Bead Setting in ZBrush

hi i'm scott from the rare grande jewelry tech team and today i'm going to be showing you beat setting inside zbrush so let's get started [Music] so the type of bead setting we're going to be doing today is more for a production style bead setting so we're going to be adding stones of course and we are going to be adding our own little beads or prongs and a cutter as well to create a seat for the stone typically in a more traditional style of bead setting you are cutting the seats yourself you're raising the beads yourself with a graver and at the end of the video i'm going to show you how to adapt this technique we're learning in the video for a more traditional style of beat setting but for this video we are going to be doing more of a production style so before we get started you're going to need a couple of plugins so in my z plugin menu uh you'll want to install the imm draw size plugin and the ring utility plugin those can be found at pixellogic.com in their resource center and in the z plugin area you will find the ring utility plug-in and the imm draw size you can download them there is a readme document inside each explaining how to install them and once you restart zbrush you're ready to go so next we're going to need a stone to start off with so in the z plug-in menu we are going to use the ring utility plug-in for this if you try to bring in a gemstone just on its own more often than not you will get an error message it's best if you have some kind of sub tool in your scene already and bring the gemstone in that way so what i'm going to do is while i have the ring utility plug in up i'm just going to generate a ring uh it doesn't matter what it is because we're just going to generate it bring the stone in and then delete it so i'm not going to mess with any of the settings i'm just going to click create ring base mesh and once i have that in there i can go back to the ring utility plug-in open up the gemstones menu and start inputting my settings so we are going to do a round stone since bead setting is typically done with smaller more accent stones we are going to keep it pretty small so under dimension i'm going to key in 1.5 and enter and i'm going to uncheck on band and then click add gemstone subtool so now we have our gemstone in our scene so i can go to the subtool menu and just delete everything that was generated when we created the ring so i'm going to click that and click delete and then delete and delete so we are just left with the stone now the first thing i need to do is i need to size this stone because when you generate a stone in ring utility it it automatically names it in this case around 1.5 millimeters but that's not necessarily the size it's going to be in our scene so if we go to the geometry palette and go down to size you can see that mine came out to be about 0.11 millimeters so we need to size that up to 1.5 that way when we use our transpose tool to measure things everything's going to come out the right size the whole point of what we're doing with this imm draw size plugin is we want to be able to deposit these stones and prongs and cutters and whatever else we have in here on the surface in the exact size that we want so in the xyz i'm going to key in 1.5 and enter and now i have my stone so let's go ahead and check it real quick so at the top i'm going to click on move scale or rotate to bring up the gizmo and then i'm going to turn off the gizmo so i get the transpose line and now i can snap to one side of the stone left click and drag snap to the other side and check my measurements and as you can see at the top mine measurements are not correct it actually says 19.0458 now what is causing that is a scaling slider down here in the export menu you may have seen this before it seems to happen with the ring utility plug-in but that can affect your measurements so under the export palette under this where it says scale mine says 12.69936 this needs to say one so i'm gonna click into there key in one and enter and now i should be able to take another measurement and everything comes out the way it's supposed to so there we go so at the top 1.4997 ver pretty much a 1.5 so now that we have the stones we can start adding some prongs to this so i'm going to go to the sub tool palette and go to append and i'm going to append in a cylinder right now it is way too big so i need to select it in my subtool menu bring up the gizmo turn that back on and i'm just going to scale it down in xyz until it becomes a bit more of a manageable size i can turn it on the side do a rotate while holding shift and rotate it 90 degrees so while we got it highlighted let's go ahead and check the sizing in our geometry palette so right now uh it is saying that this cylinder is 2.27 millimeters long and about 0.86 in diameter i want to bring that down a little bit this prong is pretty large for such a small stone so i can either key in the exact dimensions in the x and z boxes or i can use my gizmo scale in xyz and just look at the sliders as they come down to kind of dial it in so we're at about .6.605 that's that's going to be just fine and now i can go ahead and place it so i'm going to use the little corners of my gizmo here just to manually kind of move it over i don't have to be super exact with this because the prong is going to get burnished down it's going to get shaped with a beading tool so i don't have to be super exact but i want to be pretty close i don't want it to be you know off over here over here over here i want to get it pretty close to where where it needs to be next i'm going to go ahead and uh do a bit of sizing on it it's a bit long at the moment when we place this on our geometry we don't want a lot of this coming down below the surface the surface of our geometry is going to be right here along the girdle that's where the stone is going to sit so everything down here is under the surface of the metal and everything up here with the crown is going to be above the surface so we just want a bit of geometry on the prong that will overlap what we're going to be putting it on so that way we get good booleans and you know or dynamesh or you know whichever you are doing so something like that looks okay and i also want to make it look a bit more like a prong right now it's flat on top i want to kind of round it off a bit so i'm going to hit s on my keyboard and bring up my draw size and i'm just going to use the smooth brush so i'm going to hold shift and then just go around the corners a little bit just to round that off make it look a bit more like a prong and now i can make any sort of final adjustments with my gizmo as i said you just want enough geometry down here to overlap the surface of whatever you're going to be placing it on and you want enough prong above the stone where the setter isn't going to have any issues getting metal over the stone it's best to have a little too much than too little it's much easier to take away metal than it is to add it so i think that's going to be okay so i got my prong ready to go and now i need to make the other ones so what i'm going to do is go into the geometry palette under modify topology and on the mirror and weld command i'm going to make sure that the x-axis and the z-axis are both checked and click mirror and weld so now we have our four prongs or beads next thing we need to do is we need to make a cutter to cut a seat for this stone so i'm going to append in a cone 3d and i'm going to turn off my prongs to get them out of the way and make sure to select the cone as you can see it's upside down at the moment so i need to grab my gizmo and rotate while holding shift and bring it to 180 degrees and now i can start getting it ready right now it's pretty jagged it's very low poly so i want to smooth that out i don't want this jaggedness to translate to the boolean so i'm going to just do the quick way and go into my geometry palette and hit divide a few times just to smooth that out a little bit so it'll cut a little cleaner and you'll notice that just by subdividing i've kind of rounded off the top surface up here while i got my gizmo out i can just clip it so on the scale and y i'm going to hold ctrl to clip and just drag this down a little bit to clean that up that's much nicer next thing we need to do is we need to scale this a little bit because i want this cutter to be roughly the same diameter as the outside of my stone so i'm kind of looking over here while i'm scaling in x y and z and just moving it up a little bit to to get that scaling right and i think that's going to be okay but right now it's pretty long if i turn on transparent mode you can see i've got a lot of air underneath this stone that i don't want i don't want the seat to be that deep so i'm going to go ahead and shorten it real quick and in the move and y on my gizmo i'm going to hold alt to unlock and drag the gizmo up right to the top and then i can use scale and y to bring this in a little bit you do want a little bit of air underneath the stone you don't want the tip of this stone to be pushing into the metal you can get broken stones that way so leave a little bit of air underneath that stone and that will make sure you don't have to worry about that so right now the top of this cutter is just equal with the girdle we need to actually extrude this top part up a little bit uh that will make sure that if if we're setting this on you know a slightly irregular surface that we don't have the surface of the geometry in which we're putting this on kind of overlapping the top of the cutter getting weird booleans and things like that so so we need to do a quick extrusion on it i'm going to turn off the stone so you can see this a little better so what i'm going to do is i'm going to mask this bottom part and leave the top part unmasked so i'm going to bring up my masking brush by holding ctrl and i'm going to go into the stroke modifiers and do a drag rect and now i can draw out a box press and hold space bar to move that box and just get it right up to the top of the surface so everything down here is masked and everything up here is not and then i can bring my gizmo back out move in y and just extrude this out a little bit and go ahead and clear the mask so that is looking pretty good now i have my my cutter my prongs and my stone set up so the next thing i would recommend is just so you don't have to build this again i would recommend saving this as a z tool so you can bring it back in to later designs so what you would do is click save as up here in the tool palette give it a name and and save it somewhere wherever you're going to remember where it's at and that that will make sure that we can do this in a dependable way because it we are going to need to take some measurements of this before we actually make the insert mesh brush um quick introduction into the insert mesh brush is it looks at the overall dimensions of this so we're going to be placing this on our model all three of these pieces at the same time and the imm draw size plug-in it looks at the desired millimeter size so we have a 1.5 millimeter stone in here but the plug-in is going to look at the overall dimensions so we need to know what those are so i'm going to go ahead and measure real quick so i'm going to bring my gizmo back up i'm going to make sure that my prongs are selected in the subtool menu and i'm going to turn the gizmo off so i can take a quick measurement so we're at about 1.89 you can even take a few measurements if you really want to be precise with it yeah 1.903 is about where i need to be so that is what i'm going to have to plug in to my imm draw size plugin in order to get this 1.5 millimeter stone so that's the importance of saving this as a z tool because when i'm working on my design my ring my pendant or whatever it is i can bring this combo of you know the the stone the cutter and the prongs into my project size it accordingly take my quick measurement from prong to prong and then i have something to input into the imm draw size plug-in and start placing them on my geometry so so now we are done with this we have saved it as a z tool so now we can go ahead and bring in some geometry to put it on so i'm gonna bring in a simple ring with the ring utility plug-in size i'm going to leave it size 9 thickness i'm going to do 1.8 millimeters and width i'm going to do three millimeters and click create ring base mesh so we've got our ring in our scene and i'm gonna smooth out the edges a little bit just hit subdivide a couple times and get rid of that jaggedness so now i can go ahead and load in my z tool so up in the tool palette go to load tool navigate to where you saved it and bring that into your scene so as you can see i've got my my cutter and stone and prong here but i also still have my rings so i have them both in the same project so now is the time for any kind of last minute adjustments that you need i should probably do quick there we go i have a little bit of overlapping that i missed there so before we create the imm brush or the insert mesh brush there's a couple things that we need to do the way that the insert mesh brush works is it's going to look at whatever sub tool you have highlighted and it will make the brush from that so right now we have three pieces here we have our stone prongs and cutters we need to merge those together so i'm going to click on the one on top and go down to merge and merge down click ok and merge down again so now we have all three of these components combined into one sub tool and and don't worry we'll be able to split them apart later final thing we need to do is turn on poly frames you can see i've got some different polygroups going on here you can run into issues down the line especially if you're using like curve mode if you have different polygroups here so we need to make sure that this is all one polygroup that's just going to make sure we don't have any issues down the road so you can either do a control w and to make them all one polygroup or you can go to your polygroup's palette and click auto groups either way is just fine so now we are ready to create the insert mesh brush we need to orient this in a way where the top here will be facing up however we have this oriented in our scene when we make the brush is how it will be oriented on the surface so if i'm looking here from the side then this side will be facing the top so we need to make sure to have this fake we need to be looking at the top here when we create the i'm the insert mesh brush and make sure to hold shift to snap into that view so i'm going to go into my brush menu and i'm going to click create insert mesh now you'll get this window asking if you want to append to an existing brush or create a new brush we want to create a new brush as you can see in my brush menu now i have my my prongs and cutters and stone so now i can head back to the ring now i'm going to bring my z plug-in menu out and i'm going to dock it on the left so you can see it a little better and i'm going to go to the imm draw size and i'm going to key in my measurements that i took from prong to prong remember we need overall dimensions not just the stone by itself so mine came out to be about 1.904 something like that i'm going to hit enter and click set imm draw size now on my model here when i left click and drag you'll see i'm just i can keep dragging it out i don't have any control over what the size is the way this plug-in works is that once you start dragging out the stone press and hold control and now it will snap to that size and then i can drop it and now it's on my geometry but there's one thing that you may have already seen that we forgot to do so if we look at it from the side you can see that it just dropped this this combo right on the tip right where that geometry is touching the surface of our ring so we need to actually embed this down in a little bit so i'm going to control z to undo that and i'm going to go up to my brush menu and click on depth and you'll want to play with this embed slider that's what's going to embed that that geometry into the ring and usually i'm at about minus 12 or so so now i'm going to do it again i'm going to left click and drag hold ctrl so it snaps to the right size and drop it and now you can see that is actually embedded in the surface there so if you need to add multiple stones like say i want to have a small little cluster of stones now when i go to left click and drag over here and i hold ctrl maybe i want those stones to butt up against each other a little more and right now i can't move it all i can do is just spin it well if you hold press and hold space bar as well now i can move that wherever i want and kind of butt those two up together and do the same thing over here left click and drag hold ctrl spacebar and drag that into place so so that's how you can kind of create different combos that's just with a single stone let's say let's say i wanted a whole line of stones going across the top sure i could actually put them in all individually and adjust orientation and so forth but but there is a quicker way of doing it so i'm going to undo to get back to my my blank ring and i'm going to go into the stroke menu i'll click on curve and i'm going to turn on curve mode if you're going to be using curve mode always make sure to click the set imm draw size button again that if you find your stones are not coming out to the correct size just get in the habit of clicking that button quite a bit it will change depending on whether you are in curve mode or just putting in a single stone so now i can just draw a line and place stones all along that curve now a couple things about using this in curve mode so you can see this curve that i just drew is still there and when i mouse over it my cursor turns blue and i get this little green circle that's following me along the curve so that allows me to make adjustments so in my stroke menu you can see i've got bend start on so here's the start of my curve and if i click here it moves the whole thing evenly moves it all together now as i start to move down this line start clicking around that start point is locked into place but everything after that is moving so you can make some fine-tuned adjustments to your stones after the fact but one thing you will want to be careful of is that if you move it too much you can find that these stones out here on the end start to actually raise up so just be careful with that uh feel free to play around with some of these settings you can actually lock down the the start as well as the end with you know bend start and bend end and there's also some fun to be had with elastic and liquid just to you know for more free form types of configurations now you can also pair this with a another command to get a much straighter line i'm actually using a mouse and keyboard at the moment so as you can see my line kind of wavers a little bit it's not perfectly straight so i'm going to undo until i get back to my original ring and i'm going to hold shift so when i left click and drag and hold shift you can see i'm getting a bit of weirdness here because normally when you hold shift it draws it in a straight line so that's that's not what i want so if you start experiencing the same thing this this will just depend on the type of geometry that you are working with check out the you and you also have curve functions and curve modifiers so if you go into curve functions i'm going to turn all of these options for border polygroups increased edges and now i'm going to try again so i'm going to left click and drag hold shift see it's kind of locking it to a straight line and release and now i can keep that perfectly straight exactly the way that i want it another thing you can adjust as well is the spacing between the stones so in the curve menu under curve step allows you to actually adjust that spacing so i'm going to bring this down to say 0.8 and start again hold shift drag this out and drop it so now you can see those prongs actually overlap quite a bit more than before so you can play around with that if you want the spacing to be a little different that is completely up to you so one thing to be aware of too is that this curve here you can only adjust it if this was the last command let's say that i go over here you know maybe draw something out whoop let's draw something like that you see the curve goes away so just make sure to make any adjustments to the stones while you have that curve around before you proceed so let's say i've got i've got a got this exactly where i want it i'm going to go ahead and clear the mask because when you when you use a insert mesh brush it automatically will mask everything else and you'll notice in my subtool palette over here that there were no new subtools created as we were doing this what's happened is it's actually added it to this ring subtool so in order to do our booleans we need to separate all of this and the way we're going to do that is by going down to split and we're going to click on split to similar parts and click ok so now it has looked at all of these things the ring the prongs the cutters and the stones and it separated them all out and grouped them all together so now you can see i have a sub tool for my prongs i have one for my cutters my ring and the stones so now i can go ahead and check the seats and make sure that those are going to look okay as well so i've got the ring here and i've dragged the cutters below it so i can turn on the boolean to start right at the ring set the cutters to boolean subtraction and then turn on live boolean so let me turn off the stones so there are my seats already ready to go and if you wanted to even add a bit of a cutter here as well on top of your your stones and your prongs and things like that that's where you can really get creative with it anything that you add to that combination of stone prong seat uh will be transferred on as an imm brush as well so so that would be a possibility to to add that in so that's that's looking pretty good at the moment but the last thing i want to do is i want to confirm that everything came out the way it was supposed to so let's take some measurements so i'm going to turn my stones back on and i'm going to make sure they're selected in my subtool menu so let's bring out the gizmo i'm going to turn off the gizmo to get the transpose line and take a measurement so from one side to the other side and i have a 1.4911 effectively a 1.5 more often than not when you buy stones like that you buy some 1.5 you're going to have some 1.47s you're going to have some you know 1.52s in there so very rarely are small stones like that calibrated to a certain size so you have some wiggle room in terms of your size but that's pretty much it as far as using these imm brushes now i was going to address if you wanted to do this for a more traditional style of bead setting so what you could do in that situation is when you're creating your kind of combo here you're not going to need prongs because the beads are raised with a graver but what you could do is actually have a cylinder or some kind of piece of geometry that will just mark the location of that stone so you could have a cylinder that's actually coming out through the top of the stone and then when you place it on your ring you can bullion out a very small area of or where that stone is going to be located and then the setter if that's you or somebody else can use that to place the stone cut the seat raise the beads and burnish them down so so this method does work if you're doing this kind of more production style bead setting or if you're doing a more traditional style bead engraving or a bead setting so that was bead setting inside of zbrush i hope you enjoyed it thank you for watching if you have any questions feel free to leave them in the comments [Music]

Channel: Rio Grande

Views: 9,162

Keywords: zbrush, bead setting, 3D sculpting, digital design, 3D design, CAD, scott bradford, zbrush demo, zbrush how to, jewelry tech team, video, zbrush video, FTTT, Rio Grande

Id: YT_p2xI8YYU

Length: 35min 25sec (2125 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 13 2022