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Clay buildup brush & 'grid lines'

Hi there Zbrush community.

I work a lot with the clay build up brush to create muscle striations, but something I have always struggled with is that I am always left with these grid lines on the surface of the strokes.

Smoothing works to a degree but I then lose some of the desired definition.

Reading other threads some have perhaps suggested that it is because of insufficient resolution but in my testing this only made the lines more obvious:

I know that it is possible as in this model I bought, the striations look excellent, but without the grid lines:

Am I simply using the wrong brush? Or is there a brush setting that one could recommend to resolve the issue?

Hello @arumiat

Maybe!

Nope, your problem here is the opposite. The mesh is high in resolution so it is more sensitive to picking up detail, even inadvertent detail from the brush stepping. The higher resolution the mesh the more it will resist smoothing as well. The Clay brushes are “noisy” in that they generate a lot of extra detail like this. It is generally considered a feature of the brushes, since they tend to naturally create more of a textured surface as you work and smooth.

The Clay Buildup brush is working normally here. If you worked on the mesh at a lower resolution you could use it to quickly build up form without adding so much brush detail. The brush is also sensitive to stroke speed. If Lazy Mouse is not active then faster strokes will begin to separate more, creating more visible stepping.

You can reduce the appearance of these lines by activating Lazy Mouse (Stroke> Lazy Mouse), and reducing the Lazy Step value to minimum. You could smooth out the stroke further by increasing the lazy radius and smoothing values.

However, it is just in the nature of this brush to produce that sort of detail. It may be more useful when sculpting on a multi resolution mesh, as that workflow allows you to instantly jump to whatever level of mesh resolution best fits the stroke.



While this brush is called “Clay Build Up”, a more commonly used Clay brush for the purpose of building up form and detail is the Clay Tubes brush. You’ll find this brush produces a much “flatter”, more consistent stroke to begin with. This makes it easier to control the build up of the strokes. ClayTubes will also produce similar stepping detail. However it doesn’t produce it to the same degree and the ClayTubes brush is also more responsive to the changes I mentioned above. If you reduce the Lazy Step value for active Lazy Mouse, it will produce a much smoother stroke.

If you don’t want this kind of detail at all, I’d recommend the Layer brush. It will produce flat, smooth layers of displacement.

:slight_smile:

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I played around with all of your suggestions @Spyndel and found that sticking with the clay build up brush with lazy stroke and a low value gave me the best results. Thanks!