ZB_09 | Using mask and Curve Bridge Brush To form a skirt (Masking Part 5)
Labels: alpha, brush, curve, curve bridge brush, mask, zbrush
Michele teaches Zbrush for beginners
Labels: alpha, brush, curve, curve bridge brush, mask, zbrush
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!
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.
Labels: alpha, brush, curve, curve stroke brush, mask, zbrush
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.
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!
If you like my content, please subscribe and give me a thumbs up.
Tell your friends who are learning Zbrush about my channel
and I'll see you in the next video.