I am a carpenter furniture maker. I make 3 dimensional wooden support structures for sculptures.
ZBrush will be ideal for cleaning up and modifying bronze sculpture. I also would like to use ZBrush to represent the members that make up the structure, usually based on a geometric shape such as a tetrahedron, for example. Ordinarily I would use traditional descriptive geometry techniques based mainly on orthographic projection. This would involve the projection of points and lines onto a horizontal plane, a vertical frontal plane and a vertical profile or side plane. I can see that ZBrush is based on a grid which resembles this. Would it be possible to use ZBrush to solve problems graphically of the angular and true length measurements of the joining of the members that make up the 3 dimensional structure. I realise that programs such as SketchUp can do this, but to be able to do it on ZBrush would be ideal and give me less of a steep learning curve in having to learn two different programs.
Hello @pompey,
Please forgive me but I’m not certain I understand what you are asking for. It sounds to me like you’re asking to create both 3d supports for the purpose of printing, as well being able to define a structural “fill” (like a honeycomb) that will occupy the interior volume.
Both of these would traditionally be done in a pre-print slicing program. While you could put it together in ZBrush, this is not the program’s intended purpose and most slicing programs will have automated this process making it far easier. ZBrush is not intended to be a pre-print application and there are already programs, many free or open source, dedicated to this purpose. You would need to use these programs anyway to prepare the mesh for printing, so ZBrush could not replace the need to learn that program by incorporating a single feature from it.
Thank you!
Thank-you very much for your response. I think that you may have misinterpreted what I was asking and I apologise for my lack of clarity.
I have a bronze sculpture and I wish to make a “support structure” for it so that I can display the sculpture in a gallery and so that the sculpture can be raised off the ground to a height of about 1 metre or so. This “support structure” may take the form of a trestle or it may be in two parts taking the form of, for example, the Eiffel tower. Therefore, by “support structure” I mean a physical structure that is made up of lengths of material (wood is the obvious choice for me because I am a carpenter but it need not be), which are joined at angles. So a tetrahedron serves as another example of a geometric shape which would be hollow inside and also constructed with lengths of wood joined together at angles.
My question is therefore; Is ZBrush capable of being used to sketch out the members that make up these geometric shapes (which are 3 dimensional) and also compute and tell me the angles at which the pieces of material are joined and give me the true lengths.? Another way to do this may be to design such a structure on ZBrush and then 3D print it as a homogeneous structure.
I understand that a separate program is required to carry out the pre-print slicing slicing procedure.
I think that ZBrush would excel at the task which I require it to do (if it is possible to do) because it gives me far more scope to integrate the bronze sculpture itself with a support structure to hold it up. I would be able firstly to 3D scan the bronze sculpture which I already have physically made ,then use ZBrush to make alterations to the sculpture and then use ZBrush to design a support structure which is completely integrated with the sculpture.
The reason that I think that ZBrush may be capable of this is because I have noticed that there is a “grid” facility which is based on a horizontal plane (or “floor” as it is named by ZBrush) and vertical planes. This resembles the co-ordinate grid system used in traditional (hand drawn) descriptive geometry.
Thank-you again.
Yes, in a variety of ways. The bulk of the toolset could be used to do this in some form or another. The subject is impossibly broad, but possibilities include:
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Creating the meshes as IM (insert mesh) which can then be inserted into a subtool in a variety of ways. This allows you to repeatedly recreate the same repeating mesh elements over and over.
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The meshes could be created as Nanomesh and applied to the polygons of a piece of target geometry.
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The meshes could be created as a micropoly mesh, and replace the target polygons of a mesh while inheriting their shape. If the geometry is properly constructed the pieces will weld to each other.
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You could even draw out the support panels as a 2D shape, and create a 3D mesh based on it.
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Numerous other possibilities
To an extent. ZBrush is not CAD software, and will not replace such for the purpose of creating machine parts with exacting precision.
It will not compute the angle, but you can define snapping increments for rotational transformations and then draw the piece out at a specified angle.
Like a number of popular export formats, the units of measure in ZBrush are generic. It does not know that something is 10 cm, only that it is 10 units long. You can call these units whatever you like, and there are mechanisms for manually measuring the unit distance from point to point.
However, please be aware that the effective worldspace in ZBrush is finite. Overly large meshes in the program are problematic and must be resized to work well in ZBrush. The program is tuned for artistic sculpting of individual components one at a time, not for real world scale and machine precision. Excessively large scenes created at real world scale can not be easily worked on all at once in the program. So ZBrush is well suited for sculpting an automobile, but not the automobile at the same time as the street, surrounding buildings, and landscape. Those would ideally be separate projects.
In short, if your need is for a program to manage large scenes of real world scale with many pieces of lower poly geometry of exact size and position with mechanical precision, there are many other tools that do that. ZBrush is designed to be an artist’s tool for hand-sculpting highly detailed meshes, and the features are generally designed to support that process.
Hope that’s helpful! 