ZBrushCentral

How do you guys approach ZSphere Hands?

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hey Guys,

You know, I’m curious about that - I love to block out my models with ZSpheres, but there are a few places where ZSpheres just make the blocking out thing a little too complicated.

For example: A hand, fingers. I always encounter overlapping mesh. And overlapping mesh is a big nono for me, cause fiddling with single verts afterwards doesn’t really lead to a fast workflow.

So, how do you guys approach hands, fingers, parts of a body that require 3 or more ZSpheres as the childs of another ZSphere?

I attached an image, so you guys can see what’s bothering me:

Working on SubD0, moving Verts around won’t help in this case - So how do you guys deal with this kind of problems?

#2

Hi

First I make sure the palm zsphere is NOT the first sphere (in case you are just doing a hand tool to add later). What you want to do is one of two things before creating the sphere that the fingers are going to come out of.

Some folks mess with the ires settings and get ok results…that’s number one.

I prefer to go to transform menu and move the xres,yres,zres to 2 or more(depending on need…you may need to keep the mesh as low as you can and still add as much as you can to the one sphere…so…it’s up to the situation) then create that sphere…now go back and return it to the default settings…which I think are either 1 or 0…I don’t have access to my z2 to say for sure at the moment but either way…ya know what I mean.

It allows you to add digits without problems, or if they intersect initially moving the spheres corrects it or a vert or two will clear it up.

hope this does it for ya!

#3

Hey Aminuts,

Yeah, I already tried to fiddle around with the Ires Setting - Problem is that it’ll affect the whole model, not only the one Zsphere I want to!

And sorry, but, I don’t seem to find these xres, yres, zres settings you’re talking abuot - neither in the transform, nor in the tool panel!

I encounter that problem pretty often, so any help would be appreciated!

#4

xres001.jpg

They are in the transform menu just above where it says modifiers.

if you change the xres the rest will follow suit automatically, if you wish them to be different then you can set them as well but I usually let it do them all at once. Which is not necessarily the most efficent way but I am pretty lazy!:wink:

#5

Oh man… I should get more sleep! :wink:

Thanks, I’m going to try this now!

Well, I tried it now, but the results are not what I expected. I still get tons of overlapping.

If I put the xres, yres and zres sliders to a value of 2 or even higher, the result will be that the next sphere has a pretty high resolution that not really flows with the rest of the geometry.

So is there no other way to deal with that kind of overlapping geometry? That’d be a shame, Zspheres are a great way for blocking out models…

#6

I posted a zscript of how to make hands in Zbrush without having the fingers bleed into each other back when Z2 first came out. It’s really not that difficult once you figure out the way zsphere’s work.

Anyway, here is what the zscript will make:

And the link to the zscript:

http://homepage.mac.com/chadtheartist/.Public/hand/basehand.zsc

When running the script, make sure that your canvas size is bigger than the default 640 X 480. I would just double the default canvas size, that way the zscript will play correctly. So when the zscript asks you to initialize Zbrush, click the skip button.

Also of note, when the zscript changes the X,Y,Z res, it changes from 0,0,0 to 3,3,3 when I draw the zsphere for the palm of the hand. After I draw the palm of the hand, I switch the X,Y,Z res back to 0,0,0 for the fingers. It’s in the zscript, but it goes by really quick, so you may miss it.

I hope this helps.

#7

Another note on zsphere construction all around. When working with blocking out the figure, I’ve found it increasingly helpful to work with the zspheres at the lowest density setting. So at level one, the geometry is incredibly easy to manipulate and form. That way you aren’t stuck with a ton of geometry all over the place, especially when you adjust the X,Y,Z, res.