From the course: ZBrush: Tips & Tricks

Using Project Primitive - ZBrush Tutorial

From the course: ZBrush: Tips & Tricks

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Using Project Primitive

“

- If you've used the live booleans feature, you know that it's a great way to combine different shapes together or subtract them from each other. However, they have one drawback, and that is that live booleans don't allow for soft transitions or fillets between shapes. It's always a hard edge, so new with Zbrush 2018 is a gizmo deformer called Project Primitive, that gives us a way to achieve that effect. Now it uses a totally different workflow than live boolean, and it has some distinct limitations of its own, but there are some times where it comes in very handy. Let's see how it's done. So right now you can see this car template model, and I'm using live booleans to cut out the shapes of the wheels and to cut off the bottom of the car. And as you can see, it's creating a very sharp edge, so in order to avoid that, let's use Project Primitives instead. So I'm going to hide the wheel hole cutters and let's go ahead and keep the cutter for the bottom side here. And let's hit W to go into our gizmo. Now let's click on the gear icon and come down to Project Primitive. So it looks like kind of a jumble of all kinds of options here, but let's try to go through this and see what this is really doing. I'm going to grab on one of these movement cones right here, just so we can see what this is doing. So basically, Project Primitive is creating a primitive object. It's basically a cylinder, and it's sort of bulging it into the object that we had created already, and if we bring it out far enough it kind of turns into a subtraction instead. So in a lot of ways it behaves like a boolean, but it's not exactly the same. But one advantage you can see is that we get a soft transition between the cut and the original object. So you can already see some interesting things are happening here. Now let's move and rotate this cylinder so that it's in position to cut the hole for the wheels. So let's rotate this around about 90 degrees. I'm gonna hold down Shift so it snaps. And it looks like we can move it forward, and probably shrink it down somewhat. And actually, what I want to do with this is use it as a positive first, because I want there to be sort of a bulge right around the wheel where it goes. Okay, that looks pretty good, so let's see what some of these other cones do. Now, I'm not going to use all of them necessarily. There's this one, for example, that sort of modifies the shape, so we can get a little bit more of a square shape on that or a diamond shape. Obviously somewhere right in the middle is what we want for a wheel. And then there's another modifier that can modify how the shape looks, and sometimes it's not so visible. You might have to move it out a little bit to really see what this is doing, but you can see it's pinching, or sharpening the cylinder in different ways. So let's go ahead and scoop that back in. Something else you might notice here is we've got symmetry turned on in the X axis. This might not be on by default. If we turn that off, we're going to see the effect only on one side, so for this we want the effect on both sides. Something else you might want to play with is this fuschia colored cone, which is blends. So this affects how soft or sharp that transition is between the original object and the projected primitive. Something else you can do is change the primitive type. So right now it's a cylinder. If we were to grab on this cone, we could change it to basically a sphere, or we could change this to something that's more based on a cube. So there's something different things to play with, and I know it's kind of cumbersome with all these cones, and they're not really labeled, but you just sort of play with it and you see what everything does, and you can kind of get a sense for how it works. So let's make this a little bit bigger. And I'm just gonna scoot it a little bit closer. So when I like the shape of this added object, we can kind of lock it in with the accept, so it's this white cone here, so I'm just gonna drag that up, and what that does is it locks in that change and it creates a new project primitive. It's going to create a new one in the same place, so I just scaled it down and moved it out a little bit. So now we can get that nice cut in there. Now obviously what we've ended up with is a little impractical, so you really probably want to undo and go back and reposition this so that there's a little bit more space for that wheel down there. But you can kind of see how this can be useful as it is right now. So when you're happy with this, you can click on the gear icon and just go back into regular gizmo 3D mode. Now we've still got this box here that's cutting the bottom, so maybe if we bring this up a little bit that'll compensate for how we created that wheel well. Okay, so you can see we've got a start on some of the intermediate shapes for this car. As you can see, one of the down sides is that these changes get locked in. We can't dynamically control all of these different shapes after we've created them. They're very much locked in. But hopefully you see that there's a lot of interesting ways that you could combine all of these different primitives and settings to get some interesting results.

Contents