Tweaking the shape of the laces - ZBrush Tutorial

- [Instructor] Now that we have the basic structure of all the shoelace segments done, let's fix it up so that everything is overlapping and positioned correctly. I'm going to use the Move Topological Brush for this because it will let me move each segment separately even though they're all in the same subtool. So let's get to it. Okay, so I've got my lace segments as the active subtool. I'm just going to turn on transparent mode so we can see everything more clearly through all the other subtools. And let's get out the Move Topological Brush, B M T on your keyboard. And we'll just adjust the draw size here, and I'm just going to go through and start shifting the positions of all of these little pieces. So it might go a little bit slow, because we've got Dynamic Subdivision turned on, so I'm going to hit Shift-D to turn that off. That should go much faster now. And I just want to push these difference pieces into place I want to get the different ends to go through the holes if they need to go through holes, and I want the laces to not be penetrating through other segments of laces or through little patches that they shouldn't be passing through. So I'm just going to adjust my brush size accordingly and just go through and start tweaking the shapes of all these. Something else I can do at this point is to get the thickness correct on these laces. If I turn Dynamic Subdivision back on you can see they're actually pretty thin for this particular shoe. So let's go ahead and thicken everything up the same. So I want to get my Move Manipulator Brush out and we'll just click anywhere on this, and I'm going to right-click on the red end of this Manipulator, and this just allows me to scale everything evenly. Okay, that looks about right. Let me take a look back from a distance. Actually it looks like it might need to be a little bit thicker even. So I'm just going to drag that a little bit more. Okay, that looks pretty good. Okay, back to the Move Brush. So another thing I can do on this is I can hold down Alt and then click and drag and it'll push relative to the surface that I'm clicking on. So that pushes that through there, and the same thing on this side, I just want these to be hidden underneath the eyestays. We can undo that, I think I messed something up slightly. So you might run into situations where it's a little bit awkward if I turn Transparency off here, where it's starting to pass through this segment right here, but it's not fully underneath this piece here, so one thing you can do for that, I'm just going to Alt-Click on the eyestay and we'll bring the draw size down and we can actually tweak this as well. Kind of pull that up so it's sort of like this lace is pushing up on this piece. So it really is just kind of a back and forth process. Picking different pieces and pushing them and making sure they fit with other pieces. So this can actually get kind of tedious. So I'm going to skip ahead now, stop working on these segments of the laces. And actually jump up to the knot here. So to make this easier to work on, let's give every one of these segments its own polygroup. So let's go to Polygroups and let's do Auto Groups. So you can't really see what happened but if I hit Shift-F, turn on Wireframe, and actually if I turn off the Texture Map, we don't really need to see the Bump Map on there right now anyway. So now we've got a separate polygroup for each segment, and so now we can make it a little bit easier to control, let's say if I want to Control-Shift-click on one of these, now we can just see this one piece here, but actually I want to see everything together. I'm just going to get a really big draw size here on this, and just click and drag on this piece to move it on up. It's moving kind of slow so I'm hit Shift-D to turn off the Dynamic. I'll just move this piece up, too. And now we can actually rotate them. So I'm just going to Control-Shift-Click on one of these, and we'll get the Rotate out, I'll just drag out a Manipulator, and we'll just rotate this like that, and Control-Shift-Click in an open area. To bring everything back. we'll Control-Shift-Click on this one. While I've got the Manipulator active it's actually going to mask everything else. So I'll just go into Rotate mode and just kind of rotate this one around. Maybe I'll hit D to turn Dynamic Subdivision back on, and really just what I want to do is try to position these so that they are kind of creating the appearance of a knot right here. So just Control-Shift-Click on the piece that I want to move, and we'll just go into the Move here and kind of make them overlap, just kind of make the appearance of a knot. And then what I can do, is I can get these different ends of the loops and the lace ends to stick inside here so they kind of disappear and you can't really tell that they're just separate pieces. Okay, so back into Draw mode. We can clear the mask. Control-Shift and drag in an open area. And let's go ahead and grab some of these ends here. So, for example, this end, I'm just going to drag it up inside the knot. And let's see. Let's turn on Transparent mode so we can really see this. So I'll just hold down Alt and click and drag on this so it brings it up out, so it's not hidden inside. And it can be a little tedious and cumbersome, sometimes you think you're clicking on one piece and it actually clicks on a different piece. So it just takes a little bit of patience. But eventually you can pull everything where it should go. And actually one thing that's making it kind of slow, let's go under Geometry and go to Dynamic Sub-div. It's actually set to five right now. That's way too high. I'm just going to bring it down lower to like two. Yeah, it should run more smoothly now. I don't know why it was set so high. But, yeah, it's just a process of grabbing different segments and moving them, maybe this loop should be kind of floating out a little bit. And we can grab this loop, pull it out somewhat. So there's not really any rhyme or reason to it so much as you just keep moving pieces until everything is lined up where it should be. So let's see, maybe we'll try to get this piece tucked up underneath here. Maybe this piece can be tucked under there. Maybe we'll have this overlapping through the loop like that. And let's hit Shift-F to turn off Wireframe, and turn off Transparent mode and just kind of get a sense of how this is looking overall. Okay, so not too bad. It's just a matter of tweaking everything back and forth and making sure that there's nothing too awkward going on. So this can be very time consuming. You might want to spend an hour or two really just getting everything aligned where it should be. I'll join you in the next video with this tweaking finished, and ready to work on the aglets. Those are those little tips on the ends of the laces.