ZBrushCentral

Creating tube

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hi all…

this is a very basic straight forward question, but I’ve been battling to find the answer to this.

I want to create tubes that is coming out of a characters head, but I can’t figure out how to do the grooves so that their spacing and indent is right. The tubes are also bent.

I have added an image here of a similar type of tube I quickly made in XSI to illustrate. If I create it with Z-scetch I get a groove like look, but it’s not quite what I’m looking for. I considered first doing the tubes and creating the indents by masks, and then duplicating and bending them into place, but I’m sure there must be a faster more ifficient way of approaching this??

I’m sure the answer is plain, but this has me stuck!! :confused:

Attachments

pipe.jpg

#2

Hi, I’m also been looking at it. I’ve tried curve tubes. To make the tube, but getting a fast way to loop (ring loops)
Now I’m masking every second row and then using (Deformations using the inflate to get the rings on the tube)
Must be another way to do this fast?

#3

Have you tried masking a cylinder primitive in intialize/pre-polymesh mode? You can set up your desired vertical/horizontal topology and then go to the mask pallet and then “mask all” and set your row number and “skip” number then hit the row button (or column or both) and then use negative inflate in deformations. I mirror modified my result after doing a test run to make it a bit longer and then used the rigging feature with zspheres to get a bend. I did it fairly quickly and in someone else’s patient and expert hands they might get a very acceptable result with less squishing at the inner bend:
Curvedthingy.jpg

#4

I already seen this technique, but It would nice if you could do it with the curveTube brush. And then to be able to select and skip you’re rows then inflate it. But now you need to jump in and select/mask your rows. I was wondering if there were other ways.

#5

ZGrab01.jpgIf you make (or find online) and then import a texture of black and white horizontal stripes and put that in your texture slot and “fill” the object with the texture, you can then apply it as a mask all in one go by going to the masking palette and selecting mask by intensity. You may still need to tweak the mask a bit and clean it up on the ends, but it may be what you are looking for.

#6

the texture masking idea seems like a good approach.

Thx 4 the input! :+1:small_orange_diamond:+1:

#7

hello,

Thanks, again for the info+tips. Could you show us an example using the curvetube brush. A more complex curved tube with more bends :slight_smile: Also using the Texture fill approach. As I’ve been unsuccesfull filling it with a striped texture. I have RGB turned on. But my mesh stays white (fastshader) :frowning:
It doesn’t fill anymore after converted to polymeshmode!!

I also been looking into using it with the Surface option (noise) using a striped horizontal texture). My guess you would need to make uv’s on a low version first as the texture needs to curve along the bends correctly and not deform!!
Thanks,