I'm looking for help to Replicate leather weaving in Zbrush...

bkost

Hey friends, so I'm working on a character and she has this leather chest piece



I'm struggling to make the leather weaving pattern she has on her chest and waist strap, any ideas on how to go at it? Here is my canvas, thanks guy!

CheeseOnToast

Two possible methods I can think of. 

• Make a tiling alpha and apply it using surface noise and some clever UV mapping. You'll probably end up with some distortion to tidy up and/or some cut off sections of the tiling map. Save a morph target before hand so you can paint out some of the unwanted parts. This is a quick and dirty method that probably won't give great results without a lot of cleanup.
  
• Make an tri-part insert mesh that lets you draw out a single leather strip. Draw out the weave pattern, without worrying about the overlapping areas at first. Use the move topological brush to push in/pull out parts of the strips to create the weave. If you hold Alt with this brush it will push/pull along the average normal under the centre of the brush, which should make this job a bit easier. This is a bit long-winded, but you should get a really nice result with full control over the strip placement. I did a quick example here just using the CurveStrapSnap brush for the leather strips. If I was doing it for real, I'd make a dedicated brush.
  

bkost

@Cheeseontoast Hey man thank you very much for the reply! Before your post I began to mess around, I ended up going through 3 iterations of the leather weaving. First I tried projecting and editing alphas and that didnt work out quite well. Then I thought of using the IMM hair curve that created flat planes, that worked out better. But the problem was that it had no thickness. I exported out the obj to blender to extrude then brought them back in and smoothed them out. It looked better but the straps were not tightly compact and the edges did not look great.

 Then I got to read your excellent post! I figured out how to create my own IMM (which is awesome) and put that to the test, I am very happy with the result. The Move topographical and using the alt-click helped so much. Thanks man!

musashidan

You could also have created an 'X' shaped tiling Nano Insert mesh brush and saved some manual labour, but your result turned out well.

As for doing this with alphas, as you've discovered, I certainly don't recommend that method. Insert brushes are so much better in every way for several non-destructive reasons: ability to use move topo and mask by polygroup, utilise polygroups,  separate subtools, not reliant on underlying topo, etc.

bkost

@musashidan

Hey man, yeah the IMM brushes practically trump alphas in almost all cases..
If your curious about my progress of my whole character; here is my thread of Gabrielle! Thanks for the reply, cheers.

http://polycount.com/discussion/167552/gabrielle-from-xena-warrior-princess