Making STITCHES in ZBRUSH and SUBSTANCE 3D PAINTER!

today we're talking about stitching in zbrush and substance manner let's go [Music] what's up guys i'm eric and today we're going to be taking a look at stitching i'm going to show you three different ways to do stitching two in zbrush and one in substance painter and i think this is a good detail to talk about because not too long ago stitching was something that was only done in the texture and then you could do it in zbrush through sculpting then as zbrush has added more tools there's more ways to think about doing it within zbrush and then with the rise of 3d painting packages like substance painter we now can do a lot of this stuff in substance painter too so i'm going to show you a bunch of different ways to do stitching in zbrush then i'm going to show you why you shouldn't so why don't we go ahead and jump in and i'll explain why alright so the first thing we're gonna take a look at is insert mesh and insert curve brushes so to get started we need a stitch so very quickly i'm gonna go ahead and model a stitch that we can use i'm just using an initialized cube and bending it a little bit adding a couple edge loops and just kind of giving it a rough stitch shape and that way when it subdivides it kind of rounds out a little bit and looks much more like a stitch [Music] now once we have our stitch what we can do is go up to our brush menu and at the very bottom we can click create insert mesh this turns our stitch into a brush that we can use in its default state what you can do is click and drag this stitch out and that works pretty well now that we have our stitch as an insert mesh we want to adjust the depth that it sits on the surface so we can go up to brush depth and choose the inset and you can adjust that inset so that when you draw it out on the canvas the depth that it sits at feels correct so you can kind of play with that and figure out how you want your stitch to sit on the surface now that we have that we want to obviously turn our stitch into something that can be repeated across the surface and in order to do that we need to turn it to a curve brush so we can go ahead and go to stroke and turn on curve mode and that's going to change our insert mesh into a curved mesh brush now if we go ahead and draw it out you can see that our stitch is repeating we have some settings that we can use to adjust this but first let's adjust that depth to get it how we want now you'll see we have something called curved step if we increase that curve step we'll increase the spacing between our stitches and with that we can kind of figure out how often we want our stitches to repeat as we draw our curve on the surface as long as you still have that curve on your canvas you can also do things like adjust the draw size so you can increase the draw size and then tap on your curve it'll actually increase the size of the stitches or you can make your draw size smaller and it'll decrease the size of those stitches now curves are very very powerful and we can make a whole video just on curves and we've kind of gone over them a little bit in the past this is a reminder you can go up to stroke and go to frame mesh and it'll actually frame your mesh with curves so you can go ahead and then insert your stitch on that curve you could also do this with like poly groups or poly loops like you could poly group an area and then frame that and then apply your stitch so there's a lot you can do with it super powerful and obviously the benefit to curves is that the stitches are their own geometry so what i mean by that is that you're not altering the surface that you're drawing the stitch on so it's independent of the amount of geometry you need so whatever the geometry the stitch is is all you need and since the stitch is a separate mesh from the surface that you're drawing it on the major benefit is that you can then fill the stitches with a color you know so the background could be red and the stitches could be blue and it's very easy to bake out a color id map when you go to texture and painter or whatever software you texture in right because you have a very solid definition between the two colors the downside to insert meshes is you're not really affecting the surface itself at all so you know you're just drawing a stitch on the surface and the surface isn't reacting to that stitch at all so you would actually have to go in and then manually sculpt or make any changes you want to make to imply that the stitch has some impact on the surface so that's kind of the pros and cons right got something that's very flexible but also something that doesn't give the maximum amount of detail and obviously you can pretty much create any shape that you can imagine in terms of stitches or anything that might use this kind of curve i didn't really count this as one of the three ways that you could do stitching in zbrush however i did want to show it because you could actually use nanomesh if you for example did a polyloop polygroup so we just kind of choose a polyloop to draw a nanomesh out on and if you want to learn more about nanomesh you can click the link up top and that'll take you to my nano mesh video but you know you could use nano mesh to line up a stitch repeat it however you want that sort of thing maybe i'm like hard surface stuff like on like a car interior where your topology is really clean you know like a seat or a steering wheel but maybe you could find a use for it on a character too it's kind of interesting because it's so non-destructive and you have even more technical control than like a curved brush so i just wanted to throw that in there really quick [Music] now the next major way you can create stitches in zbrush is through alphas right and so this has been around for ages you can have your brush modify it with an alpha and then sculpt on the surface with that alpha and so you can either create alphas in a different program like photoshop or designer or whatever or you can create your alpha directly inside zbrush so let's go through a couple ways you can do that now the first is once you have a document much like nano mesh or micro poly or other topics we've gone over in the past you want to keep everything in that one by one grid so when you grab a plain 3d that's kind of the area that you're working in in terms of creating your alpha now we're going to take our stitch and just duplicate it twice and we can go up to alpha and at the bottom of the alpha panel you have grab dock when you hit grab dock it's going to create a black and white capture of your document and create an alpha from that now keep in mind the angle does matter so you want to make sure you snap straight on before you do grab dock if you're off a little bit it is going to affect that image and now here's what we have to keep in mind when you're using a alpha to create small detail like stitches it is geometry independent so very quickly you need a lot of geometry to have enough topology to work with in order to have your stitches look good you can see here that we have six million points on the sphere already and if you look closely you can even still see a little bit of crunchiness around those stitches now obviously if you were just doing stitches like this there's no reason to do them with an alpha you would just use the insert curve brush right so really the power in using alphas is that you can create a surface underneath your stitches that you have control of so very quickly i'm going to sculpt like a rough jeans seam that our stitches is going to sit on and that's going to be the base of our alpha that we can apply to a different mesh so we have our stitches and we have full control over how we have those stitches interact with the surface below them because we're sculpting it this is what makes alphas really really powerful the major downside is that you need a lot of geometry for your outfit to look good and you also don't have as clean of a color id map as you would with using an insert mesh now there are some ways to get around it we'll go over a little bit but it does make it a little more difficult for texturing using alphas the first thing you'll notice is if we grab a brush and select our alpha we did a very basic grab dock and you'll notice in our alpha panel the alpha doesn't fill up the whole brush square so we're not using the full resolution of our texture and you can see when we draw our alpha out even if we adjust the step curve it just doesn't look right it's not lining up right we have a weird edge to it and it's giving us issues now part of the problem is a feature called roll however it's not going to look right because our alpha isn't right so what do we have to do to make our alpha look right now there's two things we can do first there's a 2.5 d brush called the mrgbz grabber this is pretty useful you can find this if you go to the sub tool menu and you click your active sub tool you can choose one of these brushes with the mrgbz grabber you can basically marquee select an area you can hold spacebar to move it around and it lets you kind of frame your alpha and take a snapshot of it now if you want your apple to repeat perfectly this isn't the best option because it's very difficult to get those edges to line up so in this case the mrgbz grabber actually did a pretty good job like i don't see a noticeable seam now i want to show you the other way to capture your alpha besides the mrgbz grabber before we move on and this is through resizing your document so if we go up to the document menu disable pro that you didn't know you were pro and put in a resolution so for example we're going to do a 1024 by 1024 and go ahead and hit resize now it's gonna squish your canvas so just hit ctrl n on your keyboard to clear out your canvas and then drag your sub tool back on the menu and hit t now what we're going to do is frame our sub tool to perfectly match the document size in order to do that a little bit better what we're going to do is go up to zoom in the top right and just click and drag and zoom out a little bit so that we can see every edge of our document it's almost like zooming your document in and out in photoshop it's very similar to that now that we've done that we can select the sub tool that we want to frame in our case it's the background plane and you can go over and click frame sometimes you have to click it twice and you'll notice it snaps to the edges of the document and so that way we have our alpha completely filling up our document so when we go to the alpha menu and hit grab doc it's going to fill up that alpha perfectly in the document space when we're finished we can go back up to document and create a new document back to our max canvas size so now let's talk about roll what roll does is treats your texture like a repeatable alpha so instead of just stamping the thing over and over and over again every new step as you can see in our lazy step menu it actually kind of treats it as a continuous texture that it should repeat as your stroke moves on but you can see now with roll on we're actually getting our stitches with roll off it just kind of draws it and makes it look like train tracks so roll is very important when you're using an alpha like this now back to our original something i want to show you is that the focal shift does matter in terms of drawing your alpha out so you can see if we kind of bring that focal shift all the way down to one direction it's going to make the alpha look a lot flatter but we're going to start to get our edge versus if we drag the vocal shift all the way to the other side it's going to smooth it out more but you're going to get a much more rounder result and so it's important to kind of play with the focal shift to find the right happy medium that works for your alpha now we have another problem and you'll notice that when we draw aggressive curves with our alpha you get this kind of weird stamping effect where instead of it blending smoothly it's actually kind of stamping along the curve this is where alphas get sort of complicated because there's a lot of different settings that can affect this we have our lazy menu settings we have our alpha settings and we have our brush settings and all of those contribute to the final look of your alpha so first we can play with our lazy radius you can see if we're just doing gradual curves we can pretty much get it to look decent from just the lazy settings so as i mentioned we have a few different ways to modify the result of our stroke the first being in the alpha menu so if you go up to alpha and we're actually going to go ahead and click the top little circle so that we snap the alpha to our side panel that way we can just look at the settings a little easier and there's a ton of settings you can play with in here we're not going to go over every single one a lot of them are pretty self-explanatory and you can always do the control mouse over on any of them to see what they do there's a few that are interesting to us though one of them being rf that's radial falloff so when you're adjusting an alpha you can use the radial falloff slider to smooth out the falloff of your alpha in our case our alpha is a rectangle so using the radial falloff isn't going to work for us because we're going to get gaps another option is contrast so contrast is going to increase the values between the black and white areas of your alpha and if your alpha is raised and you're getting a seam from your plane you can use the contrast to kind of get rid of that plane seam uh in our case we shouldn't really have to worry about it and then you also have this curve that you can use and drastically change how your alpha kind of gets applied to the surface so there's a ton of settings in there now these are just settings so if you actually want to bake your settings into the alpha you can go down to alpha and then the transfer menu and go ahead and hit make modified alpha what this is going to do is it's going to take all of those settings that you've adjusted in the alpha menu and bake them down to a new texture in your alpha menu so you'll see that you have a new alpha to choose from that has those changes now the next thing that can really have an impact on your stroke is your brush settings so if we go up to brush we're going to go ahead and hit the little circle again and pin the brush menu to our sidebar there is a ton of settings in the brush menu i mean it can just go on forever and you know there's people that get really into brushes and sell custom brushes obviously some brushes became notoriously popular because they just worked so well the damn standard being one came so widely used that zbrush actually added it as a standard brush in the project for our purposes of trying to get our stitch alpha to behave a little better we're just going to look at one thing so if you go to the auto masking menu you'll see a section about halfway down called directional we're going to enable directional and this kind of affects how the alpha is applied on your brush we're going to reduce the influence pressure has on it slightly and then we're going to take this curve and we're going to drag the focal shift very very far to the right hand side so our curve kind of only affects the right side of the menu and you can see already as we do a very aggressive curve we're getting a much better result there is still a little bit of weirdness here there and that kind of comes with the territory however the more you dial this stuff in you can get rid of it but here's just an example of toggling the directional on and off and you can kind of see the two different results with it on we're getting a much smoother result overall now full disclosure i did not arrive on this curve result by myself now if you actually go to lightbox and go to brushes zbrush has three different stitch brushes baked into the project so you can go to stitch and then you'll see we have stitch one stitch two and stitch three and these are both alphas and brushes that are dialed in for this kind of work so if you don't want to waste your time trying to dial in a brush you can just grab one of these brushes and then apply your own alpha to it and you should get a pretty good result and you'll see when we go to the brush menu that curve is very similar to the curve we just set up and here's just another example toggling that directional on and off when that directional is on we get a much smoother result on extreme curves than we do with it off very good to know and it saves you time to just grab one of those brushes instead of trying to make an entire new brush from scratch if i grab that stitch brush with our own alpha applied you can see here was our standard brush with the alpha applied versus using one of the zbrush preset brushes with our alpha applied we're getting a much smoother result now i mentioned one of the drawbacks to alphas is that it's much more difficult to capture a color id map but there is a way you can do it and i think this is actually a pretty new feature so if we add a color to our base and then we add a color to our stitches we can go through our grab dock again the same way we did before but you can also go to your texture menu and do a grab dock there and it'll create a texture that matches our colors so if we have both the alpha and the texture applied what we can do is go to our mesh that we want to influence i don't know if the mic is picking up that thunder it is thundering like crazy at right now we can turn on the brush in our subtool menu and then also make sure that rgb is on on our brush of course then when we draw a stroke out you'll see that we're actually drawing both the texture and the alpha now the struggle is that both the rgb and the z-add are pressure sensitive so what you'll need to do is adjust the intensity of your z-add you can do that through the actual alpha by reducing the strength of the alpha or you can just use your z intensity to lower the intensity of the brush so that you can apply a lot of pressure to get really solid colors but not pull out your alpha too much so you kind of have to balance the two so that you're getting your colors and then also getting the alpha that you want to get now i don't think this is a great workflow but you know if you really need to get the color id from an alpha brush this is a method to do it a quick note you can click the ep button at the bottom of the alpha panel and when you export your alpha it'll actually bake any settings you have from your alpha adjustments or your alpha adjustment curve into the exported alpha you can save all the information inside your alpha texture now i want to show you one more way that you can make adding stitches a little easier in zbrush and you could use this for both the curve brush or the alphas we're just going to use alphas for this example i'm going to grab one of the default stitch brushes that we looked at earlier and what we can actually do is use a technique called morph uv to make it a little simpler to figure out how to apply our stitches and this is useful if you have like a lot of complex wrinkles or something that's making it difficult to draw along your surface we can actually flatten the surface out to simplify it a little bit now before we do that i want to give ourselves some guide marks to make it a little easier and so what i'm going to do is just make a brush turn on rgb just to add a couple markers that we can use so i'm just going to paint a little bit of red at the cuff and then a little bit of red at the top of the pant and this is just going to tell us where we want to draw our stroke in between now you'll see in our menu we have a section called uv map but it's grayed out right now and so what we need to do is go to z plug-in uv master and create a uv layout for these pants we're just gonna go to uv master we're just gonna hit unwrap and just let it do an auto unwrap now we have morph uv so when we hit morph uv it's going to actually morph our mesh into its uv position now we can actually just go ahead and use our stitch brush and draw stitches in between our two points i think this just makes it especially if you're trying to do like the inside seam of pants this just makes it a little bit easier and you can see it's a little goofy looking so that's where adding good markers to let yourself know where you need to draw your stroke comes in but i really like this feature and i think it's really useful you could also use this to apply texture patterns or anything where you need a pattern laying it out flat with the uvs could make that a little bit easier there you go it's pretty cool i really like this feature and now before we move on to substance painter i just want to show you a couple more examples of stitches so here's just a sphere where i took some different stitch brushes and applied them so we have the insert mesh stitches we have kind of a stylized stitch that i did and then more of like a basic stitch so you know whatever you can come up with you can pretty much apply to one of these two methods to create a stitch that works for you and of course if you go to somewhere like the art station marketplace people have made tons of stitch brushes and stitch alphas and things that can speed up your workflow so you know if you're doing something realistic it might not make sense to sit there and spend a whole bunch of time making your own brushes maybe you just want to buy a pack instead and speed up things but here's just some examples of things you can do with alphas all right so now that we've talked about the different ways you can do stitching in zbrush i'm going to talk a little bit about why i think that might not be the best way to do stitching in 2021 and that's because programs like substance painter have gotten so good at this kind of detail and as you've seen in zbrush using alphas you need very very dense meshes right millions of polys i mean maybe you could break up your mesh in some clever ways where you're only subdividing those areas you've seen with uh insert meshes and curved brushes you're not always getting the amount of detail you want you're getting the stitches but you're not getting the detail on how those stitches interact with the surface below them so this also isn't ideal now in census painter you can achieve both of these things both out of the box or with your own assets that you create instead of trying to sculpt all this detail you can just plan for it and then do it all in the texture so why don't we go ahead and look at substance painter and what you can do now they've had stitch brushes in the past but they did update these brushes recently to add a bunch of new functionality so if you go to your project and just very quickly all i've done is added a denim smart material as our base and i'm creating a fill layer with a black mask and then a paint layer and if you go to your project and go to your brushes you'll see there's a whole bunch of different brushes you can use and so on the most basic level substance painter has just stitch alpha so you can just apply a stitch alpha to your brush and get a basic result but they also have these three new stitch brushes that give you a lot of customization and a lot of flexibility with what you can do in regards to stitching so if we choose one of these brushes and just drag on our surface you can see we're getting a basic cross stitch brush now if you go over to the right hand menu so we can choose between these three brushes and get different results however each one of these brushes has a ton of customization options now for starters you'll see that there's a base color option and since we're applying this brush as a mask of a fill layer that's not going to work you'd have to actually go to the fill layer color and add color you can also just use these brushes on a fill layer without a mask and that way you can actually drive the color from the brush settings if you want to work that way totally up to you so you can see now our color is being driven by that base color in the brush settings now you'll also notice besides base color we have a ton of different options that we can use to customize our stroke so under the parameters menu we have everything from the stitch type to the thread type and you can even modify those so under stitch selection you'll see there's a bunch of different things we can choose from as a base and let's just go through a couple of these and try them out and see what they do we have the running double running right there's double-sided ones offset ones so you can see just out of the box there's a ton of different options that we can play with and these look a little crunchy because our resolution isn't very high but if you have a very high resolution texture these are actually very very detailed brushes i'll paint them larger in a little bit just so you can see how detailed they actually are but these are really cool and they give you really good results very quickly so let's just go through and paint a couple different options we went through the stitch selection now we're going through the thread type now you can also see we have puncture intensity this is basically the hole on the end of the stitch how uh pronounced that is so you can see if we crank that puncture intensity way up it's very pronounced and a little unrealistic we also have the seam intensity which is similar we can actually drag that all the way to zero to remove the seam or we can increase it to increase the thickness of the seam once you have those dialed in you can also go to the advanced parameters and dial and dial everything in even further so you can adjust the stitch length width and the depth and also the material effects the roughness the metallic you know all that kind of stuff too is all within these options and you can actually see in our little uh preview panel on the right hand side as you adjust that stitch size length you can actually see the stitch getting thicker or longer or whatever so that's a good preview there too under technical parameters we also have the height intensity the normal intensity and we also have ambient occlusion the ambient occlusion is pretty cool because it actually sort of bakes in a default ao into your texture so if we crank that way up we can see we're getting a really strong ao around our stitch versus if we turn it off we're not getting any ao so you can kind of find a good balance for what works with your texturing overall these brushes are super powerful and this isn't the only way to do stitching obviously you could import your own alphas to do stitches you can create your own custom brushes in substance painter you could even create your outfit in designer and then import it to painter and use it like that so there's a lot of flexibility there's also ones on the marketplace just like for zbrush where the people have made extremely realistic stitch brushes for substance painter that are even more realistic than these ones and so there's a lot of options you can also click and hold shift to draw lines so you can just kind of shift click around if you're trying to quickly place a bunch of lines of stitches like i mentioned before here if i just draw this stitch really large you can see how detailed these actually are so they give you plenty of detail to work with in regards to what you're trying to achieve now before we wrap up i do want to just quickly go over how you can use your own alphas in substance painter to create stitches and any kind of alpha detail so i just want to cover a few ways you can do that now for the purposes of this demonstration i went ahead and just took the alpha that i made in zbrush exported it as a psd and brought it into painter make sure when you import your alpha into painter you are selecting the alpha as its definition and i also created a couple different versions in photoshop where i erased the background and made a couple different modifications and we'll go over those you'll notice that when you apply an alpha straight out of a zbrush if you have a gray background and even if you're using just a normal alpha you're going to get a really weird result so the first thing you need to do is turn on follow path in your brush settings so you'll see a little button there you can just toggle that on and then you're going to need to play with the spacings you can see as we slide the spacing slider the preview is kind of adapting to show us how that elsa is being stamped down and that way we can kind of space it out so it follows each stamp in a line you'll notice immediately when we add height to it because our background is gray we're getting an elevated background and obviously that's not really going to work for us now you can kind of use the contrast or levels to get rid of some of that but the truth is it's not really a great result and so i went ahead and did a modified version of the alpha in photoshop where i just erased some of the background and that helps us out a little bit you know we're getting the seam and the stitch it would be difficult to colorize this obviously because we're blending both the background and the stitch also there is brushes in painter that are set up a little bit better for this kind of work you can go ahead and search in the project for the paint roller brushes and some of those will give you a better stitch result i adjust the spacing and get this to line up a little bit better this kind of alpha is not going to work right on extreme curves but for something like a pant leg it seems like it would work just fine you can see now if we colorize it we're colorizing everything about that stitch not just the stitch itself so the last modification i made to this elsa was i deleted everything except for the stitches so that we're only doing stitches and that way when we colorize them we can get the stitches now we're not getting a background which is unfortunate so we could break out the background into its own stit its own alpha draw that and then draw our stitches on top of that that's a bit cumbersome but it would definitely be a way to work very quickly i just want to show you a workflow where you can add a fake shadow to these stitches so if you create your fill layer and have your paint stroke so your paint stroke is defining where those stitches are and we can use what's called anchor points to reference these stitches and create a shadow mask for them so what an anchor is is it's just a spot that says hey anything below this save this as information that we can use in a different way somewhere else so we're basically going to use these stitches that we drew as a mask to create a shadow underneath them now in this example the way that anchors work is any layers below an anchor the anchor cannot affect it can only affect what's above it and so we're actually going to add the anchor to our shadow fill layer and then reference that information for the height and color of our stitches on the fill layer above it so you can see we have our anchor and then under our fill layer we can add a black mask add a fill layer to that black mask under that fill layer we have an anchor tab we can go to that tab and select our stitches and that's going to reference the anchor that we created now you can see anything that we add above the anchor does not get stored in that anchor information so we can go ahead and add a blur and a levels to kind of get a shadow effect underneath our stitches so just toggling that on and off you can kind of see it adds a little bit more depth to our final result another thing i just want to quickly show you is the stitch generator so you can go ahead and add a auto stitcher generator and this model doesn't have uvs or anything so we're not going to get a really great result it's just going to kind of randomize where it wants to go but this basically just automatically creates stitches it's not great but you know it will try to add them to uv seams so you have a couple different options on where they generate you can also add a custom input so for example we could actually paint some white lines on a different layer so i'm just going to like roughly block out where stitches might go similar to last time we're going to add an anchor point so that we can use that white line that we painted as a mask and then under our auto stitcher we're going to use a custom input for our anchor and you can see it's going to draw those stitches around where we drew those lines and then you can add an additional paint layer and mask out the stitches that you don't want you can see though that these auto stitcher stitches aren't really that realistic you know just for something quick it's viable i think so you can see between using these preset brushes that substance painter has built in that give you tons of customization options or importing your own or downloading some from a marketplace you can get very very good stitching very quickly in substance painter i think this is a easier and more non-destructive way to work in terms of this kind of detail there's still a place for doing sculpted stitches you know obviously you want to do a render of your high poly or you just need extreme detail that you can't get through one of these then sure but from now on i think i'm gonna try doing more stitching through painter instead of doing it in zbrush however you never know that might change in the future anyways i hope you learned something and i hope this was useful i hope i was able to kind of explain how each one works and when you might use each one and how they can help your workflow if you have topics or things that you're interested in me going over in a video like this please let me know in the comments and if you like this kind of content please consider subscribing and hitting thumbs up i really appreciate it and it does help me out so thank you i know you hear that all the time thank you so much for watching thanks for checking out my videos i've been having a great time making these and i plan to make a lot more and i'll see you next time don't stop creating take care [Laughter] [Music] also this is the first video that i'm shooting in 4k which has been a complete pain in the ass i can't promise every video is going to be in 4k from now on but i'm going to try however the amount of data this footage takes up at 4k is absolutely ridiculous it is ridiculous so we'll see

Channel: hart

Views: 24,142

Keywords: art, game art, gaming, games, 3d, 3d art, digital art, stylized, stylized characters, character art, video game art, cg, computer graphics, cg art, art education, art tutorials, game art tutorials, sculpting, modeling, 3d modeling, 3d sculpting, digital sculpting, texturing, retopology, zbrush, substance, painter

Id: r3Wt36QwkHg

Length: 33min 23sec (2003 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 06 2021