How to create and use instances in ZBrush

so i thought we'd do a quick tutorial on instancing here i have a character that i'm making at the moment and i'd like to put a forearm guard on this character but i'd like to put that guard on both arms and then adjust it to place and while it's doing that i'd like it to be an instance so i already have an arm guard made i can go into solo mode here so we can see it this is it very simple piece of geometry i'm going to press shift f so we can see exactly what that looks like and you can see just how simple this is i've intentionally kept it this simple so if i hold down control and alt i can drag over an area like this and then i can kind of adjust this as needed so i don't have to worry about too many polygons and or polygons deforming badly for myself so i literally have no loops in between each of these stages of this actual mesh here i'm going to go out of solo mode so we can have a look at our character again this is what he looks like at the moment this is our object in the center of the world and i'd like to place it in two different places here so the way this actually happens is we have one object called armguard i'm just going to hold down shift and press this arrow to shoot it to the top so we can see what we're looking at and you'll see if i go to macro there underneath macros here there's a macro that comes with zebrush called crate instance sub tool and what that's going to do is it's going to take our arm guard and then create a duplicate of it and use that as a nanomesh so we'll go back to macro we'll hit the button this time create instant sub tool and take a couple seconds and you can see it immediately comes up and says okay position the nanomesh poly to the id location and you can create duplicates using control and drag and activate edit mesh so we'll just go over that very briefly basically it's hidden our original object here the arm guard is now hidden and it's created a new object here this new object is actually a nanomesh if we scroll down to the nanomesh here you can see that this nanomesh if i turn this off it's just showing us a single polygon that it's created what's actually happened is it made a single polygon and then drew our arm guard onto that polygon as a nanomesh so if i turn this back on we can see that so that polygon is actually the placement polygon so return on shoulder show placement we'll actually see that polygon so i'll turn it off again so with this effectively all we're working on is that one polygon if we press w and we scale this down we're effectively just scaling down that single polygon which happens to have an instance of this mesh on it so i'm going to take this and i'm going to move it into place scale it down we can zoom in and basically place this roughly where we'd like it and at the scale that we'd like it so let's say something like this now i can see that there are some issues with it protruding through the arm here and this is why i wanted to do this i wanted to see if this step is too much or not you can see if i had to modify those points here it would be awkward to get the right angle for it to be consistent and straight so i have that one object now um but if i want to create another one for the other arm effectively remember if we turn on show placement what we have is a single polygon and in zbrush if you have any piece of geometry that doesn't have a subdivision which this one doesn't go back to nanomesh and we can just hold down control and that will drag out an extra copy of that polygon and mask the original control every time we do that we're going to get a copy left behind these are all instances then effectively this nanomesh is the same on all of them so if i i'm just going to undo that i'm just going to ctrl drag once we can actually turn off show placement we don't need to see that polygon here so i'm just going to ctrl and drag and that will bring this one over here and we can orient our gizmo anyway we'd like by just holding down alt and locking that or resetting our gizmo if we want to alter clicking we'll do that so i'm just holding shift as i'm rotating around and my views just to kind of snap my view to something like where i want it and if i want to modify my gizmo here we can just hold down alt and then we can modify the orientation of this in a way that makes sense to us so if i want to rotate this up here and do that so let's say i'm happy with this placement and we have the same problem on this arm that intersecting the arm a little bit at one point and maybe i'll rotate it a little bit more like this and using screen space i'll just move it like that okay so now that we have these two and they're both instances we don't have our original so how do we actually edit this so that's the edit mesh button so as soon as we hit this button it's basically going to split the screen into two and if i zoom in or out from one it's going to zoom in or on the other and you can see now that as i'm playing around with this one we're going to see the effects on this one here so for example i have a problem here is that the step is too much so i can go to a side view here we can turn off perspective if we want just to get an orthographic view and holding down control and alt will mask everything except what's underneath my my cursor now i can press w and move that out now you'll see as i move that out i'll just undo it again as i move it out it's basically going to move out on both of these instances on the other side so now we can actually determine okay this is actually intersecting his forearm it's too big a step this is kind this is all right this is enough of a step for me to keep that and make it interesting if i want to change this i can hold down control and alt and you know decide how long or short these these parts are and you can see i had very few loops here and that was very intentional that if i had lots of loops in the middle here and i tried to make a selection you know they might not all follow along nicely but there's only one loop in between here it's very very easy to get straight shapes also because now that we have this and i'm happy with the location i can now edit this piece of geometry and the instances will update with it so i can press my z modeler brush or press q to go back to draw mode and press open up your z model brush bzm and we can just insert loops now i'll press shift d to turn off dynamic mode which i had turned on and so we can insert loops and modify this geometry any way we see fit so if i know i'm going to be carving detail on this later on maybe this is an area that i'm going to need more loops in and so i can add them in now and i know that they're going to be added in to the instances that we see over here as well so that's pretty much it one thing i would say is that we can press d to turn on dynamic mode here d will toggle that on we can say always yes and you'll see that that updates here but it doesn't update in the viewport over here so turning dynamic toggling it on and off won't affect the nanomesh over here which is a little bit unfortunate and what we can do is we can go down to our nano mesh and we can go out of edit mesh mode once we're done editing and even now if we press d you'll see it will turn on the dynamic subdivision or it won't actually but it will turn it on just for the polygon not for uh not for the the geometry that's on the polygon so i'm going to press shift d just to turn that off again um and you'll see even just by turning on dynamic subdivision even though show placement isn't turned on it will toggle that on for you or effectively show it whether you want it or not so shift d will turn it back off again so now that we have those and we're happy with the placement and they it's helped us determine the scale and the position and any geometry changes that we want to make how do we make it real so there's two ways to do that to convert these from instances into final pieces of geometry one is to go down to the inventory and just hit one to mesh and the other is to go to geometry and hit convert bp or to geo both of these will do the same thing you see here if i go to nanomesh i'm happy with the results i hit one to mesh i go back up to my sub tool you can see we now have one piece of our one sub tool here now if i hit d we would turn on dynamic subdivision for both of them but i still want to get rid of this original polygon but luckily enough they share the same polygroup so we can just hit control and shift click on that click on it again and it's hidden to actually permanently delete it we need to go into modify topology under geometry and say delete hidden that's it we're now done um we have our model we can turn on or off dynamic subdivision as we see fit or real subdivisions if we need to but our instances serve the purpose and because of that we can go back to our original object which we now no longer need and just delete that hope this tip helps anyone else is looking to do some instancing and as ever don't forget to like subscribe and comment alright bye

Channel: Sean Forsyth

Views: 2,516

Keywords: zbrush, zbrush tutorial, zbrush instance subtool, zbrush macros, zbrush macro tutorial, zbrush instances, zbrush instance mesh, zbrush 2021 tutorial, zbrush 2021.6 tutorial, armour instance

Id: zJF6yfwaeCQ

Length: 9min 21sec (561 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 31 2021