#AskZBrush: “What's the best way to apply a mesh pattern to a dynameshed model using noisemaker?”

you this is just a trust and well back to another episode of ask ZBrush so we'd a question sent in from a user asking what's the best way to apply a mesh pattern to a dynamesh model using noise maker so here I just have a quick sculpt done inside of ZBrush and this tour so here is a dynamesh model that has about 1 million polygons and consists of one single poly group so now that I have this model at this stage say I want to go in and apply a mesh detail pattern to say this panel here this panel here and then maybe some of the other panels on my model how would I go about doing that inside of ZBrush so the process that I normally do is first I will take my dynamesh model I will break this model into polygroups I'll then use zremesher to zremesh this model to give me a lower resolution version I'll then unwrap that model to generate UV coordinates I'll then project the high details back to the zremesh model and then I'll use surface noise with those UV coordinates to apply the patterns where I want it so to start this process off we first need to break our torso here into different polygroups and we want to create these poly groups around the natural seems we've sculpted it this is going to allow us to have that mesh break up appropriately and look correct on our model so everywhere we have these seams sculpt it in you want to make sure that this is a different polygroups area on the surface of our model here there are quite a few ways to break a model up into poly grouping I'm going to talk about two the first one is using the slice brush and the second one is using masking an edge loop mask order so here I just have a poly sphere and it's one single poly group and I might turn on the poly frames here and I want to just come through and break this model up into a few poly groups the first method is using masking and the edge loop masked border so this process involves applying some masking to our model so holding control and applying a mask and then after this mask is generated we need to navigate over here to the geometry panel open up the edge loop tab and click edge loop masked border now after you click this and then clear your mask you're going to notice that masked area has a edge loop that's been applied all around the area and this is giving a nice clean cut to the surface ear model so if I isolate that poly group there you can see it this nice transition and it should mimic the masking we just had applied to the surface of our mesh so that is the first method to come through and mask out different areas on the model and apply new polygroup into that area the second method that works really well is using these sliced brushes so if I hold ctrl and shift on my keyboard and navigate over to the brush palette you'll see there are a few slice brushes here then we can choose from so as an example I'm going to just click on the slice circle brush here I'm an old ctrl and shift to drag this slice out and so you can drag it out like so hold spacebar to move it around and when you release it's going to slice the model and then generate a new polygroup area there so now I can isolate that you can see I have a nice cut around that polygroup and I have a new polygroup terria on my mesh so these are the two approaches that I use to cut a model up into polygroups so if I navigate back to my torso here which is one single poly group and come through and start masking these areas out so say I want to mask this area here fly a I'm asking like so and then I can come through and click on this edge loop masked border and notice it's going to give me a clean transition now for that polygroup and now I can just quickly isolate that area on the mesh like so now since this is an a/c brush video I'm going to go to the next version of the model here that has this process already done so this was using the slice and edge loop masked border options and I've gone through and applied different polygroup into the areas of my model here so I can hold ctrl and shift and click on these and kind of see the breakups in which I did so all these panels have their own poly grouping all the trim has its own poly grouping and then these endcaps have their own poly grouping as well so I've gone through now and broken this model up into these different areas now after this model is broken up like so I now need to create a zremesh version of this model and I'm going to use these poly groupings to establish cuts in my mesh and this is going to give me a clean cut for all these seams to do this first I want to make sure that I duplicate this model here because I'm going to use this version of the model to project the details back onto my zremesh version I'm going to duplicate that mesh and now I have a second version of the model here and now I'm going to navigate to the geometry tab here I'm going to open up the zremesher area so zremesher is going to take this model and it's going to generate a lighter weight version of the model with reduced topology so I can unwrap it and then use that unwrapped version with the surface noise options so I'm going to come over here and turn on keep groups I'm going to keep the smooth group border setting like so and it would change my target polygon count to something around 30 and then I'm just going to click zremesher so after this finishes you can rotate your around your model here and you'll see that all that poly grouping we applied to the mesh has held and if I turn on my poly frames here you can see that the model has drastically reduced polygon count compared to what we had originally so I'm down to 30000 which is a more reason amount to unwrapped compared to the million polygons version so now that I have the poly grouping established and I have the zero meshed version of the model we now can unwrap this model using UV master so I'm going to navigate to the top here and go to the UV master tab here turn on polygroups turn off symmetry and click unwrap so after this process is finished you should have quite a you UV Islands created so we can come back up to our Z plugin tab here and we're going to click on flatten it's going to take our model and flatten it out like so and now we need to come through and adjust our UVs so they're all going in a vertical or horizontal fashion so this should keep all those different parts of your model one-to-one but right now they're kind of oriented all over the place so we need to come through and change this orientation so we make sure that our mesh is all going in the directions we want it to go now with this flattened version you can manipulate these different UV islands and then unflattering inside of ZBrush now one option that's really handy is using the transpose options up here along with polygroup masking so first I'm going to select the move transpose line here and I'm going to navigate over to brush and I go to auto masking I'm going to turn on mess by polygroups to 100 now with this option on if I come through and click on an area that I want to transpose and then now say switch to rotate it's only going to rotate that poly group that I have selected so I come through with move and rotate now and reposition these UV Islands for my model just want to quickly come through and reposition the UVs so they're all going in a similar fashion just looking for these different ones that are mirrored and just lining them up through an just manipulating these UV coordinates around the model now these are the end caps so I'm not too concerned about their direction this is one of the areas in the front we're just repositioning these as I go so just doing some rotations on these switching to transpose move and moving them and that polygroup masking is going to allow me to keep all these parts separate in this stage make sure when you rotate using rotate and not transpose move move will end up distorting the UVs so after we're done with that we need to go back to the Z plug-in menu here and click on unflattering and now those UVs have been applied to the model like so so now the next step is that now we have our lower res version of our model with UV coordinates on it we need to project our high-resolution data back onto this mesh so with this model we first need to divide it up some because right now we do not have enough topology to support all the details we had in our original model so I'm in Avigail tree tab here and divide this up a few times so over a million there 1.9 million and now I'm going to make sure I have my original dynamesh version turned on so is clicking the eyeball icon here and with the zremesh diversion selected I'm going to navigate to the project tab here I'm going to change my distance to 0.1 and I'm going to click project all now you click this projectile button ZBrush is going to look at any visible sub tools and it's going to project those details onto your selected tool so I just have point 1 here sets and I have the high-res version turned on and now I'm going to click project all so after that process completed you'll see all the sculpting details have been projected back on our model here and this model has UV coordinates so now we're all set for using noisemaker to come through and add these different mesh patterns to our model so just to double check our UVs I'm going to scroll here to the texture map tab click this texture map here and I must select texture 19 texture 19 has these UV coordinate kind of layout system here and then go to the UV tab here go to create and change this repeat to say 2 by 2 and you can see that all those squares are in a vertical fashion so that's going to allow me to apply this mesh texture evenly wherever I want it on the model so this is good to go just turn that texture off so now the next stage in the process is to apply surface noise navigate to the surface tab here turn on noise this is going to open up noise maker I'm going to set this option to UV because we have established UVs on the mesh here and I'm going to load in our mesh pattern so I'm going to come in here and click on alpha on and off and then I'm going to select my mesh pattern here so it's just an alpha mapped texture click open next I'm going to flip the graph horizontally this is an allow me to get positive strength values to see the effect on my model here I'm going to set the mix basic noise option down to zero and then I'm going to change the alpha scale here to adjust the size of my mesh so you can see I have it like so I can change the scale to get this mesh exactly how I want it to be sized then after that is done I'm going to hit OK and you should now get a preview of this mesh on the model since we set those you v's up you'll see that the mesh is breaking correctly on all these seam lines so it's generating a more realistic effect on our model now another thing we only wanted mesh in certain areas on the model here so right now with surface noise that's being applied everywhere well you control where the surface noise is being applied by using masking so if I only want the mesh on this side and say on this side on the model so I need to mask everything out except for I want that mesh to be applied so first I'm going to isolate polygroup areas I don't want to mask so this panel here going to hold ctrl + Shift + click though isolate it and then ctrl + shift and click again will hide it I can hide the other one and then say maybe I want a mesh back as well so we're going to hide those two panels there so I end up with something like this now I want to mask everything else I'm going to hold ctrl and drag a mask across everything just going to mask that area out and then I'll hold ctrl + shift and just click off in an empty space and that's going to return the visibility of the other areas and now as you can see the unmasked areas are getting the surface noise and the masked areas are not if you want to toggle the visibility of the masks can go to masking hair and turn off view mask and I can see your model as how it would look with that mesh applied so now that this mesh is still active and go back to the surface modifier here and I can change the size and scale on this mesh like so then return back to I model and see it update across the surface here now if you want to apply this as sculptural details so say you're doing a 3d print you just need to navigate to the geometry panel here and then just simply click convert BPR to geo this will take your model and divide it up to the necessary resolution to hold that mesh surface so there we have our model turnoff poly grouping here with that mesh appearing in those areas so if you have any other additional questions related to ZBrush pipelines or processes please use the hashtag ask ZBrush on Twitter happy zbrushing you

Channel: Pixologic ZBrush

Views: 72,027

Rating: 4.9823303 out of 5

Keywords: pixologic, zbrush, 3D, askzbrush, sculpting, modeling, digital, art, design, creation, create, artwork, how to, tutorial, making of, surface noise, noise, surface, plugin, uv, uvw, mapping, master, polygroups, alpha, texture, tiling, depth, noisemaker, dynamesh, masking, mask, seams, panels, clothing

Id: Puwx5rDFOHo

Length: 15min 6sec (906 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 08 2015