Today I'm making a stamp
of a zipper that I can use to sculpt in Mudbox.
and I'm starting off in Photoshop, with
photo reference of an actual zipper. And from this photo reference,
I'm going to create a black and white height map.
So I'll start the process by simply painting over the zipper teeth here.
And I'm using white,
because I suspect is going to be one of the highest points on the height map.
I'm using a fully opaque paint brush with sharp edges, because I want this detail to be
relatively solid and flat.
I can see that there are some parts of the zipper that are
not as high as other parts, the teeth that to connect
into the other parts of the zippers look like they're a little recessed.
And what's more, it looks like they are rounded around the edges.
So I'll apply a gradient on top of that
as a multiply layer, so that I can just curve the
edges of that bump map away. And then
I'm going to assign an inner glow. I'll set it to black,
and use it as a multiply. And what I'm doing here is just ensuring that
the edges my objects are not too sharp.
So I'll duplicate those,
and now I'm onto the next step, which is the cloth, that the zippers
adhere to. And trying to paint gray, on top of a gray background is difficult,
so I'll use a red brush at this point,
all paint it in using red, and then when I get that set,
I'll desaturate the red back to gray, so
Control+Shift+U, or I can use the menu.
Then I will update or add brightness to it,
and once again, go in to the layer styles, and use
a gradient overlay. And I'm just creating a radial gradient,
to give it a little bit of bulginess. And I'll use the same
inner glow trick on the edges, just make sure that at the edges,
the object comes up subtly, and we don't just get
a drop-off, from one area to another.
So I'll duplicate those, and I'll create this other area of fabric in a very similar fashion,
a simple fill, I'll overlay some gradients, and I'll put that
under my other areas, and add the stroke around the edges.
I'll do one last section of fabric, this is
the big bulgy fabric that wraps around the edges of the zipper,
so that the zipper is recessed in this valley between these two big areas of fabric.
And I'll use gradients, to color that again. And then I'm just going to feel it all in,
so that I can create a repeating stamp, so that I have a section that will work.
So I'll use a black background, because that's what Mudbox expects for a stamp.
If I want: I've added a bit of overlay of the original texture, so I get a little bit of that photo detail.
And then I just need to crop the image evenly, to create that tiling stamp.
And now it's time to bring the stamp texture over into Mudbox.
So in Mudbox, I'll click this little button here, and add a stamp,
and search and find wherever I put my texture. And that will add the stamp,
into lower right corner of the stamp menu.
And because this is a zipper, I want to use the repeat tool.
and I'll just pick the stamp image, while I'm using the repeat tool.
I definitely want to make sure that randomized is off,
and I want to pay attention to that rotation, because that's going to have an effect on the stamp.
So my first attempt, the stamp
is not strong enough at all. So I try it again
and when I look at I can see that it's
turned the wrong way. So I'll rotate it,
and I'll try again. And when I zoom in, it looks much more like a zipper.
I can try adjusting stamp spacing to see if that helps,
I can use steady stroke on my brush,
this will help give me a more even stroke on my mesh.
But overall, it looks like the stamp we
created is not working so well. So we might think that
it's because it was initially rotated the wrong way, so we could try rotating in Photoshop.
and then bringing it back it, just adding a stamp again,
and using the repeat tool. But we'll see it's rotated incorrectly again,
regardless of how we imported it. And the problem is actually because
Mudbox is trying to paint this texture as a full square, and out texture is actually
more of a rectangle. So I'm going to fill it out in Photoshop,
make an actual much more square proportioned texture,
and then save and bring it into Mudbox.
And then use that to create my stamp.
I see it I get something that's much closer to the
zipper shape that I'm looking for. So let's look at another way
that we can actually create a more smoothed line,
which is to use the curve tools. And the curve tools let us draw
curves onto the surface of the mesh,
and then our brush will follow that curve.
And in this way, we can create more complex shapes
on the surface of our object.
Now, we do have another option with curves, as well. We can enable a
tool, and then go to our Object List and select our curve,
right click, and do a stroke on curve.
And Mudbox will automatically populate that shape
with whatever brush that we have. We'll see that stamp spacing is
really important here. Stamp spacing was much too big this time,
so I'll try it again with a different curve
I set my stamp spacing to a better number, a number I think will work better,
and right click, stroke on curve again.
And this time we see the result
is much more satisfactory. So let's change tracks here,
and talk textures. In most cases you have to have an extremely
dense mesh, to use the brush that we've created
as an actual sculpt brush. In some case, our computers won't be
fast enough to handle it. So we can also use this exact same brush as a bump map,
we can create a new bump map layer,
and use my paint tools to apply this brush in the same way.
And in this way, I can get that really finely detailed
resolution, and apply it on top of a sculpt,
even though the sculpt lacks density
that's needed to create detailed geometry. It will still look like
we've got detail. And with that, we're done!
Wasn't to hard - hopefully you found it helpful,
if you want to see more stuff like this, just check out my blog, MethodJ.com