Intro to ZBrush 032 - ZModeler Polygon Actions! Use ZModeler to quickly and easily box model!

now up to this point we've done a lot of sculpting modeling you might say organic modeling but let's go ahead and use a brush called the z modeler brush which will get you acclimated to more of a box modeling workflow within zbrush which will really come in handy you can solve a lot of problems with dynamesh and masking and sculpting and clipping and stuff like that but there's a lot of really good functionality in the hard surface side as well so when i'm using z modeler a lot of times what i'll do is i'll start with the polymesh 3d and just drag it out on my canvas and go into edit mode what this allows me to do is to skip the make poly mesh 3d part because what i'm going to do is go down here to initialize now we've touched in briefly on these initialize options basically if you click and drag on these sliders you can dial in any number you can also go through here and choose a number like three and then just tap tab and type three or just click on here and hit three hit enter and that'll go ahead and lock that value in there and then you can choose a q cube and if we turn on poly frame you're gonna see here it is divided by three you can do a q sphere q grid which is just a plane and then an x y and z cylinder depending on the axis that you want so what we can do is we can start with a very simple cube that looks we'll go ahead and keep three here hit q cube and you're going to see we have poly groups on both sides here and if we hit x to go across x symmetry and turn on our floor we have z forward here and here is the left and right side of the object so what i can do is i can hover over one of these components and right now if i hover over this component you're going to see it's going to kind of snap that dot to verts and if i hit b z to narrow it down to all the brushes with that start with z and then m is z modeler so now i can hover over a point and you're also going to see i can highlight edges and faces and if i hover over any of those components let's choose a face hold down spacebar you're going to see i am automatically in z modeler polygon actions if i hover over an edge and hold down spacebar i'm in edge actions and of course if i hover over a point i'm in point actions now underneath here you're going to see there's target and modifier so if we go back here to face we have target some more options down here and then modifiers down here at the very bottom now this may seem like an overwhelming menu like there's a lot of things to choose from but once you get the basics down you're going to see you only you're only going to use a handful of these things ever probably and even then there's some repeats in here so try not to get too overwhelmed it'll become easier where you start learning where things are of course if you're used to signing hotkeys to brushes the cool thing about z modeler is you can hover over face and choose a face action so for example cue mesh a single poly an edge action in this case insert single edge loop and a point action in this case move by brush radius and you can save that as one hotkey for three different component actions so if i want to go over here to z modeler i can say clone and now i've got a new z modeler brush at the very bottom here and now i can say if i wanted to make say a topology brush i can hover over an edge i can say extrude snap to surface i can hover over a point and say move snap to surface and i can hover over a face and say do nothing so now i can go in here to brush save as i can save it in my c program files pixel logic version number z startup brush presets so that it shows up every single time i start up zbrush and then i can assign a hotkey to this and i know i can save brush save as and give it a name besides z molar 2 or keep z molar too if that's okay and then every time i set up zbrush i can assign a hotkey to that brush and i'll know that whenever i choose that hotkey it'll choose that z modeler brush with those face edge and point attributes that i want so instead of assigning a hotkey to say bevel edge loop complete i can assign a hotkey to bevel edge inset polygroup all and point split so if i use those all the time together i can assign a hotkey to all three actions but i'm getting a little bit ahead of myself let's back up let's go ahead and undo all those changes i'm going to go up here to brush reset all brushes so now when i hit bzm that's going to grab our z modeler brush when i hover over a face the default is going to be qmesh a single poly so let's focus on face actions for a little bit here now right now i have x symmetry turned on so if i tap out of x symmetry and i say q mesh a single poly it'll just q mesh a poly on this side now what is q mesh q mesh is basically an extrude with a few more cool properties that extrude doesn't have there is an extrude in here if you hover over a face you can just do extrude however if i choose qmesh a single poly and i start pulling this out you're going to see it's going to snap to that other object or that other face next to it and in fact it's going to snap to increments so you're going to see one two three four five six seven eight nine ten increments before it caps out and i can continue to do this and as i do that if i hold down shift to smooth all of these are vert welded however if i hover over a face and i switch to extrude a single poly and i extrude this out it's not going to snap and in fact even though it looks like those are welded i can hold down shift to smooth and you're going to see let's drop my z intensity down you're going to see those are going to split apart because those faces are actually separate so that's one cool thing that qmesh can do we hover over a face hold down spacebar say cue mesh a single poly and you're going to see there's an aligned tenth step if we change it to quarter step it's going to go snap one two three four one two three four before it caps out so that's why it was going from ten to four you can also do full step it'll just snap straight out to that without having an incremental angle so let's take our undo slider and we'll undo all the way back to where we just have our cube here now if i hover over a face and we've already talked about qmesh a single poly that's our target you can choose all polygons and it'll do every single polygon you see and there's a bunch of options in here generally speaking i tend to use polygroups and you see we already have polygroups on here in fact if you hit ctrl w that'll make it all on polygroup and then if i go up here and do a polygroup group by normals if you remember that normal angle here we'll say every single major angle change will get a new poly group on that surface so you can see we have a different poly group on every single side so if i hover over a face and choose qmesh polygroup all every single face with that polygroup will be cue meshed so i can cue mesh this one and qmesh this one in fact if i cue mesh something out and then i just tap it's going to do the exact same height that i pulled out originally you're also going to see every single every single time i do this it gives me the same polygroup here so now i hover over this phase and say qmesh polygroup all every single polygroup because these are all the same they're all the same color it's going to do all of those if i switch this to polygroup island just this island of polygons let's go ahead and switch over here to skin shader for you can see a little better just these pink ones right here will move because it's separated by an entire polygroup ring that doesn't match so you can see these pink polygroups here don't touch any other ones that's considered an island and i can just pull these ones out alternatively you can also hover over face and say flat island so now anything that's sharing that same level where it's flat right here you can pull just those out or just these out because again that's a flat island here so you can pull these out and again it's q mesh will snap and we also have a line full step on so now if you do that and you'll say okay qmesh polygroup all and you're cue meshing all these down you're like i wish i could pull one out and not have it do the same polygroup so if i undo back or restart it here as i'm pulling out i can say qmesh polygroup all and then i can say cue mesh polygon balling and tap alt and as i tap alt it's going to cycle through new polygroups here so i can go through here and tap alt and get different polygroups so now when i go through here and say qmesh polygroup all it's just going to grab these ones because those are the only orange polygroups i have on my entire object if i do this one where the yellow is it's going to go all the way across and then it's going to start wanting to snap here so if i don't want that snapping behavior i can simply go over here to extrude polygroup all and now it won't try and snap of course i'm going to get some planar faces over here probably not the best idea but that's available to you now if i want to reset up my polygroups all i got to do is go over here to group by normals and now every single one of those major face changes gets its own polygroup so now i can go through here qmesh polygroup all pull these ones out and again it'll snap snap snap or like we were talking about before q mesh flat island and now it's going to include this polygroup and this face here and all of these ones because they all share that same flat level so i can pull all these up at once now you're going to see cube mesh snapped all of these ones but left kind of just an extra little vert that kind of doesn't know where to stop you can fix that by holding down ctrl alt hitting w to go to gizmo hold down alt and snap to this one vert hold down shift to constrain it just up and down and then use z scale to go ahead and scale this out alternatively you can also hold down control alt and unmask this hit ctrl shift change it to clip curve and now i remember this gradient will pull verts toward a flat line so we can just go here and just change all of those so in fact if we go over here to our deformation and then run some noise through the top here we can hold down ctrl shift and clip these all to a flat line and then over here we'll hold down ctrl alt we can clip these and then over here we can hold down control alt and then we'll do w control alt shift to set that pivot and then we'll use z scale to just scale those along a flat island there so let's go ahead and undo back now you're going to see if we turn x symmetry back on by tapping x on our keyboard here we have a pink poly group over here and a blue poly group over here and if we hover over a face and say cube mesh polygroup all and we pull out it's going to do both sides however if we turn off that symmetry and say qmi is probably ball it's only going to do that one side because this is the only poly group here so x symmetry will override polygroup all but usually what i like to do if i want to make sure i'm working symmetrically i'm going to go over here to geometry modify topology do a quick mirror and weld across the x-axis that's going to put in a new midline here just to ensure that this thing is mirrored and welded across a single axis and now you're going to see both poly groups are the same on both sides if i undo that you're going to see this one's blue this one's pink if i do a mirror in weld now it's blue and pink and in fact if we turn on our floor here you're going to see z forward is actually the side we want to be on because it's going to copy the negative x-axis over to the positive x-axis so now let's keep talking about face action so again we're going to hover over a face with our z modeler brush b z m hold down space bar there's bevel so you can go through here and you can bevel a single poly and usually a single poly is the first target or you do polygroup all bevel this entire polygroup here but usually when i'm beveling what i'll do is i'll hover over an edge and i'll choose bevel i'll do an edge bevel here but we'll get to that edge actions in a bit so hover over a face and here we have bridge so we can actually bridge two polygons here one thing you can do with qmesh if we hover over a face and go back to qmesh here qmesh polygroup all you can start pulling this polygroup out and if you hold down shift you can actually pull that whole polygroup all again the target is all of these along that surface normal so very quickly i can go through here and again hold down shift to move this entire thing and also i go through here if i switch this back to cue mesh the single poly i can push these down and it'll actually get rid of those but it'll still be all vert welded so this is a very cool way to go through here and clean up geometry add geometry and poke holes through geometry without having to go through here and do a lot of bridge actions but we can also bridge faces so if i hover over a face and say bridge connected polys if i zoom in you're going to see there's a little orange connected line here so i can bridge these two polygons and i can pull out you're going to see that's going to have some interactive uh behavior there now if i want to get this to work a little bit better with connected polys i go down here to bridge connected police i'm going to choose circle so now when i pull this out hopefully it'll be a little more circular but it's still kind of skewing it a bit so i'm going to tell it down here align to normal and you're going to see we have interactive curvature and resolution that's what's causing this curvature to happen i can pull up and down on my screen and that's the resolution and then left and right is the curvature here so i can quickly go through here and pull left and right to set the height and then drag to set the resolution so that's where that interactive curvature and interactive resolution comes into play if i don't i can say okay specified resolution i want to have eight specified curvature i want at a hundred so now when i click through here it's automatically gonna snap to one two three four five six seven eight and the curvature is gonna be perfectly circular so it's kind of up to you if you wanna you know make it perfect or if you want to have that interactive ability here and again the thing that made it work a little bit nicer is just from aligning to tangent to aligning to normal if we'll have a line to tangent it tends to kind of skew it over to the side so switching this over here to align to normal helped with that issue now you're going to see we also have bridge two polys so like i've already shown you i can actually go in here to qmesh a single poly and i can stitch this entire thing up so if i want to bridge two polys i can use qmesh as well i can just drag these together and they'll snap to the middle i can hold down shift to smooth and you see these are welded together so qmesh already kind of has that functionality built in another thing you can do is i can say qmesh flat island and i can start pulling these across or i can say cue mesh polygroup all and if i start alt painting on here this is going to be like painting a selection so now this is going to be treated as one polygroup or in fact if i say qmesh a single poly it'll be treated as one single poly because whenever you alt paint on something it treats it as the same thing in fact if i hold down alt and paint over this it'll remove that painted selection so if i go through here and say qmesh or poly it'll actually pull all of these polygons out even though i said only one poly it traits painted polygons as one single poly and again i can hold down shift if i want to pull along that surface normal or i can q mesh out or as i'm pulling i can hold down control and pull this out now you're going to see this polygroup here is the same purple as the other one so if i want i'm going to tap alt to make these new polygroups available to me so i'm going to pull this out and then i'll let go of control and then just cue mesh let's say qmesh polygroup all and there we go we've got a separate piece over here so if i go back here and i say i want to bridge two polys i can say this poly here and as i hover over here it's going to say bridge two polys click the first poly and then click the second poly and it'll go ahead and bridge those two now i hover over a face and i say i'm going to skip crease i'm going to go straight here delete a single poly i can delete this poly and then i can delete any one of these i can delete this poly now this poly if i undo that if i say qmesh a single poly i can just literally just pull this over and it'll snap to that other side here so this is a very easy way to kind of bridge two polygons or even close holes in between here or get rid of them with qmesh here however i can also say delete a single poly let's say this one and this one i can now hover over an edge and say bridge two holes and now i can bridge that hole and i can hover i just click that edge here and it says click the first hole and now click the second hole and drag and now you can see i can change the curvature here and i can change the resolution if i want so that's another way you can use a bridge function that doesn't rely on just faces let's go ahead and undo all that we'll hover over a face we've already talked about do nothing equalize we'll go ahead and make all the sides equal on that single poly extrude we've already talked about it's a lot like qmesh here we can all paint this and extrude it just won't have that snapping functionality it's just a simple extrude flip faces i don't use that often you can go down here and you can actually say display properties flip and that'll flip all of your normals in here we'll get to that later when we do close holes you can do inflate a single pollen and because these are already marked it's going to treat both of these as a single poly however if you say all polygons as you pull it'll just inflate all of those polygons along the surface normal insert nanomesh we'll talk about when we talk about nanomesh insert point will literally just add a point to the middle and this will come in handy if you hover over a point here and you say split you can now split a point on here and as you pull this out and then you go to the other side and you just tap it'll make it the exact same size you can alt paint every one of these faces here change this to cue mesh polygroup all and you can just push this back in and it'll snap to that other side so that's another easy way to maybe do an inset in fact speaking of inset if we go here to and set you're going to see we have inset polygroup all and we have a new thing in equidista called equidistant in zebra 2021 and that'll just make sure that this is all equidistant it also does the entire region here by default so you can see it's set to inset region so we're in setting polygroup all let's go ahead and do another polygroup group by normals and again if i want to have the poly groups the same on both sides geometry modified topology mirror and weld so over here we can say inset polygroup all center and border region equidistant so now as i drag through here it's going to keep this edge nice and equidistant if i change it from region to each poly each polygroup or each polygon on this polygroup will be inset individually but still equidistant so if we want to go inset a single poly each poly we can go through here we can pull this into inset and then again just tap over here to get the exact same inset and then one more time switch this to hover over face cue mesh a single poly pull that through and there you go now if we go over here and we hover over a face and we say inset polygroup all region equidistant and we pull this in you're going to see it's going to try to do a good job and for the most part it will but it may have a kind of a tough time depending on your geometry in fact let's switch from this object over here to a cube 3d zoom out a little bit let's go up here to make poly mesh 3d and we can hold down alt i'm going to paint over all of these here and again we'll go in here to inset polygroup and you're going to see in order to keep this equal and this equal it starts adding these little lines here and trying to make it so that it can be as equidistant as possible however if you take this custom equidistant snap and you crank that up that'll try to snap that as opposed to like putting a line here and adding geometry it'll attempt to snap that and again it's gets a little wobbly through here but again it's trying to maintain equidistance on topology that's a little bit tough to do if you want you can go inset polygroup all instead of doing equidistant you can just choose standard or legacy so we'll choose default equidistant staff we'll choose this legacy now and now as i pull this in it may not be perfectly equidistant but it does a pretty good job of keeping the line straight so legacy might be a better option you're going to see over here in the corners it kind of starts to dip down a little bit depending on how far you pull this in so again it's not equidistant but this might be another option for you if you go to standard it'll try and do equidistant as well but it'll also start having problems keeping these things on the same plane here now some of these let's go back to our working mesh here some of these are pretty self-explanatory if you hover over a face we can say mask polygroup all and it'll go ahead and mask that for us we can control tap to invert that hit w and then we can just move these mass points in that direction or remember you can hold down control and you can pull out extrusions or hold down hold down control start dragging and then let go of control another one too that i like instead of mask i'll just go over here to transpose polygroup all so now what i can do is i can just tap on here and it'll automatically go to transpose and put that gizmo right where i tap so i can kind of skip a step and then again i can hold down control and just drag this out now this is another option where if i want to go through and do another transpose polygroup like say back here instead of hitting q to go back into draw mode control dragging hovering over face and saying transpose polygroup all again and then running this operation what i can do is i can just tap off to go out of that mode tap on this polygroup and then start moving this so very quickly i can just tap off tap this polygroup and move again we talked about this before but it's under preferences gizmo tap to exit gizmo so if you're going to use hovering over a face and transpose this is a good option just tap off tap move tap off tap and move of course same thing you say like move polygroup all and you can just tap a polygroup and it'll just slide along here of course you know you already know you can go in here to cubemesh and hold down shift qmesh polygroup all and hold down shift so instead of using a move you can just use cue mesh with shift now you can also polygroup a flat island for instance and go through here and then anything that's flat along here you can just tap and then tap alt to change it to a new polygroup here but generally speaking what i'll do if i want polygroups i'll just go right back down here to the polygroups options and say group by normals and then geometry modified topology mirrored well to make sure it's the same on both sides another thing too that you can do speaking of polygroups so you see you have a green polygroup here an orange one and a blue one if i hold down alt and start painting on the green let go of alt you're going to see it's just going to cycle through a bunch of different polygroups so i can make this purple and then i can just continue painting and just paint everything purple if i undo that hold down alt start painting on this green and then let go of alt and tap shift it's going to inherit that polygroup that i'm painting on so if i continue painting it's going to paint with that green poly group so if i go over here and start painting and let go of alt it's still going to be painting with that green polygroup so that's an easy way to kind of take a polygroup like this blue hold down alt tap shift to inherit that polygroup and then continue painting without letting up on my tablet like so of course if you're using polygroup you can say polygroup polygroup all you can say checker so if you if you tap here it'll go through and try to i mean that one looks a little bit weird but if you go through here and choose something like a plane 3d make polymesh3d hover over a face and say polygroup polygroup all checker now it'll be every other polygroup will get its own polygroup here so some really cool stuff in here like topological and six sides isn't going to do too much on this one but if we go back to a cube 3d make poly mesh and then choose that one that'll go through here and basically do a six six-sided projection to give you a poly group on each side and of course we go down here to checker now i can put a checker on each one of those polygroups or i can say all polygons checker and now every single polygon gets a checker pattern here so if i now go through here and say inset polygroup all each poly now i can quickly go through here and insert all of these and then i can say delete polygroup all and delete those if i want

Channel: Michael Pavlovich

Views: 7,944

Keywords: ZBrush, ZBrush Intro, ZBrush tutorial, zbrush for beginners, zbrush basics, zmodeler, zmodeler brush, zbrush QCube, ZBrush QGrid, zbrush face, zbrush verts, zbrush edges, zbrush components, zmodeler polygon actions, zmodeler qmesh, custom zmodeler brush, zbrush hotkey bevel, zbrush hotkey insert edge, zmodeler extrude, zmodeler polygroup, zmodeler keep value, zmodeler island, zmodeler bridge, zmodeler alt painting, zmodeler selection, zmodeler masking

Id: XcR5TzvIaoc

Length: 26min 56sec (1616 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 19 2021