Helmet Modeling in Zbrush

hey folks so today i'm going to be jumping in and taking a look at making some helmets i'm going to talk to you a little bit about reference gathering about how i approach breaking down some of the shapes and show you how i start things out my general process is i'm going to be doing picking a reference talking about some of the pros and cons to some of the different models or objects you can be going from i'll do a breakdown of it gather some reference put together a pure f board for me to use while i'm sculpting and i'll show you some of the pros and cons of that and then i'll actually jump into it and try to get through my major sculpting and then breaking down a few of the parts my likely in order to get a polished final result i probably won't have something that's fully finished or completed by the end of the stream but my goal is to have everything blocked out planned and uh be building several of the pieces to show you how i approach some things like that as well as how i can use some of the techniques of the noisemaker some of the alphas maybe even try out a couple other cool features that are in zbrush so let's go straight into it and now of course i've got my zbrush open but i don't really use this um when i'm starting out because like although i've been doing the cartoon sculpts which is you have like a single cartoon image we're gonna have to pull down more information one of the places i like to go when i'm concepting or trying to find good references or resources um pinterest is great searching is great maybe you have an idea in your head already but if you're just looking for things i like to come into art station i can type in a search result in this case i can say helmet and i like to go by medium and look for digital 2d i want to avoid 3d things because those are kind of already models and renders and if you're just starting out there's the real habit of trying to follow exactly how they did it and this assignment and the whole project really is about training your brain to be able to convert something that's two-dimensional into a three-dimensional shape like how do i convert some of these shapes or interpret those to make it a 3d mesh something like this is probably a pretty good reference again i get front side back views a lot of detail gives me color but also gives me a really good sense of the paneling for it and but it still gives me some room for interpretation or to give me some flexibility on it now i look through a lot of the things uh that we're doing this sculpt and um for the next session i might try to do something a little bit more traditional or medieval but um i figured for this one i wanted to do one of these kind of sci-fi helmet sculpts that are really really popular uh this is a style of sculpting especially like you see a lot of these helmet designs uh if i go especially into 3d you can you'll see like um a lot of these kind of guys like this is a michael pavlich does a whole series on this but there's a whole lot of references on especially making this style of helmet inside of zbrush and it's a very popular way of working usually you start with dynamesh you pull things out and so i want to work with a helmet that's relatively like that but i also want to show you how you can polish something the work i'm going to be working basing my work off today is some of michael jensen's excellent work that he did for destiny 2. i really love the heads of the exo characters which are you know basically some kind of biological robot type thing but i love the simplicity of the design i like the seams it has enough detail and enough to go through without having um like a ton of the tiny little gribbly detail which i don't want to sculpt usually when i do this kind of stuff i pick like a star wars helmet because they have so many great helmets in there but this time i'm going to break a little bit from form and use one of these and so let's we'll take a look then at some of the ways i can assemble the reference material for this so the tool i use for reference material is called puref qrf is maybe one of the most commonly used tools for any 3d artist pretty much everyone i know who works in the industry uses pureref at some point and uh you can check out the site gearref.com uh it is free but they do ask that it's a sort of a shareware or donate where and um i definitely gave them some money because i use this a lot and it's always nice to do but they maintain it and update it for free and like everybody uses it so you know throw them a couple bucks if you uh feel like you can but it is uh you know accessible you can choose to just uh download it without giving them any month at the moment however i recommend you do if you end up using it and liking it a lot because it's just nice to do they made it for us for free i've used a lot of ref reference like kind of tools um and i like quadro was one i used a lot for a while a lot of people used to just use photoshop documents where they throw a bunch of images in there but now pref is like the standard that pretty much everyone uses when you pop it up you as you get something like this right mouse lets me um actually control the movement here so my right mouse does all this oh look my input is working zooming in and out with my scroll wheel and then left mouse is like lets me drag and do stuff like that there's nothing in here at the moment but this is where tariff is so cool is it stays on top of everything and uh it makes it pretty easy for me to move stuff into it so if i say take this gallery here i can also resize this by dragging it out it's pretty easy for me to just drag and drop images into my purif and i'm gonna see if i can find some other um these are some great renders of already 3d models but i'm going to pop in and i'll look for destiny xo heads and see what i get on just a general image search so you can see some reference of maybe some of these designs from some of the different angles being planned or knocked out often like concept art is kind of what you want to be working for or looking for this is a pretty good one so let me again drop in you could find uh there you go someone who actually worked on the game and some of the designs that they did i like that one like i said the simpler for me the better but this is going to help me fill in some of the gaps of some of the information maybe so i like to start a project when i have a fair bit of concept this is pretty nice if you can find like art books those are also really great too because i like some of these uh designs in here so i'm not going to spend a ton of time on reference gathering so you're not just watching me gather reference um i personally would spend a lot of that time on it but for me showing you today i'm just going gonna try to like knock a couple quick things in i will spend if i have five days to work on a project i'll spend an entire day on just referencing and testing things out and experimenting because i think it's a really it's really worthwhile so i can try uh exo heads on set i have never regretted spending more time gathering reference and in fact as you go you usually end up needing more time to work on stuff if i was doing a full physically based rendered thing this is also where i would pull down references or material spheres or images of those for the different metals or surfaces or manufacturing but i want to go ahead and show you why prf is cool so i can zoom out i can select all this stuff i hit ctrl alt and up and it resizes everything and then with it still selected i hit ctrl n not control n what is it is it control p there it is uh control p i don't need my note here which will resize everything to fit this scene and now i have this little guy right here and there's different modes like you can turn it on to be like transparent which is always kind of cool i don't really want that thing as it goes through there's a let me get my purif back click and turn that mode off there we go don't want that one there's uh what is it canvas one ooh that's it canvas clear and i'm gonna save this desktop and i'm gonna name this exo head because this was another thing that's cool about it is unlike like it's not actually looking for these other files it'll save this all as one single image like all the images together are going to be saved as one pura file and that makes it really easy to move computers and anytime i want to work with this i can always just load it back up and i have the whole thing oh that clears my canvas that's why i'm looking for there's a there's a one there's a way of doing this where i make it transparent the background overlay yeah it doesn't quite give me as much control as i want i'm just going to go ahead and use it how i usually use it which is something like this kind of stuck in the corner and right mouse moving it middle mouse helps me navigate it and that's just going to give me the ability to pop around and look at this from a couple different angles without getting into my way so now what i want to do is i'm gonna take i suppose i'll take this image this is a pretty good one so i'll copy that and i'm going to go ahead and do a little draw over in my sketchbook you can use any tool for this i i personally have been using a lot of um let's scale that down i use a lot of uh the procreate on my um ipad lately this is a pretty good tool for this kind of thing too that in and i'm just knocking things out so i'm going to get you out of the way really quick let's turn on layers i can't see because i do that everybody i'm hitting like so many buttons by accident because everything's in my way i'm going to take you i'm going to lock you put in a new layer and then i'm going to just push this out of the way for a second so now i'm in a position let me slide my cam over a little bit so now i'm here and i'm trying to figure out how i want to do my draw over i'm going to go pretty small with this the brush i choose here doesn't really matter something nice in this case i'll do like this nice orangey kind of color a little larger and a little darker getting a bit of that tap delay not a fan of that so what i'm looking for all the pieces of course i'm thinking about the helmet and this is my overall profile of the whole shape in fact this little scoop out here is really important shape for what i'm trying to do so i want to make sure in my first pass i get this whole shape this is kind of my primary then i need to start worrying about with my secondary some of these other breakdowns areas of low and high detail so these are some of the big channel shapes that i'm going to be worried about when i get into my next stage and then when i get down to like the lowest level down to like a tertiary that's when i'm starting to think about like tiny little panels and details and things like that those are the little things that are going to do probably with alphas or other techniques that'll make it look really cool i'm going to go ahead and get rid of you you so i want to show you all the parts that i would be making this out of and i'm going to keep things in symmetry so i don't think about it that way i have this panel right here is going to be one whole piece this panel right here will be a separate piece and i'm trying to keep these separate because it's going to help me control some of these curves a little bit better especially some of the really crazy shapes now this one right here this whole area here all the way along is one big panel i think it's interesting that's one of the reasons i like design so much is little details like this sort of helps simulate the area under your eyelid which is really cool so even in this white part of the helmet which feels kind of more or less like a monolith of like one single piece we can see how many different parts are there um i don't have a lot of information on what's in the back but i'll have to kind of guess that myself i suppose i continue to go around thinking about this whole thing will be one piece and the rest of this will get carved out of it looks like they gotta be here you can think of this as just like kind of highlighting to help me figure out where things are i like that shape there here and then i'm going to get this guy this piece right here and one more piece right up under the nose so i have quite a few pieces in here i'm kind of counting one two three i'm seeing about 17 probably more than that uh that'll have to make smaller little parts or pieces but this is a good start for me as far as understanding uh when i do a model like this it's always nice to take just like it took me like two or three minutes just to go through and break this down and i think it's generally worth doing because it helps you understand a lot better what goes into it and where your problems might lie i want to see if i can fix my chroma key again i swear the lighting in here always changes so much so i always need to go back in and make so many tiny adjustments to my chroma key so apologies for that so with this um i'm actually going to take this image and i'm just going to control wrong guy and i'm just going to screen grab it while i got this in here and add this into my prf board again one of the many advantages of using pura and ctrl alt and drag will just let me resize it and position it and now anytime i want i can check out my um my breakdown so i'd use this instead of spotlight because i can put so many more images in there and it's really easy for me to drag and drop images back in so now i can have this hovering over i know where i would put my images in uh something like spotlight i'm going to start out here with a dynamosphere 32 it's one of the ways i like to start a lot of projects and i know like there's so many ways you could start but it's a good breakdown um and now that i think about it i'm actually not going to start with this because what i'm going to start with is this demo head i'm going to use this and i could use headplanes too but i'm going to use this because it's going to give me the proportions of a head already it kind of gives me something to start with to build a helmet off of so when i'm building a helmet it's really nice to be able to just have this so that i can you know know that i've got head proportions and a lot of the stuff is going to line up based on where a human head is this is not the greatest head in the world in fact there's some kind of little proportional issues with it but it's fine it will generally proportion in size to it definitely if you're ever gonna do something like this for like a project like a head scan um like some people do a full scan of their heads and they'll bring it in here because then you can get the sizing right it's great for 3d printing a lot of cosplayer type people use this program specifically for this kind of thing um if you check out the zbrush learning center there's like i think i can't remember which artist does it it looks a really great series on sculpting a full sci-fi helmet inside a zbrush which i really recommend because it's got a lot of cool stuff in here i'm going to append a sphere i'm going to start the sphere generally in the location and the size that i want it and i'm going to go ahead and dynamesh it keep our visible count down but now that's gm geometry don't need 80s right now i'm going to go to my dynamesh and i'm going to let's set it to 32 because i like to work pretty low and let's start by clipping some stuff off i know i want the sides to be relatively flat let's use clip curve and that's going to like kind of clip this out and then i start to sort of shape and form it around the head thinking about like the profile here is what i'm trying to get is the right curvature and then thinking about this little back piece kind of coming off here so again you can be just like super super rough at this stage thinking about it from a couple of these kind of core angles and it the proportions of this head is it's supposed to look like a robot's version of a full human head so that makes it a little bit easier to work with in terms of that makes it a little easier to think about some of the proportions for this this character so i kind of have a separate paneling but like i said i'm thinking about it all as one big shape right now and let me put in a couple lines for the eyes and i'm going to use this to help me kind of define the sockets because i can kind of see under it the transparency that's going to give me some sense of like where that is again working really low as low as i frankly can get away now i feel like i'm ready to go up to 64. so i mentioned this to someone else before but like it's not jumping up at all you can see it's not increasing size at all it's because nothing's changed between now and the last time i dynameshed it so if i move it even just a smidge now it's going to re-up my resolution now i have something a little higher to work with so now i'm going to start to think about some of the big shapes that are are popping off here so i can kind of look at and brushing across really lightly because at this resolution a little goes a very long way i'm just trying to think about some of the core big shapes with it so trying to separate the top from the bottom trying to get some definition for like a socket you know maybe carve away a little bit back here but i'm still probably too low to really go with anything too severe but i do want to help kind of get this idea this in and this is where um a tool i like for this is the clay tubes is really nice because it actually builds up nice flat surfaces tube clay tubes is really nice for building up panels and things because you can really get the idea across with a lot of it i can kind of trim dynamic that up but i think again i'm going to go up to 128 now 128 is probably a resolution i'm going to work in for a while i kind of like do a little smooth pass on everything before i kind of approach stage and this is because it's going to let me move like a lot of these i don't like it just helps me soften things up and i can still see what i was trying to do i'm getting some definition right now of the year i don't want to make anything too sharp or too hard right now i'm just trying to lay in like largely almost like reference lines for things so right now and in perspective if you switch to orthographic it kind of lies to you see none of my images are an orthographic i usually use orthographic for when i'm doing hard surface work and i know things should line up with each other but when i'm trying to sculpt something in this case even though it is a hard surface object like this kind of helmet i'm thinking about it like i'm doing a likeness so let me look at it kind of straight on and whoa there's a lot more room between the eyes than i initially hopped off so i'm gonna go ahead and really change the shape on that and gaining standard is my most commonly used brush for this stage because i'm just kind of knocking in big big shape again it helps that i i started with some referencing but like i can do as much visual measuring as possible to figure out how high and how low things need to be so this kind of comes down and then i think up a little bit there's sort of a stair stepping kind of thing happening like right under the eye here so that needs to happen like this lines up with the inside of the eye like this line here a little bit further over containing standard pretty small and i want to make sure this line here then this almost hits the inside like that guy right there this one kind of hits this curve here so there that is relatively to the center just anything i can do to help me get the sense like sometimes you'll see me just kind of trace a line like this it gives me a direction to how something's going so i can see already this was kind of in the wrong spot gap between here and here a pretty strong little line and i'm not trying to get it too perfect right now i'm just trying to like lay in but i would consider major landmarks i've done some you know like likeness sculpt work and honestly this kind of thing i find is helpful like it's helpful to do have a little experience doing some likeness sculpting i think which i know people taking this course are pretty new to zbrush so probably haven't done a lot of likeness sculpting maybe in a traditional art class i'm guessing most of you haven't my clay i don't really use a lot of clay build up here i tend to use clay and clay tubes the problem i have with clay buildup is the way it builds up form is is a lot uh so um this is actually a good time to go to your naval customize and think about putting uh that clay tube down in the list here because i'm gonna use it quite a lot just nice to help build up and then polish down some stuff but it's also clay tubes is nice for cutting kind of cutting some stuff away probably make my panels so if i was doing a live character one of the first things i would do is place the eyes because it helps me get a sense of where everything in the head is and it doesn't really have eyes but there are these little kind of simulated like lenses for the eyes so i'm going to make a version of that let's go append go poly mesh solo that i'm going to use some of the z modeler tricks and techniques that we used last time let's make a cylinder i'm going to give it kind of like this shape it's not super important we're just trying to get a sense of the object because we want it to sit in the head this is serving the purpose for us of an eye now giving us room to help define an attitude for the character i actually hit tab which if you ever do that it just um hides the rest of the ui some people like it because they feel like it helps them focus their work a little bit i i don't use it personally because i like having my stuff available more than i find my ui to be a distraction and honestly as you're working like feel free to customize the ui however you see fit everyone is going to have a slightly different way of looking so in this case i want to make a little cut for the bottom of this jaw kind of piece here and it's interesting two parts from what i can see this guy kind of comes up and over it and then i'll use my clay tubes to help build them up a little bit i can use my polish polish them back down so pretty low resolution so it's not too hard to just nudge and move things around i'm going to use my clay tubes now just kind of cut away the area like under the mask or under this top feature so i'm going to go up and kind of cut away helping lift this top part off i have this kind of sense of a brow maybe right about here goes up and then it intercepts this kind of angle a little more like that trying to do my work as much as possible on the same sides you can see i'm just i'm like just like kind of cutting pieces up right now thinking about this here now there's an angle up and a little piece back there this little sphere thing for the head i might have to build that out a separate piece not sure what's happening here but i'll have to use my imagination a little bit i don't have a good back reference for it this is a case of it is all one piece but it's just helping to find some of the contours i have a very strong angle not coming off this guy that runs along here so if i use trim dynamic with alt it'll actually pull up towards it which is great for like leveling out stuff like this and then i'm going to use clay tubes i'm going to carve some of this away move it back out so some of these little tinier details are pretty hard to get right now but this is a good time for me to save because you should be saving your work i'm going to go exo head underscore i'm going to say underscore 01 black because this is my initial blocking just doing before i go up to another resolution doing some quick proportion checks um definitely think like that needs a little bit more of a doming to it eyes are not quite scale these eyes down i'm going to use local symmetry all right let's put vocal structures oh i don't have x on this i'm trying to get the right proportion of stuff the whole advantage of the approach i'm going to use is it's going to make it easier to go back in and fix stuff later but we want to get our lines and geometry as good as possible right now so like one of the big things i notice is it's a little thin down here so like that and then one of the really important shapes that i mentioned before is i need this curvature so i'm going to take move tool pretty large and if i alt it moves it towards and away from the surface that's going to help me kind of control this sort of sallowness that i want to be getting in some of these shapes okay let's go ahead and up it uh i'm i the next of course is 256 but i'm actually gonna go up to something like 400 right now undo that because i think 256 is going to be just a little too low for what i want as you can see now as i touch it up like there's a lot a lot more definition to stuff that's going to let me work a little smaller and a little sharper with some of these shapes but hopefully not too small and too sharp to make it difficult for me to work with so now a technique i use when i'm kind of more at this stage is often i'll try to help define the edge by holding alt with my damian standard and brushing across you can see like it lifts it to the surface and makes it easier to kind of control um i do a lot of like light brushing but of course one of the things we use really cool is the lazy mouse uh l is the hot key for it but the lazy radius is always set so low it's practically unusable it's just really nice to make straight lines through things so that's going to help me take these shapes and carve out some straight lines i'm going to turn it off for now though i want to get you know make a little mark definitely it should kind of come up a little bit more before coming down and then something like that again i can still think about this stage almost like i'm sketching but i'm looking for kind of some of the most important angles and shapes this is all going to be obviously thin because everything under this is going to be its whole own thing so i'm just using this opportunity to carve some of this out everything is is going to be really lumpy for like a pretty long time in this process i see i got a pretty strong line running through here so use that and pop in with my high polish and just use it to help me define as i brush across this particular shape and then i can see it kind of curves into here with that same kind of bit so i'm going to take my same standard and that means this line kind of comes into here so i'm looking at like the shape profile i got it comes up comes over and then this really runs a ridge with the eye that means this needs to come in a lot more which means i have another bend kind of like right in there it looks like i gotta like that all comes in i'm gonna use my mask game to help me do this i'm gonna mask this area this kind of really pushes in a lot more and now i can use the clay tubes here to help push it and find it so it's thinking a lot about like where do things turn this should be flat across the front sort of sinking in a little bit here but this is where i start i kind of think about this as like a secondary form because i'm thinking about the curvature of my surfaces because i'm thinking about how light reflects which reminds me another great way of looking at this is i'm using matte cap gray right now but one of the materials i like especially when i'm doing this kind of thing is this guy because it gives this really shiny reflection on the surface that gives me a lot of information on what exactly it is i'm doing and going for this needs to be in here a little bit more because i kind of got this angle this is where the high polish comes in handy because it's about where it's at i mean it's sort of like where the angles are hitting at and use that alt with flatten because it kind of brings everything to the highest level i want to make this a plane as much as possible but i'm really pushing it pretty far with what i have right now i run a pinch along the top just pinch up some of these creases here and i know on this angle i call this this is going to be 2 and this is going to be guess i'll call this i'll call this panel because i'm just trying to go through and define where the major panels are this runs here that edge or less defined kind of measuring of the stage is kind of dangerous because you you can lose a lot of detail really quick because it'll try to even everything out so i i try to use dynamesh only if i really really need to so this angle a little bit more like like something by accident and especially on something like this the smooth tool i think about it almost like an eraser because what i'm doing is i'm adding details to a surface and that smooth tool is like really erase details angles of all of these things really matter right now way too straight on it should be a lot more here what's up peter and dynamic pull the shape way a little bit i'm gonna use damian standard pretty large to kind of carve it back i can use high polish this goes here this line this up there looks like we have another kind of defined crease that runs from kind of this corner into well this is all one line back seems like it kind of intercepts there i'm gonna pull it that way use plate here to kind of by dragging across it like so making hard surffish like you know just these clay tubes so they kind of filled up anywhere i need i need surface so i'd say kind of the irony of working in something like hard surface is the cleaner you want something into the messier it's going to get that's working on like i said this is not going to be my final version this is just a base for me to work from and i'll show you how we get here to i think i'll just focus for right now on the top of the helmet and the individual panels because that's gonna take enough yeah i change i mean all my streams are like that uh the color scheme stuff is really easy to change is just preferences eye colors and you can click everything in here i've definitely gone overboard on it i think what most people do is they just replace the orange or something is what's most common but i've definitely seen people go real far with it not me though so this line comes here and then here and then it sort of shoot off of this up into this corner which means there's definitely some adjustments i need to make a couple other spots this shape's going to come in a lot more this one we go mask all this because i don't want to move it by accident this is again what masking is really useful for just letting me move part of this keep the other part i know where they are and this line actually i should shoot and line up that i gotta really move you a lot more aggressively forward because i feel like that could trace right into this is a line i gotta go even further a lot of just paying attention no it's a subject challenging for many i got this shape here which goes across both these so here kinda over the end of this interesting from the side you can see like it looks like just runs right in build that up a little bit and then from dynamic i kind of knocked it back i'm ignoring little details like that for right now not really important for what i'm doing seems like it runs into here and here there's a cut and another one we'll go here and then around i'm not going to build it like this this is a simple enough shape that i'm better off doing it as a separate piece of geometry like i did with the eyes so let's do that i'll get a lot more control that way solo z modeler let's load up in cylinder 3d let's make a lot thicker and yeah that's a good number i think like bottom wise it should come to about here clockwise was a little bit above let's see there's any better this is a pretty good view so the kind of bottom of this top of that make it a sense of scale for the whole thing and then i'll just toss it in and come back into here and use blade tubes to just actually play build will be good for this display buildup gets rid of stuff that kind of clay build up to get rid of things distance wise though probably not and just kind of give it a little bit like real bob ross when i'm narrating this kind of thing like making little sounds i'm kind of like something i learned when i was uh first like well well before i was a 3d artist i was just drawing and painting and i really loved and i still love drawing and painting and one of the things i i certainly picked up from that was the value of drawing a line in the air so i try to get like look at something you see something in perspective and you're trying to figure out like what's the angle of the top of this painting and draw a couple times trying to like build the sense memory of the angle and it made it a lot easier to help me figure out figuring out definitely there's not enough depth to my skull like giving it a real look-see here i can see i'm not quite sharp enough on stuff which you can always do is take the whole thing so all out again i'm going to be doing a lot of work on lots of panels individually goals just give me something so i have enough information to be able to start with like there's another little this has two stages to it foreign i'm definitely going to focus on it i just want to get a little bit of this down here before i start breaking these stuff i said i wasn't gonna use clay buildup but i guess i lied because it's good at exactly what it sounds like building things up sometimes i can take trim and i kind of like rough it because this needs to kind of feel like it's curving around i draw across like that and then i can come over it kind of running back and forth like a polish again it gives me that like smoothed over form that would otherwise be really hard for me to get all the clay brushes are really designed to fill in gaps what they're good at so if you have a lot of creases and crevices it's good for that like i said it just builds up form like crazy so you just got to be careful that's exactly what they're supposed to build a form really quickly and easy so you can see i'm trying to get a lot of the details as i'm going already getting that real sci-fi kind of look to it what i don't quite have is all these little curvatures all these little surfaces you can see much more closely when you really get into it where everything's going which is kind of my next the whole thing so what i'm going to do now is split this into two parts and i'm going to work on the white pieces and i'm going to work on the black piece thunder because kind of white part of the helmet is really something i'm going to treat as its own entity i'm going to take this opportunity to split it and i'm going to split it by duplicating it but solo things out kind of get things by itself and i'm going to go kind of frame it up i'm going to use mask i could use curve but i think lasso is here for this lasso just kind of erasing this i don't need and this i'm going to do an orthographic because it'll make it easier for me to not accidentally get stuff i don't want this needs to come out i'll leave that chin piece up for now and i'm going to go w look at a different color there we go something a little easier to see and identify and uh i'm going to hide that guy because that was just gotta be a backup for me i already poly grouped this thing so i'm gonna duplicate that as well so i won't have that one so if i turn off soloing i have two of them but what that's gonna give me is ctrl shift and i can polygroup high and that's going to let me delete it so now i have just this top part and this is what i'm going to be working on right now so i'm going to go ahead actually undo that i'm gonna dynamesh it now i'm gonna go pretty high with my dynamesh now because now i have a lot of control so this is something i can start using like flip curve flip great for doing that little double click in the cutaway kind of thing helps me get some really sharp lines on stuff got to be careful not to cut a lot of this back here so i'm actually going to hide the back so that when i cut out these eye holes it doesn't cut holes out of the pack or something by accident yes let's do this one half the time like so i'll have to go that so that i can because otherwise if i click curve just trying to get these pieces straight another thing i can do here this test here that the bottom angle go here i can take all this and come down to my deformation i get polished by groups which is going to largely keep the surface alone but it's going to really smooth this stuff and leave this little circle like so a couple other clips through here we can start thinking about this in terms of the separate pieces and i actually now that i'm looking at also split this off hey just get a couple of these shapes a little closer to the way i want them edges polish these guys i want to start thinking about this now in terms of these just raw panels i'm going to take this panel right here because i think it's one of the ones i have best defined so that's this shape and go back in make sure generally the shape that i want i'm going to start with this one piece and you can see my my technique for doing some panels in here so there's a couple ways you can do this to mask it out i think the way i like to do it though is i can do my um select i guess i can do it a mask lasso let's do it with a couple things i'm going to go with start with my select lasso because i'm just going to take this and say i only want to look at this general region start using this glass out here help me distract shape from it so this is the shape i have now w i can solo this back you know bring everything back this is the shape i have for this piece let me show you how i process that into something that's like a final panel for this so once again this is the piece i'm going to split parts off from it so i can do it a couple ways i can leave it i can split it i think in this case i'm actually going to go do a split in here and i'm going to do a group split now i have just this piece with just this piece selected we can see i've got plenty of surface and detail and all that i'm going to do polish by groups which just sort of sharpens up these edges i can also do polished crisp edges works pretty well and something else you might want to try if you really want to help get it a little bit more defined is like a clay polish you can see kind of sharpen some things up but i don't want to do that because you can see every time i do that it gets a little shrinked shrunk i don't really want it to drink that much ooh and i get an opportunity to get rid of this little guy make sure i don't have any this stuff in there so i can now down the tree and then i can do that polish because i want a nice sharp edge running on ideally i want this to be a nice line here okay then give myself the best possible chance of getting my curves so like kind of run the way i want them to i'm gonna make different polygroups where i know i want like there to be a line to run because now i can go to my zero mesher my favorite tool ever i'm gonna leave it at something i like you know pretty high to start with and i'm gonna do keep groups not freeze groups because that will help me keep a line like an edge loop that runs along those edges that i did not like figure out what's going on there not a fan of that line i think what i might try then is get it to reconsider the way i'm interpreting this i'm just going to treat this flat thing this little crease is more or less going to be i'll have to think about it a little bit more like a plane and again i want to always polish it first this one i'll just try to get it to run off like that let's see how this is going to work oh man what is it just not like about we turn off dynamesh i'm gonna try my legacy dynamesh instead see if it works better wow that full shape is just not like i'm gonna turn off keep groups yeah okay keep groups is working better i'm going to try doing a lower poly count to start with that i usually like to keep the group so it keeps a line and then i i lower its resolution because i'll like hit half i'll just keep hitting it same resolution a tray and for the life of me figure out why it hates this place my settings a little bit this comes through fine that guy's still a problem save zero measurement go low with it and not work my head around why that's being such a problem i suppose the alternative is to build that part by hand turn on detect edges see if that helps it helps a little bit full shape it is just not a fan i'm going to try really quick going polished by groups and i'm going to go polish by groups i'm going to turn this guy way like this because it's going to really sharpen up a lot of stuff now let's see what still just like goes crazy there must just not like the shape is just weird enough that's really struggling with it so that's pleasing awkward condition being how do i get you behave see if i can push it a little bit more up wow this thing usually like does this does a pretty good job of managing it for the life of me i guess i can show you with this piece the way of doing it by hand which is not what i prefer to do affordable i want to see is what's crazy about this is even if i go really high with my zero measure like usually that's more than enough it struggles to do that shape something weird about that let's see if i kind of go like this now that i got this just wow i'm flummoxed everybody flummoxed i say i do not want to build this by hand but i think i have to i'm going to try a different part just to see if something else will behave a little bit better i'm going to go to here i'll go into my solo and let's do this this is a pretty big piece got a lot of shapes to it let's see what you do for me let's take that select lasso the shape just kind of get extra a little bit okay this is all one piece let's see how you behave fingers crossed i'm gonna go ctrl w and uh split just look at this let's see what happens it's really shredding stuff up here there must be something wrong that i'm just not you know what i think i have a bunch of little points that seem like they're flipped on the wrong side here's what i want to try just in case i'm gonna do an auto group i select this try this oh so our group let's look at this let me try this delete it because i just basically did that to get rid of anything that wasn't part of this group is that could have been it does not contain polygons in nature okay i'm not going to do it in symmetry okay that is much more what i'm expecting let's see what happens now if i reintroduce some of the edge loop stuff that i want to do basically anywhere i have a crease line i'm hitting this up better there's some weird weird stuff going on in here though not not free there we go that's like exactly what i'm trying to do don't know why that was being so difficult the other one i think might have just had a lot of invisible dead stuff i'm trying to go reasonably low-ish on this if you get too much lower it really like obliterates stuff like that but like low enough that i still have everything and now i'm going to go in here with it in transparency mode and just sort of reshape it now that i have fewer polys to work with helps me kind of keep some of those edges it helps me kind of control this to turn it into a smoother curve i can use high polish to sort of bring that back down make a mirror version of it this kind of corner here and that line goes straight great probably could have spent more time polishing this to get it to where i want it but it is going to crease by polygroups so that when i smooth it it's going to help me keep some of those creases and now i'm going to take my z modeler and i'm going to say q mush island which is everything and i'm going to push it in that's the surface it kind of made everything reverse fine because all i have to do is go to display properties flip it now let's try grouping by normal not bad i'm going to use this to help me define a lot of these creases and stuff this whole guy here i can take the z modeler set your polygroup i'm just trying to you to have a new one polygroups i have this piece now really make my life a little bit easier by just removing some of these edge loops so many running along here you can see that density of edge loops that run along this i'm like man i don't think i'll move those edges i could say the same of these but it's all too densely packed in here and zero measure likes to do those kind of shapes i wish it would but you know as they say there they are missed that line so to give me this because that's not doing what i wanted to do the modeler insert point and i get here here and since i'm using polygroups i can do uncrease all the modeler but now i'm like controlling way way fewer group get my final date let's take the whole thing because they tend to shrink up in a little system i give it a little plate i think i need to crease back here somewhere too maybe right about there i know it sure seems like a lot for a little it's just how we can work so that i can get something that eventually i can throw more small details onto now when i'm trying to straighten out my lines or move points around i have a lot less to work with another thing i can do when i'm working at this stage is going to brush let's turn on customize because i want to pull this down get this guy out of the way and i'm going to go to brush auto masking and i'm going to do this mask by poly group i can kind of wedge this somewhere i don't really have a lot of room for it right now i'll pull out snake hook because i don't need it right now and so what this is going to let me do is when it's off you can see a brush goes across everything when it's on it's going to only let me do it for polygroup so it's going to let me flatten on just one thing at a time that's going to be convenient some of these kind of like control things because then i can like flatten her poly group one thank you match see that little guy so a lot of work here but we can see what it's doing for us really giving me something that i'm able to push and pull the points around on someday when zbrush gets it fancy advertised free topology tools doing a lot of this very differently right now this is uh this is the business and we can see i now have like this clean working with kind of model as a result we can start to see i can build these pieces out one by one i'm going to try fixing that because this was that one i was really struggling with recall and uh what i'm going to do auto group kind of grab everything and i'm not going to try to do it in symmetry like i was before so before i was doing everything in symmetry i'm not going to delete hidden so i'm only working in half of it i want to see if i can get it to do the paneling thing that i was trying to do with it so symmetry was the problem so i got rid of half of it deleted the symmetry now it's happy i mean ish so i go low like as low as i feel like i can get away with and then it's just a matter of unless you mask my polyverse here if you ever get this like you accidentally grab hold on something you can just grab and hold on again get the brush you want back this one a lot better do that d modeler q mesh island and actually that flip there's a flip in here too so i can do flip places island as well to do the same thing basically and then it's just uh you know a matter of time to do what i wanted to do let's go real quick modeler mesh single poly because i want this to be the gonna be this little guy helping to find that turn on the group shift the sample sample just these take all of these in normal see how we did i'm not too shabby i do want to make sure i keep let's give you a little plate and you know let's try to [Music] polish by groups actually doesn't produce too bad a result too if you want to give it a shot with this technique now it's a matter of getting these pieces to line up with each other and i'll show you one other thing before i kind of sign off here i did forget you we needed a nice crease right here there we go now he's doing that respect groups which identified here too that's nice it helps me smooth these out quite a bit oh yeah that makes me happy so now i have these two separate panels but what i can do let's say this and i'm going to call this mesh underscore panels what i can do with this now is take these two panels that i've created and i'm going to merge them i want to show you i now have this one sub tool i got a mirror called and in this case come here something here well just the right direction so now what i do is this is where move topology rate because it's going to let me move pieces by themselves a little tricky because it's local symmetry will help me here go i can kind of push and pull both of them and then i can also move them together just whichever move will i want to use as you can see these are really complex like lots of curves but by paying attention to the shapes i'm trying to make and making some pretty smart choices about um where my creases are going i didn't have to get that deep i probably could have made this easier on myself by going another division level down into the sculpting or working it a little bit more with some of the traditional stuff but i mean what i have is polish by groups this little arrow makes smaller changes like it won't move the groups as much what i really have is something that's very very workable and uh if i really want to bump something out well i'm going to lift it out a little bit like so to change from its profile and then i can do polish by groups again and it's going to help me smooth out that surface but because i'm doing everything in this kind of sub d mode really going to help me keep nice sharp kind of crisp edges with everything i need here the back you lose the plot a little bit so to speak but i need to make sure i have another crease right in here that kind of more or less be right about there so two panels down 20 more to go that's uh that's the technique so i guess my tip from this is don't try to use zero measure for this in symmetry because it will freak out yeah i have something and i can always go that mask by polygroups and i can just use stuff like my high polish even these little things out without affecting some of the other areas okay give it a save because i'm on my zero mesh panels i've definitely got more to do even in just this top helmet piece i got this piece this whole helmet piece is kind of one big guy it looks like i'm gonna need to do some lifting on there but i have something that if i want to make some pretty major changes to it can really affect the shape of and think about how it curves in so i guess i'll have to this piece and this piece are going to make that piece which should be a pretty simple shape that shouldn't be too bad i could probably even z model that i need to get the idea that the inside of this i can use this here to help me like lift up this inside like so so that whenever i get into this and i have this piece kind of carved away i'll have that under it like so and then i'll use this piece to help me you know more define it that'll work just fine so two pieces basically on the top oh three because i got that little back piece here to make do but these are we're definitely the most too kind of complicated ones and you know still need a little bit more work on a couple of these points because i want to maybe sharpen up this little crease in here push that around a little bit and polish it somewhere definitely kind of brush it off and kind of and i can do it real small too not possible features tap it and it does it really subtly okay well thanks for tuning in and uh i'll check folks in the next one so looking forward to seeing tomorrow people posting their work of progress from the helmets don't forget you can post questions about like is this cool or not is this a good project or not um in the discord happy to answer those questions for you looking forward to see what everyone comes up with thanks for tuning in you

Channel: Andrew Dennis

Views: 73,625

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Id: caL3iZqNYFA

Length: 111min 20sec (6680 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 29 2020