Working With Fibermesh For Hair And Fur - Zbrush Top Tips - Pablo Munoz Gomez

Hey everyone hope you're having a great serious summit. My name is pablo munoz gomez, i'm a 3d concept and character artist and i've been using zebros for almost 10 years, but my first contact with the software was around 2006 um and the past few years really has become one of my. You know my go tools to to do everything really, so i use it on almost on a daily basis. So today i just want to show you a couple of tips on how to work on how to deal with one of my favorite features in xerox, which is mesh and obviously, is that they feature the the thing that i used to create. The the hair and the and the fur for this creepy creature. So i'm going to start by showing you some tips and tricks on how to deal with it and how to grow the fiber mesh and then how to groom it or give it a bit of shape, because it can be a little bit tricky. Especially if you don't know some of the settings, so i have prepared this this project just to give you an idea of what you can achieve very fairly quickly really with this with this fiber mesh. But i'm going to start simple with a sphere and i have this standard zebra gui and the way that you grow fiber mesh uh in in just a couple of clicks is very easy. I'M gon na hold ctrl and that's accessing my masking brushes to mask the top of the sphere. I'M going to hold ctrl and click on the mask to blur it right and then i'm just going to go down in the tool palette to my fiber mesh sub palette, i'm going to click on preview and that's it. You have fiber mesh right now. There are a couple of things that is important to kind of like get right from the beginning. One is you can go in two ways basically or take two different avenues. One is with the fiber mesh settings sort of like establishing the the look and feel of the fiber mesh with the settings and the other one is with the grooming. And i i said that it's kind of like two different ways, because if you are going to groom or if you're going to basically give shape with the grooming brushes uh you're going to basically override all the settings that you set up in the settings. So i'm going to explain that in a second. So, basically, if now that we have fiber mesh, we can go ahead and start tweaking the settings to change the the shape the color and you can create a bunch of different things, not just hair or or fur. So, for instance, let's reduce the the max fibers and that's releasing the number and by the way this is just a preview we haven't actually created. So we can keep tweaking this. I'M going to increase the length, for example, take the gravity off so that they're kind of like shooting straight up uh. Here with this color, we can change. Let'S say: let's create some some weird roses, or something like that. So you have the tip and you have the the base, so i gave the base a green color and the tip a red color, and you have this color profile that allows you to change how much influence of each color you have so the left hand side Is the root and the right hand side is the tip. So if i give more prominence uh to the green color to the to the root, i can click to add a point and just drag this like so, and now we have more of that color. Let'S make it a little bit darker right and then we also have these settings here to colorize the base. So right now it's at 0.5 i'm going to give it 100 to 1.. Now we have that full influence of that color right. The other thing that we can do is go to the width profile. I'M going to reset this one, and the width profile allows you to change the the thickness of the entire um, the entire fair on the entire fiber. So i'm gon na increase the coverage and that's just the overall width, as you can see, i'm just increasing the the thickness of this. In a way i'm gon na set the root scale to one and the tip to one as well, not too tense. Sorry to one and one i have to press enter there we go and with the width profile. I can change this, so i'm going to take the root down. So you see the the beginning of that. Fiber becomes really small and i'm going to take the tip. All the way up right, it becomes really really thick now i can just start adding points and variate that thickness. So we can add - maybe a couple more points here just to sharpen this, and you can also click on this uh surrounding circle as well. Just to make it a bit sharper there we go so you see uh, it's pretty pretty easy. How you can just tweak this and generate a bunch of different. You know, looks uh to your fibers. I'M gon na go ahead and maybe add a bit of twist. Just to rotate the each fiber on itself and if anything we can add some maybe revolve radius, and this revolve radius is going to create kind of like a curl effect right. So all i'm doing right now is just altering the settings of the fiber mesh right and let's say i'm happy with this, but i want to further tweak it right. I'M going to go ahead and click accept and i'm going to get this pop-up when i have plenty of fibers asking me if i want to activate fast preview, render or fast preview mode, i'm going to click now in this instance and zebra is now created from Those settings a new fiber measure, a new sub tool right. So now we have. If i go into solo mode, i have the sphere. We can clear that mask and i have the fibers right so in the fibers i can just go ahead and click on the brush palette. Let me just put that here on the right, so you can see properly i'm going to click on the thumbnail of the brush terminal and i'm going to use something like the this one, the chrome hair toss. So hopefully you can see that yeah, i'm going to grab that increase the brush size and i'm going to start grooming this right and that's how easy you can just start giving this fiber mesh some some more kind of like a flow or an intentionality um. Now the issue here or not the issue, but in a way the the alternative workflow that i wanted to to mention is because i set up all the settings from the fiber mesh settings really when i start grooming, this i'm basically overriding all that twist. All that revolve radius, all that gravity thing. So in a way you have those two avenues. You have the option to go with fiber mesh settings and create something that looks really cool like i just did there with some settings press accept and then you have the fire image, and the other way is just to keep it very, very simple, which is what I do for in most of the cases for grooming and then use the grooming brushes to alter the you know the shape of it. So that's what i'm going to show you very quickly, i'm going to jump into this creature all right and i'm going to show you the second method, the second workflow right. So i'm gon na go ahead and turn off the fibers and i'm gon na also turn off the poly paint, and you see i already have prepared this mask uh very similar to what i just did with the sphere. I'M gon na go to the preview, create these fibers and these are almost like the at the default settings. So the first thing i like to do is change the base to white and the tip to white as well. So we have a pretty clean set of fibers and i can see clearly what i'm doing. The second thing i like to do is change my document size, so you'll notice. If, even if i get closer, there is a bit of a weird artifacts all around and that's just because of the thickness of the fiber mesh, and it has to do with the way that xerox handles the empty aliasing. So for that you can click on a half and they'll see the half of the document and you'll see that you know the fibers are a little bit more well clearer and sharper, but the document is smaller. So i'm going to go to document and put that here, so you can see what i'll do document i'm going to click on double and that's just simply going to double the document. I'M going to hold ctrl and n to clear, drag my creature again and go to a half perfect. So now i have similar kind of like document size to work with, but i have anti-alias now great. So let's go back to our fibers and, like i said, the the settings here are relatively unchanged like i won't, i won't add, twist or rotation or um. You know gravity any of those things, because i'm gon na i'm gon na use the grooming technique or the grooming approach uh. What i want to change is the amount of fibers, of course. So in this case i want to have a few more fibers like so, and i want to increase the segments, so the segments is the amount of subdivision of each fiber. At the moment, i have seven subdivision the more subdivision that you add the the softer is going to appear when you, when you groom it, but i'm going to get to that in just a second. I think six should be fine and we have a max fibers of 11 and this number is in the thousands, so 11 000 um fibers right, which is which is fine. I think it looks good, and you see it's just growing from that - mask that i that i masked previously so i'm going to go ahead and click on accept and i'm going to get the same fast preview notification in this case i'm going to click on yes And i'm going to show you a couple of techniques as well or tricks to deal with it. So now that i have accepted the fire image, we should have a new sub tool and it's automatically selected. The next thing that i like to do to be able to deal with fibermesh is to see it a little bit clearer. So i like to select something - let's say something like a yellowish color for the fibers and go to the color palette. Let'S drop that here. As well and i'm going to click on fill object make sure that rgb is enabled and fill object and make sure that rgb is set to 100 so that we can fill the entire object there. We go now because i don't have poly paint in all the in all the subtools just in the fiber mesh. I can simply just change the color to something like a blue color and i would be able to see something very contrasted and and basically see where what the gaps of the fibers are. So it's just an easy way to to see what you're doing right. Then, if we go back to the fiber mesh palette right right now, obviously everything is grayed out because we already created. But if you go down to the preview settings right, here's where you have the fast preview that notification that we got. So if i click this to turn it off you'll see the the real set of fibers right now. This is great because you can kind of like use guides to guide the entire set of fiber mesh when you're grooming. So i'm going to enable this and i'm going to reduce the previous visibility. So now i'm going to go for something like six or eight and you'll see that it just reduces the amount of fibers that we can actually see, and that is much easier to work with. So i have the groom, hair toe selected and increase the brush size and i'm going to start just grooming, this oops without rgb, so that i don't paint it which you can also do by the way uh. We had it in seven or eight, something like that. Right and i'm just using a large brush so that you can see how how quick this is right, um. So that's just a very quick grooming of the creatures here, uh. But now, if i turn this off, you see the the few guys that we moved and that we changed they're basically guides for the rest of the fibers. So it's very easy. Obviously, you can keep tweaking this once you turn this off, but it's just a very simple way to to go about it and, finally, just to complete this uh sort of trick on on dealing with fiber mesh and and be able to control this a little bit Better, there are two things that i would suggest you do. The first one is from the brush palette, which i should already have here. When you select any grooming brush right, you can go to the fiber mesh top palette here and there is this setting called the front collision, tolerance or detection tolerance, tolerance, sorry and that basically allows you to change the the gap that or that buffer between the fiber And the surface of the model. So if i do this, maybe from a different angle, yeah right and you rotate around you see - there is a a gap between you know: the the fiber and the actual model. So that's this collision tolerance. So i'm going to do that, set this to five or you know some something around there like a number around there, and then i have a bit more of a freedom to get these fibers closer to the mesh and the final trick to deal with fiber mesh Is using polygroups and masking so i'm going to go ahead and turn on polygroups right and if you hold the ctrl key using the mask with a smaller brush size, you can just literally paint the mask and what's great about this technique. Is that, as you paint the mask you you actually painting or creating a mask for the entire fiber, regardless of where you touch so now that i created this, this simple mask: i'm going to go ahead and hold ctrl and w, and now we have polygroups. So this is great again because we can hold ctrl and shift right to isolate this mask that we can turn off. Polygroup now bring the rest invert the mask, and we can start splitting this and create kind of like this. This effect right, you want to give him uh this creature, some more more intentional um. You know hairstyle or something like that, but there you have it it's a pretty simple trick: uh. Hopefully that gives you some ideas on how to deal with fiber mesh and you know, make the whole workflow a little bit easier, enjoy the rest of the summit.