Extracting the simple patches - ZBrush Tutorial

- [Man] All of the various leather patches on the upper are going to be made the same basic way, however, each one comes with its own unique difference or challenge. Let's start with the easiest ones to do first. The Toe Cap, which is here on the front, then the Eyestays and the Quarter patch. Okay, let's jump in. So for this what I wanna do is zoom in, and we wanna mask out the shape of these various patches. So I'm gonna hold down space bar, let's get a different draw size here, a little bit smaller, more precise masking, and I'm just going to hold down Control and start painting this. And actually I might run into some trouble because I've got Symmetry turned on, it might mask things in places I don't want, so I'll just turn that off, hitting X. Just continue masking around. And just trying to follow the lines that I created in the previous video, actually I'm gonna turn off my grid so I can see this without having the reference in the way. Okay, so I skipped ahead, it was kind of tedious to just watch me mask out these sections. You'll notice I've only masked out the Eyestays and the Toe Cap, and this is because the Quarter patch right here is actually touching the Eyestays so I can't mask it and extract it as a separate piece at the same time, so we'll do that later. Okay, from here let's extract these patches. So I'll go into Sub Tool, come down to Extract. And we'll set this to zero thickness, we'll add our own thickness later. Go ahead and click Extract, so it gives us a little preview of what that looks like and let's accept that. Okay, creates a new Sub Tool so let's go ahead and click on this, and I'm going to turn on Solo Mode so we see just what we've created. Okay, it looks pretty good, let's go ahead and clear the mask on this, holding down Control and clicking and dragging in an open area. I'm gonna hit Shift + F to turn on my Wire Frame, so you can see it still retains, for the most part, the same typology as the upper, but the edge is pretty jagged, so what we can do is quickly run ZRemesher on this to give us some nicer typology. So let's go into Geometry, open up ZRemesher, and let's set the Target Polygons Count, two pretty simple pieces, so I don't know, something maybe like 2.5, three. Alright, let's hit Shift + F to see what this looks like. Alright, actually not too bad, it's actually a little dense for what I need, I'm gonna bring the Target Polygon Count down lower, maybe 1.3, and let's run that again. I usually like to run ZRemesher two or three times anyway, because I usually get a cleaner, smoother result if I run it more than once. Okay, let's see how this lines up with our reference. Let's turn our Floor back on, and what I wanna do is come around to a side view here, and I wanna see if the shape of this is more or less corresponding to the reference. So you can see that some of these corners are rounding out a little bit more, and in the reference in some places they're sharper, and also there's some waviness to these edges, so I'm gonna come through and get my Move Brush, B + M + V, and I just wanna make some tweaks here to this, kinda bringing sharper corners to things, tweaking the shape of this a little bit, getting some straighter lines, sharper corners in places. I wanna go ahead and skip ahead now, 'cause this can be tedious, taking up a lot of time fixing all these little things, so go around and see if there's anything that needs to be cleaned up in that regard. Okay, so now that I've gone through and made little tweaks everywhere to make sure the shape is neater, let's go ahead and add some thickness to this. Okay, for this I'm going to use the ZModeler brush, B + Z + M, so okay, we can skip this note, and let's go ahead and zoom in on one of these pieces. I'm gonna hover over a polygon, hold down my space bar, and let's go to Extrude, let's Extrude All Polygons, and we'll go ahead and click and drag out, add some thickness on this. Alright, let's see how that looks. Not a specific thickness, just something that generally looks believable as a leather patch, I think I'm actually gonna make it a little bit thicker, so I'm gonna hit Control + Z to undo that, let's try this one more time, I'm gonna pull it out a little bit thicker than I did before. Okay, I'm gonna hit Shift + F to turn off Wire Frame, and let's also hit D to turn on Dynamic Subdivision. So I wanna use Dynamic Subdivision to help these patches be smoother and softer, at least temporarily, but you can see it's rounding out those edges too much, I need a sharper edge on that. So let's go to Crease under the Geometry palette, and let's go ahead increase my Polygroup, Increase PG. Okay great, so this softened the shape of this for the most part, but it hardened those edges that were created when I extruded thickness because they came out as separate Polygroups. And this leaves these corners just slightly rounded, which is good, one last thing I wanna do on these is delete some of the interior polygons. So when the rest of the shoe is made you're never going to see the inside of this, and so it's going to be just wasted polygons that are never going to be used. So we can go ahead and delete those. Okay, for this what I want to do is Control + Shift click on the inside Polygroup, and let's go ahead and invert that by Control + Shift clicking on it one more time, and then we'll just Control + Shift click on the inner part of the rest of these. Okay, so now we've hidden that inside area, and I want to extend this a little bit more so it's not cutting off right at the edge just like that, so let's go to Visibility. And let's Grow the Visibility once, and now we can delete everything that's hidden. Geometry, Modify Typology, Del Hidden. Alright, we've got these two pieces done. Let's go ahead and turn off Solo Mode, and now let's Alt click on the upper template that we've got going, and we'll go back into Solo Mode actually because I wanna hide those patches we just made. Okay, so now we can create the patch for the Quarter right here, so let's clear the mask, Control + Shift click and drag in an open area, and now all we have to do is just hold down Control and create a mask, and I'm just gonna create it precisely right here on this edge because that's the only edge that's going to be seen, all the other edges are going to be covered by other patches, so where it's covered by other patches I can just kind of, just do it very loosely, I don't have to be very precise, it's just on this one edge where it needs to be precise, so I'll go ahead and let you handle it on your own from here, so beyond this point all you do is continue masking out the shape of this, extract it, ZRemesh it, clean up the shape a little bit, extrude thickness, and delete the interior faces. I'll let you handle that on your own, and we'll pick it up in the next video. Okay, so this is the basic technique that I use very often, not just with shoes, but all kinds of projects where I need a new object that is based on the shape of an existing object.