ZClassroom LIVE: Modeling Basics: Booleans - Pixologic Joseph Drust - ZBrush 2020

hello hello hello hello hello hi guys doing and gals so give me a shout out if you can hear me and see my screen should see the trial stuff going on right here hope you guys and gals are doing well and staying safe doing that ZBrush from home excellent excellent thank you for verifying the sound there alright so welcome to another Z classroom live session here so I've been doing these little developer streams and I'm focusing on kind of the basics of ZBrush so if you download the trial you can just pop in one of these streams and hopefully learn something so that was the whole process for the streams I've been doing the trial is out so if you know anyone that wants to try ZBrush or has had an interest in ZBrush and just maybe hasn't had time to learn it if you're at home now and you're looking for something to do definitely need an load the trial will give you 30 days of ZBrush you'll have all full-featured ZBrush there and you can try out different things and see if you like the software one caveat with the trial here is that it will work for mac and windows it will not work on iOS so if you have an iPad you will not be able to use the trial so we've had a few people that have tried to download the trial for iOS and it will not work on iOS but it will work on a Windows machine and also a Macintosh machine and it just from the trial we have multiple ways you can get in the ZBrush so we have a monthly subscriptions and also professional licenses so multiple avenues to get into ZBrush if you know someone that's looking to get into it the subscriptions plans feature monthly and also six month and then our perpetual licenses we've never charged for an upgrade and so these are the prices here listed for the full version of ZBrush we also have ZBrush core and ZBrush core will come in even at a lower price rate it's the light version of ZBrush so basically the full version is the professional version and then we have ZBrush core which is kind of our intro version for ZBrush so you can do a lot of stuff with core but doesn't contain all the bells and whistles that have the professor version has some of our other developers Daisuke and Solomon will be doing ZBrush core developer streams too so if you have ZBrush core you can jump into one of their streams and see this stuff happen live ask some questions and kind of get some information on ZBrush core once again core has monthly subscriptions and perpetual licensed versions of each of those so for today we are going to be focusing on doing some live boolean stuff so I'm gonna go through the light building process and basically talk to you guys like you just download the trial and you're just using ZBrush for the first time kind of the steps you need to go into it some of the other streams I've done have gone even more basic so if you need to you know just figure out how to do sculpting I say go back and watch the replay for the first Z classroom livestream I did or I just model a bust and that one's gonna bring you down to like the basics of just getting a piece of digital clay into the application and then sculpting on it so you can get really simple and get great results at a ZBrush or even get really complex the ZBrush has a lot of stuff that's in it but you often don't need to use all that stuff to produce great artwork so with the live billion stuff there's also some videos here on Z classroom you can follow after this if you watch the live stream and you still have questions or you want to follow along with another tutorial there's an intro video that will go in some of the basics I'll cover a lot of these in this stream today the live boolean computer case fan is a whole project series you can kind of go through and use the live billion system to kind of create a case fan and there's a project that ships with the trial of ZBrush so you can just open up and follow along with that and then finally there is a video set here on fixing live bullying errors so the live building system is fairly robust but every once in a while if you have some weird shapes or geometry in your mesh you could end up getting some topology errors and so there's a whole video on how to find those issues on your mesh and also fix them so I'm gonna hop over to ZBrush here this is live as well so if you guys have questions during the stream definitely shoot them out I'll see if I get to him once again I'm trying to keep this add more of a basic level so if there's only like high advanced techniques or questions on that kind of stuff I may be able to answer them quickly but I probably won't be able to demo depending on what time I have to get through this stuff Paul also his streams are gonna be more of the high-concept type stuff so if you have any there's really like hi related questions popping his streams when he's doing them and he'll be able to help you out alright so to start let's say I just launched ZBrush here and at the top you'll see we have lightbox so like boxes ZBrush is browser inside the application and this allows you to see the contents of your files that ZBrush saves and loads so I think of it it's kind of like a bridge for Photoshop now one thing nice about this is you're using lightbox you can get a preview of what models you have and so one folder that you're probably going to use a lot when you're here is gonna be this quick save folder so we're gonna use a lot of quick saves during here to save our files and they will end up being in this folder and when they're in there you'll be able to see a little previews and then to load anything and hearing just click on it and then double click and I'll load that file in and you'll be able to get in and start using the application so for today's thing for the live bullying mom I'm just gonna grab this see sphere or the dynamesh sphere here the 128th version and I'm just going to double click that to load it in if lightbox is not open when you launch ZBrush you can come up here and click this lightbox button and that will show and highlight box there's also a hotkey of comma so to press comma on your keyboard that will also open and close lightbox another thing any interface items that you hover over inside of ZBrush you'll see if they have a hotkey assigned to them it'll display that hockey so you see if I hover over edit mode it says edit mode and has T next to it while you're over these options if you hold down the control key on your keyboard you'll also get a little pop-up with some auto notes that will display some more information on the process so if you ever find yourself wondering well what does this button do hover over it and then press control and there may be some information on there that will give you a little more clarification of what that button does inside the application so another little way there to get some kind of help if you're using ZBrush for the first time another thing for my voice is echoing oh is it still echoing I don't know if I can resolve that I'll have to see let me know if it if it gets better another thing with the application there is a help menu of the top here and in here you have an online Docs you can search so you can just click that will open a browser window and you go in there and search different keywords that are inside ZBrush so if you won't know about dynamesh you can click that I'll open a browser type in dynamesh and then you can find out stuff on that here we have a link to z classroom which is that page that had the options and the video is covering the live boolean we also have our support site here so if you come across anything that's like hey this might be a bug you can send us a ticket at support all right so I'm gonna select that dynamesh sphere 128 and double click that to load this in and after it loads in you should get something like this now we talked briefly on the interface stuff here just for navigation purposes and I have a little floating little floating a keyboard here just so you guys can kind of see this so after I loaded this file in it's basically ready to go so you could grab a sculpting brush and start sculpting on it for navigation stuff inside of ZBrush there is a few hotkeys I'm going to cover quick but if you're brand new you may want to use these buttons right here so we have a move we have a zoom and then we also have a rotate and these are going to be your kind of go twos for using the navigation inside of ZBrush so to move an object around zoom in and out on it and then also rotate it so if you're brand new definitely use these buttons here that'll help you out and then correspondingly you can also use some hotkeys inside the application as well so the main one is if you're hovering out in the blank spot of your model so my models here and this is called the canvas if you click and drag here this is gonna allow you perform a rotate and I'm just gonna make a mark here so you guys can see this quick and as you click this your ability to rotate around your model so just clicking and dragging a little rotate and then if you hold down alt and click this will pan and then to zoom in which is really kind of hard it's basically the first thing that I was doing then said ZBrush for navigation that was the most tricky was the zooming in and out so if you're brand new use this if you want to know the hotkeys for the alt click navigation zoom it's whole alt clicking the canvas which will give you that pan and then as you can see here I'm pressing down with the mouse and then if I release alt and drag with the mouse this will perform that zoom so you have click off rotate alt click pan alt click release alt zoom so those your hotkeys for moving around the model inside of ZBrush and as you're rotating if you hold down shift this will lock that model into a front back side axis there so you can snap into different things so Brian's asking me chav this is another beginner course so yes I'll be covering the basic stuff just download the trial and today we're focusing on the live boolean so inside ZBrush this is just your kind of normal way to do this and we have our sub tool list over here so we're gonna hit this quite a bit if you've just installed ZBrush you're gonna have this visible count set to 4 if you want to expand or show more sub tools while you're working on your meshes because when we start using line building we're gonna start taking a bunch of different shapes and we're gonna start modeling in a negative fashion so you think you know you can add positive you can also model negatively so if you cut one shape out of another you get a different result and so to do this it's gonna use a lot of sub tools so we're gonna come over here and I'm just gonna adjust this visible count some so you can change the slider here and this will allow you to see more sub tools in your scene so by defaults gonna be at 4 I usually like leave it at 8 some people who have you know massive amounts of sub tools they'll crank it all the way up and it will go all the way to 24 there and so you can then end up having all your kind of sub tools visible at the same time because this list will grow quite large we start adding stuff to it so for the labelling system it's basically a preview and so what this allows you to do is allows you to preview boolean actions and you can then manipulate these change these on-the-fly modify these and then after you're happy with them you can then convert them to true geometry so here I have just a sphere of topology here and to use the labelling system we have to first activate it and that can be done by coming up here and clicking this live bullion button now when you click this this is going to tell ZBrush hey we're in live boolean mode and you're gonna see pretty much nothing happened on the screen right I've gone through and there is you know no change I'm just activated a button and this is okay this is what you're gonna get now the next thing we want to do I want to come through and I want to append another sub tool than I seen so in order for the live billing system to work you need to have more than one sub tool so right now I just have the sphere I've live billions hold on turned on but there is no result so I'm gonna come over here and click append and when this opens up I'm just gonna select this sphere 3d object here so just selecting another sphere object and now this is gonna append to my scene now these two spheres right now are stacked on top of each other so if I come over here and click on this second sphere I can switch to it and then right now you'll see that this V R got dim so if it's selected and I have no color on it you're gonna be able to get this highlight basically that sub tool you're currently have active so I've selected the second sphere and the first sphere went dim but I still can't see this one so we can also change the visibility of our tools and this can be done by in our subtil palette over here there's an eyeball icon so if you think about layers inside a Photoshop you come over here and toggle this on and off and this will allow you to see or show which sub tools are visible and if you have eyeballs icons off on everything you're only gonna see the selected sub tool so here's my first sphere and here's my second sphere now with my second sphere here what I want to do is I'm just gonna move it out in space and to do this let me use the gizmo 3d so I have that second sphere selected I'm gonna come over here and I'm gonna switch from the draw to move scale or rotate now draw mode is gonna light a sculpt so if I'm in draw mode and I sculpt or touch my model you're seeing their Bell sculpt on it however if I switch to move scale or rotate this is gonna give me this gizmo 3d and the gizmo 3d is a universal manipulator so with this selected if I perform a gizmo action by coming over hitting move using a scale maybe it rotates imma be able to manipulate that sub tool in my scene and this is just only manipulating this sub tool I'm currently on so if I come back over here and activate that first sphere so I have my sphere that I have selected which has given me this coloring on it and then the first fear is being dimmed and now if I use the gizmo 3d you can see it's only gonna affect that secondary sphere so I can move this out in space you know position it somewhere else on the model the gizmo 3d also has these move screen options and also has a rotate screen option and these are handy too for just moving objects really quick and it's gonna be based off your camera angle so if I wrote to my model this side here I can then move it like this and if I rotate back to the front you move it like this so that's what these little kind of border move screening options gonna allow you to do so now that I position this model off to the side here what I want to do next is I want to tell the boolean system hey take this second sphere I've added and set it to subtractive so right now they're set to both additive so I'm seeing both these spheres at the same time however if I go to the subtil palette over here and I locate that second subtool there's these little icons that live on the subtool now these icons if you switch them normally they're not really going to do anything but once you have the live boolean system active that is when they're gonna kick in and start to become active so if I come over here and we have a union and then next to it we have a subtraction now you'll see as soon as I click this icon here and switch the subtraction that sphere has now vanished so if I go back here and click the first one you can see that's still there if I click the second one it is vanished now this is vanishing because the live boolean system is now seeing this as a negative shape or a subtractive element so it's removing it from the scene it's saying hey you've got live bullying on let's remove that shape now if I come up here and turn off live boolean your see I'm gonna get it back so live boolean has to be on and you have to have a sub tool that's set to something other than the Union option here to see that result of that live boolean subtraction process happening now once you have this subtracted bump it sets if I rotate the model here you can see I'm not getting a change on this so you want to make sure too that you may have the eyeball icon turned on and then you want to make sure that your model is penetrating your mesh so as you can see as soon as I turned that eyeball I can on ZBrush recognizes that that that sub tool is also visible and you'll see now it's cutting the second sphere into the first now this is a non-destructive workflow - so what this means is that any time now I can now manipulate the sphere that set of subtractive and I'll be able to see the change happen in real time so if I use that move screen space and move it I'm gonna be able to manipulate how this is cutting into that sphere so just moving around the object you can see it's cutting right into that mesh now if I turn on my poly frames this will allow me to see the mesh I'm editing - so this helps sometimes if you're definitely you know using a lot of subtractive forms you're not gonna be able to see them in your viewport so you can come up here and turn this off and see them or you could change it to Union and see it but basically it's easier to just come down here and click this poly frames button and this will now display the mesh and it's subtractive view with kind of these hatched lines so now I'm getting it as still that subtractive element but I'm kind of seeing it or seeing through it and so I can fly any normal actions of this I can move I can scale I can rotate and you'll see as I'm doing this it's doing this live doing boolean process in real time so I turn my poly frames and start manipulating this I can start tailoring the shape now that's the basics for the live boolean so adding two elements here that I have so it's up to one a second sub tool the second sub tool set to subtractive and both eyeball icons are turned on and then in addition I have a live boolean set so now with this this is how I can start manipulating shapes look at these questions you're quick and then I'm going to jump to a different project file in lightbox here and kind of talk about some other processes with the live boolean let's see here so the keyboard I'm using so I'm using no board is the keyboard program I'm using and then I have another application that's called on top replica and I'll double this keyboard I have and place it over top of my screen there so that way it's always going to be on the screen so I have two of these keyboards on screen I got one right here and then I have another full-size one on the secondary monitor I got here glad you guys are liking the streams yes a no board and on top replica those are the keyboard I'll see I'll type it in here no board and those are the two applications that I'm using for that alright so now that uh Nick I see your image here I'm gonna look at it quick but I don't think I'm gonna be able to go into it as well it better be a good image here so for this one here I'd say pop into any of Paul's streams so he's been doing a lot of this stuff with his hard surface type elements we'll be covering some of the detail things here like these options through here and you can definitely use the live billions for a lot of this to get these little designs Paul's last few strains been focusing on like a ship he's been doing and they've been doing a lot of the processes that I see here that would be used to make this mech so I definitely check out his dreams alright I do not use a voice mixer this is it's just it's just what I sound like this on this Apple headphone that i got in my ear one day I'll bring my recording setup here but I'm on this isn't my normal space so this is my internet at my shop where I work from primarily and you ZBrush primarily record all my pre-recorded stuff has like you know microphone and sound clouds and all sorts of that stuff but then this is a conference room I'm barring that has better internet so I have a laptop here and another monitor that I bring in and set up ought to do this so that you guys have enough bandwidth basically to show you guys stuff and not have a good like robotic chugging alright so let's get into something that's a little more advanced with the labelling well not more advanced just more practical so I'm going to open up lightbox again and in here I'm going to locate this jewelry folder here so I hit calm on my keyboard or click this lightbox button here in here I'm gonna locate the jewelry folder and then double-click and this is gonna open up and we have some different files you can use to kind of mess with the great jewelry designs so I'm gonna grab this signet ring 1 right here and then load this guy in so just double click it's gonna ask me if I want to save the project I was currently working on at this stage I was just messing with this fear so I'm gonna say no and then I'll load in the ring here and now I should have this loaded in now with this ring object if I turn on my poly frames you can see it's pretty dense and it's set up with dynamesh so dynamesh is ZBrush is kind of digital clay system and it will allow you to take a model and flood it with even topology and what this means is that if you have a dynamesh model and you go to sculpt if you sculpt here all the way down you should get a consistent stroke all the way through so it kind of takes your model and does this reprojection of topology across the entire surface trying to keep it even so when you sculpt on say the ear or say the mouth of the character you get that same consistency across your mesh and so this model has dynamesh active so I've go to the tool palettes and go down here to the geometry area and go to dynamesh you can see it has dynamesh turned on and it's resolution or what the amount of density or topology that the mesh has is set to 128 so if I increase this resolution slider it would allow me to get more details on the surface so that's just there just the terms of what type of mesh is this is now what I'm going to do with this ring here is I'm gonna go through and I'm gonna add one of those sphere primitives back in here and then show you guys some of the power of modeling with this subtractive form so once again I have live bullying active I have this set to Union here and you see nothing really happened so this is just the same thing I had earlier so in order for the live willing to work you have to have it turned on you also have to have a secondary sub tool so I'm gonna come over to the tool palette again I'm gonna click append and I'm gonna come over here and I'm going to grab the sphere 3d object and so you can see now I have my ring bass and I have that sphere 3d object no one skin I want to make sure that I have both the eyeball icons turned on over here so that the live boolean sees them as being visible and then I want to come down here and I want to select that sphere and you'll notice when I selected it that it's gonna be get toned in this kind of white color and then everything else that's unselected is gonna be a little dim so now that I have the sphere here I want to set it as subtractive and this is going to allow me to see the subtracting process is a live boolean process happening so I'm coming here turn that on and now I'm getting this result so that ring is now getting that sphere subtracted from it so I'm gonna turn my poly frames you can see it's still there but it's just being previewed in this live billion preview as subtractive now what I can do is I can now manipulate this sphere here and to do this I can use the gizmo as we did before with the sphere so switch to the move gizmo here and move scale and rotate will give you the same gizmo so it doesn't really matter which one you're in if you're using the gizmo 3d so just one little thing there and now with this loaded I'm just gonna start messing with the sliders here so I can start messing with the gizmo 3d here so if I start scaling it I'm basically taking that sphere object and I'm compressing it so I'm doing this to it and wherever it's intersecting it's performing that subtraction process so as I squeeze it in like that you can see now I have this I can now move it up and I can start tapering the shape design so maybe I want something like that maybe I can taper it more like this pull it back down and so you can see just by manipulating that secondary sub tool I've now created or modified my shape so now instead of having that simple flat ring or that simple signet there I've gone through and now added this kind of dimension to it so it's really fun to play with the labelling system because you can see how much difference you can get and all I'm doing is I have the gizmo 3d active and I'm just scaling the model so if I turn on my poly frames here this is that sub tool that I took so I took the sphere and compressed it on or off and now if I grow this out this is all I'm doing I'm just doing this manipular so it's simple scale simple moves simple rotate and you see it's changing that shape dynamically and this is all non-destructive through here now this is just a subtractive part so in addition to subtractive you also have a third option over here and this is going to give you an intersection and so what this is going to do it's going to look at this shape so the boolean works in a hierarchy system so it'll go from the top to the bottom so it's going to look at the volume of the first shape look at the volume of the second shape and then if I have this active it's going to give me the contents of those two volumes where they intersect so if I activate this one now this is the result I'm going to get so it's taking the space where the secondary sphere here is intersecting the ring and it's giving me the result of that so now I can come through and say taper my ring like this and all I'm doing is finding out where that intersection is and now changing it and now we end up getting that shape so just a simple manipulation and I'm just moving one sphere one subtools fear over here across that ring and now I've changed the result on this so so far we've been doing all this with just two primitives as well and you're not limited to only using two options with the live boolean as we talked about we got in here there's gonna be a lot of sub tools and come into play and you can keep adding to your shapes and keep growing how these bullying's are gonna be generated so let's say I want to go through and I want to add another shape now so I'm come over here and click append and now I'm gonna say grab this ring 3d primitive here and this is now gonna come in and with this let's say I want to subtract this from the shape as well so I can roughly position it where I think I kind of wanted and then I come over here make sure I still have that live bullion on I'm gonna select the second option here we're subtractive and boom that is now subtracting out of that shape now you'll notice as I do this I can rotate this around I can play with the designs again and this is just manipulating this second shape now we talked about how this is all hierarchy based right so we're taking the first ring ZBrush is then gonna process the second part as an intersection then it's gonna look at this one and process out of subtractive and it's always going to do it top to bottom so if I change the order here and say move one of these up or down it's gonna change the look I may get so if I move this ring up now ZBrush is looking at this one subtracting this one and then doing an intersection again if I change this to say up the Union now you can see now I'm gonna get this kind of effect happening so I have positive ring subtracting out the cylinder and this one is now positive as well and if I come through and say duplicate this ring again get its second one and then I move that below it and just click and drag to move subtools as well and set that to subtractive you'll see now I have positive Ring subtracting that ring then this is gonna get added that initial kind of egg shape I have there and then I'm subtracting this out again now you'll notice that the subtraction is going all the way through but as this ring right here if I move this up you can see it's only gonna cut into the ring because it's directly below it it's not gonna cut into this next one because it's after it right so this one's cutting into that but it's not gonna cut into this because it's a positive shape after the that cut now if I move this one down below that one now it's gonna cut into both so now it's gonna cut all the way through and it's going through both this one in that one so you got to think of the hierarchy as you're using the live billions because it's gonna go from that top to bottom and then as it does this it's gonna figure out hey ok I'm subtracting from here I'm structure up here oh you've added one well these two that you just said is subtractive are no longer gonna subtract from this new one because it's below the stack does that make sense so as you play with it you'll kind of figure it out and it's all non-destructive so if you mess anything up you can just simply you know redo it bring it back and just say I want that the way it is like that maybe I don't want this subtractive anymore so you're at this stage you're not doing anything crazy that's destroying anything you're just playing and it's really fleet free-flowing you don't have to worry about you know making a huge kind of error or anything like that because if you don't like what happens you just move things around and undo it so you've not committed anything this point now with this we talked about that mesh being dynamesh too so if I go back to this ring here and we showed that this was a dynamesh model then this one here was just a primitive model so this is just a 3d primitive that's been turned and do a shape so this has no dynamesh active I could say come through and Z remesh this zremesher is a process that's going to give you new topology across the surface and then let's say for this shape here we can do another mesh process which is division it's like if I want a subdivided model I can divide this up and I'll turn off my solutions here so now I've just taken this and divided and normally now the live links this will work with any topology inside of ZBrush as long as it isn't a 3d primitive so we have a dynamesh model we have just a normal polygon model then we have one with subdivisions and then this one's just a we'll do this one as a decimated model now if you're new to ZBrush this is all gonna be very confusing but just know that it you can have whatever geometry you have as long as it's the surface you can sculpt on in ZBrush you can use it with the live boolean system so here we have that we have this we have this I mean this and they're all different mesh geometry types inside ZBrush and they're all working with the live billion now another thing nice with the lye boolean is that you can also sculpt on your meshes as they are in this preview mode so let's say with this ring here I want to switch to the draw mode over here to get the standard brush and I just want some sculptural marks so if I come over here in sculpt you're gonna see that I'm able to sculpt on that piece and still see it happening or applying that live boolean so you can also tailor your shapes while they're in this boolean preview so I can come through and say pull this edge out and I'm raising this edge here so if I just turn on solo this is what I'm doing on the model so I'm just sculpting like this so I'm making a mess but then if I turn the boolean on you can see this secondary shape right here it's still doing that intersection and so as I sculpt on the surface of this that intersection is still happening and I'm getting that change so you can do a lot of crazy things just going through and even just sculpting on a mesh building up the surfaces changing things and the live buildings still gonna kick in and give you a result so you can get all sorts of stuff like noises bullying noises change the shapes your meshes you can use any of the brushes inside of ZBrush so if I want to say like take the move brush and go to the brush palette over here and then isolate by the letter M by clicking on em and then locate move I can now say it ctrl Z to get back to where I was and I can move like this and as I move the surface topology here you can see I'm manipulating that ring and the boolean is kicking in and now I'm changing the shape or the design of it and this is all done in real time preview right here so now I've added this kind of element to my shape there so a lot of stuff you can do with the live billions just by playing with the different shapes and forms so let's see what I got here so darken is asking about workflow for switching between ZBrush and fusion 360 so basically any time like applications such as fusion 360 are cad based so they usually add allow for n Gon's and things like that ZBrush is always triangle based so it's gonna be triangles and quads and so the process can be able to go from fusion 360 to ZBrush pretty easily but going back you're gonna get a mesh so ZBrush handles meshes not end guns so one little thing there with say going to fusion 360 or another CAD system like SolidWorks but basically if you have a model that you've got in fusion 360 if you can bring it into ZBrush as an obj and STL p ly FBX like any of those kind of default file formats you can get into ZBrush then you can use say dynamesh to give it even resolution you can use sculptors Pro with it there's a bunch of different ways you can bring that model in crease edges and start sculpting details on it but usually it's from a application to zbrush going back part isn't really that fluid but going from an application like a CAD program into ZBrush is gonna work fine and that's a whole nother thing in itself I do have some videos on a sea brush on how to import CAD data think I have some Sketchup ones where I've brought in a model from Sketchup and then process that inside of ZBrush so you can watch those and kind of see the process for that they'll go through in like setting up grouping and adding creasing to keep those edges hard and then sculpting on the mesh so HD is asking if that live meant that it's always procedural and can't be baked it's just regular bullying's with a preview so yes the live option is that it's just a preview it's a live preview of the boolean operations it's non-destructive at the stage and then after you're happy with the result you can then commit it to a true geometry model and that's gonna give you a result Beene is asking about dynamesh yes so he's he's commenting that using dynamesh for blocking out the initial shape and then rita polishing and adding details so if you're going into dynamesh dynamesh was created in order to generate base mess topology and so with that topology basically block out your save get your silhouettes and then after you have your model as a dynamesh the process would be that you'd subdivide it so you had your initial shape you then subdivide it to get those other details you want on your mesh so dynamesh was never really created to you know max out and be used a lot of people use it today it was intended just for like a base mesh blockout so cam is asking is this all the bullying's do so yes and in the basic aspect of it that is it you are able to add different parts to your mesh and you can subtract shapes from its you can create intersections creating create unions and it gives you a way to build in the negative forms so oftentimes if you have a shape and you want to say like for me to model say a whole lot of this I can just come through and say append in another cylinder I can take that cylinder say rotate it 90 degrees maybe scale it down a little bit let's say place it where I want it scale it out like this and now instead of me having to model that hole into that surface of apology there I can just take the cylinder and cut it out and now I have the hole right there if I want to add another one I can duplicate this shape so one option you have inside ZBrush if you have a sub tool anything that is unmasked if you hold down the control key on your keyboard and you click and drag the gives me the 3d Oh light and duplicate that part so it's basically going to take the sub tool and take that uh jonsharland and duplicate it and so now i have two of those and then it's unmasked so i can reposition it so now I've just cut holes into my shape and since this is dynamic I can now move these and change them I can scale them up and down you know I can decide if I like it or don't like it so there's a lot of just power in the preview application of this so beens asking about the gizmo 3d orientation so you'll see as I move the gizmo around you can unlock it by holding alt and this will allow you to change where the position is so if I want to take my gizmo 3d and move it here to say perform a rotation from that point on these subtly I have I can hold down alt and then move it to a new position and then let it go and that will move that gizmo 3d if you want to get it back to say world space so if you hold alt and click on a surface it will end up changing to that surface so if I click here it's gonna snap there snap snap snap and let's say your gizmo 3d goes crazy and you end up with something like this and you want it to go back to that world axis all I need to do is unlock it and then click this little reset orientation button here and it'll reset it back to the world axis and then you can lock it again and then that'll allow you to reset your gizmo so a little thing over at the gizmo 3d Webb's asking what is better to divide or dynamesh so there's really nothing better about either um dynamesh isn't going to give you subdivisions so if you need to repose something basically you'd want to probably use subdivisions because then you have a lower res version of your mesh that you can scale down to and then you can make large-scale changes at that low resolution and then you can scale back up and get all your high details back if you go with dynamesh the dynamesh resolution is gonna be what the mesh has so it's great for sculpting but if you need to go and manipulate something move something around Yorker now gonna be trying to move a lot of topology where if you had a mesh set up with a low-res subdivision level you'd be able to move it a lot easier position it a lot easier and then divide back up and have your details so there's nothing really better about them they're just different workflows darkins asking does the c and c plugins to work it should you can download the cnc plugin for ZBrush from the pixologic resource center and on there there's a bunch of different helpful plugins you can download they'll kind of automate some stuff inside of ZBrush divvying is asking can you change the brush shape from round to square so there is an option on any of the brushes inside of ZBrush you can apply a alpha stroke to these and these will allow you to change the alpha of the brush so basically the tip so if you think about say like you know Photoshop how you have different things you can apply to get that Photoshop brush effect this is how you can do that so if you have say a sculpting brush you can change the stroke to say a rectangle and then instead of getting that spherical kind of fall off when you move the brush across the surface you'll end up getting a harder fallish fall-off if you watch the first set of z classroom live where I go into the sculpting stuff I'll switch from say in that video or in that stream I switched from the standard brush which has a soft fall-off so if I come across my mesh here the sculpt you see it's a soft fall-off you see there is and then if I switch to say something like the claybuildup brush which has this alpha attached to it if he now sculpt across the surface there you see I'm gonna get this so using the brush without any alphas is gonna give you this kind of soft shape and then if you have an alpha tag to it like the claybuildup brush you're now gonna end up getting that harsh form so you can't control the tip of the brush just by changing the alpha look at these questions here quick we Linda's asking if I lost the center of sphere and I can't get back is there where to find the midpoint for it so if you have a sub tool selected so say like this here and I have the gizmo 3d and it's off in space somewhere over here and I want to get back to the gizmo 3d being in the center what you can do is all you have to do is click this little Home icon right here and this is gonna look at any unmasked parts and then move it back to the center so if I click this here it's gonna go to the unmasked mesh center and that should now put that directly in the center of that egg shape there now that process also has a hot key so sometimes it gives my 3d maybe off in space so see it's over there so I can't really see it unless I move my entire model so there's a hot key for that process too so if I go to the tool palettes and then scroll down to the let me find it here at the masking area there is a go to unmatched mess yeah go to unmasked mesh center button here and if you click this they'll return it back so you can bind this to a hot key and then if your gizmo goes crazy and just hold the click the ha key and run this link it to that button and it'll go right to there now to create a hot key this is a tangent but basically if you wanna create a hot key for anything inside is II brushed all I need to do is hover over the icon or the button hold down ctrl + alt and then click and this will now tell you at the top here oops let me do that again I'll tell you at the very top of my screen upper left there press any key combination to assign a custom hot key or escape or mouse button to cancel so let's say I want to take this button here and I want to apply it to the letter J on my keyboard so hit and holding ctrl + alt clicking on the button now pressing J will now assign that hockey to J and so you'll see if I hover over the button now it's gonna say J and so now if unlock my gizmo move it over here and press J it's gonna go right back to the middle so that is how you can hide our assign a hotkey inside as you brush and then just pressing J now we'll Center it gives me 30 now if you have masking on your model that will also be respected when you use this go to unmask mesh center or click this button right here so if I have this part masked off and now I press J or click this little icon you see it's gonna move it to the unmasked mesh Center so if you want to send her back to the middle of your model Mesa sir you have no masking on it either because it's looking at the volume of the entire shape and it's gonna go try to go back to the center and then it's also respecting masking so if you have a part masked off you're able to get that gizmo into that unmasked mesh part so little thing there with the gizmo 3d and masking alright so now we talked about how the librarian will work with sculpting they'll work with any type of mesh geometry inside of ZBrush so work with dynamic geometry it will work with your mesh geometry over with decimated geometry it will work with dynamesh geometry or work with subdivision geometry the only thing it's not gonna work with is up here we have primitives that are labeled 3d it will not work with 3d primitives however if you append any of the 3d primitives to your sub tool list here it's going to convert them from that 3d primitive to geometry and then you'll be able to use it so these little rings here were primitive 3d models but then when I appended them it converts them automatically so then they can be used but if you came up here and tried to use just the cylinder object here with the labelling it would not allow you because it is a primitive 3d shape and not a polymesh3d shape so no confusing thing there but basically pretty much everything inside ZBrush will work with the liability system all right so now let's say I go back to this and let me just do that I'm going to delete those little holes there now let's say I'm happy with this shape so I went through I made it my bullying stuff and now I'm happy with this and I want to take this and I want to convert it to geometry so I could go in and start sculpting all these elements but this right now is still giving me a preview so this prior right through here where it's creating this edge it's creating it by two different shapes so if I come through and say grab the ring here and I start sculpting with clay build up I have to do it on this one you can see I'm affecting this but I won't be able to sculpt directly on it because this is still in preview mode and I still have this boolean coming in and creating a different element for me so what I need to do is say if I want to 3d print this or maybe sculpt on it as its entire form so use this as like a block out and now I want to add you know converted to one mesh thing then sculpt on the entire thing add some say noise to it something like that I need to convert it from the live boolean to traditional geometry now to do this we just need to come over here and we need to select our top tool here that we have so I'm gonna select the very top the signet-ring part here so the one that's the probably the highest in the hierarchy and now with this if I come through and go to this boolean area so tool June tool sub tool boolean open this up there's this button called make boolean mesh now when I click this button ZBrush is gonna look at that boolean process and it's gonna render how the preview is rendering it so it's gonna look at the top tool then it's gonna go in the next one if it's subtractive it's gonna cut it out it's gonna go in the next one if it's a an intersection it's gonna do an intersection it's kind of on the next one if it's add its gonna add so it's gonna go through your tools like that next to this button there is this DS div option here and if it's your first time in ZBrush and you're just doing what I'm doing here you're not really have to worry about this but as a general kind of rule of thumb you probably just want to turn this on most the time because what it's going to do it's going to take anything that may have dynamic subdivision which is what we were using in the previous stream where he talked about the zmodeler brush using dynamic subdivisions it'll take those convert those dynamic subdivisions and then apply the boolean so this way if this is on you're pretty much always going to get what you see on screen if you have this off and you have models that are using dynamic subdivision it's not going to convert that dynamic so you may end up with a result that has some meshes that look a little lower res so just one little thing there with this option now after I have this turned on I now can process this and the boolean processes from the preview to real geometry like extremely fast so you can send pretty much 10 million polygons dynamesh models sculpt the detail on them cut something out of it process with the boolean and it's gonna take you like a few seconds and so if I come over here and click make billion mesh this is now gonna process and you'll see up at the top here I have a new tool created that should have a prefix of Umesh attached to it and if I select that this is the result I'm getting so now I have one sub tool and if I try to do that sculpting process across this edge here you see it's gonna allow me to do it now because it's takin that live boolean preview and it's converted to geometry now one thing with the library in preview that's a big deal inside a ZBrush especially for doing toys you know anything that has a certain topology you won't add something else so one example would be if I had an arm of a character and I wanted to separate say this part here so I can make a mold right so I could chop the arm off using the boolean and then I need to add some sort of key element to it well if I have this arm here and it's all fleshed out nice and pretty yada yada yada I don't want this to get destroyed so I want to add a key but I don't want to store this part and so one thing nice about the live boolean is that it's only going to change the topology and where those intersections happen so if I turn on my poly frames here you can see that the topology is only changing where the intersections happen so this topology right through here is the same topology I had on that initial ring this topology through here is the same topology I had on that egg shape and this topology through here is the same topology I had on the dynamesh base ring right and the only areas that have changed are where these parts enters so this is huge when it comes into you know combining meshes and changing them because basically it's not going to destroy the mesh you already have and it's only going to change where those intersections happen so if I go back to my ring and let me just append this part in here quick so you kind of see the difference here and let's just turn off the live boolean here and I'm just going to isolate that ring part so here we have my ring and so let's say I'm really happy with this topology I had enough resolution I did some crazy Dorne details here and then I process it with the boolean you're gonna see that none of that area where that ring was except where the intersections happened has changed so this is a big deal in terms of it's gonna keep the topology constant now if I did this process say with dynamesh it's gonna change the entire volume of my topology which could change some of those sculptural details maybe I had some edges that I really liked those could kind of get mushed or you know I wrote it away but if you use the live billion it's gonna keep what you have and it's only gonna change at the intersection so as an example of what the dynamesh process would do if I take this and say duplicate it and let's dynamesh that ring here quick so I'm come down here and click dynamesh you can see that's changed this area through here so I no longer have that came kind of like cylinder shape that I had originally so this topology changed so this is what was before and then this is with the new so you see this is what the dynamesh process will do so it's going to resurface your entire mesh the boolean it's only going to happen or change where those intersections happen so that's the big difference between using say a dynamesh subtraction process first using the boolean and the boolean is gonna give you great results out of it and it's also non-destructive so if I decide hey this isn't what I wanted I can always go back to my original parts modify them again you know a solo here modify these and then after I'm happy with that new change so maybe I want something like this instead I can now go to that tool pallet sub tool boolean make boolean mesh and now I have a new version of that with those changes so it's very handy non-destructive and it's gonna lie to just increase your workflows and keep trying stuff experiment things and you're not really committed until you do that make billion match process why we're doing these things as well you may want to save during this time and what I recommend doing if you're definitely new to ZBrush just come up here and click and click save and this will save everything that you currently have in your scene now to access these say your next session while you're using ZBrush you just want to come up here an open lightbox and this will also open as you saw earlier when we were in when we launched ZBrush this opened up and when it opens up just navigate to this quick save folder here and in here any of those quick saves will be stored and I can come over here and just simply double click and that will get you back to where you are so first time users definitely just keep hitting this quick save you know anytime you remember it just come over and hit it and as soon as you do it it's gonna add a quick save there and then when you come back in the lightbox and go to that quick save folder you'll see that file there so there's multiple ways to save inside of ZBrush but the quick saving is gonna be your easiest in terms of first time usage so let's look at the questions here so am i using this for the tablet or a pencil or just the mouse so I'm currently using a Wacom tablet here so here I have an old Intuos and then I have my stylus you can use a pen you can use a mouse the big thing with a pen or a sculpting device is that you're gonna have pressure sensitivity which is gonna come into play when you're sculpting on your model if you're doing things like I'm doing today and we're just moving around primitives you can basically do that with the mouse or the pen you're not gonna have you don't really need pressure sensitivity to do it so it's gonna happen either way same thing with kinda like the zmodeler brush you can definitely do a lot of that stuff with the mouse you can also do with the pen but unless you're sculpting that's pretty much the primary thing for pressure sensitivity and pen usage dynamic is asking is the way export increases from ZBrush as topology so as Paula G the crease options you can you can use the curated process so maybe the way to go for that you can export creases out and if you have say something like three so your max or Maya it will respect those creases and you can do those with the FBX format so if you come to the easy plugin tab and export out with the FBX export import there's options where it'll actually keep decreasing now one thing with creasing inside of ZBrush it's always gonna be on or off so you're not gonna have a blend variable between the creasing so if you export a mesh with creasing it's gonna send it out as a 1 and a 0 rather than say like a point value and so once you get that into say a third-party application that accepts the creasing stuff you can then change it in there to get your blends but the creasing will always come out as one and zero out of ZBrush and FBX is the best way to get that creasing out it's gonna be your primary format for that the other thing with creasing is well if you can you can also export out as with polygroups and it's polygroups of ZBrush is kind of like selection sets and you come through and set all your areas to have different polygroups things see this model as I created it these different shapes generated my values and so I got different polygroup rake ups across the service here so if you export this out the poly groups will come over and then sometimes import them in as either separate files or as separate selection sets and then you can use creasing based on that poly grouping in that third-party application to get those creases back Benjamin so I definitely check out the I've done a fusee Crescent lives here since this whole crazy pandemic broke out the first one I go through really quickly on very basic level sculpting a bust second live one I did I went through and generated a really ugly gazelle so using some of the zzo option and Zuzu and files so there's definitely a bunch of those have already been done you go back and re-watch them we have them all up on YouTube so if you just go to our YouTube channel so just search for pixologic on YouTube and just do a search for Z classroom live and that'll be the streams I'm doing as a developer and they'll have the sculpting a bust and using the Z zu will be the two ones so what kind of sculpt on or touch on the very basics of character sculpting will go through navigation on those and then how to sculpt and edit your meshes so I definitely say check that out so NAB is asking at this stage so now that I have this what would I do with this now so if I want to sculpt on this you have a few different options so we talked about the creasing properties so I can come down here and let's say I can activate dynamic subdivision and you see this is giving me a decent result I have some pinches through here so I can scrub those out like that I can also convert say this mesh to a dynamesh now if I want even sculpturing sculpting abilities across the entire thing so I come over here to the tool palette I can go to that geometry panel and go to the dynamesh and I can dynamesh this and I'd probably want to up the resolution to say something like 512 and then I can apply a dynamesh their internal my poly frames you can also play with this blur after you applied dynamesh and this will allow you to come through and kind of blur those edges out there's a little white circle here they'll allow you to give you more aggressive blur as well as things see now I can do this and it's gonna kind of smooth those edges out and give me like a little bit softer forms on my model and at this stage this mesh is a hundred percent on dynamesh model so I could come in and start sculpting anywhere on it it's gonna allow me to do it and it should get a consistent stroke all the way across so that is one option there so after processing with the boolean you can just apply a dynamesh and then change the blur some to soften or bevel some of those edges and then use just traditional sculpting to get results the other one thing you could do is we could run the zremesher on it so let's get back to my original here yeah i'm dynamesh there undo I've got a bunch on these here and with zremesher so right now I could come through in a cat zremesh this model and this will come through and generate new quadrant topology across the surface so it's gonna try to use quads as much as possible it's a little bit different than dynamesh dynamesh is just gonna try to give you an even surface zremesher is gonna look at some of the curvature aspects of your mesh and it's gonna try to give you nice curves along those edges so I can come over here and say activate this keep groups option which is gonna look at the divisions in these polygroup colors that I had from the original mesh and I can now runs your mesh on this see this is the mesh here and we'll see how zremesher does on this and this is the result I got from zremesher there so went through and generated new topology and you'll see that zremesher since I turned this keep groups option on it looked at those edges that the boolean system used or generated and then it's clean those up so this is what I had before so you see all those little triangles there and now if i zremesh this is the result I get so now I've gone through and basically just instantly read apologized the mesh and zremesher was smart enough since those creases were really harsh where was cutting the model and now I have you know nice clean geometry for this page here so using the boolean and using zero measures another great thing to use and basically the same thing you want to probably work or use when using zero measures just using this keep groups option on and it'll come through and if it's a boolean mesh usually does a pretty good job because the boolean czar gonna give these nice clean areas where so your measure can find those really quick and go hey that's that's a good crease and then it'll come through and add that edge there and then after this is zremesh I can now you know sculpt on it like so but my resolution may be a little bit low because zero measures made to kind of give you a lower topology so this would be when you'd want to add your subdivisions to your mesh here send come up here and click divide and this would now divide that up and so now I have a nice clean ring I have subdivisions on it and now I can come through and start sculpting on this as well so those are the two options there I'd go through and you know use after I've generated my boolean mesh and you can see you know that that looks pretty good so you can definitely expert that out sculpt on it more add some micro details if you ever want to see crazy jewelry sculpting definitely check out Thomas Whittle Bach he is one of our ZBrush live streamers as well turn into one of his channels and he streams all the time there's a calendar if you go to ZBrush live.com you can see when the streams are gonna happen but I definitely pop into one of his streams and watch him sculpt some jewelry he's crazy and he gets really really detailed so this for example of a ring here is definitely nowhere to his caliber so if you're just in doing any jewelry sculpting inside as he rushed check out his channel alright so now we've gone through and we've used you know just the basic primitives here to generate our shapes now I want to go into another thing that's it's kind of high level stuff but it's gonna add a bunch of details and processes to your mash wire using the boolean it's one of the cooler things that I think the bullying can be is used for and I use it all the time when I do stuff and this is taking the model and then coming through and using an insert mesh brush and with an insert mesh brush I can select it to like a subtractive format and this will cut into the surface now and it's gonna allow me to get some really crazy shapes out of it so if I take this model here and I shall go back to this one and let's say I have live boolean active and there's a special brush that's inside a ZBrush remove this keyboard out of the way actually I need to put it there we go and it's already set up for this process so what I want to do is I want to come over here to the sub tool area and I just want to make a dummy sub tool so I'm gonna click append and I am going to just get a cube 3d object and just select that and then I go to my sub tool area over here select that sub tool now going to switch to move scale or rotate which is gonna give me that gizmo 3d and I'm just gonna scale this down and I want it you know pretty small and it can live in the middle of the Ring here for now that's a pretty good shape and then I'm gonna set this sub tool to subtract it so you'll see since that cube is in the middle of my mesh here and it's such a subtractive I'm not really seeing anything right so it's not subtracting from any of the form it's just kind of hanging out a zone but it's set there it's in the model and it's set subtractive so now what I can do that I have this set up is then come over here to the brush palette and open this up and in here there is a brush called the IMM model kit now instead of ZBrush to select brushes there's a hotkey system so you can hit B which will open up this menu here and then you can isolate by the next letter that the brush starts with so if I hit I after I pressed B and then C it would isolate everything to begin with hi and then if you hover over the brushes that begin with I you'll see that these little letters next to so hitting K would select the IMM model kit so B I K would select this brush now with this brush if I drag it out actually that's in the brush alone hold on wait for it we want B I be I be hi boolean bi B we don't want bi K we want bi B remember that so bi B will select the IMM boolean brush which is one we want the model kits great for adding positive parts so the last stream I did a one of the street westerns I did also made a robot out of IMM parts and I use just primarily that brush so it's really good for adding different things there so this is the IMM boolean brush and at the top here when you load a brush that contains insert mesh parts or multi parts you'll see this little viewer at the top here and if you come over here you can scroll to select different ones you can also press M on your keyboard which will open up a little preview window here you can also select the parts here so I'm gonna come through and say select this ball radar here and select that and this is now set up as an IMM brush so what that means is if I turn off live boolean and I have a substance elected if I click on a model this will take that part we'll draw it out right so it's basically going to take this and it's gonna draw it out as another geometry Allen on the subtool I've selected and this will allow you to model with kind of this shape mode so I go in and just start adding these different parts we want a different one I can select it up at the top and now I can get that part so you can go through and you can model entire objects it's great for Griebel processes you're making a ship it works really awesome but basically all it is is just inserting this part now you'll see that these parts are looking a little bit funky as I draw them out so if I go back to this one here you can see it kind of has this weird shape so if I activates solo you can see it's doubled and then it's also kind of inverted right so this brush is set up as an IMM brush but it's set up to draw negatively so it's going to draw subtractive shapes now since I have this tool set to subtractive if I come back and turn solo on and activate the live boolean if I now draw out on this tool that's already set to subtractive it's gonna draw that IMM part out and then it's gonna subtract it already so if I come across the surface here and draw this out you're see it's going to take that item in part and then subtract it from the surface so if I go back up here and say select that crazy radar one click and drag I now get this shape cut into my model and this is all just taking an item and brush and as I draw it out it's cutting to the form so this will work with any instant mesh brush but the ones with the boolean are set up so you can see the preview of it and also draw it out because basically you want to draw out and reverse to how you would normally create an insert mesh brush so you want to cut into the surface rather than add to the surface so it's really fun to come through and turn on symmetry here and I can start adding these different parts you can add them to anything so I'm gonna do like the curved surface over here and you can see just with a few clicks I'm gonna add different ones you can start playing with the designs and shapes of em all right so now I've got a really happy ring he's so happy hahaha and all I'm doing is taking this brush and adding elements to it now you can make these large or small too to make drastic changes across the surface or mesh you can definitely do that so as you draw this out you know all it's doing its drawing this item and part out and I have it on this tool it's already set up subtractive so it's cutting through so we had a question earlier about designing a kind of a mech character and there was a image and so this is the way you can kind of get those little details on your model so you just make a brush basically or use this one and as you draw it out you see it's cutting into that surface right and so this will allow you to add you know intricate noise and stuff effects to your models so if instead of doing say surface noise or sculpting I can just take these insert mesh parts and start carving into the model and so now I've generated this effect now if I look at this tool and turn it on you can see this is what it looks like it's craziness right so it's just all these insert mesh parts that are all gobbled together but when they're applied in the boolean fashion you started to get some cool stuff now this can also all go into a traditional mesh right now it's all boolean if I don't like any of these parts to say I added yeah maybe a little bit too many may I don't want this one here these are all set up with these poly groups so as I drew them out they gave me different grouping on them so if I don't want our one of these I can remove them as well so I'm hold down ctrl and shift to select it if you see a part that has multiple poly grouping you can then isolate by that geometry island so it's a little advanced but if you hold ctrl shift and a it'll give you the entire geometry island and so now I have this part just isolated and then I can say flip the visibility by holding controlling shift and dragging off and then I'll only give me so I basically remove that part and then I can delete that so it's no longer there so I go to the tool geometry modify topology area and do delete hidden but you delete that hidden part of the mesh and now if I get out of solo you can see that parts now been removed we have one question about the increasing the depth of the boolean so you can so after you draw it out it is going to give you that part unmasked so let's say I grab this part here and I drag this out and now I want that to be deeper so right now just think of it as a normal insert mesh brush or a normal piece of geometry so if I get out soloing see this is a half so as I drew it out it gave me this as an unmasked part so now you just need to modify that shape so I'm gonna switch so that gives my 3d it should put the gizmo close to where your model is if not you can hold alt and click and it will Center it back on that part now I can scale this and if I scale it this direction what is it doing it's changing the shape of that which is going to increase the depth and which it's cutting into that surface so if I turn off solo and apply that transformation with scale you can see now I'm making that carbon more or less so the depth that the IMM is gonna carve into your mesh is all gonna related to the part itself so you can use move or transform or different processes and that's going to determine how that cuts going to happen because all it is is just a piece of geometry that's just being seen as subtractive and you're just changing the shape of it and that's gonna allow you to cut it in more or cut it in less make it shallower make it deeper it's all up to you in terms of what do you wanna do there after you draw it out so if I want these to be deeper you know I can come back I just have this whole tool selected everything's are a whole sub tool selected everything is unmasked so if I move this you know it's gonna cut through that surface and change that so I can definitely get these a little bit deeper I can then scale these now once again everything is unmasked so as I'm scaling here these are gonna get deform too but you can see now I can come through an ad you know those elements in different parts of the model and this is all in preview mode so none of this is happening like it's not destroying your mesh it's all non-destructive at this stage so if you make a big change or you rotate something and then you decide oh I don't really like that you can always undo and get it back to where it was so now that we have something like this we can come through and now generate topology out of that so same process come back over here we're gonna go to our top sub tool here that's creating the hierarchy of the balloons we're gonna go down the boolean area and we're gonna click make boolean mesh now before I click this make million bash we're gonna hit on this dynamic subdivision again so I'm gonna go back to my cube and here you'll see that these parts my drew amount they're a little bit low res right so they're not coming in as crisp and the brushes are the parts that are in this I'm and bullying brush are set up to use dynamic subdivision and so what that means is if I locate that sub tool that I've selected with a cube and I come down to geometry and go to the dynamics of the vision area and turn on dynamic you'll see as soon as I turn this on they're gonna get nice and smooth so dynamics television is gonna give you the ability to have a little resolution model and preview it as it had high subdivision levels and this is handy for keeping your files really lightweight you can change the subdivision level here it's gonna make your ZBrush flow a little faster but then you realize see what it would look like if it had high resolution so these parts here from the cyan boolean bro IMM boolean brush are set up to use this dynamic cuz you can see as I toggle this on and off those parts are gonna get nice and smooth so now if I go back to my ring you can see with dynamic on the look how smooth those parts are there you go back it's like that there we go so you see they're nice and smooth now I'm getting really nice round results and if I turn dynamic off this is what I had before so just a little thing there with dynamic so now that dynamic comes into play when processing the boolean so if I go back up to my top tool here and I'm ready to process the boolean if I have this dynamic turned off its gonna give me that rough result from that shape so even though it looks nice and smooth here this is a dynamic process so if I don't have this turned on ZBrush is gonna ignore that diamond dynamic process so you know make sure dynamic is on if you're using dynamic and then when I click make million mesh this will process this and you can see once again how long that took it was seconds I was hoping to get a quick drink of water here and that's the result there all right and so once again if I turn on my poly frames here and turn on line you can see the topology only changed where the intersections happened so this whole part here with that sphere that's all the original topology on that sphere this part here for the ring all the original topology these little line things here all the original topology the only thing that's changing is where those parts intersect so now I've taken that boolean there and now I have this kind of ring design and for the most part if you're dealing the labelling it will all so always require you in order to use it you'll have to have watertight meshes and so what this means is if the mesh is watertight and you apply it with the boolean that's going to stay watertight and so most of these things that you do inside a ZBrush using the boolean z' since they already started watertight when you're making the elements you can just directly 3d print them because they're already ready to go so stuff like this is easy to make just modifying it using those different parts and now we have a result let's look at these questions here let's see oh man there's a whole bunch in here so Ram was asking about the how-to remesh it so we talked about earlier you can use dynamesh and so the one example through here was this was where we had let me find that here this was a well one option you have for taking the topology after it's been process of the boolean is you can do something say with the zremesher so this was a zremesh version of the first one I did here and you can see the topology gave me for that and then after you have the zremesh version you can divide it up when you use zremesher if you're going that route make sure you keep that keep groups on and they'll come through and allow you to keep those polygroups the other option would you just be dynamesh and so if i go back to my one here so that was the boolean result and i duplicate that now if you dynamesh this it will go through and give you that even serpents tubes so let me just do that quick and one thing with the dynamesh has is polished our blur slider here and you can change this and that will also take that result clean it up and then you can sculpt on it so those are the two kind of things I'd say recommend if you need to go in and process your sculpt on after use a lot billions so you can use the zremesher with keep groups or you can apply dynamesh and then after you dynamesh I'd say adjust the blur slider here there's a little white circle that will give you a more aggressive blur and just use that and you'll be able to get a result so that's usually two ways I go and the zremesher will use do a pretty good job on giving you a new topology so this this one did a really good example here and got all those lines and then with subdivisions it looks really good so Michaels asking can you shell the model so you can shell the model using dynamesh you could also duplicate the model use the boolean to kind of get an inner shell on the mesh as well so as an example that with this subdivided ring here I'm just gonna duplicate it so I have a secondary one I'm gonna take the secondary one and say turn it subtractive now you'll notice that the model vanishes kind of right now because both of these objects are sitting in the same thing so I same space so I took that one mesh that I zero meshed and divided and then I duplicated it so I have a secondary one but they're sitting on top of each other so it's cancelling out so what I want to do with the secondary one is and go to move scale and rotate and I can start scaling this down and maybe scale it out and you can see how this is giving me that hollowed shape too so now I've come through and done this and that is now one way you can go through and hollow out like a service this ring is pretty simple in order to do because doesn't really have too many complex volumes so all I'm doing is taking a duplicate version of it and then scaling it in basically two directions and you're see I'm gonna get that shell type format and then after that you're done with that shell you can reprocess this as the boolean the boolean system will also only look at what's visible so if I have this one off down here it's gonna ignore it so now we'll process this and this so I come down here and click make boolean mesh and this is gonna process and after that's process I'll have a new result up here and find it and this is the well I should have the result I think I did something very new let's try that again and now I have this and this is the geometry version of that so that is now taking the boolean I've just in that little shell process there and this is the final generation for it now if I turn on my poly frames you can see this is pretty dense because I had that subdividing zremesher topology but you'll see that it's only gonna change in topology where that intersection happened so you're gonna get a nice clean intersection this was a pretty simple one in terms of kind of getting a hollowed type form out of it if you have more advanced stuff you'd have to probably move the surfaces a little bit you can use inflates as well down here in the deformation palette there are some flayed options in here you can mess with those to also kind of get that volume you have and shrink it down to give you a cavity the other way to do a shelling process is with dynamesh and now allow you to come through and create a shell using dynamesh but if you can get away with it with the bully and the building's gonna give you a nice nicer result on that shell so one thing there for you for hollowing let's see can you use a Ramos James is asking can you use a Rey mesh with boolean by all means yes you can Rey mesh will work with the billions so array mesh is a little more high level than one getting in here today Paul if he does another stream you can ask him about ray mesh he loves showing array mesh and billions it's like his favorite thing so definitely check that one question here why is there so many IMM so they do different things or is it all the same but with different brushes so the I MMS basically are just can contain different parts so if you think if you just have like different pieces of geometry and they're all different so like this one has just body parts in it so it's heads and arms this one has clothing parts so buckles buttons this one's curves for straps this one has a bunch of gun parts so just they vary on what kind of geometries in them the IMM model kit is one of the larger ones here in ZBrush and this has a little kind of little pieces of model stuffing you to make like saying gun gnomes or things like that so it's made of all these little parts so these are primitives or half primitives this one has holes in them right here so you wouldn't want to use the IMM primitives H for your boolean processes since those would not be watertight wouldn't process but that's all basically they are they're just different pieces and you can find a lot of brushes online too that people have made their own ones and you can use those to kind of get a heart start on modeling use them there's some really good ones you can find that have like breaking down in like hands and then you have like heads and torsos and arms and you can quickly just take those and draw them out and get an entire character in a few seconds and then after you have that done you could then use the boolean to say merge it all together to make one mesh and then sculpt on it so there's a lot of different avenues so just customizing for the IMM part stuff there see what else so tropical is asking well ZBrush deny the boolean operation if the mesh isn't suitable yes it will give you an error and tell you that the mesh cannot be modified oftentimes when it does this it will dump a file up here and then you can use a process inside of ZBrush to test the errors if you want more information on this if you go to the Z classroom site so this is a pixologic Zeke Laz room and do a search for live William there is a whole series here on labelling fixing errors and this will go through that process in this step so to show you here's a mesh there's an example mesh that breaks and then how you can fix it using the live boolean so there's a series of checks if it fails and then you go in and find where those issues on your mesh fix those and then we reprocess again so there's a whole there's a classroom video on that to go over that 12 is asking he's talking about is there a way to hide this so we'll hit that again so yes any time you select an IMM brush or a zmodeler brush you can get this little bar at the top this is the IMM preview bar if you don't want this to show up you can go to preferences I'm gonna move my keyboard here you can get a preferences and then I'm following his directions here so I can remember last one and then I am in viewer and in here you have an auto show hide and if you turn this off it will hide it you also have the ability to change its location so if you don't want to always on top you can move to the side or even the bottom it'll scroll way around just by changing that placement but if you don't want to show up when you select an item brush and just turn that off now as we talked about earlier with the mm brushes select apart you can use this to select you can also press M on your keyboard which will pop up this window and you can select that way well as well so if you had the preference interface show/hide turned off and you wanted to select another part that I am M brush you can just press M and then select that part and then I can go on your model and add it so Rio is asking to connect pieces which is the best boolean dynamesh for zremesher as far as holding details so the connecting pieces you are going to have to either use dynamesh zremesher isn't going to do any model connection it's just going to give you new topologies so if your meshes are separate and you run zremesher they're gonna stay separate when using the boolean you have another option you can use as well the primary one let's say if I want to go in let's go back to let's grab this and then let's append in a cube I'm just gonna move the cube so let's say I have this right so I have two sub tools here and I want to connect them right so I can use dynamesh to do this to do that I would come in and say select this tool I need to merge these together to make one sub tool so I'd come down to the oh let me make this a poly mesh first and now it's a pendent cube there we go so the it's not a poly mesh object it would not let me do that so basically I first need to merge these together so I go to the merge option here I can take one sub tool immersion into another and so I'm gonna burn down now this will look like it joined it but these are still separate pieces of geometries so the merge inside of ZBrush the subtool merge he's only going to take the sub tools and merge them together it's gonna keep them separate but it's gonna merge them together now if I want to join these you have a few options so we could use dynamesh so if we go to the geometry area here and dynamesh this you see now it's going to dynamesh and now it's going to take those models where they insect it's going to dynamesh it and give me one surface now this is gonna give you even topology everywhere so you can see this is all together and this shape wouldn't be too bad dynamesh together but you'll see it's changed the topology entirely so if I undo this this is what I had and say I really liked the topology on this cube if you dynamesh it it's gonna change everything so you see it change the entire surface there so another way to do that would be using the boolean so if I do a group split on this and go to my sphere we can then go to the boolean operation make sure I've live boolean turned on I have both of these set to positive so that are you in this union process here and then I'm gonna click make billion mesh it's gonna process that you me a new tool at the top and now I have this and so the bullying has gone through it's welded those two parts together and it's changed the geometry only where those parts intersected so you see my box still has that same topology now the third way to do this is if I came through and merged these guys together this is high level is is what I can do is I can activate it two former and there's a little done it there's a boolean to former so remesh by Union is what it's called so to get to deformers I can just switch to move scale or rotate which will give me the gizmo at 3 D if I click this customize button here in here I have a bunch of different deformers I can apply some of these our lattices some of these are like Bend curves so they're handy to come in here and you know select one of these and you can deform the entire subtool we have selected now the one in here that's called remesh by Union is gonna do that boolean process but it's gonna do it on a single sub tool so if you went through and merged a whole bunch of stuff together and now you want to remesh by Union which is gonna take all those parts and where they collide it's gonna intersect them and perform that boolean process so this is handy if you have you know a whole bunch of stuff tucked together and you just want to merge everything together and have it all nice and welded and all one single mesh so if I take this and now to remesh my union it's gonna process and you see it's gonna give me the exact same thing I was getting from doing that live boolean process except instead of me having multiple sub tools it's gonna do it on one sub tool so that's the third process there and that's using the customized remesh by Union to former that's located in the gizmo 3d so that's a little highl over there but there was a question on it so I figured answer quick so we're getting a question about making patterns of balloons yes by all means you could definitely use a ray mesh to get some patterns you could use nanomesh - I'm not gonna go into those today but basically you could create an animus ervice there's actually some acid ZBrush videos on using nano mesh let's see here let's see if I can find that one quick it should be up at the top here maybe maybe not maybe not but um if you do a search for a ZBrush and bullying and nanomesh there's one where I'll go through and take a man at mesh surface apply it to a mesh and then use it to cut it out of another mesh and that gives some really cool details too because basically nanomesh will allow you to take one of those insert mesh parts and you apply it to every polygon on the model and then you get these weird kind of shapes out of it and then you can use those and subtract a form just like we're doing with the IMM boolean and it'll cut into the surface so some cool stuff there too all right so I've got one more main thing I want to hit in this video on the boolean and that is how to set up one of these kind of brushes for use with the boolean process so you saw with these parts here when I was using them they're kind of set up weird as in they're double sided so they had one side that was kind of cutting and another side so I just want to show the process of how you can make these really easy because thinking about stuff negatively is sometimes very hard so if you want to add a cut in shape you know you can sit there and your brain can kind of stumble on this but if you kind of analyze it it's pretty simple to do so I want to show a quick process on that so this is going to hit on some of the stuff we did with zmodeler in the last episode too so I'm going to use the zmodeler brush with a cylinder I'm gonna make a shape and I'm gonna get that to set out Pat be set up as an IMM boolean part so I'm gonna go through that real quick alright so first for this what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to lightbox now once again if you want to save anything you have just a quick save I'll save it out I don't think I'll be going back to these files but you never know you never know so now I have a version of it in here so I'm gonna go the project tab here and frame time I usually start using the Z moly brush usually grab this primitive zpr file here so I'm gonna grab that quick and then I click no to saving my scene there and this is gonna come in with a bunch of different tools here and these are set up to be used with Z Mahler's so they have some creasing set they're ready to go for use with dynamic and then you can just use the zmodeler brush on them and start generating shapes so I'm going to generate a quick shape here and it's one of the shapes I kind of like doing so I'm gonna take the cylinder with the inner loops and the inner loops just Stanford that has this ring on both sides so it has a ring there and a ring here and now I'm gonna activate the zmodeler brush and so this can be done by going to the brush palette over here and then locating the zmodeler brush right there my keyboard out here and so I'm gonna select these zmodeler brush with the zmodeler brush selected this is a context sensitive brush so what this means if you hover over an edge a poly or a point you're gonna be able to apply different actions to your model the last series of stuff I did a tire using this process if you want more information on that there's a whole live on that and then on Z classroom there's a video covering every single little functionality of the zmodeler brush too so a lot more information on that you can find on z classroom so with this i wanted to design kind of a little loop shape that maybe has a little indebt cut so something simple not too crazy but i want to use this to subtract from other models so say i want to generate it and then say take like the demo anime head or something and cut into that surface using this brush so I just want to make a part that I can then reuse make a brush out of it and have it set up for that subtractive process so the first thing I'm doing I'm just going to model this really quick and one of these things I kind of like doing to generate an oval shape is all masks off part of it and then use the gizmo kind of extrude functionality to kind of pull it up and this will give me this nice oval shape and it's gonna have these nice topology to it so I start with a primitive and I'll hold down the control key which is gonna give me the mask rectangle brush and I just want to mask off part of this here so something like that and now if you haven't masked if I switch to the gizmo and move your C imma be able to move part of the mesh here but it's gonna keep that masked part masked so I'm protecting that area with masking now with the gizmo 3d active and hold down control and I'm a click and drag and if I did this right let's flip my masking there if I do it right I'm gonna get this shape okay so what I did here is I'm in a mask out and the mask you'll process based on the vertices so if I come through here and I cover my mask so holding ctrl and press spacebar to move this and if you come across a point that is what is getting masked so it's not the faces it's the points so you want to make sure that when you're doing this you're masking the points is what you gotta remember you're doing and that's gonna give you the mask and so when you're doing with like high polygon models and you're doing the masking you're not really gonna notice it because there's so many polygons but if you're dealing with low res stuff remember that it's masking based on the points not the faces so just one little thing there so now that I have this part mass in this part unmasked I can now switch to the gizmo and if I hold down control and use the move option it's going to perform this extrude function and what this is doing it's taking the unmasked parts and it's strewing them out and this will allow me to get this kind of nice shape so this is a handy one for creating little intricate details for mechs and things like that it's kind of one of my go to use and it's really simple to do because all you're doing is taking a Siller cylinder masking part pulling it out and yeah I got this now with this what I have is now I can add some more details to this and to do this I'm going to use a the insert mesh or the zmodeler insert edgeloop option so I want to add say a ring around here so I'm just clicking and dragging to add a little element there I want to kind of pop this up so I have one that's kind of raised so I want to do like something that's like tapered on the inside and then maybe have this middle part having angled in and as I'm modeling this I'm modeling it how I want it to cut out of the mesh so I'm modeling it as how I want to be when it's on the model so that's the thing here I'm modeling it positively I'm not really thinking about negatively right now I'm just modeling the shape how I wanted to look when it's on the mesh so I want to extrude this part out so I'm going to come over this edge and I press the spacebar to go in the Z molar edge action menu once again there if you watch the last stream this will make sense if not then maybe a little bit high level so with this I want to switch to the polygroup option here and I'm gonna change my modifiers to overwrite and I'm just gonna click and just press alt until I get a poly group that I can see now poly grouping inside of ZBrush will allow you to isolate different parts of your mesh really easy you can use this for visibility purposes you can also use this with the zmodeler brush to control different processes so now I want to extrude this up so I'm gonna come across one of these Polly's on this edge here and press the spacebar and go in the Z molar poly Action menu you have one you can actually see that's not keyboard clipping no keyboard put you up here and now in here I'm gonna set the target to polygroup all and this is going to use that poly group that I just established to that nice edge loop there and when I perform this action that's going to extrude it out this is the cue mesh section here so as this pulls out it's going to apply this extrude and it's a smart extrude so if I have areas of a model that are near it it would perform a weld since there's nothing really in this vicinity as I pull it out I'm just going to get this shape so now I have that now the next thing I want to do is I want to do the same thing to this part here but as I do this I want to click and drag and as I'm dragging out from that cubish action I'm gonna hold shift and ships gonna give me a move instead of an extrude so now I can get this kind of shape to it and I want to pump it out just a little bit like that so now I've got something like this now you'll notice the bottom here went to because it had the same polygroup I'm not really concerned about this at the moment so I'm just gonna ignore that I'm really just focusing on the shape itself up here so what its gonna look like when it's applied to a mesh so I want this kind of popping out may want to add some edges in here maybe you know maybe a little detail around this edge too so I'm just gonna play with this a little bit more so I'm gonna come through an hover over another edge press spacebar go the edge action menu and choose insert and single edge loop this time since I still have this nice edge loop here I can add edges pretty easily it's gonna go right where I want of them so I can add that there and say add one in here maybe like that I may want to add this little more intricate so I'm gonna add that edge there and then push this part in so the hover over an edge again go in that edge action menu choose that polygroup option again you'll see that I switch a lot between insert and polygroup and this just allows me to quickly come in and you know establish new poly gripping to an area really quick and then I can use that cue mesh just to affect that part you see now I can drive that in and now I'm getting that shape on my mesh so now that I have this it's looking pretty good let's set up some creasing really quick so I can get areas when I apply that dynamic so that it smoothes it out so if I turn off my poly frames you can see I have some rough edges so I won't apply creasing to the mesh so do the submit' of the tool palettes then go down to the geometry area and open up the dynamics so the visionary here and activate dynamic this is a result I'm getting there now with this you can see some areas are looking ok so the initial shape had creasing but you see it didn't go all the way across so I have some nice edges here and then it gets a little bit crazy so I'm gonna reset all the creasing on this so I'm going geometry and go to the crease area and then in here I'm gonna click on crease all which is gonna increase everything and then I'm gonna try creasing by 45 degrees it's gonna look at the angle values of my mesh and look at this slider here and determine what angles I should apply a crease to and then click crease on that and you can see now I have that result so it's gone through and now I have some harsh edges going through there so that's looking better similar to what I'm looking for now you notice the back of the mesh is still a little bit crazy there so still not worried about that we're gonna let that go for now so now they have the shape here I continue modeling this if I want if I want to add more details to it when I add different elements may want to you know add some beveled edges so I can come in and say maybe I want to bevel this edge a little bit so I'm gonna come across this edge here select the bevel process make sure I've edge loop complete just add a little bevel there and I can check it by turning on dynamic again so that's softened that up so now I have our edge and a soft edge I can maybe soften this one too so there we go it's a little bit and I'm gonna make you perish and so now I have that so now what I want to do is if I create this as an intra mesh it's gonna create this part and I can get this and I can add it positively to my shape but what I want to do is I want to take this part and when I apply it I want to have this cut into the surface of the model and give me this result so I want to cut into the mesh and get this so what I want to do with this is I want to generate the negative of this form so what it would look like if you cut through it now to do this it's very simple you just need to think about it in a different way well you know I could have gone through and modeled it negatively but that's my brain doesn't want to go there our brain knows what it wants and it doesn't want to model it negatively negatively is not what I'm used to so I can't really you know figure it out on the fly it's gonna take me a lot of time so if you do this basically you're taking the mesh and you're just generating it positively and you're generating the exact result you want and now I have to do is take this mesh and kind of invert it right so I'm going to invert the mesh basically turn it inside out so it's like there's all those like cartoons back where he had someone that was running around then all of a sudden they got inverted you know so it's the same process we're gonna do here we're just doing it digitally so I'm gonna come to the back here and I'm just gonna hold ctrl and I'm just gonna mask out this back part it's just masked the entire area out I could also do a a selection kind of mass too so if I mask it out I can flip it by holding ctrl which would give me this part mass in this part unmasked I can also if I have nothing selected and called down ctrl + alt this give me a white box instead of a black box this will do a mask unmask process so it's going to mask everything that's not in this area here so there's a little bit faster I still do the other way too but if I'm teaching people how to do this they should probably do it this way because it's a lot quicker so basically holding down ctrl + alt and basically selecting the area you want to be unmasked and then the rest of the parts will be masked you notice again once since that the masking is based on that you'll see that you can see this area is kind of masked out and this one's got a little bit of gradient through there but this is the fully masked part and that's the unmasked so I'm gonna activate the gizmo 3d and I'm gonna click the little go to unmask mesh Center I could also use the hotkey we set up earlier which was J get that back over there and now I want to take this and I want to flip it so I'm gonna drag this across and do that right so now I've taken the mesh and I've turned it inside out now that the mesh is inside out this is looking a little bit weird right so what I want to do now is I want to flip it again and it's time to flip the normals of every single face on this mesh so for this I'm gonna come over here to the tool palettes I'm gonna go all the way down to the display area display properties and I'm gonna click flip and that is now taking that mesh I've just flipped it upside down basically so I took that one edge and I ran it through so it went inverted and then I flipped the faces so now I've taken in that shape and I've now generated the negative for it and that took a few seconds so instead of going in and me trying to model this like this negatively I modeled a positive and now I've taken that shape and then just flipped it and so now I have this right and this is the part that if I press it into the model it's gonna give me that bullying result I'm looking for so with this now you can see I have this side looking how I want and on this side I want it to look you know the same so I can see what I'm going to drag out on the mesh now the process to do this is fairly simple too so since I have this kind of buffer in the middle here I can use a mirror and weld process and it'll take this side that's already good and then just mirror it over the other side so I'm going to align this and then go up here to the geometry tab so tool it'll close myself to a pallet here second and go to modify topology it's a tool geometry modify topology and in here is a mirror and well now if I mirror and weld this currently it's gonna do in the x-axis which is actually this direction like this so take this side and flip it over there I'm going to do it based on Z so I'm gonna come over here and activate Z turn off X now it may take you a few times to figure out which axis is the correct one you can also rotate your model and get it to where it needs to be but if you don't have the mirror and weld working correctly you can always undo so you see here I did the mirror in weld and it did it based on the world axis so what that means is if I turn on the floor here you can see this was the z-axis here going across like this and it took what was over here and mirrored it to the other side well I don't want my mesh to look like this I want it to be the same so I want to actually mirror it down the middle of itself so to do this I just need come over here to activate this local symmetry so this is gonna change the symmetry from using the world symmetry which is here in the middle and then it's gonna use the local symmetry which is the symmetry based on the bounding box of the subtool I have selected so if I come here and activate local symmetry and now click mirror and weld that's gonna process and I'm gonna get this result now you'll see that this did it in the direction I didn't want to do it but basically it gave me what I was looking for so I'm gonna undo that quick I'm now gonna come to the deformation area here mirror and Z and now make sure of local symmetry on now Mearing weld and now I'm gonna get this result and you see I now have that object with a front and back face that look exactly the same now if i activate my dynamic subdivisions now this is the result I should be getting here so that looks pretty good and you can see if I look at it this way we're looking at it this way and looks exactly the same so now set up my part I've made it in positive view I flipped it inside out I've now a mirror and welded it so I can see what it looks like on both sides okay so now I just need to create an insert mesh brush to use with the boolean now the easiest way to do this is just first position your model how you want to draw out so if I want this to model dry out like this I just position it like this on my canvas it can be anywhere on the canvas just make sure it's positioned in the right angle after you have it positioned I'm just gonna cover the brush palette over here let me go to the create menu and I'm gonna click create insert mesh this is going to look at what I have selected the subtil I've selected and it's gonna create a new brush a new insert mesh brush out of it now if I had multiple sub tools and multiple parts then this insert multi-national option would light up and that would allow me to process multiple sub tools and then use those as different parts in that brush so right now I just have one piece so I'm gonna click create insert mesh this is now gonna ask me if I want a new or append to the existing one well since I have a zmodeler brush I do not want that something clicked new and now I should have a new insert mesh brush selected now if you have the preferences I am in viewer show/hide on this should now pop up there and you should see that part now you'll notice that when you view it in this bar here you can build an out tell what it is if I didn't do that backside there I'd get a view of this model where I wouldn't be able to see the other side because the side I want to use is down here so it's the back face of it right and the IMM preview is always going to show you what you're looking at right so if you draw it out that's when it's a look at but since I'm setting these up negative I want to make sure I have both sides of that model there so I can tell what that part is so now that I have this now I'm gonna go and say select a mesh to mess with this before so let me just copy my tool here so don't lose that if at anytime you want to kind of copy things in the memory really quick and use this copy button this will allow you to open up another project inside a ZBrush then you can paste that tool back into it it's a little handy thing there so imma go in the project tab here I'm gonna go to the project area I'm gonna select the anime head and double click that and then I'm gonna paste in that tool was working on just so I don't lose it and now with the anime head here I want to take this boolean that I just generated I want to use it okay so we do that same process we did before so I have labelling active I currently have one sub tool so I need to add a secondary sub tool to actually get the live boolean to start working so I'm come over here I'm gonna click append I'm gonna select the cube 3d again I'm gonna activate the cube 3d or select it switch to the gizmo I scale it down and I'm just gonna put it in the middle a head you could also move it off in space it just doesn't really matter it's just a temporary point of reference for this mesh here you can delete it layer after you've added parts now that I have this I'm going to set that sub total subtractive you should see the cube vanish since it is in subtractive and I have live boolean active and now I want to select my part here my insert mesh brush and now if I draw this out what I'm doing is I'm drawing it out on the cube sub tool that's such a subtractive so as I draw this out on the surface wait for it make sure it's working it should be what did I break what would I break what did I break let's save this so what happens in your life all right one thing here one check wait for it wait for it ah okay that's what I thought all right so I have my tool the cube gone through set it small set it subtractive now I'm gonna go and I'm gonna draw this out so I'm gonna draw it on the head and what it's doing it's gonna add it to the cube and let me get back to where this was now you'll notice when I draw this out initially nothing has happened so if I turn it on my cube the parts there it's coming through but I'm not getting to cutting the surface and this is because by default when you create an instrument brush it assumes that you're always going to want that piece on top of the surface and so what you need to do is you need to modify the depth in which that intermesh parts gonna come out at now I could do it manually by using move scale rotates but what I can do for this brush then go to the brush area here I can open up the depth area and in here we have an embed value now the embed value initially is going to be calculated by the bounding box of the part that you just turned into an insert mesh so it's gonna go from 0 to whatever the height of that part is so this one's default when I went in here was 97 so what we want is we want this IMM part to not be drawn out positively we want it to be in the middle so we're gonna take this embed value in this brush pout here and we're gonna set it to zero so now when it draws it out it's going to look at the surface I'm drawing it out on and it's going to stick it based on its height or its bounding box and the depth in which it's in bedded into the head is going to be at 0 so you're gonna have right in the middle where that part is drawn out so if I draw this out there this is what I'm getting now so it was drawing out at the surface and it's now being generated directly in the middle of that part now this may be a little bit too deep for what you want so now I'm cutting in you know a lot into the surface here so I'm gonna come back over here and I'm gonna adjust this a little bit more so may I want my embed value not to be so deep so maybe 70 let's see what 70 does so that's pretty good but you can see as I get too far past on a curved surface it's gonna start cutting out because it's embedding a little bit too far so I'm go back in here and change that down a little bit more maybe to 65 around 60 and now that's giving me a better result so now if I use this and draw it out on the model here you can see it's gonna come through and give me this boolean shape so that is the you know pretty quick process of coming through you want to model the shape positive flip it inside out set up your IMM brush and now you can use this and simply add this detail cut to your mesh now so now I can make all sorts of crazy stuff add away and you've got your own brush now once you're happy with this brush - you can save it out so this can just be done by going to the brush option up here and clicking save as you can then save that brush and then you can load it back in and use it later with this we can go also to the geometry tab here and go to the dynamic area and you can turn that on you'll get a preview version of it - so that is that process let me look at these questions quick question about how can we know the real size or about the size of the object so your best option for size inside ZBrush ZBrush has two areas that kind of control the size the first one is in the geometry area and there is a too many too many windows of it size area here and this is the internal ZBrush size this is gonna be a value in here based on ZBrush internal size ZBrush likes it when the meshes around the internal size of two so this XYZ size is gonna be that and then you also have a export slider all the way down at the bottom and for getting the value of your mesh basically it's the XYZ size x the scale the export scale down here and then that will give you the value of your model basically resembling millimeters there is a plugin called scale master which will automate that process for you and so you can use this process here and set your scene scale you can then change the objects dimensions here so currently if I do subtools the slider size on this mesh you can see I'm getting two point nine three six by two point eight four by one and so for this one we so you can take that and you see it's this number here multiplied by that expert scale and that's what you're getting so that's how you can get your scale for objects inside it's a brush forge [Music] Sandeep's asking how to use the kit bash mesh and ZBrush so if you're talking about just using the IMM brushes so if you go back YouTube will have a replay of the stream I did on a robot and basically I used the entire I'm a mauka brush to make that entire thing so you can go back and watch that Z classroom live so you just go to youtube and search see classroom live and it'll be the thing building a robot with IMM parts and they'll go through the entire process and using that to make you know a mesh out of using the kit bash stuff so that should get you covered on that digital Plankton's asking what is the max geometry that she keeps in the insert meshes to so there's no real maximum you can use whatever you want but just remember when you save that brush out it's gonna be massive so basically think that when you save the brush it's creating a copy of all those meshes in there and saving it in that brush so I've had a few brushes that I've created for use with insert meshes that contained scanned data and also that scanned data had color information on it and those brushes were in the gigs so one brush would be like a gig and a half so it can get really heavy and then when you load those brushes in ZBrush it sometimes can be a little slow so what I recommend doing if you're making insert mesh brushes if you don't need it to be high res i suggest setting them up to use that dynamic subdivision with like curves and stuff and then their light weight in the IMM part and then you can just apply them to the model and activate dynamic and you can get the high resolution result out of it what is the difference between dynamesh dynamic and divide so dynamesh is going to evenly distribute geometry across the surface your model so if i take this part here so let's first talk about a few minutes here we'll cover this so here we have a mesh and I've turned into a polymesh3d and so the first option you have for kind of mesh geometry is just simple mesh so what you see is what you get topology on your model is the apology it has now I can apply subdivisions to this and what this is how this is done is in the tool palette and click the divide option here and this will take the geometry and it's going to subdivide it up so it's basically taking it and dividing it and giving you more resolution now when it does this gives you the ability to go back in time to those other subdivisions so you can see I can go back to the first one I go to second third fourth and fifth now on a map forth if I sculpt let's say the claybuildup brush I'm gonna get a lot more resolution than I was getting at subdivision 1 so the subdivide option will allow you to keep stages of your mesh and then add topology it's gonna divide the current John which you have on your model as you go up a subdivision but then that will allow you to reach higher polygon counts which is gonna allow you to generate difference better sculpting results or marks quality and then you can always revert back to the lower subdivision level so that's one option there now the dynamesh option I'm gonna get undo here it's going to take your mesh and it's going to flood it with even topology so here's my starting mesh here and if I click dynamesh you see it's gonna take that model and it's gonna flood it so it's basically looking at that shape that's flooding it with topology and it's kind of try to flood it with even topology but you can see it didn't smooth it out because I didn't divide it so I still have these rough edges on it however if I sculpt now it's going to give me a consistent result wherever I sculpt on the model now if I just did the subdivision one this area up here didn't have a lot of topologies so even subdividing it I wouldn't get a consistent stroke so dynamesh will reach apologize your entire mesh flooded with even geometry so when you sculpt something up here it will also appear the same quality as down there now the final one you're asking about is zremesher and zremesher is going to reach apologizer model and it's trying to look at the geometry functions on it so this is good if you have a surface that already has some sculpting on it or maybe some edges set up you can then run zremesher and this will process the mesh and give you entirely new topology as well similar to dynamesh except it's gonna try to keep it nice and neat and quat it so here's the result after the zremesher on that so with that those are the kind of three things there and then the fourth one you can play with is sculptress so the first Z Carson live video I did will cover the sculptor's pro mode and this is going to allow you to take a model and as you sculpt it will dynamically tessellate the model so if I scope normally this is what I'm getting such as pushing the vertices in and out as I sculpt on the mesh so what was existing is already there he's just gonna move those in space now if I have sculptors Pro and sculpt with this it's now going to add topology while performing that push and pull action so you can see it's come through and it's divided the mesh and it'll divide it on the fly so I recommend if you want more information on sculptors Pro if you're doing any kind of sculpting stuff this is by far my favorite way to use ZBrush is just using sculptors Pro so I'll take any mesh activate sculptors Pro and as you sculpt it's only gonna divide for what you need based on your brush size so that's another fun one there and if you watch the first sea grass room live on sculpting a bust I get through all that and it should give you a bunch of good information to start in that process inside of ZBrush Gary's asking so you wanna apply a brush all the way around the ring shank what is the best way so to do that as long as your mesh is in the center well you probably I'm doing is going to the transfer palette up here and activating symmetry and in here you have a radial symmetry option now you can set which axis you want this to happen so say this is the ring here and set Y and you can see all these little pips are going around in a radial fashion so if I sculpt here you see it's gonna sculpt all over so as long as that ring band is centered when you activate this you'll be able to come through and sculpt and you're gonna sculpt in a radial fashion and this will allow you to you know do all sorts of crazy stuff just in this radial format I also use the regen in the UM lab where I covered how to model a tire I activated the radio option to use with the zmodeler brush which helps quite a bit so you want to go over all sorts of different edges it's cylindrical and it's in the center turn on radio it's gonna save you a lot of time yes hungry hungry is saying that divide gives you more polygons but dynamesh Tessa lights so thank you for having that so else he's also asking how do we insert and append tools that we want without disturbing the tools already in the sub tools or time to try to get a tool that's not in sub tools it resets everything so to a pen you just need to select the tool you want to append to so say I have my cylinder shape here let me quick say this and if I just want to add to this file or add to this tool you just come down here click append and then whatever you click should append it as a new subtool because he's just gonna pend it as a ring so this should be allowing you do that I'm not quite sure what you may having issues with if you can explain a little bit more I may have some time here to answer it sandy was asking how do we can do Ram custom settings there all the settings in size the arrested you launch it will end up using the performance that's best for your machine the only thing that you really ever need to customize especially be doing streaming and stuff is you may want to turn down how much performance ZBrush is going to use ZBrush should try to use as much as possible so one thing I do you'll notice on my machine here is if I go to my performance tab my max threads I turn that down so basically give OBS a little bit of power a little bit of RAM so I ended up going down a little bit on that but everything else should automatically be calculated to get the best performance out of ZBrush so if you have something else that's happening with the RAM settings saying an error occurs I'd highly recommend going to the help option here and clicking on this pixologic support and sending in a ticket and we sleeping look on look into that Alfa's from images and if they're a so sandy was asking again what's the best way create alphas from images so next I think Friday I'm gonna cover over how to use spotlight to model some stuff so basically we use black and white images or alphas is gonna be your best way to get details on models and you may some other thing about height maps so height maps again your friend that's what all these are over here so textures I'm really gonna give you what you want in terms of details you're gonna want height maps or depth maps like things here things with gradients so if you have one of these you can convert these a few ways one way you can go to the Alpha palette select an alpha and then you have a create option here which will create and make 3d option here which will make it out of 3d also spotlight which I'll cover Friday I believe that's my Friday day a spotlight I'll go through and add that stuff there looking at some more questions here the tools that you want are not in the appendix so hungry what you need you need to load the tool in first so if you want to append in another tool say like I want to add say this lets go to the tool option here I want to add say the demo head to this tool so you want to make sure this is loaded in first so if I double click the demo head it'll pop up over here once it's over in the tool pallet so you can use this load tool option up here also load the tools in once it over here it's over here if you come in and select the sub tool and click append it should show up in this menu if it's not showing up in this menu you want to make sure it's probably not loaded so this is anything that's loaded inside of ZBrush in that scene you're in is going to show up in this area and then you should be able to select that and have it show up now the demo head has two parts right so it's only gonna allow me to select one so I can select the demo head and then select his head and then I can pin that in but if I want to append the eyes I need to go and select that eyes in the sub tool and now I need to go back to this tool click append and now select the eyes and that's how I get the eyes in so you're only going to be able to append the main the sub so we have selected currently in the tools so that could be the issue you're running into while you're trying to pin something that's in a tool but it's another sub tool so select that sub tool first then go to the tool you want to append and then click it there's also some options in the Z plug-in area up here in the sub tool master area here where you can copy and paste different parts of models to other tools so some of these may be helpful as well in automating that process especially we have a tool with a lot of different parts and you want to append them to another tool it would take some time to select one and a pen select one append it's like with a pen so there's some automation processes and sub tool master that will speed that up lord of the mountains is asking of a sword than when positioned in the character's hands but I want to bring it back to edit in the world origin so there's no real way to do that inside a ZBrush the there is one way you can kind of do it well two ways but they're really kind of technical setup one ways you can use a nano mesh and then you can position the nanomesh on a single plane and position the sword in one hand and then you go to edit mode you can edit in the sin of the world the other ways you can use array mesh to create a parade piece of geometry so you have two sword in your center and you can offset the array and position it where you want I may have a s ZBrush video on using that let's see here let's see what we get here Internet let's see maybe I don't know I think I did one where I was positioning hands for a character so one one hand on one side and one hand on the other and I usually array for it so that may have it in there just do a search for a Rea mesh and positioning lord of the mountains and I may have one in there but they're kind of high kind of level stuff so it's not the simplest process to do the nanomesh one I'm pretty sure I don't have one on that but um you can definitely do that I think I've also done some presentations where I've shown him one of the ZBrush summits I think it might be one that was like labeled tips and tricks or something had some processes where I had earthquake and I was moving some barrels around I had one in the center and I wanted one over here or his armor plating was what it was for his shoulder so I had the armor planar in the center so I could use symmetry and then I used the array mesh to offset it and put on his shoulder so we could see it update as I was modifying the other one to reach I'm not sure that shouldn't be happening if it's still happening you have a repeatable option you send a ticket to the support site so just pixologic support click on that and send that a file if it's repeatable it shouldn't be kicking anything out of the folders web watching web edging yes you can use sculptures prolog billions so sandy bike one over the process if you have to go back in time in the stream when it goes on YouTube but basically you can use zremesher and it will end up adding the edges between those polygroup set of crates and then you can use creasing based on polygroups and you get that harsh edge back yeah just do in the so after you run zremesher go to geometry go to crease and if you have a poly group set up you can do this crease by poly group right here and it should look at those poly groups and give you a crease along those edges and then when you activate that i Namek those creases should stay there digital plankton I'm not quite sure on the Lightcap stuff Paul's the one go food for lighting he just did a whole session yesterday on lighting information I usually ask him sorry I'm not gonna be much help in that uh that area all right well I think that's it for time today so thank you all for coming out and watching this stream so I'll be back on Friday at the same time so we'll be doing some stuff and I believe Friday I'm going over the using these spot light processes to start generating models with that and then they'll also go into tangents with the live boolean system to model assets so I think I'm doing a weapon part on Friday so more shape building and more defining stuff but it kind of plays into you know some of the stuff we had questions the end here of using alpha is to create geometry so definitely if you're interested in that please show back up on Friday so I hope you all are well stay safe and once again if you have anyone that's looking to learn ZBrush the trial is now available you can download this from the pixologic site just do a search for pixologic trial it'll take you here you'll get the full version of twenty one twenty twenty-two messages for 30 days there's also an option for the bridge as well at the bottom here so you get a trial that - you can end up starting sculpting we're doing these developer streams probably till the end of this pandemic and so we're trying to do at the Vella per stream every day and with these covering different things so Solomon and Daisuke are gonna be doing some more ZBrush core stuff I'm doing more this kind of ZBrush z classroom live stuff Paul is doing a lot of tips and tricks and the high level type stuff so definitely if you have anyone that's looking at ZBrush trying to learn the software definitely come on out and once again it's always live so if you have any questions I try to answer what I can if you everything I didn't answer you have any problems or issues that you think may be a bug definitely the biggest thing to do to help us on our side it's just submit a ticket to support and go to select this pixologic support link inside of ZBrush this will open up a web page for you fill that out if it's repeatable that's the biggest thing so if you run across anything we had something with appending to a folder kicking out something like so something like that if it's repeatable sent us the file it helps quite a bit then we can look at it and try to lock down you know well what's causing this and then get it fixed in the patch so definitely do that if you're having any issues so thank you all and I think that is it thanks again happy zbrushing

Channel: Pixologic ZBrush

Views: 12,658

Rating: 4.9661016 out of 5

Keywords: zbrush, zbrush tutorial, zbrush hair, 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, boolean, modeling, live, sculpting, negative, union, subtraction, mesh, intersection, interactive, non-destructive, nondestructive, convert, shapes, forms

Id: aDiH2TFFscc

Length: 129min 21sec (7761 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 15 2020