With the introduction of 3.5, Pixologic introduced us to a sketching with Zspheres.   Gone is the need to develop a highly planned armature before sculpting.   Sculptors can now grow their base mesh model much like adding tubes or lumps of clay together and then skinning them to create a sculpt-able mesh.  The primary output of this workflow is what is referred to as a “unified skin” which is a sort of smoothed voxel construction in space.   Probably not an efficient animating form, but for sculpting it has the advantage of being relatively uniform mesh.   Pixologic has done considerable magic in their skin generators to handle branching forms (including the more traditionally used adaptive skins.)  In 3.5 R3, they have also added considerable features for defining edge loops by merely painting color on the surface of the model.   That’s right, in 3.5R3, you can just paint color on the surface of your sculpture and Zbrush with calculate an underlying topology to follow your colors.  It is a truely an amazing piece of technology in and of itself.

What’s more important is the sculpting tools.  While R1 and R2 offered us glimpses of the power we would see with unified skins, the clay brush types were the primary manipulators of the mesh for sculpting.   With the R3, a new category of polish brushes have been introduced.   They take a little getting used to, but the gist is this: press lightly, the buff and smooth your surface (like running a wet finger of over clay), press hard and they gouge into the surface or operate like a planer flattening tool.   It seems like a bit of an odd combination in words, but when in actual usage, the feel like the ideal detailing tools for working on hard body forms in virtual clay.

R3 also adds a Boolean system for Subtools, so many unique new forms can be quickly established from primitives including boring precise holes into surfaces or alternatively closing up holes or gaps.

Polygroups (essentially selections) have become quite powerful in R3.   They can be used to define selections, painted on textures, convert to masks, and even saved as textures (although this feature seems slightly experimental for some–use with caution.)   One of the best features is that brushes can be told to automatically mask their actions with the polygroup as you contact the surface of the polygroup, thus confining the brush to that group alone.   This will save tones of time detailing a model since hiding polygroups to get a a hard edge is no longer required.   (Try this with the layer brush and you’ll see what I mean.)

Projection tools a better than before.   This will be handy since unified skins aren’t always the best for animation.   With the projection tools a complex mesh can now be easily transferred (color/surface information included) to a more traditional mannequin which can be created through traditional Zsphere adaptive skins, a SDS modeler such as Modo, Topogun, or Zbrush’s own retopology tools.

Clearly Pixologic is committed to innovating Zbrush beyond any other sculpting product out there.   The fact that this innovation is free to existing customers of Pixologic is truly an amazing testament to their belief in supporting their customers (compare to Luxology’s $395 upgrade from 301 to 401  on Cinema4D’s latest “point-5″ upgrade weighing in at a hefty $695.)   Zbrush is a bargain the digital sculptor cannot overlook.

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.

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:

Step 1) Go to the UV menu (or the Texture Menu in earlier versions of ZB3) and select the UVTile button.   This will stack/overlap each polygon on top of the UV space.  Normally, overlapping UV’s is a BadThing™, but in this case, this is exactly what we want.

Step 2) Subdivide the object to get lots of detail–about 1M polygons (8 levels)

Step 3) Go to the texture menu and select a texture that would look nice.   A seamless texture will also look cool.  I picked built-in Texture 13, which looks tailored made for Greebles.   In one step, the whole object is covered with texture, 1 copy for each polygon at level 1

Step 4) Covert the texture to a mask by going to the Masking pallet and select “Mask by Intensity”.   For clarity, you can turn the texture off if you want.

Step 5) Inflate once or twice to bring out the geometry.

A little texturing and it has a nice tech technical surface.   Try this with other alphas or make your own after looking at Lemonnado’s Tutorial.

The trouble for some users is that the line interpreted between the points is a spline and often doesn’t give a more angular shape.   It isn’t obvious, but when you select a point on a graph, a circle appears around the point like a halo.  That circle isn’t just to highlight the point–it also controls how smooth the line is that passes through the point!  Draw the circle close to the point by dragging its rim, the point gets sharper–further away, the line through the point gets softer.  Neat!

The second profile, T Profile,  controls the thickness of the object that is swept.  By default it give a nice even thickness top and bottom, so I leave this alone.

After converting my simple octagonal object to a poly mesh, and subdivided it 8 times with SMT (smooth) off, I can then start decorating it to make it a little more mechanical looking.   Picking a simple alpha from my collection (this one from Codeman Studios) I can just drag a marquee of the alpha by starting my click off the object and dragging across.   Do it twice, and I have a nice set up to inflate some ridges from the surface.

A couple of inflates (deformation menu) and  then Iuse radial symmetry of 8 and couple of different alphas to decorate the object further getting something like this.Add texture and I have another mechanical part for a machine.