ZBrush: Tips and Tricks

- [Instructor] Polygroups are the workhorse of modeling and sculpting in ZBrush, and if there is one skill you need to master quickly, it's how to create polygroups. We've explored this briefly in another weekly video, but we'll go deeper into all the options you have to create polygroups. Let's take a look at it. The first thing you need to do is bring up Lightbox and let's go ahead and grab our DemoHead, and I'm going to bring him slightly closer to the front, and then let's go into Polygroups. And these are all the options that you can use to create polygroups. The first one, Auto Groups, works on and off, so if we actually make sure that we see the polygroups and we click on this guy, in this case, it shouldn't work because there's not really pre-defined features that should be auto-grouped. This works better in hard surface modeling, but for this guy, it's not going to be very useful. One of the best way to do this is by Masking, and most of the time, this is the first way that you're going to learn. But I want to show you first how to do it by polypainting. So let's go ahead and first click on Polypaint, and then click on Colorize, and let's remove the polyframes for now, and then make sure that you have RGB selected, and select a brush that you can use to colorize. So, in this case, I'm using the SK_Pen, which you can get off for free on the web, and there's many others that you can use. So, in this case, I'm going to use SK_Pen, and then select the color that I want to colorize, and now I can start painting on my model here. So I'm going to paint this area completely and then maybe paint the back as well, like so, and then have maybe another line here, so we have multiple polygroups. All right, so we have kind of three sections or four sections that we can use to create polygroups. So let's go back to Polygroups, and then we could do from Polypaint here. So if I click there, and let's again make sure that we see our polyframes here, and then click, now I've created different polygroups. So I have this polygroup here, this here, and these are the same. So if I mask out this polygroup, you're going to see that now this is one polygroup and then this is one as well, and it's based on color. So if you use different colors, it would create different polygroups. Okay, so let's back out of there. Now let's use again the same models. So let's go to Lightbox, use the same model again, don't take the changes. And now what I'm going to do is use masking to do polygroups. So polygroups with masking is typically what you guys learn first. So let's go ahead and do that. So I'm going to mask, and when I use my mask, I can use different masking methods so I could use a Mask Lasso, Perspective. I could use Mask Perfect Circle, Rectangle, and so on, so forth. But I could use a different stroke as well and I could use an Alpha. So, in this case, if I want to do something very cool, I can use a Drag Rectangle and then use a different Alpha, so I could use something like this. And then I would literally go and drag that shape into the face of my model and then create a polygroup based on that, and now you can work with Panel Loops and a whole bunch of stuff to actually create some geometry from there. So let's go ahead and do that. So you can use from Masking here or Group Mask. And now I've created a different polygroup here, and this is another one. So if I actually hide this guy, I have this one polygroup here and then the other one. Now the other ones are based on the geometry, so Merge Similar Groups and Merge Stray Groups. So if you have all similar groups, you can use that, and stray groups if you have something that is a stray from your model, you can use that. Regroup By Edges will basically look at the edges and create polygroups based on that. So let's undo the creation of the polygroup. There you go. So if I use Regroup By Edges, it's created a bunch of polygroups here. Not very useful. But if you're doing hard surface modeling, this actually could come handy. Now, a Group By Normals, this one has only normals pointing up. So, in this case, if I do this, it's going to create one polygroup, so this is normal. But if you have multiple normals within a model and you click here, it's going to create different polygroups based on that. If I make the top part of the head only visible and then I Group Visible, then this creates a brand new polygroup, so now I have two polygroups. You could do the opposite. So if I were to mask the bottom part, so I would do Control + Shift option, and then I would mask this as opposed to make it visible, then Group Visible, then I have just this one polygroup here, and if I bring it back, I have the bottom as a separate polygroup. So these are all the different options and ways you can create polygroups on your model. So use it. I've used it. You need to become a master at creating polygroups because it's going to help you do a whole bunch of other things inside of ZBrush.