How to Measure Jewelry Items in ZBrush

hi i'm scott from the rio grande tech team and today i'm going to show you how to measure things within zbrush so let's get started [Music] okay so i've got zbrush booted up and the first thing we need to do is we need to bring in the subtool so i'm going to go ahead and click over here to bring in something easy to measure we're going to start with a cube 3d so i'm going to click on that click and drag to bring it in and immediately hit the t key to go into edit mode i'm also going to make this a poly mesh 3d now the way zbrush works is that when you bring in a subtool it will always be pretty much the same size now to know what size this subtool is we navigate over to our geometry palette and go down to size right here so currently this cube is 2 by 2 by 2 units now the units within zbrush is a measuring device which we can assign our own real world units to later we can actually use these values to resize a sub tool really quickly so i can in this xyz box i can click in on the number key in let's say three and it automatically adjusts now don't be alarmed if when you see this kind of stuff uh 2.99999 that's just zbrush and the way it does measurements but for all intents and purposes uh this was this is a three unit cube if we want to actually measure this ourselves the way we do that is we're gonna go into either move scale or rotate to bring up our gizmo 3d and then we're going to click on this box here and turn off the gizmo 3d and go back to the old transpose line now this is going to be our ruler in zbrush now you can see as i move my cursor around my that little red dot is snapping to certain grid points and i'll turn on my polyframe so you can see it a little better so it will automatically snap to certain grid points now to measure i'm going to snap it over here to the corner and i'm going to left click and drag now as i'm dragging this out i can move it at any angle i want or i can hold shift and it will snap to certain degrees so i'm going to keep this flat i'm going to hold shift and i'm going to snap to this outside corner here and then release now you'll see up here on the top left that's where the unit measurement is going to be displayed so 2.99999 or basically three units now if we want to assign a real world measurement to this the way we do that is we go up to z plug-in up here at the top and open up the 3d print hub inside is a buttons called update size ratios and when i click on that it will look at these units here and ask us what what measurement these are so here's my my three by three by three and it's asking if that's in inches or in millimeters now it's got two measurements here these are the same measurements uh so 76.2 millimeters is the same as three inches and it's the same over here so in jewelry most of the time we're working in millimeters so i would just go ahead and click on millimeters now when i export this for 3d printing it'll translate this file as a file that was built in millimeters now after updating the size ratios um let's take another quick measurement so we're going to do down here on the bottom here so i'm going to snap to this corner left click and drag holding snap to that corner and you'll see i'm still at 2.9999 units now there's a way to change what this displays because we know that we're going to be using millimeters in our jewelry design more often than not for things like prongs and shank thicknesses and and so forth so if i want to change what that says up at the top i can i can go to preferences up here at the top of the screen and go to transpose units and then click on set units and now i can type in millimeters hit enter and now my measurements will show up as 3 millimeters or 2.9999 so so yeah that's that's one thing you can do right off the bat just an fyi if if you're inputting a size of a subtool at the beginning into this box and you find that when you go to measure something the measurement is different you can go back into your preferences there is a calibration distance here so what you can do is let's say you know my my box here is a three unit box and i put this transpose tool from corner to corner and this measurement should be three units then i can go into preferences i can type three units into this calibration distance and that will calibrate this transpose tool so in certain instances uh there will be times when you don't have these nice corners to grab onto so i'm actually going to bring out a different subtool i'm going to bring out a sphere and i'm going to make polymesh3d and i'm actually going to subdivide it a few times let's turn off polyframes and then so i've got a lot of geometry i mean it's snapping to a whole bunch of points in there but i can still use my transpose line to measure so i go back up to either move scale or rotate click on one of those make sure my gizmo 3d is turned off and now i can look where that red dot is you can just barely see it kind of pop onto the sphere as i mouse over and i'm going to click and drag hold shift and now i want to try to line up the other end right in the middle of this little orange circle that's around my cursor and my measurement comes out to 1.9916 now our actual sphere is about 1.9999 so that's pretty close in certain cases you will your measurement won't be completely identical to what you have in the size box here but it's close enough to make that inference that yes this is a two millimeter sphere now we'll use the transpose tool a lot with things like rings for instance when you have items like pendants or say a broach those are a little easier because if you noticed when we went up to our z plugins and into the 3d print hub and we did our update size ratios these numbers are only looking at the entire outside of our our sub tool or you know what whatever we've sculpted so if we have to measure individual items within that that piece that's where this transpose line is going to be beneficial and i'll show you an example so i'm going to open up my subtools again and i'm actually going to bring in the ring 3d and again going to make poly mesh 3d now when i go into a size here and take a look at it so it's saying that it's about two by two by 0.4 units so uh 0.4 being the width here but we need to know what this measurement is on the inside because if we just go to update size ratios we're just going to see these same numbers here it's just looking at the total outside dimension so we can use our transpose tool and let me bring it back up i just go into the move option there and then kind of snap on to the inside surface click and drag hold shift and then snap it to the other side so in this instance we don't have this ring sized up to an actual ring size but at least this way it's reading about 1.2 millimeters this way we know what this measurement is on the inside so we can make sure that our ring sizes are are going to be right and this will this will make it much easier to bring stuff into your 3d printing software and not have to make any kind of scaling changes or or anything like that okay and lastly this is more of just a quick tip so when you're when you're using the sub tools that are within zbrush there's there's usually not any sizing issues with those but i'll i'll give you one instance where you may run into some sizing issues and that's when you're creating something in another piece of software and bringing it into zbrush so you can start sculpting on it so say you're using something like like two shapes or three design uh to make kind of a basic ring and then bring it in here to do some some sculpting on it now if you start using this transpose tool to take measurements and they seem to be way way off what you can do is make sure to check your calibration distance here so check the overall size of your model here under size and then do a kind of outside measurement of it and check your calibration distance just to make sure that your transpose line is calibrated properly in most cases it will be but it is one thing to check but the other thing to check is i'm going to close the geometry palette and i'm going to go down here to export so in here is a scaling now this could actually affect the measurement of your your model without you knowing it so make sure that if if you do a update size ratio within the 3d print hub or you're doing a transpose measurement take a look at this just to make sure that your scale is at one and all of these offsets are at zero because that could have a drastic effect on what the measurements actually come out as and basically what it does is let's say that you know i put 10 under scale and i just did the same measurement so if i go back into geometry all my sizes here are still the same but my export scaling is at 10. now you'll see i measured the inside of this ring shank again and it was 1.2 millimeters according to zbrush and now it's sitting at 12. so you can get some funky results and you can see how that when i click the update size ratios what that did so even though my sizing you know over in my geometry palette is still showing the same values these values are way off so just make sure to check that if if you're bringing stuff in from other cad softwares just take a quick peek in here and make sure that that scaling is just fine now the actual measurements haven't changed all it did was it took this measurement which was 1.2 and it multiplies it by whatever this number is here so even if you were to export it in that way and bring it into your 3d printing software it's going to be the right size it's just it's more disconcerting to to see that the measurement is so far off so that's more of just a quick tip just something to watch out for if you find your measurements are wildly off but that's pretty much it for measuring things within zbrush it's a bit more of a roundabout way than other types of cad software but it is possible to measure things precisely within zbrush so if you have any questions always feel free to contact us

Channel: Rio Grande

Views: 8,080

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Id: xpGfDw7gdr4

Length: 14min 41sec (881 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 26 2020