Saturday, May 22, 2021

ZB_09 | Using mask and Curve Bridge Brush To form a skirt (Masking Part 5)

  


Hi Everyone, My name is Michele.

Today I will show you 2 ways you can join separate surfaces to

form a skirt in Zbrush. One using mask and one using

Insert Multi Mesh(IMM.)

We will start with masking the top of the skirt then the bottom and Zbrush will form the third using

curve bridge brush.

Let's begin. Press "," to open up the light box. Go under project. Open up a female model that comes with Zbrush. We will use this female model to help us with forming the skirt

 then go under Subtool.

Click on Append. Click on Cylinder3d.  Click on Cylinder Subtool layer to edit it.

Press "W" to turn on gizmo and scale it down to fit the model,

just below the waistline. Now, increase the resolution of the

cylinder so that our mask can be as smooth as possible.

Turn on polyframe by pressing this button or Shift "F". Go under

Tool > Geometry > Dynamesh. Turn off blur and increase the resolution up to 800k,

so that the pixels look smaller. Press "F" to fit to screen. If you use a lower resolution; for example 512,

the squares will look bigger.

We only need to see the parts just below the waist

where the waist band begins and just

below the knees where the skirt ends. Go under Subtool.

Click on the Female model Subtool layer to activate it.

Ctrl Shift Click and Drag from the waist to the knees to isolate.

Rotate the canvas so that you're viewing from the top.

Press "F" to fit the waist to screen

Let's use method No.1. I'm going to use Method No.2

on the next video so stay tuned and remember to subscribe :)

Press Ctrl and select Freehand stroke. Reduce the Focal Shift to

-100 to get a sharp edged mask. Activate the cylinder subtool

layer. Method No.1 uses MaskPen to create the top of the skirt.

Zoom in close enough so that it's easier to paint on the mask.

Just beyond the skin.

Press Alt to erase the painted mask. Rotate it if you can't see the edge of the skin.

Ctrl "W" to Polygroup it.

Press "F" to fit to screen. Now, let's do the bottom of the skirt. Rotate the canvas so that you are viewing from the bottom. Let's hide all the other surfaces so that we will only mask the

bottom of the cylinder. Ctrl Shift Alt Click and Drag.

Remember to use SelectRect for the brush selection,

and Rect as the Stroke.

Rotate to view from the bottom of the cylinder.

There are 3 ways to do this.

Method No.1 is using Lasso tool. Let's do that.

Press Ctrl. Change the Stroke to Lasso. Now let's draw the

soft curves of the skirt. Turn off perspective.

We want to see it straight on.

Slowly, draw the curves with your

pen like what I'm drawing now.

Press Alt to erase using Lasso then Press Ctrl "W" to Polygroup it. The next method is using Radial symmetry.

Go under Transform, Click on Activate symmetry.

By default, only X symmetry and mirror button is On.

Click on "R" to use Radial symmetry.

Click on the number on Radial count and type in 16.

This number will create 16 numbers of whatever you draw on

the axis you have chosen above be it X, Y or Z. If you want to

know which one to use, Just test out each of them until you see

one that fits but if you want to dive deeper into understanding

which plane you're looking at and which axis you're going to

draw on this is how i do it. You can turn on Floor plane

with this button or Shift "P".

On Floor plane, you can click on X axis to find out where it is, and your radial symmetry will divide whatever you draw on this

surface or on this plane.

If you click on "Y" axis, that is the plane

our symmetry will be divided on,

and similar for Z axis. If you click on Z axis, both on

Active symmetry and on floor plane, Zbrush will

divide 16 numbers of whatever you draw on Z plane so,

in order to apply Radial symmetry. You need to identify which

plane you're looking straight on and then, you click on that axis.

For example, I'm looking at Z-axis and my Active symmetry,

I have Z-axis on, and I'll be able to draw

16 numbers on that plane.

Let us switch back to Method No.2 on How to mask the bottom

of the skirt. Now we're going to use Radial symmetry to mask

the bottom of the skirt. With Radial symmetry on Y-axis on and

16 Radial count, Press Ctrl to activate MaskPen and under

Stroke, Select FreeHand stroke.

Let's start masking using our Freehand

stroke. Press Ctrl again to activate masking. Then change the stroke to circle. Draw the circle to

cover the unmasked skirt area.

Press Ctrl "W" again to Polygroup it. Now there's a third way to

do this using a pre-made mask I'm selling soon on

michtintin.com. Still working on the quality of the mask. Let's

undo the steps we have done. Press Ctrl. Go to Alpha.

Import a Custom Alpha.

Change the Stroke to Rect;

with Square and Center On. Go to the Center of the circle.

Click and Drag to apply the custom mask.

The parts that intersect with the skin can be adjusted later on, or you can scale the polygons bigger later on before you bridge

the two surfaces. Then Ctrl "W".

Let's unhide everything. Ctrl Shift Tap.

Let's isolate the top and bottom of the skirt.

Ctrl Shift Tap on the unwanted parts then Tap again

to reverse the visibility. You can watch my first few videos on

masking if you want to understand more about using masks.

Unhide all of the female model. Then go back to cylinder layer.

Ctrl Shift Tap on the unwanted parts then tap again to

reverse the visibility.

Ok! Now let's delete hidden geometry.

Modify topology > Delete hidden. Done.

Those are the 3 ways you can mask the bottom of the skirt.

Now we will smooth out the edges of the

top and bottom polygons.

Go under Tool > Geometry > Edged loop > Groupsloops.

Increase the polish to 100. Keep the Loops at four and

triangles on. Hit Groupsloops.

Hit one more time to smooth the edges further.

Zoom in and check. I have no idea why I didn't turn off the

female model instead of hiding them, so let's turn it off now,

by clicking on the eye icon on the Subtool layer. Let's turn on

Double so that we can see the bottom of the top surface...

On second thought, let's flip both surfaces instead when you

look up from the bottom of the skirt, it should be see-through.

Similar to when you look down from the top of the skirt it should

be transparent so I will keep both surfaces empty when you 

look from the top and the bottom, so that we can see through

them. Under Tool, and under Display properties, turn on Double

so that we can view both surfaces. Now turn double off

and we can see the opaque surfaces of the top of the skirt

facing outwards and the opaque surface of the bottom of the

skirt facing outwards and under Display properties,

we click flip once. We can flip both surfaces so that the

transparent side faces outwards and opaque sides

face inwards,

and if you rotate to view from the top you can only see the

bottom surface and then if you rotate to view from the bottom

you can only see the top surface. This is what we want.

Now to join them together Press B>C>5, shortcut for

Brush>Curve>Bridge.

Then click on any one of the surfaces.

Click on the Center then Drag towards the edge.

When you reach the edge, press Shift.

It will form a curved line around the edges.

Then let go of the pen. Do the same for the next surface. Click at the center, Drag towards the edge,

Press Shift, Red highlight visible,

Let go. Next all you have to do is wait for Zbrush to do

the magic. It will form the 3rd surface of the skirt automatically

using Curved Bridge Brush. Rotate around to view it from the

top and bottom.

There could be another problem you might encounter if your

computer is too slow. You can reduce the polygon count before

you bridge the two surfaces together. Just go under Geometry >

Zremesher, turn off Adapt, reduce adaptive size to zero. Let's undo. We are now going to reduce the number of squares

we see here.

Click Zremesh with the settings mentioned and watch the

polygon counts drop in half.

If you can't join them you can try Groupslooping them before you

Bridge them using BC5.

Now with lesser polygon counts, it should be faster in bridging.

Let's try smoothing them. Turn off Polyframe. Shift "F".

Go under Tools > Deformation > Polish, slide it to 50%. You may

have to do it a couple of times until you're happy with it

If you enjoyed this video, please click on like and subscribe. and thanks in advance I'll see you in the next video Adios!

Remember to subscribe!!

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Tuesday, April 20, 2021

ZB_07 | Transpose Smart Mask (Masking Part 4)


 Hi Everyone, my name is Michele. You’re watching part 4 of my

series on masking in Zbrush. In the last episode, we looked at

how to isolate, mask and polygroup the lip area including the

mouth cavity using curve stroke brush. Today we will look at

how to use Transform Smart Mask, another cool brush to mask

in any direction or in today’s tutorial, wrinkles that go any

direction we want! Let’s open up a new Femaledemohead

project by pressing “,”.

Click on project and double click on Femaledemohead. Press “F” to center the model head. Turn off perspective by

pressing “P” & turn off symmetry then turn on “Double” under

Display Properties. There are two ways you can use

Transform Smart Mask. The first, is without alpha. it will wrap

 the mask around any contour originating from the starting point,

 best used for overlapping surfaces. A good example would be

the tongue. Let’s isolate the teeth subtool and have a look.

Go to SUBTOOLS click on skin subtool layer & turn off the

EYE icon OR you can click on teeth subtool layer and click on

SOLO button to isolate it.

Rotate the model so that we are viewing from the top,

then zoom in. It would be difficult to isolate the tongue by

painting on it or lasso around it since it’s in such close proximity

to the teeth. Fortunately for us, ZBrush has a brush called

Transpose Smart Mask under Brush,

Transpose, Smart Mask. Use keyboard shortcut B >T > S.

The korean boy band name, yeah? Easy to remember. Press on

CTRL/CMD and left click and drag down with alpha off. Drag

until the mask covers the tongue area you can see, if you drag

any further it will start masking the teeth too. Let go of your left

click. Rotate to view the bottom of your tongue and You can

continue masking the bottom of the tongue by pressing CTRL

SHIFT CLICK and drag down on the unmasked area until you

have covered the whole bottom of tongue then press

CTRL/CMD W. That’s it.

This trick is good for areas which are difficult to lasso,

challenging surfaces which overlaps.

The second way to use this mask isssssss….using alpha!

Thats right! One without alpha one with alpha. So simple!

Now, let’s apply the mask. B>T>S. Unhide all to reveal the skin.

Divide the active points to amout 2-3 million. Then Press “,” to

open up the lightbox and Click on Alpha. Click on

Leatheryskin88. We will use this to apply some wrinkles around

the eye area. Then Holding down CTRL,  Click and drag on

the model and hold,

watch the top left corner. There is an indication of the

size/ units and the angle. The cool part about this mask is you

can adjust the angle and size accurately on the model.

The anchor point is at the top/bottom middle of the mask,

depending on if you drag up or down.

Then you can turn it left or right to whatever angle you want to

fit into your model. Press spacebar to move the starting point.

Wrinkles around the eye usually begins just after the eyelids

and runs toward the hairline as shown in this image. Unlike the

regular rectangle masks using standard brush, I can scale it

and move it around , but I can't pivot it to any angle I want.

Using BTS I can turn it upwards or downwards!

One downside or maybe it can be considered a feature, is if you

scale it too big and you want to go smaller, you will end up

skewing your mask.

Like this wrinkle alpha, it becomes elongated and flat.

It can be a feature though, depending on how you want your

mask to turn out. I’m not sure how to remedy this but I think

undo and redo the mask is the way to go for now.

Alright, if you learnt something new, give me a thumbs up and

subscribe to my channel for more.

The next video I will show you more ways to mask!

Probably after a video on navigating and saving files.

See you in the next video. Bye!

 

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ZB_06 | Curve stroke brush mask (Masking Part 3)

 


Hi Everyone, My name is Michele.

You're watching Part 3 of my series on masking in Zbrush.

In the last episode, we looked at how to combine 2 polygroups

into 1 polygroup using two methods. Today, we will look at

how to mask and polygroup the lip area and the mouth cavity

using Curve Stroke brush. Let's open up a new female demo

head project by pressing ",". Click on "Project" and double click

on "Female demo head".

Press "F" to center the model head. Turn off perspective by pressing "P"

so that the model is not distorted while we are editing. (Just woke up!)

As usual, let's divide it up to 800 000 so that we can be as

accurate as possible. Press "X" to turn off symmetry.

Green mask half of the head to isolate it so that we can see the

cross-section.

Turn it to the side. We can only see the front surfaces, and the back surfaces

are invisible.

Let's turn on the invisible surfaces. Go to tools. Scroll down to the bottom

of the palette. Look for "Display properties" and click on double

to turn it on. Let's analyse. Okay, we need to turn off the Subtool

for eyeballs and teeth so that we don't damage them and they

don't block our view.

From this view, we can see that we need to mask from the tip of

the nose to the bottom of the chin, to capture the whole mouth

cavity. Ctrl Shift Tab.

Ctrl Shift Lasso. Mask from the front then isolate just the front

part of the face.

Turn to the back view and hide all that is not required.

We only need to mask the lips and a mouth cavity.

At this stage, we can clearly see that it's easier to isolate the mouth cavity and polygroup it first.

Let's do that and CTRL "W" to polygroup it then unhide

everything.

Once again, isolate from the tip of the nose to the bottom of th

chin.

Hide the rest.

Holding down control. Change the stroke to FreeHand and paint in the approximate shape of the lips.

Holding down control, change the Stroke to Curve.

Press CTRL ALT and Slice away the mask area, which goes

beyond the lip area. Left to right, masks the top. Right to left,

masks the bottom

Hold down Spacebar to move the position of the starting point.

You can also use this to change the direction of the curved line.

You can bend this curved mask line by pressing ALT once.

Press ALT 2X for a sharp angle.

If you need to change the direction, just press Spacebar and

then move it to change the direction.

Once done, rotate to the back and check the extent of

masking. Add more mask where needed before pressing

CTRL or CMD W to polygroup it and that's it.

These are all the basics of masking you need to get started.

In the next episode, I'll be showing you how to use this

Transpose Smart Masking to isolate the tongue from the teeth

Subtool into a different polygroup.

That's it for this video. Remember to click like and subscribe if

you find my video useful and do visit my webpage at

michtintin.com for a more indexed tutorial.

See you in the next video .Bye.

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Wednesday, March 24, 2021

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.

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Sunday, January 31, 2021

ZB_04 | 1 Ctrl button with 5 ways of masking (Masking Part 1)

 

Hi, Everyone my name is Michele. In today's Zbrush tutorial, I'm

going to show you 5 shortcuts to apply your mask. First, let's

open up a New document, if you need to. Under Document and

then New document

with the W Size turned on to fill up your whole screen with the

canvas space. If you have just launched your Zbrush, you can

go ahead and press ","  to turn off your Lightbox .

Then, let's go to tool and Sphere3d. Click and drag in the middle

of the canvas.

Press "T" to switch it from 2.5D default canvas into 3D canvas.

Then click on make Polymesh3D to activate the polygons.

Before showing the first method, I am going to show you

how to activate your mask pen. Just press CTRL key and it will

switch the default standard brush into mask pen. The stroke

I'm using freehand stroke which is equivalent to painting.

You can select others but for Method no. 1, I will use this.

Alpha. Currently I have none on but I'm going to use one of my

own custom alpha, I have just made.

If you want to know how to make a good 2D Alpha, head on

to my previous video linked above.

Okay, now let's begin with Method no. 1. This is the

simplest method which is to paint over your model like a paint

brush. Holding down control. Cover whichever area you want to

protect. like a band-aid. Leaving behind the

other parts of the model to edit.

If you're using alpha, it will be used as a brush pattern.

If you don't want any pattern, go back to Alpha

and click Alpha off .

You can go ahead and paint it with the regular round brush.

The brush size is adjustable with this slider 

or with the "S" key and a slider will pop up for you to adjust.

Next method is pressing CTRL,

and instead of brushing on a model, I'm

going to switch to my own Alpha 2.

Click outside and drag. You will see the pattern greyed out

on the model. However, as you can see, the mask is very

pixelated because it has only 8 000 active points.

In order to make a seamless

smooth edge, we need to divide it up to 2 million points.

Go to Geometry.

Divide it up to 2 million by clicking this button or pressing

CTRL D, a few times.

I'm going to press CTRL,

Click on the outside of the model.

Drag downwards and press Spacebar to adjust the position.

Let go of all the buttons.

Let's turn on Polyframe by pressing Shift F

or pressing this button. Then press Command/ CTRL W

to isolate it into its own Polygroup.

Now you can extrude it using the two methods I showed in the 

previous video linked above.

The 3rd Method is pressing Ctrl,

Click outside the model, 

similar to the second method, you need to begin

outside the model.

Then, instead of letting go of all the buttons,

let go of just the CTRL button.

When you let go of the CTRL button that means you want to

ignore the brush alpha. You just want a sharp edged,

rectangular alpha.

This means you have masked this area in the middle and

you can edit the model outside this mask area.

The 4th method is very similar to the 3rd.

Press CTRL, starting outside the model, on the background.

Let go of control and re-press ctrl button again.

Let's try it out.

Press CTRL, Click background and drag.

Spacebar to reposition.

Release CTRL and repress CTRL again.

Your mask will turn green which means it has been inverted.

Let go of your left click on your pen. Holding down CTRL key and

this is what you will get. Isolated and editable pattern from your alpha.

Now I can inflate it and move it as i like without affecting the

parts which have been hidden.

Now let me undo this and move on to Method no.5 . 

Ctrl,

begin outside the model.

Click and drag.

Spacebar to position.

Release control,

Repress control and Release control again.

This will give you a green mask which means an inverted mask.

It will ignore your alpha brush, giving you a sharp edged mask

just like Method no. 3 and those are the 5 methods of masking just

by pressing CTRL.

In the next video, I'm going to show you how to apply these

5 Methods of masking on a Demo head.

Remember to click like and subscribe if you enjoyed my video

and don't forget to visit me at www.michtintin.com

for a more indexed tutorial and I'll see you in the next video.

Bye.

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Monday, December 7, 2020

ZB_03 | 2 ways to turn 2D alpha to 3D Model using alpha.

 

Hi Everyone, my name is Michele

and in today's Zbrush tutorial,

I am going to show you how you can import a good alpha

and convert it into a 3D model using 2 methods.

before we start doing that,

Let's learn how to export a good alpha from your image editing software.

Let's switch to my image editing software,

I'm using pixelmator pro, but you can use any other's like photoshop,

procreate or corel draw etc. Just take note of these few items:

your width and height must be at least 512 pixels,

your resolution 72 pixels/inch and colour depth needs to be 16 bits/channel.

The image you want to extrude in Zbrush has to be in white with the RGB value of

255,255,255. then your black colour which is ignored by Zbrush has be in 0,0,0.

Sometimes your colours may look white or black but their RGB value may not

read so. and when you extrude them in Zbrush it ends up with an unexpected,

messy blob. Just keep in mind for alpha, absolute white means show,

absolute black means ignore. So go ahead and get your image ready and let's export it to your desktop for easy access.

You can save it under PNG, JPEG or Photoshop file format.

with 16 bits channel, which means

there are 16 bits of colour information in a pixel which can do amazing

extrusions with VDM brushes. I'll do a video on that next round.

So do subscribe if you don't want to miss out on that.

Now let's just export this simple alpha and switch to Zbrush

when you are in Zbrush,

press comma to close the lightbox.

Then click on Documents tab and New document so that Zbrush window

auto fits my screen size. and save this as my default startup screen.

You can delete it under Zstartup folder if you want to undo it.

Let's draw out a 3D plane on the canvas,

click edit to switch it to 3D document.

Make it into a Polymesh 3D, and turn on the polyframe with line and fill on.

fit the model to screen by pressing F and let's import our alpha.

Press control to activate your Mask pen.

Click on alpha and click import.

Click on the image I have just exported and then click open.

Now press control to activate your mask pen,

click on the image we just imported to activate it.

and change our stroke to drag rect so that we can draw out the pattern with

click and drag. Now we need to increase the geometry so that we can use the

alpha we have imported. If we just drag out our image with this

current resolution, it will only be a pixellated, faint grey shadow.

and another thing is, we need to press control and reduce the

focal shift to -100.

By pressing control and changing it, I am only changing the focal shift of the

mask pen. The focal shift of the drawing/sculpting pen remains intact.

Then, go to Geometry under Tool, divide the geometry 6 times until you reach

1 million active points.

This is not a hard and fast rule, it depends on how detail your mask is,

if it has simple shapes,

250K is fine but mine is filled with swirling curves so 1 million it is.

Then, we need to smooth out the mask edges by going under Tool > Masking > Sharpen mask.

Now let's use method no 1

which is using polygrouping to separate the masked area.

Polygrouping is like playing colour tagging.

Tag it a different colour, it belongs to that group.

You can edit one colour and the geometries in that colour are affected.

Next, look at the new Polygroup up close,

urgh, jagged edges.

Let's smooth it out by going under

Geometry > Edgeloop > GroupsLoops.

This button Groups the visible polygroups on canvas into individual groups

of colours and pad the edges with Loops which smooths out the edges.

So let's run the GroupsLoops on the isolated polygroup. Hmmm, sounds like Fruit Loops.

Before that we need to delete off the lower divisions,

or else Zbrush won't let us run GroupsLoops. GroupsLoops

the settings I am using are 4 numbers of Loops on the slider.

Polish all the way up to 100,

less if your image is not so full of swirls and twirls.

Leave the Triangle on

and just look at how smooth that is.

Next I am going to extrude this flat image.

Press Ctrl & Shift

Click on the pattern to isolate it

and mask the pattern by holding down Ctrl and tap on the grey background.

pressing Ctrl & Shift, tap again on the grey background to reveal everything.

Now I want to invert my mask by holding down Ctrl &

tap between the canvas edge and the white line.

Press W to reveal gizmo and slightly orbit the pattern so that we can see the

blue arrow clearly.

Click and pull on the pattern to extrude it and that's it !

Here you go, the first method to convert 2D alpha to 3D model. Press F to fit your model to screen

and turn off Polyframe.

The next method is using the subtool to extract the mask as a Subtool layer.

So let's undo everything and go back to masking stage, then

Go to Subtool > Extract. When you click Extract it will show you a preview

of the settings you have chosen. Just a preview until you click on Accept,

Once you Accept though there's no going back and change the settings.

However, even if you can't undo it, you can always hide it under Subtool layer

and re-Extract it again onto another Subtool layer.

The settings I'm using are 100 for Smoothing,

Turn on TCorner & TBorder.

I am leaving Double off because I only want it to

extrude on one side of the surface and not both sides.

Let me zoom in, I want to show you the effect of extract.

Once you click on extract,

the result is visible as long as you don't touch anything on the screen.

The moment you click on the screen, it disappears but the result is still

stored. If you want to keep the result, just click on Accept and the extrusion

will be saved onto another layer in Subtool. if you want, your can extract

another version of it again. Just turn of the visibility of the subtool layer you

extracted the first time, adjust the settings then extract and accept again.

and there you go, the two methods of converting a 2D alpha to 3D model

Oh just as a bonus, there's a simpler way of using your alpha

which is the quickest. Just drag and drop it on any surface.

Select clay buildup brush, Stroke as DragRect and

Select your alpha image. and Drag away.

The downside is that I can't isolate it as a group

or polygroup automatically unlike the previous two methods.

which is why I don't recommend it, unless it doens't matter to you. Alright!

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