[TUTORIAL] Jewelry Design with Zbrush + Demo [ft. Tomas Wittelsbach]

hi everyone um welcome to the webinar um zbrush for jewelry with thomas uh sorry tomas whittlespock uh this is the last of our jewelry cad webinars for the month um so i hope you guys find it a really valuable look at a sort of somewhat different way but still very powerful way to create preform jewelry design um so just one note in addition to today's content i just wanted to invite everyone to join our jewelry industry discussion panel um on june 23 uh 25th on thursday which is between rio grande and the gia so we'll be looking uh at an in-depth uh into jewelry fabrication the digital workflow and kind of what's next for digital jewelry manufacturing so i'll drop a link into the chat and let tomas get started thanks hello and thank you hi guys so today we're going to go through zbrush for jewelry design but the big difference is that i'm going to kind of show you tools that you can use that are helpful if you're like using other programs because a lot of people see zbrush and they see demos of it and they're people sculpting and they're like wow that's really cool except i'm not a sculptor and that ends right there and you don't continue on well i'm going to show you a few ways where even if you're not a sculptor you can integrate zbrush into your pipeline and you can see how it becomes a very powerful tool in your toolbox to generate some jewelry so an introduction all right so this is things that i have made obviously these are models and um some actual physical objects that we've made i sculpted these don't worry about it you don't need to but let's get into one of the first myths in the jewelry world about zbrush zbrush has no scale there's no way to do scale you can't make things accurate in scale you can so let's look at scale scale no seriously zbrush has an accurate internal scale and always has actually so i created this model right scale is a three-dimensional object and the first place you start to integrate with your scale system is in scale master and you find it in your plugins and all you do is um slider's a sub tool you hit that and this gives you the measurements it's a box measurement of this object now if you'll notice this number this number is 99 100 000th of a millimeter that's not a real number that's a computer number there's that kind of accuracy will never get out of the machine okay can't say never you're right it's a very high end milling may be able to get that accurate that's not a manufacturing reality right so to say that zbrush doesn't have an accurate scale system it has an accurate scale system that's so accurate that you can't even use it so computers lie to you a little about some of these numbers and you can't get caught up in them the other thing zbrush does is it's because it was it was never intended to be used this way a lot of these tools come in at different times so how it rounds up is a little different and that freaks people out because you're like oh wait a minute those two numbers are different well as we'll see in a second so scale master is the first place you can deal with scale the second place is within the 3d print hub and that is update size ratio now if you'll notice our number here is zero zero zero six and it's like oh my god it's giving me different numbers it doesn't have an accurate scale it just rounded up so we're 100 000 different right so yeah once again not a real issue you just have to remember that these tools were integrated at different times and when the programmer wrote it it just rounds differently it's not that it's giving you an inaccurate measurement because let's face it even a ten thousandth of a millimeter is a pretty small amount so the other thing is i'm going to kind of blow through this and i have all of these models open in zbrush so if there are any questions later about some of the stuff we can go over i just want to get these ideas into your head because it's really about rearranging how you think about zbrush and how it works okay so we have scale here and when you hit update size ratios i've pulled this out into my custom ui so it's down here you can see that it gives you a few options it's like oh did you mean inches did you mean 100 you know and you just click millimeters and now that's your scale the third place we use scale this is called the transpose tool and i use it like a ruler and so each one of these ticks is one millimeter and then as you can see these little red ticks and there are ten of those and those are tenths of millimeters in jewelry manufacturing tenth of a millimeter is pretty darn close to how accurate you need to be i mean on some things you may like a mechanical function you may need to be more accurate but then you just notice that it falls between two lines and you're like oh look it's 10 and a half millimeters but here you can see 28.054 units units is the internal measurement of zbrush those are millimeters so this is 28 millimeters now if you feel uncomfortable with millimeters there's a way we can come in and in scale master there's this beautiful little thing right here it says one unit helper if you hit that it produces a one millimeter cube and it'll you go set scene scale and it gives you all kinds of different options is it did you mean one inch did you mean one foot did you mean one centimeter no we meant one millimeter so we click that and now that is set as our scene scale we have a reference point and it is now are you ready change it to millimeters so now it's more accurate right because it's millimeters so you can see that there is a very accurate scale system within zbrush but in manufacturing you're never going to get that first model right you're always going to have to print it cast it put a caliper on it and figure out what your ratios the change ratios are and then you change your model there's no one that has an accurate model from whatever program from the from the uh the model to casting because there's polishing in this and that and i'm talking about ten thousands of millimeters or hundred thousands of millimeters and i get certain cat operators get very anchored in these tiny tiny numbers and that's how accurate it is and not after polishing so this is scale master and there was one other thing i wanted to show you here so you can see set set scene scale sliders to sub tool we've kind of gone over that but you know this is a one millimeter cube but let's say you needed it to be 1.32 millimeters right you needed that accuracy all you do is type the new number in here and say resize sub tool and it changes your skill instantly so they're very easy and accurate scale tools within zbrush so let's put that to rest everyone breathe easy you can have real scale and zbrush next thing geometry in zbrush works a little differently it started out as a two and a half d program so it was never it doesn't look at models the same way so some things that could be very easy in a cad program are very difficult to accomplish in the sense of writing code that'll generate those tools within zbrush so you may not get the same tool set but you can accomplish the same things and it's just learning how to deal with that tool it's like if you're a physical sculptor learning how to sculpt in clay clay compared to plastolene well it's both sculpting but they're different tools different techniques and different usages so in learning how to think about geometry and zbrush and then incorporate it into your workflow there are a few things i want to go over with geometry so one we can import geometry from any program you have so you can do your major work in the program you're comfortable with z remesh it so it becomes in native internal z brush geometry there's dynameshing decimation in sculptures pro is the final tool i'll show you as far as geometry manipulation and how to kind of think about geometry so this is an obj that we imported from matrix which is rhino the only difference is you can see this little double line right here i put those in because when i z remesh it will take those and turn each of these spaces into a different poly group and that allows me a little bit more control over my geometry later so we have now z remeshed it and all you do is you slide you pick the final number of polygons you want after the remesh it remeshes it you can see it's turned it into a larger quad model and where i put those creases it changed these poly groups so now i can double tap on any of these surfaces separate them out work on them individually so now we have a completely native zbrush geometry base model so all i did was subdivide that up to 5.1 million polys so this is a comfortable resolution that i tend to sculpt in at the beginning now i'm going to show you here where printer companies lie to you so a lot of printer companies are like oh yeah we do 25 microns and then they'll show you all these beautiful thin wire filigree jewelry the problem with that is any printer can print a half millimeter wire ring that is not that's not impressive as far as the capacity of what that machine can do right here is the down and dirty when i talk about detail this is what i'm talking about see those very subtle brushed marks here the separation of these multi-strokes the fidelity of these edges they don't tessellate and how crisp and sharp this dipping is when they talk about detail they're talking about things like this they're talking about hard linear detail this is much easier to carry over than this very subtle surface geometry the main difference is your x and y resolution and so a lot of people have a 25 micron z step right and that's a mechanical function you can get that to a half micron if you have a screw that's threaded enough so as it turns or whatever mechanical function they're using to do that z step but that z step is mechanical where the x y step is um the x y resolution is based on the thickness of the light that's coming into the projector and so this kind of very subtle geometry is very difficult to retain and that's where the form 3 is really incredibly good its xy resolution is pretty wonderful i mean it's real competitors jump up into 15 to 30 000 printers and to be able to get into one at this price point um becomes a a really really powerful tool in your wheelhouse so the first thing we're going to do is a thing called dynamesh dynamesh takes the 5 million poly model and we're going to dynamesh this down to 1 million polys so we've lowered our geometry and i'll show you it's trying to retain the geometry of the original model but dynamesh takes quads and triangles but it tries to create a homogeneous mesh so all of the quads and triangles are roughly the same size so here you go this is the same model i've dynameshed it down to 1 million polys and you can see that it's a pretty even mesh now when we look at it you can see some issues here right we've lost some of the surface resolution any of the curves start to tessellate so you lose your edge fidelity this is completely softened so you can see we've softened this model there's not as much separation between these strokes and you can see even just within the computer we can lose a lot of our surface resolution or our detail right so but this gives you a nice quad model or a homogeneous model there are triangles in there but there are a lot of other tools there are reasons to dynamesh but just so you can see this so a dynameshed mesh now decimation is adaptive geometry it means it's going to put the geometry where it needs it to retain the surface detail so we're taking that 5.1 million poly model and we're breaking it down to 250 000 polys why this is important is when some people have computers that can't deal with the higher res when you're going out to printers you don't want to send it a 50 million poly model you want to send it you know 100 000 to a million poly model so these are all things of being able to retain your surface detail while controlling your geometry counts so now this is a 250 000 poly model and as you can see it's not even right where that little ridge was it added more geometry to keep the fidelity of the dimples it's obviously added a lot more geometry these are nice deep strokes so it added more geometry there and now if you look look at how much detail is retained you know 250 000. this is you know a quarter of the geometry of the decimal or of the dynamesh model but because it put the geometry where it needs to be you can wind up with a model that has all of this beautiful surface detail and is small and so now well we're going to take this down to 20 000 and you can see how it starts to break out where it won't it just doesn't have enough geometry to retain the detail and you can see here but you can see how it's thinking right it's trying to give more geometry here it's doing its best but 20 000 polys is really hard to retain that much surface detail now if you look these lines are holding up fine so for people like oh but we have great linear detail well great you know those ridges hold up well but you lose your surface resolution in a lot of ways so this brings in that fourth one which was the sculptures pro and sculptures pro i use more as a later in the process you bring these models down to this later on or when your model gets too big and you just need let's say an eye or a setting that has a lot of detail but you don't need the detail in the rest of the ring you bring it down and you use sculptors pro so that's a 20 000 poly model and i've drawn these lines on it and i want you to kind of wrap your head around some of the scale here and this is another place that those precision junkies who are like oh it must be precise computers lie to you you can't you can do things in a computer that will absolutely never come out of the computer and learning that oops sorry my little speaker that's the only way i hear those so okay oops let's go back so this is this line is 0.7 millimeters so you can see that a one millimeter little vein is not super impressive so we're now at 0.4325 0.16 and down here we're at 1 millimeter but there's no way i could have any of these lines in here with a 20 000 poly model so sculptures pro just adds geometry where you need it in the stroke so you can see that this is still a huge loose mesh but where i need more geometry sculptures pro adds it as you're using it to the location that you need it and i want you to look at this number so just me drawing those lines and doing this little bit of thing down here we went from a 20 000 poly model to an almost 2 million poly model and if you think about most cad programs we'll need to add geometry evenly to get this kind of detail so being able to get you know so if this is two million polys if you think about just this strip right here that'd be two four six eight ten so you know it'd be 20 million polys just to get this side of that half to everybody be at the level where we can get just that smallest detail this allows you to only put the geometry where you need it so now you can see here this is one millimeter 100 microns so this is a 25 micron step so that's the thickness of each layer of the printers well now let's go over here into this circle and what do we have down here what i've written my name at 0.0019 millimeters so 1.9 microns i've put this in here so you got to think those m's are probably about 1 micron high so i can put this into my model in the computer i would say that's a lot of resolution a lot of accuracy problem is we're never going to be printing at half a micron well i don't think in my lifetime it'd be very exciting though the detail i could get so once again you got to remember that your computer lies as far as reality goes right your i can do this but it'll never come out of your machine so being able to design to the printer that you're using is a very important skill and a very important thing you need to wrap your head around when you're thinking about mesh management and your product so how do we get this you're not a great sculptor you have z or you have uh matrix rhino moto but and you're not getting these sculptural elements so how do you bring that into your toolbox and for the most part it's going to be through alteration and iteration those are the ways to bring zbrush into your pipeline and have a valuable tool right so we are going to do those primarily through a number of tools libraries is a very big important one and that's libraries of design elements of settings of ring sizes of cuff sizes bangles stone shapes cutters and we're going to go through each of these and if you have matrix you are very familiar with libraries and this is a easy way for you to get elements you like and be able to use them and you can buy all kinds of stuff on the internet and there's nothing wrong with that it's usable stuff but you can take it twist to turn it and use it right so let's go into design elements these are all architectural design elements that i've lofted from those vector books and i just i've collected over a long time and i've jammed these all in here so you can see and i how i did these is each one of these is a separate element so i can just take that little swirl if i want and we've been working on these libraries for a while now so these are all elements that you don't have to sculpt but you can use on your jewelry and apply it easily and we're going to go through it settings right so you can have libraries of custom settings so you don't have to sculpt it you can import them from any of your other programs and boom now you have a library of zbrush so you just bring it in tuck it and use it just as you would in any of your other programs ring sizes i use it as a mandrel and a band so this is always the internal reference of the ring size and then this is a base model that i can use to just start you know people are like oh well how do you get a 10 and a half ring well i just use the manual and i start using this band and now i always have this consistent scale reference right cuff size is the exact same thing bangles the exact same thing these are base models that i know are the right size stone shapes i use a thing called gym cut pro which is basically a digital faceting machine and you can see how very quickly you can get custom cut stones all you have to know is your facet maps and you can find facet maps for all kinds of stone cuts out there so you just put your facet map in you can see that it generates the stone and it also gives you like a little rendering so you can see if you're what the reflection map of the stone is so yeah cutters so cutters are how i use them is sort of the air space in a mechanical function right so this is a clasp and why these are awesome is once you have this you have a mechanical function that you never have to think about again i know for a fact that that geometry works so i can sculpt this part all i do is take the cutter and slide it in so that's where i want the pen you can readjust this so it lines up with that and then you just bully and cut it and it produces the three parts look it's produced the air space for the spring and the little notch it's produced a little lip so when these sit together it won't slide in a notch for the spring and then it's done a hole in a pen so you can see how that's very freeing because i don't have to think about the geometry i just worry about my sculpture and once you have a library of cutters you can do it to anything you know i can i can do anything to this and i know for a fact that this mechanism functions so these become very powerful tools so the other way of altering your geometry is through alphas vdms and imbs alphas are displacement maps or depth maps vdms are basically three-dimensional displacement maps and i was you're like well it's all three-dimensional i'll show you what i mean by that um but it's a vector displacement map it's using a slightly different geometry or how it understands geometry an imb is insert mesh brush and within zbrush you'll also see imm which is insert multi mesh brush so you can have a library of stuff in your brush so let's say you have screw heads right you can click the one brush hit m and it comes up with a library of all the different versions of that tool you can use you just drag them out you can use them as a curve they just apply to the surface and it's just a very easy way to use some pre-built brushes and once again that way you can acquire those either through buying them or build a handful of libraries and then you don't need the sculpture anymore you know you can hire a sculptor to say oh we like you know our shops called lilly you hire someone for the weekend you make them make ten lilies and now you can use those as elements within your thing and you don't have to be a sculptor to accomplish that so insert mesh brushes this is one of my libraries and we're going to choose this element right here and i'm going to want to apply it to my jewelry so i take it out here is my model we come into our brush menu we hit create insert mush mush create insert mush is very important create insert mesh and then what you will get is a little tool that looks like this you know the icon will look like your tool and you can see now within my insert mesh tool the little menu comes up so if you have different versions of this or one that has three prongs those will show up as tools across the top here you select it and go so now we have this it's a brush it's a usable 3d element and you don't have to deal with it anymore alphas we're going to take the same element and in our alpha menu there's this button that says grab alpha from document so you can take any 3d model you want and you can turn it into an alpha by pushing a button and that's really cool a lot of people think an alpha is just a black and white image it isn't it has depth information so as you can see it's taken this object and we've turned it into an alpha and you can see that the high point is white the low point's black so whether it's from zero to ten or zero a thousand whatever the resolution is um black is your ground white is your high point and you know so you get this is a true alpha information um i did it with a person because this is where people they take a black and white picture of someone and it never works and they're like why isn't this working it's because well the pupils of your eyes often your eyebrows things like that the shadows in your ears well that's black in the picture so that all drops to the bottom when you're using an alpha as an alpha so black and white photo is not necessarily a successful alpha you can use it as an alpha but when you get to something like a face it breaks it falls apart in here let's just go through the same process grab doc and you can see this does not look like a black and white photo of napoleon right so i just want you to wrap that in your head that black and white photos are not alphas so how do we use oh vector displacement vector displacement map you notice that i've now i just projected this which is a tool onto this mesh and this mesh is the base grid which zbrush is going to use to think about this part now if you notice i pulled this edge out and i've kind of twisted that over and i've tucked some of this under so there's this overhanging area when i show you the examples you'll see where this becomes an insanely cool tool you can see our overhangs here and have tuck this under how we make that is we put this on our grid we go into our brush menu and go from mesh and that now creates a vdm this is alpha information and it can be used negatively or positively right you drag it onto the mesh and it's positive you hold down alt and drag it onto the mesh and it's negative so it can be used as a positive or negative thing but you'll see here this is 90 degrees from that edge right there are no undercuts and so if you have a complex image and you want to be able to use it with no undercuts use applying it as an alpha is often a very good tool but you can see once again no sculpting and here you can see it finds that terminal line or terminus line and then it just goes straight down where the vector displacement map look we now have these overhangs and these undercuts and this is really impressive this is really really cool so like if you're doing scales or something like that and you pull it out you can actually get it to where they overlap one another and you get real dimensionality it's an incredibly powerful tool it's very cool because not many programs will give you this three-dimensional alpha so you own a jewelry shop you built this model in matrix or rhino it's your best seller you've been using it for three years now and you're like well okay i mean it's our best seller so what do we do well you take your model you import it into zbrush and with alphas and just a little bit of pushing and pulling i think it took me like 20 minutes and i made five different iterations of my favorite ring and so now you can iterate and ideate very quickly you know once again not a lot of sculpting skills needed here right i drew a line i drew a line with an arch and went squiggle squiggle squiggle drew you know this little belly shape i cut these edges and kind of pushed that in i scooped that out and cut this edge a little and did a little sculpting i think that everyone agrees that they can probably get away with this level of sculpting and then i applied the sculptural elements to it from the alpha library or from the elements library so all of these are elements that are in my elements library that i then applied so you can see very quickly you can get a lot of stuff out there look at it and you can decide where your lines are going you're developing skus you're freshening stuff that you know is successful this is an incredibly powerful tool if you have standing inventory ring sizing and i know that matrix has a ring sizing tool but it stretches and distorts the beautiful thing about zbrush is i sculpt the first model and then i sculpt the last model and what it will do is it will morph between the two models it won't stretch it's actually a film thing it's called doing in-betweens and so it's it's morphing um sorry about that guys if nothing comes through that it kind of turns itself off so as you can see we're going to jump through our half sizing and i did two sculpts and really i did one sculpt and i just kind of stretched the other one and then retouched it up and you can see we go from here and you can see that it's sort of stretching but not really you're not getting that distortion right i don't know if sorry i didn't get those centered so it hops around a little but you can see that's incredibly powerful when you have a sculpted surface and you're not just stretching it out and the same thing can be done the other way where you have the size but you want to change the stone size and and this one is going to become a little bit more obvious how cool the morph is so we have a small size ring that's successful we want to make it different stone sizes well you can see that it's going through it's going through so all we did is we had the original model i stretched it out to get it to work at this size and it was looking a little funny because this was big and just sticking out so i sculpted this little design element into it so it looked a little bit more balanced as opposed to just having this little band with this huge thing on it right so i made this design decision to put this little ridge here so it's not just standing out well this is what's wonderful is that it's going to morph that ridge from the first piece right so you're not just once again it's not just stretching this out like i can actually change the design elements and each size now becomes a sort of cool independent design that's all within the same design vocabulary but it's slightly different so it actually looks like more thought and work has been put into the piece it's pretty cool now obviously you don't have to do that and you can do it without the distortion but these are two really cool features because it's not stretching it's morphing boolean color cutters these are things that i use a lot because once again when you have to think about the mechanical functions of a piece it becomes a nightmare because you're trying to sculpt around that and think if it's going to work and you don't i don't do that i have the air space to my mechanical functions and i use them as cutters for whatever that sculpt becomes right so you can see here this is a sculpt i didn't take into consideration really what was going on and now i can come in here and you know smooth this out and kind of just go around it and i can fine tune my sculpt to the cutter and once again it produces the air space the hinges the little lip the seats and it's just once you have a library these things they just go so with my body jewelry we know that this is a form function that we use a lot and so i know that i don't have to be careful about sculpting this because it's body jewelry we don't want to sculpt here because that's what's actually going through the body but i have tons of iterations of these it goes very quickly and then this is the mechanical function you can see that it has cut this little channel and it's cut this little dimple and um hole so we have our snap receivers this is a ball it drops down into here it rotates up and snaps but i don't have to once again wrap my head around oh is this going to work i know that that geometry never changes here's another example this is my air space it's my hinge my pen the separation the dimple and the dimple receiver the little hole right so we're getting it's cutting this space and it's cutting the notch here right so or the notch is actually here this slides over there the pin drops in and i know every time that this mechanical functions geometry works so you can see that this has been the same size ring and i just came through and did a bunch of different stuff to the bottom of it i don't think about it i know my geometry works oh so there is all the other ones cut here's another really good way of dealing with what i call cutters so this is my small gym studding tool and what this tool has you can drag it on you can place it and what this allows this is the tool here and what's inside this tool are these three stages and what we have this is the cutter for the azures and the seat these are production prongs they're longer than like rendering prongs because this is a rendering set it has a stone and the prongs are lower so i can make a render model and a production model just by clicking visual right turn it off save that one out turn it on save the other one out and that way i can create a render model and a production model at the same time and all i do is push one button and it turns you know switches between the two models i export both of them out and now you don't have your renders that have the big long production models on it or big long production prongs on it you know this is an easy way and you can develop these tools very easily to solve the issues you want no sculpting skills necessary here's a little line of tiny skull rings that we did and i sculpted the band and this is a seat so it sort almost snaps in and these are the different design heads you can see that i didn't include the whole thing because there are so many sizes you wouldn't be able to see the details but so i have all the sizes done i have the little head separated i have the little heads not separated so i have in about two and a half hours i produce the entire line all sized one solid in one cut where the heads are separate so um i can do multiple metal pieces and so that took me about two and a half hours can you imagine trying to do that in rhino or matrix where you have you know six different versions you know 14 sizes and two versions of each two and a half hours that's fast so it really helps with iterating this is just this was a jam session with a friend and so basically we started out with this band and we made it flat and then we did all kinds of different heads and you can see one you can see how quickly these little details change right scales no scales and this is about four hours worth of work and it it's just fast and once again you know these are easy things to do it's not like these are dramatic sculptural issues so z modeler is the other thing i kind of want to introduce you to and i looked at this last night and i apologize this is going to be like that draw a circle draw two lines through the circle oh it's leonardo drawing i apologize but i think you'll get the idea this is more what most cad modelers are sort of used to working with and it's basic quad and z model is an incredibly deep thing but i really use it mostly for exactly this i want my base block ups to be as low as possible and so i use the modeler to generate my base geometry most the time and so basically you can make a square so we have this drawing i have a base square i turned that square into a circle and kind of got my frame and then i just start creating cubes and you can see how very quickly you get this block out very fast and now i'm going to show you sort of the finished sculpt there was supposed to be another slide in here but i don't know where it went sorry um this is the block up and this is the final piece but if look at this and really think about this all i did was knock these edges off right i drew one line gosh that's ugly um i did a couple lines i created a little depth and this is not dramatic sculpting skills here right it's knocking off edges and drawing a few highlights and with a little bit of practice you can get to be able to do this from a block up very fast and you can create very organic lovely models without a whole lot of sculpting skill so instead of thinking of zbrush as a replacement for your other tools it can become a very integrated part of your toolbox and do those organic things that become very difficult in other programs that are easy in zbrush and i think that is the end of the slides so i think uh yeah yeah uh we have some question and answer uh questions from the audience um can you hear me uh tomas is almost there can you hear me tomos hello i can't hear you okay i don't i can't see the questions let's oh my speaker can you hear me now that again can you hear me now i can't sorry yeah all right sorry about that guys um so yeah we have we have a few questions from the chat um uh one question is what are production prongs versus render prongs oh so when when you render right you want is that the one model i don't have here oh here we go so let's look at this right so when you're rendering you want it to look like the stones are set and that means that someone took a setting tool and wedged them down so these you know pinch over the edges now when you actually make a production model you're going to give those you're not going to just only give the meat down here you give the stone setter extra meat so they have enough metal to push down and apply to get the stone to actually set so you can see here a little bit clearer where a production or a render model looks as if someone has already set the stone the production model is leaving the center enough metal to be able to set the stone cool thank you for that um scott asks uh when you make a line of stones with your prong and cutter on a ring how are you controlling the size of those stones are you using the transpose tool on each one or do you have a different method there is a lovely tool called insert multi-mesh draw size and you can go imm draw size right here and you just select whatever your draw size is a millimeter so you're setting the size of the insert multi-mesh brush right there so you can tell it whatever size you want it to be cool um let's see can you expand on morph targets to control ring sizes a couple of people have questions about resizing using morph um i don't know if that's something you can show right now um um yeah we can do a real quick example here we're just going to take let's he asks how does sculpting two models help control sizes well sculpting the two models doesn't necessarily help control sizes what it allows you to do is matrix tool what it does is it literally just stretches everything so you get weird distortions and so i can take this model let's bring it down here and so how i do it is i take the base model i then duplicate it and then i get my size measurement let's get that mandrel in here append mandrel and here we're just going to pretend this is a small size and we'll go up so i know that this is the size that i'm trying to get right and so all we do is we've come back here and normally if we're trying to get it where you're not distorting the top here let's is that actually yeah that looks like it's touching normally i'll just turn on x y and z move elastic um we'll go to w come up here first mask this off tap it a couple times so it's soft come here i'm going to stretch this out to where i know that bottoms roughly there let's turn transparency on so we can see our ring turn that off so it just looks like mesh move elastic change my brush size this touch and just get this out to where it's roughly where you want it to be and this seems like well you know i can just push a button and do this and the other one well no because now you can see here that where that distortion was i can come back in here and kind of control the distortion a little bit more push it around if i need to re-sculpt an element or something i can do it right now and then here let's do something dramatic let's just push that up all right so now we have our new size with this you know slight alteration because it's bigger so we want it to look a little bit more natural and as you can see it's not stretched we've re-sculpted it or readjusted it to where it fits the bigger size a little better than just stretching everything i don't have the mermaid ring here the mermaid ring works pretty well because it stretches everything on the side and so all we did with that is i just take this and move it up so that slight distortion you can really tune where those stretches are and just push them into place and it's that quick it's not something that you need to be you know it's it's a visual thing it's not a math thing right so you just kind of push it until it works and so now i know that this is my larger size you have to sculpt the first one and the last one and then now if you just want to do it live you can but i always like to have an anchor so i kind of know where i'm going because you can't you can't just replace the models when you're doing this so we come in we go to layers we turn one on and now i'm going to turn my reference point on we're going to mask it stretch it and obviously i'm not being as careful as you would be move get it out to where my element is i'm not going to push project because we have a limited time and it might take a little bit of time to do the projection oh this is a small model we'll do it so project i didn't line those sides up sorry guys um while we wait for that um jeff asks uh is your cutter library available anywhere um it will be i'm still kind of building it to where there are enough of them that are useful a lot of them are weird body jewelry mechanisms that no one's going to use so um a lot of them i'm working on my education platform right now so as soon as those videos are done and stuff the libraries are going to be the next big push so we're working on them yes they will be at some point if you want something specific you can email me and i'm more than willing to share them it's just um at the moment they're pretty specific and odd so you can see that now we've reprojected to our old model sorry i didn't push these up to match but you can see the process we sculpt it i come in here and i can sculpt and tune this up do whatever i need to do to it so it actually looks like i want it to look in here i'm going to let's remove these so you can sort of see what i'm talking about in the morphing instead of just the stretch right so now we turn record off and now we go through the little eyes so that's our original size we turn the eye back on that's our backside so we come here we go into movie we turn on our timeline we show and i go to the size that i want i start here and go boop now between that original model and the bigger model let's say it's five sizes we just go to the big ticks one two three four five and now as we slide this back no no wrong thing now as we slide okay that's always where you have to be careful on this one hold on let's take that out yeah no okay the order is really important and i always i do this every time i do this turn it off this is a model this is our first state turn it on this is our second state and now as we slide this you can see how it's scaling and it's a proportionate scale and luckily ring sizes is an actual proportionate scale so you're like wondering one size two size three size and then that way these half notches are half sizes if you need it right and you what's cool about this like i said it's not just stretching it's morphing and see how the details sort of go away right it didn't just stretch it literally morphed between the two and that's the big difference because it allows you to have some like vitality in your design where each one's not just a clone of each other but it's sort of this transitional thing in sizes and that's one of the things that's always bothered me is you know the detail in a small ring compared to the detail on a large ring they're different they have to be so you used to have to sculpt each one well now you just sculpt one sculpt the other and it'll do all those subtle transitions between it's really awesome powerful tool um sergio asks if he wants to buy zbrush which plug-ins should he have for jewelry well the beauty is all the plugins are basically free you get a lot of them but you'll want ring master you'll want imm draw size um dynamesh master is a very important one uh let's see what we have here i use so much z brush which is um a completely different it it does a lot of um remeshing and projecting tools at one button and that's joe made those if you go to so much zbrush you can get that one there's a powerful powerful tool let's see i think those are the only ones that are dynamesh master imm draw size oh kitko metal quotes is a really good one because it'll give you your metal evaluations right if we just hit this get metal prices and see it'll tell you what the weight is and kitko gives you spot pricing so this is what metal is selling for at the moment it's gone up a little since yesterday 1766.4 and so now you know that in karat gold it's 500 and 22 karat it's 2 337 dollars worth of metal right so kitko's an important one by the way we have a uh quick poll that um my colleague thomas will will post in the um we'll launch um which i hope you guys can answer um a few more questions here um from one from karen uh what kind of design details are lost during 3d printing what's the best way to overcome this well the best way to overcome it is buy a printer that'll print to 25 microns you lose a lot of that subtle surface stuff it's this is the stuff that you lose right and the going from this to dynamesh actually gives you a pretty good example of sort of what you lose right if you go here you can see this is sort of what printers do you lose the surface detail because it just doesn't have the resolution to carry that geometry so basically it just softens and a lot of it really depends it's funny it can really depend on the angle you print at but having a printer that has the capacity to actually cover that xy um geometry is the key right um inform labs does an incredible job with that their surface resolution is their xy resolution is very good especially for the price i mean you know the one that sort of beats it like i said starts at 25 000 as opposed to five thousand dollars so you know it it really is getting a printer that has good oh only 40 come on guys no um so a lot of it is just the capacity of your printer so if you can't print something at 25 microns there's no solution really other than getting a printer that can you know did that um yep another question um how do you create gemstone cuts with zbrush modeling tools i don't i import them like i said i use gym cut pro to generate most of my stones right this is a model out of gym cut pro i mean you could but there are plenty of just accurate stones you can just import you know as opposed to me trying to what's really funny is i was trying to make gym cut pro in zbrush with cutters and using arrays and you can but there are tools out there where you can just get perfectly accurate beautiful models i mean like trying to figure out your faceting cuts on something like this with booleans so it's much easier just to get these and once again if you don't have one of the pieces of software i can give you gym libraries it's part of the download on my website you can just if you sign up for the newsletter you get gym libraries and stuff like that so um the easiest thing is just to import it uh just a couple of um people asking where the available the video will be available afterwards um so we'll have to wrap up by 1 pm but the video will be available on demand in an hour or so and eventually on youtube um i think we have time for just uh maybe a couple more questions really quick ones um let's see um we went over this a little bit but uh how is it possible to add 3d textures in the model using zbrush well i mean do you mean like just random textures i think i think i think he probably means like just uh maybe you can show applying an alpha uh and what that really means sure sure so let's go to our full resolution model and so basically let's pick a standard brush standard standard just has a better profile for laying on alphas and so you can just take your alpha boop and drag it on it's oops i say that it doesn't work the alpha didn't come on either there we go um and it's literally just sort of dragging something on so where's napoleon here's no that's not napoleon all right we'll just use this we'll take this let's turn that off come here grab doc so you can see the alpha's there and now we go back to our ring and we just drag it on and you can see that it'll come on i have symmetry on and so we're getting a quad symmetry you can see it's sort of flat there so we can kick up the intensity a little and drag it on and so you can see is if you have a library of stuff you can very quickly just drop these on as detail and you don't have to know how to sculpt now here's the displacement map right you can see here that it's detailed and it has these overhangs and so we come into our brush menu sorry i have to actually stop us here um but uh we have a hard stop at one but um yeah just to if you want to give a plug for your um your classes yeah so if you go to on vector school there is um i will probably do another class this year there and then by the end of the year it should be up at zbrush jewelry workshops um if you go there there's an email link or if you put yourself on the mailing list you can download my tool set and my ui and be on the mailing list just when any of the classes go up we send it out to that email list as well all right fantastic thank you so much uh tomas wilsbach um uh well well again as i said make the video available afterwards but uh thanks everyone for joining us today uh and i hope you'll join us as well for the panel discussion on thursday have a great day everyone have a great one

Channel: Formlabs

Views: 7,410

Rating: 4.9509201 out of 5

Keywords: zbrush tutorial, zbrush 3d printing, zbrush jewelry, zbrush basics, how to use zbrush, zbrush tutorial for beginners, zbrush jewelry tutorial, zbrush 3d print, 3d printing zbrush, zbrush 3d printing tutorial, zbrush ring, jewelry modeling, jewel 3d model, zbrush for 3d printing, jewelry 3d software, free zbrush tutorials, 3d printing from zbrush, jewelry wax modeling, modeling jewelry, zbrush jewelry tutorials

Id: W3Vq88BulKQ

Length: 61min 0sec (3660 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 17 2020