SubD Modeling vs. ZBrush Hard Surface Modeling | PART 1

okay so in this video i'm gonna be talking about the two methods of hard surface modeling that i do i take in my workflow the first one is the traditional subdivision modeling and the second one is is what i just picked up um not a long time ago but i really like that method is the live boolean dynamesh and finish that up in zbrush well this video isn't meant to be for absolute beginners because you have to know basic steps to take in every method that i'm mentioning to address the pros and cons of the two basically you have to understand what the basic uh in order to be able to understand the methods in the and what is best or or what job all right so as you can see here this is the piece this is um this is a whip of a hyperlid width of my custom smg that i'm doing for my character and i did a blog ad in my in maya i did the block the first block at maya i did that with some symbol pieces like this one in my uh basically i combine the two methods of doing uh half surface into one piece since there's a lot of complex shapes this one is made using live bullion and dynamesh most of it was done using zbrush so today i'm going to be showing you guys that and basically telling you what what are the advantages and disadvantages of the two so that you can pick which one to use okay first i will go to uh maya i've got two uh rolls here the first one the third one is meant to be for zbrush i'll take these pieces and go into zbrush to do the high pulley and uh i already did some of it because it's going to take quite a uh quite a long time so i already added some edge looks here you can see if it's taking too long i might have to speed the process up so you guys don't have to uh wait for that to complete okay so this one here is another piece so yes i usually i do combine the two uh using boolean union and then it will it will automatically merges the vertices together there's no gap here uh okay let me do it real quick uh first so non-symmetry i can turn on symmetry please turn on symmetry okay it's not symmetrical anyway i'm gonna use this one i'm gonna sorry i'm gonna do this one uh real quick because i think it's not going to take that long so uh no need to be symmetrical anyway uh i'm gonna do it real quick um because i'm gonna be really messy here because it's not uh it's not you know like uh we're not really fussy here um much it up and then do the target well process hey and then you connect these vertices together connect connect i usually like to um set the soft edge and heart h on the go right and the press three to preview that it's not going to turn out good so um usually you guys go in and connect i mean you insert the actually right like that but i'm not doing that i my way of doing it is let me check obs obviously recording i thought i forgot to press record i select all the hot edges [Music] select all the hot edges there's a button here that you can press but i might have to write that that down for you to copy and and save it to your shelf because this is really convenient but i just want these hot edges i don't want the whole object to be selected i don't want these edges to be selected so i just do it manually yeah so if you yeah yeah so this is my attack this is my way of doing it you select all the hard edges press ctrl b or bevel it you kind of crying off the f ration no it is yeah you kind of crying out the fraction a bit like that and then you turn off chamfer right keep the main edges and then it add the the surrounding edges just to support it and then i kind of like to uh fit the soft and heart edge again and then you connect these into place i think i'm gonna put it here it's not ideal to uh to connect the two vertices into this vertex because it's gonna if you press three it's gonna drag the support edge away from the main edge here which is not ideal so this vertex has four edges connected to it right so if you add one more here it becomes five it becomes a star ideally you don't want to start to be connected into your um support edges because well it would try to drag the vertex out of place because this line is not it's not straight anymore so bear in mind that okay but if you delete these it is nearly straight but well i'm doing an example so i'll get away with that [Music] all right now let's see yeah we got the result let's see if there's any pinching we did a good job i think that was the um the traditional subdivision modeling we call it sub d modeling for sure right i'll take these one into the brush and i'll show you the the process of doing that in zbrush export air i'm going to create a folder for this i'll call it mesh yeah very creative i'll expose obj i don't want that to include material so i'm gonna take off material right i'll call it number one yeah another all right i'm going to z brush now import this in okay this dialogue pops up it means that it has some end guns and would you like to triangulate it i usually mostly pick that one [Music] well we have a problem in order to do the live boolean effectively we have to create all the hard edges like in maya freeze all these let me do this real quick connect and knight yeah no i think that will solve the problem when important in order to do the um live bullying effectively we have to crease all the hot edges and then subdivide that but keep the whole edges creased okay i can go in and do freezing manually in zbrush but i don't want because this is going to take so long what i'm going to do is first i'll select the hard edges right and i'll be attaching those right detaching oh no but you have to if you use this uh this script you have to select first you have to select the object right and you click that uh script and then we it will turn your selection into edges but not really you have to go to edge mode in order to access it otherwise it's not going to be selected it's just a preview okay then you will be detaching those do this again with this one select the object go uh click that script or you can go to h mode first and then click the hard edge it will be selected as long as you go to h mode after before clicking that one and then detach that okay i'll redo the export um [Music] and i'll import this into the file okay you have to since you got all the um the pieces disconnected but it's still in one single mesh actually two then you go into zebras you have to by the way this is the custom menu that i got but everything i pressed in here is gonna be available outside you just have to find them somewhere in the menu or in top row menu so first i have to um please fully group okay yeah um cruising will be in yeah you go to geometry crease and then crease body grip it will automatically freeze the um edges that you got from freezing over here one more thing if you would like to to see the polygroup in colors like visually you go auto groups or you can click crease by group without auto gripping it right what you want to do is oh where point since you know since i don't want the points to be welding in here i don't think it's the problem let's do that wait point okay right so now i got a cruising i have to subdivide those but so um what i do is i turn on dynamic subdivision by pressing d but pressing d pressing d without any subdivision it will ask you to have the uh dynamics of diff turn on instead uh you go to geometry i think and then turn the dynamic on and then you turn these most division levels up to four i usually use four and i'll go to the modular brush i'll select crease i crease two of these but it will create a pinching so i'll create the whole i'll create the whole edge loop by pressing h loop complete i think i've got all of them yeah wait what i'll undo and then do that again yeah let me real quick split these out off the uh the object here because i want to boolean those two together so let me do that real quick i'll split hidden this one goes up and then i'll turn on live boolean you check on the down arrow here click on that it will turn on the operation which means the boolean operation will start from this sub tool down all the way down um okay so the first icon is union which means it will combine the two this one i think is this one is different this difference is that you okay i'll do a difference for you i'll check that okay the difference will only take the the sub mesh and subtract into the main mesh and the third one is intersection it only take the intersection of the two or whatever inside okay the the operation here we want to go for is the the union operation and then we have to make sure all the edges are smooth we don't want you don't want to show polygons here that's why we crank up to four to level four in order to get the smoothness that we want okay after turning on live boolean we did the uh the the operation and choose the operation that we wanted and then we go down here to boolean and subtool boolean turn on ds because we use dynamic subdiv here we have to turn this on otherwise it will create the mesh without the dynamic subdiv which is this one the level zero subdivision or you can apply that and turn it into real subdivision then you will not have to click on this one but with the dynamic subdiv i can go back and use the the z module brush to add more freezing but with the real subdivision you cannot do that the z model only work if you don't have any subdivision we turn on dynamic subdiv and then make boolean mesh it will throw at a new u mesh here this is the mesh that got booleans in together and then what we want to do with this is we gonna dynamesh it it's gonna take some time okay now you got you dynamic i think i went overboard uh i'll just undo and and do a small resolution dynamician yeah well it's not enough i think it's not enough when you see the the wobbling uh edges here you can tell that is not enough resolution you crank that up i think two millions works no nearly three millions but whatever okay now what you can do is uh go to deformation here um polish crisp edges you turn the dot off turn that off yeah and then crank it up [Music] this is this is going to be your hypoli this small things will not go away but let me see how i can fix that i don't know how how i did to fix the decreasing here i think well let me go back and see what i can do with that i don't want the cuisine to be um that much so i'll just increase oh i think i have to crazy right obviously no okay let me let me let me think increase increase and create let me craze these [Music] all right we got a problem here but if it was made i think i would i'm gonna tweak the model here did someone some um i think i'm gonna bevel this like that and do it again but i'm not gonna do this here but well you got the point this is the result that we that we got from uh bullying zbrush well if you if you know what you're doing you can um boolean the the first the main mesh first not boolean but let me turn that off you can um dynamesh this piece first actually i'll do that okay you go dynamesh this piece first apply the uh the subdivision and dynamesh you see what i mean in a second you want to get the smoothness uh varied like i'm gonna take this one um dynamesh it and then polish it uh police by crisp edges [Music] like that i'll do it 50 like say if 50 resolution is my final i'm gonna i'm gonna only do it like 25 and then when i got the other one boolean in i'm gonna do another 25 so that the final result is most 50 percent you got what i mean i'm gonna do it again okay so if if the sorry i'm gonna crank that up if there is if the final result i want to get is 70 i don't know if it's percent or what percentage or what but i'm going to call it percentage from there if this is the final result that i wanted for this piece for these edges i'm gonna only do it 35 and then i'm gonna boolean in with this one i'm gonna blend in with this one and then i'll dynamesh it again and then i'll do another 35 and then what i got is these edges are smoothed 35 whereas these edges are 70 percent which is two times stronger you got the point here okay so i'm doing that live bullying mesh yeah i'm gonna do that it will create another u mesh here come on come on you mesh where is it okay yeah i got the result i want then i will i'm be a mission okay and then i'm gonna do our another 35 okay now you see that the these edges in the small part in the smaller part here they are not as strong as these ones right so this is the result that i want this is what i'm gonna take out and decimate it and put it into maya to do the lower poly okay all right so i'm going to get back to maya so actually i'm going to dynamish it oh sorry not dynamesh this might and by the way um i'm going to be talking about the pros and cons of the traditional subtee modelling the pros are you got nearly total control over the topology right it's easier to fix when needed of course because you got the the this more man of topology and is really manageable and the cons of the um the sub d workflow is there there are pretty much some artifacts like some pinching you cannot eliminate you have to deal with those obviously if you do that you put in a lot of time to plan your model ahead then the pension will be minimized but pinching is inevitable and the other cons is that you you have to spend a lot of time moving vertices adding adding edge loops it'll be tedious it's time consuming right now i'm going to be taking this and and estimate that about five percent ten percent yeah and put that into uh put this into uh maya and preview that i think ten percent is overkill and still a lot so i'm gonna take that down to five export this one is two okay let me uh actually want to delete these because this is the demonstration you know i don't need that i'm gonna hide it instead this this is the hyperlink with this example it's actually identical they're actually quite similar right it's actually quite similar [Music] okay now i'm gonna talk about the pros and cons of refresh and then i'm gonna end this video because it's taking too long and i want you guys to watch an hour-long video it's gone it's not very effective i'm gonna do another part of this now the the pros of zbrush is almost like um no pinching whatsoever you will see you will see my point when it gets to this one yeah so whatever you do when you do the um the subdivision modeling will be pinching even more with the sphere every round object with the the sphere or the cylinder there will be a lot engine happening if you're not careful if you use a very high resolution mesh it'll be a lot better when it comes to eliminating the pinching but at the same time it will be really hard for you to go in there and add all the support edges because the mesh is really dense so those examples those three examples i'll cover that in the next video if you guys are up but in this video i'm gonna wrap that up well another pros of zbrush is that it is very real-time right when you do the live volume you can move that in and out maybe i want to subtract this you go and move the object up and then like you manipulate the object in real time you can see that visually right it's super fast and the third pro is that it's really fast this is the demonstration i'll be doing it really slow for you guys to understand but if i'm doing it it's like three to five times faster than how i usually did it in maya but the the cons are first can be hard to control the individual edges smoothness this is what you have to be careful of so the second one the second point is that like well you have to back it up because there's gonna be a lot of times when customers or or your your art director wants you to change things a bit well maybe he want this to be a little bit lower or he want this muslin to be stronger or softer whatever you have to keep this fire in order to redo that right i think the industry is implementing the zbrush workflow into our surface a lot on there i think it's really cool because i when i pick this one up i like it and i do it a lot in my workflow in my in my in my heart surface modeling so um as you can see i did i did all the parts here in zbrush most of it it turns out really well andy and the um the process is really easy to understand okay i think this video is gonna be quite long so sorry for that i didn't plan it to be that long but well i think those are the tips that i'm i'm showing you guys i think those will be helpful i hope if you guys like it please like the video or if you have anything to add or anything to say please leave it in the comment below i'll be answering them thank you and have a good one

Channel: vinnimate

Views: 17,496

Keywords: subdivision modeling in maya, hard surface modeling, zbrush hard surface, tutorial, zbrush, workflow, maya, boolean, subd, modeling

Id: FxkPkG7DYyM

Length: 28min 49sec (1729 seconds)

Published: Fri May 21 2021