Michael your talent for teaching is unmatched. I've been in Zbrush for a long time and stopped keeping up with the new tools for a few years. After a few weeks of watching your videos and trial and error I feel I'm back up to speed and the possibilities seem endless. Keep them coming and we owe you one!
So I'm looking at the boot in the beginning. I've been working on boots and shoes for my characters and for the life of me, I can't seem to get things so beautifully smooth and crisp despite hours of polishing and trimming. If I want that result, I typically have to design my base mesh in Maya or something then import it. The trickiest parts for me are straps, buckles, and soles.
It won't allow me to post direct links to entire playlists, but the substance painter quickstart and speed modeling both have bump and damage: ru-vid.complaylists
this is a custom stitch brush; here's the making of a custom stitch brush with 3 options (so when you hit "M" you'll get all the options you've appended): ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-BF82D3GsbUE.html
Awesome tutorial! I'm just wondering how will I texture the stitches in substance? Because what I'm thinking is to merge both stitches and leather subtool, dynamesh, zremesh for low poly, UV in maya and export to substance and bake. But if I apply a texture, both leather and stitches will have the same texture because the stiches doesn't have a separate UV, and what I want is for them to have different color. I understand that I can add them in substance but what I have are big stitches. I think I can't explain myself properly, hope you know what I mean and could you give a proper workflow how to texture them separately in substance? Thanks in advance!
I put the stitches on there in zbrush just as a demo, but in production I'd definitely just add them in painter, not bake them out from ZBrush: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-YZKCTzdqmp4.html If you wanted to bake them (or any part of the boot) just fill them with a material ID color and use that as a mask in painter (for example, video 30 in this series: ru-vid.com/group/PLkzopwqcFevbWhV669XJZNclPLaIpO9de )
So its totally legit to just do stitching in painter? I always feel like im cheating it by not doing them in zbrush but its just way more convenient doing it in painter
Hey Michael, I still do stitches in ZBrush at the moment since they look better due to AO. Do you maybe know a way on how to achieve that AO effect in Painter as well? Cheers Christian
Sure, there's also a way in painter to give an "embedded" look to the stitches as well; it's a little tough to describe in text, but basically create a fill layer with color/height of your stitches, add a black mask, use the stitch brush to paint white in the mask where you want your stitches to go, adjust the height / color / roughness of the fill layer as needed, duplicate this fill layer, add a blur filter to the mask, turn off all channels except for the height, drag the height slider into the negative for embedding. Duplicate this layer, add an AO channel if you haven't already, turn off everything except AO, go to the AO dropdown for the layer and choose whatever blending mode you want to add this layer to the AO on export. It's super subtle and usually ends up making things muddy so I don't bother doing the AO part, unless I'm going for a stylized look.
HA .. nice! Many thanks Michael, works great! Is it also possible btw. to use one of the ZBrush stitch brushes that go in- and outward at the same time? Can I somehow set 50% grey to have no effect while black pushes in and white pushes out? This way I wouldn't have to sculpt the seams inside of ZBrush and then afterwards add the stitches in Painter.
In ZBrush sure, that's just utilizing the midvalue under the Alpha menu (check out the custom alpha section in Intro to ZBrush Part 2). Painter does have positive and negative height (red and green), but there's no adjustable "mid value" in painter that I know of, so any alphas imported would only be positive. Somebody fancier than me could probably figure out a really elegant substance solution that would work however, since it does recognize positive and negative height.
Someone just told me that you can put the texture in the Height Channel of the brush instead of the alpha (also disable the alpha). Then you can apply it into both direction at the same time and use all of the ZBrush alphas for example. :)
Hmmm...do they have documentation anywhere for that, I can't find anything to support that unless I'm misunderstanding...any ZBrush alpha I bring into the latest painter behaves as only height positive; I can adjust them manually to be a 128 "midvalue" to behave properly with the linear dodge add, but again it's only positive. I'm not sure how to "apply it into both directions at the same time", which I'm not sure would work even if there was an option for that-- in the ZBrush stitch brush alpha, for example, the midvalue set at 20 tells the values below that to "dig in", and the values above that to "push out"; if you were to apply the zbrush alpha as-is in painter, it would push out, but applying that positive alpha "in both directions at the same time" would effectively cancel out the height entirely, again unless I'm missing something in translation. I would love the ability to control positive and negative height in a brush, but I haven't seen that in action in painter yet, if you have a video or documentation it would be awesome to look at. However, even if they do have an option for painter for that that I can't find, I would still only be able to use this in limited situations-as soon as you begin painting height in a layer as opposed to a fill layer, you lose the ability to adjust important properties, and it becomes a destructive workflow, so I'd probably avoid doing much of it due to the amount of rework it would require if I had to iterate. Tied into that is the matter of material masking-if I want a divot line for stitches to sit in, I only want that to effect the surrounding materials height-- adding in height stitches into the divot does me no good if it's built into the brush, unless the brush can...somehow apply an accessible mask for the stitches as it goes so I can adjust the material properties of the stitches independently from the divot. Not saying it can't be done, I'm sure there's an elegant solution out there waiting to be found or implemented, and if you know someone who can do that I'd love to talk to them!
Love this technique thanks so much for the video Michael! I have a question not so related to the video, hope you don't mind.. So I've been searching everywhere the reason or the solution why my stroke modifiers are all greyed out, and can't find any solution on how to unlocked them or know why is it so cryptic to find out the reason why is locked (I wanted to do some patterns like stitching increasing the stroke spacing but I guess that's not an option)
if you're sculpting the stitch detail, the lazy mouse options should be where you'll adjust the pattern spacing (lazy step). If you're utilizing the "roll" option under the stroke menu, lazy step won't act as intended. If you're using a curve brush to add stitch patterns, the stroke > curve > curve step is where you'll adjust spacing between objects. As for the greyed out part, I'm not positive-- make sure your object isn't a primitive (hit tool > make polymesh3D), and/or make sure it's not a zsphere or something, which won't have stroke options available.
