Making Custom Vector Brushes (VDM) in ZBrush

hey guys have any Mormon from flip normals here in this video video we are going to looking at how we can make custom VDM s4c brush or vector displacement brushes for those who you don't know what we're actually talking about here let us show you real quick this is a custom video where you can have a bunch of 3d brushes which allows you to very quickly drag and drop them on to your model yeah like this little fish eye the difference between a vdm and 2d brush or an alpha is that this has real depth to it it doesn't just go up and down it actually goes out as well so you can make this super cool stuff yeah so now you can get overhangs which is traditionally not possible with regular displacement brushes so you can see instead of just in and out it also goes in and it creates an overhang I think the eyes were a good example of that where you can see the actual cavity sort of like going into the eye there so before we get into how to do this we want to just quickly talk to you about a product we have where we've made this yeah so we have we've created our own creature kit where how many hundred and something brothers is 72 brushes I think it contains yeah so these contain this is actually the kit that we're showing you in the video and it's the reason we made it is just to make concept thing easier like you can drag and drop eyes noses mouths horns different kinds of scarring so it's a really quick tool to help you sort of like concept even faster and see brushes like I think it's cool to listen like an hour and a half or you see the horn strike and rock the now the nose to mouth is just straight up drag and drop into it yeah and then you can just modify it a little bit and now all of a sudden you have a lot of variation on your sculpts also quick heads up we have a new website up and going yeah so if you know if you're looking for some assets or tutorials or if you have assets or tutorials you want to sell yourself pop over to ignore mr. Coleman check it out and now back to zbrush so we are going to be looking at how to create this from scratch the Mae we're gonna be doing this is using just a plane to 3d so select a plane 3d then we convert this to poly mesh 3 and what's important when you're making this brushes is that you don't go too high rests it's very easy to make this brushes where you're talking about 10 million Polly's to get all the detail in here yeah that's not what this is for this is generally something where you you know you want some quick shapes out or you just want to get something repetitive the recently you really don't want to do 10 million Polly's is that your file would become humongous yeah the difference between a vdm and the regular displacement or an alpha and ZBrush that the alpha the resolution of the Alpha it's purely an image so the higher resolution your plane is the smoother your gradients are going to become but with the VMS they're actually meshes stored within your brush so you know if you have ten million times ten that's a big file yeah and if you have a kit which has hundreds of new brushes and you're being in for a world of pain we have that another important note is to disregard everything it says on the pixel logic Help section of how to create these this was something that we struggled with for weeks yeah because everything they tell you to do actually make the brush worse yeah if there are some very specific things here which really really sabotages what are is you're trying to do which is in ZBrush if the docs tells you to use this feature relax plane grid don't do it I when I made when we made them the creature kit this was a real pinning us because we have so many artifacts around the shape so when dragging something like this out it was like beautiful you can see you had there was so many things around it so many artifacts yeah and we just couldn't figure out how why it wasn't clean enough and I was because we followed the official docs so we're gonna be showing you a pretty simple way of making brushes this should be the de-facto way of how to create videos and see brush that are perfect yeah so just start subdividing I know you're like oh wow the coroner has a smooth off it's not a problem at all with would be an issue but it really doesn't pose any problems whatsoever so I personally prefer to suffer that after around 260 you don't really want to go over that because the demand details you can capture it becomes more like more legible and also it becomes really heavy as you go along yeah so important regular plane and just subdivided normally control D and then we store a morph target this isn't strictly speaking necessary this is more so that if you're sculpting on on your brush and now you accidentally hit the border of it you know just a little thing like this this is going to give you issues yeah so now we can use the morphe brush by hitting B and oh I'm never going to paint it out so it's just a security in case something goes wrong you can also mask out the borders as well in case you want to you can make polygroups for it yeah can you control ctrl W to make polygroups for it if you want to so there you can very quickly just ctrl click the polar group you want afterwards with one the transpose or new gets more live but we don't have to do that because we're hopefully not going to screw it up so what we're going to do is make a mask for the center we're gonna make a little horn for this because that shows it quite well it's quite easy to do you want to use as much of the space as possible because if you if you just use a tiny region and center you argue twice in the polygons that bold you know and then you'll just have a large file for no reason yeah so we are going to go under tool display properties and you double so we can actually see what's going on also as a general rule disable perspective when doing this this becomes important later on so now we can use beautiful get more tool to drag something up I recommend that you smooth this out by hand just as you go along whenever you making this yeah not use their elect relaxed plane to grid feature under deformation yeah then you're in a lot of pain and you don't know why yeah it seems like a great idea because it distributes all the polygons evenly a our mesh which you know like I felt like that was a great idea and they've got four four v DMS for some reason that just breaks them it's a it's one of those things that it's like it takes it takes a little while to create these brushes but you know at the end you're left with some really really cool assets that can really speed up your workflow so I think it's something that everyone who does any sort of creatures or organic stuff should really do I mean there's also in the pack that we sell we have stuff for for people as well so we try to include some cheek bones some chins noses and mouths as well so it can even be used for forgetting variation in people like if you don't want to just have generic face with generic nose you can experiment a lot with that yeah I personally use the creature could quite a lot for a lot of my consulting it was it was something we used a lot when we worked on Pacific Rim just to yeah massive kaijus because you just had to very quickly just get out quick designs for a bunch of different things so but having a base mesh ready and by having some some default brushes or stuff like a mouth nose eyes ears particular warns as well horse ages to sculpt yeah and there isn't that much variation comes with horns either sure you have you have like the difference between like deer antlers and you know your basic ZBrush diamond kind of thing but it's all is all based on the same thing so if you have five different kind of horns you're pretty much set one thing I like to do is I like to experiment with them in the kid in a way that they aren't designed for hmm so I've made wings with the horns so you can see this once you start to experiment with symmetry the vector displacement brushes aren't really designed to work in the center of things when symmetry is turned on so that becomes a really really interesting thing because you can just drag these out and just to extremes you don't have just because it's an eye it doesn't have to be an eye you can invert it yeah yeah exactly and and like with the horns they can become these giant gouges inside of their bodies as well and so this is just a lot of room for experimentation when you have a kid like this just because you're not really restricted to okay let me just try and make this maybe this will be okay this is an excellent way for you to just exaggerate what you're doing yeah so now we have our beautiful scope done I'm just gonna go over the borders just to make sure I didn't accidentally hit something with the morphe brush you should be fine otherwise this this will always know this is also going to show up once you actually captured the brush and you try to use it so yeah we're getting a pretty immediate feedback it can support something else so when you need to capture the brush you have to snap it so it's facing the camera like this and you also have to disable perspective because it doesn't capture the model per se it captures depth information it captures at this location all right this is this angle and then we use the layer brush you can also use Nestle test the candles use a standard brush but it's fun I get better results if you use two layer brush and it was less set up as well before you do anything you also want to duplicate the brush just hit clone because now you overriding the original brush what you really don't want to do if you already have something here like we have a little cheeky guy then we can go under brush and create and hit delete mesh and that sets us back you're gonna do this a lot when you make your brushes house you're gonna experiment the shape and make new brushes yeah and now we can hit create mesh or from mesh and now you can see we have a little guy up here what we have to do now as well is make sure the intensity is set all the way to a hundred but fall to accept somewhere twenty you're not gonna get the full effect of it and then we can see if what we did worked make sure it's selected oh and also make sure this is up to drag rect as well if it's up to drag strokes you're gonna get something like this perfect which can also you know you can experiment yes absolutely and you can experiment with the spacing yeah so so drag rect and there we go perfect severs demon horn perfect symmetry monster this is why this is why it's so cool because now you can just experiment with this very quickly and get really interesting results you can do a sculpt only made out of horn its eyes horns eyebrows or horns the interesting thing is like the more you drag it this all of a sudden it's gonna drag through the other side of the model and then you can start to dynamesh things and you know really experiment with this you can have a lot of fun with this so I mean obviously it's pretty nice you know you can see that you can do something really quickly and this was was this a pretty shitty horn this was very rough stuff no reference used just getting something up or running yeah but if you spend proper time with this and make real refined shapes you can make something really good as a quick note now we are using morph targets on this we use some more flares on the plane we're using but to create it you really don't want to use morph targets on the model you're sculpting so let us show you an example here if we have a morph target in this guy and now we want to we want to have another stroke on this it doesn't work it's not as going to completely screw up what we're doing if we second eye now you see it goes into it and tries to go back to the original shape so right now you want the eye here to not go into it we want to go on top it doesn't work on a morph target so this is what we want yeah you want to go on it so whenever you're sculpting make sure your model doesn't have a morph target also one cool thing is that let's say you have a bunch of these this is how we made a cricket we had a bunch of these little things here where you know you can scale them down you can let's do this we can move it down here and we're gonna scale it down so now you have a different or an oil and tar it all together so now if you want both of these to be in the same brush we can go to our layer brush what we had before we can delete whatever is here this is how I used to do it I would just straight up just delete all the delete all the brushes and then make them again I would have the sub tools over here for all the different shapes brush then under brush again create multi alpha brush and now we see we have both of them here so whenever you're sculpting and making these kits or whatever you are doing you can just have a single tool will multiple sub tools and just keep refining them and when you change you want to change your brush you just delete the brush from up here and you start again so now we can you know drag out a small one and we can drag out a big one and suddenly you have even more variation what do you want to do let's see if we can show an example of why you also shouldn't use the things logic approach to this so yeah I don't know why they I don't know it's weird it's weird that it's there i when it's so wrong for some reason even though the plain to grid plain grid fixed grid whatever on the deformation doesn't really this is seem like it touches the borders something definitely changes there and so once you start to drag it out it just it just looks weird so what they're saying to do is that you should mask out the borders and then you should use under tool deformation use use relax plant a grid but what is doing you can see this tributes to Polly's way better which is a great idea which is a great idea because this way you can optimize you know the polygons that you have for your vdm yeah but what happens if we again go to layer again face in the camera never get a brush and we hit from mesh and just make sure it's selected up here you're gonna see some pretty nasty stuff you see this you see the issue around this this was something we struggle with for like a week or two it was a real real pinning us to figure out why this happened so don't do that yeah very simple make a plain subdivide her up no perspective sculpt to your heart's content brush from mesh so very nice and easy and then you can let's just show you quick one-minute demo and what you can do with this if you don't have some fun we can make give this guy some horse ears beautiful we can give in little skeleton nose they were just disable symmetry we can enable symmetry again yeah like we tell you because like symmetry and the vector displays me brushes they act weirdly together so we're gonna add some Anatomy stuff like we have some you know cheapo this and then we can add maybe the eye again oh this guy has polygroups to be pull grips or live nerve targets and get this in here so I'm have some bone structure for this add a little mouth to here again disable symmetry so cute is skully little mouth a nose and then we can add some third to it and then you know you're talking within seconds you can have a version of this yeah exactly and then you just you know now you have a base to sculpt on and now you can just refine the shapes or you can start tweaking the proportions you can go back a few steps at different kinds of eyes once and and this way it's really easy and really quick to build up very interesting looking concept and then you can you describe the scope by hand yeah but the cool thing about this you can you can build up so many different ideas but I would ever actually sculpting now just straight up just by doing it so I highly recommend that you you spent some time to make cool brushes for your own personal projects cuz you can make some really cool designs particular if you're constable artists and you don't really care about the whole let's become let's train to become a good sculptor or you just want really quick designs out this is a phenomenal way of building really cool brushes right away and it works for environments and everything yeah it rocks trees whatever all sorts of stuff so we hope this year has been been useful and let us know if you want to see anything more in ZBrush or if you want to see more complex this in the future make sure to LIKE comment and hit a notification button and subscribe also subscribe and thank you guys so much for watching thanks guys

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 64,677

Keywords: 3d, sculpting, zbrush, concept, maya, tutorial, autodesk, film, vfx, animation, flippednormals, henning sanden, morten jaeger, creature, character, texturing, substance painter, substance designer, education, foundry, pixologic, nuke, art, fundamentals, art fundamentals, art school, art tutorials, blender, flipped normals, 3d tutorial, learning 3d, learning ZBrush, 3ds max, cubebrush, cube brush, gumroad, marvelous designer, photoshop, mari, blender guru

Id: jBXs8cUm0CI

Length: 17min 42sec (1062 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 04 2019