ZBrush Masters: Hard Surface Modeling - Marco Plouffe - ZBrush 2020

[Music] hi everybody welcome mother amazing fun ZBrush masters so season two we are in right now so we're excited to have our Marco Plouffe here he's done many presentations even an easy brush summit he's done a lot of stuff he's gonna be sharing some pretty amazing hard surface techniques he's one of the cofounders of the chaos Mason's so he's gonna be showing you guys some pretty great techniques I know myself personally I still get asked a lot about hard surface stuff I actually recommend Marco's videos that he's done for us with the zebra summit so this is a great opportunity for you guys to see him working inside a zebra shop he goes about his approaches and ask any questions you have so Marco thanks for being here with us it's my pleasure Paul so I like it was saying I'm gonna be showing a few things related to a hard surface but like my journey with with ZBrush like brought me to learn so much more so I just wanted everybody to feel welcome to ask like any kind of questions I just I like to answer questions so don't don't hesitate and basically like I'm I'd rather like keep things like freeform for the stream but like I'm gonna be like somewhat like doing it in like two or three chapters because I want to show basically I want to show two approaches for hard surface modeling for those who saw my interrupted summit presentation basically I'm gonna basically I'm gonna be like starting from there and you should going like a bit further and basically the two techniques I'm going to be showing I call them the quick one and the clean one and it's they exist for many purposes basically they exist for one for making something like quick where you don't rely on like absolute quality so you're actually gonna go like faster you're going to try to stay efficient and the other one is where you actually need to bring like the the notch like up but at the despite at the consequence of like spending more time so that been said one of the thing that I actually want to talk about also is efficiency or at least like the overarching theme above that the philosophical point let's say is going to be like efficiency there reason why I like to talk about that is because often people ask me like like how I do to work so fast and my answer is always because I kind of like know where to spend time and where to spend to not spend so much time and I think it's actually like something that's like hard it's kind of hard to break the abbot of like taking the time to do something super well which is fine absolutely fine but it's also good to know like worth it cut corners to actually get something done quickly especially if you're gonna work in the industry where like things are always on like a deadline sometimes it's good to actually like know how to be efficient and such so this is also something like I might touch base on or it might be just a background like in a philosophically way basically I'm also like out of like the structure of the to method there's also like a lot of like little tricks that I know that I I want to share because it's it's really hard to share those tricks if it's not like live or on the fly so let's take the opportunity to do that as well as taking the opportunity to answer questions so that would be my little introduction normally when I teach or I do a workshop I always start by like asking people if they have questions but I guess maybe it's better we jump like public this is better we just jump in a subject or sure we can yeah we can go in and then for everybody obviously the chat I'll be monitoring so as questions come through I'll answer what I can and text form for you all and then I'll be storing questions to throw at Marco in the opportune times so just keep your questions coming through and you have and we'll find the moments like Marco said he's got his presentation broke down kind of in three sections so we'll find moments when you can throw questions at him but we wanted him also get in a groove of showing the stuff he wants to show for you guys as well all right so I'm gonna we're gonna switch you guys are gonna see now Marcos full full glory of ZBrush and still his little webcam here all right so mark I'll let you take it away from here and I'll be monitoring the chat what the questions coming through and throwing them at you and I need to throw them that yeah yeah that's cool let's go all right so I'll be I think I'll be revolving around to two models especially I have like much more models that I can load anything that like a client has given me permission or anything that's personal I can always bring it up it's like you guys have questions and whatnot but I find that these two models basically like show a lot of them like the most of like the techniques that I use for during the presentation of the ZBrush Simon I was showing this model that I made for sideshow so this is like the health the head of Sentinel and it was made to be like broken in pieces so like ironically like nobody ever saw it like this except for my 3d renders because there were always they're always all like busted I actually have a screenshot here like this is for example like something that the Sentinel head was used to actually do like this base here which is completely destroyed it's kind of funny this is a skull by a will Harbottle by the way I'm pretty sure I hope Jesus Christ if I made a mistake with the name anyways so it's kind of funny to see that like it was like all pristine first and maybe some of you might say like oh well that was maybe like useless but the idea is that like a head like this with my technique like if I don't hit like if I don't hit any walls which I don't often I can basically like do like a head like this and when I rush probably like three four days just because I'd like to technique I'm so used to it plus putting like the affairs at the right place also knowing what's the purpose for this head later and so so yeah so this is something that I may I just to show like quickly how it's been constructed it's been constructed in three pieces well first of all it was a blocking which I'm going to show later but technically there's like one center piece here that's like just a bunch of like nothing it's just like visual noise for in between the cracks and there's like the floaters that are on top the floors are basically the plates some plates that are made like this and some other piece that you can say maybe they're more like a block like these here sometimes and also like some stuff that are more like procedurally done like this earpiece or like stuff like that like IMS and that sort of stuff like pieces like this like the air it's gonna be more like said modeler because anything that's made out of like a primitive shape that's gonna stay for a minute shape most of the time I'm probably going to use that modeler for that but the moment that I go into my organic shapes this is where I actually start to the model with the brush and use the other techniques that are less poly modeling let's call it so yeah so like the blocks like this those are pieces that are more or less done with like a dynamesh technique no real like technical approaches and plates like these are gonna be more are going to be approached more like a Nichole way so like the panel loop the dynamics of division decreases a bit of said modeler Exeter Exeter and some other tricks I'm going to be showing so that's the overall idea is like how do you do like pieces like this how do you do pieces like this why and also to know that like some areas like this one here there was no reason for me to actually like do anything really clean it's just a matter of having a center piece especially because it's going to be printed and you kind of like need to have like something that's watertight at some point this is very relating to the print the collectable industry though but it's a practice that I've always done so if I look like another model like this one it's basically going to be the same thing once again like pieces like this are going to be made with like panel loops and such they're going to be the approach is going to be more like going clean and stuff doing the whole like panel loop technique and whatnot and sometimes like pieces like this here are going to be simply like modeled so you see it's like pretty sketch when you look at it up close but it's never gonna really be shown up close so why do something that would take more time right even like the neck the almost the entire neck is like one piece this is not really hard surface though but whatever it's maybe worth to say that this is like maybe an area and we're going to be spending less time to make sure that like the focus area I spent most of the time on then especially if I have a limited time so yep this is gonna be like another plate I think like for this guy I knew that I was going to do like face close-ups so I actually made it very very intricate even like for just like some head details but that was the purpose that was the focus I knew I was going to go there so that's why I spend a lot of time alright um so yeah let's just go and talk about like how to approach approach a model with my two techniques for that I'm going to be using this model here oops so the same to know but I'm just going to show you real quick like that was the blocking of it so this is the high-rez this is the blocking here and this blocking here is basically done almost in one piece except for the thing that are floating here alright so a lot of people often ask me like how do I do everything in one piece and it's basically like this is like the one piece except for I cut some things there anyways whatever and the answer is basically just like I practiced so much controlling my crushes so I like gained like a certain dexterity that lets me like take like one shape shape it and like process it so it reads as like hard surface even like if it's just a blocking or something so this is just a question of like time and practice of course but I'll I'll show you like be my approach I'm not going to show you necessarily like how I design and that sort of stuff this is not something I feel particular particularly adept at or at least at a point where I'm not sure if I can explain it well but like I will often start from a sphere that's going to be a dynamesh oops so just a simple dynamesh you go in symmetry and basically you would sculpt like any way you want but the idea here that I want to actually to to convey is that when I actually model for for hard surface I don't really put myself in a mindset of doing hard surface necessarily at the beginning it's very important that I approach the model with less constraint so what I do is I really like to just think about like the shape first and whatnot like this let's say like I'm starting to do like a human head like this would be like where I would start creating the shape and such and at some point I'm going to be maybe applying some like visual language that shows that this piece is hard surface and by visual language I mean like a moment you see like a surface is clean it's like a hearts it's a it's a visual language used to heart for heart surface the moment you put little bolts and stuff this is like a visual language that's used to express hard surface so the point is that hard surface is not necessarily a technique it's more like a result so anything you do if it reads as hard surface well you've done hard surface it's not hard surface because all you use the battle loops in that brush and whatnot it's just a way to get there right so this is really important to keep in mind Cedric is a is really good at actually doing hard organic shapes that transforms into hard surface that's why you showed in his presentation of the zebra summit it was basically like a shape that transforms into like many through my process changes into like many like results like one that is really organic one that is hard surface one that is like organic hard surface whatever the point is that you approach it organically and when it's time to give it like to give it some like hard surface treatment one technique that I like to use is like for example let's say that I would yeah let's say that this shape here was flat so like right now I'm just really like crudely flattening the shape okay let's say that like this the top of like the the cranium here is roughly okay let's say you want it to have like a Ledge or something like that something that's going to be like like a silhouette break that as like as some somewhat of like a hard surface feel to it there's like an approach that I find that goes that goes really well is to break down your process into first you do the mass and then you do the edges and then you do the plains so for example if you look at this piece over here well the mass is basically just like the volume of itself then the edges are of course these two lines here and the plains will be like for example those are three planes planes number plane number two plane number three and there's like a plane number four here let's say so it's really important to think to think this way and this is like the the actual process of it will be to first of all adding mass so there was like a Ledge here so I'm just gonna like be having like some mass here so what are your go-to brushes that you like to use they're doing the hard surfaces the brushes is it's actually yeah if I actually just look at like here you know those are basically like the brushes that I use the most and to be honest maybe like the first five is the one that I will always like go to this is a standard brush which I actually don't really use that much to be honest it's more like the clay brush to create met the mass of things like I'm doing right now damn standard in the for crack that will I will use to do either cavities or edges and the move brush of course I use it often just to move my pieces around but for example right now I'm creating mass and the mass once I actually like added it I will just smooth it out like this and you see I'm already basically like creating like well my planes the second thing that I'm gonna be doing is gonna I'm gonna actually incest insist on adding the edges so by using damn standard you see like damn standard normally does like a cavity like this but if you actually use it with alt it does like this like geek thing here and this way I kind of like insist on having my my my edge right here and it's kind of important to really insist on having your edges because a lot of time in my process I'll be smoothing and it's gonna be important that like after I'm done smoothing I keep the intention of like that edge so I'm gonna be maybe insisting here I could even like insist on like the cavity here like this and after that what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to concentrate on the planes so I did the mass I did the edges now I do the plane and I like to use smooth stronger it's just smooth but stronger and like I'm going to basically be doing something that I could do with aged polish but at a stage of blocking like this I kind of like used to use I like to use smooth because it kind of like gives like a melty effect that I actually enjoy so if I actually I'm gonna undo what I did then because this is gonna show what it does from the side view it's like you kind of see like that by giving the treatment I kind of like flatten this edge right here I'm just gonna go back again so you see that now it's like squiggly but by like softening it with smooth I actually pretty much get my plane all already polished now there's just like this little dip here and you can basically just like smooth but making sure that there radius of your smooth brush never touches your edge in case you don't want to lose your edge well you see like I kind of like got rid of it and if you really need to insist even more so that the readability is like even more than that then you can use something like H polish for example maybe a question would be like why would you stay like this at this point it's because maybe for a blocking this is good enough for that like an artistic director can read this as art surface so why go more than that if it's like for a blocking or just like conveying an idea right like this is not the thing we're gonna bake so it doesn't matter if you spend more time I mean in my opinion but like if you do spend more time and you want it to be like your polished result that one you're gonna bake so you're high res maybe you're gonna want to actually spend more time with like polish and polish this now it's H polish is going to be important to take in consideration that I'm often going to use H polish with the alt button pressed and without the alt button pressed and what's the difference it's just basically in which direction that the the mass is flattening so is it flat like let's say like this is like the metal here and your mass is kind of like in the middle but it's not straight let's say you use H polish it's going to like straighten it but going lower and if you actually use out it's going to straighten it but doing like higher for example and I realize that for example if you use it without out in that angle here oops you're going to start to affect like the surface here that was beside it like we don't want to affect here we just want to affect this like plane here so to not affect it like this what I'm going to do is I'm gonna use out I'm gonna make sure that the radius of my H polish is somewhat the size of the thing like this so now you see that it's kind of like adding mass and it's not digging on the the level it's right here yes it did it did some like nasty stuff on that up here but because this is like the most like the higher point it's just a matter of cleaning this part afterwards and yeah if you for you if you bust up like this part you can just go back on it and do a couple of like strokes like this and etc etcetera so this would be basically like the the approach that I'm going to be using to create those like this like visual language of hard surface even if I'm working on like a blocking or if I'm working maybe in that organic sculpt II approach this is how I actually do so so yeah that's us so basically like in a nutshell this what I just explained is like the maneuver that you're going to be using over and over and over and over and over and over again so of course there's like a lot of things I can add in there so I actually I get to like a very a better polished product but this is basically the rinse and repeat thing that I'm going to be using that's like the dexterity did you see any question so far oh yeah let me wrap a couple questions up together that relate to what you're talking about so you started in dynamesh do you ever use Tessa Maine at all or the only beginning process you're working in dynamesh um I actually only use dynamesh I'm just so happy of the way it actually works already and it I kind of like a like the consistency of dynamesh because everything is always at the same resolution and it kind of like works for me and yeah I have nothing against Tessa like it's actually pretty pretty cool but it's it's easier it was easier for me to just keep using like the same approach I've been using I mean sometimes I will use tessellate when I'm I have to correct a dissipated mesh so something let's say I dissipated to be printed later and I realize that like my ready to print product is like there's something that's like wrong and the decimation is is like there's not enough resolution in like this area to really like add the thing I need to add I might actually use like sculptress that sort of stuff to just like that the Italian or like remove something and then for your desig when your dynamesh and what are your resolution usually set out like for this model what's your resolution set at what they not revolution okay this one right now that's like five hundred but like it's always related relating to the scale and this one is like a weird scale the scale of this small is weird because I've been using a base mash that is like not really within like the units that like ZBrush appreciate but maybe if I look at the other one here this one here the resolution is 3000 and it's basically I think this one is more like in the standard resolution I guess I think that the point is more like why would I go lower or higher and my idea is that I always try to be as low as possible in resolution within the needs right now for like this head right now the needs are not to be polished they're just actually read from like this distance school he has hands too anyways like it's supposed to be read from like a full full body like from head to toe on the screen nothing needs to be more precise than that I'm just trying at this point to sell a design and I don't and I don't believe that it needs to be like more than that at least if like the result of that the result of the scope of the goal of the characters to be seen from that distance most of the time if you need to do like if you know that you're do this this character will be a talking head maybe like you're gonna I'm gonna like subdivide or use a higher level of dynamesh but my idea is that I always try to stay as low as possible so that I get the least at least big like the smallest ZBrush files just to help for maybe like transfer to clients and that sort of stuff or myself I hate when a project is lagging so I'm actually going to try to really keep the things like as low as possible and this way I don't need to break my character into many pieces in maybe Z tool I can pretty much have my entire character in one Z tool just because I've been economic let's say and then when you're done your dynamesh do you transition out of dynamesh into like subdivision levels or you use pretty much stain a dynamesh mode for yourself yeah I'll be I'll be showing that later that's pretty much like the next thing I'll be jumping at but I'm going to I'm sometimes I'm gonna keep things in dynamesh because it's just like it's it's fine like the illusion is there we don't need to be like more polished or whatnot but sometimes what I like to do is I like to zremesh my models just so that it actually works on a subdivision level base and the reason why I like to do that it's because it's kind of easier to move around your character when you're using subdivision levels because it can compress your model into its lowest subdivision level while moving and that sort of stuff once again it's just because I I like when things are like moving smoothly and stuff so yeah it's the same reason why I will often use like dynamic subdivisions also for models that don't really need to actually have like you don't need to sculpt on them it's just a matter of like using decreases and stuff this is something else show again later yeah any other questions yeah a quick one that you can and that you can move on to your next thing how long have you been using ZBrush and how long you've been in like the 3d Jen artists okay I have been using ZBrush since 3.1 I was that was in 2009-2010 that's when I went to school for 3d and so in the moment I actually started to use the brush it was kind of like an answer from the gods because I remember like doing like in my character art classes character modeling classes I used to just use 3ds Max and try to do like like hair strands on the beard just by modeling like diamond shape and like cutting like bevels so that it actually stays creased right and like when they showed ZBrush I was like I think up this is like the thing I needed because I'm not necessarily like good at drawing I mean I I'm okay it's fine I just never had really any academic training for it but I've always I've always drawn since I was a kid I've always had like a pen in my in my fingers and in my hand and just like drawing and drawing so it really comes natural to me the approach of like doing it by hand so this is why when I actually start to use the brush it was like oh yeah that's so good and this is also the reason why when since I like to do robots the woman that like I saw like people like filio or Cedric do hard surface things in ZBrush and I was like oh it's possible and it's great and then I was fortunate enough to have say Rick show me and then I was fortunate enough to have ZBrush create some more hard surface inclined tools then for me I was like that's perfect because I can still sculpt do my art like organic approach to modeling but I have now the tools to transform it into hard surface things so since 2009 2010 I've used the brush that's so that means like ten years now yeah no one hears anyone here but I've done a no treaty and yeah was it yeah in question second questions keeping I'd say move on to your next part and then that'll answer some of the questions that are coming up okay that's cool okay so I'll be uh just in the sake of like staying in the same Lane as the presentation I'll be showing that a little like piece here this little guy here I'll be showing like how I approach to actually make this thing clean now that I made the blocking of it basically I'm going to show you how to make it look polished so yeah everything first of all everything you see here I've done it with the exact the exact technique that I showed you at the top of the head of the other character so the creating the mass doing the edges and then flattening the planes like everything in this character here has been has been done this way for parts that like I separated I might have used also some some clip curve like why not right when you have like a like a silhouette and you want to really like have like those like those edges using the clip curve is like more than welcome boom quick curve that is basically using ctrl + shift and it's gonna give you at first it's going to give you a selection tool but you can just transform it into a good curve here and you can see flat and flatten your silhouettes like this so basically yeah like I said it's just like using the tools that I just showed you but at the same time may be hiding click curve or whatnot okay so now I have this basically I sculpted my my blocking and I'm gonna be polishing it so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm actually going to do a duplicate duplicate of my my model here so that I always have this one and back up and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go in isolation I'm going to select only this part I can hide it easily because it's a it's a poly group and I'm going to delete hidden everything else so now in my sub tool that's only it's only that I have deleted in is in modified topology geometry what if I topology delete hidden somewhere in here me I have shortcuts on my on my keyboard also yeah a good thing to know I use almost only shortcuts and like my tools here or my custom like custom menus that I created that has like my quick tools and I almost never go in like here or on top here so I know it so I have this idea lead hidden now this piece is isolated I can even like work on only half of it so it goes like faster I'm gonna like mirror and weld it to the other side later but so far like this the first thing I am gonna be doing is I'm going to get rid of everything that could be in my way so by that I mean like all their little like details here like this cavity this alpha that's here I I don't want this in by the way I basically want to go back to a simpler shape so any technique is fine I don't really have a particular technique but it can be as simple as just like using the clay brush like this and just filling the holes and yep this so basically once I got rid of those I call them mid details mid details once I got rid of the mid details at this point I'll basically just like try to get rid of like the brushstrokes just like the smooth technique like I said it's a matter of just having their radius at the right size so you don't hit like the edges and make them disappear like this you just want to keep some remnants of like your edges you can even use like H polish they were basically doing the same thing I'm just trying to like like clean my planes but yeah any technique is fine I guess but me a smooth brush and H polish at this point I'm probably gonna like use dinah dinah mesh again just a like maybe reset some pinching in the topology that could just like influence my brushstrokes and I'm gonna clean the backside just so it's a bit cleaner I'm never really gonna show the backside of this piece so there's no reason for me to really like make it like so clean but I just want to have like something that's like decent so I'm just gonna like create some let's give it a shot like this how does it look on the other side now you see it's kind of well cut all right this this all right so now the the shape itself is pretty clean just start doing the process itself maybe this could be able to flatter like this all right so let's let's say that this is a clean enough I'm gonna give a little dynamesh and from this here this is where I actually might do a Zed remesh to just get it to like is sub vivid subdivide a bo model I could go like further with the dynamic and dislike to do the said mod there's a tree mesh later because at the end of the day I can always see I can always like use project like project all to just get back the shape but basically I know that like at this point the shape is not gonna really change like the design is is there that's the shape I'm going for so so yeah I can commit probably to using subdivision levels and you know at the end of the day it doesn't even matter because I can always just decide to erase my subdivision levels go back to dynamesh and do a again as ed MA as a tree mesh and another project all it's really like you're not that you don't you're not that like much of a slave of like that the technicalities with my technique you can pretty much just jump from one to the other I'd say it's more in the other approach to clean approach it's like sometimes you're gonna hit stuff that are more like like points of no return in quotes even if there's like a couple of techniques that I learned but whatever we always from that here I'm going to let's say I'm going to go with Zed remesh what I'm going to do is I'm actually clown this into its own Z tool so that it's alone in the in the scene I'm going to do a duplicate sorry and then I'm going to said Ramesh this is every match is normally in geometries I do Ramesh and that's it but here I have it in my quick tools and the other option only a really option that I use at least for the moment is the the target polygon count so this is like in thousands so if I let it at for its for thousands Polly's it's gonna aim for I know I can be like much lower than that so I'm gonna go for like 0.3 which is 300 it's probably going to give me more but it's just like a ballpark like number like you see like like this this is like low enough this is good I mean it's gonna help me to navigate my in my scene so I'm gonna go with that shape here the one thing I'm going to do is I'm just gonna check if there's no like holes sometimes very rarely Zed Zed remesh is gonna actually leave like a hole in there so like I try to just like make sure that it's like taken care of early and if there's a hole is real easy you just go in like modify topology close hole I think it's there yeah you're right all right there and me it's in my little thing here close old feet right next is that said rematch because that's there is one of the reason why I use it you just hit close hole and you can just make sure it's all on the same polygroup again my control like clicking ctrl W and that's it so now this I just need to reproject it so on this shape here so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to subdivide let's say two times then project is here but I'm gonna be using like for example the only thing I'm going to be using is the projection shell distance and project all so projection shell is basically telling him how far you need to go to calculate where you need to snap it just helps for the algorithm I guess we're not stepping on a mesh you don't want and then distance here you just try something if it doesn't work you change it so project all I'm gonna say no to the Oh lead paint and you see that was not enough because like this piece here did not snap so I'm just gonna put it a little bit higher in project all again and there you go it's not completely on it so I didn't really have much to gain to reproject but you see it went from like smooth or it's a little bit more precise so just imagine if your mesh was like really precise with detail project all would be able to capture almost all of them like 99.99% of all of them which in my book is like good enough so in that stage now I have like this mash that pretty much has a topology it's gonna have for the entire time until the end actually so I can put it back in my scene so I just go here back in my scene and I insert this here and I can delete the old one so now I have this piece here and what I'll do is I'll actually like from the backups the duplicates that I have here I'm just gonna get rid of like this piece here so now I just have the new one that's on top like this here right right right right so delete hidden there we go so now I have this piece here and now I'm going to be like polishing it so I'm going basically this is since this is the quick technique I'm going I'm not going to use things like panel loops or creases or whatever I'm all going to do the cleaning by hand so the result that is this here like will be done by hand if I remove the poly pane you can see this is the piece if I put like a material that is less that is more like like it lets you show like maybe more like the imperfection you'll see it's not perfect perfect but I was able to do this piece like in like if I go like top speed I can probably like do this piece polish this piece and like maybe like 20 minutes not like more or less I guess I'm like that which like thumbs up for like the entire head not being like that much time so that's and because I know that I'm never going to like zoom in more than this for example I know that doesn't need to be cleaner so once again talking about efficiency while this is taken in calculate calculation what technique I'm going to be using so so you see exactly so this piece here it's done entirely by hand with the same technique I'll be showing here so once again I have this piece here I can subdivide it a little bit more I guess I'll stay at that level here and to polish an object that already exists I'm basically going to be repeating the same three steps that I told before the mass edge and volume no sorry mass edge and planes but this time I'm kind of like reverse and gonna reverse a bit the order so the first thing is like mass the mass is pretty much like already there but the idea here is that I'll probably do my planes before doing my corners and the reason why is because you'll see me in action but the reason why is because when I work on the planes I'm kind of like going to make my corners like very sharp and I'm going to decide how like smooth or sharp I want my corners at the end actually because working on the edges is less destructive to the planes then working on the planes is destructive to the edges actually so working on the planes this is the next step step number two in that case so I'm just going to take at this point I'm going to take H polish and I'm actually going to just like flatten my surfaces while trying to make sure that my the the the edges have a like a certain like to clean this cleanliness that it's clean you're good yeah make sense for example like this this edge is not clean because it's not straight and if you want to actually go for like something that is more like cubic and if you're if you're trying to do a straight line do a straight line if you're trying to do occur do a curve but don't be in the middle because if it's like ambiguous it's not going to read well and exactly so like if you're not gonna get you're not going to get you're like hard surface point across like it's fine if it's a curve it's fine if it's a trait a straight line in hard surface but it has to look like surgical so make sure that it's like it's clean and by clean I mean surgical so I mean precise or calculated also those are all good keywords or what I'm trying to explain so if like that the lines was was curvy like this I would probably like take my move brush and try to like move it back to like a straight line actually so you see I kind of like calculated the size the radius of my brush knowing that like if I push it it would go back to like something of a straight line so basically when I'm polishing my planes I can I kind of try to pay attention to that also so making the plane straight clean but also making sure that the edge is somewhat straight and if it's not I'll just move it so now that's the explanation and I'm just gonna go ahead and do it so I use out now because if I use not out it creates a cavity here so just keep in mind to experiment how it works with the alt button and if if for example my edge here is just not helping me with with my polishing like you see it's kind of like hard to make like this a plane because this edge is so rounded I will actually go and just like insist a little bit more on making this cavity really a cavity and what I did I just took my damn standard I lowered the intensity so you see the intensity is like I have to press very strong like really hard to actually go deep but it actually helps me to just sometimes get like you see like this like how smooth this is if my damn standard was too high I would be doing this and I don't want to do a detail I want to really affect the mass so I'm going to probably go for a larger radius less intensity and really like just like making sure that like the cavity is really like a cavity so that in this like perspective it's not rounded like this I'm not going for a round corner I'm actually going for a sharp burner this is what I did with them standard like this so now that this is I insisted more on my corner I can go back to like H polishing like this this this will like dip here I could actually like use clay if I feel that it that H polish is not really responding well but I could also just try and insist with H polish what I'm trying to say is H polish is a well it's a polishing tool it's not a tool to treat mass or whatever it's really there to just once once that the mass is there just make it like cleaner I'm not using it to build anything so I get polish like this or you know what might as well well I'm here planar sometimes I'll I'm gonna use it to like fill holes like this so you see planar it's kind of like fill the hole you start from like somewhere where your plane is straight you're used out and you just like draw it so yeah I messed up like here and here but that's not really a problem we can just clean it yeah often I'm gonna be using a quite large radius because that's really what's gonna make like the surface smooth if you actually use too small at a radius you might actually have too much like brushstrokes recorded in your your work I'm actually gonna clip things here like this this here is a bit messy it's a bit too much noise I think I'm just gonna like change the design completely planar there we go so if I change the design too much I'm actually might actually maybe destroying the topology so that's something to just be careful with but it doesn't mean that you can't do it it's just you might experience like some some hassles on the way but it doesn't really stop me I'd say so yeah I mean there's still some work but just for fun just to show you like what I did so far I'm just gonna go back to in my history just to go work just to show where we came from so blocking as an remesh reprojected and then the rest is like by hand working on like making it cleaner and I'm using the metal the metal matte gap so that I actually really see like where my planes are like uneven and stuff so this I would call it like a first pass of polishing so if like my object is going to be more like seen from from close I might actually want it to be even cleaner and by cleaner for example what I don't like at the moment is like if you look at my at like the main plane so I'll call like this thing the main plane if you look at it from like this angle let's so you like with under another madcap you'll see that like this line Jesus Christ I'll go in an orthographic view there you go so you see like this line here is going like more like but like an let's say like that direction and this line here is actually going in the opposite direction that plus there's like a curve on this line and by analyzing the edge you kind of you kind of you can see that like your object is your plane is not really straight which will make for like a kind of like a dip when you look at the light if you look at the light moving on your object like the really like the blasting white spot you're gonna see that it's kind of like doing like a diagonal here and then like it's gonna dip here like this so this is like a sign of what I call wobbliness and I try to maybe get rid of that if I want things to look even like sharper and cleaner so what I actually am going to do is I'm basically going to use move that I'm going to move my edges to make sure all my edges have like a good clean flow and then I'm gonna go back to cleaning my plane so when I use the move brush you can move it you can use it just like this but since I'm talking about the move brush I'm gonna talk about this little thing here called a Q curve this is a trick that phileo showed me which is it's so cool first of all move when you use it it does like kind of like a line like this right but if you actually activate a Q curve it's going to do a spike like this and I really love it and I have it on a shortcut where I can enable it and disable it anytime I can and sometimes to move my edges since this is like this one is a cavity I might want a Q curve to be activated so I'm just gonna give like those strokes so that this line and this line might are maybe a little bit more like parallel or if they're not parallel that the taper at the same like like calculation whatever same thing for like this one here make sure it's like somewhat straight with this one here this one this one I'm going to let I'm gonna let it taper it in a different direction I'm just going to make sure it's like somewhat the same direction and for here so you see by changing that that I'm looking at this line and this line here right now and just by moving it like this in this line and this line from different angles I know that like because now my edges are kind of like calculated to be kind of like following each other so some form of line flow I know that once that I polish the plane it's probably going to give me like a better like sheen of light moving on my object hence a cleaner surface so so yeah so now I'm gonna go back to cleaning the plane and I'm gonna basically do the same thing again but keep in mind that when I use H polish sometimes instead of using H polish sometimes I'm gonna be using smooth so like right now I'm smoothing because I kind of like want to melt there's like a bump it's kind of like hard to see but there's like a bump on this and I kind of like will just want it to melt so if I want it to melt I'm going to be using smooth if I want it to I don't know how to explain that flatten I'm gonna be using H polished so I'm just using smooth right now and then I'm gonna go back to H polish so H polish I'm gonna use a darker color cuz it's kind of hard to see my planes using alt sometimes using not out oops like I'd rather like I could like mask this part here but like I'm always going to be like somewhat uneven on the edge and creating damage so this is why I kind of like prefer just to use out rather than like masking or that sort of stuff actually something I could be using that it's actually making the process longer so I I prefer to use my dexterity but I could actually store a morph target and like use h polish and restore the state here using the morphe brush but it's kind of like adding steps like I'd rather know how to do it like clean with like one swoop rather than adding those techniques but sometimes with some when something is way too complicated I'm going to add those extra steps like using morph targets and that sort of stuff is going to go back to where I was before I saved the morph target it's using out and so I think I'm gonna subdivide one more time now this because I want to get rid of a bit of a bit of the pixel the pixelation so you see like those those lines here are not super clean so I might want to move them just a little bit too big too much other big radius there we go all right so at this point I'm gonna call this done and what I'm going to do the last thing I'm going to do is actually making sure that my edges have the appropriate amount of like smoothness or sharpness that I want so by by working on this piece I made some of my edges sharper than other like this one is like quite sharp whereas like maybe like this edge here is like smooth or right and I kind of like things to be more smooth because it captures more light on the edge kind of like a bevel so what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna make sure that things are like smoother and I prefer to go from sharp to smooth rather than smooth the sharp so this is why I will let things get sharp like this in the broad in my process so what I'm gonna do by using smooth which is already that's what I have selected I'm just going to actually maybe give a little like smooth to like some of my edges so that they kind of like widen and capture more light like this okay so bear with me I haven't really taken care of like this side and the back side but this is basically like showing the sense of what I'm trying to explain here and you can you're more than welcome to make some edges more like sharper than others but if you do just make sure that it looks like planned yeah and so if I want it for example to have one edge that is it is smoother I'm going to show you like a little trick first what I'll do is I'll kind of like bevel my corner and then I'll make it smooth so to bevel something this is like a weird trick I don't remember where I got it from fortunately but using the just a clay brush not that clay build up like I was using before but using the clay brush I'm going to I'm going to actually like lower the radius and look at if I actually make their radius big like this I use out and I just draw here you see it's kind of like a flat 45 degree that just needs a little H polish to become really clean you can actually add a laser mouse in there just to make it even like cleaner so you see I can just do this and then I can just go on it and give it a little like H polish and then like it would be like clean so let's say you want it like everywhere it was just a matter of like oops start over with it this then H polish whatever I didn't make it super clean here I was a bit too reckless but if I just I was a bit more careful when I did my stroke at the beginning I could have added like a screen is here but like that would be like how to make the bevel and if I want to be I wanted to be a round corner I'm basically what I'm going to do is I'm going to do a bevel of that bevel I could have done the bevel of the bevel before I actually cleaned my bevel actually you know instead of like saying if I'm just gonna do it going back to before I did the devil okay clay clay clay like this and then lower the radius I'm gonna make these second bevel in there so I kind of like already told them what I'm what I want and the only thing that I need to do now is smooth it so it becomes like like a like a becomes round so now it's more like a round corner and if like anything needs to be rounder around it kinda like this and if I unsharpened some area that I want it just to keep sharp and always just like reh polish some areas like this but now like I give it I given it like a like a rounder like feel to it so this is the technique here it's a little pinched there you go yeah so this is pretty much a technique and like that like if you if you practice it if you spend more time on it you'll get cleaner and stuff but this is basically how I do like a lot of my like round corners you with the dexterity quick technique so that cover is basically like how to make your plane look clean the method so like using the edges making sure your edges are like have a good line flow and it feels calculated and then making sure your planes are like clean enough the amount of clean cleanliness you finished by like making sure your corners or are as round as you want smooth I'd say and if you need to make like more beveled edges like wider edges well he can just cut them manually and like that sort of stuff so like the next point would be to talk about how I do the mid details and the details which is pretty quick and pretty much at the end of like the demonstration for the quick technique but before that I guess is there like any question about yeah man we got a bunch of questions coming through I talked for I talked for too long you know you're fine you're fine I would just let you get a rhythm and then we can do this and then fire questions off okay so when you're working in a technique like this when working with collectibles how do you decide when the mesh looks good enough well what's there fine good enough I guess I'll create my own definition for I'd say I'll go with like the scale that the client yeah like gives me like if he says like I it's a 1/12 scale 1 12 12 is a pretty small so you don't really need things to be like that plain so that they actually look clean for something like like The Punisher that I did think this guy here and there you know there we go this guy for this guy it's like 1 that's 1/4 I think anyways for something like this like I'll pretty much try to get something that looks clean from like for example the descent to know if if the Sentinel here was let's give me a sec no no not this one sorry I kind of I was not working in the right file I just want to put before I lose it I just want to put my yeah ok okay so yeah so for let's say like this Sentinel had was is supposed to be like the scale of the Punisher this guy probably I would I would make sure that like it looks clean when I look at it like in a like port rift like dimension like this here let's say like there's like the rest of the body that exists under like if it looks good from this like like this close this is pretty much what the eye is gonna capture when you look at it printed I guess this is gonna like my idea of it with my tests that I did with my prototype with my form too so that print the print prototype I made so yeah I think that would be it but personally I kind of like to go the extra way because at Vienna I like to show my renders so maybe I'll make sure that it looks like clean enough from like this distance here I'd say so it would actually answer the same question as like how small you're gonna make your details well it's gonna be like depending on how close you're gonna get for to a dance or something like in another way I will also try to make sure what is important like for example the head of the character is like the most important part so I'm probably going to put more time on the head of the character but like if this piece was like on his belt for example and there's no focus on it I'll sometimes I'll leave it like pretty dirty and nobody notices which is like sneaky but it does the trick and I waste less time I can spend more time doing other stuff by playing video games or movie or art or soon changing the diapers of my baby so like you kind of like have to actually know to be efficient sometimes so do you change this workflow for when you're making a gaming assets or do you just hand off what you've done to the studio and then they make it a game ready model no no when we do for video games we do it from eight it is that like I mean from from the blog in the textured model so we're gonna make sure everything looks clean but in terms of like the comparison between collectibles and videogames it's pretty much like the same the same technique except for like when you do collide you have to really make sure that it's like printable so like you have to really know about like making your thicknesses enough so that it doesn't break so there's like a lot of like that technicality that goes with it but outside of that technicality it's like the same techniques that I can use and the same like mindset of like what to focus on and what not in terms of like the ZBrush when I do something for videogames often you don't like you don't end up really doing like fabric detail like t-shirt fabric because it can be done in painter but if you want to do like an honest like art dump with ZBrush you can actually just learn to maybe doing like a quick UV on your high-res and learning user displacement maps to do like textile and that sort of stuff or if use like key shot then my kinky shot you can add your displacement map for details but I'm just trying to say that like it's pretty much like the same approach I'm gonna use I suggested like for video games sometimes I'm not going to do like the sharp detail thing I'm going to keep it at like if it's cloth I'm gonna keep it up like maybe like memory wrinkles but I'm not gonna do like the fabric and for like hard surface and pro like I'm probably not gonna do like the Battle Damage for example like they I'm gonna keep it clean armor okay and then here's another question when you're reproducing or creating manacle machinery or characters do you define every function of the individual piece or is it more about just the aesthetic and creating or reproducing the form so you think yeah yeah there's there's really different school of thoughts and my school of thoughts is basically as long as you sell the illusion so for me functionality is actually important but not at the extent of my like my like my design preferences or my time I'd say so I'm probably gonna be I'm got probably going to go in the categories of artists that that that don't really spend so much time studying the functionality of something as long as it kind of like does look functional so it's all I'm all about like creating the illusion for people that are really like technical like they're probably like the see through that illusion and they think I'm full of which is fine it's cool whatever but I really found that I'm really happy err with my approach compared to my needs and my needs are not necessarily to make something perfectly functional like I remember there was like I correct me if I'm wrong but I think it like for like avatar they made sure that like the mechs are like actually kind of like one-for-one work which might but functional yeah exactly which is kind of scared because it's like lets you know that like those guys at the that studio they can do like war machines you see it's like that's something that like I find virtuous to have this knowledge but I I would rather like I would like I wouldn't do that for me I would have pleasure doing that so fighting like this guy here this guy here the amount of like thoughts that's that's put behind like the function is basically that it's look it looks somewhat like force-fed of like whatever liquid isn't that and it's like there's like all that like the circuitry that's pretty much like they're just to look a bit like alien and like like forced but like the weird like the cables are going and that sort of stuff is I haven't really thought of that that's more like design and on the fly the group like knowing that visual language I think is pretty important and that's part of functionality like the fact that you're gonna add like grids and stuff like Grizz is basically like just something that's good for like removing heat from like something so like it's kind of like it tells you like okay so this things need to be like cold so maybe it's because like there's like a mainframe and there so then I'm gonna have like those kind of thoughts but they're really like surface levels just just just so I had like a little bit of function or at least as much as I feel comfortable with I'd say what's your what's your polygon count of all the subtool how many subtool do you have for this forty how many do you uh well first of all right now I think I have a bug that doesn't really say the amount that I have with for this this is head alone I have 25 million polygons and for a full body I probably and I don't even know that second table in a large icon market I'll give you the number a number of so long yeah but I mean like the full body is not part of this Z tool I don't know I would need to open the other one and it's gonna be it's gonna take too much time but like I would say you know what I would say probably like a hundred fifty million Polly's if you last one hundred million I don't know but like for example like I I don't really care about that I go with how well my scene is like moving and I'm really just gonna like start like dividing things when my scene starts to actually like lag I'm never really going to look at like my my my pole account because I'm out like I said earlier I'm always going to try to be at the low as possible so when I do like a detail like how precise like so you steal another civilization right but I like already at this point here there's like no more like and I know that I'm never going to see the character closer so there's no reason for me to go higher than that and some of my like my things like this one here it doesn't take much time before you see like the peak civilization because it's not an important part so I always try to stay low so I know that I never really need to look and unless I find my seem to be laggy I'm maybe gonna cut my model in half like top and bottom but I almost never need to do that so that's pretty like pretty much my approach I'd say I will my only like calculation is that I'll never try to I'll try to never go higher than 10-million Polly's on one sub tool that's kind of like I realized that my preference in like speed or like smoothness is that's kind of like a magic number I figure figure it out for myself and the only reason why I will go above a hundred million well ten ten millions for one subtool is when sets that say it's like one naked body that's like cannot have a seam because it's like it's it's naked there's no wrinkles to hide like a split and it's just complicated sometimes I'll actually like yeah I'll go like to maybe like 15 20 but like 20 now you're getting like pretty high I mean I have a really great machine but I mean it's just like there's still like a number reactive that's where any like machine will start there maybe not ruin so smoothly I will have you move into now you wanted to go into showing more the detailing of that one piece while you're doing that if you find our way someone is asking a specific question if you could share maybe a technique how you would do a perfect half circle panel line if you perfect circle what a half circle panel line any technique that you might be able to share while you're going into this detail stuff you can think of anyway while you're working so a half circle panel line half circle panel line is how they put it panel line because I'm thinkin I think what they're looking for is a half circle perfect half circle panel that they could probably pull out of the surface is how I'm taking the question okay cuz like the first thing I'm thinking of half circle panel line is basically like how this remains like a half circle after like and it being like a panel and to answer this question that would basically just meet like I will just insert a cylinder subtool or a capsule sub tool and I will just like insert it actually you know what I'll just go quickly insert primitive okay so I basically just did that so I can have like this like this thing here I'll basically just like move it into place like this I would do it like cleaner right but technically if I actually have this here it's pretty much like my tool it lets me make make sure that like this like this line here turns like in a clean surgical circle that's how what I understand from because otherwise it's just a question of like mid details and masks which I I can probably show in my while I continue here ya go yeah go into that where you wanted to go to the next level detail on that out alright cuz like once I start to show tricks I can feel crazy like I know yeah yeah Frick's it's just it's not the fundamentals I'm like how to build my masses and stuff anyways so but just just to say I kind of want to jump in that now that like the question has been have been asked but like for example if I wanted if I want to do like a half circle of something like you know like using masks to like extrude shapes like this is something that I really like to do so you see like by simply like drawing like a shape and making sure that like your lines are flat like this or whatever you can basically like create like a volume it's like a mid detail volume but still you can pull it out and like make it look clean just because the mask was clean at the beginning if it needs to be like if you're if you're sturdy enough you can actually make like a capsule shape like this just by drawing it and then pulling it out and then you have like some half circle shape same thing in the other direction of course like this and if you need like if you need it to be a like from the edge well you can just like do something like this making sure this is whatever and one trick that I use is likes often I will sharpen and blur my mask and I can sharpen it again and if I just do like let's say in flight in a in d-formation then I can pull out I can pull out some like half circle shape this is like you see I don't really understand a question that well I'm just trying to show like Oh ideas of like maybe what the question was but but otherwise there's like three tricks that I really like to use like there's like a brush called trim hole that is in the light box but I put it in my main menu because I I like to do it I like it a lot and it's one that lets you do like holes like this so sometimes what I will do is I will actually like put it like on the edge to do like a detail like this or I will like like if you do it with an angle like you can do like those kind of like details here and you can really go like as far as like without you can do like this kind of like detail like this which is kind of like a half circle I guess or trim front so that was trim whole trim front that's pretty cool also because you can basically just like like the side to trim okay so the same way that like planar cut well do like a plane like this you see it's only cutting at the same level as like the first polygon but it will just go the deeper before doing so like planar cut it does that well trim front kind of like does the same thing but it's gonna be like compared to like the camera angle so trim front I like to do like details like this and just to help me dig deeper I'll just use like just like round alpha alright sometimes you can do like details like this and this is like proper is it's like compared to like today it compares itself to like the camera angle so if you go in that direction it's going to do this but if you want this line to be this line here you just have to be somewhat flap to the surface and then you can do like that kind of like detail here if you start from closer to the edge then it's gonna do it less deep this is kind of like a half circle thing so there you go seven half circle techniques choose the one you like so like to resume where I was at this point when you have like your piece that technically has like it's planes that are like pretty much like cleanup at the level you need them to be clean the next step is going to add some mid details there's like three ways that I add mint details I'd say there's going to be using alphas using masks and using cavities so to replicate the exact same like thing as here for example like this like cavity here is basically done with orb crack so orb crack is kind of like damn standard it does like a cavity like this but it does it it does it like really sharp like in a v-shape so like if you look at like the profile it's kind of like like a V whereas like damn standard would be like you see like round and round so just to draw it damn standard but this is like a line and damn standard would do this and like or crack would do like this here so knowing that it's going to do like two flat planes like a V sometimes I'll use it as like mid details you actually like do like something like this now it's just a question of being like somewhat like clean while doing it so you can basically like it's like acting weird when it gets near to the edge so sometimes it's just a matter of finding the right camera angles so like it doesn't get influenced by the depth and you just try to do it like in one stroke clean you can clean this like later and sometimes if you need to actually bridge to well now it's a question really a precision I'd say but it's kind of like it's doable while you see like this is like I can work with this I just did it in one shot I could have been cleaner but I can always just go in there and just do what I need for it to be look cleaner so what doesn't look clean like now well my lines are kind of like like curved to compare to the other ones so I'm just gonna go and like maybe like just push this so it's somewhat like straighter just like this like here it's like not as deep it like I say if I was just a little bit more diligent and I give it a few try maybe I could have done it like clean from the beginning maybe you would a lays the mouse I could have like do it in one stroke also I just I like to do it like in a way that it doesn't work so I show how I recover from it also sometimes but you see H polish now I have this here so what I this demonstration is actually also helping me to show that I didn't plan for this in the masses of my object at the beginning like this I knew that this would be amid detail something that doesn't really like is seen from the silhouette but it's just like an addition for like mid-frequency details on my object so it's not a small detail I still call it a detail it's a big one but still it's not like the fundamental of my shape so once that this is done I can actually like go even like further with like mid details and I can actually add like this like extrusion was added like by mask I could do like something like this also actually I'm gonna stop the vibe before I go further because I'm starting to get pixelated to a point I don't really like but let's say you want some like extrusion you can pretty much just like draw yourself like your area of extrusion making sure the shape of the eugen is pleasant and follows the line flow of your shape so I'm just gonna cut it maybe following like the lines of the contour maybe I'm gonna want to make some of them rounder like you see like right there it's like too sharp like it doesn't work with the visual language of like the surroundings this corner is so sharp but it's right next to an edge that is actually round I would probably keep it rounder in that area because I don't want to mix sharp edges with round edges too much or too close one to each other so talking about like visual language and choices of shapes this is more like a concept design thing but like I tried to make sure that like when I take I do a choice like even if it's a mask in the mid detail it does not betray the other visual language used for my bigger shapes so for this one the shape that I'm using right now I'm trying to convey it in minded details also like this mask right here so I'm just gonna make sure that lines are somewhat like straight and what I like to do like I said is I like to do like a little blur and sharpen so you see it became like cleaner with my lure and sharpen and some areas actually became rounder which I like so that now this mask is ready to be manipulated in any way you want you can basically just reactive with the action line you can like pull it like this and then you have like a 90 degree extrusion I call it 90 degree because I'm talking about like this line here it's kind of like 90 degree or you can push it in you can push it in instead of course there you go after pushing it push it push it it in Jesus Christ you can maybe like change like its shape so that like maybe like these angles they bevel more than these ones which which creates more dynamism it's less like static or what I can do is before I even push it in I can do like some blur if I want my edges to be less sharp so if I hit blur once the blur that you have in the inner mask masking here blur mask if I do I press it once and now it's like smooth ER so when I am gonna extrude it's gonna be you see it's like it's smoother it's rounder it actually fits a bit more with the edges are around it or you can go like really smooth but if you go too smooth it might start oops it might start to look not intentional or or I have the word in French in my head but not in English malleable man I don't wear clumsy I guess kind of like not intentional I know happy mistakes well now the i-beam is it's this I won't call it a happy mistake because I feel it's like smooth like this you're probably getting in the territory of like somebody that doesn't know how to do these creases and is like sharp edges it looks more like like you missed the target I'd say so just make sure that your choice stays within the visual language of what's needed in this case heart surges but something you can do another way of masking things that I really like is instead of using blur masks and masking here you're gonna control click on your on your object and this is going to blur only in one direction so you see it blurred inside of my mask but I didn't it didn't blur in what's unmasked and hence what I'm going to pull it out I'm going to have this here we're like one edge is smooth and the other one is sharp if you look at it from the profile this edge is smooth and this edge is sharp here and this was accomplished with ctrl-click so I really like that little trick here if I push it inside it's going to do like a more of a pool shape like this and if I want another result I just invert my mask control click and then the pushing in will just trade what edge was curvy and what edge was sharp like this there we go and if like this edge is like too sharp you can always like just with a little like smooth move brush just giving a little like quick smooth fast here I smooth too much though I was not diligent enough you can also like reduce the strength of the smooth but you say like like that it's pretty cool it's like still a little bit smooth it it's nice here I don't like but see so I can just like reduce the strain of my smooth by pressing space and shift there you go well that's like how to do like mid details with the mask and the other way we do with would be to do mid details with alphas so with alphas you can simply like load one of your alpha whatever like I'll go here I'll take well it's going to load I'll take this alpha here and so what this alpha does is does like that kind of detail my um my mid value is not correct so I'm just gonna fix it to maybe like one or two yeah it's still present I would need to put it to 1.5 but I can just like use some radial fade there we go alright so this is like the detail I can put on mic on my model but the thing is like you can experiment with having like really use radius when like placing like a detail and you can actually maybe experiment and use it at your advantage so what you can do is like maybe like I don't know oops like that's disgusting so I won't do that but like maybe if you use it like around here it can make for like somewhat of a cool mid detail now I kind of like busted this part here so I could use like store morph target like I said earlier you store morph target before and you're clean it after with the morphe brush or you can mask or you could use I'm going to show another little trick here the depth I really like using depth you can find it in brush depth here and my three options that I use is the the graphic embed and depth mask so depth mass is to activate it and then if you take like that top here and you you lower it like this you're basically telling your brush do not affect anything that's on top of me right now so if I place the alpha again you see that it's not even touching the side here except like don't mind this like smudge here there was this is me earlier but you see that like I didn't create the smudge from from later see if I remove my depth mask and I try again it does this if I actually activate the depth mask and I you I play with the height like this it's actually not even like applying it to the side here so depth is pretty cool also so yeah this is like another way I could do it some mid details yeah and also like that the strength of it is important don't like if it's supposed to be subtle don't do it too harsh and once it's placed you can do it like you can give it like a little smooth pass also so that would be like a detail well I don't think there really it's fitting in term of like design right now but I'm just like playing around and stuff so at this point I would like I would I could I could say that I'm done with my mid details I could go like into the last phase of applying the details themselves which are super easy I'll go I'll do it like right off the bat it's going to take like five seconds but my details are basically just applying alphas and adding cavities so I'm gonna go back to my orb crack I can I'll do basically what I did here you can just like have this orb crack follow the contour you have to be really diligent maybe it's going to take a try or to do it clean like you see like that that the distance between the edge and the cavity is shorter than like here so I kind of like changed it by accident so if it's not too visible just let it pass if it's actually noticeable you might want to try again just hold your breath like a sniper and do it worst that I did it before there you go perfect exactly what I wanted maybe I'll just follow the line hold the line love is always our time glow low boom I can change maybe like the the the radius to just create some like different side when I'm resuming my cavity I'm just trying to not press so hard and once it starts to draw engage how much I need to depress on it there we go well like that would be like clean enough I'd say I can do it if we wear everywhere else I want and then at the end I can just like start adding like other kind of like alphas and details maybe I'm gonna go like deeper so it's really readable deeper I need more intense changing a bit value and this is just a question of like deciding where it you need to actually attract attention or etc or you see like the rest of like those like little details here they're all applied is just alpha as if you slap on it at the right place you just experiment until you find something is like visually appealing and it would be pretty much like how you actually get to this stage here which is pretty much the end of the demonstration for the quick technique I'd say is there any questions you're using a lazy Mouse I'm assuming right yet lazy mouse turned on for the orb crack that you're using yeah it was turned on yeah exactly so easy snap at all someone's asking yeah I mean okay so you're you're naughty and I like me Paul but like I didn't understand the lazy snap it works with which tools because I know it works with the crease brush but sometimes I've been trying to apply it to actually know I'm talking about the morph target ability of the crease brush sorry sorry the lazy snap yes I'm going to be using it sometimes but the thing is that and that is gonna sound like a total drag but I feel that I got good enough to just resume it without it but it's just one less option that I need to click and I just win some milliseconds so I just got good enough to to do like these or good result without using the lazy snap that I will really use it for that but sometimes when a case is like I just cannot do it correctly I actually might be using it so yes lazy snap is what I would consider it's a good tool it's a really good tool do you use the vdm brushes at all from when you're working in your workflows BDM okay so that's a no now he doesn't use the vdm that doesn't look like alright sorry no that's fine you wouldn't I wouldn't expect to use everything so someone was asking I just want to find out if you were yeah one day when their releases come out and when I like I'm gonna use like the what about the minimum amount of free time that I have to just like play on an experiment and at this point I pretty much just like focus on like the tools that really add something to my workflow and the other ones I will like sometimes create like shortcuts on the top here just so I do like a reminder to keep experimenting with them because I find that they could they can help me and it's just in due time I'll get to them right that's how I deal with those but I usually I get tools that work with my workflow because my workflow is so like cemented in me yeah pretty much became like the pillar of like my approaches and stuff yeah and Kevin brought in another question just to highlight the brushes again he's asking he forgot to write them down what brushes were you using the cut in and then flattening to a specific depth I think he's referring to your brush for cutting in and then you were showing your play nurse okay well I was gonna again and because it's it's like the brushes I showed earlier they were more for like that step of like detailing but what I what I wanted to when I show I started by talking about planar which is kind of like the fundamental brush of the others planar is basically something that will flatten everything to the first normal if you pressed on so the normal of this like those poly polygons are its silhouette so let's say I want to cut this piece I can start from here and I can just use planar and cut this now the thing is that I know really get the result that I want just for this kind of like need so planner I will use it for something else but it's just a demonstration of what planner does it's gonna take like the normal at this thing here and it's gonna try to flatten everything to its level now it's not doing it correctly because my radius is too small but basically that's the point now cut we'll do the same thing but it's just gonna dig deeper before doing it so you see it just it dug deeper then not it digs deeper and then it actually does the plan our planner thing from before so knowing that I can show trim front so brush trim front that you're gonna find in the lightbox on there trim brushes trim brush what it does trim front it will depending where you start on on your an angle it will actually flatten to the camera flatten to the camera angle everything that you go over so like this here right but if you don't overdo it you can do it stuff like like this here basically and like you see like your line it's not really aligned to here so this is just a matter of like placing your camera maybe like like this you see now I overdid it like this almost now you see like pretty much like my line is not parallel to this one so it looks like lean now yeah this is like trim front and trim trim whole is basically just it's particularly just a brush that will dig using the camera angle so it's it digs like this depending on how strong you press on it and if you do it like on this side well it takes like this so if you actually kind of like move your brush with a slide like this you can dig you can do like those kind of like holes and if you do it without you can do like the opposite so like if you do both of them it don't it does like those like inclined like Balti thing see this is how much I'm the functional artist I don't even know what's that called I call it incline multi thing it works it works I like it perfect works exactly so there's a life will let you move on to your next technique that you want to share with them yeah okay it's cool so like those little thing I showed a DNR more like tricks like I have a lot of a lot of things to show actually but let's just jump to the other the clean technique first you'll notice that by the end of the clean technique it starts to to get pretty similar when it when you get to like adding mid details and details so the clean technique is just going to go through like my panel looping approach so if I take for example like another part of this character here so let's say like like the cheek is pretty complicated this part here is also like pretty interesting I'll take a look just this part because it's like simpler but like let's say that we're the way I did this this object here is basically with panel loop right but the way to get there is like so that it's not like too long there's like a certain approach that I will show you so first of all I'll just save it as like a little like screenshot like here so I'll go back to my blog King is that the blocking new it's not the blocking is that the blocking that's the blocking all right so like this guy here is actually sculpted in the piece so the way that I actually did like this piece here is exactly how I actually show him before so I pretty much like had like like the model like this at some point and I knew I wanted to do like some like like eyebrow on him it's maybe a bit too low I'm just gonna push it to to double so basically I just like did like the mass like this like I said earlier masse edge and plane so I did the mass once that I had the mass sorry once that I have that mass I just do like the edges so the edges is basically going to insist on what is really a edge using my damn standard like this this is a edge edge edge this could remain like a round thing so I'm not gonna like insist on adding an edgier I'm just gonna add the edge here instead so those are my edges I can go as far as actually at this point cleaning so that my line flow is is nicer I can change it to be more dynamic also a little dying diagonal here is going to do some help all right then I'm going to with a CH polish or smooth brush do my planes without or no out then a little quick cleaning for the ones on the side this yes I'm destroying the this this part here but for the moment I don't really care I can always clean it later or just out first and smooth it back smooth smooth and then I can do like a last pass of like making it look like it's actually its own piece and not an extrusion of the base by using like an orb crack and maybe like insisting on it being like a cavity now I may be like I want to really test like the depth or the width but you know what I said earlier like I'm just trying to sell the illusion this is pretty much like trying to sell the illusion moment like just having like this cavity just already like makes it feel that it's more like modular of the thing you like added or separate rather than like an extrusion of it and often I'll see that I'll see like some people trying a hard surface and maybe like lacking this little like functionality or like visual language and I find it like by insisting that some plates are separated with like this just little caddy d-trix often will actually help just to add some intricacy to the detail so technically like that would be it then I could like add like whatever detail I need to add or or mid detail like if like this things check this needs to like to go lower or whatnot but this is like a blocking stage right so you don't need to do things like really sharp that would be to me details and then there would be like the cavity whatever so basically I am just trying to say that this is how I actually made like the piece like it is now you see it's it's not clean it's just there for design but you get you get the point that it's like of a certain mass certain with a certain shape but now when I want to actually make it clean the way of doing it using the clean technique would be what I'm starting right now after taking a sip that's actually part of the process it's a very alcoholic inducing process I do not condone drinking alcohol while working maybe a bit anyways whatever so yeah so like what I'll do is I'll basically like start by doing a duplicate again well actually you know what that's the thing there's like many ways to start this process here there's a way I'll show like the simpler one and then I'll show like another like approach to it one way up one way of doing it if it's going to be isolated like an isolated case compared to like doing many plates at one the isolated case would basically like do a duplicate of like this shape here so now I have like this one that's a this one that's a backup this one that's my my shape now and I'm basically just going to try to mask it out and separate it into its own piece so the moment I actually got it I can just do like show I don't remember what the name of the button for me it's just pressing on the F it just like does show visible I think or showing show mask hi part there you go hide part it's basically takes what's like masked and just like show it to you alone so from there what I can do is I can just still continue like removing with the selection tool what is like the width because I don't want the width because well the thickness I should say because I'm going to create it during your using the panel loop so I can pretty much just like remove it by hand like this that would be one approach that I could do or I could just try to do like a cleaner mask actually first of all I'm gonna use it I'm gonna put it in gray here so what I could do is I could actually instead of like doing this I could use the mask but apply a depth limit at the bottom here so when I mask it like this it doesn't go like you see it then went lower than this compared to if I actually if I don't have it you see my mask is going way deeper here but with depth it's actually staying at like a certain limit so like now that I have this here when I actually hide it it's pretty much like the thickness is already taken care enough so that's like a cool trick also another way is that I use sometimes is just a draw like the poly paint I just filled filled object all in white and then I'm going to to use like a darker gray only RGB I'm going to draw the the edge here like this and there's a there's a plug-in that's called in here follow the group it poly group is from paint is actually it's gonna actually take what you painted and actually separated in different polygroups and it's basically going to do that like this maneuver here the maneuver basically that it's doing like is something that I used to do or Cedric showed me like earlier in the past which is basically selecting what is what is a darker polypaint it's the idea of like having a mask by color masked by intensity then it's gonna hide part of it like this actually I'm gonna do it invert first it's going to hide part of it and if you Auto mask this here on the group I'm sorry Auto group basically since like this part is now disconnected from the rest guess it's it gets its own poly paint so now you can just select this and pretty much just grow your selection until you pretty much have everything except your your thickness so you see like those are like three approaches to do like the exact same thing basically and I'd say that it varies from situation to situation which one I will use because they all have like the old perks and stuff so it's just good to know like there's many ways of going at it but only I just realized something you can tell how far I am in the stream by like the amount of sweat that I have on my cap here because now I'm like at here and I starting at zero and then you have like a progression so if you fast forward it's just gonna feel like there's like water that's going out so that's I think you can become a gif yeah exactly there you go yeah like a human a human clock whatever yeah the human sweat clock no human sweat calacas gross that's cool trademark by the way so don't everybody there you go so once I have this year I can just delete everything I can just remove the poly paint so now I have like this year which will be like the piece I'm going to want to panel loop before panel looping it I just want to make it a little bit cleaner so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna get rid first of all of my mid detail that's here while we mid detail detail whatever and I can just get rid of it by just using planar maybe or simply like using the clay tools to fill it and then I can use my H polish to kind of like have like a better like surface if i h polish too much I might end up actually flattening my object so you see how it went from like a curve to but if I actually do that honestly sometimes it's just a matter of like taking your move brush it got like pulling on it like this to just get back a little bit of the curve that you lost so my first trick would be just be careful and don't like overdo don't press too hard on each polish or try to actually like maybe like for example like maybe use out so he doesn't lose its curve or just like just be diligent a little bit but you can always just like move it back to like more of a curve at the end you have a big radius with the move curve so you won't see like the move brush pulling it it will just feel like it's actually like a constant curve and you can see it by the light going on it so now you have it really like like good looking plane and the next step will basically just making sure that like your contour is clean enough so that's when you do that - it doesn't try to actually mimic the contour so for that there's a couple of approaches again you can basically just use like in masking here you have like you can you just have mask border selected and when you click mask by feature it's gonna select all your borders which you can invert and use like deformation polish to just like get it a little bit cleaner like this until this little dent here might still be interpreted as like important by Zed remesh so maybe you want to maybe insist a little bit more so you can like blur it and do another polish so now it's like a little bit cleaner or you can do also what you can do is you can use this tool and edge loop loop loop I just put like one loop or zero I keep some some G polish and when you click on it it kind of like smoothes your contour here here and just this is just to make place for using instead remesh and making sure D algorithm just gives you like a clean result from the get-go so yeah so at this point what I'm gonna do is I'm actually link to Zed remesh because I want something cleaner than this here here this piece here the Zed remesh was not was just done so that it's actually easier to navigate and that I still get like the worst of division if needed but here it's actually going to be important for my panel loop to have a clean mesh or a cleaner mesh let's say so I just want to show something there's just a parenthesis I'm adding I just did one side and like some people which would be like well you just have yourself divisions so like how do you do the other side how you get back your symmetry it's really simple it's just a matter of like deleting your your subdivisions here so now my object is with no subdivision and now I can use deformation no modified topology mirror and weld there in weld here which will basically just take what's on one side and put it on the other so you click on it and now it's on the other side if it was the wrong side let's say like you have two objects and one is not the good one and it's mimicking the right the wrong one you can also just do like a mirror before doing a mirror and weld it's a little trick but basically mirror and well we'll put your object on the other side as long as it doesn't have subdivision levels but some might think ah but you lost your subdivision levels yes but you can always always reconstruct them because they existed before and you have not changed the topology so you can always just geometry here reconstruct subdivision so you can see I'm slowly getting back my sixth subdivision levels here there we go and now I can reactivate symmetry and now I have my object and symmetry here the one way that you would not be able to get your your your your subdivision level back is if for example your object you change its topology in one accident that can happen is if you would do the mirror and weld if it cuts your object in half before duplicating it like this you're basically changing its topology so it so it doesn't have the potential of going back to its state before but if you don't modify your topology you're going to be able to the mirror and weld and get all your subdivision level back here so deep in mind you cannot do that when you have layers so before you start adding details on layers if you want to keep for the end you want to keep your layers keep in mind that you any like modification that like is gonna ask that you get rid of your layers you're gonna lose your layers so you're going to need to bake it and be at these that you baked it there's actually a way that you keep your layers but it's pretty hard it's basically like you turn all your layer off you duplicate your object and your reproject all your layers one by one on new layers it's super time-consuming but if you need to do it you can do it yeah someone brought it up in the chat Marco I just want to let people know to the subtool master yes it can actually mirror over with some additional models since it was brought up in the chat so I'm brought it up yeah but the idea is that that it's doing what I just did in the backend yes if if your subtool master is going to be changing the topology by accident it's just gonna say no I cannot I think it's gonna actually stop you and say I can do it because I'm going to be changing the topology hence I won't be able to reconstruct it so what I did is I just did the whole thing by hand here basically anyways that's just for you to understand the theory that goes behind the practice actually so basically back to here so now what I'm about to do is to give it like a topology that's good enough for like a panel loop so now we have a clean surface or clean enough we have a clean edge and now we can actually ask it to do as I dream ish so I will go very low I will go actually at the lowest which is 100 Poly's and well said Ramesh this it's going to give me this here which is could be better because like there's a lot of stars like their vertices that are connected to five other vertices or connected to three vertices this is called a star you want to have them or the most vertices that are not star so that's are actually connected to four edges like for example this vertice here has four edges so it's it's good this one has five edges this one has three edges and the one with three or five edges they're not the best I mean it's workable but it's always better to try to just like have like not so much basically so sorry I'm just gonna let it save but that's the that's the idea like you don't have to go like like bonkers with the said rematch you just want something somewhat workable so I'm just gonna run zat remesh again and you see it actually got should I'm gonna try without adapt yeah don't remesh again yeah there he goes you see like this for me like that's fine I have like a star here here and here and that would be good enough so what I'm gonna do at this point is I'm just going to make sure I'm not losing the the shape that it had before so I'm basically just gonna like push everything into place if I if I want something to be like a hard edge like a 90-degree angle and really going to make sure that it's a nine degree thing if it's supposed to be a curve I'm gonna try just to make somewhat of a curve like here I don't try to make everything like super perfect for the moment I just tried to have essentially my shape be mimicked correctly so like that would be pretty much like it like this now I make sure that my line is somewhat clean yeah you see like my silhouette is somewhat clean my surface is not so clean anymore I can just give it a little like h polish little additional h polish so then it's just like a little bit cleaner if i flatten it too much i can once again move just give it some curve and yeah so that at this point i could do like my panel loop for some reason I kind of like pushed it really far from my objects I'm just gonna so now I'm move it somewhat to its shape it's not important if it's not 100% there we go so that's now my shapes I would be like ready to do a kind of loop at this point I just want to show one thing that's also can be pretty cool is there's like keep the keep group option it was added and I think like two updates ago or something and it actually like lets you kind of like add a poly group before you do like this step here well the step the step I'm about the show is basically like how to do like these like panels right but before I do that I'm just gonna add like one little complexity that actually I really appreciate its the fact that before you do like any Zed remesh you can kind of like cut a poly group and Habs that remesh follow your poly group also and what what it helps you to do is stuff like this so for example I'm going to be using like a slice curve here and it's basically I just want to do anything slice curve anything that adds like a poly group like this in a straight line and if I actually use the option key group before doing my Zed remesh it's actually use like keeping those two groups separated and that's actually pretty good if you really want to like make sure to keep like a crease so with that line here sorry I'm kind of like repeating the step from before it's not really important like the shape I'm trying to do but there's the fact that like my that the key group was able to keep those into two different different [Music] polygroups will just help me when I'm gonna crease my things later okay so there we go I can even like add like some kind of like level change here with that shape here like this I could have totally do that but like a mask later but like on a bigger piece sometimes you want to isolate like a portion to control more easily but technically now that I have this here I can basically do my panel my panel loop and like have some fun on like the result so and what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna kind of loop this panel loop you're gonna find it in edge loop here panel loop I basically like bring everything down to the minimum - hundred zero zero one loop and the thickness is the only one that's going to be variable so I'm just gonna test at this this is too thick for me we're gonna test that best this looks somewhat good but I forgot one thing important is ignore groups here because I don't want these two polygroup to become individual I want I want to keep the polygroup but I want the mesh to be uniform so ignore group I click on panel loop and now I have the thickness that's added and it's still one whole mesh but it kept different polygroups and this way now what I can do is I can pretty much like use dynamic subdivisions to test how it would smooth but by adding creases using the poly group to help me add the crease so this is like a whole like technical part for sure but it's one that really helps a lot to create yourself like a great fundamental and polished shape so I have this here and what I'm gonna do I'm going to start right away using dynamic subdivisions here on top dynamic subdivisions I activate it it's going to subdivide by - by default so it's subdividing - subdivisions but tearily it's not really there yet so hence I could not like sculpt on it because it's still using only the topology from its level 0 like the rest is theory : it's like showing you how they would go if it would be something bits of divided by 2 but what is cool about this is that I can actually tell him a little bit like for Maya users it would be hard hard edges and for 3ds Max users it would be a smoothing group you can pretty much use your poly groups as like smoothing groups and make sure that like where - poly groups are different where they meet that they stay hard and the way that you do that is staying hard basically is is using creases and the the one to actually tell him to stay hardware there's like different polygroups is croup creased PG crease Balaji you click on it and instantly anywhere where you have two different polygroups now you have an hard edge and now the question is well how do you make other hedges hard well either you change their polygroup by any means either you can use like like in poly group you have group by normal which is basically group by angle it's at a 45 in goal by default so if you click on it you're gonna see your some of your polygroup changing like you see like those here it changed this one in this one so if I would do a crease group now I'm just gonna use my shortcut button but if I use crease polygroup again now it's actually making these one hard these what this one here didn't change now it's just a question of like do you I want it to stay curved or do I want it to become like to have this like edge here I'm probably going to keep this one now I'm going to make it hard because it doesn't look good it doesn't look intentional enough so I will actually just like give it like more of an angle here and I will try group group by normal again it didn't do anything so I maybe I'm gonna lower it to like 33 degrees now it did it so there you go I'm gonna I'm gonna backtrack I'm going to show you another way of doing it it's gonna first time and I enter zmodeler I actually use similar for a lot of like little tricks here and there I actually have a shortcut for zmodeler it's a shift cue I just put that because I often will go here just so that I can actually like select an edge go increase mode and just like rapidly like a side where I crease my things my pup Mike my my poly group angle actually pretty much creased everything where I wanted it to be but I could actually like manually add a crease like here by simply clicking on it and now I can see if I activate reactivate dynamic subdivision which is once again here but my shotgun is a shift D I can basically like to see like what gets smooth it and what stays hard so like for example like I want this head I want this edge to curb so I'm not gonna add a crease there but if I was to actually crease use like for example crease edge loop complete and add the crease all over it now I would stay hard like this but I'm gonna go back because I actually like this kind of like Turner here and I like this curve here so I'm not gonna change it one thing if you can do now to make sure that your your your contour is clean because the inside of my surface is pretty clean and the contours are pretty clean but I can just give it like a little procedural like maneuver just to make sure it gets maybe a little bit cleaner and it's basically to use in the formation use polish crisp edge so what polished crisp edge is going to do it's basically going to to polish or flatten if you want like anything that is not creased so for example like let's say that I have like a bump on this like surface here like this if I actually use just normal polish I kind of get rid of the bump and I get rid of like everything at the same time which is not good we want to keep the shape but if I tell him don't move my my creases if I use polish crisp edge it will actually smooth everything that is actually not a crisp edge sometimes it will get too much and this is where I'm actually going to save a morph target to get back something that I lost so for example if I use once again polish crisp edge I'm going to use it two times it makes for a pretty pretty clean surface except for like the star you see like the star what it does it kind of like doesn't bump that's it I'm going to clean later all soon but it's just to show that stars that's why we try to get rid of like most of them I'd say but you see like the before and after like this line here got actually pretty like flat so this is this I like but I lost my mic my line here that I don't like and I lost my my a little like curb here that I don't like either so what I'm going to do is after doing that I'm just going to go over with the more brush and just like get back like what I lost so you see like I pretty much like got back what I lost here but you see having like not having like a bump from the beginning would just help not having to do like too much polish bite all this crisp edge so you would you could probably like get to a better result by manually cleaning first and then giving it maybe just one go at it it's for more target first get this back give this back there you go so everything I showed so far if I was not talking it would have been done in like two minutes so what did the explanation I take more time but you can trust me it's like you can go pretty quick with that you're when you're comfortable with the technique so the next thing I will do is probably just give it like a little like push just to make sure that like it was just you see like I have like bombs here and here is because my mesh is not necessarily like the most flat so I can probably just go to an elastic cleanup like this and dynamics evidence shows me that like it's gonna be pretty clean so the next bar is going to make sure I have the edges that I want because right now they're all super start it's not something that I necessarily want and what I'm going to do is I'm simply going to use the crease level to tell him hey you know what subdivide but at a certain point stop keeping my crisp edges and start smoothing everything and what is the option it's in crease here you have a crease level basically it's at 15 now so it means I can divide 15 times and it's never going to smooth my crisp edges and after at the 16-time now it's going to smooth it we're not gonna suffer by 16 time but let's say for example I put it that at 4 so it means that like if I actually subdivide I'm just going to use the subdivide of the dynamics of division for the moment if I've subdivide at 3 it gets more subdivided but it's still not crisping my smoothing my edge if I smooth it at 4 it's still not doing it but the next one is gonna get smooth it so 5 now I get like a very tiny spoon here it's very pinched how do I make it less pinched reducing the crease level to something lower this is just my experimentation let's say three you see it got like a little wider - it got like even like rounder and that might be like too round now it looks a little bit too like soft but like maybe a 3 it was round enough so it captures more light when the light passes over the edge it actually helps with the readability of your edge and so that would be like an electron that I actually appreciate right now maybe you want to chart Burke I actually like it at that level so now that I have this I pretty much have my mask it's pretty much like I know like the shape of it the next step would be to commit the find dynamics of division into stuff like real subdivisions and start adding like mid details and masks and details like I did in the other example but one thing you can do before you actually go to to commit your subdivision that old is like have fun with that modular so one thing that I sometimes I'm gonna do with my objects before committing does that modeler is actually going to start committing to subdivision levels is going to use that modeler so once again Zen modular oops no here and I'm going to use like stuff like to add like edges and extrusions and whatnot so this is this is starting to be more experimental like you do whatever like looks good but for me like my old techniques are like going and like insert adding like some edges to your eye maybe adding like some almost on top one of each other and then pushing in flight in poly loop mode pushing this like inside like this here so you have like now you have like a trim detail all over your model now it lacks of like creases here so it's gonna around but you can always just like crease edges loop and then now it's sharp and you can do like the inside also the reason why I didn't use an inset or an extrusion for that it's because inset and extrude will erase creases like arrays the creases of your edges here and that I don't want so IFIF I figure it out that by manually adding my edges myself it actually helps me to get like this this flow of detail here so you can do this here you can even like inflate it like the other way around like this so now you have like some like external trim detail you can go to the point of light actually adding even more like this and having like some like go in like this which add four intricacy of details and whatnot and now it's just a matter of like adding your creases again I do like that it's around like this if you don't like it you can go back to like group by angle and see if it like helps you grew by angle crease polygroup and then oh you see you got a good result here like this so there you go not actually like that's like a little trace you can do and you can really like have fun with but with those like if you don't want one to actually to extrude you can basically like do things like masking masking if polygroup so when you're gonna use like inflate poly loop you're actually going to actually keep this from inflating and that sort of stuff you can do so much things with does muddler but this is pretty much like my idea like something it can do quickly something else you can do quickly that's like a trick is like I if I want to mimic adding like a rubber pad to like this plate let's say it's like a plate that goes like on somebody and you want don't want the metal to hurt the like the skin you can have like a rubber pad and something but like a quick trick that I like to do is just use a curved tube snap the curved tube snap lets you like add like tubes like this but if you actually start to draw it on the edge and press control it's actually going to go from one polygroup to the other or one crease to the other if it stops here you can simply mask everything but one side and then apply it so it's going to reappear and by when reappearing it's also gonna have like this like two thing here so you can like hide it and split it into another sub tool like hide it's the same it means the F key which is like visibility hide part and you can now go into a split to split it into another sub tool and we'll split yeah Eric split it in and now it became its own sub tool here and we're just gonna hide everything with this and now you can give it maybe like they're like curve that maybe like you lost here I just Marga I just want to let you know that your about a little over two hours into your stream just so you know - okay that's actually good timing because I'm pretty much nearing like different the Mentos and everything else will be like maybe like overtime on over to techniques so yeah anyways thanks for letting me know so now when I actually when I am I will go back to my my distress my dynamic subdivision with my creases now I have my mesh here to get rid of like that line it's just a stroke line so you just go in straw stroke curve function delete and the other one here you can also apply a dynamic subdivision and then you just pull on it until like it kind of like does that rubber padding thing but you need like here and here it needs to like be a little bit more like similar but you can just do it by hand whatever so back to here here basically like before I go back the repeating like the mask and the thing that I showed earlier I just want to show you like the transition to like subdividing and it's pretty simple basically it's just a matter of it's just a matter of in dynamic subdivision you click apply and now it becomes real subdivision levels here and it means that now you can also like like draw on it your details and everything one thing that I want to show is one of the first thing that I do is I just finish something that might be it still unpolished and it's it has to do a lot with like like something that apology was not really helping me to do or maybe like the stars like I said the vertices that are creates pinches when I'm actually back to this here what I like to do is get rid of those right away and what I do is I'm simply going to go to like a somewhat bloat of the vision level where I can kind of like see my pinches now it's like a very very subtle shade of gray but I still like see it like right here and what I do to get rid of those it's really simple so well you're looking at you're gonna you're gonna tell me what's the name of that brush because I never I don't know what's the official name I call it smooth relax it's when you start to smooth and your finger from the smooth button but you still continue smoothing yeah the smart it's called the smart polish smooth smooth which is a really a good name because it does really it's smart with the topology and it's gonna relax your pinches to actually like make it like an even surface so what are you gonna do like I said I'm not gonna do a simple shift like this which is first of all it's really flattening my object I'm going to click shift click on the pad or the screen and right away remove my finger from shift and now I'm gonna move and it's actually going to keep my my shape and remove the pinches now one morning if your radius touches the exterior it might do a bumpy thing like this so if it does that just hide the exterior just hide everything but your your plane and now you're good to go but you see I just did a little quick ok use it I'm gonna try to really like show you that pinches ok now you can see it you see like the bump here in the bump here there because I've logged those things here but you see if I do like the ship thing like they're pretty much going on them you want to make maybe make your poly up your a poly paint a little bit darker because it'll make your Polamalu a little bit darker yeah you'll actually I'll remove Mitte the metallicity of the madcap also so that we it quencher the yeah yeah hot pink was good though - yeah stereo I think perfect doesn't hurt the eyes at all yeah you can see you got two bumps there it actually makes me look more tan also yeah I don't have a reflection from your sin T yeah exactly anyways so I'm back to this so you see like the pinch you see like that's one is like that's that's a bad one when you're gonna bake that and put it in subtool and put like a material like a metal material on it like that is gonna pop and that's that's I'm really really critical to get rid of those especially when I'm using my clean approach because my clean approach I'm using it because I know it's an important part so I really want to be like as clean as I can and this will go in its I will try to get rid of that but you see with like the smart the smart thing a smart smooth it's actually getting rid of like pretty much like it instantly there might be some of it left but it's really getting rid of like most of what's needed to once again sell the illusion so there you go it was made actually specifically for smoothing out points like that and there is actually yeah we made it specifically from when we were doing all the Z sketching and then you would get a normal topology and this regular smooths would create points so that's nice about it there's a straight slider there's a strength slider for it as well if you want to show them that in the brush palette and smooth modifiers there's one slider only for that brush as well really yeah and the go to the brush palette so everyone can see it since they're looking at your ZBrush and you go to the smooth brush modifiers at the bottom you go and then you see that slider says polish strength that's me for that brush cool that's nice I actually did not know that I did I didn't really need it it because I really used a pressure of my pen and I got really adept at it but that's actually pretty good cool thanks for letting me know and I just wanted which I just want to let you know also that another way that this like alternative smoothing technique is a smoothing brush is actually pretty good it's for keeping your volumes because if my group your volume is for example like like it oops like a curve like this if I press shift and I press on it its melting but if I actually press you the thing I just said the alternative smooth so I press shift I click on the screen and I get my finger off shift and I use it you see how it likes more slowly it's like melting well it's fixing all of the artifacts while doing some very minimal melting to your shape so it's really good at retaining the shape also so basically back to this now my shape is cleaner I could also maybe take the chance to maybe like maybe like like flatten this a little bit because it got maybe a little bit too curvy and when I go back to my higher subdivision levels well now it's like way cleaner and like here I could actually do a little like and clean pass if I find that it's like not clean enough still and this would actually be the result of like my pretty much witness like the mesh itself the final mesh I just need to add the mid details like I did earlier and the details and like we would be good to go so adding mid details it will be the exact same thing that I showed like earlier where you can either use like masks so I'm gonna use law so here you can use this and smooth I mean just using smooth and sharpen just because I know it's really good at like smoothing the the shape of the mask and once I'm like this well then you can just like like push this like this so now you have your mid details you can even like pull it out of the shape a little bit like this if you want to influence the shape and then a little smooth or crack you can use or crack if you want to actually like simulate that this would actually be after all I separated piece I'm gonna put the intensity higher now I'm using shift to do like a like a quick slash whatever and then you do you add whatever detail that you need to add to get the result that you want this I should like make it like its own brush because I don't want to have to like change those options all the time but whatever I'm just showing that right now same thing is like showing wider technique of like trim front if I want to do like this kind of like indent like this here all right here we go this add like a little detail in it whatever like adding alphas and stuff it's really pushing up like design and that sort of stuff but yeah you can like add a little lip like here with simply using like the standard brush just to like accentuate like this and just give it a little bit of like character one thing that I really like to do is like sometimes like add like like lips around like edges just to give like to accentuate it maybe or just add some detail if you feel that like it needs like a trim detail or something but there's like so much little tricks like this that you can do basically the point is that like this is how I will treat it like a shape like this here this this whole I actually accounted it well while doing the the mesh itself let's add remesh if it's a smaller detail that's like this sometimes I'm just gonna push it in with a mask it's just a matter of like how close it is to the camera so you see like for those I actually did made this like part of the mesh just by making sure that when I do it might as a tree match that there's the contour but sometimes I'm just gonna like to use a mask and push it in so this is basically like how it would do this the same way that I will do pretty much like all the all the shapes on that that guy here now this is like super convoluted but it's basically what I just shown with maybe like a five percent of difference but alike spice here and there it gets me to like a little extra result but yeah basically that would that would be it actually I'd say for ya for pretty much letters like the main like the meat of what I wanted to show I'm an open book if people want to stay and ask questions or specifically clarifications so I would call it done for like the main event and the rest is like over time yeah I'm just looking through the questions see any questions we can ask [Music] let's see proposing a character do you do have to do the poses yourself and when you're posing are you just using as you brush the pose or 100% ZBrush baby everything in ZBrush like it's so rare than I'm gonna go outside it like ZBrush like I mean except for sometimes when I want to really have like a simulated cloth some and I want to do it quickly I'm gonna cut corners use like marvelous like something often like things like scarfs or things that are like pretty much like like that fell on the character that are not like well yeah I'm gonna use like marvelous just get like a quick shape put it in ZBrush is that remesh it not a loop it and then just finish it in ZBrush like yeah but like there's I'm gonna do a lot of like hand sculpting for things that are like like often like if there's just like a sleeve I'm not gonna like do like a sleeve and marvelous I'm just gonna like drive my hand and this is where like well it's good to practice cloth sculpting because you don't want to always rely on the tool to do your result and but I mean just a little parenthesis here I find it's really very important to really to have at least some practice and like human anatomy and like cloth anatomy because even if you use like scans or like marvelous you want to be able to take what the software gives you and make it look good and artistically and a well-designed because it's not because it fell according to gravity that it looks good and like appealing so you're always are often going to need to fix your scans or your your cloth your your marvelous so I'd say it's really good to practice like a certain reasonable amount the traditional approach to anatomy and anatomy and cloth sculpting actually what's your favorite way to assign polygroups is it polygroup it now and groups by normals or are you still just creating a mask and control doubling what's your your way for you applying polygroups that's the best way you like to do it my favorite way of assigning polygroups is basically always starting with a passive public polygroup by normal by the grew by angle so that is I still get like at least all my 45-degree angle to be different already my panel looms gonna give me some but I often do like a angle and if not I will add some more by hand like by simply like using a selection tool by like selecting polygroups or and assigning them and playing manually I'll do that yeah like the same way that like if I'm doing like in an instance I'm doing some zmodeler like cylinder with details you can use just out and just like remove your finger from album pressing on out again before removing your your pen from the screen and it's just going to assign a different polygroups so I use also this one but it's a lot like a what poly loop gives me then the group by normal and and pretty much that's it if I want to crease often I'm gonna use the technique I showed with Zen modeler where I'm going to crease by hand like the edges that I want to stay creased and and then seeing that you guys as a company cast Masons you guys are doing concept video game pieces you're doing collectible pieces what else do you guys been doing well our first our first mandate is video games that's like the thing that like we're the most like known for and the most set up for but I'd say I'd say that like collectibles is like a close a close second with design also we were very unfortunate than a lot of like our design contracts I never saw a line update so most of like our design stuff is stuff that we do for ourselves I personally do a lot of design for sideshow like they make me design my own characters they they just tell me like do him and I could do him in my flavor and it's you it's one of my I love doing that because I love to have agency over the design of what I'm working for but most of the time you're working from like concept so you have to be good interpretive interpreting concept as much as you have to be good at like designing so often to fill the gaps that the concept is not really clear but the collectible thing is more something that I actually like do myself I'd say video game is like 92 like 95 like everything that we do because it's just what we we've learned like we've learned video game we mastered it and we took some like sometimes we went like on the side and actually like the other things and collectibles and whatnot but it's more like something I do for fun because it looks cool and such they acted your techniques are really changing much too right from what for me to one of those clients why they're doing a concept I'd say are maybe the most important thing is if I do something it's going to be printed I try to make sure that there's like a shape inside my model like for example this guy here like this is basically the blocking that I each time I did like a new piece I just pushed my blocking inside like let's say like once I did like this piece here I just made sure that like but the remaining that was like here I just pushed it in but the fact that I have this at the end it makes it just much more easier to just like boolean everything into like a watertight model so this is something I'm going to do is specially for for printing but for video games or like any other thing like this guy here whoops the higher res version this guy here doesn't really have like an inside I think if I remove like this plate here oh no actually I have I have one it's this piece here but if I did not have it like I would see my model and this you don't want for collectibles right even if it's like there's something on top you don't know if there's like a little like cavity somewhere that's like hidden that's actually reaching for the inside and creating like a non watertight cavern if you want in the in the in the middle okay I'm yack to answer your question I think what you were looking for the method he use to add thickness to his mesh was panel loops yes whoops to add the thickness in the mesh and then started using zmodeler to do some other things to it ted suit yeah you're asking a question alt release what was that trigger I'm not I was probably looking at text I'm not sure did you mention a trick sometime with alt release mark law in the last 10 minutes five-minute release while I did the smoothing the smoothing for not losing your volume it yeah yeah it's a it's a smooth smooth thing I was showing like for example like here is gonna be a good example if you smooth without the release it's gonna like kind of like make you melt your shape right but if you have it it actually you see I'm pressing super hard on it it's not losing like the curve instead of and if I use it without their release it does lose it so using the out release your shift release when smoothing keeps more your shape and also gets rid of like the the pinches when you have like stars on your topology okay yeah that was the shift one I mean yeah you were saying you made me miss hurt it yes the shift keying again there's a separate slider for that in the brush smooth smooth brush modifiers yeah like I just wanted to show because of the question earlier like like this like hood that was like done with marvelous because but but but that's not how it looked when I came out of marvelous it came out like just like really not of that shape but I just wanted to have like all this like resting this resting cloth already done and it's like it's super easy to do in marvelous it's so longer in ZBrush and since I I wanted to like optimize my time I went for the thing that was maybe easier in marvelous but how I posed him it's in zbrush everything is posed in zbrush i won't simply use transpose master to like just pose it and i was off that often i will pose like a blocking of it like it like i disobey my model i posed it so it doesn't look good it's just a bit crudely decimated model but it's in place and I know that like a composition is everything that I need and then I will pose my final model on top maybe arm one arm at a time one leg at a time that sort of stuff now they want to know how many polygons total all those are cross because you're you're showing it then a usual question yeah it's a 140 million Polly's and I think everything like it doesn't count your dynamic subdivisions but I don't think I have any dynamic subdivisions on that guy this guy is like pretty much like all subdivided because I wanted to have like some like some grain on the character pretty much everywhere since it was a Sofia was to be printed later and before like I know that they're gonna ask this this is a displacement map the grain here it's just like this this model when it came out of like marvelous it actually I still hadn't like put my my polygroups so like the thickness of this was a polygroup so I simply went in UV master UV and Rabbi polygroup I had something super flat that was able to just add a displacement map of this kind of like random grain that I need it for like it's not a super nice grain but it's good enough for how close I want the screenshots to be so yeah okay one more question do you use thumbnail sketches for creating concepts or you just develop the shapes as you're moving along inside the ZBrush I didn't really have the chance to croute to create that much concepts lately so I actually have not really used it but I totally see why it's actually good to use it because often often you're gonna actually want to pull your character back to see really like how you read like the major shapes and stuff and it's something it's the sometimes like you I personally I forget and I think a lot of people forget to like look at your character from afar to really see how like these are when you're seeing from afar so I having like the thumbnail is actually pretty good for just like having always keeping like an eye on it I find alright unfortunately we got to get going but mark I want to thank you for spending so much time with us in the stream and sharing all your your tips and tricks again this stream will is recording it will be put up on our YouTube channel the pixologic youtube channel that will be there forever and then also a little stay on our twitch channel for as long as the videos are able to be stored on the twitch sir they don't keep the videos forever but YouTube does so you guys will be able to re watch it as much as you want over and over and over again watch Marcos sweat go from the forehead out to the brim I'm doing it I'm the same way I'm in the same boat as you that's good actually it's been like two hours and a half now right yeah yeah let it be said this is two hour and a half at this mark here so now we know on the sweat the sweat strong polymer the sweat almoner this way no matter so Marco again thank you for sharing so much with us and sharing all these tips this has been part of our ZBrush master season 2 or DeMarko was kind enough to be a part of us next week we'll be having been Moreau so check that one out that's gonna be at 7 p.m. Pacific Daylight Savings Time so again that 7 p.m. los angeles time if it makes it easier to grasp it but you can definitely visit our calendar that i've shared with you guys to get reminders so i'll put that back in the chat so everyone can have that marco i don't know if you want to put in any last-minute words for yourself to the the people watching and tuning in oh well first of all that's been really fun i I know I have like verbal diarrhea so like but I think I was pretty good at like covering what I wanted to cover but if like anybody has like questions they're more than welcome to email me or send me a message since I'm about to be a father for the first time I can promise I will be super available but it will be my pleasure to help you if I can for sure if you invite here again another time I think I have like other stuff I could maybe show that would be my pleasure I love to share I just have so little time to share but I do love to do that so that would be nice and for myself I'd say that like if anybody is like interested to work for Kaos Mason's know that is it take to send your portfolio or always like excited to meet new people and add them to the roster or the team it's like we have projects and stuff so don't hesitate and I to say that if you have any curiosity about like what we do you can always visit chaos Mason's comm if you're like a producer or whatever we're always available for work or we always like to make ourself available for work and outs I'd say that if you want some merch like cap or whatever I just opened this door if like that's interesting for anybody your money is probably better spent with the college situation right now but whatever it's there if you want it we still have some collectable that we have available especially the daddy figure and the creep and we have actually some very interesting project that are coming about collectibles we're expanding our line unfortunately this is going a little bit slower that we would want but that like the world is in a special place right now but let's say that like if your eyes open because we're looking into like expanding our our collectible collections and whatnot earlier this is my personal remind next fashion project so stay tuned for that also you know they're really loving your Mega Man series by the way everyone's been commenting on that as a lot much they love when you've been doing the Mega Man series thanks though it's really like something that I did like for myself I always I knew it was like aw it's not that original it's like something we already know and love but it's really good to make something for itself once in a while and it can really be like a recipe for a white page or a blank page syndrome that's a expression in English right yeah when you have a hard time too at the start let's do something for yourself it's much easier that way I'd say yeah I've also shared the Kaos Masons link inside the chat everybody so you can see what mark was was talking about for his his company and how to reach out to them that's in there and I've also again I've also put the calendar link in there for upcoming zbrush live streams and again we've got we got Joseph dressed tomorrow we got Saul on Blair on Thursday I myself and going on Friday continue my gremlin project so by all means hop on that calendar there's a certain events you guys like to see and you can actually click on the events and have a email reminder and even add it to your calendars and if you're a Mac user the I Cal's as well so again Marco thank you so much I really appreciate you taking time out of your day on this Tuesday to be with us it's been a lot of fun and it's been great watching you work inside of ZBrush with your techniques for hard surface alright that's cool well it's been a pleasure again and until the next time I might say for the moment just wish me good luck because in one month I'm making a double of myself so it's gonna be something else alright everyone have a fantastic rest of your day really appreciate you tuning in we'll see you next time on our next ZBrush masters next Tuesday tomorrow or we'll see you in any upcoming streams from the pixologic team I have a wonderful week thank you for tuning in

Channel: Pixologic ZBrush

Views: 81,598

Rating: 4.9733443 out of 5

Keywords: zbrush, zbrush tutorial, zbrush speed sculpt, zbrush hard surface, zbrush beginner tutorial, zbrush 2019, zbrush 2020, pixologic, zbrush free, z brush, sculptris, pixelogic, zbrush live, zbrush download, zbrush core, zbrush trial, zbrush brushes, blender, 3d coat, 3d modeling, digital sculpting, adobe live, zbrush student, etsy, zbrush character modeling, zbrush character, zbrush sculpting, zbrush realistic face, 3d printing software, 3d modeling software, sculpting a gremlin

Id: u75skb32GTo

Length: 171min 48sec (10308 seconds)

Published: Tue May 26 2020