What would be the best way to achieve this kind of effect of sculpt made of metal panels that goes one on top of each?
I was thinking making alpha and then masking out shape on sculpt and then extract each one separately but I can;t get sharp tips on square and leaf panels. I tried projecting square panels on sculpt but when I have them with some thickness projection is flattening them out on sculpt.
Mask rectangular area, use extract, play with thickness setting, if happy hit accept?
But corners of the squares are round.
No picture? Maybe underlying mesh isn’t dense enough? Increase density through subdivision, mask then sharpen mask. Duplicate your model and slice it up for the square parts. More ornate ones will need a different approach maybe. You do or don’t want the parts tight to your model?
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This is going to be a bit disjointed, I need more coffee and what you want to do has so many possibilities its amazing so I will try to go over a good bit of everything, from this you should (I hope) find your own workflow.
You can do this in a lot of different ways, Extracts are great, and after you do the extract try using PolishByPolishBy Feature its fantastic and you should play with it a lot trying it out at different times.
In the Extract Pallet:
Once you hit accept you will have a new subtool, switch to that and turn on PolyFrame (Shift F).
You will be able to see that your extract has three polygroups, inner outer and edge, you can now select these individually by holding down Ctrl and Shift and clicking on them.
So, if for example you want the extract a bit thicker rather than make a new one you can select the outer PolyGroup and use Inflate in the Deformation Pallet. If you do a bunch of these panels at once you can select the edge group and inflate that in or out to make them closer together or further apart.
To do the trick with the leaves overlapping you can do all this by drawing your leaves and using them as alphas to create masks that you can extract using the same stuff above.
One method of making the masks into something amazingly useful is to go into the PolyGroup Panel on the Right (Under Tool) and once your mask is drawn hit the FromMasking button, this has a smoothness slider, if you want VERY sharp edges keep that at Zero, this will likely look a bit jagged so you might want smoothing or you can use PolishByGroups …
Now…
Once you have all your parts:
To move them so they overlap!
That is the seriously fun part and there is a VERY cool trick for that and its VERY easy to use once you know where on earth it is.
If you do this on the edge group of your extract you will be able to manually pull your leaves (or whatever) anywhere you want and create the overlap you are after.
If things are getting lumpy you can use PolishByFeatures in the top of the Deformation Pallet to smooth stuff out, you can also do this with polygroups turned on or off at will selecting just the areas you want to fix.
There is an exquisite video for this bit of stuff only its about PanelLoops instead of MeshExtracts but the same information applies to anything with PolyGroups.
The video is here, watch Panel loops Basics Part Two:
http://pixologic.com/zclassroom/homeroom/lesson/panel-loops/
I hope this helps!
Also this is a very cool project you are undertaking!
Good luck I would love to see the results!
Cheers!
Mealea|
Thank you Melaea,
I already did the project. But I used more manual method because extracting masks was giving me round corners. I basically created simple plane geometry in 3dsmax, placed it as on real sculpts and then in zbrush I used panel loops and voila. Too bad there’s now faster way to do it right in ZB.
Here it is:
You know…
Looking at that I realize that the easiest and fastest way of doing this in ZBrush is also going to give you a whole lot of control, just make a few insert Mesh brushes and put them in one brush so they randomize.
I should have thought of that before its so obvious!
All you would have to do is make your base mesh one polygroup and then go nuts with the insert brush, then use split in the SubTool Pallet.
Your results are wonderful though, so whatever you did in Max worked great!
You are right 
ah too bad I heaven’t thought about it too. There’s so many new ways of doing things with new tools in an that it’s hard to think about all possible solitons.
