NanoMesh Scarf Tutorial - zBrush

you guys I've been playing with nanomesh lately and I figured I would put together a quick tutorial for using it nail mesh is useful for a whole bunch of different things uh organic surfaces and a lot of repeating patterns it's very useful for for this example I'm going to be using it to create a scarf so the first thing you need to do is create a base mesh that's the finished product at the natal mesh and this is the base mesh so for this I just create a low poly mesh and Maya and then I transferred over to ZBrush but I had the problem where my edges weren't all properly aligned to use the nanomesh so I had to manually realign them which was a big pain so another method that I found after I did this was to just use a/c brushes curved strap snap to create something similar to this so that's what we're going to do for this video because it creates perfect edge orientation for nanomesh so I guess um I'll just append the cube or something just so we can start it up creating a strap snap so I'll just move that all the way and curse trap snap is bcj and I guess I'll just start over here and just start drawing out a mesh so we'll want this to be a little bit bigger so I'll do that you just increase your draw size you have to make sure that it's this red draw size though if you hover over your strap it will turn blue so you don't want to change that you want to hover over somewhere else and then change your drill size so after you draw a section you can continue by just hovering your mouse over your mesh and once you see this red line that appears you can start drawing again and I'm actually going to decrease my draw size for now I'll increase it later so I'll just keep going around the mesh I'll just hide that sphere so it's not our way turn off rotational I X's because I think that's the most annoying thing ever so I think something like that will be okay I'm just traffic girl what the hell is going on there they like duplicate the mesh so I'm just gonna start from here and draw out a new one I'll do it again I know why because I had that cube okay that's better okay so I'm just going kind of speedy for the sake of this video and now we can increase our all size get something all thicker maybe a little bit bigger okay so I think that it's okay I'll just click on my mesh now and we have this mesh and we can go ahead and isolate our strap snip and delete hidden so now we're just left with our strap snap here and I'm going to use move topological BMT to move this into position so maybe I think that would be okay so this part right here will be talked under everything so I'll bring this section out yeah I think that's how I want to do it so I'll bring this section all to the outside and you can see how move topological is useful because we're not moving this part of the scarf okay and this partner will be on the very outside and I want to come down so whenever you strap snap you get this ugly end where it's like four tries so we're going to fix that just you zmodeler bz m and hover over a face right-click go to delete and we will just click on all four of these tries because we do not want them this one the inside doesn't matter as much because it'll be hidden but I'll get rid of it anyways because we want to add extra edge loops to our mesh so now we got rid of all those tries we can go to geometry modify topology close holes right here and that is cool but it still gives us two tries so now we will hover over an edge right click and go to delete that is an edge action delete an edge like this edge now we can freely add edge loops without it making some weird topology let's see okay yeah our model our meshes and that fit to our character so we'll take care of that I'm using the default move tool now so it moves everything and we'll just fit it to our character a little bit better okay and now I can take care of this part because I want to sort of hang down because of gravity you know when stay like this so I'm just going to use C Mulligan and hold alt to create a temporary polygroup maybe I'll take these first two loops here and use the transpose to move line to mask that and I'll just rotate it down so like that and maybe I'll use C miler to move these edges so I open up similar right-click on an edge and go to move there just and we can just move this one of the biggest things with nanomesh is that you want your mesh to be as you want to have as many square Polly's as possible so right now we have a lot of rectangles which can create some bad results so we'll try and make them as square as possible of course they won't all be perfect but as long as they're close you'll get some good results so now that we have something that is acceptable we'll get those square polygons that I was talking about so and zmodeler I will right click on edge and go to insert and let's just insert some polygons or edge loops I mean and now I got something that is sort of square it's not perfect but it's a lot better than it was so I'm happy with that and now I can either create my nanomesh or I can just test it to make sure that all my edges are good I guess I'll go over trying the nanomesh first so we are going to go ahead and open up a poly plane and we will make it a poly mesh and we want to imitate the effect of knitting and I actually got this idea it's pretty much exactly from this video from supreme funk where he creates a a hat using micro mesh nail mesh is very similar to micro mesh it's just more feature-rich so he creates this knitting texture using micro mesh so our micro mesh is just going to be something like this or it's just a series of loops and that will imitate the effect of knitting so we'll go back to our plane and this time we're going to use the curved tube curve - there it is and we'll just draw something something like this and once we were happy with that loop we can click our mesh and we will want this area to pictured up so I'll just mask it out and pull up up a little bit at this point we aren't really concerned about our plane that is just for a reference point of creating our nanomesh so that is good and I'll pull this section down maybe I'll just rotate it down like that okay so that is fine now we can just go ahead and duplicate this using the move train spawns line and holding ctrl and just pulling it down actually up pull up instead so what we want us to do is go over this loop and into it so what we're going to have to do is probably pull up the section a little bit more and maybe rotate it so I'll just pull up the move tool and then I'll rotate a little bit okay so then that's better I'll get something like that oops and need to hit maybe I'll scaled up a little bit to fit this uh plane a little bit better and maybe I'll just make one more I think that's why didn't the so I made three if so I can get rid of this plane now so this is fine but we want something that's a little bit lower quality because there will be probably millions of these maybe not millions but around 500,000 of these recreates so you wanted to be as little as possible 3k points is pretty high so we can just see remission I'll do a value of 0.1 let's hold it there if we wanted to go even lower we can just use your my Rosie Muller and right click on edge delete edge loop complete and I think that we can delete half of these edge loops on the radius of it maybe not see modeler gave me something bad wasn't exactly clean I guess that worked we'll just get rid of whichever ones we can without destroying the mesh at least this one is clean see how this one is okay so this one's good so I'll just duplicate it instead so that isn't too bad now so let's go back to our original tool and we can do some modeling on it if we want so I'll let me get my tablet I'll just do something real quick since we use curse trap snap we know that our edges are all aligned perfectly so that is not a problem so we can just subdivide this and sculpt a little bit on it so we can quickly create some folds and what Matt to get something early realist like you'll probably want to spend some extra time on this part look at images of scarfs on Google and just kind of recreate the form of it I'm just quickly adding some random strokes so now we have something like this we can apply our nanomesh to I will open up our mesh that we just made and go to brush creat insert mesh new and then once you got that done you can go back to brush and create nanomesh brush go back to our original mesh and we will I guess it already opened up the brush for us so we can just saw right click one of these polygons and we want to apply our nail mesh to all polygons Oh multiple subdivision levels let's just delete lower from now okay so we have our nail mesh applied to our mesh so we can go to the MLS drop down set the scale to one for now and we will set this to fill mode turn the z-rotation down to zero and we will want to play with the I think width or height in order to get to look better definitely not height or width okay maybe sling there we go so we'll just increase that until we get some nice overlapping so it looks a more realistic okay cool that actually works pretty good and we can play around with the seer rotation if you rotate it by 90 it will change the orientation of a scarf maybe negative 90 would be better so it's really up to you what you think looks best I think in terms of knitting this is more accurate the knitting usually goes this way but I mean not everyone's going to pick up on that so if you think this looks better than it's totally up to you I'll say I think this looks better yeah I like negative 90 the best so now we got something like this which is looking pretty cool on our regular much I could have hardened up these edges a little bit because it looks kind of like too round right now I'm actually going at the base mesh too because I'll want to be pulled away so much so I'll just use topological to make it look a little bit more natural okay turn it back off I like that so once we are happy with this we can go through inventory and 1/2 mesh and that will just go ahead and create a mesh from our nanomesh um it has the underlying mesh applied to us so we can just isolate it I believe yeah you can see the blue poly group on there there is our original mesh I guess we could keep that in there I'm just doing a BPR render real quick to see how it looks without the underlying mesh uh yeah I think I want that underlying mesh so I'll just keep it cool so at this point if I want to go further I could create some fiber mesh geometry on the edge of this normally scarves have like some strings coming out the end like this so we can just use fiber mesh to quickly recreate something similar to that and this is really bogging down my scene right now it's 8.4 million polygons so what I'm going to do is just decimate it actually I won't do that for a video because the decimation master takes a few minutes to compute it but I would recommend you to do this to use the decimation master and all you have to do is press pre-process curve it will take about a minute or two and then set the number of K Poly's so right now it's up to two hard K Poly's which might not be enough for this mesh you might want to change it to a thousand for 1 million and then you press decimate current and they will decimate your mesh that's what I did to the scarf here it's decimated so it's a lot lower polygons it's all tries I actually like the scarf better anyways we will create our fiber mesh fringe strings whatever you want to call so I'll just mask out area on the end here go to fibermesh and preview it so this is okay we definitely don't want density variation if we don't want length variation maybe we can make the length a little bit longer let's go double and let's make it as wide as possible something like that and we don't want to scale the root or tip at all okay and the profile let's set the four so now it has some thickness to it you know what actually I think it's okay as Plains we can always extrude it later on with zmodeler and as of right now we have a lot of these smaller fibers that's because the mask is in sharpen a lot so we can change this by mask feature to something higher and it will give a lot of those smaller ones okay let's not do that I think that's okay I can I can get rid of all these small ones so I'll just accept that yeah oh I need to select the fire mesh and I'll mask all these big ones and group masks and delete anything and I'll just use groom hair toss to strain it out a little bit you okay so this is probably way too many but you get the idea behind it once I get something like this I can go to geometry and convert BPR to Geo and that just uh turns all this into geometry now and like I said earlier we can oh I guess it's already okay all right it's already squares or not planes so that is the general idea behind using a nano mesh to create a scarf you can apply this to make quite a few things one thing that's really popular is chainmail I see that a lot but uh if you're going to create a custom mesh and apply nail mesh to it you want everything to be as square as possible in terms of polygons and you will have to spend your edges so you want to keep it as low poly as possible so you create less work for yourself I'll show you what I mean about spinning edges so this is the low poly mesh I created in Maya and if we apply our nail mesh to it it might not all be yeah it's not oriented properly like this one is pointing down this one is pulling the right way so I'll just reset all these okay that's it so now you can kind of see what I mean by sping your edges like right now this one's pulling up just bad whilst these are pointing the right way though so if you get something like this all you have to do is use C modeler right click on a polygon and select spin and you can just spend a pullet spend the polygon it's not doing anything right now I'll spend edges my bed spinach is this what you want there we go and then you can get facing the right way so if you create a custom mesh you most likely will have to do this to get everything facing the right way but as long as you keep it very low poly once you subdivide it will remember all those edge orientation so now everything is facing the right way you can keep subdividing and you'll still be facing the right way so that's why I say work low poly as possible even if you get something that's you know like this and not looking proper once you self divide it okay once you subdivide it you can sculpt it however you want because all the edge orientation is good now so that is pretty much it we have our fancy scarf here not looking too bad I would have spent more time on making the form look a little bit cleaner but at least you have a general idea of how nail mesh works now thanks for watching and I'll catch you next time

Channel: Nick DuPree

Views: 95,627

Keywords: zbrush

Id: WMUKhlT7Lt0

Length: 38min 30sec (2310 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 15 2016