5 Tips to IMPROVE your ZBRUSH workflow!

what's up guys eric here and i just wanted to go over five quick tips that can help speed up your zbrush workflow these are those things that seem very small and insignificant but over the course of using zbrush for a long time they really start to add up and save you a lot of time and that's the interesting thing about digital art whether you're doing 3dr or editing or whatever there's no super fast shortcuts without sacrificing massive quality there's areas where you can have tiny little improvements in efficiency that can add up to save significant time and so these are five things that i think just kind of help your sanity and help make your workflow and zbrush more efficient let's check them out this first one is either one that is slowly destroying your sanity and your will to live or you've already figured it out and it's very obvious to you and that is backface masking so if you've ever been in a situation where you're trying to sculpt say a helmet or a wrist guard or any piece of armor and you're sculpting on it and you've been working on it for a while and suddenly you turn to the other side of the model and it's all messed up you've pulled the geometry in from the back side of the model and now it's super goofy and you're trying to smooth it and it's just getting worse and you don't know what's going on and you've probably found some weird thread in the internet that's given you an extremely convoluted way to fix it but no this is just back face masking so if you go to brush auto masking and turn on back face mask that's going to keep you from sculpting on the inside faces of a mesh that has thickness but it's thin so it's very useful do keep in mind that back face mask is brush dependent so when you go to hit shift to smooth it's going to be disabled or if you switch to any other brush it's going to be disabled so you do have to turn it on per brush so if it is something that you use a lot it's probably worth putting somewhere on your ui so it's more easily accessible because it is kind of buried in that brush palette next up is what i think is a much faster way to create primitive geometry so you know typically what you do is you might go to insert or you go to a different sub tool choose a primitive from the subtool palette scroll all the way to the bottom of the palette go to initialize choose how many edge loops you want all that sort of stuff scroll back up to the top and then make polymesh 3d so it's not that it takes a long time but it's like a good amount of clicks to create a primitive and this is a much faster way i think so in your project you could just take any sub tool and duplicate it and then go to your gizmo so just hit w bring up your gizmo you'll see the little gear in the top left and once you hit that gear you'll have an entire shelf of primitives that you can choose and you can go ahead and choose one so we'll choose a cylinder or cube for example and it's going to instantly turn your currently selected sub tool into that new primitive and it's ready to go but if you want to adjust the edge loops or anything on it you have these little cone tools in the corners and you can go ahead and try those and when you mouse over it'll tell you what they do and you can change the amount of edge loops on that primitives i think this is just a very efficient way to create new primitive geometry without as many clicks as the typical methods next up staying in the gizmo tool palette for a minute now there is a whole bunch of really great tools in this palette so if you've never really explored the gizmo transform tools i really encourage you to do so and just check them out because there's tons of things that can help you save time and get results that you might not be able to otherwise one of the tools that i want to focus in on is the extender and so what the extender does is it allows you to be able to create additional thickness or length to a mesh and then be able to control the amount of topology in that newly created area of that mesh and typically what we might do is just grab your mesh scale it or mask an area and scale it down and you end up messing up the distribution of polygons on your mesh so then then you'll do a zero mesh reproject the detail like it kind of becomes a whole thing the extender is kind of neat because you can actually extend the center chunk of your mesh so for example in this loincloth we can go ahead and make it wider and it creates a new polygroup in the middle and then with the little tools in the corner you can go ahead and drag one of those and increase the amount of edge loops that you have in that area so then you can just set the edge loops to be roughly the same density as the edges of the rest of the mesh and then you're ready to go so just kind of an interesting more methodical way to increase the length or width of something instead of doing it by hand which is kind of cool next up let's go back and talk about zero measure for a minute now i have a whole zero measure video on this channel that you can go back to i do plan on updating that at some point because i feel like my editing and my videos have gotten better since then but for now that video still has a lot of really great information so if you're interested in zero measure go ahead and check it out however i just wanted to touch on one thing about zero mesher that could be useful to you in the near term and that is using masks to create poly groups before we use your mesh now typically what we do is we just have a face we're working on it we run a zero mesh and then we just keep sculpting on it we're like oh good enough the geometry is kind of sloppy but i'm just trying to get it done but if you just take a little bit more time for setup you can get significantly better results and so what i like to do sometimes is use my mask brush and i will mask a couple areas that help guide the edge loops and topology for the zerometer algorithm and so in this example what i'm going to do is mask the eye cavities hit ctrl w to create a polygroup i'll mask the ear and turn that into a polygroup the nose the mouth just some key areas you can kind of play with how many you may or may not need but you can see in this example just by doing those going to zero measure choosing keep groups and then running the zero measure you can just see on the side by side how much better the zero mesher algorithm was able to create natural edge flow and topology versus the default one so pretty significant result for one or two more minutes of effort so i think that's pretty cool and definitely worth doing last up i just want to show you a lazy way to make leather straps obviously the fastest way to make straps is by having a imm brush for leather straps and then just generating a curve and drawing your imm brush on that curve but if you don't have a library of imm brushes or you don't have one that quite fits the style that you're going for this is a great way to just create some basic geometry that you can sculpt straps with what this is doing is controlling visibility through masking and so what we need to do is first take the mesh where we want leather straps so in my case we're going to add some straps to the knee area on this character so i'm going to go ahead and duplicate those pants i'm going to use my lasso tool to mask a section of that knee off and then i'm going to go down to visibility and hit hide pt and that's going to hide it and now we're going to hit outer ring and that's going to give us just two of the outside poly loops of our new area but if we hit grow grow will begin expanding our selection so we can just keep hitting grow until we get the thickness of leather straps that we want now before we can go any further we need to delete our hidden geometry so we're just going to go up to modify topology delete hidden so that we know that we don't have anything else from there we can go down to deformation polish by features just drag that slider and it's going to smooth out the edges go back up to geometry zero mesher and just run a really low zero mesh until you kind of get nice clean geometry and then we've got some planes that we can use for leather straps if you want to add thickness just go to z modeler and go to extrude all polygons and pull those out give them a little bit of thickness or you can use panel loops or any other ways too but i like to use z modeler and then you're good to go so pretty cool and just takes like a minute or two and you have some straps so this was just a quick one this week i just wanted to share a couple things that aren't like huge concepts or really complicated concepts but just tiny little things that you can literally start adding to your workflow today and they will help speed things up and just help make you a more efficient modeler and really just trying to get you guys in the mindset of trying to find small ways to be more efficient with how you model if you invest the time up front and figuring out how to speed things up in your workflow is going to pay off in the end it's like the old adage of work smarter not harder so sometimes you have to spend more time upfront figuring things out to have the payoff down the road oftentimes it can be worth it so i hope these were helpful if you like this kind of content please consider subscribing if you have questions or comments go ahead and leave a comment in the comment section below and i try to get back to everybody thank you so much for watching i'll see you next time and don't stop creating take care you

Channel: hart

Views: 68,376

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, zbrushtutorials, hand, hands, sculpting hands, hands zbrush

Id: yPSr0FhjBp8

Length: 8min 51sec (531 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 12 2022