Controlling hair with masks - ZBrush Tutorial

- We've already looked at masking different sections of a hairdo for making a part in the hair. But we can also mask different sections of individual hair follicles. For example, you could mask from the root of the follicles up to a midway point, so that you could continue to groom the hairs and only the ends would move. There's a few other interesting ways that masks work with hair, so let's check it out. One thing that needs demonstrating is that fiber mesh sub tools are a lot like regular mesh objects, but they do behave differently. For one, when you mask fiber mesh sub tools, they either mask the entire follicle, or just a section of it, depending on how you make the mask. So let me demonstrate. I'm going to go into solo mode so we just see the hair, and let's zoom in on a section so we can see this really clearly. All right, I'm going to shrink my draw size here, and I'm going to hold down Ctrl so we go into masking mode, and let's start painting a mask on this one hair. So you notice that when the mask touches any part of a follicle, it masks the entire follicle. As I'm brushing this on. So that's a little bit different from normal meshes, where if you're brushing on a mask it only masks the part of the mesh that you actually brushed on. But with hair it's different. If you start brushing on any one part of the length of a hair, it'll mask the entire hair. However this doesn't mean that you can't mask just a part of a hair. It's kind of strange but if you hold down Ctrl and click and drag a marquee mask, then only the parts of the follicle that are underneath that marquee get masked. Or for example if you hold down Ctrl and go and get the mask lasso, you can also draw a lasso shape and only what is covered up by that lasso is going to be masked. So you can still mask sections of hairs. Okay I'm going to go ahead and clear this mask, so let's just go to masking, clear, now here's another masking tip. For when your fiber mesh objects have at least three sides. Let me zoom in here so you can see exactly what I'm talking about. If you look really close at the roots of these hairs, you can see that they are three-sided objects. If your hairs are single plane ribbons, this trick isn't going to work. So that's why I always like to make hairs as at least three-sided objects. Now the way we can take advantage of this is by going into our masking sub palette and we can go to mask by feature, and make sure that border is turned on but none of the others, and just click mask by feature. So what this does is it finds any open edges and masks them off. Now we can take advantage of this, by zooming out here we can use this mask to mask off different sections of the follicles. So let's go ahead and grow this mask. And sharpen it. And maybe grow it one more time, and sharpen it. Let's try it one more time, grow and sharpen, so now every part of the hair is masked except for the end part of it. Let's just do that one more time to make it really obvious, grow and sharpen. Okay now let's switch to BG, I want to get the groom toss brush, let's go ahead and zoom way out now. So now we can have effects on this hair that only affect the tips of the hair. And it's going to leave the roots where they were, or it's going to leave the bottom half of the hair, where it was. So this can make it a little bit easier to control hair for different effects. One other thing we could do, let me zoom in here to make it easier to see again. Is we could invert this. So I'm going to hold Ctrl and click in an open area, so now just the tip of the hairs are masked, so what you could do with this is you could get out the lengthen, BG and E, and what you could do is grab and pull on these hairs, and it'll lengthen the hair but it'll leave the tips where they are. So this could create some interesting effects. Now one thing that's really different about how hair follicle objects work is that not all brushes will respect the masking. So let's switch to a different brush, BG, I'm going to get toss again, and let's just see how this works. So with toss, it's actually going to affect parts of the hairs that are masked anyway, just by the way that the brush works, it sort of grabs hairs by a certain point, and then it pulls the entire hair along with it. So, masks aren't really something that affects this brush. All right let's go ahead and zoom out, turn off solo mode, and I'm going to clear the mask. So masking is just one more tool in your toolbox, for controlling hair and getting different interesting effects.