From the course: ZBrush: Tips & Tricks

Smoothing and adjusting curve length - ZBrush Tutorial

From the course: ZBrush: Tips & Tricks

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Smoothing and adjusting curve length

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- Working with curves in ZBrush has always been a little finicky. With the release of ZBrush 2018, however, some new ways of interacting with curves have been added. It is now much easier to control length, smoothness, and twist of a curve. Let's see how it works. Let's say we want to add some fancy reptile scales to this skull, for whatever reason. Let's open up our brushes by hitting b. And let's find the IMM Curve brush. And this pops up a selector for all kinds of different things that we can insert into this object. Let's go ahead and click on Scales. Now we can click and drag on the object to create scales on a curve. So just to demonstrate, let's just click and drag and see what happens here. So a couple of things we can do with this real quick. We can change the size of it by going up to our Draw Size and bringing this down somewhat and just clicking on that curve again. Something else I want to do is turn on Dynamic Subdivision mode. Just to make those scales a little bit smoother. Okay, so let's take a look at what we have. There is a curve attached to the object, and this curve is generating these scales. Now traditionally in ZBrush, you could click on this curve and try to reposition it, but it kind of does some strange things. You might get some weird scrunching or things might not quite look exactly the way you'd want and things kind of get a little bit crazy. So there's some new modes added in the latest version of ZBrush that can help us with this. So let's say we want to increase the amount of curvature in this, but keep the endpoint and the beginning point in the same place. So let's go up to stroke, and let's change this to Elastic mode. So in this mode, what we can do is grab on this curve and just basically pull it out. And you can see it's adding more segments to this curve, as needed. So it's not actually moving the endpoint, at all. And so we could say go up here or down here, wherever we want to put it. Maybe we could grab in a different spot and pull this up here, or we grab over here. Now let's say we want to get rid of some of the length of this curve. So what we do is we click and hold down and then hold down the Shift button. And so what this does is it smooths away a lot of the length of that curve. Pretty much ending up with a straight line. Now let's take a look at another mode. Let's go up to Stroke, and use Liquid instead of Elastic. So this is kind of similar to Elastic, it's going to drag out more length, but it's gonna do it more softly and with more control over how this gets pulled out. So we can kind of pull out curves, instead of straight lines. Same thing as before, if we click and pull down and then hold down Shift, we can smooth away unneeded length. One other thing that's really cool is twisting. Now you might notice that when we're hovering over the curve our cursor changes to a blueish color. Now that means that whatever we do is going to affect the curve in that size of a radius. So we can actually change the size of this by holding down the space bar and going to Draw Size and bringing this down, or larger, whatever you wanted. So what we can do with this is twist the curve. So let's say we don't want all of these scales resting at the same angle, we want to twist it up a little bit. So let's click and hold it on the curve and then hold Ctrl and click and drag. Now you'll notice it's doing a little bit of a weird thing and it's a little bit unpredictable, it's kind of jittering around. And that's because Snap mode is one. So sometimes that can cause a little bit of a problem when doing this twisting. So let's come up to Stroke and turn off Snap. And let's try that again now. So we can click and hold on the curve, and then hold down Ctrl, and now drag. And what this is going to do is it's gonna twist these scales around. So we could twist it a little bit more here and maybe twist in the opposite direction, click and hold, and hold down Ctrl, and drag in the opposite direction. So we can get some interesting effects going on here. Okay, so these new features add some functionality to how curves work, and it makes it easier to achieve the results that you might want. Hopefully, with a little practice, you'll be able to use these modes to gain better command over curves.

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