Creating a rope by drawing a curve with a custom brush - ZBrush Tutorial

- [Instructor] Earlier in the course, I showed you how you can create a rope around the neck, that we utilized working with ZSpheres. This time, I'm going to take a slightly different approach, and work with the Insert brush. Now I've already created a brush, a custom rope brush, that I've handed off to you, it's in your folder. And if you put in your brush presets it will automatically launch with ZBrush. And we're going to build this rope, waistband, or belt, that goes around the character. Now to do that, I could work with the torso geometry. But in this case I'm going to actually work right on top of the Sphere, that I distort a little bit better, so that I have more control over the rope. And you'll see what I mean in a moment. So to do that, I'm going to start off with the new Sphere. Make it a polymesh 3D and divide it up. I want the rope to essentially go around the Sphere, there will be a knot, but then there will be two edges that sort of flare off, now it's up to me, how I want to go about sculpting that. Do I want to do the rope all in one go? Or do I want to break separate pieces off? And to be honest, I can go either way with that. Sometimes it's easier to actually have separate geometries, separate subtools, and then just marry them together later. Most likely, that's the way I'll end up going, but I'd like to show you, how I distort this Sphere, just to add a little bit more interest, to the tutorial. So, first thing I want to do is actually deform the Sphere and flare it out a little bit towards the bottom. I'm going to activate symmetry. I'll turn on the X and my Radial Count. Actually we want Y for this, and what I want to do is just start to inflate the ends of the Sphere. Okay, and that is just bringing it out a little bit. There's obviously many different ways that you could inflate the edges. I'm just doing this very quickly. Okay. So the first step in working with the rope, is I need to activate the Insert brush. I'll switch over to my brushes and I'll locate the Insert MI rope brush. And what this brush is basically, it's one section of a rope that will step and repeat itself. But before I can actually use it, I need to create a curve that we're going to set it to. So I'm going to enable my Stroke, turn on Curve and Curve Mode, and now I'll be able to actually draw a curve onto the Sphere. Now before I draw my Curve, I need to delete the lower geometry, because the curve likes to work on one subdivision only. So once again, I'll begin drawing my curve. I'm going to wrap this around quickly. And come back around. Okay? So now you can see I've wrapped the curve which has automatically attached to the rope. One of the neat things about working with this technique, is that I can now continue to move the rope. I can move the curve, any way that I'd like. So I have the ability to actually re-position this, accordingly. It takes a bit of time and finesse, but once you have it and you're happy with it, we're now ready to move on to the next step. You'll notice the first thing that we have is gaps between each of the segments. Now in order to fix that, we have to go into the brush modifier. So what I'll do is go under 'Brush', and I'll select on the icon so that we bring it over to our drop down. And now under modifiers, what I'm looking for is the section just under TriParts where I have Stretch and Weld points. I'm going to click on Stretch, which will automatically stretch out the pieces but I won't see the results until I click on the curve. The moment I do that, it actually repairs itself. You'll notice there is still some gap happening with the geometry, because it's not perfect. To fill in that gap, I can work with the Overlap. Now Overlap is very sensitive so you have to work with it in low, numerical count. I'll go ahead and use it point zero zero one to start. Once again, I need to tap on my line. And that tightens it a little bit. I'll probably up this to point zero zero two. Once again, tap it. And I'm going to leave it at that. I do have some Seam here that I'm not happy with, but I'll fix that later on in my sculpt.