Hey everyone. I’m working on making a strap brush, so I can easily strap gear to a soldier, and I’m having trouble getting the ends to meet up correctly. The curve makes a nice loop, but the geo isn’t close enough. How can I fix this?
See pages 37 to 40 in the ZBrush4_R4_whats_new.pdf in your ZBrush 4R4/Documentation folder.
I did some more digging on my problem, I found the problem is the geometry is not coming all the way to the edge of the curve. Where I start drawing the curve is not where the geometry starts. This makes creating loops impossible as the curve points connect and with the geo not at the edge, it will leave a gap. Is there a setting or a creation technique I don’t know as to how to adjust this? I managed to get one brush set up so it will loop, but it took 20 minutes of going back to the original mesh, lengthening the tiling piece slightly, creating a new brush from it, and testing it.
I looked in the What’s New Help Docs and it doesn’t say anything about how to adjust this.
Also, how do I start a new curve? I’ve been getting around this by trying to subdivide the mesh, which divides the curve and finalizes it, but that seems like a hack. Whats the right way to do this?
Thanks!
Ben
Figured it out, and since I can’t find the answer anywhere on the internet, I’ll post it up here for everyone. Well, this may not be “THE” answer, but it works.
Imagine your trimesh object as three equal parts, and the size of each part depends on the size of your tiling piece. So if you want your mesh to tile in a loop, the end pieces need to be the same size as the center pice, else the curve you draw won’t have geometry up to the ends. So if you were making tank tracks, that’s easy, since each piece is the same (and you wouldn’t need to make it a trimesh brush anyway). But say you want to make a motorcycle chain, which has a cool master link to tie the ends together. You would make your chain segment and your master link segment the same length in the axis you want to draw the curve. Then when you draw the curve and join the ends, you master link and regular link will align together nicely. If you want to something that overlaps, like a strap that has buckles on both ends and you want to be able to claps the buckle, you will need to work out how much overlap to give each end, keeping in mind the size of the middle segment.
Oh, one last thing now that I’m playing with the loop some more. Just because the loop is “closed” doesn’t mean it will weld your end pieces together or otherwise try to respect the smooth look you’re probably going for. It will keep your end pieces separate and require some tweaking to line up right without janking up the rest of your curve.
Okay, hope that wasn’t too confusing and it helps.
Ben
Well just tried my theory on an overlapping mesh. Didn’t work. So back to thinking…
I’ve just spent an hour looking for the simple question of how you draw closed looped curves (Like a belt). It doesn’t seem to be in the manuals.