5 Hard Surface Tips in ZBrush You Didn't Know

hey guys hanging up more than from flippin almost here and in today's first-of-a-kind video I think we are taking a look at some of the heart surface features inside of ZBrush we wanted to do a little we wanted to compile in a list of this sort of like top 5 coolest features when doing hard surface in C brush for you guys something that can help speed up your workflow and some things that are just kind of cool in ZBrush and also a little weird that exist in ZBrush but you know whatever it's ZBrush an awful this is the first off many hard surface videos yeah so the first one is the Q cube or Q sphere and Q grid these can be found if you select your starred poly mesh and you just simply hit Q cube this will just make a perfect cube that's subdivided based on these parameters down here you can also say Q cube 7 and it does this to it so it's a really quick way to just have perfectly subdivided cubes that are easy to then sort of manipulate afterwards you can only find these under the star yeah and you know you have a cube 3d so why will you want to do this well if you look at the wireframe with the Q 3d it is bootleg as hell it's basically a sphere in the shape of a cube so you can't really use this I never thought about it's terrible you try to use for anything and you can't yeah but this one actually has proper you know keep topology no that should be that hard butter so this is a really good starting point if you just want to play around with cubes or wood spheres the nice thing about the Q sphere is that it's actually cubed unlike there's another way to get a Q sphere a cube sphere in ZBrush but this is now the easiest way I feel so this is a really cool option that you can just play around when they have some really quick primitives remember only under the star yeah another really cool feature is which seems weird is the dynamic subdivision and dynamic subdivision is something I've often sort of overlooked as an annoying feature mostly when you're doing organic stuff but for hard surface is actually really really useful so you activate dynamic subdivision just by hitting D you'll get a pop-up the first time you do this every time you open C brush we can just say yes to always or yes or no for this session so a standard dynamic subdivision this is what we all know and don't love I think but what you do have so I've made this little bootleg menu down here which is super confusing I guess but that's still a bit progress yes we're working Froggers right now so you have the cue grid and the cue grid basically does magic so tada there you go then you have a nicely something is kinda like how you would expect the cube to subdivide if you had put in like put in some more supporting edges but then you just play around with the parameters of this so the cool thing is the cube grid and coverage sort of work together to sort of like get the look of the cube or the subdivision that you want right now I only have pebble activated if I disabled that and hit chamfer then we get a super nicely rounded corner you can do these in conjunction and it's just that's a little tighter and then you just sort of like play around with the cue grid and the coverage to get the the look for the perfect cube that you want this is super nice as you don't actually have to subdivide your model in order to control control this with regular subdivision you would have to add supporting edges yeah or maybe you have to decreasing whatnot but this is just an eyesore the substitute for that and you can always hit shift D and go out of dynamic subdivision again go back into it so if you run into performance issues always you know just hit 50 and you're good to go again another really cool thing is when it comes to booty ins so I've loaded up the insert mesh boolean's brush here and this cube right now you know has a dynamic subdivisions on so what you can do is you can simply like you can simply drag out any of these meshes let's drag out this oval here and this now inherits the the values of the dynamic subdivision so this gets dynamically subdivided as well so you don't have to go in for objects this is now all contained within this object and it just sort of does that I have a little menu here for splitting unmasked points actually not something I really wanted to talk about but I just sort of like unmet it splits whatever is unmasked so with this selected now I'll show you something really cool let's turn off dynamic because we're 50/50 to turn that off and we just have this object now so if you hold down alt and click the little go to unmask Center it just sort of goes to the center of the object that is just a little Google Maps icon yeah we call that a little rotation key and then our gizmo is sort of reset back to normal so let's just scale this down a little bit move it in and then we will activate live boolean so live boolean should be in your default menu up here I've just moved it down here because this is a like I said the work-in-progress hard surface UI that I'm working on so it's all over the place right now let's turn this into subtractive you have additive subtractive and intersection these are these little weird things next to the name of the subtool which you have never known what they are Julianne's next to the i1 there you you you've been accidentally clicked clicking them nothing has ever happened you like I guess they don't do anything yeah yeah therefore boolean so I don't like one of them was like I think you can use one of them for rendering transparency at one point like when civil war first came out there was something like that I think the Mirena a really cool thing so we're moving this around you know just old I'm a maple cool but let's say we wanted to have multiple of these and you wanted to space them out in an even way now one way you can do this is by hitting the little sticky mode thing here and then hold down control move it out and now it's out one like it sort of one unit or whatever then you hit one which is repeat active or repeat last stroke or something like that it just did one on the keyboard no no no interface normal one key and then you have these perfectly spaced out all the same and then you can move them around and you know have fun with them an easier way to do this is with a ramesh so and this just the other method just with the sticky mode enable just as more of a committal one so you're like okay I'm pretty sure I want to move these out now the other way is with a ramesh so with a Rhema shacked evaded all you have to do is see we want to do move it in the y-direction so let's do that and then repeat like four times and then you can like just offset it like this really handy because this way what we can also do is you can go in with dynamic subdivision activated and all of these are now active but if you then decide well I only want one you can just turn off very much again so it's a really quick way to sort of concept when doing hard surface in ZBrush and yeah I've found this really really useful actually so what we could then move on to is one of the features that they added oh when was that two versions ago three versions ago I don't know like ZBrush updates are so regular that you never really know now sometimes they have like three in two months and then they have like they had some years ago but it was quite often and then out there was like two years between each version yeah exactly so in whatever version that came out I think maybe it was r8 they introduced this little start thing up here which I think some people have been using for grouping you're sort of like you can collapse them so Auto collapse and then it collapse into the group so that's just a nice way to organize your your your Z tools if you have like a lot of Z tools or sub tools in here it can be quite hard to figure out where does where does one start and where does one end you know but with this enable what this actually does it it also impacts the order of operations when when it comes to boolean's so right now if we have live boolean's turned on and we have this cylinder you can see this just goes in let's just do slide one there so just intersects with this now if we were duplicated this again and subtract it this control D for duplicate yeah shift control D should control D now this affects both of these right and you might not want that even though like I say it's it's moved all the way in to the other cylinder but you don't actually want it to affect the cube what you can do is simply hit the start key here and now it'll only affect whatever comes below this or it'll like this will be like the parent and anything that comes below this will only affect the parent so that sort of leaves the start cube here alone and that means that we can just move our original cylinder in do what we want with that and then we have this additional cylinder which now only affects the second cylinder under the start so it's just a really handy way to organize your boolean's I guess because these can get quite complicated if you don't commit for a long time and you just sort of like play around so we definitely have a have a have a look at the start um sort of like order of operations option 2 to speed up your boolean workflow yeah can we use a grouping or it can just be used for boolean so yeah very handy stuff now the last thing I just want to show you is see here we made this wonderful object whoa this is super cool with queue mesh so for some some of these things I actually like to use the mouse just because it's more accurate but if you go into the B Z and M the zmodeler there's you know there's like a plethora of options here and where do you even start but what I wanted to show you today we want to show you today is the bevel option so if you go in and you just bevel there will something like this for example it has like as this this amount of bevel let's say this was the perfect amount of bevel and you want to do it again it's quite hard to like do it at the same time you could do this with some poly groups or something to have it mirrored over but if it's like spread all over your model but you want to make sure that you apply the same level of the same amount of bevel to every edge you can just drag it out and then without doing anything else you just click on the second edge now this way this way it preserves the amount so you have exactly the same bevel all the way around this is why using a mouse is also a bit nicer because then you make sure it's a click and not a drag yeah so these are all weird because if you wanted you can assign polygroups to these and it would be able around this but yeah it's just really the show of the power of the bevel click I call it it's not really advanced it's just like one of those like small hidden features within ZBrush I think yeah it's one of these which speeds up you've worked in over enough time yeah makes everything just a bit more comfortable so I think that about wraps it up that was probably like six tips but it was like five and a half because we skipped over one semi tip so but I hope you enjoyed this video and if you want to see more hard surface videos from us in the future make sure to like comment and subscribe yeah and let us know what's hard surface things you want to see is well then we might do some you

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 80,972

Keywords: 3d, sculpting, zbrush, concept, maya, tutorial, autodesk, film, vfx, animation, flippednormals, henning sanden, morten jaeger, creature, character, texturing, substance painter, substance designer, education, foundry, pixologic, nuke, art, fundamentals, art fundamentals, art school, art tutorials, blender, flipped normals, 3d tutorial, learning 3d, learning ZBrush, 3ds max, cubebrush, cube brush, gumroad, marvelous designer, photoshop, mari, blender guru

Id: r8u3zQHKuMg

Length: 11min 37sec (697 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 03 2018