Lord Rae: I apologize, but I’m not entirely clear as to specifically what you are referring to about the ‘crisp’ edges. Are you referring to the flow of the geometry lines in general across the whole model or something specific to a portion of it’s anatomy like the legs?
Areas like the joints separating the leg sections start with a zsphere scaled much smaller than the rest of the leg then I convert a connector sphere on either side of it into a zsphere (draw mode + click on a specific connector sphere) then scale them down a bit. That helps to cinch in the membrane of the model making a nice clean joint. You can see a bunch of cinches all over the legs. I wanted to get the overall form quickly though so most of that cinching I did after something like the whole length of a leg had been quickly roughed in with only a few ZSpheres. The small scaled magnet spheres placed so close to the legs help to flatten the leg segments a little so they aren’t so unnaturally rounded. You can fine-tune that effect and creat gradual twists and sweeps as you can see in the ZSphere views by moving the magnet sphere handles around and scale them up and down a bit. Each one shouldn’t be angled too differently from it’s next neighbor or you’ll get knots and other undesirable things. The nice advantage to that is the magnetic pull of the magnet spheres curves the geometry lines in a nice flow with those sweeps and twists. That makes your detailing later considerably less ‘jaggy’ when you are doing all the fun edit brush stuff since your geometry lines are already flowing in the direction you want to paint.
I come from more of a fine-art training background. Practically everything I know about computers and software came on the job over the years. It hasn’t been easy since much of the time I’m forced to learn on my own and still somehow have to make deadlines. One thing you’ll almost always hear in any kind of fine-art painting, drawing or sculpting class is not to worry about the details up front. Rough in your ENTIRE subject as quick and simple as you can then gradually refine and add detail in successive passes. That principle definitely holds true in the digital realm as well. I see too many people succumb to the tempation to jump right into the fun details without paying much attention to the basic form and proportions. The details can look nice when done but the overall piece often suffers because the basic form wasn’t nailed down first. It seems like that temptation is something everyone has to deal with. The habit of succumbing to it can be broken.
As an anecdote let me tell you about one of my experiences in college: I had a professor in one of my life drawing classes who was this funny little German lady. To get us to loosen up and stop focusing on details she would time the sessions with a stop watch counting down the last 15 seconds then slap a pair of rulers held in one hand onto her desk - making an ear-splitting whip-crack sound to get us to stop drawing or painting. Sometimes we would have as much as 20 minutes or more to do something but then in later sessions be required to do the same thing in shorter periods down to only 30 seconds. 30 seconds seems impossible to do a complicated subject and it is but it got us to really loosen up and focus our perceptions on the basic form and discard the details from the view our eyes were transmitting to our brains. As an added measure she would draw her ‘line of death’ on the floor in front of each of us with masking tape that we had to stand behind. Heaven help you if you crossed the line! She’d sneak up behind you and crack those rulers into the palm of her hand with a BANG which would make you jump right out of your skin. We were so far away from our paper or canvas that we were at full arm’s length from the surface. That physically prevented us from tightening up into the details.
She was a weird lady and it was a weird class, but even today if I catch myself tightening up too quick or take too long on the initial rough stage of something I still expect to hear that crack of the rulers right behind me.
In the example of the Scarab model the very first rough in of the model was probably only a dozen or so ZSpheres representing the main areas of the head, body and legs done in around the first 5 minutes. It’s a very primitive charicature stick figure at that point but let’s me see how the general proportions and placements look in the level 1 and 2 resolution levels. The IRES and Membrane sliders are real important at this stage too along with the Minimal Skin to Child and Minimal Skin to Parent buttons.
I gradually started adding magnet spheres and cinches, working across the whole model from one end to the other in multiple passes until I felt I couldn’t take it any farther in the res 2 density stage. I didn’t do much at all with the editing brushes on the base modeling. Mostly just the Nudge brush sometimes to push/pull some mesh lines into a more natural looking flow. I use that brush more than any of the others in the beginning stages to adjust the flow of the geometry lines to be neater in areas that have problems. Even that isn’t really needed extensively if you’ve used your magnet spheres well. They can really help get a very clean base model with good line flow that will make your detailing in the hi-res stages much easier and with fewer ‘jaggy’ areas.
I’ve been having alot of fun experimenting with the possibilities of magnet spheres. They are one of my favorite tools I’ve found so far but I haven’t learned more than half of all the features in ZBrush yet. There’s still plenty of territory left for me to stumble over something else unexpected and equally cool.
By the way: earlier in the first page of this post I described 2 methods of making use of magnet spheres. In a recent experiment, trying to create a better starter low poly human head with a large array of magnet spheres, I came across a cool 3rd method. I’ll describe that method later when I post images of the head model.
Not sure if this answered your question Lord Rae or not but hopefully someone out there will find it useful. It seems some people aren’t really taking advantage of the full potential of magnet spheres (or is the official name attractor spheres? - It’s stuck in my head as magnet spheres) so I’m thinking of making a more formal tutorial on what I’ve learned of the subject and maybe a scripted session later when I have a little more time.
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