Vimeo:

Character Reel 2013 – Henning Sanden from Henning Sanden on Vimeo.

Youtube

Applications used
modo, Maya Mari, Mudbox, Vray, ZBrush, Photoshop, Nuke

Contact info
henning [dot] sanden [at] gmail.com
+45 31 32 83 58

That didn’t stop him from trying to enjoy life to the full though. This all ended one evening when somebody stole his butterfly collection. He became… moody.

This piece started off in Zbrush to get the concept nailed down, along with a photoshop paintover. I then brought into modo to retopologize it. Once the topology was working, I kept on sculpting it in ZBrush until I was satisfied. For texturing, I used Mari, which is quickly becoming one of my favorite apps. I brought it all together in modo for rendering. I did post work on it in Photoshop for the final touches.

Here’s a video with turntables and closeups.

Moody Conrad from Henning Sanden on Vimeo.

This project started really as a quick sculpt in ZBrush over a couple of hours during an evening. As the sculpt turned out well enough, I decided to finish the piece. I’ve been working on and off it for the last two months in the little spare time I’ve had.

I started out with a very rough model in modo which had the correct scale and proportions. I then brought it into ZBrush where I really defined the design. Once I was happy with it, I retopologized it in modo, where I also did my UVs, along with UV Master in ZBrush. I had to redo the topology several times until I was satisfied. At this point, I brought it back into ZBrush to finish off the details. This took a while. I then brought the fish into Mudbox for texturing, which I find to be an excellent application for texture painting. Once the texture was working, I painted a variety of maps, including SSS color, SSS amount, specular and so forth to really control the shading. I brought it all into modo for shading, lighting and rendering. I split it into two passes and composited it all in Photoshop.

Lurking in the Deep from Henning Sanden on Vimeo.

Something you’re going to do very frequently in a production while using ZBrush is to make turntables, as clients and directors love them. This can be done very easily in ZBrush, but there are a couple of things that you need to be aware of. ZBrush also has some nice rendering tools which will make the turntable look pretty respectable.

The final result

Or a high res video if you’re into that sort of thing.

FishTurntable

This is the model I’m going to be using for this tutorial.

Let’s get started!

The first thing we need to do is to actually set up all the technical things in order for the turntable to actually work properly. We do all of this under the Movie-menu. Hit the little circle icon to the left to dock it to either side.

This is what we see by default.

The first things we need to change is what ZBrush is rendering and at what size. Currently, it’s rendering the entire window, meaning that you get the UI and all that jazz along with the turntable. It’s also set to medium resolution, meaning that it will only render it at half the size.

Change this so that Doc and Large is enabled. This will render the viewport only and at full res. Now we have a problem: The document probably isn’t using the correct resolution. Normally 1280 x 720 is enough.

We change this under Document menu.

On the bottom here, you see the resolution. Uncheck Pro (short for proportion) and type in the correct resolution, here 1280 x 720. Hit Resize

Click Yes

This is what my canvas looks like now. The tool (model) has been dropped and is no longer editable. To clear the canvas, hit Ctrl + N.

Draw the model out again and hit T to enter Edit Mode. We can now continue fiddling with the turntable options.

Under Movie – Modifiers, we only change one thing: The Spin Frames. This means how many frames it will take for the model to do a full 360 degree turn. I usually set this to 150. Next to it, we have Spin Cycles. This means how many rounds it will take. This should pretty much always be set to 1, as you’ll simply loop the turntable in whatever video player you’re using.

For some absurd reason, Pixologic thought that you’d want a ZBrush logo on your turntable. This means that if you render out your turntable now, the movie will start out with a ZBrush logo. This must go away.

Under Overlay Image, sett the Opacity to 0.

Under Title Image, set the FadeIn Time and FadeOut Time to 0 as well.

You’re now ready to render it out! To do this, simply hit the Turntable button right under Movie.

However, if you want, you can make the turntable prettier using some of ZBrush’s render juice.

Switch the MatCap to SkinShade4. You can use whatever you like, but this usually gives good results.

This chap.

Hit Shift + R to render. This is what it looks like at this stage.

Let’s make the lighting more attractive. For this, we’re going to use LightCaps. Under the Light-menu, you have the LightCap dropdown. However, before we change anything here, we must disable our main light under Light. Simply click on the orange light bulb to deactivate it.

And it will look like this.

Scroll down to LightCap and make a new light by pressing, you might have guessed it, New Light. You can now move it around on the sphere to change the light direction. I usually use two lights: One key light and one rim or fill light. Usually one of them is warm and the other is cold. This just works 99 % of the times.

Change the strength to something like 0.9. This is the intensity of the light. Also change the color of the light by hitting the color icon. I chose something blue-ish.

Add a second light by pressing New Light again. You switch between the lights by hitting the arrow icons on the bottom of the screenshot here.

I put this light slightly from behind to make a nice rim. I also made it orange. Hit Shift R to render. Now let’s say that you’re happy with the lighting setup and you’d like to reuse it in the future. No problem!  Directly under LightCap, there’s an Open and Save button. They’re doing exactly what you  think they are: Save will allow you to save the lighting somewhere and Open will open any previously saved light caps.

You can now do some final light adjustments under LightCap Adjustments. For instance, I sometimes change the exposure slightly up. Here I set it to 1.3.

This is what it currently looks like. For me, the shadows are slightly too sharp. To change this, go to the Render Menu – BPR Shadow and adjust the Angle.

By default the Angle is at 0. Setting them to 20 makes the shadows smoother.

With softer shadows.

Now if you hit Turntable under Movie, it will render the turntable with the current render and light settings. Let it cook for some minutes and you have yourself a pretty decent turntable.

After the turntable is done after 10 min or so, hit Play Movie just to see that it’s what you want. If it’s all fine, hit Export. Change the compression to H264 and the framerate to 25 fps and you’re good to go!

I honestly think that setting up turntables should be more intuitive, but if you get used to doing it this way, it’s not too bad. I really think it’s worth spending some extra time to make nice turntables, as it can really make a difference when dealing with clients.

If you have any comments feel free to let me know over email (henning.sanden [at] gmail.com) or in the comment field below.

Click the image for it to display correctly.

This is the property of Wring Wrong Films Ltd.

You can follow the progression of the film on their Facebook page

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Magic-of-Love/500779903311892

…Said nobody ever. The reason? UVs are invisible. You will see when the UVs are bad, but you’ll never notice them if they are good. This is where this tutorial in comes handy: I want to show you a way where you can get as good UVs as possible in a minimum amount of time, so that you have more time for the creative process.. like not doing UVs.

In short: Ever wanted to spend less time UV mapping and more time on the fun part? If you’re frantically waving your hands in the air by this notion, read on.

Oh, and if you’re new to ZBrush and you only want to use it for the sweet UV mapping, you can check out this tutorial which I’ve aimed towards beginners.

General ZBrush Tips & Tricks

Intro  

First, let’s discuss what UV mapping actually is and why you need it:

UVs are basically just a 2D representation of your 3D model. You need them so that you can texture and use maps such as normal, bump and displacement maps. Without UVs, there is no way to paint a texture map (we’re pretending PTEX doesnt exist for now). The U and V are axis in a 2D coordinate system. U is the horizontal direction and V is the vertical direction (V – Vertical – you’ll remember it now) .

Oh, and if you’re looking for a more technical description, Wikiepedia has some good stuff on the subject.

Wikipedia on UVs

Here we see a 3D model being unfolded into a 2D representation of it.

Uv mapping in general can be very time consuming and it’s the phase of the production you just can’t wait to get over with.  Some years ago, Pixologic, the wonderful guys behind ZBrush, released a plugin called UV Master. It’s truly a fantastic plugin and I highly recommend that you learn it really well, as it will without a doubt help you a lot with UV mapping.  It has some very interesting and fancy features, but we won’t be playing with any of those. Basically I’m only using UV Master because it has a really good unfolding algorithm.

With this technique, you can easily unfold very complex character in a manner of 10-20 minutes.

To describe the process in short:

1. We pre define the seams in our main 3D app. I’m using modo and here, but you can use literally whatever you’d like. We simply make sure that all our uv islands are made before we go into ZBrush.

2. In ZBrush, we use UV master to unfold our model.

3. Send it back to your main 3D app and arrange the UV islands to your liking.

This is a very simple process and it works really well in nearly all cases.

This is the model we’ll UV map, freshly cooked from the modo content.

PART 1 - Defining the UV seams  

Modo

Go to the UV tab and activate symmetry. It’s really helpful if your model is symmetrical as you only have to do half the work. Start to select the loops you want. I always start with the biggest loops. Every time your close off a loop, you define a separate UV island.

ProTip:

When you’re deciding where your UV seams should be, look at your clothing. If you use the seams in your pants as a guide for where to place them in 3D, half the battle is done.

Every unique color is a different UV island

Have a seam which goes through the 4 fingers. This makes the unfolding easier.

The final seam placement.

Now hit the Unwrap Tool under the UV tab. The settings really doesn’t matter: The only thing we want is to define the seams.

I now scale them down so that there’s absolutely no chance that they will go outside the 0-1 UV space. Scaling them down this much isn’t necessary though, as long as you’re absolutely sure that they’re all inside one UV tile. It’s also essential that all parts of the model are in the UV map, even if they wont be textured. If parts of the model doesn’t have UVs associated with it, the UVs will not appear in ZBrush.

Click the GoZ button. This will send the mesh over to ZBrush without you having to export it.

Thats it for now. Next up: ZBrush!

Maya

Load up your model and go to Panels – Saved Layouts – Persp/UV Texture Editor to get up a more UV friendly UI.

Make sure that you’re in modeling mode. Then go to Create UVs – Planar Mapping. This is simply to get some UV coordinates to work with. It should look something like this.

Selection in Maya is pretty bad, but there’s one tool which will save your sanity while doing UV seams:  To select a range of edges, select the first one and then double click on the last one. Very handy!

With the seams selected, go to Polygons – Cut UV edges, or simply hit the Scissors Icons in the UV window. So far everything seems to look the same.  However, if you enable UV seams in the viewport, you can now see that the seams have indeed been cut.

To make the UVs prettier, go to Polygon – Unfold, and then Polygon – Layout, in the UV Window.

Now, select all the UVs and scale them down so that they’re within the first UV tile.

I’m really not concerned with how much stretching there is at this point – the only thing I care about is the placement of the seams. Frankly, you dont even need to unfold them. Simply cutting the planar projection works just fine too.
Export your mesh out and you’re prepared for the next step! File – Export Selection – Save as an .obj. You can use GoZ, but use that at your own risk; I’ve had very mixed results with GoZ and Maya.

PART 2 – ZBRUSH

Now it’s time to actually unfold our model and make some nice UVs. If you didnt use GoZ:

Tool – Import. Select your file.

Hit T to enter Edit Mode.

Now, go to Zplugin – UV Master.

You should explore what all the buttons are doing, but for this technique, we only need a few:

Unwrap – By hitting this, you unwrap your model.

Use Existing UV seams – This must be activated for this to work. You’re now telling ZBrush to only use the predefined seams as UV seams. ZBrush will then not try to cut up the model to its own desire.

Work on Clone – If you’ve already sculpted on the model and you want to UV map it, you need to click this. Doing so will clone the current tool and delete the higher subdivision levels.

Copy UVs & Paste UVs- Will copy the current UVs to memory and paste them onto a new model. Extremely handy in so many cases.  The vertex ID needs to be the same for the two models for this to work.

Flatten – This will flatten the model to UV space.

The ideal settings

Hit Unwrap! Boom! The model has now been unwrapped. Hit Flatten to see the uvs in 2D.

The UVs are now pretty awesome when it comes to stretching, but the placement is bad. This is where we bring them back into our main 3D app to organize the UV layout.

Hit UnFlatten to bring it back into 3D.

If you’re using GoZ, hit Ctrl G to send the model back into your main 3D app. If not, go to Tool – Export and save as an .obj.

PART 3 – BACK IN MODO/MAYA

I’m not going to go too deep into the two apps here, as the process is very similar.

At this stage, I always check how much stretching there is in my UVs. I do this by adding a UV checker as a texture map and tiling it about 7 times across.

modo:

Make a new material by pressing M, go to your render tab, Render Preset Browser  - Images - UV. Drag one of the textures on top of the model. Go to the Texture Locator and change  the Horizontal Wrap to 7 and hit Enter while holding down Ctrl. This will add the same value to the Vertical Wrap too.

Maya

Right Click on the model – Assign New Material – Lambert.

Go to your Lambert Node in the Attribute Editor. Click on the Color slot (Create Render Node) – select File – select your uv checker. You can find some simply by Googling “UV MAP”

Go to the place2dTexture node and change the  Repeat UV values to 7 in both slots.

As you can see, there’s very little stretching.

This is what our UV layout looks like now. The most apparent problem is that all the islands are very, very close together. This will definitely cause problems later on.

Here I’ve simply moved the various pieces around. As a general rule, have the islands belonging to the left of the character (as seen from the front) be on the left side, and the same with the right side. This makes the UV layout way cleaner.

And there we go! A full figure with pretty good UVs, all in about 10-15 minutes.

If you have any questions, dont hesitate to contact me at henning.sanden [at] gmail [dot] com

This tutorial is going to be similar to the one I have on how to get a displacement map from ZBrush to Vray for Maya. We’re going to look at how to get the ZBrush – modo workflow going.

Displacment maps. The words sends shivers down the spine of any CG artist. It’s a topic I’ve spent countless hours trying to wrap my head around. In this tutorial we’ll look at a reliable way to use 32 bit displacement maps in modo generated in ZBrush.  You have significantly more data to work with so your displacement will be more accurate and will contain more information. I’ll assume you know the difference between a normal, bump and displacement map, and why a displacement map is necessary. If not, you have some googling to do.

Let’s get started.   Here is the mesh in Zbrush which I want to transfer to modo. It’s about 4 mill polys and it’s fairly detailed.  It has been retopologized to make sure that the topology is good, and it has UVs with little to no stretching. It’s extremely important that your UV map is good, otherwise you’re going to see nasty artifacts and stretching in the render once you apply your maps.    

Alright, let’s jump into ZBrush We’re going to use Multi Map Exporter (MME), which is a relative recent plugin in ZBrush. You can find it under Zplugin in your top menu. This is your friend and you should know it well. Before we had this thing of beauty, we had to export every map manually, which is a tedious process. With the MME, you can export several maps at the same time where you have more control over them. It also supports multiple UV tiles. This is a huge thing when you’re working in a production and your UVs are laid out over several tiles. Traditionally, multiple tiles are hard and convoluted to work with in ZBrush, so this is wonderful. More info regarding the MME

Open the plugin up and you should hopefully not be too overwhelmed by the wall of text and buttons. Check Displacement in the very top.  Here you can adjust your size, export map for all visible subtools, et cetera.

Set the size to whatever you need, in my case I need a 2k map.

Enable Flip V which will flip the maps vertically, which you always have to do in Zbrush due to some weird voodoo by Pixologic.

Next, hit the friendly looking button which says Export Options. This is where the options for the various maps can be found. You want to click Displacement to bring up the options for the displacement map.

Now we have a couple of settings which we need to know about

SubDiv Level: This dictates which subD level the displacement map will be generated from. You normally want this set to 1 as the displacement will then be generated from the lowest level, meaning that the map will have the difference between the lowest and highest level. This overrides the current subD level your model is currently in, which means that if your model is set to level 5 and your SubDiv is set to level 1, then the map will be generated from level 1. I sometimes use this to make bump maps. If I set my SubDiv level to 4 out of 6, the displacement generated will only include the finer details, so it can be used as a bump.

Adaptive: If pressed, the map will be of higher quality, but it will take longer to generate. I always have this on when exporting a final displacement. I leave it unchecked when doing tests.

DpSubPix: Now this is an interesting one. Initially I thought this was only a quality slider, where 0 was the worst and 4 was the best. It’s not. This is what Matthew Yetter from Pixologic writes about it.

This is most likely unnecessary and is definitely a significant drain on resources. DPSubPix is mostly a dinosaur, held over from when ZBrush couldn’t handle models in the 10′s of millions of polygons. What that slider does is to virtually subdivide the model a number of times equal to the slider setting before then creating the map. Its purpose is to let you create a larger map than what your current number of polys would allow.

For example:

A 1 million poly mesh is ~ equal to a 1K texture map. If you want a 4K map, that would mean that you’d get a lot of artifacting caused by interpolation while the map is being created. You’d want to divide the model twice to bring it to 16 million polys, which is ~ equal to the number of pixels in a 4K map. In ZBrush 2, you couldn’t get to 16 million polys so you’d use a DPSubPix value of 2 and get a nice, clean map. With ZBrush 4.x you CAN hit that many polys easily and so you can subdivide the model yourself, do some more detailing and then create the displacement map without DPSubPix.

Now if you have a 20 million poly model and you’re using a DPSubPix value of 4, guess what happens? You’re telling ZBrush to first calculate over 5 billion polygons and then create the maps. Even just a DPSubPix value of 1 is enough to hit 80 million polys. Not only will it make most any computer puke, it’s also calculating WAY more data than the displacement map could possibly hold.”

The TL;DR version? Disable it. It takes A LOT longer to extract the map. One test I did took 23 seconds with it disabled and 5 minutes with it set to 4. The quality was identical.

Smooth UV: This will smooth your UV, as you might have guessed. Might or might not be preferable, depending on your project. If unpressed, your UVs will be rigid, which might be what you want. By default, modo will smooth your UVs so this might be preferable. In this example though, I will NOT smooth the uvs. It’s extremely important that you’re consistent here, otherwise you will have issues with seams.

Mid: This is the mid range for the displacement. When using 32 bit maps, you want your mid range to be set to 0. By default the mid range will be 0.5, meaning 50% grey, which makes no sense when using 32 bit images.

3 Channels:  Will give the displacement information in all channels instead of just the red one. Enable this. 32 Bit: Enable this. Otherwise you cant get a 32 bit map. Scale: Don’t touch this. Intensity: Don’t touch. There is a way where you can use the intensity with 32 bit maps, but frankly, there’s no need to do so. 16 Bit Scale: Only relevant when using 16 bit maps. Get scale: Can be handy, but don’t touch this for this particular workflow.

In short, there are the settings you want for top quality:

Now hit Create All Maps and chose the directory you want to save it to. You can only create Tiff files, but they should provide you with sufficient data. Give it a couple of minutes and you should be set. As a general rule, I never touch the computer while Zbrush is calculating. Sometimes it freezes and crashes when you touch it.   Export your base mesh at the level you want, preferably the lowest one.

ProTip:

Leave the ZBrush window active while the maps are being generated. This will make the maps generate faster, according to the developer of MME. It will generate regardless of ZBrush being the active window, but it will slow down if you Alt+Tab to something else.

There’s a bug in modo which means you can’t import 32 bit TIFF-files. It’s easy to go around though: Open the newly generated map in Photoshop and simply save it as an .EXR It will look something like this. Just because you cant see all the information doesnt mean it’s not there.

Modo time!

File – Import and select your Obj file. Organize your file and give the different items appropriate names. This will save you so much trouble later on.

Remember how we made the displacement map with Smooth Uvs unchecked? Now is the time to change this. Click on the mesh item and enable Linear UVs

Here you can see the difference between linear and smooth UVs.

Linear                                                                                                         Smooth

Lets head over to the new, sexy render layout found in modo 701. Select the model you want to displace, here the body, hit M to give it a material. Again, give it a proper name.

Now we need to assign the displacment map to our fishy.  The easiest way is to simply drag it from the explorer to the shader tree. By default it will be set as Diffuse Color. As this is a scalar map (as opposed to a color map) the gamma should be set to 1.0. In other words, dont touch the gamma if you’re rendering in linear workflow. If you’re not rendering in linear workflow, shame on you; you should.  

Right Click on the newly imported texture map, Surface Shading – Displacement

This is what it looks like currently. Apparently nothing is happening. Either the map simply isnt working, or it’s not strong enough. In this case, it’s simply not strong enough.

This is the million dollar question: How the heck to you know how strong you should set the displacement map to be? What magical numbers work every time? I’m going to be completely honest here: I dont know. In vray, there is a way to do it which works every time, but I havent found anything like this in modo yet.   That said, setting the Displacement Distance to 1 meter seems to work in most cases, but this can vary from scene to scene.

This is with a Displacement Distance set to 1 m, rendered out.

If you want to have better visual results with the displacement, enable Displacement as Bump under Settings

And there we go! That’s how you successfully render a displacement map from Zbrush in modo. It’s really a rather simple procedure once you know how.

I hope this is helpful!

If you have questions, corrections or general comments, feel free to email me at henning.sanden [at] gmail.com

Modo is a brilliant all-around application and it’s currently my favorite 3D app out there. It started out as a modeler and as such, that’s one of its strongest elements. However, it’s not perfect. Sometimes it’s missing features, hotkeys or it takes too many clicks to perform a certain operation.

I’ve been using modo since 203 and it’s my primary modeling tool, so I have spent quite some time customizing it to be as efficient as I can get it. That said, I’m by no means a modo master and my techniques are probably not the most efficient ones in all cases. If you’re reading this and you have a better way of doing something, I’d love to hear it.

Customizing modo

Before we look at how we can optimize modo for modeling, we first need to know how you can actually customize it: Setting up pie menus, hotkeys, installing scripts and all that good jazz. If you already know this, skip this. Skip along now. If not, keep on reading!

Installing Scripts  

Some scripts do have custom install instructions, but most are installed the same way:

Copy the script file into this directory on a PC

C:\Users\[user]\AppData\Roaming\Luxology\Scripts.

After the script has been copied here, you should now be able to access it in modo. To fire off a script, simply type

@ScriptName.ExtensionOfScript

An example of this could be

@Quickbridge.LXM

To test this, type it into the Command port in the bottom right corner.

If you don’t know the  suffix of the script (meaning which format it was made in; Perl, Python or Luxology Macro), simply look in the Windows Explorer. I now immediately know that msp_50_50 has LXM as a suffix.

Changing Hotkeys    

Changing hotkeys in modo is very easy – if you know how to. If you don’t, it’s a little less straight forward to figure out than in, say Maya.

Method #1

This is perhaps the quickest way:

1. Hit F5 or go to Layout – Palettes – Command History. This brings up all the commands which are being fired. Very useful. Here you can see the names of all the commands. This becomes very useful later when setting up Pie Menus  .

2.  Activate the tool you want to map to a key, here the Thicken Tool.  You will now see the command “tool.set Thicken on”.

3. Right Click on it – Map Command to Key

4. Hit the hotkey combination you want. In my case, I have Thicken set to Shift + T. If there’s already a hotkey assigned to the command, it will ask you if you want to overwrite it. Hit Yes.

And that’s the fastest way of mapping commands to hotkeys!

Method #2

This method is preferable in some cases, particularly if you want to map commands to various mouse clicks. It’s also nice if you want to have a good overview of which keys are assigned to which command. We’re going to use the Input Editor for this, found under System. When you first open it, you might be overwhelmed by the wall of text with commands. It all makes sense if you take a moment to look at it.

To the right, you have the Trigger. This basically means which hotkeys is assigned to which command.  In the middle, you have the Command. This is exactly what you think it is – it’s the command used to trigger certain tools, like we discussed above.

I use this in conjunction with the Command History. Again, let’s say I want to add Thicken to the hotkey Shift + T. First we need to know which command triggers the Thicken Tool. Hit F5, go to Polygons – Thicken to activate the thicken tool. The command “tool.set Thicken on” pops up. Click on it in the Command History to make it editable. Copy it to the clipboard. All repetition so far.

This is the new part.

Click on the button which says Shift. This will show all the key combinations which includes the Shift key. Shift + T currently doesnt have a key assigned to it. By default it will then be hidden. You then have to click on Show Unmapped Keys to make it visible.

Double Click on the key combination you want – here Shift + T. Paste the command you previously copied and hit OK.

Hit Shift + T to try out the freshly cooked hotkey!

Beautiful.

Pie Menus  

Pie Menus   are extremely useful for quick modeling (or rather, quick anything) in modo. It’s basically a concept which is very similar to Marker Menus in Maya, though not as powerful. In short, it’s a radial menu where you can add up to 8 commands.

Example of a pie menu

To make a pie menu, you need to familiarize yourself with the Form Editor, another seemingly scary and technical editor. You find this beauty under System – Form Editor. This is not going to be a tutorial on the Form Editor; there are other resources for that. I will only go into how to make a Pie Menu. I’ll show how to make a pie with various modo commands and scripts.

If you’re an observant chap, you will see that there’s a group here called Pie Menus  . As you’re a clever person, you’ve now realized that this is where we put our Pie Menus  . Open it up and you can see all the various pies. Some of these are my own custom ones, so you won’t have all of them.

This is how you make your own pies:

1. Either you can make a form (basically the name for a group here) from scratch, by going to Create – New Form or by duplicating an existing form. I personally prefer the latter. If you make a new form, it will be created at the bottom of the list and you have to drag it up, which is tedious.

Select a form – Right Click – Duplicate.  I duplicated the Modeling form.

Select all the commands, Right Click – Delete.

2. We now have a clean form we can use to make our own menus. Now we need to populate it with awesome sauce. Remember how we found the commands for the various tools earlier? This is useful now as well. Hit  New Control  and then – Add Command

You will now be asked to add a command or arguments, meaning a modo command or an external script.

I’ll add the following to this Pie Menu:

- Topology Pen

- Perfect Circle Script

Let’s start with the Topology Pen. I know that the command for it is “tool.set mesh.topology on snap:true“. You can now simply paste that into the Command and Arguments popup.

If you press the Preview Form, this is what you’re going to see. It’s working, but it’s not sexy.

Let’s give it a name. To the right, you can now type the name of the tool under Label. You see the nice, friendly letters saying “NAME HERE”? That’s where.

Congrats, you’ve now made your first item in your first pie menu.

To add a script to a pie, the procedure is almost exactly the same:

1. New Control – Add Command

2. To have a script, we go back to what we learnt earlier on how to fire off scripts.  Let me quote myself.

To fire off a script, simply type

@ScriptName.ExtensionOfScript

Type “@perfectCircle.pl“.

You can now see that it says “Run Script”. This means that it’s recognizes that it’s an installed script. Give it a new name under Label and you’re good to go.

Alrigth! A wonderful little pie. So how the heck to we use it? Well, we simply assign it to a hotkey. Right Click on the Form (not the individual commands, but the group) and select Assign Hotkey

Now you’ve made your beautiful pie and it’s stored in the default config. This is a problem. If modo messes up and you have to delete the default config, you’re screwed and you have to remake it. To save it, simply use the Save Form command, found when you right click on the form.

Keep populating the pie menu until you’ve reached 8 slots and you have a shiny new pie menu ready for work.

Also notice how I didn’t make a single bad pie joke or pun in this entire section. Kudos to me.

Super Useful Scripts & Commands

Some of these scripts and macros might seem redundant, but if you’re modeling all day, it’s the little things which save you time in the end. Most of these are scripts I’ve collected online and while I try to give credit where credit is due, I might have lost the source over the years. If you know who made a certain script, email me and I’ll update the tutorial ASAP.

I’ve put all the scripts listed here in a .zip file which you can download:

- DOWNLOAD LINK

Duplicate Selected Polys

This is basically just a macro I’ve created. Normally when you want to duplicate polys and move them around, you have to hit Ctrl + C, Ctrl +V and W to copy, paste and activate the move tool. Three commands and quite a lot of finger work over the day. This macro does it all in one go. If you fire it, it will duplicate the selected faces and activate the move tool. Handy! I’ve mapped it to Ctrl + Shift + C

Loop Move 

I frequently want to select loops of polys or edges and then move them around. This macro selects the loop and activates the move too.

Perfect Circle

I don’t use this script too often, but when I do, it’s very handy. As the name implies, it’s making perfect circles. Making circles in 3D can be a PITA, so this is a very welcome script.

Quick Bridge

A useful macro I’ve put together. Allows you to quickly bridge edges together without activating the Bridge Tool. I use this very frequently.

Select Adjacent

This script selects the adjacent polygons, verts or edges. Handy in some situations.

Set Position to Zero

Select That Mesh

The way you normally select meshes in modo is to use the Item list, clicking on them in Item Mode or Middle Mouse Button-Clicking on the different items in poly mode. All of those are indeed very handy, however, I find this script to be far more handy. Not only will it allow you to quickly change the active item, but you can select models within the item itself. This definitely saves you a lot of clicks in the long run. Just by single clicking instead of double clicking, you’re saving yourself some work.

I’ve assigned Select That Mesh to LMB + CTRL. This makes it very fast to select the various meshes.  Assigning it to this key is very easy.

Open the Input Editor and change the settings to match the screenshot below.  Add the script to Ctrl – Left Click. Remember to check Show Unmapped Keys.

Stretch Snap to Zero

Yet another Seneca Script. Text shamelessly stolen from this wonderful guy’s website:

This script will look at the stretch tool and snap any values that are not 100% to 0%.  It’s just
nice, because you can now easily perfectly stretch stuff to 0 in any axes without having to
type in 0 in the Tool Properties window.   It’s great for modo2′s new ability to bind keys to
specific tools.    I went and bound it to “S”, and it’s cool because that key is only used for
this script when I’m using the stretch tool. 

Subpatch Keep Selection

Another awesome script from Seneca Menard. When you hit the TAB key with geometry selected, it only converts the selected geometry to subdivisions. This is seldom what you want and will in most cases only cause problems. This is where this script shines. You can select one polygon, vert or edge and if you now hit tab, the entire model will be converted to SubDs. An absolutely MUST HAVE. Whenever I’m working on a clean install of modo without my scripts, this is the one thing which makes me lose my mind the quickest.

Toggle Symmetry

A really handy script which allows you to toggle symmetry on and off. Ive mapped it to Ctrl + Shift + X

Lasso Partial Select

601 allows you to change the way your selection work in your preferences. This might seem like a small thing, but it really is extremely useful in the long run. Map the following command to a pie menu, hot key, the UI or whatever you prefer. More info about this in the Uber Pie Section.

pref.value remapping.lassoSelectPartial ?(true|false)

 Isolate Selected

Again, a 601 update. This allows you to basically have a proper isolate mode, similar to Maya, 3ds Max or any other 3d app. We’ve been lacking this for a long time and 601 finally delivered. I’ve mapped it to Alt + Q. Sure, you could change this under your Display Options (Hotkey O), but it’s significantly faster to have it set to a key.

view3d.inactiveInvisible state:?+

Topology View

When doing retopo, this is essential. I’ve have it set to a pie menu, direction east.

view3d.topology ?(true|false)

Hotkeys  

Duplicate Selected:
Ctrl+Shift+C

Loop Move :
Shift+ R

Select Adjacent:
1 (not numpad)

Join Averaged (verts)
3

Select Invert:
2 (not numpad)

SelctedBetweenByClick:
LMB + Ctrl + Shift

Select that Mesh:
LMB + CTRL

Move Brush:

S

Toggle symmetry:
Ctrl+ Alt + X

Quick Bridge:
Shift + B

Add Loop

Q

Thicken
Shift + T

Grow Selection 

I’ve remapped grow and shrink selection as the default keys require that I use two hands. As this is something I do all the time while modeling, I can work faster and with less pressure on my body if I move my fingers less.

Shift + X

Shrink Selection

Shift + Z

Extrude

X

Drag Weld

Shift Q
Toggle Grid
Shift + G

Toggle wire overlay
Shift+W

Isolate Selected

Alt + Q

Slide
Alt + Ctrl+ S

Stretch Snap to Zero
Ctrl + Alt + S

Push
Shift + P

Perfect Circle
Ctrl + P

Modeling Pie

Ctrl + Q

Modeling Tips  

Select In Between

It may sound boring, but trust me, this is sexy stuff. Have you ever needed to select, well, anything? If so, this will make tears of joy crawl out of your over caffeinated eyes. In short, this selects the range between two selected elements, be it polygons, verts or edges.

This is one of the most useful scripts you can find for modo, in my humble and slightly sleep deprived opinion. It’s something which has been available for modo for a couple of years now, yet a lot of people don’t know about it. By default, it’s mapped to Shift + G, but I find that to be unintuitive while modeling. Also, the default command select.inbetween requires one extra click compared to this script. I’ve mapped it to Shift + Left Mouse Button.

#LXMacro#
#selectBetweenByClick.LXM

select.3DElementUnderMouse add
select.between

 

Here is the command you need. Copy it into a note pad document, save it in the Scripts Directory and name it selectBetweenByClick.LXM. 

Now go to System – Input Editor. Change the Edit Mode to Viewports and enable Show Unmapped Keys. Find the key you want, I’m choosing Ctrl + Shift + Left Click, 
and Right click on it.

Type the command @selectBetweenByClick.LXM. Hit OK and you’re good to go.

Uber Pies  

This is my holy grain for modeling. I’ll go over every single entry here. The pie menu is mapped to Ctrl + Q, but feel free to map your equivalent to whatever you prefer. This is the current state of my menus, but they are constantly changing based on new features or scripts I find.

Topology Pen - 

A true beast of a tool. If you’re not intimately familiar with it, go and read everything you can on it in the docs right away. It’s my primary tool when doing retopology and it’s doing a mighty fine job. Link to the Docs

In short, what you need to know:

LMB = Move
RMB = Move Edge Loop
MMB = Split
Shift+LMB = Duplicate
Shift+RMB = Duplicate Loop
Shift MMB = Add Loop
Ctrl+LMB = Slide
Ctrl+MMB = Remove

Center Pivot

Does exactly what you would assume: It centers the pivot (or rather, center). Handy.  You can find this under Edit – Center to Bounding Box – Center or the command. The center in modo is what other apps refer to as the pivot. The reason I call it “Center Pivot” is because “Center Center” sounds like a mediocre pop song from the eighties.

center.bbox center

Topology Mode

Allows you to see the model in Topo mode. Essential when doing retopo.

Soft Selection

Pretty self-explanatory: Gives you a soft selection. Extremely handy when doing modeling in general.

Merge Meshes

A new feature in 701 which I love. It allows you to merge layers without copy-pasting.  This is an extremely welcome feature which you will learn to love. You can also Right Click on a mesh item in the Item List and selecting Merge Meshes. The command is

layer.mergeMeshes true

Select Style Toggle

This is not an essential part of modeling, but it is a very useful one. It basically toggles between lasso and rectangle selection modes. You can change this in the preferences, but frankly, I find that to be far too tedious, so I’m rather using it in the pie menu. The command is

select.lassoStyle  ?(rectangle|lasso)

Select N-Gons

This command will select any N-gons (5 sided or more polys) you might have in your model. Very handy when cleaning up. You know the drill: Here’s the command.

select.polygon add vertex bezier 4

Partial Select

One of those things which it seems like nobody really knows exists. By default, you have to select the entire polygon or edge in order for it to be selected. In most cases this is all fine and dandy, but in some, it’s extremely cumbersome. Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could select a polygon simply by selecting parts of it? Well, you handsome reader, this is exactly what this command does.

Where you normally have to drag out a selection for the entire polygon, you now only drag over an area of it. Handy!

pref.value remapping.lassoSelectPartial ?(true|false)

And that’s it for this pie menu.

Menu #2!  

Time for another menu I use all the time. This contains a bit of everything really. Mapped to Ctrl + F

The first section covers my most frequently used primitives. I very rarely use any other primitives than the Cube, Pen, Sphere, Cylinder or the Plane.

Next, there’s a Light-button. I get up all the different lights if I click it.

Symmetry Tool

Symmetry in modo is notorous for breaking. This tool will try to fix the symmetry. It won’t always work, but it is handy at times.

Mesh Cleanup

If you’re modeling in modo, you need this script. It will fix corrupted geometry and all kinds of issues. This script has been available in modo since the dawn of time, and in 601, they integrated a similar script into the program. You can find it under Geometry – Mesh Cleanup. It offers more control than the script, but frankly, the script is good enough for my uses.

Set Pos X 0

A very simple macro. The only thing it does is to set the vert positions to zero in the X-axis. When modeling, I always use instances scaled on -100 in the X. However, this means that the center verts will be off center. Having this as one button is very handy.

#LXMacro#
vert.set x 0.0 false false

Viewport modes

Just a quick way of changing between the most used viewport modes

Item List

A quick way of bringing up the item list.

Info & Stats

You gotta love this menu, as it gives you a lot of info about your model.

Ruler Tool

Found under View – Ruler Tool. I use this all the time for checking the scale of my model.

Export selected

If you do, well, ANYTHING, in CG, you have encountered situations where you need to export geometry out of modo and into another package. The file exporter in modo currently only supports LXO files, and as a result you technically cant export  your selected objects as an OBJ. Huge hassle. How do we fix this? Of course, some clever people have already scripted this.

There are two main scripts here. Use whatever you prefer. They both work with 701.:

- Export Selected to OBJ 

This does exactly what you want. The current selection will be exported as an OBJ. Neat. I’ve put this in the File menu, right under Export. This is extremely useful and it’s something which will save you a lot of time. Also the chance of you having hair by the age of 40 just doubled.

mm_saveLayersAs

A more fancy script as it has more options. You access it by right clicking on the layer you want to export. Very handy too.

Retopo Timelapse  

This was a relatively quick modeling task; it took me around 1 hour sharp. It shows my preferred way of retopologizing a model: I start out with big, clean shapes and then I connect everything.

1 hour retopo from Henning Sanden on Vimeo.

 Slice Presets

An absolutely wonderful script from Cristóbal Vila! In short, you have a bunch of presets which determines how much to slice a loop. Instead of constantly going to the Loop Slice tool and changing it there, you can now save time by simply using this script. Amazing stuff.

You can find installation instructions here.

Use the sculpt brushes!

This probably seems like an obvious one, but in reality, I don’t see too many people actually using the sculpting brushes while modeling. I pretty much only use one sculpting brush: The Move brush. I find it to be infinity useful when moving polygons around and smoothing them out. When modeling, it’s very common that your mesh becomes messy. This is where there smooth brush truly shines. If you hold down shift while using the move brush, the smooth brush is being activated. This is one of the features which really separates modo from maya, in my opinion: Being able to quickly move points around and getting a clean mesh. Without the move and smooth brush, you have to use soft selections, the tweak tool and the smooth tool. While it works just fine, it’s a very slow process.

More resources  

A good resource from Cristóbal Vila about scripts in modo. In spanish, but should be easy enough to understand if you throw this baby into Google Translate.

Link

Awesome scripts from Seneca

Conclusion  

Congratulations on getting to the end, you fine person! Lift your right hand up with your left hand. Now, place it on your left shoulder. Move it slowly up and down. A well deserved pat on the back.

Feel very much free to leave a comment or shoot me an email at henning.sanden [at] gmail.com if you have any comments, feedback or you generally feel like chatting. 

Let’s start off with discussing what reprojecting is and why you need it. Lets say you’ve been sculpting in ZBrush and you have something you’re happy with. At this point, you might want to take the sculpt into a finished state. In order to do so, you need to retopologize your model. This basically means that you’re re-modelling it, most times in a package dedicated to retopologizing, like Topogun, 3D Coat or modo.

Here we see the a model which is ready for retopology. In the highest subD level, it looks fine, but in the lowest, it’s completely broken. For a still image, the top one might be fine for certain scenarios, but there is no way you can use it for any kind of animation, particularly not if  it’s going to deform heavily. You will get a nervous sweat just thinking about rigging or deforming this model.

The solution? We retopologize, or retopo for short, the model. This is just a fancy word for remodeling it.

Here you can see the retopoed version. I did end up scrapping the topology completely in the end, but for illustrational purposes, this topology is absolutely fine.  I’m using modo for retoplogy as I find it best suited for my needs. Topogun has some more advanced features, but it’s also lacking some core modeling tools. If you’re into retopology, I can highly recommend trying out modo for the job.

So now we have a clean model which could be animated. Even for a still image, it’s a good idea to have a somehow decent topology. The reason is that it will be far easier to UV map, it will be way lighter in your scene in terms of polycount and it’s easier to add very fine details if the polygons are evenly distributed.

So in short, we want to add all the sculpting from the ZBrush sculpt onto the new and clean topology.

There are several ways of doing this – some automatic and some manual. Each have their pros and cons. I’m going to go over two methods here, one which is fast and sometimes unreliable and one which is slow, but rock solid in all cases.

 # 1

This is the automated way which is really fast, but also unreliable. You should know that it exists though as it might be useful in some  cases. The reason I don’t use this technique that much is that I cant rely on it fully. I’d rather spend 10 minutes extra doing it the manual way than to spend an hour trying to fix issues.

1. In ZBrush, make sure that the original sculpt is selected. Go to the lowest subD level.  Then go to Tool – Import and find your .obj-file.

2. You’ll get up this little pop-up. ZBrush has recognized that you basically want to transfer details from the original sculpt to the new model. Click Yes.

A progress bar will appear in the top of the UI. Just be patient and wait. When ZBrush is working like this, I just leave the computer alone. Sometimes, it enjoys crashing if you touch it.

And this is the result. It will mask the areas which are similar and leave areas which are different unmasked. Just Ctrl Drag on the canvas to clear the mask.

As you can see, there are some pretty bad areas here which will require cleanup.

The only way you can actually fix this, is to go crazy with the smooth brush and resculpt those areas.

This is a pretty fast way of doing it as the projection stage is automatic. However, it’s not a particularly clean way of doing it.  Method #2 is far cleaner, but takes more time.

#2

This is my preferred way of working. It’s more complex and it takes more time, but it’s rock solid and it will work every time. The basics of this is that we store a morph target before we project. After the projection, the geometry will have some nasty artifacts. We now switch back to the clean version and we use the morph brush to paint back in the details we want. If that sounds confusing, read on.

1. This time, we dont select the high res model and import on top of it. Instead, we import the freshly cooked topology into the project.  Select the PolyMesh3D (the star) and go to Tool – Import. 

The clean topology has been successfully imported.

If you get this message, that means that you have ngons in your mesh, which freaks ZBrush completely out. It’s also not a big fan of triangles. Keep all quads when working with models in ZBrush.

2.  Go to your original sculpt and and append or insert (whatever you prefer) your newly imported mesh.

It should now look something like this, with the clean topology being in the SubTool-list.

3.  Go to your newly imported model and subdivide it to the subD level you need. Ctrl + D a couple of times. I’m bringing my model up to around 3.6 million polygons.

4.  Go to Tool -  Morph Target  and hit StoreMT. This will do exactly what you think it will: It will store a morph target. This is often referred to as a blend shape in other applications, such as Maya. A morph target is in short just a copy of the model in a certain state.

5. Make sure that ONLY the new topology and the old sculpt are visible. If you have any other subtools, hide them now. If they are visible, they will be a part of the projection, which will mess it up completely.  Make sure that the NEW topology is selected. This is important.

6. Now it’s time to finally project the information from the original sculpt.  Go to Tool - SubTool – Project – ProjectAll. I wont cover what the various sliders and buttons are doing, as the doc does a pretty good job of that. Just note that you want to be aware of the PA Blur. This will blur the projection, which is extremely bad if you’ve sculpted a lot of very fine details. Overall though, the default settings are good.

It will also transfer polypaint data. If you have polypainting on the subtool, you’ll see this message. I’m choosing NO as I don’t want polypainting transferred.

You’re now going to see a friendly slider go across the screen. Let it work for some seconds.

As you can see, there are some major issues here.

These issues are unavoidable as there will pretty much always be differences between the original sculpt and the new topology.

So how do we fix this? Read on, soldier.

7. Remember that morph target we stored earlier? This is where it comes into play. The morph target stored a copy of the clean mesh which means that we can now revert back to it. Go to Tool – Morph Target and hit Switch. This will revert the model back to its original state before any of the sculpting.

Before and after switching.

8. This is where the magic happens! We can now paint back in the projected details by using the often forgotten Morph Brush. Hit B M O to access it. Enable symmetry by hitting X and start to paint in the details again. The trick here is to avoid painting in those areas which are broken. The broken areas will have to be resculpted.

The eyes are nearly always messed up by the projection, so I mask them out early on by holding down the Ctrl key while painting.

One region of the mesh painted back in, avoiding the trouble areas.

And here the final projection with the new topology. All in all, this normally takes 5-20 minutes, depending on how much clean up there is.

Common mistakes

- The two models arent matching in scale, position or orientation. If you’ve moved the model at all when retopoing it, and you try to reproject details, you’re in trouble. The only way to really fix this is to match the original sculpt to the new topology again. This is tedious and sometimes hard, but it’s pretty much the only way to fix it.

Conclusion

There are probably a lot more ways of doing projections of details in ZBrush, but these are two ways which does work, #2 being what I personally use. Knowing how to do this will be very valuable in a production. There is always something which needs to be reprojected in some way or another.

Thank you for reading this far, you fine person. If you have any comments, corrections or general feedback, feel free to send me an email at henning.sanden [at] gmail.com