ZBrush Jewelry Basics: Flower Eternity Ring

hey guys it's Kat and I'm here today to teach you a little bit about how to make this flower eternity band within ZBrush now this is a design that I've created in the past using radial symmetry and extract on a cylinder so there are different ways to get this effect one of the things I find important is that this is a flower that bends around the finger so it's comfortable and to do that I'm using a different technique using something called array mesh which is over here on the right hand side and also another tool called bend arc which I was just introduced to through rick powell a new friend on facebook I am using my custom interface so you'll see I have a lot of buttons down here on the bottom if you're new with ZBrush this makes it a lot easier to cut through all of the functions that you'll never use so if I recommend that you use the link below and the instructions to install that so when you're following along it's a little bit easier I'm also using the full version of ZBrush 2018 and not core which is going to help us at the end when we start measuring the thickness of the band and making sure that this is completely printable and if anybody's curious I'm working on a Mac however I will give you the commands in both PC and Mac versions also tell you I've successfully cast this by printing it on a formlabs form to printer and casting it in my home studio so this does work it's printable and very wearable so with that let's go ahead and get started alright so I have just launched ZBrush so we'll all get the same messages so there'll be some messages I'll tell you that you can ignore and some of them that don't tell the truth so anyway in launching ZBrush the first thing I need to do is get rid of this lightbox and you can do that by clicking hide up here or you can press the comma key which is a shortcut so we'll start out over here with the simple brush tool and we want a sphere 3d and I'm starting this way so we're all on the same page the reality is you could also use the dynamesh sphere from the lightbox but we'll go ahead and use sphere 3d from simple brush and once we've chosen that we'll click and drag here on the stage and immediately press the T key is in Tom which then activates the edit mode a way that you can tell that you're in the setup mode is you have this little tiny white line that goes all the way around the center canvasser stage so that's important so once you're in that mode you can click and drag you can't see a lot though because because you have a sphere and it's it just there's nothing sculpted so you really can't see it if I look over here on the right-hand side we want to also turn on the floor the floor grid you can also turn that on by pressing shift P so go ahead and click on that and you can see here that the floor is a little bit strange it doesn't look like there's perspective and that's good you don't want perspective turned on if you do it looks like this make sure over here on the side that perspective is turned off this will be important for when we're working with symmetry and trying to slice things so so that's set up correctly if I look down here at the bottom I can see that I'm missing some buttons which for me is always a quick indicator to tell me that this is not a polymesh3d so the first step before you do anything else is you need to convert this so over on the right hand side about four rows down there's a button that says make polymesh3d so go ahead and click that when you do a lot of other things will appear over here on the side and the rest of my buttons appear so that's always handy having this layout this way because I can tell if I've taken that important step now let's take a look underneath the hood and see what's happening with our sphere if I go to the right hand side here I'm looking for a little grid that says poly F at the bottom go ahead and click on that and take a look at your sphere and one thing that you'll notice is that this has a lot of longitude and latitude lines sort of like the lines on a globe within ZBrush though this makes it very difficult to sculpt so the next step is to convert this into something called a dynamesh object which will evenly distribute that mesh the surface so look towards the bottom if you've got my interface and we're looking for this dynamesh button if you don't have that loaded yet you'll want to but over here on the side it's under geometry and then you can scroll down and find dynamesh right here but we want to accept the resolution and the reason is is because this is pretty early in the process so I'm not really caring much about what the resolution is so at this point I'm just going to accept the default and click dynamesh and you can see that that then distributes a mesh all over the surface that's more even so there's a lot of polygons in there there are some triangles but not a lot of them but this will make it so this is sculptable now the other thing I want to do is to click and drag on the background and press the shift key which will lock in on a top view which will be important here in a minute when we start making the flower now we don't need to see the mesh anymore so we can turn it off by clicking the polyframe button or pressing shift F so now we're ready to start sculpting so I want to turn on radial symmetry and I can do that here under the transform menu or I also have it in my interface sort of so you can toggle symmetry on and off by pressing the X key so you can do that or just go to transform look at activate symmetry and I know because of the orientation of our sphere that I want symmetry about the y axis I need to turn off X and I also want to turn on radial symmetry in my interface and with my hotkeys I can kind of toggle these on and off by pressing four five six and seven seven is radial so once you get used to this know that there's some shortcuts for that as well now as I run my cursor over the sphere you can see that there's little tiny dots situated all the way around and I did choose a radial count of eight so you can see here radial count of eight you could also adjust that to be five or six or whatever else you want it to be now the tool we're going to use today is one that I just recently became familiar with and it's called snake hook so click over here under the brush palette over here and look for snake hook which is down here somewhere in the bottom the other thing you can do is you can use a shortcut which is to type the letter B then s and H so B is some boy SS and Sam H is in holiday I guess and that will also load the snake hook brush you will also want this brush to be a little larger so we can press the spacebar and then increase the draw size to maybe something like 200 now as i zoom in and just for a quick refresher so zoom in you're gonna press the option or Alt key so option on the Mac Alt on a PC and hold it then click on the background with your mouse then release the key and then you can zoom in and out so if you're not familiar with navigation you might also want to go back to you the ZBrush coresight and it has some really good tutorials on navigation but we'll assume everybody's on the same page here so we'll zoom in a little bit and then I'm going to click and just sort of start dragging out petals on my flower you will see that this is not really pretty so there's a lot of faceting here and that looks really ugly so why don't we take a look at the underlying mesh again so we'll click on polyframe or press shift F and see what's happening here in fact I can see some of this you know some of those polygons actually disappear so whenever you've done a lot of distortion on a ZBrush model you want to read ina mesh assuming it's already a dynamesh object you can click this button twice so click dynamesh once then twice or hold down command on a Mac ctrl on a PC and then draw a box on the background and it will redistribute that mesh and every time we do a good amount of sculpting then we want to read dynamesh again now I can turn off the poly frame and it still looks really bad so if you're in my interface there's one thing you can do that's quick you can use the polished crisp edges you want to click on this dot right here and I could maybe polish it the number two and another thing I could do is I could use the shift key and then click and drag to smooth that out so that's nice and smooth now then we can use our brush to make some more changes so I just want to drag this out a little bit more and if I want before it starts getting ugly again I can read dynamesh hold down commander control and draw the box use your shift key and smooth it out if you want and then drag it out a little bit more so it's just a process of doing this several times until you get a petal shape that you like another thing is if you want these petals to overlap a little bit more I can also mask off one side so I can hold down command on a Mac ctrl on a PC and then be sure and click on the object and that will bring in a mask like that where you can then drag your petals over and get it closer to the other one like that then I can use command or control click and drag a box on the background and maybe just click now clicking on the background reverses the mask so we'll hold down command or ctrl draw box and then we do that one more time to read ina mesh you now I can use my shift key again to smooth this all out and make it look pretty and there I have a nice flower so I can go in and do some sculpting but we're going to clean it up a little bit first let's turn to the side so click and drag and then press the shift key to lock in on a side view now we'll switch to the move mode either by clicking on the icon or pressing W and you'll see that it gives you this gizmo 3d if you don't have the gizmo be sure and click this button up here or press Y now hold down commander control and click up I did it wrong I actually clicked on the line instead so I'll undo hold down commander control and then click on this green box and then drag up and this is a shortcut for using the clip command which there is a clip command that you can find up here under the brush menu I guess but you can use the gizmo to do it very quickly and easily if I click and drag to the bottom you can see that it cut off the bottom but it also closed it at the same time and so that looks good again I click and drag and use the shift key to get to a side view and now do the same thing hold down command on a Mac control on a PC click and drag on that little green box and drag this sound so it's even on the top so we now have a flat flower that looks something like that then that looks good I can then switch back to the draw mode and use the shift key to smooth this and do the same on the bottom so it's just making it neat will eventually be cutting that off so it won't matter for right now now we can go to the top so let's zoom in on the top and get a good view and I'm going to switch to a different brush I want to switch to the claybuildup tool which is up here in the quick picks and maybe zoom in on one of these these petals and I want to carve this out so let's get a smaller brush I'll press the spacebar and reduce the draw size to maybe something like 90 or 100 now I can just start skull ding although I'll pause for a moment because I just put a lot of material on let me undo and I can adjust the intensity up here at the top or it's also located under the same place when we press the spacebar the intensity is right here I would take that down to maybe 5 or 6 because it deposits less material and it's a lot easier to smooth out so I'm just going to enhance the edge here sort of build this up just smooth that out and then you can maybe bring this into the center just sort of build it up and I'll show you another trick something that I always do when I'm making jewelry is I like to zoom out and see what this looks like from afar and I'll show you why so once I smooth that out zoom all the way out till this is about actual size and I started doing this after a lot of unsuccessful prints and unsuccessful jewelry so I've learned that when I'm working on it big I think it looks one way but then when it's actually printed small it looks different so looking at this I can see that those edges aren't really visible so I might want to pump them up just a little bit so I'm just gonna add more material make them a little thicker I can smooth that out I can also use the option or Alt key to sort of carve away a bit sort of sculpt this a little and then the shift key will smooth it and if you play with this you can also kind of get some nice streaks that sort of look like flower petals that's another thing I've done maybe make it a little bit more realistic so as you zoom out see if those are even visible you can also change materials so over here on the side I have a modder T blue or mah dirty blue you can switch it to that and that sometimes makes it a little more visible when you you move out like that now the reality is is that the low parts of this if I'm going to darken this with a patina you won't actually you won't see any of those streaks unless they're fairly prominent so just get a flower that's that's appealing to you and if you want you could hit pause for a moment while you work on your flower and then come back so so assuming that you're continuing on let's go ahead and flatten this middle part real quick and I'm going to start sketching in a center of my flower and this can be something that is just flat or it could have a Ridge on it sort of like a sunflower and I do another version of this where I actually dig out a hole and then use that as a starter to set a stone later on so you could drill that out later and set a stone so let's just say I'll leave mine like that but you know be sure and kind of bump this up I want a nice edge though between the flower so that needs to be a fairly vertical edge you can see it has sort of flat sides on it and if you want to fix that you could also get it out into your radial count and pump that up a little bit I just bumped it up to 37 and that will make it a lot smoother so let's say if I wanted to do that as a flush set stone for example I could do this and there's my flower alright so now that you have a flower and a center now we're ready to start working on the next part of this tutorial which is to repeat the pattern so I am going to turn off radial symmetry by pressing X or you can go up to the transform menu and let's talk about how to duplicate this we're going to be using a function called array mesh so it's going to be over here on the right but before we do that let's see if we can bump down this resolution a little bit because the higher the resolution or number of active points on this flower the longer it takes to create the array mesh so let's see if we can play with this a little bit I'm going to go down to the dynamesh box at the bottom and look at the resolution and I'm going to bump this down quite a bit let's put in something low like 32 and then read ina mesh so hold down command or control andrey dynamesh and see what happens and I did this one really low on purpose to make a point so you can see that this low resolution is not good so we'll undo and let's try something else we were at 128 so let's jump up to 60 it automatically updates that to 64 and then let's read ina mesh and see and this is still a little bit rough and it's doing something weird with the petals so I'll undo and then let's maybe go up a little bit more let me go to 96 and then read ina mesh and see how it did and the difference here is that it is a little bit pixelated but not bad my active points are now it went from 140,000 something to 63 so that just means that when we do our array it will be a lot faster also if we zoom out you can't tell the resolution is lower but once this is printed it won't make a difference so so there we go now let's go over and work on the array mesh now in the past if I were doing a ring like this I might use something called a radial array and there is a preset under the light box for a radial array the problem is is that your ring ends up then not being it's kind of flat it's not nicely curved around the Rings so that's why I don't want to use that you can hide this or press the comma key to get rid of it oh and I do remember one other thing we need to do a little bit of maintenance here so the other thing is is I need to turn this to the side press click and drag and then press shift-key hold dental command on a Mac ctrl on a PC and start anywhere out here down at the bottom and I need to draw a mask that comes up right here where this starts to curve I need to double check the top and make sure that it hasn't masked off anything else and it hasn't now I need to reverse the mask and to do that hold down commander control and click once on the background like that I can also soften this mask a little bit by pressing commander control and clicking once on the flower not on the background but on the flower and you can see that blurred the mask a little bit and that might make for nicer sides now we switch to the move mode and use this green arrow to pull this down and that thickens our flower so you want to make it look something like that now to clear the mask hold down commander control draw a box on the background and remember anytime we stretch something we need to read dynamesh it if you want to see why click on the polyframe button and you can see that we've distorted those polygons so let's read ina mesh by holding commander control and drawing a box on the background and you can see it distributed the mesh nicely if we turn off the poly frame though it still looks kind of chunky and awful so let's switch to the draw mode and then use our cursor oh we also need symmetry turned on so let's go back to transform activate symmetry and we need to make sure that that radial count is 8 so type 8 and hit enter and then you can use your shift key to blend this in make it nice and smooth something like that all right so that gives us a flower and it's a nice thick flower because once we're done with this we'll need to resize it so we want more material than less all right now to go back over to the lightbox here I'm sorry the array mesh we want to click on the button that says array mesh and now we want to repeat right here type in 11 and hit enter now this is going to be the number of flowers on your ring plus one because we're gonna actually chop the ends off so I have 11 here but nothing seems to have happened now if I go down here to the X amount slider I can then click and drag this although I'm gonna go a different direction and this depends on what direction I was at so let me undo I had to click on the background and and undo and let me try it's not why it would be the z-axis so I want it to go over to the side like this and in a moment we're going to rotate this flower so we'll make some adjustments back and forth but we want it to be something like this where it's overlapped now I can tell that symmetry is still on so let's turn it off because it might give unexpected results and then let's switch to the move mode and by doing that we can then rotate our flower in a way so the petals are oriented nicely but now it's still not it's not pretty so let's increase the size just a little bit and I think that's good so what we're looking for is we want these petals right here to be touching in fact they could be further away you can rotate this if you want a bit but what we're looking for is we're looking for these petals to be touching and then these are gonna overlap so let's even go a little bit further that's too far obviously but just kind of bring it together and I can't oh there it is okay I brought it together mine's at about 7.6 and the way that this is overlapped with these other two petals is just fine so we're going to be angling this in just a moment to make these come in front of the other one now we need to recenter this axis so you'll hold down option on a Mac or alt on a PC which unlocks our access and then click on this round arrow which then reorients the axis so it's straight up and down now we'll click on the background and drag and hold the shift key and use this little circle here to rotate the flower just enough so that the petal sticks out on the front like this and that looks good so we just want it to be raised up enough that it's going to show up when it prints and so I think that that works just fine now if you need to make any other adjustments like I might want to take this a little bit further I might go in and actually type the number maybe seven point seven and hit enter and that was the wrong direction so click again and do seven point four five and hit enter and that brought these together so there's not a hole there will be a hole right here between the flowers but this other one is is nice and closed so there we go there is our flower band now I need to reset this axis one more time so I'll hold down option or alt and then click on the round arrow again and that centers it and that won't matter here shortly but that's what we need now the last step is to go in and convert this to a mesh now what happens within C brush if I click on this polyframe you can see that ZBrush sees this as a meshed object these other ones are just repeated instances of that which means that my active points are very low because ZBrush thinks this is the only one that's sculptable however to go in and make changes to the other ones I need to convert it to a mesh so within the array mesh section I need to click make mesh and it will take a little bit of time to do it actually that was pretty quick but it's usually you know it's going to jump up over a million point so you can see it went from ninety four thousand to a million if this had been say a hundred and fifty thousand it would have taken a lot longer so now I can zoom out and see that this is now all one mesh so I can turn this polyframe off and we'll go to the next step so now we need to find the center of this so let's go ahead and use this third icon up here on the gizmo to find the center and then we need to use the home button I guess the home icon will Center it within our universe so let's click on that so it's now centered here on our grid so it means it's centered and then I need to reset the gizmo one more time so we'll use option or alt-click on that and that just makes sure that this is lined up correctly that looks pretty good now we need to cut off the back because the back as you can see is kind of weird so let's cut that off and we're going to use that same clipping function in the gizmo to do that hold down command on the Mac ctrl on a PC and click and drag this little green part until it looks something like this and that gives us a nice flat back of the ring so that looks good all right so the next step is to cut off the ends so let's go ahead and close up the array mesh section as we don't need it anymore and we are going to the subtool palette and we will be appending a cube so use the append button and append a cube 3d which is here in the middle let's go ahead and turn on transparency though because this will make it easier to tell that the flower band is active and we need to make this little cube active so let's click on it and now it also gives us the silhouette at the flowers which will make this easier we need to increase the size of the cube so click on this yellow box and drag that until it is bigger than the flowers and then we'll move it over using the blue arrow to this side over here and what I'm looking for is just some sort of reference point so say for example I could try and use maybe the center I could use the center of the flower could be my reference point or it could be that I'm looking at the edge of a petal although that sometimes creates more cleanup so I'm gonna go for about the middle of this little circle here in the middle or the center of the flower now I can zoom out I need to duplicate this box so I'll hold down command on a Mac ctrl on a PC and click and drag a copy over to the other side now I'll zoom in and then use the blue arrow to move this to the center of my flower and you just want to make sure that it's kind of in the same place as the other side and the reason I was able to move this one without the other one is because this one's masked so the next step is to release the mask by holding down commander control draw a box on the background and now both of these are are amassed so we'll be subtracting this so we're doing the next operation as a dynamesh boolean operation so what that means is our cubes now will be subtracted so we need to click this third icon right here that's a moon and that tells the brush we're going to subtract it we need to make sure that our flower band is above those if it's not you can use these arrows down here to move it up and down but it needs to be above the other layer and we also need to know that this is a dynamesh object so remember I said when I load my interface I like having the dynamesh button visible because at a glance I can tell you this is ready now we select and make sure that the band is active we can see it's blue here and it's it's grayed out up here we're going to merge down which is down here below in this sub tool pallet so we'll use merge down or if you're in my interface the merge down button is right here so click that and it's going to tell you this is not undoable anyway it's a lie it is so you can click always okay but you can actually undo that operation just click OK these are now merged together it didn't subtract them which is a little deceptive but the last step on this is to go ahead and read ina mesh so remember we hold down commander control click and drag on the background and that will perform another dynamesh operation and it will subtract these cubes now we have a band that should be continuous if we were to wrap this around the edges will meet so that is everything that we need to do to prepare the ring for bending so the next step is to go over here to this little gear right here and choose bend arc when we do that we get a totally different interface item that we probably haven't seen but we need to click and drag to the side of this and remember which side your design is on click and drag and use the shift key to look directly at a side move it down here to the bottom and then click and drag this little green cone until it stops moving so you'll see it stopped we can't see it at the top but we know when it stops moving it's actually it's wrapped it all the way around and you can see if you go to the top that that should be pretty close but enough that we can then blend it later and now the last step is to use the white cone if you go to the right it will increase the size but if you go to the left it decreases and we need to make this so it's kind of thick like we had intended and then turn and move it to the side what you'll see is that the flower is probably not proportional so like the center is a good indicator of that it's not round so you can use the little white cone here to try and make it so that flower Center is nice and round and just make sure that it looks like what you want it to look like okay so that looks good it's not squashed you know because before we had squashed it like that but we want it to come back and be round and when we do that we are almost ready for the next operation now I can tell you I'm using a Wacom pad so when I'm trying to do that with my pen it's hard so I just switched over to my mouse to get that correct now there's one last step on this which is look for the little gear click on that and we need to accept the been dark operation and when we do that this is now a rounded piece it still has not merged this totally so these ends are close but it's not merged so the way we do that is we read ina mesh hold down commander control and draw a box on the background and watch what happens so it blended that in pretty nicely you can switch to the draw mode and then hold the shift key and sort of give that a little bit of a blend and keep your design intact and don't forget to come to the side the back won't matter because we're about to cut that off so just make sure that everything looks pretty good and remember if you're turning it need to click on the background like that and there we have our flowers so there's my little flower ring so last but not least it's the part where we actually make this actual size and let me see if I can bring this up real quick but I usually use the ring size Wiki see if I can bring that up there we go go to Wikipedia and there's a good article in there that shows you everything that you need to know so I can scroll down and say well I need a US size 7 and so what I'm looking for right here is this year which tells me that a size 7 is about seventeen point three two millimeters in diameter it also has it in inches if you don't like millimeters but I think most jewelers like to use millimeters so that's our target is we know that the middle of this ring is going to be about seventeen point three two we'll probably bump that up with about half a millimeter just to adjust for shrinkage and stuff but here we go so the best way I know to do this is to go ahead and append a cylinder now the cylinder is going to give us a size that is I guess accurate and then we can we can resize the ring around it the other thing I noticed when I brought that cylinder in is ZBrush brings that in in the middle of our little universe well the ring is not centered so I'll select the ring real quickly switch to the move mode I'll use this centering icon is third one and then click on the house which will bring it to the center now you can see it's lined up with this cylinder I'll switch back to the cylinder and then zoom in and I want to turn to a side view where I can see that the cylinder is on its side like that now I can click and drag and use the shift key to lock in at 90 degrees I also notice that this particular cylinder is not smooth so I need to smooth that out and the way I do that is using the divide command so here under the geometry palette there's divided or you can use command or control D and I usually do that two or three times so I'll divide divide divide and then I'll delete the lower levels it usually gives me a cylinder a smooth one is about 31,000 points now there is one other little maintenance thing that I do which is to chop the ends of this cylinder off because when we resize it because one edge is rounded and all this is anyway it doesn't end up to be the right size so I usually use the command or control click on this little box and just make that a sharp edge I'm just going to do it to the bottom it doesn't have to be perfect or pretty just needs to be sharp edges now I can go into the size command which is at the bottom of the geometry palette so we're going to be using Xyz size or in my interface that's down here at the bottom and remember that we were going to add about a half millimeter to that so I'm going to type in 17.8 and hit return and it resizes that cylinder to be 17.8 millimeters in effect now because it's filled my whole screen here I need to click somewhere if I look at this size it's red which means it's waiting for me to type something else so by clicking here somewhere in the middle it deselects that and then I can press the F key as in Frank which fills the screen with the cylinder now the trick here is with the XYZ command when I just changed this one number well the X size which is actually the shortest size that's top to bottom is 14 point four millimeters but the other two critical sizes are seventeen point eight it is a little confused so if you look at the the axis ball it's not oriented correctly and I'll show you how to fix that click and hold or press it down on an option alt and then reset this little ball arrow thing you can see now it's reset the axis to be correct so the red one is is the x-axis and then that is the one that's fourteen point four but again the critical diameter here is seventeen point eight and that is correct now switch over to the sub tool palette again and we're going to click on the ring now click and drag so this is you're looking at a side view and we want to increase the size of the ring so we're just going to use this little yellow square here and make this so it sticks out a bit from the ring like that I can also rotate it a bit because I'm looking for the thickest part of the ring or not thickest but maybe the thinner part instead of this thick part here so I am going to rotate it just a bit so I can see maybe this part of the ring is right here and then again I'm going to reset this access so I'll hold down option or alt and then click on the round arrow again so now that's that situated correctly now I'm going to use something called the transpose line so the old method of the move command in ZBrush was using a transpose line - gizmos actually fairly new so we want to turn off the gizmo and that gives us this little line and that line is going to be used as a measuring device we want to switch to the cylinder so I can use a shortcut which is option or Alt + click on the cylinder and that will make it active then I'm going to click on the background and drag to the side and I want to place my little transpose line somewhere somewhere along this axis here where it was but let's move it out here so I just click once and then click and drag to the side and what you'll see is this little transpose line here it's now a measuring tool if i zoom in a bit I should have some little lines I do and so you can just count the lines but this main line right here is now one millimeter so the thickness of our ring probably on average is about 1.1 millimeters I need that to be thicker so I'm going for maybe about 1.4 to 1.5 millimeters let's leave this little line here though let's switch and make this ring active so you'll hold down option or Alt + click on it it's now active now we can use the size command to increase its size while being situated around the center axis so I'll zoom in so I can watch this scale over here if you don't have my interface you can find the size command down here under deformation sizes right here or you can use mine that's down here at the bottom and all I want to do is I want to increase the size of this ring until I can count so there's 1 1 point 1 2 3 4 so that's a one point 4 millimeter thickness which is pretty good I could go a little bit bigger if I want so maybe I just bump it up one so I could type number 1 there and when I do it's a little bit bigger but let's say 1 2 3 4 5 so that's now one and a half millimeters thick and so we'll just go with it for there that's a little bit thicker band but it will also be very durable so let's zoom out and I also want to make sure though that my ring overlaps this shaded circle right here and if yours doesn't you might have to go in and do another operation just I'd say roll with it for now but you'll want to decrease the size of your ring until you have a little bit of overlap here now zoom out and what we're ready to do is to do a boolean operation okay so we're going to be subtracting the circle from the ring so I go to the subtool palette I need to make sure that the cylinder is beneath the ring which it is click on the little subtract icon click on the ring and make sure that it's active and now we're just going to merge down and then read ina mesh so go down here into the sub tool palette and look for merge down or in my interface that's right here so we'll merge those it looks like it added them together now we're edina mesh hold down commander control and drag a box on the background and once it read I know meshes and it's gonna do something we didn't want it to do and I'll show you what's gonna happen quickly look at the active points which is 670,000 I didn't adjust my dynamesh resolution and so this bumps it up to a very high resolution so let's undo real quick remember it said that you can't undo this operation it's not true let's undo and get back to this point where these are merged into one sub tool but we have not yet dynamesh and let's bump this down let's take it to something like maybe 60 which of course will bump up to 64 and now let's read ina mesh sorry dynamesh and it'll be a higher resolution but it's not going to be $200 or 2 million so it's still 1.1 million which is a little bit high if you were sending it out to shapeways but but that's a nice thick ring like that but let's say we did want to send it to Shapeways we know our thickness is right everything's good and we needed to get that size down just a bit so we could go into the Z plug-in right here and look for something called decimation master and with decimation master I can tell it to pre-process the current sub tool so we'll click on that and I'd say just accept the default values it'll take a moment to think about it and another moment to think about it now I could go get a drink okay it's gonna write it to disk watch up here and once that's done we can go back to Z plug in and do the second step which is to decimate the current now you can see that it's bumped the size down to 230 1000 which will be sufficient for sending it out to someplace like like shapeways so I guess another thing you could take a look at these edges right here are a little bit sharp so if you wanted to go back in and smooth those out you could go into the transform menu and activate symmetry and remember that we had a count of 11 but we cut one off so let's type 10 that's our radial count and that's obviously not right so you can see that you switch to the draw mode also so that's not the right symmetry so let's try our shortcuts if you've loaded my hotkeys I can press 4 to turn on X and then turn off Y by pressing 5 and now you can see that I've got radial symmetry now all I have to do is to go in maybe increase my brush size a little bit by pressing the spacebar and then use the shift key oh and see what it's doing that's because we decimate it already if you need to smooth it out you can read I know math if you do it'll bump the size back up but anyway I would probably go in and smooth these that's a edges before you do the decimation but you get the idea you could smooth that out and so there is our flower ring that's ready to take to a service to print or to print to your 3d printer I can tell you that putting the supports on this becomes a little challenging if you were able to see it you can look at these low edges right here if you're sending it to shape ways they take care of it but on your own printer you would have to add supports to any low spot like this so when I printed this one it did have quite a few supports but it wasn't that hard to do and it turned out really well so this is a nice ring that I actually wear as a wedding band now for the final final I guess tada moment you could also switch it to a shiny material and see what your ring is going to look like or maybe even shiny dirty and that looks kind of like it has a patina so so anyway that is a fairly complex tutorial to make an eternity band but you can use this technique for just about anything it could be flowers it could be cars it could be anything so hopefully you've enjoyed this tutorial if you have any questions at all leave me a message down below in the comments and as always happy zbrushing you

Channel: Kat Adair

Views: 37,102

Keywords: ZBrush, ZBrush Jewelry, ZBrush Arc Bend, ZBrush ArrayMesh

Id: qnVdTMGQ69Q

Length: 45min 58sec (2758 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 19 2018