ZB_05 | 2 ways to combine 2 polygroups (Masking Part 2)

Hi Everyone, My name is Michele.

In today's Zbrush tutorial I will be showing you how to use the

5 methods of masking introduced in the previous tutorial on a

demo head.

Let's press ",". to open up the lightbox.

Click on Project then double click on DemoHeadFemale to open up this project.

Press "F" to center the model. Symmetry is on by

default so let's turn it off by pressing "X"

We'll begin with method no.1, Painting on the mask. Before we

paint, let's increase the number of active points to be more

accurate when we mask.

Press CTRL "D" a few times until we reach 800 000 points.

Turn off the eyeballs and teeth on the Subtool palette,

in case we accidentally damaged these parts. 

Turn off perspective "P" and let's begin painting.

Press CTRL, Stroke, change it to "FreeHand" Alpha off.

Let's be as accurate as possible in our masking and start

with isolating the ear area.

Press CTRL to activate the MaskPen.

SHIFT to isolate only the parts we need, to avoid any unwanted damages.

Go to Stroke and change it to Lasso.

This command activates the green mask which doesn't have to

begin on the background as mentioned in the previous video.

You can begin on the model and you can use alpha.

Method no.5 from the previous video starts on the background and only applies rectangular mask with no alpha.

Draw around the ear area to isolate the ear.

Let's use MaskPen to paint on the ear.

See how the mask is feathered out on the edges.

Since I want to be really accurate,

I want to know exactly where the edge of the mask is.

There are 2 ways you can do this. First is by using a brush with

sharp edge. This can be done by pressing CTRL,

changing the focal shift of the brush to -100.

Second is by sharpening the mask by holding down CTRL ALT

and tap your pen on the mask or greyed out area a few times.

You will see the feathered edges become more and more defined.

Showing the exact line where the mask begins and end.

CTRL ALT and paint to erase the unwanted masked area.

Let me orbit around my masked area

to check if I have done a good job.

Reduce the draw size to refine the mask.

Orbit around to see if I have done a good job .

If not, proceed to mask any parts I

missed out and polygroup them again.

So what we have now is

the ear area with two polygroups.

We want to combine into one polygroup.

There are two ways you can combine them

that I know of at the moment.

Begin by hiding the parts that don't belong to the ear polygroup

then polygroup whatever that's visible or left behind.

Let's try that.

Depending on whether you have any existing hidden parts ,

in my case I do have the other parts of the demo head hidden.

So, when I press CTRL SHIFT and tap.

This command hides the polygroup I tapped on.

If I don't have any polygroups hidden, let's say I unhide everything,

CTRL SHIFT tap on the background.

I will begin by hiding the parts that don't belong to the ear group.

CTRL SHIFT tap on the part which is

not part of the ear to isolate it,

then flip the isolation

by CTRL SHIFT tapping on the visible

polygroup.

Now, I brought forward the two polygroups that made up the ear

area and I can polygroup all,

by pressing CTRL or CMD W.

As a summary, if you have existing hidden parts CTRL SHIFT Tap.

CTRL or CMD W.

If not, CTRL SHIFT Tap, to isolate.

Tap again to switch to isolation.

and then CMD or CTRL W.

Method no 2. This method assumes you don't have any hidden parts,

so let's unhide everything. CTRL SHIFT Tap on the background .

Start by isolating a single polygroup

out of the multiple polygroups that make up the ear.

CTRL SHIFT Tap on the isolated ear polygroup to flip the isolation,

then holding CTRL SHIFT Tap the rest of the ear polygroup.

Basically, pick a leader and the rest will follow.

When you've hidden all that is part of the ear group,

then CTRL SHIFT Tap on the last visible polygroup,

to flip the visibility of the hidden and the visible polygroups.

If you tap on a polygroup and it doesn't flip, that means that is

not the last polygroup and then CTRL or CMD W to regroup it.

Actually, these 2 methods are very similar.

The only difference is either starting by hiding what you don't

need or hiding what you need.

Okay I think my video is getting a bit too long.

So I'm gonna split out the masking of the lip area to the next

video. I hope you found this useful & enjoyable.

Please hit like and subscribe if you did and I'll be indexing all my

Zbrush tutorials on my website at michtintin.com for future

reference. Feel free to visit. I'll see you then. Bye.