ZBrushCentral

Creating a chain link fence

ZBrush Artworks
#1

Heya y’all happy ZBrushers,

What do you know. I went and bought ZBrush two days back. Whooppee! Still learning the ropes. I’ve got a long way to go…

I’ve just been trying to create a tileable chain link fence pattern. I started by bending an L-shaped thing out of a cylinder, and making sure the wire’s ends crossed the edges exactly in the middle of the canvas:

I then duplicated the L-shape and rotated it by 180 degrees, making sure the bends cross / overlap each other correctly:

After this, I scrolled the layer across with the Tilde key (or rather, the Ö key as I’m using a Scandinavian keyboard)…

… and tried to weld the ends together, without too good results (despite my valiant attempts with the SphereBrush and the Picker):

I scrolled the fence section back to the center and Grabbed it with the MRGBZ Grabber to produce an Alpha and a Texture out of it.

I created a Plane on which this texture was tiled a few times over, and rotated it by 45 degrees:

… voilá! but the problem is, it doesn’t have the bump map from the alpha, it only has the flat color texture. If I Baked the texture, the bump wouldn’t work correctly in different lighting conditions, and I can’t really use the “alpha displace” action because the thin wires would require and absolutely insane resolution from the plane.

How should I proceed to get both the bump map and the texture aligned and tiled on the same plane? :confused:

Anyone got a more clever method? :smiley:

#2

Hey, you ask good questions! It keeps my brain cells alive :smiley:

I think that for the most flexibility regarding lighting changes a single 3d zigzag strand would be better than a texture

I hope this idea won’t lead you astray – it might be something like:

Start with a long thin cylinder and use the Tool:Mods:Selection subpalette to mathematically select the bends, then move them left along the X axis to get the zigzag, then rotate them to put the kink that the right-hand angles would fit into

You could then duplicate the tool across the canvas (snapshot and move), then use the Eraser to get rid of every other top that sticks out :smiley:

[EDIT: sorry, I think I misread your question – if you were building a scene in ZBrush my notion might work, but if you wanted a tileable pattern with a bump map for export to another program, then someone else will have to answer]

#3

Thanks for your pointers… I was mainly looking for a way to create such a texture, that I could lay a sheet of wire link fence anywhere into the canvas, and it would be shaded correctly depth-wise.

I could perhaps use a material that has ColorBump in it, but then part where the wires overlap each other would not render correctly - they would look like lumps, not like two crossing wires.

#4

This is off the wall and most likely won’t work, but what about filling your plane, and making it an alph then 3d it? You could have fence sections… Wouldn’t be too good for closeups I imagine… okay, I’ll leave this to the guru’s ~S~

#5

Little headache :slight_smile:
Pilou

#6

Hmm, you could try inflate/ or Offset on Z axis (whichever works best) and then selection>Alpha Inverse, Hide Points…

Or assuming inflate actually gives some slight volume to the light surface wires, you could use the texture side (inverse, color to black 0,0,0) and enable transparency. This might give you an interesting fence.

And if all else fails, there is always the Polymesh tool. :smiley:

#7

Hi Skaven
When you have the start module, maybe use the “Intbetweener” for an entiere line !
It’s a script inside Zbrush :slight_smile:
You can enter precise numbers x,y,z,etc…on the bottom page.
Pilou

#8

Well, Pilou, that only works if you don’t use perspective at all… right?

Hmm… overall, how does bump mapping work on 3D objects? Can a 3D object have a separate texture and a bump map? Or is bump-mapping always only based on color?

You see, I could always MRGBZ Grab the thing I drew above and use the resulting bitmaps as a Diffuse, Bump and Alpha maps on a material in a 3D art package. (alas, I don’t have any installed right now, I could have tried it)

Too bad you can’t do this trick in ZBrush -except maybe by Offsetting a massively divided plane (one polygon per pixel), and even then you cannot use the “tile repeat” on the plane’s texture controls - the texture and the “alpha” (=height map) have to be tiled with the Tiler tool first, so that you can Offset the polygons according to the map. Which in turn makes it hard to use it in perspective, because the resolution of the bitmap suffers from the pre-tiling process. You would have to start with an insanely huge document.

Hmm. Challenging. :slight_smile:

#9

So the solution is : how modelise the entier wire netting grille wished in a 3D Object !
No doubt that someone will found this amazing puzzle :slight_smile:
Maybe a procedural script : ask to Muvlo or Cameyo :slight_smile:
Pilou