#AskZBrush: “Do you have any tips for creating cables and wires in precise locations?”

you you this is Joseph trust and welcome back to another of ask ZBrush suite a question sent in asking do you have any tips for creating cables and wires in precise locations so to start off and just to have ZBrush loaded up and I just have the ZBrush searchlight here loaded in and the question is asking about generating cables and wires so as an example let's say I want to draw a wire from this part here and have it go all the way to the back over here so are there any workflows or processes that can be used to generate these in a precise fashion so the primary method for creating wires on models is to use an IMM brush with the curve mode active so in example this I have a wire brush here selected and if I go to my stroke palette here and open this up and go to the curve area you can see the curve mode is turned on so with this IMM brush if I come across my mesh and if I just click and drag and going to start drawing a curve out now after I release this is going to now generate a mesh across that curve now with this mesh being drawn across this curve the curve is still active so I can come in and click and drag on this curve and I can start manipulating it kind of change how this is being affected around my mesh now this process can sometimes take a while especially if you want to line the curves up specific areas on your mesh so if you want to move this down here and then maybe move this over here you can see that this process may take a bit of time so another process you can use is you can generate a mesh and then have the curve follow that mesh and then after that curve has been drawn across that mesh you can then apply the IMM curve brush to that curve so example this let me just undo this get back to where it was originally and instead of drawing a curve out this time what I'm going to do is I'm going to append in AC sphere object so I'm go to the subtil palette over here let me go and click on app end and from the quick pick menu here I'm gonna select the Z sphere and this will now append a new Z sphere to my scene I'm gonna scroll all the way down to the bottom of my subtil palette and then select that C sphere then turn off perspective and zoom out a little bit then you'll see I now have a Z sphere sitting directly in my model so with the Z sphere being appended now why don't you do is I just want to scale the Z sphere down to be the size of the wire that I want to generate and then I want to place it where I want that wire to start from so I'm gonna switch to the scale option here at the top and I'm just gonna scale the Z sphere down and turn on transparency so I can see this scale it down now I'm gonna switch to move and I'm just going to move it to where I want it to start from you can zoom in a little bit here scale it down a little bit more because I want it to just be the size of this part here I'm gonna rotate to the side and move it out from the interior surface here so switching back to move moving it up here and just making sure that that Z sphere is about right there so now I've just taken that Z sphere that I've appended and I've scaled it down and then I've repositioned it so it's at the location of where I want the wire to start from now after I have this created things which does solo here quick and turn off transparency I now want to start drawing some more Z spheres from this so I'm gonna switch to draw mode I'm gonna switch to a smaller draw size here and I'm gonna come across the surface here and I'm going to simply click and hold and while holding want to press shift and this is now going to generate this effect so this is adding a new Z sphere to my existing Z sphere and it's capturing the size of the original z sphere so these two z spheres here should now be the same size so now I can switch back to move and move this out a little bit here and then get out of solo I know if I rotate around I'm getting something like this so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to use the Z sphere and now I can manipulate the Z spheres to how I want this wire to run so I can switch back to draw and then I can add a new Z sphere here and go back to move I can start manipulating this z sphere here and just reposition it around my mesh so let's make this wire a little bit tricky let's have it running underneath through here like this I can just add another Z sphere by switching back to draw switching back to move so I can move these and then draw another one and then move it so I can funnel my wire through here do something like this and the process for manipulating the Z spheres is simply just drawing and moving so you can stretch out to the extent switch the draw you can then add a Z sphere in the middle of the chain there and then you go back to move and you can start moving this around so I'm just going to move these these spheres and just wrote to my model and just start positioning these Easter is where I want this wire to be this process can take a little bit of time depending on how complex you want your wires to be but this is going to give you a really nice and exact result so I'm just gonna go through and speed up this process as I draw the rest of these Easter's here and establish a nice smooth line you so now after I've completed that I now have this nice Z sphere wire through here and by using the Z spheres you control how they flow through your mesh here I think seeing having go up and over around things in between things so you have a lot of flexibility and control when using this process so now after you have your Z sphere mesh created we now just need to turn this into an adaptive skin so I'm go to the tool palette over here I'm gonna scroll all the way down to the bottom I'm gonna open up the adaptive skin area in here I'm going to set my dynamesh resolution down to zero and I'm gonna change my density to one and then click preview or press a on my keyboard now after you do this process and I turn on my poly frames here you can see this is the result I'm getting and as you'll notice the topology here is spread evenly across the entire area so this even spread of topology makes using Z spheres really nice for generating wires and other things on your meshes so now after I have this generated I now just need to come back to the adaptive skin area under the tool palette and then click make adaptive skin this is now going to generate a new tool at the top here so now if I select that tool you can see this is the result I am getting here and now I just need to append this back into my original scene so I'm gonna go and select my original searchlight again go back to the sub tool palette here I'm gonna go to the append option here click this and then any quick pick menu here I'm gonna select the skin that was just generated and this should now append it to my scene I can hide my Z sphere here and then I'll simply select the adaptive skin sub tool so now with the adaptive skin sub tool selected there's a few things we need to do now to modify this mesh some activate solo here and zoom in a little bit first thing I want to do is give this one single poly group so do this I'm gonna press ctrl + W on my keyboard that's gonna give this an entire single poly group next thing I want to do is I want to trim off the ends of my adaptive skin here so I just want this to be a cylinder and I don't want this taper to end so do this I'm gonna hold down ctrl + shift to get the select rectangle brush I'm gonna drag this out across the end of the mesh here and hold down alt and that's just going to hide those polygons there and I'm gonna do this for both ends of the wires in that top area and then this bottom area so coming across dragging out holding ctrl and shift pressing alt to turn these selection box red and then releasing and that will hide that area and after those parts are hidden I now just need to do a delete hidden so I'm gonna go back to the tool palettes I'm gonna go to the geometry tab and then we go to modify topology and I'm gonna click delete hidden and now that should have removed those hidden parts of the mesh there and now I just have the mesh with those end caps trimmed off so now the next thing you need to do is I want to assign some more polygroups to this mesh here and do this and use the zmodeler brush so I'm going to just zoom in a little bit here lemon navigate the brush palette over here and open this up I'm gonna locate the zmodeler brush here with the zmodeler brush selected I'm gonna hover over one of the edges here I'm gonna press spacebar to go in the zmodeler edge action menu I'm gonna find the action of polygroup and make sure my target is poly loop and I'm just come across one of these and click and I'm just gonna tap alt to give it a more vibrant color here so I've just added a new polygroup to one of the edge loops I'm gonna locate another edge loop right next to it and click and assign a different polygroup so now I have this poly group that's going all the way around that edge loop I have this poly group going around that edge loop and then I have my other poly group which has the rest of the topology so now that I have my mesh hair broken in these three polygroups I just need to hide my original poly group here so I'm gonna hold down ctrl + shift again make sure I have that select rectangle brush selected I'm gonna click on one of the vertices of that polygroup this is now going to isolate it and then clicking again will hide it and now I should just have the two polygroups visible across my mesh now go back to the geometry tab here and do a delete hidden and that is now going to delete everything but these two edge loops here with those different polygroups now that I have my mesh like this I can now use the frame mesh option and this will generate a curve between the poly group division so I navigate up here to the stroke palette and open this up I'm going to open up curve functions area and then in here you can see there's this law frame mesh button I want to turn off border and creased edges I want to make sure I just have polygroups turned on and now and click free mesh and you'll see that I'm going to get a curve drawn along the poly group division of that mesh so now I've just generated a curve across that area so now if I get out a solo you can see I have something like this so I have that single sided mesh that consists of those two poly loops and now I have a curve running all the way down it so now that I have this curve running down it now I can go and just select an IMM curve brush and then simply click on this curve and it's going to take that curve brush and it's going to follow this curve that I generated so now I go back to my brush palette over here I'm gonna select that wires tool again and I'm just going to click on this curve here and you'll see that my wires are now going to follow that exact position on that curve now you will notice that this isn't fully matching where I had it originally and this is because of the depth setting that the IMM curved brush currently has so I can undo this to get back to just my curve there and go back to the brush palette up here and go to the depth area and in hearing see my embed value is set to 91 so this will allow me to draw this insert mesh curve on a surface and it would stick right on the surface so I want it to go entirely into the surface which is going to match how I originally drew out those Z spheres so I'm gonna change my embed value to the negative number and which it currently is so I'm gonna change it from 91 to negative 91 and hit enter and now if I come across and click on this curve and now it's going to take that and apply to the curve and you can see instead of it sticking out it's now getting closer to where I want it to be now you have to play with your draw size some when using this to make sure that it fits perfectly in that area so this is still a little bit too small so I'm gonna undo this of my draw size to say 24 and then click on that curve again so that's getting a little better there so let's go up one more time let's go to say 28 and then click on that so there we go that looks pretty good going all the way through the mesh there and it looks like it's fitting those two end caps there I can now get rid of the extra geometry here so I can get rid of the curve so I go to the stroke menu here and go to the curve function area and click delete which will delete the curve and then I go back to the subtool palette and then I go to split and I can now do split unmasked points which will now split off the initial Z spheric apology that I modified and now I will just have a new subtool that just consists of that curve so here we have that nice curve and it's flowing all the way through the mesh like so so this process is really handy especially for doing complex wiring on meshes so you just append a Z sphere to your scene then you manipulate that Z sphere to generate the effect of where you want that wire to go and then you convert that to an adaptive skin you set up some poly grouping to allow you to establish a curve line through the edge loops of that mesh and then after that curve is generated you can take any insert mesh brush and apply it to that curve and you can get that exact result you're looking for so now if you had an IMM brush as well set up with some nice polygroups so I turn my poly frames here and turn off line you can see how these nice poly groups that were created with this I'm and brush as well you can now modify these with move and use the mask by polygroup function so if I switch to say the move brush here and then go to the brush palette and then go down here to the auto masking and turn mask by polygroups on I can now come in with a large draw size here and click and drag on these poly groups and I can now start freeing some of these wires to so maybe they're not as bunched up all the way through the cord here so maybe a little a bunch up at the ends and you can start seeing how you can start playing with all these things inside a ZBrush and get some really interesting results on your meshes so I hope that helps so if you have any other questions related to ZBrush pipelines or processes please use the hashtag ask ZBrush on Twitter happy zbrushing

Channel: Maxon ZBrush

Views: 70,526

Keywords: pixologic, zbrush, 3D, askzbrush, sculpting, modeling, digital, art, design, creation, create, artwork, how to, tutorial, making of, wires, cables, imm, brushes, insert, mesh, modify, zspheres, edge, loops, frame, curve, mode, mask, polygroups

Id: s6WSC9QTab8

Length: 14min 22sec (862 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 09 2017