ZBrush Update! Our thoughts on 2021.7

foreign [Music] right so each uh version of zbrush that comes out each new update seems to be defined by a particular trait i i would say the last version was defined by the cloth tool so if you had to call this the blank update what word would you use to define this update uh this would be flexibility it's the flexibility update because you have so many options to change things after the fact that it it allows you to experiment even more and you're you're less locked into anything so it's that flexibility i think is the main theme of this update uh so same question to you tomas what would you define this new update i think flexibility i agree with eric i think flexibility really is the um the feeling that we get because we've taken a bunch of tools that have had some history in zbrush and completely tied them to different tools that were available in zbrush and like the expansion of history and poly grouping is just awesome all right well let's see some of that i want you to tell me what your favorite new tool in this update is okay um it's a hard one to pick but if i had to choose my absolute favorite i think it is the masked by change points so what this means is if i go and so i'm working on this little playing with the scorpion cuff idea that has been i've been knocking around forever and so these are just kind of variations of the same model and as you can see uh it's already been posed so i made this model months and months months ago not in the new version so there's an older model but i'm going to use the new features on this older model so if i go in here and i'm i'm you know i want to decorate some stuff and add some cool details to it so i'll just use the damian standard brush to start with so um i'm just gonna kind of like actually let's get a little a little bit bigger there okay so let's say i draw some some kind of crazy design or whatever right so i've drawn that in there i can now in the tool palette i'm going to go down to masking and there's this new button right here called mask changed point so if i click on this it's going to create a mask on all the points that have changed since that last stroke right there's a few cool things about this uh one is like let's say i want to do more than just one stroke so this is uses undo history as part of the features so i'm going to go back a few steps i'm going to control click on this undo history marker right and now let's go in here and i'll just make a few random marks again all right and then uh math changed points so it's masked all of them because it's paying attention to everything that's happened after that stored undo state also as a side note you can also go in here to polygroups and polygroup changed points as well so if i do polygroup change points again it's looking at the undo history and is creating a polygroup around all of those change points so that's another level of flexibility so now it's not just masking but you can store it as a polygroup uh same question to you tomas what's your new favorite tool in this update i would say knife tool probably i think it's the most universally useful tool that we've needed for a long time and they've taken the trim brushes and really turned them into incredibly useful tools remember there used to be a lot of distortion when you made chopping and that's no longer the case here let me show you what we got here so i really love the knife brush because it has brought the trimming tools into incredibly useful and much more accurate tools if you remember if we came in and did something like this very often we would have those bridges you know it wasn't a sharp clean cut and as opposed to the trim tool which leaves it leaves a non-quad mesh this leaves a nice sculptable quad mesh which is really cool now the other thing they brought in is this b radius button and as we come in i'm going to hold it down let go and then i'm going to tap to change my shapes and and the radius of my brush it now just uses the radius of the brush to determine what it's trimming or cutting or you can do it the other way you can come in and then hold down alt before you release it and you can see that it's now let's auto group it's now created two different objects with that space so for cutting parts up for molding or printing or also just generating cutters like for other tools like you know that you're going to want this shape you can now take that and use that as a boolean cutter so it's a very good way of generating a chopped up part and or pieces that you will then in turn to use to chop up other parts so it's just really awesome that's a really interesting use of flexibility in the new update now have you developed any new processes while you were using the beta do you have a favorite new process yeah this sort of builds on what we're just talking about it's uh this new option also found in the masking palette called flip by posable symmetry right so this particular model is you know when i when i originally modeled it it was perfectly symmetrical so this feature is dependent on the topology the topology has to be symmetrical so this piece even though it's posed differently does match the topology of this piece so that's important to understand but basically what it does is uh i'm going to go back to my layer brush here and to set the free hand and if i just do i'm going to do a simple math so i'm just going to hold the ctrl key and paint a mask right here right some kind of squiggly design and now if i choose flip by posable symmetry there we go so now we have this mask over here so again since i've already posed this that doesn't necessarily mean i have to go back to an unposed version to make symmetrical edits so let's clear that mask and just to speed things up a little bit let me go down one level subdivision so it's three million points not 14 million so now let's combine that with the uh masked change points so i'll use the layer brush here and let's get a little bit more intensity here and a little bit the focal shift that's not so there we go so let's say i do something like this and now i'm going to do in the masking palette mask changed points i decided i like this but i want to have it also symmetrical on the other side so now i could do flip posable symmetry right and now the mask is over here ctrl i to invert the mask and i could actually just do a drag rack and pull this out right so maybe that's a little bit too strong but what we can do of course i'm gonna undo that if we could play with thick skin which is introduced a couple versions ago this kind of sets an upper limit on how far the stroke will go if i turn on thick skin and let's set the value to like five then i can pull this out do a little smoothing and they match okay so given all these new updates uh to zbrush what's your favorite new process i think it just last is actually going to be the tool that allows for some interesting new processes because it makes you think about geometry differently and honestly i've only played with pushing it a little you know i've played with the standard what i would consider standard usage but i think that it's going to have some amazing ways of generating some just interesting cool forms um let's take this for example so i was discussing eric and i were talking about this the other day and i thought this was kind of a cool process we were talking about roses the other day with one of our members and they were like oh well how do you do a rose and i was like well you know you have to set up the rhythm of the petals [Music] and now i'm going to come in it's allowed me to do this kind of rhythm block up i'm going to come in with slash and just get some depth in here and the nice thing that slash does is it has sort of soft edges so it makes the petals thick where it's creating sort of petal thickness and when we were discussing this with one of our members the other day it was like okay well it's great you got that rhythm but now what do you do with it right and the beauty is this we just go back to where we created our first strokes hold down control tap your orange block it creates a white that's our history we come all the way back and now i grab adjust last and pull this out and i mean that's pretty awesome you know that gives you a huge jump on the process of creating something like a rose or the such so if you want to do something geometric you could just come in change your history state to here come in do something that's sort of square straight or flush and you can use this to really accentuate the stroke you just did as opposed to just hitting one where the stroke repeats repeats repeats this way you can take the one stroke and really play with it and get it to the depth you want and you know if you want it to be a clean surface just take sk trim pop that off and you can clean those surfaces back up pretty darn quickly so eric what would you say is the most unique feature of this update the thing that hasn't really been available in zbrush before so one of the coolest new features in zbrush that's not necessarily based directly on any existing zbrush feature is the stager and what the stager does is it allows you to work on a model whether it's an opposed state or at the origin and you can flip between them so this is what i mean let's go to i have a little model here of this young woman and i have my scorpion cuff so let's say that i want to work on this and also see what it looks like on her wrist at the same time so this is now at the origin of the grid i can go down here to the geometry palette and right above mesh integrity there's this stager subpalette so this is a new stub palette and if i click on this what it's going to do is it's going to store the just the transform information in other words the scale position and rotation of the model but it's not going to necessarily pay attention to the sculpted details in the model so i've set my home stage and that's stored in memory so now what i can do is i'll press w for the gizmo and let's put this in a new place we'll put it on her wrist so i'm going to move it i'm going to scale it [Music] so we can see it on her wrist and now i'm going to store that stage so this will be the target stage once that's stored i can now use this switch stage button to flip between those two so now it's back in this original point and i could sculpt some details on here so go in here i'll just use a demon standard brush just whatever any type of sculpting that i want to do i can sculpt on here and now i say okay i want to see what it looks like on her wrist i'm going to do switch stage you can see now it's on her wrist and even though i've scaled it and rotated and all that kind of stuff it hasn't disturbed the sculpting at all it's just pay attention to the details and you can sculpt in either state so if i wanted to make my scorpion look a bit happier right i can sculpt right there so click on switch stage and it's going to bounce back to that origin with all the sculpting intact see happy scorpion it's pretty cool because uh obviously it it you know if you have some kind of default character and you want to actually see what the jewelry might look like on on him or her as a great way to flip back and forth between that uh again it's more flexibility um and obviously it's going to be a big deal for for character modelers who are doing clothing and weapons and stuff like that tomas can you show us what you think the most unique feature of this zbrush update is i think interpolate is one of the more unique features that um hasn't really been nzbrush i mean we've had some repeating stroke things but this has taken it to a completely different level of usage tying it to the history brushes so let's go here i have this pre-sculpted and let's say we just want to put you know this has become boring and we want to put kind of a cool pattern on it easily um we can come in let's change the photoshop here [Music] and we can do this mask it out because this is the only area we want so we mask this off and when making jewelry i use a lot of this stipple pattern i've made out of the form brush tool and the thing about it is is that it's sort of a random splatter pattern and it really holds the sulfur very nicely but as you can see and i even have an i have a pretty even hand you can see that as i crossed over it gets weird spots and this is a little lighter and this is a little smaller and sometimes you want something that's a nice rhythmic pattern or you want something that's pretty symmetrical or you may even want like a slight pattern to the speckle so what we can do we've masked this area off let's flip it i'm going to come up here make sure i'm above that line come down and brush through and then i'm going to start up here come down and brush through now i'm going to hit interpolate and you can see that i have these nice even strokes now the problem here is that they're too far away from one another so we're gonna undo that and that was what 12 so let's go to 25 26. and hit interpolate and you can see that we have this nice even pattern that has lines in it now if you don't want the lines in it you can always come back we're going to just take those strokes up to let's say well let's just go all the way to 100 and see what it does interpolate and you can see using 100 strokes removes all that linear detail because it's stacking on top of one another but it's still a very nice even consistent pattern so it's a really good way of controlling some of these pattern in the background you know you can also come in let's back this up and we're gonna start over here just above and we're gonna stroke sort of at an angle we're gonna come over here we're going to stroke sort of at this angle and now we're going to help let's kick that back down to 30 and so you can see you can create really beautiful nice even background patterns super easily that right there is awesome because then you're not completely dependent on your ability to stroke evenly so i think that's awesome and incredibly powerful [Music] those are some really interesting and useful tools i want to know if you have an opinion about the most useful new tool in this update oh yeah i think the one that's that's going to [Music] get the biggest reaction out of users is the bevel brushes so let's just go to a nice primitive object so a cube going here and i'm going to add some divisions here and turn off smooth so we have nice sharp edges and just divide this get it up to like 300 000 polygons now um if i go into draw and there's two new brushes here bevel arc and bevel flat so if i choose bevel arc i'm going to lower my draw size it's a little on the insane inside here this works just like any other brush in terms it could work with symmetry you don't have to delete lower levels of subdivision or anything like that but basically i click here and then i draw out a line and then i go back and forth it makes that perfect arched bevel now it's important to understand that what it's doing is it's it's literally squishing the points so you can see i have a couple little bits right here but you could always use dynamesh's z-remesh to kind of fix that but um you can adjust the amount of beveling using the draw size there's a couple ways to adjust the amount of beveling right so you can use the draw size as one way to do it and you can also go in here to the brush modifier if i go to the brush modifiers and change my modifier let's lower this you know like six i'll make my draw size really big but even though i have a really big draw size you can see how i can control the depth of that and what's cool about this is of course it also works symmetrically even with uh radial symmetry so if i go in here and i'll choose y symmetry and then set this to four right see so let's do that one more time so turn off polyframe and you can see i mean that's a huge deal what happens to that brush if you go all the way to the corners um i think it looks it works pretty well i go all the way here look at that yeah i mean so that's a big deal for what we're trying to do and you know we use that constantly yeah and and tomas has been doing some really cool stuff with it as well um but you can see i mean it's just it's so neat i mean the one thing that i've been playing with that i think is kind of fun um if i go in here to cylinder 3d and this is kind of i've already set this up so it has an inner radius but you can use this slider changing inner radius and then i'm going to squish this down turn off smooth and subdivide it a few times get some 400 000 polygons that's great i mean this is kind of fun to play with the radial symmetry um i'll go in here and turn on symmetry the z-axis yes hey i got it right the first time um and let's set this up to like i don't know and then [Music] do like a mask like this i'll invert the mask so you can get some really cool designs going with the masking and then you know invert the mask and bring my brush modifiers there and then the other bevel brush works the same way it's just instead of a curved brush it's flat also known as jamfer camper it's a be a happy chamfer [Music] so given this and the other features are there any objects you can think of that just got substantially easier to make in zbrush yeah well unique curb links just became a much easier process so here let's go here oh here's our base ring let us make it thicker let's get all the geometry we can here and so we're going to make our hole size a little thicker let's get it about there because you want the thickness of the link to be able to fit in the hole all right we're now going to come here to twist and i'm going to rotate this 90 degrees and there is your basic curve and i'm going to stretch this out and i'm going to go w and i'm going to drag this out to where they're almost touching i still have my hand on control and then i'm going to release control and i'm going to drag out and now i know that these are my evenly spaced forms for link all right we're going to come over here we're going to stroke so we are unmasking and we're just going to rotate that 45 so it's straight all right we're going to test it against this edge yep about this tip's turn and so now we have our basic curve shape right i am now going to drop this [Music] i'm going to come to symmetry and what direction are we actually facing the easiest way to test your directionality is hit gizmo and then hit reset orientation i want see the blue arrow z so i know that when i come up here i want my symmetry to be z i'm going to hit q i'm going to come to the side and i'm going to hit trim front get my brush fairly large and i'm going to knock this edge off i think i'm going to knock that edge off a little bit more and i actually want a lot more geometry than this so divide divide divide and now when i cut this that's going to be sharp okay so i have a nice sharp edge i'm going to change my symmetry to x [Music] all right it's like cutting both sides yet and we're just going to stroke through that so we have these other face we've got the top and side done we're going to make sure that x and z is turned on we are going to rotate this towards camera and then i'm just going to go from here to here making sure that stroke is pretty straight and now we're just going to roll this edge off make sure to roll up and over stretch and there you go and now you have you know a really interesting curve link at least the foundations for a really interesting current leak really fast this wasn't that easy in the last one now here we're going to change it to and we're going to take the bevel and we're going to come in here and just make sure those green lines are sort of straight there you go and you know you can come back in and do this a number of times for whatever like come in here and we're going to take the round bevel and knock that little edge off so it has a straight edge and a round edge okay so you can see that pretty quickly you can get those base forms for curb links that it's tricky geometry and if you're trying to get this curve in there and get it nice clean and sorted that was tricky before thanks for watching we'll see you next time like subscribe hit that bell icon to be notified about future videos

Channel: Zbrush Jewelry Workshop

Views: 2,583

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Id: sH5XskxpVtI

Length: 27min 14sec (1634 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 07 2021