ZBrushCentral

help with armor details/patterns

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hello to everyone, this is my first post on ZbrushCentral.

I’ve been stuck on detailing my latest character and thought I’d give it a go and ask you guys for some advice.

I am modeling a female knight, and I based her armour on mostly gothic/germanic style plates. I was fascinated with their elegant details, but it’s the details themselves where I got stuck.

The two examples at the bottom of my post show what I want to do.

Firstly, it’s the intricate golden borders of each interlocking plates ( red highlight ). I can’t figure out how to model those.
I tried to do it using a mix of uv mapping and the mask by intensity/deformation->inflate trick but I had a lot of trouble with controlling the shapes of the uv islands and also even though the shape would be cut into the mesh, it would not cut through to produce an actual shape, like a boolean operator or something.

Secondly, I also want to model the more larger details on the plates ( green highlight ), but again, I can’t really figure out how to do it.

I want to use these details for example on the bottom of my character’s gorget ( red highlight )

If anyone has any suggestions or methods or can point me to any relevant tutorials I would really appreciate it.

Thanks!
Alex

Attachments

1.jpg

2.jpg

g.jpg

#2

you coud treat it like lace https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqiA1cEO7BU and then dynamesh lace and the main armour pieces together

#3

Hi Blake,

Thanks so much for the link, at first look it seems to be very useful, probably spot on with what I needed.

I’ll give it a try as soon as I can

Cheers,

Alex

#4

I tried the trick above, however I got stuck on the way, there are several problems which I can’t figure out on my own, i guess mainly because I don’t have too much experience with insert mesh and curve.

I made a brush base in 3dsmax which I used as an insert mesh.
The problems that have arisen are the following:

  • firstly, I can’t seem to be able to make the brush produce the stroke where I want it to. It seems that it uses some sort of a center pivot on the individual brush mesh, and I would need the base of my brush to be flush to the border of the armor piece, as it is now it’s not what I want, obviously, but I can’t really figure out how to adjust that. ( item 2 in picture )
  • secondly, the orientation of the brush is reversed, before I made an insert brush out of the mesh, I rotated the mesh from the deformation tab both in -90 and 90 degrees on the y axis, but it still kinda orientates itself the way it likes, opposite from what I need unfortunately. ( item 1 in picture )
  • also, I can see that the brush doesn’t merge the mesh properly on the symmetry line, it’s broken there, although I did play with the brush modifiers tab. ( item 3 in picture )

Everything can be seen in the shot I made below, if there’s anyone who can help, I would really appreciate the effort,

Alex

ZBrush Document.jpg