From the course: Learning ZBrushCore

Polishing shapes - ZBrush Tutorial

From the course: Learning ZBrushCore

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Polishing shapes

- [Instructor] So we have created the primary and secondary shapes of our creature and everything is looking good. Now we can start doing some refinements and polishing the sculpted volumes a little bit. Let's begin with the torso and we're going to use this piece to introduce new tools and to establish a workflow that we can use for the rest of the subtools. So make sure you select the torso and let's go into Solo Mode. Now if we zoom in a little bit, one of the things that become evident is that there a lot of jagged edges but we can really see the polygons. So there are a couple things that we can do. The first one would be to subdivide this model so that way we have more resolution to work with. So let's go to the Geometry pallet and click on the divide button and you'll see although this is a DynaMesh object we can also use the subdivision approach. Alternatively what we can do is increase the DynaMesh resolution at this point instead of subdividing it. So let's go ahead and undo that. So we go back to the one subdivision level and let's expand the DynaMesh options and let's push the resolution slide up to something around 300. Okay, now let's go ahead and hold Control + Click + Drag to re-DynaMesh that object. Now we have more resolution. Also, we can use the smooth brush and go over the entire mesh, just smoothing some of those transitions but the problem is as you can see, that we start to lose some definition. Plus if we just wanted to smooth out the entire model, there is a faster way to do that than using the smooth brush. And let me just show you that because that thing might be useful for you depending on the type of character you're working on. Let's go ahead and go to the Deformation pallet and expand that and here we have the smooth slider and we can push that towards the right and it will basically smooth out the entire model or the entire subtool that you have selected. Now after you let go this slider will jump back to the center, so you can repeat the action a couple times just to make the effect a little more evident. Okay, I'm just going to undo that a couple of times and I just want to show you what happens if we move this smooth slider towards the left, to the negative values. As you can see it essentially acts as a sharpening tool. It might not be the look that you're after for this creature but in other projects it might come in handy, so it's good that you know it's there. Okay let's go ahead and undo all that and let's take a look at polish slider. Now this is the real reason why we're here in this Deformation pallet. This is a great feature that creates a smoother effect but it tries to respect the crevices and the volumes a little bit more. Let's go ahead and move it a tiny bit towards the right just because the effect of this slider is quite strong. Like so, and the good thing is that you can undo and try different values again and again until you're happy with how it looks. Cool, so that's looking much better but the nice definition that we had around the edges was kind of lost with the polishing process. Fortunately there is another great tool in ZBrushCore called the ClayPolish. And it's great for this type of stylized character. Now the ClayPolish button lives under the Geometry pallet. So let's go ahead and expand that and you'll see a big button here. Let's click on it once and you'll see the effect it has straightaway. One of the thing that is important to note is that this process generates a mask and sometimes it's a bit subtle. So you might want to move an area and get this kind of result and that is because some of the points around these edges are still masked so after using the ClayPolish process remember to always clear the masks. So I'm just going to hold Control + Click + Drag and that's it, we can move things again in the normal way. Now these sliders next to the ClayPolish, they control things like the amount of sharpening, the amount of smoothness, the maximum and the minimum angle to apply the effect to the surface, and I generally leave them at their default values but feel free to play around with those and see what they do. Okay, let's get out of the Solo mode and as you can see the surfaces around the body look definitely more polished than the arms, the legs and the head. You can go ahead and repeat those steps for the rest of the subtools. In the next video we're going to take a look at another interesting technique and we're going to use this to generate additional geometry for details like the clothes of our creature.

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