Hello
I’m fairly new to ZBrush and am trying to find the best method to “wrap” a character in tape. I’m still learning about the curve brushes, but I find it hard to get them to “bend” accurately around the character.
Is it just a matter of becoming more familiar with the tool or is there a better way to achieve something like this?
I’m starting with the body of the Demo Solider just to figure out the right approach, but would end up being on a very simple character. The tape does not need to be “mummy” like, i.e there would be gaps around the layers of tape.
There are many different ways you might approach this. Here are a few:
Mesh Extracts. You can mask the mesh for each section of “tape” at the desired thickness as a separate subtool. Each section can then be merged into a single subtool.
If you want to “cocoon” your character in tape, with no gaps between the arms and torso, duplicate your character mesh and use tools like Dynamesh and Sculptris Pro brushes to sculpt it into a solid cocoon shape while leaving the contour of the body intact. Then perform extracts or otherwise sculpt your tape onto this shape.
Lazy Mouse 2.0 features can be used to sculpt long unbroken strokes on the surface of a mesh, which may be useful .
When using an IM curve stroke brush, when you make contact and then hold down shift while continuing to drag out the red line, zbrush will attempt to wrap the stroke around the form of the mesh if it understands it. This could be used with a Strap IMM curve brush to draw out a strip of tape.
The Topology brush can use that curve wrapping mechanic to draw edge loops around a form, which will let you create strips of “tape” as separate geometry.
Remember that Polypaint, Masking, and Polygroups can each be converted into the other. This opens up a ton of possibilities to polypaint your “tape” onto a mesh, then convert that into masking for extracts, or inflation. Or you could convert masking into polygroups, from which the “tape” can be extracted or extruded as geometry.
Thanks a lot for all these great approaches.
If you don’t mind, I’d love to ask for a clarification on or two of these
1/Mesh Extracts are great, but the issue I see is that the outcome has rounded edges. I suppose I could trim those later using sculpting brushed, but is there a way to avoid them all together? Here is an example of what I mean
5/The topology brush approach sounds really interesting, but strangely when I try to use Shift to create a loop, I see the straight line appear but no loop, even though that seems to work well with curve brushes. Are there any particular parameters to pay attention to with this one?
Actually on the topology brush question I figured out that my problem was not having the right subtool selected…
One more question…If I use the curve strapsnap brush, which is quite useful, I’m not sure how to change the thickness of the curve that is created. Is that possible?
Well, bandages do have rounded edges, but I think what you’re objecting to here is the rounded end. This will vary with how accurate your masking was, and how high of a resolution the extract was created at (higher res meshes produce higher res extracts).This is easy to fix, but your approach may vary with whether you intend to keep the tapes low poly, and therefore must care more about topology, or whether you’re just going to subdivide or dynamesh it into a high poly mesh and work on it at that level.
In the case of the former, mesh extracts are created with crease tags between the two extruded surfaces. This means when subdivided, the edges will stay hard any place the creases are applied. You would have to locate the corner geometry for that end, and apply additional crease tags to keep those corners hard when subdividing. This would apply to extracts as well as any low poly topology you create with the Topology Brush.
If you’re going to work at high poly, then simply use the Trim Curve brush to chop off the end of the tape so it is flat, then dynamesh to remesh the topology.
The ZIntensity setting should alter the thickness. The Brush radius will control the size, and also the spacing to a degree. The stroke can be further modified by settings in the Stroke > Curve palette. One you have a curve drawn out, you need only make changes to the brush and re-click on the curve to apply the new stroke.
