How and Why to Use Gizmo 3D in ZBrush

hi i'm scott bradford from the rio grande tech team and today we're going to be looking at the gizmo 3d inside zbrush so let's get started okay so today we're going to be talking about the gizmo 3d and in order to do that we're going to need a couple sub tools so i'm going to navigate over here to my tool palette and click on the box here to bring in a primitive and i'm going to bring in a sphere 3d so i'm going to left click and drag bring that out release and immediately hit the t key on my keyboard or click the edit object so just to kind of get things ready i'm going to go ahead and make this a poly mesh 3d by clicking on the make poly mesh 3d button up here on the tool palette and i'm going to add some subdivisions to it so i'm going to just click divide a couple times just to kind of smooth everything out and i'm going to delete my lower subdivision levels here now to add in a second tool if i click up here to add a tool it will just replace this sphere so to add in a second one i'll navigate to the subtool palette here and i'm going to click on append so now for my second one i'm going to add in a cube 3d and i want to do the same as before i don't need to make this a polymesh3d but i do want to select it from our subtool list here make sure that that is highlighted and then add some subdivisions to it as well so i'm going to click that a few times just until it looks smoothish and then delete my lower subdivision levels okay so the gizmo 3d is it contains all of our move scale and rotating functions along with a few other things so to bring that up i can click on any three or any one of these three buttons up here uh we have the move the scale the rotate and you can hit any of these hotkeys so you can hit the w the e or the r to bring up the gizmo so i'm just going to go ahead and click on move and here is our gizmo 3d so what this is going to allow us to do is move things in a precise way so to start with as these three boxes suggest the move scale rotate they're all contained within this gizmo so the move functions are these cones here on the outside so i can i can left click and drag to move this cube around and you can navigate back to your subtool palette and the the gizmo will snap to the one that you want to move so i just clicked on my sphere again gizmo moved back to my sphere and now i can move that independently these cones and these these colors i should say are representative of the three axes so the x the y and the z so i can even if i have the this scene here pointed at kind of a kind of a off direction i can still grab these cones and move things along those axes so on the interior here we've got these boxes so the the x the y and the z and these are for our scaling so if i left click and drag on these it will actually scale in that axis so of course same with the x y and z and these are really good for just kind of roughing out different shapes at the beginning before you start sculpting this is one this would be one of the first things you do when you're you're getting your primitive into a basic shape that you'll start sculpting on and same thing when if you have your view at kind of an off angle you can still use these and it will scale only along that axis so on this in the center here this is our scale all or scale xyz so if i click and drag in here then it's just going to scale all of them evenly now you can see that when i mouse over these it's actually written below what they do so scale xyz if i mouse over one of these boxes here it just says scale x and and there are some modifiers there as well we'll be going over those here in just a moment so these boxes on the interior here are our scaling functions in different directions now for rotate you'll see i have these these circular lines with the colors corresponding to our axes and that allows us to rotate along that axis and i'm going to select the cube again so you can see it a little better kind of difficult to see a sphere rotating so i can rotate along the x-axis by left-clicking and dragging on this axis and again it doesn't doesn't matter what what angle i have my viewport as long as i'm clicking on this red rotate line then i'm rotating along that axis now when you're rotating you're left clicking and dragging to rotate and you'll notice down below there's a number there uh that is actually the degrees that you're rotating so if you want to be more precise with it as you can see it goes to about four decimal places as you're left clicking and dragging and hold shift button and it will actually snap every 5 degrees so you can really dial in the angle that you want and this comes in handy when you're trying to be symmetrical we've gone over the the move the scale and the rotate functions there's a couple more in here you'll notice that these rotate lines they'll move with the the axis they are they are pinned to their respective axis uh however we've got this white one here on the outside that is not moving and that's because that allows us to rotate relative to our scene so whatever angle i have my kind of camera pointed here i can left click and drag and rotate along the scene now this can be a bit unpredictable because you can have your angle of your camera in pretty much any direction so getting precise movement with this is a bit tricky but what you can do is when you're holding right click and and spinning to get the view down you can snap by holding shift to that that axis and you can now rotate along that respective axis and again i can hold shift to snap to certain degrees now the last one here is these little arrows here so this error these arrows are are going to allow me to move freely within my scene so i can left click and drag and i can move this anywhere that i want and again uh same with this white kind of rotate function on the outside this will be respective to the angle in which you're looking so if i have my scene kind of off to the side here or my camera off to the side and i left click and drag it's going to move it relative to my my scene so those are kind of the basic functions of the the gizmo but let's look at some of the modifiers as well so when i mouse over these uh you'll see it says under this move command it says move x uh alt to unlock so uh we're going to be going over the unlock lock and unlock feature here in just a sec but some of these have a few different modifiers in there so if i go to one of these scaling ones it says scale x which is you know just left clicking and dragging but it also says control to clip and alt to scale in y and z so if i hold ctrl and then click and drag you can see i'm actually clipping off part of that that primitive and of course this works in either direction so you can kind of rough out the shape you're wanting and if i hold alt while i'm doing this you can see it's only scaling in the x and the z axis my dimension in the y axis is not changing and all of these interior boxes have that same function so and these are are tied to the different axis so i don't have to worry about which way i have my camera pointing i can just hold ctrl and start clipping away this primitive um the the gizmo really comes in handy for that early layout when you bring in a primitive and you're getting a very basic shape ready uh to start sculpting or whatever you have planned for it these are these are great functions for that the scale and x x y and z so if i hold ctrl it'll actually just kind of kind of inflate it a little bit you can see it's getting a little a little boxier as i go smaller and then as i bring it out you can see it's actually changing some of the geometry here that's because we've only got certain subdivisions so it's trying to stretch these subdivisions if i click on poly frames you can see it's it's trying to keep the model together so be careful with this uh that is that is best with dynamesh objects so you could always uh just re-dynamesh after you're done so i'm going to go ahead and turn off our poly frames again just get back to our regular screen here so so those uh don't don't forget about these these kind of alternate functions because uh clipping these primitives is a really nice way of making quick adjustments to these and as you can see they allow you to keep a pretty sharp edge even though i've got this i've got some pretty decent subdivisions to do some sculpting on this model but i don't have to worry about creasing or or anything like that so so yeah don't forget those are there so i'm going to go ahead and undo and get back to our two primitives so on the top here we have a a variety of functions that will will definitely come in handy so so the first one we're going to talk about we're going to come back to customize here towards the end but we're actually going to start with sticky mode so if i click on that and activate sticky mode what that does is when i move something so i'm going to left click and drag over here my gizmo is going to snap back into its original spot so why would you use that one of the reasons there there are multiple reasons but one of them would be to rotate along a certain axis so let's say that my gizmo was in the center of something and i wanted to move this along an outside axis by moving it's kind of out here to the side and then having my gizmo stick back to the center of where it was now i can actually rotate it around wherever i need so that would be one of the reasons why you would use the sticky mode the next one is called go to unmasked mesh center so what that's going to do is it's going to snap this gizmo back into the center of our selected subtool so if i unlock this gizmo so i'm going to hold alt i'm going to left click and drag and again we'll go over the unlock all uh unlock and lock here in just a sec but in certain cases your gizmo will not be lined up like sticky mode for instance after you view sticky mode your gizmo may be kind of somewhere else than where your subtool is so if you want to get this back to the center say you've rotated around wherever you need to and you need to make another adjustment to this you can click on the unmasked mesh center and it will immediately snap back to the center of your subtool now one thing about this command is that it does respect masking so if i hold control on my keyboard and i've got my mask pin up here i'm actually going to change my stroke modifier to this drag rectangle and i'm going to hold ctrl and i'm going to drag over about half of this primitive here to mask it now when i click go to unmask mesh center it's going to look at the unmasked areas of my model and when i click it it will snap to that part of it this comes in handy when when you're going to be doing some manipulations uh to only certain areas of your subtool so you can you can mask them off uh bring your gizmo over to to the area that you want and and do those so uh so i can hold ctrl drag out off to the side to clear my mask and then go back to my unmasked center to bring this gizmo back into the center of our subtool so since we've talked about lock and unlock a couple times now would be a good time to kind of show you how that works so we saw that with our move x y and z and i know we're jumping around up here a bit but just just stay with me we saw that it on these cones for moving along certain axis says alt to unlock so basically think of lock and unlock like when this icon is a closed lock your gizmo is tied to your sub tool so that whenever i move the gizmo it moves the subtool now if this is unlocked then when i move it i'm only moving the gizmo so again this allows for opportunities to rotate along certain axis there will be opera there will be times when you need the gizmo to be somewhere else so you can manipulate that sub tool in a certain way and now if i lock it back now again my gizmo is tied back to my subtool so that's a good way to think of it if this is locked it's locked to the sub tool if it's unlocked it's unlocked from the subtool and you can move it wherever you want if i lock that back i can go back to the go to unmashed mesh center and it will snap back in the next option here is mesh to access so think of this like your home button so if i click and that's why it has a little home icon there it's a good way of thinking about it so when i click that this will go back to the center of my scene basically the zero point so if i click that this is where this the very beginning of my scene was now if i undo again this will respect the lock and unlock feature so if i unlock that and i click the home button it only takes the gizmo with it because it's now been unlocked from its subtool so now i can go back and and that's just a good way to get something to the center of your scene when you generate primitives in zbrush it's always going to start right at the home home area or the the zero of your scene so if you ever need to get it back over there you can do that or if you want to rotate along a certain axis you can make something on your piece like say if you're going to be making a ring and you want to have multiple pieces going around the ring you could you could send your gizmo to the center of your scene and then just rotate your sub tool around the ring however you want it okay so the next one up in this list is this one here it's called reset mesh orientation so the first thing i'm going to do to demonstrate this is i'm going to rotate just a random amount and now let's say let's say i need to move this along a certain axis so if i use these then because i've moved everything these are no longer moving along the kind of global x y and z axis so so how do we get around that so the reset mesh orientation is what that's used for now if i just click on it right now then it's because it's locked to my sub tool it's going to take the sub tool with it so if i go back i'm going to just rotate again a random amount now if i unlock my gizmo and then click reset orientation it's just going to reset the gizmo itself and now i can lock it back in and now i can take this rotated object and move it along the x y and z axis and the reason why that would be important is because if you have multiple sub tools like this sphere for instance this sphere i haven't been rotating at all it's still along the global and x y and z axis and by rotating this we've actually we changed the the orientation of this and we we need to be able to move this sub tool relative to these other ones so this just kind of it's think of it like a reset for the the gizmo 3d to get it back to the direction that it's supposed to be now the last one here it says transpose all selected subtools as you've probably noticed when when i'm moving an object it's only moving this selected sub tool it's because i have it selected over here and if i select the sphere then it the gizmo jumps to the sphere and then i can move that but what this command this transpose all selected subtools does is it allows me to click on that and then i can move all of the subtools in my scene all at once so that way it grabs the sphere and the cube and moves them however i need them to now one of the nice parts about this is that let's say let's say you have a scene with a lot of subtools but you only need to move a small group of them you can actually select individually which ones you want to move and the way you do that is you you hold hold shift and click now you'll notice that my my sphere here is kind of grayed out that means that it is not selected so as you're once you turn on this transpose all selected subtools option you can go you can hold control and shift and individually click on the subtools that you want and it will only move those and then to get rid of this i hold ctrl and shift and just drag a box out in the scene somewhere and now i can again move all these together until i've unchecked the transposal subtools button and now i can move these individually so yeah once you start getting into scenes that have lots of subtools in them if you need to make little groups to make adjustments to those that's the command that you would use to do that okay so the last one that we're going to look at up here at the top is the customize button so when you click on that it's going to bring up a new window here and that's because the gizmo 3d has a lot of extra features built into it we can actually generate primitives within the gizmo 3d so so i can actually click on one of these like a cylinder or polycube and whatever tool that i have selected here will be replaced so i'll go ahead and i'm going to bring in a third sub tool and i'm just going to bring in this star here and i'm going to select it and just kind of move it where we can see it so if i click on customize and do a let's do a cylinder 3d so now my my star has changed to a primitive that i can actually do a bit more modification on you can see i've got these little these little uh cones that are sticking up out of the side so over here uh this one is v divide and h divide so what that does is it can actually as i click and drag on these i'm actually adding more geometry to it so if i need something that is a you know a slightly different shape i can use the subdivisions on there to actually adjust that and the v divide is the same way i'm just kind of adding geometry here this is especially good if you want to start off with a z modeler brush we won't be going into z modeler here there is a lot of content around c modeler so i would recommend checking out the video series on the z classroom to learn all of the functions about z modeler but we will be using it on occasion uh and one of the nice parts about this cylinder here is we have an inner radius so we can actually uh make a tubing which comes in handy when you're doing things like settings and things like that so this is a a nice way of generating a a primitive that you can start sculpting on right away and and i can go ahead and add subdivisions to this and start sculpting on it however i want and i can also jump back into my gizmo so if i click on that little gear icon again right here where it says customize it'll bring me back to my window and i can go back into the gizmo 3d and move it however i need to and and you'll notice that even if i switch i have to go back into draw mode to kind of get rid of the little handles there but i can always go back into that those options by bringing back up the gizmo 3d going back into customize and then i've got my cylinder 3d button up here where i can go back in and make more adjustments to it so so yeah don't don't forget that these primitives are here these offer a lot of customization options rather than just bringing out a standard primitive uh from your tool palette up here uh you can bring in something like that that star or whatever you want and then immediately go into the gizmo to bring out a more customizable primitive okay so the last thing i want to show you i'm going to i'm going to go back into the gizmo 3d go back into draw mode and i'm going to do a quick modification to my cube here so i'm going to go ahead and hide these the sphere and the cylinder so i'm going to select my cube and the little eyeball here on our uh subtools if i click the eyeball it will hide those in my scene so i'm going to go into the gizmo 3d and i'm going to drag this out and i'm just going to create something that's a bit smaller so i'm just gonna drag this out a little bit make it a bit smaller just by using the little handles that we were talking about earlier and i think that will be good so i'm going to go back into customize and you'll notice we have all of these functions as well now we won't be going over all of them but i'll show you roughly what to expect from these so so i'm going to do the let's do a taper so these are deformations that you can do on these primitives so we have all these different handles again and some of them you'll you'll just want to play with them a bit and see how they they react um you can you can play with these to your heart content but as you click and drag you can actually add tapers to different areas of your primitive so you can see i've even got handles in here so i can click and drag on these and take a just a regular primitive and only using the gizmo 3d you can create endless shapes so yeah give them a try it's it's really great for little freeform pieces like this i mean i could add that as a design element to anything i wanted and yeah just really the element is play because there's as you can see if i go back into customize here there's a lot of different options here to to play with so yeah feel free to try some of those out now if i immediately go back into my gizmo 3d again i can kind of move and rotate this any way i want but there's one more thing that we have to do let's say this is the shape that i want to keep so from my customize menu here you'll see i've got some new buttons here i've got my here's my taper which i can still go back into and make adjustments but i've also got accept reset full reset and delete so in order to keep this mesh let's say i'm done making my my deformations i click customize and then click accept and now it is a finished piece that i can start adding onto my my overall design so so yeah it's it's easy to forget that these are hidden inside the gizmo 3d but there's there's so many that have so many useful uh applications like the the bend arc you know allowing you to kind of bend things in different ways now because we've we've done some other deformations on this you'll you'll just kind of have to play to see what goes with what so i'm actually going to just reset that and delete a lot of these are very useful so so yeah play around with them see what you think you can kind of play to your heart's content and and just be careful it is kind of easy to break your model with some of these uh that one didn't break luckily enough but uh but yeah you can really create some cool effects with these so so yeah feel free to to play and and try these out so so that's a pretty pretty in-depth look at the gizmo 3d uh you'll be using it quite a bit for moving things around but as you can see there's just so many different options that you can you can use just with this one tool so yeah that's pretty much it if you have any other questions always feel free to contact us [Music] you

Channel: Rio Grande

Views: 4,119

Keywords: gizmo 3D, gizmo, zbrush, digitial production, 3D design, 3D jewelry design, 3D, zmodeler, jewelry sculpting, 3D manufacturing

Id: B2qQaE3aqP0

Length: 32min 17sec (1937 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 04 2020