go to another software or you just need a very simple quick clean face mesh and you can totally do it within zbrush so to show you how this works what we can do is go up to the tool menu and go to z sphere and choose a z sphere we have a z sphere and you can go down to rigging select mesh you can choose what mesh you want to re-topologize so we'll choose our head you'll see that it adds it in then you go down to topology edit topology from there you can go ahead and in our case turn on symmetry or make sure symmetry is enabled and basically what you can do is click and place down points so just like you would with any other retopology program you're putting down quads yourself and creating a new base mesh so you can place points you can use your move tool to move these around they will adhere to your reference mesh once you're happy with your result you can go up to adaptive skin set the density to 1 and the dynamesh all the way down and hit make adaptive and in our menu will have new geometry that we can use you know you could sit there and do the whole head and have a wholly retapologized head but oftentimes i might use this just to do like a quick strap or just a quick simple extrusion or detail on an armor and it's just the easiest way to go about it because i'm planning on using z model or something afterwards pretty useful i i do use it more often than i'd like to admit but there's probably better ways to do things the next thing i want to show you is less actually creating geometry but more where you can find really accessible geometry so in lightbox if you go to the project menu so go up to lightbox up top there you can go to project you'll see all these different folders and they have what's called mannequin so you can go to mannequins and you'll see there's a whole bunch of z sphere like characters that you can choose from and then sculpt on so you can actually take these mannequins and pose them and do whatever you want with them you can move their joints around and then when you're happy with them you can go to make adaptive turn them into actual geometry and then sculpt on them you'll also see in lightbox under projects there's just tons of bass meshes and geometry that you can just grab they have headplanes for example you can just quickly grab a headplane to sculpt from or even entire character base meshes there's the male female and a whole bunch of other demo projects so definitely dig through this projects folder and you can save a lot of time by just picking one of these to start with if you're still learning anatomy and you're practicing i recommend that you start from scratch because you'll have much better success learning the fundamentals versus choosing something that's already made for you it doesn't hurt to go and look at those for reference but practicing yourself is always gonna help you down the road the last thing i want to show you is something that i was debating putting on this list but i think it's useful to know and i think it kind of counts for what we're going for here and that's insert mesh brushes so with an insert mesh brush you can choose a piece of geometry and then have a brush that drags that piece of geometry out onto your canvas and then take it a step further you can have that geometry spawn along a curve that you're painting so in our example we can take a cylinder and then convert that to a curve brush and actually paint that out as a tube so you could just paint like a chain link or a piece of a complex tube or wire or something like that and then paint that across the curve you can use this for hair you can use this for fur for all kinds of different piping tubes things like that super useful you can also grab the edge of a object and spawn that in as like a lip so if you need like a trim for armor or you need like a lip or on a can or something like that it's super useful and you can also break up end caps with poly groups so you can have a shape and have a upper cap and a lower cap and then the curve will only repeat the inside poly group and so say you make like a a top piece of a hair and then a bottom tip of hair and then the middle is kind of like a repeating section when you're painting chunks of hair with the curves you actually kind of get different lengths but they're fairly uniform because of your top and bottom so you're getting similar results so in our example very quickly make a cylinder and you make sure that cylinder doesn't have any top or bottom geometry and you also make sure the top and bottom geometry matches because it needs to be able to weld to the repeating sections what you do is you take that cylinder go to your brush menu and choose create insert brush at the bottom you can go ahead and click new from there you can go up to your stroke menu go to curve and turn on curve mode you'll see it right there at the top when you draw that out on your canvas you'll see that it's not really connected it's just kind of hitting pasting that mesh over and over but not making it one continuous mesh so what you need to do is go over to your brush menu you can choose modifiers and you'll see an option called weld points if you hit weld points it'll try to weld that mesh as one piece so as you draw it out it's nice and smooth there's a couple settings you'll see curve res and max ben angle you could play with those to kind of adjust how it interpolates between each new mesh that it spawns along your curve like if you're getting a result where it's kind of like rigid you can play with those settings to try to get it more smooth you also see the tri parts triparts selection in that menu triparts is what decides if you're going to have that top and bottom cap on your curved brush or not lastly if you go back to the stroke menu you can go to curve modifiers and you can play with how that curve reacts over time so for example you have curve falloff if you choose size you can adjust how it tapers off as you draw it so with like a piece of hair you want it to kind of get smaller as it reaches the end this is how you do that through this menu and there's a whole bunch of different settings that you can control mouse over to look at what they do this is extremely powerful you can get tons of amazing brushes and over time you'll build up a library of brushes that you'll have and be able to pull from when you need to do something complex so the next time you need like a chain instead of sitting there and duplicating that chain link over and over again make yourself a chain brush that you can just draw along a curve and quickly make chains it's super useful so i think that wraps it up that's all the different ways that i know you can create geometry in zbrush and each has a place and a purpose i recommend you go through and try out each one of those and look at the settings and see what they can do and see how you can add them to your workflow thank you so much for checking out this video if you like this kind of content please consider subscribing and if you have topics or things about zbrush that you would like me to go over or have questions about please leave a comment below and maybe i'll make a video about it or at least we can have a chat in the comments on thursday there will be a video dropping where i use a bunch of these techniques to create a simple model and there's a little surprise with that one so definitely stay tuned thanks for watching i'll catch you next time [Music] you

Channel: hart

Views: 2,794

Keywords: art, game art, gaming, games, 3d, 3d art, digital art, stylized, stylized characters, character art, video game art, cg, computer graphics, cg art, art education, art tutorials, game art tutorials, sculpting, modeling, 3d modeling, 3d sculpting, digital sculpting, texturing, retopology, zbrush, substance, painter

Id: J3ePwRCCr44

Length: 13min 45sec (825 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 12 2021