Making Tileable Geometry Maps in ZBrush

hey guys sending a Morton from flip normals and in today's video we are gonna be looking at more rocks I don't know why we keep doing this but its rocks but this is kind of related to the previous tiling textures in ZBrush video that we did but this time we're going to be looking at it with geometry instead of only having a plane to sculpt on so this can be used for if you're doing rocks like we will be doing or you're doing on like a floor that's made of my planks wooden planks or something or just anything that you want a tile across a plane that's actual geometry the cool thing about this is that you can also take this geometry not just export it as maps but export it as actual geometry for you know your game engine or if you want to do something cool with it so they get started I'm just using this poly mesh and because we're using we're doing like a brick sort of pattern I'm just gonna initialize this and make it into a cube cube so with the Q cube we just have that I just that I just need a cube basically so the Q cube is nice because it doesn't have all the weird stuff that the poly mesh cube has yeah that's essentially a sphere and a cube shape yeah it's just super wacky so it's not gonna be a like a rock sculpting tutorial per se so we just want something that resembles a rock shape so you know don't expect the the most amazing rocks from this I think people will expect the most amazing rocks so I don't know usually when I do this kind of rock stuff I just use the trim dynamic brush just gives you nice surfaces trim lambic is so nice is called the rocks yeah I also really like using H polish just really just yeah trim lamech is for like kind of designing it and then H polish is for refining it which makes stuff just accordance with sharper yeah so and it's not gonna be the most amazing rock in the world but it's just to give you a proof yeah tried to see the potential start to see the framework for the so you can use this for different things essentially we're now just building geometry which is like Tyler Bowl geometry which you can do whatever you with such as turning into a displacement map would you Thailand or you can bake you down as a normal map or like Morton said you could straight up used to geometry by itself so now I'm just using the H polish just get some more final shapes in there there we go that's a perfect rock right there and beautiful I just recommend just going down the sides a little bit you don't have to you don't have to do all site you could do all six sides of this one Rock and that would make your job pretty easy because then you can just sort of rotate this one rock but for you know for our purposes this is gonna work just fine and then and I'm just gonna tile maybe this is good yeah that's actually rid of that it's actually the worse okay I don't have any actual real alphas that would be good for rock so we will just make do with what we have and make something we pretend looks like a rock yeah use your imagination so yeah imagine a tiger came across these cobblestones or something and then just scratch the me hates couple stones really hates them okay so something like that so that's gonna be our perfect Rock or break the next thing we're gonna need is a plain just the regular plain 3d know I don't know if this is gonna work if you have your own kind of geometry it's very ZBrush scale dependent so just be aware of that and looks like we sculpt it on the wrong side just hold on shift and then it sort of snaps to an angle you can see that it says snaps to 90 degrees so we want this to be facing up towards the camera and this is where we're going to sort of grab our our information from so it's it's really pretty simple once you have one rock or two rock so however many rocks you want to use then you just need to populate this plane and we can just get started by setting something there like that let's say that's our starting important and to place as many rocks now the way you do the tiling effect is pretty simple is whenever you place something that's on a order so you can place whatever you want inside and you don't have to do anything extra but whatever anything touches the border of this plane you're gonna have to go to deformation duplicate shift ctrl + D and then you offset it so we offset it by two times a hundred because the units here is the center of this plane is a hundred by a hundred so we need to offset it twice to get it to to match up here and this is essentially what you do all the way around for in order to be able to preview this a little bit better it's probably good to at some point to set your document to the resolution that you want to capture this out so we're just gonna do a 1k map and then just resize that yep controlling to clear the canvas drag it out edit mode again and then just let's zoom out here a little bit and if you just press F this is just gonna align perfectly to that to the edges of the plane so using F to frame your plane that's where you want you know all the action to take place if you selected anything else so if you press F again this the tiling is obviously not gonna work because no ZBrush is gonna grab whatever is outside the plane as well and also make sure a perspective is off as well mmm otherwise that's not gonna work at all and we also recommend if you watch our last video on this because we covered the same principles just a bit more in depth yeah I mean sculpting instead of moving stuff around so actually one thing I really want to just touch on here so right now all these are sort of on the same level here you can you can vary the level by just scaling it regularly and then that's gonna affect your the map that your output if you don't want that to happen you can hold down ctrl + alt and then just drag on one axis and then you can see it stays level here in the in the y axis but the X and the z-axis they they sort of get modified a little bit so that's a way you can sort of play around with this and make some more interesting and if you're doing this for any kind of production not just for 10min you to video then I recommend that you sculpt like a proper rock like you spend some time like anyone just come over one angle but you sculpt one Master Rock because then you can rotate it around and you can scale it and you don't have to really sculpt any of the other ones if you you know if you flip and flop a rock you have a whole different different asset and there again you see the the rock where the brick there touches the top of the plane so you want to offset it but we can't offset it an X so we're gonna have to offset it and Y and again we just do this twice set up a hotkey for this maybe if you wanted to probably make it easier yeah put her into a UI or something yeah especially if you do rocks a lot or like tileable Plains or something like that and that might be might be useful to you so from here on it's basically just exactly the same thing just you know 20 times or however many rocks you decide to do one thing that I want to touch on is just to make it easier for the tiling if you place something in the corner like here so this touches two corners you're gonna have to tile this on every single corner otherwise you're going to end up with a gap in your in your texture so if we have it here that's rough here we duplicate that chip control D again and then we offset it twice there then we can offset that one in the y-axis up there and then we can offset that also in the y-axis now that's gonna tile perfectly so do you have anything interesting to say about rocks yeah I actually do when it comes to when it comes to like if you start a new project I really recommend that you spend some time on doing these kind of maps these kind of assets because then you can speed up your work so much later on if you if you have to do a bunch of rocks and you're sculpting all by hand you you need to be lazy you need to cheat as much as you can because now instead of you know sculpting like crazy you can you can straight up just apply a map to it a title map and also regarding how much you tile it if that you could make like four rocks here and that would title do you that could tile perfectly but just because something is seamless doesn't mean that you can tile it like a million times you're still gonna seem to see a pattern yeah so let's say you have four rocks in your tall a hundred times yeah there is no seam but you're gonna see a pattern like right away but if you have a would you tile something like this four five six times you not gonna be able to see a pattern so there is a big difference between it being technically seamless and it being usable for production yeah that's very true it also helps if you start to create some variation in there as well really awesome right now again I mean we're just using the same same rock over and over again probably not the best no you know it definitely works for this example yeah if I were to do a map like this let's say I had to I had to do a whole city give me the thing I'm thinking of is like a witch or two I had to do a lot of if you had to go over cobblestones for like one of the cities there or sky or whatever might be you know I would really spend a lot of time on on doing these kind of assets you know sculpt maybe 10 different bricks and then start tiling it across that's gonna make your life so T sure yeah and especially if you sculpt this on all sides then you live the super ease you can just flip this around you know and then that mixes it up a little bit so highly recommend that then you can also make a few different one of these maps where you know you can blend in between them maybe one is for a more a finer area of the city and one is for a rougher area of the city and now you can you know blend between them yeah great rocks oh this is gonna be beautiful so like I said before I would recommend that you start off like this where everything is on the same level so make sure that you restrict your or scaling tone to axises because then afterwards you can always go in and experiment and see if you want oh maybe I wanted something too because this way everything's gonna be perfect and be on the same plane but once you start and think about you want some variation in there and that's a way you can convey it a little bit more yeah it's easier to make something perfect imperfect than it is to make something imperfect perfect yeah trying to make something which is just a huge mess into nice level this is really hard this is obviously a great stretch truck right there but if you just make a few of these that have this kind of thing and then obviously don't stretch it just like this but stretch it and then put on your alpha or sculpt on it afterwards just to fix it that's gonna start to look really nice for whatever you're doing we have some real nice alphas on our flip animals marketplace for for rocks made by XMD mmm was a rebuttal stuff you can instead of the kind of shitty one working as you see here for ships with ZBrush you know they're what they're actually they're actually really solid alphas which were made for exactly this purpose and that's also probably a good idea just to try and vary the spacing between these rocks a little bit so it's not all the same so you could have luckily lofts it there or something just so everything doesn't look super perfect so let's say this was something like this and there's there's some holes in this and stuff that's fine and then then what we can do is I'm just gonna be worrying about the inside stuff here but then you know you can go in and just vary the height of these just a tiny bit you want something to stick out some to go in a little further but be mindful once you're at this stage and you start editing any of the border bricks you're gonna have to you know that change has to be reflected on the other side as well so when that is all said and done we can just frame in on this one plane here to city F key again just checking that the corners are fine no symmetry no stimulus or he knows no perspective maybe also no cymbals video Center defeats the point of tiling I suppose and yeah then we just go to alpha or alpha and grab duck and then here we have some beautifully grabbed bricks what you can do to sort of adjust the intensity of this inside of zero is your plane so it like it stops grabbing once it hits this plane so you can take this and just move the plane up a little bit let's say we wanted to cap there instead so framing again and let's grab it and now you can see now we get a lot more variation in here so let's just try and export this out into for show up and maybe see what it looks like there we go and then nicely placed on the disk oh yeah where everything else belongs so we have this and now that's looking pretty nice but it's like you can be a bit hard to see some of the pattern obviously if you sculpt it more that's gonna be a lot easier for you to see so in here now just gonna do what I did last time and I've done here as well it's the stupid way of checking your timing so I'm just gonna copy and paste this in to my document here tada there we go sounds perfectly so you are gonna notice some of these things there's some artifacts that happen with like the depth map inside of ZBrush this is purely because there's an overhang here that goes all the way out and there's nothing for ZBrush to sort of make this gradient with so you're gonna have to go in and fix these small parts in your geometry if you want to use this kind of see depth map from from ZBrush basically but I think it's a small price to pay for forgetting something that's title and procedural like this yeah absolutely and you can always use the levels like this and just adjust it so we can see how super cool our texture now looks and we get a little more of the pattern in there and then you know you're basically ready to throw those into substance or even even just use this directly just in a game engine or something so I'm really sorry for actually not changing the material I didn't even realize I was so focused on rivers wax is the worst thing in the world but you know you have to use it when doing things yeah sorry doesn't compute if you don't but yeah I think that just about covers it for this yeah like I said you can use it for all kinds of things if it's bricks if it's I don't know some kind of weird carpet or planks whatever this method works with with pretty much everything and we also have like recite we have a part one to this as well where we show have to actually sculpt this kind of stuff yeah so if you want to feel to make something like wrinkles and want to make that those Tyler balls we have a part and of course we're linking to that in the description there's probably ways to combine that actually probably do like a plane and then geometry on top that reminds me if you guys have any cool tips you know we'd love to hear hear that as well yeah definitely so if you want to see more content like this in the future make sure to like comment and subscribe and turn on notifications so you get notified every time we put up a new video thanks for watching see you next time

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 34,377

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: BTRKo6EgXVs

Length: 16min 20sec (980 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 18 2019