#AskZBrush: “How can I create an IMM Curve Braid Brush?”

you you back to another episode of ask ZBrush so we had a question sent in asking how can I create an IMM curve braids brush so start off I just have ZBrush start up and I just have a poly sphere loaded in here and the question is asking about how to create a IMM brush that is a braid so making a piece of geometry that looks like a braid for say hairstyles or rope and then convert it to a curved brush so you can apply it to your model so the first thing I want to do is go over the tool palette over here and I'm just going to click on this polymesh3d star here and then click again to open up the quick pick menu here and then in here I'm going to select the cylinder 3d object so select that primitive there but turn on my poly frames and then I'm going to open up my initialize tab here so for this process here I'm just going to go through and model a quick braid shape and then set it up for an eye mm brush so I'm going to create a simple shape here out of the cylinder and then I'm going to duplicate that a few times to create my braid that I'll then will repeat with an eye mm curved brush so in the initialize panel here first I want to set this vidas ID so I have 12 divisions through here so I need 12 of these so I want 12 different segments so in the V divide area here I'm going to type in the number 15 and hit enter and that should give me 12 these so 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 and 12 and then I want to change my H divides two so right now I have a thirty two sided cylinder I'm going to come over here and set this to eight and now I should have a eight sided cylinder and after I have it set up like this I'm just going to the top of the tool palette here and I'm just going to click make polymesh3d so now I have taken that primitive of that cylinder there and I've converted it to a poly mesh next thing I'm going to do is switch to the move transpose line I'm going to zoom in a little bit and I must select one of the vertices at the bottom here and click and drag vertically and hold out and shift get my transpose to extend out like this I'm going to zoom out a little bit I'm going to click and drag this outer circle here and just extend this so I'm just looking to get a cylinder here that's a little bit longer and trying to get the topology here to be roughly squares sales something like this now doesn't have to be exact squares we will modify this a little bit later so now I've just gone through the process of taking that cylinder I've been initialized it in that initialize panel and then I've now just stretched out so it's elongated so the next thing I want to do is I need to add some bended areas to the shape here so I'm just going to mask out some of the parts of this and then just move them off to the side so I'm going to count down to divisions here and then at this division I'm going to mask and then I'm going to do three divisions from the bottom so one two and three and then mask this area so now I have this line of geometry masked and this line of job entry masked so two from the top and three from the bottom now I'm going to invert that mask summon hold ctrl and click off of the canvas here in a blank spot that will flip my mask let me switch back to the move transpose line I'm going to click and drag on a vertice and drag it out horizontally while holding shift and I'm going to grab the middle circle of the transpose line here and click and drag while holding shift again I'm just going to distort these songs so I'm looking to get a shape like this so I just want to get those pieces offset and this is going to generate that curve for the braid shape so they can intertwine together correctly now I'm going to clear my mask by just holding ctrl and clicking off and then I switch back to the draw mode here I'm not going to select the zmodeler brush so I'm gonna hit B on my keyboard when isolate by letter Z and then I'm going to press M and I should have the zmodeler brush selected I'm going to hover over a few of these edges here so this edge here I'm going to hold down alt and then click which is going to remove that edge and I remove that second edges at the top there and then remove this edge here and then this edge here and this edge here so now I have a wide area of topology a short area by area short area wide area short area wide area and a short area and if you took the shape and repeated it vertically it would match so you have the same connection point up here and then repeat this braid pattern and I'm just going to elongate this just a little bit more sometime switch to the move brush here little bit I'm gonna click and drag from the bottom here holding shift to drag a new transpose line up and then I grab this inner circle and hold shift just to extend that up a little bit so getting my braid a little bit elongated and so now I should have something like this now I just want to rotate to the side so I'm just going to rotate my model and hold down shift that will lock it into a position like so now to switch back to the draw mode here I'm just going to mask out a few more points so I want to mask each area right after the long section of geometry so in my mask this line this line this line and this line so it's going to hold ctrl and drag out and apply one mask ctrl and drag out second mask Patrol and drag out third mask and ctrl and drag out fourth mask now I want to virt the mask so holding ctrl and clicking off the canvas that should flip that I'm going to switch back to the move transpose line draw out another transpose line again so clicking and dragging holding shift and I grab the middle circle and then position it like so and this is now going off set all those unmasked points and I now should get this stair-step like function so you see now I'm generating this stair-step effect on this area of the braid and you can move this as much as needed you can always come back and modify this later as well so after that is complete so I'm going to go back to draw mode and clear my mask and now I want to go through and I want to add a edge loop in the middle of all these long parts here so I remove these edges initially just to allow me to move these things a little bit easier and give me this nice straight edge on this part of the cylinder here so now I just want to add those back in so I'm a hover over an edge loop here press spacebar to go into zmodeler edge action menu make sure I have the insert action selected I'm going to change my target to multiple edge loops and now I'm just going to click on one of these edge loops here and just drag but I want to make sure I drag so only one loop is being established and this is going to put that loop directly in the middle of those two outer edges and then repeat that process here here and here and then I'm going to clear my knee mask it's on my model and I'm going to hit ctrl W just to give that entire piece a new polygroup so now I've just made this single piece of geometry here so I've taken that cylinder and modified it this is what it looks like from one side and then from the front looks like this so now that I have this shape created I can now move this and it will generate the rest of the braids so I'm gonna switch back to the move transpose align here I draw another transplants line out from the bottom so clicking on a vertice holding shift and dragging up it's going to get a position like this and now I want to duplicate this so if you have a sub tool that contains no subdivisions you can use this process of being in transpose move mode and then income a process middle circle here and as you click on this circle if you hold down ctrl and then click this is going to duplicate the mesh so you see here that unmess part has now been duplicated now while I'm doing this I hold down shift and this will lock it in to that axis and what I want to do is I want to extend this up to give me a gap in between so you see this is the original position and I want to skip this area and I want to position it to here so you see now I'm getting this kind of braid twine effect on the mesh and after I have this positioned I want to now just repeat that one more times I'm going to press 1 on my keyboard and this will repeat the last stroke that I just did which was that copy or clone so pressing 1 again will just repeat that and this should now move that up again right above this spot here so now you can see I have these all spaced evenly and if I clear my mask now you'll see now I'm getting this braid effect through here so I'm gonna go to the tool pallet and go to the polygroup area here and open this up and I'm going to click Auto groups this is just going to assign a new polygroup to each of the geometry islands so now I can see the clearly defined area of this braid now I'm switch back to draw mode so coming over here and clicking this we're going to zoom in a little bit here and I just want to trace one of these groups here so you can see I have this part here so let's say it starts here I'm going to go like this and then it's going to end right here so I can trim off this part hold ctrl and shift drag that out hold down alt to trim that area and as you can see if I trace this one again so I need to get to this part here and this would give me a repeating pattern so ctrl + shift drag out this box hold down alt and then release and now remove that part and I now should have a tiling braid pattern here so each of these endcaps here should link up to the top I can now delete the hidden geometry so go to my tool palette here open up the geometry tab go to modify topology and now click delete hidden and now I should have a clear braid part now I can unify this to the world if you want to do any more modifications to it so I'm gonna go to the deformation palette here open this up now click unify and I'm going to click frame so that will just take that braid there it's going to put it back in the middle of the world and then frame it like so I can now modify this a little bit more if needed so it's looking a little bit wide on the sides here so to switch the move transpose line drag this out and then click the end circle and hold shift just to scale that a little bit there so now I have this part of the brain so now that I've created the geometry for my braid I just need to convert this into a insert mesh curved brush so I can now draw it out on a mesh so to do this you just need to position your model how you want it to draw out so I'm just going to make sure I have it positioned like this let me go to the brush palette up here and open this up and then click create insert mesh now since this file only has one sub tool and I only want to create a insert mesh with one single part you can see that the insert multi mesh is grayed out so if I had multiple sub tools or multiple braid versions I could then create a brush with multiple parts but for this braid here since it's only one sub tool you can see that it's grayed out and so I just want to click create insert mesh and when I click this it's going to take this model and it's going to give me a new insert mesh brush just clicking that your little dialog I'm just going to hit new to this and you can see now I have a new insert mesh brush over here so now I'm going back up to my tool palette I'm going to click on the cylinder 3d object and open this up I'm going to click the sphere 3d object I'm going to turn this into a poly mesh quick and then now I'm going to make sure it has no subdivisions to go to the geometry tab just make sure I has no subdivisions on it and now I can take this insert mesh braid here that is created and I can draw it out and you should get a result like this so this is now a insert mesh brush so I could draw it out multiple times on my mesh now I want to take this insert mesh brush and I want to have it follow a curve so I can making of a braid a rope or a braid of hair so I just need to turn this into a curve rush now so with that intervention brush still selected we come to the stroke palette up here open this up I'm going to open up the curve area here and I'm going to activate curve mode so now this has activated this curve process now if I draw this out with this brush like created it's not going to behave exactly what you're looking for so drawing this out you're going to get that curve but when you release you're going to get something like this now if you run into this it's probably related to any poly grouping that you have established on your mesh so if I undo this here and I go back to that stroke palette and I turn off curve mode and now draw this out as a normal insert mesh and then come over here and activate poly frames you can see that this mesh consists of three poly groups so when I did that Auto group process to see how those strands were going in that braid it established a poly group for each of these strands so by default when you generate an insert mesh curve brush if that curve brush has three polygroups ZBrush is going to try to process this as a try parts brush so this would be a brush like the zipper brush here so this brush is a try parts brush so it has a starting zipper and a ending zipper part and then it just repeats the middle and the process to create a brush like that uses poly grouping so since this insert mesh part here has three polygroups ZBrush is assuming that you want it to be a try parts brush I don't want this to be a try parts brush but since it has those three poly groups on it when you draw it out with curve mode like this you may end up getting a result like this where it's thinking it is a try parts brush and now it's giving you this effect so to fix this we just need to modify how this curve is being seen in the brush palette so make sure your inner stroke palette you have curve mode active then go over the brush palette over here and open this up now we're going to locate the modifiers area here and open this up and since this part had three polygroups this button became active so I'm going to disable this and now if I draw this out again on the mesh here turn off my poly frames here and increase my garage you see now I'm going to get this effect so now it's giving you more of the result you're looking for so it's taking that insert mesh part and it's now duplicating it across it's curved now you'll notice at this stage that it has not been welded so I'm getting seams between each of those breakups so to fix this and go back to the brush palette over here open this up and right next to that tri parts button in the modify area here there is a weld points so you want to enable that you probably also want to enable the stretch option probably to increase your curve resolution to the maximum and also increase your bend angle to the maximum so now that I have these sets come back to my curve and click on it it should update with those properties and now you can see I have all those holes are now welded together and if I drag this out I'm getting this effect so I should be able to redraw this curve anywhere on my mesh and as I draw it out I'm going to get that IMM part following the curve and now I can apply it to my model now there are a few more attributes you can change here just when you're establishing this on your mesh one thing is the depth or where this is drawing out so if I rotate the model here you can see that that the curve is following the surface of the model through this area and you can see that the part here is sitting directly above that curve so this effect is occurring because of the depth so if I go to the brush palette here open this up and I open up the depth area and here you have an embed value and so right now this is set to 37 so at 37 the IMM part here that you have applied to this curve is going to sit directly on top of the curve if I change this to say 0 and now draw this curve out this is going to sit directly in the middle of the curve so as you can see here this part is now in the middle of the curve here and you see it's going into the surface of the model so if I wanted to expand off the surface and go back to that brush menu over here I can change the embed value to a higher number so let's go to 100 and now drag this on the surface there and now you can see that this curve is floating on top of the surface so if you want your part to embed into the mesh you can control that by going to the depth pallet underneath the brush menu over here and just changing this embed value now after you have the curve drawn out you can also apply this to the mesh and to do this you just need to snapshot that curve so the button to control this lives in the stroke palette here and if you one up the curve functions area in here you have a snapshot this is also hotkey to the number five so if you press five on your keyboard it's going to lock that curve in and it's going to allow you to draw another one then you press five lock that one in and draw another one press five and you just keep drawing curves out across your mesh now if you don't press five you're going to be able to modify the curve so if I can come across the curve here and I can modify this after I draw it out and you can even extend it so if you move your mouse near one of the endpoints of the curve you're going to this little red line and this is going to allow you to extend the last curve you drew so you can see I can extend that out and then so that will allow you to modify that a little bit after you have a drawn out and then once you're happy with it you press five and then draw out another one so that is the process of creating a simple braid brush now if you want to modify they shape your braid in any way you can always go back to your original mesh which was this part here and you can modify this then you go back to the brush palette and create a new insert mesh brush and then reapply those settings and you can keep changing the brush as needed so if you have any other questions related to ZBrush pipelines or processes please use the hashtag ask ZBrush on Twitter happy zbrushing you

Channel: Pixologic ZBrush

Views: 57,235

Keywords: pixologic, zbrush, 3D, askzbrush, sculpting, modeling, digital, art, design, creation, create, artwork, how to, tutorial, making of, braid, hair, rope, brush, imm, parts, insert, mesh, cylinder, 3d, primative

Id: rPUr4FMNgLE

Length: 17min 2sec (1022 seconds)

Published: Sat May 13 2017