ZBrushCentral

ZB4R4 ZClassroom videos by Michael Pavlovich

Hey guys! I’m the guy that bloated the ZClassroom vids for the R4 stuff. I wanted to make a thread where you could ask questions (that hopefully I’ll have a good answer for), as well as point out any areas that were unclear. Or information that was just plain wrong, I’m far from perfect!

Or if you just want to rake me over the coals for saying “aaaaannnd” and “ummmmmm” too much. Sorry in advance for that! :o

I’ll go ahead and post some pictures and links to get things started–

All things insert brush!

001CurveInsertBasics.jpg

Basic insert mesh brush techniques

002TriPartCurve.jpg

Tri Part insert mesh brush techniques

003ImagePlane_QRemesh.jpg

Image plane and QRemesh techniques

004InsertMeshBrush.jpg

Slice Curve and Insert Mesh Brush Creation

005InsertMeshCreature.jpg

And finally creating the creepy crawler using your custom insert mesh brush!

Transpose modeling basics!

009TransposeBasics.jpg

Overview of using Transpose to model in ZBrush

010CableTransposeModeling.jpg

A small, quick modeling tutorial, as well as creating a tri part insert curve brush

008TopologyBasics.jpg

Topology brush basics (Video labeled “Topology Brush Accessories” in that section)

Hopefully between this thread and the videos, it’ll be a nice smooth transition into the new features. Thanks guys!

006Greyscale.jpg

Here’s a breakdown of features used for my creepy crawler

007ColorCoded.jpg

Great videos Michael, thanks. I’ve watched half of them, but zclassroom buffering is too slow to watch anymore. Might be my location , UK. But if you could have them mirrored somewhere else, that would be really great. As I’d love to watch them and have them to go back to as reference.

I think they’re on the pixologic channel on youtube as well:

http://www.youtube.com/user/zbrushatpixologic?feature=results_main

Let me know if that works better for you! My source videos are 1600x900, and the h264 .mp4 compression I use when I make my “at recording dimension” versions for home use is actually pretty small (40mb or so for 14 minutes of video at that size). If youtube isn’t any better, maybe we can zip them up somewhere. I think I’d have to go back and re-edit some of the earlier ones though…I may have set the project source at 720p.

Hi Michael great intro to zbrush 4r4,only problem with it is i find that you work really quickly and it is a bit hard to follow.
I have question and i am not sure who to ask, so thought i would ask here since you appear to be a teacher of sorts, i am looking for a tut that uses zbrush and coral painter instead of photoshop? any ideas

Hmmm…off the top of my head the last time I saw ZBrush and Corel Painter used together was a demo that Andrew Jones did years ago. If I remember correctly though, it was a “free form 2.5D creation in ZBrush with a Corel Paintover”, not a Zapplink or GoZ type situation.

I’ve never tried it personally, but you might be able to set the default program for opening .PSD files to Corel Painter (instead of Photoshop), so that when you leave ZBrush using Zapplink, it’ll open the .PSD in Painter, then it’s just a matter of saving your changes in painter after painting, then going back into ZBRush and accept changes. Not sure about GoZ though.

Hi Michael, I don’t have any questions but just wanted to say thank you for such fantastic tutorials. They really help open up the mind to the new possibilities in ZBrush4R4. The Curve Insert Mesh Triparts is just so powerful!

Thanks for all your hard work, Michael! I couldn’t have learned ZB without you.

Also, thanks for upping the volume level on the recently posted videos. I can hear you clearly now!

I wouldn’t mind a new video showing how to adjust uv master unwrapped islands (I’m trying it with a tree with a few branches) so noisemaker could apply a vertical bark map that follows the bends of the branches.

It looks like noisemaker isn’t the tool of choice for a mesh that doesn’t have its uv map aligned the same way the texture map is aligned.

Or maybe how best to uv map a curve insert brush (Like a bandolier) which has multiple repeating items (like the bullets in the bandolier) that should have the same uv mapping. Maybe there’s a way to uv map one, and replace them all with that one?

I use zbrush with external 3d applications like lightwave and poser and I need proper uv mapping on objects for those, but the curve insert brush doesn’t retain uv mapping. Creating the curve insert brush geometry is easy… uv mapping the resulting mesh though to something useful can be a daunting task.

(For instance, if I modelled a bandolier by hand, each end would have its own uv mapping, but each bullet holder section would have the same uv mapping, lined up on top of each other on the uv space, as would the bullets. (So for instance instead of seeing 50 bullet uv unwrapped islands, you would only see one on the uv template.)

Maybe you know of a trick that can project the same uv mapping on each of those replicated parts?

Can I use the insert mesh replacement with the IMM brush?

Hi Michael,

I wouldn’t mind if you could upload them somewhere please. They are just too slow on the zclassroom site for me. I really don’t know why.

Also - the topology brush accesories video is not on the youtube yet, hopefully that will go up soon ?

Thanks

@Pavlovich,

Thank you so much for such a comprehensive review of the new brush system! Great job as you have covered almost every aspect of the new ZBrush curve tools. I could not find much information about one particular topic though. What is the best way to edit “Multi Mesh Insert Brushes”?

Multi Mesh - Insert Brush Editing

Maybe, there was no need to go for a separate thread but I wanted to explore every possible way of converting existing brushes back to subtools? I hope there is some simple way to do it because recombining libraries without original tools files currently looks pretty hefty to me.

Thanks!

Thanks for the great tutorials Michael, they are a fantastic help.
One question I do have about the new topology tool, is that I don’t see any way to tweek / move the points created by the topology brush. For me this, would be a very handy thing. Is it possible? Or can you send the topology created by the new topology brush to a Zsphere Subtool somehow. eg., like the Zsphere - SubTool > Rigging - Select mesh > Topology - Edit topology way, so points can be moved and still be snapped to the surface of the sculpt?.

Thanks,
Sam.

Hey guys! Sorry about the slow replies this week, I’m at siggraph right now being a sweaty mess. I’ll sit down tonight hopefully and get you some answers!

I used to work trade shows… I feel for ya, man!

You can sort of tweak the topology by selecting any curve brush and adjusting the topology lines and then switching back to the topo brush and finish up.

Micheal - I do have a question with regards to the draw size when generating mesh with the topology brush. Since there is no negative value for the draw, is there a way to quickly have the mesh extrude inwards instead of outwards? I know we can always extract it but was wondering if there is a quick way of doing this?

Hi Michael,

like all the others: thanx A LOT for these tuts, they are reall making the difference between stumbling in the dark vs. feeling the way around only half blind :)!

Got a few questions for the " unify>orient>duplicate>create IMM" chain:

  • the single parts have to be oriented along Z with the opening of the mesh (joining points) to the back, pointing away from you? Always??

  • the “unify” step is needed - why?

  • the “duplicate” step is needed - why?

Thank you for your time.

Sorry about the late replies guys, hopefully this will clear some stuff up:

@Gareee:

Maybe you know of a trick that can project the same uv mapping on each of those replicated parts?

In Maya what I would do is break up the duplicated curve parts into their own objects (like that bandolier, for example), UV one of them, then do a transfer attributes (with UVs selected) to transfer the UVs to the other identical objects. Hopefully future iterations of Zbrush will allow you to maintain UVs, but in the meantime you can give that a try (not sure what the equivalent of that process would be in 3DMax or XSI, but I’m sure there’s similar functionality). As far as the UV Master, it’s been a while but you should be able to flatten then use your move brush to move points around, if that’s what you’re asking.

@andreseloy

Can I use the insert mesh replacement with the IMM brush?

If I’m understanding the question correctly, yes! My zombie brush is a IMM brush that all utilize the insert mesh replacement (just make sure there’s one and only one hole on your replacement object)

@Jharford

I wouldn’t mind if you could upload them somewhere please. They are just too slow on the zclassroom site for me. I really don’t know why.

Also - the topology brush accesories video is not on the youtube yet, hopefully that will go up soon ?

let me go back through my older videos and make sure they have the right encoding, and I’ll see if I can get them down to a reasonable size. The topology brush accessories video wasn’t on youtube last time I checked either…hmm. Maybe give Pixologic a few days, they’ve had a busy week at siggraph lol. Hopefully soon though!

@moth3r

…I wanted to explore every possible way of converting existing brushes back to subtools? I hope there is some simple way to do it because recombining libraries without original tools files currently looks pretty hefty to me.

The easiest way I’ve found (that Paul showed me) is to select your polymesh3D star geometry (in the upper right of the tool menu), select your MMI brush of choice (with the part of the brush you want to extract), then go to Geometry > Modify Topology > Mesh From Brush. This will replace the generic star with the mesh from the brush.

I know it’s kind of a process to do this for brushes with tons of subtools, so one other method you can try is to make a polymesh plane, choose your MutiMeshInsert brush of choice, go into the picker menu and set your orientation to draw out straight from the camera, then go into the brush menu > Modifiers > MutiM (Multimesh Selector, the small slider) and choose the “1” option. This will cycle through muti meshes in the brush. Draw them out on the plane, then when you’re done, delete the plane geo, separate all the muti meshes into their own subtools, then run a deformations > unify on one of them. Then choose the “repeat to other” option at the bottom of the deformations menu, to get them all similar. This should allow you to take lots of the meshes from big insert brushes and make them into subtool libraries, which you can then mix and match and save out.

@SammyD

One question I do have about the new topology tool, is that I don’t see any way to tweek / move the points created by the topology brush. For me this, would be a very handy thing. Is it possible? Or can you send the topology created by the new topology brush to a Zsphere Subtool somehow. eg., like the Zsphere - SubTool > Rigging - Select mesh > Topology - Edit topology way, so points can be moved and still be snapped to the surface of the sculpt?.

One way you can do it is to draw out your topology lines using the topology brush, then switch to the CurveEditable brush, turn off Zadd and Rgb, and move the curves around that way (make sure you have bend and snap on). Then switch back into the topology brush. Or like you said, you can get most of the topology done, make that into a mesh, then just load that mesh into your Rigging > Select mesh topology using Zspheres and clean up using that method. Hopefully there will be a simpler approach to moving verts around in later iterations of Zbrush.

@dominicqwek

Micheal - I do have a question with regards to the draw size when generating mesh with the topology brush. Since there is no negative value for the draw, is there a way to quickly have the mesh extrude inwards instead of outwards? I know we can always extract it but was wondering if there is a quick way of doing this?

Oh man good question, can’t believe this hasn’t come up yet. Hmmm. Shoot, I’m stumped, I’ll have to ask the Pixologic guys on this one. Sorry about that!

Thanks for the reply, Mike!

Unfortunately, my other main tool is lightwave, which is sad when it comes to uv mapping tools.

Looks like I’m stuck for now until zbrush hopefully can add uv mapping options with the curve insert brushes, but ya can’t blame a guy for asking! :wink: