ZBrush Hard Surface Techniques I

what subsea pressures welcome back to sea fever my name is Ricky and today we're gonna be going over hard surface techniques in ZBrush alright okay I'll cut with the silly accent guys I've had way too much coffee just got finished with a workout in a pretty amped to be making this week's discussion in this wonderful ou program that we call ZBrush so I'm gonna try not to go too crazy with my frantic bouncing all over the document bear mine is kind of how I process my thinking whenever I'm in here so um I'm beginning into questions through this channel and through another channel that have it's a bit of an older channel people asking you know how how can i sculpt hard surface forms so similar to these where you have these cuts you know where one one form runs into another similar to what you would see on say an automobile okay so I figured you know I've been meaning to put together somewhat of a series on here so why not jump right into it with this so let's uh let's do some groundwork first so whenever we are working with something like this we need to start somewhere so what I'm going to do before I do anything else is I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to grab just a spear going to make it a polymesh3d then I'm going to dynamesh it I'm just going to leave the resolution okay let me bust it down say like 72 or something like that okay go ahead and turn on symmetry and let's talk about what we are going to be tackling here first we're going to talk about brushes what sorts brushes that I like to use um granted I am always going to tell you guys that there is no wrong way about doing things in this program there are best practices and many of the techniques that I picked up along the way a lot of them I did not think on my own shocking right no um but a lot of the things that I picked up or through other people like Mike Jensen my my own instructor Isaac Ulster whenever I was going to school out and at the Art Institute and then there are the things I've picked up on my own through experimentation things like that so we're going to be using combination brushes we're also going to be going through some reach apology here in ZBrush um you can choose to go to an external program say like a 3d coat or even with Maya with this quadrille capabilities but we're going to keep it in-house here here in ZBrush because you know not everybody has access to those other programs so we want to make it we're gonna make it user friendly here today alright so once we get that done then we will jump into using polygroups and then use increasing functions to be able to get the final result okay so I'm going to try and blast through this as fast as possible but you know I am going to take somewhat sometime to make sure that we don't lose anything in the mix right so what I would usually do if I don't have a concept if I'm just messing around is I will just stick to the basics I'll grab a sphere and start pulling things around um I don't even know I'll you have concept right now but you know I'll just use my transpose before I even get into the movie brush right so pull things out and I think that's pretty good to go all right and so what I like to do is just keep it basic right what we're looking for whenever we're working with hard surfaces we're looking for a change in surface we're looking for those those angle changes those phase changes right so I'm not sure exactly what we're going to make you're going to be some weird alien spaceship head thing I don't know what I'll do is I'll just start cutting into the surface I'll be cutting in and then I'll also build up right with somewhat of a large brush you know I don't not going to be too concerned with the way that this is flowing right remesh smooth out the surface but what I really want is just some surface change fill that out look like but it's so what I'll do is I'll just I'll just cut into things and just kind of formulate some sort of an idea you know how do I want this to run into that that to run into this all right so this is no this this is more than enough we're not even going to be cracking away at the entire piece here but so once I have you know just a basic form I'll jump over to Damien's standard I'll use this or slash 3/3 is like using it a lot more sometimes because it really gets in there um so I'll use the Damien standard and usually what I'll do is I'll crank up the lazy Mouse lazy radius right and I'll just use this and the majority of the work is done here just kind of drawing things out I'm sketching right just sketching on dynamesh piece of geometry so I'll go through sketch things out figure out you know where I want my little panel lines to be then after I'm done setting those creases in I'll start coming through and deciding you know how do I want my topology to flow this way so I'll set a crease there then once I've established that I can go ahead and set one here - lets do one there - um once I've established that then I'll come over with the say H polish like using H polish because what it's going to do it's going to push the Geo up to that edge right I'm not being too careful here no need to be this is just a sketch right you'll see what I mean here in a moment whenever we go to retype this so try to you know use a large brush especially for this portion and don't limit yourself you know you might think that you have a solid idea what you were going for but don't be afraid to experiment I mean that's the entire purpose of this whole process right so I'll come through with an H polish the side set that in and then just use it to round out this surface you come over with the smooth then you can also just stamp it down right just a lot of it all it is is just a bunch of its push and pull right you're pulling out a surface come back over with the H polishing stamping it back down okay now whenever it comes to other things like those contours that we will work that was working with on the previous project where you have let's say a shape like this and we want it to run down right we want it to cut in with the out real quick you use the same sort of principle right so we've come through with the Damien standard pull the shape down right and then likewise will push the shape right back in pull it back out then with a smaller brush size push that back in then come back over with the edge polish stand the right back in place and continue going about your day nothing too fancy nothing too crazy right and so you can use things like that to really go to town um you can come up with some pretty crazy forms just by doing that right and so so that takes care of the sculpting part of this this entire equation but then we got to start looking into okay well how do I take that and turn it into something manageable because there is no way that Maya is going to work for me with geometry that is as dense as this well that's great assessment and that's something that we have to tackle here in ZBrush so I've got the Dark Lord of the Sith here it's a bit of an older project there's some things I not happy about with it but I bring it up because this is a similar situation right where I had a sculpture me solo that so I had a piece and some reference and went through sculpted things out set creases doing all that stuff you can see here I wasn't nearly as careful here as I just was on that previous demonstration and the thing is that I have to be because what we're going to be doing here in a moment is we're going to be reach apologizing some pieces right so let's do that let's go back over to here and let's use this so what I want to do is I want to create like a like a like a panel that goes all the way around here yeah so what we need to do is we need to reach apologises now we could break this part we could try running this through the zremesher if we wanted to and let's go ahead and do that let's let's let's see how it looks at what I'm what I'm basically getting at is that it's not going to give us the results that we would really like to have so we're going to crank it all the way down hit with the zremesher and it gets pretty close I mean this is this is manageable but it's not optimal so I mean I'm even going to run it with the alternate algorithm see how it goes still not bad but still not exactly what I want so here is where we're going to go we're going to hop over here grab it see sphere alright and then understand that this is a completely separate project okay once we go down we're going to go down to rigging and we are going to select a mesh and what we're going to select is our um project that we worked on okay or you know what now we're going to we're going to work on this once we have that selected let me turn off solo so we can actually see it right it does not matter where that Z sphere sits in correlation to that mesh once we have that taken care of we're going to open up this topology tab and hit edit topology all right now we're in edit topology mode a few things to be aware of in here you cannot use shift to snap the view while you're in draw mode here because it will add a point you don't want that okay but if you're in move mode you can do that all day long okay see all right all right so what we want to do is go ahead and put on turn-on symmetry and let's go ahead and start drawing out some topology so whenever you're at this Green Line is going to be your center line and when we need to do start drawing out some quads so let's go ahead and get that done and I'm not going to be too careful here I'm not even going to try to follow this whole entire form in fact I'm going to bring this down pretty far and yeah we'll work with this just be mindful that this red dot here is going to be at the very last vert that you drew and let's say I'm not ready to go back up in that direction so what I want to do is I want to clear it so I'll hold control and control it works with the masking feature normally whenever you're sculpting and what I'll do is I'll just double click off of the off of the Geo and then I'll go right back into it and I usually make a habit of hitting that pretty regularly right so that's good enough it's probably not stretch kind of strangely but I'm actually going to work with this so the next thing that we need to do is we need to get this turned into a piece genome now the same principle would apply if we were going through and making a panel like this you would just go through and draw things out and call it day so what we need to do is we need to head over to adaptive skin and what I'm going to do is I'm going to make two versions I'm going to make one with no thickness and one that does have some thickness so on this adaptive skin we're going to drop this density down to one and just hit preview what's going to do it's going to show us what our piece of geometry looks like right turn on poly frame that's what we have to work with I'm going to end up moving this edge up to even things out a little bit but so once we have that we say we want to make this an adaptive skin so we will head back over to our our main project and we'll say okay I'm going to pin that skin to this project and it's going to drop it right below right and it's sitting right in the same exact space before I go any further though I want to head back over into that project and turn off preview because I want to grab one more piece so at this time what I'm going to do is I'm going to create some thickness you can go two ways you can go on the positive and that's going to make it come off of this form or you go into the negative so that it drops down to the form so that's what we're going to do I'm going to set it into the negative and then I'm going to preview this again so now right right now there is thickness but you can barely see it so let's um let's drop that down a little bit more review alright now you can see alright and so now I'm going to make this one an adaptive skin as well we're going to head back over to that project then we're going to pinned that skin along with the other one now we need to start talking about polygroups increasing so what I'm going to work on first is I'm going to work on the piece with the thickness because this is a bit of an older way of going about things alright um with the z model it kind of changes things up but let me take care of this this verts here so what I'm doing is I'm grabbing the mask lasso I'm just going to mask those verts and hope that I get the ones underneath as well then I'm going to invert the mask I'm just going to grab my transpose line move that around yeah grab those two good just kind of even things out okay so whenever we created this it gave us three different polygroups so we gave us one for the inside and give us one for the combining edge then it gave us one for the outside and there are a few things that we can do arm I've seen people go a few different ways and I'll show you I'll show you one way and it's going to be bouncing back forth between making polygroups and setting creases so what I've seen people do let's go ahead and set this crease tolerance to 90 in this creasing level to three okay this is going to be the the tolerance the degree tolerance okay and this is going to be the subdivision level at which armed the kree stops holding if that makes sense so it's going to stay a solid crease up until level three and then once once you move beyond that then you're going to start seeing um see it a soft now okay so let's let's look at this first way okay so what I've seen a lot of people do is they'll come through the grab and edge right and then they'll just manually crease it so let's take Greece right and you'll know it's crease because they're going to be a little dotted line there and they'll go through and they'll go through each little piece grab that no grab another one they'll just go through and grab a whole series of things well I don't work like that on what I like to do is I like to take advantage of the polygroups feature so there's this thing down here called in the polygroup tab called roots by normals right so if I go grouped by normals ZBrush is going to look at the normal difference based on the maximum angle so right now I have a set of 45 degrees right and so it's going to give me a group for every change in surface and by doing that I effectively knocked out 90% of the work that I need to do I do need to go through here and turn this into a poly group what I'm going to do is hit ctrl W on the keyboard and then I also need to turn yeah that one turn that one to a polygraph is well the reason that I'm doing this is because rather than go through and try to force try to do creases for every single move that I make I'd rather just make ZBrush do the work for me because I'm lazy I mean so what I would do is I'll say hey there's this crease by polygroup function let's do that crease by polygroup hmm look amazing it's set creases for every change of polygroup and so I can even go further let's say I didn't want to do that yet um let's say I want to hold this edge here all right I'll make this is a pulling group as well okay that works then we'll do that again crease pop polygroup and it might give me some walking this here but we'll see um so now all we got to do is we need to subdivide and watch the magic happen you're going to laughing if there's some weird pinching so you can see it started smoothing things out and I'm up to the subdivision level for now if I go up another one we should start seeing surrounding yeah and so give us that nice a little bit of a bevel right the cool thing about this is that this still sculptable piece of geometry guys you still come back over here and make whatever changes but you've effectively knocked out the majority of your work by doing something like that so that's that's doing it a bit of the old fashioned way let's have a look at doing it with the zmodeler right so we have the same exact piece of geometry effectively let's go ahead and grab our zmodeler brush yes okay thank you and let's turn on our poly frame again I want to grab that edge and put the mask move that up okay lectern align symmetry and I'm going to use cue mesh with the ones who grabbed all the entire polygroup I'm just going to queue mesh that out okay and essentially you can go through and do the same exact thing or you can done you know you make quick work of it by doing use increasing function tube so like your vibe border grab that that same thing here there there and there and there now if I turn on the dynamic subdivision hitting the D on the keyboard you'll see that it changes no you also grab this surface there take that its own polygroup dynamic subdivision boom right same thing and so by doing things like this you know this is just one piece right and so by using techniques like this this is the same way that I went around creating Vader it's the same way that I'm going about I went about creating this a fembot that I'm working on right now see here this originally started it's just uh just a sketch right so love this and I just went around the surf went around this this started out as a sphere I started pulling things out shaping them no that was um use a curved tube and it's just a matter of using brushes set increases smoothing the mount and then going back over and reach apologize in them and then retooling them now this has changed quite a bit in the time that I've worked on it um but you know it is what it is there is no right or wrong way to go about using things here in ZBrush um I've heard so many different things for people especially whenever you know I heard it back whenever whenever I started working on on things like this people would say why are you using G brush to do hard surface um and they're the same people that you know that will say well you know max is better or Maya is better you know the only thing that is better is the thing that that speeds up your workflow if you're great and the hard surface and max or Maya good on you but you know other people either a don't have access to those programs or maybe they struggle with those things some people are coming over from traditional sculpting background that could run circles around most people in digital realm if if they had the proper amount of training so arm you know don't don't just assume that that there is some golden right way about doing things there are best practices there are definitely best practices and they you know they have proven to be successful but you know don't ever let somebody else is uh view on how to approach things affect your workflow because um whenever you're doing things that are essentially based in and imagined and came out of either your imagination or someone else's imagination it's a little bit insane to sit there and tell somebody that you know that's not right you know we do have things like organic things you know especially when ever comes to human anatomy and things like that that need to need to be grounded in reality but you know who says that we have to follow any given rule and I guess I'll in my little rant there but I hope that this was useful I hope that this is this answered some questions if if you guys do have any questions feel free to reach out to me I'll be more than happy to help you with any situation or point you in the right direction definitely join the the Facebook group some people already have they've gone out and put put some of their work up it's really cool see what you guys are working on definitely get out there get involved if you don't I've got got some free tools free resources for anybody to grab if you only joined the group just to grab those things good on you and you know I'm glad you did so my aim here is to make sure that you know there's someone out there delivering some some useful word on how to do anything in here but always please feel free to take it with a grain of salt anyway guys thanks for watching if you're new please subscribe otherwise have a great day and happy zbrushing take care

Channel: ZFever

Views: 173,285

Keywords: zbrush tutorial, zbrush sculpting, zbrush hard surface, zbrush zmodeler, zbrush 4r7, zbrush armor, zbrush dynamesh, zbrush hard surface tutorial, zbrush hard surface modeling, zbrush hard surface techniques, zbrush low poly, zbrush polygroups tutorial, zbrush retopology, zbrush retopology tutorial, zbrush sculpting tutorial, zbrush sculpting tutorial for beginners, #1 zbrush sculpting tutorial for beginners series - organic & hard-surface t-rex 1080p hd, ZBrush Crease

Id: 5Fm8d9bqHRE

Length: 32min 40sec (1960 seconds)

Published: Wed May 06 2015