#AskZBrush: “How can I use Live Boolean to create a watertight mesh for 3D Printing?”

you you this is Joseph trust of ask ZBrush so we'd a question sent in asking how can I use live boolean to create a water-type mesh for 3d printing so start off by just to have ZBrush loaded up and I have an example model file here loaded in that was created by Tomas Rachelle he was nice enough to allow me to borrow his model for this ask ZBrush video so the question is asking about using the live boolean system to create watertight meshes inside of ZBrush so first I just want to demonstrate how you may already be using ZBrush and say dynamesh to generate a watertight mesh so as an example here I have Groot and I also have his base here and these are two separate sub tools so let's say I have this model you know good to go and then I decide I want to add a base to it so now I have these two separate sub tools but they're just intersecting geometry right now so I want to take these two meshes and apply them together and generate one single water type mesh so you may be used to doing this with the dynamesh process so for this process you navigate to the tool palette and make sure you have your sub tools visible that you want to merge together to create a single water type mesh then you come down to the merge area here and you do a merge visible this will now give you a new tool at the top and then after you have this new tool at the top that now consists of those two separate parts you now come through and dynamesh this so you go to the geometry palette you'd open this up and you go to the dynamesh area type in say 512 turn off blur and then click dynamesh now dynamesh is going to look at your model and it's going to distribute even topology across the entire surface and while it's doing this if you have any inner penetrating geometry it's gonna weld those pieces of geometry together giving you a single watertight mesh so if I take Groot now and say just kind of hide part of them here you can see that he has an entire inner cavity now so he's a completely solid watertight model now one thing when using the dynamesh process you'll notice that it is going to change the topology across the entire mesh and depending on what your model looks like you may reach a cap for dynamesh so you may have some details like say with Groot here that you're kind of losing or getting lost after performing this dynamesh function so this may not be what you want to happen so at this stage you can do a few things you could have duplicated your model first and then it could divide it up the dynamesh version of the model with traditional subdivisions and then project the details back from your high-resolution model but that also takes some time so instead of doing that process what we can do is we can use the live boolean system in intersection mode to come through and just merge those two parts together which is going to give us that nice watertight mesh but it's not going to change any of our existing topology so let's go back to our original group file here or we applied the dynamesh so this is one with the two separate sub tools here and instead of merging these together and using that dynamesh function we're now going to activate live boolean now to activate the live boolean system just need to navigate to this live boolean button here and simply turn it on and this will enable the live boolean now with lively and active and come over my subtil palette I can set say one of my models as a start group by clicking this arrow icon here and then any models that are underneath this start group till it comes to another start group will be processed with the live boolean preview so as an example with the base here I can come over here and set this to now subtractive mode and if I go to my gizmo 3d and move this you'll see that that base is going to be subtracted in real time out of my model so this is a real time preview of the boolean process so you'd come through and manipulate your models and change things and see this boolean effect happen on the fly now the boolean system is often used with this subtractive functionality however you can also use it with the intersection functionality which is this one here and when we use it with the intersection functionality it's gonna work similar to how dynamesh was doing when I merge the model and then read dynamesh so first going to look at Groot and process that model then it's going to take the base and apply that to the model of Groot and when it does this process any areas where the intersection occurs it's going to fuse those together and then create a seamless surface so to process this we now to select Groot we can now go to the tool palette and come down here to the boolean option under the sub tool menu and we simply click make boolean mesh and this is now going to process the start group we have here so which is our groot sub tool and the base sub tool underneath it with the live boolean system just clicking this button and you see the live billing and was gonna process and then at the top we should have a new tool created now I can select that here and you can see this is the resulting mesh we have now if I turn on my poly frames you can see it's still kept the poly grouping so it kept the poly grouping for the base and the poly grouping for Groot as well but if I go down here to the polygroups area and open this up and then now do an auto groups this is going to look for any geometry islands in the mesh and you can see that it is now one solid mesh now another thing nice about this live boolean system is that the original file I had for Groot if I come back to here and select this quick I'll just go to solo had some hollowing already done to it now when I use the dynamesh functionality if you had any inner areas that were generating kind of holes or hollowing effects when you dynamesh it's going to remove those inner areas one thing nice about the live boolean system is that it's gonna respect any hollowing you've already done so if I go back to my boolean version of Groot here and now say a pend a cube here and now I can use the live billing system to preview what a slicer would do for this model for 3d printing so I can set the start group for the top sub tool here for the cube and set this to subtractive and then activate that turn off solo here I turn off my poly frames and then switch to the gizmo 3d and so now I can move this cube and as I go across the model I'm gonna be able to see that shell so you can see it's kept that internal shell from the original file and it's still welded correctly to the base so I've just used the live billing system to merge these two models together to give me a nice watertight mesh and it's also retained that inner structure now if you want to get rid of the inner structure so let's say you had Groot already carved out and then you attach the base to but now you don't need that inner hollowing anymore after you do the live billion process and we did that Auto groups function we now should have that separate area inside of group as its own polygroup so if I hold down ctrl and shift to get select rectangle brush and then click on Groot and then click on Group one more time you can see this is the inner area or that Energy AMA tree for Groot here that's creating the hollowing so I can just show this and then flip the visibility by holding ctrl and shift with the select rectangle brush I'm just dragging out on a blank spot on my canvas and now I should only have the outer shell visible now I go to the tool palette I go to the geometry area open this up and go to modify topology and I can now do a delete hidden and that will not remove that inner hollowing and now I should have a completely solid model so I go test this again by using the labelling system with this cube let me just select that cube quick turn off my poly frames go back to the gizmo 3d and then move this and you'll see it's cutting back into that model again to show me a slicing effect here as you can see I'm no longer have that hollow area inside of Groot so he's entirely solid now so at this stage I can export them out for 3d printing now as in another example let's say you've already gone and taken your model and you've already merged it together so here I have another example file here this is just a truck model here that was created inside of ZBrush and let's say I've already gone through and merged all my sub tools together so if I turn on my poly frames you can see that this model consists of multiple parts and they're all kind of intersecting so instead of multiple sub tools I have a single sub tool with multiple parts and I want to take this sub tool now and generate one single water type mesh so removing all those intersection so if you've already gone through and merged it together you may have a bunch of parts on this you don't really want to split them back out to do the labelling process so what you can do is you can just append another sub tool so I come to the sub tool palette here and go to append and click this and I'm just going to penned in another cube here I'm gonna select this cube and I'm going to move this off to the side and then scale this down just a little bit and the key here is that we just need another sub tool so that we can process our mesh with live boolean so the boolean process does require more than one sub tool so by creating a cube sub tool and now placing it off in space and then coming over here and setting our truck as a start group we process with the live billing system it's going to look at this model here and any intersecting geometry on this mesh is going to get welded together as well and then it's going to take the cube and attach that so it's going to do the intersection process on any tool that you have in your scene so if you have a add a tool that's already merged together or maybe partially welded you can use this to come through and finalize all the welding in there and get that solid mesh so with the truck selected here and a cube that's just floating out in space set to the intersection mode now go to the boolean area under the sub tool palette i'm gonna click make boolean mesh this is now going to process the model with the live boolean system here and it's gonna give me a new tool out of this and after that's complete we can just go back up here to the top and i should have a new mesh created so there's our new mesh here so you can see it's gone through and kept telepods groups i had on the original model but if i go down to the bottom of the tool pallet and go to the polygroups area and do an auto groups you're gonna see that i only have two polygroups now so i have the truck and i have the cube so i just appended this cube so I could use the boolean process to make the mesh already had merged together watertight so I can now remove this cube saying old control and shift and select it and then ctrl and shift and click it again to hide it then go back to the geometry tool modify topology area and do a delete hidden which is not gonna remove that cube and now I should have the truck here as a single watertight mesh so test it again and use the live boolean system one more time I can append in another cube object set that cube object to subtractive make sure my truck is a start group turn off my poly frames and now go to the gizmo 3d make sure I have that cube selected I can move this up and then say scale it out and now I can drag this through the model to get that slice effect so now I've just gone through and taken all those intersecting parts that this sub tool had and welded them all together to get me a nice watertight mesh as you can see all the details were held because the live boolean system is only going to modify topology at the transitional areas so if I turn on the poly frames here with the line you can see all my original topology has held and stay so another nice workflow for using the live billing system to take models and turn them watertight and also hold all the existing topology you have on your models so if you have any other questions related to ZBrush pipelines or processes please use the hashtag ask ZBrush on Twitter happy zbrushing

Channel: Pixologic ZBrush

Views: 32,383

Rating: 4.9357142 out of 5

Keywords: pixologic, zbrush, 3D, askzbrush, sculpting, modeling, digital, art, design, creation, create, artwork, how to, tutorial, making of, Live, Boolean, Intersection, Intersecting, union, subtraction, multiple, hollow, shell, watertight, process, dynamesh, topology

Id: vzifB1xtR00

Length: 11min 55sec (715 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 17 2018