ZBrush Tutorial: Arraymesh for tiling sculpts

hello everyone my name is Kasper I want to show a quick and easy way to do tithing textures in ZBrush where you don't have to make any guides first or have to clean anything up in Photoshop afterwards because let's face it that's just disgusting right no one want to actually clean up after themselves so it's very simple we just as you can see we start off just with the default plane in ZBrush make it a polymesh3d and then we enable array mesh on it for those of you who are not familiar with it by the default settings here setting the X amount Y amount etcetera it will always make the array depending on the bounding box of your model so you can see here I did it too it will work perfectly but as soon as I then start moving a single vertex it will break or you know it will not work for our purposes of making it title so you fix that easily by just locking position and locking size and as you can then see it then works for our purpose so let me just disable these again and append new and set it on the y axis as well so we have our four different planes which is exactly what we need so lock position and size again and then you have your tiling setup you can combine this as well with using wrap mode which you might be used to working with which works on this plane as well so if you want to have some grout or something in between your stone tiles you can have red mode on this plane in the background and then having all your tidying stones on top of that so as you can see I just used insert mesh to get something on there and then we split that by masked by holding ctrl and interacting this out if we can just make our tiling Texas like we normally would just duplicate the stuff around we have our whole child showing always I just have to put in frame on so I can see what I'm doing otherwise I think the the shapes might blend too much together sometimes and that's that's it guys so I obviously you can see here that I I mess up the timing a little bit like I have this one line going through the entire texture which is obviously bad but yeah for the for the purpose of the of this demonstration I guess that's okay just be aware that when you scale it as you can see I did I get some random heights in this case I don't care because I want to have some random height anyway but just be mindful of only scaling it on an x and y if you don't want to have this and let's break the lead for the whole tiling setup just go down into polygroups outer groups to get all your different polygroups perfectly set up and then we can always just come in and put dynamic on it enable groups so they don't all merge together and that's it and we are ready to sculpt on it if you reason have our high poly the playing in the background the original one we can we can use as our low poly default in ZBrush already has UV so we don't need to do anything we can just export it one thing to be aware of though is that since we started up in the left corner in this case it might have some negative space so to make sure that it tiles perfectly without any visible gaps or anything we can just go down here to deformation and add an offset and just put that to 100 so that would be in the center of the for array measures that we made before so no matter how you set it up this will always work and and one other things to be aware of if we export this array image now we we actually only get the top left half or a portion of it because the rest doesn't exist it's just an array so what we need to do is just to make that an actual mesh to be able to bake it which we just do by going down in a transform stage and then clicking make mesh down here and that makes the mesh for that first transform stage and women just have to do it for all our stages which is twice and then we have the whole high poly and that's it so this was the intended end of this little mini tutorial but as I had tsipras open anyway I thought why not sculpt it this time-lapse is sped up by a factor of 10 so the total time sculpting this was around 54 minutes and while this is by no means a mind-blowing sculpt it's enough that you can such a smart material on it and get it an engine for a test sometimes this might even be shipped and I guess that's really what I would like to get with this small video work fast working iterations gets tough an Indian now I've made many others who would spend several days undetected like this just to get an engine and then see that it doesn't quite work anyway and by working in iterations you would spend an hour on a sculpt like this throw a smart material on it and then get in an engine and move on to the next thing so in one day you can have blocked out several of your toilet bill Texas like this or maybe even a pretty big part of your environment or overall look of it some some of these might actually even be good enough that you can simply ship them and others might need a little bit more iteration and then you simply go back and do that so it's a simpler workflow I believe saves a lot of time as it will enable you to see your scene and work on what needs to be worked on instead of spending a lot of time and something that might not even need that attention anyway one of the things to keep in mind when when doing something attainable like this is to not make something too unique if you make one stone very big make sure there's at least one other brick of equal size the same can be said for height color or any kind of damage or detail I'm already messing it up a little bit here by varying my sculpt technique a little too much between each stone and therefore I go back and reach out to those areas a bit to make everything a little bit more uniform if you are if you ask about what brushes to use then the answer is simply that it doesn't matter you can use flatten or mallet or trim or clay or anything else really in this demo I think I use all of them just you know it's for fun but you really don't need to just you know select whatever you like to do and then just go for that like what process you didn't use doesn't matter it's the result that matters so some some brushes might feel good for some people others might feel better for other people and then just just do that there is no right or wrong here and in general just don't be afraid to go in there and be rough and dirty and just destroy it you know destroy those edges and make that these other pull out the whole thing you know move stuff around it's it's much more important to be to be rough and and sketchy basically and just like get the big Reed's in there and evaluated texture as a whole so like either work out from work from from this zoom out view or when you zoom out look at it and then zoom back in and then work in a specific area of that deliberately don't be that guy who's it's totally something and tweaks the same little pixels for 20 minutes and then zooms back out and realizes that it sucks so instead just focus on the big reads the like edges and and you know the overall flow think about the normal map based like that the direction of stuff also the big reads the medium reads and the details just forget about those for now because in the big picture they really don't matter what what matters is the big reads and actually I would take that a step further and say that if you need to sculpt any details I suggest you don't just they take way too much time for their impact so rather go make an alpha instead of example I made a few of these cracks and stone detail else s five years ago or four years ago and I'm still happily using them on pretty much every stone I ever make so maybe I could make a few new ones now that no WB good idea but the point is just that this speeds up your work a lot because you can just focus on what actually reads you know what what actually is important when you get this in game remember that when you sit here in NC pressure whatever tool you have then you focus your entire attention on the entire viewport or your entire screen on this one texture when you have this in game or in an environment it will you know the majority of the time we will not be this big fine if this is something on the pavement and you even like on the floor then you even see it on an angle so you know the amount of pixels that the stuff you do here takes up and screen is usually very small or far away if it's on a building or whatever it is so that's why these the big reads it really the most important and those are the ones you need to get right and all the details don't really matter so just put some alphas on and just yeah make one alpha or two alphas and just use them on everything you can always come back later if you notice like hey I've you know made the stone crack and I just see that on every stone - don't I ever make them you're going to make a few new ones later but uncertain sculpt every crack you ever do is I will just take way too long like if it has to look at it this way way too long instead you're sculpted once make an alpha out of it and then slap that on everything this also has the benefit that leather work feels the same like it not necessarily similar I would like the exactly the same because the big reads and the medium reads will still be different there will be different kinds of stones or wood or whatever it is you do but it will you will have the same style to it or the same touch and it's really important when you when you make an environment anyway right you don't want to look like it's just kid best from completely different worlds or different scenes I do want stuff to belong you want things to look like it's all in that same world so really don't don't think of alphas as cheating I know some people do that like instead think of it as you being a smart artist working fast and winning in life I hope you found this useful and if you have any questions just let me know

Channel: Casper Wermuth

Views: 29,304

Keywords: Zbrush, Tiling, Sculpting, Arraymesh, gameart, texture, Casper, wermuth, tutorial

Id: mPWLL2L-hMM

Length: 9min 48sec (588 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 30 2019