SCULPTING STYLISED WOOD -- Tutorial -- Zbrush --

[Music] in this video let's focus on stylization and in particular stylized wood now with stylization there's obviously a whole heap of different kinds of styles so in this video i'm just going to try and show the difference in techniques between something really simple and something a little bit more detailed and of course everything needs to be taken with a pinch of salt because it's down to your particular preferences uh your drawing style or even if you're in a studio uh the drawing style or the stylization of that game first of all let's go for something that people often mix up a little bit and this will be low poly people often confuse old games that were limited by the poly counts as being a style in itself and okay it is kind of um but nowadays often the low poly stuff that we see is this very kind of geometric type shapes where there's not much textures involved and the the light hitting individual polys actually describe the the shape and the pattern on these objects themselves and they're not particularly low poly compared to say models made in the 90s because they've obviously got a lot more pollies in places to describe kind of cloth patterns or shapes of items and stuff that could actually be more efficiently described probably in some sort of texturing process but it is actually a really nice style and the big advantage of that is it's actually quite easy to do because you don't have to worry so much about texturing and uvs and stuff like that and the process in itself is quite fast so that kind of stuff can normally be made in programs like maya or blender and one way you can do that in zbrush for wood at least is to use a clip curve brush and i use this a lot in a lot of my videos but it really does work for these basic shapes so to get the clip curve brush up you can hold ctrl shift and that will bring up select rectangle which normally uh looks like that selects parts of your model but this time hold shift control go to your brushes palette and navigate to clip curve brush okay now if you've not used click curve brush before if you hold shift and control and drag off the edge of your model you get this line with this gradient and anything on that gradient will be pushed towards the white line so if i let go here you can see that's pushed towards the model so i'm going to go to geometry and i'm going to just dynamesh this quickly so i'll turn up the resolution a little bit and dynamesh that let's see how that looks okay yep that's pretty sharp so i'm just going to go around this model and i'm just going to take off some of these edges and another thing you can do with click curb brush you can make a curve so if you hold ctrl and shift and drag it out and then hit alt on the keyboard you can let go of control and shift at this point as long as you still have the mouse down if you hit alt you can create a point and then if you pull that again you can see that will curve from that point and you can do that multiple times okay now you can also make hard edges so again shift and control and drag that out and then i'm going to hit alt and then i'm going to keep my mouse still and hit alt again and that'll create a tight angle so now you can see we've got these these sharp edges and i'm just going to keep repositioning this piece of wood to give me different angles in which to remove pieces from [Music] and we can also do stuff like cracks in the wood as well we don't want to go into too much detail on this but if we line the wood up like so we can come down in a v shape and we can make cracks down the water now it's a little bit too big i don't want it that far down yeah something like that i'll just do one more on the other side okay so you can keep working into this and make it as detailed as you want so the next stage with this would be to get it ready for either texturing or in engine we go over here and hit poly f to look at the polys you can see this is not right at all for any kind of use outside of zbrush so what we need to do is somehow reduce these polys and you can use stuff like zero mesher and that is good for a lot of stuff but it's not very good for these very tight edges the other option would be to hand route to apologize this and it's not a complex model so it wouldn't take very long and you can use stuff like maybe mayer's retapologization tools or my preference would be to use 3d coat i found that pretty useful but that might just be because i've used 3d coat a lot more now i'm going to go to z plugin and use decimation master so pre-process current and once that's processed go back to z plug-in and select the amount of decimation now this is set on one percent normally it sounds something like 40 so i'm going to go for one for now decimate that and once that's done i'm going to go to poly f so i can have a little look at what it's done here so you can see it's dramatically reduced it there's obviously still way too much detail there so i'm going to go back to decimation master and turn this to point zero five point zero one and hit decimate okay so that is reduced it right down there now but i do think we've actually lost some of the details that we put in um for example we've only got one of these cuts here and the other one's gone so i'm going to go up a little bit more than that okay so after a bit of back and forth i've come to this level of polis in decimation master now you can get other decimation master plugins that might help you target a more specific polycount but in this case for me .03 is enough and at this point i would then take this into mayor and clean up a little bit so you can see that pretty much describes all the details we've got into this and it just requires a little bit of cleanup so to do that i would take this into something like maya where i can then reduce the amount of edges on the faces of these the flat faces and i would expect that would probably take five minutes maybe not long at all it's really easy and i've done this a few times some of them turn out a lot neater as well so that it takes a lot less cleanup so if this represents the popular low poly style wood then the next step up for me would be to break out from that low poly style and go for a bit more of a sculpted style and that would be something that would probably have a normal map and have more information on the surface of the wood in the normal map so with this i'm not really including the hand painted look because with the hand painted stuff you would pretty much have really simple geometry and all your information would be described in the base color um maybe sometimes with a little bit of roughness as well depending on how stylized you want to go again like i keep saying a lot of this is based on personal style and it might be a mixture of of a lot of these different techniques um but i'm just i just want to try and cover maybe techniques you could use to achieve some of that if you've got one of these types of styles in mind so with this one we're going to pretty much do the same thing again to start off with so like before we're going to start with a clip curve brush and go around the model getting it into the shape we want this time we can go a little bit more detailed or a little bit more precise in those cuts once we're happy with the placement of those cuts we can look at adding a bit of detail to the end grain um now i'm going to make a separate tutorial on how to do this a bit in a bit more detail but for now i'm just going to use this technique which i like to do which is just to add a little bit of detail by by masking out a circle [Music] and then inverting that and using the transpose tool [Music] to lift some detail out there just a little bit [Music] okay so the next step i like to do is to grab the trim dynamic and just knock back all these hard edges a little bit just to make this look a little softer a little less aggressive than those hard edges [Music] okay once you've softened that up a little bit the next step would be to add some surface detail now with this i like to use orbs cracks brush and you can get these for free just have a google search the guy orb who released these brushes also released a lot of other brushes and they're really great for doing stylized stuff so the orbs cracks brush does a nice soft line um and it's a nice hard edge one really great for this kind of thing and using lazy radius you can either turn that right down and you can create more detailed shapes but if you turn lazy radius up you get this nice smooth edge behind the drag brush to get to these settings you can go to stroke and you can find lazy mate lazy mouse there okay so what i'm going to do is turn it off a little bit so i'm going to do a nice long stroke and i'm going to vary the pressure i put into the stroke to create this deeper and more shallow parts of the stroke now again doing this kind of detail is entirely up to you it's the stylistic choice you might want to do long and soft shapes like this um or you might want to do more precise uh like geometric type pattern i mean this is stylized so it's down to either the style of your project or the style of the stuff you like to do another thing you could do if we just reduce the lazy radius here you know if we do some nice long strokes we could also add some swirls like this and this kind of stuff really speaks to the stylized or fantasy aspect of it and it can really make your stuff look cuter and pop nicely um i think i'm gonna do more hard edge stuff so i'm just gonna go around this add in some shapes and if you can't quite get the randomization of it down then just have a look at some real wood and try and copy off the shapes that are on the back of real wood just make them a bit more stylized but looking at reference even for stylized stuff is obviously super important [Music] okay so actually not so happy with how this one turned out but i won't do it again because i think it's important to show you that this isn't a precise art um that you know it's it can be difficult to get the exact look like you want um also i'm doing a few different styles here so it's difficult to jump between them so for this one i'm going to do the same as previously but i'm just going to be a tiny little bit more i'm just going to be a little bit more aggressive with the cuts that i make for this one i want there to be an extra layer of bark over the top that extra bit of detail so i'm going to duplicate this and i'm going to scale it up a little bit [Music] and scale it down so that the tops and bottoms of the one underneath can be seen and first of all i'm going to do some cuts on the tops and bottoms [Music] so [Music] okay and where the other one clips through what we can do is just mask that invert it and then go down here and go to split mast points so now we've got these two separate we've got again separate so we can delete that now delete [Music] and an extra step that you can do might make it easier depending on what you want to do with this is you can hit close holes on the geometry tab just to cap those off so now nothing pokes through the second skin and so now i want to add different heights of the bark at the top so i'm just going to mask the back face of these off and just do some little cuts in here so i'm just going to go over this now with the trim dynamic brush to soften the edges and the orbs cracks brush to add the wood grain if you get to points like this and you want to add the seam running around a corner and you get this pinching you just need to work it out a little bit so one way of doing that is to just use the smooth brush smooth it out a little bit and then work that line into there and then you can come back with say the trim dynamic brush and just neaten that up a little bit like so [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so the other thing i'd most likely add at this stage is some extra fine detail to the grain some of the details we could add could be scratch marks or pop marks so nice way of doing pot marks is i use a clay buildup brush and change the alpha to this alpha 48 and i just work them in [Music] and a quick tip if you're not sure about details that you're about to add in what you can do is you can go down to layers and you can create a new layer and then on this layer as long as it's got the recording button on there you can add the detail that you want to try out [Music] and then you can use the slider to increase and decrease the the amount the opacity of that detail okay so that's a pretty detailed but still stylized log i mean the main thing that makes it stylize is the lack of any super fine detail and also the chunkiness of the detail to take this one step further at the moment this would be easily returbologized you could bake this detail down onto a pretty simple mesh something not much different than what we've got as the first one we did here but to add a little bit more detail and a little bit more flour to it we could start to bring out some of those details so to do this i'm just going to duplicate what we've got here rather than start again so one thing i can do is pull out some of the details we can do that much like we did with the end grain just mask what i want and then with the transpose tool just going to rotate that out and pull that out just a little bit [Music] and then you might want to do it to other areas as well [Music] and then of course that will require a little bit of cleanup as well you might even need to redone a mesh okay and the next step might be that you want to bring out some of the bark around the edge of this so one way to do this would be to [Music] give yourself enough room to work and there's loads of different ways you could do this but i like to just append some new pieces so i'm going to go over here and append a cube okay and then i'm going to scale that to place so using the s bend is one way to make something curved or if you go to the transpose tool send to the pivot and then go to the settings on transpose tool we can go to bend curve and then set the position of the bend curve points and how many points we want so curve resolution so we just do three and then we can grab each one of these points and bend them into position [Music] so once you've got something you like you can click on the little cog again and just go to accept and that'll go back to the normal transpose tool and then we can move this into place so i'm just going to position a few of these on the edges that i want to be curling away from the wood [Music] [Music] once you've got these roughly into place you can start manipulating them with the move brush and cutting the excess off as well [Music] [Music] [Music] so once you've got these pieces in position you want to get them to match up as much as you can to the original mesh so that you don't have to do much cleanup once you combine these together because every time you dynamesh and re-polish you do lose a little bit of information a little bit of sculpting so we're just going to go around these and try and eat them up on the dynamism making sure that there's no little errors like this on the edges we just want to clean that up chop that off a little bit just looking for little errors from the clipping stage it all looks good um so i'm going to increase the dynamesh resolution on this now dynamesh that and then go around and just knock some of them edges off with the trim dynamic again okay so once you've got it pretty close to the underlying mesh we can combine these together so we'll merge that down so there's now one and then we can dynamesh these together so once that's dynamised together we can go over these seams and just smooth them out again just blending that back in so it looks like one piece and we can also go over these [Music] [Music] so this is four different levels of stylization and of course this is completely dependent on what the project is for or your personal preference of stylization but this is one way to do it and hopefully there's some handy techniques in there that will help you produce your stylized wood and often and also these techniques can be used on rock and metal and other things as well it's pretty transferable so the next stage for these would be to re-topologize them if they were going into an engine but if you're just planning on using these for a piece of artwork then you could possibly decimate these um or even use ziri mesher if you want to texture these then having a nice clean mesh that you've done by hand so retopologizing these by hand would definitely be the ideal route to go even though it takes a little bit longer it's much easier to make a neat unwrap if you have a nice mesh a nice topological mesh so i hope this has been useful and i'll be posting a new video soon on some more stylization techniques and thank you

Channel: RobotArmy

Views: 17,829

Rating: 4.9912281 out of 5

Keywords: Stylised, Zbrush, Wood, Sculpting, Modelling, Low poly, Stylized, CGI, CG, Game Modelling

Id: rnKyPkpVBl0

Length: 24min 50sec (1490 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 09 2020