Welding tubes in Zbrush

Pedro Amorim

Ok. so i was riding ma bike and tought, i should model my bike its one of the things i always wanted to do. The thing is, my bike has this big ass tubes welded to each other and the welding marks are really proeminent, so i tought to myself, how should i make the welds?
so after a few minutes in zbrush i discovered this nice technique im sharing with you.

Test made earlier:


Here's the pic of the bike im making (click for big pic).



So. i i made a tutorial making welds.
this is the base mesh


and this is the result of a few minutes welding (Click for big)


And here is the link to the video. it's in Mov format (Save link as to save, 64mb)


Now. the thing is, the base mesh as enough segments so that it divides nicely. But for the bike, i think im gonna probably check out out to do local subdivisions to certain parts of the mesh so i only add more geometry to places where the weldings are gonna take place.

Jonathan

I've done a bit of MIG welding, and this is something similar to what I do sometimes if textures space allows. Nice work.

renderhjs

nice one

Pedro Amorim

thanks guys

Xenocidex11

thats really awesome. thanks man

sprunghunt

that's a great tutorial

Pedro Amorim

thanks sprunghunt. im glad you like it.
Btw, love the stuff on your site

bluekangaroo

jesus murphy! that looks awesome

Sam Hatami

Does anyone have these files somewhere? =(

sltrOlsson

If i remember correctly he subdivided all the parts equally, toke them into ZB, with the intersecting parts crossing he started sculpting with clay buildup (with soome fancy setting i think). He moved the brush in small circles.. Try it out..

I don't think pedro mind if you PM him neither. But what do i know, he may kill you

AlecMoody

I have been using a similar technique on square joints where I make a highpoly joining strip that is co-planar to both the parent objects and just do my sculpting on that. Its faster and cleaner with the added bonus of not needing to sculpt on the entire object making it lighter weight. Also, when I decimate the sculpt result the flat areas that are co-planar to to the parent objects can be easily selected and deleted- I also treat it like a floater and turn off shadow casting so my ao result is clean.

You could do this with round tubes but it would take a few more minutes to set up the joining strip.

I could also model things as once piece but this is faster and doesn't require any topology planning.

The sculpting is also the same basic execution with the elastic brush.


Edit: if anyone needs that original video I have it saved on my HD. I don't want to host it publicly without permission but I can email it to you.


here's an image:

sltrOlsson

Yeah, that technique is perfect for objects that got flat surfaces. But Pedro does it for a bike, and it would take longer to make thous intersections clean for sculpting then just go in and start sculpt right away..