Wireframe cages are handy.    They’re pretty easy to make.   In fact, you can make a wireframe of any mesh’s level 1 polygons quite easily.    You start with your basic mesh, and apply UVTile UVs from the UV pallet.  

Subdivide the model 3 or 4 times so you have some nice detailed geometry to work with and store a Morph Target use “StoreMT” on the Morph Target pallet–we’ll need this later.  

Next, we want to mask the wire look.  This is easy–alpha 28.  It just looks like a square smaller than the the full alpha space.  

Use “Mask by Alpha” on the Masking subpallet and invert.   I filled out the mask top and bottom squares from my alpha because I’m going to want a place to drop in a logo later.  

A quick application of inflate and we have the shape protruding up from the basic object.  

If only Zbrush had a way to just save this frame and chuck the rest.  It does!   Remember that morph target we saved?   Well, there is another handy button on the Morph Target panel marked “Create Diff”.   Press it once and it will create a new tool in the tool pallet which is the difference between the existing mesh and its stored morph target.   Since we only raised up the wire shape, that’s the only difference and that’s what we’ll have left, leaving us with nice wireframe shape.

Tags: Zbrush

This isn’t really a Zbrush tip, per se, but I’m often surprised by frustrated modelers when they hit a wall saying, “This is way too complex!”   What they sometimes have failed to notice, in the pursuit of efficient modeling is that complex machines are often built out of assemblies which are made of subassemblies which are made up of even smaller sub-assemblies and ultimately out of individual (often cast) parts.   Observation of existing machines (and even disassembling a few) can improve your mechanical modeling.   To approach this piece of a leg, I didn’t start with the whole piece.  Instead, I recognized the sides were (at least in my concept sketch) just a mirrored pair of simple subassemblies.   A couple of cylinders and box (suitable beveled by masking and inflating.

Thanks to subtools, I only had to make one cylinder and one box which makes the basic strutSince I don’t plan to take this apart, I went ahead and merged these into a single tool–if I thought I would need to edit the diameters of the cylinders or something, I might have left these in pieces to adjust them.   (I do bend them, but fortunately I don’t need them in pieces for that.   To build up more of my machine part, I then take two of the assemblies plus a hollow cylinder to build up my next subassembly.

I haven’t built out some super machine with this yet (it will probably be the shin of some mechanical dinosaur when I’m done with it) but you get the idea–work with bite-sized parts and pretty quickly you can get some complex machinery (even without sophisticated texturing.)   This whole mechanical part was really created with just 3 simple forms, suitably scaled, deformed, and positioned.

Add a few more assemblies:

Tags: Zbrush