How to Create Clean Hardsurface in ZBrush

SE brush and heart surface one of those things that can be a little bit tricky but today guys I am going to be showing you how to go from this just a very basic sketch of a breastplate into this right here the clean version of the element I'm going to be showing you all of the process right I'm going to show you the techniques that I used to create this piece right here or the start of this piece right here and I do believe that this tools and techniques are very very useful especially if you don't want to be jumping in and out of the software so if you want to know how to create this very clean looking plates let's go very well my friends so let's get into making this like very rough sketch of an armor into a nice piece so the first thing that we need to do is we need to create this like rough sketch that I have for my character you probably have seen it running around in some of my stories there on Instagram so what I'm going to do here is I want to extract all of this shape right here and to do that we're going to be using masks now this is one of the steps that you need to be very careful about because as you can see if we start grabbing on the like outer edge of this thing we're going to have a little bit of an issue so idea you want to grab only the flat area on the front of the armor you can see that they have some section lines that I drew for the design of this uh chest plate or this breastplate and we actually don't care about those just yet we're going to use them as a guide later on but right now we only need the general shape right here try to clean your edges as much as possible this is again one of the important parts of the of the process of this um of this cleanup effect and this is something that you would normally do or there's another way to do it which is of course go into a software like Maya or blender or even like 3D code or topon and just create the retopology of the element but I don't want to do that it's it's a little bit timec consuming so once we have this I'm going to go to subtool and we're going to go to extract and the first little secret here is that you want to extract with zero thickness this is very very important hit accept let's isolate this so that we can see it and this is what we get so not bad for our first extraction not mad for our first like a assd right here the next thing is we need to clean the edges a little bit and there's a bunch of different ways to do it the first one that I like to do is I actually like to go with my select lasso and get rid of some of like the very obvious uh like errors that I made on the on the masking process now once I pretty much like do that the next thing let me remove there we go the next thing is of course delete Hidden so we're going to go here and say delete Hidden and we're going to go all the way down to De formation to clean up the edges because it's very common to get this sort like jaggedy edges on the elements and we're going to use either polish or polish CRP crisp edges whichever one you prefer this is going to clean them up a little bit it's not going to be perfect but it's going to give you a nice result now don't worry too much about this because the real way in which we're going to be cleaning this is of course with C measure so I'm just going to click C measure and immediately we're going to get a more organized sort of like topology as you can see right here it's not perfect but it's getting there now one of the secrets about Sir measure is that you don't want to work with as high of a resolution as you normally get by default so I'm going to go a little bit lower to like 2.5 I'm going to sir remesh and then I'm going to click on this option that says half and I'm going to see remesh again and as you can see with h c remeshing I'm going to get a very sort of like low poly version of the whole thing this right here is perfect perfect perfect and why is this perfect because of two reasons first of all on the corners right here we don't have a loop we actually have a a sharp corner and this will give me a a nicer more like crisp looking Edge than having an edge Loop that continues all the other way around I'm going to do the same thing here just like move things around we do have a n Loop right there and if you want one of the things that you can do is of of course just like move a couple of this points and generate a a nicer uh border and yeah and we got this underlying or under like Edge on the bottom part right there so this right here is a perfectly workable topology now if you're like super super like um like precise of your topology like a perfectionist yes there are things that can be improved like this Loops right here there's definitely a couple of things but to be honest especially if you have a character that's going to have this big breastplate and he's never going to like bend down into like a C- shape he's always going to be moving very very tanky like like then this is perfectly fine perfectly workable and I would even say like the topology resolution is is really nice as well so once we have this the next thing we need to do is we need to add some thickness so again I'm going to go to Geometry dynamics of division Dynamic and I'm going to remove the dynamic subdivision for now I don't want any smooth subdivision I just want thickness when you add thickness thickness by default is going to add thickness to both sides of the elements it's going to it's going to grab your Bas plane it's going to push some thickness up and some thickness down by the way all of these things I'm talking about uh like the tools here instead of cush if you are new to cush and would you want to like learn a little bit more about the software I got some free lessons and a premium course down here on the comments that you can check out it's like 20 hours of of content so that you can create your own characters and we cover a lot of these tools as well so over here I'm going to change the offset to the back okay this is very important I just want the offset to be going back why is this well because if you remember we grabbed the mask from the front part of the of the breastplate so we want to create the depth of that breastplate and we don't want to push this and make it like way way thicker than it should be now you can see we have a couple of like weird edges or weird like things right there that's fine that's very very easy to to fix I'm going to show you in just a second so I'm just going to hit here apply so now I'm just going to press control click on this thing and then control and drag and then I'm going to hide this guys oh oh is that part of the oh that's horrible I thought it was like separated oh it is separated but it's the same for some reason it's the same poly group so what I'm going to do here is I'm just going to do an auto groups option and that should now be its own sort of like polyr there we go same of those or let's just let's just grab this one right here there we go and I'm just going to say delete Hidden I mean we do we do lose the polygroups but it's very easy to recover them if we go back to C modeler we can just grab this Edge right here and say polygroup and that's going to polygroup the whole Edge right there and then we can hide that invert it and say autog groups again and now we got again the back and the front as a separate poly trops so now if we turn on dynamics of division again without uh thickness of course and we turn on a couple of subdivision levels we going to get the very nice smooth effect but we get this s like rounded Corners which suck right so in order to get a sharp look again withy modeler we're going to be using this insert Edge which is pretty much like traditional poly modeling and this is a question that I get often about like poly modeling like do you need to know about poly modeling if you know how to sculpt and the answer is yes because if you know the basics of poly modeling support edges bubles things like that all of this becomes way way easier here as well so make sure that we have a symmetry turn on yeah okay so we're going to add one right there and look at how sharp and nice that corner becomes same thing over here so one right there on the very border we're going to add one right here and one right here and as you can see that gives us a very very nice clean look over the whole thing now I'm going to disable Dynamic of division because as you can see there are a couple of like little bumps here and there you can actually smooth them out if you want like a super super like nice effect but I'm going to show you a very cool effect that I like I'm going to hit apply and now this is like real subdivision like we've created the subdivision for the element we actually have the subdivision levels here and this is another like very cool thing about this process you already have your high poly you don't need to go back to dynames you already have your low poly sorry you already have your low poly and we can now work on the high poly to generate all of the details so one of the things that I like to do is I like to go to train Dynamic and change my Alpha to round Alpha and I like to just like small little hits to several like different parts as you can see we're going to start getting this s of like hammered effect like hammered metal effect so if you can imagine like a dban um blacksmith creating this breastplate and he's just like hammering and hammering and hammering well this is how you how you get it cool let me very quickly cuz I don't want to spoil the character just yet I again I've spoiled it a little bit in a couple of videos but I don't want to like have it completely there on out in the world just yet uh we're going we're going to wait until the course releases but let me bring in the upper part of the breastplate so that we can see how this fits and there we go this is the the upper part again this is our like a base mesh or our block mesh that we have and this is what we have and look at that that looks really good as you can see things are overlapping very nicely we don't get any sort of like empty spaces and the only thing that I might want to do is I find this sort of like Corners a little bit um like not ideal so I'm just going to use my mve brush and overl overlap them there on the inside so we get a nicer curb for the arm of our character and look at how clean this looks compared to the to the old like little thing that we had right here it was just like the very basic rough sketch this looks way way way better now we're still going to go back here and we're going to do a couple of factor changes as you can see this is meant to be a sort of like paneling effect I wanted to create this sort of like paneling for the whole thing so this one that I've created is the first layer which represents this layer right here and then on top of this layer we're going to have first this layer and then this layer so it's three layers of like very thin like metals that are going to create the sort of like U the depth that we're looking for so let's go uh right here this is fine and first let's extract again but now we're going to extract this piece right here okay so all of this piece right here now why am I extracting again and not just grabbing it from the from the previous one if we already have a clean one and the answer is the topology might have changed or we might want a slightly different change in topology like this angles that I have right here and it's not going to be as clean and besides we can have multiple layers like that's another thing that people think about uh uh games and characters you don't have to model everything from a single mesh it's one of the most common errors one of the actually whenever I'm teaching Maya um one of the first exercises I call it um simple to complex which is Model A lot of simple elements and combine them into a single object to make a complex object back in the day we used to do like a little uh like alarm clock like a traditional um just like clock and then later on I started doing a Thor's hammer so if you've if you've if you've grabbed any of my Mayas uh like course you're going to do a a Thor's hammer in the first few lessons so that you understand that like you can have a very complex object made out of very simple elements and you don't always need to have it uh be completely modeled from a single piece there we go so we got this again we are extracting at zero uh thickness there we go look at that super clean let's go to Sir M I actually like the edges right now so we're just going to go directly to three mesh go to half and we're just going to start cleaning this up ideally as we clean things up you can see that the corners are going to start changing but here we do need to be a little bit careful about the topology because as you can see one thing that is happening is that we are getting a loop and we've mentioned this before Loops are not always the like the best thing for us depending on how we want certain things to be so in this case since I want a very like clean cut on the very like border of the object we need to modify this right here and again fairly simple to do with Simer we just delete this Edge Loop or this polygon right there and then we go back to our move brush we push this line a little bit up like that and then again we see model we should go to Edge and we extrude so we're going to extrude this Edge down as you can see all the snaps which is great and there we go so with that we pretty much create or fix the um the geometry that we're looking for in this case so we have a very clean sort of like sharp border when we create the whole thing so that border right there goes nicely all the way over here that's fine but then over here right like if you remember we had this cut right here and we had another cut like right around here so this is what we need to fix again see modeler we delete this poly actually uh I'm trying to think here yeah cuz other I mean it's shouldn't be that much of an issue actually let me keep this corner I want to show you how to fix this corner right here but we're going to like make this a little bit better right there perfect let's grab our move brush again and just fix the the angle right like we want to make sure that the angle of our of our element is looking as as nice as possible there we go so here again I'm not too worried about it if we want a sharp edge we just need to add a couple of edge Loops yes we're going to get a pinch but I'm going to show you how to how to fix that and then over here again very importantly we want to delete this one and then this is going to extrude this out like this there we go very important to go to your mve brush and just clean some of the borders a little bit and now that we have this we again go to um Dynamic ofd division we enable it no subdivision first we're going to do thickness and in this case we want the thickness to go on the other way because we already have the the depth going in so this is the depth uh going out now we don't want this to be like super super super intense but which is one that give it a little bit more actually let me get out of dynamic solo and let's bring there we go so that we can see like the actual um the actual thickness that we want and again it's not too much like at the end we want to get close to this one but not exactly the same uh distance so keep that in mind so I would say right around there good now you can see some of these edges are not like matching perfectly this is again where the move brush is great and this is great because we're we're already in this sort of like pre preview of the of the dynamic subdivision even though we have not created Dynamic subdivision I personally like when things are not perfect I've mentioned this before one of the the like the main issues with 3D is that we often get very perfect results with like um all of the babbles and extrus and things like that so whenever I get a little bit of weird overlaps or weird effects I find like that gives a little bit more of a realistic look because especially like in medieval times you would not expect to have like super high-tech Machinery that would give you perfect uh perfect like constructions all the time now this is of course a little bit too much right here so we we do need to go a little bit out there to create like the two sort of like borders but once we add a little bit of smooth that's also going to be be fixed a little bit try not to smooth the the borders I did that right there and I kind of like messed it up so try not to to smooth the borders too much there we go and check everywhere it's very very important there's a very famous quote right the Devils on the details so you want to make sure that all of your details are as clean as possible when making this construction so that when we like finalize this and we add all of the support edges and stuff like that it looks as clean and as tight as possible this is uh I did a short like not too long ago talking about quality and time and it's funny shorts shorts are I I love doing shorts it's it's a very fun uh sort of like medium to convey information and it's very enjoyable very entertaining but the problem is that since you only have one minute there's a lot of context that gets lost so I did a short again not too long ago about art and how how you need to learn like the fundamental of Art and you you need to to not call it your style there were some comments like oh but art can be anything like yeah yeah but I'm talking about production art right like entertainment art not just like expression art so that's the kind of stuff that's a sometimes a little bit difficult to convey on the on the short format and again talking about the short format there was another one I did where I talked about time like this stuff takes time you cannot expect to do the sort of elements uh like very very quickly so there we go now I don't want to have this put like long curvatures actually this was I believe this was supposed to be a a square rather than um than a curb I'm not against the curve now though I think it looks interesting it does let's let's sharpen this a little bit here so I'm going to keep there we go yeah I think the the sharper effect looks a little bit better cool so now we hit apply of course we turn on Dynamic again no thickness now and we're going to add two subdivis and this is where again using C modeler we're going to go back to our insert Edge Loop uh let's make this very small I need to go to the edge there we go insert one on the bottom one on the top one on this corner see that that matches the corner a lot better here's where where things are going to get a little bit tricky we're going to have one right there we're going to have down here another one this one's going to be fairly easy and then this one is the one that I was talking about so I'm going to add it right here to to generate the pinch and I'm also going to add one right there again to generate this sort of like like intense Loop right there remember this is the high poly right so the low poly we can delete those edges and that's fine so now with this the cool thing is I can just uh go into again term Dynamics I'm going to hit apply of course I'm going to give it one more Division and just flatten that out so that little pinch that we see we just start relaxing it a little bit and no one's going to know that there's a a weird pinch right there so yeah that's the second part of the thing now I'm not going to bore you with the with all of the details there's two more that I'm missing so if we go very quickly to this guy right here I'm missing this one right here and I want to add another sort of like secondary one right here to complete the sort of like a pattern that I'm thinking of and so yeah let me do it real quick and I'll show you the final result and that's it my friends as you can see once you have all of this ready you are going to have a very clean message you can Dynam them if you want you can play it with poly groups you can add the exact same technique to get this like border right created for the for the upper part of the element but in this case I'm actually going to leave it like this because once we get go into texturing I'm going to be adding all of this like very nice details and and cuts all around the the surface of the element so if you like this video please let me know here in the comments make sure to subscribe we're missing a lot of subscribers right now you're watching the videos and not subscribing it really helps the channel and uh don't forget to watch us today we're not today this week on Friday when we're going to be going live on Twitch and here on YouTube as well so that's it my friends I hope this little technique has been helpful to you and if you want to check more advanced tips and techniques about C brush make sure to check the full course down here on the description I'll see you back on the next one bye-bye

Channel: Abe_Leal3D

Views: 8,494

Keywords: 3Ddesign, 3Dmodeling, digitalart, createalphas, monetizeart, 3Dtextures, designskills, sellartonline, 3Dcreations, graphicdesign, techart, freelancedesign, earnwith3D, designinspiration, digitalartists, arttech, innovative3D, visualart, creativeskills, artpreneur, abraham leal, abe leal, abe leal 3d, art community, 3d art, 3d artist, make money with 3d art, artstation, earn with art, learn 3d

Id: Mk909y967EI

Length: 18min 54sec (1134 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 14 2024