How to use the Chisel Brush to create clean detail lines in ZBrush

so have you ever wanted to put in some nice clean scribed line detail on the surface of your stylized characters well today i'm going to show you how to do it so let's get to it [Music] okay so i have an example of one of my characters up here that i have some scribe detail lines in his pants along with some colored stripes now if i turn those colored stripes off you can see the scribed lines that i'm talking about and those lines work really really well for 3d printing they're just subtle enough to be there but not overbearing okay so i'm going to show you how to make these clean scribed lines today so let's start with a basic sphere and this sphere has dynamic subdivisions applied i don't want dynamic subdivisions i want real subdivision so i'm going to hit apply and you might notice that this user interface doesn't look like the generic zbrush user interface this is one i've made and i give it away for free along with my brushes if you like it you can go grab it over at 3dcharacterworkshop.com the link is in the description below okay so i have this this sphere and i want to change the basic material so you can see this a little better i'm just going to change it over to basic material and i'm going to hit ctrl d a couple more times because if you look up here to active points it says it's about 13 000. we need a lot more geometry than that so i'm gonna subdivide up to about eight hundred thousand which on this particular sphere which is a quad sphere is about eight hundred thousand okay so now it'll give us the the detail we need in order to scribe these lines in now speaking of detail make sure you wait until close to the very very end of your stylized character production before you put any surface detail on your character and the reason i say that is because it's kind of one of those finishing touches or the the icing on the cake as they say okay or the cherry on top so you want to wait wait it's it's hard to wait because it's one of the most fun things you can do when you're creating characters but be patient just wait until the very very end and then do all your surface details like your noise your surface noise scribe lines like this your coloring all of that stuff wait till the very end okay so i want to um you'll see that symmetry is turned off and the next step that i want to do is i want to store a morph target now on my user interface store morph target is right here if you don't have this user interface you can find store morph target under morph target and then store morph target right here under the tool menu okay i'm going to turn that on and now all that does is it saves the mesh in a certain state it remembers what what's going on and i'll show you why we store a morph target here in a minute and you'll notice all these custom brushes across the bottom these are a lot of these are brushes that i've made or i've made based off of other custom brushes that i've found on online and have adjusted so you can also get those brushes from my 3d character workshop website again link is down in the description okay so um i used to have a brush called the carve brush and now i have i've replaced it with this new chisel brush that pixel logic added to zbrush and we're going to be using that one as soon as i click on this brush you'll notice a lot of different chisel brush profiles across the top now i only really use this first one because it basically does what the old chisel brush did but now it's so much more controlled and i can overlap strokes over the top of each other without it doubling up on what the brush is doing now if you're wondering what the heck i'm talking about what i mean is i'm going to grab this cloth brush and i'm going to hold down alt so it does the reverse so you can see it better but if i do a stroke like this and i draw over the top of itself you'll notice that right where i drew over the top of the stroke it's doubling up what it did it's not it's not going through it it's actually crawling over the top of it and that's not what i want so if i cut into the surface of this object with the chisel brush you'll notice it has lazy mouse on that's what that red line is but as i come around here and cross itself you'll notice that it doesn't double up the effect of what it's doing it will just cut right through that and it's a beautiful beautiful thing that means i can go crazy with my scribe lines and not make a mess essentially that's the idea anyway okay and i'll make a couple more lines like this like this and maybe i'll make one more through them all like so okay now you'll notice that if i get close up with the camera you'll see that it is quite chunky on the borders and it's also very sharp and i don't want either of those things so what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to rewind back to before i cut in any of these chisel lines and i'm going to add a layer and the reason why i like to add layers is i usually don't add layers until it's time to add surface detail and i'll show you why after i add a layer so again i have my morph target i'm going to go down to layers and i'm going to click on this new and it's going to automatically make a new layer and put it in record mode okay that just means everything from here forward it will be recorded into a layer so i'm going to do that again i'm going to make that funky design like so and cut across like this do a couple more cuts it doesn't really matter what i'm doing here let's kind of make this curve like so okay i don't even know what this symbol is but um i think it looks kind of cool so we're going to go with that and now with layers what you can do is you can turn the effect down so i can grab this slider right here and start to drag it towards zero and more towards zero and you can see the effect that it has i can make this this cut in the surface very very subtle it's really nice i can do some some really nice stuff with layers and i can go beyond it and actually start to push it out so it's more of an emboss rather than an embed which is super nice so i can make some pro some puffy lines instead of some some cuts in the surface really cool stuff but for this i'm going to take it back to 100 on to the other side now you'll notice when i start to scroll the slider back and forth that it automatically turns off recording now i want to turn that back on because i'm going to do a few things to sh and show you what else i can do with this okay so i'm going to turn record back on and i'm going to go grab this very specific brush called the morph brush so if i go b m and then look for the morph brush in this list come on bm and you'll see it right here bmg is the the hotkey for it okay i'm going to click morph brush and what that does is that's going to pull from memory the morph target and bring it back so not only does it allow us to draw the stroke over top of itself without doubling up what's happening but it also lets us erase the stroke so what if i want to erase kind of maybe maybe the ends down here and basically i can just draw right over the top and it just starts to erase and bring back that the morph what was underneath it sometimes it doesn't always work super clean but you can see that i can just erase right off the top just like that and it's just bringing it back i'll make a bigger stroke so you can actually see what it does so you can i can erase a whole bunch of that it it works pretty well but i'm going to undo that i'll leave the other one there and now what do you do if you want to get rid of these jaggies well it's super easy there's a couple things you can do but what i like to do is i like to make my brush really really big covering the whole thing and make sure that my smooth intensity is is high enough that it's going to affect the surface but i'm just going to barely tap over the surface and smooth it down just barely making sure my record is still on on my layer otherwise it's going to affect the layer underneath it okay so you can kind of see that it knocked off those sharp edges and it also smoothed out those jaggies throughout the curves there and made it really buttery smooth and i can i can do that even down in here because it was still showing some jaggies and here is my nice detailed surface with some cut lines without it being all jaggedy and that is essentially whenever i need to cut in some lines into my stylized characters this is the exact method that i use so i hope this helps and i hope it gives you some ideas of things that you can do with your characters if you'd like to see more tips like this please like and subscribe and i am shane olsen thank you for watching my channel thanks for hanging out i hope you got something out of this and i'd love to hear what lines and things you would do with your characters down in the comments all right thank you guys for watching happy sculpting we'll see you in the next one

Channel: 3D Character Workshop

Views: 3,126

Keywords:

Id: 8oU7ZnTSkHA

Length: 10min 1sec (601 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 19 2021