Intro to ZBrush 044 - Use IMM Brushes (Insert Multi Mesh) to kitbash and enhance your models!

now let me go back to the character we've been working on here i'm going to use a macro in here that's going to be i have this tool selected out of all these tools here so i'm going to go in here to macro delete unselected tools and hit ok that will clear out all of these tools in here i'm not going to use and just narrow it down to this so if i do a quick save by hitting 9 on my keyboard it'll quick save much faster and clear a little bit of my clutter out now let's talk about another very important concept and that's insert mesh brushes and insert curve brushes so if i go here to b i you're going to see a bunch of default insert mesh brushes and some of them are pretty useful so if i want to go through here and say industrial parts i can go through here and i can skate up here at the top there's going to be a dual drop down area and if you don't like this you can go here to preferences interface imm viewer and you can turn off auto show and auto hide if it is not showing you can just hit m on your keyboard and have a you have the selection available to you and essentially all an insert mesh brush is you choose an insert mesh brush you just drag it onto your object here and you can just insert meshes onto that object those will come in handy for all sorts of reasons but if you also want you can say turn on auto show and auto hide so if you have your standard brush selected it's not there if you go bi brush insert and choose an insert mesh brush you're going to see a little number next to here that's going to indicate how many insert mesh objects are in that brush so we can just choose this one there's 12. let me just go through here we can scroll through here another function of this is if we choose one we drag it out on our object here and we hit w that's going to put a gizmo right in the middle of here and you're also going to see it's auto mask so if i go over here to auto masking you're going to see auto mask mesh insert is on by default so whenever i drag an insert mesh brush out on my object i can very quickly go through here and move it or sub tool split mask points or split unmask points and i can put this onto its own sub tool another thing i can do is i can hit w and bring the gizmo up and i can go through here and i can just swap out these on the fly so if i want to go through here and try out some different things we can go through here and just choose these and again if i'm done i can hit q to go back into draw mode and i can say split unmasked points i can also use my custom menu here you can see those split options are right here and now these are on their own subtool now one thing i can use i can go in here to bi brush insert and i can say this insert and mesh body parts select that i'm gonna hit m i'm gonna grab the hand and if i drag over here you're gonna say oh the hands are on the wrong side that's okay i just need to come over to this side here and drag these out now you're going to see when i drag these out these phillips head screws get auto mask that's because if i go into solo mode here i'm actually dragging these out on the sub tool now if i try to drag out down here it's not going to let me it's going to make me navigate however if i go out of solo mode and there's a mesh here i can just drag here it'll stick to that mesh but it'll still be part of this sub tool here so go to solo mode here you can see there's my hands and there's my masked objects so if i want i can go down here to split unmask points i can alt tap the hands those will be selected i can hit gizmo or w to go into gizmo mode i can go through here and i can move these hands into place if i want to scale them up remember if i scale it's going to go away and towards that world axis go over here to lsim your local symmetry button then you can scale those out along those local axis here so now we have our own hand sub tool now you may think well let me go ahead and merge these hands with the body and i can do that i can take the body here i'm going to go down one so it's right above here and i can use my hotkey or i can say merge down and because this already had dynamesh properties built in i can just control drag and it'll dynamesh these hands together and in this case it did okay however if this was a very low resolution mesh and i dynameshed you're going to see it's going to stick those fingers together so depending on the resolution of your mesh it may not be a good idea to dynamesh things together and remember you can always leave them separate so right here you also notice when you drag out an insert mesh brush if i go to b i industrial parts here and we just start dragging these out it will give these a new polygroup as i continue to drag so we can use that to our advantage now too we can hold down control shift isolate just this insert mesh polygroup here and i can go over here to split hidden so i can continue to work on these hands separately and if i want i can dynamesh these at a higher resolution and work on them as a dynamesh or i can go through here with my z modeler brush bzm or assign a hotkey to that and you can say hover over an edge hold down space bar close convex hole you can close this hole you can hit ctrl d to subdivide or go down here to geometry hit the divide button and you can just work on these separately just subdividing as needed going through here with like hold down control going here to mask lasso we can move these fingers apart here using our gizmo or remember you can hold down control and drag and it will auto mask for you from those videos so you can very quickly go through here pose fingers out we can hold down control drag over this knuckle ctrl tab to invert that w alt tap on this knuckle and bend these in and again very quickly go through and pose and continue working on these fingers separately and in fact if we want to make these very wide fingers just go through here and inflate these fingers you can see it might be a good idea for us just to go through and start masking and spreading these fingers out just a little bit so that if i did want to go through and dynamesh these together i could but again we can go through here every single knuckle ctrl alt unmask w alt tap on that knuckle position go through here and pose or you can hit w and then hit y to go to transpose and then continue to control drag and then put a transpose line down here and you can use this hit r to go and rotate and you can use this to bend so again we can just mask through here move this bone and use this to kind of bend so we'll go through here and i'll just go ahead and flake these hands up and like i said before we can just work on these hands separately and if you want to deflate we can hold down alt while we inflate or you can hold down shift to smooth so feel free to work on these at separate resolutions and separate pieces of geometry and then if you want to merge these back together later after the body is at a higher resolution you can do that so remember the flexibility of working on separate subtools now using what we've learned up to this point we can very quickly create some eyeballs so i'm going to go to b i brush insert there's an imm primitives and i am in produce h these have a hole in the back of them which you can use for mesh fusion and things like that these are solid mesh primitives we're going to go ahead and select this one you can go up here and select or i can hit m on my keyboard i'll grab a sphere 32 drag it into the eye sockets here let's go ahead and say split mass points or use your subtool split menu and hit w let's put y to go back into gizmo mode here and you're going to see i can move and rotate these around and if we're going to scale these up or down make sure you do have lsim turned on so we can scale on this local axis so we can go ahead and position these eyeballs in place and if we hold down ctrl shift we can go through here and we can use slice or even better trim to go ahead and give ourselves some quick eyelids so with this eyeball selected we go through here and we can duplicate twice i'm going to choose one of the duplicates go in here to poly frame mode go to the side we're going to trim the bottom of these eyelids down and then choose the other duplicate and we're going to trim the top of that sphere so now we have bottom lids top lids and then our eyeball here now our top lids probably need to come out a little further of course you can go through here you can use your move brush and move these around but remember you can go in here to your z modeler brush b z m hover over face go to cube mesh polygroup all and then just pull this out and hold down shift to pull along those surface normals same thing for the lower lid if you want you can alt tap and you may not be able to select it but just go over here and you can select it then just hold down shift and pull along so now you have upper and lower lids which might be a little easier to go through here now and shape using the move brush and again because these are all separate subtools it's very easy to alt click through here go in here and move things around if you need a mask or you know continue sculpting on a mesh go through here and continue refining now you're not just limited to what's in here you can go to bi brush insert and there's a lot of really cool things if you go in here to like imm model tool kit and hit m you see there's a bunch of things you can choose in here you can also hit the comma key go in here to brush choose insert imm and there's some really cool ones in here like dragon bones you can double click on here hit m grab a horn drag it on your canvas here because it's position the horns on the head i'm going to do a quick split mass points or split mass points down here and you can alt tap on this head you can go through here and you can sculpt you can all tap on the horn you can control drag because dynamesh settings will already be set because you dragged it on something that already had dynamesh properties and you can sculpt this separately as well if you don't want anything uh want to use these of course you can go through here you can delete that subtool here and on this subtool we can just control z to undo those changes now there are some brush options we need to be made aware so i go here to bi brush insert we'll go back to our industrial parts here now if i choose m and i choose like a bolt head and i drag it on my object here you're going to see they're this size if i change this z intensity down i can drag that out and they'll be flatter and in fact i can crank this up it's going to cap out as the intensity of 100 but underneath our brush menu here i can go all the way down to modifiers you can see there's a strength multiplier so i can crank this up now when i drag this out it'll be even longer there's some other really cool options in here there's a projection strength so if i drag something out let's go ahead and hit bi brush insert model toolkit we'll hit m i'll go ahead and grab this plates 6 here so when i drag this out you're going to see it's just going to be flat against my object here however if i turn projection strength up to 100 as i drag this out it's going to want to conform to the underlying surface so i can continue to drag these out and they'll again wrap to the underlying mesh of course at this point if i want to separate these out i can hold down ctrl shift and select my body here and if it's all one polygroup it'll select it if you had multiple polygroups on here sometimes it's easier just hold down ctrl shift grab select rectangle grab a little piece of it ctrl shift a which again if you remember is a visibility grow all and now i can do a sub tool split hidden and then these will be on their own sub tool i'm going to alt tap on the head here again and if i go in here to bi brush insert industrial parts one more time you're going to see there's a multi mesh selector so if you set this to one it'll actually cycle through so it'll start with the bolt and then go to the screw and then just continue to cycle through forward two will cycle backwards and then three will be random let me go ahead and undo back through here and again we can just take this subtool and just delete that out of our scene now when i drag these out let's say to choose that bolt head again as i drag these out you're gonna see i can stop and then i can drag out another one but what if you wanted these to be the same size and let's go back here and switch this back to zero so if i hold down or as i start to drag out i hold down control it'll snap to your brush size so you can see as i go through here it'll go ahead and snap it and then if i make my brush size larger it'll go through here and snap and if i make my brush size smaller and i go through here and hold down control it'll continue to snap to that brush size so that'll keep things nice and consistent now you can create your own insert mesh brushes and you can use any geometry for that for example i can take this character here i'm going to go ahead and say clone and that's going to clone his body into its own subtool here i'm going to hold down ctrl shift i'm going to slice let's go into polyframe mode so i'm going to slice right along this line here and just take his head hold down ctrl shift isolate his head geometry modify topology delete hidden and remember you can put that in your custom menu and in fact i can go ahead and duplicate this one off hold down ctrl shift i'm going to slice his face i can isolate this one and then again delete hidden i can go through here and i can append a ring and if you notice in here i also have my own custom menu so if i hit b i brush insert i have an imm base primitives these are custom shapes i've added and they're all named and they're also like here's a sphere 16 12 8 here's a cylinder 16 12 8 cylinders from different angles and you can do the exact same thing very simply by going in here and choosing a cylinder 3d and we can initialize this as a say a 16 and a 4 hit make polymesh 3d and we'll come back to that cylinder 3d initialize primitive and change this to 12 that make polymesh3d go back to the cylinder make this eight make polymesh3d so now we have three polymesh 3d cylinders in here and if i want to i can rename these now so i can name this one cylinder 16 i can name this one cylinder 12 name this one cylinder 8 i'm going to go back to my working file that has the two faces in the ring i'm going to go through here and i'm going to append the 16 the 12 and the 8. now one important thing to know is that i need to choose the camera angle that i'm going to capture this object so if i want to capture from if i turn on the floor z forward and i'm going to capture all of my brushes at that angle i can do it one at a time if i just want to make a brush of this head and normally when i drag out a head i kind of want to maybe drag it out so the neck is down so i'm going to go to the top here hit b create insert mesh new and then if i hit b over here you can see i have a new insert mesh that's just the head and so at any point i can go in here to any of my creations here drag on a head ctrl drag to dynamesh all this together maybe go in here with inflate and now i have an object with a head on it however if i want to save all of these as a brush i can do two things number one i already have a brush started so i have an insert mesh brush here so i can go now to the second sub tool again i can snap my camera view to the angle i want it at so i can hit b create insert mesh append and that'll append it to that current brush so now it has two in here so now i go back to this one again and go to the back of the head and i can just put a face on the back of this head here ctrl drag again and now we have a face ready to go but if i want to capture every single one of these into a brush one thing i want to do is i want to make sure i name these so let's go down here and we'll call this head and we'll call this face and we'll call this ring now i mentioned before the orientation of these is very important if i drag this cylinder if i capture for example this cylinder as is so i go to b create insert mesh new and i go back to a character here and i drag the cylinder out it's going to drag towards me as i was as the camera was looking at the object however if i go back to my brush here and i move my camera this way and i go to b create insert mesh append they're both named the same they're both cylinder 17 if i go back here and now i drag it out they're going to be facing towards me this way so how you capture them is important and if you want to capture multiple sub tools into one brush very quickly make sure they're oriented correctly first so first you need to decide where you're going to capture these we're going to say z forward and to make things a little bit easier to find them i'm going to say with this head selected go down here to deformation unify and then just do a quick repeat to other so now every single object in my scene is sitting right in the middle here and i'm going to go ahead and rotate them how i want them to be captured so the head i want the neck to be away from how i drag this out so i want the top of the head let's go ahead and reset our axis and go to mesh center so i'm going to hold down shift and rotate this this way so the head is towards the camera and the neck is away so when i drag this on my object this is what i'm going to see same thing with the cylinders i'm going to make sure i rotate these 90 degrees and the ring i can do multiple ways i can have the ring drag out towards the camera like this and i can duplicate this and i can rotate this one and i can go ahead and rename this ring forward and i might as well rename these so that they're correct there we go so now again i want to capture from z forward and if i click through here all of them are facing the way that i want them to towards the camera so now instead of going through here and saying be create insert mesh we can go in here to say create insert multi mesh so i hit this button and now we have multiple objects here so i go back to our creation here let's go ahead and raise our dynamesh resolution up just a bit so now i can hit m and you're going to see i have a ring that'll drag out like this and a ring that will drag out forward now when i dragged out that ring you're going to see it sits right on top of the object if by default you want to change that embedding amount and go over here to your depth and you can say embed at zero and now when i drag this out it's going to go right through the middle of that ring or you can embed it further or you can have it sitting on top of your mesh just depends on what result you want to see by default so let's say we really like this brush a lot i can go up here well number one we can say i can tap through here and we can just start dragging these out or we can even go through here and say multi mesh selector one and as we drag these out it will start cycling through our mesh let's turn off our floor here ctrl drag to unmask and we can use this as our brush icon so i go in here to brush save as i'm going to hold down alt and say select icon and that will give us a new icon here i can do save as and if i'm not planning on using this a lot i'm going to go to zbrush 2021 see brushes i can throw them here in the imm and we'll call this one test so now i'm going to hit the comma key go to my brushes go to underscore imm you're going to see there's our test brush that we can bring in whenever we'd like

Channel: Michael Pavlovich

Views: 6,246

Keywords: ZBrush, ZBrush Intro, ZBrush tutorial, zbrush for beginners, zbrush basics, zbrush imm, zbrush IMM Brush, zbrush insert multi mesh, zbrush snap object to surface, zbrush screws, zbrush bolts, zbrush IMM same size, zbrush custom IMM brush, create IMM brush, zbrush swap IMM meshes, zbrush horns, IMM projection strength

Id: U5u3RpI9In4

Length: 21min 16sec (1276 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 19 2021