Sculpting and Posing Complex Hard-Surface Characters In ZBrush - Marco Plouffe - ZBrush Summit 2022

foreign [Music] [Music] hello again people at home and around the world Louis Tucci here with Paul gabery Live for the zebra Summit 2022 the magic continues we just had a stellar presentation from the team at Sony Santa Monica with the God of War swinging the chains and making it real my Lord the amount of detail I am hyped can you tell uh yes I can tell yes moving at the speed of light you got it wow wow was the right word isn't it oh yeah we're not done we're not done we're not done anything but how do you feel about it so far I feel fantastic I feel great you want the book I know you do hello I'm gonna get it it's gonna happen guess what yes talk to me next up all right a really uh no stranger to the world of zbrush he's a nice guy too always nice to see him and it's going to be uh Marco ploof and he's going to be here with chaos Maison and it's it's our pleasure to have him we're going to be walking him to the stage I am excited to continue the magic here across uh day two it's day three really if you think about it your body had a zebra shot we had a zebra sculpt off in case you missed it you can check it out on our social media channels you can recap but let's bring uh let's bring out Marco ploof from chaos misone and we'll talk to him more about some things that he's been up to uh right uh right now let's do it foreign [Applause] you found your way back home with the zbrush team here onto the green screen stage in Sunny Burbank California I'm here with Paul Gabriel Louis Tucci and Marco PLU finally makes his way to the zbrush lemon how are you I'm pretty good pretty good it's really nice to be back here after uh well the last time that we had the event so uh it's pretty cool new stage also it's pretty rad you guys he's no stranger this is number three for the summit for the repeat Fender the number three exactly the repeat I think you're actually maybe the only one that's been three times that I can think of that's cool so you're you're in a special uh repeats aside he's been working with the four horsemen on a new project is that correct Patrick yeah yeah exactly that's been like the huge project lately so it's cool because I'll I'll be like showing a little bit of that today or at least like I'll use that as like my platform to uh for my presentation man it's good I'm happy to be here locked and loaded in the hits keep on coming I feel like the most blessed person on planet Earth I'm gonna try and zip it up as much as I can you know I can't but uh I'm looking forward to what Marco's gonna be showing everybody you like your hard surfaces no no C secret on this planet that Paul Gabriel is a big fan of hard surface modeling and Marco we're not going to chat over you we're going to let you take it away now give the people at home what they're waiting for they're not going to hear us they want to hear from you take it away Marco proof all right cool all right well I mean so as the third time I come here but uh for people who don't know me I'll still present myself my name is Marco Pluff I worked for uh 12 years in the industry as a character artist and um as an artist I worked in uh like a few Studios like BioWare [ __ ] but pretty rapidly I created my own company called chaos Masons with uh Cedric sale that was uh eight years ago and basically I'm like the co-founder of the company I'm also a business manager and art director and artist there and we've been uh pretty blessed to be able to work with a lot of like AAA Studios doing character art so uh so that's pretty cool and uh yeah in my career as an artist or um with um chaos Masons we've been able I've been able to actually work with a few uh like pretty cool projects and some Giants of the industry and whatnot so um like our most recent project was uh Gotham Knight where we did like uh I don't know like easily like 60 characters for the project and I mean they turned out pretty good like I'm pretty happy like in some important characters as well so uh actually 60 6-0 yeah six zero I'm sure they get this how big was the team that you uh just him it's just him inside of it yeah yeah exactly no we were like a team of uh we started with like a team of 10 then like we went out to a team of four like a more on a more continuous basis but it was a pretty long project so like we we were not we didn't need to be like a huge huge team to accomplish all that but you know what in the end it looked pretty cool so like I'm very happy about that and um so yeah that was the last project there's like so much more to come that I'm super excited about but I can't dip upper lip he says look at that he even did the job to share today that's for sure yeah exactly but like overall with chaos missing and everything like we've worked on stuff like uh like The Witcher OverWatch uh Apex Borderlands Outlast Baldur's Gate uh pubg and of course I worked for a mass effect and um and do sex since we've uh like as a as a as a personal artist but that's a lot of video game right there was a lot a lot to take in right there I didn't take a breath before doing the list pause for a second yeah you and Cedric founded this eight years ago Dude That's the moment was a mind blower for me too man hey you had time flies by seriously yeah so uh no we're pretty lucky I mean we put the efforts in and uh we're happy like to be able to show like everything we've accomplished so far and I mean it's it's just going up yeah we applaud you they've killed it we all I remember the days when uh at the convention center with Marco me and Marco like eight I would say nine years ago probably ten yeah yeah Cedric too I think 13 years ago running around the cigarette yeah one of the time we went it was like pretty much at the beginning of the of the the company so uh yeah long congratulations man yes man thank you Cedric if you're watching and she's got a cool hat on today with that under these lights like a hot pink I like it yeah it's pretty uh it's pretty contrasty with the with the stuff but I don't know I like it I take it it's um it's a me peacocking basically yeah well I don't know anything about peacocking stay tuned here we go here we go so um so yeah I've talked about a lot of video games and stuff right but the um the the thing is like relately my my passion has been with uh collectible figures a lot for people that follow me like you've seen it like I've been working a lot on um like on statues that can be printed and everything and I've always did that in my career but like in terms of like spending my own time on my own projects I've been pulling out a lot of efforts into creating like uh like IPS that can be printed and whatnot so it's kind of like a bit of what I'll be showing today and the reason why I'm so passionate about the collectible industry is because uh video games are all fun right but something I really love to do is to be able to create kind of like a like a moment with the character like having in having him in a pose and like have some composition yeah exactly kind of try to tell like a story in one frame and that sort of stuff and I feel this is something you can accomplish and if you can print it and paint it afterward and make it look cool well it's uh it's even better so I uh when I was asked to come here I was like okay well one thing that could be cool is to show like a little bit of that but make sure things like stay relevant to like the video game industry as well and basically I told my self I could show a project I've been working on and a few of the like methodologies and the techniques that I actually used to get to the end product which was a printed sculpture but the thing is that pretty much like 90 of what I have to show is applicable to video game as well so either if you like video games or if you like the collectible industry uh like I have nice things to show it's good to see that and hear that overlap is about to be demonstrated because we know it and maybe now the general public will know it even happens a lot yeah well I mean people ask me that question often and it's it's the same thing I say it's like you can pretty much approach it the same way for a long time and then at some point like you choose what for yeah what Fork you take but a lot can be done before that um so yeah um just before I start showing I I get into like the the the core of this some might know the four horsemen already it's a series of character I've been working on for uh for a long time it's the thing you can see on the screen right now also stable in wrestling in the 19 80s but that's a different Four Horsemen exactly but those are it's inspired it's inspired let's say yeah but the uh so so I've been uh like this was my first group of character that I created and basically they were meant to exist into like a world that I I um I worked like behind the curtain so like what that world is and like the characters that could live in it and whatever and I basically um I basically created this website called neopocalypse now Neil Dash apocalypse.com where people can learn about this universe and this is a universe where the four horsemen live basically and um I've been created this other group of characters called the archangels on screen right now uh which are basically like the sequel in the story and I'm basically just creating this story to have like these character exist in the world and have some backbone for whatever other series of character I'll be creating afterwards and uh the thing that I the most proud about this project is that it captured the interest of uh some like a company that's now a collaborator of mine called XM Studios and we've been able to produce these characters into uh printed statues and everything and they look like pretty pretty rad I just want to show you something here superb it's uh it's a little teasers some of you might have seen it already but it's basically just like introducing uh the first character of the series called uh war war from The Four Horsemen and what you see right now is basically the actual statue printed and painted oh wow uh by XM so it's my design it's xm's production and I'm really happy to be able to say that it's the uh the first of the four that we're producing it's uh out on uh pre-orders right now uh and uh I I tell you seriously it's like one of my biggest accomplishments I'm so so happy of like congratulations and they really did a great job for like the uh the production and everything so seriously it's really cool so if you ever want to learn more about new apocalypse because I mean I'll get to the good stuff now but if ever you want to learn more about the characters of that universe and have some cool renders and ways to like view the characters and everything just go on Neil Dash apocalypse.com go check it out you'll be able to see the characters you'll be able to actually also pre-order wow and uh if you're a video game uh geek like me you'll like to know that they all have their own stats they'll attack powers and be made stats for them all like yeah what's their strengths again let's see never mind the stats I want to meet a bad story for them all look at this death again show the death again oh my goodness la muerte yeah this is one of the four sold yeah yeah yeah so I've been having a lot of fun basically wow I've been having a lot of fun yeah they're amazing yeah they're mixed man thanks thanks beautiful great and uh now straight transition to zbrush where you can see uh well the actual sculpture that's the sculpture for the Statue you just showed yeah yeah exactly way to look at this so uh basically um I'll be using like a few of these uh these models to uh to show my process today and um I'll I'll be starting it by explaining like a bit about how I went for like designing them or at least finding like the main like general idea for these characters uh although like I'm I'm not necessarily like a concept artist or anything there's still like a process that I like to use uh for um just giving me like a bit of uh like a stepping stone before I actually go in zbrush so I'll just really really rapidly uh show you uh this uh image right here um as many of us do I always start by gathering references that sort of stuff and really like even if I don't really have like a specific idea of what I'm looking for I'm just trying to get inspired by things that I find and everything maybe that I had an idea of like making the four horsemen because it's a it's a theme that I like and since I like to do hard surface I knew I wanted to like make it with this kind of like visual but I really started with just like capturing a lot of things that for me had some kind of like um uh whatever like just something that inspires me even if it's just a little detail of a like an image or or that sort of stuff and this is by the way like a very um short version of my reference like there's much more images normally but still I just do that and it kind of like helps me to like daydream about like where I want to go with things uh without I without me doing like anything using my pen or that sort of to do this at the beginning of whatever you're trying to conceptualize yeah yeah exactly well I'm trying to find like just like a one-liner concept that I that is going to be like a driving force to go forward with everything sure and doing this actually kind of like helps me to unlock things in my head and uh and that sort of stuff so this is really like the first phase of it and afterwards um like I said not a concept artist but still I like to just uh push a little bit more in doing like some small like thumbnails and that sort of stuff just to just to see if like the vision that I have in my head just translates at least in this very early stage because thumbnails you can do that do them like a few seconds and that sort of stuff so I just go through that but I don't really overstay my welcome with thumbnails because at the end of the day I'm a 3D artist so I'll jump like pretty rapidly into uh you're gonna thumbnail and zbrush into 3D yeah exactly I'll thumbnail in Z Russian this is where like the the exciting stuff like at least for me really like starts right but this is like a good way to just like just make it clear in my head where I want to go with things and at the end of it like the bottom section here is basically just like uh like a few images that I find represents the best what I'm going for and this will be the like most uh Abridged version of uh the idea uh and that's pretty much like all it is for everything that's like before zbrush but sometimes you for a second that model on the screen that you have is 290 million polygons yeah yeah true it's it's uh by the way uh pretty good computer that you have here to be able to run this scene because like there's a lot there's a lot happening in here and uh of course I mean I don't work on everything at the same time like this like I chop it off in like pieces how many sub tools Paul Gabriel wants to know dude I don't know I mean right now there's like 138 but this is not even the the real amount because I merge things together basically so it's pretty catastrophic at the end but I notice on hard surface you do use a lot more subtools a lot of cases yeah so you do an organic I'd say yeah exactly so thanks for like the folders and everything because that helps to sort it out right there yeah especially when I need to do like 300 million this guy yeah so but you know at the end of the day if I want to do like switch outs like the end the hands just change there or like the the head just changed with the folders it's just really nice to be able to just like do those switch outs and stuff especially in the collectible industry because it's a thing right yeah absolutely different hands so uh yeah I know basically that's uh look at that yeah just basically yeah so just do that and like there thanks for coming and thanks for coming so uh yeah um this is like uh this is a demonstration of the uh of the end product but of course like everything starts uh somewhere more uh more uh humble and um basically this is like a start a good starting point to show you like where the whole process goes and from the thumbnail that I showed you earlier like I'll still go through like having my characters in uh typos apos whatever you want to call them and for doing a lineup something that I thought was very interesting to do is to start even like her earlier with these characters uh this is like uh something that can actually get um like it takes more time to actually go through everything but I like to have my characters be um like constructed with layers basically and I always start a bit like I would do with like uh like a human character that has armor or everything so I'll just start with what's the character what does the character look like if he was in quotes naked as an Android and um I also work on this like blocking the four characters at the same time because since there's a group they're also like a unit right as like even the four of them together our unit and they have to have like their own differences and their body archetyped and that sort of stuff so like I'll start like very uh normally with like uh like a human human based mesh um maybe if I was doing like a beast I would start from a sphere right but might as well start with uh humanoid figure and what I do or at least what I did is to be able to save on time the way that I like to layer the character is to use poly paint to really break what is like um more like the underneath maybe like the synthetic muscles and that sort of stuff and then I'll go like a little bit more of a gray and I'll use it to for everything that's more like maybe like the cloth that's over that's holding things together a bit like a fascia if you if you want and then I'll use a lighter um poly paint just to express what's really like over as like the the top surface of the character and for me this is like really really a quick way to really cut into anything that would be more like time consuming um for creating like at least like the body of the character because it's like there's all these tools to create like many like assets and stuff but I don't think it's like right now the moment really to do those things when you're exploring when you're looking for shapes you really want to use like what's the quickest so for one I'll use uh poly paint like this and also at some point I'll start working on like the the layers that would be on top of the character here and the layers here I don't necessarily use um like a lot of sub tool anyway and just to give you an example here like um okay so you can see like the different colors they're basically like all the layers that I will be adding on top for example if I click on this this is basically a mesh that was hidden inside of the character I'll do a little presentation demonstration afterwards but it was a layer that was kind of a hidden in the character and I just like extruded the shapes out of the character trying to Define like what would be like the armor on top but it's pretty much like all one subtool anyway except maybe for like the shoulders that you can see were made of like actually two um two subtools here just trying to say that like I try to be very like efficient in terms of like not creating too much stuff that can be in the way and um and yeah that's like how I I'm able to pretty much get to like for example this uh result uh within like maybe like uh like a day or two like for like the blocking of this character then you write what you have on screen now is in a day or two yes well I mean the the picture was like today yeah all right I had a pretty good idea of what I was going for okay like I you know sometimes it takes I was gonna say I worked four hours each one of those days yeah I mean you need to be like I'm I'm saying like eight hours full time I started from a sphere and I got this in four hours and here it is enjoyable well you start from the human character so yeah here we go this guy but uh but yeah but seriously sometimes I'll give myself the chance to explore further and I'll just like like put it to the trash and start over and do something else right so so I think that's good let go yeah exactly go and then start again you'll probably and that's why I don't want to spend more than maybe like a day or two for like doing a whole thing like this because like maybe if I'm gonna scrap it then it's like well I need to spend it like don't get married to it as I say don't get too married to it yeah exactly exactly and basically all of the characters will uh be uh I'll do the same thing until I have like so you create this in essence almost skeleton pattern poly paint thing for all your messages just for these well I mean since they're a group and I wanted to find like a way that they're unified in their design I actually went and I made them like naked but if I was to do like a one-off character that you never see under everything I'm not necessarily always going to spend like this amount of time but since it's like something more like a group I was like Ah that's worth it plus like I thought it was fun so even if it were it's not like the maximum efficiency I thought that yeah that could be cool and I didn't really know also how much armor I wanted to put on them so I was like well at least I'll have what's under the armor already done and it's all blocking right so it's like I didn't spend like that much time on it but uh yeah so just to go into like demo mode for uh for a second right here and I'll just take this character um I'll split this off right now and what I want to do is I just want to show you what I was talking about earlier where um like what I do when I start concepting um well for this part I mean it's already done basically this just this is just using clay build up damn standard to find like the things and using poly paint so I kind of like explained that but to build on top of this the way that I work and it it didn't really change from like when I started to do 3D is that I will duplicate this character I'll just make sure there's no like so I don't want to interrupt you but I have this question it's probably nagging a lot of people did you specifically make that base for this project or is that something that you do typically the way this looks oh this is like a this is a base mesh that I use all the time okay all the time I have like a few but they're all great pretty much just like like of a certain like uh archetype of bodies or maybe like I'll have like a muscular one or more like skinny one a female one and that sort of stuff I'm glad I asked you that yeah but they all start from like yeah they all start from the same base um so yeah um one of the first thing that I'll do is I'll just take this character for example and I'll just like uh invert inflate it I always used to you I always like to use a transpose line with right click in this one here to do that it's a really quick way to inflate and you can see that now like everything is inside of the character except for like a few things sticking out but whatever and once that you have this I'll pretty much start from there and build on top using like clay build up or that sort of stuff so you see you can simply like paint and whatever like um wherever you paint like it basically like shows um like what's underneath and this is how like I build like the top layers and everything so this is the uh the armor pieces now yeah yeah exactly or like I mean it could be whatever you want right but in this instance of this character yeah it would be like the uh his armor and everything so you see I'll just use like clay build up uh to kind of like give the volumes and everything and then I'll use uh damn standard to um just create some like inverted volume to create like edges yeah or not using out it will create just like the cavities and everything so I can pretty much just like get like my volumes uh get planes if you use like ins and outs of um of Dan standard it'll create your volumes like this and to give it like a smooth surface I won't even like start using like age polish yet I'll simply use uh smooth because smooth will smooth out your mesh and a smooth mesh give already gives it a more like um like hard surfacey look if I can say so um yeah or you can use like polish I'm just saying smooth really does a lot of work especially in the in the blocking stage you don't want to always have to change your brushes so it's really nice that like the shift key gets you there what material are you using for this for you because you obviously want the reflectivity yeah I think yeah oh yeah and then blend right now you're just using a blend yeah or this I think it was really just like I used the first thing that came here like if it was maybe this material I would not scope with this one but uh or you could it could be a challenge it would be interesting the next zbrush challenge using this material wow that would be something here we go it actually might help because the normal map of that material you would see the actual level change yeah I'm sure I can look at that but you get you like blind yourself yeah yeah it'd probably get you squirrely-eyed after a while yeah pretty much yeah I haven't heard someone say that in the dogs I've heard that one either a dog here there you go bringing it today people so the um the uh another tool that I like to use is basically just curved strap snap it's been then zbrush for a while and I just find it works really well to create like um to create like any kind of like belt-ish kind of thing or it it cannot you can even be more than just a bell you can basically just use it and say like oh you know what it's like a metal uh trim for like other another piece of armor or whatever and it's just like a quick way to have like a mesh inserted on your model and do whatever you want with it afterwards and um I just love it you just have to be conscientious that you need to use a um a mesh that doesn't have subdivision or like layers this is why once again in blocking I try to not use like too much like layers and whatnot or have subdivision levels to my mesh to be able to use tools like this yeah you're keeping your freedom open yeah yeah exactly so the same the same way with the the curved tube snap so if ever like you need to have like a like a tube or something more tubular like this you can easily place it on your model and then you go to your move brush and you start like placing it around and just figuring out like where it goes I don't mind for the stretching and that sort of stuff at this stage because it's once again I'm just looking for shapes and forms and whatever nothing I'll never stop myself like polishing too much and so even if like the tube has a stretch it's like whatever it reads as a tube so it's fine um so stuff like this there's another another one that I like to use as well I don't have it in my quick shortcuts though because I don't use it often but it's still a nice one curve quad fill for doing like vast but thin regions I just take something like this here this one I might actually split it into another sub tool just to have a bit more control over it like maybe to reduce the um the the the the thickness and uh like I could if I want to sculpt in it now maybe the resolution is not uh superb but something that I can do pretty easily is for example let's say hide this polygroup I'll do a mirror and weld um I'll do an auto group because I know that there's like a mesh in the middle now that I did my mirror and weld this way I have one continuous shape I can just zero mesh it let's say two thousand polys that might be a little too much there we go a little better and from there you can simply like give it like a quick um whatever a quick shape to simulate like a cape just to be able to say like ah well there you go that's a cape and I use a lot of my imagination at this point to tell myself oh it looks good it looks really credible but you know what as long as it reads I mean I'm good enough for like the um the the um concept thing uh point I like the joy with which he said that he said I use my imagination and he laughs people you can use your imagination for the entire presentation If Ever I do something that looks ugly just tell yourself wow it's in my head yeah exactly so there you go this is just a nice like quick way to create like a somewhat of like a cape for the character um so you don't put the little it's interesting you don't put the little silhouette window that we have oh yeah I've just like we've just gotten used to doing I just got used to like always like pushing back the character and that sort of stuff I uh it's not it's a great feature we work in a similar fashion you and me it's fine okay yeah there you go I'm just making an observation about myself thank you no problem it's all good so I'll probably stop talking out loud I'm thinking huh hey well we're all good here so uh yeah something else that I I like to do is just using the good old extract especially for doing like uh just taking part of a mesh that like really does like follow the um the the silhouette of the character so I'll just like mask like part of it let's say like this and uh I'll extract it and I'm most of the time I don't even look at like the the result I'll just like commit to the extraction right away because uh like I do often I'll just grab whatever like subdivision it gives me sorry not subdivision but like uh like mesh or shape it gives me yeah always run it through uh zedri mesh to just get something uh most of the time it's to get a lighter um like density of polygon and the reason is because with a lighter density of polygon you just have more like flexibility into like melting the shape away um and redoing the whole shape it's just because like it the the brushes react more uh uh vividly or they're more reactive to the shape so uh yeah so once you get this here uh I'll put it into double again and you can simply like start moving it around get like a hood shape pretty rapidly as well and in the idea of conceptualizing things it just like helps to really go fast and add stuff on top and and whatnot it's kind of where the the pressure is uh the pressure is very um is very uh low like I have to press like super hard to get something oh really anyways whatever it'll uh it'll work but basically yeah like I'll do that and this is just like the first step you continue to do that and or like I said use your imagination now and just tell yourself like wow that looks pretty great but yeah that's the basically the tools I actually would use to create some of those meshes um the um I sometimes for like stuff that I know that are going to be like floor meshes like especially like shoulder pads and that sort of stuff I'll go grab like the IMM Primitives maybe like uh the sphere let's say sort of sphere there we go and I'll just add them on top like this split them into their own sub tool afterwards and after that I can simply like start exploring the um like its shape in a very um yeah in a very like uh typical like way of like sculpting the volumes and and that that sort of stuff yeah I'm sorry I'm sorry it's like uh it's really hard to the pressure doesn't seem to actually go like pretty really yeah I'll try to well you see if I actually just like um makes make the Z intensity like higher it actually uh Works a little bit better I'll tell you what we modulated it because you said you were so fast we wanted to see if it could slow you down a bit how's that for on the spot yeah I guess I should not have said that eh I shot myself in the foot we could try restarting the welcome driver and see yeah I think well I mean it's not it's not really gum gonna like stop me uh stop me enough I'd say so uh it should be uh it should be okay but whatever this is not really a demonstration of the whole process this is just me like showing like a few uh like quick tricks that I like to use while doing concept and uh yeah and of course I mean uh just to say that dynamesh is always my friend at any point if I do like a transformation to the mesh that's going to like just like hinder my uh my resolution to create like volumes and stuff of course I'll always just dynamesh whatever I have and this instance and so at this point I'll actually end up having like I'll then I'll end up like creating something like this out of just like using those tools everything that you see on the character right now uh I'm like pretty certain doesn't have like one single tool that I just didn't show like right here so it's all about just like figuring out like what looks good exploring like the designs and everything and then you have like your you have your character in this level of of uh detail which is like I said um since I'm using tools that are pretty simple you can get there like relatively fast if you like know what you're going for with the design and everything so you can have like this whole group of characters done like pretty quickly and once that you have them then you can start really figuring out like what uh looks like how they can be like different but similar at the same time right because since the like a group of this uh like a character called The Four Horsemen they have to look like they're part of the same group but you don't want to do four times the same character so you kind of like you have to find like what makes them different one from the other like death here for me the example like my goal was to make him look kind of like a necromancer so all of his like armor they kind of look like skulls or like animal skulls or human skulls even if it's just like it's not really like a head it has kind of like a skull-ish aspects to it whereas War right beside him had to look more like a dark Paladin that this is like this is what I was going for right but I figured that out while I was sculpting the characters like the the look of them and the look of their armor and everything her was more like elegant that sort of stuff and uh famine here was more like uh like disheveled Fallen night that sort of stuff and those are all thing all things that I pretty much like figure out when I'm um when I'm sculpting the characters inside of zbrush because it gives me a little bit more time while I work on like maybe like uh finding my shapes I find that like it gives times for my my brain to just like see like to to just figure out what I see and what I like and get to um get to something uh that I find is a good direction something that I will commit to push further afterwards um at this stage I'm not done with the blocking though because something especially when it comes to printing something you want to block is you want to block the final pose of the character pretty much right away um so for example like this is like the next Target in my process I'll try to have the character posed uh in the blocking so you see like if you look closely it's still the blocking I didn't do anything more I mean there's now a horse that's something more but it's he's got a brush for that yeah exactly the horse I am a horse horse processing and there it is IMM horse and the um the uh it's a really good brush uh thanks for adding it to zbrush and uh it's my pleasure yeah yeah no problem uh but whatever I mean the horse was the same process so it's just rinse and repeat the whole thing but just start from horse and uh the idea is to be able to get to this uh the guess this thing right here and um the way that I go by is that I'll just take for example uh my posed model and I'll decimated I'll create uh polygroups just for like some of the sections even like if the section is uh is merged like this belly section here I'll take it and this way from a character that stands in an A Pose it's really just a matter of like moving the character around and finding the right composition because since they're in different like poly um polygroups you can always just use uh like the transpose line control click on it do like a bit of a blur like a masking blur and you can always just rotate the character around until you pretty much like put it in a pose that for you looks like uh it would make for a great composition at the end I'll go into detail of like the posing later on a more complex character but this is just to say that from the very very beginning I want to know where I'm heading like it's very important for me uh it's a thing because like it gives me confidence I'd say to commit to my character and to push forward because The Next Step afterwards like the polishing and everything they'll take like much more time right and you you if you commit to do something that's going to take a lot of time I find that it's always better to know like where you're going so that you're not too much in the dark or at least Less in the dark at least clear about your intention let me let me slip a quick question in there yeah um how do you circumvent or overcome the hardship of the hard surface Parts when you're posing that let's say you had like an elbow pad or a knee pad in this case how are you avoiding the sort of distortion it's a it's a very good question if if I could have almost asked you to ask this question for my next step so that's pretty great it's not even scripted I just you know this is what we do here yeah exactly I think we were mind reading as well yeah because this is where I was going brother's in Z yeah exactly brothers and Z basically the um the idea is that this blocking here um it can stretch it can do whatever it wants and like I don't really care with it because the thing is that if it does stretch I'll know that it's something that I need to change on the design before I go further into like polishing so it's really the time to make those mistakes and to see what's really going to work or not and especially when it comes to the the final pose of the character well I'll know that like if I actually do something like extremely exaggerated well I have to have the design kind of like work for it at the same time so this is the one thing that's cool about sculpting is that sometimes you can also also scoped for the final pose actually not for like every condition of like the movements and everything right so this is kind of like a one little like cheat thing that's kind of fun in terms of like matching design with um 3D print and uh statues and whatnot so if you look at this character for example it's kind of hard to say because it's still like pretty like blocky right but you can see how like the the back of the calf armor actually goes inside of the the thigh armor while this is kind of like for me a good uh demonstration that in the uh posed character or at least let's take the one that looks good in the post character well in this section here I'll need to maybe like cut it just so so it allows for more space before I um do the polishing yeah especially if you've gotten that deep this is the biggest problem I see with hard surface they go too soon trying to do the cool polishing parts and then once they get moving like uh this is all not working together anymore and then yeah your reverse engineer you're trying to go backwards is that this thing that's the thing that's fun is that if you know things ahead I mean you won't follow like in these pitfalls but yeah at the same time I mean I did fall in a couple of pitfalls over my career and I still do and there's always a way to fix it afterwards and it's fine right it's not there's no like real point of no return it's just like oh you might save like a couple of hours maybe if you just like think ahead I think the things to be careful of for people who are just getting started is burning out on artistic sort of um stamina yeah and then just realizing oh God I have to go backwards and like now I don't yes I need to fix it you know that's a reality for a lot of people yes indeed they feel so deflated you know that they don't know what have I done yeah so this is just like giving you like a little bit of like extra stamina I'd say yeah uh one thing I can say also by the way is uh this was my t-pose for the horse like I already knew I wanted the horse to do like um like I think it's called Counting when they go in their uh legs like this anyways whatever oh like I wanted the horse to be kind of like in that position so I actually modeled him in this position knowing that the end result is like pretty close to this I'll do that sometimes not all the time because like uh it's fun to work on a character that has like a nice gesture and everything but I found that for the whole the horse like it was inspiring enough to do it in that pose here that like that's what I went for it just helps for the final posing of everything I'd say speaking of the pose I really like I like death the way that you have handled the sort of inflection or the bending of the abdomen region a lot of people don't do that you know he's got them do you see that Paul you see how he's like lurched over a little yeah I was inspired by the Napoleon painting yes I came on the horse it's so Stark it's right there yeah so um oh look they're all there together yeah yeah yeah yeah and the um whole community of killers put them a bit more lined up there we go it's very powerful to see them all there lined up like that look at that there's not even enough screen space for that stuff yeah but also I think it's like very important to be able to view them as a group like this because once again for the same reason I said earlier you kind of like want them to look like a unit like a legion really they look like a legion all right you know yeah absolutely it's great yeah and uh also an extra thing I I like to think about like how they're gonna look on yourself if you have the four of them like for me like this is like the winning composition you know what short story I did an interview uh if you go on neoapocalypse.com I've been sharing it I've shared it in the chat right there that's what he's doing don't think he's texting his friends he's well he is he's communicating with all of our friends in the chat right now again yeah and if you check the interview on the website uh I you'll see that the the statues are in the background well I didn't even did it on purpose but I ended up placing them in the exact same composition oh really yeah yeah because I think it's just like when I I did it I figured out like this was like my favorite composition and just naturally I went back to like this composition when I placed them in the background looking good man looking good I feel good just looking at this thing there you go incredible yeah so yeah I mean at this point if you if you feel it I mean you've pretty much covered like the design of the character at least the main shapes and everything you've designed the pose you've designed them as a group so it's like okay well when you have this now you can pretty much like decide to go into something that's more like a commitment so like the polishing and everything excellent I actually also used this like image almost to show it to a couple of my friends to ask them like do you think there's like potential into creating this project and maybe like get the in like the interest of the people uh because since we're doing like statues like people have to like buy them to show like there's the support so it's like do you think like there's going to be like uh like a clientele for this I think the answer is yes 100 well thank you I appreciate this I have to sit back when I say that 100 yes there is an audience waiting for everything but you want to have also like something to show them to be like because you don't want to tell them like oh I have this idea about the four horse menu when I have like something that you can like show them and be like hey what's your feeling about this and I find that this is pretty much the quickest way to get like the more the more bang for your buck let's say right because like you didn't spend that much time it took a while but just imagine if that was like all in Polish it would have taken like months and months instead of like maybe like a few weeks right so and it does like a few weeks the concept of time hey this is a few weeks for everyone everyone else it's about six months I'd like to say I think you might have a skewed concept of time here I just think because he's perfected his workflow so that's what I'm saying this is the one that you guys get double buckled up for Marco man this workflow he's perfect it's not messing around well it's all I guess it's all based on efficiency like I I I'm not stopping time when I work it's really just like like I think I figured out like a few of the shortcuts that just like helped me like go through a few steps that sometimes like you can get lost in and sure that sort of stuff right yeah um so at this point um this is for example like the uh the the polishing of uh death in its a pose t-pose whatever this is the polished version that we're looking at right now yes yes this is basically like the final version the only thing that's not there for this character is like the cape this portion of the Cape is still like the um the the uh the the the blocking because I knew that this character like the cape let me get back to um the actual final model the Cape of this character is extremely flowy and it really plays with the composition and everything so there was like no purpose for me to make this cape in uh in symmetry or in t stands right like I knew that like it was it was going to have like a lot of like movement and everything so I basically like told myself well this is gonna wait for after the posing uh which is actually like one of the the subject that like I wanted to talk about is basically just knowing like when it's time to do something in tipos when it's time to do something uh like imposing right and I find that there's like many schools of school of thoughts because I know a lot of artists that they're going to pose like the naked The Naked character like pretty early or like a like um uh kind of like not early in the sense of like blocking but early in the sense of like the elements on the character like pretty early they're going to pose the character and just finish it like in their final pose which is absolutely fine I think this is like a great way of work of working sure but you know like when you're working with a lot of subtools uh stuff like that uh sometimes like especially when it's like hard surface and everything sometimes you kind of like want to have like a lot of your character finished in tipos before posing him um so you kind of like just have to be um like you have to make choices I guess and for me the Cape was one of those choices let's do it at the end and the rest since it's pretty much like symmetrical like I can pretty much do it right away or if you know that a mesh is not really going to bend or anything yeah you can do it in a sense or right now like for example like the Hood part anything that's cloth here or like this like upper cloth section like I knew that in the final posing of the character it will probably not be bent so much so it's not like if any modification to this part would make it look like bent or whatever so yeah I thought that this would help a lot um so in the same idea of like what do I do now uh another one is just to think ahead about like what you want to use like in symmetry and uh something that I do for uh for my character oops not this one yet sneak peek this guy sneak peek um so there's something I do for my characters is that the the position of the arm and this position of the uh actually is the position of the upper arm in the position of the thigh I try to make sure that it's somewhat like on a straight line so that from the Z axis I can still work in symmetry for those uh for those models here so if you use local Symmetry and you put yourself in like Z symmetry you at least you benefit from having this like model be in the scene on the character but be somewhat of like an orthographic view so you can actually just use um the symmetry for parts like The Gauntlet or the the Greaves like the tibia section uh for those what I do is I always take my my blocking I place it into like another scene and I construct those pieces in orthographic view like this here so this is done like fairly easy because it's just a matter of grabbing like a section of your character like you can basically just like take this one here clone it into its own um it's on Z Tool you erase sections of it um like this and then you basically just place your floor remove perspective and you aim for like the center oops all right like this rotation you pretty much just get like a ballpark um a ballpark um estimation of like if it's in the middle and then you just mirror and Weld and if you haven't lost um like too much volume well then you know that like you're pretty much like smack in the middle of your uh your mesh you can even like move it like this try to just like eyeball what's in the middle and you see like something like that you haven't lost much volume you can always get it back by simply like doing this and um this thing if I do the high res of this I'll know that like I can always just place it back on the character afterwards and like it's going to fit um it's gonna fit at least 90 95 percent so the modification you'll need to do once it's on the posed model it's not going going to be like really big so um this is pretty much like the um like the idea for anything that's not in a kind of like a orthographic uh view of the character so basically this was the idea of like what do you do now what do you do in pose so if we jump into uh uh okay so how do you do all that polishing like in more uh and more precise steps uh we can take uh part of the character for example I'll just create a little screenshot of him right there just as a kind of like a an example of like where I'm going with this and uh just take my blocking which is this one here all right so how do I get from the blocking or at least like this armor section to this section here which is more finished that is the question so I'll start by basically just like splitting everything into like Auto groups just to kind of get like only the part that I want to I want to be working on it's going to be this one here activate Symmetry and I'll start by simply like isolating kind of like the section I'm going for hiding it deleting everything that is hidden I'm using my shortcuts for those and then I'll just get enough resolution on the mesh so that I can start using um poly paint and what I'll do is I'll just quickly oops yeah this is a good one I'll just quickly draw the uh the bun the border of it also uh sometimes I'll draw if I want like negative space in my model like let's say like this was this is supposed to be like a a hole yeah also a mask this portion out but this is like a pretty like a full mesh so this is going to be fine once that I get this I simply do a um um mask by intensity to change my poly paint into like an actual mask so uh mask by intensity this is in my shortcuts this is where I place it I'll hide this and I'll just see if there's like a like um like a hole in my mask which there's none which means that I can reverse this delete everything there are subdivision so whatever delete and now if I Auto Group this I have this section that is all clean and whatnot and from this here The Next Step that I'll take is basically just get rid of everything that is kind of like mid details or actual details I'll simply use like the clay brush to kind of like Get rid of it visually because the step afterwards is going to rely on uh like one of the algorithms so what I'm doing is I'm just like doing something that I'm sure is going to help like the the algorithm to understand like what I'm going for so getting rid of like anything that could be distracting and I'll even start kind of like emphasizing uh on what's like what's my goal like what I what what am I going for in terms of the planes of the object and if you look at the planes I'm basically like drawing them right now like this is what I'm gonna go for like you can it's all bumpy and stuff but you can see what I'm going for there's this section there's this section and this one here is split in this one and this one here mm-hmm once that I have this I can even take H polish just to give it like a little extra uh uh clean pass let's just say there's slick series of operations you've just demonstrated there without batting an eyelash did you catch that I caught it all it's a good thing it's being recorded we can watch it again later yeah I'll tell you this is really rinse and repeat this is like this like when I do like my streams and everything like I always tell people you always need to start working on like this part this part this part right and it feels like it's always like this three three steps that uh is just going to help you in the long run so um the first step was like the basically the um the piece itself the Second Step was its edges and the third step is its uh planes so right now what I'm doing is I'm just making sure the planes are readable and I've used the edges right before to kind of like insist on where there's a plane change once that I have this I'm actually pretty much ready to get my uh my final mesh for this character so what I'll do my fellow mesh will be a z rematch but right now it's kind of like a uh dynamesh so what I'll do is I'll simply start to kind of like select the areas that I want to be really like the different planes since they're really visible because I've used the the cavity and everything I can simply go over like this hide them give them different poly groups there we go and now all of my planes have like these like different sections here and by the way I mean there's going to be other planes on this character later when I'm going to be placing the mid-level details and that sort of stuff but this is pretty much like what I do is I break down like what's major shapes and then what's like the other like less um like um how could I say that less like Elemental things let's say so uh these I do these because what I want to do is before I said remesh I want to put the key group option on and what I'll do is I'll simply click Z re mesh with my keep group and it's going to give me oops I actually put the resolution too high so let's go back and try with maybe a around like a thousand polys yeah there you go okay so I'll just do that again all right so for most of it it's pretty good uh I got like a little artifact here and I could actually just like try to to um to fix it by hand or what I could do sometimes when I get like stuff like that it happens I just try to use like the other zedri mesh option which is like the one where you click um you click uh out the ALT key yeah the ALT key exactly I cannot use it in my shortcut you see like it actually gives me like something different so that's good um so when I when I get this sometimes you'll get like meshes like this but most of the time you can actually get some pretty good results and you can always fix it by just reapplying and others that remesh on top of it and you get something that's actually pretty clean uh really fast so you might say like ah but you lost like it got it got like like smoother and stuff and yeah sure it did but I mean it's never like something that you cannot like repair uh relatively quickly you can get back like the shapes that maybe might have been like too smooted like even when the algorithm works like from the get-go really quickly I don't find that it's always better to just like start really working on having the shape that you want the silhouette that you want at this stage here so now you have this you see it's much cleaner you can already see like where I'm going in terms of like having it polished so what I'll do is I'll do a little bit of the same of what I just did before but like with this mesh now so I'll start kind of like making sure that like the curves the elements of this object are um more in line with like the final result I'm going for so what I'll do is I'll look at it from like different views try to make sure that the line flow of my of my mesh is kind of like clean like if you look at this line here and the line that it does at this point I'll try to make sure that like this aspect of it is um is good because it's probably going to be like the final state of this um portion so that was for the the line flow and that stuff and now once I got the entire piece one once I get the uh the edges correct little two now I work on three which is the planes on the object so what I'll be doing to get something clean is I'll actually hide them one by one using uh their polygroups once again I'll just uh use a material that is just easier to see and I'll just H polish things so that they look uh like flatter more hard surface I'll do this for every section I use a combination of out and uh not pressing out when I use uh H polish hey what does the alt button do it's kind of like just like instead of like like pushing in the shape it kind of like elevates it like a little bit higher both of them are trying to flatten it to a certain like average but they're still like a direction that it goes and I find that it's really good and another thing that I find that using the ALT key does is for example let's say I I I use it like this look at this part here if I don't use out it's kind of like crushing this part in but if I use out it's elevating it Without Really affecting like in the radius of the brush also so there's that that you can use at your advantage actually uh in this instance I find that just like hiding sections like this is like works well for me and although although they're they they still like have like they're a little bit bumpy between themselves uh this will be fixed in another step I'll show like right after and the final one like for this curved section here I won't be using H polish because uh um the thing about H polish since you're flattening stuff sometimes you might lose a bit of like your your curve and one thing that I find really um works well for me is using the smooth brush but by removing the shift key from um the old smooth yeah like the Alta smooth I I call it the smooth relax like I don't even know if it's his name but it's a smart polished smooth brush which is now it's called officially alt smooth old smooth as we shipped it now you can actually make that your defaults can I still call it smooth relax yeah I call it relaxes in fact that's how I explain it I explain it more as like you're relaxing the topology is more than pushing you're holding I like to go a little step above and say it's like Superman I'm not pushing through the wall oh look at this I'm just only climbing a wall like Spiderman relax so I couldn't have that I could not have said it in better words because that's what I'm trying to do with this mesh here if I use use H polish like I'll probably start like crushing the um this like curve here it's not a big curve but still each polish is going to start like flatten stuff and I might lose um like the volume that I have uh and ALT will kind of like elevate it but add like planes to it so the I feel that like using um so it's smooth and it's not the normal smooth because Normal smooth is basically going to like flatten your mesh also you see but by using so you press shift you click on the screen you remove your finger from shift and now you're smooth and it kind of like does not you see it didn't destroy my volume but it did relax pretty much everything so that like I get rid of like the uh more like uneven aspect of this mesh so now you see it kind of like looks pretty clean it's like a Tuesday afternoon smooth very relaxed exactly it's a taco Tuesday afternoons [Laughter] um and yeah there's one last thing that I do in order to really like bring it to like its maximum level of polishness but this one requires that I create a thickness for the the piece first so I'll I'll just do a little um well panel Loop I'll use my shortcuts once again I pretty much put all the sliders to the minimum I just decide of like the the the good thickness and I press uh ignore groups because I have polygroups right and I don't want to create different meshes I want it to be all one mesh I click panel Loop and now I have my thickness here so it's pretty cool that's pretty great and uh from there from there from there um I'll just make sure that um all of the art Hedges or hard corners or at least the corners that I want to keep um kind of like sharp and stuff I'll just make sure that they have creases so first step I can already tell zbrush and you know what every where there's like different polygroups I want you to create to add creases so crease polygroup now there's like dots on the on the lines here I know this is going to stay sharp and I do the same for every corner I want to to keep sharp my favorite way is to actually use a Z modeler Tool so I just switched to Z modeler if you go on an edge you can choose crease Edge and then you just click every Edge that you want to keep hard you could also use um polygroup by normal to kind of like let the the the software uh do um like basically choose where to press to put the polygroups and stuff uh creases well polygroups increases but I kind of find that doing it manually like this works pretty uh rapidly as well so there we go so now that we have that this is pretty uh pretty like um important in the pipeline because what it does is that if you subdivide so you see I'm subdividing but I keep uh the hard edges where I want okay so this is where I'm going for with the creases but I'll just do one last step before doing that and it's to add this final level of smoothing first of all I'll create a store morph Target just in order that I can come back to this state of the mesh if I want and what I'll do is I'll go in deformation and you see like all my tools are all like one next to the other right so everything I'm showing with my shortcuts I just get to do them like extremely rapidly because they're all there but just to show you like this is where you would find it polish crisp edges and with Polish scripts edges you'll see that all of my surfaces that still have like artifacts and stuff are going to get pretty much like to their like most smooth that they can get so polish crisp Edge I just I don't put a lot and you see it's already like much much smoother see before after before after works pretty well and the reason why I did a morph Target is because if you look in this area here it got pretty round and maybe that's not what I want to do but with it made that look really simple I just want to say to you it is simple oh yeah it is simple it's just that like you kind of like have to understand like the way to go buy it so that the the tool really like responds the way that you want it to respond right like you have to give it a chance and this is why I did the preparation before to really make it like the kind of curve that I want and the kind of edge that I want so that this like more like automated process just makes it clean like instantly at this point at this like moment and uh yeah so um so I'll just grab my morph brush and because I saved the morph Target everywhere that I paint I'll just get like the shape how it was before so uh like I'm pretty happy with the rest of the result but like that curve here was a bit too uh polished and this is how I prefer it at this point here I pretty much have uh the mesh how I want it to be with the surfaces all cleaned and everything so I can go for the actual subdivision of the mesh and what I'll do is I'll simply tell him to to like to to do a crease level of let's say uh one so that my first subdivision stays a hard surface and my second subdivision actually starts to smooth where my creases are so that it creates kind of like a little like round Beverly um like aspect to my mesh if you find that this is too round you can always go back before it Smooths putting to two of crease level give it another another crease level and then when you subdivide it gives you that round crease but this one is tighter than the first one so it really just depends on like if you're going for tight creases or more rounded creases basically so uh you have this The Next Step afterwards it's like it's like another chapter let's say it's more about like creating the the mid-level details because now you have your mesh and this is the mesh you're going to keep for pretty much the rest of uh the time that you're working on this character so at this checkpoint here um you need to like know that you're not really going to need to do much more like changes that have to do with the topology of the mesh so we're really going into like sculpting now at this committed you're committed you're committing to something committed a point of no return well like I said it's kind of like point of no return e but at the same time there's kind of like ways to go at it right because I can always just like said remesh what I have tell him to keep the polygroups reproject there's a lot of tools that I can have it's just that they they're not going to be the quickest way to get to your your ends right so you kind of like want to just be thoughtful at this moment because it's kind of like point of return e yeah um so yeah uh at this point since we're not really going to change the mesh anymore that's when I'm going to start using the layers just to like be able to do like before and after on my work so I'll add this layer and I'll start to add mid-level details to this mesh um Maya style is that I always start with like some trim details and the way that I go at it I'll just show you um the way that I did it for the horsemen it's basically just to um isolate the edge shrink it and at some point Ctrl shift s people Ctrl shift s and Ctrl shift X row and Shrink exactly and once that you have actually the section you want you can mask it and you can just inflate this uh once again I'll use the transpose line with right click and it's just going to inflate it and you're gonna get like this um this Edge right off the bat and uh something else that I could have done right before that is safe a morph Target of this uh inflate it and then I can decide that maybe some parts of the the model should not have like an edge so I can basically just like give it like um like a certain like uh look uh it's like offsetting from just like a a constant uh Edge like this and uh or something I like to do sometimes is uh it's once again it's the morph rush I just put the focal shift to like almost 100 and you just like take a section maybe like this one here and you just press like not too long on it and you can have kind of like a halfway like of the the the length of this so it just adds like a bit of um of uh I don't know like uh yeah offset yeah variation yeah variation sure yeah there we go different type of layering happening yes there seems to be a theme today with layering are you watching leather leather upon leather with uh yeah yeah correct we find ourselves in the shot here live yeah with Marco ploof it's all about layers yeah I think my Nest the next time I come here I'm just going to talk about layers okay I I say it right now I come here for the fourth time that's the theme layers so rule them all one layer to rule them all so this is one thing that I like to do um another way that I like to play with the uh the trims here is to take a mesh that would actually kind of like damn standard when you use out it kind of like uh pushes thing out and it pinches it well this is one brush that's called orb crack that I like to use a lot and uh when you use out it basically does this kind of like edges here and um something that I like to do is for example I can take um I'll just use another layer once again I'll mask like the front but I'll keep the the thickness masked I'll just blur it a little bit and you can basically like take a section of your mesh maybe a little bit bigger than that and you can basically like manually add like um a um like a ridge yeah a ridge yeah exactly a ridge to it uh sometimes you can even like mask like a portion of it like this and then when you draw it you have it already like sectioned off like this I find this actually works pretty well as well and uh so yeah this is uh something else I actually did it on the character here you can see this is how I did this portion um of course there's always the masks and everything this is one of my favorite uh anytime that you want to just like have your entire surface kind of like um I'm gonna say later again I'm sorry you know it's fine and I'm like larian or whatever you can just like mask it off you find like a shape that's appealing that that follows the the line flow of your model all right you can have it like this and um my point is is going to be to all right there we go let's clean enough I guess if you move it you can just like add like a different like layer on the model but there's many things that you can do before that you can always you can like move it just like on the side here to kind of like create like a like a tapered um a tapered leveling let's say layering whatever and this is basically basically this is done uh with the move brush and using the ALT key which is basically going to push the mesh in the direction of the normal of the polygons I really love this uh this brush and something else that you can do to the uh the masking just to have more variety is at this point uh maybe I'm gonna lower the resolution here at this point you can always play with the the blurriness and the sharpness of the Mask to kind of like round things off so you see I I blurred and sharpened I will do it again and the more that I do it the more that like the shape itself becomes round what I like about that is because it rounds the corners here so sometimes I'll actually do a couple of them just around the corners and then I'll remask another portion that I don't want it to be rounded and it creates this kind of like shape where like these Corner around it these ones are a bit more sharp so it's just more things that I can do more things that you can do is you can also blur with uh control the control key which is basically going to blur in one direction of the mask only and it creates for a very cool like fall off effects when you push it in so you see that like you have the the rounding and then like this edge here is sharper so this is another like profile of uh the mask that it creates and uh I think it's pretty cool but for the example I'll use this one and I will basically move it like this there you go so now I have like this detail here I always like to give it just a little smooth afterwards this may be too much just to kind of like blur it a little bit so it's not too too sharp and now you have this and this is basically like the way that I go by using my my masks you can of course do it like much bigger than that you can go you can go and pass like planes it doesn't need to be isolated into like a section of your mesh so there's like a lot that you can do in terms of like using mask to control your shape that does not look good but uh it could be but if you use your imagination yeah well placed I have that song in my head don't do it we're gonna get it I'll do it don't do it I'm gonna get tagged on the on the feed so um yeah another tool that I like to use uh this one is a fun one this one uh I get a lot of reaction when I use it so trim hole um so basically what it does it just like takes the angle of the camera and it just like pushes it pushed a mass like uh forward but if you actually move the cursor and you take like an angle to it sometimes you can have like instantly some like pretty cool like effects like something like that um you can always smooth it or add some lazy Mouse in case like you have like Strokes within like this section here but the idea is that you can basically push your mesh like this and get some pretty cool results um just by like like experimenting with like the angle of the mesh and the movement of things that sort of stuff so you just play around figure out you'll find cool stuff to do and um the other one is uh trim front from front it's kind of like the same idea it's going to take the angle of the camera and um I like to place a small circle Alpha on this one and what you do is you just calculate like the angle of your of your mesh and if you use out it's just going to bring everything to the same level depending on the angle of the camera and this is how I do like those kind of like details here like it's pretty rapid to be able to do something that looks like a it's just responding to a like a portion of the the surface so uh I like it it looks so cool are you kidding they're old school ones yeah yeah minerals little nibs they are they are but you see it's like that's that's just to say that like the things you can do with like simple brushes and zbrush depending on like the angle of this and that or whatever you can join just a couple of things together and it just like creates a new effect and sometimes you can fall on like a very cool visual language that you just use for the rest of your curator afterwards yeah like I do it says fall into a visual language that you use yeah for the rest of your career that's actually well said I'm glad you said it are you kidding well you added the first part to it that I was like oh that's a better way of saying it sounds like that needs to go on your website maybe all right there you go I have to hire you guys for like PR and stuff hey now um of course mold lines is something uh very um important when you do a hard surface stuff um basically mold lines I like I use two profiles of mold lines the ones that the dam standard gives me which is pretty much like um like a round fall off and then like a sharp edge and orb crack which gives me uh two hard edges so depending on like maybe the other visual language that you used on your armor you'll decide to go for like one profile or the other but this is pretty much like what I'm going for so you take orb crack you go in Strokes you basically maybe augment the lazy radius and you'll get you'll just get like more control over doing the lines here um so for example let's say I've taken here I saved the amorph Target because I know that I'm going to maybe like draw over things that I don't want to draw over like this thing here uh so basically at any point I can always just go here and I can get it back actually sorry no I didn't do it correctly there we go like if nothing happened and this I would do at the end after I'm done with all my my my mold lines are done so I don't do it for every line right and once that I have this I like to add some some offsetting or some variety to the mold line so that they're not like just always constant so sometimes what I'll do is I'll just add like a an extra line inside I'll just take like um like a bigger radius and I'll just do like a line on a line so it just it has like a portion of it that's been kind of like um uh a line on a line a line of the line it's maybe later on Dracula for some reason and you can just use also the uh the standard brush if you want to do like uh like a lip here orange yeah some Ridge so basically it's just to say that once you've drawn a line you can add on top of it just to like make it a little bit more like Rich right because you're not going to want to make mold lines like this everywhere and make it too busy so sometimes what it's fun is to make one line but add complexity to this line and it's going to make the entire thing look like rich without looking too um busy yeah exactly uh so there's that and um I mean the last thing in terms of like uh the the shape themselves it's pretty much just like imms at this point so the way that I go by adding IMS is I always create a new um a new mesh and this this mesh will I will remove all the layers all the subdivision levels and I can actually just start placing uh imms on them so you just take anything from any library that you have something that looks kind of uh kind of cool and uh it's just a matter of placing it good old imms and once I have this and just make everything disappear but the IMM I delete what is hidden and I have uh my two subtools here together like this and once you have one IM in place this is where I'll be like placing other IMS using this uh sub tool because it doesn't have layers or whatnot so you won't have any like warnings of like oh you can do this because there's layers and that sort of stuff so yeah um and imms um I mostly use imms for like those kind of like small details maybe like belt buckles or like buttons like this um sometimes like uh like circular joints on the character but I try to not use any IMM for like what's my major shapes of my character that I try to have like agency over it so it's always going to be for like smaller stuff that like I will be personally using them so um now we're getting into like more like detail stuff but detail stuff I find that it there's not like really like much to say because in the end uh I find it like detail is more about uh visual language than anything because all my detailing most of my detailing at least it's all done using just like the simple brush and placing alphas and stuff like that so it's really a matter of just like figuring out shapes that you think look good on your character and trying like placement until like it actually like resonates there's there's an old theory about like details and choices and that sort of stuff right but that's a whole other book for sure but the idea is that you can get like a lot done just by having like a few Alphas that you find inspiring and just like testing like how does it look in like certain areas the one tip I would give is a bit like I said for the line is try to not add details everywhere just have specific areas that like you add details there and put your details right there so it creates kind of like a balance of like empty sections and sections whereas there's like details and what can I interject for a second breathing room yeah what speaking of breathing room yeah what's the resolution on this piece right now like in terms of like uh the whole account he's asking polygon count how many polygons are on that um it's uh that's correct one million ah one million uh five five there you go and he doesn't remesh right you don't remesh this because it's already rematched sorry no this is really like and it's quite simple I mean I just wanted to draw people's attention to that it doesn't have to be sort of a gabillion polygons there's only a million and it looks that tight and smooth because of all the planning I just wanted to pause and give people that kind of moment to reflect on that yeah you know what's interesting also about that is you it's um the um in terms of like working fast you have also to be smart about like how dense your mesh is because like even the best computer at some point is going to start to uh is going to start to have problems like chug Chugga lug me yes Hey listen absolutely we're here live Yeah so basically um the um the the the uh Jesus Christ um sorry I really took it we're all good chug Chugga let me really throw them off you got me on a journey right there for a second I didn't need it I needed the flashback of a different game reflection time on that one exactly take a water break for a minute here everybody you at home too take a sip of water cheers that it was actually time for water it wasn't but you had a look on your face like you'd got like I taken you back to like some sinful nights in Montreal exactly if I'm stopped for me I went like now I'm back here I'm just like brutopia Circa 2002. I'm on stage right now making a presentation what's happening exactly so uh at this point at this point the what I wanted to say is that since you talked about like resolution and that sort of stuff for me like there's two things I want to say the first one is that uh to be able to be efficient I never tried to go over what's my need in terms of subdivision so what I'll do I didn't show it but what I'll do is when I start adding subdivisions to my mesh sometimes what I'll do is I'll just take an alpha that is kind of like um like an alpha that will be probably like the smallest that I think I'm going to go for my needs and I'm just going to check like how it reacts to the subdivision to the maximum subdivision that I give it so maybe I would have like subdivide the four place that detail realize it's too pixelated subdivide the five check that detail and see like okay you know what this has enough resolution for like the uh the the renders that I'm gonna go for at the end contextualized resolution not just resolution for the sake of saying I have like you know this thing has 10 million points but in context right absolutely and this is uh I think it's very important because it you'll you'll get to really know like what you're going for what you're aiming for and you won't create like uh excess especially in terms of stuff that is very like costly for like your processor or your RAM or that sort of stuff uh and in the end you'll be able to work like on a full-size character like death in one scene just because you made those smart choices so you basically have to tell yourself well okay what am I doing am I doing a full character am I focusing on the head uh what are the renders I'm going to show at the end and know that like you might not need to go like so crazy on the details in this area or the like resolution or yeah intent should drive your workflow you know and what is the intention the final product what is it for and yeah you know what are you trying to make and what for but sometimes when you don't know where you're going it's like you let yourself drive by uh you love you let yourself be driven by like uh subdividing just because you want the resolution to be good without knowing what's really chasing design without having a clear path you know yeah exactly and um I just want to show you like this example here um look at this Paul wow so um like once again like this is the uh the print of uh death right Captain happy I call him yeah Captain exactly I have the last ride hey he's having a laugh he's having a laugh it's not because he looks crazy that he cannot someone's going to be having a laugh at that final moment exactly or maybe everyone perhaps but basically the point of like showing you this uh well first of all is because I think it's lovely but the second reason is because um talking about like what's the result that you're trying to get uh especially when it comes to printing You're Gonna Want to basically know how small that you can get in terms of your detail sure and what's going to actually Translate late once it's printed because depending on like if it's like a like a one for one scale one fourth one tenth whatever the size you're going for uh at some point you're not going to want to go like too fine into the details because it's just gonna look blurry at the end because it's not going to print what's right this one is one fourth so basically it's like well I don't know if like people are gonna see but whatever let's say like a little bit more than a half a meter high and half a meter wide it's it's massive it's really massive it's gigantic yeah yeah wow actually meter half a minute if you're gonna do it do it big yeah exactly in height there's probably like a picture here of like and just to break this down for our folks watching all over the world uh I think that is big one on their side that is big yeah there was a uh like I would need to I know where there's like a picture it's just I would need to look for it but there's like a picture of like somebody beside the statue and it's like how many centimeters are we talking about uh in centimeters yeah yeah like uh an inches for the for the American oh I'm kidding I'm kidding how many centimeters math yeah I mean there's the actual size in the uh you see you know what there you go you're asking me a question about technical stuff it's written right here on this page that's what I was told there you go dimensions in well millimeters so okay here we go how many millimeters uh 450 by 510 by 840. so yeah like half a meter in uh that is a big piece yeah and also one meter in height because uh because of like the scythe and everything like this one meter in height 500 550 millimeters is uh like about 21 inches close to 22 inches that's a big boy for Americans oh it's a big boy it weighs probably like close to 70 80 pounds can I weatherproof it and put it in front of my house to scare the neighbors away you can you can but I think somebody's probably just going to capture it and take it home that's actually true that's what I would do especially and um so basically the idea is to know like what's the end product so the end product for this one was the statue you just you just saw and because of like the scale I knew that Paul's doing over here he's just doing a [ __ ] yeah it's 85 centimeters by 81. exactly like I see myself in the the camera right there and it's not I can't even like do it like it's the frame is not even like bigger than the frame he's in okay so that gives us an idea if someone at home is measuring this and put it on their shelf I'm gonna buy this please tell us right someone's looking hey that goes back to hashtag it the measurement of your desk for Marco's thing hashtag zbs22 it's a good challenge well that's the one they're supposed to be sending to doing their selfies if you got a selfie out there do a selfie however you're watching us yeah good point yeah some good ones I've been looking at them there's some fun with this thing though can you maximize that screen look at this thing get me off this screen show the people a pony I mean geez look at the detail on that thing and it's two heads okay let's get this yeah there's two heads out this one also has like a hand switch out I have like this one too yeah yeah there's like the grasping hand and the the hand that has uh the the you know time oh man I'll tell you what I do yeah did you make any compartment for the switching out or are they just there's no compartment for them compartment yeah I always wanted this with the hand switch out and stuff and the head switch stuff for Collectibles why wouldn't put something in the base so you can store when you're not using the one that's true right underneath it's not just laying on your shelf right you pull out a little thing it's stored there you need to go back in there you're making them I want a little LED inside that thing oh yeah yeah that would be pretty radical that's that's the cost then it's going up well that's real yeah well for this one for this way we wanted to go like artist series it was like more relying on like the like the paint of it like more like traditionally let's say look at this thing yeah I mean but it's nice to be that guy look at him I'm really happy of what XM did with the the paint job like I gave them a lot of freedom as long as they follow like the important ideas you didn't give them a master you just give them a zbrush master or anything for people oh I gave them free I get him renders the renders that I had and like they did a first pass and then I was like okay well this like color needs to be like hotter or warmer and I really just like made these uh these uh changes in case that it actually like goes a little bit too outside of like the theme right of like what they are but like choices for like how the skin would look or like the some Hues and stuff or uh like I was like you know what you're the experts you know how it's going to look once it's going to be printed painted and everything and uh like I trusted them a lot in those choices and you know what pretty happy with it that's a great that's a great look at that piece yeah a great horse so basically wow um to get back on track the idea is like if you look at details like uh this one here like this little dot like this little dot or at least you know this little Dot and this line right here it's pretty much like the um like the smallest that I I would actually go for in terms of deciding the scale of a detail no not you he really wants to be in the shot this one I keep going second time or third time that guy's made an appearance there's something to be said about it he really wants it really but if you look at hit here like you see like this is pretty much like the finest line that I will go for because when you do 3D printing you kind of like have to be conscientious about um yeah the final result the same way that like the uh the perforation here on the the cape like this was pretty much like the size that I knew already that one fourth would look good because if I go actually smaller they would start they would start to go to look really like shallow and it would just not look good so you really have to stop yourself a certain sometimes for like the scale of things and that sort of stuff um and I like to go in between I like to go as small as I can so that like it's nice for the renders but also smart so that like it prints correctly so I'm truly trying to hit like Both Worlds at the same time uh as much as I can um so yeah so that was for the uh the the details and that sort of stuff let me get back on track where was I here there we go okay so yeah detail placement that's really just like what there is it's all a matter of like choices and most of it I do just by placing Alphas uh like this and uh sometimes since I have a form Lab at home sometimes I do like test prototypes of sections yeah the form two or form three form two I wish I had a form tree it looks really good but uh you know what my firm 2 is still like rock incredible the details too yeah yeah and I get like I can do my prototypes and stuff and I can see that like things work well and then when I send it to like a like a Production Studio or whatever I'm I know that like it's gonna look like okay at the end even better right because they're better than me it's just at least I tested um is the perforated cloth that you were shown was that micropoly someone was asking wait the cloth wasn't it was like how I did it yeah oh well you know what that's exactly what I was going to show look at this get this stuff right itself it's all in the same mindset that's incredible look at this scripted the thing even if I wanted to Yeah so basically the way that I go at it is uh I'll just like use UVS for uh a lot of like this stuff the moment that like a pattern really gets like over the entire character I'll rely on UVS to do this so I'll start by working on a clone of course even zbrush tells you to work on a clone so you listen yeah I'm Gonna Bake everything make sure it doesn't have any subdivision levels so once that you have this uh here okay so we see the topology all right so basically I'll simply use the poly groups that I have and I'll just make sure that my front section plus the thickness of it is on one polygroup and that the back is on another polygroups once that I have this I'll simply tell him a split bipolar group make it symmetrical and unwrap and it's going to go pretty fast and if I put like a texture on it you'll see that uh there you go so I have like this texture it's already placed symmetrically if that's a word and if I do flatten you can see it's all reducing symmetrical so you're all good um I think Danny uh Bell yesterday like showed a bit of like the UVS and you you see like you're drawing pretty much like Orient them right away so that it really goes in the direction of your patterns and everything and I find that like if you just like cut things on their seams or for metal plates you cut them on there like what's the front what's the back you'll always have like a chance to put things in the direction that you want for it to look like um I love that our presenters are watching the presentations and watching the presenters and coming back and talking about each other before and after well I was just trying to make sure like I don't repeat stuff too much as well I'm like when he showed that I was like you know what I'm just gonna say a quick word I think this one is a great one to compound go ahead yeah for sure so what if I have this you just copy UVS you put it in your uh in your object here so paste UVs and uh so now you can actually like have the same texture here just to confirm you see you're good you're good and the way that I go by is I'll create a some more Target I'm gonna work on a layer I'm gonna go into surface noise I'm going to tell him use UVs I'm going to use the plug-in here I'm going to take spheres I'm going to say okay and then I'll just um since we're doing something hard surface I'll get rid of the noise I'll just take the effect by itself and I'll you I'll reduce the plug-in until I have like the size that I'm going for let's say this one I'm gonna augment actually I'm gonna not use any poly paint and I'm gonna play with the strength to know like how deep I want to go and like if I'm going up or down once I got this I click ok now it's on my mesh for the moment it's just a preview but if I actually apply to mesh it's going to apply this detail on my layer here from the layer I can duplicate the layer to double the intensity I can merge it so now it's on one layer and from there I can apply also a morph Target to this hide my layer and just draw where I want this detail to to appear so you get like a lot of control by having it done all over your character and then you decide where exactly you want it to appear like right now it looks kind of weird like this like maybe it would be best if it's actually like maybe inside of a section but that's basically like the way that I go by to use this guy's on fire yeah so mini tricks mini tricks there's a lot more they call it Marco mini tricks ploof crew so uh yeah I mean like that's pretty much like all of the major tricks that I use when it comes to creating details and the medium details so from um from this uh point out if you just use everything and you apply it to all of the meshes of the character you'll pretty much end up with uh with this like fully um fully finished uh model here like once again nothing that is on screen right now or I'd say easily 99 of everything that you see on screen right now I've just shown all of the tricks in my in the past minutes so it's yeah it's really just a matter of uh rinse and repeat uh going at things and uh there you go time check for you you got about 19 minutes 19 minutes yep all right well okay well I have like two sections I wanted to talk about the last one is not really that important time take your time so uh I'll just uh I'll just jump right into like the uh the last portion that for me I think is really important for like the entire presentation in terms of uh posing mechanic posing the character in composition so we're going to talk about while posing the character yeah um the demonstration I'm going to do is uh something that takes a lot of time if you want to do it well people think it's like posing the character should be done like quickly and that you should not have to redo anything and that's not the case that's the idea fantasy yeah exactly it's a fantasy but you know what sometimes it's it works pretty well and sometimes you have to redo some parts but the thing is that you have to be smart about it as well and for having tested it unlike close to like 60 70 models complex models this technique work you just have to know like what to be careful about so when you're opposing actually you know what I'll just say I'm going to do a little demonstration here but if you want to see like the full process on a character just go on uh chaosmasons.com go at the bottom go on our links uh you'll find our YouTube page and on the YouTube page if you check our playlist there's one that's called um mantis so you're you're doing YouTube I shared your Twitch so your YouTube yeah well I mean the twitch is the videos it's just they're archived on YouTube as well right they just watch this for free on the YouTube did you watch them for free yeah they just have to they just have to injure me and the rest is free sharing away yeah and so you know what while we're while I'm I'm saying this I'm just going to uh delete you uh a few meshes because one thing that you have to be careful when you're working with um transpose Master is that if you have like a lot of Z tools open like I have right now Z tools of like millions and millions of polygons you kind of like have to be careful um because it can actually make the software crash because this is like ludicrous the amount of like things that I have in the ram in this instance so let me just delete those all right and I'll open my of course for the younger viewers watching you would have named all of your tools just checking I'm gonna named your sub tool you mean PM 3D underscore six nine we know this 30062 yeah is not a name no no okay no final seven final eight final really the final one really really really the final Yeah final final the final with the chance this time it's really the final like the name is just like my last name because they're submitting it to me as a student exactly not good yeah name your name your files so um so basically yeah the the YouTube was just to say that like I show the entire process I spend like I think four hours posing like a fully mechanical character so the proof is there the technique works but just to give you a bit of a taste of like what I do is first of all I always try to make sure that like the design of the character allows for for bending parts and that sort of stuff so uh for these characters I really try to make sure that like everything around like the the waist here or like the elbow um it's it's like a material that can be flexed and if not if it's a joint I really try to I kind of like test during the block talking that if you turn the object around the joint that it's not going to penetrate with each other right so clip into each other so this I did that sorry I did this for this guy here and for things like for example the shoulder here I really try to make sure that things are kind of like modeled in a way that like things can slide into each other so you see like all the plates here on the shoulder basically if the character like lifts his arm well the the plates can slide into one of each other and this is going to give me a lot of flexibility for placing this character into the the final pose so I I try to make like smart choices like this but at the end uh like my technique still works for uh like a lot of different designed the decisions let's say I'm going to show you um so okay well one thing that I can say as well is that I try to separate my model into sections so for example like the arms I'm going to section them like this the legs are going to be sectioned and I'm going to actually sometimes I'm going to pose like just a portion of the character like I could be posing this first and then the rest afterwards or even like a section like this and the reason why I don't pose everything at the same time is just to give me a break I'll place like a portion of it and then I'll commit my transpose master and I'll save my project and then I'll go back to transpose Master because the thing is that at the end of the day I have the um I have the the the final posed model already done like I'm posing the character over this model here so it's like I figured that out what we were seeing at the beginning of the presentation is like there's no unknown or almost no unknown for me so I just need to post my results I know your end results you know exactly your Finish Line so if I oppose my character on top of this guy here there's nothing that's going to really like go wrong or at least nothing that cannot be like easily fixed afterwards so the way that I'm gonna go to do this is I'm going to figure out a section I want to pose let's say this one here I'm going to go into um my Z plugin transpose master here oops and I'm simply going to click on transforms Master it's going to make all the calculation necessary to pose the character and then uh I'll start by putting into polygroups elements that I know that I might actually pose one at the same time or in two parts let's say the entire under body of the character will be one section and the plates will be its own section on top of be able to separate them what is like the belt section and the thigh section so I'll work with these three things here uh since we're posing the character in um sorry since proposing the character in a non-symmetrical position I'll actually have different polygroups for uh everything that's like Symmetry and whatnot and the legs here the underbody I'm going to start by just like really quickly masking a portion of it just to be able to select it rapidly I'll try to have it like follow kind of like the the flexion areas of the body and I'll do the same for like the upper part here like this so those are my sections and this one I'm also going to make non-symmetrical all right and I will add my final pose in this um in this file here warning before committing the transpose Master you have to delete this extra sub tool that I added or else it's going to confuse the software so just a reminder to delete this one here but basically we have our final model uh I just need to pose uh my polished model on top of this here it's also important to note that you're you know you've posed it in a way that is not overtly extreme away from the standard uh pose that you had at the beginning yeah it's not going to be um going from like an a pose to something that is drastically different but it could though it's just I can't you would need to plan ahead and like you're the pose you would just need to make sure that like if the character is really going to do like an exaggerated like elevation like this well it's giant shoulder maybe is not a good thing right exactly I was hoping you were going to say foreign and also I mean like in real life it's like you have this much armor you don't have flexibility so don't choose like a a position that doesn't work right in the context of that design absolutely so um what I'll do is I'll start by placing the pivot this is pretty much how I start like every posing of my characters I'll just figure out like like that the just try to make sure that like the angle is like somewhat what I'm going for uh this one actually is going to need to be rotated a bit like this all right and when it's time to place the limbs I'm going to actually add a layer just to make sure I can go back and I can simply mask blur and a little warning a little warning over here um it's always best to make sure that the topology of what's going to bend is not drastically different one from the other because when you're blurring your mask the spread of the blur is going to act differently if your mesh is dense or not dense so like the blurriness and I made it on purpose to actually make a little mistake here but if you look at the um the tube here it's very high and the thigh is much bigger than that so because I blurred once you're going to place like you're going to move the character like this the bending of the cloth well it doesn't really show but the building but bending of the cloth will act differently on the high density mesh and the low density mesh so this is something you just have to be a little bit careful about and maybe you'll want to remove some subdivision levels of your mesh just so that it kind of like um uh it's it's more like averaged with the rest and Essence make every first level be relatively the same type of polygon size exactly that so you're getting consistency with your Bend and your masks and all on all of them as low as possible without degradating the the design yeah keep that silhouette the three of us we should have a show wait a minute wait a minute we'll we'll talk about during the pause I think yeah chuck chuck Aug me so the I distracted him again so at this point um what I'll do is I'll take some of my meshes that were maybe like bent or that doesn't make any sense if like that they're a curve and I'm gonna use the occasion to kind of like just straighten things out a little bit and uh this is something you can do also like at the end but uh it's also something you can just do once that you know that like you've placed your thing correctly you just like try to get rid of like any impressions of stretching just by replacing things correctly like this and this is also why I made uh some like more uh like some smart choice into like what's hard surface and what's flexible because because areas like this since it's going to bend a lot you just really want to make sure that it's like an object that if you bend it it's not going to like remove the the nature of like what it is so I'll do this I'll for example I'll mask the the armor here and I'll start like oops putting it putting things back into like place and the reason why I do this with transpose Master is really just because like I get to move everything at the same time I'll still do a password like every each of my sub tools I'll just scrutinize them and see if I've added any like Bend but this is basically like how I go uh at placing them all together like this and uh also I'll sometimes I'll just hide them and um I'll mask portions of them just to maybe like add some mass that I might have lost during the uh the move and once I replace the mesh if I see that my mesh are interpenetrating like this here well this is why I said earlier that like this entire like layering of object is um is really helping because when you layer stuff you get to place them back afterwards um you just have to find like something that looks just like would make sense that makes sense yeah exactly and also by the way don't don't shy away from uh using the move brush to move your things because the things like move brush the problem that sometimes like it can have is that if you use it like on um if you use it on um on like a hard surface object sometimes it can bend some areas that you don't want it to bend but the idea is that pretty much everything can be bent without looking bent except for stuff like primitive shapes so stuff like the circle here the moment that you bend it now it looks absolutely off but like plates that don't really have like very primitive shapes in it you can move it and it's it's not going to look like that bend so the idea that like you cannot reshape a hard surface object is not true you actually you really can it's just some stuff is more sensible to the eye um and some is not really sensible so you see this plate which was hard surface well I pretty much like bend it to kind of like fill the holes and do all that stuff and this is how I'm actually going to go by to place the entire character and the one final thing how much minute do I have I would say probably seven minutes seven minutes I was gonna say that seven seven minutes if I was timing you so the one thing I'll say is that I've shown that like I use like polygroups and masking and blurring to move my object but like I said sometimes the topology is just going to make things not really move equally like for example if I take this upper body part here and I just blur it and move it so you see that like all the meshes are kind of like um separating from each other and you're creating negative space and I think of a lot of things are not really like bending accordingly so what I do to average this mask but to the same kind of like spread along all of the different meshes with their different density is I place my mask by hand just using the mask with the uh the dot stroke like this so really just by hand and the reason why I do it by hand like this it's because um the the radius of your brush will apply the same strength of mask everywhere on every vertices at the same intensity it doesn't have to do with like the density of the mesh it's really like just makes it much more equal so you kind of like have by hand to make that kind of like fade or that gradient but once you do and you don't need to be like extremely um like Precious about like the spreading after that you see the way that it's going to bend it's not going to do like all the separations and everything because the vertices were pretty much allowed the same kind of like movement and range so you do this you place it into position and now you can actually keep your mask and already start to kind of like move the mesh around to give it more of like um like a flow that's going to look maybe less like bent sorry I keep pressing on the the right that's great just keep doing what you're doing looking good there you go Marco mini tricks ploof here on a Tuesday tricky Tuesdays there you go magic fingers Summit 2022. I really want tacos now you know what I'm going for Mexican after thanks a lot there you go look at that yeah perfect we're here all week perfect think of us while you're eating that taco we got about 90 what is it uh 180 seconds are left here two and a half minutes three perfect did you say three minutes throw about three minutes left okay well you know what that's it's pretty much done the idea is that like because of like that mask I was able to move things in a way that like is not like really spreading everything around um once I apply the um the transpose Master to this like I'll just do it don't forget to delete that mesh yep [Music] here brother boom uh uh transpose so this is like the step where like if I had like a ton of Z2 open it might actually be problematic uh so now that I actually uh removed from the ram most of it it's gonna find correctly like the mesh it's going to apply the changes everything should be fine so you see it's already moving things around there's part about this you get to see all the subtools somebody at home wants to know what what happens if I change my mind after I do that yeah what happens if they change their mind well I mean at some point you kind of like have to commit and this is why you you do a lot of iterations walking until you figure out which is the one you want but the idea is that if you actually pose it like this and you have you still have changes to do you can always go back and transpose Master afterwards and replace it and do changes and whatever so you can go and transforms Master as much time as you want over this process until you figure out that the the final posing of your character actually uh looks good so there we go at some point you must commit don't be commit yeah exactly plus I mean at this point here like there's still like some stretches in some areas like I'll still go over like areas that were maybe a bit problematic and like move things around just to just remove a bit of the impression of the of the the stretching but the idea is that those are the most problematic sections that I just showed you they're like the rest is much more of a breeze and you don't get much like Distortion and that sort of stuff so it ends up being like a really cool um like I really a viable way for opposing characters that are pretty complex and like any kind any kind of of character like I mean if you're posing a character that's organic with like anatomy and everything you're still gonna have to like rework like how the enemy is after like deflection so the same idea that stuff have to be um like fixed after this step is applicable to organic or to hard surface okay so let's finish with your model in its entirety on the screen perhaps yeah well actually you know what I'm kind of like I'm loading this model here okay and this is one of my faves yeah the idea is just to show you that like at the same time uh characters depending on like their style or any or anything every trick that I showed here um can be application yeah all the things can be applied to any style or anything like that or at least the range of possibility is pretty vast so for something that like looks compact like this I'll use the same same method to get the same results and everything so uh the sky is the limit wow that's an angel right it's it's the sky is the limit and it's come to that time when we reach for the sky and stretch a bit and say thank you so much Marco many tricks ploof here uh merci beaucoupons for our French correspondents and people at home he's got a big smile on his face we appreciate it uh I'm Louis Tucci here live for the zbrush summit 2022 with Paul gabri we're going to send you off and we're gonna do some giveaways so thank you again to Marco plouffe and I'm sure their fans along all over the world are saying yes yes more and more but uh we'll be back after this with some giveaways all right thanks awesome thanks mayor foreign [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Maxon ZBrush

Views: 24,388

Keywords: zbrush, zbrush tutorial, zbrush beginner tutorial, zbrush 2019, zbrush 2020, pixologic, zbrush free, z brush, sculptris, zbrush live, zbrush download, zbrush core, zbrush trial, zbrush brushes, blender, 3d coat, 3d modeling, digital sculpting, zbrush student, etsy, zbrush character modeling, zbrush character, zbrush sculpting, zbrush realistic face, 3d printing software, 3d modeling software, zbrushcoremini, zbrushcore mini, zbrush mini, figurine, zbrush 2021

Id: pdCAnrfpSQw

Length: 117min 36sec (7056 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 03 2022