3D Printing in ZBrush: Keys & Articulation - Aiman Akhtar - Episode 46

hey everyone how's it going my name is Damon after thank you for joining this ZBrush livestream in the morning I want to prep for like in just a minute make sure everything's working alright so just give me a few minutes hang out and I'm gonna double check the audio and all that good stuff people love somebody else half the stuff Thank You out so got a boy's trailer play ball so that should be good there let's double check on uber July so that should be good there sweet I can hear myself alright pull this up over there so you guys can see what we'll be talking about today let's get some music going in the background it's going to put on some ambient music in the background let me know if it gets too loud just give me one more minute I'm gonna set up a bunch of browsers and then we'll jump right into it [Music] [Music] hope everyone's having a good day today thank you for joining from all over the world wherever you're tuning in from I'm gonna get set up on the chat as well so you should be able to send any messages you have from see let me pull that up right now actually saying select all images with traffic lights why does it always do that kind of thing all right mr. nice guy just got out of jury duty so it's a good day so far so I'm on this restream chat app so I should be able to see your messages whether they're coming in from twitch YouTube Facebook got crazy jackass I'm from Germany the year 2021 nice well what do they say in 2021 hopefully this will say guten tag all right just give me one more SEC and then we'll be up and running today we'll be talking about articulation obviously and I'm finally gonna share my keying and articulation zbrush I am M brush that many people have been waiting for and I've been too busy to be able to publish but almost time where's musica think it just so ambient that it's having a hard time like even playing it oh yeah that's super ambient it's called ledges legacy big giant circles I like the service pretzel it's like a radio that we get that have going in the background and all the music is royalty-free so you can stream with it okay looks like I'm pretty much done setting up so let's kick this off all right cool lower the music down just a smidge check the restraints chat okay we got Tony that's not for Pakistan what's up Matt thanks for joining Sasha loves a quiche man I don't know what that means when after Google Chanel all right learning the anatomy is to help me sculpt cool so I have something that I may be able to help you out with anatomy was peter masak saying do you have two 3d printers that's cool yeah I've got a few that you may be able to see behind me you may pull this up a bit all right cool so this is my first time streaming from my new office we've got some seed funding for fungus ores and then we've expanded so you could take a look it's not massive but I've got my one big raise 3d n2 plus printer here and the to form two printers over there looking to get a form three soon got the writers table in the middle or whatever we're going to use it for and then we've got on the right hand side left hand my left your right kind of like an expo tables set up so we can get the inspiration we need as we work on stuff so I'm excited to spend the next few months working on my own project it's exciting so let's get right into what we're gonna be talking about today and I'm gonna just do a very brief intro for my usual kind of feel so you know who I am and what I'm about and then we'll get into today's uh super straight okay so for those of you that don't know just a smidge 1% okay my name is a man doctor I'm a 3d artist out of Los Angeles and I've been doing this for about a decade past five years in LA been doing a lot of 3d printing so large-scale sculpture small-scale stuff Jericho's tombs vr two three read 3d print prep so you can see a bunch of that on Aemon 3d comm slash print and check out all sorts of stuff the Corgi math Sarah big favor and yeah you can check out more of my work at aim to 3d comm project right now is fungus short this is my own IP that I've been developing with my wife thaw and we've created a series of characters and did a Kickstarter and made our own mystery box toy line so those are available online at fungus Orascom and we've got all these characters that we're now taking the ZBrush models the scopes I used to make the toys and now turning them into augmented reality game models so we can have the toys come to life an augmented reality this trick is basically if you have the app which ever told you yet we can scan it just using the yuphoria kind of object tracking and scanning that you can get in your phones and then that toy will be unlocked as a playable character in your game you know I've met to reality so that's what we're developing right now and you can follow more about fungus sores on instagrams at the fungus ores because we'll be bouncing around all over the place we were at comic-con in San Diego last week we'll be a lightbox Expo in September and then in December we'll be in my sake December in September zebra summit I'll be there so if you're coming join it I'll definitely be there and then November will be in designer con and the thing next weekend is Jackalope arts faire in Pasadena so if you're in LA showing bat okay got the restream chat going till he does some hope to get some tips on character Anatomy I will definitely do my best to do that today alright so if you're interested in seeing anyone previous streams you can go to presenters with pixel logic so pixologic zbrush live presenters scroll down and to see you you see this beautiful gentleman right here in the blue that's Samia you can see some more of my work there there's fungus ores prototypes a dress that I did for 3d World magazine all 3d printed beautiful Jessica drew Johnson modeling and I've got all these different characters that I've got 3d print prototype to my own company 3d Smith's alright so like I said if you want to see any of the previous dreams they're all saved here so even this one if you don't get a chance to watch it live will be saved here I've talked about some articulation stuff before molding and casting large-scale sculpture wearables just prototyping my own new fungus ores and characters this is gonna be stream number 45 46 47 so yeah that's there like I said I'll be at the ZBrush summit so if you're interested in in LA that you can make it I believe C that is September 27th through the 29th so please do come join and then hang out with me alright about the twitch going being light games saying so handsome thank you so much alright cool so I'm watching and if you guys want anything let me know on the chat and I will pop in and try to answer your questions ASAP if you're interested in learning more in depth 3d printing from me I teach an online class at mol 3d Academy comm it's self-paced right now so you can get it at a great deal 3d printing for ZBrush artists eight lectures on how to sculpt for 3d print toys wearables articulation keying slicing all sorts of stuff and I'll share this link in the restream chat so you guys can get that and what we're talking about today is what I can get you for even less than 200 bucks basically for ten bucks basically I put up my articulation and keying I mmm brush on gum road so I'll drop that link in the do I get the link copy URL I'll drop the link for that in the restream chat and I'll talk about that brush today so that's kind of what today's stream is dedicated to I'll show you how to make your own brushes of how I go about that process of creating a key in ZBrush and that how to use that on a character and this a course a model is included in the purchase so you can practice your anatomy and slicing the keying using that simplified a crochet model so gum road see these articulation brush I am and brush right there double make sure you guys are getting back should say it right there but I do not see it gum road keys and articulation brush here and I don't think there is any channel on there look at this it's like the freaking inception of the chats alright so what is this IMM brush what is an eye on them brush and how do you use it in ZBrush let's jump into ZBrush and then we'll talk about it you pull up the chat on the other monitor so I can have that running do you focus on YouTube get the link because sometimes I can double check the twitch and Facebook stuff but not necessarily YouTube so let me know if you guys got the gum Road link on YouTube and if not I will jump in and create it alright so we got this fresh ZBrush scene we've got a spear in it that's kind of how I start most of my ZBrush scenes is just throw a sphere up at the top that way when I saved the tool it'll save that file right there okay so you guys didn't get the link on YouTube let me see all right these brush like YouTube you puff on that right now there we go YouTube alright sweet let me drop the link on there Gumroad link - there we go alright here a bit of double audios I'm doing this on my other screen ZBrush you articulation brush alright so now if you look in the comments it should be down in the comments because I just went to youtube and typed it in that just a little tad bigger so you can see me alright so we've got the ZBrush scene it's got just that sphere in it that's how I start most of my scene because when I saved the tool under tool save as wherever you save it that name that you put in the file name gets dropped right there on that first model so that's how I start most of my scenes and then I've got a bunch of stuff in here so these are all the different types of keys up guy this is a snap in pin boolean got a non boolean one as well snap in pin free rotation and if you control shift click I guess can show you that these models are made up of two parts there's the internal component and the external component so the outer edge can be used for cutting and the inner edge can be used for actually adding to your model so you want to keep you want to make sure that when you draw out with these brushes that they have both parts here's another snap in pin so you can see this one allows you to rotate full 360 degrees inside this one is limited so you can snap in but you can't rotate you can see the part that's inside there and these have all been tested by 3d printing it may not work depending on the scale and your 3d printing or the machine that you're using the 3d print but this brush should give you a good way to just articulate and key your own models and then work from there you could prototype got a taper squared key got a tapered round key got a tapered boolean and don't worry if I'm going through these a bit too fast I'll go back in and I'll show you what these all do there is a hinge boolean in here so this is modeled based off of the videos I saw if Joseph trust doing it and I tried to copy it as best as I could and in my testing I made some slight tweaks and improvements so it works well for me so this is a hinge boolean I just all made up of one piece also have a limited hinge joint which is made up of several pieces so you can create your own hinge around this piece a ball joint similar to that previous hinge joint where you can build on top of this just use the engineering on the inside and then I've got a few different ball joint boolean types so this one is ball articulation in by its nature is destructive you're ruining your model in order to make it move better so this one is to let you cut out you know an area and key it in so it's basically acting it's snapping pin and a cutter and then this area is for the pin and then the rest of it you'd sculpt in this last one which looks kind of like that thing from Rick and Morty does anyone know what that thing's called it's like this weird looking thing in Rick and Morty where I don't know they don't really describe what it does they just did multiple episodes on it plum bus yes there you go thank you lattice Tech so this thing that looks kind of like part of a plum this is also a ball joint cutter and I'll show you how this works this is a boolean mesh that should just give you a ball joint that works right off the bat all right so these are the parts that make up my I meant brush and the way I create an Iron Man brush is pretty simple I'll delete that first sphere because I don't want that as part of my brush I'll turn everything on and then I'll choose an angle that angle is very important because that's we're going to determine how you draw these pieces out so you want to face in my case I want to face this directly after the direction I'm looking and then you can go under your brush palette and say create insert Multi match if you just have one sub tool you can say create insert mesh but since I've got a whole bunch of sub tools it's gonna be created insert multi match give that a sec [Music] thinking about it it's thinking about it there it is okay so there's all the IMM brushes the brushes that make up my eye on that brush and now this is what I'll be sharing with you guys so let's open up something new let's just say we'll go to a cube 3d and make it a poly mesh so we're starting on a fresh clean edited cute so this is a poly mesh cube and I'll show you what happens when you draw a bunch of these out for the sake of actually being able to demonstrate that it's keying stuff I'll duplicate that cube and move it over so now you see two cubes leaving a little gap in the middle just so you get it and then we'll maybe add a little bit of color to it that one can be slightly green besides the yellow so you can tell these are distinct models and I'll show you how these work so the first one is the snap-in pin boolean so you can basically draw it out in the direction you're looking so if I want to come to the top I can draw it out and then I can move it in move it into my mesh move it around you can see transparent won't work yet because when you draw it out it's part of your mesh and what I want to do is once I draw it out using this iron mem brush I want to say split unmasked points and now it's on its own layer now transparency should work and we can see what's going on it wasn't perfectly flat when I drew it out I wanna make sure it's flat and this is version one of the brush so there's issues with it let me know I'll go and try to correct those issues they should all be drawing flat out and all you need to do to boolean in ZBrush is to go to your transparent see mode not transparency mode in your sub tool palette click on that little Halfmoon icon there you go and now when you go to your render boolean's live boolean turn that on now you can see the bats you cutting out of our mesh so what did that actually do I'm gonna go to boolean make boolean mesh it's gonna think about it for a second and it's gonna make me this match right here now if I say Auto groups it'll break them apart into multiple pieces and now we can see what it did so the snap in pin boolean brush creates this snap in pin on the inside as well as cuts out the negative on the outside so in theory you should be able to just select this and move it in and out and it should pin in place and so this we did with just one cue [Music] let's go back to that cubes mesh I'll turn off the snap-in pin pull in and let's try doing the same thing but with a snap-in pin kind of freestanding so this I'm going to use to connect two separate cubes come over to this angle and I'll draw it out not too worried about the way the normals are working that's not really a problem that just means that probably didn't have a texture or material on there when I made this brush so same way I'm just gonna draw it on presuming that it's gonna cut into here so you can see that and I'm going to split unmask points again so that's on its own layer now this is made up like I said up an internal component and an external component so I'm going to click Auto groups and group split and that should give me the internal snap in pin and the external cutter and what I can do is duplicate my one cube merge down and now I've got this piece as part of my cube now you can see if i zoom in that there's a little bit of space and we don't want that so I'm gonna undo that delete this and I'll show you how to draw it out properly so there's no space what you want to do is to adjust your brush Det so under brush that you can change the slider it's my head blocking that so I've got the brush depth on my custom UI that I've built and you guys can access it under brush and that depth right there and then the deeper you push this in the deeper your models gonna your IMM brush is gonna get buried into your match so you can see when I do it like this it's all the way in it's like halfway into the model where says if I bring it up a little bit then do it it's a lot further out so you can play with this brush setting brush depth setting so I'll draw it out there I'll do the same thing split on mass points Auto Group it group split I'll duplicate that cube and I'll merge down and so now I've got there my snap in pin as part of that cube I can even down to match these pieces together but you want to make sure when you're done to make sure you have enough resolution because if you dynamesh these at a very low resolution it's not gonna work 500 it's gonna think about it for a second there it is alright I can make sure the whole thing the same color as well and now on the other end you can use this piece as a cutter out of the other cube so you can cut that out so I'll duplicate it bring it up here I'll use this one as a cutter but before I do that I want to actually let's see make sure they're both on turnoff transparency mode in there you can see it's being cut out now there's a few different ways you can do this you can just use that make boolean mesh option that I showed you before and append it back on or you can merge down and dynamesh so I'll show you both ways make boolean mesh we'll make that boolean mesh and there it is on a separate sub tool and you can append that in and this does work probably the best but I'll show you both ways so you can understand all right [Music] there we go Phil coloring material so we could see that as one piece and then there's the other piece and the whole point is that that should snap in into there so you can use snapping pin joints for just about anything they're very common 3d printing articulation tool this one is a snap in pin I believe limited so you can't rotate it all the way around but basically that's gonna insert itself lock into place and let me show you what's going on on the inside to allow it to lock into place I'm gonna dynamesh this mesh david ran out for saying snapping with the satisfactory click I'm sure maybe alright I'm gonna hide half this mesh so you can see what's going on and I'll turn on my double-sided so the way this work is this pin is gonna be a lot of that's what she said jokes in this stream I'm pretty sure but you insert it's going to shove its way in there and it's going to slap with the satisfactory click right there when he gets to the end but a bit farther but yeah and it should hold in place that ledge is enough to get it to stay in place now obviously if you yank really hard it will come right back out and the whole idea is that these two ends they can bend a little bit they can flex so when you insert them they'll flex in and then when you you know get to the end they'll flex up and then then you pull them out they'll flex in again and then when you get out they'll flex up again so flex in flex up and then insert it and then flex in and then out and then back to normal so I showed you the boolean method of creating that piece the other method is to simply dynamesh both of these pieces [Music] individually and then cut them in place so what I'm gonna do is right now you can see that this mesh is a decimated mesh and what I want to do is go to my dynamesh crank that up to like four or five hundred for this scene scale and now that's ready to be our cutter so I'll say make that the cutter group is dynamesh sub I've got that on my UI but for you guys I believe that's under if I can find it probably under polygroups so you go under polygroups group is dynamesh sub and then this one does not need to be a dine of poly mesh sub but it does need to be done to mesh for this to work properly so we'll also need to dynamesh this there we go and now I'll just merge down and just done a mesh like I normally would and that piece that was the dynamesh sub should get cut out of the other piece and there we go got cut out so two ways to get to the same exact thing this is dinah mashed mesh with the snap and pen cutter take it out all right so now you can see how the snap in pin works merge that down and I'll name that snap in pity so obviously the boolean works faster it's better but in some cases you may not want to just cut your mesh like that so snap pinpin boolean may not be the answer you need you may actually need to want to come in and set up your custom snap in pins I can think of several rephrase I've needed to do that several times all right so what's next in the IMM brush we've got snap pin pin snap pin pin limited oh so that one was a snapping pin free rotation that goes all the way around this one is a snap in limited taking it out will be a hustle yeah it might be let me show you how the snap in pin limited work so this one I'll say snap in pin fr4 free rotation that means should be able to spin 360 okay I'm gonna come to my snap in pin limited I'll come right to the center of the mesh and I'll draw it out this one you can actually kind of see the direction you're drawing out and you can hold shift as you're drawing it to make it go a certain direction I'd already adjusted my brush depth so I know there's no gap would there now and I'll go split unmask points Auto groups group split and I should be able to see there's the internal component and there's the external component so I'll merge the internal component onto my upper mesh merge down i'll dynamesh those pieces together then color fill objects that we can see that it's one piece and then I'll use the other piece as a boolean cutter out of the other side now the tolerance isn't this brush have already been baked in so you should just be able to insert and it should work but if it doesn't just come to this mesh right here dynamesh it inflate it a little bit so just go to deformation tab inflate by one or two and that should give you enough tolerance tolerance has really changed depending on the scale you're printing so it's hard to make it impossible make it work more retainer is saying on twitch you can place two pieces in a folder make that the boolean folder so you can have the sub tool inside the tool and then get an extra tool with the normal boolean that's a great idea yeah folders in ZBrush I have highly underutilized them but they're very powerful all right so I'm gonna make this a boolean cutter there's my mesh that's gonna get boolean out of I'll say boolean make boolean mesh it's gonna pop it up there and I'll append that in toss these two pieces there's my boolean mesh for snap in then free rotation and I'll color fill objects so it's just one piece probably dynamesh it as well just so this stuff isn't happening all right and this mesh similar to the previous one should just be able to flex insert all the way and then snap once it gets to the end now when you'll notice is this one does not allow you to rotate the previous one so you obviously drew it pretty differently and there we go all right so this one you got in the hole for the bully and outside it's a full circle so you should be able to rotate in every direction with that snap in it however this other one didn't happen pin limited is limited you've got just the sides that are flattened so you can only keep it in one direction you cannot rotate all the way around the mortar decanters saying no love for folders know I like folders all right I'll make a folder in here later just to organize these bullets all right so we'll call this snap in pin not free rotation I'll say limited limited all right so I've showed you a few different brush elements let's can move on from the snaps to the tapers so the papers are pretty straightforward they are you can draw the tapered round split unmasked points auto group group split that you've got the internal component and the external component the internal you can merge down and the external you can use as a cutter the same thing as the previous pen I'm just showing you repeating the same things over and over so you get how this works is it gonna boil in cut that out and this isn't going to snap and stay in place this is just gonna rest on top and but that sometimes all you need all right so I'm just gonna go over to here and I'm going to say make boolean mesh and I'll append that in where's that down I'm gonna call it tapered round believed that cutter don't need that anymore what is this extra piece extra piece good alright so how does the tapered round work now now that I've made it and it select only part of my mesh move that out oh I merged into the wrong one wrong end all right so high that high that these two pieces need to be mushed together and I didn't actually die no much I merged into the right one I just didn't die to match so I'm gonna split make sure these are dynamesh so they're one piece one geometry not to separate geometry and then it'll work properly alright so there's the end for the tapered round and there's the key looks like this didn't actually merge I may have not that double-check the depth on this but for the sake of this presentation I'm just gonna move it in yes to their dynamesh and now it should merge into one piece and I can demo and move on [Music] all right so there you can see how a tapered round key would work it's going to rest on top so basically this is better for just a simple vertical key where the weight of the upper model is going to keep it in place and once you have it in place you should be able to just rotate this mesh all the way around and it's just a you know keep in place because of the key below so tapered rounds are pretty useful for that as well I think you guys get the idea of how I'm working with these brushes well let's move on to the next one we've got the tapered square tapered square works pretty much exactly like the tapered round does so I don't want to really demonstrate the whole process again does anyone have any questions about it let's see doo doo doo doo doo okay we got a talk going on in twitch about different materials looks like madcap red wax indie adventures I'm not really sure what that is but taper square I drew it out the same as the other one I'm gonna split unmask points I'll order group group split and I've got the outer component and the inner come on it can tell because it's actually changing the scale one piece is the inside the other piece is the outside the inside one you want to make sure to put merge with your with the proper mesh so I'll merge down dynamesh that oh and I did the same thing I want to check my brush depth first so I'm going to actually undo all that so when you draw these out make sure that your brush depth that you see under brush and depth is set so that your mesh actually is inter penetrating a bit when you're doing 3d printing there can't be any gaps so that mesh has to be going through a little bit so if I split unmask points and if I do transparency you should be able to see that it's buried into the other match that's important for this to work properly Auto groups group split there's the internal one I'll merge that down onto their dynamesh it so there's one side with the tapered square and then the other piece I'll use as a cutter out of the other end with boolean turned on that should be visible for me see why I did that oh I did it the wrong direction of course I do I'm just gonna move it over it's like a rule of demos and like online streaming it's like things are bound to go wrong make sure these are lined up so that this key actually works that clicked on something not sure what to turn them into a folder I think you I just clicked on the down arrow next to it that's all good all right so we're gonna then use this as a boolean cutter so that we get it to cut out of the other side so this is probably my most commonly used key I use tapered squares all the damn time and I'll show you how to make a tapered Square to see if you don't want to buy my brush you can make this because it's a very useful key because this is pretty much you know 90% of my keying I use a tapered square and then epoxy and then make sure those two pieces fit together all right so I'll make boolean mesh here and append it in and there's my boolean mesh this is extra that's extra now cool and same as the other stuff that I've been doing just to keep it all organized I'll make sure that that's color matched that side it's color matched and you can see how this would work simple taper square key you can use these anywhere over a model and this is how I do 90% of my keying for the large-scale sculptures that I cut up into pieces tessie's tests on youtube saying new room new day for live streaming indeed it is it's a new setting for me still have a lot to setup but I'm feeling good about it alright I'll merge those two pieces down and we'll call this tapered Square I'm going to save this scene cuz have feeling ZBrush might crash in all this madness ZBrush demo key all right so keep it running keep it chugging let's move on to the next one this time I want to make sure I have both pieces visible so I'm keying in the right direction that's the direction and what's next on this brush so the next in our brush is the tapered square boolean so I don't need to be suffered this this is when you have one long piece and you want to cut between it so what I mean by that let's say I've got this piece and it's longer I'm gonna come over to my tapered Square and let's see how this draws up well I want to make sure when I scale this I'm scaling up from the right angle there we go so I'm gonna have my tapered Square selected and I'll just start drawing it out you see this one I've got it coming up from the side because I often use it from the side the most not from the front so you're gonna basically draw it out you're going to split unmasked points so it comes out on its own layer and then just move it in place however you want it you can use the transparency setting to check how it's working and then you just use it as a boolean cutter there we go and that's what it should look like you're gonna have a little obscene but these two pieces should be keep in one no no mess about having to dynamesh multiple pieces duplicate and keep track of things bullying's are the way to go and ZBrush for articulation owe him more detainers saying new set with the overfed paradox and background yes he's all the way back there little chubby but chubby is cute all right we're gonna go to now we've drawn this it we see that it's there and it's set to boolean cutter I'm gonna just select my mesh and go to boolean make boolean mesh and let's append that it there it is and there you can see is done the work of adding the key to the right side and cutting it out at the other side and the tolerances are baked in so it's got some thickness to it so it should be able to work for you all right I will draw that paper square out over here as well do we get an idea what that tool was that was used to make this alright there you go that one is the tapered square cutter boolean looks like I labeled this one wrong so I'm going to fix that too it's not swear it's square all right cool that's that that's that huh did I yeah I did of course I did hard to keep track when you're working in like this but I will grab that color put it onto their real object move it on over so I can keep demoing these different pieces so the bullying's are designed to cut out of one piece some of these other keys are designed to put two separate objects together all right so there's the tapered square next up is the hinge so the hinge is a ball joint it's kind of pointless to demonstrate them on cubes it's not gonna make any sense to you to demonstrate a hinge or a ball joint on a cube these are designed for characters so let's switch over to a different scene and I'll show you how to use the rest of this brush push I should mention the gum rod where you can buy this keys and articulations i'mmm brush I shared the link earlier in the chat I'll make sure to share that link again it's available for $10 u.s. but there's also a deal sorry to not let you know about the deal for any of you that already bought it but if you go type in ZBrush live all lowercase one piece in the form when you add the purchase you can get it at half off at least the first 25 people can get it half off so that code is ZBrush light so let me share that link with you and then the code is ZBrush live code to get the Gumroad app off for the first 25 buyers is ZBrush live and that is all lowercase one piece and I'll drop the link in the chat again so you guys are able to see it and I'll add it into the YouTube as well to do there we go and then YouTube chat as well there we go so yeah whoever use the first twenty five to get it can get that half off for five bucks and so I've demonstrated the snapping pins the tapered keys and the boolean's so I've demonstrated this side for the ball joint and the hinge joint I'm gonna demonstrate it on a character so when you guys download this you're gonna get a zip file that zip file is gonna contain this model as an obj so you can start playing around with your own articulation and Anatomy sculpting stuff this should help inform that it is not anatomically perfect it is a simplified akash a so it's kind of your standard superhero buff dude but stylize do you know stylized so you can understand really what i was trying to focus on was trying to help myself identify the insertion points and the volumes so that hopefully will be helpful to you so let me demonstrate so when you get it you're gonna get like a zip file like that double click on it it's going to have these three things let's drag them out okay so these three things are one just a simple image to describe what what pieces come with it then you're gonna have an IMM brush and then you're gonna have a head course a simplified so that you can open in ZBrush is going to the tool import and then you can bring in the obj let's test that make sure it works and then the IMM brush I'll show you how to load that in as well for the IMM brush you're gonna go to brush load brush click on the desktop and there's the IMM brush when you load it in it should appear in your brush palette just like this and if you want to save it drop that IMM brush in your let's see let me see if I can find that you want to drop it in your ZBrush folder for your startup like when you open ZBrush it's always in there let me see where is that ZBrush 20:19 so that is under C program files pixologic zbrush 2019 and under startup z startup you want to drop your brush in there so I think it's under brush presets that's where you want to drop it if you want it to show up I mm keys articulation make sure that's an older one I'll drop the new one in there in keys articulation that's what it's called I figure if Damien Kendall can do damn standard I can do aim keys so that's aim keys articulation I have my brush feel free to rename it to whatever you want just call it key arc or whatever you want and there you go so that should show up under there the obj you can import just in your tool palette settings a macro che simplified and fingers crossed this works I did not test it sweet it works alright and there's the obj of the course a model that I sculpted so this should give you a little help in trying to understand how Anatomy works and how to sculpt around with it it's a poly mesh it's a it isn't dynamesh so you can you should probably dynamesh it because right now it's kind of pinched in a lot of places so if you start sculpting on it make sure to dynamesh it I believe the eyes and the base are separate so if you click Auto groups yeah you can see that the eyes can come off and then the base can come off as well so what I've done is set up a scene here with that akaash a as it comes in I've also then gone ahead and separated out the eyes in the base and dynamesh did and made the arms just kind of go from rest pose more to standard T pose I found T pose is better for me for articulation purposes because when you're doing it like this sometimes you're gonna cut pieces out of your torso and I don't want that I want to cut I want to make sure that it's out wide Mike Morgan say dude that's an amazing starting point figure thank you see motor Tanner saying not a twitch hold on I'll go type it in on twitch there code to get the Gumroad half off first 25 by or ZBrush live there's the key like alright so what was I doing yes I'm glad you like it it's a figure that I've made few years back and I just use it as a base mesh to start a lot of things so I figure it'll help you guys out as well so how did I get from here to there I basically just transposed so if you want to see how I did that I'll quickly show you kind of shittily show you so I'm gonna Auto groups I'm going to ctrl shift click so I just have that selected maybe I'll bring the eyes back into this mesh but I want the base off I'll delete the base and I'm gonna go to dynamesh geometry dynamesh and just dynamesh it 120 in resolution you lose a lot of detail so make sure your resolution is set higher plátano saying why don't I see the link on the chat room in YouTube so I'm not really sure I'm not I don't set up this ZBrush life thing those are the pixologic guys are setting it up so I just put the link in in the YouTube comments I'll ask them later when they post this to have it as the main comment on the link description in YouTube but for now just go into the comments and you can see me as a monitor typing that link in and then you can see the link okay yeah back to it so I don't really care about the resolution of this that's good enough well sorry about that guys else I'm calling me on Facebook I'm gonna decline that all right back to it alright so the way I transpose you go to your math class oh and then just use your pen to drag out a mask over the area you want to lasso it can be as precise with this or not precise with this as you want just make sure that if you're doing it symmetrically you're not unmasking pieces out of the other end unmask that and that should be basically good enough and I'm just ctrl tap a bunch so it softens that now you can invert that mask click on rotate draw your transpose bar and then just kind of transpose now if you want this to be a full tea pose you want to make it a bit higher move it out a bit and then drop that mask and then just kind of Reese Culp that bottom transpose isn't perfect it gets you as far as it can but ultimately it's all about the masks you use and it's a sculpting application damn it just enjoy sculpting and then yeah once you dynamesh it once you smooth it out once you sculpt it in place you should have something that looks kind of like that alright so once you get to this point now I can show you what the hinge joint does with the ball joint does and you can kind of see how you want to use it and I'll show you on this big beefcake dude and I'll show you on a skinny dull girl character and that way you can have both sweet okay gotta gotta got it okay so if you guys are taking my mold 3d class on ZBrush on multi Academy you guys get the this IMM brush for free I'm gonna actually give it to the administrators of Moultrie to make sure that students of that class get this brush for free I'm literally just doing all of this on the fly so I'm not like totally prepared but yea I'm figuring this out as I go guys so if you want the the brush for your keying and articulation I'll show you how to use it the rest of it in the stream but it's ten bucks five bucks if you get it right now with the code ZBrush live and if you're taking my multi Academy class which is on mold 3d CAD Amin comm under all classes self-paced class 3d printing for ZBrush artists then you'll get this IMM brush for free I'm also gonna try to update this class I'm not sure when but I'm gonna update it with kind of a full new lesson plan so yeah just keep tabs on that mold 3d Academy comm 3d printing for ZBrush artists alright um see did it distract it lots of lots of things happening and popping off David Nash was saying it should let me change the URL on YouTube if I'm the moderator like I said I'm not the moderator I see YouTube doesn't a lot of links in chat I'm not really sure how to share it with you guys on YouTube that just go to Gumroad and type in key art our key articulation and it should pop up okay so I'm going to show you how how to use the rest of these keys I've got the hinge joint I've got a hinged limited ball joint and basically a few different ways to do a ball joint and a few different ways to do it in joint time is it 1103 got another hour left of the string so let's start with the hinge boolean so the way to work with the hinge boolean it's come to the let's start with the knee so I'll zoom in to the knee and what kind of just draw it out if you hold shift it'll snap in place or a theory will once you draw it out you can move it in place I'll kind of move it up just a bit and I want to make sure that it's going all the way through my mesh so if you need to adjust the scale go ahead and do that after the fact and you may also want to rotate this so that it is lined up with the direction of your foot a bit better so just rotated it slightly let's see what it's doing so I'm gonna split unmasked points that David Rasmussen so the plan to defeat you is to attract you to YouTube where you have no power it's my kryptonite haha indeed alright so there we go I just said that to be a boolean cutter and there's the hinge joint you can see it's a bit wonky we can move it around and change the scale to make it work a bit better let's move it wrong thing to move I want to move the hinge joint there you go I'll move that forward a bit and you can see how it works like I said articulation is destructive by nature so you want to make sure you are placing these things properly otherwise it's going to just create a big ol mess and none of these brushes are going to work perfectly and articulation you're going to need to come in and hand sculpt a bit alright here we go so there's the key for the hinge this guy's a bit of a beefcake so it's hard to make it work perfectly but you're basically going to use that as your starting point um and fix things how far up this cut goes determines the range of motion so let me go ahead and do a you know I'm just gonna do one leg at a time just so it doesn't give me too many pieces to work with you delete that so there we go there's the one side and I'm going to click on my crochet model and I'll say make boolean mesh it's gonna think about it it's gonna think about it okay so where to go there it is it's kind of popped it off on to its own layer I think there is ok so who's gonna do it in this scene you can auto groups and do a group split and it'll pop these pieces off and what are we working with we're working with the upper piece which is going to be basically the body where we've got a pin that you can print them and just slide into place and then we've got the lower half so what you can do now is go to your dynamesh settings let's see 128 resolution NX and 21s on twitch is asking was the link to purchase thank you for sharing that moderate kina appreciate it let me make sure this resolution is high it should be something like that and this seems like eight nine hundred so it's like twelve hundred make sure it's good all right there we go you can also then come in and color fill object and then you could desculpe fix that up right there smooth that out at the edge and I'm going to do this kind of with the low-poly settings just to kind of get through this demo but when you do this please try to make sure it's a high poly enough that it's worth it there's the pin going through and there's the mesh up top so do the same thing with the mesh up top I will dynamesh it it like a thousand resolution and then I can come in scarred sculpt fixing let's do fill object you will probably need to adjust your model after you use this brush anyway and probably even more so after you print it out and test because I highly recommend that step do not step the print prototyping phase because once you print these things depending on the scale you're printing it it may not work there we go relatively clean looking so now see if it'll let me demo it move that to there with all of that to the center you know what I'm gonna click on that hopefully it'll be relatively correct normal wise if you go to your rotate you should be able to see it rotate like that so in theory that's how it should work it's hard for me to get a exact rotation angle for this but it depends working properly it should stay in place there and your range of motion will be as far up as you can go with that before interpenetration starts so that's your range of motion and your range of motion in the front will be stopped by this limiter in the front so I go and do a lot more detail of this stuff in my articulation class in Moultrie D and like I said I'm gonna update the lessons when I can get around to it but all of this info is in my ZBrush class so you can learn more about articulation but that's how the hinge joint works the Puglia it's an excellent cutter not saying that to pat myself on the back I just know it works alright let's do the next one so we'll go from the hinge boolean to the hinge limited so the hinge boolean you can use for knees you can use it for hands are elbows you can use it for a bunch of stuff I mean demonstrated the hinge boolean on an elbow as well just so you guys get the idea and your boolean draw that out move it back into place that's just a scale size whatever have people need and you want to make sure you're doing it in the right direction as well like this way is the wrong direction because that's gonna make my arm joint been backwards so what I want to do is draw it out when I draw it the other direction draw that Hubbard draws out and then rotate it into place I'm gonna move it rotate it get it into place move it rotate it get it into place and then you can split it split on mass points and make that a cutter and there you are you've got articulated elbow and like I said keep moving these pieces around keep scaling and adjusting based on your own model and then three sculpt do not rely on this brush to do everything for you all right David and that's to say you have an example of a clockwork imbricated sculpt like what's your craziest articulated to it I've done some crazy articulation stuff man but I can really show most of our projects as their client projects I can show you one since the client gave permission to share it on so I'll show you this girl doll that I just did recently one of my previous streams kind of the finished version of it so you can get an idea of that so hinge boolean works on knees and elbows and hide it for now like that for now - let's do the next step which is the limited hinge so basically the hinge is basically the same thing as the hinge ebullient but if you do all the work yourself what do I mean by that let's come here and draw it out I'll draw it out that way I'll rotate it into place and I'll move it into place back there [Music] no more that should be good and this really is for people that are a bit more advanced because you need to be able to learn how to cut and slice and key and all that jazz so I'll split unmask points there get my Akashi a so I'm not working on that I'll do a Auto groups so you can see this is made up of the upper piece the inner piece and then the pin so actually I want to rotate this all the way around because I generally work when I do these higher to lower meaning thicker part up and then down alright something like that then you want to go to you've already did the I already did the auto group so I want to do a group split so there's the pin there's the upper piece and there's the lower piece and what you're gonna do is come into here flip hidden dynamesh that that becomes closed dynamesh that closed and you're gonna work this bit by a bit here's the arm here's the arm yeah would I need folders very soon to keep this scene organized all right there we go it's the body all right so now I'm going to try to sculpt this into place with the key so the key I'm basically using as like an engineering base for the rest of my sculpt and I want to make sure that you know that pin slot is empty that my musculature is on top of this but it's not actually affecting the rotation on the inside like that what's stuck so you want to make sure that you can see all the way through your mesh here I learned this workflow originally from Robert bin Yan who used to teach them all through the Academy 3d printing class before me there we go getting it getting it that tricep volume back as you can see it's a quite a bit more sculpting than just using the hinge boolean but it works it's just a matter of getting in there and making sure that it's all done properly okay so basically that piece is gonna get attached onto there and you can do this a lot finer then I'm doing it I'm just doing it very roughly you should be able to extend your sculpt all the way on top here along the sides just not in the center rush down and then this other piece is gonna merge out to that same Delia you want to merge it such that you're not actually interrupting the function of the wheel I guess on the inside merge down onto that and let's see all these pieces Wow okay there so that out only select the piece that you want let's sculpt up into it and like I said this is a bit more advanced because you're gonna need to sculpt it by hand and make sure you understand why it's doing what it's doing you also need to understand range of motion and how many pieces you want and what works the way it works and why if you want that brachioradialis coming up and over and ultimately you're going to have a hinge there when you're good and done properly sculpting up all the pieces and you can make as much of it visible or invisible as you want but like I said this one you need to actually know a little bit about what you're doing and why you're doing it I just can't possibly show all of that in the demo that's this short your range of motion is going to be determined by the gap here so you actually want to probably for some reason I cannot switch to my damn standard brush right now you just keep switching back to move that is a funky funky mess a feeling of my ZBrush is about to crash but let's hope it doesn't double-oh-seven Jurassic on YouTube is asking why do you not use the gizmo I use it time to time I'm just more comfortable with the transpose so you may want to do something like this in order so you have more range of motion and again that's something that you'll learn over time how to use I just included that hinge in there for you to be able to experiment alright so next up we've got the ball joint with cutter this works the same way as the hinge joint I showed it's kind of do-it-yourselfer and then the ball joint boolean and then the ball joint boolean cutter so let me show you those I did not okay I'm just gonna merge all these pieces down so I can organize my scene a bit better all right back to it all right nuclear Dan's asking if I have damn standard on shift by accident it's possible yeah look like that damn standard is on shift so how do I get smooth back on shift ah there you go good guess me appreciate that and you press a brush while holding shift sometimes that'll become your new shift and then need to make sure your shift goes back to normal to smooth all right so here's my articulated unarticulated at crochet I'm gonna go over to my ball joint and I'll show you all of these so I'll start with all the way at the end the ball joint boolean you got to draw that out move it into place this took me a while to figure out I spent like all of the last dream trying to figure out how to create this boolean joint and it's still not perfect because like I said articulation is destructive by nature so it doesn't there's no one-click solution for articulation but I'm gonna draw it on I'll split unmask points and I'll use that as a cutter and there you go there's your boolean cut shoulder this one doesn't work as well for beefcake dudes it works better for slightly smaller proportion characters but you can adjust it for your beefcake dudes and in one cup it'll give you the arm it'll give you the body cut out with a snap pin pin on the inside the pin for this arm you're going to need to create because this kind of creates three separate pieces let me show you alright so once you've got that in place you can go to boolean make boolean mesh they'll think about it and make it on its own layer that looks like it will do a Auto groups and a group split like this is gonna be funky I already know but you can come in here smooth all that down so it works a bit better dinah meshing helps or you know what I'm just gonna turn on the sculptor sculptors Pro that way I should be able to smooth is the area I want right oh it is working I think this my brush is uh too small you know what I'm just gonna dynamesh turn off sculptress Pro and if your smooth doesn't work at any point and it just gives you too much you can go to lightbox underbrush and if you go too smooth there is smooth stronger and I use that all the time because that kind of ignores the mesh and just gives you a kind of ignores like how much how many Polly's you have and it'll still give you the functionality of smooth that you're used to all right so I doing this really quickly but this should give you guys an idea of how to work with this brush all right so there's the internal component of the shoulder then we've got this ball joint here and if we group that it should be able to split onto its own separate piece maybe I didn't position it properly but it should pretty much be split so I'm just going to go too much shift controller and this will work better on a less beef caky model like I said so we'll try that shortly there we go damnit we'll split that and we'll do it dynamesh there make sure your resolution this have high enough got some wonky stuff because it's a very thick model but there's the pin piece that fits in to there then we've got this guy which if we dynamesh head why is it not that much some part invisible there we go okay like I said demo purposes so I'm doing this relatively quickly to get you guys the idea of how the brush works you can take a lot more time and do it right the pins getting filled in but that's okay because I'm going to come in and cut it out there's the pin you can see the pin gets cut into a few different pieces if you just do a boolean just like straight through but I'm not gonna worry about that right now I'm just going to select it just like part of it and move that in and dynamesh there you go got a working pin bit wonky because of the speed I'm working here there you go so there's our pin and we can duplicate that pin and use it as a cutter out of the arm so that pin can be a cutter out of there dynamesh subit merge down there we go and so now we've got the pin cut all the way through and so there's your functioning ball joint now that part goes on to there and this part goes into the body and now you can come in and actually Reese Culp the body a bit better to decide how you're going to limit the motion now you can sculpt around it so there you go that's how the ball joint cutter works and you can layer this along with the hinge joint along with other pieces and then you need to be able to use it all right cool how we doing on time 11:30 cool I think I have time to finish showing you all the brush pieces so that was the ball joint boolean the ball joint boolean cutter here I'll demonstrate on the other end works in a similar way but it does slightly less work for you however it's also much less destructive so for a big beefcake character like this you can use that bring it in place decide where you want that cut to be split unmask points said that to be boolean cutter and check it out in transparency mode make sure that you're getting it to the right spot where the actual joint would be so slightly higher and then I'm going to do a big boolean mesh it's thinking about it this one's a bit more of a complex operation looks like it did it already let's find where it put it that's it right there so we will do a Auto groups that should help split that off onto its own mesh and peace I will do a group split I think when I dynamesh should merge all of that side together so I'm not even worried about that right now I'm worried about this side so here's the pin so it gives you that pretty perfectly better than the other one it cuts the arm off and adds this snap in pin there so you can come in and just sculpt away we switch to the clip curve and when I can clip some things this a bit faster clean up wise dynamesh that and I'm doing this superfast again you guys should take more time with this but that's basically half of it and what you want to do is come over to your select lasso kind of grab that piece and make that its own separate thing so probably best to just come in with another boolean cutter piece and separate that off and there you'll have your internal ball joint component and then your external ball joint component not going to take the time to fully sculpt all that stuff but you guys get the idea based on the previous one I showed you and then the body it leaves you with kind of like that perfect space to cut into and then same thing you can smooth at on the outside so articulation is destructive by its nature but you just takes a few rounds of going at it and then you can spend some time to get it right and it'll get done all right so that's the ball joint boolean and the ball joint link cut and then this one the ball joined with cutter that essentially works a similar way it just wants you to do the work I drew it out funny draw it out split unmask points rotate Oh make sure I'm rotating the right piece so you can choose which way that you guys want to do this providing you with a few different options in this brush but basically this piece is going to get attached on to the body and then this piece over here other group it will be getting attached on to the arm so imagine that's the bicep basically or the other way around try really seeing what works for you there's the cutter so that piece actually fits into the body and then there's your pin so I'm giving you basically all the elements to start experimenting with your articulation and then trying it out let's show it to you on a different model and then I'm gonna have to start signing off skin get the actual work work think I have the scene here one of them all right here we go so this is a model that I made with another modeler Jake Kemper helped me out with this a lot this is for a client Shannon Victoria this is her style of character 2d character and then we basically sculpted it to match the appeal of her 2d drawings as a 3d character and then we articulated it so I can show you a bit of how we articulated it and let me show you just how to do the ball joint in joint on her so you can see how it works on a slightly different character so I'll go to the hinge joint first draw that in place rotate it around rotate it around move it in place there we go that should be the other way okay in theory that should work on a scale it down just a smidge and split that off split on mass points that then becomes a cutter solo off there we go there's our hidden joint like I said you can smooth this a bit better you can adjust the scale a bit better so that works better for you but there's how you set up a hinge joint and then the ball joint same way let's do the ball joint boolean move that in place rotate it around articulation is different than 3d modeling you have to think a bit like an engineer most of the time with 3d modeling we're thinking about the final output being a game or animation or even toys but we don't think about it in engineering terms and that's important when we're creating something that needs to move toys in general engineer because the balance think think about weight distribution all right got that in place I'm going to split on mass points and we use that as a cutter and then adjust the rotation angle the scale and the placement so that it's rotating from the right angle just like that so that gives you basically the starting point for you to then articulate the character let me show you what we ended up doing for the finished character okay that's opening up right now there we go so I tend to color my meshes green when they're ready to print so I know that this is decimated hollowed ready to go but I will so you turn the base on and the plug-in sub tool master fill color and material it's the white sculpey material so we can see it all alright I could try this let's see what expose does exposed tends to always overdoing it and go into the transform menu and reduce the amount of expose so we can see all the pieces that this is broken into let me unexposed it and I'll do it a bit by hand so you can see what's going on hope you guys are enjoying this stream and if you have any questions you can email them to me at a man doctoral gmail.com but like I said this is version one of the brush so I'm not really sure how well it works and for every scenario however you can help me figure that out so if you have any feedback on that brush please do let me know what we go so you can see with this one I actually pop the head off up at the top so we could have the eyes go inside the models head cool and for these ball joints for the shoulder I tried something unique which is I tried to have hooks at the end and have them run through the model so basically crud pressed expose again there so I'm basically made a hole all the way through the body and did a rubber band insert on the inside to hook into the outer edges of the ball joint I ended up actually not using that and just putting the rubber band right through the shoulder and then keeping it in place with the pin and that worked really well this down here you can see the hip T joint coming through on the inside of the mesh here under the pelvis ended up doing something really complex there to where I ran a rubber band through the inside of the body up into the torso and then connected it to the shoulder rubber band and that way it was all able to stay in place so there's the articulation kind of a finished piece you can see I've got your standard hinge joints for the knee and then for the elbow those are hinge joints i've got ball joints for the shoulders the hips of their own thing they're not really a ball joint it's kind of called a tee joint and snapping pins for everything else so snapping pin free rotation for the feet for the hands as well as for the neck so hopefully this articulation brush helps you guys experiment a little and then get into this stuff there really aren't that many articulation classes the back bend is someone's asking on to which is the same way the rubber band is going up through the body from the pelvis and attaching to a hook I made up here in the top of the body I ended up not using this and is drilling through the top and attaching to the rubber band up in the middle just that was more secure and I can show you some photos of that so you can get an idea of what I'm talking about [Music] so here's the articulated Finnish model printed and clear resin you can see how it can pose did the dirty dancing pose or I don't know matrix pose whatever you want to call this but yeah articulation for print it's you know basically that it's going to work here's a model that we printed on articulated as well that you may use for molding casting I'm looking forward to seeing it all painted up and then finished and dressed up and whatever she does with it so yeah I'm hoping this was useful for you guys to see the articulation brush and how it works like I said it is up on Gumroad so you can purchase it and then try using it first twenty five users get it half off with the code ZBrush live and I can share the link again and if you join my amol 3d Academy class on 3d printing I go over a lot more in art about articulation talking about Hema and GI Joe toys that I grew up with Barbies and how they have a limited range of motion because you're you know you want Beauty versus some other toys like the SF PT and Toa it's all about articulations they've got like a hundred plus points of articulation I talked about clothes characters art toys and then open source action figures that you can purchase online and articulated toys not having to look like anything else so moti Bhat is a great example on shapeways so yeah we can keep talking about articulation forever but I hope this i'mmm brush is a good start for you to help you on your journey to learn about articulation you make sure that I have that link so once again that's on Gumroad it's just called key art or keys art keys and articulation IMM there it is who's looking for all that jazz okay once again thank you for joining me for this stream my name is Amanda thir if you want to follow more streams they'll be on pixologic comm ZBrush live author a man doctor you can see all of my previous streams there's like five pages of like almost 50 streams now I'm probably going to take a break through August and not stream just so I can catch up on my fungus or project work once again that is my own IP that I'm developing and you can follow that on fungus Orascom these cute little creatures and the story surrounding their creation and proliferation and all that and you can follow us on instagram at fungus ores all right just to make sure you all have the link I'll go ahead and post and share it again see here have to find where I wrote it believe is on the YouTube channel all right cool they sit in there taste it on Twitch and on REE Street chat as well and let me go back to gum road and make sure that it's actually working as far as downloads go see rocks Gumroad does not want to open up for me seems to be quite busy you all right cool let's work it looks like we've got 12 sales so far right sweet thank you guys for your support I appreciate that yeah I hope this is useful and I hope if you guys want a refresher on this lesson you can check it out on the ZBrush live presenters page and once again if you want to get a more in-depth lesson you can go to mold 3d academy.com go to the all classes self-paced class 3d printing for ZBrush artists and then you can learn all sorts of stuff there you can see the lesson plan and it's all mostly free software except for ZBrush that you'll need alright guys and gals thank you for joining gotta get back to work so I'm gonna hit it and I will see y'all next time I stream and if not before the summit I'll see you at the 0 summit alright guys Cheers

Channel: Pixologic ZBrush

Views: 24,821

Keywords: pixologic, zbrush live, digital sculpting, 3d modeling, art, design, tutorial, how to, making of, twitch, character creation, live boolean, vdm, sculptris pro, deformers, project primitive, illustration, mudbox, 3d coat, autodesk maya, adobe, photoshop, cinema 4d, 3d printing, concept art, games, reel, keys, articulation, figurines, toys

Id: ObuBlxH7fEw

Length: 112min 51sec (6771 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 25 2019