How to Create Ropes and Chains in ZBrush

hey guys welcome to this is a very cool video where I'm going to be showing you how to make your own curve brushes for chains rope hair whatever you can think of so let's get right into it this is at the very basic the polymesh 3D star that we have here inside of seabers and I want to create this very like nice bevel chain so I'm gonna go to the initialize properties I'm going to modify the resolution to one for all of this I'm going to say key Cube so that we get a very like nice single cube with only one side I'm then going to go to make polymesh 3D make sure that this is a polymesh 3D object and I'm going to go to C modeler and I'm going to go to R to scale this I'm going to make this a little bit longer a little bit thicker and on the side view I'm going to make this a lot smaller something like that seems fine now I'm going to turn on poly frame so that we can see what we're doing and what I want to do is I want to cut in a hole inside of this a chain so I'm gonna go to A spacebar and I'm going to select inset and on the options down here I'm going to select polygroup all by doing this I can do this like an insert on the face and it's also going to be working on the back face right there which is very important because now we want to push this in we're going to push this in with qmesh and again using polygroup all when we push in and both faces meet Boop there we go we got a little nice hole here on our chain so now I'm going to go to the bevel option I'm gonna go on top of an edge I'm going to press spacebar I'm going to select a bevel over here and we're going to Bevel this corner right around there and then if you just click on the next Edge it's going to give you the exact same size which is very important to give things as standard as possible on this one right here I'm going to do a small one and again just click back here to get the exact same size and then this outer one I actually want to go a little bit harder so something like that and there we go so that's it we've successfully created our very first link right here now the secret is as follows first I'm going to control W to make sure that everything is a single poly group and then I'm going to press Ctrl shift and I'm going to duplicate this up now some people like to have like 90 degree chains like this that's perfectly fine I personally like 45 degrees so I'm going to go to the top here and I'm gonna rotate this with shift 45 degrees then I'm going to duplicate this get that right around there and if I go over here I'm going to rotate this 45 degrees to the other side which in this case is minus 90. and that's it we got two very simple links ideally when you're doing curve brushes or insert multi mesh brushes which is what we're doing right now you want to keep the poly count low because we're going to be duplicating this along like big surfaces and um you don't want to like make this thing too extreme so once we have this what I'm going to do is I am going to go to uh B in Brush I'm going to create an insert mesh brush right here I'm going to create a new brush and by the way this brush is going to be available in the resources of our Discord so if you haven't subscribed to the YouTube channel and you're not on the Discord check the link down here and you're going to be able to join an amazing community so I'm going to press Ctrl W again and now let's just jump into like a normal sphere so I'm gonna grab like a sphere right here let's make this a polymesh 3D and of course at the insert multi-mesh right now we're just inserting links but we want to make sure that this becomes a curve or a rope or in this case a a chain right so I'm going to go to stroke and under curve options for this particular brush I'm going to turn on curve mode and when I do that as you can see I now can generate this very nice curve however there's this model issue right here the curve brush will always try to generate a a uniform like distribution of your elements and sometimes depending on how you model things they won't perfectly match for chain links like this it's very important that we move the move step a little bit so that this little guys right here actually like linked together with the next one so I'm gonna go back here to stroke and if I change the curse step a little bit lower let's say like point I think 0.75 is going to work fine and we draw again you can see now my chains are actually linked together and that's it we got a chain brush right here now there are a couple modifiers that you might want to like take into account so for instance when I do some crazy ropes like this especially when you go like really really crazy you might get some like weird like a hard Edge over here one of the things you can do is you can go to brush and I know this is underneath my face right here so let me move this to the other side like that there we go so if we go to brush and we go to curve you can actually change something called the modifiers and here on the curve resolution we can increase this a little bit to say let's say six and that's going to give us a soft tracker look at that so instead of having this very like uh jaggedy effect we're going to have a soft curve just keep in mind that this will distort your chain a little bit so you might see some links like this one right here it's getting a little bit stretching a little like weird way but again not a bad thing to have right like it's uh it's looking very very cool so yeah by doing this as you can see we can get this very very cool effect now let me show you something real quick this is a little bit I wouldn't say more advanced but it's a little bit hidden so this is not something that you find everywhere if we have this sphere right here and let's say we want to add a rope on a specific section like for whatever reason we have like a patch right here and we would like to have the Rope following this exact same shape that we have on this mask one of the things I can do is I can press Ctrl W and that's going to create like a nice little polygroup right there and if I then go to deformation I can do a Polish by groups and what that's going to do is going to create a very nice division there on my polygroup now what I can do is if we go back to the stroke options there's this curve functions and curve functions are like little tools that we can use with curves to generate at the place where we're going to be like projecting our chain in this case so I'm going to remove border increase edges I'm just going to say frame mesh and look at that it automatically builds a curve along that surface so if I click it there we go we got chain going around the whole thing how is this useful how could this be useful imagine you have a piece of armor and you have a really clean border with polygroups you just like add a little trim around the whole thing by using this Frame option right here so that's the first like uh tool that I want to show you which is this uh insert mesh now let's do a very quick rope which is also a very basic thing that everyone should be able to do here instead of seabrush I'm going to go into my shapes again I'm going to go to a cylinder right here in normal cylinder so there was cylinder 3D perfect and the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to scale this up so I'm going to scale this to a division of two now this is important because as you just saw with the chain if we don't make sure that this thing's like fit properly when we do the the like the whole like curve function sometimes they won't match perfectly on the on the top so in this case I'm going to go to the transform options I'm going to go to twist and I'm going to click oh yeah right let's make this a polymesh 3D I'm gonna go to twist and we're going to twist the top part like this 180 degrees actually let me check right here actually I think we can keep it like this I think this was it so let's go back here I'm going to press Ctrl shift and we're going to rotate this around and we're going to move this two units to the side like this and now again going back to this thing let's Center the point of course and we're going to go back toward the format now we're going to twist and we're going to twist this 180 degrees and the ideal thing here as you can see is that we have the beginning and the end on opposite sides but it catches like we're gonna find the next element on the other side now on this one I'm going to delete the Caps so let's remove this and it just delete the Caps that one and that one I'm gonna say delete Hidden over here and that's it and this is what we're going to be making a multi-mesh brush out of so once we have this uh the next thing that we need to do is adjust again press B and we can say create a new insert mesh I'm going to create a new one because the property is going to be a little bit different but you could create like multiple ones in the pandem in a single one so we you can switch between the different ones so for instance on the Chain one if we did like two or three different models of chains we could very easily vary between those so on this one right here I'm just going to go to stroke again turn on a curve function let's go here to a sphere or test sphere and if we draw the curve you're going to see that we get something very very very ugly and the reason why this is very ugly is because it's not like perfectly calibrated so in order to calibrate this a little bit better first let's make sure that curbside is set to one and I'm going to go back to the brush menu over here and under modifiers I'm going to use a well points and stretch and again change my curve resolution to six and by doing that now as you can see we're gonna get a very very nice clean rope a very common advice that people give when you're doing this is to go all the way down here to deformation and use a little bit of inflate if you feel like your rope is a little bit too thin you can just inflate this around and look at how nice this new tool works now keep in mind that this also works for um other elements such as like or using other features like the one that I just showed you here's another like a cool like trick that I can show you let's go let's go to another sphere let's make this a polymesh 3D there we go and let's say we're doing again like a like a piece of armor or something so let's imagine that this is our element right here we're going to do like a like a bracer so I'm gonna just like mask out the shape of this like plate or brace or whatever this thing is just like this and once we have this one of the things that we can do is we can go to subtool and we're going to extract this so I'm going to extract this with zero thickness very important zero thickness hit accept and this one we can delete so now we're just going to be left with this one and one of the things that we could do for instance is again go to the formation polish by features to generate like a nicer effect and now let's go to Geometry a series measure and we're going to Siri mesh to create a nice clean border that should give us a nice resolution right there we can even bring the poly count quite a bit lower there we go I'm gonna do half right here see if we can make it even lower there we go and now if we go to C modeler for instance and we go to qmash polygroup O we can polygroup this and press alt while we're doing this so that we get different polygroups right here so now what we can do again is go to the um stroke options well let's go to our curve brush first this one right here and we're going to go to stroke curb functions polygroups frame mesh and look at that we get double frames and we can click and we're going to get our ropes along both elements right there of course here one of the things I need to do is I need to make my brush a little bit smaller remember the size of the brush is going to give you a really really interesting effect and look at that we get stitching all the way across and now we just go with deformation and we can again inflate this a little bit to generate a very nice effect like how long how long will the would it have how long would you oh my god English is failing me imagine how much time you would need to spend to generate this sort of effect inside of Maya or something like that and here by using these functions look at this we get this very very cool effect very very quickly so yeah that's pretty much it my friends hopefully you like this video if you did please make sure to subscribe we're really close to our first go which is 1K subscribers and uh we're preparing a lot of cool stuff so thank you very much for your support guys make sure to check out premium courses or Discord or Twitter and everything down here on the description thanks my friends I'll see you back on the next one

Channel: Abe_Leal3D

Views: 7,357

Keywords: Zbrush ropes tutorial, Creating chains in Zbrush, Zbrush modeling techniques, Zbrush for beginners, 3D sculpting in Zbrush, Zbrush sculpting tutorial, Creating 3D objects in Zbrush, Making ropes in Zbrush, Zbrush chains creation, Digital sculpting tips, How to use Zbrush, Zbrush modeling guide, Zbrush asset creation, Detailed modeling in Zbrush, Zbrush ropes and chains, Sculpting chains in Zbrush, Advanced Zbrush techniques, Learn Zbrush sculpting

Id: j0gViuAjQWA

Length: 10min 49sec (649 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 27 2023