ZBrush's Gyro Tool & Questions

tristamus

Hey there guys,

So I'm finally continuing work on my Japanese Garden and I've come to a point where I need help!

I have my separate tools here, (a wall, and 4 variations of stones) and I'm using the gyro to duplicate and place them on the bottom of this wall here. The thing is, I have no idea how to bake these meshes down onto the wall, or what? I tried appending each stone as a subtool to the wall but placing them that way is absolutely & ridiculously tedious!

My goal here is to just have these stones be part of the geometry of the bottom of the wall here and 1 solid piece, welded. If there is a better way, please tell me how

Here's what I'm talking about...



Thanks for any help guys!!!

[Deleted User]

So you're just trying to get the stones welded to the plane? Or were you looking for a faster way to get them in place for other walls?

If you're trying to make it one piece, you can use Project All from the Subtools palette and turn up the projection distance enough to encompass the rocks. You might have to subdivide the wall mesh a few times to hold the details.

You could merge the subtools with Weld enabled too, but I think it makes triangles that way.

If you want to make the rocks easier to get into place, you could use GrabDoc from the Alpha palette and adjust your brush settings to use drag-dot or drag-rectangle and adjust the BrushMod, Z-intensity, and Focal Shift until it looks right. Then you can just stamp the rocks in place onto whatever.

cryrid

If those are dropped to the canvas, a fast method could be to add a new plane, switch to edit mode, subdivide it up and then use match maker to project the details onto it.

If you do GrabDoc, you can also try applying it as a displacement map.

tristamus

fly_soup wrote: »

So you're just trying to get the stones welded to the plane? Or were you looking for a faster way to get them in place for other walls?

If you're trying to make it one piece, you can use Project All from the Subtools palette and turn up the projection distance enough to encompass the rocks. You might have to subdivide the wall mesh a few times to hold the details.

You could merge the subtools with Weld enabled too, but I think it makes triangles that way.

If you want to make the rocks easier to get into place, you could use GrabDoc from the Alpha palette and adjust your brush settings to use drag-dot or drag-rectangle and adjust the BrushMod, Z-intensity, and Focal Shift until it looks right. Then you can just stamp the rocks in place onto whatever.

Well here's the thing flysoup, those rocks you see there aren't subtools, they're just duplicated and drawn in and moved around using the gyro and such. Will projecting still work if I dont have those as subtools for my main wall piece?

I actually did what you said a bit ago - I used GrabDoc, drag rect and etc, however the details all become very flat and such.

What I need, is to get these rocks in their full detail onto the wall there. Cause what I'm going to do is decimate this piece and retopo it so that the geo actually is protruding where the rocks are instead of it being completely flat when using just a normal map. So I guess I'm just trying to figure out how to make zbrush realize that, for those rocks on the wall there, I want it to let me position them all just like that using the gyro and then weld and then decimate.

As of now, I do have a version that is completely flat and it is using the normals to the maximum extent without any extra geo, but it is by far much worse than what I'm trying to go for...

m4dcow

I agree with cryid about the displacement map method.

http://osart3d.wordpress.com/home-page/tutorial-creating-perfectly-tiling-meshes-in-zbrush-for-use-in-videogame-environments/
The beginning of this tut (it's on the wiki also) shows the workflow you would use to apply the displacement map properly.

cryrid

Cause what I'm going to do is decimate this piece and retopo it so that the geo actually is protruding where the rocks are instead of it being completely flat when using just a normal map.

Here's the thing about dropping them to the document, they're just pixels with depth now, not polygons. There's no 3d, no angles or anything like that, nothing to rotate. All that's left is just a normal image pixel's color value like in Photoshop, but with additional values for it's depth and matcap (zbrush calls these enhanced pixels 'pixols'). You can recapture/transfer that depth onto a polymesh with things like matchmaker or displacement maps, but depending on how far you want them to stick out of the surface, there's just going to be certain information those pixols no longer carry (like if there was anything along the sides of the rocks which you can't see). Basically if it doesn't have a pixel/pixol on the document, it's just no longer there; what you see is what you get.

Seeing how those rocks look, I don't think you want them sticking too far out anyway so I'm pretty sure those two methods (matchmaker or displacement maps) would work just fine to transfer that back onto plane mesh. Determining the right strength should be the only tricky part, because when you're looking straight onto the document like that and can't rotate, it becomes hard to determine the true depth those stones were placed (but even that shouldn't take too many quick attempts to get right, ctrl+z adjust the intensity and try again until you're happy). While you only have to pick one method here, I'd recommend giving both a shot just so you can see how they work first hand (both methods are pretty quick so it wont waste time). Then with that experience in mind, in the future you'll have a feel for what kind of detail can be captured from the document, giving you a better grasp for knowing when working with the document comes in handy (generally for creating planar textures/normal maps, custom alphas, etc), and when you might be better off sticking with 3d tools/subtools (typically anything more advanced than a displaced plane).

tristamus

cryrid wrote: »

Here's the thing about dropping them to the document, they're just pixels with depth now, not polygons. There's no 3d, no angles or anything like that, nothing to rotate. All that's left is just a normal image pixel's color value like in Photoshop, but with additional values for it's depth and matcap (zbrush calls these enhanced pixels 'pixols'). You can recapture/transfer that depth onto a polymesh with things like matchmaker or displacement maps, but depending on how far you want them to stick out of the surface, there's just going to be certain information those pixols no longer carry (like if there was anything along the sides of the rocks which you can't see). Basically if it doesn't have a pixel/pixol on the document, it's just no longer there; what you see is what you get.

Seeing how those rocks look, I don't think you want them sticking too far out anyway so I'm pretty sure those two methods (matchmaker or displacement maps) would work just fine to transfer that back onto plane mesh. Determining the right strength should be the only tricky part, because when you're looking straight onto the document like that and can't rotate, it becomes hard to determine the true depth those stones were placed (but even that shouldn't take too many quick attempts to get right, ctrl+z adjust the intensity and try again until you're happy). While you only have to pick one method here, I'd recommend giving both a shot just so you can see how they work first hand (both methods are pretty quick so it wont waste time). Then with that experience in mind, in the future you'll have a feel for what kind of detail can be captured from the document, giving you a better grasp for knowing when working with the document comes in handy (generally for creating planar textures/normal maps, custom alphas, etc), and when you might be better off sticking with 3d tools/subtools (typically anything more advanced than a displaced plane).

@cryid and m4dcow - Very, very appreciated guys. I will definitely give both methods a run tomorrow and see what comes out best. You explained it perfectly, and I'm sure it will all work out

Cheers guys, I'll let ya know if I have any more questions and show ya how it came out later! :thumbup: