Creating a Ring with ZBrush

hi i'm scott from the rio grande tech team and today i'm going to show you a few different methods for creating rings within zbrush so let's get started okay so we got zbrush booted up and the first one i'm going to show you is actually a plug-in uh now if you have a zbrush 2020 this will come installed already on on your uh installation uh it will have a different name though the plugin is it used to be called ring master it is now called ring utility and if you have zbrush 2021 you will have to download this separately but it is worth it because there's some really nice features in it if you go to pixelogic.com zbrush slash download center slash z plugins uh you can download the ring utility plugin as it's now called and when you download this it will have a document folder on how to install it it's very easy literally just taking a couple files and dragging them into the right folder to navigate to this you'll go to your z plugin menu and locate the ring utility plugin here now the nice part about this is it will make us a base band with some very simple options so we have our ring size here uh we can input whatever we want let's make a size 10. so i'm just clicking into the number keying it in and hitting enter the thickness typically with a ring um i don't go more than about two millimeters thick uh it gets a bit uncomfortable to wear starts to intrude on the other fingers uh but anywhere between 1.5 and 2 millimeters is a good thickness so i'm gonna do two millimeters and for width uh this will be mainly a design consideration uh i'm actually just going to key in five uh so we're going to make a size ten two millimeters thick and five millimeters wide now there are a few other options within this ring utility plug-in you can click on the more options tab to bring those up things like creating separate polygroups increasing which will keep your corners nice and uh sharp when you're subdividing uh mirror poly grouping for uh you know keeping symmetry and things like that so there are a few other options to play with in here and once you're ready you can click create ring base mesh so i'm going to click on that and there we go now we have a ring that we can start sculpting on now one thing i want to draw attention to is if we navigate over to our subtool palette and expand it you'll notice we have three sub tools in here two of which are hidden now what these are these will generate whenever you're creating this ring and what it's actually doing is creating a ring mandrel so if i unhide this this ring mandrel has been sized to a certain size to make sure that this ring is going to be the proper ring size and then the bounding box around it which i believe helps with the thickness of the ring but these both will be hidden by default when you make this ring one of the nice parts about the ring utility is it it works really well if you're going to be using something like the z modeler brush so let's take a look at the geometry of it so i'm going to turn on poly frames and you can see it's very very simple we're only at about 256 polys just for the rain so if you're using something like the modeler this is actually a really good place to start and you can see we had creasing turned on so you can see creasing has been applied to these corners so yeah that's a very quick and dirty way of just creating a straight band as you can see it's it's just flat on top uh really no frills but it's a just a quick way to add in a ring of a certain size and that way you don't have to go through the normal sizing operations which we'll actually be going through with the next the next ring that we're going to make now another reason why i recommend downloading this ring utility plugin is because not only can we create rings there are gemstones in here as well i click on the z plugin menu go back to my ring utility plugin and under gemstones we can click to expand that and you can see we have a number of gemstones that we can start with so rounds some fancy shapes even a custom shape if you're using like a like an imm brush under dimension we can set the millimeter diameter of the stone and we can choose to have it on the band and how many we want to have on the band along with their orientation with the top middle and bottom so this is a handy way of generating a stone really quickly so if i want to do a one carat so we'll key in 6.5 millimeters and i'm just going to bring in the one stone so i'm going to turn the on band option off and then click add gemstone subtool and that will actually add a gemstone to our selection i'll turn off poly frames here and now i can start using that to actually build a setting like a bezel setting or a you know four prong head or whatever i want so uh even just generating a stone when needed it's it's nice to have something like this because it's um just very quick and you can set it to a certain size so that's a that's another nice part about the ring utility plug-in to have and there are a few other options things like mandrels uh you really won't be messing with these too often but generating quick rings and gemstones it's a it's a nice tool to have so just uh just in case you need it okay so so that was pretty much the ring utility plug-in incredibly simple uh easy to use and yeah great if you're going to be using zmodeler or you can just start subdividing this and and go from there but let's go on to the the next way we're going to make rings because right now this will only make straight flat bands and we could apply some deformers to that but i'm going to show you a different method so let's actually get a new document here so i'm going to go up to document and go to new document so the first thing we need to bring out is we need a cylinder so i'm going to select the cylinder 3d and i'm going to left click and drag and immediately hit the t key to go into edit mode now this is going to be our ring mandrel so the first thing i want to do is i want to size it so in order to size it need to do one thing first i need to make this a polymesh3d so i'll go ahead and click the make polymesh3d button there i need to navigate to the geometry palette and go to the size submenu now as i was as i've explained in other videos before when you bring in a subtool it'll always have the same dimensions 2 by 2 by 2. so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to size this to the internal diameter of the ring size we want to make now i'm actually using the ring chart at rio grande.com we have a article about how to cut the proper amount of stock to make a ring just as a side note with a handy little calculator that is super super nice but this is what i'm going to be using right here so so we have our ring sizes we have circumference and diameter here and let's do let's do a size 7. so size 7 is right here my internal diameter is going to be 17.35 so i'm going to go to xyz and key that in 17.35 and zoom out because i just made it a lot bigger and sometimes you'll see it kind of jump back like that uh i'm just going to key it in again there we go make sure that we've got the right size there now i'm going to click on the move option to bring my gizmo out and i'm going to grab the scale in y rectangle this little green rectangle and just kind of bring this up just a bit we're actually going to be making the ring on top of this surface so i'm just kind of expanding this to give myself a bit of extra room go back into draw mode and now i want to add some subdivisions to this and we're going to be using masking to make our ring so i want to have some decent subdivisions i want to have a really nice crisp mask if i can it'll make cleanup much easier down the road so i'm just going to click subdivide and i'm going to bring it up to i'm up to about 2 million polys um yeah i want that surface as smooth as possible the first thing we need to do is we need to activate symmetry so to activate symmetry go to your transform menu and activate symmetry button is right here go ahead and turn that on and i need it in the y axis so i'm going to select y and i'm going to deselect the x-axis so we've got something like this and now i need to change my masking brush so i'm going to hold ctrl and it defaults to the mask pen i'm going to select mask curve and you'll see it already changes my stroke modifier to curve because i'll show you what we're going to do here right now i'm on the model and you can see i've got my two points here i'm going to estimate about what the width is going to be at the bottom and i'm going to slightly move my cursor off of the the model here still holding control and i'm going to click and drag and i'm going to bring it out at a bit of an angle because we're going to make a kind of tapered ring so i'm going to drag it all the way across the model and then off the model again and then release and we'll give that a sec to calculate and there we go now i don't need this so i'm actually going to hold ctrl and i'm going to go back to my mask pen and i'm going to turn up my draw size so i'm going to hit s on my keyboard bring the draw size up and then hold ctrl and mask that portion off so we're left with something like this now what we're going to do is we're actually going to extract this surface from this cylinder and the way we do that is by navigating to the subtool palette and it's the menu down here at the bottom extract now with the extract function it's not actually going to extract the unmasked areas it's going to extract the masked areas so i need to reverse this so i'm off my model i'm going to hold ctrl and click and that will reverse my mask and now we need to actually extract this from the surface now we've only got a few options here so we actually want to turn both of these off t borders is used in other things we're not going to really be using it for this demonstration and double double will actually extract in both directions so once we extract this ring it if we leave double on it will extract this outward as well as inward and we don't want that because this cylinder has been sized to our ring size so we don't want it to actually extrude inside of it that would that would mess with our ring size now one downside to the extraction tool as nice as it is the thickness you want to extract is not going to correspond to your size here so i wouldn't be able to key in say 1.5 mil or 1.5 and it extracts 1.5 millimeters but you can actually just measure it after the fact if you do a i'm going to click in here under thickness and i'm going to do 0.12 and hit enter that will extract a about a 1.5 millimeter thickness and if i do 0.15 that will be about a two millimeter thickness so uh your all your rings are always going to be in that range between 0.12 and 0.15 and if you really want to get exact with it just do an extraction take a quick measurement if it's not what you want you can always redo it so i'm going to deselect double here and once you're ready just click the extract button and there we go now if you want to inspect this ring you may have already tried to turn the screen and notice that the ring simply vanished so that's because if you want to accept the extraction you actually you have to hit the accept button before you start moving the screen or it'll disappear so i'm going to hit extract again to bring that ring out and then i'm going to click accept and there we go and it's actually extracted it as a separate subtool so i can hide my mandrel and it's still got the masking on it so i'm gonna off the model i'm gonna hold ctrl click and drag to clear that mask and and there we go now i have a tapered ring shank that i can start sculpting on before we continue i want you to get in the habit of turning on poly frames when you do something like this and take a look at the geometry so as you can see we have a very smooth surface right here uh because our cylinder was up to two million polys and that surface actually transferred to the top of this ring but if we look on the sides and i'm going to zoom in here really close these are all stretched quads there's not a lot we can do with that as i'm sure you've already noticed we have these ridges all over the surface which we would need to smooth out now because we just have these stretched quads we're going to need to remesh this the way i'm going to do that is i'm going to navigate to the geometry palette and i'm going to go into z remesher now z remesher is going to uh adhere to this shape as much as possible and and reorient the geometry all around it so uh one one last look high geometry low geometry and if i just click the z remesher button and we'll just give that a set to run you can see the progress bar up here at the top it's usually pretty quick it usually doesn't take too long there we go so so now if i turn on poly frames you can see i have a much more even surface over the entire ring but you'll also notice that i still have some of this uh kind of bridges there that kind of stepping so in that situation i would probably navigate down to the deformation palette and i'm going to do a polish crisp edges so i'm going to click on this little button to open that up and then i'm going to drag this to about 4. and there we go that took care of it uh usually you don't need too much um but it kind of rounded off the corners pretty nice we're down to about 14 000 polys with this so we have a nice smooth surface it's very low poly so now we can we can start adding more subdivisions and and start sculpting so so so yeah that's kind of a quick way to do something that's not necessarily just a flat straight band but that's not all we can do with this technique so let's actually go back i'm going to get rid of this extraction and i'm going to show you another method i'll throw in a few tricks so i've got my ring selected i'm going to bring my mandrel back out and i'm going to delete my ring i can turn off poly frames now so i've got my cylinder back out i'm going to click and drag off to the side to clear that mask i'm going to hold ctrl and make sure that my mask curve is selected and we still got symmetry on so we're we're still good there so we're going to start pretty much the same way we're going to kind of estimate the thickness and then drag our cursor off hold ctrl left click and drag but right now this is just a straight line now i've still got control held if i tap the alt button you can see it adds a bit of a curve tap it again and i can get more of a curved line and then i drag it off the model and release so again i'm going to hold control go back into my mask pen and then hold ctrl while i'm re-masking that area so you can see now i've got more of a curved surface rather than a straight surface so uh so yeah as you're dragging out this mass curve line you can just tap alt and it will create a curve in that area and you can you can add as many as you want and then i would just go back into the extract tool remember we need to reverse our mask because it will only extract the masked areas so hold ctrl and click to reverse those and all my settings are still the same so i can just click extract and then click accept and i'll click on the i to turn off my mandrel here and then clicking hold ctrl click and drag to clear the mask and the cleanup process would be the same as you can see it it's going to be the same thing just these stretched quads around the outside edge and the if you if you try something like a smooth brush it's just not going to ever get rid of them you can see that i'm holding smooth and i'm trying to smooth them as much as i can but it just never really gets rid of them so you would want to do something like uh like a z-re mesh uh and then maybe a polished crisp edges and and go from there so yeah that's uh that's another thing you can do and see you get this nice little curved edge uh just as a as a good starting point okay now i want to show you one more thing uh with this method that we can do so again i'm going to click on the eye to bring my mandrel back in make sure that my ring is selected and i'm going to hit delete what i'm going to do is i'm going to i'm going to clear out a spot on here and i'm actually going to draw what my ring is going to look like i'm going to hold ctrl i've got my mask pen selected so that's good but i'm going to go into the stroke modifier and i'm going to do drag rectangle i'm going to hold ctrl left click and drag and before i release i'm going to hit i'm going to press and hold alt and that will clear my mask in this area so now i can actually just draw directly on this surface what i want that ring to be like now i'm going to turn symmetry on for the other side as well let's see is that the z yes it is so i need to go back to my free hand mode for my masking so i'm going to hold ctrl go back into my stroke modifiers and just do freehand and draw size is a little big so i'm going to turn that down just a bit and now i can hold ctrl and just do something fun and right now i'm just kind of kind of freehanding it but you know maybe maybe something like that and then add something like that or something in here who knows so so now i can actually extract this but before i do i want you to take a look at something because we we did our masking over here and you can see it's nice and crisp and clean and over here it's kind of blurry to sharpen that up you can navigate to the masking palette on the right side here and click sharpen mask maybe click it a couple times and there we go now we have a much cleaner mask that we can we can bring out and you can always use something like your uh you know if i hold ctrl and i'm drawing a mask i can also hold alt and get rid of some of that mask and again i would just want to click sharpen mask a bit and forgot to hold alt there we go and just kind of clean up some areas uh make sure everything is exactly the way i want it and then extract same process as before just go in to your subtools click extract it extracts it as another sub tool you'll probably have to z remesh and then you can start adding subdivisions and then making these bits more sculpted and the nice part is you can do this for the entire ring shank if you want so you can bring out one of these cylinders and just draw the ring design with using using your symmetry or without if you want something more asymmetrical and draw the entire ring design right here on the cylinder and extract it out and then the mandrel will stay in the background as your sizing mandrel so so yeah that's a that's a really a really good way of doing some really interesting ring designs really quickly and then you can start sculpting them and adding you know stones or whatever bits you want and and take it from there okay so the last one we're going to look at is a pretty pretty simple method of just using some of the primitives that we have available so i'm going to go to document i'm going to bring out a new document and i'm going to navigate to our tool palette and i'm just going to bring out a sphere so left click and drag the t key to go into edit and click make poly mesh 3d so we're actually going to be using the uh live boolean system for this one so the sphere is going to be our ring so the next thing i need to do is i need to bring out a mandrel so i'm going to click append in the sub tool palette and find our cylinder 3d here we go and i'm going to select it and i'm going to use a gizmo to turn it on its side and hold shift [Music] to turn it about 90 degrees and now i'm going to kind of scale it in a bit oops i need to make it a bit longer so i'm going to do the scale y this little green rectangle just click and drag to bring that out and that will be our ring mandrel as i scale this you can either kind of eyeball your thickness or use the transpose line uh in an earlier video we demonstrated how to use the transpose line to actually measure uh very specific areas of your model so you could actually use the transpose line to measure how thick this this ring is going to be for this demonstration we're just going to eyeball it so i'm going to do something like that now you can see we've already got a bit of our you can already see what this ring is going to look like now i need to add some subdivisions to this because it is pretty blocky at the moment but since we're doing a boolean i'm just going to turn on dynamic subdivisions so i'm going to navigate to the geometry palette and find the dynamic subdiv and i'm just going to turn it on i don't need to click apply i can just leave it where it's at uh and i'm going to navigate back to the subtool menu and set the cylinder to boolean subtraction and on the sphere i'm going to hit the arrow here because that's where the boolean is going to start and now i can turn on the live boolean system and see what this ring is going to look like and after seeing it like this i might actually uh still got my gizmo on i still have the cylinder selected so i can make some small adjustments here now you'll see that right now this band is extremely wide and these edges are extremely sharp uh so what we would actually do is we would go in and kind of clip these i'll show you that here in a sec but i need to i'm going to go ahead and just add some subdivisions to my sphere here so i'm going to click on the sphere to select it click on geometry palette and then just maybe hit it a couple times something like that just a better representation if you want to leave this ring nice and wide you will be clipping it on the side to give it a bit of a flat edge here i'll go ahead and show you that real quick so go back to the subtool palette we've already set up our boolean and if you're if you're wondering about booleans we do have a video about that so be sure to go check it out to get a more in-depth view so in the sub tool palette i'm going to click on the boolean menu here and the cylinder that we used had dynamic subdivisions activated so i'm going to turn on allow dynamic subdiv here in the boolean menu and then i'm going to click make boolean mesh our new piece has been populated here in the tool palette and i can go ahead and click on that so we need to get rid of these sharp edges here so i'm going to go into the gizmo by clicking the move button and when i grab this scale z here i'm going to hold ctrl while i do it just to kind of clean up those edges and then i'm going to do that on both sides so so yeah now we've eliminated that that sharp edge there created a little bit of a flat edge but now we have this ring that is not flat on top like ring utility does we have a nice little nice little radius going here and we can actually control that so so if i go back into my ring from earlier so here's my my sphere my cylinder so i can take the sphere go into my gizmo and i'm not going to hold control the clip i'm just going to click on it now i can get a much more much taller radius well not really taller but a more you know half round type of radius just by adjusting the dimensions of the sphere so if i turn off the live boolean and i hide my cylinder here you can see i'm just taking the sphere and just kind of squishing it in a little bit to change that that radius so yeah and this is uh pretty much the same as before i would just make sure that since my cylinder is using dynamic subdivisions i would want to just make sure that have this activated if you're if you're only subdividing your cylinder you don't have to worry about this this is only if you're bullying with something that has dynamic subdivisions and then click make boolean mesh and now we have our boolean ring and then i would just use the gizmo to clip it same way as we did before so i'm going to hold ctrl while i adjust this we'll come to about right there why not and then to about right there or so so now we have some you know a nice little flat edge here but we do have more of a domed look on top as well and that was just a quick boolean with a few primitives to throw this together really quickly now the only thing about this method is if we go to our sizing in our geometry palette you can see the size is it's bringing this in as a standard size of a zbrush subtle so it's about 2 units by 2 units by 0.4 so it would be 2 by 2 by 0.4 so you would want to append in a cylinder and size the cylinder to your ring size and then you would scale this ring up to fit on your ring size and real quick i'm gonna i'm i'm actually going to demonstrate that because i want to show you uh one thing to be aware of when you're when you're scaling things up to a certain size so i'm going to go ahead and in my subtool palette i'm going to append in our cylinder and okay i need to rotate this so make sure that that's selected go into my gizmo click and drag on the outside edge and hold shift and now that is ready to go now i need to size it so i'm going to go back into the geometry palette and the ring size that we were working with earlier was a size 7 and that was an internal diameter of 17.35 and i'm just going to go ahead and turn on dynamic subdivisions for this just so we have a bit smoother surface so i'm going to key in in the size menu here i'm going to key in our 17.35 and hit enter and we glue this way up so i'm going to zoom out a bit and now i need to scale up my ring that i made so i'm going to select it and just a quick tip because right now we can't actually see the ring over here if you click on transparent mode or it says activate edit opacity so click on that now it will kind of ghost that cylinder so we can actually see our our ring and i'll just grab the yellow circle in the middle here [Music] and kind of line this up as best i can and then i can turn off transparent mode and hide my mandrel if i need to so now we've actually scaled this up to a proper size seven so let me show you one thing that uh that could get you in trouble and it's just something to be aware of so let's say i'm going to be doing some real sculpting on this so i'm going to go into our brushes so i'm going to hit the b key and i want to bring out the move brush so i'm going to hit m and then v now if you want to grab large swaths of this ring and manipulate it you can see my my draw size is pretty small at the moment so i'm going to hit the s key and i'm going to drag my draw size up so you can see my draw size is maxed out right now at about a thousand and this may not be big enough for your your needs now the the easy way to get around that is to disable the dynamic draw size and just a quick refresher dynamic draw size will keep your draw size the same size on your model so if i if i actually zoom out then my draw size is the same on the model even when i zoom in it stays the same size dynamic draw size will will keep that kind of locked into a certain size but if i under draw size here if i double click on dynamic and then bring my draw size down you can see i can get a lot bigger [Music] than i would with it on but if you zoom in or out you can see the draw size regardless of how zoomed in i am it's not changing so if you're if you're going to turn dynamic draw size off just be careful not to zoom in or out because at that point you will change the draw size of your of your brush and if you're sculpting with the same size in different areas and you accidentally zoom in getting that same size is going to be tricky so just make sure to keep that in mind if you if you size things up first then you could get into some issues where you you can't get your draw size big enough and you're only you have to turn off dynamic draw size so in some instances it's actually better to go ahead and bring in you know make your ring have your mandrel there uh leave it as the default size that zbrush brings them in at do all your sculpting and manipulating on your ring and then at the end do what we just did and select your ring mandrel size it to a certain size and then scale your ring up to fit around that mandrel so that's a that's a good way of doing it to where you can you can keep dynamic draw size on which makes it easier to sculpt it's it's very easy to zoom in without even thinking about it when you have dynamic draw size off and then getting it the right size is very very difficult so that's pretty much it that's just a few very quick and simple ways along with just a few tricks uh for creating rings and zbrush and keeping them the the size that you want so if you have any questions feel free to contact us [Music]

Channel: Rio Grande

Views: 21,573

Keywords: ZBrush, 3D Manufacturing, Jewelry Design, Rio Grande, From the Tech Team

Id: 4dOYDz2kaEE

Length: 41min 13sec (2473 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 15 2020