Using NanoMesh in ZBrush

Have you ever been working on a sculpt or model in ZBrush and wanted to populate a mesh or model that you have created over a large portion of the surface. I know that I have from anything like shingles or tiles on a roof, scales on a lizard  or dragon, or even bricks on a wall. The NanoMesh tool in ZBrush allows you to do jus that with creative control on size, shape, distribution area, and direction to name a few. There is a whole world of things you can use NanoMesh for and I will be showing you how to put scales over a surface area to demonstrate a small portion of is capabilities.

Step 1- The first thing you'll need to do is open up ZBrush. Under the light box tools that appear select the human being that has already been created within ZBrush.

Once this character is loaded go over to the tools menu and pick the sub tools menu.

Since we do not need the clothes or the pre-painted textures, go ahead and click the eye symbol for everything from below the teeth and turn off the paint brush symbol from the top to the bottom and your character should now look like the one seen below.

Next we will need to take the subdivisions back down some. Go and click on the torso in the sub tools menu.

Then open up geometry and take the subdivision levels back down to 3 and then delete the higher and the lower subdivision levels.

Doing this will make the model much easier to work with. We need to create a scale, that's right just one scale to get this to work. First we have to save this model first so go to the top right corner of the tools section and slick save as and save it as "Guy.ztl." After you are finished with that start a new project in ZBrush.

Step 2- Next we are going to create a scale to be used as the Nano-Mesh. First select a Dynamesh sphere 64 from the light box menu.

Then by pressing X o turn on symmetry and then B to bring up your brush menu. Then press M and select the move tool. Begin to shape and form your scale until it looks similar to the one below.

Once you are satisfied with your scale it is time to save it out as a ztl file. Go to save as and then save as "Scale.ztl."

Once that is complete it is time to go back to your human figure.

Step 3- Click the load tool button up in tools menu and then load you "Guy.ztl." from your computer.

Drag him onto the screen and hit T for edit. open up the sub tool menu and select the torso or the top piece of the model.

Once you have completed that press the B button to open up the brush menu and press Z and then select the ZModeler brush.

Next you are going to turn on your poly frame button.

You should now see your model's poly groups with various colors of separation.

For now we will only focus on the torso region of the body.

Step 4- Next we will begin setting up the Nano-Mesh process. First hover over a polygon on your model and press the space bar and it should bring up the ZModeler menu. You will then click Insert Nano_Mesh in the action box and then click flat island in the target box.

Doing this will allow for the mesh to cover more area repeatedly across he model. 

Step 5- Lastly we will insert the scale mesh onto the surface of the torso. Press the M button on your key board and select the Scale.ztl. that you created.

Now click and drag out and you will see your scales drag out evenly across a certain area of the torso. As you can see they did not drag out the way that we wanted them but there is an easy fix for that as well.

Go over to the tools menu and select the Nano-Mesh tab. Inside here we can change the size, shape, positioning, offset, and much more to get are scales to the way we like them.

After making some adjustments and playing around with the settings, you can see that we can get very interesting shapes, sizes and placements of our scales to make for interesting patterns that would continue across the character as a whole.

This was just one of many ways that Nano-Meshes can be utilized and below are some more images of ways in which Nano-Mesh can be used to heighten the look of your models.

As you can see Nano-Mesh is a great tool to use and have in your skill set to not only save on time but to add a little extra to your models. The possibilities with Nano-Mesh is as endless as your imagination and will only enhance your capabilities and your understanding in ZBrush. If you would like to know more about Nano-Mesh inside of Zbrush visit: http://pixologic.com/zbrush/features/instances-and-details/#NanoMesh

Resources

Pixologic :: Pixologic :: ZBrush 4R7. (n.d.). Retrieved May 23, 2016, from http://pixologic.com/zbrush/features/instances-and-details/#NanoMesh

Modeling A Realistic Human Arm Reflections and Final Thoughts

      When modeling the bodybuilder style arm I found it to very challenging, but in a good way. I also learned a lot in the process of working on this assignment and would like to share some of it with you. When choosing to pre-model the arm in Maya in order to create the primitive shapes of the muscles in the arm, I found it to be very helpful especially when taking that model and importing it into ZBrush. Another thing that I found to be very helpful was when creating the primary forms in ZBrush was after smoothing everything out with the Smooth Brush and Dynameshing the objects made creating the forms from the primitives very simple. When working on the secondary and tertiary forms and details the Smooth, Inflate, and Damian Standard brushes helped the most in getting the details that I needed. Another helpful process was the constant building up and tearing down of certain areas really helped me bring out the final results.

      Although a lot of things went well there were things that didn't go well and I think it hindered the way my final resurfacing came out when taking it back into Maya. While in Maya and doing the resurfacing I ran into a lot of spiraling which caused me to have to do a lot of fixes and I am sure that I possibly missed a few. I tried to create a good edge and surface flow through the biceps, triceps, deltoids, and forearms. I think to me not catching on to what I was doing at times caused me to cause a lot of Ngons and triangle issues that shouldn't be in the model. I need more practice with the resurfacing and how the edges and faces should flow all over the body and making the right junctions and transitions. For this reason I think some things I would definitely do different in the future is taking more time to plan out the resurfacing and UV layouts of the model. In all honesty I think the sculpting turned out fine and I think that when I resurfaced and UV'd is when I took down the quality of the model overall. In hindsight I will continue to practice those two aspects so that I can come to create awesome modeling works in the future.

      There were some major issues that I encountered with the resurfacing and UV layouts. Like I mentioned before when trying to resurface the base meshes I kept getting multiple spiraling incidences and as well as bad junctions and Ngons. I just kept working at it with some of the previous tutorials and pod casts and tried my best to fix most of the issues mentioned to include sporadic density variations. Although I am sure I didn't get them all it gave me great resolve to continue practicing and get the proper methods down to be successful. The end result of the project honestly turned out very good in my opinion. I will honestly say that I still have a long way to go with resurfacing because I feel like that and the UV's were definitely not what they were looking for but when viewed side by side from every angle it turned out to be an exact replica of the base meshes details So though i did not do excellent I still think I did pretty good as far as a final visual result and the resurfacing and UV's need major improvements. It was a fun project and I enjoyed the challenge and it has reinstalled the will to keep practicing.

Modeling a Realistic Human Arm by finishing with Resurfacing in Maya

 After importing the decimated mesh from Zbrush into Maya I began to resurface the mesh with the quick draw tool. I tried my best to keep the flow smooth around the arm to help it retain certain shapes and forms in the arm.

I took the same approach with the sleeve but tried to keep it simpler since it was a cloth object and the transition between the two objects would be easily recognized.

Modeling a Realistic Human Arm ZBrush Work

 After importing the OBJ. into ZBrush I turned it into a Dynamesh and began smoothing every thing out to get the base shape. I then masked out the arm and extracted it to make the long sleeve that I wanted for the arm and then moved on to create the secondary and tertiary forms and details.

 Working on the arm itself took the longest but I used a lot of time studying large muscles from magazines to try and get the shapes right as best as I could along with the Arnold pics I gathered as well. I tried to make as much definition and fall off with the tertiary details as well.

I took the same approach with the sleeve but used a lot of body builders wearing long sleeve pics that I could to try and get it right.

Modeling a Detailed Human Arm Preproduction

To start off with we were instructed to do a bodybuilder type arm so I did some research on Google in order to find various references for the arm and the sleeve respectfully. I decided I wanted to challenge myself and do a long sleeve for the arm. Finding the references was a more challenging than you would think for finding various arm angles but after refining the words and using Arnold Schwarzenegger a lot I was able to finally find what I needed to use in this project.

Then I went into photoshop to do a little preplanning with Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary forms and details.

I then went into Maya, because I thought that starting with a basic primitives build to outline the muscle would be the easiest way to start before going into ZBrush. By using a reference image and shaping out the muscles everything actually worked out really well and I was pleased with the result. I exported it and was ready to dive into ZBrush.